Monday, August 10, 2009

FriendBook? FaceFeed?

Some news broke today that was like the shattering of a thousand teacups in the hands of a legion of grandmas across the globe: Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed. What to make of this? Will we FriendFeed-ers lose our beloved insider's social network forever? Will Louis Gray end up dating Paul Buchheit? It's such a complicated situation.

The really worst thing about this, in my view is that the FriendFeed team is moving out of has already abandoned its Mountain View digs and is moving to the Facebook offices in Palo Alto.

It's been hard enough to find a table at the Starbucks on University Avenue as it is. Now with all those FriendFeed people in town, it will be that much tougher to find a place for me to sit down and sip a chai latte while staring blankly at my Macbook. OK so maybe I'm being a bit selfish.

Surely there are other downsides. Such as the fact that FriendFeed will probably cease to exist, and instead will be rolled into Facebook's functionality. Still, if I know the pace of these things, it will be another four years before this happens. Witness the fact that Google Video still provisionally exists, three and half years after the much ballyhooed YouTube acquisition. But mainly, I'm worried about the chai.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hopefully the Facefeed integration will offer a better UI for Facebook to integrate your RSS feeds. Sadly, before I got to be an avid FF user, it is going away.

Maybe the Facefeed offices will be so huge they can have a Starbucks satellite?

Steve M-- said...

I happened to be in the Starbucks on California Ave in Palo Alto this morning. Plenty o' tables.

Sunshine said...

I agree Jameane--if FB could integrate some of the cooler features of FF we'd all be in luck. Somehow I don't think this will happen, or not right away anyway. But hey I've been wrong before.