FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time , but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore . Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users). That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge ), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down. It’s sad, really. FriendFeed was easily one of my favorite services (so much so that I’m still waiting for another service to replace it ). But since the acquisition by Facebook , it has been a ghost town. And now, with its 500 Internal Server Error, it’s really a ghost town. The impressive team behind FriendFeed (most are still with Facebook now) have indicated they wouldn’t let the service wither , but that seems to be exactly what is happening. If it comes back up, I wonder how many of these remaining few dozen passionate FriendFeed users that are tweeting will even notice. Maybe they’ll just give up too. Update : FriendFeed is still down over an hour later. Their official Twitter account blames a “major power outage.” CrunchBase Information FriendFeed Information provided by CrunchBase

Maybe you’ve read some of the stories this past week about how FriendFeed’s traffic is way down following their sale to Facebook . The stats don’t look good, as the site’s traffic may have plummeted as much as 30% following its peak just prior to the sale . But to anyone who has meaningfully used the site since its inception, you probably didn’t needs stats to tell you what should be obvious: FriendFeed has turned into a ghost town. One of the most compelling things about FriendFeed has always been just how easy it was to have a conversation on the site. Someone posted an item, and within seconds, many had robust conversation threads updating in the speed of realtime beneath them. This also lead to the occasional trollish activity , but overall it was great. But since the acquisition, those conversation threads have largely slowed to a crawl, or worse, don’t exist at all on many items. Previously, FriendFeed had committed to keeping the site running indefinitely despite their new jobs at Facebook. And it has remained running, but the site’s innovation, always its key attribute, has been completely halted. And perhaps as a vote of no confidence, previously rabid users are now largely staying away. And that’s really too bad. One of the key things I used FriendFeed for was to get information. There was a great system in place that would allow interesting things to bubble up based on people commenting on and the liking of items. Not all of it was great (baby pictures, while cute, get in the way of information), but overall the system worked. It was crowd-sourcing at its finest. But that obviously doesn’t work too well when the crowd has vanished. Sure, there are some items on the site that still garner a good amount of conversation and likes, but as a whole, my experience post-sale has been severely tainted. So why not just move on to Facebook, you may wonder? Because while there are similarities between what Facebook does and what FriendFeed does, FriendFeed is still much better at it. Hopefully soon we’ll begin seeing the effects of the FriendFeed team at Facebook, but so far that hasn’t happened. It’s still too slow to share , automatically imported items take forever to show up, the filtering system needs work (I want to be able to hide just a certain type of item from one friend, like I can on FriendFeed, rather than hiding everything), as does the relevance of the main stream. That last item looks like it could be close as it would appear that Facebook Lite’s “View Top Stories” will soon make its way to Facebook proper. That’s a good step, but it’s basically FriendFeed’s “Best of day” area, and doesn’t do something like push recently liked stories to the top of the stream. But more to the point, Facebook is an entirely different beast than FriendFeed. Facebook is still first and foremost a social network for people you know and want to connect with, FriendFeed was much more about information sharing and conversation. And that’s what I miss. There are plenty of others ways to get information on the web, but FriendFeed was like a playground for information. It was fast and fun. And the team’s rapid pace of innovation pushed others, like yes, Facebook. Moving over to Facebook obviously didn’t make the FriendFeed team any less brilliant, but I worry about their ability to rapidly innovate in a much larger company, one that has to worry about its legacy of over 300 million users . This week, one former FriendFeeder already left Facebook . He reasoning was that he didn’t want to telecommute anymore (he lives in Seattle), but he didn’t seem to mind doing it while he was still working on FriendFeed. Read into that what you will. The bigger picture is that we see this happen all too often. A larger service buys a smaller one and proceeds to run the smaller one into the ground. Not on purpose, but because they have bigger goals for their own products. Google is particularly good at it. Jaiku, Dodgeball, you could even put Feedburner in there. Now we’re seeing Facebook do it too. The users are just along for the ride, helpless when this happens. They take our playground, and put glass on the ground. We can still play, but it’s not as fun. And eventually, everyone leaves with bloody feet — and doesn’t want to come back. We should consider ourselves lucky that Twitter hasn’t agreed to be purchased yet, it could have very well suffered the same fate. Look, I’m happy the FriendFeed team was able to get an exit that they clearly felt good about. And I realize that some services, no matter how innovative or how passionate