FriendFeed was a real-time feed aggregator that consolidated updates from

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social me ...

and

social networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...

websites,

social bookmarking Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social ...

websites, blogs and

microblogging Microblogging is a form of social network that permits only short posts. They "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links",. Retrieved June 5, 2014 which may be the major reason for ...

updates, as well as any type of RSS/

Atom Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons. Every solid, liquid, gas, a ...

feed. It was created in 2007 by Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh. It was possible to use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share, as well as originate new posts-discussions, (and comment) with friends. Friendfeed was built on top of

Tornado A tornado is a violently rotating column of air that is in contact with both the surface of the Earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. It is often referred to as a twister, whirlwind or cyclone, alt ...

. The service was shut down at about 21:00 GMT on April 10, 2015, though the service blog announced it a month before. The goal of FriendFeed according to their website was to make content on the Web more relevant and useful by using existing social networks as a tool for discovering interesting information. Users could be an individual, business or organization. Bloggers writing about FriendFeed said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members' social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provided the facility to track these activities (such as posting on

blogs A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, and

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

) across a broad range of different social networks. Some bloggers had concerns about readers commenting on their posts on FriendFeed instead of on their blogs, resulting in fewer page views for the blogger. The founders were all former

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

employees who were involved in the launch of services such as

Gmail Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...

and

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets (Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

. They included Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Sanjeev Singh and Paul Buchheit. Along with the latter two founders,

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which h ...

agency

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups. History The firm's most successful investment was a 1997 investment of $6.7 million in eBay for 22.1% of the company. In 2011, it invested $12 mil ...

was involved with the investment funding. FriendFeed was based in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is t ...

, and had on average one million monthly visitors. Employees of FriendFeed created the

Simple Update Protocol Simple Update Protocol, or SUP, is a protocol developed by FriendFeed to simplify and speed up RSS and Atom feed updates. Updates from services that supported the protocol would appear on FriendFeed within seconds, Paul Buchheit''Simple Update ...

to reduce the load put on sites by aggregators such as theirs. On August 10, 2009,

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...

agreed to acquire FriendFeed. FriendFeed was bought for $15 million in cash, and $32.5 million in Facebook stock. Facebook, along with a small but active community of users, kept the service going until its pre-announced closure on April 9, 2015.

Supported services

A user could configure their FriendFeed account to aggregate content from the following services:

References

External links

FriendFeed

FriendFeed Is This Years Twitter, But Why?

Friendfeed.com raises $5m VC
{{DEFAULTSORT:Friendfeed Social information processing News aggregators Meta Platforms acquisitions Internet properties established in 2007 Internet properties disestablished in 2015 Companies based in Mountain View, California 2009 mergers and acquisitions Defunct social networking services