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.
