FriendFeed Bought by Facebook
Mon, August 10th 2009 at 01:34pm
Wow pretty big news for a Monday, it seems that Facebook has bought FriendFeed outright. Noone is sure exactly what this means for Friendfeed right now, but it is pretty big news.
I actually only started using FriendFeed on Saturday, but just from a few hours of use I was quite impressed by what it lets you do. The whole site feels very “instant” unlike many other sites that rely on RSS feeds, or even Twitter requires refreshing and polling every minute or so.
The biggest thing I am worried about though, it that FriendFeed seems to be a bit of a testing playground for developing social technology. For example, in my earlier post about Google Wave tech they are the first site to use the Pubsubhubbub to get instant updates from RSS feeds. If FriendFeed goes away it seems like the tech savy crowd it currently has, and the more bleeding edge environment might go away.
What I Hope Happens
Hopefully Facebook will be smart about this, they should leave the FriendFeed website alone and allow the team to continue development there. They should just try to focus on integrating some of the more real-time stuff into Facebook like the instant comments and great aggregation features of FriendFeed.
It just seems like it would be a mistake to dismantle the FriendFeed community when it is such a good place for development to continue and new technology to emerge.
Also, by keeping FriendFeed separate hopefully we will not be subjected to all the questionable ToS agreements Facebook comes up with.
This could be a great thing for everyone, it could mean that Facebook is finally opening up a little. Lets hope it works out like that.
Tags: Web
