We had a wonderful, thriving life science community [1] on Friendfeed, which we have not been able to replicate since. Some of that crowd even published a paper about it [2]. Most of the original crowd left sometime after the FB acquisition. While many of us hang out on Twitter, it's not the same thing).<p>----<p>1. <a href="http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists" rel="nofollow">http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists</a><p>2. <a href="http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000263" rel="nofollow">http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...</a>
FriendFeed had the best social network mechanics of all social networks I ever saw. Part of it made it into Facebook now (but I can't consider really using FB).<p>Unfortunately, it had no monetization strategy. I suspect that if they had optional paid accounts by now (e.g. $3/mo), many people would pay just to keep the thing afloat and their community intact.<p>Unfortunately, there seem to be only two ways for an online service to last: to become paid by users commercially, or to become "paid" by users' labor of love when they install and maintain it. The later practically requires the service to open its source code.
Thank you FriendFeed - I'll miss you. At some point I thought Friendfeed was going to take over the world... But as usual I have to be reminded that I am not representative of the mass audience.
best thing to come out of friendfeed, Tornado. I remember asking Bret Taylor on his blog [0] when he gave a Tornado example if he'd ever release it. A bit of time went by, then he did. [1] Thanks Bret.<p>[0] <a href="http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado" rel="nofollow">http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado</a><p>[1] <a href="https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-news/9b8fbaed/technology-behind-tornado-friendfeed-web" rel="nofollow">https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-news/9b8fbaed/technology-b...</a>
An interesting Quora answer by Bret about the status of FriendFeed some weeks ago.<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-current-status-of-FriendFeed" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-current-status-of-FriendFeed</a>
One of those things...<p>Friendfeed was technically better medium than twitter in every single way at the time (maybe still) yet it died (don't mean that it failed). Another example of why making social startups is a huge risk.
The Archive Team on the case to archive the content as usual #humancentifeed <a href="https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/575143304859361280" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/575143304859361280</a>
I personally hate when services let people down.
I prefer a much more "future oriented" approach much like the one from Basecamp <a href="https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3830-ta-da-list-until-the-end-of-the-internet" rel="nofollow">https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3830-ta-da-list-until-the-end...</a><p>or the idea behind <a href="https://posthaven.com/" rel="nofollow">https://posthaven.com/</a><p>I guess it's all about vision and how to delight your customers.
All the people who believed in a product are people who trusted your words, and gave you access to a lot of their information.
Yet it's so easy to let them down and shut down a service.
It was for springpad, it now is for friend feed.
Sometimes it's about the money sometimes it's about the users (I guess it's always about the money though).<p>But I can't help it, I prefer when you can trust a service,and I'd be willing to pay as long as I know that service will stay up even if I'm the only user.
How can I export my data? I know there is an API but it will be incredible useful to have a link to download everything.<p>Google Reader had an option to export your data when they closed their web service.