Robert Scoble on the Future of FriendFeed

Posted on August 11, 2009, 10:13 am, by Thomas Hawk, under FriendFeed.

Robert Scoble

The downside for me? I invest time in things that WILL BE not that are. That’s always been what keeps my interest and now that I know that FriendFeed probably will not be, even if it takes five years to totally die, I’ve lost a great deal of interest in it. – Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble: So Who is Leaving FriendFeed.

An interesting thread yesterday from my friend Robert Scoble on Friendfeed. Having reflected more on the Facebook acquisition I can see Scoble’s point. Scoble’s always been an early adopter’s early adopter. He’s always been about going where the ball is headed, not where it’s at.

After sleeping on the acquisition news I have two thoughts.

1. Maybe, just maybe, enough of the really good FriendFeed features will somehow make their way into Facebook and Facebook will actually get tolerable enough to use. Actually I’m not optimistic, but I will begin spending more time and using Facebook more because of this. I logged on yesterday for the first time in a while and I’ll probably be spending at least some time there every day now.

2. The FriendFeed acquisition creates a vacuum for a kick-ass life-streaming service. I signed up earlier today and played around with Posterious, but it felt nothing like Friendfeed to me. Last night Scoble suggested Ning. He also said it may end up being Google Wave. If anyone knows how I can try out Google Wave I’d be interested. But actually I think the real opportunity very well may be for, of all things, Scoble himself to create the new place to be online. Scoble’s got a big enough web presence to create the seed necessary to start a vibrant community and he’s got a good jump start with this with his new Building43 efforts. It would be really great to see someone with his vision turn Building 43 into the next FriendFeed.

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  • August 11, 2009 at 6:14 pm Thomas Hawk
    The downside for me? I invest time in things that WILL BE not that are. That’s always been what keeps my interest and now that I know that FriendFeed probably will not be, even if it takes five years to totally die, I’ve lost a great deal of interest in it. – Robert Scoble
  • August 11, 2009 at 6:14 pm Thomas Hawk
    After sleeping on the acquisition news I have two thoughts. 1. Maybe, just maybe, enough of the really good FriendFeed features will somehow make their way into Facebook and Facebook will actually get tolerable enough to use. Actually I’m not optimistic, but I will begin spending more time and using Facebook more because of this. I logged on yesterday for the first time in a while and I’ll probably be spending at least some time there every day now. 2. The FriendFeed acquisition creates a vacuum for a kick-ass life-streaming service. I signed up earlier today and played around with Posterious, but it felt nothing like Friendfeed to me. Last night Scoble suggested Ning. He also said it may end up being Google Wave. If anyone knows how I can try out Google Wave I’d be interested. But actually I think the real opportunity very well may be for, of all things, Scoble himself to create the new place to be online. Scoble’s got a big enough web presence to create the seed necessary to start a vibrant community and he’s got a good...
  • August 11, 2009 at 6:17 pm Valeria Maltoni
    Thomas - agree with you on focusing on who (people/your company) and not what (network). I posted my thoughts about the conversations here and what it means for individuals and organizations today http://www.conversationagent.com/2009/08/how-social-media-is-like-sharecropping.html
  • August 11, 2009 at 7:51 pm Leigh Marriner
    Maybe FB folks will read these comments and think about keeping FF. Have they heard about segmenting the market?
  • August 11, 2009 at 8:05 pm Thomas Hawk
    Leigh, unfortunately the community of FF users is likely of zero concern to Facebook at all. We are a drop in their proverbial bucket. They probably could care less if we all went away. Facebook has no time to deal with some piddly little one million user community like FF when they've got hundreds of million to serve and need to compete against much larger entities. What remains is a void and I wonder if some talented engineer somewhere might be able to come up with something compelling.
  • August 11, 2009 at 8:06 pm Andy C
    @Thomas +1 In fact, +10.
  • August 13, 2009 at 1:59 pm Chris Myles
    Friendfeed got me to question the way I interact with the web.. one place for my content and conversations, leverage known experts to search through the crap, combined with a flexible open platform that can quickly morphed/integrated into various shapes/forms. After my trip (http://ff.im/4gfo2) I'm starting from scratch.. so I'm looking at friendfeed and asking what CAN'T it to for me? I'm not done playing and prototyping MY VISION.. and they'll have to pull me off kicking and screaming before they pull the plug!!
  • August 13, 2009 at 2:22 pm Cristo
    The problem with Robert's quote is all the so-called cool and successful products and services now, are built on the backs of so-called failures. In the fullness of time, all technologies could be considered failures as they are supplanted by newer technologies and companies. Switching back and forth between different services as small bits of information flow in doesn't make you a long range predictor, it makes you a weathervane.
  • August 13, 2009 at 2:25 pm Clare Dibble
    I know FF might not be the most popular place for this now, but I <3 Cristo!
  • August 13, 2009 at 2:37 pm Cristo
    :)
  • August 13, 2009 at 2:50 pm Lindsay, thread killer.
    This just makes me sad. FF is still the best option out there, and though it is no longer a "will be", there's no other good replacement for it right now. FB certainly isn't. Twitter isn't. Posterous isn't... If Robert called for someone to recreate FF (and improve on it) he probably has the influence to make it happen, mold it even more toward his ideal. But instead, just wiping his hands and declaring it dead and waiting for the next thing seems like a cop-out. Especially since his support for FF was a major driver in helping it grow in the first place... It seems like he'd have a little bit of an attachment to it and the community. But, whatever... I'm still depressed by the whole thing.
  • August 13, 2009 at 2:50 pm zeroinfluencer
    FF set a benchmark for how to use the streams of the internet in an open and social way. Paul and Bret along with the awesome FF team demonstrated and inspired the use of communication technologies that gave us a paradigm shift a kin to Ward Cunningham's 'Edit' function (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham) which gave birth to the wiki ideology. They invented something that we all find hard to define in a word. So simple, yet very hard for the 'casual' internet user to see the value. I would say it's a massive failure of the FF user base, not FF, to explain/demonstrate/inspire the value to non-FF users - this is where FB will succeed. If they have swallowed the 'open communications' pill through acquiring FF, then we should be dancing and cheering.
  • August 13, 2009 at 2:51 pm zeroinfluencer
    If you don't know who Ward is: http://www.aboutus.org/Ward_Cunningham
  • August 13, 2009 at 2:54 pm zeroinfluencer
    Oh, I wrote a blog post a while back, covering some of this thinking about using design to invent. http://zeroinfluence.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/designing-problems-are-for-the-lazy/
  • August 13, 2009 at 9:22 pm Robert Felty
    I recently saw something about the founder of delicious, who left for Google when Yahoo acquired delicious. It made me think that delicious is mostly the same as it was before Yahoo acquired it. There have been changes, but it is still a separate entity, with its own domain name and logo. Maybe this could work for facebook + friendfeed too.
  • August 13, 2009 at 9:37 pm Robert Scoble
    Robert: yes. I don't sense that FriendFeed will be turned off. That would be pretty stupid. But it will be interesting to see what happens to it and how they integrate it into Facebook itself. Unfortunately FriendFeed's systems were built to handle a few million people, not hundreds of millions of people, so it would probably need significant work to integrate it into Facebook. I hope to learn more soon from both teams about what will happen.
  • August 13, 2009 at 10:21 pm Ben Reierson
    I was just catching up on exactly what Google Wave is, and I honestly think it has the potential of replacing nearly all our collaborative communication needs, even sites like FF. It seems crazy, but I often think about the digtial communication systems of the past (email, forums, IM) and how they never really went away, but they kept giving way to something 'new' that did certain things better but other things worse.
  • August 13, 2009 at 10:24 pm Ben Reierson
    WAVE seems to do pretty much everything that all those past systems did, AND it has the real-time aspects of FF. All you'd need to do is add in the aggregation bit, and you're there. I love the idea of having ONE place for all my communications. No longer would I need outlook + FF + IM + Twitter. I could just have various groups of waves, all of them 'alive' with data.
  • August 13, 2009 at 11:00 pm Lindsay, thread killer.
    I think Wave has lots of potential too. I got to play with it briefly and it was pretty confusing to use (though it also seemed to be encountering bugs when I was using it which contributed to the confusion). I think it or something like it will eventually replace the standards we use for online communication but it will be a learning curve, definitely. Also, it will need some means of discovery... FriendFeed's FoaF does a great job of finding me people with similar interests.
  • August 13, 2009 at 11:00 pm Lindsay, thread killer.
    I think Wave has lots of potential too. I got to play with it briefly and it was pretty confusing to use (though it also seemed to be encountering bugs when I was using it which contributed to the confusion). I think it or something like it will eventually replace the standards we use for online communication but it will be a learning curve, definitely. Also, it will need some means of discovery... FriendFeed's FoaF does a great job of finding me people with similar interests.
  • August 14, 2009 at 1:40 am MaryB, BrandingBroadOfFF
    I like all the ideas I'm hearing here. I was absolutely blown away by the Wave demo, and Building 43 seems like a very logical home for any FF replacement. Then, of course, there's the clone that Akiva says some friends of his are working on . . .

