Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

poetslife — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:01:15 -0000

Robert and his lists. Why he never became a technical writer is beyond me.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Helen — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:06:08 -0000

Come on. FB is crap. I do not have a FB account, and do not intend to get one. But, recently I flirted with the idea of signing up, and so I browsed the user pages using a friend's account...and it was lame. Not useful AT ALL. As you said, the FF community, on the other hand, is great: geeky, legit, no celebrities, few spammers (virtually none), users interested in discourse and engagement about a variety of topics. Basically, more INTELLIGENT than the average-Joe FB user. And, of course, Groups on FF is amazing. I have been in groups composed of techie geeks, of members of courses (students & instructors), of educational professionals, of linux enthusiasts, of scientists, of DIY biologists, and the list goes on. Oh, and how cool is the FLOSS Weekly group where we can talk to enthusiasts of the show in real time as we're watching the video of the show being recorded. Very cool. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted. All good things eventually come to their demise in the face of greed. Twitter's time will eventually come too.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

chupchap — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:37:25 -0000

You sent a DM? I thought you were against DMs =D
Meanwhile I think this deal is more about search than just real-time. I find Facebook search very restrictive, Google's Orkut has a better in-site search. However, Orkut sucks in almost everything else. It would be great if I could search through all items posted by my friends and myself and yes I wouldn't want to restricted to a certain number of updates like twitter does. If facebook-friendfeed combo can deliver that, then it would be awesome!

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

pamelahawley — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:34:52 -0000

Robert, very interesting post. I do believe that what will win the day is how we personally use and invest in these networks. And, the extent to which these networks allow us to be personal, and not just a part of some mass produced site that everyone joins.

Technology -- only goes so far. It's how we engage with it, connect with people, and 'stay with' a certain product or technology which really creates its impact. Having said that, I am an entrepreneur and always appreciate the smaller, customized service such as FriendFeed staying unique and independent. Why? As you point out, the R&D team addition could really enhance FB, so let it roll. I am always aware, however, that these mergers increase the likelihood that good features -- and products -- can be killed as they get absorbed by the larger animal.

Pamela Hawley
Founder and CEO
UniversalGiving
http://www.universalgiving.org

Living and Giving
http://pamelahawley.wordpre...

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

paramendra — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:26:02 -0000

I think this is a smart move. Sure. Buying Twitter? I don't know. Buying FriendFeed, good idea. Twitter will stay strong, thought. It is almost a different paradigm.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Elizabeth K. Barone — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:04:39 -0000

I never used FriendFeed, but from what you said, I'm kind of sad that I didn't. Is it too late to become a part of that fun and geeky community?

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

mathewballard — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:09:13 -0000

Until the day comes that I am proven wrong I'm going to remain very displeased with this whole thing.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

liza — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:27:46 -0000

so quoting you because it's so true.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Alex Hammer — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:04:46 -0000

Yahoo will be bought eventually. By Microsoft if the search deal takes off, by Google (or even Facebook) down the road if it did not (not sure the length of the search deal).

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Otto — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:41:50 -0000

Yes, that is one idea indeed, but consider also the different user bases.

When I'm posting stuff between me and my friends on Facebook, then it is a fundamentally different type of stuff than I broadcast out to the rest of the world that I don't know. The two sets *rarely* overlap. Why? Because, to be quite honest, I'm a nerd who nevertheless has a social life among non-nerdly folk. ;)

So there is a great distinction between what I say to one group and what I say to the other. Having all these people on the same service means that I have to go to extraordinary lengths to separate those two groups, and I can't see any way Facebook can realistically pull it off. Sometimes I have things to say that my friends are not interested in, and I don't want to be forced to bombard them with those things just so I can say them where the rest of the world can pay attention.

