I think it came from the same kind of place as Buzz. Aggregating feeds fro a lot of different places into a single stream where people reading the stream could then comment on them. So you'd get a Blog post from Scoble generating a comments thread on Friendfeed. The innovation was to have real time updates appear on screen using javascript, with real time search as well. So you could do a search query and then watch the flow of posts about that query from numerous sources.
They also put quite a bit of effort into making it easy to define all the services and social networks you were on and to grab any available feeds from those services.
+Edward Morbius oh come on... :) It was most of what G+ should have been in 2008/2009 already! Go over to the friendfeed.com URL and take some screenshots before its gone. End of an era...
Their founder team of Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail) and Brett Taylor (FB CTO from the time of the acquisition until he started his latest, Quip.com) were so far ahead of things it wasn't even funny:
Using MySQL as a No-SQL-ish JSON "document" records serving engine, creating their own, fast Non-Apache/CGI, non-blocking Web server in Tornado: www.tornadoweb.org/en/stable/
One of the amazing things about FF was that you could stand in the full stream and watch snippets of the global conversation float past every 5 seconds or so.
It's also reminded me about a long standing FAQ about G+. The Profile.About.Links YASN-Roll really ought to grab the content and feeds from those links and present them somehow. Not by auto-generating posts but perhaps filling another tab on the profile. It's still a missing piece in the Apps puzzle to aggregate all the posts and all the comments and conversations across all the platforms. The Buzz problem (and FF problem) was the potential for spammy abuse. So the answer is to make it private to the profile pages so you only get to see it if you specifically go and look.
The other challenge is that when FF was built everybody, but everybody, produced RSS/Atom feeds so there was generally something to pick up and aggregate. But then location apps like Foursquare stopped doing it. And shortly after, the major platforms stopped as well, requiring authentication, went to custom formats and generally stopped playing ball. In some ways, FF was the peak of the Web 2.0 dream of open common formats before the tide rolled back.
They also put quite a bit of effort into making it easy to define all the services and social networks you were on and to grab any available feeds from those services.
Their founder team of Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail) and Brett Taylor (FB CTO from the time of the acquisition until he started his latest, Quip.com) were so far ahead of things it wasn't even funny:
Using MySQL as a No-SQL-ish JSON "document" records serving engine, creating their own, fast Non-Apache/CGI, non-blocking Web server in Tornado: www.tornadoweb.org/en/stable/
Etc. etc.
/cc +Paul Simbeck-Hampson +Theo Tol +June M +David Wood +Rob Gordon +Walter H Groth
update - that link is from 2011 - no idea how it ended up in my feed - i think someone must have reposted on Hacker News
It's also reminded me about a long standing FAQ about G+. The Profile.About.Links YASN-Roll really ought to grab the content and feeds from those links and present them somehow. Not by auto-generating posts but perhaps filling another tab on the profile. It's still a missing piece in the Apps puzzle to aggregate all the posts and all the comments and conversations across all the platforms. The Buzz problem (and FF problem) was the potential for spammy abuse. So the answer is to make it private to the profile pages so you only get to see it if you specifically go and look.
The other challenge is that when FF was built everybody, but everybody, produced RSS/Atom feeds so there was generally something to pick up and aggregate. But then location apps like Foursquare stopped doing it. And shortly after, the major platforms stopped as well, requiring authentication, went to custom formats and generally stopped playing ball. In some ways, FF was the peak of the Web 2.0 dream of open common formats before the tide rolled back.
http://blog.louisgray.com/2015/03/friendfeeds-closure-another-painful.html