Thoughts about the Facebook FriendFeed Merger
Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.
Just got done listening to the latest FFundercats "emergency chat podcast" discussing the Facebook / FriendFeed merger. Of course there's a lot of fear around this from the community. Will they merge the 2 systems? If I'm only a friendfeed user, will I have to get a facebook account in order to retain all the things I've posted in friendfeed? If they merge the 2 systems will my contacts be merged? Will my Facebook friends be able to see my FriendFeed activity or vice versa? Will I have to become Steven Perez's bunneh vampire? Actually we all know that DYSP's bunneh vampires will take over the world but I digress.
First off, I'd like to say that I don't they that the FF guys owe us a thing. They built a service, let us play there and now they've found their way to make money, good for them. Let me let you in on a secret, that's why they started FriendFeed, that wanted to profit. Other then the fact that they should've let Scoble break the story, I don't think anyone else was "screwed". It's funny, we never learn. This happens with communities all the time on the net: 6apart, blogger, flickr and youtube all leap to mind. And everytime it happens people are outraged and yell and scream "You Owe Me". Well, in the case of a free service, especially one that doesn't have any advertising, we're owed nothing. We got to play in a playground, they got to prove something has value and that's that. If can't handle that level of disappointment, don't play in their sandbox.
If you're not backing up your activity on these services you haven't been paying attention web startups there past 15 years. I plan that if I'm not capturing some I post and put it into a DB that I control and backup, it's going to be gone. It's a risk we take with every web service we use. So if you want to keep your tweets, your facebook statuses, comments you make on other blogs, your own blog posts make sure you have an extra copy. Part of the reason I'm running a lifestream at play with keyboard is to backup my activity into a separate database that I control (I'm still importing older content that I have stored on my homebox).
Now, I do have some concerns about cross contamination of the groups. I really work hard at siloing my friends. Where there is cross contamination, I really reserve facebook for people I actually know and linkedIN for people I've worked with but I liberally add "interesting people" or just people who post interesting things on friendfeed and twitter. It's funny I share the same information on most of these networks, it's just a matter of siloing what's coming in to me. If I have only a few minutes I'm more likely to scan facebook statuses then FF or tweets. Ironically you are more likely to be my friend if you're a facebook connection then a friendfeed friend (I'll rail on using the word friend for any of this some other day).
This might be the number one reason why a decentralized network is important. But that's a discussion for another day.