6 ms·

FriendFeed is shutting down

136 points by Mithrandir 12y ago

DevFactor 12y ago
Ditch your friendfeed & head over to http://www.youtube.com/devfactor http://www.youtube.com/devfactor and code with me :) The web has enough social outlets, now we need more productivity outlets!
gourneau 12y ago
Sad to see it officially shutdown. I have been using their API for years on my crusty personal page. It has been rock solid.
bootload 12y ago
best thing to come out of friendfeed, Tornado. I remember asking Bret Taylor on his blog [0] when he gave a Tornado example if he'd ever release it. A bit of time went by, then he did. [1] Thanks Bret. [0] http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado [1] https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-news/9b8fbaed/technology-behind-tornado-friendfeed-web https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-news/9b8fbaed/technology-b...
- ponytech 12y ago
  Will Tornado continue to be maintained? There are still a lot of commits being made: https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/commits/master https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/commits/master
  - m0th87 12y ago
    Tornado has a BDFL (Ben Darnell) who continues to maintain it, and hasn't been a part of facebook/friendfeed for some time now.
- nailer 12y ago
  Goddamn Tornado was/is the best Python HTTP server ever. Asides from the wide utility library of non-blocking IO (years before node got popular) it had Sinatra-style class based routing that was far simpler than django's bizarre route.as_route() stuff. A friend once said the worst thing about Tornado was how little publicity it got.
  - bdarnell 12y ago
    Why all the "was/is" in this subthread? Tornado's not going anywhere.
    - nailer 12y ago
      Only reason I wrote 'is/was' because it's been a couple of years since I used Tornado and other Python HTTP servers might have gotten better. I hack node all day now.
  - pekk 12y ago
    What did you think about Twisted?
    - nailer 12y ago
      Twisted was focused on general sockets apps rather than HTTP, and for some reason had code written using a styleguide different from the rest of the Python ecosystem. Tornado OTOH was very HTTP focused. It also had a bunch of useful examples maintained in the actual repo so they were always up to date.
- napoleond 12y ago
  Agreed, Tornado was/is awesome. Is it still being used in new projects? I somewhat prefer it to node/etc for that style of app, but I would probably still choose JS for real-time web nowadays just because of the mindshare/community around it. I would love it if there was a thriving Tornado community somewhere that I'd missed.
  - adregan 12y ago
    We use it for quite a bit at my job (for everything really). Mostly, I think due to familiarity. I enjoy working with it (and I've grown to really enjoy python due to my time using it), and it's possible to build a server that uses generators pretty easily. The only problem is that you have to be really watchful for blocking calls mucking the whole thing up. For a long time, I really would have rather used node, but now, I'm ok with using python. I pushed us into a micro service style architecture, so one day, it's feasible to upgrade different parts of the stack with different technologies.
andrea_sdl 12y ago
I personally hate when services let people down. I prefer a much more "future oriented" approach much like the one from Basecamp https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3830-ta-da-list-until-the-end-of-the-internet https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3830-ta-da-list-until-the-end... or the idea behind https://posthaven.com/ https://posthaven.com/ I guess it's all about vision and how to delight your customers. All the people who believed in a product are people who trusted your words, and gave you access to a lot of their information. Yet it's so easy to let them down and shut down a service. It was for springpad, it now is for friend feed. Sometimes it's about the money sometimes it's about the users (I guess it's always about the money though). But I can't help it, I prefer when you can trust a service,and I'd be willing to pay as long as I know that service will stay up even if I'm the only user.
- ozten 12y ago
  They continued to run FriendFeed for 5 years after it was clear the core team was moving on. That is above and beyond the call of duty. 37 Signals has a healthy business with good revenue building only "sane" products. To compare the two is apples to oranges.
  - andrea_sdl 12y ago
    I know they are not the same kind of business, and I didn't want my view to sound harsh, sorry if it seemed that way. As you said they did A LOT for the friendfeed platform even after it was somewhat decided they would have not mantained anymore, that is not something I want to ignore. My point is that many services are born and die, some of them die because they weren't building "sane" products. It's a choice, not complaining about that, but I personally prefer when there's a path ahead that won't let the users down because they weren't relying on funding or other things to stay up, but only on the power of their users. Maybe I'm asking for something impossible? Dunno, but the PostHaven/Basecamp thing is giving me hope :)
- jimminy 12y ago
  I don't feel let down at all. I was one of the most active users prior to the acquisition, and and still an active member of the site. It was an inevitability, that the site would shrink, and that FB would either decide it couldn't continue to fund a small community or the handful of employees would decide to depart. Currently, there are only 3 members of the team working at FB, and I have a feeling a few of them have decided to move on which has precipitated the closure.
liotier 12y ago
Thank you FriendFeed - I'll miss you. At some point I thought Friendfeed was going to take over the world... But as usual I have to be reminded that I am not representative of the mass audience.
