At the risk of offputting the remaining active members of a once-vibrant community of which I still consider myself part, or annoying the sharp developers who created a great site, and may have big plans at Facebook, any debate over whether FriendFeed as a network had stemmed its decrease in use, or if its population had simply shifted, should have been snuffed long ago. I still use the site every day, and find it best in class for many activities, but the numbers tell a story better than I could through conjecture alone. The network's slow fade shows it driving less than 10 percent of the activity to my blog it once did during its heyday. While TechCrunch's MG Siegler (a one time FriendFeed regular himself) noted the site can still be credited for a share of visitors earlier this week, the downstream effects of a stalling network with an uncertain future are stark.

FriendFeed, at its apex of visibility in early 2008 and 2009, was often criticized for its consolidation of comments and a perceived lack of downstream visitors, who opted to talk about content on the network rather than on the originating blog. But, for me, an active member who had found real value and promoted the site, the service always gave back a lot more than I took from it. In rapid time, FriendFeed was driving more traffic back to my blog than any other Web site, with the exception of Google.


I've never been a high-traffic blog, and disseminating my content all over the Web on different networks, without pushing ads, means I don't obsess over page views. But according to Google Analytics, in July of 2008, nearly 5,400 visitors came to the site by way of FriendFeed.com, a significant chunk. I could routinely count on FriendFeed to drive about 5,000 visitors a month, every month, for the better part of a year, as Google Analytics shows that as late as March of 2009, that number was exceeded. Only direct visitors and Google searches drove more.

But in the middle of last year, as people started to discontinue using the platform, and especially following the company's sale to Facebook, activity on the site started to fade, as did its downstream impact. This isn't to say you can't spark a good conversation there or find great people. They still exist. But the situation changed from a community driven to talk about technology to a much more casual (and social) atmosphere.


Referrals here from FriendFeed dropped below 2,000 by June of 2009, fell below 1,000 by fall of 2009, and just barely passed 500 last month, not even entering the top ten referrals overall, eclipsed not just by sites like Twitter and Facebook, but also StumbleUpon and the different flavors of FeedBurner.

Reasons for the downturn are multiple, to be honest.

It's not just the obvious question of the site's total population decreasing. Depending on which stats engine you use, you can see the traffic at the site actually recently took an uptick, and whatever US audience they lost, international visitors picked up the slack. But for every lost active user and sharer compounds the issue - as fewer opportunities are there to be shared and to be seen. Also, the discontinuation of "10 people to follow" lists that Mike Fruchter and I were putting up on a monthly basis certainly hasn't helped. But more dramatically, the site's makeup changed. Activity within the site definitely overtook the activity outside the site, and what used to be a site that drove people somewhere else in many cases has fostered a community that keeps themselves on the site instead.

As a user who has watched the site closely for the better part of two and a half years, and conceptually knows activity has slowed as items go ignored that once would or spark numbers well below they used to, the clearest measure is the complete elimination of downstream traffic. You can't get there from here, because there's no there there. But my numbers show it wasn't always this way. When it seemed others gave up on the site, and the developers went quiet, so too did its downstream effects. For those people looking to be on the "cutting edge" or needing page views over casual conversation, they've largely known this for a long time and have had to go somewhere else.

You can't click a link these days without bumping into news on Apple's new iPad. Some lunatics are already in line at Apple Stores across the country, waiting overnight to be among the first to buy the new device. My e-mail in box is swelling with new announcements of applications that are debuting for the iPad, and Apple released a list of Web sites yesterday that leverage HTML 5 (instead of Flash), making them "iPad Ready". Practically all forecasts expect the iPad to a big success on par with the iPhone and iPod, not a dud, like the ill-fated G4 Cube.

After years of tablet rumors, which initiated well before the iPhone, Apple opted to deliver an iPad that didn't run a slimmed down version of Mac OS X (i.e. Mac OS X Lite) as many had anticipated, but instead, opted to go the route of the iPhone, without a Finder/Desktop mentality, led by Apps accessible from the iTunes Store, with an integrated Web browser, Safari. While we have grown used to mobile devices that download and deploy apps - be they from Apple, the Android Marketplace or for Palm's WebOS, these apps were not designed for a full-size computer, and Apple effectively turned its back on a 25 year history of nested folders.

The debut of the iPad comes at a time when Apple's most notable assumed competition may not be Microsoft, who is by far the market leader in folder and desktop-based systems (and the core software to run atop said machines), but instead, Google. Google in the last few years has emerged to not just be a dominant player in its search engine market, but has risen to be a major player in the mobile phone industry - taking Apple's iPhone head-on - but also the operating system world. Its announcements for a Chrome OS, with the Chrome Web browser at its core, make it a very serious alternative, one that is designed not for a world of apps, but instead, one of Web services and data in the cloud.