Facebook is very good at being a mechanism for me to push items into the viewpoint of my friends. FriendFeed is very good at being a mechanism for me to push items into the viewpoint of people with my shared interests. Those two groups are, and need to be, separate.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Jeff Stannard — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:25:02 -0000

I use friendfeed. My wife uses facebook. Looks like we're married again. :)

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Riaz Kanani — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 05:14:37 -0000

its interesting bret said zuckerberg was on the same wavelength.. of course you can read that in many ways.. ;)

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Riaz Kanani — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 05:12:19 -0000

you dont highlight the negatives so much.. whilst it is definitely a positive move for the friendfeed team and pushing real time to a wider and broader audience, it is going to be interesting to see whether facebook even chooses to deal with the edge cases - geeks who consume significant amounts of information and interact significantly online.

Your scobleizer group is nothing like friendfeed today - will it be tomorrow?

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Adi — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:40:56 -0000

This is a very interesting development. I've by and large regarded Facebook as a social network and kept any commercial things off of it, and I think many of my friends think likewise, but this could change all of that and turn Facebook into a location that you simply cannot be out of.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

technogran — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:33:32 -0000

Hey! I'm a Granma but I am also a Geek as well! Are you insinuating that we oldies can't be Geeks? You'll all be oldies yourselves but I am sure you'll still want to be at the forefront of everything, you don't lose it with age you know!

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Kyle Mulka — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:59:21 -0000

Just a simple fact correction:
"Paul Buchheit told me that he and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of FriendFeed..."

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder of facebook, you just got them mixed up I'm sure. By the way, I wish there was a service that allowed people to easily offer these kind of corrections without leaving an entire comment to do so. Heard of one?

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

nicheslayer — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:44:55 -0000

I agree that this is Facebook's defense against whatever amazing Wave Google will have us surfing very soon. To one of Otto's points, it's true that my FF subscriptions and subscribers are not friends of mine, but I certainly find those streams generally more interesting than the mundane details of my high school acquaintances.

Why not be allowed to intermingle streams within Facebook? Frankly, there are LOTS of FB comments that I'd like to tune out and tune in the great content I receive through FF.

Another great post! Thanks for the scope and perspective.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

panicattack — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:25:09 -0000

I was wondering why friend feed items ranked so fast on Google. Thanks, Frank from Panic Away and The Linden Method

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Larry Roth — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:44:41 -0000

I liked the aggregation features of FriendFeed and how they were loosely coupled with the service. Robert, I know you said FriendFeed relied on other services for photos and video, but I think that's cool. Instead of all the content being in one place, it's distributed. And different people can see my content in different ways with different apps. I liked the way FriendFeed brought it together, others didn't.

That said, at this point they serve two completely different needs. I am hopeful that FriendFeed will stick around. I love it.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

climenole — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:11:00 -0000

Hi John E. Bredehoft :)

May be your right. I read somewhere that the number of FF users do not increase enough to give a "kick" to this application. Now I'm looking for a replacement of this fabulous (and unacheived) application...

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Ken Kennedy — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:10:02 -0000

As Facebook becomes a more "open" network, alpinefolk, the issues won't disappear...I just will stop using Facebook. The only real win it gives me is a certain amount of privacy; it's coarse-grained, as there's currently no easy way to only share wall updates with certain groups of friends, for example (though they are supposedly working on that).

I have no interest in using Facebook as a Twitter/Identi.ca/blog clone. I have all those things. Facebook is overreaching to attempt to be all things to all people...it'll work (for those people who only want "one place" to update), until something else comes along. Then the new "one place" will cannibalize the old, as happened to Friendster, and LiveJournal, and MySpace. Facebook may think they're the service to break that pattern, but any chance they have to do that IMO means moving in the direction directly opposite to the way they're going.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:59:41 -0000

George, at least FriendFeed didn't get bought by MySpace. :)

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:58:14 -0000

Climenole, if FriendFeed had stuck it out and created "a new and genuine Web 2.0 service," would they have achieved success? When you compare FriendFeed to other services in terms of users, I'm unhappy to have to say that it's a relative failure. I don't know that continued innovation would have helped their numbers much.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Steve Chou — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:58:09 -0000

Can't believe Facebook acquired Friendfeed. I don't like Facebook too much.

Re: Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

Scobleizer — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:56:28 -0000

A DM is a Direct Message. Private message to the person only, not for public consumption.