Media Blog

The two best websites for connecting with your friends have suddenly connected with each other.

Facebook has acquired the life-streaming website FriendFeed, the companies announced Monday. The sites will both continue to operate independently for the time being until the companies can decide the best way to integrate their products.

The integration will be delicate work: While the two sites have much in common, there are several hurdles relating to privacy, feature redundancy and the big question of what to do with all that FriendFeed data  that need to be overcome.

“The exact plan for how the integration is going to be handled is something we’re still discussing,” FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit tells Webmonkey. “In the short term, nothing changes.”

Friendfeed and its API will both remain working normally until further notice, the company explained in a blog post Monday. Also, according to the official press release posted at Facebook, FriendFeed’s employees will join Facebook, and the site’s four founders will take on new roles within Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

At this point, details are slim: Both FriendFeed and Facebook folks have made it clear that the long-term plans for merging the products are still being ironed out.

Webmonkey’s biggest question is what this means for the “stuff” currently residing on FriendFeed’s platform. Right now, the default is that all posts are published publicly, and there are millions of comments, files and links stored on FriendFeed that will need to be forklifted over to Facebook. What changes will we see when that data is moved over, if any at all?

Buchheit says long-term issues such as that one are still being resolved.

“We want to look out for our users,” he stresses, “so obviously we want to make sure everything is preserved. But as far as the long term and how those integrations will happen, we’re still working on it.”

It’s not surprising to see these two companies come together. Both Facebook and FriendFeed offer easy ways for friends to connect online, share links, photos, status updates and other socially relevant media. Both sites also emphasize the importance of providing real-time updates. The big difference is that, while some users publish exclusively to FriendFeed, the site is more broadly used as a funnel — an aggregation tool that pulls in data streams from a plethora of social websites using streams.

Facebook has a much more fleshed-out platform. Granted, you can set up your Facebook profile to pull in activity streams from other sites like Flickr and Twitter, but most Facebook users prefer to just post everything to the native publishing platform provided by Facebook.

When Facebook updated its site design about a year ago, it brought the two products closer together visually as well.

But it’s the differences that are going to stand out. Both Buchheit and Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, to whom we also spoke, say that there are some particularly difficult challenges ahead, like the fact that many of FriendFeed’s features, such as Groups, don’t correlate exactly with any of Facebook’s current features. There are some features that come close, but the rest present headaches the companies will have to cure down the road.

And what about FriendFeed users who are not Facebook users? Will they have to sign up for Facebook to continue using FriendFeed?

Again, both Buchheit and Schroepfer said that their teams are working on the long-term details for transitioning user accounts.

One thing that should make the integration easier is that Facebook supports the emerging Activity Streams standard, a way of structuring data streams that standardizes the way events are announced. For example, “Scott posted a photo” or “Heather commented on a video.”

One point we didn’t get to ask about is the fact that FriendFeed recently added a file sharing component to its service that lets users pass MP3s to one another, and to publish them for streaming and download on the public web. It will be interesting to see if this will be integrated into Facebook, and what shape it will take if it is.

Developers who are working on apps that push to or pull from FriendFeed can watch for developments in the FriendFeed News group. Likewise, Facebook developers can keep up to date with changes at developers.facebook.com.

See also:

• Facebook Cracks, Here Come the Apps
• FriendFeed Adds Simple Logins for Twitter Users
• Facebook Redesign Mimics FriendFeed

The two best websites for connecting with your friends have suddenly connected with each other.

Facebook has acquired the life-streaming website FriendFeed, the companies announced Monday. The sites will both continue to operate independently for the time being until the companies can decide the best way to integrate their products.

The integration will be delicate work: While the two sites have much in common, there are several hurdles relating to privacy, feature redundancy and the big question of what to do with all that FriendFeed data  that need to be overcome.

“The exact plan for how the integration is going to be handled is something we’re still discussing,” FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit tells Webmonkey. “In the short term, nothing changes.”

