FriendBinder Shutting Down 26th October

It's with regret that we announce, we will be shutting down FriendBinder with effect from the 26th October.

Our goal with FriendBinder was bring all of your social networks into a single place to save you time. However, the site hasn't been the success we hoped, with a good number of signups, but only a small number of active users. This market is no longer an upcoming segment, but rather a established area where many sophisticated tools compete, making it hard for us to gain traction.

All collected data will destroyed including authentication data/keys and any cached personal data.

If you have any queries, I can reached at richard@friendbinder.com

Thank you to anyone who used the site, blogged/tweeted about us, gave us feedback or supported us in other ways.

#newtwitter, Diaspora and the future of the Social Web

On Tuesday, Twitter unveiled their new interface for Twitter.com which now embeds content from Flickr, Twitpic, YouTube and others. I think it's an attempt to make Twitter more compelling for casual users and is something we have done in FriendBinder for a while now. It also has the effect of destroying some the advantages that 3rd party clients have had, especially the Twitter-only clients. This is ironic, since I believe that Twitter wants Twitter-only clients to continue to exist. Twitter has also started to take control of it's own platform by producing iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry clients itself. Twitter has also taken sharing buttons in house. In fact the main differentiation you get from Twitter is to support multiple networks as it's likely Twitter won't do that themselves in their clients.

Facebook has been relatively closed until the last year, choosing instead to have it's platform mostly built inside Facebook.com. It wasn't until last year that Facebook really became open enough for true 3rd party clients and we were so excited we had it working the next day. Facebook, however, has it's own iPhone client and most users still use facebook.com, so in general prefers to control that direction just like Twitter is starting to.

What's clear about these moves, is that Facebook and even Twitter are trying to keep their garden's pretty walled for now. If Twitter or Facebook make an official version of an application, then the theory is that no one else will be able to get enough market share to compete and make a viable business. Jason Calacanis for example calls out Facebook based businesses because Facebook will absorb the features into it's own system. He also has made numerous comments stating, that you shouldn't build a startup based on a single ecosystem, because it's very risky and he is not alone in this point of view.

Diaspora released it's initial code yesterday and they say they want to be a more privacy aware Facebook. The problem Diaspora has is, how to break into Twitter's and Facebook ecosystems? It's not 2006 anymore, people have picked their primary social networks (for now) and are starting to settle on the tools they use with them and there are vast number for both. Many people for example use only Facebook.com and the Facebook iphone client to access Facebook. Even with Twitter some of the most popular clients: Echofon, Twitterific and Twitter's own apps. are Twitter-only.

Diaspora needs to do two things in order to get real traction:
- Get into multiple network clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic, Gwibber, FriendBinder and others.
- Provide something it's competitors don't and preferably won't

So what's next? there are already many social networks and multi-network clients can only realistically support so many if they all have different APIs, and those will be the biggest ones typically. Activity Streams, is one solution to this. Activity Streams is an extension of the Atom standard to provide social context to feeds and there are many related standards to provide the glue for this to work, OAuth and PubSubHubbub for example. If social networks and clients all supported Activity Streams it would be easier for people to get access to brand new social networks in the clients they use.

I, like Alex Payne, think we need to move to a model like email with multiple providers and clients. Currently Twitter and Facebook are like Gmail and Yahoo mail in this model and clients like Tweetdeck and Friendbinder are equivalent to Thunderbird/Apple Mail and other IMAP clients. This already has happened in the past with instant messaging, there are several protocols, but clients like Pidgin, iChat and Trillian support the main sites and the standard, XMPP.

I don't think we are far from an open model, but to get there we need everyone who's not Twitter and Facebook to support Activity Streams and users to support multiple network clients.

Geolocation, Retweets and more...

Twitter last week updated their API with two new features, geolocation and retweets. We now have initial support of these in FriendBinder.

GeoLocation

If geolocation is available on a tweet you will see a map link which expands to something like the above Goolge Map and you can pan and zoom on it. We are also doing the same for Flickr content that is geotagged.


