Over the past week we have seen FriendFeed bought out by FaceBook and tr.im coming close to folding.
Users are investing a lot of time and effort building social networks and getting their content onto various third-party sites – never really knowing if all that hard work will be undone after an acquisition or a provider going broke.
Understandably, the question a lot of people are now asking is; “who or what can I trust?”
We can trust ourselves!
social media friendfeed facebook I saw an interesting post on ReadWriteWeb about one theory; which is that we self-host our own social network and media sharing. They speak about a “wordpress.org-type version of Twitter.”
This may sound a little crazy, but a self-hosted open source platform would instantly solve a few really common issues.
Think about it.
Firstly, it would ensure that your information remains ‘live’ for as long as you want it to. Secondly, it would remove all those privacy concerns, which many people have regarding how their content is handled on sites like FaceBook. It would also stop the often insane account suspensions that Twitter is becoming renowned for.
Why FaceBook really bought FriendFeed
So, FaceBook has acquired FriendFeed. This immediately got people speculating as to why FaceBook, with all those hundreds of millions of happy users, would want to buy FriendFeed. In short – FaceBook didn’t want to buy FriendFeed!
FaceBook bought talent – Not a platform
facebook buys friendfeedFaceBook is huge and has no need to buy in the relatively tiny number of users that FriendFeed has. So, this was not an acquisition of eyeballs.
The FriendFeed software is (as any geek will tell you) awesome; but that’s the problem. Geeks like us LOVE it, but it’s not usable enough for mainstream use. Although far superior to Twitter technically, FriendFeed lacks the instant usability that sites like Twitter offer.
So, I don’t believe FaceBook bought FriendFeed for the platform either.
FriendFeed does have one extremely valuable asset though – Talent!
In buying FriendFeed, FaceBook has just acquired the services of four extremely smart people; Bret Taylor, Sanjeev Singh, Jim Norris and Paul Buchheit. Before founding FriendFeed, these guys worked at Google and helped develop services like, Gmail, Google Maps and Google Groups.
Their market value is huge and that’s what I believe FaceBook is paying for.
In a press release accompanying the acquisition, FaceBook confirms the value it places on FriendFeed’s co-founders – saying they will; “hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.” The remaining 12 FriendFeed staff members will also be joining FaceBook, as part of the deal. At the time of writing this, there’s been no mention as to what FaceBook has paid for Friendfeed. If you are looking forward to translate this content, contact Translation Agencies UK