FriendFeed Turns 5. The One-Time Pioneer Is Still Here.

Five years ago today, a small aggregation startup called FriendFeed opened its doors, in beta, to intrigued early adopters who wanted to bring all the updates from different services they used into one place and follow friends. As was evident from initial coverage of the site from outlets such as the New York Times and TechCrunch, what grabbed attention as much as the product itself was its founders - a group of four former Googlers who had made their name on products like Gmail and Google Maps.

After an admitted slow start, the product gained incredible attention from the Silicon Valley digerati through 2008 as the team expanded and features rolled out with regularity, including the launch of the "Like" button, which became the hallmark action at Facebook, the company's eventual acquirer, a pioneering approach to real-time, and many other aspects which have shown challenging for other startups, including photo display, topical rooms, participation by email and more. By August 2009, less than two years after its initial launch, FriendFeed was gobbled up by Facebook, and work on the site essentially stopped. Now in 2012, two thirds of FriendFeed's initial 12 employees have left Facebook, and yet somehow, the site is still up - despite the occasional outage.

Now that we have the benefit of looking backward, with FriendFeed being part of Facebook much longer than its lifespan as an independent company, it is worth reviewing why the company was significant, relative to many other startups at the time, and why people would keep using the service, even as alternatives to take one's time on the web sprout constantly. Also -- keep in mind I am speaking as an individual, not as a Googler, and this is no reflection on any of Google's products...

Good old FriendFeed, with Lists, Rooms, Likes, Comments, Photos and Search

FriendFeed Took On Challenging Problems -- Here are 10.

1. Rapid Aggregation

The first challenge for FriendFeed to approach was the retrieval of near real-time aggregation from the Web's many services, constantly looking for updates on sites like Flickr for photos, blogs for posts, Twitter for Tweets, and YouTube for your shared videos. The assumption was that when you made an activity elsewhere, it would appear on your feed practically instantaneously. Initiatives that helped this included their own Simple Update Protocol (SUP) and Pubsubhubbub.

2. Interaction - Presenting the Like

The second challenge was converting from a site that highlighted activity elsewhere to a thriving community of its own. A feed of all your friend's activities could be hollow without your ability to interact. That was solved with three steps - the first being a bookmarklet that let you share content from other sites directly to FriendFeed, the second being the introduction of commenting and liking articles shared by your friends, and the third, the ability to add a status update directly to the site - which converted from just a catch-all for content started elsewhere to a starting point for new conversations.

Nowadays, the like button is so closely associated with Facebook that it's assumed to have been born there. Yet, it was FriendFeed, in a trend that took place regularly, who initiated it only to be mimicked quickly.

3. Search With Brains

The third challenge was delivering intelligent search. With backgrounds at Google, it was assumed when FriendFeed would deliver search, it would be done well, and they didn't disappoint. Their advanced search lets users find comments and posts from specific people, all friends, or from everyone. It lets you search on the type of content or any combination. With Twitter remaining unable to produce a search engine with any history, FriendFeed's search archive remains valuable for anything published on the social sphere beyond the last month.

4. Organizing Your Friends

The fourth challenge was helping users organize friends into lists. As is seen with Google+ circles and Facebook lists, sorting people into smaller groups is important and challenging. FriendFeed introduced lists in August of 2008, which let people not only put people in the right buckets, but take especially noisy people off their main stream -- extremely helpful. This also delivered what TechCrunch called a "fake follow".

5. Real time at the Core

The fifth challenge? Moving away from a load and refresh model to one of real time. The concept of new content flowing in from the top of the page, and conversations bumping comments back to the top of the page made FriendFeed have real time at its core. Combine that with advanced search, and realt-time search on FriendFeed became the place to gather for breaking news events, like Apple keynotes.

6. Topical Rooms

Challenge number six... delivering topical rooms that let people with shared interests participate, with granular sharing models, so rooms could be public, private, or moderated. This could be as simple as a room for intranet-like discussions, organizing the week's poker tournament, or to debate politics endlessly with friends and foes.

7. Smart Display of Photos, Video and Audio

Text is easy. Getting photos and other rich media is hard. Twitter took years to graduate from a text-only site (with links) to one with embedded images. Even then, they are a click away. FriendFeed made it easy to share multiple photos, or even embed Mp3s so your friends could listen on the site. Shares from YouTube and other services, like Vimeo, could be easily viewed and detected by the service.

8. Selective Viewing of Shares

Not every post from everyone is gold. This is not a surprise. FriendFeed made it so you could hide all updates from specific services, or people, or any combination. If your buddy who writes a great blog tweets too much, FriendFeed had a solution for you. This remains a challenge in most places.