The strain between the two companies, now well documented, is seeping into the way the company's employees perceive one another (and their products).

For example, upon reading the news that Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow recommended against buying an iPad, Google's Adam Lasnik shared the piece on Google Reader, adding: "the future is Open, and thank goodness for that". The inference, of course, is that Apple's closed ecosystem, contrasted with Google's belief that they are promoting open standards, is not where the world is headed.


In November of last year, I said Google's Chrome OS was not about deploying today, but preparing for a future with Web-centric world, where Web sites trumped applications, and standards like those promoted from the Buzz team allowed for a rich experience free of client software. Google's Chrome OS, unlike the operating systems of today, from Windows, Macintosh, Linux and others, lacks a desktop, or its equivalent. You can't exit out of the browser to see the hard drive, and it's like being at a permanent Web terminal. Applications run in the browser and crash in the browser - without any need to know if that's on Drive C or Drive D, in My Documents, My Settings or My Photos.

Meanwhile, in Redmond, Windows 7 has come and nullified many of the bad feelings about Vista. It's a pretty good operating system, all things considered. But it's not moving the ball forward in the way that the iPad/iPhone/iApps approach is, or in the way that Google's Chrome OS hopes to do. Apple and Google are betting, in no small part, that users will adapt to a new construct of how they interact with appliances. Apple's move seems to be more about manual input and self-contained applications, while Google is maintaining the keyboard approach, but doing away with the decades-old desktop and file folder structure.

Regardless of the over the top headlines asking if Microsoft can "survive in an iPad world", change takes time. While Apple was once seen as an outsider to a big market when they first launched the iPhone, and Google doesn't yet have penetration with Chrome OS, Apple now has significant mindshare and is seen as the one to beat in the innovation scale, but they haven't snuffed out Windows. Meanwhile, we haven't heard what Apple has in mind for Mac OS X Eleven. Will it merge the iPhone OS with Mac OS X, or will the dual operating systems evolve in parallel? I wouldn't be too surprised if Apple found a way to move us forward with the iPad and apps-based computing being the direction, with desktops falling away to the annals of history, but if they went this route, it is going to be a long haul indeed.

The concept of browsing the Web with friends is an often-discussed target rarely implemented well - usually requiring heavy browser plugins and Web meeting software or a centralized Web site. We saw Browzmi in 2008, an interesting service that didn't gain tremendous traction, but was a good proofpoint and testing ground. Today, we have a new entrant, Nurph, which lets you take the conversation with friends and move it around, complete with a new URL shortener to drive engagement from network to network. The service is now open in public beta.

Starting with Nurph (at http://nur.ph) is very simple. Go to their Web site and drop in a URL that you want to discuss. That could be anything from CNN or Apple's iPad page to any article or photo stream you find online. The customized URL (extended from nur.ph) delivers a chat window in the bottom right corner of the site, with your Nurph avatar.


If more than one friend is on the URL, their avatar is displayed, just like many other chat rooms. You can chat in the floating window - entering an @username to refer to the individual, or a URL to take the conversation somewhere else with its own Nurph.


In our testing of it, switching URLs was seamless. Clicking a shared link would whisk you away from the existing chatroom and your friends would need to follow you along to keep the conversation going. This was a small hassle in terms of waiting for them to catch up, but there's no sense in keeping a discussion in one place and people in another.

In a Nurph chat I had with some of the company's first users, including Neil, one of the the cofounders, we talked about the popular FTC disclosure icons from this blog in December, debated a slow news day at CNN and chatted about whether we had purchased iPads yet. Practically the only site where we ran into trouble with the Nurph window was when playing QuickTime videos, but for static pages, the Nurph just became part of the experience. Should be a fun way to get family and friends on a single page, breaking chat out of the social networks and into everywhere else.

Check out Nurph at http://nur.ph.

Introduced during Ev Williams' keynote at the SXSW interactive event last month, Twitter's @Anywhere platform promises to extend the ability to see following status and Twitter user information on third party Web sites. The idea, which will go live on many top-tier sites upon its release, is to bring Twitter activity well beyond Twitter.com. While the service hasn't gone live yet, you can test it yourself, if you can't wait, at an odd domain: http://eggboiling.com/.

The domain, which titles itself as an "@Anywhere test site", asks you to connect to Twitter and shows your following status for @Ev, @Biz and @Jack, Twitter's three cofounders. You can also view a hovercard for @wendyverse, Wendy Hepworth, no doubt part of the family of Isaac Hepworth (@isaach) who joined the company via Google.



It's not a fancy site, but it works. The raw code gives a hint at what is to come as Twitter extends @Anywhere and you see this information flow through the rest of the Web. Test it out yourself here: http://eggboiling.com/