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Posts Tagged ‘friendfeed’

FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time, but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore. Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users).

That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down.

It’s sad, really. FriendFeed was easily one of my favorite services (so much so that I’m still waiting for another service to replace it). But since the acquisition by Facebook, it has been a ghost town. And now, with its 500 Internal Server Error, it’s really a ghost town. The impressive team behind FriendFeed (most are still with Facebook now) have indicated they wouldn’t let the service wither, but that seems to be exactly what is happening.

If it comes back up, I wonder how many of these remaining few dozen passionate FriendFeed users that are tweeting will even notice. Maybe they’ll just give up too.

We’re two weeks away from the SXSW Interactive, a drinking festival with a side of tech that takes place each year in Austin, Texas (before the larger SXSW film and music portions). While the conference itself is interesting, more interesting is usually the “next big thing” that comes out of it. And I think I already know what it will be this year.

Three years ago, Twitter famously was the talk of the conference (it won the web award that year). While sure, it didn’t explode into mainstream popularity until sometime later, the writing was on the wall for the early-adopters who started using it there or shortly thereafter. Two years ago, it was arguably Twitter again that was the must-use service throughout the conference as it continued to mature. But last year saw some new entries rise. Both Foursquare and Gowalla launched at the conference, with Foursquare gaining much of the momentum coming out of the conference (as some of us predicted). And this year, I suspect it will be largely an extension of that, with location services in general being the talk of the show.

Based on what I’ve been hearing, basically at the major players in the location-based space have big things planned for this year’s SXSW. Foursquare hopes to have a new, completely overhauled version of its iPhone app ready for the event this year. They are also likely to have a huge batch of new badges for people to collect throughout the week. Meanwhile, Gowalla has a large event of its own, complete with special VIP access if you use the service throughout the conference. The SXSW conference is also highlighting the Austin-based Gowalla as a key tool on its own pages.

A newer startup, Plancast (started by TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson — think “Foursquare For The Future“), has already put together a helpful unofficial SXSW guide surrounding events during the conference (and actually events for those who aren’t attending too). They also hope to have their iPhone app ready in time for the conference.

Meanwhile, both Twitter’s and SimpleGeo’s plans are still largely unknown at this point, but both are planning big things, we hear. Twitter could use the event to launch its ad platform, and CEO Evan Williams is giving the keynote on Monday.

And then, of course, there is Facebook. While they’re sniffing around Loopt right now, could they use the conference to talk a bit more about their location plans? If all these other services start getting a ton of buzz during the conference, they might have to.

Of course, all of this is assuming that AT&T supplies any service whatsoever this year. Last year, the network was completely overloaded until the final two days after the telecom giant scrambled to up their bandwidth (and even then it was only marginally better). They promised that failure would never happen again (people in San Francisco in New York City may have something to say about that), so we’ll see this year. If AT&T fails again, it could really hurt a lot of these location-based services, many of which are heavily predicated around the iPhone.

Otherwise, this is going to be location’s year at SXSW.

As soon as Google Buzz was released earlier today, all the early adopters piled in to give it a spin. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmal and a founder of FreindFeed, was among them and his initial reaction was: “This seems vaguely familiar . . .” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail. Sweet! “

It is vaguely familiar to him on various levels. Like FriendFeed before it (which was acquired by Facebook), Buzz acts as a way to bring together different social streams together—Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader shared items, status updates, shared links and videos. It presents them all in a single stream from everyone you follow from you Gmail contacts. Each item can be commented on, “liked,” or taken into a private email or chat conversation. You end up getting comment strings around a single shared link, photo, or video, just like on FriendFeed, except FriendFeed can import items from many more social websites. (Although FriendFeed is not enabled as a connected site for most users, strangely enough it is enabled for Buchheit’s account.).

But the other reason Buzz is vaguely familiar to Buchheit is because it lives right inside Gmail, which he launched when he was a Google engineer. It appears right under your “Inbox” link, and takes over the entire window where your 10,000 unread emails usually stare you in the face. It replaces it with a living, breathing, never-ending social commentary. My first reaction when I saw Buzz was to wonder what happened to all my mail. I didn’t miss it.

