I had the opportunity to spend a brief few minutes with Paul Buchheit, co-creator of FriendFeed.com, which was recently acquired by Facebook end of last year.  In our interview, I asked Paul where “the Butterfly” was that was mentioned by him shortly after the acquisition (you can read more about that here).  Paul seemed much more enthusiastic than Bret Taylor was when I asked him in the Press Conference earlier in the day.  In short: the butterfly is not one, but multiple butterflies that permeate both FriendFeed and the Facebook Platform, and will continue to grow.

In conversation after the interview, Paul mentioned while not as much resources were put into FriendFeed as before, he was still releasing updates and continuing to do so.  He even hinted at the potential for better Facebook integration now that the 24 hour storage limit has been lifted from the Facebook Platform. (He mentioned that was the biggest impact on them not integrating Facebook Connect more, and as a developer, I agree)  Paul reminded me that they’re still releasing features (the most recent being just a few weeks ago), and their move to the new Facebook-hosted servers which they’re currently hosted on.

When asked which developer platform to develop for, Paul’s answer was to look at your needs.  Facebook Platform of course has over 400+ million users, while with FriendFeed you may get some added aggregation capabilities you wouldn’t get from Facebook.  You could tell by his voice that he still has a deep love for FriendFeed, and seemed to have no intentions to abandon it.  In fact, his entire presentation (you can watch here – click on “previous sessions” on the right) was around the Tornado Framework which FriendFeed is based on, something Facebook doesn’t really have intention on integrating into their own environment.

So, it would appear, that the butterflies he mentioned earlier are none other than the Open Graph API, the move from centralized data silos, to an entire web of meta-linked data which is unreliant on any one source to get at the data.  The butterfly that has emerged has transformed into many, which anyone, anywhere on the web can gain access.

The full interview can be found on my Cinch page – you can listen to it below:

I don’t do speculative posts like this too often, except around Facebook’s F8 developer events for the most part.  The last one I predicted was that Facebook would announce a Mobile Platform at F8 - the announcement did occur along with Facebook Connect.  The first F8 was the announcement of the Facebook API, which revolutionized Social Development and has left players like Google scrambling to play catch up since.  Now, 2 years since the last F8, the next F8 has been announced, and we are all wondering what the next big announcement will be.  If it is to be in line with the last 2, and, considering they waited 2 years to have another one, they have to be announcing something game-changing.  I predict it directly involves some of the FriendFeed team and it’s directly related to real-time.

First of all, let me preface this with the fact that I am not receiving this data from any inside contacts at Facebook, nor have I been told anything the rest of the world doesn’t already know.  This is pure speculation – I hope it’s taken as such.  I am also certainly not a psychic.  I think if you look at some of the hints though, you can see the potential for something big, perhaps FriendFeed 3.0-like (remember, FriendFeed 2.0 was the advent of their real-time stream you see now) about to happen at Facebook.  Here are my reasons for thinking such:

What is Paul Buchheit Working on?

Paul Buchheit, one of the founders of FriendFeed, creator of Gmail, and now working at Facebook after FriendFeed was acquired, hasn’t yet made it evident exactly what he’s working on.  We know Bret Taylor, also a founder, is now Director of Product for Facebook, and working heavily with the Facebook APIs and the new Roadmap Facebook has laid out for developers.  We know Kevin Fox, pretty much the man behind all the design of FriendFeed, has been working on the new Games and Apps dashboard that Facebook just launched (that you can see on the left-hand side of Facebook).

But what is Paul Buchheit working on?  He recently commented stating he is definitely not working on Facebook’s new e-mail product that they have been rumored to be working on to replace their current inbox structure.  I’m not sure anyone has specifically stated exactly whether he’s working on the Facebook developer platform now or not.  He seems to be doing something big, and he’s certainly been studying Google Buzz recently if you look over his FriendFeed stream lately.

Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee

Then there’s that “Butterfly” post.  Paul Buchheit specifically stated when Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmor, and others were all pressuring Facebook to make a statement on what they were going to do with FriendFeed that “the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world.”  He then continued, “Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage — if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge”.

The mystery in all this is that Facebook has not yet released anything even remotely similar to what Paul described yet.  Paul’s a really smart guy.  He’s not just going to work on something mediocre for Facebook – whatever it is, it has to be game changing.  I really believe that whatever it is will blow our minds away when it happens.  The FriendFeed team doesn’t just innovate.  They revolutionize.  I don’t believe they would still be at Facebook if they didn’t have that opportunity.

