FriendFeed — The Geeks’ Real-Time Network Facebook Bought for Its Brains
Summary
FriendFeed was the real-time social aggregator that the technology industry's early adopters loved and almost nobody else used, and on April 9, 2015 Facebook — which had owned it since 2009 — finally switched it off. Launched in 2007 by four former Google engineers, FriendFeed pulled a person's activity from dozens of services — blog posts, Twitter updates, photos, bookmarks, any RSS feed — into one live, continuously updating stream, and then layered fast conversation on top of it. Comments and likes appeared instantly; a popular thread could surface and ignite a discussion in real time. For a particular kind of user — bloggers, developers, journalists, the people who lived on the leading edge of the social web — it was the best conversation tool of its moment.
It was also, commercially, a service ahead of its audience. FriendFeed's user base was small, intensely engaged, and disproportionately influential, but it never crossed into the mainstream, and it had no obvious path to the scale or revenue that would make it a standalone business. So in August 2009 Facebook acquired it. The reported terms — roughly $47.5 million, split as about $15 million cash and $32.5 million in Facebook stock — were never officially confirmed; Facebook's announcement said only that the financial terms were not disclosed.
What Facebook bought, in the end, was less the product than the people who made it. The acquisition was widely understood as an acqui-hire: FriendFeed's four founders — Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh — and their team joined Facebook in senior engineering and product roles, and over the following years helped build large parts of Facebook's infrastructure. Bret Taylor became Facebook's chief technology officer; Paul Buchheit, who had created Gmail and coined "Don't be evil," went on to Y Combinator. The team's fingerprints ended up on the real-time News Feed, the Like button, and tools that outlived FriendFeed by more than a decade.
FriendFeed the service, meanwhile, was kept on life support — left online but undeveloped for nearly six years, its small community slowly thinning, until Facebook announced on March 9, 2015 that usage had "declined steadily" and it would shut the service down. On April 9, 2015, FriendFeed went dark. It had been acquired not to grow, but to be absorbed — and it had done its real work the day its founders signed on.
Timeline
Built by the People Who Built Google's Best Products
FriendFeed's founding team was its whole story before it was anyone's product. Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh had all come from Google, where they had worked on some of the company's most consequential products — Buchheit had created Gmail and is credited with coining "Don't be evil"; Taylor had been a product manager on Google Maps. In October 2007 they left to build something of their own, and what they built was a bet on a then-novel idea: that the interesting unit of social activity was not a single network's posts but a person's entire stream across every service they used.
FriendFeed aggregated that stream. It ingested updates from dozens of sources — blogs, Twitter, photo sites, bookmarking services, any RSS or Atom feed — and rendered them in one continuously updating timeline. Crucially, it did not stop at aggregation: it added fast, threaded conversation, with comments and likes appearing in real time, so that a single shared link could spark a lively discussion within seconds. In 2007 and 2008 this was genuinely new, and to the people who noticed, it was electric.
The people who noticed were a specific and influential crowd. FriendFeed never had a large user base; what it had was the early-adopter elite of the social web — the bloggers, developers, and journalists who set the agenda for everyone else. For that crowd FriendFeed was the best conversation on the internet, and the features it pioneered, particularly real-time threaded comments and a prominent Like, began turning up elsewhere with suspicious speed. FriendFeed was, in effect, a public R&D lab for ideas the whole industry would adopt — including, soon, the company about to buy it.
The Acquisition That Was Really a Hire
By 2009 FriendFeed faced the problem that kills most beloved-by-insiders products: a small, brilliant, unmonetized audience and no plausible route to the scale or revenue of a standalone business. Facebook, meanwhile, was in the middle of remaking itself around exactly the things FriendFeed had pioneered — a real-time feed, lightweight engagement, conversation as the core unit — and it wanted both the ideas and, far more, the people behind them. On August 10, 2009, Facebook agreed to acquire FriendFeed.
The terms were never officially disclosed; Facebook's announcement said only that the financial details were not being released, and contemporaneous reporting put the deal at roughly $47.5 million — about $15 million in cash and $32.5 million in stock. But the price was almost beside the point, because the asset was not the software. All of FriendFeed's employees joined Facebook, and its four founders took senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams. This was an acqui-hire in the textbook sense: a company bought less for what it had made than for who had made it, with the product itself understood, from the first day, as something to be absorbed rather than grown.
