Facebook's new Timeline, currently in a limited developer release but set to be unveiled to its hundreds of millions of users any day now, is going to shake up the social networking landscape. It's going to bring lifestreaming - formally a geeky activity based around RSS feeds - to the mainstream. In my view, Timeline is the smartest and most significant thing Facebook has done since launching a developer platform in May 2007. I think it's that important.

So where did the inspiration for Timeline come from and why is it going to be such a big deal? We can see the future just by looking at two earlier lifestreaming products: FriendFeed and scrappy start Memolane.

One of the strongest inspirations for Timeline came from within Facebook itself, in the form of a startup it acquired in August 2009: FriendFeed. Co-founded by Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook's Chief Technology Officer, FriendFeed was a social media aggregator that was much beloved by Web geeks.

FriendFeed was always far too geeky for mainstream users, however to his great credit Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spotted its potential. At the time Zuckerberg called FriendFeed "a simple and elegant service for people to share information." (emphasis ours) Well, two years later and it just so happens that sharing information is a key reason why Facebook is introducing Timeline.

Yes, Facebook's Timeline is ostensibly focused on an individual's personal history - kind of like an online diary. But that's really just a front for the real purpose of Timeline: to expose your entire content history to your friends and public subscribers.

It's not just the sharing that's key, it's making that content more social. ReadWriteWeb did one of the earliest interviews with FriendFeed's founders, Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, in February 2008. Something that Buchheit (who in the past had created Gmail for Google) said back then is more relevant than ever today, with Facebook's Timeline. Buchheit said that FriendFeed was "trying to go beyond simply aggregating to actually creating a pleasant social experience around the content." (emphasis ours)

So that's key point number 2 about Timeline: Facebook expects to make that content more social. That goal is supported by other Facebook initiatives this year, such as the real-time updates ticker and automated sharing from apps like Spotify and Washington Post.

Let's move now to a startup that wasn't acquired by Facebook, but which earlier this year launched a timeline service that is very close to what Facebook introduced later in the year. That startup's name is Memolane and we gave it a favorable review in January.

After Facebook announced its Timeline, Memolane CEO Eric Lagier tried to differentiate his service as a "Timeline of Your Life (more than just your Facebook posts)." Regardless of how Memolane is different from Facebook Timeline, he hit the nail on the head with his point that "time is the perfect tool to organize social media."

That's key point number 3 about Facebook Timeline: it organizes a lot of your social media activity, at least that which occurs on Facebook or on its third party partners like Spotify.

Incidentally, you have to feel for Memolane. An 800-pound gorilla just sat squarely on its little niche of the Web. Memoland is rather ominously "down for maintenance" as I write this, although its Twitter account reassures us that it is "preparing for some exciting things coming your way" this Tuesday. Here's hoping Memolane innovates itself into an exciting new direction with the timeline concept, because of course we love scrappy startups here at RWW.

Lifestreaming is Going Mainstream

There were many other products that Facebook probably took inspiration from for Timeline. Nokia Lifeblog and Six Apart's Vox are two that come to mind (to see how times have changed, read our mid-2006 analysis comparing Vox with Facebook). But the key points are clear from FriendFeed and Memolane:

1. Timeline is all about sharing personal content.
2. Timeline is also about making that personal content much more social than it is on your old Facebook profiles.
3. That's because a timeline is a highly effective way to organize social media content (making it easier to like, comment on and re-share).

The over-riding lesson from Facebook Timeline is that lifestreaming is going mainstream. At the beginning of this year, digital design consultancy Fjord predicted this would happen: "in 2011 we will see increasing numbers of people uploading aspects of their life to the cloud. They'll be able to combine this across multiple online services, generating meaning from data already online."

Of course Fjord wasn't to know that Facebook would implement Timeline and effectively position itself as the center of a huge trend. Which is what Facebook Timeline has done and why Facebook - and lifestreaming - is going to be very big.

Friend.ly is a place where people can get to know each other based on random questions you might have in common. Answer a question posed by the service, and you'll be able to see how other people have answered that question. You can also search for a question by typing it into the site's search bar.

So, are you ready to get even more friend.ly with Facebook?

If you can't think of a question, you can click on the Questions tab at the top of the page, and then you'll get a list of questions you can choose from, along with everyone else's answers to those questions.

You can answer as many questions as you want, meaning Friend.ly will only acquire as much information about you as you are willing to give it.

Getting Friend.ly with the Facebook Interest Graph

Friend.ly bases the questions it asks you on the Facebook interest graph, pulling from a user's Likes and the Likes of their friends, says InsideFacebook. After answering the questions, you can share your answers to your Facebook wall, Twitter, or the wall of a page related to the question.

The acquisition of friend.ly comes fresh on the heels of Facebook's frictionless integration featuring music sharing service Spotify, which allows all of your music activity to show up on the real-time news ticker and your own news feed as "Recent Activity." Facebook already knows what kind of music you like. With acquisition of Friend.ly, it will know even more about your personal life.

Facebook's List of Acquisitions Continues to Grow

At the beginning of 2011, Facebook announced that it would acquire 15 companies in 2011. In August 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed, which was expected to change Facebook a great deal. While Facebook has utilized some of the FriendFeed real-time commenting technology and adopted FriendFeed's focus on making the social networking experience more public, it doesn't currently play a big role in Facebook as a whole.

Friend.ly brings an added layer of data based on the social graph based directly on questions, which will help Facebook get even friendli.er with you.

What do you think Facebook will do next to learn more about you? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Don't get us wrong, the concept itself isn't bad: a discussion board built around interests as opposed to popularity. It's just that the execution makes the service seem a little confusing.

So what is miio? That's what we're trying to figure out today.

When you first sign up for miio, you can search for friends across your social networks and email accounts or you can skip that step and just search for other miio users who share your interests. This is perhaps the key feature in miio that differentiates it from many other social networks: it's not yet another site where you have to (either manually or automatically) re-create your social graph. It's a place to meet new people who share your interests.

Now whether you're supposed to chat them up or hit on them when you meet them is something I wasn't too clear about, given that miio asks for your "relationship status" and what you're "looking for" (friends, dating, chatting, "whatever") via your profile page. Those seem like features borrowed from Facebook, and frankly, if miio just wants to be discussion site, it could do without them.

