Friendfeed lives! Co-founder says it’s in “chrysalis stage”
When Facebook bought pioneering social sharing site FriendFeed in August, the fate of the service seemed uncertain. FriendFeed never captured the same kind of traction its competitors did, but it win deep loyalty from its limited user base.
Today, Paul Buchheit, who is also the creator of Gmail, said, “FriendFeed isn’t dead. It’s just getting started.”
He wrote in FriendFeed today:
There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is… Continue Reading
Zoho Discussions launches as FriendFeed-forum hybrid to help groups track online conversations
After somewhat of a dry spell, Zoho has finally launched a new product: Zoho Discussions. Designed for companies and groups to carry on internal, time-lapse conversations, appears to be a combination of FriendFeed and traditional internet forums.
The simple interface lists all the topics on a particular forum, along with the name of the user that has added to the thread most recently and when. The topics are split among four main categories: Discussion, question, idea… Continue Reading
Twitter had been in talks to buy FriendFeed too, co-founder Stone says
Twitter had been in talks to acquire FriendFeed before the start-up of ex-Googlers decided to sell the company to Facebook last week.
“If that’s where they wanted to end up, that’s the right move for them,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in an interview with VentureBeat, acknowledging that the company approached FriendFeed several times and would have considered buying it at its reported sale price of $50 million in cash and equity.
“We know them from Google… Continue Reading
Benchmark took “almost all equity” with FriendFeed sale to Facebook
Benchmark Capital, FriendFeed’s sole venture capital backer, took “almost all equity” in proceeds from the startup’s sale to Facebook on Monday, according to the firm’s lead partner on the deal.
Facebook bought social sharing startup FriendFeed on Monday for $47.5 million, with $15 million in cash and $32.5 million in stock, according to The Wall Street Journal. That means FriendFeed’s two other primary investors, co-founders Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, along with their employees probably received… Continue Reading
Benchmark’s Peter Fenton nails both FriendFeed, SpringSource deals in one day
Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton scored two exits in one day — a rarity in the world of venture capital.
Fenton was the lead partner behind SpringSource’s $420 million sale to VMWare, the company’s biggest acquisition yet, and FriendFeed’s sale to Facebook. A competitive triathlete, Fenton has his hands in several of Silicon Valley’s most talked-about companies: He joined Twitter’s board of directors in its most recent fundraising round and holds a seat on Yelp’s board, after… Continue Reading
Facebook gets more FriendFeed-like with improved search
In discussing today’s news that Facebook is acquiring social sharing service FriendFeed, both companies have emphasized that the deal is more about talent than technology — which makes sense, because Facebook has been incorporating FriendFeed’s features for a while now. Here’s another FriendFeed-like addition: Facebook is rolling out a new search feature today.
With this feature, users can see every time a certain search term showed up in their news feed during the last 30 days…. Continue Reading
FriendFeed’s price tag? $50 million, WSJ says
Facebook paid $50 million in cash and stock to buy social sharing site FriendFeed today, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper reported: “The company paid roughly $15 million in cash, with the rest in Facebook stock that vests over several years and would be worth roughly $32.5 million based on the $6.5 billion common valuation an investor recently placed on the company.”
FriendFeed last raised money in 2008 with $5 million from Benchmark Capital and… Continue Reading
FriendFeed future cloudy; co-founder Buchheit says he’ll “do the right thing” for users
FriendFeed’s sale today to Facebook inevitably raises questions about whether the site will slowly fade out of existence as other acquired companies have.
“The long-term plans are something we need to work out here,” said FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit. “This very much intersects with Facebook’s long-term plans. We are committed to doing the right thing for our users.”
Sounds fairly ominous for FriendFeed users, who have praised the site’s real-time updates and sharing features. FriendFeed compiles all… Continue Reading
FriendFeed says it had no pressure from Benchmark to sell
FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit said the company had no pressure from Benchmark Capital to sell to Facebook.
“We just realized this opportunity wasn’t going to be around forever,” Buchheit said. “As we talked to more and more people, we came to realize that this is something that we should seriously consider.”
Benchmark held a minority interest in the company while Buchheit and fellow ex-Googler Sanjeev Singh owned the bulk of FriendFeed, he said in a call. Because… Continue Reading
Facebook courted FriendFeed since it was two weeks old, Buchheit says
With an all-star cast of early Google engineers, FriendFeed had attracted the attention of Facebook since it was two weeks old, said co-founder Paul Buchheit.
