FriendFeed ‘majorly down’, only bloggers seem to care

FriendFeed, the website for social network aggregation and real-time communication, has been down for at least three hours now (I’m writing this shortly after 1am Pacific time). A FriendFeed team member tweeted that the site is “majorly down due to major power outage for multiple racks.”
Both the outage and the response will probably contribute to a sense of the site’s irrelevance. Personally, when I saw that FriendFeed was down, my first thought was, “Well, that was inevitable.” Granted, it sounds like this outage was caused by factors outside of FriendFeed’s control. But I’ve felt that the site has been stumbling along at slower speeds recently, and even if that’s just my imagination, it’s certainly true that it has stagnated in terms of any improvements or new features since Facebook acquired FriendFeed last year.
Maintaining FriendFeed, much less continuing any serious development on it, is not a priority for Facebook — it’s probably more interested in incorporating FriendFeed-like features into its own site, and putting Gmail- and FriendFeed-creator Paul Buchheit to work on an unidentified project.
An even worse sign is the relative indifference to the news. When TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wrote about the outage earlier tonight, he said a paltry 50 people had tweeted about the outage, far below what you see when other well-known web services go down. The tweets have gone up substantially, due in part to MG’s post, but we’re still not talking about a flood of complaints here. The FriendFeed downtime message, for example, hasn’t even been retweeted 100 times.
The only other person in my Twitter stream to remark on the downtime is Inside Facebook’s Eric Eldon. You might remember that both Eric and MG are VentureBeat alumni, and in fact they were the ones who set up the private room in FriendFeed that we still use for communication between the VentureBeat team. Perhaps this outage will push us to finally move off FriendFeed and onto a communication platform that’s a) designed for business, and b) has a better chance of survival.
Me, I’m still excited about the possibilities of Google Buzz as a business tool, especially since it incorporates a number of FriendFeed-like features. And hey, it’s not like Gmail ever goes down.
Companies: Facebook, friendfeed