The return on the people was extraordinary. Bret Taylor rose to become Facebook's chief technology officer and is credited with influence over the real-time News Feed and the Like button; the wider team helped build infrastructure that powered Facebook for years. Paul Buchheit moved on to Y Combinator. The founders' later résumés — Quip, Salesforce, board seats at companies including OpenAI — read as a who's-who of the following decade in technology. Facebook had, by any honest accounting, made one of the great talent acquisitions of the era. The conversation tool that talent had built was the part it could afford to let wither.
Six Years on Life Support
After 2009, FriendFeed entered the strange limbo reserved for acqui-hired products: kept alive, but not kept up. Facebook left the service online and functional, and a core of devoted users kept posting — including, notably, a large and stubbornly loyal community in Italy, where FriendFeed had taken on a cultural life of its own well after it had faded in the United States. But with its founders fully occupied building Facebook, the product received essentially no development. It ran, year after year, as a museum piece that happened still to accept comments.
That arrangement could only end one way, and it ended slowly. Without new features, new users, or any reason for the mainstream to discover it, FriendFeed's community gradually thinned, exactly as a frozen product's audience always does. On March 9, 2015 — nearly six years after the acquisition — Facebook posted a brief notice on FriendFeed's blog: usage had "been declining steadily" and the community was "now just a fraction of what it once was," so the service would be shut down. Users had a month to view and save their posts, messages, and photos. New registrations were closed immediately.
On April 9, 2015, FriendFeed went offline. The shutdown was mourned quietly, mostly by the same insiders who had loved it, and the eulogies reached the same conclusion: FriendFeed had not really died in 2015. It had been bought to be ended in 2009, kept breathing out of inertia, and finally unplugged once the inertia ran out. The decline Facebook cited was real, but it was the predictable result of six years of deliberate non-development — the diagnosis describing a condition the owner had induced. FriendFeed had done its job long before, the day the engineers it had been built to showcase walked into Facebook instead.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
FriendFeed's users lost a genuinely good thing — a fast, civil, high-signal conversation space — and they scattered to Twitter, to Facebook, and to a series of small successor projects that tried, mostly without lasting success, to recapture the feel. The Italian community that had outlived the American one dispersed too, its tight culture preserved mainly in memory and screenshots. No data was confiscated; Facebook gave a month's notice and a window to download. The cost was the place, not the contents.
The lasting mark of FriendFeed is split cleanly in two. As a product, it is remembered as a brilliant, premature experiment — the thing that proved real-time social aggregation and conversation worked, years before the mainstream was ready, and whose innovations were quietly inhaled by the network that bought it. As a deal, it is a near-perfect specimen of the acqui-hire: a modest sum, a service left to fade, and a team whose subsequent work — Facebook's infrastructure, Gmail's legacy, Y Combinator, Quip, Salesforce, board seats across the industry — repaid the purchase many times over in places that had nothing to do with FriendFeed itself. The product was switched off in 2015. The acquisition had already paid for itself many times over by then, which is the entire point of buying a company for its brains.
Lessons
- If you build a product adored by insiders but ignored by everyone else, find a business model before you find a buyer — influence is not revenue, and a small elite audience is an acquisition target, not a company.
- Read an acqui-hire for what it is: when a giant buys a small team's product, the team is the asset and the product is on borrowed time, however warmly the press release talks about "shared vision."
- A product kept alive without investment is being managed toward death; "usage has declined" after years of neglect describes a result the owner chose, not a verdict the market reached.
- Being first to a great idea is not the same as owning it — patterns travel, and a larger platform can adopt both your innovations and your engineers, so protect what you can defend, not just what you invented.
- For users: cherish the small, good networks while they last, but do not assume an acquired one will survive — the things that make a niche community special are usually the first things a big owner declines to fund.
References
- Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed Facebook (official announcement)
- Facebook Acquires FriendFeed TechCrunch
- Facebook shutting down FriendFeed, citing declining usage VentureBeat
- RIP: Facebook is closing Friendfeed April 9 SiliconANGLE
- FriendFeed Wikipedia