facebook and FriendFeed – will the merger make them more distinct?
In the FIR FriendFeed room, Dan York asks:
Surprised to not yet see a thread about Facebook aquiring Friendfeed… Anyone care about it?
Most of the comments in reply to Dan’s question focus on what we as social media users might do given the uncertainty about the future of the two channels. In reply Andrea Vascellari (in the 9th comment on his own blog post) takes note of the engineering-heavy team at FriendFeed, but other than that this conversation hasn’t dealt much with the strategic implications of the purchase and the long-range possibilities they suggest.
I”m trying to tease out those implications.
I haven’t tried to study the issue in depth, but I’ll put forward some tentative conclusions anyway.
First, I don’t think facebook’s management are likely to merge the two channels into a single hybrid. In fact, I believe part of the strategy may be to let them live on as quite different tools.
Second, I do believe that the heavy hitters on FriendFeed’s development team may have been a juicy temptation to the acquirer, but I don’t believe this means any great change in the development paths of the two.
Why do I believe these things?
Mostly, my thinking focuses on key differences in the paradigms of the two channels. Facebook is a walled garden. Google does not crawl it and cannot deliver its pages. In response to the growth of Twitter, facebook’s management has taken some steps to make the channel more Twitter-like, but these steps haven’t generally been well received. For example, there’s been considerable annoyance expressed over the change that made the fully public profile the default. The purchase of FriendFeed may well arise out of an understanding on facebook’s part that the walls of the garden may be desirable. And not just because so many users say so, but, more importantly, because the walls, coupled with facebook’s phenomenal growth, mean that there’s an increasingly important part of the web which Google can’t reach, read, deliver, or monetize.
So, while Twitter with its openness threatens facebook with its walls, and while those walls themselves are valuable, what’s their owner to do? I think the correct answer is: Build its own open property, so that its closed property may safely be kept fenced. Only by keeping the walled and unwalled paradigms separate can facebook hope to take on Twitter while also claiming territory from Google.
Another clue to this is the APIs of facebook versus FriendFeed. I myself don’t know much about APIs, having given up coding years ago (beyond fairly simple Perl scripts). But I trust Dave Winer’s judgment on these things. Winer said, in the August 17th episode of Rebooting the News, that the FriendFeed API is far more approachable and usable than that of facebook. My thinking is that while this may in part be an accident of FriendFeed’s having a superior development team, it’s very likely that the difference falls out from the open versus closed paradigms that have been architected into the two tools from the beginning. Like Twitter, FriendFeed has established itself as a platform, while facebook is a closed channel. In keeping with these paradigms, the API for Twitter and FriendFeed will have been built with an eye toward application to be built around the platform, while that for facebook looks for applications to be built within the channel. The first sort of API has to be far more structured, robust, and flexible than the second, which can afford to be something of an afterthought.
So, like Meghan Keane, I believe the greatest value of FriendFeed to facebook is in search: but I go farther in believing that this value can’t be delivered unless the two tools are kept separate and different. This means that each must be faithful to its own paradigm.
Here is a first cut at a table of some features of the two paradigms.
| FriendFeed (and Twitter) | ||
| API, developer community | critical in platform paradigm: encourage broad, inventive community | nice to have in channel paradigm: limited possibilities, less importance |
| default for profiles and updates | open, public | private |
| friending/following | promiscuous: new friends, friends broadly defined | chaste: most connections are existing, IRL friendships |
| social graph, circles of acquaintance | fluid: large circles with loose borders | stable: slower growth and less shrinkage |
| marketing uses | flea market: shouting and hucksterism largely tolerated | referral network: real relationships make users trust brokers for brands & companies they value; hucksterism more likely to cause lasting damage |
This post expresses an opinion loosely held. I put it forward because I believe FriendFeed and facebook are both important tools (or channels, as I’ve called them here), and that their future matters. I believe strategic use of them in marketing and PR will depend on the user’s theory of their future, and I offer this as the beginnings of a framework for building such a theory.
I’d love to hear what others think.