Miio's Twitter-Like Dashboard

The miio Dashboard is reminiscent of Twitter, with its "replies" and "messages to me," the latter very much like Twitter's own DMs (direct messages). But unlike Twitter, you don't just follow tweets, err...posts, limited to 140 characters or less. Users can write as much as they want. And like Facebook, those status updates can be links, photos, videos, etc. as well. They can also be questions, which then puts miio up against Q&A sites like Quora, for example.

Miio RSS

In fact, updates can even be RSS feeds thanks to a profile setting which lets you publish RSS to miio. Already a number of "members" have created miio accounts with RSS feeds - as you can see here by searching for *rss*. However, given the high profile nature of some of these accounts (ABC, AP, BBC, CBS, Huffington Post, etc.), it looks like miio created these accounts itself for others to follow, which is actually a handy feature.

From the Public Timeline or Search page, you can filter out whether or not you want to see RSS updates or whether you want to see just text updates, just photos, just videos, just questions and so on. If you switch the setting to "RSS only," miio could effectively function as a lightweight RSS reader for those who don't really do RSS.

Miio Groups

There are also groups within miio, where you can discuss items of interest to you whether that's sports or iPads. But given miio's "early adopter" mindshare, the biggest groups seem to be tech-focused ones like those discussing iOS, startups or even miio competitor Google Buzz.

Final Thoughts: Too Much of a Good Thing, miio Needs to Diet

Although miio gets some things right, simplicity is not one of them. It's not clear yet what exactly miio wants to be when it grows up, why there's a need for this service and who should use it.

Our advice to miio, ditch the advanced feature set (it's overwhelming!) and focus on doing just one thing and doing it well. Groups, perhaps. Google Buzz lacks a "groups" feature and although FriendFeed has them, that service lost quite a few members after its Facebook acquisition. Do discussion groups and do them better than anyone else. And don't allow top followed members to dominate discussions like on Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter and every other "social" service out there today. Make it more democratic.

And simplify, simplify, simplify. Twitter worked because it was basic and easy. That's how miio should start too. It can add in advanced filtering, location-based services, metadata and all the rest later on, if necessary. (Or perhaps not at all).

With a redirected singular goal like this, miio could have a chance at attracting not just the tech geeks who sign up for anything shiny and new but those who just like to go online and chat about things they're into, no matter what those may be. Obviously, the folks behind miio have the technical know-how to build a great service, now they just need to establish a sharper focus. Good luck, miio!

A visit to Vineub.com satisfied my curiosity, though. It appears that Vinehub is a new social network aggregation application, in the same line as FriendFeed or even Buzz itself, except with one major difference: it doesn't just pull in updates for liking and commenting, it sends them out too.

After testing the application, I can see why it wasn't included on Google's list. Vinehub is clearly still in beta. In fact, they should probably call it alpha, based on my experiences.

The service currently supports adding Facebook and Twitter accounts - at this point, the only Buzz integration offered is the addition of a "Buzz This" button on posts.

After announcing a partnership with the on-demand data center and hosting services company NetDepot in November, a press release went out promising MySpace integration, too, but that doesn't appear to have launched yet.

It took me four different tries over the course of two days to finally get the Facebook account added to my stream. For whatever reason, it simply would not take. I had to remove the application's Facebook permissions and the re-add my account again and again before it finally worked.

When at last I managed to get Facebook messages to appear in my stream, the "like" and "comment" buttons beneath the status messages were un-clickable. That is, I could click them, but nothing happened - I was simply redirected back up to the top of the page. Another feature that wasn't ready for primetime, it appears.

Some Facebook messages came in entirely blank, only showing an avatar, name and date.

On the other hand, Twitter functionality (reply and retweet) did work.

Could be Great, Too Soon to Tell

However, pre-judging Vinehub now based on these issues would be unfair. It's obvious that the service is still actively being developed, and isn't ready yet for everyday use. In fact, some of the links at the top of the Vinehub homepage don't even work yet - they display a "coming soon" message when clicked. Plus, the support email address is also non-functional - an email I sent them for more information was kicked back.

That said, the promised functionality is appealing. Instead of simply aggregating your networks like FriendFeed and Buzz do, Vinehub wants you to be able to post back to them and use the essential features they offer, including replies and retweets on Twitter, commenting and liking on Facebook and "buzzing" posts from one network to the next. In the future, the company plans to offer more functionality, too, including editing profiles, viewing friends' updates, viewing and sharing photos and adding contacts.

Another feature in the works is a pro-level account which will allow business and power users an ad-free version of Vinehub with up to 5 accounts per social network. That could be handy for those tasked with keeping track of the social media efforts within an organization. But today, there are several far more robust Twitter clients like CoTweet and HootSuite which offer more features than Vinehub. In its present form, Vinehub doesn't even come close to competing with those services. Unless Vinehub can ramp up its offerings to be on par with what's already out there, it will have a hard time gaining business users, despite the other services it offers.

Again, though, it's too soon to tell what kind of application Vinehub will be - it has to get built first. In the meantime, we'll definitely keep our eye on it, both on the site and via Twitter.

The irony of the situation is that the new "How to Fix Google Buzz" site was created by Jyri Engeström, a former Google employee who was at one time tasked with "making Google more social."

If Engeström's name rings a bell, it's probably because you remember him as the co-founder and chairman of a social networking startup called Jaiku, acquired by Google in fall of 2007. Jaiku was a formidable microblogging service and one of the few that could have ever truly given rival Twitter a run for its money. With this service, you could update your status from both the web and your phone as well as aggregate and automatically publish stories from your other activity streams including blog posts, del.icio.us links, Flickr photos, even yes, even Twitter updates.

If anything, Jaiku was a "proto-Buzz." It was a FriendFeed before there was FriendFeed. It was FriendFeed mashed up with Twitter. It was one of the first to stream your social activities from around the web in an easy-to-read format that people could follow and reply to. It even had comments! And IM! In fact, you could argue that Jaiku was a better Buzz than the half-finished service Google launched just last week.

Unfortunately, Google let the original Jaiku service languish until eventually stopping its development entirely and open sourcing its code over on Google App Engine. Afterwards, in October of 2009, Engeström moved on to greener pastures. However, despite no longer working at Google, Engeström still clearly cares about Google's social networking issues. This led him to create the "How to Fix Google Buzz" site.

"How to Fix Google Buzz" - Submit and Vote on Buzz Ideas

Using the new site is simple. Sign in, read the issue on the screen then vote "yes" or "no." If you don't have an opinion on that particular idea, you can click the skip button. As of right now, the number one request is an option to hide comments. It's followed by other popular requests including lists, blocking improvements, filters and more. Plus, the nice thing about Moderator is that each idea has its own permalink so if you want to rally support behind your top feature request - like, say, the whole messed up, broken Google Reader integration, you can do so. Ahem, cough, cough.

