Paul Jacobson

By now you have probably heard about Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition. I first heard about it when TechCrunch published a quick post last night about the acquisition and more news started to appear within the next half hour or so. The short version is that Facebook has paid $50 million in cash and Facebook shares for FriendFeed. The whole FriendFeed team is going to move across to Facebook and FriendFeed’s 4 founders will take up senior positions at Facebook. As you can see from this thread below, people’s responses to the news have been mixed:

There has been some really excellent coverage of the acquisition (Mashable, in particular, has a number of terrific articles (as usual)) so I won’t rehash everything that has been discussed. While I was a little disappointed to read the news about the acquisition, I was more disappointed to learn that FriendFeed’s adoption hasn’t exactly skyrocketed in recent months. This seems to be the case so often: great new Web tools launch (or relaunch) and just don’t get the traction they deserve because of slavish commitment to more established services (Twitter, in this example). We’ve already seen Jaiku all but disappear (and that was before Google acquired it) and I regarded Jaiku as a better option compared to Twitter. This acquisition is preferable to seeing FriendFeed drop off down the line although it remains to be seen how FriendFeed will be integrated into Facebook and what will happen to the current service.

Anyway, I was thinking about the acquisition last night and aside from the FriendFeed team, I can see the acquisition boosting a couple other aspects of Facebook’s service. For one thing FriendFeed can really improve the wannabe real-time Facebook newsfeed and make it truly real-time. Another thing FriendFeed can improve is the discussion toolkit on Facebook. Facebook has been copying FriendFeed for some time now and FriendFeed just seems to have a superior discussion engine that also ties in very nicely with the real-time stream.

Of course there is also FriendFeed’s powerful real-time search capability which will give Facebook an edge. Facebook has recently upgraded its search engine which apparently includes Bing but the FriendFeed search engine is just amazing. It even searches Twitter better than Twitter search searches itself.

I am looking forward to seeing what happens to FriendFeed and Facebook. Will FriendFeed continue on as a distinct service or will we see the site disappear and everything be folded into Facebook. I am hoping the former. FriendFeed as a standalone service is terrific and I’d hate to see it go away or even stagnate as we saw with Jaiku in its final months. When it comes to Facebook I’d like to see some of FriendFeed’s technologies incorporated into it to improve it. I am always a fan of an improved Facebook.

The elephant in the room is Google. Google hasn’t made any concerted efforts in the social networking space. Orkut is popular but just not outside South America and India and it isn’t like to pick up a substantial following where Facebook is dominant. I hoped that Friend Connect would become a lot more pervasive but that doesn’t seem to be happening. If anything, Facebook Connect is surging ahead and leaving Friend Connect in the dust. What I am wondering is if we will see Google do something big or continue on in a different direction?

I have Google’s Friend Connect integrated into this blog and you can sign in and comment using your Google account, OpenID, Twitter credentials and one other set of credentials. It works pretty well and when I comment here it integrates nicely with my blog credentials.

I’d like to add Facebook Connect integration to the blog too and I have the Sociable plugin loaded and just need to configure it. What I’m not sure about is whether the Facebook Connect plugin will co-exist with the Friend Connect plugin and give you the option of which service to use to sign in to comment.

I’m certainly seeing Facebook Connect being used far more widely as a sign-on service on blogs and other sites (I’m using Facebook Connect to authenticate on Digg rather than my original credentials) and I’ve read some positive posts about how Facebook Connect integration helps boost awareness of the blog (although there are also reported problems). At the same time Facebook Connect integration seems to be a little more difficult to implement than Friend Connect. Compare these two demos, for example. The first is Kevin Marks, formerly Google’s Developer Evangelist, demonstrating how to add Friend Connect to a static to Robert Scoble.

The second video is Facebook’s Luke Shephard demonstrating how to add Facebook Connect to a similarly static site on Building43.

I know that there are people who are somewhat skeptical about Facebook (I have certainly been skeptical in the past) but given Facebook’s moves towards a distributed model and what seems like pretty widespread adoption on the social Web, it looks like a really good way to go.

I’m going to get the Sociable plugin configured properly and see what happens. What I am already wondering about is what to do if it doesn’t co-exist peacefully with Friend Connect and give you a choice of which way to go? Which option do I go with?

