Facebook Targets FriendFeed; Opening Up The News Feed

[Chris Messina]

Man, these activity streams are all the rage! It'll be useful to see
how Facebook implements this, from both a UI and technical/
permissioning perspective.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/22/facebook-targets-feedfriend/

Chris

Sent from my iPhone

[David Recordon]

It completely makes sense that they do this since Beacon failed as a
proprietary way to bring outside actions in the the FB News Feed. It
will be interesting to see how users setup their actions and what
controls they have.

--David

[Pras Sarkar]

An interesting side-effect to this is the problem of aggregating
activity streams that might be aggregated streams themselves. Sites
like linkriver.com, imintait.com, etc. are helping aggregate life
streams from 1st level services (twitter, facebook, tumblr,
del.icio.us, etc.). But when Facebook (being a 1st level service)
itself becomes an aggregation of other 1st level services (thereby
becoming a 2nd level service), there will be an obvious collision
between activities (1st and 2nd level).

The longer term effect is that lifestream sites will lose their core
differentiation and coupled with the higher adoption-barrier, will
soon find it harder to compete with the 1st level services.

Of course, the other obvious reason for Facebook is that they now will
have access to a more complete profile for each user, rather than just
the Facebook specific space. Better profiling leads to better targeted
advertising.

-Pras

[Chris Messina]

Yep. ;)

Brian Oberkirch has some more thoughts on this trend:

http://www.brianoberkirch.com/2008/02/25/gumbo-ya-ya/

I expect FriendFeed to get pretty big, maybe not quite the next
Facebook, but their success looks like Twitter's.

Chris

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[Stephen Paul Weber]

This is already an issue with twitter-to-facebook-status (at least on
socialthing!)

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[Tao Takashi]

So is it already possible to create loops then and bring all those systems down? ;-)

But I think what it all needs in the end is a good filter anyway.. Right now those aggregations might be useful as a filter but over time they also might get more and more. Additionally my focus might shift depending on where I am, what I am doing and so on and thus I might need to adjust.

I also noticed with Noserub how much work it is actually is to sort your friends and their activity streams properly (depending whether they are on Noserub already or not). This again might raise the question of Data Portability as I might want to move these profiles then over to other services.

-- Christian

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[Chris Messina]

The infinite echo problem is a big one, for sure. Atom and permalinks
help, but only if those permalinks are carried through. If they're
stripped out, and you're aggregating both your Facebook stream and
your Twitter stream (which was already being aggregated by Facebook)
the problem manifests very quickly.

Ideally you should really only ever have on activity stream
aggregation per person, but since they're coming in vogue, it's likely
people will possibly have more than one aggregated feed of their
activities... how we de-dupe and prevent infinite loops here will be a
challenge, but it's something that we certainly are aware of and must
keep in mind as we think about the federation and then re-aggregation
of your activities across many disparate sites with different sets of
privacy and access/permission lists.

Chris

--

[Ryan Price]

I was actually planning on doing an art project around this infinite
echo problem - exactly my point. When is Really Simple Syndication so
simple it becomes stupid, and you can re-post a message back and
forth ad infinitum?

Ryan Price
ryanpricemedia.com

[Pras Sarkar]

Good point about permalinks and problems with using them as unique
identifiers. I think de-duping algorithms could be very useful and
effective here because of the time-sensitive advantage. Infinite
echoes will exist very close to each other in a timeline, so it is
easier to figure out (even based on something simple like identifying
highly homogenous clusters).

But it becomes really complex when sites like linkriver.com allow
users to mash up others' activity streams with their own. That can
potentially result in infinite echoes that are echoes of other
individuals. So it's not just about hearing your own echo and
repeating it back, but others hearing your voice, and echoing it back;
so you end up hearing not only yourself but others saying the same
thing. This problems becomes very aggravated in closely connected
social groups (as the group members tend to have a high coefficient of
similar interests and topics).

-Pras

> > On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 11:44 PM, Stephen Paul Weber <singpol...@gmail.com>

> > wrote:
>
> > > This is already an issue with twitter-to-facebook-status (at least on
> > > socialthing!)
>

> > > On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Pras Sarkar <pras.sar...@gmail.com>

> > > MSN/GTalk/Jabber: singpol...@gmail.com

> > > ICQ/AIM: 103332966
> > > BLOG:http://singpolyma.net/
>
> > --

> > taotaka...@gmail.com

[mndoci]

That's a problem even with something like Google Reader shared items.
Many of my connections have similar interests, so in the end you get
tons of duplication. Another example is people who update their
Facebook status with their Twitter status. For some people, whose
updates I was getting on my mobile, I had to shut down one or the
other, since there was a big echo.