It’s been a few days since the news broke that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed in what was described as “an 11th hour deal“. Since then, the tech media have been trying to come to terms with what this means for the social networking industry and where it’s likely to lead. What’s captivating is that many of these articles see this as a fight for users between Google and Facebook over the concept of real-time search – being able to feed a user with search results as that content is created. It’s something that Twitter does very well – so much so that news outlets have started tweeting links to new stories as soon as they are published. But dig deeper, and it’s possible to see how this deal isn’t just about real-time search, but much more besides.
Putting the imagery of battling industry heavyweights to one side for a moment , it’s worth focusing on the intricacies of the deal itself. It’s interesting that TechCrunch reports that the deal is more about talent rather than product acquisition. With this, we’re more likely to see FriendFeed slowly wound down as a separate service as Facebook incorporates more of the former’s capability. This means that all of the aggregation and real-time feed management that currently resides in FriendFeed will eventually find it’s way into Facebook in one form or another. Users already use Facebook to comment on links, articles and posts made by their friends, so FriendFeed doesn’t really add anything new here.
It’s Reveloution that comes close to explaining why the deal is important, but relegates them to the bottom of a five-point list. Ask anyone that manages a portal, website or other content respository and they’ll tell you that one of the most important concepts they work on is how visitors can discover content, either through an external search or by traversing the site once they’ve entered it. Journalists and marketers want their content to be discovered by as many people as possible, while advertisers and site designers want to maximise the relevance and opportunity for advertising alongside it. Make it easy for a user to discover more content that’s meaningful to them and the theory is that they’ll return to read more content housed there at a later date. They also recognise that conversations happen around content, but that unlike older mechanisms such as blogposts and forums the conversations are shifting to areas such as Twitter or Facebook that can potentially be much harder to mine for feedback. Again, these conversations are happening in real-time (linking back to the importance of real-time search).
All this is good stuff, but it doesn’t exactly show where the industry is heading. And although a few key components are highlighted, it doesn’t exactly round off the idea. To get to that, it’s probably worth looking back on an older technology – portals. Back when Yahoo and Google were fighting it out, the concept of personalised search portals emerged. The idea was that you’d set one as your homepage so that every time you launched your browser, you’d have content that was relevant to you. Their two products – iGoogle and My Yahoo! – are still out there and being used, but have failed to make an impact on the world’s browsing habits. They’re underpowered and underpersonalised, relying on a more generic approach. And it’s in this area where the Facebook-FriendFeed tech can really shine. Imagine that your homepage is filled with content from across all areas in which you have an interest, all tagged and sorted for your convenience. Things that your friends have found might have conversations attached, encouraging you to delve deeper. You might find something and want to alert others to it yourself – the key thing is that be it a blog post, status update, news article or anything else, you get the opportunity to discover it, share it and discuss it in one place. And by incorporating all this in one site like Facebook, it provides even more opportunity to provide advertising around it.
So that’s the deal, but what about the tech? The key thing about a portal is providing interconnects for people to drop in their own content, and there are signs that Facebook is already moving in this direction. By providing support for a multitude of apps from image feeds to multiplayer games, Facebook is moving away from being a service that people consume and towards a platform that developers create their own services to run on. This is most evidenced in games like Mafia Wars, a micropayments based MMO game that is available via Facebook amongst other methods. It’s not a world apart to imagine some of our favourite content providers developing small facebook apps or even just facebook-friendly feeds to sit on our portal view in a similar way. The trouble is, running a portal requires awareness of the symbiotic nature of the many services we use, and it’s not exactly clear that Facebook understands this.
While it’s clear that some analysts see this as an opportunity for Facebook to take on Twitter at it’s own game (or that it’ll even prompt Google to push for a buyout of Twitter), I’m not so sure that it’ll happen or even that it’s needed. Nowadays, web content can be commonly exposed through APIs. Both Twitter and Google have a set of APIs that allow developers to wrap services around them, from user authentication to automated status updates. It’s one of the reasons why there are tens of iPhone Twitter apps each offering a different experience, while there still remains just one for Facebook. But by leveraging the power of these APIs, it becomes far more possible to generate a tailored experience. And should Twitter fall out of favour and be replaced by something else, all a portal would have to do is access those new interconnects or APIs presented by whatever replaces it.
It’s thoughts like this that make the recent announcement of Facebook Lite all the more confusing. Although it’s purportedly intended for users in India, China and Russia where broadband isn’t commonly available, it also has a very similar look and feel to the web view of Twitter. While producing a lite version of Facebook is commendable, I just can’t help but feel they should be focusing on what makes Facebook a unique experience, instead of trying to ape another service that already works well. Facebook doesn’t need to compete with Twitter, it just needs to think smartly about how it can integrate Twitter’s open services into it’s emergent platform.
If Facebook’s serious about becoming the home of all our networks and not just our social ones, it needs to open up a little first. The web connoisseur of today is a fickle beast that doesn’t much care for limitations or walled gardens, yet values being able to integrate or mash-up services for a personalised experience. Facebook currently have the momentum, but there’s always some startup working out of a garage somewhere that may just beat them to it.