9. Posting from Email or Mobile

Thanks in part to outside developer Gary Burd, later hired, users could post to FriendFeed by sending updates to an email address. Attached photos were attached to the post itself. Very clean. The site also had an iOS-friendly version at http://www.friendfeed.com/iphone which worked very well on a sub 4 inch screen.

10. Embedding On Other Sites

Though not used a ton, you could embed FriendFeed conversations and feeds on external blogs or websites. Have the conversation in one place and want to showcase it elsewhere? FriendFeed let you do that. Most social services have widgets, but can be as limited as links back to the original source. FriendFeed was much more portable.

These innovations, in addition to a growing loyal community, had us hoping FriendFeed could cross the chasm and reach a wide audience beyond those of us who were tech-centric. Interestingly, many of the conversations evolved as users of the platform talked less about startups and platforms, and made the site a place for pictures of kids, silly memes, and glorious food pics.

And it Stayed Up When Others Didn't

At a time when Twitter was as known for its fail whale as anything else, FriendFeed refused to crash. The team had learned how to scale the product so that even under periods of peak load, sluggish behavior was practically absent. Only in the seemingly annual event of datacenter failures, and eventual site rot due to abandonment for practically three years, has seen the product unavailable. In fact, as the legend tells it, one of the caveats for signing off on the 2009 acquisition was one of the cofounder's wives making the request that FriendFeed stay alive as an independent service indefinitely - which has happened.

So Now What?

The initial gut-wrenching response to the acquisition by those of us participating FriendFeed regulars was one of distrust and pessimism, that the pace of innovation and open behavior the small startup had was going to become opaque post-acquisition. It was assumed the relationships built in the community would disappear. Not too long after the purchase did you start to see news that one engineer after another would turn away from Facebook to start something else or simply take time off.

There is no question the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook was a lucrative one for its employees, and particular its cofounders and earliest hires. While the initial price didn't set records, the acceleration of Facebook's value, recent events notwithstanding, made the purchase an impressive one. Split among a dozen employees and a minor investment from Benchmark, and you can see they did well. Features initially in FriendFeed later made their way to Facebook, for the most part, and the team dispersed to various corners of the social monolith.

Of the 12 employees at time of acquisition, 4 are still employed at Facebook, including Ben Golub, Casey Mueller, Sanjeev Singh and Tudor Bosman. Ana Yang Mueller left last week, following the arrival of her first child. Former Facebook CTO and FriendFeed cofounder Bret Taylor recently left to launch another startup. Jim Norris, another cofounder, is at AeroFS. Dan Hsaio left. Ben Darnell, at Facebook for about half a second, is at DropBox, following Thing Labs and later AOL. Kevin Fox is at Electric Imp. Paul Buchheit is at Y Combinator. Gary Burd left 2 months after the acquisition, preferring not to telecommute from Seattle.

Given the array of places these folks have gone after Facebook, it's obvious top talent finds top roles. The FriendFeed team was ahead of its time in a number of ways in developing what it did at the pace it did - even offering up a changelog to show checkins to the site, which updated rapidly. The site turned out a community which I've watched stay fairly solid, despite the neglect, and one that's moved from network to network. At the end of 2009, I even said I would find value from FriendFeed if I were the only one left on the site. Keep in mind Google+ debuted two years later, and that's where many similar interactions take place today, but at the time, it was true.

In the thousands of blog posts I've added to this site, I've covered hundreds and hundreds of unique services. There are the rare ones which are so clearly innovative and inspire real community that demand loyalty as FriendFeed did. For those who opted out of the FriendFeed experience, you missed out. For those still hanging on, it's maybe time for a group hug. The small team accomplished incredible stuff, and surprisingly... it's still here. I wonder if it will stay on another five years.

Full Disclosures: I work at Google and work with the Google+ team through Developer Relations. I am good friends with multiple former FriendFeed employees on the list. We're buds, essentially.

The Future of Local Storage Is Practically None At All

Stand Back or Your Hard Drive Is Going to Get It

First they came for our floppy drives. Then, they came for our CDs and our DVD drives. It won't be too long until the concept of a hard drive, or any local storage, beyond that needed for temporary offline use, is itself antiquated. After decades of dramatically increasing PC hard disks, from megabytes to terabytes, saving local data is more likely to put you at risk of loss, relative to remote backup, than it is to keep your data safe, helped along by many trends pushing toward cloud storage and applications.

