The Inquisitr » friendfeed

Facebook get a Friendfeed treatment – no surprise there

Steven Hodson — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:04:43 +0000

It should be no surprise that today’s news about Facebook’s launching of the Live News feed option for your Facebook status update page has made the front pages of just about every tech blog. Given Facebook’s recent purchase of Friendfeed – or more important the acquisition of the talent behind it – it is no surprise that we are seeing this real time implementation on the status updates.

While a Facebook spokesperson may have told Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb that the purchase of Friendfeed had nothing to do with the implementation of the Live News Feed the timing certainly might suggest otherwise. Even if the two events aren’t connected what we are seeing is the very beginnings of what made Friendfeed the quality service that it was.

As cool as the idea of displaying your status update information in some sort of real time fashion it was also one of my big disagreements with Friendfeed when they introduced it. While it isn’t a bad idea when you list of people you are friends with is closer to the magical Dunbar number it can very quickly become a blur as you follow more people.

There is no argument that we are moving to a more real time web and in many cases this could be a very good thing – but not in all cases in my opinion. Given that Facebook’s user base is much more mainstream that Friendfeed’s was it will be interesting to see how this real time implementation will be received especially by folks who are friends with a large number of people.

For the love of God Paul Buchheit, be a man and put FriendFeed out of its misery

Duncan Riley — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:12:11 +0000

The increasingly quiet (see chart above) social streaming service FriendFeed is in its death throws following its talent based acquisition by Facebook in August, but the agony is being made worse by the ramblings of one of its founders.

Friendfeed co-founder Paul Buchheit commented over the weekend on FriendFeed’s demise in a classic case of lets avoid the subject with gobbledygook, writing that the “The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage — if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge ”

Most seem to think that Buchheit didn’t give an answer, but there’s another way of reading part of the response; “a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world” sounds an awful lot like FriendFeed type features will appear in Facebook, after all, that’s who Buchheit is working for now.

What is clear though is that Buchheit isn’t committing to a future for FriendFeed because there isn’t one. There can be no other explanation because it doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to say these three words “FriendFeed won’t close.”

Paul Buchheit, for the sake of your loyal users, past and present, be a man and put FriendFeed out of its misery by announcing the date the service will close. Those very users helped get FriendFeed to the sales table with Facebook, irrespective of what now seems to be a case of you forgetting that. At the very least, they deserve the truth, not some gobbledygook corporate speak about butterflies.

Facebook to be the Huffington Post of your social media?

Steven Hodson — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:36:30 +0000

There’s been a lot of discussion happening in the days following the snapping up of Friendfeed by Facebook. Some like Steve Rubel wondered if we would see a rush of Friendfeed “refugees” heading to Facebook since he was already experiencing an impact of sorts

I am in no hurry to make changes but I am already starting to see Friendfeed have an impact on Facebook indirectly.

I have pretty well put Friendfeed on the back burner sometime ago but I do think there were, and maybe still are, some questions that could do with being answered

Even though Friendfeed is still around and people are still adding to its massive database of information that we have no idea of what will happen to, one has to wonder why we are even bothering.

It isn’t like there is going to be any pot of gold at the end of the rainbow when the day comes and the door is finally closed on every Friendfeed room. Sure they announced the cool feature of users being able to design and save their own themes – but really who cares?

Louis Gray though still holds out hope that Friendfeed will be around for awhile to come

Meanwhile, if you expected them to stop using the site, they haven’t. After a few busy days following a practically sleepless weekend prior to the deal’s completion, the founders have started posting again. They’re not going away, and neither are we. Hopefully, they will talk a lot more about what the acquisition means – as much as they are able – soon. But for now, I’m going to keep using FriendFeed,[….]

Then along comes a post from Chadwick Matlin at the Washington Post suggesting that Facebook’s intent by buying up Friendfeed was to cement its place as the leader in social aggregation.

Instead, I think this is about social aggregation. Facebook bought FriendFeed so it could become the Huffington Post of your social life.

Right now the majority of your news feed is filled with updates that your friends have (for the most part) made within Facebook. Status updates, engagements, zombie bites — it all shows up in your news feed. But those are all internal to Facebook; everybody spends plenty of time outside Facebook, as well. And in order for you to track your friends’ activities you either have to subscribe to all of their different feeds or hope that they tell you when they add content to one of their other profiles. That’s a hassle.

What you need is an aggregator — a place to come that gives you a news feed not just of what’s happening inside your walled garden, but also what’s going on elsewhere, too. A Facebook/FriendFeed mash-up — FaceFeed, we (and many others) will call it — would be exactly that.

It is still early days of the acquisition of Friendfeed and really the only ones who know what is going to happen to Friendfeed are the people who signed the deal for $50 million (cash and stack) but I’m inclined to agree with what Duncan Riley (the man behind The Inquisitr) said in response to Louis’ post on Friendfeed

Friendfeed and some unanswered questions

Steven Hodson — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 21:59:53 +0000

As summer slowly heads into fall so to will Friendfeed slowly disappear into the bowels of Facebook and for all the people who invested so much of their rime and energy into making Friendfeed the perfect acquisition target they are left with …. nothing. Even though Friendfeed is still around and people are still adding to its massive database of information that we have no idea of what will happen to, one has to wonder why we are even bothering.

It isn’t like there is going to be any pot of gold at the end of the rainbow when the day comes and the door is finally closed on every Friendfeed room. Sure they announced the cool feature of users being able to design and save their own themes – but really who cares?

And what about the mess that they have made out of more than one bloggers Feedburner numbers when they got the bright idea to throw them out whack by adding in Friendfeed subscriber counts. Are they going to stay screwed up or will they return to the normal numbers that they should be?

What happens to the great effort put forth by people like Johnny Worthington and his crew of FFundercats podcasters? What will happen to all the promotional work they did to make Friendfeed what it became – an acquisition.

These aren’t the kind of questions for early adopter’s to worry about because like Robert Scoble they’re already gone and unaffected by any repercussions. These are the questions being asked tough by people who are still there, making Friendfeed their home on the web. Except that home has been sold out from under them for $50 million (cash and stock) making a couple of rich guys a little richer.

P.T. Barnum is probably tipping his hat to them.

I’m not sure what Streamy is, but it’s not FriendFeed

Duncan Riley — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 03:09:30 +0000

Social something site Streamy is getting a lot of attention online this week with many predicting that it’s the next FriendFeed…in a good way. It’s not.

In explaining Streamy it’s best to start with a description of the service, but actually coming up with a description was only the beginning of my confusion. It’s not helped that Streamy doesn’t offer an about page, and instead offers a video explaining what the service does…except that the video shows the various features without properly describing what the product itself is meant to do as a whole. The front page uses the 2.0 buzz words “Read, Share and Discuss” then quotes a TechCrunch article saying how awesome it is.

I’m going to call it a social aggregator, because that is the closest model Streamy touches on. From within Streamy you can follow and interact with external services, including Twitter, Facebook and even FriendFeed itself. Indeed the FriendFeed interface is Streamy is better visually than the actual FriendFeed interface, although given the monstrosity of the last FriendFeed upgrade that achievement wasn’t particularly hard to achieve.

Then we have RSS. Well, I think it’s RSS, least it allowed me to import my feeds from Google Reader. But then Streamy offers pre-sorted content in categories; I’m not sure where this content comes from, and can only guess that it is listed due to some sort of user ranking system. Annoyingly though you can’t get rid of it; you can exclude content from certain sites in the “home” view, but you can’t exclude content within a category, or exclude the category itself. Some of the categories include Health & Medical and Politics, neither of which I have any interest in.

