talkingDigital

Anyone who follows tech news knows that today, Facebook announced that they have acquired FriendFeed. Not a big deal to most people.

What does FriendFeed do?

FriendFeed is a social media service that tracks “friends” across all of the other social media services – Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Tumblr, etc. etc.

FriendFeed allows users to watch what their friends are doing everywhere – but it also allows users to post everywhere more easily.

Like Twitter, Facebook is searchable. However, FriendFeed also aggregates Twitter feeds. This means that a FriendFeed search could yield what everyone is talking about everywhere.

Whoever can master social media search, will lead the next generation of relevant search – perhaps pushing Google out of the top spot for web searching.

In other words, would you rather search for a topic based on how many other websites link back to it, how often it is mentioned across the web in general OR would you rather search for a topic based the buzz about that topic across the social networks?

Of course, it depends on what you are searching for – but any search engine can find the nearest Starbucks or Pi to the 100,000th place – but can they tell immediate information that doesn’t make Google news? Can they tell your abstract information that isn’t relevant enough to make a standard Google search?

We have had two plane crashes in the Hudson this year. In both cases, Twitter and social media not only broke the news, but reported it in brief 140 character accounts while CNN, FOX News and other mainstream media read the tweets.

Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed may not seem like much on the surface, but give it two years to become cool to the geeks and five years to hit the mainstream. It isn’t what Facebook is the day after the acquisition that matters, it’s what Facebook will be five years from now.

I am sure that many bloggers will claim that this is the death of Facebook, FriendFeed or Twitter. In reality, it may just be a new life to search technology. After all it is much harder to become relevance is much more real if make it to the top of the social media buzz verses getting a million sites to link back to your own.

This article on the BusinessWeek site got me all stirred up.

Facebook Finds a Friend in Google Rivalry – BusinessWeek.