"Most commentators think that FriendFeed is dead because the founders have been bought by and buried inside Facebook. If FriendFeed is so dead why is Twitter trying to choke it. Correction: FriendFeed is clearly dead. If you have ever worked for a startup and tried to ship a running product you know that focus is the only thing that will keep you alive. Facebook is a massive platform serving a scale of social interaction that has only been previously seen by distributed systems like email. The last thing Facebook wants is for its newly aquiried superstar team to waste time working on a platform that no longer matters to their commercial success or the bulk of their users" - Louis Gray from Bookmarklet

Great article - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

Friendfeed is NOT dead until the community leaves. The fact that you're posting this here means it's not dead - maybe dead for Chris, but not dead. (nice comment bait ;-)) - Jesse Stay

Comment bait? I like Chris and think his article makes sense. I would prefer to use FriendFeed for posting to Twitter, so I did. - Louis Gray

Louis, more comment bait on Chris's part, but posting his quote around FriendFeed being dead is sure to get some comments here trying to prove otherwise, don't you think? - Jesse Stay

FriendFeed is a great platform Louis - and they owe u a lot :) My only point is that it's dead and it's time for more distributed alternatives. - Chris Saad

Chris, I agree with the latter part of your statement. - Jesse Stay

I also agree FriendFeed owes Louis a lot - Jesse Stay

It's not dead though :-) - Jesse Stay

this is a lot like the movie Ghost - Steve Gillmor

Does the "Open" community think that by siding with Twitter and trying to kill FriendFeed that they'll get some sort of 'open' solution when the estate is settled and the will read? - Cliff Gerrish

Or is it like the movie Sixth Sense? - Louis Gray

All this is moot anyway until we all get the identity problem solved and context controlled 100% by the user. - Jesse Stay

haha "I see dead technologies" - Chris Saad

I see 'open' technologies that were never alive in the first place. - Cliff Gerrish

Cliff, amen - Jesse Stay

Really? You've never used HTTP, HTML, TCP/IP, CSS, POP3, SMTP, RSS, Atom, on and on? - Chris Saad

@Cliff You are also probably using OAuth every day now too - OpenID is probably in the mix too but you just don't know it - Chris Saad

OAuth is a temporary solution - it will be gone in 5 years - Jesse Stay

It's "Truly, Madly, Deeply". Or Will Self's London Book of the Dead. Not dead, just in a different neighbourhood you don't visit. - Kevin Marks

Chris, your argument is orthogonal. It's not about protocols. It's about societies and micro-communities. - Cliff Gerrish

I love that we're saying FriendFeed's dead, yet we're using FriendFeed as a medium to prove such :-) - Jesse Stay

Some 'Dead' is in a different neighborhood (i.e. not cool to talk about any more) - like RSS, but FF is Dead, Dead - like Jaiku Dead. - Chris Saad

@Cliff no it's really not - Chris Saad

Chris, have stats to prove that? (FriendFeed dead like Jaiku dead) - Jesse Stay

Chris, a new protocol won't create a new twitter or friendfeed. It's not that kind of thing. - Cliff Gerrish

Jesse, let's not play denial games. Yes, FriendFeed as a platform exists. Its community, though smaller than before, is still here. But its future appears to be dead. - Louis Gray

Meanwhile, in an entirely different thread, Paul Buchheit confirms that 'BirdDog' is not in place yet -- but RT service should be restored when it is. - Cliff Gerrish

Of note, Paul Buchheit made a comment on Steve Gilmore's post, here: http://ff.im/cbHzx "To be clear, Twitter has made available a realtime replacement for the firehose (the replacement is called "birddog"). We have not yet started consuming that new API because we're waiting for the lawyers to come to agreement on the terms of use, which I hope will happen soon. I think Twitter's legal team is simply overbooked at the moment" - Louis Gray

http://friendfeed.com/stevegi... - Steve Gillmor

Louis, it's not dead until they say it's going to be dead. The community is still here and trying to remain. I'm not playing denial at all - ask Johnny if it's dead. Ask Josh if it's dead. Ask Akiva if it's dead. We're all still using it and I don't think any of us except maybe Chris in this thread plan to stop using it. - Jesse Stay

Yeah saw that - but it doesn't change much - still a bunch of lawyers and corps playing games with each other - if it were an open system, there wouldn't be lawyers involved and we wouldn't be programming defensibly against closed systems. Steve wouldn't have to drive us a all nuts with questions about Track because he could just build it himself. - Chris Saad

