FriendFeed product manager Dan Hsiao and company intern Ross Miller released a short video today from deep inside the core of that innovative company that Facebook just paid $50m in cash and stocks to purchase. Now that FriendFeed has had its exit, the staff must feel comfortable opening up a little to the world and letting us see what really goes on there.

Enjoy The Video

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This meme seems be done for just about everything on the web these days, but this one is particularly good because it’s full of good insider-y references. And it closely echoes some of the actual backlash against the news today which played out on FriendFeed.

Among the choice lines:

* “It was a complete talent grab.”
* “I even remember what it was like before Robert Scoble got here!”
* “I used FriendFeed to argue about Obama and talk about health care, and to like tons of pictures from NASA that were awesome, not to spend my time posting pictures of bacon and talking about mangoes!”
* “Of all the companies, they went with Facebook. They could’ve been acquired by Google and I would’ve been happy for them. Or even Twitter: That I could understand. But Facebook?! What the hell?!”
* “Don’t worry, we still have Plurk.”

Watch The Video

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Using social media correctly helps companies engage audiences in new ways, be more personable, develop new connections, and maintain the ones they have. This two-part article will cover the elements of a social media strategy and the steps to build one.

Social media has taken the institutional control of marketing and put it in the hands of consumers or the general public. This is important because, with technology being ubiquitous and available to all, we’ve been given the tools to carry on conversations and discuss our views and vote for our favorite content online. We now form many of our opinions and impressions from others we come in contact with online.

Understanding this principle is an important factor in building a social media strategy. Essentially, traditional ways of thinking won’t necessarily work. Instead of studying demographics about your audience, you need to get out there and talk with them. Get involved with the conversations that are already happening online.

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At roughly 7am PST the site was attacked in a co-ordinated fashion, and the entire network was down for at least 30 minutes. Over the last couple of years, the site stability has been quite strong and the infrastructure was strengthened through a series of updates and scheduled downtime. However, there is little-to-nothing any site can do against denial of service attacks unless they have direct support from their service or network provider.

The ironic thing was that people were trying to use Twitter to search for tweets which told them if Twitter was down, or going down.

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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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CNet News Webware — Reports are surfacing that Twitter users’ updates are showing up on their Facebook walls, quite against their wishes.

Twitter previously developed a Facebook app for users of both services that takes in a user’s Twitter content and posts it on Facebook. Apparently a lot of people installed it but left it turned off, and now Facebook is, in error, ignoring the setting and letting the app do what it was designed to do even if users don’t want it.

There are also reports that the same thing is happening with the Friendfeed app, which quite complicates things since many people give Friendfeed itself access to their Twitter feeds.

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