scobleizer’s posterous

maybe 50,000 people would be willing to pay something like $5 or $10 a year ("just pennies a day!") to keep the lights on. That might be enough to retain a good sys-admin & infrastructure. Open source development could go a long way toward keeping feature set moving in the right direction as well.

friendfeed would have users that would help Johnny and Josh keep running FFundercats http://ffundercats.com/ but i feel done with it tech. folks have started going elsewhere and there aren't much tech discussions going on, twitter doesn't have likes and comments and page need to be refreshed, but for twitter there are clients and things like brizzly etc that i can use, it is sad ff team had facebook on their minds while designing...would miss the old days dearly

Dan: this is NOT about keeping the lights on. I'm pretty sure the servers will stay up for a long long time. No reason to turn them off and the costs to keep them running are a rounding error at Facebook. What I AM talking about, though, is having a talented team working on improving the service and bringing us new features. Those days are gone, sadly.

testbeta: Twitter is coming out with features over the next month that look a lot like FriendFeed's likes. Comments are a little bit harder, but I hear they are working on something like that. Facebook already has likes and comments albeit they don't work as well as FriendFeed's do.

it would have been great had the ff team worked on ff even after the acquisition, it is sad though such a good platform is left to die

Part of the problem with Facebook as a "replacement" for FriendFeed is that it requires you are either a Fan or a Friend to participate in the discussion. I personally keep my friends list to just my friends and I tend to not join many groups due to the amount of noise they produce in the News Feed.

Twitter has the problem of no 'likes' and a lack of inline commenting. But what it does have over Facebook is the ability to participate in any discussion without having to follow or be followed.

Facebook cannot easily change their model to fit this design. It would require a significant rewrite of their platform. It would be very difficult to implement as an application because essentially you'd then be maintaining two separate friends/fans lists.

That Facebook is letting FriendFeed suffer so is essentially an example of just what they were after when they bought the platform and the company. The product was irrelevant to them. I had brief hope for it when they open sourced it, but thats long since faded. They don't care about FriendFeed, they just wanted the talent and the ideas behind it. And even the talent doesn't appear that important to them anymore.

They could have taken on Twitter and seriously kicked it to the floor in the way they did MySpace and are doing to Orkut (outside the US its still big.) But I think they've missed that opportunity. The exodus is from FriendFeed right back to Twitter, where once it was the other way around.

Pity. 20/20 hindsight will hurt when they realise what they've lost.

wondering how much would it take to support a "talented team working on improving the service and bringing us new features"? Say three or four developers, plus systems people ... and the UX boffins ... Starts to bounce around the $1M ballpark - would be a bit of a feat to float that with direct user fees, true. Maybe not entirely out of the question though ....

The Facebook purchase coincided with a two week, tech free, vacation for me. When I got back I filed Friendfeed with Jaiku and, at the same time, discovered that many Friendfeed contacts were becoming more active on Twitter again.

So that's where I spend my time. I still dip back into Friendfeed occasionally but it is as you say - there is less and less going on over there. What activity I do see is from others who (like me) linked in their Twitter accounts. There is the occasional tweet with a Like, but none of the conversation that used to take place.

It is still the best Twitter search engine out there though. I only hope that the Twitter devs are taking some inspiration from Friendfeed. :-)

Great blog post about the state of Friendfeed Robert. Totally agree with you here.

What did you all expect ? Friendfeed was in its way and now its gone, just one to go (Twitter).
Facebook is just cleaning the place for surely something centralized a sort of Social Media Google.
Get that, pictures, videos, profiles, emails, notifications, all in one place.

Better thing of something new .

Whatever happens to FriendFeed I won't be going to Facebook. I can see me using Twitter more, the more they implement FriendFeed-like functions - I'm looking forward to the lists function. But there is absolutely no attraction for me on Facebook.

i think you have a good argument for a second life for friendfeed, and the geeks the first wave adopters that have gone off away from there were going to go someplace else when that place was built, its sort of how the whole thing works. Crappy neighborhood is cheap and the creative types move in and start fixing it up, pretty soon the real estate people notice that the neighborhood is on an upswing, they start pushing more sales into that area pretty soon the creative types are priced out or have become comfortable enough that they can afford the new nice neighborhood and stay.
So now Friendfeed can expect a wave of Yuppies to move in and all the people who built it up will complain about how the place has gone down hill and go to the next place.

OK. So, I still use Second Life sometimes. Only sometimes.

