FriendFeed should have been part of Facebook from Day One
True confessions time: I created a FriendFeed account some time back but never really used it. I was already deeply entrenched in Facebook by then and was starting to see some value in Twitter - so I jumped into FriendFeed and created an acccount.
That's as far as I got.
Also see: Facebook to acquire FriendFeed
You see, FriendFeed was always so similar to Facebook that it kind of seemed a waste of my time to tap into two services to share the same details of my life with the same groups of people. Twitter, for me, had me interacting with strangers who were following me - so the idea of sharing a link to an interesting NYT story on Twitter was OK while sharing the details of my weekend adventure just felt creepy. Instead, those details were left for the group of people on Facebook that I'd already welcomed into my circle.
For me, though, it just felt so much like Facebook that... well, you know. In fact, in a brief interview with FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit this afternoon, he joked that within a few weeks after the company launched in 2007, the FriendFeed folks and Facebook folks would bump into each other around Silicon Valley and had this ongoing joke about FriendFeed becoming part of Facebook.
The companies are located in neighboring towns in Silicon Valley - Facebook in Palo Alto and FriendFeed in Mountain View, home to the Google campus where the FriendFeed founders came from.
You see, when the dust settles on all of these "Facebook buys FriendFeed" blog posts - mine included - we'll see that this was less about the FriendFeed service and more about the FriendFeed brain power.
I'm told that the team - all 12 of them - will start working for Facebook immediately, as in tomorrow, and move over to those Palo Alto offices. As for the FriendFeed service, the word is that there will be no immediate changes - and the company went so far as to tell CNET that "we absolutely wouldn't shut (FriendFeed) down" - but I suspect we'll see FriendFeed wrapped into Facebook sooner than you think.
After that, I suppose, I won't have to feel guilty about being friendless on FriendFeed.