FriendFeed

Facebook promotes Bret Taylor to CTO

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that Director of Platform Bret Taylor has been promoted to chief technology officer--a position that the company had not previously counted among its ranks.

Taylor joined Facebook last summer when the company acquired his start-up FriendFeed, a social-media aggregator that was rife with ex-Google engineering talent and Silicon Valley early-adopter hype, but slow on mainstream uptake. Shortly after Taylor and his team joined Facebook, the company open-sourced the Tornado server, which powered FriendFeed's impressive real-time streaming capabilities.

The reasoning behind Taylor's promotion appears to be logistical, judging by an internal e-mail from Facebook that was conveniently forwarded to TechCrunch. &… Read more

Buzz Out Loud Podcast 1174: Pregnant robot drones

In and amongst our fights over Facebook patents, TV spectrum and the reasons for the decline of music, we find time to agree on one thing. Robot drones are cool. Robot drobnes that carry little baby drones with them are even cooler.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 1174

Buzz features compared: Just the important stuff

When Google unveiled Buzz earlier this week, one of the first things that jumped into many people's minds (including ours) was "haven't we seen this before?" The answer is yes.

Buzz is, in many ways, highly derivative of existing, and quite popular services. The three biggest ones that come to mind are Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed, with the latter two being the same company. Though to Google's credit, it has done something none of these companies has managed to do in integrating it deeply into a popular e-mail service.

While there are too many differences to make an apples to apples comparison here, there are a lot of key features the four services share. Read on to find out which of these features each service is the best at. … Read more

Sneak peek at Strings: A social tracker with a twist

This week we got a sneak peek at a new social tracking site that's launching a little later this year. Called Strings, it's made up of tools that let you passively share your various on- and offline activities with others online, all in the hopes of both getting and giving recommendations from its online community.

In many ways Strings feels a lot like FriendFeed. For example, just like FriendFeed you're able to tie Strings into to various services you're using like Amazon, Netflix, and social-bookmarking tools so that it can implicitly share information about what you're doing on each of those services with others. And like FriendFeed, this information can be tracked and filtered depending on what type of content it is, and what group of friends it's coming from.

Where it differs though, is that this data feed begins with complete anonymity; nobody ever has to know it's you who is feeding the site. If and when you decide you want to start identifying data as your own, Strings has a very deep set of privacy controls to protect what other people can see. … Read more

Brands in Public: the end of the conversation?

It was just a matter of time: "With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf," I wrote in early July.

And now Seth Godin and BzzAgent have done exactly this. The marketing guru and the marketing agency have launched a portal that aggregates conversations about brands and presents them in a unified public-facing dashboard that gives brands the chance to lead the discussion. Brands in Public translates the Get Satisfaction … Read more

Facebook wastes no time putting FriendFeed to work

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook has unleashed a Tornado, and it's hoping that some eager engineers will go catch it.

Earlier this month, Facebook released the open-source Web server framework called Tornado, which powers the real-time streaming behind its latest toy, social feed aggregator FriendFeed. And on Wednesday evening at the office that most recently housed the FBFund incubator program, senior open programs manager David Recordon and director of products Bret Taylor held a "tech talk" to pitch Tornado to a crowd of several dozen interested members of the Web development community.

"We had actually been planning … Read more

Nomee combines AIR with social information

Adobe AIR applications are typically well designed. They feature a sleek look and relatively fast response times. TweetDeck (Windows | Mac), a popular Adobe AIR app, has put the platform on the map. It has caused some developers to view AIR as a viable alternative platform to building a Web site.

Nomee (Windows|Mac), a company that helps users see what celebrities, prominent figures, or their friends are up to online, is one such app.

The basics Nomee is based on "cards." When you first sign up for the site (you can use OpenID if you don't want to create unique Nomee credentials), you'll be presented with celebrities and prominent figures who currently have cards on the site. But before you start thinking that there are scores of celebs on Nomee, think again: for the most part, those cards were created by Nomee users, not the celebrities themselves.

When you view a card, it displays an image of the person, followed by several sites or services that are related to them. When you click on one of those services, you'll be brought to its respective Web page. For example, if you click on the Twitter logo on my card, you can view my Twitter page.

If you like what you see, you can "add" the card to your Nomee Dashboard. From there, Nomee will track all the card updates. It will alert you when there's something new for you to check out.

Nomee's Newstream lets you view all the updates from every card you follow. Thanks to such a nice design and some filtering options, you shouldn't have any trouble finding exactly what you're looking for. It's arguably Nomee's best feature.

Card creation Of course, Nomee isn't just a place where you can see what your favorite celebrities are up to. You can also create your own card to share with friends. Those same friends can create cards and share their social profiles and links with you.… Read more

Facebook open-sources real-time FriendFeed facet

Facebook announced on Thursday that it has open-sourced recently acquired FriendFeed's real-time technology. Dubbed Tornado, the company's real-time, nonblocking framework is written in Python.

"Tornado is...designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services," Facebook's David Recordon wrote in a blog post. "While Tornado is similar to existing Web frameworks in Python (Django, Google's Webapp, Webpy), it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic."

FriendFeed co-founder and new Facebook Director of Products Bret Taylor said in a blog post of his own that … Read more

Facebook launching Twitter-like 'Lite' site?

Facebook, it appears, was not about to let Google get this week's award for shadowy new projects. On Tuesday night, a number of users--including Mashable blogger Ben Parr--received notifications that they were beta testers for something called "Facebook Lite."

The notifications, as well as the site hosted on the subdomain lite.facebook.com, disappeared within minutes. It seems to have been rolled out prematurely by mistake.

"Last night, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake," an e-mailed statement from Facebook representative Brandee Barker read. "We have … Read more

FriendFeed features that Facebook needs to absorb

Monday's news that social giant Facebook is acquiring the less than two-year old FriendFeed included an important postscript: "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product." But for FriendFeed users, the future seems unclear. Will development on the service be discontinued as the now Facebook-employed FriendFeed creators have been tapped to work on a bigger, and more popular social-networking site? Probably.

What is likely to happen is that many of FriendFeed's killer features become features on Facebook, with FriendFeed eventually shutting its doors to focus on Facebook development. So what are those FriendFeed features Facebook doesn't have, or that FriendFeed simply does better?

Search: One of the most important features FriendFeed has (that Facebook doesn't) is a really solid search engine. On FriendFeed you can search for content from your friends, or the entire world. The best part is, you can save any search you've made and keep an eye on it for updates. Facebook's search is currently focused more on finding people, along with navigating to various parts of its site like events, pages, and applications. Update: Scratch this one off the list. Hours after this post went live, Facebook began pushing an updated version of its search engine that indexes updates and other content. At least for the past 30 days, which is a good start.

Real real time. FriendFeed's real time is a constant flow of information that comes in as soon as the service can get it to you. On Facebook, you get a little reminder to refresh the stream when there are updates. FriendFeed's way of letting users avoid an overload is to simply put the stream on pause--something Facebook could soon adopt.

Content aggregation. Facebook's "highlights" section of its home page does its best to show you new or otherwise interesting things from your friends if they've liked something. It feels like an afterthought though. FriendFeed's solution is to create a "best of the day" which shows the most popular and fresh content that your friends like. It can also be filtered by day, week and month, which lets you get a quick digest of content without having to keep your eyeballs glued to the news feed.

IM integration. I've knocked this feature in the past for being noisy, but… Read more