Facebook vs Friendfeed
Facebook recently announced some broad updates to their developer API. The opening of status messages in particular caught many a tuned-in blogger’s eye. Some have even called this move “the Twitter Killer“. I’ll save that discussion for another post — it’s a heavily debated issue with some interesting arguments on both sides.
But what struck me recently about the direction Facebook is currently headed is its striking similarity to FriendFeed, not Twitter. At this point I’d wager that most Facebook users have yet to sync all of their other social media outposts with their Facebook mini-feed, but nonetheless the opportunity to do so exists today. Between Facebook’s Import function and the rising number of sites (such as Yelp) that have been fully Facebook Connect-ed, the overlap rapidly becomes clear.
Just look at the following two screenshots. The first is of Facebook, the other is of FriendFeed. You’ll notice that because I have different platforms synced with each, the feeds carry different content. But they could easily be identical.
My Facebook feed:
My FriendFeed:
As Adam Ostrow on Mashable pointed out on Monday, Facebook recently added “Like” functionality to stories in the news feed, a minor feature attributed to FriendFeed. Twitter remains the target most armchair social media analysts predict to be in Facebook’s sights, but I’ll be curious to see if Facebook ever makes an overt move on Friendfeed, given the clear redundancy in functionality.
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[...] about Mashable as of February 12, 2009 Facebook vs Friendfeed – scheuguy.com 02/12/2009 Facebook recently announced some broad updates to their developer API [...]