In April of last year, I talked about how I planned to forego the purchase of physical media, disavowing books, CDs, DVDs and other printed materials, when digital would do, and I haven't looked back - getting to my media from any device that recognized my signed-in identity. Meanwhile, as chronicled, starting in early 2010, when I first got a MacBook Air, and accelerated as I've turned toward ChromeOS as my primary device, I have almost entirely stopped the use of desktop applications. If it can't be reached via web browser, it's probably not worth having.

Goodbye Desktop Applications. Your Time Is Past

May's introduction of the latest Samsung Chromebooks (see my review) left me using my Mac only once per day, for a specific task - synchronizing my FitBit. Until recently, FitBit didn't have a completely cloud-capable service, so each night around midnight, after a full day's neglect, I open the Mac, sync the FitBit in the cradle, confirm the data's gone through, and close the Mac again, until the next day. With the recently announced FitBit One series promising wireless syncing to iOS or Android, I'm just one device away from being done.

For the rest of the day, without exception, I am on my Chromebook, or my Android devices. All my music, emails, photos, documents and other web services can be accessed and managed on the cloud through the browser.

Knocking Down Lagging Apps One By One

The evolution of software and its intersection with platforms is an intriguing one. We Mac users in the 1990s and early 2000s occasionally had to make sacrifices, not having access to apps available only on Windows. Similarly, as iOS and Android increased in market presence, there was the occasional app missing from one platform or the other. But over time, practically all applications, or their equivalents, make their way to the top platforms, and while my move to Android more than two years ago came with some apps missing, all the ones I needed quickly followed me there.

No Seriously, Have You Seen Pixlr on the Web? It's Great.

Now the web itself has proven capable enough for almost any task, and reasons why not to go all Web are dramatically reduced, especially the improved capabilities of documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Google Drive, the release of high quality image editing software like Pixlr, and promises that popular desktop applications like Spotify are set to reach the cloud very soon now, to stream music in addition that which you can purchase from Google Play.

Time to Move on From the Desktop and File Mentality

With solid reasons to not go all Web rapidly eliminated, this evolution also brings up the opportunity to revisit old paradigms we've always taken for granted, as how we use our computers and mobile devices has changed.

Consider, for example, the desktop and files metaphor. Decades ago, we adapted our PCs to be similar to those environments we knew offline. The desktop, folders and files all hearken back to this original model. Even the hyperlinks of today's Web follow similar structures with directories and files owned by top level domains, and today's leading cloud storage vendors, including Dropbox and Google Drive, mimic a traditional desktop environment to bring ease of adoption to users migrating from local storage. But this shouldn't always be the case.

While clean directory structures once were enough for me to almost quit a job over a decade-plus ago, machine-generated links to content are good enough, and it's possible we just need to know how content relates to one another, or what you're searching - for example, email, and tags that generate metadata, providing you with what you need even if you don't know exactly where to look.

All Your Computers Are Mine. Seriously.

The notion of this being "my laptop" or "your PC" doesn't even make sense any more if you think about it. All I need is access to my "stuff", and that stuff is tagged to my identity, be it one that is affiliated with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook or any other provider. While Chromebooks have made it most clear that you can sign out of one account and sign in as another and retain access to all your things, the truth is that so long as you are using a leading provider of identity, you should be able to get to all your files, bookmarks, and media from any device with a modern browser. Go ahead, steal my laptop. I'll just get another one that will do the same things and be up and running in minutes.

Kids These Days... They Don't Need Hard Drives

Consider also that my children should never need to use or know about local storage. At ages 4 and 2, my children will enter elementary school in 1 to 3 years. They have been raised with web-connected TVs, tablets and smartphones, have an expectation of anytime access to data, and shouldn't be trained to store data that is tied to any single device. To them, every device has Netflix. To them, every device can get to Google, and anything they want to see, hear or watch can be found by asking Google for the right image or video, instantly - no buffering allowed.

Just two to three years is enough for us to see how rapidly USB thumb drives went from being the hot tradeshow giveaway to now seeming almost completely useless, with online sharing being the norm. Just two to three years was all I needed as a student attending Berkeley in the late 1990s to move from carting a floppy disk across campus to the computer lab for printing my freshman year, to instead email the document to myself as an attachment my junior year.

Oh. So You Don't Have Pervasive High Speed Wireless?

It's easy to sit in Silicon Valley's ivory tower and say that with pervasive high speed Internet, eliminating any dependency on local storage is a brilliant idea. It's easy to overlook potential power outages, cloud disruptions, dependence on third party services, and spotty web. Nobody likes being out of range for phone calls, let alone all your data, and nobody truly wants to be helpless if their account is compromised. Those are not minor and trivial concerns. But neither is ensuring data compatibility as the data is stored on multiple local machines, and backed up to temporary local storage which may or may not be less reliable than a service provider that serves millions or more.