The article reading interface isn’t great. Instead of the ability Google Reader style to be able to list items or view them in full down the page, to view an item in Streamy you have to click on it to get a popup. The popup is also the only way to share items as well; so each sharing step requires two clicks, not one.

But wait, there’s more! Streamy also offers Meebo style aggregated chat, and supports GTalk, AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Windows Bing whatever Microsoft is calling its chat service today Live.

Next on the list is “people.” This is something close to a FriendFeed experience….or maybe not. You can leave status messages, and your friends appear on a list showing what they’re doing, for example Louis Gray is reading SocialGeeks. The stream though doesn’t aggregate in other items. The process of importing and finding friends is also woeful; despite happily supporting my FriendFeed account, it shows up blank for FriendFeed friends. When you do get a list of friends (it matched my Facebook account list), the only way to follow them is one person at a time, with no option to follow all.

Before this post gets way more out of control, it should probably be noted that if Streamy sounds a mouthful, that would be because it is.

There are things to like in Streamy, but it never seems to master any of its various features. I’m still not quite sure what Streamy is, but it’s definitely not FriendFeed.

It’s not a matter of will Friendfeed close, but when

Duncan Riley — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:58:18 +0000

As reported earlier today, Facebook has acquired social sharing service FriendFeed for an undisclosed sum (believed to be $50 million.)

The deal was a talent buy according to most analysts, with Facebook landing the likes of Paul Buchheit (who created Gmail for Google) and Bret Taylor (previously with Google Maps.) Talent deals tend to share one similar trait: the original product eventually dies some time after the acquisition, if not immediately, and the confirmation of this is in the media release put out by Facebook today:

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

The emphasis is mine, but it’s the key section, because you don’t say “for the time being” when you have a long term commitment to a product; you say this when you have every intention to close it down, but don’t want to close it down as the deal in announced so as to focus the news on the deal, as opposed to abandoning your users in return for a ton of cash.

That may sound a little sarcastic, but noting the truth doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense, because it does: FriendFeed as a service has failed to take off. Back in January I defended their stats, noting that the stats then looked liked Twitter’s at a similar stage in its history; that was 8 months ago, and two new versions of FriendFeed later FriendFeed’s traffic has continued to remain flat, or according to some stats providers, started to decline. The product wasn’t helped by the latest version, a so-called “real time” version that made usability so bad you’d have to be on acid or suffer severe ADHD to keep up. That last version is what turned me from a loyal FriendFeed user into one who only logs into the site once a week, and only then because someone has shared a FriendFeed item on email first.

The question now becomes one of when will FriendFeed close. The timing there is at best guess work: my guess is the announcement of closure will happen before the end of August, and be scheduled for maybe September or October.

See also: Hear the news? Let the Friendfeed exodus begin

Hear the news? Let the Friendfeed exodus begin

Steven Hodson — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:23:31 +0000

So all that is left now is the tears and someone to shut of the lights as the last of Friendfeed fans finishing drowning their sorrows. Yes folks it is a sad, sad day in the world of the real-time web as Friendfeed and Facebook have announced that Facebook has successfully ~~sucked the life force out of~~ neutralized Friendfeed by making them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

It might have been an all stock deal but I don’t think that the founders and employees of Friendfeed will be hurting at all especially as they will soon start picking up their Facebook badges. The only ones getting screwed out of this whole deal are the thousands upon thousands of people who lived and breathed Friendfeed to make it what it was.

You can be sure that Facebook doesn’t give a shit because for them this was all about the technology and the main people behind it, regardless of press release platitudes. I’d be willing to bet that other than the founders of Friendfeed much of the staff will probably find themselves shuffled off to some boring mindless section of the Facebook Borg machine; at which point resumes will start being passed around.

As much as everyone on Friendfeed is trying to be all chipper and happy as they pat Bret on the back there is still the underlying question – what now?

Well there are some that even at this early point of the take-over are nuking their Friendfeed accounts and probably retreating to Twitter. Others are probably still in a state of shock at how quickly their online community has changed and will eventually become nothing more than a footnote in Wikipedia. Then there are those like myself and others who are wondering why it took so long.

The fact was that this was inevitable. Other than being swallowed up by a larger fish Friendfeed didn’t have an exist point. Its growth for the most part was flat, it had become home to a relatively small number of people with really nothing other than being a real-time labs for other services to ~~steal~~ borrow from. If it hadn’t been Facebook it would have been either Google or Microsoft that made the move to snap them up.

Not because of the number of users of the system but for the talent that had created Friendfeed. That is where the money was in the long run. Sure much of the web technology that the Friendfeed team came up with will find other uses – it just won’t be Friendfeed. Time to start collecting all that schwag memorabilia and deleting accounts.

The one area of this that is something that should be worrisome – especially as VC funds are a lot harder to come by is the apparent consolidation of power in the the social media field by the big players like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple. This is a question Louis asks as well

So what’s happening to this Valley? Is it as dire a situation as it sometimes seems? Are we really going to end up with four mega-companies: FaceBook, Google, Microsoft and Apple? Because if Google or Microsoft can weasel their way into acquiring Twitter, that’s sure how it will seem. If the IPO market continues to be closed, and innovative companies can only knock on doors 1 through 4, that’s not a good thing.

All I know for sure is – one down and one to go.

Next up – Twitter.

Friendfeed Acquired by Facebook

Paul Short — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:46:36 +0000

From an official press release issued by Facebook.com August 10:

PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 10, 2009 — Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

About Facebook

Founded in February 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a privately held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

FriendFeed killed Twitter, started World War 2 and eats babies

Fake Steve Gillmor — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:13:38 +0000

Our favorite satirist Fake Steve Gillmor comes out of retirement for a special post on the dangers of FriendFeed.

I’m back bitches, did you miss me? I’ve been heavily denuded for this past year, basking in the grammatical orgy that is MG while secretly plotting my return. I’m not returning in realtime, but the Rsscloud and PubSubHubbubGlubglub that is FriendFeed has forced my hand.

FriendFeed killed Twitter! This isn’t the first crime committed by the poor excuse for a Twitter client: FriendFeed also started World War 2 and relies on a fresh feast of babies to keep its servers up. FriendFeed is a parasite on a pimple on Twitter’s ass.

How the hell does a denial of service attack plague reach into the coolest service no-one will ever use, so I’m told because FriendFeediots like myself are smug and never use it. How does a baby eating service with no users become a complete and total gasbag when Twitter farts on the Drudge Report?

The game of soccer between Laconica and Facebook is a pathetic attempt to imitate Twitter. It doesn’t reduce my own guilt by endlessly promoting the advantages of realtime and the ephemeral return of Track. Scoble. FriendFeed will solve all of my social media problems before anybody else does by killing Twitter and babies, are we clear here?

I’m beginning to shake the blood off with stream splicing, Scoble is being attacked for being Scoble, and I’m breathing deeper now. It’s all good. God says I should stop playing with myself, and naturally I blame FriendFeed.

Friendfeed adds some themes to the mix

Steven Hodson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:23:20 +0000

I just got an email from the folks at Friendfeed letting me know that users can now select one of the six available themes to change the background and colors of their pages.Besides the classic look you can select from

Fresh
Bamboo
Flowers
Butterfly Corner
Helvetica
Blue Wave.