You can also send a tweet with a location on it. You will need to turn the feature on in your Twitter account settings and turn it on in FriendBinder in settings also. We've tested this on the iPhone/iPod Touch OS 3.0, Firefox 3.5 and it should work on anything that supports the W3C's Geolocation API.

Retweets

We have supported retweets in FriendBinder for a long time now, however one problem with it, was that you would often have to shorten the original message in order to be able to retweet it. With Twitter's new native retweet feature this is no long necessary and it's a simple two clicks to retweet anything.

and more...

We now support playing of YouTube, Facebook, Flickr videos inline in FriendBinder so you don't have to leave the site to view them. This also works for YouTube and Qik videos posted on Twitter. Videos open in a lightbox similar to what we do with photos.

If there are any problems let us know in the comments or on Get Satisfaction

FriendBinder Launched

We have just removed the invite system from FriendBinder which means anyone can now join!

Here is quick overview of what friendbinder does:

Friendbinder is Multi-social network client, it connects to all your existing friends on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and others.

It allows you to update your statuses to Facebook and Twitter. You can also comment and like Facebook content from the stream. For Twitter content you can reply or retweet inline and view a thread of replies from your friends.

FriendBinder also allows you to view the photos from your friends on Flickr and photos they have favourited.

FriendBinder works in a similar way to a twitter client in that your friends do not have to join FriendBinder, you will always see all of your friend's content.

You can join at http://friendbinder.com.

I hope you enjoy friendbinder and please report to us any problems or tell us of features you would like.

Style update and Launch date

We have updated the site style again. We have simplified the row style so it a bit less busy and the overall look has changed to allow a clear distinction between the stream and the activity column. The context menu is now available by clicking on a friend's picture (instead of the pencil icon). We now also support grouping all a person's activity, so that if they post a Twitter update at shortly after a Facebook (or the same time) they will now be grouped.

Finally, we are preparing for a public beta launch which should happen on the 1st of September.

Threaded Twitter Conversations

We've added a feature to show you conversations from your friends, it's pretty simple as you can see from the screenshot. You can reply to any part of the conversation.

Facebook Stream API support in FriendBinder

Facebook yesterday updated their API to allow more access to the stream. This means that we can now read replies and likes to items in the stream. We have implemented this for status updates today and we will support the other types in the next few days.

Facebook will soon allow replying and liking of these items and we will support that when it is available.

New Twitter Features in FriendBinder

We have added a number of small features to improve experience of using Twitter on FriendBinder. They are all additions to the "stream" page.

We have changed the "reply" and "re-tweet" feature so can now reply inline without navigating away from the page:
We have add a search replies link, which again works inline, that tries to find replies to the twitter message from everyone (not just your friends).


We can also find the message that someone replied to (though this working depends on their client having been updated with the feature)
and finally, we have implemented inline viewing of pictures from TwitPic, Twitgoo, yfrog, pix.im and img.ly.
Please let us know what you think or if you have any suggestions on how we can improve FriendBinder.

FriendBinder on your mobile

FriendBinder is now available on your mobile at http://m.friendbinder.com. You can view the stream and post to Twitter and Facebook using the mobile site. We have added a "re-tweet" link on both sites which is particularly useful on the mobile site.

It's mostly been tested on Nokia devices (N95, N96 and E71) but tell us if you have any problems with your phone, and we'll look at it.

FriendBinder style update

We have updated the style of the site, gone are the various beige and brown colours as are the controls on the friend's menu. We have changed the internal links to blue (from red) and external links are still green (which open in a new window/tab). It's tested and should work in Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE (even IE6) so if you come across any issues please let us in the comments.

We have recently simplified the sign ups to the site so that should be more straight forward and quicker.