Although Google Moderator makes aggregating and voting on Buzz ideas and issues simple, can we believe that anyone at Google is actually watching? Of course, we can't know for sure, but when we asked Engeström if Google would look at this page, he only coyly responded, "trust me, they will."

As Louis Gray points out, Google Buzz validates FriendFeed's ideas, but it also marginalizes the service even more. While some will look at Buzz as a Facebook/Twitter competitor, it also represents the final nail in FriendFeed's coffin. We will surely see a lot of FriendFeed's features appear on Facebook in the future, but FriendFeed as a stand-alone service has now lost its relevancy before it ever got a chance to go mainstream.

The real question, though, is whether Google Buzz will be able to succeed where FriendFeed couldn't. FriendFeed never made it out of the early-adopter phase and slowly became a self-referential community that was never quite accessible enough for a larger audience.

Looks Familiar?

If you are not familiar with FriendFeed, just have a look at these two screenshots:

Google's Advantage: Lifting FriendFeed's Best Ideas and a Huge Built-In User Base

Google Buzz has a number of advantages over FriendFeed. While FriendFeed tried to attract early adopters and mostly catered to their tastes, Buzz has a built-in audience already. While FriendFeed had to work hard on building a thriving community and never managed to attract a large mainstream audience, Gmail is one of the world's most popular email services and thanks to this, Buzz has millions of potential users from day one.

Also, while FriendFeed tried to allow users to connect to as many social services as possible, Google Buzz is just starting out with a few core Google and third-party services for now (Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader and Twitter). This will make it far more accessible than FriendFeed ever was.

Google is also putting a lot of emphasis on location-based and mobile services here, which is something FriendFeed never did. FriendFeed, for example, never offered a mobile app, while mobile apps and sites are one of the areas where Google is focusing on with Buzz.

The Buzz team has also been able to lift some of the best ideas from FriendFeed. You can "like" items, comment on them, you can see who liked a post (which looks identical to FriendFeed's implementation of this feature) and Buzz will recommend items that it thinks will be interesting to you because your friends also liked them or commented on them.

What do you Think?

Do you think Buzz's built-in mainstream user base help it to succeed where FriendFeed failed?

Hours after high-profile Silicon Valley social aggregation service Seesmic announced that it acquired angel-backed cross-network publishing service Ping.fm, a similar deal was announced in Europe. Identity management service Critical Path, maker of software called Memova, announced that it has acquired mobile uploading service ShoZu, a company that had received an enormous amount of venture capital.

ShoZu raised more than $30 million to build a mobile app that allows users to publish photos, videos and text to more than 50 different destination social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blip.tv and more. The service has long been popular on Nokia phones and sells an iPhone app for $5. Shozu was voted one of our readers' favorite mobile apps in 2007. For more about ShoZu see this Techcraver interview with the company's CEO.

Critical Path is a little like a combination of Plaxo and Verisign. It offers messaging and social apps, APIs, Identity Management and Access Control.

Was this the big exit that ShoZu's investors sought? Almost definitely not. Critical Path is an innovative service that's got some big customers like BT, France Telecom and Orange, but it's unlikely that ShoZu came at a high price. Spence alludes to the same when he writes that Critical Path "saw the potential of combining their Memova platform suite with ShoZu's engineering." Update: In the official release, ShoZu Board Director Nigel Pilkington from lead investor SEB Venture Capital UK, called the deal "a successful outcome for us." Maybe that's being polite, maybe it's true or maybe it was a small success financially.

It's most likely a talent deal and evidence that cross-platform publishing tools like ShoZu, Ping.fm and competitor Pixel Pipe are probably not stand-alone businesses. Just like FriendFeed's aggregation across scores of APIs wasn't enough to make it a success outside of being scooped up by the much, much larger Facebook - these other companies that create the pipes for the tubes just aren't compelling enough to a large number of consumers.

They do make nice acquisition targets, though, and show that the future of the social web may not be found in reading and writing to one single network like Twitter or Facebook. The savvy companies that are building value on top of those networks are also dedicating resources to bring on engineers skilled at working with far more networks to publish to or read from.

Gelato is the kind of web site that's going to make married and attached folks almost wish they were single again - it's that much fun to use. Getting started is one of the simplest processes we've ever seen. Not only does it offer Facebook Connect as an alternative to creating an account, it actually imports your Facebook profile information to create an instant dating profile on Gelato. (You can select and deselect which items you want to import, too).

However, Gelato doesn't stop with just Facebook - the site actually supports eight social services in total and has more on the way. Obviously, there's Twitter support, a key component to any good lifestream, but there's also Last.fm, Netflix, Flickr, Hulu, Amazon, and Seesmic. By adding a mix of these sites to your profile, it's much easier for someone to get an idea of what sort of interests you have than by reading some sort of self-created profile list. Think about it: you may have a rather typical list of favorite movies which include everything from "Forrest Gump" to "The Godfather," but your recent viewing of Dollhouse Season 1 on Hulu will out you as the sci-fi geek you are at heart.

Your updates on these social networks are combined to form a lifestream of your activities, just like they would on FriendFeed. Also like FriendFeed, you can "like" and comment on the items posted. And if you don't know what to say, various "icebreakers" are available to help you be witty on the fly. However, because Gelato is focused on making one-to-one connections, those likes, comments, and icebreakers remain private. The only person who can see them is the recipient. They can then respond to your comment if they want to start a conversation with you.

Real-Time Search

A real-time search feature, another borrowed idea from FriendFeed, helps you find topics you're interested in. For example, if you're looking for someone who's talking about the latest Harry Potter movie, you can search for that using keywords. Of course you're also able to filter your searches by age, sex, and location, too, so you can find someone local to chat with.

Legit Accounts and "Friendships"

One unique feature to Gelato that didn't come from elsewhere is what they're calling your "SCOOP" rating, aka the "social confidence of online profile." The higher the "SCOOP" rating, the better chance you're legit. This feature is designed to combat those who post fake profiles on dating sites. To bump your rating up, you can post to Twitter or Facebook and ask your friends to confirm who you are. Obviously, this isn't foolproof, but it should help highlight legit accounts as being so.