To change to one of the new themes just select the Settings link under your Profile name to display the default Settings dialog (above picture). Once there you’ll see the new Themes link that when selected will load up the new Themes page with the list of currently available themes.

Changing your theme is a simple as clicking on the one you want – in my case I tried out the Blue Wave theme.

While this might not be an earth shattering addition to Friendfeed I am sure it will be a big hit and spawn many discussions this evening on the service as the news of the new option makes the rounds.

Who will be the John Lennon of Social Media?

Steven Hodson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:46:45 +0000

Openness.

Transparency.

Bringing about a sense of change and responsibility.

For my generation these ideals where embodied in people. People like John Lennon who typified all the good thing, all the good ideals in our society. Peace, love and human compassion for others were his rallying call.

To today’s Web generation these are some of the things that are being attributed to the potential of social media and all the tools and services that are a part of it. It’s a nice idea to think that such a change could happen just because of something we have created using the wonder that is the Web. Like all nice ideas though not everything is positive or warm and fuzzy.

As with human nature, and anything we touch, there is always a negative side, the dirty side of the story that no-one likes to talk about or admit to. The same applies to Social Media and we see it rear its ugly with every case of Internet flash mobs of hate and recrimination.

For the longest time we like to blame all the bad things that happened in everything from the old USENET newsgroups to the more modern social networks on those nasty people who hide behind anonymous nicknames. They are painted as cowards who unleashed their venom against people via their keyboards just because they can.

Then as we moved into this new open world of Social Media and people started coming out from behind those nicknames many claimed that the day of mob mentality would fade into the past like a bad dream. After all the thinking has always been that it is a lot harder to mean and cruel to other people when they know your name or know where you live. The only problem is that we have forgotten a key part of human nature – not everyone is nice.

Sure it was easier when there only existed anonymous nicknames but even in this day of openness and accountability something haven’t changed. People can still be thoughtless, cruel and fall easily into that mindless mob mentality that can act without taking to the time to make sure what they are doing is right.

Up until recently this kind of mob formation still took time to form as the Web is only as fast as someone hitting the refresh key. While it might not seem like much of a delay it has been a long enough one that it would give people enough time to calm down or maybe double check their information. that is changing though as we move faster and faster to a real-time Web.

No longer is there time to take a deep breath and think things through. Now we are dealing with raw emotions that don’t have a chance to cool off before – often in seconds – they get re-enforced by a new flood of heated emotions. What were once flash mobs are now becoming real-time mobs that can strike faster than a cobra and be even more poisonous.

Michael Arrington wrote today, in his usual link grabbing and in your face way, about how he considers Friendfeed to be one of the primary feeding grounds for this kind of real-time mob mentality. The section of interest for me is this:

Some people say it’s not appropriate to pick on FriendFeed. Other services like Twitter, which are much bigger, have similar problems. But the conversations on Twitter aren’t centralized. It’s hard to see it when a mob forms unless it’s something massive like the almost-revolution in Iran. But on FriendFeed all the comments are aggregated on one page, and everyone participating sees it all. It’s much more likely to break out into a mob. And even niche topics, like mobile phones, can lead to death threats.

He uses his recent experience with Leo Laporte and the blow up that happen as one of his illustrative points and it does quite rightly prove his point. I remember this because I was reading at least two separate threads on Friendfeed where he was being hauled over the coals, and not nicely either. At the same time though I was also watching the follow-up podcast/videocast that he and Leo did to sort out what was nothing more than a misunderstanding.

But this escaped the people locked into the real-time threads because they were too busy feeding off of the emotional cesspool that had been created around the incident. No-one took the time to find out what – if anything – was going on from Arrington’s or Laporte’s point of view.

While I have decided recently to take a holiday from Friendfeed I must say that during my time using the service I have seen this mob mentality rear its ugly head more than a few times. Some, like the incident that caused Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins to leave during the American election, were before Friendfeed switched to the real-time display but the speed at which they form has increased since that switch.

This is only the tip of the problem when it comes to the idea behind the real-time Web. As we increasingly advertise our whereabouts and voice our opinions there is going to be somebody out there who isn’t going to be satisfied with just spewing their venom from behind a keyboard. For them this avenue is no longer good enough regardless how real-time it is and they now have all the tools at their disposal to make this truly personal.

It is true that when it comes to our social media world there is no-one that is of the larger public stature that John Lennon was for that earlier generation but that doesn’t preclude that the same result couldn’t happen. The only thing that is a big question mark is who is it going to be.

For all the good that Social Media can bring to our society there is that negative aspect of human nature egged on by the immediacy of the real-time web that is the great unknown. One thing that isn’t unknown though after seeing the depths of anger and hate that can be exacerbated by the real-time web is that some-one will be the John Lennon of the Web Generation. It’s just a matter of who will be our Chapman.

Iran and Social Media – watershed moments in history

Steven Hodson — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 02:53:06 +0000

For anyone following any of the reports coming our of Iran it isn’t very difficult to see that to potential for change is sitting on the cusp. It’s been bloody, it’s been violent and people have been hurt and some have died. Change doesn’t come without a cost but most of the world are only getting an inkling of the cost being incurred by the people of Iran. News organization after organizations have been tossed from the country and those mainstream media reporters and photographers who have managed to stay do so at great risk to their lives.

The only window we have at this point into this watershed moment in Iran’s history is because of those gallant and dedicated journalists and photographers. However they are not alone in the documentation of change. Right at their side, like never before, are the people of Iran. Using tools that didn’t exist when Ayatollah Khomeini took control of the country in 1979 the people are telling the world what is happening in their country.

Iran and its quiet world of social media

I won’t claim to be any more knowledgeable about the politics and inner workings of Iran than the next person – that would be foolish. What I do know is that for some time the Iranian people have long been users of social media tools like Facebook, and now Twitter as well as Friendfeed. It has never been an overtly publicized usage as it is here in the US or other countries around the world. It has been a quiet usage because their government is well known for throwing up blocks to keep them from being able to access the web.

As a result the knowledge of how to get around the government filters is passed quietly among those who want the world to know what is going inside of the country. As Anne-Marie Corley writes at the Technology Review blog [referencing her conversations with Ethan Zuckerman]

Zuckerman attributes the continued information flow in part to "latent capability": savvy Internet users in Iran already know how to circumvent blocking measures, so in a political upheaval they don’t have to relearn the process. "The longer a country censors and the more aggressively it censors," says Zuckerman, "the more incentive it gives citizens to learn how to get around that." Because Iran has been filtering since at least 2004, says Zuckerman, a lot of Iranians already know how to use proxies–computers that route traffic around a government-imposed block. So even if you’re just using a proxy to surf porn, says Zuckerman, suddenly, a political crisis hits and you already have the means to communicate.

However the recent events in the country have raised that previous quiet use of social media into a large worldwide voice that isn’t letting this event fade quietly away under the repressive measure of a government being called into question by its citizenry. In most countries this kind of uproar would be one thing to deal with but it Iran this isn’t just an outcry against a questionably elected government. As of Friday it is also a voice against the religious leaders of the country and that – for Iran – adds a whole different meaning to what is going on.

As CNN foreign affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria said in an interview about what was happening in the country

No, I don’t mean the Iranian regime will fall soon. It may — I certainly hope it will — but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. I mean that this is the end of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian regime.

The regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, laid out his special interpretation of political Islam in a series of lectures in 1970. In this interpretation of Shia Islam, Islamic jurists had divinely ordained powers to rule as guardians of the society, supreme arbiters not only on matters of morality but politics as well. When Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran, this idea was at its heart. Last week, that ideology suffered a fatal wound.

