Facebook has been in the news quite a bit this week which they started off with the announcement that they have acquired the social-identity aggregator, FriendFeed.
Many people are still not very familiar with FriendFeed even though it’s been around for awhile. FriendFeed’s audience, according to Compete data, attracted 918,000 in July. In comparison, Facebook added 54 million U.S. visitors during the first part of 2009.
I’ve been using FriendFeed for awhile and if you subscribe to my feed you’ll see just about everything that I do online. My feed includes all the articles I bookmark with delicious. When I write a new blog post it automatically shares it on my feed. Every time I tweet on Twitter and when I update my status on Facebook, they’re included here. When I add a video to my favorites on YouTube it is shared here as well. Currently there are 58 different sites that you can link to your FriendFeed, so it’s like the one stop shopping place for everything online!
FriendFeed also has a search function where someone without even registering on the site, can easily search all FriendFeed updates. This enables users to search across multiple online platforms so it is a great way to get a taste of what certain consumers are talking about. Try searching for some Rochester terms and you’ll see who locally is using FriendFeed.
So what does this mean for Facebook now? Well Facebook has been trying to make it easier for its users to share updates from other sites and become more of a social portal. So possibly through the FriendFeed acquisition they will have an easier time making this happen. Right now it’s hard enough to search for anything on Facebook. So imagine if on Facebook you could search what consumers are publicly sharing anywhere? You now have a U.S. database of 54 million vs. 1 million? Since 70% of Facebook’s members are outside the U.S., the global opportunity is even bigger.
This is definitely something to watch.
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