As anyone that has used FriendFeed knows, the service allows you to aggregate all of your online activity on social networks. However the information is presented in a way that looks similar to the Facebook News Feed Homepage. Everything on the FriendFeed homepage seems to get clustered in that way.
Earlier this week Cliqset went into public beta. The Cliqset application was built using Adobe AIR. Cliqset can aggregate all the same social networks that FriendFeed can, but it allows you to sort the activity in separate modules. Cliqset also has better control of what you the information that you would like to see.
Updates on Cliqset can be shared and commented on. There is also a feature that allows you to “like” certain updates. Would I use it personally? Probably not because I only use Twitter and Facebook the most. For those needs, TweetDeck is good enough for me
However if you have a lot of information to track, I’d highly recommend downloading Cliqset for Adobe AIR. Below is a screenshot of what the service looks like.
This past March, early Facebook investor Peter Thiel revealed how Facebook attempted to buy out Twitter. The offer was $100 million in cash and $400 million in stock options. Twitter refused so Facebook bought out FriendFeed several months later. On top of buying out a Twitter competitor, Facebook is now taking an idea from Twitter and rolling it into their own social network. This idea revolves around responses using the “@” symbol.
Here’s how it works. When putting the @ symbol before a Twitter username, you are essentially responding to them. This response is sent to the user using whatever Twitter software they prefer such as TweetDeck. Now Facebook is adding the same feature within their own service. Below is a screenshot of how it’ll work.
Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.
Friends you tag in your status updates will receive a notification and a Wall post linking them to your post. They also will have the option to remove tags of themselves from your posts. We hope that tagging your status updates and others posts from the Publisher will enable you to share in a more meaningful and engaging way, and connect with even more people. We’re rolling this feature out over the course of the next few weeks, so you may not see the new feature just yet.
Peter Fenton was one of the lead partners behind the investments in SpringSource and FriendFeed. Both of these companies were acquired this past Monday. SpringSource was acquired for $420 million by VMWare and FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook for about $50 million.
Fenton also sits on Twitter’s and Yelp’s board of directors. Benchmark started in 1995 and manages about $2.5 billion in assets. Benchmark made a substantial amount by investing early in eBay too.
Fenton’s staregy for choosing the right companies to invest in is based on when the company’s adoption curve meets the declining risk curve. “The challenge is to identify the acceleration/adoption phase before it’s obvious.” Before SpringSource was acquired, he was deeply involved in the $10 million investment into the company.
Facebook has announced today that they will be acquiring FriendFeed. This is not a shocker because Facebook previously made an attempt to buy out Twitter for $100 million in cash and the $400 million in stock. Over the last year, Facebook has rolled several FriendFeed-like features into the social network. One of the features they took from FriendFeed was the concept of “Like.”
One of FriendFeed’s popular features is that the more comments a story receives on the news feed, the more it floats up to the top. This concept is similar to the Reddit and Digg homepage. FriendFeed’s voting system is real-time, but Facebook’s news feed popular stories constantly has to be refreshed.
As part of the acquisition, FriendFeed’s team will be joining Facebook. This includes Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. Buchheit was responsible for early stage development of GMail over at Google.
Facebook sent out a press release regarding the acquisition. Check it out after the jump:
Facebook has introduced a new feature that reminds me of Digg and FriendFeed. Everytime someone submits some sort of content like an article, photos, videos, links, reviews, etc., there will be a thumbs up or thumbs down button available. Every time someone clicks on thumbs up, it will report who else liked the same content.
“Recently, I had a friend write a note about running her first marathon and another friend upload pictures of his new baby. In both cases, they ended up with over 30 comments, all saying: ‘Awesome!’ ‘Congrats!’ The aggregation of the sentiment ‘I like this’ makes room in the comments section for longer accolades,” stated Facebook employee Leah Pearlman.
Digg and FriendFeed use similar icons. Digg uses these icons to vote comments up or down and FriendFeed uses these icons to indicate whether stories being shared are liked.
Amit Chowdhry | September 18, 2008 | 459 views | Comments Categorized under FriendFeed
FriendFeed has launched a new look for their site and features. For those who don’t know what Friendfeed is, they are a company where you can aggregate data from your Flickr, Twitter, RSS feeds, Picasa, and Amazon.com purchases. FriendFeed added photo uploading capabilities and friend lists can be more customizable.
“The new design offers friend lists to help you organize your subscriptions into groups,” stated Bret Taylor, co-founder of FriendFeed. “Now you can get updates from specific groups of people separately, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.” There is also a new sidebar with lists of groups can be created. If you click these links, then updates will be filtered by those groups. Another feature that has been added to FriendFeed is duplicate story detection. If a bunch of similar content appears on FriendFeed, then it will be automatically aggregated in a Techmeme-like fashion. Fascinating! I haven’t active on FriendFeed, but with these features in place, I think I’ll start paying more attention to it. I like the idea of being able to follow groups of people separately. I think Facebook should do something similar as FriendFeed, but for individual networks.
For example, Facebook should just let me see what updates are from my friends in New York or my friends at Michigan State in separate filtered News Feeds rather than having to manually add friends to a list. FriendFeed has about $5 million in funding from Paul Buchheit, Sanjeev Sing, and Benchmark Capital [Crunchbase].
