Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.

So can we kill email?

Well if Buchheit’s quote didn’t tip you off, the consensus was “no.” Though there are some interesting things coming out that are helping to expand our communication, we’re just not at the point now where we can live without email. And in fact, for many of these services like Twitter and Facebook, you still need email to be notified about new followers or new messages.

Threadsy (which launched at TechCrunch50 this year) is trying to help the transition away from email by integrating it with other services like Twitter, but even Goldman acknowledges that the email notification problem remains an issue because people keep relying on it. At one point, a question from the audience asked about Google Wave, another would be “email-killer,” and Schonfeld noted that he was having a hard time getting into it because he wasn’t getting notified via email when there is a new Wave message. So you can see the problem.

Speaking of Wave, when asked about his thoughts on it, Buchheit noted that he hadn’t actually tried it yet, while laughing. “The invite is sitting in my inbox.” This is significant because Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google. But Buchheit doesn’t consider Google Wave as a replacement of email or even Twitter or Facebook. Both him and Goldman agreed that it seemed more of a collaboration tool. And both felt that despite some great technology it was still a few years away from having a polished experience.

When asked if there would be a mashup of social and private streams, such as email and Facebook with Twitter, Buchheit said that he felt rather than one thing killing off another that we would just keep layering on new things. Goldman noted that the next step for Threadsy is to provide better context about the messages you’re getting and who you are talking to. He also noted that being able to search across all your messages is key.

So, no. Email isn’t dead yet, but it may be changing.

[photo: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com]

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Social Search essentially pulls in information from social networks to augment Google search results. But a major question is: What social networks get pulled it? While the experiment isn’t quite live yet, it would seem that from the video below made by Google’s Matt Cutts, Social Search, at least at first, will be able to include results from Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Reader.

The last three are obvious since Google owns all of those. Twitter seems obvious too because of the new Google/Twitter search deal. FriendFeed is an interesting one though since Facebook bought that service in August. As expected, it doesn’t appear that Facebook data will play a big role in Social Search (if any), as Google and Facebook continue their social profile stand-off. Cutts makes it clear that public data is the key to all of this, and Facebook doesn’t exactly have the most public information. That’s too bad since Facebook is, after all, the largest social network.

Cutts explains that the idea behind all of this is to utilize your “social circle.” The key to populating this social circle is your Google Public Profile. On this profile, the different social networking profiles you list yourself as being a member of will be a signal to Google to scour those networks for social data to serve up in its new results.

Interestingly, in the second video below, explaining how Google Social Search works, a Facebook profile appears in the lists of profiles. But again, in all the experiments, no data from Facebook seems to show up.

For its social circle, Google is going deeper as well. For example, if you follow 100 people on Twitter, Google will look at their public updates when you search for things, but it will also look at the friends or your friends for even more data. This is similar to what FriendFeed has done in the past to help surface other information that may be relevant to you. Google calls this your “extended social circle.”

Google also uses your Gmail chat buddies to build out your social circle.

When it’s live, you’ll be able to find Social Search here on Google’s Experimental search page.

Update: And now it’s live.

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FriendFeed Co-Founder, Paul Buchheit has taken the stage at Startup School at UC Berkeley. Buchheit is talking about what he’s learned so far as an entrepreneur, from creating Gmail to founding FriendFeed. Buchheit made some interesting points from his career at Intel, Google, FriendFeed and now Facebook. He’s also winging his presentation to see how it goes (and he’s doing a good job at it).

Buchheit talked about his past at Google, where he is of course known as being the creator of Gmail, as well as Intel. At Intel, Buchheit learned that he didn’t enjoy working at large companies. People often ask what’s the formula to startup success. Buchheit answered with that Google had a formula for making successful products that everyone had to follow.

Buchheit also mentioned that he left Google because “it seemed like a good idea.” He said the same thing for why FriendFeed sold to Facebook. Buchheit’s biggest learning experience from Facebook so far is that Facebook ins’t like Google.

Buchheit talked about college, and whether or not to go. He said that you have to pay for college, while if you have a startup, you get paid. Also, the formula of success — there is none. You have to figure it out yourself.

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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]

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One of the most compelling things about FriendFeed has always been just how easy it was to have a conversation on the site. Someone posted an item, and within seconds, many had robust conversation threads updating in the speed of realtime beneath them. This also lead to the occasional trollish activity, but overall it was great.

But since the acquisition, those conversation threads have largely slowed to a crawl, or worse, don’t exist at all on many items. Previously, FriendFeed had committed to keeping the site running indefinitely despite their new jobs at Facebook. And it has remained running, but the site’s innovation, always its key attribute, has been completely halted. And perhaps as a vote of no confidence, previously rabid users are now largely staying away.

And that’s really too bad. One of the key things I used FriendFeed for was to get information. There was a great system in place that would allow interesting things to bubble up based on people commenting on and the liking of items. Not all of it was great (baby pictures, while cute, get in the way of information), but overall the system worked. It was crowd-sourcing at its finest. But that obviously doesn’t work too well when the crowd has vanished.

Sure, there are some items on the site that still garner a good amount of conversation and likes, but as a whole, my experience post-sale has been severely tainted.

So why not just move on to Facebook, you may wonder? Because while there are similarities between what Facebook does and what FriendFeed does, FriendFeed is still much better at it. Hopefully soon we’ll begin seeing the effects of the FriendFeed team at Facebook, but so far that hasn’t happened. It’s still too slow to share, automatically imported items take forever to show up, the filtering system needs work (I want to be able to hide just a certain type of item from one friend, like I can on FriendFeed, rather than hiding everything), as does the relevance of the main stream.