Friendfeed and its API will both remain working normally until further notice, the company explained in a blog post Monday. Also, according to the official press release posted at Facebook, FriendFeed’s employees will join Facebook, and the site’s four founders will take on new roles within Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

At this point, details are slim: Both FriendFeed and Facebook folks have made it clear that the long-term plans for merging the products are still being ironed out.

Webmonkey’s biggest question is what this means for the “stuff” currently residing on FriendFeed’s platform. Right now, the default is that all posts are published publicly, and there are millions of comments, files and links stored on FriendFeed that will need to be forklifted over to Facebook. What changes will we see when that data is moved over, if any at all?

Buchheit says long-term issues such as that one are still being resolved.

“We want to look out for our users,” he stresses, “so obviously we want to make sure everything is preserved. But as far as the long term and how those integrations will happen, we’re still working on it.”

It’s not surprising to see these two companies come together. Both Facebook and FriendFeed offer easy ways for friends to connect online, share links, photos, status updates and other socially relevant media. Both sites also emphasize the importance of providing real-time updates. The big difference is that, while some users publish exclusively to FriendFeed, the site is more broadly used as a funnel — an aggregation tool that pulls in data streams from a plethora of social websites using streams.

Facebook has a much more fleshed-out platform. Granted, you can set up your Facebook profile to pull in activity streams from other sites like Flickr and Twitter, but most Facebook users prefer to just post everything to the native publishing platform provided by Facebook.

When Facebook updated its site design about a year ago, it brought the two products closer together visually as well.

But it’s the differences that are going to stand out. Both Buchheit and Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, to whom we also spoke, say that there are some particularly difficult challenges ahead, like the fact that many of FriendFeed’s features, such as Groups, don’t correlate exactly with any of Facebook’s current features. There are some features that come close, but the rest present headaches the companies will have to cure down the road.

And what about FriendFeed users who are not Facebook users? Will they have to sign up for Facebook to continue using FriendFeed?

Again, both Buchheit and Schroepfer said that their teams are working on the long-term details for transitioning user accounts.

One thing that should make the integration easier is that Facebook supports the emerging Activity Streams standard, a way of structuring data streams that standardizes the way events are announced. For example, “Scott posted a photo” or “Heather commented on a video.”

One point we didn’t get to ask about is the fact that FriendFeed recently added a file sharing component to its service that lets users pass MP3s to one another, and to publish them for streaming and download on the public web. It will be interesting to see if this will be integrated into Facebook, and what shape it will take if it is.

Developers who are working on apps that push to or pull from FriendFeed can watch for developments in the FriendFeed News group. Likewise, Facebook developers can keep up to date with changes at developers.facebook.com.

See also:

• Facebook Cracks, Here Come the Apps
• FriendFeed Adds Simple Logins for Twitter Users
• Facebook Redesign Mimics FriendFeed

Mozilla has released the first alpha test version of the next version of Firefox.

According to Mozilla, the main focus for Firefox 3.6 will be speeding up the browser’s user interface. Speed improvements have already been made to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which helps pages render more quickly, and other plans call for speeding up common tasks like opening a new tab, a new window or a sidebar panel.

The alpha release of Firefox 3.6 is still not stable enough to recommend for everyday use, but testers who want to try it out can do so now. It’s available at the Mozilla Developer Center for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The browser maker is hoping to get Firefox 3.6 (code named Namoroka) out a bit more quickly than its last release, Firefox 3.5, which was delayed several times before it finally arrived in July 2008.

“Unlike the year that passed between Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5, we expect that this 3.6 release will be released in a small number of months,” writes Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard in a recent blog post.

The faster turnaround time means that Firefox 3.6 won’t have quite as many new features as 3.5 offered, but there’s still plenty of good stuff in the roadmap.

In addition to the speed boost, there are a few new features in this alpha, like the long anticipated Ctrl + Tab switcher with thumbnail previews (originally intended to arrive in 3.5) and a new method of auto-completing form fields that relies of frequency of use rather than simple alphabetical sorting.

