I Just Fell In Love With FriendFeed

Several days ago, I whipped off a quick list of feature requests for FriendFeed which I published on this blog.

First, I got a comment from Bret Taylor, one of the founders. He said they had passed the list around the company and agreed with them. Cool.

Then yesterday they launched one of them, posting an @reply to twitter from friendfeed.

This gives me great confidence that they’ll get to all of them and pretty quickly.

The very best thing a startup can do is create passionate users and listen to them.

FriendFeed has done both and they are on their way to doing something great.

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. fredwilson

    i just added diqus to my friendfeed. let’s see if this comment shows up

  2. Sam Davyson

    FriendFeed is brilliant. Although highly self referential at this point in time… I also worry that as more people spend more time on FriendFeed as oppose to the “feeder” sites that FriendFeed aggregates then FriendFeed will have less and less content…

  3. howardlindzon

    Bret taylor needs to log in and sign up at disqus so we can put a face to the name

    1. fredwilson

      Agreed. Or at least a cool avatar like the one you hooked me up with

  4. AlexHammer

    My Friendfeed time has come at the expense of Facebook. Anyone else finding the same thing?

    1. n8k99

      facebook is a nice little repository to let things end up, and allows other people to follow along, however most of my digital life is outside the walls of their platform. friendfeed may get more of my feed (google) reader time.

  5. Bwana

    This is part of the reason why I’m hooked on FriendFeed as well. They’re listening and doing.

  6. loupaglia

    absolutely, I commented somewhere last night how impressive the turnaround was on this piece of functionality. it will be interested to see if FriendFeed ultimately is Twitter friend or Twitter foe. Just like with Facebook, where you do draw line of being a facilitator of integrating best-of-breed offerings into an aggregated solution and deciding to offering your own best-of-breed service?

    1. fredwilson

      We’ll see. But I think they’ll ber friend to things like blogs, twitter, tumblr, flcikr, disqus, etc where content gets createdFred

      1. loupaglia

        Agree, that is where it will start. But there is that fine line between aggregation and ownership, and more importantly, where is the stronger monetization vehicles. Typically it has been with the one that has control or dominates their space (i.e. Google in search). I certainly agree early on that FriendFeed needs to be the Switzerland of social aggregation. Time will tell as to whether they need to expand to “own” and not just aggregate a certain category.I fully realize the response to this comment will be “is not aggregating social and commentary flow its own category to own?” Perhaps.

  7. Daniel Spradau

    Indeed. That is a reason why I fell in love with FriendFeed as well. They really listen.

  8. n8k99

    i really have fallen for friendfeed in the last 24 hours, it seems so obvious now that they have the @reply enabled- here’s hoping that the rest of your suggestions make it into the codebase.

  9. jeffisageek

    like the rest I too have found myself using friendfeed more and more…its hard not to when they are adding new features and seem to be listening to the users.

  10. Robert Seidman

    I have tried, pretty successfully to avoid all the Web 2.0 social networking lovefest. Twitter, Facebook, blah, blah, blah. But…FriendFeed is going.to.suck.me.in. And it will actually make some of those other service (especially Twitter) much more useful to me.Damn you, Fred Wilson!P.S. in honor of you converting me, to pay homage I signed up for Disqus but found its process to add a picture so freaking bad and cumbersome that I gave up and am sticking with the generic unverified commenting!

    1. loupaglia

      Robert: What did you find hard about the image upload? Either my tolerance for bad usability has gone up or I found it easy to do. Upload, center the portion of the image you want in the square, done?

      1. Robert Seidman

        do you see how Fred’s only got one corner of his actual avatar instead of shrinking down the whole thing. When I tried to find one quarter of my head that I loved, I couldn’t. Not that I love the whole package either mind you, but what I expected to be able to do was basically easily be able to get my WHOLE face in the picture. I couldn’t. So I resized. And I still couldn’t. So I resized again, and I still couldn’t. Then I said…”ahhhhhh screw this!” 🙂

        1. fredwilson

          Yeah, I didn’t love that either, but I’ve come to live with it

    2. fredwilson

      You are a hard man to please robert, but I’ve done it!I can go to bed nowfred

  11. jackson

    Just be sure to use your powers for good and not evil.

    1. fredwilson

      Are you concerned?

  12. jon

    actually this startup is listening to someone giving them current and future (great, free) publicity – not just an ordinary passionate user by any stretch

  13. Andy Gadiel

    I sent FriendFeed an email last night and they replied within an hour, at about 12:30am.This is the kind of stuff that makes startups successful. A passion for their product and the motivation to stay on top of the inbound correspondences at any hour of the day. Sure as time goes by the founders will settle into a work routine and possibly life ‘normal hours’, but the initial incentive to get the product vision pushed ahead at all costs “while the world sleeps” is what really fuels innovation in small companies.

    1. fredwilson

      You got that right

  14. engtech

    Hi Fred,I stuck a Twitter client into Friend Feed using a Firefox extension. This might be something you’d like. Cheers.http://internetducttape.com