What is going to happen in Iran is anyone’s guess right now. All we do know really is how little we know and how little is making it out of the country. Unlike revolutions before this one though there has never been the concentration of the world on what is happening and that is only possible because of social media. For the people of Iran though this isn’t a story about social media. For them social media is just a tool to be able to tell the story of Iran – their story.

Social Media’s growing voice in the world

While a lot of attention is being showered on Twitter and to a lesser degree the other tools of social media like Facebook and Friendfeed the idea that these tools are something new to the world of social change couldn’t be further from the truth. As Ethan Zuckerman points out in a recent post

I’ve been asking some of the reporters I’ve spoken with where they were on other recent social media and protest stories. Citizen media has emerged as one of the key spaces for journalism in Fiji in the wake of a coup government that’s censoring mainstream media. It’s been a key source of information in Madagascar as that country’s suffered through a violent change of government. (One reporter who I mentioned this to remarked that Madagascar was “just a speck of an island somewhere”. That speck is twice the size of Great Britain and has the population of Australia…) In Guatemala, online media publicized the assasination of a lawyer by forces close to the president… and government authorities began arresting people for twittering the story to amplify it. These weren’t huge stories for most newspapers – the Iran story is huge not because of the social media aspect, but because protests in Iran are a huge story independent of citizen media.

As well Noam Cohen points out in a New York Times post

Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter, the newest social-networking tool, has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months — in Moldova in April and in Iran last week ….

Where once we might have cracked jokes about all those silly tweets and pointless poking on Facebook suddenly they are providing us with a way to have front row seats to a changing world. Like never before the people directly involved in social change within their country are able to let the outside world know what is going on – with words, pictures and video. As you saw from Paul Short’s post earlier today these tools have the very power to bring a young woman’s death into our homes.

Only iconic pictures of a dead Kent State protester, or the young Vietnamese child running screaming from napalm burns, or the aftermath of Hiroshima carry the same impact. Except this time you can see the life draining from her – you can’t escape it because it is real and you know it. It isn’t state manipulated information or photoshopped cheering crowds around a false victor.

The way we look at our world, or the way we participate in our elections will ever be the same. Social media has changed all that.

The aftermath and responsibility

Just as we have had front row seats to what is happening in Iran we will probably have as well those same seats to see how it ends – good or bad. In the meantime how do we deal with sitting in those front row seats?

In some cases we have seen DDoS attacks against Iranian government sites but at the same time we don’t question is this really the best way to help. As Evgeny Morozov points out in a post at the Foreign Policy net.Effect blog

But these little subtleties get lost on an angry online mob that wants revenge on Ahmadinejad without taking the effort to educate themselves about the repercussions of their cyber-activity. It’s a shame that some American bloggers are participating in this campaign and are even encouraging others to take up their "cyber-arms". Not only is this irresponsible and probably illegal, it also hurts users in Iran and gives their hard-line government another reason to suspect "foreign intervention" – albeit via computer networks – into Iranian politics.

The net effect of this being of course the pulling of the Iranian Internet plug which would then leave us totally blind to what was happening. More importantly though it would also take away the one important way for those Iranians trying to alert the world of what was happening.

Sure it might give you a gratifying sense of doing something for the ‘cause’ but the fact is that many of the so-called anti-Iranian Government actions on the web may actually exasperating the situation. As hard as it might be sometimes the best help you can give people to to do everything in your power to make sure that the only door they have to the world stays open.

I have long maintained that Social Media has the power to be a changing force in our society it all depends on how we use the tools given to us to be a part of that change. Even in the few short weeks since the Twitter Revolution of Maldova the idea that these self-same tools that we play silly games on could be a potential factor in a change of country from both a political and religious perspective is amazing.

As is Iran standing at a cusp of change so is our larger world but we don’t see it yet. While some will definitely laugh at me and suggest the cranky old fart has finally lost it I will stand here and say that Social Media is coming of age. It is too bad that it is taking the look from the dying eyes of a young woman in Iran in a video on YouTube to show us this.

Twitter, Social Media and the revolution in Iran

Steven Hodson — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:13:50 +0000

Will Sunday June 14, 2009 go down in the history books as when Twitter finally came into its own as the voice of the people. Will it be the date when we realize that there is a power in Social Media that can facilitate real social change in ways that no government can.

Or is all just a case of wishful thinking from a minority of people in the Social Media realm trying to pin the popularity of Social Media to the coattails of an event that was bound to happen.

When it all started

It was the Saturday prior to the 14th of June that the first rumbling began to be heard moving through the Twittersphere. The rumblings of a people who felt that the election for the next Iranian president had been stolen from the people as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reelected. It was also during this time that it became apparent that if you wanted to find out what was happening in Iran you weren’t going to hear it from the mainstream media.

As Sunday rolled around all kinds of questions were being asked on Twitter as to why organizations like CNN weren’t providing more than just a ticker news bite at the bottom of the screen mentioning who won the election. According to what you heard / read on Twitter or a growing number of blogs, CNN and the other mainstream outlets were totally ignoring the growing Green Revolution that was beginning to roll across the Iranian landscape.

There were those however that tried to point out that while the coverage might not have been perfect CNN did in fact provide more coverage than other news organizations

"This is an incredibly important story that CNN, across all of our platforms, has covered thoroughly every day for a week with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in Tehran, among others," CNN spokesperson Bridget Leininger told the WSJ. "We share people’s expectations of CNN and have delivered far more coverage of the Iranian election and aftermath than any other network."

In fact, CNN had 101 mentions of Iran up until 1pmET on Sunday — then a 70% increase in mentions over the next nine hours. As of 1pmET yesterday, FNC had 75 mentions and MSNBC 53.

Source Mediabistro

Even CNN’s Rick “Mr. Tweeter” Sanchez went to the airwaves to defend CNN

CNN’s Rick Sanchez took the #CNNfail criticism head-on this afternoon, in a segment at the end of his 3pmET hour. "There have been some questions raised on Twitter as to whether we covered any of the events enough over the weekend," said Sanchez. "Frankly, it’s a compliment that you expected us to cover it more than our competitors, and we did."

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Source: Mediabistro

As did apparently Don Lemon

Twitterers expressed early on that CNN wasn’t satiating their news needs, and the CNN failure meme (#cnnfail) became so prevalent that anchor Don Lemon took to Twitter to defend the network. On Sunday, CNN improved its coverage, but a press crackdown in Iran meant that, for all major news outlets, reporting became difficult and dangerous.

Source: Daily Intel

The fact was though that all these news organizations seem to be spending more time talking about Twitter and Iran rather than providing news about Iran itself

Meanwhile, Howard Kurtz had Rick Sanchez and sportswriter Gregg Doyel on Reliable Sources for an utterly useless but incredibly ironic debate over Twitter’s relevance. To his credit Sanchez, a mildly obsessive Twitterer, sort of gets it, mentioning that he interviewed someone in Tehran on his show that he’d met on Twitter, but no one on the show seemed to grasp the fact that the Twitter was in midst of handing CNN its proverbial ass as a news source before, during and after the airing of Reliable Sources.

