FriendFeed, a service that aggregates social network information, just launched quite a nice little search feature. Users can search by individual, friends, or all users, and specify the search only to specific services like Twitter or Delicious. A basic search box is on every page. Advanced search is here.
FriendFeed is clearly more than a simple service to aggregate lots of data from other websites and then access it via RSS. Users can comment directly on posted items (and do so frequently). Now they can search, too. More and more FriendFeed is looking like a destination site built on the back of all that third party data.
That’s smart of them, and it’s something we’ve seen in the past. The most recent example is Meebo, which began as a way for users to access instant messaging services like Yahoo, AIM, GTalk and MSN on the web. But eventually they started allowing users to create their own accounts, and then launched their own proprietary chat service as well. Meebo has always said that isn’t a big part of their overall strategy, but I notice that most of my chats on Meebo are now done via their service, not one of the big IM players.
The company has had a huge surge in users the last week or so (and remember, the service only officially launched on February 25). They won’t disclose exact user numbers, but they say that the FriendFeed user base grew 10% over the weekend and 25% in the last week. They’re clearly having their Twitter Moment, and have avoided, so far, all the uptime issues that plagued Twitter for two years. Whether you think it’s beautiful or ridiculous, FriendFeed is on the rise.
And back to those Twitter comparisons for just a moment – FriendFeed now has a robust search feature just weeks after launch. Twitter still hasn’t launched meaningful search, even after promising it months ago. Twitter needs to be careful – failure to execute has brought many popular startups to their knees. It’s time for Twitter to step it up.
FriendFeed is based in Silicon Valley and has raised $5 million in venture capital.
Enough FF hype already?
niiiiiiice…. this is gonna make turn my friendfeed morning into my friendfeed morning and afternoon…
Ex-Googlers are born search-centric…
Ok, so I’m now convinced that I should sign up to friendfeed.
Very cool…..
Swee,t another service for me to sign up to! Data overloaddddddd
Timothy, no worries, just sign up for FriendFeedFeed to aggregate all that stuff.
http://www.tech...dfeed-launches/
Or, MyFeedsDB, posed for better search results for all social stuff.
The rate at which this relatively small team develops new features (and the quality of said new features) is seriously getting out of hand.
What’s the secrete? Is there a secrete..? How many hours a day are the friendfeeders working? etc.
Nice…backtracking for Duncan’s idiotic attack last week.
weird… when I type techcrunch into google http://www.measurection.com is the website they associate this place with.
Search is clearly an important feature for any service doing aggregation. We’ve had it for many months in Plaxo Pulse!
the simple search feature added great value to the service! awesome!
Unfortunately John, Plaxo had a rough start with the spamming issue and is not well-trusted by the early adoption crowd (nor is it new and “kewl”).
FF is fascinating in its ability to capture attention among a field of competitors. I have no interest in such services, but we are treating as a case study.
@Frank We’ve got the early adopter crowd in Pulse *and* really impressive adoption among mainstream users. Hats off to FF for getting some buzz. Just pointing out that aggregation search is not a new, new thing…
I love Plaxo and I’m an early adopter. Plaxo has saved my a%% by synching my contacts and calendars between multiple machines and servers.
John,
Quick question.. how do you deal with the ‘echo chamber’ surrounding FF.. ? Any chance of spinning pulse into an independent entity? Having to be a part of plaxo (re: join, login etc) has, for better or worse, kept me from checking it out – despite the great reviews its been getting.
FriendFeed search is cool, but allowing anyone to customize the CSS is even cooler because then we can use it on our personal sites and blogs.
I just published a story on Pop17 including FriendFeed and am now an active user.
http://tinyurl.com/37dvxp
John – Pulse is awesome, but the buzz is all around FF right now. Plus, you guys just sold, you have no worries.
Not sure how Friendfeed is going to supplant Facebook in terms of sharing info or feeds among friends since you can do similar things on Facebook too
FF is so-so. I don’t see why Mike’s so hung up on it. Investment coming from you mike???
@ Michael: “No comment”
Parting thought (before reaching for the Guinness)…
Whether if FriendFeed or any of the growing number of entrants into the aggregator space, I think a really relevant question to ask is, “What is the company’s source of differntiation and medium- to long-term advantage?”
know one for sure knows about us but we did that friendfeed thing for people’s profiles on http://metroproper.com it’s a really cool thing and shouldn’t be to hard to implement onto other networks also, friendfeed should spread onto other sites as well:]
I checked about ten different users feeds and came to the conclusion that as of now it is more a Twitter stream. It seems the users I checked out are just displaying their Twitter data. Im sure this will change though…
Were working towards allowing our users data to display throughout the net and FF!
