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FriendFeed has garnered a lot of popularity within the tech community for its ability to aggregate information across a wide range of social networks, and layer a new conversation on top of that. Minggl is a new service attempting to do something similar, only via the browser rather than a web page.

I sat down with Minggl founder Dewey Gaedcke and marketing director Brian Buser to go over the service and have them show me what it was all about.

Minggl exists as a browser plug-in for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Thanks to this, it’s always running (as long as you want it to be) while your browser is open. Say you want to track what your contacts are doing. To do this on FriendFeed you would have to have window with the site open and switch back to check it constantly. With Minggl you simply browse the web as you normally would as notifications appear on your toolbar as your contacts update various services

But Minggl does a lot more than this. It also allows you to merge your friends together from different online networks and tag those friends so you can easily search for and find just who you are looking for. Say you have a group of friends you go hiking with. Simply tag anyone with “hiking” from across any network you have set up on Minggl, and they will show up in your sidebar upon a search.

The service also has a “status blaster” which allows you to update your status across all the sites that use such functionality, like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. You can also do group messaging on networks from within Minggl. That feature is interesting because it points to one of the bigger differences that separates Minggl from other services, including FriendFeed.

Where FriendFeed uses sites’ APIs to pull in information from other networks, Minggl actually logs you in to the services in the background to pull information. Because of this, Gaedcke explains, Minggl has access to MySpace and LinkedIn and also the data on Facebook, such as the News Feed, that they won’t send out via API. You are constantly logged in to these sites, but you can still set the interval with which Minggl checks for updates.

Getting the information from these social networks was crucial for Minggl because it is “more friend-centric than news-centric,” Gaedcke notes.

Right now Minngl works with the Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twtter. The service also just launched integration with the popular social news voting site Digg to pull in the stories users submit and vote on.

The service doesn’t plan on stopping with those. Gaedcke and Buser said that it’s relatively easy to add more services to the toolbar, so we should expect the likes of YouTube, Flickr, Yelp and others soon. Also in the pipeline are some very cool and interesting features that they are hesitant to share at this time, but they gave me a sneak peak, and I can certainly vouch for them being potentially controversial — and popular, if executed right.

Minggl does have limited advertisements in the activity stream sidebar right now, but it is more focused on building up a loyal user base than monetizing right now

Another competitor for Minggl would have to be the social network-infused browser Flock. Flock might do things a little prettier, but it also requires that you download and use an entirely new browser. With Minggl, you can stick with either Firefox or Internet Explorer. Then there are newer services like MySocial 24×7 which takes FriendFeed’s services and ports them into your browser.

While perusing the internet recently, I stumbled upon a cool new site called Plurk. The site, launched January 23 by user interface specialist Alvin Woon, looks a tiny bit familiar. That’s because it combines features from micro-blogging service Twitter, with a touch of Friendfeed, the social conversation aggregator, and privacy features that closely mirror Facebook to put “your life on the line.”

The service, still in private beta, is pretty straightforward. After selecting a username and password upon registration, users are then directed to a page mostly filled with a timeline news feed (see screenshot below), or “plurks,” that other users have posted. Featured below the timeline are the top, recently joined, and random plurkers.

I’ve complained for quite a bit about the less than stellar user interface on Twitter, which could be a barrier to entry to mainstream adoption, or at least the HSTG (high school teenage girls) audience which Plurk’s Woon is targeting.

Plurk, for the most part with its threaded conversations, timelines, and easy-to-find buttons and features tackles the UI problem pretty effectively.

Skipping on over to your personal Plurk page, you’ll be able to check your stats — users get karma depending on the quantity and frequency of their posting — friends and fans, as well as see all threaded conversations in the timeline, and of course, a big fat message box for posting 140 character messages.

One twist to Plurk that may help us grammar nuts: users have options on which verb to use for the message. Choose between loves, hates, likes, shares, gives, wants, wishes, has, wills, asks, was, thinks, says, and of course — is and freestyle (blank).

A button in the bottom right hand corner allows you to toggle between just your plurks and your friends’ as well.

A timeline could potentially be annoying, with the burden of scrolling back and forth between days, and then returning to the current time, but as you hover over either far side of the screen, you can return to start.