Web developers will be happy to hear that quite a few new features in CSS 3 will be making their way into Firefox 3.6. The alpha release supports the background-size property as well as some cool tricks for handling background images with CSS. Now designers can specify the size of background images on web pages, stretching them by dictating what percentage of the browser window’s width they take up. There are also some new methods for applying gradients to page backgrounds, enabling designers to create more interesting, colorful backgrounds without using images at all, just by defining a few colors in their HTML.

Firefox 3.6 alpha 1 is still a long way from being a browser you want to use on a regular basis, but it offers a glimpse of what’s in store for Firefox fans. If you’d like to help out with bug testing, head over to the Mozilla Developer Center and grab a copy.

See Also:

• Mozilla Mulls Design Makeover for Firefox 3.7
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5
• Firefox 3.5.1 Released, Critical Flaw Fixed

Mozilla has released the first alpha test version of the next version of Firefox.

According to Mozilla, the main focus for Firefox 3.6 will be speeding up the browser’s user interface. Speed improvements have already been made to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which helps pages render more quickly, and other plans call for speeding up common tasks like opening a new tab, a new window or a sidebar panel.

The alpha release of Firefox 3.6 is still not stable enough to recommend for everyday use, but testers who want to try it out can do so now. It’s available at the Mozilla Developer Center for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The browser maker is hoping to get Firefox 3.6 (code named Namoroka) out a bit more quickly than its last release, Firefox 3.5, which was delayed several times before it finally arrived in July 2008.

“Unlike the year that passed between Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5, we expect that this 3.6 release will be released in a small number of months,” writes Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard in a recent blog post.

The faster turnaround time means that Firefox 3.6 won’t have quite as many new features as 3.5 offered, but there’s still plenty of good stuff in the roadmap.

In addition to the speed boost, there are a few new features in this alpha, like the long anticipated Ctrl + Tab switcher with thumbnail previews (originally intended to arrive in 3.5) and a new method of auto-completing form fields that relies of frequency of use rather than simple alphabetical sorting.

Web developers will be happy to hear that quite a few new features in CSS 3 will be making their way into Firefox 3.6. The alpha release supports the background-size property as well as some cool tricks for handling background images with CSS. Now designers can specify the size of background images on web pages, stretching them by dictating what percentage of the browser window’s width they take up. There are also some new methods for applying gradients to page backgrounds, enabling designers to create more interesting, colorful backgrounds without using images at all, just by defining a few colors in their HTML.

Firefox 3.6 alpha 1 is still a long way from being a browser you want to use on a regular basis, but it offers a glimpse of what’s in store for Firefox fans. If you’d like to help out with bug testing, head over to the Mozilla Developer Center and grab a copy.

See Also:

• Mozilla Mulls Design Makeover for Firefox 3.7
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5
• Firefox 3.5.1 Released, Critical Flaw Fixed

The popular URL shortening service Tr.im has announced it is shutting down. That means, just as critics of URL shortening services predicted, a whole lot of shortened links are about to disappear in a black hole.

Or maybe not. The developers of Tr.im say that the service will remain running through the end of the year, so your old links will “continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009.” The post goes on to say, that Tr.im “will not be turning tr.im off for redirections” and the homepage claims that “your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.”

The wording is bit vague, but the way we’re reading it is that while the Tr.im shortening service is dead as of now, the redirections will continue working until the end of the year. At midnight on December 31 all your Tr.im URLs will turn into pumpkins and vanish into the ether. Or perhaps the developers of Tr.im plan to leave the redirect engine going indefinitely, though that seems highly unlikely.

Either way, Tr.im’s saga is pretty much a textbook case of why URL shorteners are a bad idea all around.

The most obvious problem is that shortened URLs could lead anywhere -— a spam site, a phishing site, a porn site, a malware site, who knows?

Of course this isn’t a new problem. Twitter may be responsible for thrusting URL shorteners back into the mainstream, but the idea began as a way to fix the shortcomings of some e-mail clients (like Outlook), which often wrapped long lines, making links impossible to click on. However, URL shorteners quickly fell out of popularity — the proliferation of spam and link hijacking made most of us reluctant to click on something that could lead, well, anywhere — until Twitter made them favorable again.