Good analysis.
Sorry. Just read more carefully, and want to also say “Thanks for the props on what we’ve built, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington!”
And, Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all…
Its just search. So what? Of course, its going to be a destination site, but I dont think that search done on the feed is going to make it a killer app. Compare that to meebo is which really trillian IN A BROWSER
Funny that you compare Twitter to Friendster; I wrote about the very subject a few weeks back:
http://www.ajcr...new-friendster/
FF dont have OpenId support. We need that.
This seems a lot like mugshot (mugshot.org), mugshot also has a desktop client and is built on, uses and it’s self is opensource technology. But it is more of a linux/geek thing, as usable as it is
How do these Web 2.0 companies make money? Just Advert? There has to be more than advert to bring bread on the table.Somebody put this into perspective.
@31, Monica
that’s pretty much it…they make money from CPC, and CPM ads.
unless they’re large enough to sell direct sponsorships
with FriendFeed .. social networks become a bigger threat to privacy..
Friend Feed me no more.
Ff is somewhat interesting, and twitter’s issues are a testimony against ruby on rails.
A ‘nice little Facebook and Friendster’ addition would open up the value of FF to millions more users, especially in this part of the world. Maybe they’re focusing on cleverness rather than customers, in order to win over the influential blog crowd
Paul – SE Asia
“They won’t disclose exact user numbers, but they say that the FriendFeed user base grew 10% over the weekend and 25% in the last week.”
Google knows about 88,200 pages and the majority of them are user pages, so I guess, FriendFeed is in the low six figures in terms of user profiles.
http://www.goog...:friendfeed.com
Let’s see how FF grows according to Google within a few days.
One advantage of the search capability is that it solves the problem of locating all of the different discussions about a particular artifact. For example, if you perform a FriendFeed search for the words more hyped yawn, you not only find a FriendFeed discussion for Duncan Riley’s original post, but you can also find the robust discussion that started with Louis Gray shared the item on his Google Reader feed.
And no, I don’t get the impression that Arrington is “backtracking” re Riley’s comments. I suspect that diversity of opinions is allowed among the TechCrunch staff.
This twitter search isn’t too bad:
http://terraminds.com
Great. That made it at least a bit easier to find all the feeds of a certain kind and unsubscribe by hand to them (opposite to Plaxo which allows me to do a unsubscribe based on type).
And of course there currently is an early adoption rate with all the people signing up as usual for a service because it is “not cool” not to be there. If they will use it is yet on another page.
The usual complaint with all of these services beside the doubeling and trippeling of data: Nice in the beginning because you can do a lot of things, but what when the real masses hit it?
Missing ignore features (better: scoring) is something I cannot understand – especially not from somebody coming from a company like google.
Must say that I am still with Duncan on FriendFeed (sans ad hominem debate). Until you can reply to Tweets on Twitter or FB updates on FB, I just do not see the point of commenting on or “Liking” stuff on a 3rd party site.
I still don’t understand how this works. All those sites have “non-commercial” APIs. What’s to stop them from cutting off FF tomorrow?
What % Gen Y users are on FriendFeed? My guess is very low.
Friendfeed and services like it solve Tech Elite (GenBlosgster) problems.
What’s the big deal? One Gen’s behavior scales for the next 25 years and the other doesn’t scale at all.
@John Wesley, I like SocialThing better than FriendFeed.
FF seems to be have been adopted by some of the bioinformatics crowd. I guess we all like the whole “meta-conversation” that FF enables, where we end up liking and leaving comments, especially in cases where large comments at the original source don’t make sense. Many of us were on FF way before the tech elite, and look no further than Jeremy Zawodny to see how to use FF
Pretty interesting service so far. When will they get Facebook updates? This thing has been well-covered in the top blogosphere, but I don’t see my friends in there yet. So I subscribed to Scoble. My FriendFeed will never be empty…
One thing I do think will happen with the rise of FriendFeed and other lifestream aggregators: the cost of switching social networks and web services nears zero, which is a boon to users. More on this subject here: http://tinyurl.com/29cu6k.
I already made friendfeed my homepage… http://webpoet....-my-friendfeed/
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