Click on the plurk on the screen, and you can see the threaded conversations, viewing and responding to all the plurks, and in a hat tip to Friendfeed and Facebook, you can watch content (screenshot below) directly in the plurk.

Privacy settings will be familiar to Facebook users — you can allow the whole word to see your plurks, friends of friends, just friends, and lastly your lonesome self.

Finally, the service is integrated with AOL Instant Messaging, so you can send and receive plurks directly from your chat client. It also has an embeddable widget, which Woon has posted on his blog.

All in all the service is pretty nifty for a one-man creation, and the Twitter team should look at hiring one Mr. Woon to help solve their user interface issues, even if he can’t help them scale.

Update with a response from FriendFeed’s Paul Buchheit, below the article

Facebook has just launched a new feature that lets you add actions from other sites to the mini-feed of actions on your profile, including sites like local review site Yelp, photo site Picasa, and others.

This capability, of course, is vaguely similar to what FriendFeed offers. FriendFeed lets you import actions from other sites onto its own, then track what your friends are up to around the web and discuss everything all in one place.

The problem is, Facebook is about a lot of things that distract users away from tracking what their friends are up to around the web. Distractions include: Posting messages on your friends’ walls, sending them private messages, “poking” them, playing applications with people, checking out friends’ photo albums, etc.

Facebook doesn’t have an effective way to let people easily converse about what they’re up to around the web, so I don’t think this new feature is going to mean serious competition with Friendfeed, at least for Friendfeed’s core user base. More on that in a minute.

This Facebook move reminds me of when Facebook decided to offer a somewhat similar feature to messaging service Twitter last year, which it called “status updates.” Twitter lets you post short messages about what you’re up to, reply to others’ messages, share links, etc. It’s a sort of abbreviated, instantaneous — yet asynchronous — conversation with other Twitter users. Facebook’s updates feature, on the other hand, doesn’t offer the same dynamic. Instead, it’s more just a way for you to say what you’re up to, that others might see as they look at their news feed (which, incidentally, seems to be broken today), or as they look at your Facebook profile.

Twitter has been growing by leaps and bounds, and seems to be more popular than much-larger Facebook within the tech world. However, lots of people use both, even using Twitter’s Facebook application to post tweets (Twitter messages), and importing tweets into their Facebook statuses.

Here’s how this second point connects back to Friendfeed. I’ve noticed that most of my Facebook friends under the age of 26 or so don’t use Twitter — unless they’re in the tech world. But they do use Facebook’s status updates pretty religiously.

Twitter has a large niche carved out for itself, a fairly differentiated service, and solid growth. But Facebook may be pre-empting Twitter’s ability to reach college kids and other heavy Facebook users.

In the same way, Friendfeed has been growing fast in the tech world — from what I can tell — and is a valuable place for keeping track of friends. It may be that Facebook users will be satisfied enough with Facebook’s overlapping feature being released today, that they won’t feel the need to also use Friendfeed. It doesn’t mean Friendfeed is doomed, it just might reduce its potential to grow big.

Update: Friendfeed’s Paul Buchheit responds

We’ve known about this feature for a while — they pre-announced it a couple of months ago. It’s also possible to import content from these sites using third-party apps, such as http://apps.facebook.com/mypicasawebalbums/

FriendFeed is creating an interesting and enjoyable place to share and discuss things with friends — the aggregation aspect is more of an implementation detail. As you mentioned in your article, the actual experience of using FriendFeed is very different from Facebook, and I think they have very different strengths and purposes and for the most part are headed in different directions.

FriendFeed is a fast-growing startup that lets you and your friends share information about what you’re all up to on the web, and talk about it.

We’ve already noticed a lot more people joining the site in the last couple of weeks, and today the pace of adoption is likely to increase even more.

The Mountain View, Calif. company has launched an application programming interface (API) so third-party developers can build their own sites and applications that make use of the data collected, distributed and created through it. Read the company’s blog post here.

Questioning the usefulness of such a service, some users wonder if FriendFeed will not just become another temporary destination site to hold them over until the next one came along. With this API, FriendFeed is clearly aiming for a much larger goal. It makes the service a lot less focused on the actual site and more focused on the data being pulled into the site.