Then there’s the problem of long-term viability of your links. As is being illustrated now with Tr.im’s demise, a shorterner adds a second possible point of failure, making shortened links even more vulnerable to “link rot” than standard web links.

Perhaps the cost won’t be that high in the end, Twitter is after all not really an archival service. That is, most people don’t dig too deep into their own, or other users, archives so perhaps all those links will die and no one will even notice. In the meantime, most users will migrate to more popular, feature-rich and long-standing services like Bit.ly, the most popular, and TinyURL, currently number two.

Still, if nothing else, Tr.im serves as cautionary tale for anyone interested in creating archival short URLs — do it yourself. There are several options for sites to run their own URL-shortening services, including the excellent Awe.sm.

[Also worth noting, it appears that Nambu, one of our favorite native OS X Twitter clients, will be shutdown as well, though its final fate appears to still be up in the air]

See Also:

• Why URL Shortening is a Threat to the Web
• Digg Relents on DiggBar, But URL Shortening Is Still a Problem
• URL Shortener Shortlist
• Bit.ly Is a Big Deal URL Shortener

The popular URL shortening service Tr.im has announced it is shutting down. That means, just as critics of URL shortening services predicted, a whole lot of shortened links are about to disappear in a black hole.

Or maybe not. The developers of Tr.im say that the service will remain running through the end of the year, so your old links will “continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009.” The post goes on to say, that Tr.im “will not be turning tr.im off for redirections” and the homepage claims that “your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.”

The wording is bit vague, but the way we’re reading it is that while the Tr.im shortening service is dead as of now, the redirections will continue working until the end of the year. At midnight on December 31 all your Tr.im URLs will turn into pumpkins and vanish into the ether. Or perhaps the developers of Tr.im plan to leave the redirect engine going indefinitely, though that seems highly unlikely.

Either way, Tr.im’s saga is pretty much a textbook case of why URL shorteners are a bad idea all around.

The most obvious problem is that shortened URLs could lead anywhere -— a spam site, a phishing site, a porn site, a malware site, who knows?

Of course this isn’t a new problem. Twitter may be responsible for thrusting URL shorteners back into the mainstream, but the idea began as a way to fix the shortcomings of some e-mail clients (like Outlook), which often wrapped long lines, making links impossible to click on. However, URL shorteners quickly fell out of popularity — the proliferation of spam and link hijacking made most of us reluctant to click on something that could lead, well, anywhere — until Twitter made them favorable again.

Then there’s the problem of long-term viability of your links. As is being illustrated now with Tr.im’s demise, a shorterner adds a second possible point of failure, making shortened links even more vulnerable to “link rot” than standard web links.

Perhaps the cost won’t be that high in the end, Twitter is after all not really an archival service. That is, most people don’t dig too deep into their own, or other users, archives so perhaps all those links will die and no one will even notice. In the meantime, most users will migrate to more popular, feature-rich and long-standing services like Bit.ly, the most popular, and TinyURL, currently number two.

Still, if nothing else, Tr.im serves as cautionary tale for anyone interested in creating archival short URLs — do it yourself. There are several options for sites to run their own URL-shortening services, including the excellent Awe.sm.

[Also worth noting, it appears that Nambu, one of our favorite native OS X Twitter clients, will be shutdown as well, though its final fate appears to still be up in the air]

See Also:

• Why URL Shortening is a Threat to the Web
• Digg Relents on DiggBar, But URL Shortening Is Still a Problem
• URL Shortener Shortlist
• Bit.ly Is a Big Deal URL Shortener

The development (and hype) of HTML5 has been building for some time, and some of the biggest names in the business — Mozilla, Apple, Google and Opera — are already supporting elements of the still-not-finalized HTML 5 specification.

But one name has been conspicuously absent from the HTML 5 planning and discussion — Microsoft.