Source: Valleywag

It’s more than just Twitter in the game

While much of the attention centered around Twitter and how it was being used to get the news in Iran out to the world it wasn’t the only Social Media tool that was being used – or misused. It turns out that Friendfeed was becoming another really popular spot for Iranians to get the news out, and because of the way Friendfeed handles conversations there was a lot of comments being made on the news. Unfortunately this isn’t something that the controlling Iranian government wanted so it blocked all access to Friendfeed from within the country

Interestingly enough just as Twitter and Friendfeed were all about getting the news out to the world it appears that YouTube was doing exactly the opposite. According to some preliminary investigating by Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins YouTube is taking down any and all videos it can of the uprising in Iran

If you do a Twitter search using the terms ‘youtube’ and ‘removed,’ you’ll come up with hundreds of tweets from folks who’ve ostensibly had their videos of the riots in Iran removed. This points to a larger pattern of removal, and based on what I’m reading, it seems to center around description and title keyword matches around words like “beating,” “death,” and “killed.”

There might be other terms, and if this is in fact the case as to why the videos are being so quickly removed, it’s a new tactic to me.

If this is indeed the case and this news gains any real traction YouTube could potentially find itself in a PR nightmare.

From Monday forward

Then Monday came the news that the election results had been leaked, showing that rather than being the winner Ahmadinejad actually came in third. Surprisingly though, the Iranian supreme leaders called for an investigation into the election but this has done very little to quell the growing uprising.

At the same time that Twitterites and other Social Media mavens are slapping #CNNFail to their tweets it is becoming increasingly difficult for mainstream media to even report about what is happening

This morning Iran’s Culture Ministry stripped all foreign media of their press accreditation and warned that any journalists seen filming or photographing in the streets will be arrested. But all is not lost — luckily, they are still allowed to report from their hotel rooms (about the firmness of their mattresses or the softness of their toilet paper, we guess).

Source: Daily Intel

This in turn is making Twitter an even more important vehicle of getting news out – even if it is raw and hard to substantiate. Important enough that apparently the State Department was the one responsible for getting Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance that would have shut the service down for a period of time.

Senior officials say the State Department is working with Twitter and other social networking sites to ensure Iranians are able to continue to communicate to each other and the outside world.

By necessity, the US is staying hands off of the election drama playing out in Iran, and officials say they are not providing messages to Iranians or “quarterbacking” the disputed election process.

But they do want to make sure the technology is able to play its sorely-needed role in the crisis, which is why the State Department is advising social networking sites to make sure their networks stay up and running for Iranians to use them and helping them stay ahead of anyone who would try to shut them down.

Source: CNN :: Anderson Cooper

And help is coming in all forms as the Iranian government continues to try and stem the flow of news making its way out to the world. Whether it be all out attacks against Iranian government sites to people from around the world providing constantly updated lists of web proxies for those in Iran to use the news keeps flowing out to the world.

Even as we hear reports of protesters dying the news doesn’t seem to be stopping. If anything it is growing like a tidal wave. Granted this isn’t the first time that Twitter has been used to get out the news about a country in political upheaval but it is the first time that it has forced mainstream media to focus on the very thing it is supposed to do – that is bring us the news as it is happening.

As much as we might like to believe that technology can be responsible for tearing down the walls of a repressive government the fact is only time will tell if this is indeed the case. Additionally as much as we might like to point out the failings of mainstream media in this case it is interesting that those suggesting that old media has to change are also among the ones calling for that old media to give them even more news. As Louis Gray put it

That CNN did not lead the way in covering the Iran conflict this week, after decades of our relying on them to be there, as they were in Desert Storm, Operation: Iraqi Freedom, Somalia, Bosnia and others, is not up for debate. But the question is – did we really not want them to fail, or are you happy that they did?

Twitter and Social Media as a whole may be on the vanguard of change and letting us all be a part of that change but that doesn’t change the reality that we still expect our news standard bearers to keep us on the frontlines.

Does this mean that organizations like CNN failed in this duty? – most definitely.

Does it mean that we can only expect that Twitter and other Social Media tools are the only way we should be getting the news as it happens? – most definitely not.

It does mean however that the two can work together and when they do we win. Instead of spending so much time knocking old media or making fun of the new social media tools we should be working on ways to get them to work together. Each serves a purpose and in this changing world they can both help effect social and political change.

That is what Iran is teaching us right now.

Someone is blowing a lot of hot air

Steven Hodson — Sun, 03 May 2009 19:35:51 +0000

So, has everyone got their cue cards ready for the next generation of the web?

What? you didn’t get the memo yet?

Well just to catch you up we’re being told now that the next great thing that is going to have us all drooling is the arrival of the real-time web. Not sure what that means? chances are you aren’t alone but I’ll give you the short form description using an already famous web allegory.

Head down to your nearest firehouse, grab the hose and tell the nearest fireman to turn it on full blast.

Yes folks we are being told that regardless of the fact that the majority of the stuff that streams by us daily in nothing but crap this non-stop flow of stuff is going to be the way of our future. Except the future according to some is actually already happening.

At the forefront of this rush to drown ourselves with information is of course the darling of the early adopters – Friendfeed. In this case the firehose got turned on when Friendfeed flipped the switch the other day and took their beta design of the site live for everyone to play with. I have already made my thoughts about this new design of the service quite plain in a post here at The Inquisitr and I’m not going to re-hash what is pretty well old news now – especially in this real-time Web world we are being thrust into.

What I am more interested in is all the hot air being pumped out about the idea of the real-time web and some of the things being written about one of the people behind the push for a real-time Web.

A real-time Web isn’t so new

It amazes me how much of the whole Web 2.0 kool-aid is drunk over supposed new ideas that our current crop of whiz kids are dreaming up. Much is being made over at Friendfeed and in blog posts about how cool and breakthrough the instantaneous presentation of things like comments and the such is.

How soon we forget.

A few people have tried, valiantly, to point out that what Friendfeed is doing might be new in regards to the Web 2.0 world but in the larger scheme of the Internet it’s old hat. Yes people, I am talking about that old archaic service called IRC or as it is also known as – Internet Relay Chat. Get it – chat.

What Friendfeed has done is nothing more than put a web page interface to it. Now before you all start yammering about how the cranky old fart is off his rocker and doesn’t know what he is talking about I suggest you take an antidote to the Web 2.0 kool-aid and chill for a second.

I would be willing to bet that the large majority of people who are climbing on this Friendfeed is doing something new and it isn’t IRC bandwagon haven’t even been anywhere near an IRC chat network or channel. You think that what Friendfeed is doing is so new and different then I suggest you drop into one of the popular IRC channels on EFNet, Freenode, QuakeNet or Undernet and see what real real-time conversation is all about. Discussions on any of those would make Friendfeed look like a garden hose with a kink in it.

I am sure that some will try and point to things like the Groups or private as a way to differentiate the service from such old school stuff. When you do that you only show either that you have never used IRC or it’s been a long time. On just about any IRC network you can setup permanent, or temporary, channels (Groups/Rooms) in less time that it would take you on Friendfeed. What a private conversation? it only takes a double click on the person’s name and bam – your private conversation.

There is nothing new about what Friendfeed is doing. It is only new because it has the Web 2.0 label attached to it. It is only new because in general people don’t want to admit that just maybe those of us who have been at this game for a long time may just have thought of this type of thing first. Sure you can add pretty pictures to your posts (but not on the comments) on Friendfeed but that is about the only thing that it allows for now that IRC doesn’t.

The rewriting of Web history

Of all the posts written about what Friendfeed has done the one written by Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has to be the most effusive in it’s praise of this wonderful innovation. In the post Marshall piles on a lot of praise for Paul Buchheit one of the co-founders of Friendfeed.