Friendfeed is hoping that people will take its aggregated information about its users’ friend relationships, subscriptions, comments and other data, and use it on other mobile and web applications. One example might be an application that makes it easier to post new photos directly to your feed (as noted below).

This is the latest web site to grow by making communication easier, then letting third parties use the service for their own ends. The most obvious preceding example is Twitter, a simple messaging service that many other sites have incorporated. Even in Friendfeed’s case, it displays Twitter messages and as of yesterday lets you reply directly back to Twitter (our coverage).

One large difference between two services is just how quickly FriendFeed listens to user requests and implements changes. As Mathew Ingram noted yesterday, FriendFeed took only a matter of days to integrate with Twitter, as users were requesting. This stands in contrast to Twitter, which has remained largely unchanged for the past year — many people have even started using FriendFeed to search old Twitter messages because FriendFeed offers that option while Twitter still does not (our coverage).

[Above: The FriendFeed remote login screen for the API]

FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor had the following to say about the API release via e-mail today:

I expect we will see a number of desktop applications that make the site more “real time”: alerts for new comments posted to the discussions in which you are participating, alerts for new entries, etc. This type of functionality is certainly one of the most requested features of the site.

I also expect we will see a number of mobile apps that make publishing to FriendFeed easier. You can upload images with the entries posted via the API, which would make it easy to, e.g., make an iPhone app that let you post your iPhone photos directly to FriendFeed with a click of the button.

We put a lot of effort into exposing almost all of the functionality of the web site via the API so developers could develop truly comprehensive read/write applications with the API.

You can find extensive documentation on the FriendFeed API here as well as a helpful FAQ here.

[MG Siegler contributed to this story.]

One of the key components of FriendFeed is its ability to construct a conversation around an idea no matter where it’s originally placed (on Twitter, on your blog, a shared Google Reader item, etc). Some have questioned the usefulness of moving a conversation outside its intended medium and into a new environment. Those people will love today’s update which gives FriendFeed the ability to send replies from a comment back to Twitter as The Last Podcast quickly noticed today.

That’s right, you can now click on the “Comment” link below a tweet (Twitter message) in FriendFeed and you will see a checkbox below the input area that reads: “Also send this comment as an @reply twitter from [your username].” By providing FriendFeed with your Twitter username and password it can send these replies back to Twitter, essentially making FriendFeed into a reply-only Twitter client (of course the service also does much more, see our previous coverage).

One week ago, FriendFeed implemented its search functionality which many saw as a killer feature for the service (our coverage). This made it possible to search through old FriendFeed items from the wide range of services it pulls in — a feature further highlighted by the fact that Twitter itself still does not have a proper search ability, but you can use FriendFeed for that purpose.

Believe it or not, the “reply-to-Twitter” feature was one of just several updates FriendFeed implemented today on its so-called “Fix-it Day”. The company also added the ability to pull in Disqus comments, Seesmic video posts and SlideShare items among others. A number of bugs were also fixed (more on those here).

When we spoke to FriendFeed before their public launch last month the company made it clear that openness was a focus of its network. This stands in contrast to a network like Facebook which does not allow other sites to access the data that it publishes in your News Feed for example. Obviously there are privacy implications to think about, but if a user wishes to send that data to another service (like FriendFeed), shouldn’t they be able to?

Now, if FriendFeed could post new messages to Twitter, and not just replies — I may just make FriendFeed my default Twitter client.

[update]: Here’s FriendFeed’s very short official post on the update (you may recognize the example user in the image).

Both FriendFeed and Twitter have seemingly been talked about non-stop in the blogosphere since SXSW ended (our coverage). That will continue at least one more day as FriendFeed has added search functionality.

This is an important step as FriendFeed tries to maintain traction with the users it has gained during its upswing in new memberships the past few days. This addition also highlights the glaring absence of search from one of FriendFeed’s most imported services, Twitter. While not quite as ridiculous as when Google Reader didn’t have search for several months after its launch — when Google, you know, made a name for itself with search — the inability of Twitter to implement a search feature in over a year since it started rising to popularity seems rather odd.

