Robert Scoble, American blogger, technical evangelist, and author, profiled the Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed and was one of the first people to interview Friendfeed’s founders post the acquisition event. Here’s presenting his reaction and comments to the acquisition:
1. This is Facebook firing a shot at Google, not at Twitter. Twitter is mere collateral damage but Facebook knows the real money in real time is in search. FriendFeed has real time search. Google does not (although it’s bootstrapping there very fast, some of my FriendFeed items are showing up in Google within seconds now). Facebook has 300 million users. FriendFeed and Twitter do not. Google has Wave coming, along with some other things this fall and that forced a shotgun marriage between FriendFeed and Facebook.
2. FriendFeed is dead. I will keep using it until Paul unplugs the last server, which could be years, but let’s be honest, the FriendFeed engineering team will make a MUCH BIGGER impact if it gets real time search working for 300 million people.
3. FriendFeed’s social graph? Unknown what happens to that. Facebook doesn’t allow me to have more than 5,000 friends unless I move them all over to my Facebook Group, which I guess I’ll start doing now.
4. Facebook’s news feed? If I were Zuckerberg I’d keep the one they have but roll in some of the nice FriendFeed features like real time comments.
5. Places that this marriage is great?+ Profiles. FriendFeed doesn’t have them, Facebook does, so this makes everyone on both sides of the fence better off.+ Applications. FriendFeed doesn’t have them, Facebook does.+ Friend management. Facebook’s management and privacy features are lots better than FriendFeed’s were.+ Photos and videos. These are things that FriendFeed didn’t do much of, and relied on other services for.
6. Things I’m sad about?+ FriendFeed’s groups were better for me than Facebook’s were.+ FriendFeed’s community was geekier and more fun, for me. No (or almost no) celebrities, very few jerks, lots of engagement that I don’t get on Facebook, and no spammers.+ FriendFeed’s rules were much looser and I’ve never heard of someone legitimate getting kicked off of FriendFeed. If there’s one part of Facebook that scares me, it’s this one.+ This guarantees that no developers will jump into the FriendFeed pool, at least not now. Too many uncertainties. So, if you were waiting for a great iPhone app, or for Seesmic to get FriendFeed capability, I doubt that will happen.
7. What does this mean for Twitter? Well, Twitter’s search really sucks compared to FriendFeed’s, so Twitter will hunker down, I’m sure, and get its search up to par. On FriendFeed you could do far better filtering and you can look back to the beginning of FriendFeed, while Twitter only shows you the last few days. On FriendFeed the search was also true real time.
8. What would I do if I were at Facebook? I would get real time search done as fast as possible for all users. I would find a way to get FriendFeed users into Facebook (and bring their social graph’s with them, we’ve worked hard to build those graphs and they are different than the ones I’ve built in Facebook already). I would look at building FriendFeed as an R&D garden for Facebook. Let the FriendFeed team iterate and build fun stuff, but then have the 800 employees at Facebook take the innovations and roll them into FriendFeed.
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