Ray Valdes

Got some interesting press calls today about the FriendFeed acquisition. Obviously, everyone knows what Facebook is. Your grandma. My aunt in the old country. They all have Facebook accounts. Twitter is white-hot in some circles, perhaps not your grandma or my aunt. But daily fodder for those that know or care who Ashton Kutcher is (@aplusk with 3 million followers), Oprah (@OPrah with 2 million), or Snoop Dogg (@snoopdogg with 388k).

While Twitter is well-known to people in media, some reporters calling me for comment were not exactly sure what FriendFeed was about. I view FriendFeed as a site for social-media power users, and something of an acquired taste. I have observed debates among the social-media cognoscenti who discuss FriendFeed like wine connoisseurs would discuss an interesting vintage. Some think it’s the ultimate in social sites, while others find the user interface opaque, the discussion insular, and its attention requirements tedious. For many social-media mavens, FriendFeed was the latest destination in a personal circuit that began with Facebook 4 or 5 years ago, and Twitter two years ago, and a regular hangout for the past year. I got my FriendFeed account in October 2007 but must confess I only log on about once every few months. I guess my palate never acquired the taste for this flavor of social media aggregation.

Although FriendFeed has not experienced the explosive growth that Twitter enjoyed, its technology is arguably an order of magnitude better. I recall the days when Twitter crashed every single day for weeks on end. FriendFeed has not inflicted on its users the reliability, security, or performance problems that those on Twitter had to suffer. Nevertheless, Twitter users did not leave, because of the site’s simplicity, speed, and wide choice of client software (due to early introduction of an API for third-party developers) that allowed you to choose your user experience.

According to papers purloined from Twitter by a hacker last month and published on the Web, the team at Twitter was entertaining some serious offers from Google, Microsoft and Facebook. But the Twitter principals had an ambitious goal: to become the first social site to reach one billion users. This lofty goal probably resulted in a lofty price tag for any would-be acquirers. By contrast, FriendFeed’s growth curve is flat (see http://bit.ly/FF-vs-Twitter ) and presumably the price more down to earth.

Facebook is clearly not acquiring FriendFeed for its users. Given the power-user appeal, I suspect that 95% of FriendFeed users have Facebook accounts (and Twitter accounts). Facebook is also not acquiring FriendFeed for its raw technology (although there may be some interesting, patentable intellectual property at a level above the raw code). Facebook is written in PHP, and unlikely to make a wholesale change to a new platform. For the ex-Googlers who started FriendFeed, PHP is a lightweight scripting language to be looked upon with disdain (in preference to C++, Java and Python).

In my view, Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed for its talent pool (world-class developers who could learn PHP in a day if they wanted to), and more importantly for its sense of mission: to open up “walled garden” social sites and shift the world to the distributed social web, a web of interoperable sites that share data in real-time.

Over the past year, Facebook already has implemented real-time Twitter-like features, as well as FriendFeed-like interoperability and social architecture (the “like” social gesture, for example). This acquisition moves Facebook further in that direction and allows it to leapfrog Twitter in some respects.

One issue that has yet to play out is the reaction of FriendFeed community. Many of them are refugees from Facebook or Twitter, and today are feeling at best irritated and at worst apoplectic that their quiet corner has been discovered and owned.

Facebook faces a challenge if it seeks to integrate the FriendFeed site with its own. It is like trying to combine the dashboard of a Chevy Tahoe with that of a Ferrari. I think Facebook will leave this quiet corner alone, and instead will move the engineering talent quietly over to the Facebook R&D department to continue implementing the FriendFeed vision on the Facebook platform.

Everyone’s game (Twitter, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, SixApart) has to step up a level. More pairing off will occur. Twitter’s price just went up, perhaps along with their anxiety level and disposition to sell.