Analysis: Plaxo and Friendfeed, pushing the “feed”
Facebook news feed has been a hit with users because it automatically displays the latest photos, newest friends, and other updates from your Facebook friends. — The problem, though, is that most people use any number of other sites as well …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's news feed has been the standout feature of the platform since it launched, and the company spent 2007 edging toward openness, as covered in Facebook *is* opening up. But the feed only shows what happens inside Facebook's walls.
This VentureBeat analysis argues that gap is the opening: people scatter their photos, links, and updates across many services, so Plaxo and FriendFeed are building feeds that aggregate activity across all of them — turning the feed from a Facebook feature into a standalone product category.
First-order effects
- FriendFeed and Plaxo position themselves as the aggregation layer across a user's scattered accounts, competing directly with Facebook's news feed for the daily check-in habit rather than for any single feature.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces pressure to either open its own feed data or absorb cross-site importing itself, since every update a user posts elsewhere is one the Facebook feed cannot show.
- Other social sites gain leverage as feed sources: being aggregatable becomes a distribution channel, and services that block exports risk losing the attention war.
Third-order effects
- If aggregation wins, the center of gravity in social software shifts from owning the user's profile to indexing the user's activity stream — a structural move from walled gardens toward interoperable 'lifestreams' where no single site controls the timeline.
The trend: Social feeds are evolving from single-site activity logs into cross-network aggregation products, with startups like FriendFeed and Plaxo racing to own the stream Facebook's walled garden cannot reach.