By now, you’ve probably heard all about the controversy surrounding the Iranian election and subsequent protests. If not, check here for a solid roundup. And you’ve probably also heard how this has spilled over into the tech world because Twitter has been one of the key points of contact between those inside Iran dissenting, and the outside world. If Twitter escaped being blocked by the Iranian government, you’d think FriendFeed would have too, right? Nope.
FriendFeed has been “almost completely blocked” in Iran, co-founder Bret Taylor tells us. You might not think this matters too much since FriendFeed is much smaller than Twitter in terms of users, but the service was hugely popular in Iran, Taylor says. In fact, Iran is one of the service’s most active countries, and it is the most active region as defined by comments per user per day, according to Taylor.
Now you can see why Iran apparently wanted to block it. FriendFeed is great at facilitating conversations around topics. The reason for this is that it’s so quick to post a comment and have it be added to a thread. While this can sometimes lead to an angry mob situation, it also can be extremely effective at having a conversation about an important topic in real-time. Except, of course, when the Iranian government blocks you.
The only people getting on to FriendFeed from inside Iran now are apparently doing so through proxies.
They can still access Friendfeed searches though the Yauba anonymous search engine
http://anony.ya...61726368?q=iran
I think blocking Internet sites will become more and more difficult with the advent of newer and newer technologies.
Unless a government is willing to block ALL access to the Internet (e.g. North Korea) new privacy and anonynity tools like Tor, Yauba, Bitblinder will continue to pop up.
Even in China, people are still able to bypass the Great FIrewall if they know how, and the Chinese system is probably the most sophisticated out there.
+1
Good one. Bitblinder does not seem to be fully available yet though
I like Yauba’s privacy policy
http://www.yaub...sttname=privacy
This article is another one by Techcrunch that for whatever reason severely inflates the importance of Friendfeed.
Friendfeed is just another minuscule part of an attempt to block media coverage in general, yet the blanket attempt to block media isn’t mentioned.
“”Yesterday, after coming back to my studio from the street revolts, we saw that they blocked all satellite TV. All the internet sites like YouTube, Facebook and… and maybe more. All blocked. Internet speed was reduced from 128k to 12k. I tried to send you a video of streets to publish on YouTube and… but it is impossible. ” – http://andrewsu...heatlantic.com/
Websites need to adopt, like facebook does. Be in legal limit, talk to authorities and make it up and running. You cant teach a nation what not to do, only wikipedia can do it.
where is the so-called democracy?>>
No where to be found. The elections in Iran are a sham.
This is why web proxy software is extremely important. http://glype.com is a free open source solution that anyone can run on any hosting to bypass governmental blocking.
The government of Iran can do all it wants to block conversations, but just like goback mentioned saavy people will always find ways around the blocks.
I hope so. It’s rather staggering to see that kind of drop in traffic.
lol, when I saw the homepage, for a sec I thought that was the graph for all countries, I was like damn! Iran is like 95% of friendfeed’s traffic
Any idea why FF is so popular there?
because its unpopular everywhere else. kind of like orkut with brazil. noone uses it except mike arrington and iranians
The fact that the website is actually localized in Persian (Farsi) is perhaps a major reason.
Good point.
This is a false cause. Farsi was added only a couple of weeks ago on May 29, 2009, but there’s been a significant Iranian population on FriendFeed since at least March 2008, when I joined FriendFeed.
For a real answer, no, I’m not sure why it’s so popular there Kevin.
Many other social networks have been previously blocked in Iran. Friendfeed spread like wildfire through Iranian college networks. Social networks spread through different cultures irregularly. Not everyone reads Techcrunch. Picso, for instance, was popular with Canadian teenagers. Turns out a few of their first users were Canadian and spread it there. Same happened with Orkut in Brazil. There are 10,000 or more Iranians living in Silicon Valley. One or more probably got his or her friends back in Iran on it, and that caused the spread. I’d love to know who was the first Iranian on the service, that would tell you a lot. Oh, and I have 41,000 followers on friendfeed, which is more than I have on every service except for Twitter and they are more engaged than the Twitterers, so that’s a whole lot of “nobodies.” I love that Arrington now calls friendfeed “mob feed.” Like TechCrunch isn’t a mob at times, either! Ahh, the fun we have with each other.
