So now Facebook’s crush on Twitter gets real. By acquiring Friendfeed, Facebook has finally added a real time search engine. It has also added the capability to pull in information from a variety of sources which was one of the standout features of Friendfeed.
While many good things can come out of this arrangement one thing is certainly lost, Friendfeed. Friendfeed had a certain something about it. Twitter is like the high school Quarterback that everyone loves. Friendfeed is kind of like that guy’s younger and more talented brother who seems to live in his brothers shadow. Friendfeed was way more feature-rich than Twitter, had an equally loyal following (albeit smaller) and was beginning to really establish itself. Now it’s part of Facebook. Everyone is on Facebook, but it was really only the geeks and early adopters who’d ever even heard of Friendfeed.
My privacy concerns: It’s not like I really have very many privacy concerns. Most of my content throughout the web is open, anyone can see it. However the implications are much more far reaching than my own personal way of operating on the web. I used Friendfeed to pull my data from all over and broadcast it ultimately to Twitter. It was my own personal aggregator of web activity. I don’t do that on Facebook. Facebook’s Terms of Use has frequently been outed for odd language giving them unusual control over your personal data. Many of these claims and events have been since fixed, but what is stopping it from happening again? I was much more selective about what data I put on Facebook, much less so with Friendfeed.
Facebook for me was never really about microblogging, that’s why I use Twitter and Friendfeed. It’s like, I LOVE Pizza but when I go to a sushi restaurant across the street, I don’t want them serving Pizza. Facebook was great the way it was and the more they try to take on Twitter, the less I want to use Facebook. Friendfeed was a great competitor to Twitter AND it integrated with it nicely. Facebook wants to take Twitter down. My biggest worry is that Facebook will try to emulate Twitter and Twitter will add Facebook features. I don’t want 2 Twitters or 2 Facebooks, I want them to go their separate ways and let me just use them the way I want.
Facebook is for friends..close friends, real friends. Twitter is for other people in my industry, news and event updates, it’s for the conversation I want to seek out.
It’s not the end of the world but I’d have been much happier if this deal didn’t go down.
Just in case you liked the Quarterback analogy, take a look at this blog post I found on the Friendfeed-Facebook hook up using another analogy.