How FriendFeed Will Generate Revenue
Information Week — Earlier this month FriendFeed launched the next version of their API service. It got me thinking about how FriendFeed could generate real revenue and become a real-time search leader.
When people ask me to describe FriendFeed, I usually begin by noting, “FriendFeed is a social bulletin board service”. At the most basic level, FriendFeed is a forum. The only difference is that instead of users starting threads, they typically suck in threads from other social services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.
There are a variety of popular forum tools including vBulletin and phpBB. I’ve been using vBulletin on the HTMLCenter web development forums for nearly a decade. vBulletin isn’t free; a license costs $180 for life plus $60/year for product upgrades and updates.
The software is very powerful, the administrative panel is easy to use and the email support is always very responsive. There’s only one real issue with the software – it hasn’t moved into 2009. The software still looks and acts as it did 1,2,3, even 5 years ago. You can always tell when a forum is using vBulletin without even looking at the footer.
They continue to add improvements and bug fixes which is great but it’s time to update the look and the usability to today’s standard. The same can be said for phpBB and many of the other forum software packages.
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