Until now, that is. The sleeping giant, whose Internet Explorer browser still accounts for over half of all browser usage on the web, has awakened and decided to weigh in with some preliminary thoughts on the HTML 5 draft.

In a post to the HTML 5 mailing list, Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman outlined some of the company’s thoughts and criticisms of the current draft spec.

While Bateman doesn’t address every aspect of HTML 5 in his message — for example he avoids the controversial <video> tag and codec debate — he raises a number of valid concerns about some of the new tags in the current HTML 5 draft.

In particular, Bateman calls out the <aside> tag, saying that it “seems very arbitrary,” and pointing out that the <header> and <footer> tags, thus far “don’t appear to indicate anything about printing that might reasonably be expected from those terms.”

Microsoft’s other concerns mainly revolve around the necessity of the new elements and whether or not the tags thus far included in the draft actually reflect the best options.

And Microsoft isn’t alone in many of its concerns. For example, Jonas Sicking, who works on Gecko, the rendering engine that powers Firefox, chimed in to suggest that Mozilla shares Bateman’s concern about the bb tag.

Likewise, others both inside and out of the HTML 5 working group have questioned some of the new tags and anyone who’s sat down to use the new <aside> tag in particular has probably come away scratching their head a bit. But that’s part of why HTML 5 is still a preliminary draft; it needs work.

And while many might deride Microsoft’s fashionably late arrival at the HTML 5 party and many others will likely be suspicious of its motives, the fact is HTML 5 needs as much input from as wide a variety of voices as possible.

If HTML 5 is going to succeed, it needs to listen to Microsoft’s input. Fortunately, it would seem that Microsoft is finally ready to throw its hat in the ring.

See Also:

• XHTML 2 Dies a Lonely Death, Makes Room For HTML 5
• Google’s Latest Acquisition Renews Hope for Open Video in HTML 5
• How HTML 5 Is Already Changing the Web
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5

The development (and hype) of HTML5 has been building for some time, and some of the biggest names in the business — Mozilla, Apple, Google and Opera — are already supporting elements of the still-not-finalized HTML 5 specification.

But one name has been conspicuously absent from the HTML 5 planning and discussion — Microsoft.

Until now, that is. The sleeping giant, whose Internet Explorer browser still accounts for over half of all browser usage on the web, has awakened and decided to weigh in with some preliminary thoughts on the HTML 5 draft.

In a post to the HTML 5 mailing list, Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman outlined some of the company’s thoughts and criticisms of the current draft spec.

While Bateman doesn’t address every aspect of HTML 5 in his message — for example he avoids the controversial <video> tag and codec debate — he raises a number of valid concerns about some of the new tags in the current HTML 5 draft.

In particular, Bateman calls out the <aside> tag, saying that it “seems very arbitrary,” and pointing out that the <header> and <footer> tags, thus far “don’t appear to indicate anything about printing that might reasonably be expected from those terms.”

Microsoft’s other concerns mainly revolve around the necessity of the new elements and whether or not the tags thus far included in the draft actually reflect the best options.

And Microsoft isn’t alone in many of its concerns. For example, Jonas Sicking, who works on Gecko, the rendering engine that powers Firefox, chimed in to suggest that Mozilla shares Bateman’s concern about the bb tag.

Likewise, others both inside and out of the HTML 5 working group have questioned some of the new tags and anyone who’s sat down to use the new <aside> tag in particular has probably come away scratching their head a bit. But that’s part of why HTML 5 is still a preliminary draft; it needs work.

And while many might deride Microsoft’s fashionably late arrival at the HTML 5 party and many others will likely be suspicious of its motives, the fact is HTML 5 needs as much input from as wide a variety of voices as possible.

If HTML 5 is going to succeed, it needs to listen to Microsoft’s input. Fortunately, it would seem that Microsoft is finally ready to throw its hat in the ring.

See Also:

• XHTML 2 Dies a Lonely Death, Makes Room For HTML 5
• Google’s Latest Acquisition Renews Hope for Open Video in HTML 5
• How HTML 5 Is Already Changing the Web
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5