Five years from now, we’ll look back on this and laugh. Or at least some of us will. Others are decidedly more cranky these days. But the great FriendFeed-Socialthing war will seem trivial compared to… whatever meme we’re obsessing over in five years. The funniest part of all this hubbub is that the CEOs of both companies don’t even view each other as competitors. After talking with both Matt Galligan at Socialthing and Bret Taylor from FriendFeed, it’s clear that the two companies are approaching a very real problem – information overload – in very different ways. In fact, it’s entirely possible for someone to use both services at the same time, with virtually no rips in the space-time continuum.
As Taylor noted, the end goals of the two companies are their key difference. FriendFeed is about content discovery and applying social solutions to the problem of information overload. Socialthing focuses more broadly on a user’s entire digital life, in an attempt to make sense of the myriad networks out there. FriendFeed is bringing the conversation in, while Socialthing is broadcasting it out. FriendFeed has morphed into a separate social network while Socialthing wants to help consolidate all the networks you’ve already built. FriendFeed, tomato; Socialthing, tomahto. Read the rest of this entry »