The only area that may need a little finessing is the way friendships work on the site. As with Facebook, you can send friend requests to other users and they must accept your request before you can be friends. This in and of itself isn't so bad...or all that different from how many other sites work for that matter. However, since a lot of online dating interaction is typically of the "try-before-you-buy" sort (live chats, email messages, etc.), it could lead to some sticky situations when you decide that the person you "friended" isn't someone you want to get to know better after all. To get them out of your friends list, you have to unfriend them and they will know you've done so. Considering all the other smart features in Gelato, it would have been nice if they could have come up with a less hurtful way of saying "I'm just not that into you."

Still that's a minor complaint in what is, overall, a unique entry to the billion dollar marketplace that is online dating. Despite the fact that much of the site's inspiration comes from FriendFeed, we won't hold that against them. In fact, we applaud them for it. Taking FriendFeed's innovations and applying them to a marketplace decidedly lacking in such technical innovation is a brilliant idea.

If you're ready to give the "stream dating" of Gelato a try, you can join now at ge.la.to.

• First generation: was done on a single processor, usually for process control in military systems.

• Second generation: within a Local Area Network, usually for a financial trading room.

• Third generation: applied across the whole Web/Internet, what we call the real-time Web.

In each generation a stack has emerged, and secure messaging has been key to that stack. The names change and the scale of the prize and challenges certainly changes, but the basic issue remains the same: delivering messages reliably and quickly. In this post, we trace the steps from the second generation to the third generation to see how the real-time Web might play out.

Generation 2's Winner: The Teknekron Information Bus Story

I worked with the technology's second generation. My company took on the challenge of delivering market prices from multiple sources to hundreds of traders in a trading room, enabling new apps based on real-time calculation. The solution had to scale to maybe 2,000 traders, which is laughably small by the standards of the real-time Web. But you did not want to face a roomful of furious traders if your system was down for three minutes or delayed prices by 15 seconds. The reliability and latency requirements were very stringent.

The company that emerged as leader, Teknekron, coined the term "Information Bus." It did very well by coining the term, because it established Teknekron as a market leader; it followed the "get mindshare first, and then go for market share" strategy. Vivek Ranadive, the visionary founder and CEO, describes in his 1999 book "The Power Of Now" how the term came to him. He was schooled as a hardware engineer and was appalled by how much more chaotic (i.e. error- and delay-prone) software projects were compared to hardware projects. Looking at why, he realized that the concept of a "bus," which is the device that all hardware components connect to, could be applied to software.

Ranadive understood that real-time, event-driven systems would not be limited to financial trading, and he executed brilliantly on that insight. He sold Teknekron to Reuters, the company's main rival in trading systems, but retained the right to use the technology outside of financial markets. That offshoot became TIBCO (The Information Bus Company), which at the time of writing is a publicly traded company valued at $1.6 billion, with annual revenue of over $600 million.

But TIBCO did not leverage its position to dominate the third generation. Another company tried that and blew a lot of money in the attempt.

KnowNow: Lessons of a Blow-Out

KnowNow worked through $50 million in funding before throwing in the towel in July 2008. It was going to update the message bus to the Web using RSS. It was still an enterprise play.

It had a strong management team, top-tier VC (Kleiner Perkins), and strong technology. Why did it fail? Three big reasons stand out:

• Generation 3 is a tougher technical challenge. Generation 2's state of technology was perfect for local area networks using Ethernet, where the user device was always connected and where we measured users by the thousands. With generation 3, we are dealing with millions of users who are offline some of the time, and the network bandwidth available for messages is not under their control. In other words, it is one big bear of a technical challenge!
• Companies are reluctant to invest millions of dollars in closed software when open standards clearly always win on the Web. Companies can instead experiment very cheaply using consumer-centric RSS tools and open source.
• KnowHow was early. The hype on real-time enterprise did not last long enough, and it hit the trough of disillusionment.

Contenders for the Real-Time Web Message Bus

We have probably missed a few, so please tell us about them in the comments. These are very different types of solutions, but they are working towards a similar objective. First, we will list them and then attempt a bit of categorization:

• Gnip: an independent venture whose monetization model relies on it being a hub that different sites can connect to.
• Tornado (FriendFeed's Python-based Web server technology, which was open sourced by Facebook): this uses PubSubHubbub.
• RSS Cloud: promoted by Dave Winer, with WordPress as a marquee partner.
• PubSubHubbub: promoted by Google (and FriendFeed/Facebook), with SixApart as a marquee partner.
• XMPP The technology with which IM clients interoperate. Being used by Yammer, Present.ly, and Drop.io.
• Twitter.
• Facebook.
• TIB: an enterprise solution from TIBCO.
• MQ: an enterprise solution from IBM.
• Sonic: an enterprise solution from Progress Software.

Here are the categories they fall into:

1. Enterprise
   TIB, MQ, and Sonic all fall into this category, and there are more. They will find it hard to make the transition to the real-time Web for two reasons. The first is technical. Connecting millions of users over a low bandwidth network via HTTP is very different from connecting a few thousand users over a corporate network. The second is commercial: they monetize by selling licensing fees to enterprises. But that is not the primary way in which the real-time Web will be monetized. Still, these are big profitable companies with the right tech chops, so they cannot be dismissed.
2. Open source and open standards
   Tornado, RSS Cloud, PubSubHubbub, and XMPP fall into this category. They have differing purposes but also a lot of overlap. XMPP is low level and not affiliated with any big company. RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub are most similar to each other. Tornado is a Web server. But they all face the issue that an open standard takes a long time to evolve and consolidate into a winner. Before that happens, we will likely see more entrants, making the choice even more confusing for developers. So, developers may hedge their bets and go for commercial/de facto standards.
3. Commercial hub
   Gnip is the purest example of this. It aims to get traction by being simpler to implement than the open-source/open-standards offerings. It is a bold strategy from a strong team of entrepreneurs and investors. For something as big as this - basic plumbing for the Web - it feels like a bit too much reliance on one company.
4. Traffic plays
   Twitter and Facebook are the major players here. They might become de facto standards because the biggest issue is traffic. Developers will build where there is traffic as long as two conditions are met:
   • It works technically (i.e. latency at scale). Twitter has some credibility issues here.
   • It is open and transparent - i.e. anyone can connect without fear of the game changing on them. Facebook has some credibility issues here.

The Technical Challenges

First, we have to address the question of "What does real time mean?"