Now just to clarify before the fanatics send out the lynch party Paul has had a great influence on the Web we use today from his time working at Google. After all his was the moving force behind Google GMail. However as one commenter on Marshall’s post pointed out this praise doesn’t include rewriting history in order to make Friendfeed even more world changing. The part the commenter was referring to was Marshall’s opening paragraph

Paul Buchheit built the first version of Gmail in one day. Then, he built the first prototype of Google’s contextual advertising service, Adsense, in one day as well. Now, he’s working on a much-watched startup called FriendFeed that he believes just brought to market the next big form of communication online: flowing, multi-person, real-time conversations

The point of contention isn’t Paul’s contribution regarding GMail but rather that Marshall attributes the development of Adsense to Paul. Well a quick check of Wikipedia, as the commenter shows, proves otherwise

The underlying technology behind AdSense was derived originally from WordNet, Simpli (a company started by the founder of Wordnet, George A. Miller), and a number of professors and graduate students from Brown University, including James A. Anderson, Jeff Stibel, and Steve Reiss. A variation of this technology utilizing WordNet was developed by Oingo, a small search engine company based in Santa Monica founded in 1998 by Gilad Elbaz and Adam Weissman.Oingo changed its name to Applied Semantics in 2001, which was later acquired by Google in April 2003 for US$102 million.

Nowhere on the Wikipedia page for Google Adsense does Paul’s name come into it so either a whole bunch of smart people who contributed to the entry are lying or Marshall is intentionally trying to puff up the importance of Paul – which doesn’t need to be. As a result for anyone who knows Web history Marshall’s post stopped being anything of substance by the end of the first paragraph.

Not to diminish a cool feature

I am not trying to diminish anything the Friendfeed team has accomplished, or will accomplish in the future. My only point is that before you start trying proclaim something as new and game changing you would be best to check your history. What Friendfeed has done is taken an already existing principal of Internet communication, added a few unique ideas to it and put it behind a web page. for that they deserve all the praise in the world.

However to suggest that real-time communication on the web is something revolutionary and game changing is misleading. Just as misleading is to write something that is provably incorrect in order to increase the readability of what is written.

In both cases it is nothing more than blowing a lot of hot air, something we already have enough of thank you very much.

No related posts.

Taking a hammer to Friendfeed

Steven Hodson — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:30:32 +0000

For the past month Friendfeed has been running a new version of the site through their beta URL but yesterday like flicking on a light switch the beta became the live site for everyone; whether you wanted it or not. Unfortunately even under the glare of the light Friendfeed is still the ugly looking site that it was as a beta.

During the beta I made my opinion of what I thought about the beta clear to anyone who cared. Now that it has gone live with no real changes; other than some email feature, from the beta I figured I would state for the last time why I think this was a bad decision.

Real time display

There is a big misconception about what a real time web is. The most common argument is that it is the ability to read about events as they are happening. A good example was the one that Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins gave in the inaugural CobWEB podcast last night. Using the example of Google the idea of a real time web would be the ability to search for something that was happening right now and have the search engine serve up all the different conversations that are happening on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and blogs. Not what happened half and hour, or hour, ago but what is being talked about right now.

As it is Google is great if you just want to find things that happened at some point in the past even if that past is only a couple of hours old; but when it comes to right now it pretty well falls apart. Many folks like to point to Twitter search as being the answer for that but to me once you get past a certain point with Twitter it is more noise than anything of value.

However this is the real time that works and makes sense, except people seem to have the impression that real time should be being able to see what is happening; boring or otherwise, the moment it happens. This is the route Friendfeed has taken. Now when you hit your home timeline in Friendfeed everything is being streamed at you within milliseconds of the information entering Friendfeed.

Now for people who either have a small follow list or have cut back on that list this might be a manageable way to deal with your timeline. On the other hand for those just new to the service and being displayed the full force of the public timeline this could prove to be just like the proverbial firehose. Even myself, I am following 450 people, you could pretty well double that number if you take into account Friendfeed’s Friend of a Friend feature, but even at that level this real time display is nothing but a complete irritation.

What gets me is the stupid argument that people put forward that if it is that bad then just create new friend lists or groups. Excuse me? Why all of a sudden am I have to make more work for myself in order to use this service? That’s just a silly blow off kind of statement to make.

The things is that Friendfeed had a perfect, workable, solution with the previous iteration of the service. By default any page would automatically refresh on it’s own every minute or so. this made the flow of information manageable regardless of what you were reading or trying to do on the site. To top it off for those that really wanted to stuff the hose down their throats there was a link to change to the real time display. Two different options and everyone was happy. Now we have only the single option and a lot of people are pissed.

This is definitely a case of taking something that wasn’t broken and breaking because Friendfeed felt like it and screw those people who seriously didn’t like it.

User Interface – WTF?

Look the old interface might have been plain and boring with its own inherent problems but compared to what we have now it was a friggin Picasso of interfaces. Now it looks like someone took a box of crayons, melted them and then mashed them into a page. If there is the perfect epitome of a badly designed blog from the 90’s this is it.

The rounded edges of the different blocks are ragged looking. And what is with the green and orange as contrasting colors for blue and gray? Speaking of the gray background – what are you thinking?

During the beta phase of this abomination one of the members of Friendfeed, Lindsey Smith, did a mockup of what was something that maybe should be consider as a possible interface for FriendFeed. You can see it here and unlike the current version of Friendfeed it is easy to see that a real designer had something to do with it

Sorry but design wise Friendfeed has become an embarrassment. Where I usually had it running all the time in a browser on the other monitor I now only open it up when I want to take a minute and try to catch up.

Some general observations

The above are two of the most glaring problems with Friendfeed as it is now but in some ways it gets even worse when you start digging behind the scenes. Things that worked well before are either gone or they have been changed for the worse.

Simplicity is great right up until it is pointless

I get the whole simplicity thing. I really do. There comes a point though when you have dumbed something down so far that it is borderline unusable. If you were to look at the main (home) page of Friendfeed for the first time I would be willing to bet you wouldn’t have a frikken clue as to what you are suppose to do. Hell I look at after using Friendfeed for over a year and I went WTF am I suppose to do now.

At least with the previous version of the site there were some clues as to what you can do. A good example of simplicity carried to far can be found when you look at the Groups block on the right side of the page. Now it might be cute and a great way to show off your coding ability to make the Pref option link only show when you move your mouse over the block area but really that is just irritating. Not to mention but a new user would probably look at it and go – Ya .. so .. now what.

Groups – no longer a productivity gain

The other thing with the Groups menu area that really really pisses me off is that they have totally changed the way it works. In the previous version of the site you could in a single glance tell which of your Groups (or Rooms as they were called) had any activity happening. This was because when something got posted to them that Group moved to the top of the list with the time the activity last took place. Now we just have a lifeless useless static list of Groups that unless I take the time and go through them manually I have no way of knowing if they have been active. Ya, that’s a great boost for productivity.

Ode to the missing Source Icons

One of the other really big complaints that is resonating throughout any of the conversations I have been following is the removal of the Source Icons. These icons were the graphical display of which of your importing services had added items to your timeline. It was an excellent way to be able to identify – again – at a glance what was coming from where. Now you can’t tell because those icons have been removed and it is really pissing people off.

