The rich just got richer. The bastion of social networking Facebook is expanding its empire further with the acquisition of FriendFeed. You may not know what this feature is all about but let us remind you of that recent Facebook update of your friend which you “liked.” FriendFeed pioneered that feature.
Apart from that, this is a major step by Facebook to offset the progress of its rival/partner Twitter. If you have been using Facebook, you’d know that you have to refresh your site a few couple of times just to get the latest updates of your friends. But with FriendFeed, these updates come in real-time.
“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”
So what does this all mean? This only goes to show how the World Wide Web values the here and now in the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Everything that is happening by the minute is the most important. Things get old quickly and headlines get stuck in the bottom very quickly. This is why Twitter succeeded as an online virtual community platform.
This is also a powerful partnership actually. FriendFeed is a brainchild of former Google talents. One of whom, Paul Bucheit, is being credited with creating Gmail and the “Don’t Be Evil” motto of Google. Bucheit is joined by former Google fellows Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh.
“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”
Simplicity, on-the-dot updates, interactivity – these are the present values of the World Wide Web and it enables virtual worlds even if there are no common 3D environments to move around. Because of these values, people can already share a culture, abide by a certain set of rules and laws and interact with each other. With technologies such as Facebook and FriendFeed, some of the obstacles with being online such as lags and inaccessibility are wiped off via a simple real-time update.
What are the implications of this move from Facebook? Well, this is an indication that they are not just in here to be a concentrated camp of adding friend requests and answering applications. They have plans to compete with Twitter and Google as one of the superpowers of the World Wide Web. And they are going to need all the help they can get.
FriendFeed is a brilliant step in that direction. It expands the horizons and may be a stepping stone in wanting to be a do-everything station in the Internet. You can see signs of these in Facebook now. It’s not just about collecting friends. Users can also play games, chat through instant messaging and access various applications.
Communities under these virtual settings are seen in the past as the target audience of sites such as Facebook. Bu this is not the truth altogether. What is actually happening is that these virtual communities are the products of these sites, being marketed to advertisers and sponsors everywhere. So as much as you enjoy all these free applications, friend features and games, understand that we are being cultivated as products. This is something to think about as we log into our favorites free sites everyday.
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