Since Friendfeed was bought by Facebook, my time on Friendfeed has dropped considerably. I've been testing the waters of posting techie stuff on Facebook and am totally fascinated at the insights and experiences of my non-techie friends.

It's actually been beneficial to talk outside the circle. Maybe we've been too closed by sticking only to tech tools and related circles?

Continuing my experimentation with Facebook and peeking in on Friendfeed too.

Thanks Robert!

I just don't see Twitter Lists as a viable alternative to something like FriendFeed. The problem with Lists is that its completey account based - meaning that once I put you in a list I get everything you tweet - not just the stuff that I want. So it's great for simple things like lists of "Friends", "Family", and "Work."

But try adding a list of developers to a list like "Code" and you'll end up with a list filled with 20% code talk and 80% personal business.

The other gripe I have with using Twitter instead of FriendFeed is that conversations are all but impossible to follow on Twitter - try following an at-reply chain more than 3-4 levels deep.

I think you'll see a crop of new services pop up in the next 12 months to fill the void that left in the wake of the FB acquisition of FF.

I've been working on a project called Simler for the past few months that I think solves a lot of these problems, and in fact Louis Gray liked our application quite a bit.

We're super small right now - but I'd love to get everyone's opinion on what we've built.

You can find it here:
http://simler.com

Your writing is totally on point for us. We're crafting our site's hermetic version of FF/FB for the 5-10 yr old set on ClubPonyPals.com. COPPA keeps us behind some walls, for obvious reasons.

What FF/FB's choices have been are illuminating. To quote a former staffer on one of Vin DiBona's 90's disaster shows who saw a rival's airing of a similar show: "Pillage their research!"

We stay open to what the kids want. Chris Dixon put it best--"The content isn’t as important as the connection shared and presence felt."

Very, very timely post.

I love FriendFeed's aggregation and that I can put it as a widget in the sidebar of my blog. Nothing else does that.

...or perhaps we need to come to grips with the notion that perhaps online services -- or social media networks or whatever you want to call them -- have non-infinite lifespans. at some point, they will cease to be relevant or useful. Or something better will come along. The relatively short history of the commercial Internet is littered with online "communities" that went from the coolest place to be online to dead zones. What is so much different about FriendFeed? Or Posterous? Or even FaceBook. Something new will ALWAYS be coming, down the line. It's called "innovation."

The only problem I see with FriendFeed going is an outlet for Twitter users when the Twitter service goes down. We are now putting all of our bags in one basket that get's holes in it quite frequently. Twitter needs to figure out how to scale. More now than ever because the downtimes are unexceptionable, with new features or not.

Friendfeed is needed by those of us with a dozen or more Feeds, but most people don't blog and only upload a few photos or a video once in a blue moon

While the slow death of FF seems undeniable, I am not sure like you that it can have a "second" life like SecondLife :)
FF was still more of a bundle of cool features when it was sold. Don't know if that will be enough to keep a community alive.

I use Friendfeed primarily to import content to Facebook where popular items are discussed with my friends. As Facebook have imitated the popular features I have been using the service a lot more than I do Friendfeed now!

Heh, I still think there is a Second Life for Twitter!

I kept trying to convince myself that you and those who say Friendfeed is dying were wrong, but it's getting harder and harder. Unfortunately , I haven't found something to replace it yet, so I will remain with Friendfeed until the lights go out.

Sadly, I have to agree with Robert's assessment here. And he's right that the tech conversation on FF has pretty much gone dead, although he has contributed to this through his own absence. If nothing else it shows how quickly the tides of conversation momentum can change.

What NO ONE is talking about is Twitter's persistence issue, and how FriendFeed is still pretty much the only solution to this problem:

Twitter is more or less actively withholding from you both your own tweets, as well as the tweets of your "with friends" following stream. Once it's passed by, and 7 days or so have passed, there is no way for you to get these tweets back out.

Now when it comes to the Twitter Firehose stream, that is somewhat understandable, since Twitter wants to sell it expensively to corporate data miners. But when it comes to your own stuff (including tweets from the people you may have spent a long time collecting into your "following"), you are out of luck. You can't even get it back by any kind of search natively (if you use Twitter Search, you will get the results mostly polluted by people you hadn't chosen to follow).

You probably wouldn't accept this from just about any other service that you are putting so much of your time and energy into. And none of the Twitter clients I've seen really resolve this issue, since they don't store the incoming tweets persistently (e.g. if TweetDeck crashes, the old stuff disappears, and is is generally not designed - yet - to create persistence/archiving).