their user base is, sometimes fade away. It’s just sad to see it go. It used to be my playground. [photo: flickr/ Alejandro Hernandez ] CrunchBase Information FriendFeed Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Following Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed , a lot of users in that community were up in arms. Basically, everyone was quick to jump to the conclusion that FriendFeed, as we knew it, was dead. And with the comments immediately following the deal, the parties on both sides did little to change that line of thinking, basically saying things along the lines of “we’ll see.” Many users were threatening to leave the service immediately, turning them into yes, FFugees. Well, now that the FriendFeed team is successfully in their new Facebook office and working to get up to speed on their new site, Steve Gillmor got a chance to catch up with FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit , and to ask him some of the questions that Mike didn’t touch on too much during his interview with Buchheit last week. Warning, the video below is quite long (over 50 minutes) and free-flowing at points, so I’ll summarize some of the key things said first. Of note: FriendFeed was in between large new internal projects when the Facebook deal came along, so the timing was good for it. That said, they were working on a new feature to allow you to pipe FriendFeed feeds into FriendFeed Groups. While you could import pretty much any feed previously, you couldn’t import an entire FriendFeed feed into another feed. The service was working on that and still plans to launch it, but Buchheit says he wasn’t running point on it, so doesn’t know the timing details. Buchheit has a lot of trouble pronouncing PubSubHubbub . He also talks a bit more about their SUP implementation to speed up the gathering of information. Buchheit is not aware of a conspiracy on Twitter’s behalf to slow down their feed coming into FriendFeed post-Facebook deal. While FriendFeed had switched from Twitter’s XMPP feed to the newer HTTP-based feed a few months ago , Twitter recently requested that they update again to a newer HTTP feed called “Birddog”. Birddog is the name of one of the restricted feeds of Twitter data, you can read more about it here . With regard to the old FriendFeed team’s focus right now, Buchheit notes that for the time-being it’s dedicated to the issues Facebook is facing, and learning now Facebook actually works. That said, while new FriendFeed development may stop during this transition period, maintenance that needs to get done to FriendFeed will get done still indefinitely. Buchheit notes that the FriendFeed team is still using FriendFeed to talk internally about their new projects at Facebook. Buchheit notes that Facebook had shown interest in FriendFeed basically since they launched the company in 2007. But FriendFeed was never interested in an offer from them until they actually started talking to people on the Facebook team recently and saw their vision for where they want to take the product. He jokes that the whole “has Facebook been copying some of your [FriendFeed's] features” thing helped the FriendFeed team actually see that they were at least interested in the same goals in some regard. (Something which, ahem, I pointed out in my first TechCrunch post .) Buchheit notes that a couple years ago Facebook was just profiles and games, now it’s much more. Buchheit likes the idea of FriendFeed clones popping up. Their new API allows you to do a lot of things, and offers much of the functionality of actual FriendFeed, and he hopes people keep building cool services on top of it. The APIs will live on. He still believes that long term, all of these status and information streams should be more federated in some way, much like how email is. Of course, Facebook is known now for its lack of openness in that regard, but Buchheit cites Facebook’s unique security issues as being a reason to take it slow. Still, he sees a future where Facebook is much more than just a website, where it’s more of a platform for the web, and he believes that is what Facebook wants to be as well. Buchheit notes that the Facebook inbox is not his favorite feature, but that it was born out of the long history of email where people have expectations like subject lines and signatures. (Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google.) He notes that direct messages, like the kind used on Twitter and FriendFeed, are much more efficient for messaging now. There won’t be a literal dropping in of FriendFeed code to Facebook because that wouldn’t work well. On the topic of the fears some FriendFeed users have about still using the service because their data may just disappear if FriendFeed does, Buchheit notes that if anything, the Facebook acquisition has lowered the chances of that happening. He says that in the big picture, it’s so little data, and takes very little to support. And Facebook is a huge, secure company now. (He is, of course, alluding to the fact that FriendFeed was in a much less stable position in the market.) Buchheit reiterates again that he is not worried about FriendFeed vanishing. And he believes that some features may start to appear in other forms on Facebook that users will like. And there may be some experimentation with that relatively soon. Those are many of the key points, but again, if you’d like to watch a nearly hour-long video on this fine Saturday, please be our guest below. Hopefully much of this will further put to ease the minds of would-be FFugees. CrunchBase Information FriendFeed Facebook Paul Buchheit Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors