OurielOhayon

10 random thoughts on FriendFeed acquisition by Facebook

This is one of the biggest tech news of the week. FriendFreed a lifestream service, i have been using nearly from day 1, has been acquired by Facebook. Tons of things are being written here and there. Here are my 10 short random toughts

1. FriendFeed is a Xoopit not a Zappos. Could it have been a Zappos? i don't think so. In spite of an amazing product and massive coverage they never reached more than 1m users. With no clear revenue model and unlike Twitter a very ppor ecosystem of developpers and apps.
   
2. Acquisition price? Before WSJ published the info i twitted yesterday that the price tag was sub 100m USD but not far. With a premium mostly paid in stock. Seems to be the case (around 50m USD)
   
3. Facebook acquired a great technology and amazing talents (they did the same with Parakey than became Facebook iPhone app). Friendfeed news feed is by far the best on the market.
4. Benchmark is both an investor in both Twitter and FriendFeed. Facebook tried to acquire Twitter for 500m USD in stocks and failed (that was before Benchmark invested). I can't imagine that this episode did not help Benchmark in making the deal happening. including being aware of the terms. I can't also imagine that Benchmark did not have some conflicts of interest since both services have a strong overlap (both a re news stream)
   
5. From a VC return point of view Friendfeed should be considererd as a failure. But it's not. Bencharmk invested 5m a year ago probably for 20%. They got back a year later 10/15m USD. Mostly in Facebook stock potentially worth much more.
   
6. Soon i'll be visiting 1 site less. Would not make sense for Facebook to keep Friendfeed alive. Until today i was visiting both every day.
   
7. Friendfeed is a name i never like for a company: but a great name for the new Facebook "News Feed" (a name i never liked either)
8. If FriendFeed was an israeli company not one singly VC would have put money on this company. Me included. Actually i saw a couple of startups in this field no one has put money on them.
9. TO all startups: it is possible to build a better product than giants if you decide to go head to head against them. But you have to be REALLY good at it and be aware that the upside can be limited
10. Everyone says that Facebook acquired a real time search engine. They did not. Friendfeed search engine is not good enough. And it only indexes the feed in their system. A real time search engine should index the whole web and provide the right filters to put out the noise

bonus 1: i think Facebook paid a premium because they wanted to make sure that neither Twitter or Google would acquire them and close the deal fast.
bonus 2: given the amazing number of tweets on the matter i don't understand why friendfeed does not appear on top of the top 10 trending topics. Any idea?

pic: mark zuckerberg and Friendfeed founders..apparently happy

update: wow, i am already #2 link on top of Techmeme with this post!

The free idea of the day: AppTagger

Every now and then i post an idea i think is worth exploring, but that i don't have the time or the skills to develop. If someones knows anything equivalent or want to jump on it feel free (but remember me if you get rich with it...)



The idea is very simple: in our digital life we have more and more services that we use. Some of them are on our desktop and some of them in the cloud. I find myself installing more and more apps on my mac. Apps that are really well done but that i am not using on a daily basis.

I end up with tones of apps on my computer, but can't remember their name and what they do. Sometimes the name is explicit enough and i can deduct what it does just by crawling the app folder: AppCleaner for example speaks for itself. But many times i have no clue. And i find myself going to the app folder trying to remember which programms does what.

I recently found a method that solves that issue: i add a few keywords description in the "info folder" (avail on right click get info). Those keywords are then indexed in spotlight, the mac search engine and i can find them just by writting the keywords i need. For example: photo editing would give me "Gimp" or "PhotoShop"

The problem

In a word the problem is to find more easily what you have already used.

There are 2 problems to the prior method described above: you need to do that manually for each single soft. And you need to be good enough at guessing the keywords that characterize your needs.

The idea: An automated application tagger

A simple app that detects all your installed soft and populate the description and keyword in the file information about the soft which would be indexed in spotlight. That way i would not need to search for a soft but browse by need.

A kind of internal delicious for applications. This idea is worth for Windows too. And i am not even mentionning the iPhone where you get easily lost. It can be built easily by crawling the app directories out there that have already done the job.




As an extension it could become an personal app search engine, with results taken from your desktop and from your delicious account. If for eg i need photo editing, it would serve me desktop results: Gimp or Online > picnik.

