Facebook Targets FriendFeed; Opening Up The News Feed

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1. John McCrea
   

   February 22nd, 2008 at 5:35 pm

   Seems like a good move. Letting users move their data and content around is smart, and in line with where the Social Web is heading. Bravo!

2. Michael Arrington
   

   February 22nd, 2008 at 5:36 pm

   John - when does the Comcast acquisition close?

3. Wills
   

   February 22nd, 2008 at 5:38 pm

   They have to be careful here. The news feed is their bread and butter. Can’t afford to spam it.

4. John McCrea
   

   February 22nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm

   Michael, “No comment.” (Per usual.)

5. Omer Zach
   

   February 22nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm

   Ha you wrote FeedFriend in the title instead of FriendFeed. Oh well, I forgive you.

6. Michael Arrington
   

   February 22nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm

   Wills - If you look at what Iminta is doing, I think it’s the right way to go. Users determine what stuff is published. Readers can also remove certain stuff from their friends. So they can remove all twitter stuff, for example. Or whatever. It’s filtered on both sides that way.

7. Michael Arrington
   

   February 22nd, 2008 at 5:42 pm

   John - will my Pulse feed now say what I’m watching on TV? I hate Comcast.

8. John McCrea
   

   February 22nd, 2008 at 5:45 pm

   Michael - That is also the approach in Pulse. Each user determines what they want to share with whom (family, friends, business network, certain groups, or anyone who have them in their address book). And while you’re looking at the stream of content coming into you, you can “hide” any event. When you choose “hide” you can eliminate all content from that person, just the content of that type from that person (such as their tweets), or all content of a certain type (such as all tweets).

9. Michael Arrington
   

   February 22nd, 2008 at 5:46 pm

   John - That’s great, but Comcast still sucks.

10. John McCrea
    

    February 22nd, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    Michael - that’s interesting, but I think I’ll go have a pint now.

11. Michael Arrington
    

    February 22nd, 2008 at 5:54 pm

    hah

12. Wills
    

    February 22nd, 2008 at 5:56 pm

    Michael - I know that’s what they *should* do, but they currently have zero configuration options for the current news feed in respect to application spam. You can filter the amount of photos, wall messages, status updates etc that you receive, but no granularity for application stuff.

    So I still ere by the side of caution when I hear about more content coming through the news feed.

13. Dave Winer
    

    February 22nd, 2008 at 6:21 pm

    River of News all the way baby.

14. OpenSocialFeeds
    

    February 22nd, 2008 at 6:23 pm

    One step closer for Facebook to open themselves up to OpenSocial?

15. Ryan
    

    February 22nd, 2008 at 6:37 pm

    Any word on launch date? Or on-Facebook.com reading / marketing material? Thanks!

16. Tomas Granger
    

    February 22nd, 2008 at 7:36 pm

    as if friendfeed is even on Facebook’s radar.

    centralization will make sense for most users though…

17. Ryan
    

    February 22nd, 2008 at 7:54 pm

    With all the crappy applications and the information litter they leave behind on your Facebook page this will be a great addition! More information that maybe important but will get lost in that crap app info

18. chris m
    

    February 22nd, 2008 at 8:06 pm

    I wonder if they will allow any website to solicit their users to “add your events to your facebook feed” - could be the easiest way to create a facebook app for people with pre-exisiting apps.

19. Elias Bizannes
    

    February 22nd, 2008 at 8:46 pm

    The stuff I expect to see in a data portable world

20. Luke Noel-Storr
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 2:53 am

    I just feel sorry for the developers who have developed apps that already post your flickr updates and twitter comments to your mini-feed.

21. faizal
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 3:27 am

    they steal my idea! before this i’ve try add my FriendFeed feed into facebook notes, but it will show weird in title like tag. now they want to integrate it. please credit me

    when this will be available?

22. faizal
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 3:29 am

    too bad google not buying friendfeed first.

