FriendFeed Should Kill Those Who Accuse It of Murder
Internet - Can we please stop with the FriendFeed murderous meme? — Over the weekend it was that FriendFeed is going to kill Twitter - which won't happen. Today it's that FriendFeed is going to kill Google Reader - which won't happen.
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2008, FriendFeed — the lifestreaming aggregator founded by ex-Googlers — was the hot new thing, and tech commentary kept framing it as an assassin: first it would kill Twitter, now Google Reader. This piece pushes back on the murderous meme, arguing aggregation and conversation tools complement rather than replace their targets. The irony is rich in hindsight: FriendFeed itself was acquired by Facebook and later shut down in 2015, while Google Reader was killed by its own owner — the supposed victims outlived the alleged killer.
First-order effects
- FriendFeed gets a fresh wave of attention and signups from the very 'killer' headlines the author derides, but also faces pressure to prove it can grow beyond early-adopter buzz rather than just absorb activity from Twitter and Reader users.
- The 'X will kill Y' framing forces both Twitter and Google Reader into a defensive narrative they didn't ask for, even as neither loses users to FriendFeed directly.
Second-order effects
- Competitive pressure pushes FriendFeed to keep shipping differentiation — its move toward realtime APIs later in 2008 shows the product racing to own the live-conversation layer rather than merely aggregating it.
- Twitter and Reader's resilience signals to the market that open, multi-purpose networks are hard to displace with feature-level challengers, redirecting would-be competitors toward niches or acquisition as the realistic exit.
Third-order effects
- The episode foreshadows how social platforms actually die: not by a rival's 'kill shot' but by their own owners' strategic decisions — Facebook retiring FriendFeed, Google killing Reader, and Twitter/Facebook later deprecating RSS entirely.
- The 'killer app' meme becomes a durable template of tech discourse, recurring with every new entrant, which shapes coverage cycles and inflates short-term expectations for challengers regardless of fundamentals.
The trend: Tech media keeps recasting every promising new social tool as the executioner of an incumbent, yet platform deaths consistently come from internal strategy shifts rather than competitive murder.