5 Comments

  1. Kol Tregaskes says:
    August 11, 2009 at 10:17 am

    I’d like to try Google Wave too. I feel the protocol could certainly be used to make a social media service like FriendFeed.

  2. MacSmiley says:
    August 11, 2009 at 10:51 am

    I don’t care who Facebook buys or how good its features get.

    I REFUSE to do business with a company that invades the privacy of even NON-MEMBERS. Facebook BEACON gathers purchase data of ALL the transactions made by customers of its BEACON partners, even of NON-FACEBOOK USERS!

    http://pcworld.about.com/od/onlineprivacy/Facebook-s-Beacon-Ad-System-Al.htm

    Due to the horrendous PR backlash, Facebook offered a way to members to opt-out of displaying that information. However, there is no way to entirely opt-out of Facebook’s gathering of that information altogether.

    Needless to say, I refuse to do business with Facebook’s Beacon affiliate websites, as well:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon#Partner_websites

  3. Digital Photography Live » Robert Scoble on the Future of FriendFeed says:
    August 11, 2009 at 12:46 pm

    [...] more: Robert Scoble on the Future of FriendFeed Share this on del.icio.usDigg this!Post this on DiigoShare this on RedditBuzz up!Stumble upon [...]

  4. Davis Freeberg says:
    August 11, 2009 at 12:53 pm

    This is all much ado about nothing. Friendfeed may be owned by Facebook, but they aren’t going to make drastic changes to it. If anything, the service will have even better support. I understand that something like this could change the culture by bringing more mainstream people to the service, but that was bound to happen sooner or later anyway. I say good for them, if Facebook does drop the ball, I’m sure that there are smart entrepreneurs who will step in and build another one.

  5. Weekly Digest for August 17th | Richard McKay says:
    August 17, 2009 at 12:58 pm

    [...] Robert Scoble on the Future of FriendFeed [...]

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