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.