Adding search to Twitter has been talked about before. Back in September of last year, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey told TechCrunch that real time search would be added to Twitter “very soon”, and went on to suggest that historical search (of past Twitter messages) was only a couple weeks away. As of right now, more than six months later, all we have is a people search for contacts on Twitter.

However, with the addition of search to FriendFeed, there is now a slightly more roundabout way to search Twitter — simply do it through FriendFeed! I just tried a few sample searches and it works great. It even has an ‘Advanced’ search capability to drill down into results and only search select types of items, such as Twitter messages.

The addition of search is hardly a surprising addition to FriendFeed, after all, most of its key team members come from Google. In their post, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor credits Jim Norris (another co-founder), as the guy who put forth all of the effort to get this functionality implemented. It’s surprising how quickly, and seemingly easily FriendFeed has taken Twitter to task on search.

For what it’s worth, Bret Taylor tells us, “We really don’t think of it as taking Twitter to task. FriendFeed is designed to make all the sites you use a little more social and a little more useful.” He goes on to say, “One of the benefits of the Open Web and Atom/RSS feeds is that you don’t need to choose a single service for all your needs. FriendFeed is built with that philosophy in mind.”

FriendFeed launched publicly in February after raising a $5 million angel round from some of its founders and Benchmark Capital (our coverage).

If Socialthing (our coverage) also gains search capabilities before Twitter does, perhaps we should be worried for the service after all (our coverage).

update: As John McCrea, Plaxo’s vice president of marketing notes in the comments, Plaxo Pulse has offered up search for several months now. Search will indeed be an important component of aggregation going forward (our coverage).

There was a fair amount of debate and discussion heading into this year’s SXSW (South By Southwest) Interactive conference as to what would be the hot new app that everyone would be using. At last year’s show it was the online messaging service, Twitter, that rose to prominence. Well guess what? This year’s Twitter was — Twitter.

The graph down below, placed on the Twitter blog today, gives a good indication of just how much usage has increased since last year when it exploded onto the scene. The graph tracks the use of the term ‘SXSW’. It also nicely points out what was going on in the conference during the peak times of term traffic. Not surprisingly, the controversial Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg Keynote drew the highest number of tweets (Twitter messages) related to ‘SXSW’.

While many are quick to jump on the FriendFeed bandwagon now (which we’ve been on for a few months — our coverage — and some of us even longer) and say that is the service that gained popularity at this year’s SXSW, the massive influx of friend notifications in my inbox didn’t start until after I was already back home from the conference. That spike was almost certainly kicked off by the massive amount of talk about the service the past couple of days — as seen on Techmeme.

[Above: A graph showing the usage of the term "SXSW" on Twitter this year (blue) compared to last year (green). Find a larger version here.]

On the ground at SXSW, everyone was still using and talking about Twitter. If you walked by a person with their nose buried in a smartphone typing quickly, you knew what they were doing — because you saw their tweet show up a few seconds later on your own phone’s screen (which was naturally set to browse Twitter as well).

Gabe Rivera, the founder of Techmeme, and a few others successfully predicted that “this year’s Twitter is: Twitter” — and they did so where else but on Twitter.

Kudos really needs to be given to the Twitter team which was able to keep the service up with an exceptional 99.97% uptime during the conference. This lies in stark contrast to the experience many users had suffered through the past several months with the service’s downtime woes (our coverage).

FriendFeed is like Facebook’s news feed. But it’s more of a dynamic conversation among close friends about what they’re up to all over the web — and not so much a social network.

I’ve been using FriendFeed religiously this year, after reviewing it in detail last month, and I’ve been consistently impressed. So I’m pleased to report that the company is launching in public beta today, and has raised a $5 million Series A round from some of its own founders (early Googlers Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh) and Benchmark Capital.

On FriendFeed, you can see your friends’ published blog posts and Twitter messages, their favorite YouTube videos, their uploaded Flickr photos — and their activities from more than other 20 other sites. You and your friends each pick the sites you use, that you want FriendFeed to track for you. Then every activity is presented in a running stream, with every item from all your friends appearing in chronological order on your FriendFeed homepage.

The dynamic action happens because of two one-click features: You can comment on your friends FriendFeed activity items or “like” an item — basically a vote, that shows your name and a smiley face next to the item.