Those results could be split in applications i have already used/tagged and those i don't know, which could become the revenue model (lead generation)

Do you like it? Anything equivalent out there? Someone wants to jump in?

Technorati Tags: mac application software delicious productivity search

Twitgraph: track micro trends on twitter

i know i blog a lot about twitter, but this is by far my favourite web services.

A follower of mine @rantav has created - TwitGraph, a rough but interesting mashup using the twitter API that helps you find out trends in Twitter. You ll find plenty of good tools out there for that. The best is probably Twist. The problem is that they start to be useful only when a series of keywords is used often. Twitter is also spotting hot trends but only for most searched keywords and Twitter Search only displays a timeline of message with no visual report.

Take for example the request "cesar film" for the past week, you would not find anything on Twist because the trend is too small. But on TwitGraph, you can see a clear trend, with the messages corresponding. It also detects positive and negative messages and can show a trend. finally you can embed the chart on your site.



The UI is ugly, and it runs a bit slow, but the service could be very useful (if you are interested in creating the UI Ran could use your help). It s been created by Ran Tavori, as a side project. Ran is currently an engineer at Google Israel. I like this type of initiatives. Sometimes it is the beginning of a bigger story.

Like many things, this could be a feature of Twitter, it will probably become one.

Technorati Tags: Twitter trend

Tweetizen: nice web app for smart twitter usage

Since twitter is growing fast, once of the pains Twitter is not solving for now is the growing noise at all levels. For now they let other services do that for them. By noise i mean things that do not really matter to you. I discovered this morning Tweetizen, a brand new new clean service that helps you find on the go messages of interests for you.




The way they do it is very simple: they let you create groups by keywords, this group will represent a filter of the twitter messages published. For example you can create a Tech group with the tags: Google, youtube, Twitter will only see messages about this group. Once this is set up you are all done. All you need to is focus on the feed which can be auto updated. They have also predefined a few groups so you can start off right away (sports, politics,....)

They are a few key features missing

• Filtering the groups on my friends timeline only
• Suggested keywords
• Search for existing groups
• Notifications of unread messages by group
• Groups by users would be also very useful i believe (just like in Microplaza.com that i like also a lot)
  

But the interface is easy to use and nicely designed. I believe that for succeeding a twitter app should as much as possible avoid taking you out of your current Twitter Interface. What would be great is that Tweetizen would enable notification via Twitter itfself by letting getting subcribe to a virtual twitter users (@Tweetizen/mygroup). So i don t have to come back to the site.




From the site the official launch date is march 1st. But you can already enjoy it.

Btw: just a tip for web app creators, if you want to notify bloggers on your existence, sometimes a smart twitter follow notification is enough. I received this am an alter of @Tweetizen following me. Thanks to Topify i saw what the service was about on my email and got curious. Checked it. And that's it.

Technorati Tags: Twitter Tweetizen

Congrats to Boxee

I recently met Boxee team in NYC, a few months after i was trying their Media browser app. I was not a big fan of the first version, but the last version convinced me, even though it is still to be improved, that the future of TV will depend on the ability to surf content whatever the source is (local, online), just like on the web.

They just raised a nice round from USVP and Spark. When i met Avner, the CEO they had just received their term sheet and of course he did not disclose the identity of the investors. But knowing Fred Wilson's habit to blog about things he's going to invest in i had a feeling it was USVP. I had a great time with Avner and his partner. I really wish them a lot of success. Boxee has R&D based in Israel. I wish an Israeli VC did this round since the team is mainly israeli but i don't think they lost on the way to fund raising :)

At this stage. i think boxee is still too complex to install on TVs which is the big piece of cake. The key success factor will be to feed consumers with such a TV OS without installation, download or set up process. Meaning key partnerships with hardware and cable cos. There is no reason our TV with prehistorical EPG (electronic programm guide) does not evolve to something more sophisticated.

Someone could help this move faster. Boxee could be this one

Technorati Tags: boxee tv

No Google Maps for Israel and for the iPhone yet, but one good alternative

For some reason, many say security reasons, Google maps is not available in Israel and this is one thing that is missing for me on my iPhone. Yesterday i discovered a free alternative that should make many israeli iPhone owners very happy. Freemap is an israeli startup that let users create a map and feed metadata on it. the level of granularity is quite good.