Facebook’s Needs

Then there’s the lack of any real-time APIs or architecture at Facebook.  I have to click on the page to have it refresh.  Frankly, I think that fits their current audience of 400 million+ “average Joes” well.  It doesn’t tap into the news-seeking, data-mining, and publishing audiences very well though.  That’s what Twitter does well.  It’s what FriendFeed and Buzz also do well.  All of these come with real-time APIs and real-time searches (or “track”).

Facebook needs a real-time interface for developers still.  It needs search.  It needs search to be real-time.  It needs a public view into all of that, supported by the powerful privacy controls Facebook already has in place.  Facebook has already built out the building blocks to launch this with their recent emphasis on encouraging users to open up their posts more and at the same time enabling them to have granularity in who sees those posts.  The next natural step is to finally open up those public posts to developers, and provide a real-time interface to it all.  With a 400 million user audience, that would be game-changing in the realm of real-time data.  We ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

The Lack of any Really Big Known Announcements at F8

Lastly, we know everything else Facebook could announce at F8.  Facebook has already started rolling out credits to developers, so a payment system wouldn’t be much of a “game changer” per se.  I’m sure they’ll talk a lot about it at the conference though.  Facebook has already started rolling out its Ads API to developers.  They’ve already announced the desire to open up websites as virtual 3rd-party “Pages” on the web.  They’ve let us know just about everything in their roadmap, except the fate of FriendFeed.

Doesn’t this seem strange to you that Facebook and the FriendFeed team have been so mute on this in general for almost a year now?  What’s going on behind the scenes?  Even when asking the FriendFeed team about plans to integrate better into Facebook they have remained mute.  How cool would it be if, while everyone is ranting and raving about Google Buzz and calling FriendFeed dead, the FriendFeed team along with the incredible talent that Facebook adds to the mix have all been working on FriendFeed 3.0 behind the scenes?  What if Facebook caught wind Google was working on Buzz and bought FriendFeed in response to that rumor?  Will the “Butterfly” emerge at F8?  The chrysalis stage takes patience – I’m not giving up on FriendFeed yet.

Louis Gray just reported a new way Google is trying to control the problem of mine and Louis’s and Robert Scoble and Mashable, and more of the more active feeds and streams on Google Buzz taking over the streams of our followers.  The problem that was occuring is that for those with a lot of followers, their posts would continue to dominate the streams of those following them because every time someone commented or liked the post, it would go right back to the top of your feed.  While I understand the problem, and agree there needs to be a fix, I argue Google is trying to fix this the wrong way.

The way Google decided to fix it is now they decide, based on some sort of algorithm, how often my feeds get thrown up to the top of your stream.  This ensures no active user will ever fully dominate your stream.  However, what if we want to consume this data?  The problem is Google is the one making that choice for you, not giving you the power to make that choice yourself, and I think that’s a very wrong approach.

Rather than Google making that choice for us, they need to focus on lists, the way FriendFeed and Facebook do it, and the way over 400 million people are familiar with.  This is the natural flow – if someone is too noisy, you take them out of one list and put them in another.  Let us choose which list is the default.  Give us an easy way to assign people we follow into different lists.  This isn’t that difficult a solution for someone Google’s size, and gives the users absolute, full control, rather than taking it away from them to make the decision on how active their feeds are.  This needs to be their 100% focus right now to keep my attention.

The way Google is approaching this is wrong.  I really hope they change their focus to lists, open up the flood wall, but give us filters, privacy controls, and put the control back in the users’ hands.  Don’t take our power away from us Google.

Image courtesy http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2008/03/let-me-out.html

It seems that some time today, the FriendFeed team has just re-enabled their live Twitter stream (using Twitter’s “Birddog” API) for real-time updates from Twitter.  I noticed the update when posting a cool bookmarklet by Kynetx, and re-tested it again – sure enough the update to Twitter hit FriendFeed almost immediately after I posted it to Twitter.  Looking over FriendFeed, I learned that Paul Buchheit, one of FriendFeed’s founders now working for Facebook, confirmed this earlier today.

