Working Webware: FriendFeed Video
Working Webware: FriendFeed Video Transcript
[ Music ] ^M00:00:07 [ Background Music ]
>> Welcome to Working Webware. I'm Dan Farber and I'm enjoined by my colleague Rafe Needleman and our special guest today Bret Taylor from FriendFeed. We've heard a lot about FriendFeed in the halls of CNET so tell us a little a bit about the history and evolution of your service.
>> Okay, well at its core, FriendFeed lets you see the things that you're friends are discovering on the web whether it's a newspaper article, a video, or they published new photos on Flickr. And the unique part about FriendFeed is we automatically pick up all the stuff that you share on web sites around the Internet automatically without any additional effort on your part. So if you dig a story on Digg we'll automatically pick that up and publish it to your friends on FriendFeed and this really becomes sort of a hub for discussing that content that you're friends have shared. It came to be actually--a friend of mine Jim Norris who had helped worked on Google Maps with me at Google. We left Google and became entrepreneurs in residents at a venture capital firm called Benchmark. And we were developing a completely unrelated technology related to storage and on the side I had built this little tool to help me sort of keep track of what my friends are doing online just leveraging syndication formats like our Atom and RSS and the APIs that these web sites already had available. And he really liked it so he started using it and then a few of our friends started using it and soon we've started using that little side project more than the product that we were supposed to be working on and we became sort of an enamored with the concept and more fully developed it and decide to switch courses completely.
>> Now FriendFeed in addition to aggregating all those information...
>> Yeah.
>> Also it serves as a social network unto itself where the comments are just on FriendFeed.
>> Yeah.
>> So somebody posts something from Twitter onto FriendFeed, the comments can be on FriendFeed. So you end up with a parallel social network which seems to be competing with your main concept?
>> Yeah I know it's a really, it's a really interesting point and I think the way we view this, FriendFeed is designed to make all the sites you already used a little more social and it's kind of the glue between them. So part of this was motivated by the fact that, you know, I've worked at Google for four and a half years so I drank the Google CoolAid and all of my products are Google products. So I don't usually--I use [unintelligible]. I use Gmail not Yahoo Mail and it turns out that there's a lot of other popular products out there like Flickr, and Last.fm and all these products that I didn't necessarily use but a lot of my friends did. And so the original thing I cared was just that glue like even though I didn't participate in those networks I wanted to sort of have the social benefit of my friends using them. And so our view is it should be okay that you use one product and your friends use another one and we would like FriendFeed to be the glue. The sort of ironic side effect of that is we are sort of a social network on top of that but that's why we're trying to be sort of as lightweight as possible and really sort of the social glue between them but not provide the functionality that these sites provide that are really oriented toward photos or music or videos.
>> Well the aggregation and the social networking, you know, all makes for a kind of an interesting stew.
>> Yeah.
>> But it's also difficult to digest, so and I'm a FriendFeed user but it's, I'm kind of overwhelmed, it's overflows.
>> Yeah.
>> And what are you doing to make the user experience less confusing?
>> Yeah that's a really a good question and I would say it's part where all of our focus is on in terms of user interface [unintelligible]. The biggest complaint is once you have subscribed to enough people the stream of shared information becomes pretty overwhelming. Some people call it a fire hose that's probably accurate in some cases. And so one of the features we're actually launching this week or the next week depending on how things work out is a tool that will summarize the best of, the best shared stuff from the past day, week or month. So you can get a summary of, you know, here are the 30 things that have been most interesting in among your--the people you're subscribed to over the past days. We're also, you know, working a number of features that are fully developed and we have to talk about that leverage more technology to help you synthesize the information and that's where almost all of our focus is right now.
>> Where's the business?
>> That's a good question. We're, right now we're not monetizing the site so there's no business right now. I think though that we really do think there's a big potential through advertising revenue in this product, you know, one of the things that sort of I think distinguishes between products that--where advertising works well and where it doesn't is how complimentary it is to user experience. And so I think Google search is also probably the ultimate combination of sort of context and compliment, you know, because the ads are useful results for your searches in addition to the search results. And I think some ads on the next to like an article on a web site might not, might have good context but they might not be complimentary, you know, in the sense that they probably take you away from the reason that you're on the side which is to read article. I think that FriendFeed is the type of site where sponsored information would be quite complimentary to the user experience. So if your friend, you know, rented a movie on Netflix, you know, showing an ad related to that movie would probably be really complimentary to the user experience and there's a lot of content.
>> So it's a social media kind of advertising?
>> Yeah and yeah as you said the devil is also in the details. We're not sure how well this will work but we're, you know, we're pretty optimistic that there's a lot of potential there for that.
>> You know as you're going forward you're obviously well funded and a lot of good engineering talent.
>> Yeah.
>> You know how do you see the company evolving?