Unlike Google Wave, which lives in its own silo, the fact that Buzz is a feature of Gmail makes me want to use it, despite it’s deficiencies. Right now, Buzz only consumes communications from outside Google in a one-way fashion. You can see other people’s Tweets, for instance, but you can’t Tweet back to them. And those Tweets definitely don’t come in realtime either. There is a noticeable lag.

Buchheit agrees. When I asked him via email how he feels about Google channeling him, he responded: “It seems nice. Integrating into Gmail is the right way to go. It’ll be interesting to see how much activity it gets.” The fact that I was sable to gather his thoughts from Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Gmail speaks to the disjointed nature of our communications. Back in November, I had the opportunity to interview Buchheit on stage on whether he thought that email is dead. He defended email and admitted he had not yet tried Google Wave. But he’s already jumped into Buzz.

The question is not really where email is dead, but whether it will continue to be the primary form of electronic communication, or merely recede to the background as convenient dumping ground for archiving our realtime conversations. Whether Buzz puts more people at ease with using a realtime communication mode as their primary communication mode remains to be proven. But it points towards the inevitable direction that all Web communications are taking: more realtime, intermingled, disjointed, and multimedia.

It has been a sad few months on FriendFeed following their acquisition by Facebook. Despite assurances that FriendFeed would not die, activity has dwindled and many users have moved on. While the service was still working, there was a fairly major glitch that made it much less compelling: Tweets, the main source of content for FriendFeed, stopped coming in at realtime speeds, and instead were delayed by up to an hour. But today, finally, realtime tweets have been restored.

If you visit FriendFeed right now, you’ll notice that many tweets are coming in with about an 8 second delay. Some are delayed a little bit longer, but it’s infinitely better than the delay we’ve all endured for months now. And many of us have been complaining for months, wondering if the Facebook deal caused Twitter to pull FriendFeed’s firehose. What actually happened is that FriendFeed was apparently transitioning over to one of the newer Twitter data streams. At our Realtime CrunchUp last month, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit indicated that they were close to implementing this new stream, but wouldn’t say what the hold up was.

But now Buchheit is telling our own Steve Gillmor that several days ago the two sides reached an oral agreement on the new stream. And today, he confirmed over Twitter that it is in place. Specifically, they are using the new “Birddog” stream API, Buchheit says. You can learn more about it here. “I hope to have it down to 1 sec sometime next month,” Buchheit says of the delay.

This is great news. I personally had all but stopped using FriendFeed because of this delay. While the service remains one of the best ways to filter and search tweets and other content in realtime, the delay rendered all that moot. Now it’s back, and so I’ll go back to using it. Hopefully others will follow.

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Two features make the iPhone great for social games: its GPS chip and its camera. An app called iSpy which was released on the iPhone last week (iTunes link) uses both geolocation and mobile snapshots to re-imagine the children’s game of the same name.

Players create iSpy games by taking pictures of objects in public view, which get geo-tagged and placed within a radius of their actual location on a map in the game. Other players can see which objects are nearby and try to find them. When do find an object, they snap their own picture, which is then verified by the community as either matching the original picture or not. You can also play along on the Web. The more objects you find, the more points you get. The person with the most points becomes the top spy in their city.

What I like about iSpy is that the iPhone game expands the playing area of the original game beyond your line of sight. You can play anywhere within a few blocks, with people you don’t know, and you don’t even have to be playing at the same time. It is an asynchronous game. It does require a certain critical mass of players creating games in your vicinity for it to be interesting. But iSpy an app that could build a loyal following.

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When Facebook bought FriendFeed a few months ago, no one was really sure what would happen to the service. The acquisition was mainly for FriendFeed’s talent, so there was much concern that FriendFeed would wither. And to an extent it has. But, as it’s proving today, it still can serve some purpose for Facebook: A testing ground for new technology.

As Facebook’s David Recordon writes today on the Developer Blog, the development team has implemented a prototype version of the new OAuth WRAP specification on FriendFeed. One of FriendFeed’s co-founders, Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook’s Director of Product Management for Platform, also writes at length about it on his own blog. The basic gist is that Facebook decided to test out implementing it in FriendFeed so that they could get feedback from anyone in the developer community that wants to try it out.

OAuth WRAP is potentially very important for a few reasons. Namely, it’s likely to be the next iteration of OAuth — and the first one that all the big companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and others are all helping to make a new standard. It also should greatly simplify OAuth for developers. As Taylor writes in more technical speak:

The main difference between OAuth and OAuth WRAP is that WRAP does not have elaborate token exchanges or signature schemes. Instead, all server-to-server WRAP calls happen via SSL. The “access token,” which grants your client the ability to make API calls on a user’s behalf, is protected by SSL rather than by a shared secret and signature scheme.

Recordon notes that while Facebook Connect and its APIs don’t yet use OAuth, they will next year with OAuth WRAP. And from what I’m hearing, this is likely to be on the early-side of next year. This FriendFeed integration should show developers not only how far along it is already, but just how easy it is to both build on top of, and work with APIs that use it.

With the FriendFeed team and Recordon now on board at Facebook, the company has been taking the right steps towards being a more open part of the web. Soon after the acquisition, Facebook open-sourced FriendFeed’s realtime tech, called Tornado. They’re also hard at work on a new project called Open Graph, which isn’t getting a lot of buzz, but could potentially alter the social graph landscape of the web. And Facebook is even about to open its status updates for full Twitter syndication this week.

[image: 20th Century Fox]

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Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp, Bret Taylor confirmed this was not a technical but rather a legal issue. Put simply, Twitter is choking FriendFeed to death.

What’s odd about this is that most observers consider FriendFeed a failure, too complicated and user-unfriendly to compete with Twitter or Facebook. If Twitter believed that to be the case, why would they endeavor to kill it? And if it were not a failure? Then Twitter is trying to kill it for a good reason. That reason: FriendFeed exposes the impossible task of owning all access to its user’s data. Does Microsoft or Google or IBM own your email? Does Gmail apply rate limiting to POP3 and IMAP?

So the reason Twitter is killing FriendFeed is because they think they can get away with it. And they will, as far as it goes, as long as the third party vendors orbiting Twitter validate the idea that Twitter owns the data.

There was one complaint I heard over and over again from Indian entrepreneurs during my three weeks shuttling between Delhi, Jaipur, Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune: There aren’t enough angel investors in India.

Now, truth be told, that’s a complaint I also hear in the American heartland, in Canada, in Europe, in Africa, in China and, well, pretty much everywhere I’ve traveled to over the last few years. I’m not sure people ever feel they’ve got enough money being thrown their way.

But there is definitely something that makes Silicon Valley and Israel different from almost everywhere else I’ve been. Both have a wide base of people who made lots of money in the late 1990s Internet boom: The Yossi Vardis and the Marc Andreessens, but also hundreds of lesser known stock option recipients who may not want to start another company, but want to stay in the game $10,000 or so at a time.

Sure, Europe has had some big hits, but a culture of being tight-fisted with stock options has kept the wealth from getting spread widely enough to create a large base of millionaires who feel comfortable backing startups. Bebo’s Michael Birch and Skype’s Niklas Zennstrom are more exceptions in London than the rule. Even a city like Seattle, which had two colossal wins in Microsoft and Amazon doesn’t see a critical mass of angel activity—or even venture activity according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Typically just under one hundred startups raise venture capital in the entire state of Washington each year. For all the talk that Boston’s venture scene is “dead,” Massachusetts still gets nearly three times as many deals.

Note, this isn’t a question of wealth. There are plenty of pockets of the super rich throughout the world. But unless you earned it from a high tech start-up, you’re culturally loath to give it out to a guy you don’t know with an unproven idea.

Angels may be considered a crucial ingredient in today’s modern startup ecosystem, but if you think about it, asking strangers to write you a $20,000 personal check for no guarantee and a chunk of stock is a pretty new phenomenon. It’s the result of a decade or more of broad-based success, not the result of one big hit. That means a healthy angel environment isn’t necessarily a sign that a place is about to take off, rather, it’s a lagging indicator of a healthy startup scene.

That brings us back to India—a place that venture capital has been pulling out of in recent years as the burgeoning 1.2 billion person domestic market hasn’t adopted new technologies, goods and services as quickly as outside investors would have liked. (With the noted exception of telecom.) In 2008, just $1 billion venture dollars went into some 93 Indian startups, according to Dow Jones VentureSource’s Global VC Report. That puts India behind Europe, China, Israel and just barely ahead of Canada. In the first half of 2009, the numbers were even bleaker with just 25 Indian companies getting $213 million in venture capital.

Alok Mittal, a partner at Canaan Ventures in Delhi, agrees with the numbers and says the angel totals are far worse. If there’s about $1 billion in true venture capital in India, he says there’s only about $50 million in angel deals. Compare that to the United States where there’s roughly $20 billion in venture capital and another $20 billion in angel deals that primes that VC pump. That’s a disconnect that gives Indian entrepreneurs fits. “Indians are inherently very risk adverse and many of the entrepreneurs who’ve made money just put it in stocks,” Mittal says.

It’s all the more frustrating to entrepreneurs on the ground because there are so many prominent Indians who’ve had huge success in Silicon Valley and talk a big game about the opportunities in India and their desire to help give back to their native land. The cash just never seems to make it over. What gives?

For a start, angel investing is a local phenomenon, as much about mentoring and connections as it is about the thousands of dollars invested. An Indian who’s made billions in the Valley doesn’t necessarily know the first thing about mentoring an inexperienced kid with an idea in Mumbai. Until Indians start having more big hits in India, it will struggle to improve its angel landscape.

So India—or any region like it that has money, desire and opportunity but a lack of sustained big wins— has two choices: Muddle along without the help of early money and wisdom and churn out some big hits or figure out a way to hack space and time. Not surprisingly, I met several parties in India trying to do the latter. Can it work? Maybe, but there are inevitable tradeoffs.

The most common hack is creating so-called angel networks and there are a slew of them in India. They tend to do a few dozen deals a year. The advantage is by sharing the risk, angels get more comfortable with this type of investing and can pool their resources, and diversify across several deals.

But there’s a clear disadvantage: True angel investing is when a self-made individual with no one to answer to makes a gut decision to back an entrepreneur. Institutionalizing the process makes raising angel funds like raising a small round of venture capital. There are still the same hoops to jump through and demands of near term revenues, there’s just a smaller pot of money at the end of the gauntlet. Mittal is part of one of these angel groups and admits it’s not nearly a big enough solution. “We have done twenty deals, but what’s twenty deals?” he says.

Another idea is a Y-Combinator style incubator being hatched by former Valleyite Freeman Murray (above, right) in Bangalore. Murray ran something similar in Pune, and has relocated to the South where there’s generally more startup activity as kids watching Web 2.0 glamour from afar are quitting boring jobs with multi-nationals to start mostly Web and service companies.

Murray sees the slow growth of India’s Web market as a potential advantage, giving him plenty of time to handhold and mentor smart kids with a good idea but little else. And just $10,000 each can keep these companies running and experimenting for a while.

Where does Murray get the money? Some of it is his own savings, and some comes from those very same Indian Valley successes who want to seed companies in the motherland but need someone to be the feet on the street. A similar approach is being launched by Indus Khaitan, a former Symantec executive who moved back to India and joined Morpheus Venture Partners, which recently closed a new fund thanks also to Valley-based Indian wealth. He’s also based in Bangalore.

Khaitan is one of those natural networkers with an easy smile and an ever-available credit card to buy group dinners. But Murray gets the laid-back, hippie points—he’s constructed a huge Burning-Man like complex in downtown Bangalore where he’ll put on community art and startup events. It’s wrapped in Chinese tarps with a multitude of metal stairs leading to different floors and levels inside. It’s got wifi (natch), and soon, a garden for a roof and solar panels to replace a power chord that’s now being piped in from the neighbors.

There’s something in India called Jugaad — it’s an innate creativity for problem solving that some worry the Zippo-lighter-flashing kids working for multinationals in Bangalore have lost. Murray may be a California native, but he has jugaad in spades.

But even if each effort is successful, they are still just tiny drops in the bucket—and India has a pretty large bucket. Vishal Gondal, founder of IndiaGames and a rare Web entrepreneur who’s made money in India, has had it with the partial solutions. He’s sick of attending startup events where three smart kids win the competition and the so-called “early stage VCs” judging it all say the companies are still too early stage for them to invest in. “Why are they even there?” he says of the VCs. At a recent competition Gondal stood up and personally committed $100,000 to the winner on the spot—giving his wife palpitations.

Like Mittal, Gondal (left) sees scale as the only way to push India out of this early stage funding rut. Twenty new deals is nothing—India needs to be minting 1,000 new startups over the next five years to finally start seeing some big hits emerge, he argues. He proposes a sort of uber-angel network that would look for thirty startups per year from the big major Indian metros and 10 startups from the next largest second tier cities. That leaves five to ten slots for other cities or rural areas. If each of these companies got the normal seed investment of in the $20,000 investment range, seeding 1,000 of them over five years would cost just $20 million—a big sum, but not outrageous.

Having seen loads of cities try to “recreate” Silicon Valley and fail, it’s hard to be too optimistic about any plan to short-cut the natural development of the primordial soup that leads to a complex ecosystem of entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, advisors and startup worker bees. But the fact that these efforts are coming from disparate, frustrated grassroots groups and not some top-down government grant or well-meaning, fair weather rich outsiders, lends some hope that things could change in corners of India’s entrepreneurial world.

The truth is India’s dream of building the next big fast-growing powerhouses will have less to do with angel money or Western venture money and more to do with getting around that ingrained fear of risk-taking.

There’s still a strong cultural stigma to failure in India. Walking away from a prestigious and high-paying multinational job when you don’t have an angel to catch you isn’t easy, especially in a year when India has seen some of the first corporate layoffs. But jugaad is all about finding a way, and the best Indian entrepreneurs will. The others should probably just stick with the high paying job at Microsoft anyway, angel investor or no.

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Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage for two reasons. The first was to formally announce the Google/Twitter search deal, but the second was the show off a new product: Google Social Search. The on-stage demonstration was interesting, but left a lot of questions unanswered. Today, the Google Labs experiment goes live, and we’ll get those answers.

Social Search essentially pulls in information from social networks to augment Google search results. But a major question is: What social networks get pulled it? While the experiment isn’t quite live yet, it would seem that from the video below made by Google’s Matt Cutts, Social Search, at least at first, will be able to include results from Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Reader.

The last three are obvious since Google owns all of those. Twitter seems obvious too because of the new Google/Twitter search deal. FriendFeed is an interesting one though since Facebook bought that service in August. As expected, it doesn’t appear that Facebook data will play a big role in Social Search (if any), as Google and Facebook continue their social profile stand-off. Cutts makes it clear that public data is the key to all of this, and Facebook doesn’t exactly have the most public information. That’s too bad since Facebook is, after all, the largest social network.

Cutts explains that the idea behind all of this is to utilize your “social circle.” The key to populating this social circle is your Google Public Profile. On this profile, the different social networking profiles you list yourself as being a member of will be a signal to Google to scour those networks for social data to serve up in its new results.

Interestingly, in the second video below, explaining how Google Social Search works, a Facebook profile appears in the lists of profiles. But again, in all the experiments, no data from Facebook seems to show up.

For its social circle, Google is going deeper as well. For example, if you follow 100 people on Twitter, Google will look at their public updates when you search for things, but it will also look at the friends or your friends for even more data. This is similar to what FriendFeed has done in the past to help surface other information that may be relevant to you. Google calls this your “extended social circle.”

Google also uses your Gmail chat buddies to build out your social circle.

When it’s live, you’ll be able to find Social Search here on Google’s Experimental search page.

Update: And now it’s live.

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FriendFeed Co-Founder, Paul Buchheit has taken the stage at Startup School at UC Berkeley. Buchheit is talking about what he’s learned so far as an entrepreneur, from creating Gmail to founding FriendFeed. Buchheit made some interesting points from his career at Intel, Google, FriendFeed and now Facebook. He’s also winging his presentation to see how it goes (and he’s doing a good job at it).

Buchheit talked about his past at Google, where he is of course known as being the creator of Gmail, as well as Intel. At Intel, Buchheit learned that he didn’t enjoy working at large companies. People often ask what’s the formula to startup success. Buchheit answered with that Google had a formula for making successful products that everyone had to follow.

Buchheit also mentioned that he left Google because “it seemed like a good idea.” He said the same thing for why FriendFeed sold to Facebook. Buchheit’s biggest learning experience from Facebook so far is that Facebook ins’t like Google.

Buchheit talked about college, and whether or not to go. He said that you have to pay for college, while if you have a startup, you get paid. Also, the formula of success — there is none. You have to figure it out yourself.

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