Long before many were embracing Twitter’s real-time stream, FriendFeed was one of the first Real-time Twitter stream consumers to take advantage of the platform.  Shortly after the Facebook acquisition the FriendFeed team turned off the real-time updates, others speculating that it was the beginning of the end for FriendFeed.  FriendFeed’s Paul Buchheit assured users that the FriendFeed team was simply working out details with the Facebook lawyers to ensure the real-time stream met up with Facebook’s stringent legal policies.  Others remained skeptical.

Tonight it appears they’ve turned that live stream on for good, and boy is it fast!  FriendFeed continues to remain one of the most powerful Twitter clients and Social Management tools out there.  I think this continues to prove that FriendFeed will continue to improve even after the Facebook acquisition.

If you’re not yet, you can follow me on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/jessestay.

About a month ago, Facebook’s David Recordon announced that Facebook was hard at work with the Open Standards Communities on a new OAuth protocol called Wrap.  The goals of the protocol seem to specifically provide a way to direct a user through the authentication process through a client-only model, removing the need for developers to do heavy server-side code to authenticate the user.  Such a model fits well for Facebook, who, through Facebook Connect, has fought to make it as easy as possible to enable developers to authenticate users via simple Javascript and HTML.  It seems Facebook is making through with its promises, by launching FriendFeed as the first OAuth Wrap provider to launch with the new protocol.

The launch comes as a test of a discussion that took place at an OAuth Wrap Community meeting at Facebook headquarters last Tuesday, where it was discussed how to enable client-only authorization of users.  In response, Bret Taylor and the FriendFeed team (I guess, according to Luke Shepard, that means there’s still a team?) produced a working prototype of the model, enabling it on their own site.  Benjamin Golub, who was responsible for FriendFeed’s API before it was acquired by Facebook, confirmed this with the comment, “FriendFeed supports OAuth WRAP now . Great job Bret, Luke, and David!” on FriendFeed.

It’s still unclear if this API is available to developers yet, or if it was only a proof-of-concept, but it is clear FriendFeed is very likely becoming a playground for the Facebook team to try out new technologies.  This is promising in that if this continues, FriendFeed should continue to see cool new technologies applied to it way before, and even if, they even the light of day on Facebook.com.

I’m very excited to see the Facebook team pushing these new open, client-side APIs, but even more excited to see the FriendFeed team still cranking out cool new technologies, making this the second one today for the site.  It’s becoming apparent that the FriendFeed team is finally becoming accustomed to Facebook’s internal technologies and architecture, and my hope is that we will soon to see many “beautiful butterflies” come out of what they’ve been working on over the last few months.

Now, if anyone knows how we can try this thing out I’m all ears!

UPDATE: Benjamin Golub has granted my wishes!  He says in the comments: “You can try it out yourself! Register an application at http://friendfeed.com/api/register and then follow along with http://github.com/finiteloop/friendfeed-wrap-example/blob/master/friendfeedwrap.py” – hmmm…new SocialToo feature?

Despite all the “FriendFeed is dead” arguments the naysayers have been pushing, a new, pretty significant update was pushed by the FriendFeed team today into production.  The update belongs to FriendFeed’s App on Facebook, and now imports every update users post on status update services they import into FriendFeed as status updates on Facebook.  This means if you are importing your Twitter feed onto FriendFeed, and have installed the FriendFeed app on Facebook, all your Twitter updates will now automatically import as status updates onto Facebook.  Not only that, but it supports Google Chat status updates, Plurk updates, Identi.ca updates, and potentially any status update service supported by FriendFeed.

This move goes head-to-head with services like Twitter’s own Facebook app, which, as one of the very first Facebook Platform apps, automatically posts Twitter updates to users’ profiles.  The idea also, to me, suggests that the FriendFeed team will be releasing more updates around this in the future.  For instance, it now makes sense that FriendFeed begins to enable preferences around which services auto-populate into Facebook, and perhaps even a “post to Facebook” checkbox next to the already-existing “post to Twitter” checkbox when you post an update on the service.  FriendFeed also, very soon, needs to integrate Facebook Connect so that their Facebook integration (which is bound to happen) is much tighter and works better with the Facebook environment.  This is based on a Facebook app, which in my best guesses the FriendFeed team should be integrating into their existing FriendFeed app on Facebook – it’s inevitable at this point.  When this happens it makes sense to add even more updates to their Facebook integration, further growing the service.

The skeptics have all been pushing that FriendFeed won’t grow because the FriendFeed team is no longer working on the product.  I think this pretty much debunks that theory, even suggesting more updates are to come.  As I said before, FriendFeed’s just fine – it won’t be going away any time soon, and I think this proves my point even further.

I have discovered a feature (or perhaps vulnerability?) of FriendFeed that, intended or not, could enable marketers to track every single view of their RSS posts to FriendFeed.  The feature revolves around the ability to embed images, via a subset of RSS called MediaRSS, into your RSS feed.  If your RSS is MediaRSS formatted, FriendFeed automatically reads the images in the feed and displays the first one as the main image in the post to your feed on FriendFeed.com.  Here’s the problem though (or maybe it’s a feature?) – FriendFeed stores the original URL to the image as the main image URL.  They don’t re-format it at all or store it on their servers.  This means you can dynamically produce anything you want on FriendFeed.com, set cookies, store IP information, etc. without the user ever knowing about it.

I discovered this hole due to an annoyance I had with my TweetMeme button always showing up as the image in my posts to FriendFeed.  I noticed that the number of retweets was dynamically updating, right on FriendFeed.  Sure enough, looking at the source of the image, the image was being generated from TweetMeme’s servers, not FriendFeed’s.

Such Web Bugs are common throughout the web, especially in advertising and other marketing-based mediums, so the threat isn’t huge.  However, this may be something the FriendFeed team may want to look at if they don’t want marketers to be getting information about their users off the FriendFeed.com site itself.  If anything, I’d like to see them just ignore 3rd-party image URLs altogether and maybe my pesky TweetMeme icon will stop showing up as the image on my posts to FriendFeed.  Is this a feature or a “bug”?

Googling, here’s some more information I found about “Web Bugs”: http://www.leave-me-alone.com/webbugs_growing.asp

With all the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt around FriendFeed.com one would think FriendFeed is this service that is going the way of Jaiku, Pownce, Dodgeball, and others that went dead after their owners acquired them.  There’s no doubt that amongst certain users in the US the activity in their streams is going down and some are talking about it.  Just last month, Robert Scoble, FriendFeed’s number one user and unpaid evangelist publicly announced his resignation from the service and move over to bigger services like Twitter.  Even yesterday, Louis Gray, perhaps FriendFeed’s second most active unpaid evangelist (and both good friends of mine), shared a statistic seemingly indicating his disappointment with the service.  Yet, when you look at the big picture, things are up and to the right.  There are no statistics anywhere that indicate FriendFeed is anywhere close to losing users when you look at the numbers and the long-haul.

Louis Gray shared a Compete.com graph of unique visitors yesterday which indicated that in November, FriendFeed had shown less users accessing the site than its low point a year ago.  What isn’t shared though is that Compete is normally only indicative of US users, and FriendFeed is well known as an international site, extremely active in regions such as Turkey and the mideast.  Remember the activity FriendFeed got around the Iran crisis?  Even Bret Taylor, co-founder of FriendFeed, now working for Facebook admitted that since August, International activity on FriendFeed is now dominating.  See the graph below.

If you look at both Alexa and Quantcast 2 year stats, which when taken as a whole are generally a bit more acceptable a statistics engine in terms of general and international traffic, they both show an up-and-to-the-right trend for FriendFeed that hasn’t stopped since last year.  There are a few down points, such as when 2 months in a row, TechCrunch wrote a scathing post about FriendFeed, comparing it to “the mob”, and Mike Arrington’s fallout after that (he was one of the top-followed users on FriendFeed up until that point).  The next month Facebook acquired FriendFeed, and the lash back from users ensued, many discontinuing their use of the site, especially in the United States and Silicon Valley.  The other major dip occurred in November, where Robert Scoble, FriendFeed’s most followed user, announced publicly that he was moving his activity over to Twitter and lessening his activity over on FriendFeed. FriendFeed still appears to be recovering from that, but it’s way too early to determine if that started a down and to the right trend – I doubt it.  If you look at the Alexa stats, the 3 dips I mentioned occurred right around the the 3 events I just mentioned.  Coincidence?

Yet, when you look at FFHolic, the site which ranks FriendFeed users and their activity, you’ll notice a change in the trends.  The top users all remain the same – people from the United States and especially Silicon Valley which use the site rarely, yet are very popular.  But when you look at the most active users, you no longer see the Monas and the Louis Grays and the Robert Scobles you used to see in that section.  The most active users on FriendFeed are now their international audience.  The second most active user, VAHID, has a feed of mostly non-English posts!  So you can see that yes, when a very popular Silicon Valley blogger leaves the service, a huge chunk of the US audience leaves with them, and so does their activity, yet, the most active users aren’t even listening to or following those guys.  FriendFeed continues to grow.