Another area where these source icons are invaluable is on the profile pages. Unlike a lot of people it seems I actually like to check out who I might be subscribing to when I get a subscriber notification. Even more importantly I like to see what kind of stuff they are going to be bringing into my activity stream if I decide to follow them back. In the previous version I used to be able to tell what was their Twitter input, their Last.fm additions and their Facebook meandering. Now I don’t have a frikken clue which means I’m less likely to be following as many people. Way to go – make something totally useless why don’t you.

Did someone send out a memo about hating dropdown lists and I missed it?

Everywhere it seems in Friendfeed, including its bookmarklet, dropdown lists have been banished to some netherworld. Instead we have some fancy combination of a text entry box and a auto complete dropdown. What this means is that if you don’t want the item that is displayed in the text area you click on the little ‘X’ to make it go away. Then you start typing the name, group or whatever in the text area and magically a dropdown list will appear with a list of items Friendfeed thinks you mean based on the letters you have typed in.

Gee, thanks. Good luck figuring that out all you new users as it was it took me a minute or two to figure about what the hell was going on. so tell me – other than being a way to show off some ninja javascript skill WTF is the point? Are proper dropdown lists so un-cool, even though they are simple to figure out and use, that they need to be replaced with a ridiculous option. C’mon give me a break.

In the end

Friendfeed has lost some of the best things that made it attractive and as a result it has become more work. I have always said that Friendfeed was one of the best tools out there for people need to keep their fingertips on the pulse of what is happening.

Use to.

Now it’s like taking the pulse of someone having a heart attack. Whether or not I stick with Friendfeed the way I have in the past is debatable. It’s not like anyone will really notice that I, or other unhappy users, have left or gone into maintenance mode, because they’ll be too busy trying to keep up with all the real time dribble.

Good luck Friendfeed because I really think you are going to need it.

[old Friendfeed screen capture courtesy of scriptedlife]

No related posts.

Facebook grasping at API straws

Steven Hodson — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:00:14 +0000

I’ve been reading much of what has been written today concerning Facebook’s announcement about opening up the new Facebook Open Stream API. From that reading; including the official blog post by Ray C. He on the Facebook Developer Blog, I’m left with a whole bunch of little questions as well as one big one.

What is Facebook?

Sure we all know it’s the hottest social network on the planet at the moment but what are they trying to achieve? For as much flack as Facebook might have gotten during its rise to the top it was well understood that it was a closed environment. You wanted to interact with your friends you went to Facebook and logged in. You played games, traded messages and used Facebook apps while fighting off Zombies; but it was always inside of Facebook.

As far as brands go, Facebook has to rank right up there with Google, Microsoft and Apple. Chances are your corner barber or hairstylist is on Facebook right along side your mother and father. Even though Facebook has continually done things to alienate their user base the membership keeps climbing. Also climbing is the associated cost of that increasing membership. The problem is that the majority of the user base is non U.S. and as a result the those costs aren’t being offset by any advertising revenue that is more U.S. centric.

So to try and reverse that revenue loss Facebook has increasingly turned to services like Twitter and Friendfeed and duplicated many of those service’s features into Facebook in the hope that this would pull US centric members into the service. Now today they totally swallowed the Twitter and Friendfeed API ideology in the hope that this will encourage developers to build interfaces to Facebook that would be more receptive to users.

The problem is that this does nothing to alleviate their most pressing problem – increasing revenues in order to offset the cost of the user base and produce profits to justify their $15 billion valuation. By making the current Open Stream API; with more to come if the comment on ReadWriteWeb by Facebook’s Blake Ross is any indication, available they have one less drawing card to profitability. Sure the social media mavens and gurus are heralding this as a great move but there is no proof yet that this idea of API driven businesses are even a viable business model.

The idea that web companies can even make enough money to justify their various valuations by letting developers run rampant is still to be seen. Twitter is probably the most notable in this area as it was really the first one to show real popularity due to its API but even after all this time it still exists because of venture capital – not because it has a serious revenue profit making revenue stream. Now though we have the hottest social network with a valuation of $15 billion deciding that this is the same road that they want to travel.

The other thing that this whole API thing strikes me as being is yet another grasping at straws. Ever since their Beacon advertising project proved to be an abject failure Facebook has seemed to be running from idea to idea, copycat feature to copycat feature. It almost leaves one wondering if Facebook even knows what it wants to be when it grows up. Does it want to be a full featured Twitter or how about yet another Friendfeed?

I just don’t see how this embracing of the API business model is going to do anything to help Facebook. Sure it will make developers happy but given the type of users on Facebook and how they have already been resistant to attempts to Twitterize the social network I don’t really see it having any long lasting positive effect.

The one thing that is becoming apparent though is that Facebook is running out of straws to grasp and when that happens one has to wonder what they will do next.

[picture courtesy of Top Tech News]

The New Friendfeed – who’s supplying the barf bags?

Steven Hodson — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:34:17 +0000

Have you ever felt like you’ve just gone ten rounds with Muhammad Ali and come out the worse for it?

Well that is pretty similar to the last twenty minutes I’ve sat here watching the real-time web go scrolling by at breakneck speed on the new Friendfeed beta site. Besides being in bad need of some Gravol (anti-nausea drugs for you non-Canadians) I am really wondering if this fascination with slapping us in the face with all the world’s inanity is really what people like Tim Berners-Lee thought of when the whole idea of the real-time web came about.

M.G. Siegler wrote in his enthusiastic review of the new Friendfeed beta

Look, information happens in real time. One of the reasons the web has exploded in popularity is because it gives you access to more information, faster than ever before. This new version of FriendFeed does the exact same thing, to the extreme — it’s wonderful. Are people really complaining that we should slow the information down? It may be a bit extreme to say, but that really is a form of censorship. Don’t slow the information down, tweak the way you consume it.

Uhm …. M.G. don’t get me wrong because I think you’re a pretty smart guy but can we please cut the bullshit here. People being able to easily digest what is happening in the world and their social circle doesn’t mean having to feel like you are constantly going to fall off of a cliff. As for the crap about censorship c’mon bud let’s not drink too much of the kool-aid shall we.

The fact is that what Friendfeed had before with it’s auto-refresh every minute or so; with the option of a real-time puke up your lunch timeline, worked really well. Now though all you have is the option of reaching for the barf bag or putting everything on pause. Excuse me but how is this considered user friendly in the slightest sense of the word.

Jeremiah Owang talks in his post about the changes and how we are facing some real challenges in the world where everything is a river of news

Challenges to Navigating the “River of News”
As the web continues to move faster and faster towards real-time (we see this in Twitter and elements of Facebook), it creates several challenges:

If you’re not watching all the time, you’ll miss something

An incredible amount of hay is created with very few needles

Managing these feeds take effort, you have to setup filters, lists, groups, and manage it.

You’re going to get less work done if you watch, and participate in the real-time web.

New Social Tools and Processes to Emerge
If the social web is a ‘river of news’ then we’re going to need new sea-faring technologies to manage it:

Anchors We need more anchors to slow it down and make sense of it, Friendfeed offers a ‘pause’ button that actually freezes the stream, allowing users to navigate the content.

Dams and Distibutaries Dams will stop the flow of content (users will unsubscrbe) and distributary are rivers that split off from the main river, as a result you’ll see a need to use filters and lists to group people in smaller categories.

Maps and Compasses are needed to help guide us to what’s important. Expect digests, analysis, and those who boil down what matters to matter more than ever. Traditional reporters will help make sense of thousands of opinions.

As right as he might be about it all becoming a river of news it shouldn’t mean that we live in dread of being seasick at the thought of trying to read it. In fact more than a river it seems that we are facing more of a tsunami.

