GigaOM

What if the solution to having too many social web services was another social web service? That’s FriendFeed, a yet-to-be-launched service from some former Google (GOOG) employees that I’ve been trying out this week.

Yup, you’ve got to enter in your friends again, and upload a profile pic. But then you depart FriendFeed to do the things you normally like to do — upload photos, write 140-word broadcasts about your life, listen to music. Your friend, also a FriendFeed member, goes and does the things he likes do to — update his Netflix queue, write full-length blog posts, Digg stories he finds interesting. Through FriendFeed, you’re kept apprised of one another’s activities.

Say he starts writing reviews for Yelp — he doesn’t have to tell you about it, you just start seeing it show up in your FriendFeed. You get an aggregated feed, in one place, of everything all of your friends do, while you can push out an aggregated feed of everything you do onto a blog or social network (click on the thumbnail on the left for a screenshot of the setup, and the one below the jump for the public site feed). It’s a Facebook news feed for the whole web. Continue »

The Founders Fund and Accel Partners have created a $10 million fund for Facebook applications called FBFund, Mark Zuckerberg just announced at the TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco. The funding will be given out in grants of $25,000 to $250,000.

Rather than equity, the two firms will have a right of first refusal if the companies end up surviving long enough to raise a venture round. Facebook is not putting up any of the cash, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Vice President of Product Marketing and Operations Chamath Palihapitiya will be evaluating applicants, along with Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and Jim Breyer of Accel, and investors Rajeev Motwani, Josh Kopelman, and Reid Hoffman.

This new fund is going to crimp the plans of other funds that have similar ambitions, as they will be competing with a Facebook-approved investment vehicle. Continue »

Yahoo (YHOO) has purchased web-based email provider Zimbra, Kara Swisher is reporting. Mike Arrington has Om distracted judging at his TechCrunch40 conference, but says the price is $350 million.

Update: We just talked to a company spokesperson who confirmed the deal and the purchase price, adding that it was mostly in cash.

Yahoo had only just rolled out a major overhaul to its popular mail service, based on its $30 million acquisition of Oddpost in 2004.

When Om gets out, he’ll add to the story. In the past he had called Zimbra “email done right” and “quite impressive actually.” Some of us use it internally at GigaOM.

Zimbra had some six million users as of May. Yahoo Mail has more than 250 million.

Zimbra has raised about $30 million, and recently did a deal with Comcast (CMCSA) to offer its services to Comcast’s 12.5 million broadband customers.

Amazon (AMZN) is trying to turn the art of internet startups into a science. At an open event at Stanford yesterday, a couple hundred or so entrepreneurs, VCs, and developers talked about how Amazon Web Services — cheap and elastic storage, computing, message queuing, and payments — could change, or is already changing, their businesses.

“We’re now at a point that business plans really don’t matter,” said VC Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “It’s an iterative process of quickly getting your ideas into the hands of others.”

Komisar, who is writing a book on the topic, admitted that cheap and testable company building makes his job a lot harder, and in some cases irrelevant. “Before — there was a black art,” he said. “We don’t need gurus, we have a market.”

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After being a devoted (and paying) NewsGator user, I switched over to Google Reader earlier this summer. The service is really very good, though I don’t use the doodads like an automatically generated blog of shared items or graphed trends of my reading habits. But it’s not at all perfect.

I’ve been keeping a list of product requests meant to be emailed to the folks at the Googleplex. Instead, we figured it would be better as an open letter, and you can all submit your suggestions for improving Google Reader as well.

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NowPublic, a Vancouver-based citizen journalism site has raised $10.6 million in Series A funding from Rho Ventures/Rho Canada, Brightspark, and the Working Opportunity Fund.

So first off, that’s a boatload of cash in the web news business and we’re not saying it’s justified. However, NowPublic is clearly attracting contributors (119,000 of them in 140 countries), money ($12.5 million in total), and partnerships (the key deal is with the Associated Press). Meanwhile, competitors like Backfence and Bayosphere are falling by the wayside.

So what is it that NowPublic is doing right? We spoke last week with CEO Len Brody last week and he did his best to dispel some myths of web-based citizen journalism. Here’s what he said:

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Satisfaction, a small San Francisco-based startup run by former user experience consultants, is hoping to improve the abominable state of customer support forums and help lines. The company is starting to play around publicly with its “people-powered customer service” site, so you can get a taste for yourself of what it will look like.

The way it works, CEO Thor Muller told GigaOM Thursday, is companies or their users set up Satisfaction pages where they can ask and answer questions. The company or product doesn’t have to have official involvement, and it costs nothing to set up an account, but Satisfaction will offer value-added services like a widget to place on the company’s support page. If the company’s not involved, Satisfaction will do its best to have the correct answers to questions on its hosted pages show up when a user searches the query on Google.

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