FriendFeed: The Social Network Facebook Took Offline
The story of FriendFeed, the platform that invented the 'Like' button, pioneered real-time feeds, and fostered a cult community in Turkey.
One April evening in 2015, a small but passionate corner of the internet went dark forever.
After an extraordinary 8-year journey, the social network FriendFeed was closing its doors. This expected, yet heartbreaking, end felt like losing a close friend to thousands of users. So, what made FriendFeed so special? To find out, we'll return to the beginning of its story, forged in friendship and innovation.
Part 1: The Rise
It's 2007, and we're in Silicon Valley. Near midnight, in a small Palo Alto office, two young engineers are coding, fueled by coffee. Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, whose friendship began at Stanford and solidified at Google, were chasing a game-changing idea!
They had played roles in many successful projects, from Google Maps to Gmail, but their entrepreneurial spirit drove them to leave Google. They started working as entrepreneurs-in-residence at Benchmark Capital to refine their ideas but soon felt alone.
Then, old friends came to their rescue: Gmail creators Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh had also left Google and rented a small office in Palo Alto. The quartet met weekly to share ideas and offer frank feedback on each other's projects. It was in this environment of camaraderie that Bret and Jim had an idea: a side project, initially conceived as merely "sharing interesting web pages we found during our research," began to blossom.
In September 2007, Paul and Sanjeev were captivated by Bret and Jim's prototype and joined the project as investors and co-founders. And in October 2007, FriendFeed was born.
Its goal was to unify the fragmented social media world under one roof, integrating all friends' online activities into a real-time "news feed." Everything from YouTube videos to blog posts, Twitter messages to Flickr photos, could converge in a single stream.
"Google indexes the world's information and offers search, which is great, but does everyone want to see the same things? The real problem is what should appear when you don't know what you're looking for."— Bret Taylor
FriendFeed quickly became a favorite among tech enthusiasts. They were the first in the world to implement the "Like" button concept. With a single click, you could approve a friend's post, expressing "I saw it, I liked it" with a tiny smiley face icon. FriendFeed also pioneered the idea of adding comments to status updates — at the time, even Facebook didn't have direct commenting on posts.
The real-time updated feed was a harbinger of the future: from 2008 onwards, the FriendFeed team experimented with infrastructure that allowed the page to refresh automatically, with comments and likes appearing instantly — a mind-boggling speed for its era. In short, FriendFeed was the platform that first developed many groundbreaking features in social media, and the giants were quick to notice.
The Peak
The moment they reached their peak, paradoxically, brought about the beginning of the end. On August 10, 2009, Facebook announced it had reached an agreement to acquire FriendFeed. The figures were dizzying for this small startup: for approximately $50 million, FriendFeed would join the Facebook family.
Facebook's primary target was FriendFeed's brilliant engineers and technology. Bret Taylor quickly rose to the position of CTO at Facebook. FriendFeed's framework, Tornado, which enabled real-time updates, was open-sourced by Facebook and gifted to the world.
The Turkish Story
FriendFeed's fate included a separate saga to be written in Turkey. Especially between 2008 and 2010, FriendFeed became a "cult" platform among Turkish internet users. Industry professionals and curious young people, defying Twitter's restrictive structure or Facebook's crowds, established their own interactive arenas on FriendFeed.
Turkish users of the platform blended FriendFeed with local culture, transforming it into an unforgettable experience. Humor was central to this. A writer known by the alias "Sezyum" became a phenomenon with posts that satirized everyday events. The nickname "Internet Teams Commander" for technology writer M. Serdar Kuzuloğlu first emerged on FriendFeed.
Figures like cartoonist Selçuk Erdem, digital entrepreneur Alemşah Öztürk, and journalist M. Serdar Kuzuloğlu conversed equally with ordinary users. A public space emerged where everyone could set aside their titles and express their opinions on equal footing.
The Decline
Every rise has a fall. FriendFeed's decline didn't begin with a sudden crash, but with a slow fade. After its acquisition by Facebook, the platform failed to attract new users and gradually became a "niche" community.
In March 2015, the expected, but dreaded, announcement was posted on FriendFeed's official blog: "Dear FriendFeed community, we would like to inform you that we will be shutting down our service soon." April 9, 2015, was announced as FriendFeed's closing date.
The Turkish FriendFeed community threw what felt like a farewell party: on the last day, everyone re-shared their favorite posts from years past, thanked each other, and said their goodbyes. When the closing moment arrived, screens froze, and that lively, flowing feed was replaced by a silent archive.
FriendFeed might not have reached mass audiences as a product, but thanks to its innovative spirit, Facebook today is much richer, Twitter much more interactive, and the internet a much more social place. FriendFeed's story showed us how friendship and sharing can transform the digital world. Although the platform has closed, its spirit lives on in every like, every comment, and every shared link.