SMM: How Does Facebook Acquiring Friendfeed Affect Me?
If you have a Twitter or Friendfeed account, you’ve no doubt already heard the news that Facebook acquired Friendfeed. But what does that mean to users like you and me?
Granted, the majority of you probably didn’t have a Friendfeed account 48 hours ago. Just last week, I tried to get my Facebook friends to sign up while Twitter was down, and I got a whopping two people to give it a try. My own sister was one of those two. And after a few days, her conclusion was that Friendfeed is overwhelming.
What plans might Facebook have for the future? As Nick O’Neil of AllFacebook.com stated Monday, “…the companies are being relatively tight lipped about information surrounding the acquisition…” So the best we can do is take a quick look and offer a speculation or two.
#1 Friendfeed Remains an External Extension of Facebook
In this scenario, “maybe” Friendfeed retains some autonomy and only functions as an addon of sorts to Facebook users. Who knows. My head hurts just trying to grasp how this makes sense in the context of an acquisition.
#2 1+1=3!!!!
Maybe, MAYBE you put the two together and with the synergy of so many geniuses you get a new product that does more than the sum total of all currently available parts. But since I’m not plugged into the collective, what this looks like is up for debate (and daydream).
#3 Facebook Becomes Your Feed Reader
This is the only obvious scenario that makes sense to me. By merging Friendfeed into Facebook, you could not only see the stream of your friends and groups, but also turn Facebook into your primary feed reader, where you get the latest blog posts, stumbles, diggs, tweets, deliciouses, plurks, and whatever else your little heart desires. Imagine 250 million people leaving Facebook open on their laptops all day long to get the latest everything. In a real way, venturing outside of Facebook might only occur if and when your feed only provides a partial story and you want to read the rest.
By adding Friendfeed technology, you would be able to select which of your friends’ feeds you want to read from anywhere on the Web. You could hide the stuff that gets irritating and still have total control over what type of content you want to see.
The downside:
1. Mobile apps, mobile apps, mobile apps. Someone somewhere needs to develop a mobile app that I don’t hate for both Facebook and Friendfeed. There are half a dozen or more awesome apps for Twitter on the iPhone, but Facebook is way too clunky, trying to make the entire experience available to me with little bitty buttons I can barely click with my finger. Friendfeed is no better, really. They’re way behind in the mobile app department too. Which means the FB and FF collaborative geniuses really need to put their heads together and put out at least one app that is simplified, more like a Twitter app, but continuing the threaded discussion functionality (updating threads upon refresh).
2. Usability. The reason more people don’t use Friendfeed now is that they don’t automatically understand how to adjust all their settings and import all their feeds. That, or they’re lazy and uninterested in awesome web technologies. 
I found that updating my settings were fairly easy on Friendfeed, but I took the time to explore and play around with the site, because that’s just the type of person I am. Facebook users predominantly strike me as the lowest common denominator of cutting edge adaptability. They’re mostly MySpace users who converted because MySpace advertising was so horrible and switching just became the popular thing to do. Most of them don’t use Twitter and have never heard of Friendfeed. Adding all these awesome capabilities only makes sense if the people can figure out how to use them. So we’ll see how that goes. Maybe the early adopters will continue to evangelize their friends until everyone’s loving and fully leveraging Facebook 3.0.
But I doubt it. What do YOU think? Any ideas where this train is headed?
Popularity: 61% [?]
I’ve never learned how to use facebook or friendfeed correctly so I’m pretty sure this doesn’t affect me. I could be wrong.
Jenny, Bloggess´s last blog ..It’s just coincidental that Victor got stabbed right after I wrote this. I didn’t even stab him. Some guy named Bill did. I’m the one who drove him to go get a tetanus shot. If anything, I’m a hero.
Comment by Jenny, Bloggess — August 12, 2009 @ 8:54 am
How does it affect me? It’s gotta mean that every one with a private Facebook account is about to be susceptible to being turned into an imaginary friend.
Comment by BeNiceKelly — August 12, 2009 @ 9:01 am
not sure that any of them are geniuses. if they are, why is friendfeed so annoying with the constant updates and why is facebook anti-music?
Comment by sloane — August 12, 2009 @ 9:02 am
Not sure, as I have spent very little time with FriendFeed and I don’t really use FB for business…yet. I rely heavily on my blog, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Joe Gerstandt´s last blog ..The most, bestest book
Comment by Joe Gerstandt — August 12, 2009 @ 9:17 am
I’m not quite sure how it will personally effect me since I rarely used FriendFeed but I imagine socially that it will impact small businesses and such. What about as a feedreader that you can incorporate into your fan pages on facebook and facebook ads?
Comment by Casey Yandle — August 12, 2009 @ 9:22 am
I must admit that the idea of Facebook turning into even more of an RSS feed than it already is horrifies me. If they go this route, I’d really want to see far more stringent filtering options, because right now, my home page news feed is relatively chocka with things I don’t care about. The ‘Hide’ button is one thing, but more and more posts pop up in which I have no interest. In the good old days (hello, mid-twenties!), you could specify what sort of stories you’d like to see most often and from whom you’d want to see posts. I really REALLY don’t want to see what y’all are digging. But someone else does, so we should be able to filter those things quite stringently.
Having said all this, I am a old school Facebook bore who remembers when a .edu email address was needed in order to join, and who broke through every available security hole in 2005. I liked the Facebook of old, and I don’t like the Twitter-esque feel it has nowadays nearly as much.
College. Those were the days. I’m going to listen to some 50 Cent and pretend I’m studying for finals week now.
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Comment by Jane Copland — August 12, 2009 @ 9:36 am
I don’t use Friendfeed but as is I find the twitter-like home page on Facebook annoying. Updates are redundant. It would be great if Friendfeed was an option on Facebook, but not an obligatory part of it.
–vicequeenmaria
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Comment by Maria de los Angeles — August 12, 2009 @ 9:36 am
I think it will end up blowing over and people will continue to not use FriendFeed. I think everyone is just signing up b/c of all the press buzz it is getting, but I don’t see it impacting my daily routine.
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Comment by pratt — August 12, 2009 @ 9:36 am
@Casey Yandle, I use Friendfeed mostly as a Twitter backup. Last week, when both Twitter AND Facebook had issues at the same time, it was nice to have a decent alternative to turn to where a solid percentage of my conversations were visible and still going strong.
Comment by Daniel Dessinger
Twitter: danielthepoet
— August 12, 2009 @ 9:40 am
@Joe Gerstandt, Yeah, I don’t see Facebook being much of a business tool except in the social sharing of news. I share a very small percentage of links on Facebook compared to Twitter simply because my friends are a different sort.
Comment by Daniel Dessinger
Twitter: danielthepoet
— August 12, 2009 @ 9:41 am
How Does Facebook Acquiring Friendfeed Affect Me? – Great post! http://ff.im/-6vrnS
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Comment by svartling — August 12, 2009 @ 9:57 am
@pratt, I’ve seen a ton of people joining Friendfeed lately. I agree that the hype will likely blow over UNLESS Facebook has some super secret strategies up their sleeve.
Comment by Daniel Dessinger
Twitter: danielthepoet
— August 12, 2009 @ 10:10 am
@Jane Copland, 50 Cent and finals? LOL. Good times. So you like a clear distinction between Twitter and Facebook. I can see that. But I have to admit: I never used Facebook until they made the status updates the focal point of the site.
Comment by Daniel Dessinger
Twitter: danielthepoet
— August 12, 2009 @ 10:16 am
I used FF for a while, and still maintain an account there, but I don’t visit it and turned off all of my aggregation settings. Why? I don’t feel like I know the people there. I know people on FB and Twitter, and for the most part the people I follow via these platforms are the same people as on FF. I don’t have a lot of time to mess around – and am too vested in Twitter and FB (to a lesser degree) to consider FF a sincere option to gaining more industry insight (which is my primary function of Twitter) or to keep in touch with people on a more personal level (ie FB). This merger doesn’t mean as much to me as it does say, Robert Scoble. If it works out and seems to make FB more relevant, great. If not, I’m ok with that. We’ll see.
Jim @smashadv´s last blog ..Knowing Your Target Audience
Comment by Jim @smashadv — August 12, 2009 @ 10:49 am
I have FF plugged into FB already but on another page. I dont want to bombard people with my tweets and diggs. It’s there so if they want to read it then they can.
Do I want to read someone’s tweets and diggs? Depends.
I see a cpl of people that post their tweets to FB and update 6 times an hour.
Do I want to see their other activity too? No.
Odds are if they are posting that much they are posting a lot of other activity to FF as well.
Finally the worst of all is TMI. FB has already has people posting their political opinion, then quizzes about politics and finally religious material.
When has this information done us any good?
Do I need to drop friends cause they feel the need to post their opinions about religion?
Drop friends over Digg stories about who’s right and wrong in the political world? It could happen.
I have had friends drop me because of my politics and because of my religious choices.
All this info might just not be worth it.
Then again we could just decide there are topics that are best not discussed and post what we had for lunch.
Comment by Clay Harrison — August 12, 2009 @ 11:46 am
I don’t think most people will be affected by this directly. This was more of a grab for talent than technology (after all one of the guys who wrote Gmail was working for FriendFeed, I want him on my team too).
In regards to the technology, you’re seeing Facebook try to kill Twitter and take on Google at the same time. Real time news/search is where the future is (see Google Caffeine) and with this purchase and the recently released search feature, they’re right there.
This is where you’re going to see people affected. Instead of going to Google.com to get news, they’re going to go to Facebook (just like they currently do with Twitter until Facebook ripped off every single feature like a filthy feature whore).
So how am I going to be affected? I will somehow manage to use Facebook less…of course I’ve already rebranded the site to FaceTwitter for them. That ones on me Mark, the next one will cost you.
Comment by Randy Jensen — August 12, 2009 @ 3:58 pm