Years ago, it may have seemed silly to move to web-based email instead of desktop applications, and the same could be said for other apps that have now become default on the web - including calendaring, address books, event planning and more. Digital media for entertainment, once the province of physical media delivered to your home or picked up at a retailer, is now accessible anywhere on any device. So too will be your photos, music, documents, and more. I even moved all my family's photos off spinning disk on an array of Macs from the last 4 years and put them on Drive.

The key to staying prepared for the next evolution of computing is to be willing to take a leap of faith - knowledge that you don't need desktop devices when a laptop will do, knowledge that you don't need to have DVDs in your living room when Netflix or iTunes have all you need, and that what you've been used to and taught over decades just might not be entirely the same any more.

Disclosures: I work for Google and yes, Google makes many services that provide for cloud storage and computing, as well as those nice Chromebooks, one of which I gained for free earlier this year and am using right now to make this post (as well as all the screenshots and images in the post, edited in Pixlr).

All Hands Meetings: Good, Bad and the Ugly

Whether at a startup or a Fortune 500 company, culture and communication with colleagues can have an incredible impact on morale and the bottom line. Amass enough naysayers, and the negative inertia can drag down the optimists. Similarly, a well-timed rallying cry can spur troops to close out the quarter on an up note, and help others be willing to work extra hours for a shared goal.

One of those opportunities for shared discussions is the company-wide all hands meeting, led by management, typically starring the CEO. In my dozen-plus years in the Valley, from the tiniest of startups, to my current role at Google, as you can imagine, I've seen a variety of ways a company's culture was approached, and how these all hands meetings could take on a life of their own. A recent story by All Things Digital's Kara Swisher regarding rumored changes at Yahoo! following Marissa Mayer's joining the company as CEO has had me thinking about some of the crazy things I've seen since the end of the '90s in such meetings, both good and bad.

The first company I worked, Internet Valley, didn't ever grow to the point where All Hands meetings made sense. We had 3-4 employees, and our boss simply had to scoot his chair back and speak to the two of us worker bees to have a discussion.

After that dalliance came and went, at my second company, 3Cube, I was one of about a dozen people, mostly engineers, we had All Hands discussions to announce good news on product, business development or in fund raising. I remember when we raised $1 million in seed funding back in 1999, at a valuation of $10 million, and spoke of plans to get the next round at $10 million with a $100 million valuation, if our goals were met. Our CEO, and the rest of us, were excited. As drinks were poured, we joked that the million bucks, split about 10 ways, would be a fun run to the Mexican border, if nothing else. We also used the All Hands format to discuss new partners, and ready product rollouts.

I joined BlueArc in 2001, and initially, during our glowing phase when we came out of stealth and made our first customer shipments, our All Hands meetings rallied the company for a common good.

But almost immediately afterward, due to our own issues and economic uncertainty, those disappeared. In a year's time, the three All Hands meetings we had were to discuss two separate rounds of significant layoffs, with a CEO change in the middle for good measure - on April Fools' Day, no less. We knew that if an All Hands meeting popped up on our calendar for the upcoming Friday, there was a good chance you should back up all your email on Thursday. All Hands meetings were brutal and scary.

As those of us left behind muddled through, we gained a new Marketing VP in 2002, and we survivors recounted the situation. Unsurprisingly, he was appalled, and helped us restart semi-regular meetings, where we didn't fear for our jobs or the company's livelihood. For the most part, the meetings, held once a quarter or so, recapped the last three months of sales, and highlighted our pipeline. But even those meetings started to take on a Twilight Zone feeling, as it seemed our CEO would talk about how we had not met sales expectations for the quarter, but we would still get some bumbling engineer to ask how his stock options were doing - seemingly oblivious to the fact that we were going nowhere fast.

Those meetings were also memorable for the inevitable sales guy calling in to the conference line in the car with the top down, and not being muted. Nothing like the entire company waiting around while the CEO barked into the Polycom for whoever it was to "PLEASE MUTE YOUR PHONE."

After a few years of this nonsense, and a few Marketing VPs later, I previewed to the latest guy exactly how the quarter's All Hands meeting would go down, with specifics on the CEO's nuances, the sales guys' excuses, the engineers' begging for stock updates, and more. When he viewed his first All Hands meeting in person and watch it unfold in front of him, just as I had told, he swore to me it was all he could do to stop from laughing. How could it have been allowed to be so bad for so long? Such a great opportunity to communicate transparently and freely with the whole company wasted.

