FriendFeed is a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media

Social media

The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...

 and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging

Micro-blogging

Microblogging is a broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregate file size...

 updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. It is possible to use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share, as well as originate new posts-discussions, (and comment) with friends.

The goal of FriendFeed according to their website is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful by using existing social networks as a tool for discovering interesting information. Users can be an individual, business or organization.
Bloggers writing about FriendFeed have 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 provides the facility to track these activities (such as posting on blogs, Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

 and Flickr

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...

) across a broad range of different social networks. Some bloggers are concerned about readers commenting on their posts inside FriendFeed instead of on their blogs, resulting in fewer page views for the blogger.

The founders are all former Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

 Inc. employees who were involved in the launch of services such as Gmail

Gmail

Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well via POP3 or IMAP protocols. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though...

 and Google Maps

Google Maps

Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...

. They include Paul Buchheit

Paul Buchheit

Paul Buchheit is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He was the creator and lead developer of Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested the company's now-famous motto "Don't be evil" in a 2000 meeting on company values...

, Jim Norris, Sanjeev Singh and Bret Taylor

Bret Taylor

Bret Taylor is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He was the co-creator of Google Maps and the Google Maps API. Taylor left Google in June 2007 to join venture capital firm Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence, where he and Jim Norris, another former Google employee,...

. Venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 agency Benchmark Capital

Benchmark Capital

Benchmark Capital is a venture capital firm responsible for the early stage funding of some very successful startups. In 1997, the firm invested $6.7 million in eBay, which became worth more than $5 billion by the spring of 1999. Other high-profile investments include Ariba, Juniper Networks, Red...

 is involved with the investment funding.

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View

Mountain View, California

-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

 and had on average one million monthly visitors. Employees of FriendFeed created the Simple Update Protocol

Simple Update Protocol

Simple Update Protocol, or SUP, is a protocol developed by FriendFeed to simplify and speed up RSS and Atom. A number of websites have started to provide support for SUP, meaning that updates from their services appear in FriendFeed within seconds. These sites include YouTube, Disqus, Brightkite,...

 to reduce the load put on sites by aggregators such as theirs.

On August 10, 2009, Facebook Inc. agreed to acquire FriendFeed. FriendFeed was bought for $15 million in cash, and $32.5 million in Facebook stock.

Supported services

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

Blogging Ameba Ameba (website) Ameba is a popular Japanese blogging and social networking website. Its main competitor is Mixi.In December 2009 Ameba launched , a micro-blogging platform competing with Twitter... Baidu Space Baidu Space Baidu Space is an online social networking service provided by Baidu.It was listed as Number 11 on the Top Social Media Sites of 2008 with 40 million unique worldwide visitors [source: November, 2008; comScore].... Blogger Blogger (service) Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish... Tumblr Tumblr Tumblr is a website and microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use. The site ranks as the 10th... LiveJournal LiveJournal LiveJournal is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community.... Skyrock Skyrock Skyrock.com is a social networking site offering its members a free web space where they can create a blog, add a profile, and exchange messages with other registered members... Bookmarking Delicious Diigo Diigo Diigo is a social bookmarking website which allows signed-up users to bookmark and tag web-pages. Additionally, it allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. These annotations can be kept private, shared with a group within... Furl Furl Furl was a free social bookmarking website that allowed members to store searchable copies of webpages and share them with others. Every member received 5 gigabytes of storage space. The site was founded by Mike Giles in 2003 and purchased by LookSmart in 2004... Hatena Hatena (company) is an internet services company in Japan. It operates various services including the most popular social bookmarking service in Japan, Hatena Bookmark. Hatena is the collective name of the company's services. On July 19, 2001, it was founded by Junya Kondo in Kyoto. The company moved its... Ma.gnolia Ma.gnolia Gnolia, named Ma.gnolia until 2009, was a social bookmarking web site with an emphasis on design, social features, and open standards. It is now perhaps most notable for losing members' bookmarks in a widely-reported data loss incident in January 2009... Mister Wong Mister Wong Mister Wong is one of the largest European free social-bookmarking web services.-History:The website was a German startup, established in 2006. Kai Tietjen had been running an ad agency for nearly a decade, when, in March 2006, he entered the field of web entrepreneurship with the idea to "take on... StumbleUpon StumbleUpon StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.Toolbar versions exist for... Twine Twine (website) Twine is an online, social web service for information storage, authoring and discovery. Created by Radar Networks, the service was announced on October 19, 2007 and made open to the public on October 21, 2008. On March 11, 2010, Radar Networks was acquired by Evri Inc... Google Bookmarks

