Buzz: Not Dead, No Killer
NYT: Buzz, nicely integrated with Gmail and Google Chat, will have its own following; http://j.mp/bTiQTm
Tagged: FriendFeed RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Google Buzz
Google: Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations, built right into Gmail; http://j.mp/9AFwAB
Gerrit Eicker
Google Social Search
Google uses Google Profiles to empower its Social Search through Twitter and Friendfeed posts; http://j.mp/2ZGeWM
Gerrit Eicker
Tornado
Facebook open sourced Tornado, a real-time web framework for Python, developed by FriendFeed; http://j.mp/2XZHl2
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Real-time updates have become an important aspect of the social Web that make it easier to share with friends. In March, we introduced a real-time News Feed to make the stream as relevant and engaging as possible for users. Similarly, FriendFeed, which we recently acquired, built their entire site to support real-time updates. It hasn’t been easy to build and scale these features, so today we’re open-sourcing a core piece of infrastructure called Tornado, which was originally developed by the FriendFeed team.”
TC: “When Facebook acquired FriendFeed last month, everyone knew it was getting some pretty impressive technology along with the obvious talent in the company. What people probably didn’t expect is that Facebook would open source a portion of it. But that’s what they’re doing today with the release of Tornado, a real-time web framework for Python, onto the web.”
Winer: “I also reminded people that when cool technologies are shipping everywhere it’s not a time of death it’s a time of life, as long as we have the web to connect our work, there’s nothing exclusive about it. The engineers don’t think we’re wiping each other out, only the pundits and the hangers-on do.”
RWW: “Developers will now be able to tap into one of the core infrastructure pieces that made FriendFeed tick so well. While other services (like Twitter) tend to have a lot of trouble to scale up when they grow, FriendFeed never ran into these problems and Tornado was surely one of the main reasons why the site managed to stay up and running even when demand spiked during major events.”
Gerrit Eicker
FriendFeed Makes Themes Customizable
FriendFeed lets you create a custom theme by uploading a background image and choosing a few colors; http://bit.ly/JWXQi
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
Facebook has acquired FriendFeed: the next step in its assault on Twitter; http://bit.ly/nIs6J
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Gerrit Eicker
WSJ: “Facebook Inc. said it has acquired FriendFeed, a start-up that allows users to share links and status updates online, folding in a potential rival that struggled to take off. – Facebook paid nearly $50 million for the company, in a combination cash and stock offer, according to people familiar with the matter.”
TC: “This acquisition is a very smart move by Facebook to bolster its product, especially as it relates to the real-time web. One thing it does not do however, is make Facebook simpler. I’d still argue that Twitter has an inherent advantage over Facebook because it is so much simpler to use, resulting in a much lower barrier to entry. But naturally, with the complication comes a lot more data, and data is ultimately be the key for a larger battle for the web, so it’s a trade-off. – Where this leaves FriendFeed as a service is still up in the air. The team has said FriendFeed will continue to run as-is for the time being, but made no promises about the future. Cox’s comments seem to indicate that FriendFeed will be a sort of farm system for the big league Facebook, which I’m sure will piss off plenty of FriendFeed devotees.”
AdAge: “Hopefully, through the FriendFeed acquisition, Facebook will make it easier to search these updates. It’s hard enough to search for anything on Facebook, though the network has indicated that it plans to focus more on that experience. Now imagine if on Facebook you could search what consumers are publicly sharing anywhere; that search functionality would make Twitter Search seem like a kid’s plaything.”
NYT: “It’s a logical fit for Facebook, which has slowly been shifting its focus to becoming more of a real-time social broadcasting service. – But the bigger win for Facebook may be the technical talent that comes with the deal: FriendFeed’s founders were involved in the creation of Google’s Gmail service.”
Gerrit Eicker
FriendFeed Real-time Search
FriendFeed launches its real-time search and is working on allowing subscriptions to saved searches; http://tr.im/qIMH
Gerrit Eicker
Online Mobs
What a headline: FriendFeed, Syphilis And The Perfection Of Online Mobs; http://tr.im/q72A
Gerrit Eicker
CubeTree
The CubeTree offers a social solution for enterprises: elements of Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter; http://bit.ly/J4g4S
Gerrit Eicker
FriendFeed Redesign
FriendFeed rolls out redesign, adds list-replacing eMail features; http://tr.im/k566
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Gerrit Eicker
TC: “This roll-out is potentially important for other social sites as well. The biggest is of course Facebook, which has stated its desire to make the site’s news feed streams update in real-time. Given the initial backlash FriendFeed saw against real-time, one can only imagine how bad it would have been received on Facebook. Especially considering that site has over 200 million users sending updates.”