Negotiations, however, became more serious in “recent weeks,” said Buchheit, who is known for creating Gmail and Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Facebook announced it would buy social sharing company FriendFeed today for an undisclosed amount.
“We were always a little skeptical of it,” Buchheit told VentureBeat. “As we’ve spent more time together… Continue Reading
Who rules real-time search? A look at 11 contenders
Real-time search engines have proliferated over the last month, with a series of launches from start-ups like Topsy, almost.at and Scoopler. The companies are hoping to edge in on a space that Google co-founder Larry Page has admitted is a weakness for the search giant. And they’re using microblogging and social bookmarking sites as tools to figure out what content is relevant up to the second.
Real-time search is valuable because it lets you know what’s… Continue Reading
Wave: Google’s take on the future of communication
Finally unveiled after years of development under the codename “Walkabout,” Google Wave combines popular features from across the web — feeds, shared documents, photo galleries, etc. — to redefine online communication. At least that’s the goal. Its creators, Lars and Jens Rasmussen (the braintrust behind Google Maps), even say they set out to break down traditional modes of communication — email and instant messaging — to find a system more in sync with how web… Continue Reading
FriendFeed is absorbing more Twitter users, and that’s good for Twitter
FriendFeed, the service that culls your activities on various social networks into a single stream, is seeing a surge in new users, at least from anecdotal evidence (including signups that VentureBeat’s staff is seeing).
The increase comes after FriendFeed redesigned its site last week so you can easily read what your friends are up to around the web in a real-time stream. In fact, one of our writers, Dean Takahashi, noted he’s getting more friends signing… Continue Reading
FriendFeed’s redesign has given them something to talk about
When FriendFeed launched its redesign on Monday, some users (like me) applauded the move as a step in the right direction towards a more real-time web experience. Others, simply put, hated it. But initial reactions are well, initial. Now that everyone’s calmed down a bit, and as more users are testing it out, what does the data have to say for how it’s doing?
Very well, if a chart (below) released by FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit… Continue Reading
Don’t like FriendFeed’s real-time speed? Eat my dust.
People hate change. That’s as true on the Internet as it is in real life. For proof, look at any Facebook design tweak over the past several years. Today, FriendFeed rolled out a major change of its own, moving its aggregation and conversations from a slow stream to real-time (which had existed on the site previously, but wasn’t emphasized). Now a lot of users are freaking out, saying it’s way too fast to digest. I… Continue Reading
FriendFeed’s redesign combines publishing and IM better than Facebook or Twitter
Lifestreaming service FriendFeed is launching the most intuitive interface I’ve seen yet for sharing information with your friends. It’s like the new Facebook but with simpler filters for seeing only the Flickr photos, Twitter tweets, and much more from the friends that you care about. And, as Facebook intends to be but isn’t yet, the new FriendFeed is entirely in real time. Nearly every page on the new FriendFeed site updates in real-time (unless you… Continue Reading
New FriendFeed interface to roll out Monday
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed some website hits coming from beta.friendfeed.com. This is the domain for the beta area of FriendFeed, which we reported on the existence of last year and which was eventually opened to everyone. But then FriendFeed moved all of the changes there over to the regular site and closed the beta area. But now it’s back in operation internally, being used to test a new user interface for FriendFeed,… Continue Reading
Is the social stream the new email?
During the “Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet” panel today at SXSW (moderated by VentureBeat’s own Eric Eldon) all the participants agreed that social streams of data are going to be an integral part of the web going forward. David Sacks, the chief executive of Yammer, went farther, calling these streams “email 2.0.” No one seemed to disagree.
With Facebook’s new redesign now fully in place and focusing on real-time updates in your… Continue Reading
FriendFeed gives your desktop an information morsel
Lifestreaming service FriendFeed is taking another small step today toward making information feeds easier to consume — it’s launching a simple desktop application that shows you real-time updates from the site. You can already get real-time updates from FriendFeed on your desktop through third-party applications like Twhirl. That app lets you read, sort and respond to shared items and comments on FriendFeed; it also includes integration with Twitter. But FriendFeed’s own app feels cleaner, and… Continue Reading
New Facebook: Twitter + FriendFeed + 175 million users
When Facebook made an offer to buy Twitter back in November, it seemed pretty clear it was most interested in the real-time stream of information that is the service’s claim to fame. That deal fell through, but Facebook is moving ahead with the real-time information concept anyway.
A new update to the Facebook homepage will further refine the constant stream of data that is displayed to users. This change, rolling out on March 11, will display… Continue Reading