- napolux 12y ago
  +1
napolux 12y ago
An interesting Quora answer by Bret about the status of FriendFeed some weeks ago. http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-current-status-of-FriendFeed http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-current-status-of-FriendFeed
- garkrau 12y ago
  And FriendFeed would have still be running if not that question. Bret was reminded about FriendFeed and decided to take it down completely.
  - mxfh 12y ago
    Quite sad to see that move now, especially when seeing that it's still actively used in Iran and Turkey, two countries who block or censor twitter at will. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter
  - beolab1700 12y ago
    Bret did not make the decision to close FriendFeed. Bret left Facebook more than two years ago. He had no involvement.
fmavituna 12y ago
One of those things... Friendfeed was technically better medium than twitter in every single way at the time (maybe still) yet it died (don't mean that it failed). Another example of why making social startups is a huge risk.
- wojciechpolak 12y ago
  It was much better for me than Twitter, but once the acquisition happened (FB w/ a rumored $50M), they decided to show the middle finger to its users. Isn't this the same as what happened to the thesixtyone (t61)?
  - beolab1700 12y ago
    They kept the service running for more than five years after the aqui-hire. I wouldn't call that showing the middle finger.
    - demachina 12y ago
      I suspect he was referring to the FriendFeed founders giving their user community the middle finger by cashing out to Zuck. People are going to do what is in their own self interest so you can’t exactly blame the founders for that. As I recall FriedFeed’s growth had plateaued so they probably figured it wasn’t going to compete with FB and Twitter. Mobile and apps were also starting to take the world then too.
  - codezero 12y ago
    Did t61 even get acquired? They seemed to just toss their users for fun.
kalleboo 12y ago
The Archive Team on the case to archive the content as usual #humancentifeed https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/575143304859361280 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/575143304859361280
- jimminy 12y ago
  I think the Archive Team is going to have a hard time preserving Friendfeed content, due to resource limitations of the platform. For example, it only provides a very limited amount of data through the frontend (was 600 posts, now slightly higher), and slightly more through the API (10,000). I'm currently working on a system, but it requires user input, in order to bypass the limitations of the API.
bbgm 12y ago
We had a wonderful, thriving life science community [1] on Friendfeed, which we have not been able to replicate since. Some of that crowd even published a paper about it [2]. Most of the original crowd left sometime after the FB acquisition. While many of us hang out on Twitter, it's not the same thing). ---- 1. http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists 2. http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000263 http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...
- chrisamiller 12y ago
  I miss that interface and community. Even if FriendFeed was still around, though, I wonder if it would be as popular. That group contained the early adopters of internet communication among scientists, a movement that has now grown exponentially. My guess is that the signal would be overwhelmed by noise, or broken down into sub-groups by specialty, which would overwhelm the delightful serendipity of it all.
  - bbgm 12y ago
    Great question. No idea. The other thing to note is that a lot of the people who were involved then have moved on to other things and probably could not stay as involved (pointing at myself). It remains the best time I've had online.
    - chrisamiller 12y ago
      I'm with you there. I had a lot more free time in grad school than I do now (both personally and professionally). Judging from the updates I see on twitter and blogs, most of that core group has gone on to bigger, better, more time-consuming things. I wonder if the kids these days are using snapchat to complain about how we're all dinosaurs. :)
  - brlewis 12y ago
    FriendFeed has good tools for keeping signal:noise high: Hide, like, best of day
nine_k 12y ago
FriendFeed had the best social network mechanics of all social networks I ever saw. Part of it made it into Facebook now (but I can't consider really using FB). Unfortunately, it had no monetization strategy. I suspect that if they had optional paid accounts by now (e.g. $3/mo), many people would pay just to keep the thing afloat and their community intact. Unfortunately, there seem to be only two ways for an online service to last: to become paid by users commercially, or to become "paid" by users' labor of love when they install and maintain it. The later practically requires the service to open its source code.
dksidana 12y ago
It might make sense if they can opensource the code.
- buraksarica 12y ago
  +1
wslh 12y ago
How can I export my data? I know there is an API but it will be incredible useful to have a link to download everything. Google Reader had an option to export your data when they closed their web service.
- sp332 12y ago
  You could only export your feed URLs from Google Reader. They had content archived, but you couldn't easily export the content. People wrote their own scrapers, it was a big mess and no one knows how much content only existed in Reader that was deleted when it went down.
- yinhm 12y ago
  There is a backup tool on github[1], I use it exported my feed when a saw the news. [1] https://github.com/zverok/clio https://github.com/zverok/clio
wnevets 12y ago
I forgot all about friendfeed about the time facebook bought it. I remember it being quite good.

