FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time, but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore. Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users).
That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down.
Fundamentally, what I liked about FriendFeed was that it gave me a way to take all kinds of social data and create a tailored way to view it. And though the idea never took off in the mainstream before their acquisition by Facebook, the desire for a service that can do this, remains. Despite their efforts, Facebook hasn’t solved this yet. And despite all the hype, neither has the new Google Buzz. There are at least a dozen other startups working on this problem too, but no one has even come close to FriendFeed yet. But a new one, still in stealth, offers hope.
Knowmore, is a New York City-based startup founded by Julian Gutman (ex-Google) and Joseph West (ex-Akamai). They’ve already assembled a team that includes Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP/Jabber, Wilson Bilkovich one of the core developers of Rubinius (a Ruby implementation), and Wes Augur, a former principal R&D engineer at Digg. It’s a wide range of talent across a bunch of different fields. The total team is already up to 20 people, according to their jobs page.
Google Buzz is now two weeks old. I decided to hold off on writing about it (beyond my overview on launch day), until I had a solid amount of time to play with it and gather my thoughts. Now I have. And now I will.
My reasoning for holding off is pretty simple: I was confused. For the first few hours I was sure it was the best thing ever. Then I was certain it was the worst thing ever. The truth, not surprisingly, is likely somewhere in the middle. Google Buzz is a service with a ton of potential, but the execution of it is so bad right now, that’s it’s at points completely unusable.
As soon as Google Buzz was released earlier today, all the early adopters piled in to give it a spin. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and a founder of FreindFeed, was among them and his initial reaction was: “This seems vaguely familiar . . .” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail. Sweet! 
”
It is vaguely familiar to him on various levels. Like FriendFeed before it (which was acquired by Facebook), Buzz acts as a way to bring together different social streams together—Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader shared items, status updates, shared links and videos. It presents them all in a single stream from everyone you follow from you Gmail contacts. Each item can be commented on, “liked,” or taken into a private email or chat conversation. You end up getting comment strings around a single shared link, photo, or video, just like on FriendFeed, except FriendFeed can import items from many more social websites. (Although FriendFeed is not enabled as a connected site for most users, strangely enough it is enabled for Buchheit’s account.).
See our live notes from today’s Google Buzz event here.
Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social. Yes, they have Orkut and OpenSocial, but no one actually uses them. Okay, some people use them, but not in the meaningful social ways that people use Facebook or even Twitter. Today, Google may have just solved their social problem.
Google Buzz is easily the company’s boldest attempt yet to build a social network. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package. Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz. If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present.
For the past couple of days I’ve been in Turkey, absorbing the tech scene in Istanbul (tomorrow I’m in Munich, Germany, for DLD). I was invited over by the Nubridge Venture Summit which brought together a panoply of European VCs to listen to Turkish tech companies set out their wares. What emerged is a picture of a country in high growth, as this economy and its entrepreneurs latch on to the possibilities offered by the Internet and mobile platforms.
But first, let me tell you a story. Two years ago I contacted Turkey’s pre-eminent “Web 2.0″ blogger, Arda Kutsal of Webrazzi. I said let’s do a TechCrunch Europe meetup in Istanbul. Duly, a few weeks later I took a flight out, got to the hotel he mentioned and figured Arda had organised the meetup in the bar. No, said the receptionist, “It’s in the Grand Ballroom.” I headed down the hall to find about 400 people. That was the kind of thing that was going on then.
Two years on, with a packed room full of European VCs and private equity people hearing pitches from a wide range of Turkish technology companies, it’s clear the investment community is keenly interested in this market.
It has been a sad few months on FriendFeed following their acquisition by Facebook. Despite assurances that FriendFeed would not die, activity has dwindled and many users have moved on. While the service was still working, there was a fairly major glitch that made it much less compelling: Tweets, the main source of content for FriendFeed, stopped coming in at realtime speeds, and instead were delayed by up to an hour. But today, finally, realtime tweets have been restored.
If you visit FriendFeed right now, you’ll notice that many tweets are coming in with about an 8 second delay. Some are delayed a little bit longer, but it’s infinitely better than the delay we’ve all endured for months now. And many of us have been complaining for months, wondering if the Facebook deal caused Twitter to pull FriendFeed’s firehose. What actually happened is that FriendFeed was apparently transitioning over to one of the newer Twitter data streams. At our Realtime CrunchUp last month, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit indicated that they were close to implementing this new stream, but wouldn’t say what the hold up was.
When Facebook bought FriendFeed a few months ago, no one was really sure what would happen to the service. The acquisition was mainly for FriendFeed’s talent, so there was much concern that FriendFeed would wither. And to an extent it has. But, as it’s proving today, it still can serve some purpose for Facebook: A testing ground for new technology.
As Facebook’s David Recordon writes today on the Developer Blog, the development team has implemented a prototype version of the new OAuth WRAP specification on FriendFeed. One of FriendFeed’s co-founders, Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook’s Director of Product Management for Platform, also writes at length about it on his own blog. The basic gist is that Facebook decided to test out implementing it in FriendFeed so that they could get feedback from anyone in the developer community that wants to try it out.
Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp, Bret Taylor confirmed this was not a technical but rather a legal issue. Put simply, Twitter is choking FriendFeed to death.
What’s odd about this is that most observers consider FriendFeed a failure, too complicated and user-unfriendly to compete with Twitter or Facebook. If Twitter believed that to be the case, why would they endeavor to kill it? And if it were not a failure? Then Twitter is trying to kill it for a good reason. That reason: FriendFeed exposes the impossible task of owning all access to its user’s data. Does Microsoft or Google or IBM own your email? Does Gmail apply rate limiting to POP3 and IMAP?
So the reason Twitter is killing FriendFeed is because they think they can get away with it. And they will, as far as it goes, as long as the third party vendors orbiting Twitter validate the idea that Twitter owns the data.
“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook.
Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.
So can we kill email?