Now FriendFeed has been the only relatively decent solution to this up to this point, except for the fact that it was overly hard to get ALL of one's following/friends imported (anyone not on FF already you have to import manually).

Robert has been getting some persistence (besides using FF) from using Twitter's much overlooked (b/c ill-designed) Favorites feature, and while his finds are much appreciated, this just isn't really practical for most. We can't all be monitoring the stream 24/7 like Robert is :)

What is much more useful is if you can search back over your Following's output ALL THE WAY BACK if necessary and see what they've said e.g. about the recent FTC vs. Bloggers brouhaha. Simple to do on FriendFeed, nearly impossible on Twitter.

Of course now we can't be sure if FF is going to be around long enough to continue to wholeheartedly recommend them as an option to solve this. I've never understood why the FF didn't play up this angle aggressively, they could have signed up tons of Twitter users on the archiving alone, and in due time people would have considered more of the other advantages of FF.

friendfeed's embedable realtime feed rooms are amazing - they're so easy to drop into blog pages and add content to instantly via a bookmarklet. the friendfeed tech is just so powerful and simple that i'd hate to lose it, especially since i don't think anyone is near it in functionality. maybe facebook embedded content will get more powerful, but until then... i really hope it sticks around

you are more likely to get noticed on twitter than anywhere else, so that's where the action is

I started to comment hours ago.. and it turned into a blog post http://new2me.posterous.com/friendfeed-please-dont-go-away.

>I still use friendfeed to "play around" with ideas about how I want to interact with the web, as both a content consumer and provider. Nothing I've found (yet) can replace friendfeed's functionality, easy to explain "common interface" (WRT to twitter/feeds) and the simplicity/flexibility of their embedded pages and widgets.

The future of the web will certainly involve search, content and comments, filtered using a topic specific set of trusted resources (friends, experts, websites etc). NOTHING I've found does all that.. yet!!

In hindsight the entire history of friendfeed looks like a straight shot towards acquisition. I never liked the brand, frankly, because it always sounded like a little feature of Facebook. it all makes sense now; the lame (to me) brand would of course be perfectly appealing to a Facebook looking for acquisitions to improve its core feature set. Facebook, being a place for friends, wants to enable the feeding of these friends. I get it. The brand itself was designed to appeal to Facebook as an acquisition target.

When Google a few years ago started to make bank, and many startups so obviously were created with the hope of being acquired by them, there was no particular "developer ecosystem" such as what Mark Zuckerberg created a with the Facebook platform. As Facebook grew, the analogous startups created Facebook widgets instead of entire companies. Friendfeed, being a bit old-school compared to widget startups, had the classic vision of being acquired by Facebook to help it catch up with twitter from the very beginning, is my read. Great startup strategy - seen it before with Jot, but I don't think Jot was quite as premeditated.

Yes Alex you are right it is mind boggling that NO ONE is talking about is Twitter's persistence issue, and how FriendFeed is still pretty much the only solution to this problem.

I am just trying to imagine if any of my other services had twitter's retention ... email, my blogs, delicious, flickr. simply un-acceptable

Ok, some say the action is on Twitter, because it is fast, short, but will the service getting more and more users, issue and downtime will rise and you don't wanna put all your eggs in the same basket.
Facebook is the same story.
Google wave will in the future will be of some use (when it will be understood surely !!!).

So what do you guys are dreaming of ?

Twitter is nearly replacing IM and SMS soon.
Facebook is the place to be but, mostly in Europe, you have the privacy invasion.
Friendfeed has been supported by Scobleizer and but now he is dropping it, so it is dead.

In our time, we need to be connected all the time so, a tool for mobile users has to be set, it will surely evolve and some new stuff will come but the final question is :

What is you dream tool ?

We seem to be forgetting that FF isn't closing down. It's just not innovating anymore. It's also opensourced so that one of us like Robert can build our own Friendfeed to replace this one and just have everyone move over. Just an idea.

I assure you those imaginary friends of mine will keep the real cyber punks out there busy on friendfeed for as long as we don't trust the main stream whales. Those badlands are real fine for me to fight the Jihad. people with free libertarian ideas fail to report the truth because you don't see the bigger picture. the bigger picture is friendfeed isn't a competitor. it is a tool to surveillance those with those same internationalist ideals. you say it is open source? good.

The Compuserve mainframe shut down in July 2009. Yes, 2009. That is not a fate to be strived for, but it is the path that friendfeed.com is on. The cost to keep the friendfeed servers running forever is not prohibitive, but without innovation and a growing community it will just slowly rot until the last person turns off the lights.