This weekend, a number of people had things to say about the decay and seemingly inevitable death of FriendFeed. That included us, twice. While this was going on, the FriendFeed team remained largely silent, even on their own product. But today, co-founder Paul Buchheit has responded.
Naturally, in a FriendFeed posted item, here’s what he had to say:
There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage — if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge
But, this still seems to speak to very much what I was talking about this weekend. FriendFeed, as we knew it, is over. “FriendFeed goodness to the larger world,” would seem to imply either some more open-sourcing like they did with Tornado by way of Facebook. Or, a bigger movement of the FriendFeed technology over to Facebook itself.
Further open-sourcing FriendFeed and/or its APIs is great and all, but I fear things will get messy for end-users without a single product to focus on. Certainly, that will be useful for some people, and undoubtedly some services, but I have a hard time believing it will be able to fully replace the way I used FriendFeed, as a crowd-sourced pusher of information in real-time.
Facebook obviously has the size to provide that, but I still worry that it’s too big for the rapid pace of innovation we were seeing with FriendFeed to continue. I do hope the team is able to improve some of the areas that Facebook is lacking in, such as sharing speed, filters, and content discovery. But it won’t be the same.
And that’s fine, as Buchheit notes, “transformation is not the end.” But it’s hard to watch a service you relied heavily upon change drastically. Maybe the result will be a butterfly, but I didn’t consider FriendFeed to be a caterpillar before.
[photo: flickr/kiwinz]
I like the open sourcing idea. A much rosier picture than abandoning Friendfeed just fixing Facebook.
FriendFeed *IS* dead. Their email notification service is off by more than 24 hours, and now their desktop alerts are going berserk. I keep getting alerts that are a few hours old that repeatedly popup.
There is no one holding the reigns of the product anymore – it’s been allowed to get hairy and bloated.
I gave up on FriendFeed the minute they sold it to Facebook.
“bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world”
- to me that sounds more like – “we are porting Friendfeed features to a larger audience through Facebook”
Srikanth
http://www.arktan.com
I could not live without the utility that Friendfeed brings to my web life. I personally use Friendfeed as a utility for managing content on the web.
I push youtube, delicious, my RSS feeds, everything to Friendfeed and then let Friendfeed push it to twitter and facebook for me. Saves me a ton of time.
I think if Friendfeed would spend more time promoting the utility rather than the social activity of their service, then they would get more users.
I didn’t consider FriendFeed a caterpillar either. Aside from a couple of fatal flaws, it’s easily the best thing we’ve still got. It failed to take over Twitter because of some bone-headed usability issues (injecting ff.im links into posts that got pushed to Twitter, and allowing the entire world to comment on posts) but it’s still top of the heap. Friendfeed could still take the market. Facebook is, and will always be, a privacy-based platform, so we’ll need something public to interact – right now Twitter still fills that role, but engagement is dropping off. The users are still dying for something better.
“bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world”
- to me that sounds more like – “we are porting Friendfeed features to a larger audience through Facebook”
via Srikanth Nagandla
The critical mass of users who previously made friendfeed great have all moved on to twitter. I see the drain continuing, interrupted only by a brief two week spike if/when ff releases a new feature.
So if they do integrate the good stuff from Friendfeed with Facebook, maybe we can have groups and “subscribers” in Facebook and pull in a larger audience? Keep some posts private (real friends only) and some posts public (rest of the world/viewers/subscribers can see)?
I would like to see Friendfeed open-sourced and the team duplicate the features within Facebook!