GigaOM » friendfeed

Wow, Google Is Awfully Clueless About My Social Life

Liz Gannes — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:38:30 +0000

Google has said (see my feature story) that its 2010 plan to break into the social web will consist of personalizing its products by encouraging people to expose and tie together information about who they’re connected to. To that end, today the company made its experimental social search feature a public beta rather than just an opt-in one. Now, when you search on Google.com while logged in, if it can find relevant pages published by people you’re connected to, it will show them at the bottom of the results page.

I was downright surprised to know how little Google knows (or is willing to admit it knows) about my connections. As part of the release today, the site opened up a personal dashboard page that shows each user’s “social circle.” According to my page, Google knows I am directly contacted to a grand total of 20 people (mostly, folks I know who are freelancers and therefore have good web presences or friends who have used Picasa to store pictures). Further, it tells me that I’m not showing up in any of those friends’ social search results, because “Google is not aware of any online content you have to share with your friends.”

Really!? I’m a pretty public person. I write for blogs using my real name. I update Twitter! Further, I use Gmail and have thousands of contacts there, and it would be easy to see which ones are important to me based on how frequently I email them.

What’s happening is that Google is being very cautious about clueing me in as to what it knows. The ways Google builds social circles is via your Google chat buddy list and by looking at accounts you’ve entered on your Google Profile. There’s no real incentive at the moment to fill out a Google profile, but I actually had. Apparently not well enough. My profile is associated with my Gmail address and has some basic info about my education and job, but I hadn’t noticed a place down near the bottom where you can add links to places to find yourself on the web. And Google fails to provide the familiar social web logo soup like you’d see when you configure an aggregation product like FriendFeed.

So I just went in now and added URLs and feeds for some of my web presences. Google tells me “it may take some time for the connections and content to update.” As for my Gmail contacts, it turns out I have to go in and tell Google explicitly that they are “friends” or “family” by adding them to a list.

To be sure, this is only a beta feature. Speaking at a conference I attended today about the semantic web, Johanna Wright, Google’s director of product management for search, said of the launch: “This is just at the beginning. You can expect a lot to come.” But maybe Google has overreacted to people’s fears of its creepiness. Either it needs to develop better and clearer incentives for people to share, or it needs to get a little more comfortable with using the implicit information I give it every day.

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Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

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Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Sameer Patel — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 08:00:10 +0000

Real-time communication and collaboration in the enterprise represents a significant shift in how employees, partners and customers interact and collaborate to drive organizational performance. The growth and acceptance of so-called “Enterprise 2.0” platforms and applications promise to break down closed communication and collaboration loops by moving discussions and data access from email, content management and rigid process applications to activity streams, wikis and API-based data access. This report looks at the history of this transition, the major players involved, opportunity and challenges for vendors in the space, and profiles the efforts of major enterprise collaboration tools to add real-time tools.

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3 Ways to Create a Lifestream For Your Brand

Doriano "Paisano" Carta — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:00:30 +0000

Increasingly, brands are getting into social media and social networking — we see them everywhere we go online these days. One of the most popular campaigns was last year’s Skittles web site relaunch, which cleverly included a “lifestream” of all of its social networking content and activity from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. It generated quite a buzz, and other companies rushed to do similar things for their own brands.

Here are some simple ways to display a lifestream of all of your social networking activity in one place. Some solutions involve using a third-party service, while others require the use of a free plugin or widget for your blog.

Lifestream Plugin For WordPress Blogs

I really like this simple but powerful free Lifestream plugin for self-hosted WordPress* blogs. It lets you display all of your activity on many social networks all on one page.

All you have to do is install and enable the plugin, then you just add the social networks you want to display via the lifestream settings page.

The final step is to create a new page and enter a one word line of code: [lifestream], which displays the lifestream on your site.

*Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Friendfeed Widgets and Badges
If you use Friendfeed (now owned by Facebook) then you can use some of its cool tools to embed all of your social networking streams on your web site. There are a couple of different ways to do this.

You can use the “Real-time” widget in your sidebar to display a real-time feed of all your streams.

Or you can also use a smaller “Status” widget that only displays the latest activity:

UnHub

Another way to share your all of your brand’s activity is through a third-party service such as UnHub. With UnHub, you just pick and choose which feeds you want to share on what it calls the “Personal Profile Bar.” One of the biggest downsides to this method is that you can only access it via a URL which comes in the following structure: http://unhub.com/YourName

The other big difference with UnHub is that all of your streams are segmented by service, and not displayed all together in chronological order, as with the Lifestream method.

