

FriendFeed is shutting down - Mithrandir
http://blog.friendfeed.com/2015/03/dear-friendfeed-community-were.html

======
bbgm
We had a wonderful, thriving life science community [1] on Friendfeed, which
we have not been able to replicate since. Some of that crowd even published a
paper about it [2]. Most of the original crowd left sometime after the FB
acquisition. While many of us hang out on Twitter, it's not the same thing).

\----

1\. [http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists](http://friendfeed.com/the-
life-scientists)

2\.
[http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000263)

~~~
chrisamiller
I miss that interface and community. Even if FriendFeed was still around,
though, I wonder if it would be as popular. That group contained the early
adopters of internet communication among scientists, a movement that has now
grown exponentially. My guess is that the signal would be overwhelmed by
noise, or broken down into sub-groups by specialty, which would overwhelm the
delightful serendipity of it all.

~~~
bbgm
Great question. No idea. The other thing to note is that a lot of the people
who were involved then have moved on to other things and probably could not
stay as involved (pointing at myself). It remains the best time I've had
online.

~~~
chrisamiller
I'm with you there. I had a lot more free time in grad school than I do now
(both personally and professionally). Judging from the updates I see on
twitter and blogs, most of that core group has gone on to bigger, better, more
time-consuming things.

I wonder if the kids these days are using snapchat to complain about how we're
all dinosaurs. :)

------
nine_k
FriendFeed had the best social network mechanics of all social networks I ever
saw. Part of it made it into Facebook now (but I can't consider really using
FB).

Unfortunately, it had no monetization strategy. I suspect that if they had
optional paid accounts by now (e.g. $3/mo), many people would pay just to keep
the thing afloat and their community intact.

Unfortunately, there seem to be only two ways for an online service to last:
to become paid by users commercially, or to become "paid" by users' labor of
love when they install and maintain it. The later practically requires the
service to open its source code.

------
liotier
Thank you FriendFeed - I'll miss you. At some point I thought Friendfeed was
going to take over the world... But as usual I have to be reminded that I am
not representative of the mass audience.

~~~
napolux
+1

------
bootload
best thing to come out of friendfeed, Tornado. I remember asking Bret Taylor
on his blog [0] when he gave a Tornado example if he'd ever release it. A bit
of time went by, then he did. [1] Thanks Bret.

[0] [http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado](http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado)

[1] [https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-
news/9b8fbaed/technology-b...](https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-
news/9b8fbaed/technology-behind-tornado-friendfeed-web)

~~~
nailer
Goddamn Tornado was/is the best Python HTTP server ever. Asides from the wide
utility library of non-blocking IO (years before node got popular) it had
Sinatra-style class based routing that was far simpler than django's bizarre
route.as_route() stuff.

A friend once said the worst thing about Tornado was how little publicity it
got.

~~~
bdarnell
Why all the "was/is" in this subthread? Tornado's not going anywhere.

~~~
nailer
Only reason I wrote 'is/was' because it's been a couple of years since I used
Tornado and other Python HTTP servers might have gotten better. I hack node
all day now.

------
napolux
An interesting Quora answer by Bret about the status of FriendFeed some weeks
ago.

[http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-current-status-of-
FriendFeed](http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-current-status-of-FriendFeed)

~~~
garkrau
And FriendFeed would have still be running if not that question. Bret was
reminded about FriendFeed and decided to take it down completely.

~~~
beolab1700
Bret did not make the decision to close FriendFeed. Bret left Facebook more
than two years ago. He had no involvement.

------
fmavituna
One of those things...

Friendfeed was technically better medium than twitter in every single way at
the time (maybe still) yet it died (don't mean that it failed). Another
example of why making social startups is a huge risk.

~~~
wojciechpolak
It was much better for me than Twitter, but once the acquisition happened (FB
w/ a rumored $50M), they decided to show the middle finger to its users. Isn't
this the same as what happened to the thesixtyone (t61)?

~~~
beolab1700
They kept the service running for more than five years after the aqui-hire. I
wouldn't call that showing the middle finger.

~~~
demachina
I suspect he was referring to the FriendFeed founders giving their user
community the middle finger by cashing out to Zuck. People are going to do
what is in their own self interest so you can’t exactly blame the founders for
that.

As I recall FriedFeed’s growth had plateaued so they probably figured it
wasn’t going to compete with FB and Twitter. Mobile and apps were also
starting to take the world then too.

------
kalleboo
The Archive Team on the case to archive the content as usual #humancentifeed
[https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/575143304859361280](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/575143304859361280)

~~~
jimminy
I think the Archive Team is going to have a hard time preserving Friendfeed
content, due to resource limitations of the platform. For example, it only
provides a very limited amount of data through the frontend (was 600 posts,
now slightly higher), and slightly more through the API (10,000).

I'm currently working on a system, but it requires user input, in order to
bypass the limitations of the API.

------
andrea_sdl
I personally hate when services let people down. I prefer a much more "future
oriented" approach much like the one from Basecamp
[https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3830-ta-da-list-until-the-
end...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3830-ta-da-list-until-the-end-of-the-
internet)

or the idea behind [https://posthaven.com/](https://posthaven.com/)

I guess it's all about vision and how to delight your customers. All the
people who believed in a product are people who trusted your words, and gave
you access to a lot of their information. Yet it's so easy to let them down
and shut down a service. It was for springpad, it now is for friend feed.
Sometimes it's about the money sometimes it's about the users (I guess it's
always about the money though).

But I can't help it, I prefer when you can trust a service,and I'd be willing
to pay as long as I know that service will stay up even if I'm the only user.

~~~
ozten
They continued to run FriendFeed for 5 years after it was clear the core team
was moving on. That is above and beyond the call of duty.

37 Signals has a healthy business with good revenue building only "sane"
products. To compare the two is apples to oranges.

~~~
andrea_sdl
I know they are not the same kind of business, and I didn't want my view to
sound harsh, sorry if it seemed that way.

As you said they did A LOT for the friendfeed platform even after it was
somewhat decided they would have not mantained anymore, that is not something
I want to ignore.

My point is that many services are born and die, some of them die because they
weren't building "sane" products. It's a choice, not complaining about that,
but I personally prefer when there's a path ahead that won't let the users
down because they weren't relying on funding or other things to stay up, but
only on the power of their users.

Maybe I'm asking for something impossible? Dunno, but the PostHaven/Basecamp
thing is giving me hope :)

------
gourneau
Sad to see it officially shutdown. I have been using their API for years on my
crusty personal page. It has been rock solid.

------
wslh
How can I export my data? I know there is an API but it will be incredible
useful to have a link to download everything.

Google Reader had an option to export your data when they closed their web
service.

~~~
sp332
You could only export your feed URLs from Google Reader. They had content
archived, but you couldn't easily export the content. People wrote their own
scrapers, it was a big mess and no one knows how much content only existed in
Reader that was deleted when it went down.

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dksidana
It might make sense if they can opensource the code.

~~~
buraksarica
+1

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wnevets
I forgot all about friendfeed about the time facebook bought it. I remember it
being quite good.

