FriendFeed is the easiest way to share online. FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, California.
FriendFeed had on average one million monthly visitors.
FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends.
FriendFeed is wonderful company may tire of swimming upstream and go for an easy exit. I’m sure that a number of larger companies would love to snap up FriendFeed to get the technology, team and userbase. I mean, it’s not like Google is just going to sit there and watch this all play out without them. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.
Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get an instant, customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from photos to interesting links and videos to messages just for you. And your friends get their customized feeds, full of the cool stuff that you've shared.
It's fast and easy to start a conversation around shared items, or to show that you like something a friend has shared. You can subscribe to updates from individuals and groups, such as your family or a team of people you work with.
You can read and share your FriendFeed however you want — from your email, your phone or even from Facebook. If you make your FriendFeed publicly visible, your friends can see what you're sharing without creating an account, and you can embed your feed in your home page or blog. FriendFeed also lets you pull in updates from other sites around the web, and even publish your feed to services you already use, like Twitter.
So sign up and try it for yourself. Why FriendFeed? Because it’s fun, fast and conversational. And because everyone has something to share.
FriendFeed is a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. It is possible to use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share, as well as originate new posts-discussions, (and comment) with friends.[2] The goal of FriendFeed according to their website is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful by using existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information. Users can be an individual, business or organization. Bloggers writing about FriendFeed have said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members' social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provides the facility to track these activities (such as posting on blogs, Twitter and Flickr) across a broad range of different social networks. Some bloggers are concerned about readers commenting on their posts inside FriendFeed instead of on their blogs, resulting in fewer page views for the blogger.
The founders are all former Google Inc. employees who were involved in the launch of such services as Gmail and Google Maps. They include Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, Sanjeev Singh and Bret Taylor. Venture capital agency Benchmark Capital is involved with the investment funding.
Employees of FriendFeed created the Simple Update Protocol to reduce the load put on sites by aggregators such as theirs.
Growth at Twitter, FriendFeed’s primary competitor, continues unchecked. According to Comscore the site is growing at approximately 33% a month and attracted just under 10 million unique worldwide visitors in February. It had just 1.2 million in Feb 2008. More importantly, every time I turn on the news, it seems the talking heads are pushing their Twitter account as their online identity. That kind of mainstream attention is driving users by the boatload. Meanwhile, competitor FriendFeed, despite a continuous stream of innovative new features, is languishing. It has just 637,000 monthly uniques according to Comscore, or about 6.4% of Twitter’s flow.
FriendFeed has less users today than it did last Oct, according to Comscore. Cofounder Paul Buchheit says that isn’t accurate , but it’s clear that the service hasn’t grown much in the last few months. Twitter is adding more users every week than FriendFeed has in total.
Twitter is turning into a growth monster, and the trajectory and continued media hype suggest that will continue well into broad mainstream adoption. This is despite the fact that Twitter rarely launches new features (or perhaps because of that) and had to buy its search feature.
Meanwhile, all those innovative features that FriendFeed launches are routinely copied by Facebook and others, minimizing their positive impact. And the fact is that FriendFeed may just be too complicated for the average user to quickly understand. Twitter is fairly simple: spout off on whatever you like in 140 characters or less, and if you’re interesting enough people will begin to subscribe to you. FriendFeed, by contrast, is a much more complex system with numerous bells and whistles. The power users love it. Novices can be overwhelmed.
Buchheit says that there’s no reason multiple players can’t compete in the microblogging/activity stream space and find success. He points to email as an example (and as the creator of Gmail, he knows what he’s talking about). But I’m not so sure that this space will go the same way as email. Twitter’s lead may be insurmountable by anyone other than Facebook at this point.