Internet Tech Boston

As I sit here and watch the breaking news of Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed light up the Twitter-verse, a thought occurs to me. Facebook is the epitome of the Web 2.0 world – having grown from the brainchild of a college dropout to one of the largest online communities on the internet. You know you’re not just a cool web startup when you’re interviewed for 60 Minutes. FriendFeed has not had nearly as much media focus as Facebook or other social media darlings like Twitter and LinkedIn, but with the all-knowing, yet hard to define super-powers of the “ex-Google” founders, it’s had more than its fair share of media attention. Robert Scoble, I’m looking in your direction.

Here’s a news flash – these companies don’t really make any money. While the terms of the deal have not yet fully been disclosed (or even made official), I wonder if this is worth it. When two companies making no profit merge, they must be doing it for the hope of a future realization of revenue and profit. In other words, there are “synergies” here. Sounds a lot like the fateful merger of the Web 1.0 media giants – AOL and Time Warner. We all know how that ended up.

I don’t have enough knowledge or experience to be able to effectively (or even professionally) compare these 2 blockbuster deals. But, what I know about the first one is this. The merger of AOL/Time Warner marked the end of the Dot Com / Web 1.0 hype. It was all down hill after that. Many people have been discussing and speculating that Web 2.0 is already jumped the shark, and that we’re now in Web 2.5 or even approaching Web 3.0 – The Semantic Web. There’s a big part of me that thinks all this talk about Web 2.5 is just a fancy way of hitting the snooze alarm and prolonging the inevitable. Maybe we’ll look back at this latest big time merger and see it also marked the end of an era.

Then again, maybe not. What do you think? Please leave a comment below.

I had my first bad experience with Blog it. After spending a good deal of time, doing some researching, creating links, and writing up an entry, the “Post” button returned error – invalid username/password. I hadn’t changed either my username or password since my last successful entry. Of course, my entry was gone, and I felt like I was 13 years old again – staring at a “Disk Read Error 0″ on my Packard Bell 8080 with 3 1/4 floppy drive, knowing I was going to get an F on my book report on Of Mice and Men.

I was really excited by Blog it when it first came out. Even though it burned me, I still used it to make this entry you’re reading now. However, after using it a couple of times, I’m starting to think a blog post is probably faster, easier, and safer, if done in good ‘ol WordPress. I can take the extra 2 seconds to update Twhirl myself.

I was pretty loudly proclaiming to colleagues and friends how Facebook Chat would be a pretty useless addition to the platform. Well, I’m patting myself on the back because it appears as if I got it right. Facebook Chat is pretty useless – for the win.

Ok, so maybe I didn’t really need to go that far out on a limb to make this prediction. Instead, I used common sense. You see, there’s already a few instant messenger platforms that handle chat. You may have heard of Google Talk, Yahoo IM, AOL IM, Skype, Gadu-Gadu, Meebo, ICQ, Jabber, and a few dozen more that collectively amount to over 1 billion registered users. Even with their 60 million users, it’s not hard to see that Facebook has a lot to overcome to be relevant in this space.

Now, the reviews are coming in from Tech Blog big shots. Do we really need another IM? Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb thinks “Probably not.” Michael Arrington from Techcrunch also points out that with “no integration of AIM, Gtalk, or any other protocol yet,” it makes the Facebook Chat another “walled garden.”

Why then, would Facebook come late into a mature market with a technology platform that doesn’t play well with others? Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is starting to believe some of the “can-do-no-wrong” hype around Facebook. In a 60 Minutes interview, Lesley Stahl told Zuckerberg “you seem to be replacing Larry and Sergei.” Stahl continues to refer to Facebook as, among other things, an “internet revolution” and the  “biggest thing since Google.”

The fact of the matter is – we don’t really need another chat platform. Facebook is the poster child for user generated content and Web 2.0 community, but will not surpass Google as the primary online communication, online commerce engine, and information dissementation platform used by people throughout the world. I would have rathered Facebook spend less time trying to prove how cool they are – “there’s a dude on a unicycle – how rad!,” less time explaining how unaffected they are (Zuckerberg claims to sleep on a mattress laying on the floor.), and more time coming up with new innovative ideas that might actually lend credence to all the posturing and hype thrown at the company. Then again, I’m not the one being interviewed by 60 Minutes . . .