Isn’t it interesting to note that sometimes we tend to discount these countries as 3rd World countries, yet they are the “most active countries, and it is the most active region as defined by comments per user per day” for Friendfeed, and not to mention, Twitter changing their whole downtime schedule to cater to Iranians. I thought that was positively interesting.
Well, at least, they (the Iranian government) are aggressively coping with the situation. We gotta give’em that, don’t we?
It’s sad that they don’t have access to all of the information that we in the US have. It’s also sad that we don’t utilize the information that we have access to – a great example of this is that MG has to start his article with “you’ve probably heard”, because some people haven’t.
True enough, a fair point that not every has likely heard.
My guess about the new opera is that it will put an end of such things.
It will be a P2P network of browser which will work like Skype, and no service will be ever blocked again by any government (unless all traffic outside will be blocked)
(That’s the far I can go with reinventing the internet – let’s see tomorrow)
The Iranian secret police must be bummed if they can’t track all citizens on FF. Back to walking the beat, pulling fingernails, late-night stakeouts in crapped out Toyota station wagons.
“”If Twitter escaped being blocked by the Iranian government,..”"
what? TWITTER is blocked! from Thursday!
+ facebook, myspace, 360, CELL PHONES (It’s right! PHONES are disabled! ) + SMS ( all carriers! ) + ALL THE SITES, NEWSPAPERS, MEDIA RESOURCES BELONG TO REFORMISTS + ALL NEWS SITES + 90% of the web! after politicians ( like karbaschi ) used ff & twitter for talking straight to people.
they’re killing college students , ordinary people, every one who is against them.
SWAT TEAMS from LEBANON are killing people like savages…
…………
just know this, Iranian people AREN’T agree with what that madafuck** ( Ahmadinejad ) is saying…
Apparently it seems Ahmadinejad prefer twittering over friendfeed.
Does he have a facebook account?
He’s not there yet, but he does have an official blog with a Trojan horse included if it detects that your IP is from Israel (seriously, no kidding)
btw,
if this iran election farce will be evolved into a revolution it will be the first one to be recorded online and in realtime- a paradise for researchers
Dear George , I agree with you , the power of social networks like facebook and FF and miniblogging services like twitter help people to share news , information among each other when government blocks the common communication tools like cell phone , SMS , MMS and filtering the popular website which can be used by other parties.
Friendfeed is a waste of developer intelligence, they missed the boat and it’s time to end it. Apart from Scoble and Gray no one gives a stuff.
Really? Why are so many people liking posts on friendfeed? Here is a list of all posts that have 10 or more likes on FriendFeed: http://friendfe...ch?q=likes%3A10 Got it. Me and Louis are responsible for all those. And if no one is on it why does Arrington call it “MobFeed.” Yeah, me and Louis Gray are the mob. Oh, the trolls here make me laugh sometimes!
The trolls here make me shake my head more than I do at the average Digg or YouTube commenter.
It’s a last gasp.
Get back under your bridge.
Wow. Karen, I had never thought of it like that before. Thanks for the insight. I will delete my FriendFeed account immediately.
Sorry Karen… That message was 143 characters long.
Social media is really becoming a guerilla tool in Iran.
I’ve blogged about it earlier, in case you’re interested:
http://ramine.n...la-tactics-2-0/
That’s a really good article, Ramine!
thanks, a RT would be appreciated!
not sure it’s unfair elections in Iran or not .Maybe it’s true . there are some of people was died after elections .oh..
similar to chinese “Great Frakin’ Wall”
Those who are internet savvy may find a good alternative solution for this.
PLEASE SEE………………………………..
http://www.bost...d_election.html
PLEASE SEE……………………………….. it
http://www.bost...d_election.html
Iranian Stealection proves Twitter’s worth, http://bit.ly/UVPmW.