Louis Gray in his one of a couple posts about the changes at Friendfeed said this about the information firehose on steroids

But if you follow a ton of folks, be prepared for an onslaught of information. If people thought FriendFeed delivered a ton of information before, just wait until you see the beta. The realtime flow means an item might move lower in the page while you’re still reading it. You might click like on the wrong item. And you probably aren’t going to get the chance to read everything. That’s why there is a pause button at the top. You might find yourself hitting pause just to catch a breath. But if you’re an information junkie, there’s really no better source.

Don’t get me wrong – I still think that Friendfeed is one of the best lifestreaming aggregators out there and I have whiled away many an hour following along but this move to an either or proposition with its real-time presentation has devalued it for me. Regardless of the fact that you can create all kinds of lists or rooms the fact is that with this new design the more people you follow the sooner you’ll heading for the great white telephone like a drunken sophomore.

Even Robert Scoble in one of his many posts this morning acknowledges that this real-time presentation can have an impact on your workflow

Here’s some tips I’ve learned after using the new friendfeed for a while:

1. Turn it off. There’s no way to be productive doing something else while the stream is moving and distracting you. Two ways to turn it off: 1. close the browser. That’s brute force method. 2. Push the “pause button” at the top of the feed. That will keep it from moving. You can then refresh the page to see more items, or push play when you want to start seeing new items again.

The point is, there is real-time and then there is having your head shoved into a 1,000 mph wind tunnel. What Friendfeed had before was a real workable real-time presentation whereas what they have with this new taste your lunch in your throat activity stream is highly questionable. I realize I am going against the kool-aid drinking stream – as evidenced by the many goo-goo-gaa-gaa type posts out there today but I am sure glad that even with all the good new feature in the beta I can still go back to the old style.

As to what I’ll do when this change is forced down our throats I’m not sure … maybe I’ll have to stock up on Gravol and barf bags. Or perhaps hope against hope Friendfeed will rethink this move and give us some more alternatives to control our real-time stream.

No related posts.

New FriendFeed Beta: What’s Different

JR — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:25:31 +0000

FriendFeed has launched a drastically different design on its beta site. The updated interface — which will co-exist with the old FriendFeed site for now — features real-time (and fast-moving) streaming, among other new options.

Inside the Stream

The streaming is the most significant new feature, and it’s already generating a lot of discussion. (Is it too fast? Will it finally give FriendFeed the push to become a major player?) Check it out for yourself here, or take a tour in the following video:

The real-time stream is definitely an adjustment, but there’s little question it adds a lot of power and new kinds of usefulness to the service.

Other Changes

The stream is far from the only change in the new FriendFeed beta — in fact, the whole site essentially takes on a new look. Gone are the tiny icons showing you what service someone’s shared content came from (blog, Twitter, etc); instead, users’ avatars now accompany every shared entry, regardless of where it’s from. You can now direct message with followers as well.

Other new options include filters, saved searches, keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to create a profile for your stream. There’s also a beefed-up share box that lets you send content to more than one feed at once, or even to specific subsets of users.

The Big Picture

FriendFeed’s goal, the company says, wasn’t originally so lofty.

“We didn’t start out with the goal of a radical redesign,” the official FriendFeed blog explains. “Our goal was simple. Make it more intuitive, more consistent, and ideally, more elegant.”

Though I’ve yet to fully engage in FriendFeed myself, I’d say at first impression that those goals seem to be fairly well accomplished — the beta design is undoubtedly a significant step up from the old interface. As for its future, the plan for now is to leave both the new and the old sites up together until all the kinks are worked out. The beta design will eventually, though, fully replace the main FriendFeed site.

FriendFeed

Lets face it: you don’t matter

Duncan Riley — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 03:49:28 +0000

A broad spectrum of tech blogs have flapped this week over the Twitter recommended users list, prompted by a $120,000 offer by Jason Calacanis to get on it.

Those against the list argue that it’s unfair, and unjustly gives priority to some users rather than others. Even Twitter investor Fred Wilson thinks it should be done better.

Here’s the problem: the presumption is made on the false belief that what you think matters to Twitter. It doesn’t.

Twitter joins a long list of companies that virtually c*^k suck the A-list and others they think will get them ahead than actually really care about what 99.99% of the rest of their users think. FriendFeed has been recommending A-listers since it launched, many who never use the service. Despite regular protests by users, they’ve never changed it. Why? because they don’t give a shit about you either.

Pick your service. RSS Readers and web desktops add TechCrunch as a standard feed to curry favor with Michael Arrington, who recently found God in Hawaii. They don’t recommend your site because you don’t matter to them, and they don’t care about you either.

Is it fair? they don’t care!

I’m sympathetic to the complaints to a point, but complaining does nothing with most of the these companies because they know in the most that you’re not going to stop using them, so you don’t count…you don’t matter.

Want to rage against the machine and change the system? good luck, most people are apathetic and couldn’t care less. The only way to change things if you feel strongly enough is to start your own startup and promise to do it better.

Social media services – the farm team league for Facebook ideas

Steven Hodson — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:19:13 +0000

I am a fan of FriendFeed and I hang out on Twitter but I have never been a fan of Facebook. Sure I have an account with the service but I only drop by there once or twice a month – if I remember, usually I have to be reminded to make the visit and get caught up with all the SuperPokes and wandering zombies. While I might bitch a little bit about the user interface for FriendFeed I downright disliked the one on Facebook.

I haven’t even tried to fight my way through the crowd to check out the new look that everyone is talking because – truthfully I’m not the least bit interested. What I am interested in is the new features that they announced as well today, or at least the revamping of an older one (newsfeed) and the addition of a couple new ones. Because what makes it all so interesting is that the socialization of Facebook has been copied from other services.

For the longest time Facebook has been declared as the King of Social Media when it fact it was only the king of Facebook. It was their form of social media that you had to step through the doors of their walled garden to participate. However with their latest moves to be all Social Media Correct they were put in a position where they had to play nice with everyone on the outside of their walls and make them believe that there was a reason to become another Facebooker. They needed to have the same features that the services outside their walls that all the cool kids were using. They had to start opening more doors both ways rather than just one way – inward.

So the first feature they copied was FriendFeed’s basic stream of items and called it their Newsfeed at which point the social media mavens patted themselves on the back saying that they had gotten Facebook to open up. Ya .. okay whatever you say – the fact was this was strictly a business decision to try and attract more users to step through the gateway into Facebook heaven and not need to leave. The next step of course was the much ballyhooed attempt to buy Twitter, which went nowhere but it showed the world what Facebook was planning.

Now we have the big announcement today that saw a change in the advertiser pages and .. are you ready … yes folks Real Time Status Update aka Facebook’s copy of Twitter. They didn’t stop there either .. no sirree … that went back to the FriendFeed well once more and presented to the world the Facebook Likes – or whatever they are calling it.

You seeing a trend here?

If Facebook can’t buy your social media service then they’ll just duplicated it as they have done here with Twitter’s status updating and not one but two FriendFeed features. Now whether or not these new features for Facebook will deal a body blow to either or both of the other two services is still to be seen. It does show us though that Facebook has no compunction about casting its eye over the social media landscape and taking what it needs to grow bigger and give more people a reason to stay behind the Facebook garden wall.

Not to mention the fact that chances are they won’t be back knocking on Twitter’s door again.

[graphic courtesy of Alex Kaminski]