It wasn’t too long ago that I wrote about how Facebook is becoming more open. Mashable (and others I am sure) has reported that Facebook is taking this spirit of openness even further and is rolling out support for Gmail and OpenID users to associate their accounts with their Facebook account and login to Facebook using their Gmail or OpenID credentials.

This is a pretty exciting move and it thrusts Google right into the middle of the social Web (yes, it is great for OpenID too but Google has a few more users). Using your Google account you have access not only to Google’s vast array of services (not least of which is its growing social glue, Friend Connect) but you can now login to Facebook using that same account. Now this may just be a way to get through the front door but it can’t be long before we see Facebook once again support Friend Connect and perhaps integrate even further with Google and its OpenID partners. Is it too far fetched to anticipate a unified social Web where a user of one service doesn’t need accounts with any other to access them all? Facebook has been breaking down its wall for some time now and this could be just the step needed to finally take that wall down.

Looking towards the Dark Side for a moment I can see how granting Google access to a community of over 200 million users could introduce a new set of fears about privacy and world domination. While we will probably not see Facebook hand over all its users’ information to Google, this move does make Google almost ubiquitous on the social Web. As a Google user I will be more and more inclined to use my Google account as my universal ID on the Web. I already direct people curious about me to my profile on Google. How long until I don’t need any other credentials to access any other service and Google follows me everywhere I go? I don’t think that will take too long so the question we need to ask ourselves is how we feel about that?

Nokia has published an interactive demo of the much anticipated Nokia N97 which is due to launch in a couple weeks time (it will take a little longer before we see the N97 available here in South Africa because it has to go through an approval process first). You can get an idea what it will be like to use the N97 using this demo. One of the aspects of the N97 you can try out is the new Facebook application which I believe has been developed for the N97. The Facebook app demo connects to your Facebook account using Facebook Connect if you decide to log in and try it out with your account info. I logged in and played around a little with the interface:

This is what the landing page will probably look like:

I updated my status using the demo too:

I really like that I can upload photos to Facebook from the N97’s Facebook app too. I still use Flickr as my primary photo service but this option is great:

You can do a couple other things with the N97 demo like customising the home screen (it uses a widget concept to add and shuffle different widgets around like the time, calendar, shortcuts and a Facebook widget). This is more or less that that would look like (without the navigation labels of course):

There are a couple new ways you can interact with Facebook using the N97’s app. For one thing you have more meaningful control over your events. You can view upcoming events, comment on your attendance and, if you decide to, you can add the events to your N97’s calendar! This is a new level of interaction with Facebook on a mobile and while I don’t know if this is possible on the iPhone (I don’t believe it is), Windows Mobile or the Blackberry, it is certainly a vast improvement over the anemic mobile site Nokia users have been forced to use.

last100 has a great overview of the Facebook app’s functionality including this handy series of screenshots demonstrating how you can respond to a Facebook event notice and ultimately add the event to your N97’s calendar:

You can view media on Facebook too including photos and videos and you can even post your videos to Facebook.

Fans are going to see a lot of activity leading up to and following the N97’s launch internationally early in June. I am very excited to see these devices filter down into the market and to see what the phones will be priced at by the various networks who I assume will have them. No doubt this is not going to be a mass market device but I have started putting a few coins aside in the meantime. This may even be worth renewing my contract for!

Hopefully users of other Nokia devices will be able to install this application sooner rather than later. It would be a shame to see this application confined to the N97 and future, similar, devices.

(Source: Symbian-Guru.com)

FriendFeed has been largely ignored by the Twitterati and they are poorer for that lack of attention. This may well include you if you have ignored FriendFeed in favour of Twitter thinking that the absence of your Twitter community on FriendFeed renders FriendFeed irrelevant. The simple fact is that FriendFeed is probably one of the underappreciated services in the social Web today and it could well prove to be one of the most disruptive.

FriendFeed was perhaps easier to ignore when it still looked like this:

It wasn’t as clean and simple as Twitter’s UI:

… or as feature rich as Facebook:

It seemed to fall between both services and it didn’t occupy an compelling enough space to persuade a significant number of users to switch from Twitter or Facebook to FriendFeed. Admittedly I was one of those people who still focussed on Twitter and FriendFeed and preferred to use FriendFeed as another aggregator, perhaps even as a backup to my Plaxo Pulse profile.