>> Well, we, you know, we're really in this for the long term. 7 out of the 8 people who are at FriendFeed full time worked at Google before and you know, had pretty secured jobs and we really left this to sort of create the working environment that we wanted to be at for a really long time. And so part of that is we want to create sort of the basis for, you know, really sustainable product and we view content discoveries are very important thing going forward. The amount of information being produced on the Internet is sort of incomprehensible nowadays. You know the past five years with Wikipedia, YouTube, Blogs, there's so much user generated content out there that just sifting through them is I think going to be a very fundamental product in people's lives going forward and the thing they used to sort of filter that content to find the 1 or 2 things that interesting to them personally and we really would like to be that product. We view that as sort of a long term play.
>> Well Bret thanks so much for speaking with us.
>> My pleasure.
>> We've been speaking with Bret Taylor from FriendFeed and when we come back we'll give you our impressions of this service as well as its odds for success. ^M00:06:45 [ Music ] ^M00:06:48 [ Background Music ]
>> We're back. Rafe, I'm a fan of FriendFeed so I'm a little a prejudiced, I think it's gonna be a hit.
>> You do. Well, I, I like it. I've used it but...
>> Like is not very strong.
>> No, it's, I find it a little, it competes for my attention with the [unintelligible] I do use Twitter and so much there's just a lot of overlap in my mind between the two of them. So I like it but I don't love it.
>> but what I like about it is that fact that it aggregates all those streams of content from your friends so that you can actually kind of see it all in one place as opposed to, you know, I have to go to five different places to see it.
>> It doesn't really aggregate them in the way that I'm accustomed to aggregation because it doesn't put things in chronological order. Things that are being discussed pop up to the top and other items fall off at the bottom and you can miss things too easily.
>> I think they do have a lot of work to do on the user interface. It's a big challenge and I think as Bret was saying and they really haven't figured it out yet because it is a new concept in many ways but I do think that that it's one in which, you know, there's a great need.
>> Yeah.
>> Because as we were talking about there's this overflow of information. How are you going to capture it and then rationalize it in some way and I don't think FriendFeed does a great job of rationalizing it yet but at least it's collecting it and I think that they've a lot of smart people there who can figure out what the next steps would be.
>> Right and, while they do this they also have to maintain as well as they can the unique system, the stability of the sites that are feeding into in and not end up competing with them at the same time. But if it works...
>> But it is more of an ecosystem. It's not about competition. It's about...
>> So they say...
>> Let people choose where they want to consume their information. So if they all have open APIs and you can get your Twitter, your Flickr, Facebook notifications, whatever and it can all be dropped into a FriendFeed or there, I'm sure there'll be other competitors trying to do the same thing with less pedigree, why not and a allow people to figure out how do I want to consume my information and some people will want it in Facebook, some people will just use Twitter and some people I think will use a lot of different services and I think FriendFeed is a good way to bring all those pieces together. But I do agree that the social network piece as a whole another interesting layer but where do you want to have those conversations on FriendFreed or on Twitter or on Facebook?
>> Well that's the problem is where do I have a Twitter conversation and so I post something on Twitter and people reply to on Twitter and then I go over to FriendFeed and I see people replying to my Twitter whose on FriendFeed and now I've got the same conversation in two places and I'm getting confused frankly. So maybe that's just me.
>> Well, I think there's going to be another evolution and it will somehow try to deal with the fact that you're having this, you know, you're leaving these droppings all over the place and then how do you...
>> Well put.
>> Find a way to put them together and make that conversation more rational as I was saying.
>> They are on to something and it's not just about Twitter and the Nanoblogs versus all feeding into one service. It really is about all the activities we do online. This is kind of almost Attention Trust 2.0. It's, things that we think are interesting we somehow flag them and then FriendFeed picks them all up, which is useful. The other challenge I have with this is that it's yet another social network reform. In that I have to say I want to follow you, I want to follow this person, I want to follow that person, so and each time you take your network and then you try to add a new network you end up losing people along the way.
>> Welcome to the new frontier of the Internet.
>> Yes.
>> So what do you calculate as odds for success for FriendFeed?
>> Well I think it's a very useful service. They are in the process of, they have opened up their API so people are building new UIs onto it which is important. I think people will continue to use it despite all the reservations that I have. So I think it will go on and probably end up getting acquired by the company that's funded out Google.
>> On a scale of 1-10 odds for success?
>> Six or seven.
>> I'm gonna have to give it a 9.5 odds for success?
>> You don't think that people will compete with it and...?
>> I think people will compete with it but I also think as you said it's likely to get bought by a company like Google and even if it doesn't they can fund it for an eternity probably but what's impressive to me is the talent that they've assemble to build this product. I mean these are people who built some of the core products at Google including back ends for Gmail and Google Maps and so I think that they have an advantage over those people who would try to come in and duplicate what they've done.
>> Well I'd like to see it improve. I do use it. I do like it. I would like to see it improved. I would like to see it getting better, so I hope you're right.
>> Well that's the verdict on FriendFeed for Working Webware. I'm Dan Farber.
>> I'm Rafe Needleman.
>> Thanks for watching. ^M00:11:33
Dan Farber and Rafe Needleman interview Bret Taylor, co-founder of FriendFeed.com, a Web site that enables friends to instantly share and discuss everything they find interesting on the Internet.