In each generation, the gurus of the previous generation get sniffy about the definition of real time ("What do you mean one second is real time? We measure in micro-seconds!").

It depends on the usage case and technical possibilities. Real time within a single processor is obviously faster than real time over a LAN, which is faster than real time over HTTP for the whole Web.

Real time, practically speaking, means "orders of magnitude faster than how data has been delivered in the past, and faster than most people think they need today." So, RSS Cloud is faster than RSS, and Twitter search is faster than Google search, and IM is faster than email.

In generation 2, the thinking evolved through three approaches:

1. Polling. It soon became obvious that this would not scale.
2. Broadcast, which put too much load on the client.
3. Multicast, which became PubSub.

Most current Web HTTP-based real-time systems are still in the polling phase (i.e. subscribers poll publishers to see if they have an update), which clearly won't scale. The newer approaches fundamentally enable a publisher to say, "I will tell you, the subscriber, when I have an update, so you don't need to poll me." It's a geek's way of saying "Don't call us. We'll call you."

For a good technical primer on how this works and a discussion of the differences between RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub (mercifully shortened to PuSH), check out this post.

Sticking My Neck Out to Guess the Winner

Twitter. Why? It has the traffic and is open and transparent enough to win confidence. But two big problems remain:

1. It has to reveal its business model. Only then will partners feel confident that they understand its strategic direction.
2. It has to prove it can get good latency at scale. Its early history of fail whales makes people justifiably skeptical.

The winner will likely be the platform that hosts the killer app. Most platforms get traction through a killer app. In the second generation of real time, that killer app was market data for financial traders. What will it be in the third generation? We will explore this in a future post.

What to Name This Generation?

"Message/Information Bus" worked for generation 2. It took a key concept from generation 1 - the hardware bus - and applied it to a local area network.

That does not work so well for generation 3, the real-time Web. For now, we talk about a Web-wide real-time message bus because there is no better alternative.

The new term may have something to do with "status," because the status update is a central concept in social media. Perhaps something like "StatusFabric" or "StatusNet" or "StatusWeb" will emerge.

Developers will now be able to tap into one of the core infrastructure pieces that made FriendFeed tick so well. While other services (like Twitter) tend to have a lot of trouble to scale up when they grow, FriendFeed never ran into these problems and Tornado was surely one of the main reasons why the site managed to stay up and running even when demand spiked during major events.

Here is what developers will get when they implement Tornado according to Bret Taylor:

• All the basic site building blocks - Tornado comes with built-in support for a lot of the most difficult and tedious aspects of web development, including templates, signed cookies, user authentication, localization, aggressive static file caching, cross-site request forgery protection, and third party authentication like Facebook Connect. You only need to use the features you want, and it is easy to mix and match Tornado with other frameworks.

• Real-time services - Tornado supports large numbers of concurrent connections. It is easy to write real-time services via long polling or HTTP streaming with Tornado. Every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to FriendFeed's servers.

• High performance - Tornado is pretty fast relative to most Python web frameworks. We ran some simple load tests against some other popular Python frameworks, and Tornado's baseline throughput was over four times higher than the other frameworks

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapup by RSS or by email (form below).

RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form:

Purchase The ReadWriteWeb Q2 2009 VC Funding Report

Our Second Premium Report for Businesses

We're excited to announce the availability of ReadWriteWeb's Q2 2009 VC Funding Report, our second premium report powered by data from ChubbyBrain. We have been tracking early-stage investment in Internet, mobile and SaaS since the financial crisis in September 2008 and we believe that this report is unlike anything else you've seen.

Our Report gives you the facts on 240 deals closed in April, May and June - who invested, in what company, how much they invested and when. Read on to see what's included in the guide and how to purchase it.

Web Products

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed for $50 Million

The big news this week was Facebook acquiring popular lifestreaming company FriendFeed for about $50m, $15m in cash and the rest in Facebook stock. According to a post by Bret Taylor on the FriendFeed blog, FriendFeed will continue to operate normally for the time being while the two companies figure out the long-term plans. The purchase makes sense, as Facebook had continually copied parts of FriendFeed's feature set - including the 'like' feature and Facebook's new focus on the real-time stream.

Facebook Users: Here's What FriendFeed Brings to the Family

It's going to be a little like the Brady Bunch, this union between Facebook and the just-acquired social networking service FriendFeed. Both families will influence each other a lot, though Facebook is far, far bigger. FriendFeed was co-founded by Paul Buchheit, the man who invented GMail, and by Bret Taylor, who co-founded Google Maps. Here's what they bring to Facebook; it's probably going to change Facebook a lot.

Facebook Updates Are Now Searchable

Also this week Facebook announced that it's opened up search across all status messages, notes and shared links that users have marked as public. Searching across all users, whether you know them or not, requires a couple of clicks - but the availability of the feature marks a dramatic turning point in the history of Facebook. For months the company has been pushing users towards being more public and less private. This is why.

10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only 1.5 weeks. That's bad for users and it's definitely bad for data-mining. Unless Twitter corrects this issue on its own, we have to find another solution for archiving tweets ourselves. Here are 10 ways to do so.

Caffeine: Google Tests New Search Infrastructure

Just as Facebook announces internal search for public notes, Google counters with an effort to improve on its existing services. In a blog post, the company unveiled its new Caffeine search infrastructure to web developers. The question is, will Caffeine enhance performance or lead to user anxiety?

See also: iGoogle is Now Social: Google Launches Social Gadgets

Tiny App Confuses, Delights: Check Out Robo.to, Next-Gen Animated GIFs

From "massively small products" shop Particle, itself a startup newly out of stealth mode, comes a new app: Robo.to, pitched to us as a digital calling card. Although the app first struck us as a skinnier Retaggr with an animated GIF-esque Flash avatar slapped on the top, something quirky and cute drew us back and elicited deeper digging.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
• Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
• Codero, Dedicated Hosting with Backup & Managed Services.
• Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• hakia is a semantic search engine.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
• IronScale, Managed Hosting. The Cloud Gets Physical.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. Sponsored by Socialtext.

Microsoft & Nokia: Not Just Office, It's the Whole Mobile Enterprise

This week news broke that Microsoft and Nokia were announcing a partnership that would take Office outside of Windows Mobile for the first time. It's now clear that this isn't just Word, Excel, and PowerPoint slapped onto Nokia smartphones: the world's largest cellphone maker will now support a whole slew of key enterprise software from Microsoft.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

VC Series A Web Tech Deals in July

We have been tracking Series A deals in Web technology since the market mayhem in October 2008, and since May we have been working with ChubbyBrain, which tracks this kind of data full-time. Early-stage funding is important for the whole economy. The executive summary for July: steady progress and a lot of deals in the Boston area.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

Is a Perfect Storm Forming For Distributed Social Networking?