The combination of nearly instant activities of your friends pumping through FriendFeed, along with the conversations that form around them, leads to a burgeoning, ongoing discussion.

A new comment or “like” triggers FriendFeed to send the item itself (and the entire conversation about it), back up to the top of the FriendFeed stream. This gives everyone a chance to continue the conversation.

Of course, you may wonder if Facebook couldn’t easily let its users do the same thing? Couldn’t Facebook just let people include their activity from among their friends, within their news feed? In fact, Facebook is working on this, according to one recent report.

The problem with this analysis is that FriendFeed has been emerging as a different sort of tool from Facebook. The Facebook news feed is already chock-full of your friends activities on Facebook, like when they add a new friend, break up with their girl/boyfriend, or decide to attend an event. This is information about your friends’ lives. FriendFeed, in contrast is purely about the online media you and your friends think is most interesting.

FriendFeed, as well, doesn’t promote the narcissism of a social network. Facebook is basically a huge game where people compete to have the most friends (or at least the most friends who are cool) the funniest profile descriptions, etc. Subscribing to somebody on FriendFeed only means that you’ll be able to see what they share on FriendFeed, and their comments.

As Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed’s founders told me last week, it’s not about articulating relationships about everyone you know, it’s not about poking and who broke up with who, it’s not necessary to friend everyone in your address book — and, importantly, unsubscribing on FriendFeed is not a social stigma.

Since the company launched last October, the average beta user (typically a tech geek and/or blogger, from what I’ve seen) shares their activity on 3.5 other sites. Personally, I use it to share my stories on VentureBeat, my Twitter updates, and maybe my shared items from Google Reader.

FriendFeed allows you to see in the ‘stats‘ area what users you find interesting (by either ‘liking’ or commenting on their items), and which find you the most interesting. The site also allows you the option to see content that someone posted who isn’t necessarily a friend of yours - but rather a friend of a friend, if your friend commented on or liked that person’s item. Both of these features lead to finding users and content that is more valuable to you quite often then simply importing a contact list (which you can also do).

Some of the most popular services include Twitter and Flickr, two services that are notably open in letting a third party like FriendFeed freely make use of their data — in contrast to sites like Facebook, that don’t let third parties like FriendFeed access and display Facebook photos.

FriendFeed itself has made openness a focus. It lets you view your entire FriendFeed in its Facebook application, or in a widget that you can put on your iGoogle homepage or your personal web site. The company is also working on improving its mobile version and its application programming interfaces so third parties can gather information from FriendFeed for their own sites.

[MG Siegler contributed reporting to this article.]

Facebook news feed has been a hit with users because it automatically displays the latest photos, newest friends, and other updates from your Facebook friends.

The problem, though, is that most people use any number of other sites as well — such as messaging service Twitter, video site YouTube, photo-sharing site Flickr, to name a few. There’s been no good way to see what your friends are doing on different sites around the web from one central place.

Now, there are two feed services, FriendFeed (screenshot, above) and Plaxo Pulse, that do a good job of solving this problem. I expect both — and especially Friendfeed — to become a hit this coming year, as I’ll explain, below.

FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse let you designate friends, then easily add feeds of your activities from other sites. The result is that each user sees a continuous stream of updates from friends — Twitter messages, uploaded YouTube videos, blog posts, shared Google Reader items, and much more. Both FriendFeed and Plaxo include community discussion features, such as commenting on others’ items.

Other startup competitors that are offer similar services include Spokeo and clip-sharing sites Plum and Clipmarks.

Friendfeed is becoming a valuable social hub. Get ready for more.

Within the past couple of weeks, FriendFeed has quickly become one of the main ways I track what interesting people are up to. It offers a compelling new way to communicate with people you care about, a clean, easy-to-use design and a small but vibrant community to connect with — the same factors that drew many people to messaging service Twitter when it began to grow quickly last year.

I’ve assembled a small group of friends who are also using the service — many of whom don’t know each other — and we’re starting to get some interesting conversations happening within FriendFeed on various feed items.