From that day forward, we took ownership of the All Hands meetings, working with the CEO and management, to make sure the content was planned in advance, that there was a variety of speakers, and value to everyone who joined - not just a droning on of excuses that had little bearing on employees' day to day. The results were clear, as employees felt better informed, understood product roadmap and big sales opportunities, and, when appropriate, what was needed to keep the company funded or solvent. It was a remarkable change from the three straight doomsday All Hands meetings and the cries for options to mute phones on the conference line.

Google's TGIF experience is well documented on the Web. It's open to the employees and closed to the outside world, to protect the discussions and keep people informed and engaged. That Yahoo! would now be getting the same kind of regular updates and visibility into management they deserve is something that should be exciting to their team, for those who have suffered after wave after wave of bad news, in the same way our 2001-2003 All Hands seemed to flow.

Meetings for meetings' sake don't make a lot of sense. Meeting as a company, in the spirit of updating, discussing and enriching employees does, and having seen well intended executives fall flat, and others do quite well, I know there's value to getting the All Hands meeting regular, open and engaging, even if your company is small.

Disclosures: Yes, I work at Google. No, I won't tell you more about details of TGIF. Yes, Yahoo! is an assumed competitor. No, this is not an endorsement of any rumors by ATD or any official commentary on Marissa or Yahoo!.

Real Valley Stories: Leveraging Assets to Get One's Way

Editor's Note: Part 7 in an irregular series of stories from my 13 years in Silicon Valley. Part 6 talked about the a trade show booth nightmare. This time, an example of how you can leverage opportunity to achieve a goal.

Practically every employee has had a point in their career when they have run into friction with management on ideas or strategy. How you deal with this conflict, explain your ideas, and try to convince those who aren't yet sold can have a big impact on what gets implemented and how you are perceived by your colleagues. Hold to your guns too strongly, as I almost did back in 2000 over URL structure, and you could be out of a job. Become too passive, and it's unlikely you'll do much besides become a wallflower.

In the 2006-07 timeframe, about when I started posting on this blog regularly, I was sure of the impact social media and blogging would have on the way customers interacted with each other and brands. But while I was blogging in the evening hours on strategy and playing the part myself, during the daytime hours at the office, I was struggling to get my management team to go along, no matter the examples I brought up, the guidance from our current PR team, or the links I found on the web.

As sure as I had been in 2003-04 that leveraging Google Adwords ahead of the competition would give us increased visibility to customers, buying keywords for our industry, I was sure that we once again had the opportunity to be leaders in what was a fairly slow moving market. But my boss, the VP of Marketing, said my time would be better used doing a demand gen campaign than writing a blog. When the PR team and I appealed to the CEO, and asked him what blogs he read, he drew a blank, looked up, and said "those Louis sends me." Aside from being frustrated at what I perceived to be a lack of intellectual curiosity, I felt like a fraud - unable to  get my company to do what I was telling others they should. My Clark Kent and Superman cape was showing holes.

But opportunity struck, surprisingly, when I was asked to solicit additional public relations firms, as we ramped up for what would be our first approach at entering the public markets and filing an IPO. The main reasoning for taking on an elite firm was that we wanted one to assist with not just the standard marketing and PR, but also analyst relations and investor relations.

While that in itself was a lot to do, I tagged on more. In creating my requests for proposal (RFPs), I made it mandatory that any firm bidding also had to propose a thorough social media and blogging strategy. In phone calls with each of the firms I reached out to, I made it clear that this was mandatory - and I would not consider anyone who did not lead with a comprehensive strategy that explicitly suggested I lead the company's blogging effort. Everyone, no doubt wanting to win the contract, agreed.

In the next few weeks, firm after firm came through our doors, telling us about their PR, AR and IR acumen, their industry expertise, and one after one said that our company should initiate a deep social media strategy, including blogging, and each one told our VP and CEO that I should lead it. After hearing this three or four times, my boss turned to me, and smiling, said, "What the hell? Did you tell them all to say this?" I played dumb, but eventually they wore down, and social media and blogging, including activity on Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader shared links and FriendFeed was part of our standard activity - at a time when larger competitors were still figuring things out.

I'd like to say the story ended up with roses. We ended up filing the IPO and later withdrawing it, and the quiet period disrupted some of our ability to be more active. Later, after I left the company in 2009, they filed again, before being acquired last year. But for me, it was good to see I could leverage the assets I had to achieve what I wanted, even when seeing executive debate. You don't always get a chance to get an external team to preach your ideas to your management, but if you do find the opportunity for leverage, it can't hurt to give it your best shot.