FriendFeed Not Dead, Just In A State Of “Chrysalis,” Says Co-founder
This weekend, a number of people had things to say about the decay and seemingly inevitable death of FriendFeed. That included us, twice . While this was going on, the FriendFeed team remained largely silent, even on their own product. But today, co-founder Paul Buchheit has responded. Naturally, in a FriendFeed posted item , here’s what he had to say: There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage — if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge But, this still seems to speak to very much what I was talking about this weekend. FriendFeed, as we knew it, is over. “ FriendFeed goodness to the larger world ,” would seem to imply either some more open-sourcing like they did with Tornado by way of Facebook . Or, a bigger movement of the FriendFeed technology over to Facebook itself. Further open-sourcing FriendFeed and/or its APIs is great and all, but I fear things will get messy for end-users without a single product to focus on. Certainly, that will be useful for some people, and undoubtedly some services, but I have a hard time believing it will be able to fully replace the way I used FriendFeed, as a crowd-sourced pusher of information in real-time. Facebook obviously has the size to provide that, but I still worry that it’s too big for the rapid pace of innovation we were seeing with FriendFeed to continue. I do hope the team is able to improve some of the areas that Facebook is lacking in, such as sharing speed , filters, and content discovery. But it won’t be the same. And that’s fine, as Buchheit notes, “ transformation is not the end .” But it’s hard to watch a service you replied heavily upon change drastically. Maybe the result will be a butterfly, but I didn’t consider FriendFeed to be a caterpillar before. [photo: flickr/ kiwinz ] CrunchBase Information FriendFeed Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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