FriendFeed launched in October and has a lot of important details right that make it fun to use. Examples:

- You can add a feed from a site you use in just a couple clicks

- It takes one click to ask to subscribe to somebody’s feeds and one more click for them to approve you

- It’s easy to find people you want to keep track of: FriendFeed recommends new friends to you who are already popular with your friends (details here)

- Commenting on a feed item takes two clicks; it also lets you “like,” or vote to approve of, an item in one click

- Pages load really fast

FriendFeed also has a clever Facebook application (screenshot below). Once you install the FriendFeed Facebook app, you’ll automatically see your friends’ FriendFeeds if they also have the Facebook app installed. These people aren’t just fellow Facebook app users — once they add the app, they’re also your friends in the free-standing FriendFeed site. FriendFeed, in turn, shows all the activity you see on the Friendfeed site within Facebook.

To spur further sharing, FriendFeed has also recently introduced a feature that lets you see feed items from the friends of your friends. To be clear, it only shows friends of friends who have made their feed public (an option on the site), and only when one of your friends likes or comments on the entry.

However, there’s no clear way to stop these pseudo-friends from seeing what you submit, as blog Webomatica notes in an otherwise positive review. FriendFeed says it’s working on controls to make that more clear. I think the feature is executed right, as is, because you’re essentially getting introduced to conversations with strangers via people you’re already friends with. It’s a mechanism for measured, viral growth.

Another plus for FriendFeed is that it’s formed a strong base of influential users. Primarily, it’s used by early Googlers and their many friends. The company was founded (and funded) by former Gmail team members Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh together with Google Maps engineers Bret Taylor and Jim Norris. It’s also getting championed by early-adopter bloggers like Louis Gray.

And, it recently brought in Kevin Fox, the user experience designer who worked on Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader.

In recent weeks, I’ve noticed a spike in the number of tech geeks and bloggers using the site.

Note: Most feed items, from what I’ve seen, currently come from Twitter, Google Reader shared items, direct blog feeds, and social news sites Digg and Reddit, with a generous smattering from photo services like SmugMug and Picasa and music services like Last.fm. That’s judging from what I’ve seen on my Friendfeed friends’ feeds and on the site’s public feed, an aggregated feed of all members’ publicly shared items.

For more background on Friendfeed, see our earlier coverage.

Plaxo Pulse: Larger than Friendfeed, and growing

Meanwhile, Plaxo has been developing a similar concept. It’s a feed of what the people you’re connected to within Plaxo are up to on many of the same sites you can see on Friendfeed — Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Delicious, etc.

The service is getting big. More than one million people are using Pulse per month, up from 250,000 in November, with close to two million daily pageviews, the company says. Anecdotally, I’ve been getting an increasing number of invites from friends who are using it. Screenshot:

Not everyone is taking these invites well, due to the company’s history. Back in 2003, Plaxo was taken to task for sending spammy emails between users, asking people to update their contact info in their friends’ Plaxo address books. The person supposedly asking their friends for updates often didn’t know that their friends were receiving these emails.

“Plaxo Pulse is the latest in Plaxo spam. I get 20-30 of these a day. It’s nuts and as far as I can tell there is no value in the service, ” investor and blogger Fred Wilson twittered in early November. Others have more recently suggested to me that Plaxo is letting Pulse send out a high number of email invites to grow user numbers quickly.

The company should be forgiven for its past behavior at this point, although when it tried its latest initiative — extracting friends’ emails from Facebook (our coverage) — it got mixed reviews.

In fact, I think Plaxo has gotten overly conservative with giving users control over who gets to see what. It’s created different categories of friends for you — personal friends, family, work colleagues, etc. — that FriendFeed doesn’t bother with. Here’s how ex-Googler Charles Hudson explains the problem:

With Plaxo Pulse I have to “friend up” my pulse network and make decisions about which people I’d like to allow access to which types of data. In addition, I have to classify my contacts by the nature of our relationship. I initially found the privacy controls on Plaxo to be useful, but now they’re becoming a bit tedious to manage. FriendFeed makes this process a lot easier.

Plaxo is on the right track with Pulse. Its advantage is that it is much larger than Friendfeed and already has the email addresses and friend connections contained in its existing services. But Friendfeed comes across better on many fronts: Trust, ease-of-use, successful Facebook integration and an influential user base.

Friendfeed, which isn’t disclosing its traffic numbers, says it is focusing on fine-tuning the product before it aims to grow.

