Sean Reiser
Thoughts about the Facebook FriendFeed Merger
August 11th, 2009 Just got done listening to the latest FFundercats "emergency chat podcast" discussing the Facebook / FriendFeed merger. Of course there's a lot of fear around this from the community. Will they merge the 2 systems? If I'm only a friendfeed user, will I have to get a facebook account in order to retain all the things I've posted in friendfeed? If they merge the 2 systems will my contacts be merged? Will my Facebook friends be able to see my FriendFeed activity or vice versa? Will I have to become Steven Perez's bunneh vampire? Actually we all know that DYSP's bunneh vampires will take over the world but I digress.
First off, I'd like to say that I don't they that the FF guys owe us a thing. They built a service, let us play there and now they've found their way to make money, good for them. Let me let you in on a secret, that's why they started FriendFeed, that wanted to profit. Other then the fact that they should've let Scoble break the story, I don't think anyone else was "screwed". It's funny, we never learn. This happens with communities all the time on the net: 6apart, blogger, flickr and youtube all leap to mind. And everytime it happens people are outraged and yell and scream "You Owe Me". Well, in the case of a free service, especially one that doesn't have any advertising, we're owed nothing. We got to play in a playground, they got to prove something has value and that's that. If can't handle that level of disappointment, don't play in their sandbox.
If you're not backing up your activity on these services you haven't been paying attention web startups there past 15 years. I plan that if I'm not capturing some I post and put it into a DB that I control and backup, it's going to be gone. It's a risk we take with every web service we use. So if you want to keep your tweets, your facebook statuses, comments you make on other blogs, your own blog posts make sure you have an extra copy. Part of the reason I'm running a lifestream at play with keyboard is to backup my activity into a separate database that I control (I'm still importing older content that I have stored on my homebox).
Now, I do have some concerns about cross contamination of the groups. I really work hard at siloing my friends. Where there is cross contamination, I really reserve facebook for people I actually know and linkedIN for people I've worked with but I liberally add "interesting people" or just people who post interesting things on friendfeed and twitter. It's funny I share the same information on most of these networks, it's just a matter of siloing what's coming in to me. If I have only a few minutes I'm more likely to scan facebook statuses then FF or tweets. Ironically you are more likely to be my friend if you're a facebook connection then a friendfeed friend (I'll rail on using the word friend for any of this some other day).
This might be the number one reason why a decentralized network is important. But that's a discussion for another day.
Sean Reiser, 40, is a developer, technologist, and amateur photographer. Sean has spent the past 20 years as a programmer, system architect and development manager. He is a life long New York resident.
Sean currently serves as the President and Chief Geek Officer of Repair Sense, Inc.. Please go to that site with any professional inquiries.
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Excellent post. A couple of comments.
First, in a comment you made on my blog, you said: "Honestly, I expected Google to buy them (just because of the people involved)." I'll admit to knowing nothing about the inner workings of Google, but it strikes me that they all LEFT Google at one point, and have since experienced the exhiliration of running their own show. If Google HAD purchased FriendFeed, I wonder if they would have felt like adults returning to the kids' playground. Then again, if that were a concern, they wouldn't have sold to Facebook.
Second, regarding siloing. Personally, I don't silo people that much (although I do a bit), but am more active in siloing content. For example, my blog posts, which I liberally stream in various locations in FriendFeed, are restricted to fan pages in Facebook, primarily because I think that many of my Facebook users wouldn't be interested in them. However, if at some point I need to transfer all of my FriendFeed activity to Facebook, I could easily do so by implementing Facebook's privacy features and setting up a "FriendFeed" list with the full stream, while restricting the stream to my high school list, for example. Similarly, I could keep comments about my family out of my FriendFeed stream and restrict them to the more IRL streams (bearing in my that nothing is really private online, and that my bunneh stew recipes should best be kept to myself).
I look at working for Google like being in the marines, you may be doing other things, but you're never really out. I can think of several examples where people have left a tech firm to go and do their own thing only to get reabsorbed back into the mothership later (both Apple / NeXT and Palm / Handspring jump to mind). Considering FF's emphasis on search and simplicity FF-oogle just made more sense to be then friendface.
The reason I silo my networks is that I don't want them to interact with eachother. The example I tend to use is that I don't want a cousin to send my major client a unicorn. Nor do I want to be "responsible" for some of my friend's posts. Yes, I am concerned about guild by association. So I silo business contacts in LinkedIN and friends into facebook.