Social Networking Aggregation

No matter which method you choose to share your activity on social networks, the great thing about all of them is their simplicity. What I like best about these solutions is that you can set them up and forget about them for the most part; they don’t require maintenance.

I think it makes sense to centralize your brand in one place, namely your web site or blog. It’s also a good move for personal blogs and web sites too, making it easy for friends to keep up with what you’re up to.

Let us know what you think of these options and share any others in the comments.

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Diigo Adds More Research and Collaboration Features

Charles Hamilton — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:30:52 +0000

When Mike reviewed social bookmarking, research and collaboration service Diigo last year, he liked its simplicity, its connections with other services, and its wealth of features. Since then, the social bookmarking field has continued to mature; witness the recent purchase of Friendfeed by Facebook, and the numerous ways that bookmarks can be shared on social networks. Even MySpace is getting into the act by syncing posts with Twitter!

So how can a lesser-known app like Diigo compete? The latest version of Diigo has just gone live, and from what I can tell, it’s growing beyond social bookmarking and going for the “kitchen-sink” approach: Add as many features as possible, so that no matter what a user wants, it’ll be there. Among the list of new features are a few that caught my eye:

Similar to Iterasi, users can now archive web pages from a particular point in time — even ones that are dynamically generated or password-protected. Multiple versions of the same page can be saved, either as HTML or images. Toolbars to control this function are available for Firefox and Internet Explorer.
There are now several options for commenting on web pages — highlighting in multiple colors, and different sizes of sticky notes, all of which can be private or shared.
Links to the archived and annotated web pages can be shared via email, Twitter or Facebook, and recipients don’t need any special software to see your comments.
Groups can be set up to comment, tag and collaborate on projects.

The site is still in beta, but its redesigned interface is intuitive. Searching and tagging have also been improved, and an iPhone app is on the way. The site is free and advertising-supported; educational accounts are available.

Oh, and by the way, Diigo is one of the few sites I’ve seen that offers an explanation of its name:

Diigo is pronounced as “Dee’go.” The name “Diigo” is an abbreviation for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.”

If Diigo’s impressive feature list hasn’t convinced you to try it, I’m sure that will!

Have you tried Diigo?

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Talkin' Bout a (Blogging) Revolution

Om Malik — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:53:22 +0000

Chalk up that headline as a hat tip to one of my favorite artists, Tracy Chapman, who is performing in San Francisco this weekend. In the slipstream of my post from earlier this month, The Evolution of Blogging, several folks have come up with their own take on why there is a crying need for a new blogging revolution. Chris Saad, who works for JS-Kit.com, a startup that makes social media tools and has been involved in various technical groups such as DataPortablity.org, today outlines seven reasons why the blog builders and users need to rise up. “It’s time we start re-investing in our own, open social platforms…Blogs are our profile pages – social nodes – on the open, distributed social web,” he writes. Well said, Saad! His seven reasons are:

1. Twitter Inc decisions that have not reflected the will of the community – particularly changing the @ behavior, changing their API without informing developers, making opaque decisions with their Suggested User List and limiting access to their Firehose.
2. Facebook’s continued resistance to true DataPortability
3.The emergence of tools and technologies that turn blogs into real-time, first class citizens of the social web. Tools like Lijit, PubSubHubBub and of course Echo.
4. A broader understanding that blogs are a self-owned, personalized, tool agnostic way to participate in the open social web.
5. FriendFeed selling out to Facebook
6. A flurry of great posts on the subject
7. The broader themes of the Synaptic Web” (via Chris Saad )

The point in number six is a bit of a stretch, but the rest of them make absolute sense to me. By the way, I am going to be following up my original post with additional thoughts and ideas.

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Google Reader Adds Easy Sharing, Other Features

Charles Hamilton — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:00:02 +0000

I read a lot of online publications, and I like to share interesting articles with clients and friends on Twitter. If you use Google Reader to browse RSS feeds, as I do, it’s now easier to post links to news articles you’ve found in Google Reader to sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg.

In Google Reader’s Settings, you’ll now find an option called “Send To.” On that screen, you can specify which services you want to be able to post to. Once you’ve set it up, at the bottom of each article in the main Google Reader screen, you’ll see a “Send To” menu.

The system does work, but it’s decidedly low-tech. As an example, if you click “Send to Twitter,” Google Reader brings you to your Twitter account via a popup window, meaning that you’ll need to turn off popup blocking for google.com in your browser — something many people will prefer not to do.