This isn’t the first time a new service has emerged which has been regarded as a contender for Twitter’s throne. Jaiku was in a very similar position not too long ago and while it has been relegated largely to the Coulda-Shoulda-Woulda category, Jaiku’s offering is/was similar to FriendFeed’s and it was, for various reasons, a superior option. Unfortunately Jaiku failed to attract a sufficient following and doesn’t really feature in this space anymore.

FriendFeed is, in part, an aggregator. It enables you to aggregate your various content streams and feeds to create a lifestream. There are a couple other services which do this (or purport to do this) but FriendFeed seems to be one of the bigger services.

Another powerful feature (which was highlighted during a recent episode of the Gillmore Gang) is the FriendFeed search functionality. Robert Scoble goes to some length emphasising the value of FriendFeed’s search functionality compared to Twitter’s own search functionality. The value of a decent search engine attached to and indexing these types of services is the sheer amount of current data you can turn up on a given topic. Search results are frequently more immediate on Twitter or FriendFeed than they are on Google. That can make a big difference to some people.

FriendFeed launched a new design earlier this week and I’ve been using the beta site almost exclusively.

There are a couple aspects of the new design which will be familiar to Twitter and Facebook users alike and this is for good reason. Whatever you may say about Twitter, its basic design has proven to be very appealing and that is worth emulating. That said, the comparisons between Twitter and FriendFeed begin to fade from that point onwards.

Twitter is popular largely because of its simplicity. You type in 140 characters, keep an eye on mentions (formerly known as replies), direct messages and you can run searches. That is pretty much it for the main site. An array of 3rd party applications add additional functionality like saved searches (Twhirl) or category lists for Twitter followers (Tweetdeck).

What really distinguishes FriendFeed from Twitter is how it is so much better suited to meaningful conversations. Twitter users use Twitter to engage in conversations all the time using the “@” or “D” conventions and it works reasonably well in most cases. Replies are not threaded but you can click on certain links to see which reply tweets respond to which messages. The result is a somewhat fragmented conversation with replies scattered all over the place in the main Twitter stream. The mentions/replies page collates your replies/mentions in a single window although you still need to click on a link to see which mention or reply links to which post.

FriendFeed represents comments inline so it is very simple to follow responses from the person you replied to or who replied to you. FriendFeed also allows you to see what other people are saying about the item you commented on and engage in conversations with them! This is not so easy in Twitter. If you doubt what I am saying here, compare a typical Twitter conversation with a typical FriendFeed conversation (take a look at the screenshots above and below for examples of FriendFeed conversations – notice the comment below the entry? You don’t have that on Twitter.

Facebook has been doing this for a little while now too. Its a model that works. Another thing FriendFeed does really well is it enables users to create conversations out of an array of content streams by applying the same commenting and “Like” functionality to all imported streams. Facebook also has a “Like” option although this is a recent addition. This is a handy way to indicate your preference for something without having to actually comment on it although Facebook seems to think you need to comment to explain a Like. It brings up a comment box if you just click to Like something whereas FriendFeed simply adds you to the list of people who Liked an entry.

Search plays an important role in both Twitter and FriendFeed. Both give you the ability to create realtime searches on various topics. The way you create the searches differ but both will update the search results dynamically as more users discuss or post about that topic. Twitter’s search is limited to what is posted on Twitter whereas FriendFeed’s search includes all content post to the site. Scoble has argued that FriendFeed will actually give you more accurate and more relevant search results but I haven’t done any comparisons.

A related benefit of FriendFeed is discoverability. It is much easier to find new content and new, interesting people on FriendFeed with such a wide variety of content entering the stream. FriendFeed also has a sort of “friends of friends” feature which shows you what your friends’ friends are posting and that is another great way to find new people and their new content.

I discovered one piece of information which appealed to me. When you look a user up on the beta site you can also get a sense of how many posts to expect from them.

This is useful if you are concerned about being overwhelmed by someone’s posts. Of course you can create filters to enable you to focus on specific groups of contacts. Filters are pretty important in the new FriendFeed and although the main stream can be a little overwhelming, the power is in these filters and how they give you the ability to focus on what is most important or relevant to you at that point in time. You can see some of my filters on my profile page:

Ok, I’ve talked a little about what Twitter does and what FriendFeed does. The best way to really compare both services is to take them for a drive yourself. It is worth also comparing the current FriendFeed site and the beta site to see the differences and also get an idea which features are still to be added to the beta site.