Plaxo, meanwhile, says it has kept Pulse in a sort of open private testing mode, and has yet to promote the service to many of its users.

Facebook news feed vs. web news feeds?

Facebook offers its own set of applications that duplicate popular sites on the web. For example, it offers its own photo-sharing service — the number one photo sharing application on the Web, with twice the traffic of its nearest three competitors, according to ComScore (via Jeremiah Owyang). Still, it is hard for me to imagine Facebook creating a set of services that can beat the entire web, including sites like YouTube.

There are too many competitors, too many valuable services that people aren’t going to stop using just because Facebook offers the same thing. Latest example: Twitter has maintained its role as a sort of messaging service where each of your posts answers the question “what are you doing?” — even though Facebook introduced a status update service last spring, that asks you “what are you doing right now?” within Facebook.

Rather, Facebook and the web will co-exist. Friendfeed’s Facebook application already shows this happening.

Also, FriendFeed (and in my opinion, Plaxo) may end up offering more than Facebook to other web startups. As Michael Arrington wrote when FriendFeed launched:

“FriendFeed will be a social network itself, of course. But it may also allow niche social networks, focusing on just one thing like movies or music, to thrive while simultaneously allowing users to have a single feed to aggregate all that they are up to. That means Facebook and the other giants don’t have to be everything to everyone (or at least that people don’t have to use it that way).

 updated

Four former Google software designers who helped create its mail and mapping services have started a new Silicon Valley company Friendfeed, to help you track news items your friends are reading and their other activities.

It centers around a feature made famous by the popular social network Facebook: The “feed,” which gives you a steady stream of news about what your friends are doing, i.e., what they’re reading, what applications they’re adding, videos they’re viewing, and so on.

But Friendfeed goes a step beyond Facebook’s feed. It gives you a feed from your friends’ activities on 23 other networks, too. For example, it lets you see what they’re reading on Digg and Slashdot, what they’re watching on Netflix, YouTube or Flickr, or listening to on Last.fm.

There’s a huge upside and downside: On the up, it lets you finally track lots of core activities of your closest friends. On the downside, it requires significant investment, and dealing with even more noise than already have. All your friends have to sign up, if you want to see all their activities. Already, we know of people who have tired of all the updating on Facebook. Do they want more? Friendfeed walks the fine line between the simplicity of a Twitter (simple updates from friends) and being a firehose blasting you with more than you can handle.

The company was started by Bret Taylor (left) and Jim Norris (right), two of the original Google Maps engineers. They incubated the idea at Benchmark Capital, a well-known venture capital firm (see our coverage). They later teamed up with Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, two of the creators of Gmail. Buchheit, who led Gmail project, tells VentureBeat the company isn’t ready to release details today about funding just yet, but hopes that an announcement can be made soon, perhaps as early as next week. We suspect the final terms are being ironed out, because both sides aren’t saying much. “We’re delighted to be able to work with these very talented entrepreneurs,” Benchmark’s Peter Fenton messaged us through a spokeswoman, with the excuse that he was at the firm’s day long partner meeting and couldn’t say more.

Since leaving Google, Buchheit has been investing in start-ups, and so this is a new turn for him. Buchheit told us several months ago he was looking for a better way to track news.

The New York Times first ran a story about Friendfeed story this morning.

The “meta”-feed is not trapped inside Facebook, but can run anywhere. It can run within an application on our Facebook account or on your Google homepage.

Of course, a number of other content sharing sites exist. However, none of them have focused on aggregating news feeds in this way. With one exception: Mogad, which we wrote about here, but which is in very early days. Most notable about this is that Aydin Senkut, an investor in Mogad, and also a former Google employee, sits in the same office with Buchheit on Ramona Ave in Palo Alto. The launch of Friendfeed could make for some interesting (heated) conversations over there :)

Some other sites we’ve written about, including Spokeo and ProfileLinker (see coverage), have let you aggregate profiles of your friends and what they’re doing, but they haven’t really taken off — and haven’t focused on streaming feeds.

When you sign up for an account (it is limiting a the number of accounts it is giving out; you must sign up on the site), the company lets you tell it what sites your participate on, so that it can track you. Your friends have to do the same.