I love friendfeed

For a few months now I've been using a new web service that is super useful. It's created by a few ex-Google luminaries and it's called friendfeed.

At it's core friendfeed keeps track of all my activity on a dizzying array of social web services (delicious, flickr, picasa, last.fm, twitter, google reader, posts to this blog and more) and republishes it as a news feed to which any of my friends can subscribe. I can also add directly to my feed using their handy bookmarklet.

At the same time, I can subscribe to other peoples' feeds and friendfeed will aggregate all their news along with mine into my own personal digest. In this digest, I can comment on activities, 'like' them and generally discover great stuff on the web.

That all sounds pretty useful, but what has exalted friendfeed to 'loved' status? It's a bunch of little things really, all of which start with user focus. Things like:

• Open-ness - my friendfeed is available pretty much any way I like. On their site, RSS, iGoogle, Facebook, embedded on the right hand side of this blog!
• Listening to their users - since they got up and running there's been an active Google Group in which the founders talk to users and listen out for bug reports and feature requests. Within a couple of weeks of launching they responded to user feedback that last.fm was clogging up their feeds by changing the way they reported the last.fm activity. Simple, and great.
• Change, change, change - new services added. New features seemingly every day. Using friendfeed is the gift that keeps on giving!
• Using their own product - Paul, Brett and the team are active friendfeeders. In the early days their feeds were the glue that held it all together and now they are regular participants in long debates and continue to post great things.
• Speed - the team at friendfeed are seemingly obsessed with speed (not surprising given thru heritage). They had a distributed crawler from day 1. They experimented tirelessly to speed up the updates from twitter.

So what next for friendfeed. Well I second the requests for upgrades from Louis Gray. The big thing for me is that friending is an all or nothing thing. It'd be great to be able to opt out of specific services (mainly twitter actually) for certain users. Actually, I'm confident that this and many other little bundles of innovation are on their way, so I'll give them a bit of grace on this one!

Another question is, given that they are creating bags of user value, are they creating shareholder value (for their backers at Benchmark)? I think yes, and on lots of different levels.

At the most basic level they are creating ad inventory and there's the ability to include sponsored elements in peoples' feeds similar to Facebook. I think the chaps at friendfeed are too smart for this. It's way too early in the life of the service to consider ads and anyway I think it would undervalue what they are building.

The second level is that they are creating loads of beautiful data. Relationships between people, information about webpages and services. The sort of stuff that search engine would be pretty interested in and the sort of data that the 'social revolution' is all about. In their privileged position as aggregator they are like delicious, twitter, and Google Reader all rolled into one.

The third and potentially most interesting level is that they are creating a platform that is a genuine competitive advantage. The focus on speed and scaling is something you don't often see in early stage start ups (see twitter's downtime issues). It means that even if a Yahoo or Google releases a competitive product friendfeed will continue to have a competitive advantage. A head start in knowing the nuances of crawling these various web services in the most efficient way is a defensible advantage (when you have smart people at the helm).

Anyway, I wish them the best 2008 can offer them and I hope I'll continue to be one of their happiest users...