FriendFeed - the ultimate e-spectator sport. (Note: Click here for transcript) In a world where self-expression is increasingly encouraged and exploited, a new type of activity has formed – observing the online activities of friends. Recently-launched FriendFeed is an extremely easy-to-use service that lets you see the content across the Web your friends or people who randomly end up in your network are sharing. It’s a mash up – to use the au courant term – of more than two dozen sharing and communication tools and services from Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Flickr, Netflix Queue, Amazon’s Wishlists and YouTube. FriendFeed recently raised $5 million for a $20 million post-money valuation, said Paul Buchheit, who recently stopped into the Vator studios for an interview with me.
Mountain View, Calif. Unlike Facebook, FriendFeed captures what friends are reading or consuming across the Web. “Facebook is about friends’ activities,” said Paul. Indeed, on my friend feeds on FriendFeed I can see what Michael Parekh is twittering about. Yuval Atzmon » FriendFeed Has ~75,000 Active Users (Personal Res. I believe my little research project has gathered enough data to produce some meaningful results. Please read my previous post regarding the methodology and imitations of this analysis. Just to clarify, my analysis covers only active and public FriendFeed users, and only those I was able to discover. But enough with the disclaimers, let’s see some numbers.
How many FriendFeed users are there anyway? For now I stopped crawling at about 60K users since I was discovering less and less new users with every crawl until it became clear that I’m discovering users who have just joined or existing inactive users who just happened to post something and went back to sleep. Basically they don’t interest me in the context of this little research. Factoring in a few technical limitations, API coverage issues and some secret sauce, I assume I’m missing about 15-20% of the users. What is the public/private ratio? Who are the most popular FriendFeed Users? What next? FriendFeed Adds Search, And Suddenly Feels Like A Destination Si.
FriendFeed, a service that aggregates social network information, just launched quite a nice little search feature. Users can search by individual, friends, or all users, and specify the search only to specific services like Twitter or Delicious. A basic search box is on every page. Advanced search is here. FriendFeed is clearly more than a simple service to aggregate lots of data from other websites and then access it via RSS. Users can comment directly on posted items (and do so frequently).
Now they can search, too. More and more FriendFeed is looking like a destination site built on the back of all that third party data. That’s smart of them, and it’s something we’ve seen in the past. The company has had a huge surge in users the last week or so (and remember, the service only officially launched on February 25). And back to those Twitter comparisons for just a moment – FriendFeed now has a robust search feature just weeks after launch. Yuval Atzmon » FriendFeed Active Users Crawler. Following my previous post, my FriendFeed crawler is ready.
Well, at least a version 0.1 of it. Actually it didn’t take too long to develop and it was a nice exercise. In any case I have sent it to crawl the FriendFeed main feed at regular intervals and I should be getting some initial results soon. I will share them of course but first of all we need to understand the methodology and limitations of my analysis.
How does the crawler work? The crawler starts with the current public feed. So generally speaking the process is: 1) read the feed 2) discover users 3) extend discovery through subscriptions 4) repeat. What kind of data is collected? The crawler generates a long list of pairs where each pair represents a single subscription, a relation between a subscriber and the user he is subscribed to. What are the imitations? Any interesting numbers to share? The crawler is running. Yuval Atzmon » Mapping FriendFeed’s Social Graph. While working on a social media trends project (I’ll probably write more about it in the future but for now there’s not much to say or show), I had this idea that I think I’m going to investigate. FriendFeed lets you see a user’s subscriptions but it doesn’t let you see which users are subscribed to that user.
For example, you can see who Robert Scoble follows, but you can’t see Scoble’s followers (the list of users subscribed to his feed). So, I’m thinking maybe I can crawl the public feed, discover users and read their subscriptions. Each subscription will point at other users to discover and so on. Once I get enough data, I can just look at the list of subscriptions from the opposite direction (from the subscribers point of view), meaning I would be able to see which users and how many are subscribed to a user.
This will effectively give an estimate as to the “social weight” of that user, at least among the active and discoverable users of FriendFeed. Interesting. FriendFeed, The Centralized Me, and Data Portability. It’s definitely FriendFeed month in Silicon Valley. The company, founded by ex-Googlers, let you aggregate information and activity streams from all of the various services that you use on the internet – Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blog posts, delicious bookmarks, Twitter messages, and other stuff (33 services total to date). Your friends subscribe to your stuff, and see a stream of data on their home page coming from everyone they follow.
The site also allows users to add content directly, comment on information and, more recently, added an excellent search feature that is still sorely lacking in Twitter. The site is more than a list of feeds that can be re-exported. FriendFeed wants to be a destination site, too. And their growth is very strong, given that the service only launched publicly a month ago.
Last week the site announced the availability of an API, which allows third party services to easily add in FriendFeed data and features. Is Data Portability The Anti-FriendFeed? Getting to know the FriendFeed team. The one business that has most gotten my attention, other than Qik.com, so far this year is FriendFeed. They are growing very quickly, 25% every few days. Today I was fortunate to meet up with co-founder Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit. If you don’t read these two guys’ blogs (here’s Paul’s and here’s Bret’s), you really should, they have written a ton of stuff that entrepreneurs should read. It’s long, 46 minutes or so, but today I visited FriendFeed’s offices and met up with their team, which includes some of the original authors of Google Maps and Google Gmail, who left Google to start FriendFeed. We learned a lot (there were people asking questions on my cell phone thanks to Qik) and we learned that they are attempting to build a new, scalable, culture.
At 2:57 we cover what FriendFeed is, that’s really where the interview starts getting interesting. What do you think? The first video ends abruptly when the 3G disappeared, we restarted the phone and finished off the interview here. FriendFeed Hits Nearly One Million Visitors; Grew Tenfold In The. While 2008 was Twitter’s hockey-stick year, Twitter’s little brother FriendFeed is also beginning to show hockey-stick tendencies in its growth. According to comScore, FriendFeed attracted 950,000 unique visitors worldwide in December. That’s a tenfold increase since June, when comScore counted only 93,000 unique visitors worldwide (and nearly double since September, when it was 550,000). Twitter.com, by comparison, which is raising money at a $250 million valuation, has four times as many visitors (4.35 million worldwide in December). While recently there was some debate about whether Twitter has passed Digg, the real question might be whether FriendFeed can ever catch up to Twitter.