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Bloggers writing about FriendFeed have said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members’ social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provides the facility to track these activities (such as posting on blogs, Twitter and Flickr) across a broad range of different social networks. Some (but not all) bloggers are concerned about readers commenting on their posts inside FriendFeed instead of on their blogs, resulting in less page views for the blogger.

The founders are all former Google employees who were involved in the launch of such services as Gmail and Google Maps. They include Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, Sanjeev Singh and Bret Taylor. Venture capital agency Benchmark Capital is involved with the investment funding.

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, California.

A user can configure their FriendFeed account to aggregate content from the following services:

Blogging

* Ameba
* Baidu
* Blogger
* Tumblr
* Live Journal
* Skyrock

Bookmarking

* Delicious
* Diigo
* Furl
* Google Shared Stuff
* Hatena
* Ma.gnolia
* Mister Wong
* StumbleUpon
* Twine

Books

* Goodreads
* LibraryThing

News

* Digg
* Google Reader
* Meneame
* Mixx
* Reddit

Photos

* Flickr
* Fotolog
* Photobucket
* Picasa Web Albums
* SmugMug
* Zooomr

Status

* Brightkite
* Facebook
* Gmail/Google Talk
* identi.ca
* Jaiku
* Plurk
* Twitter

Music

* iLike
* Last.fm
* Pandora

Video

* 12seconds
* Dailymotion
* Joost
* Seesmic
* Smotri
* Vimeo
* YouTube

Comments

* Backtype
* Disqus
* Intense Debate

Miscellaneous

* Custom RSS/Atom
* Amazon.com
* LinkedIn
* Netflix
* Netvibes
* Polyvore
* SlideShare
* tipjoy
* Upcoming
* Wakoopa
* Yelp

Other Information

• Type of site Social aggregator
• Available language(s) English
• Owner FriendFeed Inc.
• Created by Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh
• Launched October 2007

Links

• Source: All web 2.0
• Visit friendfeed.com
• Check out sharealink on friendfeed

F lickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, B.C., Canada-based company that launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp’s Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.

Early versions of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities. There was also an emphasis on collecting images found on the web rather than photographs taken by users. The successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It was eventually dropped as Flickr’s backend systems evolved away from the Game Neverending’s codebase.

Some of the key features of Flickr not initially present were tags, marking photos as favorites, group photo pools and interestingness, for which a patent is pending.

In March 2005, Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. During the week of June 28, 2005, all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data being subject to United States federal law.

On May 16, 2006, Flickr updated its services from beta to “gamma”, along with a design and structural overhaul. According to the site’s FAQ, the term “gamma”, rarely used in software development, is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service is always being tested by its users, and is in a state of perpetual improvement. For all intents and purposes, the current service is considered a stable release.

In December 2006, upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100MB a month (from 20MB) and were removed from Pro Accounts, permitting unlimited uploads for holders of these accounts (originally a 2GB per month limit).

In January 2007, Flickr announced that “Old Skool” members–those who had joined before the Yahoo acquisition–would be required to associate their account with a Yahoo ID by March 15 to continue using the service. This move was criticized by some users.

On April 9, 2008, Flickr began to allow paid subscribers to upload videos, limited to 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size.

Yahoo! Photos

Yahoo announced that they would shut down Yahoo! Photos on September 20, 2007, after which all photos would be deleted. During the interim, users had the ability to migrate their photos to Flickr or other services (including Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, and Photobucket). All who migrated to Flickr were given three months of a Flickr Pro account. AT&T Internet Services customers were given a free Flickr Pro account, which originally was planned to be for the duration of the customer’s subscription to AT&T Internet Services, but AT&T has recently decided to drop the Pro account services, with most customers’ Pro accounts ending next year unless they subscribe to Flickr Pro. This generated some negative feedback amongst AT&T customers. Flickr users who do subscribe to Pro before their term runs out will be given an extra two months of the service free of charge.

Visit Flickr

Cuil’s privacy policy, unlike that of other search engines, says it does not store users’ search activity or IP addresses

Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google: Anna Patterson, Russell Power. The CEO and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others. The company raised $33 million from venture capital firms including Greylock.

Name

The Irish ancestry of Anna Patterson’s husband Tom Costello sparked the name Cuil, which the company states is taken from a series of Celtic folklore stories involving a character called Finn McCuill. The company says that Cuil is Irish for knowledge and hazel.

Some linguists are unsure of this derivation and pronunciation, and note that the modern Irish word for hazel is spelled coll (coill or cuill in genitive form, the former spelling having superseded the latter as a result of the Caighdeán Oifigiúil reforms of the mid-twentieth century). Foras na Gaeilge, the official governing body of the Irish language, doubted the assertion that ‘cuil’ means ‘knowledge’. “I am unaware myself of the meaning ‘knowledge’ being with the word ‘cuil’ in Irish,” Stiofán Ó Deoráin, an official on Foras na Gaeilge’s terminology committee, said.

The company name had previously been spelled Cuill.

Launch

Cuil’s launch (with an index of 121,617,892,992 web pages) received widely critical press coverage. Concerns were expressed about the website’s slow response times, irrelevant or wrong search results and in at least one case, inappropriately pornographic images displayed alongside search results. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch questioned the validity of Cuil’s claim that it had the world’s largest search engine index and criticized it for focusing on size rather than relevance. Despite reported problems with search results, Net Applications reported that for the last three days of July, Cuil beat Google and Yahoo in the amount of time spent on a site after referral from a search engine, a key metric for relevancy of search results.

According to an interview with a Cuil representative, while other Web 2.0 launches using massively parallel processing might fail with a slow down or crash, Cuil’s architecture was responding with incomplete, “less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users’ pages.” Cuil’s VP of communications Vince Sollitto said the search engine was experiencing heavy first-day overloads and they were “busy putting out fires.” Sollitto said Cuil “will only improve with time. It’s day one. Traffic is massive. We’re new. There are bugs to fix, results to improve.”

After the initial critical press coverage Cuil was alleged to have caused issues for some websites, owing to how the Cuil indexing robot polled certain sites. Website owners were reportedly saying the method was not “scientific in any way” and “actually quite ‘amateurish.’”

According to the Alexa web information company, the site reached a peak of just over 0.2% of worldwide internet users in late July 2008 and by September 12, 2008, it had dropped to 0.02% and ranked as the 5,340th site by traffic. By October 13, 2008, it had dropped to 0.005% and ranked as the 21,960th site in traffic. About one month after launch, Cuil’s Product VP and renowned search technologist, Louis Monier, quit the company citing disagreements with the CEO, Tom Costello.

Criticism

Since launch, Cuil’s search results tend to display seemingly random images. This was noticed by several bloggers. Even months after its launch, incorrect images appear with some web sites as they did at launch. A Gmail logo is still shown for a blogging site, TechCrunch.

Contact Information

• Type of site search engine
• Available language(s) English
• Owner Cuil, Inc.
• Launched July 28, 2008

Visit Cuil