I predict there will be a shift, if this continues, where the most active users on FriendFeed soon will become the most followed people on FriendFeed.  The more the popular users neglect the service, the more the more active users will have a chance to catch up to them.  FriendFeed’s founding team has made it clear they’re not killing the service.  In fact, they’ve been keeping it running and even improving it since they were acquired by Facebook.  Check out the open source Tornado Framework FriendFeed is based on – it is still getting updates from the FriendFeed and Facebook teams.  The FriendFeed team is all using the service still.  FriendFeed was just included in the deal with Google for real-time search results, which means FriendFeed is most likely a revenue-generating site for Facebook now.

If anything, the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed should have you more comfortable, not less, that it is going to be around for a long, long time.  There is no reason for it to go away.  If it does, they’ll make it easy to get the same features you are getting on FriendFeed over on Facebook itself so you can take comfort you’re not going to lose anything.  But if anything should comfort you it’s that FriendFeed continues in an up-and-to-the-right pattern when you look at the big picture and not the short-term dips the big Silicon Valley bloggers keep bringing up.  I still see stats for my blog on FriendFeed.  As long as FriendFeed is successful Facebook has no reason to remove it as a service.  There’s still too much opportunity here.  It’s still way too powerful a tool to kill and I think we’re all jumping the gun with the “it’s dead” statements.  There are no facts supporting that statement.

I’ve been rambling on Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook tonight about the differences in how Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed’s founders participate in each community.  Look at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Fan Page.  Notice how he basically talks at the community?  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a comment by him with his followers (perhaps part of the reason why it’s so difficult to manage Fan Pages right now).  Now look at Ev Williams and Biz Stone’s Twitter profiles.  You’ll notice a little more participation, but mostly with their inner circles and occasional outreaches to the community.  Now go read Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor’s FriendFeed profiles.  Notice that they’re very actively involved in the conversation, responding in their own threads to people they barely know, participating in others’ conversations, etc.  I think if you look at the profiles of other employees in each of the three organizations you’ll see a similar trend.  Why is it that the community where the founders and employees participate the most is the smallest community with the lowest growth rate?

I’ve been contemplating this tonight.  FriendFeed, as a whole has one of the tightest communities of all.  For those that participate actively in the site, we quickly come to know each other – it’s the place where everybody knows your name.  That’s why Scoble, and Louis Gray, and myself are so passionate about it.  It is a great place to go meet new people, find more information, and grow with a community that cares and knows you.  I asked the question why Facebook and even Twitter don’t see this as an opportunity to win a new audience, much of which feels a bit betrayed by the sale of FriendFeed to Facebook, and many who have never done much venturing outside the network to new places. It seems like an opportunity to me – after all, when Facebook bought FriendFeed, they bought the technology, not the community.  The community is something that has to be earned, not bought.

Yet, at the same time I wonder if it really matters.  With Facebook and Twitter’s immense growth, do they really need to be paying attention to the small FriendFeed community?  FriendFeed has great technology, and great talent that built that technology, now working for Facebook (one who just left).  Can the community be won in other ways?  I think it can, and it goes back to the first paragraph above – look at the numbers compared to participation.  I argue a community’s growth is not relative to the participation of its founders, but rather the technology’s capability to build community even further.  It’s the technology that trumps community any day because it creates and enables that community.  Technology that empowers individuals to create their own communities wins any day, and trumps founder participation hands down.

Gasp!  You say – you mean I don’t have to participate to build a community?  No, that’s not what I’m saying.  If you’re a user of the tools, you definitely must be participating, nurturing, and sharing for your community to grow.  What I’m saying though is that no matter who the founders are and whether they participate in your personal community or not, you’re going to take your community to the places that enable you to nurter, build, and grow a community the best.  That’s why Facebook grew the fastest.  That’s why people use Twitter.  It’s also why FriendFeed was the smallest, yet had a great acquisition of some very talented individuals who know how to build this type of technology.

Let’s look at the technologies:

Facebook

Facebook not only enables you to share status updates with your friends, but enables you to share photos, videos, notes, links, and more, all in an integrated environment.  You have privacy controls to which you can control how public the information you share with your friends is.  This encourages a native environment where family and close friends can communicate and share with each other, focusing on each individual’s roots to build community out of.  You have lists that you can organize these individuals and filter their updates in your news stream.

