The Web Mini Feed?

I’ve always felt that much of what Facebook offered it’s user base could be recreated by mashing up a bunch of web services like Flickr, YouTube, Delcious, Digg, Blogs, Twitter, etc. And if you are already using all of those services, then that mashup is potentially a lot more useful than Facebook.

The one thing that has been missing is the mini feed itself. Some of that is happening at Tumblr where people can import all of their activities into a personal mini-feed. But today’s announcement of FriendFeed is pretty interesting to me. I’d like to follow the top 500 people in my Xobni network’s activities and probably a bunch more.

But I won’t know for sure how interesting FriendFeed is until I can try it. Invite anyone?

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. bernard lunn

    The idea of a mashup to replace FB or any other closed social networking site is superb IMO and FriendFeed could be the missing piece. Personally I would not want the interupt-driven mode, but the idea that when I want to connect I can see what that person has been up to is great. The mix of a start-page (PageFlakes, MyYahoo, Netvibes, etc) and Blogging tool (Wordrpess, Typepad or Blogger) then become the core of the online tools. The start-page is where I get notified about interesting stuff from my world. There maybe all kinds of clever filtering type services in background but it all comes together in the start-page. The Blog is where I tell the world what interests me and friends, colleagues and partners can pick out wha they want from there. Early adopters can put in all the widgets they want from all the services they like to make this more compelling and/or to moentize the attention they are getting.

  2. Cem Sertoglu

    Fred, isn’t Grou.ps exactly this? I have always seen it as an aggregator of updates on my (real) social network.

  3. Ephraim

    I know that these services all focus on the “early adopter”, but it is odd to me that they would require that people are members of a given service (youtube, digg, etc.) in order for them to be able to participate. the stat that i saw recently was that digg had 23 million monthly viewers while they membership base was only 15-20% of that. Given its product strategy, don’t you think that a service like friendfeed will give an incomplete view of a person’s life, regardless of the number of web services that this supports? or is the idea that over the next year or two, everybody will have an account for every type of activity in their life?

  4. Jean Sini

    Hi Fred, you may know about Plaxo’s latest service, Pulse, as it’s been around for a couple of months. If not, you should definitely check it out: they have built the mash up you’re talking about, and it really turns around the social networking paradigm in my view, by automatically weaving the activity streams of your contacts (whether the activity originates from Twitter, Flickr, their blogs, etc.) into a single social news feed. Very compelling (I don’t work for Plaxo, but find myself compulsively touting their service lately; it’s that exciting!).

    1. fredwilson

      i don’t trust plaxo and don’t use it. i got way too much spam from them years ago and i’ve never been interested in them since.

  5. Bret Taylor

    I happen to be a reader of your blog — sending you an invitation right now 🙂 Glad you find it interesting, we are looking forward to your feedback.

  6. Scott Rafer

    There’s also the great MBL feature that hasn’t yet been promoted.

  7. Dave Zohrob

    Fred,At the risk of immodest self-promotion, I think you might be interested in a similar service I’ve been working on for a couple of months. It’s called Readr, and it’s at http://readr.com. There’s no closed beta, so sign on up. FriendFeed is doing something very similar to what we’re doing.

  8. Daryl Coutts

    I run a cool app that integrates notifications from many different apps into a single “mini-feed”. You can see a demo video at blog.marengoip.com.

  9. fredwilson

    i am not sure of that. they certainly are a major player on the internet now, but my feeling is that there is much more innovation to come in social networking and it may come from companies other than facebook