Inside FriendFeed

Despite strong buzz in the blogosphere, FriendFeed was never able to gain much in the way of mainstream appeal -- in fact, your average social network user probably hasn't even heard of it. It has developed somewhat of a cult following, though, with many tech insiders adopting it and singing its praises. And the has quite the impressive collective résumé.

FriendFeed was founded in 2007 by : Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Paul Buchheit, and Sanjeev Singh. Before leaving Google, the guys helped design and launch several well-known products, including Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Groups.

FriendFeed was their vision for a centralized sharing service -- kind of like Facebook, only without all the extra stuff. It's basically a content aggregator: You set up an account and connect it to all of your different online services. Then, anytime you post a new update on Twitter, vote up a story on Digg, or write a new blog, it automatically goes through to your FriendFeed stream. People who subscribe to your stream see the updates roll in in real-time and can comment on and discuss them.

The FriendFeed-Facebook Friendship