By comparison, most of the other services that allow you to post to Twitter, like FriendFeed, Ping.fm, Streamy, Amplify and Posterous, use the Twitter oAuth system, which is much slicker — although oAuth has been down a lot recently due to the attacks against Twitter. I will probably continue to use FriendFeed as my link between Google Reader and Twitter, but the new Reader feature is a nice alternative option.

In addition to the “Send To” feature, Google Reader has added a dropdown menu to the “Mark All as Read” button that allows you to mark as read only those articles older than a day, a week, or two weeks. You can also easily subscribe to the feeds of people you follow, and there are added enhancements to the comment screen, and to the start pages of the mobile versions of the Reader.

How do you post links to Twitter and other social sites?

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Rumor Has It: Apple Developing Social Networking App With iTunes Integration

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:30:35 +0000

No, it won’t be MacSpace or anything like that, but Apple is reportedly working on some kind of software application that will consolidate all your existing social network accounts into one place. It’s an even more interesting rumor now that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, the service which previously seemed on top in terms of social network aggregation.

The news comes via a report from The Boy Genius Report today detailing further iTunes 9 rumors. A few days ago, iTunes 9 rumors began swirling on the strength of a source talking to BGR about upcoming features for the next major revision of Apple’s media management software. Now, there’s talk that part of that update will be a multi-network client that allows you to share your musical tastes with your contacts.

It should be made clear that, according to BGR at least, this won’t be just a built-in feature of iTunes itself, but will actually be a standalone application that includes as one of its own features iTunes music sharing via social media. It also offers the ability to simultaneously change your status across networks and to “connect with your friends’ friends,” the meaning of which isn’t exactly clear.

There’s one precedent that at least suggests that this rumor could be accurate. I’m talking about iChat, which, although it isn’t really a true multi-client IM app, does support AIM, which is the most popular network in the U.S. iChat proves that Apple is interested in offering built-in, native social media support for its users, and moving to networks like Facebook and Twitter is a logical extension of that interest. As has been discussed ad nauseam, Apple’s software wing is generally supposed to exist first and foremost to propel hardware sales, and the programs it packages with new Macs prove that Cupertino tracks computer usage patterns and includes apps that users want.

Personally, I’d love Apple to release an iChat-type client for social networks, maybe something like The Cosmic Machine’s EventBox, though hopefully more fully featured and with Apple’s trademark ability to provide an app with just the right balance of style and simplicity. But, for it to be genuinely useful, it’d have to compete with some of the already stellar clients out there, like Tweetie for Mac, Nambu, and the above-mentioned EventBox. A simple tool for updating your status cross-platform, and for sharing music (which I honestly don’t see myself doing much of anyways) would just fall into disuse, in the same way that I’ve stopped using iChat in favor of Proteus, because I need MSN Messenger support. We’ll see if they get it right.

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Why Facebook Wants FriendFeed

Om Malik — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:32:45 +0000

Facebook is buying Friendfeed for an undisclosed amount of money. Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed was started by co-founders Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor and Sanjeev Singh, all ex-Googlers, and raised $5 million in Series A funding from Benchmark Capital and its founders. Facebook is said to have paid over $50 million for the company – $15 million in cash and rest in stock. The question is, why does Facebook want Friendfeed?

No, this deal is not about Twitter. It is about Google — to be more precise: Google vs. Facebook.

The Problem of Plenty

The impetus behind the deal is twofold: our ability to publish more and more information in real time and the resulting explosion of data on the web. These two trends will soon make it nearly impossible to deal with the resulting information overload. I call this the problem of plenty. As a result, the current seek-search-consume popularized by Google will eventually hit its outer limits — and when that happens, Facebook wants to step in and take the leadership baton.

As I have written in the past, content creation, distribution and consumption are amid a sea change. Whether it’s photos, videos, tweets, status updates or whatever…the content is getting constantly atomized. In order to consume it all, we need to find smarter tools for content consumption. FriendFeed is one of them. “It’s a Facebook news feed for the whole web,” Liz Gannes wrote in her initial profile of FriendFeed in 2007.