There are two ways you can approach FriendFeed. You can look at it as a Twitter replacement and it will certainly do that job well (except if you have a substantial community on Twitter which isn’t also on FriendFeed) or you can look at FriendFeed as a complementary service to Twitter. While I am tempted to see it as the former in my more fanatical moments, in practice I use the two services in tandem. I have two categories of content services. One category includes services which I create or post content to first and the second include those services I repost that content to in order to create lifestreams. The diagram below illustrates this quite well and gives you an idea what my thoughts are about Twitter and FriendFeed in particular:

FriendFeed could take over from Twitter but it could take a while before your FriendFeed community would match your Twitter community and that is a challenge. One of the reasons people stick with Twitter is because everyone is there and that is still the central draw. What FriendFeed brings to the party is a better developed set of conversational tools. As handy as the “@” convention is, it is a terrible way to conduct a real conversation. Twitter itself seems to agree. Instead of “replies”, it talks about “mentions”. FriendFeed’s threaded (there is another term they used which I can’t remember) comments gives you the ability to comment directly and transparently on a specific entry and, having the benefit of seeing what everyone else is saying, engage in a conversation with those people too. It is all right there on the page, no extra clicks required to track a whole conversation. What would be handy is if FriendFeed could somehow determine which “@” replies are responses to specific Twitter posts and represent those threads in FriendFeed itself.

No-one is saying you must stop using Twitter. This isn’t an either/or question. It is about using the best tools for what you want to do. Twitter is a quick and easy way to get something out there in 140 characters or less (FriendFeed can do the job just as easily, albeit it to a potentially smaller audience if you have spent most of your time on Twitter). FriendFeed can take those posts, together with all your other posts from all your other services and help you conduct real conversations around and about them.

In other words, if you have dismissed FriendFeed as a non-starter contender for the Twitter throne, you have misunderstood FriendFeed completely. You can stick with Twitter to the exclusion of all else and you’ll probably be happy with that but if you want a richer experience of the realtime Web, you really should take a look at FriendFeed. Create an account, add your Twitter and other feeds to it and see what happens.

One more thing (update): Scoble captured much of the presentation FriendFeed gave to a closed group before the beta site was made available to everyone. It is worth watching his videos because you get a sense of what the thinking was behind the scenes.

I had a debate with Eve Dmochowska recently about her choice of platform for a business group. She picked LinkedIn for the group and one of my initial thoughts is that I’d like to see the group on Facebook rather than LinkedIn. I have two reasons for this: the first is that I have an aversion to LinkedIn and see it as evil and the second is that I no longer see Facebook as just a social (as in personal) network but rather as a multi-purpose networking platform.

Eve essentially explained that she believes LinkedIn gives the group greater credibility as a business group given LinkedIn’s business focus (LinkedIn isn’t and will never be a social/personal networking site). I respect her and I understand her perspective. Eve is one of the smartest people I know in the SA social media space. She isn’t alone in her view that LinkedIn is a far better choice for business networking activities than Facebook. I was chatting to Gaby Rosario earlier today about her thoughts on the matter and I believe she feels similarly.

At the same time I have a different perspective of Facebook after long maintaining that Facebook isn’t a business networking tool. I remember having a conversation with Paul Walsh when he declared he was quitting LinkedIn in favour of Facebook. I didn’t agree with him and insisted that LinkedIn was a superior platform for business networking. Suffice to say my two reasons I mentioned above have persuaded me to change my mind about Facebook. Given what awaits us in the form of Facebook’s proposed governance structure I am also far more comfortable to invest my time and content in Facebook going forward.

What clinches it for me is this little graph and a post I just read about Facebook’s increasing prominence on the social Web, most likely alongside Google as its only real counterpart.

LinkedIn may be the single biggest business network but it looks pretty flat to me compared to Facebook’s dramatic rise depicted in this graph. While LinkedIn is hardly fading away (I still have an up to date profile on the service) I don’t see it as a focal point of my business presence online.

Facebook started off as a personal social networking site and that is its emphasis. At the same time it has much to offer businesses in the form of its pretty appealing Pages. I also read somewhere that we may see the introduction of personas that would allow Facebook users to present distinct personas based on their business and personal needs. Put all this together and you can’t help but see Facebook as a multi-purpose networking platform.

