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

by Jorge Escobar on August 10, 2009

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?

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The Audience/Complexity Ratio and Your Ideal Point of Broadcast

July 24, 2009
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Yesterday I was listening to one of Leo Laporte’s podcasts, which I believe is broadcast nationally on radio as well. I had several times seen him record it in his Twit video channel, but had never listened to him without seeing him.

Two things struck me as I listened.

First, that Leo has a very cool radio voice. Trent Hamm, a FriendFeed user, described it perfectly: “strong, deep, authoritative tones, yet still warm and inviting”.

Second, that Leo’s technologic complexity on the show is right in the middle: not too complex, not too simple.

Leo is really admired and has a very loyal and large following. He has 137,000+ followers on Twitter and this Twit shows are always buzzing with people who ask him stuff, but also help him in things he doesn’t know.

I think Leo knows more about technology than he shows or broadcasts. He has his ideal point really figured out. Of course, he’s done it for years, first on ZDTV, then TechTV and now with his own channels.

I’m thinking about many other technology newsmakers with decent following and they always seem, to me, that they weren’t advanced in their technology knowledge. They’re not hardcore programmers like I am.

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The Loyalty Index: Why it Should Be One of your Top Numbers

July 20, 2009
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Back in the early days of the web, I worked in this small startup funded by a large public company. Life was good. We were pioneers heading into an uncharted jungle.

One of the first things we were discussing was how to measure the success of our web operation. Back then a lot of people were talking about “hits”, which seemed like a bad metric, as each hit would be an individual element on the page (like a page with 4 images would result in 5 hits). We decided to use pageviews instead.

We also knew we wanted to track unique visitors per month (i.e. if one visitor visits 5 times in a month, he’s counted as 1). This would tell us how many actual visitors were coming to our site.

But we knew there was something missing from this picture. We also wanted to know how well we were keeping our users “hooked” into our content. We decided to also have repeat visitors as part of our top goals and measurements.

This really worked. Even though the site was content centric (it was a network of radio station websites), we managed to add a lot of social features to it, so that users had a reason to come back often.

Today, I don’t hear about repeat visits any more in any of the business circles I move in. I hear a lot about user engagement and “let’s get a ton of traffic” or “how do I get more followers”.

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If Your Content is Monetizable, You Might Have a Shot at the Free Model

July 14, 2009
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There’s no such thing as Free. There is always a catch.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very provocative piece on The New Yorker about Wired’s Editor In Chief Chris Anderson’s book about the Free model: “Free: The Future of a Radical Price“.

In the article, Gladwell critizices Anderson’s ideas, specifically applied to YouTube’s case:

When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number.

In another section, Gladwell talks specifically about his world: journalism. Anderson writes on his book: “If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation”, to which Gladwell responds:

It is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write?

Anderson quickly replied to Gladwell on Wired’s blog with a provoking post: “Dear Malcolm: Why so threatened?“:

So that’s the difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write”. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).

Let me stop there and try to bring you a better level where we can start this conversation.

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Are Your Children Addicted to the Web?

June 3, 2009
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I’ve seen my twin nieces grow from zero to thirteen in what seems to be a very short period of time. I still remember when they would enjoy a wild ride in their uncle’s back, pretending to be horse riders and laughing at every little hop I took.

These days they are inmersed in computers a lot of time.

I want to think they’re not addicted to the web, but then I didn’t know what the official or medical definition of that would be, so I went and searched around for some information.

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YouTube Flipflops Users, Limiting Video Duration Again

February 11, 2009
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Is YouTube playing a prank on its users? Or did someone in their technical department just screw up and they finally realized it?

Later last month I posted an article about YouTube finally relaxing the 10 minute video limit, which I found was a stupid rule, based on the fact that as long as the size of the video is under 1 Gig, there’s no real infrastructure overhead related to the duration of the video.

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YouTube’s Video Quality is Noticeably Better Than Viddler’s

January 29, 2009

With YouTube’s time limit gone, I was now thinking about what other factors could influence me on sharing my personal videos with family and friends using Google’s service.

Quality sealed the deal.

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YouTube Removes Time Limit on Videos

January 23, 2009

I was having a great vacation in Ecuador and thanks to my new USB digital camera, I was capturing great moments that I wanted to share with my family and friends on a daily basis.

It seems an easy task with all the tools and services we have nowadays: YouTube, Facebook and all the other social sites.

I was up for a rude awakening.

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Sony Blocking Content for Netflix Streaming on Xbox?

November 19, 2008
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I have been waiting for months for this day. I’m ready to fire up my Xbox to get the new Xbox experience (known simply as ‘NXE’) and move towards my freedom from cable.

As I read with excitement on Lifehacker how thousands of users are getting their updated, I noticed some users complaining about missing titles on the Netflix streaming service.

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The Future of Newspapers

November 18, 2008
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My Dad is a journalist. Since a young age, I was exposed to typewriters, printing presses and the smell of fresh ink. Back in the early 70’s, newspaper production was a difficult cycle that took a lot of effort and manual labor.

What hasn’t changed from those years is the need for professional, thought-provoking and unique content. Providing this content should be the focus of the newspaper industry.

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