WHAT THE WEB IS SAYING:
Louis Gray: So what’s happening to this Valley? Is it as dire a situation as it sometimes seems? Are we really going to end up with four mega-companies: FaceBook, Google, Microsoft and Apple? Because if Google or Microsoft can weasel their way into acquiring Twitter, that’s sure how it will seem.
CNET: Basically, FriendFeed has been coasting on a lot of hype and not a lot of mainstream recognition, and it’s not a bit surprising that it would be seeking an exit at this point. So the real story here is that Facebook made the rather expensive hire (and we don’t know the terms of the deal) of some very talented former Googlers.
Paid Content: Facebook has hinted in the past that it was interested in making an acquisition. In raising $200 million from Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies in late May, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the new cash opened the possibility of “strategic options.” And Facebook also reportedly made a bid for Twitter last fall.
ZDNet: It shouldn’t come as a major surprise that these two companies would join forces. After all, there’s a lot of overlap between the two, though FriendFeed is one-up on Facebook with the real-time updates, compared to the Facebook updates that need to be refreshed. And really, how many friend update services do we really need?
AllThingsD: It is a logical fit for the huge social networking site, which has lagged behind microblogging kingpin, Twitter, in the real-time news, search and status game of perception in Silicon Valley.
Search Engine Watch: The implications for search could be big. Facebook has been testing search for its live feed. This is most obviously an attempt to compete with Twitter, but the FriendFeed acquisition could be a game-changer.

“Can we take the whole web and sort of project it through your social network?” co-founder Bret taylor told Liz. Well, that is precisely what they are doing with this merger. Facebook was initially trying to make a go with its own news feed, but got distracted by founder Mark Zuckerberg’s fascination with Twitter.

Smart Move

However, by acquiring FriendFeed, Facebook has course-corrected. If you look at the rapidity with which many of us are uploading information on Facebook — 1 billion photos a month, a billion pieces of content shared every week, 30 status updates a day — you know that the problem of plenty is only going to get worse.

The good news is that Facebook bought a solid team to solve this problem. This is no different than its decision to buy Parakey, the company started by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Hewitt has been the driving force behind Facebook’s iPhone efforts. You can expect a repeat with FriendFeed — though the FriendFeed founders’ pedigrees will make a difference on the org chart.

If Facebook had consummated a proposed deal with Twitter, it would have gotten a lot of eyeballs and presence on the open real-time web. And it would have cost about $500 million in Zuck Bucks! With FriendFeed, Facebook gets access to the Twitter universe and a talented team made of programming all-stars. Buchheit invented Gmail, while Taylor helped build Google Maps.

FriendFeed’s unique ability is to foster conversations — not a massive user base. If Facebook can take this capacity to “converse” and marry it to its mobile clients, what the company will have on its hands is a true interaction platform, befitting today’s always-connected life. This will give it a further boost against Twitter, a small, but fast-growing, micro-messaging company.

“We really didn’t have any need to sell the company, but we were talking to (Facebook), and we saw we had a similar vision,” Buchheit said. Despite being a generously funded company, FriendFeed has remained an insider curiosity, failing to catch the imagination of mainstream users. In comparison, Facebook is a household name, and rival Twitter is on its way. FriendFeed has been challenged by its ability to engage average users.

It Is About the People

After many attempts, I had to give up on FriendFeed, despite being impressed by the technology the company had built. This deal gives the FriendFeed team (and technology) a much bigger stage. Buchheit wasn’t shy about the fact that together the two companies can actually become a force in the emerging world of real-time information.

FriendFeed has built a real-time information aggregation platform that is impressive, to say the least. Facebook’s news stream will benefit from FriendFeed’s real-time expertise. When I asked Buchheit about the likelihood of this happening, he and Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, declined to comment on the specific product plans. For now, FriendFeed is going to exist as a stand-alone entity.

The FriendFeed team — ex-Google programming rock stars — just out-executed Facebook and kept launching new features at a breathtaking pace. “We have been longtime fans of Friendfeed and their product innovation,” said Schroepfer. “For us, the draw was the team and their ability to build faster than anyone else.”

Frankly, for Facebook, after having copied so many of FriendFeed’s features, buying it was the right thing to do.

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Get Updated With Status Search

Jennifer Martinez — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:53:57 +0000

When you’re looking to find out what folks are saying about hot political events such as the protests in Iran — or on the more trivial end of the spectrum, the new Harry Potter movie — searching for specific keywords on Twitter and Twitter-related search engines does the trick. But what if you’re only interested in what your friends — not everyone on Twitter — are saying about a certain topic? Status Search, a web-based search engine developed by Lior Levin and Elad Meidar, lets you search for specific topics (e.g. “weekend” or “The Hangover”) in the status updates of your Facebook friends and the people you’re following on Twitter.

To find a certain word or phrase in your friends’ status updates, Status Search crawls the web to index status updates. Levin and Meidar — who are based in Tev Aviv and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., respectively — started developing Status Search in February. The search engine, which they funded themselves, launched publicly in beta in May.