136 points by Mithrandir 12y ago

Ditch your friendfeed & head over to http://www.youtube.com/devfactor http://www.youtube.com/devfactor and code with me :) The web has enough social outlets, now we need more productivity outlets!

gourneau 12y ago

Sad to see it officially shutdown. I have been using their API for years on my crusty personal page. It has been rock solid.

bootload 12y ago

best thing to come out of friendfeed, Tornado. I remember asking Bret Taylor on his blog [0] when he gave a Tornado example if he'd ever release it. A bit of time went by, then he did. [1] Thanks Bret. [0] http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado [1] https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-news/9b8fbaed/technology-behind-tornado-friendfeed-web https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-news/9b8fbaed/technology-b...

ponytech 12y ago
Will Tornado continue to be maintained? There are still a lot of commits being made: https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/commits/master https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/commits/master
- m0th87 12y ago
  Tornado has a BDFL (Ben Darnell) who continues to maintain it, and hasn't been a part of facebook/friendfeed for some time now.
nailer 12y ago
Goddamn Tornado was/is the best Python HTTP server ever. Asides from the wide utility library of non-blocking IO (years before node got popular) it had Sinatra-style class based routing that was far simpler than django's bizarre route.as_route() stuff. A friend once said the worst thing about Tornado was how little publicity it got.
- bdarnell 12y ago
  Why all the "was/is" in this subthread? Tornado's not going anywhere.
  - nailer 12y ago
    Only reason I wrote 'is/was' because it's been a couple of years since I used Tornado and other Python HTTP servers might have gotten better. I hack node all day now.
- pekk 12y ago
  What did you think about Twisted?
  - nailer 12y ago
    Twisted was focused on general sockets apps rather than HTTP, and for some reason had code written using a styleguide different from the rest of the Python ecosystem. Tornado OTOH was very HTTP focused. It also had a bunch of useful examples maintained in the actual repo so they were always up to date.
napoleond 12y ago
Agreed, Tornado was/is awesome. Is it still being used in new projects? I somewhat prefer it to node/etc for that style of app, but I would probably still choose JS for real-time web nowadays just because of the mindshare/community around it. I would love it if there was a thriving Tornado community somewhere that I'd missed.
- adregan 12y ago
  We use it for quite a bit at my job (for everything really). Mostly, I think due to familiarity. I enjoy working with it (and I've grown to really enjoy python due to my time using it), and it's possible to build a server that uses generators pretty easily. The only problem is that you have to be really watchful for blocking calls mucking the whole thing up. For a long time, I really would have rather used node, but now, I'm ok with using python. I pushed us into a micro service style architecture, so one day, it's feasible to upgrade different parts of the stack with different technologies.

andrea_sdl 12y ago

I personally hate when services let people down. I prefer a much more "future oriented" approach much like the one from Basecamp https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3830-ta-da-list-until-the-end-of-the-internet https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3830-ta-da-list-until-the-end... or the idea behind https://posthaven.com/ https://posthaven.com/ I guess it's all about vision and how to delight your customers. All the people who believed in a product are people who trusted your words, and gave you access to a lot of their information. Yet it's so easy to let them down and shut down a service. It was for springpad, it now is for friend feed. Sometimes it's about the money sometimes it's about the users (I guess it's always about the money though). But I can't help it, I prefer when you can trust a service,and I'd be willing to pay as long as I know that service will stay up even if I'm the only user.

ozten 12y ago
They continued to run FriendFeed for 5 years after it was clear the core team was moving on. That is above and beyond the call of duty. 37 Signals has a healthy business with good revenue building only "sane" products. To compare the two is apples to oranges.
- andrea_sdl 12y ago
  I know they are not the same kind of business, and I didn't want my view to sound harsh, sorry if it seemed that way. As you said they did A LOT for the friendfeed platform even after it was somewhat decided they would have not mantained anymore, that is not something I want to ignore. My point is that many services are born and die, some of them die because they weren't building "sane" products. It's a choice, not complaining about that, but I personally prefer when there's a path ahead that won't let the users down because they weren't relying on funding or other things to stay up, but only on the power of their users. Maybe I'm asking for something impossible? Dunno, but the PostHaven/Basecamp thing is giving me hope :)
jimminy 12y ago
I don't feel let down at all. I was one of the most active users prior to the acquisition, and and still an active member of the site. It was an inevitability, that the site would shrink, and that FB would either decide it couldn't continue to fund a small community or the handful of employees would decide to depart. Currently, there are only 3 members of the team working at FB, and I have a feeling a few of them have decided to move on which has precipitated the closure.