At the same time Facebook provides Fan Pages, indexable by Google, for which you can subscribe, or “fan”, similar to the way you would do on the other networks.  This is your public, more anonymous persona, something I think each individual needs as well.  This enables you to share with the rest of the world what you’re doing, and build community and share through that means.

Then you have the API.  Not only as an entrepreneur, developer, or community builder do I have access to create applications that create and nurture community within the Facebook environment, but Facebook has also given me the technology and tools to do that on my own website, all with the community I’m working to build on Facebook itself.  It enables me to do that with my own community, and enable them to bring their communities into my own.

The richness of that experience is what makes Facebook so big, and is the reason for its growth.  That has nothing to do with its founders or their participation.  I’m not sure they need to participate so long as they keep building technology that further enables individual communities on the network.

Twitter

Twitter baffles me at times, but I think I understand it.  Twitter’s openness and focus on such a simple thing, status updates, is what has made it grow so big.  Users can do whatever they want with the network.  They can use it to update their friends with what they’re doing, respond, and grow a community through open communication.

Twitter also encourages the initiation of conversation.  You post something on Twitter, link to somewhere else, and the communication continues elsewhere.  Some times that filters back to Twitter.  Some times the entire communication happens on Twitter.

Twitter’s API is as open as it can be.  It’s fairly limited as compared to Facebook’s, but has enabled many people to bring their communities on Twitter back to their own brand and vice-versa to further grow community.

The problem with Twitter as compared to Facebook is that it is only status updates.  You can respond, reply, and even retweet items you read, but it all centers around those status updates.  There’s not much more depth than that, limiting the type and size of community one can build on the network.  Yet at the same time the openness and lack of rules around users and its developer platform has enabled people to do things they would not normally be able to do with a community on Facebook.  That’s why they’ve continued to grow and are the size (and hype) they are right now.

At the same time because they’re not quite the enablers of community in regards to their technology which Facebook is, I think their Founders and employees need to participate and get involved a little more.  The technology still doesn’t quite sustain the building of community the way Facebook’s does.

FriendFeed

I could probably argue FriendFeed has better technology that encourages and enables community building better than Twitter’s.  The problem with FriendFeed is that almost all the technology found in FriendFeed keeps getting gobbled up by Twitter and Facebook.  There’s not much new to it, and now that they’ve been bought by Facebook, that doesn’t appear to need to fully compete – it would just be an additional complement to the community-building offerings Facebook offers.

Beforehand FriendFeed was doing a good job keeping up, and perhaps could have even caught up to at least Twitter.  Its growth was even starting to show that before they were acquired.  Yet their founders still participated, as did the other employees of the company.  Why is this?  It was possible because the community was smaller – the founders were simply growing with the community, and the community was and is still a tight-knit community of people that knew each other.

I think as FriendFeed continued to build technology that enabled others to build community and relationships, that participation would have slowly evolved to each of the founders’ own close communities.  They would not have needed to participate for the community to grow.

Conclusion

So what do we make of all this?  I think the moral here is that entrepreneurs need to focus more on building technologies that encourage and enable community.  When you’re writing code or having others write it is it enabling people to build relationships?  Is it enabling people to share with others?  How much so?

The Facebook/Twitter or even Google or Microsoft or Apple battle isn’t over yet – in the end it will be the one that best enables their users through technology to build their own communities and communicate better with each other.  The better competitors will master this.  There will be other entrants.  It’s not the participation of a community’s founders that determines its success.  It’s the technology of the company which creates community that does.  In that regard, technology trumps community, hands down.

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As I was walking over Horseshoe falls at Niagara Falls today, Louis Gray and I chatted a bit over BlogTalkRadio’s Cinch service. In our discussion we talked about the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, and I think we both came into agreement that jumping now, while a understandable response, perhaps isn’t the best decision. I cover my knowledge of the Facebook platform and Facebook, while Louis talks about his knowledge of FriendFeed and the FriendFeed team and his thoughts on the matter. I think it was a very interesting conversation, to say the least.

You can listen via the stream above or just download it here. Be sure to follow my Cinch feed for more updates like this! (And add Cinch’s number to your phone book so you can do the same) Let me know what you think!