Facebook Targets FriendFeed; Opening Up The News Feed
Michael Arrington
47 comments »
Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed. The goal is to centralize all that activity in one place.
Third parties can already integrate directly today via the Facebook API, Beacon and the Facebook Platform, but adoption from these companies, which are indirectly also competing with Facebook, has been slow. Now, users can add the content stream directly. Users simply tell Facebook what third party services they use the most, along with their credentials or public feed for the site. The content stream is then pulled into your Facebook News Feed.
What this means: in your friends news feed, you may start to see more content from Flickr, Twitter, Digg and other third party services. This competes directly with what a number of startups are doing - namely FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and the more recently launched Iminta.
This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.
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. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.
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!
John - when does the Comcast acquisition close?
They have to be careful here. The news feed is their bread and butter. Can’t afford to spam it.
Michael, “No comment.” (Per usual.)
Ha you wrote FeedFriend in the title instead of FriendFeed. Oh well, I forgive you.
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.
John - will my Pulse feed now say what I’m watching on TV?
I hate Comcast.
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).
John - That’s great, but Comcast still sucks.
Michael - that’s interesting, but I think I’ll go have a pint now.
hah
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.
River of News all the way baby.
One step closer for Facebook to open themselves up to OpenSocial?
Any word on launch date? Or on-Facebook.com reading / marketing material? Thanks!
as if friendfeed is even on Facebook’s radar.
centralization will make sense for most users though…
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
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.
The stuff I expect to see in a data portable world
I just feel sorry for the developers who have developed apps that already post your flickr updates and twitter comments to your mini-feed.
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?
too bad google not buying friendfeed first.
http://www. i-guide .ro
facebook is the best
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…)
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….
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.
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
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 :)))
Oops - that ‘Jack’ in comment 28 should have been linked to the startup not the day job.
This is very bad news for friendfeed no??
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
blogcatalog launched a similar feature last week. http://blog.blogcatalog.com/an.....ely-viral/
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.
whis was the next logical step for facebook
http://www. i-gudie .ro
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.
“…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”.
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.