liotier 12y ago

Thank you FriendFeed - I'll miss you. At some point I thought Friendfeed was going to take over the world... But as usual I have to be reminded that I am not representative of the mass audience.

napolux 12y ago
+1

napolux 12y ago

An interesting Quora answer by Bret about the status of FriendFeed some weeks ago. http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-current-status-of-FriendFeed http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-current-status-of-FriendFeed

garkrau 12y ago
And FriendFeed would have still be running if not that question. Bret was reminded about FriendFeed and decided to take it down completely.
- mxfh 12y ago
  Quite sad to see that move now, especially when seeing that it's still actively used in Iran and Turkey, two countries who block or censor twitter at will. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter
- beolab1700 12y ago
  Bret did not make the decision to close FriendFeed. Bret left Facebook more than two years ago. He had no involvement.

fmavituna 12y ago

One of those things... Friendfeed was technically better medium than twitter in every single way at the time (maybe still) yet it died (don't mean that it failed). Another example of why making social startups is a huge risk.

wojciechpolak 12y ago
It was much better for me than Twitter, but once the acquisition happened (FB w/ a rumored $50M), they decided to show the middle finger to its users. Isn't this the same as what happened to the thesixtyone (t61)?
- beolab1700 12y ago
  They kept the service running for more than five years after the aqui-hire. I wouldn't call that showing the middle finger.
  - demachina 12y ago
    I suspect he was referring to the FriendFeed founders giving their user community the middle finger by cashing out to Zuck. People are going to do what is in their own self interest so you can’t exactly blame the founders for that. As I recall FriedFeed’s growth had plateaued so they probably figured it wasn’t going to compete with FB and Twitter. Mobile and apps were also starting to take the world then too.
- codezero 12y ago
  Did t61 even get acquired? They seemed to just toss their users for fun.

kalleboo 12y ago

The Archive Team on the case to archive the content as usual #humancentifeed https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/575143304859361280 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/575143304859361280

jimminy 12y ago
I think the Archive Team is going to have a hard time preserving Friendfeed content, due to resource limitations of the platform. For example, it only provides a very limited amount of data through the frontend (was 600 posts, now slightly higher), and slightly more through the API (10,000). I'm currently working on a system, but it requires user input, in order to bypass the limitations of the API.

bbgm 12y ago

We had a wonderful, thriving life science community [1] on Friendfeed, which we have not been able to replicate since. Some of that crowd even published a paper about it [2]. Most of the original crowd left sometime after the FB acquisition. While many of us hang out on Twitter, it's not the same thing). ---- 1. http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists 2. http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000263 http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...

chrisamiller 12y ago
I miss that interface and community. Even if FriendFeed was still around, though, I wonder if it would be as popular. That group contained the early adopters of internet communication among scientists, a movement that has now grown exponentially. My guess is that the signal would be overwhelmed by noise, or broken down into sub-groups by specialty, which would overwhelm the delightful serendipity of it all.
- bbgm 12y ago
  Great question. No idea. The other thing to note is that a lot of the people who were involved then have moved on to other things and probably could not stay as involved (pointing at myself). It remains the best time I've had online.
  - chrisamiller 12y ago
    I'm with you there. I had a lot more free time in grad school than I do now (both personally and professionally). Judging from the updates I see on twitter and blogs, most of that core group has gone on to bigger, better, more time-consuming things. I wonder if the kids these days are using snapchat to complain about how we're all dinosaurs. :)
- brlewis 12y ago
  FriendFeed has good tools for keeping signal:noise high: Hide, like, best of day

nine_k 12y ago

FriendFeed had the best social network mechanics of all social networks I ever saw. Part of it made it into Facebook now (but I can't consider really using FB). Unfortunately, it had no monetization strategy. I suspect that if they had optional paid accounts by now (e.g. $3/mo), many people would pay just to keep the thing afloat and their community intact. Unfortunately, there seem to be only two ways for an online service to last: to become paid by users commercially, or to become "paid" by users' labor of love when they install and maintain it. The later practically requires the service to open its source code.

dksidana 12y ago

It might make sense if they can opensource the code.

buraksarica 12y ago
+1

wslh 12y ago

How can I export my data? I know there is an API but it will be incredible useful to have a link to download everything. Google Reader had an option to export your data when they closed their web service.

sp332 12y ago
You could only export your feed URLs from Google Reader. They had content archived, but you couldn't easily export the content. People wrote their own scrapers, it was a big mess and no one knows how much content only existed in Reader that was deleted when it went down.
yinhm 12y ago
There is a backup tool on github[1], I use it exported my feed when a saw the news. [1] https://github.com/zverok/clio https://github.com/zverok/clio

wnevets 12y ago

I forgot all about friendfeed about the time facebook bought it. I remember it being quite good.