You can login in or request an invite at http://friendbinder.com

How Interest Levels work in FriendBinder

Today I'm not going to write about a new feature, but rather a feature we have had from the very beginning. The reason I am going to do this is because two people have been talking about this kind of thing today. Michael Arrington talks about the need for a "Fake Follow" as he calls it. Thomas Hawk talks about a 5 improvements he would like to see in friendfeed of this list number 2 pretty much describes our Interest Levels feature.

So how does our interest levels feature work?
The basic concept is that you give someone a interest level from one to five. People in your interest level 5 might be close friends, girlfriend, husband etc. or just people you want to keep a close track of. Interest level 3 might be acquaintances and less close friends that you sort of follow the noise from. Interest level 1 is probably going to be everyone else that hasn't fit into the above categories. There is of course no reason you have to use your interest levels like this, you could use them anyway you want.

Setting Interest Levels for friends
From the stream you can use the context menu or you can use the friend's edit tab:


If you want to organize all your friend's interest levels you can do this by clicking on the friends button at the top:

Interest Levels aren't the only friend organizing feature we have, you can also use tags as mentioned in a previous post.

We want your feedback, so please post comments or if you want to discuss other aspects of FriendBinder then please use the google group.

Changes to Twitter support

As you may be aware, Twitter have now introduced per-IP limits on their API (Louis Gray has the details), this affects us in a number of ways.

Previously you were able to add Twitter as a network without giving your password to us (and this was the only option for a little while), however, this is now no longer possible due to this change in the Twitter API. Twitter will now will require authentication before you can use it. Currently the only method of authentication for Twitter is a password (Twitter say they are working on supporting oAuth in future).

We now fetch all Twitter information using your username/password and this counts against your per-user limit of 100/requests per hour (currently) and this limit is shared with other sites that also take your Twitter username and password.

We are looking at ways we can enable users to follow a handful of users if you don't have a Twitter account.

Tags and Notes

Have you ever been reading your stream and you are thinking, who is this person? I don't remember adding them. Or you want to just see people who work for a particular organisation or certain group of friends.

Well, we have a solution to this, with the new tags and notes features. You can add tags to each of your friends and write notes so you can remember how you met them or came across them (or use it for whatever you want!)

You can do this from with in the stream by clicking on pencil icon, next to their picture:


You can filter the stream by one or more tags. You can also tag someone from their 'edit' page (for example when you first add them) and you can filter the friend's list by tags.

We have also introduced tabs into some more areas of the site including the stream as you see in the screen shot.

Tell us what you think about these features at http://groups.google.com/group/friendbinder

Posting status to Facebook + AJAX notifications

We got a couple of new features today:

The first is updating your status message on Facebook, this is the same place the Twitter one is. You can post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time. You'll need an extra permission from Facebook to get this working - to add this go to "settings" on Facebook network page.


The other feature is AJAX notification of when new stream data is available. This appears as yellow box on the top right of the stream.

The most useful part of this is that it updates the title on the tab, so you can leave FriendBinder open on tab and you will see without going to the tab when you need to check it.

Please tell us what you would like to see in FriendBinder either in the comments on this blog or our Google group http://groups.google.com/group/friendbinder

Posting to Twitter

Welcome to the friendbinder blog, We are going to use this blog to keep you informed about the development of the site and also via the twitter account @friendbinder, so please add this to your blog reader or to your friendbinder. If you want to know what we are all about I suggest reading Louis Gray's post about us which covers a lot of the main points.

We've added couple of features in today.
The first is posting to twitter, which is available under a new button called "you".

Also you will see reply links on current twitter messages which link to it. To enable twitter posting you will have to give us your Twitter password (yes, really, Twitter don't support anything else) you can do this by going into the Twitter network page and clicking "settings". The you button also is quick way to get to your own stream and some other tabs will likely appear here soon.

Also now you can now view the stream for all your friends not just by interest level or by network as a few people have been asking for. The stream now tells you when the last big update was which is currently not more than every hour whilst you are logged in, we are working on backend improvements to make that more frequent.

Thats all for now, more new features coming soon, hopefully quicker than these ones were.