A couple people have been writing about Facebook’s moves towards increased openness and transparency, including Chris Messina and John McCrea who are both influential and insightful advocates for a more open Web (I have already written about David Recordon’s views in my first post in this unintended series). I came across their recent posts in which they talk about Facebook’s moves towards greater transparency and openness which I want to write about, partly because of the difficulties I have with this notion of Facebook as transparent and open.

I can attribute my suspicion of Facebook pretty accurately to the recent furor about its terms of use and a nagging feeling that I can’t trust Facebook completely with my content. If it could pull a stunt like that once, it could do it again. That being said if I take Mark Zuckerberg and Co. at their word, Facebook has either turned away from the Dark Side or it is getting better at being more open and transparent (not to mention less insistent on taking more rights from Facebook’s users than it should).

Messina certainly seems to be convinced that Facebook is on the right path:

The people within Facebook not only believe in what they’re doing but are on the leading edge of Generation Open. It’s not merely an age thing; it’s a mindset thing. It’s about having all your references come from the land of the internet rather than TV and becoming accustomed to — and taking for granted — bilateral communications in place of unidirectional broadcast forms. Where authority figures used to be able to get away with telling you not to talk back, Generation Open just turns to Twitter and lets the whole world know what they think.

But it’s not just that the means of publishing have been democratized and the new medium is being mastered; change is flowing from the events that have shaped my generation’s understanding of economics, identity, and freedom.

…

Talking to people at Facebook (in light of the arc of their brief history) you might not expect openness to come culturally. Similarly, talking to Microsoft you could presume the same. In the latter case, you’d be right; in the former, I’m not so sure.

See, the people who populate Facebook are largely from Generation Open. They grew up in an era where open source wasn’t just a bygone conclusion, but it was central to how many of them learned to code. It wasn’t in computer science classes at top universities — those folks ended up at Arthur Anderson, Accenture or Oracle (and probably became equally boring). Instead, the hobbyist kids cut their teeth writing WordPress plugins, Firefox extensions, or Greasemonkey scripts. They found success because of openness.

That Zuckerberg et al talk about making the web a more “open and social place” where it’s easy to “share and connect” is no surprise: it’s the open, social nature of the web that has brought them such success, and will be the domain in which they achieve their magnum opus. They are the original progeny of the open web, and its natural heirs.

(Chris Messina’s blog post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License)

McCrea is a self-confessed Facebook fanboy and is convinced that Facebook is going to be a big part of the increasingly open Web:

And Facebook, which could have used it’s market leadership position to attempt to build “Walled Garden 2.0,” instead has been moving boldly down an ever more open pathway. My friend David Recordon said it well recently in a post entitled Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden.

…

Okay, I’ve gone over the top with this post, but I’m glad I got this off my chest. Why is all of this significant? The Web is going social (with a big help from Facebook), and the Social Web is going open (along with Facebook). That means we’re on the cusp of a massive wave of change that will unleash an innovation explosion.

There is certainly the potential and the opportunity for Facebook to become a truly open social network. Its move towards a more open governance structure through its proposed Facebook Principles and its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities are definitely moves in the right direction despite concerns about what the two documents say in real terms.

One thing continues to bother me and this is an apparent failure to take the legal stuff seriously. The emphasis is on what Facebook is saying and not so much on what its terms provide for. This is just naive. The problem with this is that those terms remain the legal framework the site operates with and if the terms contain onerous licenses, for example, then they trump whatever Mark Zuckerberg may say, particularly if the same lawyers who drafted the terms are called upon to enforce them. What Facebook should have done is not to have reinstated the old terms but to have had its lawyers prepare a less onerous set, perhaps by removing the offending provisions from the then-revised set (heck, I could have done it for them and produced a more reasonable terms of use). Reinstating the current terms may well be an interim measure but Facebook just replaced a bad terms of use with another bad terms of use. This says something about its commitment to change, to me at least.

That being said, Facebook doesn’t have to do anything. It has chosen to make changes which the vast majority of its 175 million users are oblivious to. That still says something about its commitment to effect some kind of change for the better. How open Facebook will become remains to be seen. In the meantime this image from Recordon’s post serves as a reminder how the Web could look in another year: