Service Helps Friends Share Their Online Discoveries
Four software designers who were instrumental in the creation of Google's popular e-mail and mapping services have founded a new company with the intent of making it easy for people to find out what Web material their friends are enjoying.
Context & Ripple Effects
FriendFeed arrives two weeks after Google quietly shipped its own Shared Stuff bookmark-and-share feature, but takes the opposite cut at the problem: rather than asking users to actively post links, it pulls whatever they already do across their social accounts into one running feed of friends' activity.
First-order effects
- Users gain a passive way to track friends' discoveries across multiple networks without visiting each site, directly competing for the same share-a-link behavior Google's Shared Stuff feature targets.
Second-order effects
- Social networks whose activity streams FriendFeed aggregates face a choice between treating third-party aggregators as free distribution or as data leaks — the first real pressure test of whether profile-hosting platforms control their members' activity data.
- Google's own social efforts are undercut by its alumni: the team best positioned to build Google's social layer has instead built an independent feed that sits above every network, Google's included.
Third-order effects
- If aggregation proves sticky, value migrates from whoever hosts the social graph to whoever owns the reading surface over it — a structure that forces every major platform to eventually decide whether to open its firehose, build its own aggregator, or wall itself off.
The trend: The consumer web is shifting from destination sites users visit to aggregated lifestreams that follow the user, with ex-Google talent betting the feed layer is the next platform.