friendfeed

Facebook's Live Feed challenges FriendFeed, Twitter

Facebook has recently launched a new feature that takes aim at life-streaming sites FriendFeed and Twitter. Facebook's Live Feed is an evolved version of its hugely popular News Feed feature.

Found via a tab on the Facebook homepage, Live Feed loads up all of the stories from your friends and updates the list in real-time. The feed is available in Log Mode (seen above) or the more traditional Full Stories. When one of your friends does something, Live Feed slides everything down, making room for the new story, which fades in. The stream is very cool to watch roll … Read more

FriendFeed unleashes new look, new features (in beta)

FriendFeed has just made available a new look for users who want to give it a spin ahead of its launch to the general public. Users who visit beta.Friendfeed.com will see the slightly new look that may not seem all that different from the old version, but frequent users will notice a slew of updates the greatly improve the service's social experience.

One of the big new features is the inclusion of photos. You can now post a photo, not just text or a link. Previously the service would pick up photos from some items like from … Read more

Confirmed: AOL will acquire Socialthing

AOL's People Networks division, formed when the company acquired Bebo, has picked up a new friend: Socialthing, a Boulder, Colo.-based start-up that aggregates social feeds from sites like Digg, Twitter, and Flickr.

The acquisition has not yet been completed, but is close to it.

No financial details have yet been released regarding the acquisition of Socialthing, which falls into the same niche as FriendFeed and is still in private beta. The company is a new one; it emerged out of Boulder's TechStars incubator and had its official launch party at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in … Read more

How Twitter could be worth nothing in a year

Silicon Alley Insider on Monday wrote that it believes Twitter could be worth "a billion dollars" in one year as long as it "takes full advantage of (its) messaging platform, user base, and user disposition to lead in the P2P mobile payments space, where, despite years of hype, no one has much of a head start."

After reading through the piece, it had me thinking: what if Twitter isn't worth "billions" in one year and instead, it's worth nothing? Just because it has a huge user base and it may be able to take advantage of its messaging platform, can we simply forget that it's down every single day for extended periods of time? Can we simply forget that important features like "replies" are disabled for days at a time because "Twitter is stressing out"?

Twitter may be a destination for millions of people and a great place for self-indulged "Internet celebrities" to massage their egos as more and more people follow them, but it's a poorly designed site with huge stability issues and enough downtime that people are becoming more and more likely to jump ship and join services like FriendFeed and maybe even Jaiku.

It may be difficult to believe such a popular site could be worth nothing in a year, but the way I see it, it's certainly more likely than Twitter being worth $1 billion in that time.… Read more

Today's tidbits: iPhone apps, Netvibes updates, and special Spore

Here are some news tidbits from today that were too small to fill out entire posts. We've grouped together three that are worth your time.

FriendFeed puts out an iPhone app. Social aggregator FriendFeed has launched an iPhone-friendly version of its news feed (http://friendfeed.com/i). Previously users had to use a service like FFtoGo to get the stream of news reformatted to match the resolution on the popular handheld device. The new look incorporates image sharing, using a bit of a work-around with Mail2FF, a service that posts e-mailed photos and messages to your activity stream or … Read more

Twitter's weakening pulse

It's somewhat incomprehensible that Twitter has been unable to keep the service up and running. More than 10 years into the age of the Internet, with a huge amount of R&D publicly available about scaling Web applications, you would think that Twitter's engineers could figure it out.

A recent blog post from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said help is on the way in the form of about $15 million in funding:

Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision … Read more

Seesmic's Twhirl finally getting Seesmic support

Seesmic founder and CEO Loic LeMeur is circulating an early release of Twitter client Twhirl with Seesmic support. Seesmic, if you have forgotten, is Twitter in video. Download the new release here.

The test client only plays Seesmic videos at the moment. It doesn't let you record them. Seesmic won't be updating the Twhirl client for everyone until recording is added. That's due in a few weeks. Following that, although it "will take a while," will be a version of Twhirl that lets users show their Twitter, FriendFeed, and Seesmic feeds in one window. That'… Read more

Twitter/FriendFeed client Twhirl updated

Seesmic, which recently acquired the AIR Twitter client Twhirl (download), has shipped a new version of the software. There are minor improvements in Twitter functionality, mostly designed to keep it from requesting too many updates from the Twitter API, which produces the dreaded "limit exceeded" message if you use the app too enthusiastically. The Twitter service, which used to allow clients like Twhirl to fetch updates 60 times an hour, dropped its limit to 20/hour during the Steve Jobs keynote; it's only back at 30/hour as of this writing. Twhirl can now adjust its update … Read more

FriendFeed adds personalized recommendation filter

As promised, FriendFeed has added a personalized recommendation feature that allows users to surface the best content shared by friends. The filter delivers a summary view of the best content by day, week, or month. Results are based on "gestures" such as comments, likes, and other data points.

Newbie's Guide: FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a powerful service you can use to follow all the public online activity of your friends. It takes all your friends' activity on Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, and 30 other sites and creates one giant uber-feed that you can display in one place. Furthermore, people can comment on what their friends are doing, and you can read those comments, so the service acts as a good way to discover the things your social network thinks is important.

In this guide we'll tell you how to get started with FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is a young service and its developers update it frequently. This guide is current as of June 5. If you spot errors, feel free to e-mail me and I will make the appropriate corrections. Thank you.

Step 1. Join up. This is easy. Go to the site and sign up.

The service will ask you if you want to install the Facebook app. FriendFeed in Facebook is a bit misleading: It will show you all your friends' activities in your profile page except for what they do on Facebook itself. FriendFeed doesn't have a feed of that data.

FriendFeed gives you the option to read in your address books from various online e-mail services. Then it matches those addresses to existing FriendFeed users. It's a good way to stock your network with friends, and doing this does not spam anyone.

Once you've added a few friends, you can let FriendFeed recommend other people to follow. Go to the "friend settings" tab and click "recommend." The app will show you a list of people who are followed by folks you're already following--friends of friends. Chances are very good you'll find people you know on this list.

If you have skipped all the friend-adding features so far, you'll get the option of signing up to read 12 popular FriendFeed users. Following these users will put you smack in the middle of the Web 2.0 echo chamber, and if you want to track your friends in the real world you might find it hard to hear them over the noise of these 12 white guys, but it is a good way to get started with the service. If you haven't added any friends in the previous step, I recommend you pick at least one person from the dozen top users so you can see what the service does. Try either Paul Buchheit or Bret Taylor, co-founders of FriendFeed.

Assuming you've added either your friends or the famous people, now you'll now see the FriendFeed main content page.

Step 2: Reading FriendFeed FriendFeed shows you a list of all the public things the people you're following are doing on the Web. But it gets tricky: It's not strictly ordered by time, with the most recent activities on the top of the list. While new items do start on top, an old item that's scrolled down can move back up to the top if another user comments on it.

The grouping of comments on items, and the persistence of heavily commented-upon items at the top of the list, is what makes FriendFeed a very good way to get a look at what is popular in your social network at the given moment. To help you grasp the zeitgeist even better, FriendFeed automatically includes items from friends of your friends in your main content window.

This means, however, that items from friends of yours who are not Web 2.0 celebrities can quickly scroll off your main content stream. FriendFeed's founders are working on new features to help you track the people who matter to you personally even if their items don't get the comments that stick them to top of the feed. In the meantime, you might want to limit the number of celebrities you subscribe to.

Step 3. Add your personal feeds. If you like what FriendFeed does, you'll probably want to join in as well, so your friends who are on FriendFeed can follow you, too.