FriendFeed

FriendFeed FriendFeed was a real-time social aggregation and lifestreaming service launched in 2007 that aggregated updates from multiple social networks and web services into a single feed. It was created by a team of former employees from Google, Facebook, Inc., LiveJournal and other Silicon Valley companies and attracted attention from technology journalists at outlets such as The New York Times, Wired, TechCrunch, and The Wall Street Journal. The service emphasized real-time discussion and link sharing among users, drawing comparisons to contemporaneous services like Twitter and earlier projects associated with RSS and LiveJournal.

History

FriendFeed was founded in 2007 by engineers and entrepreneurs including Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Jonathan Abrams, Dave Glazer, and Brad Fitzpatrick after previous work at Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Inc., and Six Apart. Early coverage by The New York Times, Wired, TechCrunch, Gigaom, and BusinessWeek highlighted rapid user growth and interest from venture capital firms such as Benchmark Capital and Union Square Ventures. In 2008 and 2009 the service integrated with platforms including Facebook Platform, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, and Delicious, becoming a nexus for syndication with participation from notable technologists like Biz Stone and Evan Williams. In August 2009 the company agreed to be acquired by Facebook, Inc.; the deal and subsequent staff moves were reported by The Wall Street Journal and analyzed by commentators at AllThingsD and Mashable. After acquisition, features and engineering talent migrated into Facebook Platform projects and later Facebook products, and the standalone service remained online until being shut down in 2015, a timeline discussed in retrospectives by Wired and The Atlantic.

Features and functionality

FriendFeed provided a centralized stream that consolidated content from services such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, Digg, Tumblr, Foursquare, and Blogger and allowed threaded conversations and inline commenting, capabilities often compared with features in Reddit, Slashdot, and MetaFilter. Real-time updates were pushed to users in ways reminiscent of implementations at Gmail and earlier Google projects, while aggregation supported media previews like those popularized by YouTube and Flickr. Social features included following users, creating groups similar to concepts used by LinkedIn and Facebook Groups, and filtering streams with tags and search inspired by practices at Technorati and Google Blog Search. The site also supported application programming interfaces used by developers and services, echoing approaches from Amazon Web Services, Google APIs, and Twitter API. FriendFeed’s emphasis on threaded conversations and permalinks drew commentary from commentators at The Guardian and The New Yorker about online discourse and community moderation.

Technology and architecture

FriendFeed’s architecture employed open-source components and languages with engineering practices familiar to teams at Google, Facebook, Inc., and Yahoo!; it used real-time push technologies comparable to techniques later formalized by WebSocket and implementations in Node.js-era projects. The backend used scalable data stores and caching layers analogous to patterns from Memcached and replication strategies referenced in case studies at Yahoo! and LinkedIn. Search and indexing capabilities reflected ideas from Lucene and earlier Apache Solr-based deployments used by organizations like The Apache Software Foundation. The service exposed APIs for syndication and third-party integration, a model influenced by and comparable to the Google APIs and Amazon Web Services approach to developer ecosystems. Engineering hires and departures after acquisition contributed to technology transfers into Facebook Platform and later infrastructure efforts at Facebook, Inc..

Business model and acquisition

FriendFeed initially operated without major direct monetization beyond potential advertising and analytics experimentation similar to early strategies at Twitter and Myspace. The company raised attention from venture capital firms like Benchmark Capital and internal investors connected to Google and Silicon Valley angel networks exemplified by investors in Sequoia Capital-backed startups. In August 2009 FriendFeed agreed to be acquired by Facebook, Inc., a transaction covered by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times; key engineering staff joined teams inside Facebook, Inc. and influenced product design. Post-acquisition the standalone service continued, but strategic priorities shifted toward integrating talent and technology into Facebook Platform and adjacent products, a consolidation pattern observed in other deals such as Google’s acquisitions of social tools and Microsoft’s purchases in the consumer web space.

Reception and legacy

During its operation FriendFeed was praised in outlets like Wired, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Gigaom, and The Atlantic for its real-time aggregation, threaded conversation model, and developer-friendly APIs; commentators compared its features to those in Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook, Inc.. The service served as an incubator for engineers who went on to influence products at Facebook, Inc., Google, Dropbox, Quora, and other Silicon Valley firms, a migration noted in profiles by Fortune and Forbes. Academic and journalistic retrospectives in The Guardian and The New Yorker examined FriendFeed’s role in shaping expectations around real-time feeds, social aggregation, and community moderation, and its technologies informed later implementations in Facebook News Feed features, realtime search efforts at Google, and various open-source projects discussed at O’Reilly Media conferences. Its shutdown in 2015 prompted analysis in Wired and Mashable about consolidation in the social web and the lifecycle of social startups.

Category:Social networking services