VB: “FriendFeed by Email: You can post new items to your FriendFeed by emailing share@friendfeed.com. You can post to groups by emailing groupname@friendfeed.com, and you can direct message your friends by emailing username@friendfeed.com.”
Google: “Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch – it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.”
NYT: “Google and Facebook are on a collision course in the increasingly competitive market for social networking services. – On Tuesday, Google introduced a new service called Google Buzz, a way for users of its Gmail service to share updates, photos and videos. The service will compete with sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are capturing an increasing percentage of the time people spend online.”
Guardian: “The move brings Google into closer conflict with a number of smaller rivals than ever before. Although the company remains the most powerful force on the web – and has even seen profits from its internet advertising business continue to rise despite the recession – it has also been feeling increasing pressure from competitors that have tapped into a desire to connect with friends and family online.”
TC: “Without having had a chance to play with it yet, it would seem that the core idea behind Buzz is to take on Twitter and Facebook as the easiest way to share content online. Google is offering a number of compelling features such as smart curation (it gets better as you tell it what you like and what you don’t), and a rich mobile experience including location. – Because of the features it adds on to what Twitter does, and its overall look, it’s hard not to compare Buzz to FriendFeed. That service was arguably the better product than Twitter, but never took off in the same way for whatever reason (though I would argue that simplicity was a big factor).”
NYT: “People will find the Google Buzz notes right in their Gmail in-boxes, where they’re marked with a special Buzz icon that looks like a cartoon text bubble filled with Google’s signature primary colors. The comments that follow an update, also known as a Buzz, are grouped in a similar fashion to the way Gmail handles a thread of messages.”
Winer: “I only know about first impressions of Google Buzz because once I saw what it did to my Gmail inbox, which is a mission-critical app for me, my mission became How do I turn this off? … It violates the prime directive of new software. It starts turned on, and the way to turn it off is all-but invisible. And it invades a space that heretofore Google helped to protect. One of the big values of Gmail is its spam filter. Now all of a sudden it’s as if the exhaust was reversed, and it was spraying dirt into my message stream, instead of filtering it out.”
SEL: “Gmail certainly has its share of dedicated, hardcore users – people who have Gmail set as their home page and keep it open all day in a separate browser tab. But do these users want social networking to invade their inbox? We’re all familiar with the challenge of separating work time – which almost always involves email – from ‘social time,’ and Google is taking somewhat of a risk by combining the two with Buzz.”
Jarvis: “I think this could be the beginning of some big things: The hyperpersonal news stream, which Marissa Mayer has been talking about. The key value here is not just aggregating our streams but prioritizing them by listening to signals that unlock relevance. … Local is clearly a big Google priority. Newspapers, Yellow Pages, local media, and perhaps even craigslist better watch out. Google is gunning to organize our areas and with that comes an incredible flood of advertising opportunity. … Personalization is key to this: relevance in your feed; publishing to your friends (even understanding who your friends are). I think this portends the end of the universal search and thus of search-engine optimization (there’ll be no way to calculate how high a result rises when everyone’s results are different).”
RWW: “Google Buzz could quickly become the most popular location-based service on the Internet. Not only does Buzz integrate itself into Gmail, which will give it a large mainstream user base, but Buzz also puts geolocation front and center on its mobile sites. In addition, the new Buzz layer in the Google Maps mobile interface makes it incredibly easy to find geotagged Buzz messages around you. … By default, location sharing is turned on in Buzz, which raises concerns about privacy.”
VB: “You’ll find more location features when you go to the Buzz mobile website. In addition to posting an update, you can see a Google place profile of where you are, and you can click on a ‘nearby’ button to see all the public updates from users near your location. This might be particularly useful if you’re at a big event like a conference, so you see all the conversation around that conference. – None of these individual features are all that unique or innovative, but by tying them into a comprehensive product, which is itself integrated with a number of popular Google services like Gmail, Google might find location-based success in a way that it doesn’t seem to have done with its earlier location service, Latitude.”
RWW: “Google Buzz is headed for the enterprise. According to the Google Enterprise blog, Google Buzz will become a part of Google Apps within the next few months. – Google Buzz applies as much to the enterprise as it does to the consumer market. The real-time application creates an extension for communication that adds a threaded context to a conversation, a critical component for an enterprise application.”