Paul Buchheit: ‘Friendfeed Won’t Die (Anytime Soon)’
August 18, 2009
Filed Under: in Analysis, Interviews, Real-Time Web, Sharing, Social Media, Social Search, Video
Author: Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
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Following the announcement that Friendfeed had been acquired by social network giant Facebook, panic immediately spread throughout the existing community that the original service would go by the wayside. Robert Scoble even quipped in a recent podcast that “Friendfeed is dead.”
Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble just released a video over at Techcrunch in which they tag-team interviewed Friendfeed founder and newly minted Facebook employee Paul Buchheit this Sunday past (they provided the full transcript at the original post).
Amongst the other things discussed during the interview, Paul uttered words of reassurance to those concerned that Friendfeed would fall by the wayside.
“We’re not going to switch it off or anything like that,” said Paul. “The exact form it will take two years from now, I can’t really say, but […] products do evolve. 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.”
Perhaps I had missed it elsewhere, but why weren’t these words uttered originally when the announcement was made?
The press release I received (which was the same one everyone else recieved) didn’t really provide words of encouragement, and the blog post at Friendfeed wasn’t heavy on community reassurance:
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally. We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.
As we speak, there are entire movements afoot to recreate the functionality in open source. There’s clearly a mass exodus taking place as all the regulars are interacting less frequently on the service and constantly pitching successors to Friendfeed and it’s ilk.
A company with the communicative ability and social media savvy of Friendfeed could have done a lot better reassuring the community. As it stands now, a lot of the potential goodwill and upward momentum Facebook could have gained from the community through this acquisition has been lost.
Speaking personally, Facebook hasn't lost any goodwill on my part. While I'm certainly experimenting with various alternatives to FriendFeed, it's safe to say that my chief alternative at the moment is Facebook itself.
I do agree with you, however, that a better job could have been done on the day of the announcement.
While they may have not lost your goodwill - judging by the community panic and movement numbers - every one of those dozens of negative blog posts about FF>>FB could have been positive posts, and the influence those posts garnered is opportunity lost.
In this case, I was referring to the fact that FB/FF won't be killing off the product anytime soon. It may die of natural causes - that is a different topic altogether.
Gotta say I don't really like the comments to Twitter to comments loop I feel stuck in. hehe I agree Mark. I don't think they'll get the chance to make a conscious decision. They put that decision firmly in the hands of the market...the users. I see the choice already being made.