You can tell FriendFeed was built by ex-Googlers because it is so spare, yet brings forth an avalanche of information. The social feed aggregator lets you keep track of your friends across 28 Websites and services, including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, YouTube, blog posts, shared items on Google Reader, Amazon wish lists, and what they are watching on Netflix. It launched in private beta last October, but as of now it is open to the public.
The company also raised $5 million in what is practically a self-funded A round. Co-founders Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, who created the first version of Gmail when they worked at Google, led the round. But they let Benchmark Capital put in some money as well. After all, Benchmark is where the co-founders, including Bret Taylor and Jim Norris of Google Maps fame, conceived the idea for FriendFeed when they were doing a stint there as entrepreneurs-in-residence. Says Buchheit:
This is different than when another startup raises $5 million. We won’t rush out there and start hiring like mad. We just wanted to have the funding issue taken care of so we could focus on the product and users.
Buchheit’s is part of the Google Mafia of early employees who are now avid angel investors. By his count, he has put his own money into about 20 startups, including Xobni, Justin.tv, Zenter (acquired by Google), Meraki Networks, Mint, and ScanScout. At FriendFeed, though, he is one of six employees building it by hand.
FriendFeed is a way to become aware of what people you know or respect are doing across dozens of different Websites. That super-aggregation of feeds from popular social sites, however, is quickly being copied (see Spokeo, Iminta, Plaxo Pulse, and—one that just launched today—Second Brain). Even Facebook wants to get in on the action by allowing feeds from other services to show up on the News feed of its members.
Facebook here is the biggest threat. At some level, slurping up feeds from across the Web is just a feature. But that is not what FriendFeed is all about. FriendFeed is a way to filter the Web through the eyes of your friends. And it is a way to have semi-private discussions about what you find. It is a social discovery engine and a communications platform. Most great Websites are built around communications. You can add a comment on any post or Twitter or Flickr photo shared by your friends. Not surprisingly, that communication is one of the most active ways members in the beta have been using the service. Says Taylor:
The content imported into FriendFeed from other sites becomes fodder for discussion and socializing around that content. One thing we learned is the importance of that discussion aspect. In particular, because the discussions are limited to the social network of the person, they do not devolve to lowest common denominator of discussions on the Web.
For instance, click on the thumbnail at left and you will see a discussion thread in response to our post about Facebook targeting FriendFeed. It very much reads like a discussion among friends. The trick for Friendfeed now that it is open is to keep that sense of intimacy.
As you add more friends to FriendFeed, following them all can quickly become overwhelming. That is why the company is building in algorithms to automatically promote the most important stuff and help you filter out the rest. Any items that are commented on or starred as being “liked” get more play. You can see those items from friends of your friends, even if you don’t subscribe directly to their feeds.
There are also extremely granular controls. Do you have a friend who suffers from Twitter disease and spams the minutia of his life 20 times a day? You can turn off his Twitters to hide them from view, and just enjoy the occasional YouTube video he finds. And if he is really annoying, unsubscribe from his feeds. Subscribing and unsubscribing to people does not yet carry the same social meaning that unfriending someone on Facebook does. Right now, it is just about information flow. That won’t last however.
FriendFeed is still very much a work in progress. There is no search box (coming), there is no mobile version (coming), and there is no way to group or organize feeds other than chronologically. The site just added tabs earlier today (”friends,” “me,” and “everyone”). Yet there is something pure about FriendFeed that I hope does not get lost as more people (and features) join.
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How does a site like this get $5 million? Any decent programmer could build something like this in a week.
FriendFeed has become a must-visit site multiple times a day for me, as it’s become a centralized location for intelligent discussion, link sharing and communication. It’s not just a social link and news aggregator, but instead a new communication platform for my Web-based lifestream. While it has been fun to enjoy FriendFeed during its closed beta, we’re excited to see the service open up to the world at large and continue to grow. Excellent news.
> …avalanche of information
Indeed — like drinking from the firehose! :p
@1, they are called Google options
The cool thing here is that the innovation experiments keep coming, and the Silicon Valley Darwinian competition ultimately sorts the wheat from the chaff. (Okay, that is a horribly mixed metaphor.) Anyway, I am reminded of the 1995 era of the Web, and am excited to see all the variants on the idea of socially-enabled applications being tried. It will be interesting to look back in a few years’ time and see who wins. Either way, I am confident that we are on the cusp of the Social Web, a time of explosive growth in the number of sites that tap the power of who-you-know.
John McCrea: Not if I have to make a new profile for each of them.
@EH Indeed. You should be able to create an account on any of them using your OpenID from a trusted provider. Get access to your own data via OAuth. Build your profile via a microformat parser. Find your friends via various Social Graph APIs. And connect with the people you already know without generating any emails. Yep. That’s the vision of the Social Web and Data Portability dot org. Bring it on.
You can tell it came from a team of ex-Googlers because it looks like shit. There must be a ban on Adobe products at the Plex. Either that, or they hire the worst designers free food can buy.
Nice and clean, not cluttered, and no ads (yet?). It needs a Firefix add-on though…does it exist yet.
@john mccrea — i think you lost the 99.999% of the internet who doesn’t follow techcrunch and the twittersphere about 5 words in. “bring it on,” indeed.
@1: if you know the right person … everything can be true
You can tell it came from a team of ex-Googlers because it looks like shit. There must be a ban on Adobe products at the Plex. Either that, or they hire the worst designers free food can buy.
Indeed: if you know the right person … everything can be true
Umm. This is just another Profile Aggregator AKA “Life-Stream” product like Profilactic or something…Lukup–a product I’m VP of Marketing for–does all that but give you actual interactivity. It provides the “Write Once, Read Everywhere” feature, where if you upload a video, it puts it on Vimeo, Youtube, and a bunch of Video Sites all at once (kind of like Tube-Mogul). But it does this with everything (pictures, bookmarks, etc). And moreover, it’s a product that we provide to businesses via an API for free so long as they put data from their own network or service into the system.
Check it out: http://www.faceyspacey.com/services/
James
from
FaceySpacey.com, Your One Stop Social Media Shop
After Facebook’s announcement, all I can say is those are some bold investors …
fantastic work these past 2 days techcrunch… you guys have been on an absolute tear
As for friendfeed… this is how the pros execute on an ‘idea’.. You just have to keep chipping away at the marble every single day, and eventually, something wonderful begins to emerge..
I dare say, most cats lack this kind of consistency..
FriendFeed is a way to filter the Web through the eyes of your friends. And it is a way to have semi-private discussions about what you find. It is a social discovery engine and a communications platform.
@14 - it does not take big kahunas to back a team of ex-googlers that were directly involved in building gMail + maps - i’d venture to say 95% of valley vc’s would be all over that action, no matter what crazy idea they were pursuing
@18 - if you bothered to read the article, you’d see that they financed that 5 million themselves … that’s the real headline here.
either way..as I mention in my post on the lameness of this trend
(here: http://www.whydowork.com/blog/wdw-insider/216/)
SOMEDAY
social networking will go back to its roots and connect people;
not feeds
Agree with Cancar, just remember that putting all together friends without diference from “friends” and “co-workers” first, and no difference from topics is more a mess system that a “social discovery system”