A question: Does FriendFeed have to compete anymore? Is there any shame in coming 3rd or 4th? I know people who shoot with Fuji and Sony cameras, not because they are the best, but because they like it and it works for them. - Johnny Worthington

But Robert - news makers have never supported Friendfeed-- - TechFuga

Good point. They don't bother since Fb owns Friendfeed. Remember, FF indirectly already has a deal with Bing becuase Fb has a deal with Bing. And FF is now indirectly owned by micrososft ( thier 15% stake in Fb, remember). I wouldn't worry so much. - Roberto Bonini

FriendFeed won't win... but there is no reason it should not even run the race. - Johnny Worthington

TechFuga: not true. I supported FriendFeed and I'm noticing a ton of action over on Twitter that, well, simply isn't happening here. http://twitter.com/scoblei... is just a taste. - Robert Scoble

Roberto, I was going to make that point also. FF is no longer an independent site battling for market share. They are a technology proving ground for FB with a vibrant community. ;) - travispuk

I finally removed the FriendFeed desktop notifier from my computer. It no longer updates in real time. It's a shame because it used to send me a notification within seconds of someone publishing on twitter or friendfeed - something that the desktop twitter clients couldn't even do because of Twitter API. - joebrooks

Johnny: the problem is that FriendFeed is going to be just a niche player. It's certainly not the dream community I once dreamed of. Not saying it won't be fun, but already the home page isn't the kind of things I care about. - Robert Scoble

And, Johnny, that realization is quite different than how I approached FriendFeed five months ago where I was demoing it to tech audiences around the world. - Robert Scoble

Do you not think friendfeed still wins for easy conversations though? You still couldn't have done this on twitter. I hate trying to talk to people on Twitter. - Simon Wicks

We are totally going to be niche... and I'm comfortable with that now. The coming issue which not many people talk about is the fact that all my social groups don't mix. I have 2 or 3 sets of friends, with different social norms and contexts. I like being in a few different places. Lumping them all on one service, and feeding them the different slices, is just to much trouble to manage for me. - Johnny Worthington

Err, Robert. You just said "I once dreamed of". Sure everyone wanted FF to succeed, but not everyone saw it becoming the next facebook, myspace or twitter (or even google). Where FF is now does not detract from its awesomeness, does not give us an excuse to ignore it and it continues to be, for many of us, the social platform of the future. Your dreams arn't everyone elses' dreams. - Roberto Bonini

Just a quick look at some of my lists and I notice that twitter in generally is about 6 minutes late, and sometimes are published out of order. Is that just my computer, or the same for everyone else? Being 6 minutes late to the conversation is not helpful. - joebrooks

No, but I saw it as being more important than it is today, which if you are truthful, is not all that important. And, sorry, it's not the social platform of the future. It might be the best feature set of today, but remember Pownce? It had more features than Twitter and was a niche player like FriendFeed is. What happened to it? - Robert Scoble

@Johnny, what if something like FB allowed you to categorize all your contacts into social groups... not just grouping them as you can now, but properly categorizing them and then determining which parts of your news feed is available to which category etc. I see the problem with FB contacts is that it is mostly the people you are really close to, which also dictates the type of information you share. However if your information is automatically allocated to particular categories and the social groups don't mix, would the single place to be work? - travispuk

J. Abdul: it's part of my own grieving process. It's also just my personality. I invested a LOT of my career into FriendFeed and now I realize that it just isn't going to be what I was thinking it would be. - Robert Scoble

Robert, I would say you invested your time into the idea of what FriendFeed could be, and that gave the idea a far amount of weight. When people look back at history and speak of the move to a real time web, your name will feature amongst the players. - Johnny Worthington

Wrong choce of words there Robert. I meant, "platform" as in something you build on. This is a feature set to build upon in future social networks. - Roberto Bonini

@Robert is FF becoming another Second Life: still alive but only for a few aficionados? FF is the tail of a long tail? :) - roldano

@Robert I feel your pain Robert - how many of us in the industry have had that feeling about some technology or company we actually worked for years on. But who knows what Fb will do with FF yet - none of us can see the future in technology. Something game changing comes along and bang, an existin technoloy becomes useful aain - Arthur Coleman

Simon: for now, yes, it does win at conversations. That's one thing I will keep using it for. But that's like a sub feature of these things and it's only a matter of time before Twitter does comments. Facebook already has comments that work pretty well (albeit not as well as FriendFeed). - Robert Scoble

J. Abdul-Qahhar: yeah, but part of my brand is to tell the truth and not necessarily what you want to hear. I got a TON of shit from people on Twitter telling me to shut up about FriendFeed already. My brand is about what's next, not what is, and, I also live in public. Which means I'm a butthead sometimes and that's also part of my brand. :-) - Robert Scoble

BTW. Robert, thanks. You made me write that letter :) - Johnny Worthington

Roldano: if FriendFeed turns into Second Life (which is doing quite well, albeit without the hype) that would be very cool and probably the best possible outcome at this moment. - Robert Scoble

Johnny: that's why I keep telling you the way I see it. It might not be comfortable, but telling the truth ALWAYS builds stronger communities. Your letter demonstrates why. - Robert Scoble