Maybe it's better to host your own. That's the thinking coming from a growing number of early technology adopters as service after service goes down, sells out or otherwise frustrates the users. The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new - but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed's sale to Facebook, Tr.im's up and down and Twitter's denial of service attacks.

Gartner Hype Cycle 2009: Web 2.0 Trending Up, Twitter Down

Analyst firm Gartner released its latest Hype Cycle white paper this week, detailing some of the biggest trends in technology this year. According to the report, cloud computing, e-books and Internet TV are at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations," while this year's biggest hit Twitter is said to have "tipped over the peak" and is just about to enter the infamous "Trough of Disillusionment." Interestingly, web 2.0 is deemed to be nearly past the Trough and entering the "Slope of Enlightenment."

Product Managers & Marketers: What The Internet of Things Means For You

Some of you may be reading our series on the Internet of Things and wondering: what use is this to me in my daily work? So one day my fridge will be able to tell me when the milk has run out, when I travel my luggage will have an RFID tag and not be lost, my home will be automated via Twitter. But will it affect your job? If you're a product manager or marketer, read on to find out how this will affect you.

Your "Real" Friends are Your Online Friends (or so Says Gen Y)

Is it easier to talk to your online buddies than your friends out there in the "real world?" Do you feel like you know more about what's happening in the lives of your Facebook and MySpace friends than with those who don't have accounts or don't bother to update them? According to a recent UK MySpace study, these sorts of feelings are common among today's younger generation.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

FriendFeed product manager Dan Hsiao and company intern Ross Miller released a short video today from deep inside the core of that innovative company that Facebook just paid $50m in cash and stocks to purchase. Now that FriendFeed has had its exit, the staff must feel comfortable opening up a little to the world and letting us see what really goes on there.

We thought it was elves, but this is probably the most scalable solution available. Just snap on more of the same infrastructure and you're ready to rock and roll.

The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new - but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed's sale to Facebook, Tr.im's up and down and Twitter's denial of service attacks. The tide may not be turning, but there's sure to be some new waves of innovation that come out of this period of frustration.

One of the analogies people are drawing is that we need a WordPress.org-type version of Twitter to put on our own servers as an alternative to the Twitter-hosted version that exists now like WordPress hosts blogs on WordPress.com.

Why do we need self-hosted lifestreaming, microblogging or social networks though when we've already got the ability to host our own blogs, own our own data there and set our own rules? Simply because these technologies fill different needs. Blogs are good for longer-form, author-centric communication. Quick, very social conversations around objects like links or media items can best be had in other settings. Thus the interest many people have in both writing a blog and sharing and discussing items on sites like Facebook (social networks), Twitter (microblogging) or FriendFeed (activity streams).

Twitter's Down Time

Twitter went down again today, possibly for the second time in two weeks because of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. A swarm of zombified computers, distributed all around the world, is hitting Twitter's centralized infrastructure over and over again until it can't stay up.

If we all had a little piece of our microblogging network on our own servers and they spoke to each other, that couldn't happen.

We'd also own our own data, our archives, our interface design and more. It would be like publishing little messages... like grown ups.

The two systems could co-exist, a hosted service has its advantages and many people wouldn't use anything else. Realistically, no one is going to build something too much like Twitter if they could build a distributed version of something like FriendFeed or Facebook.

Facebook Eats FriendFeed

Social activity stream discussion network FriendFeed announced that it was selling itself to Facebook yesterday and many of its users were very upset. The acquisition is likely to change Facebook in interesting ways (FriendFeed's creators were the inventors of GMail and Google Maps) but FriendFeed itself was important to its users.

The feeling of betrayal that comes from a transaction like this makes it hard to trust a hosted social networking company again.

Fortunately, there's a long and growing list of ways to put all of your activity around the web in one place on your own website. When will those tools begin to include subscription to other peoples' activity feeds and posting comments from your social lifestream viewing page that will appear back out on everyone else's?

That's a big part of the vision articulated by Anil Dash in his recent essay about what he calls The Push Button Web. It's related as well to RSS pioneer Dave Winer's recent promotion of a part of RSS called RSS Cloud. Developers are actively building on RSS Cloud and a similar protocol with the humorous name PubSubHubbub.

That's also part of the vision of the Distributed Social Networking Project (DiSo). We haven't heard much lately from this project, probably because its founders are busy building the technical standards that will allow the information to flow from one social network to another.

Tr.im Your Expectations

This weekend link shortening service Tr.im announced that it was shutting its doors. It was too expensive and hopeless to run the service without the funding, hype and official blessing from Twitter that competitor Bit.ly had won.

Big deal, right? It turns out that people freaked out. Tr.im's biggest users were developers who were hip to the opportunities to do interesting things with the service. They had built on it and they felt a lot of frustration when they heard the news.

A dead URL shortener means dead links, broken content, lost data.

There are a number of different solutions being explored in response to this part of the problem. Developer Brian Hendrickson has already begun working on a service called rp.ly, a "community-owned URL shortener" based on cloning the Tr.im API.

There will, no doubt, be any number of other efforts that rise from the ashes of the trust that's been burnt over the last week or more.

Are all of these circumstances and conversations going to push the social web over the edge, toward a more distributed and less centralized model? Probably not in a big way, immediately, but we're pretty sure that some interesting innovation is going to come out of this. Dissatisfied engineers, working on a problem that a lot of people are interested in, can produce some fun and important work.

Some will hold out for Google Wave, the forthcoming open-source hyper communication head shift. We're hearing that Wave may be too complicated, though, and we suspect that the most important innovations will come from coders building the kind of software that many, many people can hack on and help evolve.

In the future many of us may be microblogging, lifestreaming and social networking over technology that we control and can customize ourselves, instead of inside the owned networks of major companies like Facebook or Google. Those companies are seeking to branch out as well, trying to colonize the web (in the words of Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang) with tools like Facebook Connect.

But many of us may decide not to trust them anymore, and to use the tools that are becoming available to build and host our own systems of communication. People who control their own systems of communication can innovate on them outside the boundaries of the financial interests of big communication companies and we can all benefit from those innovations.

This summer is an important period in answering those questions.

