Facebook eats FriendFeed; Mark Zuckerberg is Charles Foster Kane

In a sign that Facebook's not happy with Twitter being the "pulse of the planet", it acquired rival social network FriendFeed today. Yes, Facebook gets all of the FriendFeed ex-Google employees. Bully for them. But what does it mean for a person like me who's on both sites? For the answer, I checked Friend Feed's blog.

Well, to the unaided eye nothing. But then everything. Here's my hypothesis: look for Facebook to morph into FriendFeed such that all of the content from your social networks will easily find their way into your Facebook profile. On Flickr and uploaded a new photo? You'll see it on Facebook. And you can already see your tweets on Facebook, but if you're on about 14 main sites like I am (and 34 in all) you can't see all of them on Facebook; look for that to change too. That's just my prediction, but one thing's clear: Facebook just bought itself "Citizen Kane-style", the best engineers around. This is the press release that one can see at Friend Feed:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Mark Zuckerberg is Charles Foster Kane



In the classic movie and one of my favorites "Citizen Kane" when Kane (played by the late Orson Wells) acquired a little known paper called "The Enquirer" it was far behind the rival Chronicle in circulation and the Chronicle had the best writers around. Six years later, Kane built the Enquirer's circulation and bought the Chronicle's writers and moved them to the Enquirer. That's essentially what Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook has done; bring it the best talent. It's certainly an epic move because it's one that will boost Facebook's already lofty online presence.

Who's Facebook aiming after?

The popular view, advanced by TechCrunch because it's take and readership, is that Facebook got FriendFeed to go after Twitter, but legendary tech blogger Robert Scoble has a different view: he thinks its Google that's their target and has some great points, foremost is that Google does not have "real time search" and FriendFeed does.

What's real time search? It's an on-the-spot updating of your content. Check Robert's blog for an example of this now (just look on the right at the scrolling widget). It's a great way for searching for "who's chatting about what, now" unlike what was written years ago, which is what Google does today. Now, Facebook has an advantage over Google here in an area that Google considered a priority. Robert likes the move and so do I.

Anonymous Internet Trolls Sued By Yale Women

I learned of this from TechCrunch , where Michael Arrington wrote "Although the case may well turn into an argument in relation to free speech online, it’s difficult to sympathize with the trolls. Free speech does need to be defended but it must be respected; with any power comes responsibility. Slandering people anonymously, particularly where that slander has direct consequences is a step too far."

I totally agree, yet there are people who pose as Anonymous Internet Trolls and lurk on sites like The Daily Kos , and seem to delight in trying to be insulting and hurful, and they do so behind a fake name and generally with no other website to track them down at.

I call them cowards who would not say what they write to anyone in public, and be considered pretty fucked up if they did.

As a Barack Obama supporter, I've got some weird comments; so many that after the last one, I elected to disallow comments from all but registered Blogger users.

According to Reuters,.. after facing lewd comments and threats by posters, two women at Yale Law School filed a suit on June 8 in U.S. District Court in New Haven, Connecticut, that includes subpoenas for 28 anonymous users of the site, which has generated more than 7 million posts since 2004.

According to court documents, a user on the site named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled "Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law." Another threatened to rape and sodomize her, the documents said.

The plaintiff, a respected Stanford University graduate identified only as "Doe I" in the lawsuit, learned of the Internet attack in the summer of 2005 before moving to Yale in Connecticut. The posts gradually became more menacing.

Some posts made false claims about her academic record and urged users to warn law firms, or accused her of bribing Yale officials to gain admission and of forming a lesbian relationship with a Yale administrator, the court papers said.

This news certainly should come as welcome to bloggers like Kathy Sierra, who was the target of death threats by Anonymous Internet Trolls, some of which took to wildly insulting and scary methods of hurting her with words and pictures, and for no reason -- no good reason that is.

I for one do no allow Anonymous Internet Trolls to write on this blog save for the occasional person who's trying to make money by adding a link to some program they sponsor. I'm fine with that. But in other cases, forget it. I want names. I want you to be known so we can have the authorities track you down.

Now, someone reading that last sentence might cringe, thinking about the many politically motivated blogs that need to protect their writers. Hey, I've got no problem with protecting righfully subversive political figures, but that's where a need for a community of people who really protect these figures is needed. Look, if a government wants to find even a "blogger in hiding" it can do it; a system -- a social system to keep these change-agents protected, even if it means getting them out of the country itself and to America, is needed.

My point is that we have so many Anonymous Internet Trolls running around they've spoiled the soup for the nice and respectful bloggers. Perhaps we have to remove the good with the bad as the community does not seem to want to police itself.

We've got to do it for them.