23. aster
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 3:29 am

    http://www. i-guide .ro
    facebook is the best

24. dave mcclure
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 5:47 am

    interesting development. we were just discussing the potential for this at the SNAP Chat panel i moderated on thursday night. dave morin gave no indication this was coming, but it was raised as a likely direction for them.

    on the flip side, i was just talking with a startup about how to drive user retention strategies, and in addition to email & RSS, we talked about how feed messages & updates to social networking sites might be a good method to drive retention in the future, as more & more folks got used to the news feed as a primary source of discovery. (the same could be true for FriendFeed if they continue to have success…)

25. nick
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 6:03 am

    This is good… I use Facebook more for a social ring, Plaxo more for my contact ring, and FriendFeed for those who don’t wish to join the social party. And while My FriendFeed app incorporates nicely into my Facebook profile I’d love to replace the New Feed with it… but this idea works just as well…. I still don’t see this as an ‘attack’ on apps like FriendFeed or the others, since it will only be useful for people who use Facebook. For me that is less than a third of the people I share with and for the most part… the other two thirds for the most part refuse to use sites like Facebook/MySpace/Friendster… so the idea that this is aiming at FriendFeed/PlaxoPulse/others…. besides the beautiful part of the web is that there is a place for everybody (almost) and always a niche to fill….

26. theharmonyguy
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 10:43 am

    Wait a second, stop the tape…

    “Users simply tell Facebook what third party services they use the most, along with their credentials or public feed for the site.”

    Public feed for a site is one thing, but credentials? Is Facebook going to start storing login information for other sites? Major red flags popping up for me here. Facebook has so far done well with security, but this makes me wary. It’s bad enough that users give out their e-mail passwords for importing contacts… I can see all sorts of problems arising from this new setup.

    Yet another argument for something like OpenID/OAuth and for services to provide APIs for accessing data.

27. James Gillmore
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 11:11 am

    Honestly, I don’t get why companies have been slow to adopt Beacon. Regardless of the bad-wrap it got, the point was that Beacon was awesome for the right businesses. Maybe not for certain types of stores with the whole: “I bought the kids Christmas Presents and it told all of them, including poor little Timmy, what I got them!” scenario. But, C’mon, while everyone was complaining about that, similar web 2.0 gurus were using it to make money. Not all actions have to go into the feed. You can set it up to do it for specific actions and warn the user. C’mon now!

    James
    from
    FaceySpacey.com, Your One Stop Social Media Shop

28. Jack
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 12:23 pm

    We’ve got this on Lovest.at (bug free by end of play on Monday:) ) and the feed’ll be available via RSS by the end of play Monday. We hope that TC can cover our Social Ads Beacon-buster (http://www.loveth.at) at the same time :)))

29. Jack
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 12:24 pm

    Oops - that ‘Jack’ in comment 28 should have been linked to the startup not the day job.

30. Memo
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 1:10 pm

    This is very bad news for friendfeed no??

31. Sean Ammirati
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 4:50 pm

    This is no good:

    “But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed.”

    Here is a group I created asking FB to make this reciprocal and allow the information to be shared (exported.)

    Feel free to join and show your support … http://www.facebook.com/group......amp;ref=mf

32. Tony Berkman
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    blogcatalog launched a similar feature last week. http://blog.blogcatalog.com/an.....ely-viral/

33. chris
    

    February 23rd, 2008 at 6:53 pm

    Agree with the harmony guy — chances are facebook is violating a lot of TOUs by collecting, storing, and using user’s credentials for third-party sites. how is this facebook “opening up?” This certainly is NOT an instance of facebook opening up. Instead, it’s an acknowledgement that activity happens elsewhere outside outside of Facebook, and an attempt to bring that stream into Facebook. Opening up would be data portability, or interoperability, or at the very least streaming the News Feed to third-party sites. Quid Pro Quo.

34. startscratch
    

    February 24th, 2008 at 5:11 am

    whis was the next logical step for facebook
    http://www. i-gudie .ro

35. Nels
    

    February 24th, 2008 at 11:41 am

    I agree with #33, chris. This is not opening up the News Feed at all. It’s just Facebook allowing you to import more than one RSS feed (they already allow you to import one blog’s RSS feed and post those items to your News Feed). And by not allowing people to have an RSS feed of their News Feed or Mini-Feed, Facebook is just trapping all the RSS data being fed in. The only thing that the services who are</em open and do offer RSS feeds get from this is the ability to have their data imported into Facebook, and sites like Twitter have already built applications that integrate into Facebook and post to the News Feed anyway.

36. lion
    

    February 24th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

    “…allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed”. The word “allowing” means (in the facebook dictionary) “I will add this feature in your profile without permission until you find the hidden option of deactivating it”.

37. Uno
    

    February 24th, 2008 at 11:44 pm

    ya, I don’t think I agree with this entirely. How is this any different from apps being able to inject actions into your activity stream? You just don’t need an app anymore?

    and…. most apps don’t have their activity hooks thought out properly yet.