That last item looks like it could be close as it would appear that Facebook Lite’s “View Top Stories” will soon make its way to Facebook proper. That’s a good step, but it’s basically FriendFeed’s “Best of day” area, and doesn’t do something like push recently liked stories to the top of the stream.

But more to the point, Facebook is an entirely different beast than FriendFeed. Facebook is still first and foremost a social network for people you know and want to connect with, FriendFeed was much more about information sharing and conversation. And that’s what I miss. There are plenty of others ways to get information on the web, but FriendFeed was like a playground for information. It was fast and fun.

And the team’s rapid pace of innovation pushed others, like yes, Facebook. Moving over to Facebook obviously didn’t make the FriendFeed team any less brilliant, but I worry about their ability to rapidly innovate in a much larger company, one that has to worry about its legacy of over 300 million users.

This week, one former FriendFeeder already left Facebook. He reasoning was that he didn’t want to telecommute anymore (he lives in Seattle), but he didn’t seem to mind doing it while he was still working on FriendFeed. Read into that what you will.

The bigger picture is that we see this happen all too often. A larger service buys a smaller one and proceeds to run the smaller one into the ground. Not on purpose, but because they have bigger goals for their own products. Google is particularly good at it. Jaiku, Dodgeball, you could even put Feedburner in there. Now we’re seeing Facebook do it too. The users are just along for the ride, helpless when this happens. They take our playground, and put glass on the ground. We can still play, but it’s not as fun. And eventually, everyone leaves with bloody feet — and doesn’t want to come back.

We should consider ourselves lucky that Twitter hasn’t agreed to be purchased yet, it could have very well suffered the same fate.

Look, I’m happy the FriendFeed team was able to get an exit that they clearly felt good about. And I realize that some services, no matter how innovative or how passionate their user base is, sometimes fade away. It’s just sad to see it go. It used to be my playground.

[photo: flickr/Alejandro Hernandez]

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Cliqset, a Friend-Feed-like online identity platform has gone through several iterations but perhaps third time is a charm. Cliqset’s most recent platform tried to stitch together the social web by allowing users and developers build, organize and share social information across a wide variety of services. Similar to Friend-Feed and other social media aggregators, users could merge and share status updates, location, photos, and more into one platform. Today, Cliqset is jumping into the stream by launching interactive real-time functionality and redesigning the overall interface of the platform. Because the startup will be going into private beta for the next few weeks, we have 200 invites here.

Cliqset’s primary aim is capture the pulse of conversations happening on the web from and on the platform. You can now pull in content from close to 70 social networks and services, including MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and more. Plus, users can update their status, and share photos, bookmarks, reviews on Cliqset and push them out to wherever they choose. Users can respond and comment on any type of post in your real-time stream as well.

And Cliqset has added other bells and whistles to its platform, including the ability to filter your stream, thumbnails for photo files or location details (via a map) within the stream, and a heightened set of privacy options that let you control who can and can’t see your streams.

Darren Bounds, president of Cliqset, tells me that the platform aims to be a less clunky version of FriendFeed, with a target audience of users who aren’t as technologically savvy. The platform has a fairly sleek interface and is fairly intuitive, which might help its popularity amongst users. But the real-time social media stream is fast becoming a crowded space with Threadsy, Streamy and others launching compelling platforms. And who knows what Facebook will do with FriendFeed.

Cliqset closed a second seed round, $1.5 million coming from angel investor Derek Mercer, founder and former chairman and CEO of Vurv Technology, a provider of talent management software that was acquired in 2008 by Taleo for about $128.8 million. This comes in addition to an earlier early-stage capital injection of $500,000 by the man, bringing the total invested in the startup to $2 million.

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Well, for starters, it would be impossible to cover every company and each of their competitors, and give them each the same treatment. Not only are there not enough writers to do this for TechCrunch, if you put all the blogs together, there still would not be nearly enough. Further, and maybe more importantly, no one would want to read all of that coverage. A part of our job is to provide a filter to readers.

Some call that filter “bias,” and that’s fine except for the negative connotations associated with that word. While the idea of objective journalism is nice, if you go high enough, it really doesn’t exist. Somebody, somewhere at even the most exalted publications has to make a call on which story to pursue. There is always a flip side (or several), where another story is left out.

Others will be quick to jump on that saying something like, “yes, but you don’t have to do so many stories on X company while not covering Y company at all.” That’s true, but if X company is more worthy of coverage, shouldn’t that be the story to pursue? Not everyone will agree with that, but I think it comes down to a debate of what our role is: Are we kingmakers or are we prognosticators?

The people who think our so-called bias is hurting other companies, clearly will think we’re kingmakers; that we randomly or not-so-randomly pick companies that we want to see succeed and shower them with coverage. From my perspective, the reality is more that we’re prognosticators (or at least are trying to be). That is, finding cool companies that we think could actually have an impact in the tech sphere and covering why that may be the case, independent of caring about how many stories that might mean for any one company.

A good example of this in the past couple of years has of course been Twitter. From the early days of the company, many people could not see the potential of the service, and plenty still don’t. As such, some get really, really angry over the amount of coverage it gets. But what’s interesting is that this coverage is now happening across pretty much all levels of the press, it’s not just one site (though some obviously cover certain companies more than others). So either all of the press is colluding to bolster companies like Twitter, or they’re simply seeing a trend happening, that this company, for whatever reason is becoming important, and so they’re covering it.

