friendfeed

The Friday Gillmor Gang podcast featured special guests Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, the creators of FriendFeed. Along with Twitter, FriendFeed has become a poster child for the next wave of communications tools favored by the cybernauts.

Steve Gillmor seems to think that Twitter will become the predominant messaging backbone for the social Web. If the company behind Twitter can't make it happen, Gillmor suggested that FriendFeed should do it.

Buchheit, who was employee No. 23 at Google and suggested the now famous "Don't be evil" motto, said that FriendFeed wasn't designed to kill Twitter. &… Read more

The obsession with the ups and downs of Twitter among my friends has generated a great deal of bloviation, including my own. On a slow news weekend, Twitter's performance problems are fodder for a bit of theater and for getting some daily keyboard exercise.

The image below is meant to bring some perspective to the Twittersphere. On one hand, Twitter navel gazing (or any other navel gazing) is a waste of resources in the context of what is going on in the world. On the other hand, Twitter and its brethren are becoming viable communications vehicles for spreading the &… Read more

Lately the echo chamber of the blogosphere inhabited by the Gillmor Gang (of which I am a member) has been caught in a loop of Twitter-FriendFeed convulsions.

Steve Gillmor believes that Twitter is the communications medium of the future. Send out a message to your followers and track (when the feature is enabled) the loosely coupled conversation as it wafts deeper into the cloud. FriendFeed, on the other hand, aggregates feeds from Twitter and many other sources, creating an index of the content (gestures in Gillmorspeak) an individual chooses to share with followers.

Twitter's friendly API allows … Read more

Facebook users can now import YouTube, StumbleUpon, Pandora, Hulu, Last.fm, and Google Reader into the social network's Mini-Feed.

By doing this, Facebook users will be opening up their actions at these sites to their friends. The service, which was announced on Facebook's blog on Friday, is similar to one offered by FriendFeed.

Facebook had already included Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp, and Del.icio.us. in Mini-Feed. Facebook executives have said that it intends to focus on adding data from third-party sites.

FriendFeed, the aggregation service we've written about several times in the past, has just released a new feature called Rooms. It's basically a mini version of the service, letting you pick which people you want to let join a special FriendFeed information stream.

Users can make rooms public or private, and casually share links amongst each other. It's a little different from the information overflow of the main service. A good use of this would be a work group who shares bookmarks. Each one could share links they're bookmarking on Delicious and keep tabs on the … Read more

Twitter and tweeting are rapidly becoming part of the lexicon, at least among the digerati who have discovered the jouissance of followers and following. Twitter hasn't unleashed a unique technology, but an inspired broadcast pivot on existing messaging models. As the generation that has grown up texting rather than e-mailing takes over the planet, Twitter and its ilk will go mainstream.

With Twitter, you have followers (those who subscribe to your 140-character-limited tweets) and following (those whose tweets you follow). As you can see from the graphic below, Twitter usage comes in all shapes and sizes.

At the top … Read more

The Web spirit of "build an audience and figure out the business model later" is a great filter. It allows products and services into the wild without barriers or the need to sell advertisers on an unproven concept.

Those who can build an audience, such as Twitter and FriendFeed, and before them Google, Facebook, and dozens of others who turned into giants, have the scale to develop monetization schemes that a loyal and fanatic user base won't summarily reject.

In the case of Twitter, the service is a hit, attracting millions of "tweeters," many of … Read more

For quite a while, I was nothing more than a social network hater. To me, social networks seemed like a ploy for those with so-called "notoriety" to massage their egos just a little bit more and provided no real benefit to anyone. After signing up for almost every social network in existence, I can say now that I was dead wrong.

Whether it's Twitter, FriendFeed or even Flickr, I'm extremely surprised by how much value each provides. And although I can't speak for everyone who uses these services, I honestly believe that each is unique and useful enough to justify your time.

Here's why:… Read more

Shortly after Loic Le Meur's Seesmic acquired the excellent Twitter client Twhirl, the new geek hotness FriendFeed got its first AIR application, Alert Thingy (review), which also handles Twitter feeds. Le Meur charged his new employee with putting FriendFeed features into Twhirl to maintain parity.

FriendFeed support in the current version of Twhirl is pretty sparse. If you find it frustrating, however, sit tight for a few more hours because yet another update to Twhirl is on the way, Le Meur told me tonight.

This new version will let you post images to your FriendFeed account just by dragging … Read more