Friendfeed's Business Model Will Look Like Google's

I love Friendfeed. However, I am far more enthusiastic about the platform's robust RSS and search capabilities than its current value proposition as a universal social aggregator. I find it generates too much noise at times, but when you tap its search/RSS tools you have a killer app.

As I recently noted Friendfeed's imaginary friend feature is incredibly powerful. In addition, so are its advanced search capabilities. Combine them and this is where things get interesting.

Here's an example. I haven't tried this yet. But my gut is that you can actually use Friendfeed to create a Google Coop-like scoped search tool just for Twitter.

Simply take the Twitter public timeline feed and add it as an imaginary friend. Now you can scan the full text of every tweet - even if Summize should go belly up one day. In addition, you can generate RSS feeds against this new imaginary friend for any term you want to track. The public timeline too much for you? No problem. Just take your personalized Twitter friendstream feed and now you can data mine just your peeps.

This is just the beginning. Friendfeed benefits immensely from the network effect. The more individuals that aggregate their social streams with the service, the more it can be data mined and thus monetized - and its power grows.

So, for argument's sake, let's say in a year that even 50% of people who actively publish online aggregate their streams with Friendfeed. Suddenly you have a competitor that in utility could eclipse most of the vertical social search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search and Summize. Friendfeed doesn't index the full text of blog feeds yet but I suspect one day they will give publishers the ability to opt-in.

Now, what if Friendfeed were to wrap Google Adsense contextual ads around keyword searches just as it becomes the de-facto source for searching the social web. Think that's big? I do. And that fact that Friendfeed's founders come from Google probably bodes well for such a model. Stay tuned.

Comments

[Lori Laurent Smith]

Brilliant idea, Steve. I just set up my imaginary friend as recommended and it works REALLY well. Thanks for the mega-tip for leveraging friend-feed's potential. It's my vote for killer app 2008.

[Robert Seidman]

You make great points about FriendFeed and I agree with you. Friendfeed has much better revenue opportunities than Twitter does.

The Google comparisons are not random as Friendfeed's founders came over from Google. I don't think all that whitespace to the right of the "friendstream" is an accident either... It's not "what if?", it's "when".

[TranceMist]

If you only envision FriendFeed as a tool for Twitter you don't get it.

FriendFeed makes Twitter obsolete.

[quirkyalone]

Please can you explain to me one think I seem to not understand - why should I subscribe to tweets in FF to be able to search them later inside FF, when I can search them directly with summize?

What is the exact benefit of being subscribed to them, when the data are public anyway?

Thank you.

[BarbaraKB]

Totally agree, Steve. Glad you're using FF more. Terribly exciting to me esp. since FF is visual, simple & has a killer name. These aspects just *might* convert average web user into better understanding what a "feed" does and how their "friends" will show them the way. I am passionate about that average web user.

p.s. And yes, TranceMist, FF may truly make Twitter obsolete by moving the conversation to FF esp. since Twitter can be unstable. But, because of Twitter's market pull right now and it's simplicity, I would not announce it's demise... yet.

[BarbaraKB]

Totally agree, Steve. Glad you're using FF more. Terribly exciting to me esp. since FF is visual, simple & has a killer name. These aspects just *might* convert average web user into better understanding what a "feed" does and how their "friends" will show them the way. I am passionate about that average web user.

p.s. And yes, TranceMist, FF may truly make Twitter obsolete by moving the conversation to FF esp. since Twitter can be unstable. But, because of Twitter's market pull right now and it's simplicity, I would not announce it's demise... yet.

[Dr. Mac]

I always enjoy your post! Very insightful and useful. I'm heading over to Friendfeed right now to learn more.

[Homejobsite]

I think FF has a little ways to go yet, but is coming along nicely. I do not mean to be picky, but I think they are also a good recourse, that with time will develope into something even better.

[ravinder]

thank you