At the end of February of this year, I wrote a post entitled No Contest: FriendFeed vs. The Facebook News Feed where I argued that it would be a two month project for an enterprising developer at Facebook to incorporate all of the relevant features of FriendFeed that certain vocal bloggers had found so enticing. Since then we've had two announcements from Facebook

From A new way to share with friends on April 15th

we've introduced a way for you to import activity from other sites into your Mini-Feed (and into your friends' News Feeds).

The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small "Import" link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us—are available for importing at the moment, but we'll be adding Digg and other sites in the near future. These stories will look just like any other Mini-Feed stories, and will hopefully increase your ability to share information with the people you care about.

From on We're Open For Commentary on June 25th (Yesterday)

In the past, you've been able to comment on photos, notes and posted items, but if there was something else on your friend's profile—an interesting status, or a cool new friendship—you'd need to send a message or write a Wall post to talk about it. But starting today, you can comment on your friends' Mini-Feed stories right from their profile.

Now you can easily converse around friends' statuses, application stories, new friendships, videos, and most other stories you see on their profile. Just click on the comment bubble icon to write a comment or see comments other people have written.

It took a little longer than two months but it looks like I was right. For some reason Facebook isn't putting the comment bubbles in the news feed but I assume that is only temporary and they are trying it out in the mini-feed first.

FriendFeed has always seemed to me to be a weird concept for a stand alone application. Why would I want to go to whole new site and create yet another friend list just to share what I'm doing on the Web with my friends? Isn't that what social networking sites are for? It just sounds so inconvenient, like carrying around a pager instead of a mobile phone.

As I said in my original post on the topic, all FriendFeed has going for it is the community that has built around the site. Especially since the functionality it provides can be easily duplicated and actually fits better as a feature of an existing social networking site. The question is whether that community is the kind that will grow into making it a mainstream success or whether it will remain primarily a playground for Web geeks despite all the hype (see del.icio.us as an example of this). So far, the chance of the latter seems strong. For comparison, consider the growth curve of Twitter against that of FriendFeed on Google Trends and Alexa.  Which seems more likely to one day have the brand awareness of a Flickr or a Facebook?

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