I think Chris is the one in denial - yeah, a lot of people left, but the core community is still here and the FriendFeed team and Facebook are still spending money on keeping it alive. They have made that very clear. - Jesse Stay

Chris, so you have to kill FF, so your dream of an 'open' system can be crushed by Twitter and Facebook? - Cliff Gerrish

@Cliff I didn't kill FF, Facebook did when they acquired the company and folded the team into their mainline operations. It's not my dream of open - closed systems are like ice cubes bobbing in a glass of water, they will melt eventually. - Chris Saad

Openness is key precisely 'cos you don't need lawyers involved to interoperate. See http://bit.ly/bespoke - Kevin Marks

@KevinMarks bingo - Chris Saad

So I'm confused - are we attacking the FriendFeed community in order to get more people to support Open technologies? - Jesse Stay

comment from dev at a big corp "I love pointing to open standards. Then I don't have bizdev people in my way" - Kevin Marks

Ahem... the EFF has no lawyers? - Micah

Jesse, please do not distract. This is nothing about attacking the community. We are the community. - Louis Gray

And no company is 100% open -- everything is a mixture of open and closed. - Cliff Gerrish

Louis, it sounds like it - the comment above and Chris's statements have been directly targeted to state that FriendFeed is dead. That sounds like an attack, IMO to a very passionate, still living community. That's what I'm confused about - why the distraction if you're going to promote open standards? - Jesse Stay

No sex is 100% safe either - we should give up on Condoms I guess :) - Chris Saad

Chris, are you saying that "open" technologies are like condoms? I'm not sure I understand that metaphor, can you amplify? - Cliff Gerrish

Jesse, go back and read the entire article please. Thanks. - Louis Gray

@cliff lol - I'm saying that your statement 'no company is 100% open' as an excuse for not perusing open solutions is like saying let's give up on something just because we can't get to 100%. We are always striving for a 'more perfect union' - doesn't mean we have to get there to achieve something. - Chris Saad

Quote: "Facebook is a massive [centralized, single point of failure] platform serving a scale of social interaction that has only been previously seen by *distributed systems* like email". Emphasis Mine. Therein lies the problem. You can never kill email if your strategy is to replace it with a modern version of AOL or Compuserve which in a way, is what Facebook is. The correct solution is for social *internetworking*, to commodify Facebook (and Twitter) and reduce them to nothing more than foundational distributed systems that everything else is built on. - Ray Cromwell

How about Chris and Steve to do a joint podcast series stint to pry apart the tentacles of the issues going 'round and 'round again. - Micah

Louis, why the specific quote then? Regardless of the article, statements like "FriendFeed is clearly dead" do not go well with passionate communities you could be working to garner support for your cause. - Jesse Stay

Chris can do the podcast all by himself quite well thx - Steve Gillmor

btw interesting comment by ev williams here: http://friendfeed.com/evhead... - Steve Gillmor

Jesse, the specific quote was selected for this audience because of its relevancy. I am part of this passionate community. Don't act like I am not. It's silly. - Louis Gray

Oh, and this: Friendfeed isn't dead. The hero/ine in every story brushes with death a bunch of times before the against-all-odds victory :) - Micah

Louis, I didn't like the statement - it distracted me. The statement is wrong. I'm sick of people saying FriendFeed is dead when it's not. - Jesse Stay

@Jesse stating a fact is not attacking anyone. And I have no special 'cause' other than investing my life and love in the Internet. Commercial reality is that Facebook is Facebook's primary interest, and Paul and Brett, as great as they are (I've met with Brett a number of times) are busy people working on a very successful product that is NOT Friendfeed. - Chris Saad

Chris, what fact? Define "dead". - Jesse Stay

I think I already did. Read the reset of my comment - Chris Saad

Someone needs to post "Friendfeed is dead" but in Turkish, and then stand back. http://friendfeed.com/bret... - Micah

Chris, that doesn't define it as dead if you ask me. It still looks very alive. They're still adding servers to it, they're still fixing bugs, they're still adapting to Twitter's changes. Heck, they're still, very occasionally adding new features. Sure, they're no longer a single team any more, but no one has ever said FriendFeed is going away, and it is still very much alive. Maybe not to you, but to a very passionate community here it still is. - Jesse Stay

But like I said that's a distraction - attacking a community based on your opinion is not a good way to garner support in open platforms. - Jesse Stay

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendf... - Chris Saad

http://friendfeed.com/bret... - Jesse Stay

http://i.imgur.com/YjWta.jpg :D - Chris Saad

Seems to me FriendFeed delivered the right messages to the right people this evening. - Cliff Gerrish

@Cliff Agreed - it's a great platform - it's a shame that it won't get its opportunity to shine. An open alternative will rise to the top sooner or later. The pieces are pretty much already in place - will just need someone to productize it - Chris Saad

Chris - thanks for the chart image you shared above http://i.imgur.com/YjWta.jpg, very cool :) - Susan Beebe

@susan lol actually I can't take credit for it - @jowyang shared it on Twitter earlier this weekend. Thought it might be a funny way to defuse the chart wars that was emerging :) - Chris Saad

Chris - also, nice job on the blog post, still consuming it and all these hyper comments :P - Susan Beebe

Open always seems to sacrifice the present to the future. It's already been productized: it's called FriendFeed. - Cliff Gerrish

Cliff, besides tornado how is FriendFeed open? - Jesse Stay

Tornado is Open Source, that's different to Open Standards. FriendFeed is the most open of all the platforms we've mentioned, but it is still centralized (i.e. you can't spin up your own version and participate) and it creates its own set of data (i.e. these comments) rather than being a pure aggregator - Chris Saad

Chris, exactly - I don't want to pin FriendFeed as open yet until we see the points you mentioned. - Jesse Stay

update from Buchheit - Cliff, "birddog" is just a category of statuses/filter, which is available publicly (see http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streami...). I don't know if anyone is using the birddog role or not. It's available to us and ready to go, but fb lawyers want the tou resolved before we activate it. - Steve Gillmor

The term 'dead' is subjective. Jaiku died, sort of, but try telling that to those STILL using it. How many of you closed your accounts after google bought their team? You didn't give up google but you gave up jaiku. Well, this is no different. Many will leave but saying it's dead in this instance only implies there is no growth. As for the article, I think it states many obvious things. The fact that we're moving away from a closed set of standards and yet continue to embrace twitter and facebook is a little whacked but who said anything had to make sense? People just want to communicate in whatever way makes the most sense and works the best in their lives. I'd posit that in 2 years there will still be a handful using dead friendfeed. They won't care if it's dead or not. Louis Gray may well be one of them, though that's probably not too likely. He is a smart man and if only a handful of people will read him here it won't make sense to hang around. ;o) - Sheryl

People don't just 'read' Louis Gray here, they do life (even if it's just a small slice thereof) together. That goes for others in the community too, not just Louis. - Micah

Jaiku is open source, BTW: http://code.google.com/p... - Kevin Marks

Just wondering before putting the rest of that thread on TTS if the constant reference to dead is also helped by, let's say, bit.ly URL shorteners and tracking of them vs. the FF shares? Thanks for any answer, I just still don't get the whole discussion as I don't follow any of it that line-by-line closely, that was one of the things somehow missing from the puzzle http://friendfeed.com/zjemily... - E.Bailey-2010s Zu's FF

Sheryl, whether it seems so or not, I don't use FriendFeed in order to drive visibility or page views. There are other services that can spike visibility, and I'm not in that game. - Louis Gray

Mmmm.. why can't anyone just take over then, programmatically? Money I suppose? I'm sure alot of people would love entering it, no? - E.Bailey-2010s Zu's FF

Kevin, great point, btw - not to take the argument further, but that would also make Jaiku far from dead, although it still needs more adopting that code. Anyone know how big the developer community is around the Jaiku codebase? - Jesse Stay

Louis, that's not what I intended with my statement. I neither said that nor meant it. I merely meant, if the interest of friendfeed dies, and YOUR friends. network, whatever you call the people you're engaged with should no longer be a part of this community, you likely will go where they are. - Sheryl

Louis, I confess I ONLY use FriendFeed as an easy way to Tweet a referral to a blog post or story I read. That's it. Beyond that, it's a dead zone for me. This is the first conversation I've actually read here in several weeks. For me, FriendFeed is Jaiku 2.0. Both were viable solid platforms I really liked. In both cases, the active community I was part of quickly went silent when they were acquired. It's simply migratory attrition and not a reflection on either the community or any particular technology. - Ken Camp

There you go, now I'm satisfied with the thread. Always good to read the whole thing twice. At least I can thank you group for at least giving me the pleasure of reading a reaction to a very interesting situation. I went fast on the Jaiku code base reference and seen that Google stopped supporting it, but still there's 2 mentions of it with some about new features, it keeps on going anyway, could be testing grounds, anything. Everyone supporting will be active, as Bret is right now, even if less. Let's see after their full integration and implementation at FB in time, then someone may call any sentence with certainty. - E.Bailey-2010s Zu's FF