10 Years Ago This Week: Is it time for a new FriendFeed?

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week ending April 11, 2015.

Ten years ago this week, FriendFeed was shut down by Facebook. 

Watch the recap video.

What was FriendFeed?

At it's heart FriendFeed was a feed aggregator.

You could use it to follow any RSS feed, which included blogs (Blogger, Tumblr, Live Journal) and blog comments (BackType, Disqus), news (Digg, Mixx, Reddit), bookmarking (Delicious, Stumble upon), photos (Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa), videos (YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion), or music (Last.fm, Pandora). 

It also was integrated with other social media sites, particularly Twitter, which was apparently the most popular source of content.

A draw was the platform's social features that let you share and comment, join groups, and create customized shareable feeds that could post to Twitter, Facebook or your own blog.

It was the first platform to add a "Like" button, which for better or worse was adopted by pretty much all other social networks.

Here's how FriendFeed described it: 

It's simple: On FriendFeed, posting anything takes just a few clicks, and sometimes none at all—you can choose to automatically pull in updates from the services you already use, like Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter.

It's fast: See everyone's updates in real-time so you never miss what your friends are sharing.

It's conversational: It's fast and easy to start a conversation around shared items, or to show that you like something a friend has shared. You can subscribe to updates from individuals and groups, such as your family or a team of people you work with.

It never had a huge user base, but it had popularity with techy folks.

What happened to FriendFeed?

FriendFeed launched in 2007, and was acquired by Facebook in 2009. 

It appears that Facebook never really did anything with the platform, and in March 2015 announced that it would be shut down, giving users one month notice.

On the official blog (which had no updates between 2009 and the shutdown announcement), they noted: 

We've been maintaining the service since we joined Facebook five years ago, but the number of people using FriendFeed has been steadily declining and the community is now just a fraction of what it once was.

In 2016, FriendFeed co-found Bret Taylor shared why he thought it failed: 

If you, in retrospect, placed FriendFeed, Twitter, and Facebook side-by-side, FriendFeed is an awkward hybrid. Twitter’s barebones simplicity, while criticized today, was a perfect medium for the broadcast-oriented follower social graph ... Similarly, other great features we produced ... were much better in the exceptionally safe friend graph on Facebook.... FriendFeed turned into a community, rather than a product for communities, and we never reached scale.

What's the view from 2025? 

FriendFeed wasn't the only feed aggregator with social features, of course. Google Reader had a passionate userbase when it shut down in 2013. 

Katie Baker at the Ringer noted that Reader's death represented the shift from independent bloggers and posting on open platforms to corporate-controlled social media. That was likely part of FriendFeed's demise as well. Why use FriendFeed when you have Facebook and Twitter? 

Of course, feed readers never went away. Feedly is my feed reader of choice, but there are lots of options. They just don't have the social functions of FriendFeed. 

But I think the idea of being able to create your feed from multiple sources, with social connections, but not have your feed algorithmically controlled by a big tech company, is having a resurgence.

So, for example, there is Surf, where you can create feeds, and also connect to what’s being called then open social web, like Bluesky and Mastodon. Similar apps are Tapestry and the updated Reeder. 

Everything old is new again.

References

FriendBlog, 8 October 2007: FriendFeed's First Week (Internet Archive)

Facebook Newsroom, 10 August 2009: Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed

Chris Dannen at Fast Company, 10 August 2009: Facebook Acquires Friendfeed in a Play for Relevance

FriendBlog, 9 March 2015:  Dear FriendFeed Community (Internet Archive)

FriendFeed Home Page, 31 March 2015: FriendFeed (Internet Archive)

Inc, 3 March 2016: Here's What Really Happened with FriendFeed, the Social Network That Wasn't