In the near term, Levin said they’re looking to form partnerships with sites such as MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn and Delicious, as well as Twitter applications like Tweetdeck, which he hopes will integrate Status Search into their platforms. Currently, you can sign up for free email alerts on Status Search that will notify you when subjects you’re interested in show up in your friends’ status updates, but Levin said the site will begin charging for the service in six months. Levin and Meidar plan to further monetize the site through advertising revenue.

Despite its tiny user base of 800 people, Status Search provides more expansive search results than similar offerings on FriendFeed and Zensify, an iPhone application. FriendFeed is limited because it only searches through the status updates of your friends who also have a FriendFeed account. Status Search returns your friends’ status updates from the entire week in its search results, while Zensify returns your friends’ most recent Facebook and Twitter status updates.

But Status Search isn’t without its flaws. The search engine would be more potent if it expanded its search offerings to other sites since it would help people stay more on top of what their friends are up to. Plus, people’s tweets and Facebook status updates are often identical.

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FriendFeed Search: Filtering for Popularity and Relevance

Dawn Foster — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:00:48 +0000

A few days ago, I shared my tips for getting the most out of Twitter search by using some less well-known advanced search operators. FriendFeed also has powerful, advanced search features that you may not know about, especially since some of the more interesting search operators are not well-documented. Like Twitter, FriendFeed has all of the common search operators, but the real power is in some of the advanced filtering options and the ability to find only the most popular posts. Now that FriendFeed has real-time search, these advanced searches are even more interesting.

Standard Operators

FriendFeed’s search uses the AND operator by default, but its implementation of the OR operator can be a little confusing. You can use the standard OR operator between keywords to state that one or other (or both) of the keywords must be present, but if you want to use OR with the advanced operators, you need to use a “,” (example: meetup OR tweetup service:delicious,upcoming). You can also search for phrases using quotes and exclude results using the “-” operator.

Subsets

It is important to note that you can search across all of FriendFeed (the default) or limit the search to results only from your friends. For example, here’s a search for monitoring across all of FriendFeed, and the same search with results from my friends:

monitoring
monitoring friends:geekygirldawn

I keep several friend lists. I have a list for the people who are involved in community management and another list of people who have a knack for knowing about new technologies before most people. Those are my two favorite friend lists to search. You can get to this option using the advanced search page or with the following syntax to search for the word “monitoring” in my “community” friend list.

monitoring list:community

There are also a few other useful subset searches to narrow your search to posts from a particular friend or a group:

facebook from:gigaom
panel group:sxsw

Services

Filtering a FriendFeed search by service can be really useful. For example, I often filter the Twitter posts out of my searches to cut down on the noise in my search.

As I mentioned in my previous post about Twitter search, Twitter search only returns results from the last 10 days or so. You can actually use FriendFeed to search a little further back into the Twitter timeline, at least for those Twitter posts that have also been sent to FriendFeed, by limiting your search just to the Twitter service. I’m not sure exactly how far back in time FriendFeed searches, since it seems to vary by service; however, I am seeing search results from Twitter that are around 40 days old and results from blogs that are much older.

Here are a few examples of searching for “monitoring conversations.” The first example excludes posts from Twitter from the results, while the second just includes results from Delicious and Google Reader:

“monitoring conversations” -service:twitter
“monitoring conversations” service:delicious,googlereader

Popularity

As usual, I have saved the best for last. Searching based on popularity measures is what makes the FriendFeed search so powerful. The volume of posts on FriendFeed is so high that it can be difficult to find the most interesting posts on a topic. Filtering your results by the number of likes and comments particular posts have received is a great way to find the posts that are most interesting to people. Here are some simple examples:

monitoring comments:20
“community management” likes:10

Where this becomes really powerful is when you use it in combination with some of the search operators mentioned in the sections above.

facebook comments:5 likes:5 list:news-makers
facebook research comments:20 likes:20 -service:twitter
comments:20 likes:20 from:jowyang -service:twitter

Consuming Search

The fun doesn’t stop with the advanced searches. You can also consume FriendFeed searches in so many different ways.

RSS: Get your search as an RSS feed and put it in your favorite reader.
Saved searches: Save your searches to reuse them over and over.
Share: You can share your search with other people.
Embed: Embed your search to display the results on other sites.

In this post I covered most of the advanced search operators for FriendFeed, but for the full list, visit the advanced search page.

What are your favorite uses for FriendFeed search?

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