As the consolidation of the social media space begins, Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, the meta-social service. The speed with which the news spilled out showed how well the acquisition was insulated from prying eyes, as well as the power of the social web itself.
In a brilliant parody of the acquisition, even Hitler’s plans are thrown asunder by the startling move:
The significance of this acquisition will be debated for a few days — was it about search, competition, or commercial consolidation? Or all three?
More to come. In the meantime, “we still have Plurk.”
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There’s a group of biologists who have formed a community using FriendFeed, and now that it looks like it’s going to disappear (or be integrated into Facebook), they’re going to have to scramble to find a new place to communicate or let their community fall by the wayside. This, along with the announcement this week that the URL shortening service Tr.im was shutting down, point out the vulnerability of being reliant upon cloud services. We all like the idea of not buying software, of having lean, trim devices that just connect online that let us do everything we need, but there’s still a lot of danger in becoming dependent on someone else’s unproven, or in the case of Tr.im, nonexistent, business model.
Posted by David Crotty | Aug 12, 2009, 10:16 amMore on the FriendFeed biology community’s conundrum here and here.
Posted by David Crotty | Aug 12, 2009, 10:42 amKent – I laughed so hard I almost cried – thanks for that! (The sobbing woman in the hallway is just priceless!)
Posted by ann michael | Aug 14, 2009, 9:28 amWhoever did this is genius, I agree. One of the funniest bits of geek humor in years, and they spun it up so quickly! The writing of the captions is priceless.
Posted by Kent Anderson | Aug 14, 2009, 10:24 amThe Hitler meme, using and re-using this footage from “Downfall”, has been going on for quite a while now, see here and here.
Posted by David Crotty | Aug 14, 2009, 10:29 amAha! That explains how they could do it so quickly. Thanks for the links. But the caption writing on this one is a cut above, it seems to me.
Posted by Kent Anderson | Aug 14, 2009, 10:32 amNoteworthy that other Hitler videos based on “Downfall” footage have been taken down due to a copyright claim by the German film company behind the original movie. The same fate may await this little snippet. I wonder at the legitimacy of the claim — and the wisdom of truncating awareness of the film in this manner. Seems like a gift to have all this awareness while the film in its entirety remains undamaged.
Posted by Kent Anderson | Aug 14, 2009, 11:54 am