At one time, FriendFeed clones like Lifestream.fm and Socialthing! looked like promising alternatives, but neither of them offered the same rich and innovative features that FriendFeed does - the very features which made FriendFeed the standout service that it is today. However, there is one service that may have an opportunity to capitalize on the FriendFeed exodus: social media aggregator Streamy.

When we looked at Streamy back in March of this year, we were more than impressed with what it had to offer. For some reason though, the service's social networking aspects never really became heavily used by the early adopter crowd. Everyone had their own reasons for this decision of course, with complaints which ranged from the service feeling a little too raw for everyday use to its RSS reader which couldn't (and still doesn't) provide a viable alternative to Google Reader. However, we think the main reason for the lack of uptake has more to do with the fact that Streamy's core audience was already busy interacting, commenting, and "liking" items over on their social media aggregator of choice: FriendFeed.

Now, with FriendFeed out of the way (or soon to be, that is), it may be time for us to give Streamy another look. There are a number of features which should appeal to today's FriendFeed users if they decide to make the switch. However, there are still some issues with how Streamy implements these features, and we'll make note of those too.

1. FriendFeed Friend Import

When you sign up for Streamy, you have the option to find your friends on other services. One of those services is FriendFeed. By clicking on the "People" link at the top of the page then selecting "Find Friends" you can import your friends from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Google, and even Flickr. This is at least as good as FriendFeed's own friend import process which only imported from email, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, it gives you the ability to easily re-create your FriendFeed social graph on Streamy without having to manually seek out your friends and re-add them.

What Streamy needs to work on: One thing Streamy needs to improve in this area is the ability to "select all" the friends it finds and let you follow them in one fell swoop. At the moment, you have to click "Follow" next to each individual who you want to add. It's also really hard to see who's following you and then reciprocate. Although new followers appear on the homepage in the "new from friends" section, you have to "remove" each person from this box after following them only to have more new followers appear in their place. And there's no way to tell whether or not you were already following these people, which leads to confusion. There should be a centralized way of managing this activity and the homepage widget definitely needs to sync with your following choices made on the backend.

2. Comment on Stories

On the Streamy homepage, a section called "Stories for You" delivers personalized news based on your site activity like stories you and your friends are sharing and commenting on. However, since at first Streamy has no activity to go on, it simply recommends "popular" stories to you and those may not be stories you actually enjoy. Like FriendFeed, you can comment on these stories and those comments will be seen by others reading the same story. Also like FriendFeed, undesirable stories can be hidden from your view with the "hide" button. However, unlike FriendFeed, Streamy actually introduces a great feature here: threaded comments. Each comment has a "reply" button next to it, letting users reply to each other's comments as opposed to simply creating a new one.

What Streamy needs to work on: Although FriendFeed's river of news was also personalized based on who you followed, the site offered a number of ways to surface popular content. When your friends commented on an item, it "bubbled up" to appear at the top of your stream, for instance. FriendFeed also had a "best of day" feature which displayed the most active stories that day. Streamy doesn't have anything like this so content with comments could easily become lost. For now, the best way to see stories your friends comment on is in the "New from People" homepage widget (also available in the "People" section) which is an activity feed of your friends' comments among other things.

3. Groups: Streamy's Version of FriendFeed Rooms

Streamy has a feature which lets you create groups which is somewhat reminiscent of FriendFeed's Rooms feature. As with Rooms, groups can be topic-based so you and your friends can discuss the news. You can browse through your own group memberships to see which groups you're a member of and you can access the admin features for the groups you own. Also like FriendFeed, groups can be public or private as you choose and you can invite members simply by typing their name.

What Streamy needs to work on: Unlike FriendFeed, groups can't be auto-populated with content like RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, YouTube videos, etc. Everything needs to be manually entered through a text box or shared with the group via Streamy's sharing features. However, sharing items from your subscriptions or recommended stories is more difficult than it should be. Despite Streamy's cool drag-and-drop interface for posting to external services, sharing with groups or individuals still leaves a lot to be desired.

When you first grab an item to share it, icons appear letting you save it (the star icon), share to other services like Facebook or Twitter (green arrow), or share with a friend (people icon). When you select the share with friends option, though, only a limited number of people appear and they're only identified with their avatar, not by name. Also missing is a way to share with the groups from here.

Instead, to share with a group, you have to click on the story's headline then access the share button from the top right of the article. Once here, it's very easy to share with either people, groups, or services. It's the sort of option that should be available directly from the homepage without any extra clicks.

4. Your Shared Stuff

Another sharing feature in Streamy is the one where you're able to share items by posting them to your profile. This feature is activated through the drag-and-drop interface and dragging the content to the Streamy service from the available list of services to post to (green arrow icon, once again). This posts the story to your profile which your friends can then see when they click on "Shared Stuff" from their own Streamy homepage. It also appears in the "New from People" homepage feed. In a way, this is a lot like FriendFeed's home feed which is comprised of all the shared items from your FriendFeed friends.

What Streamy needs to work on: Unlike FriendFeed, your own "Shared Stuff" isn't populated with the dozens of social media services that FriendFeed supports. Instead, Streamy displays all your site activity, including friends you added and groups you created or joined. Your friends will then see your Streamy status updates, shared stories, and stories you commented on mixed in with these other activities in their "New from People" feed. We're not sure that we want to see people's site-wide activity (like who they just friended) - we're more interested in the actual content they're sharing.

5. ...And So Much More!

What Streamy really has going for it, though, is what FriendFeed didn't - the dashboard aggregator, integration with other social media services, and built in chat. Streamy's layout is a lot different from FriendFeed - or from Twitter for that matter - and that may be good thing in some people's opinion. As opposed to a real-time "river of news" the site's homepage is a widget-filled dashboard with updates from your feeds, Facebook, and any other services you add. It also includes a friend list showing your IM buddies from Google Chat, AIM, or MSN. The Status update box lets you post to Facebook, Twitter, Streamy, or (for now) FriendFeed. As you delve into the dashboards for the other services using the small buttons at the top, you'll be surprised to find things like a full-on Twitter client complete with replies, DMs, and trending topics, for example. Digg's dashboard is a nice, consolidated view of what's hot on that service... and so on.

If you don't like the dashboard, you can also choose to have Streamy load up directly to your feeds or one of the other social media services Streamy supports.

What Streamy needs to work on: Adding widgets to the dashboard needs improvement. You have to first click on the widget (+) button from the top of the page to select the additional widgets. While simple enough in theory, there were some bugs when testing this out. For example, adding a Digg widget for the topic "Technology" was a dead-end. After you get the drop-down box to select a topic, there's no "go" or "add" button to actually complete the process.

Conclusion

In the end, Streamy shows a lot of potential for becoming a great service and they could certainly capitalize on FriendFeed's impending shutdown if they so desired. However, there's still a bit of work to be done to make the service as usable as it needs to be for ex-FriendFeed users. In Streamy's defense, however, they originally never had the goal of competing with FriendFeed which is why things are the way they are. Like us, they never imagined FriendFeed would be acquired and shut down. Now that it has sold, though, the company is interested in seeing how they could appeal to the community of early adopters who originally made FriendFeed their home.

Will Streamy be able to make the necessary changes in time before someone else lures the ex-FriendFeeders over to their service? Perhaps. The company, currently a small 3-person team, has made amazing strides so far and is currently looking into getting additional funding. In the next couple of months, if things go well, we may see a lot of changes happen very quickly - specifically to the social networking aspects of the service. The company also sees a lot of potential to incorporate new features which aren't simply FriendFeed dupes. Hopefully, we'll be able to update this post someday soon with details as to what those may be.

FriendFeed was co-founded by Paul Buchheit, the man who invented GMail, and by Bret Taylor, who co-founded Google Maps. They both made enough money from being early Google Employees that they never needed to work again and didn't need to sell to Facebook - but they joined Facebook because they wanted the work they'd done on FriendFeed to change the world of social networking. Here's what they bring to Facebook; it's probably going to change Facebook a lot.

FriendFeed is a very unusual social network, but we've long suspected it represents the future of social networking. We got one of the first interviews with Taylor and Buchheit eighteen months ago and that podcast is still one of the best ways to learn about how FriendFeed works.

Now that the service has been live for some time, here are the most important parts of it that will likely influence the way Facebook works.

1. Public Profiles and Content

Facebook started out as a site where you couldn't see the pages and posts of people you didn't know. It still retains a lot of that flavor, but this summer Facebook started moving toward a much more public and less private experience.

FriendFeed is very public. Everyones' profiles and postings on the site are public and the software has a very interesting flow that prompts people to discover new users that they have no connection with other than conversation around a common topic. FriendFeed's innovations in managing very public conversation will likely come in handy for Facebook as that site opens up more and more too. It's a sensitive subject, as most Facebook users like the privacy orientation just like it is, so bringing in some top minds on fast, frictionless, public social networking is a smart move by Facebook.

2. In-depth Conversations

Conversations around shared items on FriendFeed make Facebook look like MySpace. It's not that FriendFeed has more sophisticated users - though by being limited to early adopters so far is part of that. it's because of a key difference in the architecture of FriendFeed.

When I post something to FriendFeed, all of my friends see it. If one of them comments on it or "likes" it, then two things happen that don't happen on Facebook. First, our conversation suddenly appears in the news feed of all the friends of the person who commented on my item - whether they know me or not. That doesn't happen on Facebook. I can see the names of people who comment on my friends' items - but if my friends comment on items shared by their friends I don't know - there's no notification of that in my news feed.

Second, whenever anyone comments on or "likes" any item that's appeared in my stream of friends' updates - it's pushed back up to the top of my FriendFeed page. That makes it all the more likely that I will comment on it again or for the first time.

These two features lead to one thing: big, diverse, thorough conversations around items shared on FriendFeed. It's a defining quality of the service and one that Facebook users might really like to have as an option.

When FriendFeed users complain that Facebook is stupid and filled with dumb apps (remember complaining about how ugly MySpace was?) it's in large part because the conversation on FriendFeed has a lot more depth to it.

Neither of these features are as simple as described above. FriendFeed's Buchheit told us by phone today that both have a lot of complex rules that have evolved around them based on the experience of having this kind of social software in the wild. Learning what kinds of content to cross over from one social group to another and how to decay the prominence of conversations over time are among the skills that the FriendFeed team can no doubt offer Facebook.

3. Cross Group Interactions

You meet new people on FriendFeed. They show up again and again in conversations with your friends until you make some of those new people friends of your own. That's very different from Facebook, where you connect with people you already knew from real life.

4. Multiple Network Aggregation

Conversation starters on FriendFeed don't just come from people inputting text right into FriendFeed - most of it comes from content pulled automatically in from other networks. Especially Twitter. (From a technical perspective, you have to wonder if Twitter is going to turn off full "firehose" access to FriendFeed this afternoon or if they'll wait until tomorrow morning. Twitter can't be excited about giving their crown jewels to Facebook all the sudden.)

Bookmarks, slide presentations, videos favorited on YouTube - all kinds of other social networks get synced up with your FriendFeed account and then get pulled in automatically to be discussed on FriendFeed. That's one of the best things about FriendFeed - you can follow a person and see what they are doing across all kinds of other sites, whether you participate as well in those other sites or not.

That's quite different from the way that Facebook has tried to pull items in one at a time through Facebook Connect.

Thousands of people are helping FriendFeed stay valuable even though they never use the service anymore - they synced up their other accounts and their activity there is still being pulled in automatically so their friends can view it on FriendFeed.

5. Real Time Updates

Facebook is definitely interested in real time updates, and they offer a version of real time streaming already. FriendFeed feels a lot more real time though. On FriendFeed you don't get notification that there are new messages - you get served up the messages, comments, likes and other information as they happen using a technology called Long Polling. It can be overwhelming for the uninitiated - but so was the Facebook News Feed when it was launched.

We wouldn't be surprised if some of the real time features of FriendFeed found their way into Facebook. FriendFeed's Buchheit told us earlier this year that he believes real time conversation is the next big step on the web.

How realistic is cross pollination?

We talked to Buchheit on the phone this afternoon in what was a nice but relatively superficial PR phone call. He cautioned that he "wouldn't read too much into future Facebook development" because the two companies "have different histories." But he also said that he was interested in joining Facebook's team because the companies have "the same long term view." When asked for specifics on what exactly that means, Facebook's VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said he had to "decline to go into specifics." But said there was "a long standing mutual admiration, both products have evolved with each other."

We fully expect that Facebook gave up a respectable chunk of stock and cash to get the FriendFeed guys into their offices and not just to keep the chairs warm. FriendFeed will likely change Facebook in important ways and for now looking at how FriendFeed works is the best set of clues we have available.