After FriendFeed’s Sale, Trust In Social Sites Has Been Shattered

It’s day two of the nightmare that started yesterday. I have been following comments, posts, news and feeds and one thing is certain.

People are mad.

Some users, like OurDoing’s creator, Bruce Lewis, haven’t been able to sleep. He wrote about his anger on a post on his blog, which caught the attention of some of the FriendFeed execs. You have to read the conversation as this is going on realtime, but it’s really amazing stuff that’s going on, it’s almost like looking at the disintegration of the Death Star in slow motion.

Paul Bucheit, one of FriendFeed founders promised people that he’s personally looking out for the FriendFeed community and the product.

Obviously I can’t provide a lot of detailed plans and guarantees, but I can tell you that I’ll do my personal best to ensure that the FriendFeed users and community are treated right. I love this product too, and don’t want to see it disappear.

Robert Scoble asked “Who’s leaving FriendFeed“, only to get 500+ comments in a matter of hours. DeWitt Clinton, another very respected blogger just said “I’m out“.

Last post. No hard feelings, though. Love the site, love the community, and many congrats to the team.

There’s a movement to create a “CloneFeed“, sort of a FriendFeed clone built with the concept of being federated and Open Source. @GrowMap told me in a Tweet regarding my post yesterday about Google Reader being in a great window of opportunity:

Some of us prefer FriendFeed because they were independent of the BORG. Obviously GR (Google Reader) isn’t.

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes eloquently that this is a window of opportunity for developers and community to come together and build something. The problem is that this is not something you do overnight. There are many technologies that could support something like an open source FriendFeed, but they are, at this time, fragmented and untested. There’s also the question of leadership; you just can’t have a bunch of people writing code without a unifying leader to organize the effort.

At the end of the day, we should all take this with patience and try to wait and see what happens in the next few days and weeks.

What’s certain is that trust is something that was lost yesterday when whom we thought were a group of maverick and independent developers decided to sell out to one of the most controversial brands on the web.