FriendFeed

» see friendfeed.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

friendfeed launched on 23 october 2007. it was made by four ex-google engineers, including bret taylor (later facebook CTO and salesforce co-CEO) and paul buchheit (the guy who created gmail). the pitch was that you would connect your social profiles (twitter, flickr, last.fm, delicious, your blog's rss feed) and friendfeed would aggregate everything into one feed. your friends would see all your activity from all sources in one place.

the audience was small but loyal. mostly programmers, tech writers, designers, and the kind of person who already had accounts on twenty different web services. for that audience, friendfeed solved a real problem. you did not need to follow people on five different platforms. you followed them on friendfeed and saw everything.

facebook bought friendfeed on 10 august 2009 for about 50 million dollars. it was an acqui-hire. facebook wanted the team. the friendfeed product was kept alive but with no new features. it limped along for almost six years. on 9 april 2015 it was officially shut down.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what made it good ~

friendfeed had several features that were ahead of their time:

aggregation. you connected your other accounts. friendfeed pulled in your activity. one feed showed your tweets, your photos from flickr, your last.fm scrobbles, your delicious bookmarks, your blog posts. modern social-aggregator products try to do this and usually fail. friendfeed got it right in 2007.

real-time. the feed updated instantly. when someone posted, you saw it. when you wrote a comment, others saw it appear. modern social media has this now (instagram live updates, twitter's real-time stream). in 2007 it was new.

likes and comments per item. each item in your feed could be liked or commented on. your friends could discuss any one of your activities. this was three or four years before facebook made comments on shared posts a normal social pattern.

groups. you could create rooms (public or private) where a smaller set of users could share things to each other. this was halfway between a chatroom and a sub-feed. discord and slack channels are descendants of the same idea. friendfeed had this earlier and simpler.

~ the audience ~

friendfeed never really got to mass market. the audience was tech-adjacent. paul buchheit was on it. tim o'reilly was on it. robert scoble was on it. several thousand programmers and tech writers were on it. their conversations were good. the threading was good. the UI was clean.

this is not enough to sustain a consumer social product at scale. facebook had hundreds of millions of users. twitter was growing fast in 2008-2009. friendfeed had a few hundred thousand users at peak. those users were valuable but the product economics did not work.

when facebook offered 50 million for an acqui-hire of the team, the founders accepted. it was a reasonable outcome for a small company that had built something good but could not get to scale.

~ how it died ~

friendfeed under facebook ownership stopped developing new features almost immediately. the team moved into facebook to work on facebook problems. bret taylor became facebook's CTO in 2010. the friendfeed product kept running because it had loyal users, but it was not strategic.

on 9 april 2015 facebook announced friendfeed would be shut down. the announcement gave users one day's notice. the website went offline almost immediately. there was no good way to export your friendfeed history. some users who had been active there for seven years lost their archives.

this is one of the harshest social-network shutdowns in tech history. most platforms give users at least a few weeks. facebook gave a single day. the audience was small enough that there was not much public outcry.

~ what remains ~

the comment threads. friendfeed had genuinely good comment quality, partly because the audience was small and self-selected, partly because the threading made it easy to have side discussions without polluting the main thread. modern social media has not replicated this comfortably. twitter threads are flat. facebook comments are nested but cluttered. friendfeed's specific shape was good.

the team. the four founders went on to do significant things at facebook and elsewhere. paul buchheit became a successful angel investor. bret taylor became salesforce co-CEO and now runs an AI startup. they brought lessons from friendfeed into other companies.

the case study. friendfeed is the example of a product that was right but too small. the user experience was good. the audience was loyal. the founders were excellent. it still could not get to a scale where it could survive as an independent business. the social-aggregation use case is still real in 2026 (people still want one place to see all their networks) and nobody has solved it well since friendfeed.

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