

Blame FriendFeed - markbao
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/24/blame-friendfeed/

======
tptacek
Can somebody translate this to English? I can't tell what parts are sarcastic,
and I can't decode the cryptic in-jokes.

~~~
randy
Translation (as I read it):

Twitter was down due to a bug in their Jabber APIs.

Although FriendFeed does not use this API, I obviously don't know that, so
I'll pretend to act smart and smugly blame them for Twitter's downtime.

Also, FriendFeed has nothing going for them minus Twitter. Forget about their
34 other supported services, evangelical community, and the fact that we
already proclaimed them this years Twitter
([http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/14/friendfeed-is-this-
year...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/14/friendfeed-is-this-years-
twitter-but-why/)). Yup, nothing.

Now if you'll forgive me, I must return to sucking on the teat of my God that
is Twitter.

In other news, I am high as a kite.

~~~
breily
Nice try at playing Mark Pilgrim - evidently you disagree with the article.
You're right that Friendfeed probably doesn't use the Jabber API, but what
else is wrong about it?

I don't use friendfeed, but whenever I see friendfeed widgets on people's
blogs, they have nothing but Twitter messages and RSS entries - I can get
those elsewhere, with no trouble at all. If Twitter blocks friendfeed, what
else do they have going for them?

~~~
randy
So, I don't think I'm really the most qualified person to answer this
question, as I don't use Twitter at all (I do understand the potential value
of it, but I think the fanaticism surrounding it is beyond silly) and have
only recently started to scan FF (sometimes I'm able to pick up a cool link or
two with minimal time investment, which is good).

I disagree with the post because it contains over the top sensationalism,
misinformation, and trivial matters -- not because I've a FF evangelist like
some others noted in the post.

Those things being said, I do think they have a few things going for them
(Disclaimer: I was interested in interning there this summer, but had
committed to a position by the time they got back to me):

Minus Twitter, they're still supporting 34 other services.
(<http://friendfeed.com/about/faq#services>).

Their team seems pretty strong if you ask me, or anyone with a clue
(<http://friendfeed.com/about/team>).

Some people obviously like the service
(<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/?metric=uv>).

There's a few other things but honestly, to me, by and far the strongest point
about FF seems to be their vision as a content discovery service
(<http://mashable.com/2008/03/25/podcast-friendfeed/>). They're gathering a
lot of data, and while it may not seem very useful or valuable yet, I think
when they work it all out, it will really be something special. You might want
to read Paul Bucheit's (one of the co-founders of FF + Gmail creator) post on
this ([http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/04/power-of-links-
and-...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/04/power-of-links-and-value-of-
global.html)).

To be fair, I do think they have a few things going against them as well:

Out of the box, there's way too much noise on the service right now. Although
they've given users fairly good tools to deal with it (Subscriptions, Likes,
Hiding, Views, Rooms, etc.), it's still not good/easy enough for most users. I
just want to see interesting content without any work or knowledge on my part.
Even simple things like sorting by most likes or most comments (or some sort
of magic 'ContentRank') would go a long ways. They are working on this, so
we'll see how it goes (in the meantime, you could check out
<http://friendfeedlinks.com/>, but it doesn't seem very satisfying to me
because it's only for the link/digg entries of FF).

Facebook seems to be trying to get in on this space by integrating external
services (<http://mashable.com/2008/05/23/facebook-friendfeed/>) as well as
their upcoming profile re-design: "As part of the redesign, Facebook is
dramatically playing up the role of its News Feed"
(<http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9949475-7.html>). To be fair, they are in
slightly different groups (Subscription Model vs. Friend Model - Relatively
Open vs. Relatively Closed), but FB still poses a very big threat (not to FF's
current user base, who all seem think FB is old and lame, but to their
potential future user base).

To get perhaps get a more qualified (though obviously a little biased)
perspective of what they have going for them, you might want to check out what
some of their users think:
<http://friendfeed.com/e/cf6b48c8-29d8-11dd-92fc-003048343a40>

P.S. You note that when you see widgets on people's blogs, they're twitter
loaded. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it, I mean how often do
you post photos on Flickr versus sending out a tweet? Again, this is an issue
with noise. You'd probably be way more interested in their non-tweets if only
they'd show up.

------
joao
The difference between TechCrunch posts such as this and Valleywag: at least
Valleywag don't take themselves too seriously.

~~~
brlewis
What should I do right now? Should I do some hacking or write "Why not to get
on covered on TechCrunch"?

~~~
brlewis
Hacked a tiny embeddable slide show.

------
nuggien
Where do I sign the petition to ban *crunch posts on HN?

~~~
ivankirigin
You'll find the petition here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/newest>

or here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/submit>

to get other content to the front page

------
ojbyrne
I'm not a big fan of Mr. Gillmor, but some of this was nearly cogent, and even
funny.

And it seems to me, the fact that friendfeed is entirely parasitic makes one
wonder how it can survive once it actually starts to compete with the sites it
aggregates. Of course the same thing could have been of google once upon a
time.

~~~
randy
I don't know, maybe by perhaps driving traffic back towards the original site?
Yeah, I think that's how it worked for Google (and all other services that
have APIs). You might even have heard of the little known market known as SEO
these days (or in more familiar words: parasite baiting).

~~~
ojbyrne
"Perhaps" is a good word. Not to be snarky, just that the result is still in
doubt. You have to be large relative to the sites you're aggregating to
"drive" traffic.

~~~
randy
It seems like it's really just a matter of personal semantic interpretation to
me. Did Hacker News not drive some traffic to TechCrunch as a result of this
post? How much bigger must Hacker News be relative to TechCrunch for it to
begin "driving" traffic as opposed to some other verb? According to who?
Either way, call it whatever you'd like, but the point remains that
driving/sending/adding/creating/dispatching/routing traffic and/or increasing
visibility is what these "parasites" have going for them. Whether or not
that's worth the cost of letting them "leech" is debatable, but I'm going to
go with yes given that people keep on cranking out APIs.

P.S. Since you didn't seem to notice, "perhaps" was sarcasm on my part.
FriendFeed will most certainly create some additional traffic and/or
visibility for the sites it "leeches" off of. It is important, however, to
note that traffic != visibility. Sometimes times visibility detracts from
traffic because there's no need to visit the source (i.e. Google Maps,
YouTube, Scribd, etc.) but other times it creates traffic because the source
provides added value (i.e. Thumbnails -> Larger Image, HN Links -> Stories,
etc.). It's also worthwhile to note that the former (increase in visibility,
decrease in traffic) still has benefits, as your service becomes more well
known (creating future traffic). I'll leave you with this:
<http://friendfeed.com/e/d1ffcc73-040a-5609-6168-993c4549591a>

~~~
ojbyrne
There's one rather large difference between Hacker News driving traffic to
Techcrunch, and FriendFeed driving traffic to twitter. Hacker News doesn't
actually scrape techcrunch or get it's content via an api.

From a practical viewpoint (and this is why I used the word parasite - not to
be pejorative, but to indicate that FF is entirely dependent on its hosts),
Friendfeed could be shutdown tomorrow by the sources. If they're using APIs,
then just about every api out there is for non-commercial use, and if they're
scraping, then an appropriate robots.txt, backed up by IP blocking and
lawyers, does the trick.

------
jonknee
TechCrunch didn't exactly have a high bar for technical knowledge before, but
Gillmor is definitely lowering the bar. He's the John Dvorak of web 2.0. He's
perfect for TC's style of throwing shit up against the wall and not linking
(and possibly blocking) anyone that refutes it.