IF bret and paul are to be belived, FF is not being orphaned by Facebook. There are new servers in the works, some work has been done to the code etc. i doubt money would be spend on new servers if FF was being left to die. I'm sticking around till we see what paul was hinting at. - Roberto Bonini

Roberto, saying new servers in FB world is just moving the FF code to a FB server. I don't think any money has been spent, just space/cpu provisioned on an already massive farm. - travispuk

Still - its an investment in FF's continued life. And i doubt they would do that, much less tell us about it, unless they were comitted to FF. - Roberto Bonini

FriendFeed can't die! Things are so easy to put into FF (Bookmarklet) that newsmakers don't have to make a huge effort to "support" it. - Nathan Snyder

Roberto: Travis is correct. New servers are just Paul's way of saying that everything is moving over to Facebook's datacenter. I'm sure they got some new toys, though, and that will help speed a little bit (FriendFeed is a LOT slower lately than it was a year ago) but my friends at Facebook say that not much, if any, engineering time is being dedicated to FriendFeed specifically. But I've said enough about that part and can't wait to see what Paul shows me soon. - Robert Scoble

would be good to organize persuasive reasons for FB to nurture development of FriendFeed in the pure form we enjoy today. Thinking there may be some $$ value just in terms of PR - both internal and external. What else beyond that? What might motivate Facebook to actively support more open-source development of the FriendFeed platform? Could it make good return on that investment as a monstrously successful good vibe buzz machine - "the next Mozilla project"? - Dan Freeman

Dan: open source community projects haven't seemed to go very far. Look at identi.ca. - Robert Scoble

true more often than not - some do - but no need get sidetracked debating open-source! The Big Question to brainstorm is: what pitch can Paul polish to persuade FB to sincerely support continued growth of standalsone "pure" FF project - Dan Freeman

Dan: the deeper problem for Paul is, where can he make the biggest impact on the world? Working on FriendFeed or working on Facebook? If I were him I would be 100% working on Facebook. - Robert Scoble

FF can compete if news orgs can realize the benefits. Best way to do that is to see a competitor utilizing FF tools, gaining traffic, or doing something that makes others say "I want that." - TheIndustryStandard

Another question for Paul: how can FF community help (even with the small but significant detail work - and bouncing spammers) ... what else? - Dan Freeman

Robert, I agree, I can see a time when Facebook will be the equivalent of the telephone directory (white pages etc). Facebook is definitely where a difference can be made, especially with Paul's openness agenda. - travispuk

"I would be 100% working on Facebook" - agree 100% - and Paul definitely has his work cut out for him there. Huge. - Dan Freeman

Why is FaceBook so hard to like, it's laborious, filled with the wrong applications (Games like FARM, Friggin MAFIA) and is not simple in ease of use terms. I use it but find I spend too much time trying to figure where things are than actually get something done. I must have a learning disability I guess. - Owen Greaves

Facebook is a nightmare when it comes usability. Looks like it was designed by a pack of monkeys with ADHD. - Tony C (Unrated) from fftogo

LOL @Tony - Roberto Bonini

Yeah, college students. (p.s. I am one (a college student, not FB dev)) - Kevin L

I don't mind the 'design' of Facebook, it is relatively clean, however the UX is where it is let down. - travispuk

Not sure I agree with you assessment. FF is a different animanl and integrating with FB is not something I need or want. - Poka Yoke from twhirl

IMO, fb needs to integrate ff feature set and provide much more fine grained control over privacy. I want to be able to have public, less public and private information. I want to be able to control who gets what information. For instance, if I share a funny link it's fine for anyone to get it including google/bing, but if I'm sharing my location info I might only want my family to be able to see that. - John

News makers using twitter kills the news makers. I don't think friendfeed was ever about Newsmakers looking for a platform. - Cjay

Cjay: every single newsmaker I know came here looking for it to be a new platform that would take Twitter on. RWW even used it to plan out their editorial in a private group here. When I choose a new platform I'm definitely looking to use it as a platform for newsmakers to discuss things. I saw FriendFeed as being a new kind of talk radio. Actually, what has captured everyone's interest along those lines? Google Wave. If they hadn't stuck that into an ugly email metaphor people like Leo Laporte would have dropped FriendFeed like a rock. - Robert Scoble

The news makers platform is pure RSS. Twitter and friendfeed feels like the old belt clip pager from the 80's, a quick message here and there, but no way in hell that your going to convey any detail about any news using a platform like friendfeed or twitter. - Cjay

RSS channels are the "WAVE" of the future. Everybody has a channel, Google wave is a small ripple in a big pond..Google should have never told anybody about it until it was finished. Companies have been using this idea anyway on internal Lan/vpn for years... and all of a sudden Google comes out with wave, like its some holy grail. Change Facebook to Friendbook and call it done. - Cjay

but I digress...... - Cjay

Spot on Robert - Ryan Petty

I'll point out that today, FF features are in FB. The news stream is live (if you want it) I want the Status stream live, since I don't want apps in my stream and have made the status stream my default. FB is too cluttered, and the ads are pointless and annoying. I find FF far superior in terms of design, as I do Twitter, but I understand that ads are required for most websites to survive. I just wish that they would be nicer and less obtrusive (and that Friends would stop sending me Mafia Wars Requests) - Nathan Snyder