With FriendFeed Out of the Way, Google Reader Has a Golden Opportunity

This day has had a whirlwind of activity in many fronts. For the first time in the history of this blog I’m going to post twice in the same day.

But the news that Facebook acquired FriendFeed is really a shock for a lot of people.

You will be reading in the next couple of days a lot of information of what happened, why it happened, and what’s part of the deal.

I will summarize it in three short points and one possible once in a lifetime opportunity for Google Reader.

First: FriendFeed will disappear. It doesn’t matter as much when a product disappears, but it does matter if the community that built itself around it disappears. And no matter how much we exchange emails, Twitter accounts, etc., the fact of the matter is that the community will be sharded like a MySQL index.

Second: Facebook purchased FriendFeed to kill an opponent and inject itself with new ideas. They don’t care about the FriendFeed community, traffic or content, and will have no problem shutting it down.

Third: FriendFeed founders sell because this was their intention all along. The work for Facebook for six months and then they move on to the next exciting project.

Google Reader can capitalize on this acquisition immensely. Why? Because it almost has everything FriendFeed was offering.

If you have been following their recent improvements, Google Reader has introduced the ability to follow people, they have implemented realtime capabilities and they have a commenting system in place.

All they have to do is upgrade their web based interface and they’ll be good to go.

Opportunities like this don’t come often, and Google, having passed the opportunity to purchase something good (and with Wave still not completely out of the door), is in a unique place to finally put Google Profiles to good use, and convert a bunch of angry FriendFeed users to their platform.

I for one have been impressed with Google Reader’s improvements and have found myself using it more and more.

So, what do you think Jenna? Are you up for a good challenge?

Tagged as: reader, rss