What will Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed mean for online reputation management?
Facebook is a little like Las Vegas. I don't mean that you get pulled in by what seem harmless little games at first, only to become dangerously addicted and then unable to leave the place.
FriendFeed's real value for Facebook is in search
Facebook has been increasingly compared to Google of late, and the social network's acquisition of FriendFeed yesterday might make some large strides toward getting its functionality closer to that of the search giant. FriendFeed may not have the audience or cache that Twitter has right now, but it has something else that Facebook values: search functionality.
Twitter's popularity has escalated as FriendFeed has stagnated, but the company offers more than just executive programming talent to bring to the Facebook team. If Facebook expects to be the dominant player in the social media space (and it does), it's going to need to make itself an important aggregation tool. And FriendFeed can help with that.
Facebook can't have Twitter, so it buys FriendFeed
By most accounts, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg really likes Twitter. And as the 20-something CEO of a company that has raised over $750m, it's only natural that he'd want it, literally. There's just one problem: when Facebook tried acquiring Twitter earlier in the year, it was turned down. The reason: Twitter didn't buy into the $15bn valuation Facebook was basing its share price on as part of the proposed deal.
So Facebook has finally done what many do when rejected: you settle for your second choice. And it this case, that means FriendFeed, which it acquired yesterday.
Don't pretend to be something you're not
At some point, when you start a new business you come face to face with an interesting question: what the heck are we doing?
Chances are you had some idea of what you were doing before you started on your journey. You saw a problem. You thought you had a brilliant solution. You know the story.
Yahoo prepares to apply the social glue to its network
Yahoo has a lot of work to do as it looks to rebuild under new CEO Carol Bartz. Bartz has assets to work with, namely Yahoo's diverse portfolio of highly-trafficked properties.
One of the biggest challenges: figuring out a way to pull them all together, both from an operational standpoint and a functional standpoint.
Twingly's new microblogging search engine rocks
Even if you don't use microblogging services like Twitter and FriendFeed personally, monitoring what's being said on them may be of benefit to your company.
Online reputation monitoring is a rapidly growing market and our Reputation Monitoring and Buzz Monitoring Buyer's Guide profiles 16 vendors in this space. We've also provided suggestions for DIY reputation monitoring on the cheap.
Seth Godin reveals his blogging philosophy
It's a question that most bloggers grapple with at some point: how frequently should I blog?
If you don't post often enough, you risk losing your audience. If you post too much, you risk posting for posting's sake.