Before you know it, the company that just a few years ago no one could understand why it was getting so much coverage, is now raising money with a billion dollar valuation. Did the early explosion of coverage make that happen? Or was the early coverage simply serving as a predictor that it would eventually happen? Kingmaker or prognosticator?

A more recent example of this that we’ve been seeing is with Foursquare. Many of the tech sites (including this one) have been covering the company quite a bit, and there are plenty of readers who have no idea why. But it’s one of those companies that myself and others saw potential in before it even launched. And so far, that prognostication has been slowly but surely been playing out, as earlier this month the company got a round of seed funding that several VCs were said to be fighting over the right to get involved with. Did they get the funding because of the early coverage? Or was the coverage there for the same reason they got the funding? Kingmaker or prognosticator?

The majority of complaints about Foursquare coverage seem to be that only a few early-adopter geeks and their friends are using it. Of course, the same exact thing was said for Twitter and for Facebook before that. It was also said for FriendFeed, which, while it never got the massive amount of mainstream users (though usage was way up right before the sale), still exited to Facebook to the tune of $50 million for one reason or another. Was that just the press coverage? Or did the press see the potential, especially with regards to Facebook (back pat)? Kingmaker or prognosticator?

With Foursquare, like Twitter before it, we aren’t writing about it because a group of geeks are using it. We’re writing about it because of the interesting use of gaming elements with a mobile app that propels usage. And because of the very interesting ramifications it could have on local mobile business deals. This is about seeing the start of a trend. Just as Twitter was about seeing the start of a trend.

That’s not to say that Foursquare will for sure go on to be a real success, it’s still a very young company, and has a very long way to go. And even Twitter at this point could still fizzle away over time. And of course it is always possible that everyone in the press is overlooking the next big company. But I believe that if a company is truly great, it will find a way to make itself known. Someone, somewhere will find it and start covering it, and from there, the product will speak for itself and garner more attention and coverage.

It remains, and will always be about the product. And we’re always out there hunting for the next great one. If you’re not getting the coverage you feel your product deserves, remain focused on improving it. Focus on making it better than the ones getting all the coverage. Don’t be bitter, be better. If you stick to that, eventually someone will find it. And then the complaints will start rolling in that your product is getting too much coverage. And that we’re kingmakers.

[photo: flickr/javier kohen]

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If you’ve seen the video demos or had a chance to use Google Wave at all, Lissn may seem familiar — it has the same type of real-time conversation aspect. The difference, of course, is that this is the main function of Lissn, while Wave is trying to be a lot of different things wrapped into one. Lissn is all about having conversations with people, and allows others to watch, and join in as they’d like.

And because anyone can join in on these conversation threads, Lissn can tell what the most popular topics being talked about are. And it highlights those for other users to see, and lets them get involved in the conversations too. You also have friends on the service, and you can see what conversations your friends are engaged in, and can decide whether or not you want to join them too.

Lissn also automatically translates conversations in your native language, using Google Translate.

There is also a location-based element to the service. Using your IP address (or manually putting in a city) you can see the conversations happening around that area.

Another service that has similar conversation capabilities is FriendFeed. Of course, the future outlook for that service is murky since Facebook recently acquired them. And FriendFeed also had many more features such as aggregation of social data, Lissn is just about conversations, keeping it simple.

As for a business model, Lissn will show ads based on keywords within conversations, just like Google does in Gmail.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire

Q: Dick, you’re working for Twitter now, what do you think?

DC: I like it but on the business side, Google Ads isn’t going to work. Random conversations are hard to monetize. But I like the idea of sponsored conversations. This is kind of like Twitter meets Get Satisfaction.

RS: Conversations are interesting, but I’m not sure I see enough that pulls me in here. Why would I leave Twitter to come here.

MA: Twitter is all about short conversations, this takes that idea and extends it to longer conversations.

RS: So why is this different from FriendFeed and soon Facebook?

DC: I’ll answer this, and I want shares in the company (kidding). The answer there is the local conversation. People looking for a good pizza place in Noe Valley, etc. This is an interesting vehicle, for I want to ask questions in a local context.

MS: I think there is a big separation between big conversations and the local conversations. You need to think about how to separate those out. The local conversation has to be colored by your social network, I think. It’s about your friends.

RS: That was a huge problem with FriendFeed too. With too many people participating, there’s just too much.

C: Right, how many people can have a conversation? Like a trending conversation on Twitter, you can go back so far, to so many message.

MA: Yeah, it’s mostly about live conversations. But it’s also interesting to just listen, especially what celebrities have to say.

Myke Armstrong showed off the demo of listen today at the conference.

Video:

Other Coverage:
TC50: Lissn is like Twitter for longer, public conversations VentureBeat.

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There’s quite a big vulnerability with FriendFeed right now. Using the FriendFeed By Email function, apparently anyone can post a message as anyone else on FriendFeed. For example, someone posted this pretending to be FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor.

Obviously, this is a huge security problem. When it was spotted just about an hour ago, FriendFeed jumped on it quickly, and has shut down email posting while they look into the issue. (Good to know they can still hop on these problems with FriendFeed even though they are now technically Facebook employees.) Still, you have to wonder if this bug has existed for months, or however long this feature has existed?

We’ve reached out to FriendFeed to see if there have been any serious compromises because of this bug.

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Another new Facebook addition, Dave Recordon, explains the open-sourcing today on Facebook’s Developers blog. That Recordon is the one doing this post isn’t all that surprising given his central role in the open source community. Here’s how he explains Tornado:

Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking Web server framework written in Python, designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services.
…
While Tornado is similar to existing Web-frameworks in Python (Django, Google’s webapp, web.py), it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic.

FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor has more on his own blog. He notes that in open sourcing Tornado, FriendFeed and Facebook hope that others will use it to build their own real-time web services. They have set up a demo of how it works at its most basic (commenting) here. As you can see, it looks a lot like the FriendFeed commenting system (pictured below).

Taylor lays out three key parts of Tornado:

All the basic site building blocks – Tornado comes with built-in support for a lot of the most difficult and tedious aspects of web development, including templates, signed cookies, user authentication, localization, aggressive static file caching, cross-site request forgery protection, and third party authentication like Facebook Connect. You only need to use the features you want, and it is easy to mix and match Tornado with other frameworks.

Real-time services – Tornado supports large numbers of concurrent connections. It is easy to write real-time services via long polling or HTTP streaming with Tornado. Every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to FriendFeed’s servers.

High performance – Tornado is pretty fast relative to most Python web frameworks. We ran some simple load tests against some other popular Python frameworks, and Tornado’s baseline throughput was over four times higher than the other frameworks:

But there’s more. Buried in Recordon’s explanation is the following:

Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed’s real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain.

I’ve bolded the key part there. That would seem to suggest that Facebook is now committing to activity maintaining FriendFeed. While the FriendFeed co-founders have more or less said that the service would live on despite the Facebook deal, Facebook has been pretty mum on the topic up until now. Of course, Facebook could simply be saying that it will maintain the technology (for its own uses), and not the service.

Next question: How long until Twitter starts using some components of Tornado?

You can download and find out more about Tornado here.

[photo is an altered version of the great Toronado bar logo]

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Of the 7 bookmarklets I have installed on my web browser, the Facebook Share one is the one I use the least. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of sharing stuff on Facebook, but the Share functionality is too slow and too clunky. Today, Facebook is trying to improve it — but it’s still won’t be as good as the functionality of the company it just bought, FriendFeed.

From what it has written on its Facebook Developers site today, it sounds like most of the Share changes will be happening functionality for buttons partners can install on their sites. If you have a Share button installed, for example, users should see a dialog box that pops up to post an item to their profile. The dialog box is said to be “more consistent with other forms of sharing on Facebook.”

The problem is that it’s still nowhere near as simple as it should be. For example, while it’s nice that it auto-pulls a thumbnail image, FriendFeed’s method of allowing you to click on any image on a page you are sharing is a much better way. Facebook’s thumbnail selector often pulls the wrong image and you’re stuck shuffling through random images on the page to find the one you want — as you can see in the preview image Facebook captured below, there are 17 possible images you can use.

Another nice feature of FriendFeed’s sharer is that it displays as an overlay on the web page you are on, rather than popping open a new small window (as Facebook’s does). FriendFeed’s functionality also makes it easy to send as a message to other users all from within the same screen, rather than having to click over to a separate window to send what you are sharing as a message to a user.

Facebook’s “What’s on your mind” comment area is also confusing. That would seem to imply that you should state what is on your mind (a status update) rather than comment on the item you are sharing. FriendFeed’s comment area simply has a comment icon and the note “Add a comment” — a subtle difference, but still nicer.

Finally, FriendFeed’s sharer gives you the ability to use it as a send-to-Twitter bookmarklet as well. Basically, if you select the “Cc: Twitter” box, it will send the item to both FriendFeed and Twitter (and it can link directly to the source rather than back to FriendFeed if you have that option set). Facebook, obviously, offers no such option.

The point is that if Facebook really wants to improve its Share functionality on sites outside of Facebook, it needs to make the process faster and cleaner. In other words, it needs to use its new acquired FriendFeed guys and get them to replicate their FriendFeed button. Facebook Connect is a very powerful pipeline from the web to Facebook, but that doesn’t matter if some of the pipes to and from it are clogged.

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And I think Facebook realizes that, which is why we’re getting a post today on its blog basically explaining that it’s okay not to accept all requests.

Specifically, the post notes that if you click the button to ignore a friend request, the person who requested you will not be notified about it. Likewise, if you accept someone as a friend, but then later un-friend them, they will not be notified (though they will no longer be able to see your information, nor will you be able to see their’s). And if you don’t want to accept them, but don’t want them to be able to attempt to friend you again, Facebook recommends simply leaving their request pending in your queue.

It’s interesting that Facebook felt the need to go over this again. That seems to speak to confusion over the symmetric nature of its social graph in a world of Twitter and other social services in which the “follower” is more common than the “friend.” Of course, there are benefits to this type of network, the key one being privacy.

But the problem is that as Facebook continues to grow and evolve, we’re getting more and more requests from random people that we don’t actually know. But many of us are using Facebook to spread information just as we do with Twitter (status updates, sharing links, etc), and there is some desire to allow these random people to be able to see some of what you are doing on Facebook. This is why Facebook created the “Everyone Button” and Fan Pages, but both of those seem to complicate the social graph, rather than simplify it.

The solution that I employ is to accept all Facebook friend requests but limit the people I do not actually know to a very basic profile using Facebook’s filters. I then hide many of these people from my main News Feed. The problem is that they still show up when I do things like search for something. It’s a less than ideal solution. Plus, many users of Facebook probably still aren’t using filters (or at least not using them well).

It will be interesting to see how Facebook deals with this issue going forward. Remember that they just purchased FriendFeed, which features a combination of an asymmetric social graph with great filters. I can’t help but wonder if Facebook won’t eventually switch to something like that.

Of course, we’re also hearing that they’re very close to launching their location functionality (just like Twitter recently did), which will once again highlight the importance of privacy. Almost all location-based services are currently symmetric, because while it’s one thing for random people to read your words or see what links you’re sharing, it’s another for them to know where you are. Because of that, on services like Loopt and Foursquare I stick pretty firmly to only accepting users that I actually know.

As they approach 300 million users, Facebook continually has the tough situation of having to deal with these issues while figuring out how to educate all their current users if they intend to make a change. Of course, having 300 million users is a problem a lot of social networks would like to have.

Update: Former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson also shared some great thoughts about Facebook’s social graph on his personal blog recently. Here’s one particularly interesting paragraph:

The main problem is that people’s real-world social graphs change often and automatically, while their virtual representations on Facebook change mostly uni-directionally and manually. In other words, friends come and go in real life; but on Facebook, they usually just come. Friend lists tend to get bloated over time because users have a harder time defriending each other virtually than in real life. And even if they are going to defriend each other virtually, it has to be a deliberative effort, unlike in real-life when you just stop seeing certain people.

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Some people still aren’t sure why Facebook would buy FriendFeed. While few would question the talent of FriendFeed’s team, many still considered it to be a product going nowhere. Think again.

The new July comScore numbers are out, and they’re impressive to say the least for FriendFeed. First of all, its last full independent month saw an all-time high in unique visitors. But the stat that really will blow you away is the average time spent on the site. FriendFeed’s choice to move to a live, constantly updating stream of data was a very good choice, it seems.

At the end of April, FriendFeed turned on the live-stream that it had been testing on its beta site, for all users. At first, a lot of users didn’t seem to like it, but many quickly realized its power. From May on, usage of FriendFeed starting going up in terms of unique visitors to the site, after a small dip the month prior. Meanwhile, the average amount of time spent on the site went from just a few minutes in April, all the way up to 6.2 minutes in June. But the most impressive jump was yet to come: July saw users spending 31.2 minutes on the site. Just look at the chart below, the jump is pretty incredible.

Assuming FriendFeed’s internal metrics are close to comScore’s, it looks like a case of where FriendFeed sold high. And it may have been a very smart time for Facebook to buy FriendFeed as the trend was clearly that the site was gaining momentum, and more importantly, that what they had done with the live-updating stream was working. Facebook is of course also working on its own version of a similar stream, but it has so far paled in comparison to FriendFeed’s. Undoubtedly, the FriendFeed team will help change that over the next several months.

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Well, now that the FriendFeed team is successfully in their new Facebook office and working to get up to speed on their new site, Steve Gillmor got a chance to catch up with FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, and to ask him some of the questions that Mike didn’t touch on too much during his interview with Buchheit last week. Warning, the video below is quite long (over 50 minutes) and free-flowing at points, so I’ll summarize some of the key things said first.

Of note:

• FriendFeed was in between large new internal projects when the Facebook deal came along, so the timing was good for it. That said, they were working on a new feature to allow you to pipe FriendFeed feeds into FriendFeed Groups. While you could import pretty much any feed previously, you couldn’t import an entire FriendFeed feed into another feed. The service was working on that and still plans to launch it, but Buchheit says he wasn’t running point on it, so doesn’t know the timing details.
• Buchheit has a lot of trouble pronouncing PubSubHubbub. He also talks a bit more about their SUP implementation to speed up the gathering of information.
• Buchheit is not aware of a conspiracy on Twitter’s behalf to slow down their feed coming into FriendFeed post-Facebook deal.
• While FriendFeed had switched from Twitter’s XMPP feed to the newer HTTP-based feed a few months ago, Twitter recently requested that they update again to a newer HTTP feed called “Birddog”. Birddog is the name of one of the restricted feeds of Twitter data, you can read more about it here.
• With regard to the old FriendFeed team’s focus right now, Buchheit notes that for the time-being it’s dedicated to the issues Facebook is facing, and learning now Facebook actually works.
• That said, while new FriendFeed development may stop during this transition period, maintenance that needs to get done to FriendFeed will get done still indefinitely.
• Buchheit notes that the FriendFeed team is still using FriendFeed to talk internally about their new projects at Facebook.
• Buchheit notes that Facebook had shown interest in FriendFeed basically since they launched the company in 2007. But FriendFeed was never interested in an offer from them until they actually started talking to people on the Facebook team recently and saw their vision for where they want to take the product.
• He jokes that the whole “has Facebook been copying some of your [FriendFeed's] features” thing helped the FriendFeed team actually see that they were at least interested in the same goals in some regard. (Something which, ahem, I pointed out in my first TechCrunch post.) Buchheit notes that a couple years ago Facebook was just profiles and games, now it’s much more.
• Buchheit likes the idea of FriendFeed clones popping up. Their new API allows you to do a lot of things, and offers much of the functionality of actual FriendFeed, and he hopes people keep building cool services on top of it. The APIs will live on.
• He still believes that long term, all of these status and information streams should be more federated in some way, much like how email is. Of course, Facebook is known now for its lack of openness in that regard, but Buchheit cites Facebook’s unique security issues as being a reason to take it slow. Still, he sees a future where Facebook is much more than just a website, where it’s more of a platform for the web, and he believes that is what Facebook wants to be as well.
• Buchheit notes that the Facebook inbox is not his favorite feature, but that it was born out of the long history of email where people have expectations like subject lines and signatures. (Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google.) He notes that direct messages, like the kind used on Twitter and FriendFeed, are much more efficient for messaging now.
• There won’t be a literal dropping in of FriendFeed code to Facebook because that wouldn’t work well.
• On the topic of the fears some FriendFeed users have about still using the service because their data may just disappear if FriendFeed does, Buchheit notes that if anything, the Facebook acquisition has lowered the chances of that happening. He says that in the big picture, it’s so little data, and takes very little to support. And Facebook is a huge, secure company now. (He is, of course, alluding to the fact that FriendFeed was in a much less stable position in the market.)
• Buchheit reiterates again that he is not worried about FriendFeed vanishing. And he believes that some features may start to appear in other forms on Facebook that users will like. And there may be some experimentation with that relatively soon.

Those are many of the key points, but again, if you’d like to watch a nearly hour-long video on this fine Saturday, please be our guest below. Hopefully much of this will further put to ease the minds of would-be FFugees.

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Robert Scoble and I ran into freshly-acquired FriendFeed cofounder Paul Buchheit at a brunch on Sunday. I pulled out my trusty Android myTouch and with his permission asked him a few questions about the sale to Facebook a week ago.

Apologies for the audio quality – Powerset’s Barney Pell, BillShrink’s Peter Pham and others were chatting loudly nearby (which led to a side discussion with Pell on the exact price Microsoft paid for Powerset in 2008). A full transcript of the interview is below.

A few interesting details came out of the interview with Buchheit. First, the deal was actually signed on Sunday evening (August 9), and these pictures were in fact taken that evening, he says.

Buchheit also says that the WSJ got the price wrong, but won’t give more details.

Paul Buchheit: “The more people say about the deal, the more wrong they are. There’s a lot of inaccurate things being reported…There have been a lot of details and for some reason, the more details there are the further they get from the truth.”

On whether FriendFeed will live on as an independent product:

Michael Arrington: Back to FriendFeed, everyone’s kind of reporting to different groups. This tells me that FriendFeed’s disappearing in a year. Is it going to stay on as its own brand, its own product, can users stay secure that FriendFeed’s going to be around?

Paul Buchheit: We’re not going to switch it off or anything like that. The exact form it will take two years from now, I can’t really say, but I couldn’t really say that before (inaudible) products do evolve (inaudible) We all like the product, we all use it, and none of us want to see it disappear. We’re going to make sure it’s taken care of.

Michael Arrington: You’re not going to answer that question at all.

Robert Scoble: He promised me it would be up for at least a month. (laughs)

Paul Buchheit: It will evolve over time.

On nonexistent rumors that FriendFeed had threatened to sue Facebook over copying of features:

Michael Arrington: What about the rumors that you had threatened or had actually sued facebook, and that’s what lead to this acquisition over them stealing all of your ideas.

Paul Buchheit: No, I’ve never even heard that rumor.

Michael Arrington: I just made that up right now

Buchheit also talked about FriendFeed’s habit of inventing features before anyone else, and dealing with the copying from Twitter and Facebook. He also says that the day the deal was announced was FriendFeed’s “biggest growth day ever.”

The full transcript:

Michael Arrington This is Mike Arrington, I’m here with Paul Buchheit, Co-founder and CEO of Friend Feed, and as always Robert Scoble.

Robert Scoble: Number one user of FriendFeed.

(inaudible)

MA: How many follower people do you have on FriendFeed?

RS: 47,000

MA: 47,000. Wow, I have 0.

RS: I know, you deleted your account.

MA: Well, temporarily, but now they won’t turn it back on. So Paul, it’s been a week since the announcement, and you actually signed it about a week ago, the FriendFeed acquisition.

Paul Buchheit: Yeah, Sunday night.

MA: Now you guys haven’t commented on the purchase price but the Wall St. Journal came out and said 50. Without commenting specifically on the numbers, was that incorrect? I’ve got an indication there was something wrong with that.

PB: Yeah, I obviously can’t really comment on the details. The more people say about the deal, the more wrong they are. There’s a lot of inaccurate things being reported.

MA: Is it materially inaccurate? The number was significantly different?

PB: I don’t want to comment on that. There have been a lot of details and for some reason, the more details there are the further they get from the truth.

MA: This is something I asked you guys about the other night, you guys are all reporting into products or into engineering Mike, what’s the deal…

MA: (turns to Barney Pell) How much did Powerset really sell for?

Barney Pell: God, I mean it sold for…I didn’t buy a car, put it that way.

MA: It was 100 million, 85 million?

BP: I don’t remember (laughter)

RS: That’s called entrepreneur PR 101, “I don’t remember”

MA: Back to FriendFeed, everyone’s kind of reporting to different groups. This tells me that FriendFeed’s disappearing in a year. Is it going to stay on as its own brand, its own product, can users stay secure that FriendFeed’s going to be around?

PB: (inaudible)…We’re not going to switch it off or anything like that. The exact form it will take two years from now, I can’t really say, but I couldn’t really say that before (inaudible) products do evolve (inaudible) We all like the product, we all use it, and none of us want to see it disappear. We’re going to make sure it’s taken care of.

MA: You’re not going to answer that question at all.

RS: He promised me it would be up for at least a month. (laughs)

PB: It will evolve over time.

MA: What about the rumors that you had threatened or had actually sued facebook, and that’s what lead to this acquisition over them stealing all of your ideas.

PB: No, I’ve never even heard that rumor.

MA: I just made that up right now.

RS: The new journalism, make shit up as you ask the founder about it.

PB: I actually like when people copy my ideas because I just like to see things out there. I mean, to me…

MA: Well you say that now after you got bought, but you weren’t saying that in January, were you?

PB: Yeah I like to see my ideas. That’s part of what makes this whole thing fun is that we’ve been able to have some impact. And obviously I want wherever I’m working on to be successful, and I also like that the things we do have a broader effect…(inaudible) One of the things I thought was great about email was not only did we make this really great email product for the many millions of people who were using it, but we also impacted the community through everyone else in the world who uses email (inaudible) crazy expectations Yahoo had encountered by rewriting their whole thing, and giving people much more storage.

RS: Were you always bugged when I came in the office and said, “you’re the facebook R&D department?”

PB: Yeah, we just make things first, it’s just a fact.

RS: So are you now the official R&D department?

PB: We’re part of it (inaudible) I don’t think there’s an official department, it’s all of engineering.

MA: What was usage growth last week when the announcement came?

PB: It was pretty good.

MA: Your best day ever right?

PB: The biggest growth day ever.

RS: How come Demi Moore joined, right after

PB: I don’t know, I’ll ask her next time.

(inaudible)

MA: So were there other potential acquirers, were you talking to others or was this really Facebook …

PB: We had interest from pretty much everyone for quite a while.

MA: Even Twitter?

PB: I don’t want to be specific about anything, all the companies involved have confidentiality…

RS: Is there something you wish you had done differently (inaudible)

PB: That’s a really interesting question…nothing comes to mind but with reflection, I’m sure I can think of something.

MA: How long before you leave and start your next thing?

PB: Hopefully not for a long time.

MA: Till you vest? (laughter)

PB: No but seriously, part of what makes it really exciting is because facebook is at this really interesting point in history. It’s at this point where it’s almost inevitably (inaudible) successful…(inaudible) that’s pretty exciting.

MA: So you won the top most promising startup of 2008 at the Crunchies earlier this year. Do you think that was the main driver of the acquisition?

PB: (laughs) I have to assume it was…the gorilla was in the term sheet in fact.

MA: Oh really?

PB: No (laughs)

MA: Alright, I’ll let you go back to the party, thanks very much.

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Despite being purchased by Facebook for close to $50 million earlier this week, FriendFeed is still rolling out new features. Today brings customizable themes, which allow you to tweak your template to make it as pretty or as ugly as you would like. Naturally, I’m going for ugly, as I stated my desire to mimic the excellent “Eggplant Orange Juice With Blood” theme I created for Gmail when that service launched customizable themes.

So far, my best effort (below) is called “Dictionary.com Cheer Carrot Theme” after my new favorite website. To FriendFeed’s credit, they make it pretty hard to make a truly ugly design, like you can easily do on Gmail. One reason is that theren’t are as many variables to change the colors of.

One interesting note about these themes is that by default, you will see other users’ themes when you click on their profiles. You will also see the themes that admin’s create in rooms that they manage. You can turn this off, and choose to only see your theme, in the settings.

And just for comparison sake, the old Gmail design I did:

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But, with the cat out of the bag, everyone is now rushing to reach some conclusions about what Facebook Lite actually is. Most of these assumptions revolve around Twitter and FriendFeed. The reasons for this should be obvious: First, Facebook and Twitter seem to have a nice rivalry going on to see who is the hottest social property. Second, Facebook just bought FriendFeed for $50 million, so it would seem possible that they want to develop a service just like that one. And third, the screenshot of Facebook Lite, which we found earlier, makes it look a lot like Twitter and FriendFeed.

But in reality, Facebook Lite has nothing to do with Twitter or FriendFeed — at least, not right now. Instead, it was designed to be used in parts of the world where broadband speeds vary and can be expensive, we’re being told by Facebook. Given that the initial testing of it has taken place in India over the past several days, this makes sense.

Think about how slow Facebook is to load at times on some broadband connections here in the U.S., and just imagine what that much be like on connections that are several times slower. And then also consider that all of Facebook’s datacenters are here in the U.S. So for the data to get around the world, it creates an even longer natural load time. So Facebook is stripping the site back and allowing Facebook Lite to be a site where new users can quickly write on friend’s walls, send messages and build their social network. The basics.

As we said, it’s testing in India right now, but the plan is for Facebook Lite to hit places like Russia and China as well, we’re hearing.

All that being said, it is entirely possible that the service could find its way to the rest of the world as an option for those who maybe don’t want all the bells and whistles that Facebook provides, and instead just want speed. Facebook didn’t have anything to say on that matter, and specifically not the U.S., but it seems reasonable. After all, MySpace has a “lite” version too.

But don’t buy into the hype that we’re already starting to hear that Facebook Lite is a “Twitter-killer” — because that’s not its intention at all right now.

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It looks like Facebook has tonight turned on a feature called “Facebook Lite” for some users to test out. We’re getting bombarded by tips about it, and some of us are seeing it as well. Unfortunately, it appears that it may not be fully ready for prime time yet, but we have more information and what looks to be a screenshot below, so keep reading.

[Update: See Facebook's response at the bottom, the test was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended tonight.]

So what is it? Well, it looks to be exactly what it says it is, a lighter version of Facebook. The beta tester message reads:

We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.

The URL for the feature is http://lite.facebook.com. So far, users are reporting not seeing much different about the site, if anything.

You’ll recall that MySpace launched a “lite” version for its profiles in April.

Update: Okay, while it seems that most of the users who are getting this message now are not seeing much different, earlier this week, it looks like a very select few may have gotten a sneak peak at Facebook Lite. According to their tweets on it, it appears to be a more Twitter-like. One user notes that it, “looks like a simplified version of twitter with comments enabled. On 2nd thought, it looks like simplified FriendFeed.”

That is of course very interesting since Facebook just bought FriendFeed for around $50 million yesterday.

Update 2: We just found a screenshot of what this apparently looks like. Again, this was taken a few days ago.

Update 3: FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit shared our story on FriendFeed, so naturally I asked if he knew about this beforehand. “Someone mentioned it earlier today. It sounds very promising,” he says.

Update 4: And here’s Facebook’s official response:

We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook “Lite” is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept Friend requests, write on people’s Walls, and look at photos and Status updates. We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience.

This evening, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake. We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time. People who are not part of the test and are trying to access “Lite” will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.

Whoops, looks like someone at Facebook jumped the gun on this new feature. Too bad, looks like most of us will have to wait awhile to try it out.

Update 5: And here’s what Facebook Lite is really all about.

Update 6: And here are some more pictures of Facebook Lite.

We are updating this.

[thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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This meme seems be done for just about everything on the web these days, but this one is particularly good because it’s full of good insider-y references. And it closely echoes some of the actual backlash against the news today which played out on FriendFeed.

Among the choice lines:

• “It was a complete talent grab.”
• “I even remember what it was like before Robert Scoble got here!”
• “I used FriendFeed to argue about Obama and talk about health care, and to like tons of pictures from NASA that were awesome, not to spend my time posting pictures of bacon and talking about mangoes!”
• “Of all the companies, they went with Facebook. They could’ve been acquired by Google and I would’ve been happy for them. Or even Twitter: That I could understand. But Facebook?! What the hell?!”
• “Don’t worry, we still have Plurk.”

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As expected, the tipster says you’ll be able to broadcast songs you’re listening to out to various social networks. But the really interesting thing is the reference to some new social application that Apple is supposedly getting ready to launch. It’s not clear at all if this would be a desktop app or an iPhone app, but it is said to be something that consolidates your various social networking activity from around the web into one place.

Is Apple planning a FriendFeed-killer after Facebook has already essentially killed FriendFeed? That would certainly give the team a good reason to sell, if they caught wind of that. But who knows, it could be anything, or it could very well be nothing. Hopefully we all know by now how rumors, especially Apple rumors, work.

Regardless of what Apple has in store, if there are social elements added to iTunes, it will be a big move for the company. Right now, they basically have absolutely no social strategy beyond a bit of Facebook and Flickr integration in iPhoto. And yes, there are plenty of apps that use Facebook Connect, but that has basically nothing to do with Apple itself.

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As you can see in these pictures, this deal was obviously important enough to Facebook that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself is there. Also pictured from Facebook is Vaughan Smith the director of corporate and business development. From FriendFeed, there were three of the co-founders Buchheit, Bret Taylor and Jim Norris (Sanjeev Singh, the fourth co-founder, was not there because he was getting on a plane, Buchheit notes).

I’m still not entirely sure that these pictures are of the deal signing, and not of the crew getting ready to play a game of pick-up basketball.

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The stock is the key part of this deal. Its value is derived from the $6.5 billion common valuation after a recent purchase of employee stock by the Russian investment group DST. But what’s really interesting about the stock is that these are options that vest over a set period of time (”several years,” says WSJ), just as employees in the company get. Compared to the Parakey deal in July 2007, in which the company got only cash and no stock, this seems like a pretty nice deal (assuming that Facebook’s stock eventually pans out, of course).

Another interesting question about this is what Benchmark Capital, FriendFeed’s outside investor, got? It’s certainly possible that they’re taking the cash, while the FriendFeed employees take the stock. Benchmark invested a small part of the company’s $5 million round in early 2008, so a $15 million exit would be pretty solid. But that’s all just speculation, it’s hard to know what Benchmark is getting for sure.

What else is interesting about this $50 million number is that it is 1/10th of what Facebook was apparently willing to pay for Twitter late last year. One big hold up in that deal was that Facebook was offering mostly stock, while Twitter wanted more cash (we heard roughly 20% would have been cash, with the rest coming in stock). Another big problem was that the stock Facebook was offering Twitter was apparently valued based on the ridiculous $15 billion valuation after Microsoft’s investment in October of 2007. The $6.5 billion common stock valuation seems much more reasonable. Too bad for Twitter.

[photo: flickr/tracey o]

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That’s sort of like an unassisted triple play in baseball, it just doesn’t happen that often. Maybe that’s why the team looks so darn happy in their website picture. Partner Peter Fenton (labeled Rock Star in photo) led both deals.

The first is Friendfeed, which was acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed sum. Benchmark was the sole venture capital investor in Friendfeed, which raised a $5 million in an early 2008. Benchmark now has stock in Facebook, the hottest IPO prospect in Silicon Valley right now.

The second is the much larger deal – VMWare’s $400+ million acquisition of Springsource, an enterprise and web application development and management startup. Benchmark was the biggest investor in Springsource, which raised a total of $15 million in two rounds of financing prior to the acquisition.

These weren’t the only wins for Benchmark this year, either. They were also investors in Pure Digital (acquired by Cisco for $590 million) and OpenTable (went public in May).

Benchmark still holds the record for (probably) the best venture investment in history – they turned a $6.7 million investment in eBay in 1997 into $5 billion by 1999. Partner Bill Gurley talks about that deal and Benchmark in general in our video interview with him last year.

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