Friendfeed-Facebook Acquisition: The Positive Side
August 10, 2009
Filed Under: in Analysis, News, Real-Time Web, Sharing, Social Media, Social Search, Startups
Author: Michael Sean Wright
Welcome back.
I'm a firm supporter, user, evangelist of FriendFeed and today they got called up to the 'Majors.' FriendFeed Co-Founder Bret Taylor confirmed the TechCrunch report of the Facebook acquisition in a blog post:
The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We've always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook's passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.
I see this a giant win for innovation- others are not so sure. Since the world 'gets' Facebook it seems that another major player in social net would have to fight hard with a ton of money to try and catch up with FB. By joining forces you possibly get a testing/ proving ground - FriendFeed is behind some of the best innovations in the real-time web. Do you enjoy the real-time updates from your friends? A FriendFeed first. Like the 'like' feature in Facebook? That was a FriendFeed innovation.
What does this mean for the service and for the users?
For right now- not much. Wild speculation on my part here but ... before rolling out a huge change to FaceBook, doesn't it make sense to let the community of early adopters, techies and uber-geeks test out features first on FriendFeed? One of the most applauded services of FriendFeed is the open API and strong relationship with the developer community - Facebook has a tremendous value to be gained here if they let the FriendFeed team take the lead here.
You can track the reaction in real-time in several conversation threads on FriendFeed:
Scoble is talking about the deal here. Within minutes of the announcement, Scoble gathered the folks from Facebook and Friendfeed and recorded this conversation
Bret Taylor's thread here (while standing in front of the Alamo).
Thomas Hawk (where I first saw the news) has his thread here.
Louis Gray who was moderated a panel with Bret Taylor just last week has this to say "This relationship? It's complicated."
To my fellow FriendFeeders - the sky isn't falling, the sky is the limit. Stay cool, take pride that the service you helped bring to the limelight is all grown up and ready for prime-time!
Thrilled for Paul, but amused that FB's first big land grab is another biz that isn't properly monetized either! Arrogance, Ignorance or Clairvoyance?
come now! we don't need no steenking business models!
Seriously though, Friendfeed is lightweight enough to be properly monetized
into the black much better than Facebook.
I think it makes more sense as an investment for Facebook to think of it as
R&D costs, not a monetizable property.
Jury is still out on whether anyone can attract proper ad money to realtime user-generated environments of any sort. At the end of the day it's still just our daily graffiti and only just attracts cheap disposable ads which noone has realised yet only really deliver returns if they are tied to search! 80/20 rule...and all this stuff is within the 80%... imho
Jury may be out on mainstream services, but a couple of small realtime web
apps I have (they function off of Twitter clicks) make about a $15 CPM off
*engagement* based ads.
Nice to read a positive article. I prefer Friendfeed over Facebook, but I think this may even bring better opportunities for Friendfeed to develop and test features. And if some of the features I have come to love in Friendfeed make it into Facebook... all the better experience for all (as Robert Scoble pointed out, another 300 million eople)
[...] But it cannot be all that negative. There’s must be some positive side to the acquisition. [...]
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