This morning Gareth Jones, Editor of Revolution Magazine, asked if I’d like to bosh out an opinion piece on the five things that digital marketing people need to know about Why Facebook bought Friendfeed – it’s here ‘Revealed: why Facebook acquired FriendFeed’.
The five aspects of the deal I picked out for marketers to be aware of are:
1. ‘Real-time’ is the social media soup du jour
2. FriendFeed is a stepping-stone between Facebook and Twitter
3. Google and Facebook are fighting it out
4. Discovering content needs more than Google Search
5. Conversations happen around content
If you’re not familiar with FriendFeed so much, or want to think about what the deal means for the bigger picture, check out the piece. (This piece is for digital marketers so if you’re some kind of sick gnarly social media black-belt you probably don’t need it – you need other things, like daylight and poetry).
This social web thing. It’s hard to keep up, no? Sheesh :)
One Comment
Good post – clearly focussed on the technological ecosystem/landscape perspective. The other perspective to bear in mind is that of opportunity and business.
As you said in the full article, Friendfeed’s core team includes many ex-Googlers. Facebook had already pinched a bunch of FF ideas and there seems little that would stop them from developing whatever clever ideas FF developed in the future. Essentially, with a bigger dev team, more funding and a far bigger user base, FF was always going to lose a war of attrition with FB.
This danger was only magnified by the looming of Google Wave on the horizon – a suite that promises to offer and perhaps super much of FF’s functionality and value.
So, with two unbeatable competitors on the horizon, it seems likely that the FF team simply decided that they were better off exiting whilst they were still on top – that’s the opportunity according to FF. For FB, the opportunity to kill a competitor and acquire the FF team was just too good to pass up.
Personally, I love FF and was hoping to see the introduction of themes and more services. I’m not the biggest FB fan and hope that Google Wave lives up to expectations.