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?

The conversation isn’t happening in one place, on a single service and if you expect to be part of that conversation you should be looking at services that are better suited for these distributed conversations. So what is a distributed conversation? Well, it is a conversation that takes place across multiple platforms and services about the same topic. Take my recent blog post titled “Why you’re wrong about FriendFeed” as an example.

There were a couple comments posted to the blog itself (about 4 – there was an issue with my Disqus integration and one or two comments were misdirected) but the majority of the discussion about the blog post was on Twitter and FriendFeed. If I only paid attention to my blog I probably wouldn’t see those other discussions and I would miss out on an opportunity to engage in a conversation with those commentators.

There is a considerable amount of emphasis on specific services like Twitter and some commentators go so far as to say that Twitter has such a lead on any comparable service that none of those services really have a hope of catching up to it perhaps even surpassing it. This is a little ironic considering Facebook’s overwhelming dominance in the social space, at least as a single service. It dwarf’s Twitter and yet Twitter is held up as the social Web’s Second Coming. One of the challenges facing Twitter is that it does not contain the sum total of the conversations on the Web about any given topic. It is a single input, not the whole shebang. It’s simplicity makes it a fantastic tool for disseminating ideas, messages and information but it remains one content stream in the greater ocean of content.

There are a number of other content streams which collectively comprise the broader conversation about a given topic and these vary from conversation to conversation. Returning to my example of my blog post, there are four content streams which comprise the conversation. The first is the blog post itself; the second are the comments posted beneath the blog post; the third are the Twitter mentions and responses and the fourth are the comments on FriendFeed. Focussing on any one of these content streams means missing out on the rest of the conversation.

The challenge is how to keep track of these conversations across these multiple platforms. An obvious way to do this is by taking advantage of a number of services that are focussed on comments. I wrote about this a little while ago in my post titled “Time to get serious about comments“. I specifically mentioned CoComment, Disqus and Backtype as three services which are unlocking the value in comments. I have been using Disqus on a couple of my sites and it is a terrific service. Its latest iteration gives you the option of pulling in mentions of your content elsewhere on the Web and representing those mentions in you comment stream. It calls these mentions “social reactions” and the result is a broader view of the distributed conversation.

I had a few technical glitches on this blog which led to comments being disassociated with the blog posts they were intended for so I disabled Disqus on this blog until the cause could be identified and resolved and began exploring Backtype a little more. Backtype is basically a search engine for comments. It uses information you give it when you create an account to find your comments which you have posted and to find comments other people have posted on a wide variety of social services. The result is an aggregated representation of the distributed conversation.

I chatted briefly to Christopher Golda, Backtype’s founder, over email about Backtype and he gave me a great summary of what Backtype does:

BackType lets you follow conversations in a few different ways:

1) By Author — you can follow comments by author using the Dashboard
2) By Keywords — you can follow specific keywords with Search, and sign up for BackType Alerts so you receive e-mails whenever terms are mentioned
3) By Page — you can follow the conversation happening on and around a specific page

2) and 3) let you track conversations that involve people that you’re not following. The third is broken down into two separate features:

a) BackType Subscriptions — receive e-mails whenever someone comments on a particular URL
b) BackType Connect — surfaces the conversations related to a particular URL

Users can also set their preferences to automatically subscribe to comments on pages or posts they comment on so you can keep track on an ongoing conversation. This is a little like subscribing to a comment feed although you can customise how you want to receive the updates (email on different schedules, RSS or on your Backtype subscriptions page). This subscription tool is called “Connect” and it is a pretty effective way to track conversations connected with your posts and content elsewhere. Returning to my example of my blog post, here is the Backtype Connect page focussed on that post:

Here is another example. This is the Backtype Connect page focussed on a post I wrote on web.tech.law a little while ago about the controversial Facebook terms of use. It is perhaps a better example because there are conversational elements from a wider variety of sites and services (look for the icons on the right hand side):

To take this all a little further, you can stream your Backtype comments into FriendFeed and add them to the ocean of content available there. I won’t rehash my views about FriendFeed and why I believe it is a superior platform for conversation but I will say that when you combine Backtype and FriendFeed you have a particularly powerful set of tools to help you track and participate in the distributed conversation. Using FriendFeed you can track a far greater content array. Backtype helps you find track and participate in conversations that you are either involved in as an initiator or participant. It can also help you find conversations about topics that interest you and jump in using its various search options.

Twitter fans have another tool available to them from the Backtype team that enables them to track mentions of a specific url on Twitter. It is called BackTweets and what distinguishes this tool from Twitter’s own search engine is that BackTweets isn’t fooled by url shorteners. This is what a BackTweet search looks like:

By the way, the ff.im url is a FriendFeed url link back to a FriendFeed post that has been reposted to Twitter.

Bottom line here is that tracking the distributed conversation is becoming easier with tools like Backtype and, dare I say it, FriendFeed. It should be obvious by now that limiting yourself to a single content stream is cutting yourself out of the broader conversation that is taking place around you. If you want to take a narrow view of that conversation then that is your choice but if you want to know what people are really saying, you should take a close look at these services.

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.