They have an iPhone version which can be installed via Installer on 1.1.4 (from what i understand iPhone 3G is not supported )or less by simply adding the source

http://i.freemap.co.il

Then add the application Freemap.

You ll have a free map of Israel on your iPhone very similar to Google Maps and in addition you ll have a 3D view to navigate. I wish they had an english version too. They have a triangulation system to locate you on the map, although i have some difficulty with it. you can enter your own address with their embedded keyboard in hebrew.



I am hearing an Israel version of google maps is arriving soon however.

Technorati Tags: israel google maps freemap iphone

The Copy/Paste Web

I have been observing that for a while hesitating to publish the thought, but today, i decided to push the button. Since i am the web industry (nearly 10 years) i realized that very few companies are really innovating. They basically drive the industry which is simply following up, creating variations or simple copies of the original model. Yahoo invented the portal, ICQ instant messenger, Amazon e-commerce supermarket with their famous tab structure, Google re-invented search (Inktomi and Altavista were the pioneers)...Sometime you don't invent a practice but you set a standard: Facebook for example with social networks or Skype for Voip

The same goes with smaller companies but also with blogs. I have just read an article of ParisLemon on ArsTechnica copying other blogs (there are many other examples like this). Since i started with Techcrunch, i have seen around me this happen so many times, including people that are trying to follow the same path as i did, by writting for big blogs or just taking what i do on techcrunch france and replicating it on their own blog. I have no problem with that (i also "copy" when the idea is good). This is how it works. Other get inspired by others.

I have no problem with that unless you don't mention the credit to the original model or standard, and unless it starts to hurt your own business.

There are clear cases when the law can interfere to stop someone from copying what you do. That's what copyrights law are made for. There are also some cases when it is not so clear it is worth launching a legal war and sometimes an email/ conversation can solve the issue. I see that happens all the time: a logo that is too close, a website design to similar.

I'll give you an example of the copy/paste nature of the web with a company we have invested in. Outbrain is providing a rating system with a block or related posts for bloggers and readers. You can see that block in my own blog at the bottom of most posts (You can also see it on VentureBeat, CenterNetworks and other big blogs). Here is a screenshot below



It was launched about a year ago. I discovered less than 6 months ago that a startup called Zemanta was offering exactly the same feature, with the same design, in the same real estate. It is hard to believe they did this without copying Outbrain's model. Here is below a screenshot of Zemanta's widget you can see from Fred Wilson's blog (note Fred Wilson has nothing to do with that of course).


I hope Zemanta will change that in order to avoid user/partner's confusion. Again i don't care if someone get inspired by someone, as long as it is done correctly without a clear intention of ripp off and of course without consideration for legal rules but also for respect for users and business partners. Doing business honestly is important on the web also.



Technorati Tags: zemanta outbrain copycat copy blogs

Twitterfone now works from Israel with a local phone number

TwitterFone.com has been created by two friends of mine (Florian Sersoussi and David Marcus) in partnership with Twitter. It enables you to call with no extra charge a local phone number which is transcribed and posted to Twitter instantly (above an example of message). They just opened the service in Israel. I tested it and it works great. Twitter is becoming an interesting ecosystem generator for other companies.

ps: if you wish to have an invitation for TwitterFone just post a comment i have a few with me

Bahu.com has a great new design

 

Bahu.com just released a new version of its  social network. Although i am biased as investor, and board member i have to admit they have done a great job. The quality of execution of this small team is very impressive for a company of this size. We recently met with a big company (a very big one) that could not believe Bahu was doing so much with such a little team (7 guys). I am not afraid to say that the user experience is much better than MySpace and in some way than Facebook (specially for this age group) although the user base is still small compared to those giants.

I am a big fan of the quality of execution. And i think the Bahu guys are on to something good. Keep on running!

Technorati Tags: bahu

Solution for missing babylon on MAC: Babylon

I was complaining about the absence of mac version of babylon for mac. Actually i stumbled upon a cool solution which partly solves the issue: qtl

Qtl is a a FireFox plugin which restitutes Babylon translation service and experience while you browse the web. unfortunately it works only from the browser. I am sure there is a way to use it outside the browser when your laptop is connected to the internet.

If someone has an idea post it here.

Download the plug in here