Books Goodreads Goodreads Goodreads is a privately run "social cataloging" website started in December 2006 by Otis Chandler, a software engineer and entrepreneur. The website permits individuals to sign up and register books to create their library catalogs and reading lists. It also allows users to create their own... LibraryThing LibraryThing LibraryThing is a social cataloging web application for storing and sharing book catalogs and various types of book metadata. It is used by individuals, authors, libraries and publishers.... News Digg Digg Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems... Google Reader Google Reader Google Reader is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline. It was released by Google on October 7, 2005 through Google Labs. Reader was graduated from beta status on September 17, 2007.-Interface:... Meneame Menéame Menéame is a Spanish social news website based in communitary participation, made for users to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories... Mixx Mixx Mixx is a user-driven social media web site that serves to help users submit or find content by peers based on interest and location. It combines social networking and bookmarking with web syndication, blogging and personalization tools.-Details:... Reddit Reddit reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally... Photos Flickr Flickr Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to... Fotolog Fotolog Fotolog.com is a Web 2.0-based shared photoblog web site. With over 30 million registered users, it is one of the oldest and largest sites for sharing pictures through online photo diaries or photo blogs.-History:... Photobucket Photobucket Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.... Picasa Picasa Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my... SmugMug Smugmug SmugMug is a paid digital photo sharing website.- History :Chris MacAskill and Don MacAskill started the original company to build a new video game-oriented web service in February 2002. By August 2002, though, their focus shifted... Zooomr Zooomr - History :Zooomr was created in 2005 by Kristopher Tate and Michael Van Veen of BlueBridge Technologies Group. On June 19, 2006, Thomas Hawk, a well-known photographer and blogger from San Francisco, was recruited by Zooomr as its so called "Chief Evangelist." On July 17, 2006, Zooomr released...

Status Brightkite Brightkite Brightkite is a location-based social networking website that is available on any mobile device. Users "check in" at places by using text messaging or one of the mobile applications and they can see who is nearby and who has been there before. The service was created in 2007 by Brady Becker, Martin... Facebook Facebook Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as... Gmail Gmail Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well via POP3 or IMAP protocols. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though... /Google Talk Google Talk Google Talk is a freeware voice over Internet protocol client application offered by Google Inc. The first beta version of the program was released on August 24, 2005... identi.ca Identi.ca identi.ca is an open source social networking and micro-blogging service. Based on StatusNet, a micro-blogging software package built on the OpenMicroBlogging specification, Identi.ca allows users to send text updates up to 140 characters long... Plurk Plurk Plurk is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates through short messages or links, which can be up to 140 text characters in length.... Twitter Twitter Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July... Music iLike ILike iLike is an online service that allows users to download and share music. The website makes use of a sidebar that is used with Apple's iTunes or Microsoft's Windows Media Player. The program and sidebar are not required in order to use the site but allow for ease in discovering new artists.... Last.fm Last.fm Last.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed 30 million active users in March 2009. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for UK£140m .... Pandora Pandora (music service) Pandora Radio is an automated music recommendation service and custodian of the Music Genome Project available only in the United States. The service plays musical selections similar to song suggestions entered by a user...

Video 12seconds Dailymotion Dailymotion Dailymotion is a video sharing service website, headquartered in the 18th arrondissement, Paris, France. According to Comscore, Dailymotion is the second largest video site in the world after YouTube.... Joost Joost Joost is an Internet TV service, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis . During 2007-8 Joost used peer-to-peer TV technology to distribute content to their Mozilla-based desktop player; in late 2008 this was migrated to use a Flash-based Web player instead.Joost began development in 2006... Seesmic Seesmic Seesmic is a suite of freeware web, mobile, and desktop applications which allow users to simultaneously manage user accounts for multiple social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.... Smotri Vimeo Vimeo Vimeo is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. It was founded by Zach Klein and Jake Lodwick in November 2004... YouTube YouTube YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos.... Picasa Picasa Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my... Comments Backtype BackType -History:BackType was founded in 2008. It got 15 thousand dollars of seed funding from Y Combinator at that time, and it was awarded 300 thousand dollars of venture capital funding from True Ventures in 2009.On 5 July 2011 BackType was acquired by Twitter.... Disqus Disqus Disqus is an online discussion and commenting service for websites and online communities that uses a networked platform. The company’s platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and... Intense Debate

Miscellaneous Custom RSS RSS -Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats... /Atom Atom (standard) The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a... Amazon.com Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and... LinkedIn LinkedIn LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. , LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French,... Netflix Netflix Netflix, Inc., is an American provider of on-demand internet streaming media in the United States, Canada, and Latin America and flat rate DVD-by-mail in the United States. The company was established in 1997 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California... Netvibes Netvibes Netvibes is a personalized dashboard publishing platform for the Web including digital life management, widget distribution services and brand observation rooms.-History:The company was founded by Tariq Krim and Florent Frémont in 2005.-Technology:... Polyvore SlideShare SlideShare SlideShare is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service. Users can upload files privately or publicly in the following file formats: PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenOffice presentations. Slide decks can then be viewed on the site itself, on hand held devices or embedded on other sites. Launched on... tipjoy Upcoming Wakoopa Wakoopa Wakoopa is a social networking site that monitors the software applications its members use.- Specifications :Its members learn what software their contacts use, and receive recommendations for better software. The service includes a desktop tracker, which is a small application that runs in the... Yelp

External links

• FriendFeed
• FriendFeed Is This Years Twitter, But Why?
• Friendfeed.com raises $5m VC
• FriendFeed: All The Numbers That Matter (infographic)