Webware

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook has unleashed a Tornado, and it's hoping that some eager engineers will go catch it.

Earlier this month, Facebook released the open-source Web server framework called Tornado, which powers the real-time streaming behind its latest toy, social feed aggregator FriendFeed. And on Wednesday evening at the office that most recently housed the FBFund incubator program, senior open programs manager David Recordon and director of products Bret Taylor held a "tech talk" to pitch Tornado to a crowd of several dozen interested members of the Web development community.

"We had actually been planning on open-sourcing (Tornado)" prior to Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed, said Taylor, who had served as CEO of the start-up. "When we got to Facebook we thought it was a really good opportunity to do it."

The slant of Wednesday evening's talk (which was quite technical, so I won't be going into significant detail): if you're dealing with real-time, streaming content, Facebook thinks Tornado is for you. And if you've been listening to anything that Facebook has been saying recently, it believes the real-time Web is the future for everyone--not just its own company.

"FriendFeed's a real-time system," Taylor said as he described how the Python-based Tornado framework's non-blocking nature was ideal for real-time Web services. "Essentially, every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to the FriendFeed servers."

Both Recordon and Taylor are recent arrivals at Facebook: Recordon joined Facebook last month as its resident open-source guru, and the company had acquired FriendFeed a few weeks earlier in a deal that brought on board both a top-notch engineering team (its founders, including Taylor, were Google veterans) and cutting-edge technology for amassing and indexing real-time Web conversations--so cutting-edge, in fact, that it was unclear as to how the mainstream would ever actually accept it.

At the time, there were questions about what, exactly, Facebook would actually do with FriendFeed. In the meantime it's become clear that acquiring the would-be Twitter rival allowed Facebook to leap ahead with some of its development of new, real-time-focused features as well as to enhance existing ones with FriendFeed's technology and brainpower.

Open-sourcing the technology doesn't have an obvious financial end for Facebook. But it will ideally mean that some of the developer community will be marching to Facebook's beat, at a time when the company continues to compete with the far smaller Twitter for a majority share of what's come to be known as the real-time Web.

As for its Python foundations, Taylor said that FriendFeed had been looking to build Tornado in a manner "sophisticated enough that we could do all the things we wanted but well known enough so that a new engineer could theoretically understand our code base right away...Python has a lot of its flaws, I wish it had real inline functions like Javascript, but for all of its flaws it's actually pretty nice to use in practice."

Taylor told me afterward that no concrete plans have been put into action as to which Facebook features may be getting a FriendFeed makeover (so as to speak) but hinted that one getting talked about for some enhancement from the former FriendFeed team is Facebook Chat, the site's instant messaging client, because of its obviously real-time nature.

Tornado isn't the first technology that Facebook, still criticized by some of the open-source community for its heavy reliance on proprietary technology and a login wall, has released as open-source code: well over a year ago, the company released the code for a significant portion of its developer platform.

Adobe AIR applications are typically well designed. They feature a sleek look and relatively fast response times. TweetDeck (Windows | Mac), a popular Adobe AIR app, has put the platform on the map. It has caused some developers to view AIR as a viable alternative platform to building a Web site.

Nomee (Windows|Mac), a company that helps users see what celebrities, prominent figures, or their friends are up to online, is one such app.

The basics
Nomee is based on "cards." When you first sign up for the site (you can use OpenID if you don't want to create unique Nomee credentials), you'll be presented with celebrities and prominent figures who currently have cards on the site. But before you start thinking that there are scores of celebs on Nomee, think again: for the most part, those cards were created by Nomee users, not the celebrities themselves.

When you view a card, it displays an image of the person, followed by several sites or services that are related to them. When you click on one of those services, you'll be brought to its respective Web page. For example, if you click on the Twitter logo on my card, you can view my Twitter page.

That's me on Nomee, even though I didn't create the page.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

If you like what you see, you can "add" the card to your Nomee Dashboard. From there, Nomee will track all the card updates. It will alert you when there's something new for you to check out.

Nomee's Newstream lets you view all the updates from every card you follow. Thanks to such a nice design and some filtering options, you shouldn't have any trouble finding exactly what you're looking for. It's arguably Nomee's best feature.

The Nomee Newstream in action.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Card creation
Of course, Nomee isn't just a place where you can see what your favorite celebrities are up to. You can also create your own card to share with friends. Those same friends can create cards and share their social profiles and links with you.

Facebook announced on Thursday that it has open-sourced recently acquired FriendFeed's real-time technology. Dubbed Tornado, the company's real-time, nonblocking framework is written in Python.

"Tornado is...designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services," Facebook's David Recordon wrote in a blog post. "While Tornado is similar to existing Web frameworks in Python (Django, Google's Webapp, Webpy), it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic."

FriendFeed co-founder and new Facebook Director of Products Bret Taylor said in a blog post of his own that Facebook's decision to open-source Friendfeed's real-time feature was rooted in its desire to see "others building real-time Web services." It's a part of Facebook's open-source initiative.

Taylor went on to explain the story behind Tornado. He said that before FriendFeed developed the framework, it analyzed other Python frameworks to see if they matched FriendFeed's needs. According to Taylor, "our performance and feature requirements consistently diverged from these mainstream frameworks." FriendFeed needed "support for a large number of standing connections afforded by the nonblocking (input-output) programming style and epoll" that it couldn't find in existing Python frameworks.

Taylor's team decided to write its "own Web server and framework after looking at existing servers and tools" that couldn't quite match the company's requirements.

According to Taylor, "Tornado looks a bit like Webpy or Google's Webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the nonblocking Web server and tools."

Tornado features several key components that Facebook hopes will make it easy for developers to create real-time environments. It offers design templates, signed cookies, user authentication, forgery protection, and third-party authentication for services like Facebook Connect, Twitter, and FriendFeed. The framework also supports "large numbers of concurrent connections" to keep data fresh.

Taylor said his team ran some baseline throughput calculations to determine how well Tornado matched up against other Python frameworks. According to his figures, Tornado's throughput was more than "four times higher than the other frameworks."

Tornado's Web server requests compared to the competition.

(Credit: Bret Taylor)

FriendFeed will live on
Before you think this is the end of FriendFeed as we know it, think again.

Buried in the Facebook announcement, David Recordon wrote that "Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed's real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain."

Since Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed, the social network has stayed silent on its plans for FriendFeed. If his statement is to be believed, FriendFeed will be maintained and improved upon, going forward. When the acquisition was announced, FriendFeed's founders said the long-term plans for FriendFeed were still being worked out with Facebook, but at the very least, it wouldn't be shut down.

"Anything that we would do would be more of a transition, not shutting down," Taylor told CNET News. "I think our users have invested in our product by putting their data in it, sharing it with their friends...We absolutely wouldn't shut (FriendFeed) down."

Tornado is available now as a free download. Facebook said it hopes that developers will try it out and start developing Web services that take advantage of FriendFeed's real-time technology. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen, but if you want to a see a demo of Tornado in action to see if it matches your goals as a developer, click here.

Is this Facebook's big assault on Twitter?

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Baptiste)

Facebook, it appears, was not about to let Google get this week's award for shadowy new projects. On Tuesday night, a number of users--including Mashable blogger Ben Parr--received notifications that they were beta testers for something called "Facebook Lite."

The notifications, as well as the site hosted on the subdomain lite.facebook.com, disappeared within minutes. It seems to have been rolled out prematurely by mistake.

"Last night, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake," an e-mailed statement from Facebook representative Brandee Barker read. "We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time. People who are not part of the test and are trying to access 'Lite' will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.

From what it looks like, Facebook Lite is a simpler version of the site and pares down profiles to basic information and a stream of status updates. The easy conclusion is that this would make Facebook's service look a whole lot like Twitter. And given the fact that Facebook had attempted to acquire Twitter, got snubbed, and then acquired the significantly smaller real-time streaming site FriendFeed this week, a Twitter-like service would be rife with implications.

Here's Facebook's official explanation: "We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook 'Lite' is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept friend requests, write on people's walls, and look at photos and status updates."

Blogger Jason Baptiste managed to get screenshots.

The obvious guess is that this is yet another attempt on Facebook's part to stay abreast of Twitter in the race to own the "real-time streaming Web." There are, potentially, other reasons for launching a simplified site:

• For use on slower connections.

• For stripped-down computers in developing markets, where the 250,000,000-member Facebook wants to make inroads.

• As a more "portable" profile that could potentially tie into Facebook's aim of being all over the Web rather than a destination site.

Facebook hinted that the "developing markets" answer could be an accurate one. "We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience," the statement from Facebook explained.

Got any guesses, speculation, or conspiracy theories? Comments are welcome.

This post was updated at 7:46 a.m. PT.

Monday's news that social giant Facebook is acquiring the less than two-year old FriendFeed included an important postscript: "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product." But for FriendFeed users, the future seems unclear. Will development on the service be discontinued as the now Facebook-employed FriendFeed creators have been tapped to work on a bigger, and more popular social-networking site? Probably.

What is likely to happen is that many of FriendFeed's killer features become features on Facebook, with FriendFeed eventually shutting its doors to focus on Facebook development. So what are those FriendFeed features Facebook doesn't have, or that FriendFeed simply does better?

Search: One of the most important features FriendFeed has (that Facebook doesn't) is a really solid search engine. On FriendFeed you can search for content from your friends, or the entire world. The best part is, you can save any search you've made and keep an eye on it for updates. Facebook's search is currently focused more on finding people, along with navigating to various parts of its site like events, pages, and applications. Update: Scratch this one off the list. Hours after this post went live, Facebook began pushing an updated version of its search engine that indexes updates and other content. At least for the past 30 days, which is a good start.

FriendFeed's search is real time, and content-centric. Something similar for Facebook could yield good results.

(Credit: CNET)

Real real time. FriendFeed's real time is a constant flow of information that comes in as soon as the service can get it to you. On Facebook, you get a little reminder to refresh the stream when there are updates. FriendFeed's way of letting users avoid an overload is to simply put the stream on pause--something Facebook could soon adopt.

Content aggregation. Facebook's "highlights" section of its home page does its best to show you new or otherwise interesting things from your friends if they've liked something. It feels like an afterthought though. FriendFeed's solution is to create a "best of the day" which shows the most popular and fresh content that your friends like. It can also be filtered by day, week and month, which lets you get a quick digest of content without having to keep your eyeballs glued to the news feed.

IM integration. I've knocked this feature in the past for being noisy, but... Read More

Surprise! Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, a Bay Area-based social-network feed aggregation start-up.

"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends," FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said in a release. "We can't wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world."

TechCrunch reported the news on Monday, a matter of minutes before Facebook confirmed the acquisition.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: This is not as ridiculously huge of a deal as the Silicon Valley hype machine is going to have you believe.

Basically, FriendFeed has been coasting on a lot of hype and not a lot of mainstream recognition, and it's not a bit surprising that it would be seeking an exit at this point. Facebook acquired it for its talent; prior to FriendFeed, Taylor was part of the team that helped launch Google Maps. So the real story here is that Facebook made the rather expensive hire (and we don't know the terms of the deal) of some very talented former Googlers. FriendFeed's co-founders "will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams," according to the release, and the rest of the company's 12 employees will also join Facebook.

This would also be consistent with Facebook's minimal past acquisition history: the company bought little-known start-up Parakey two years ago with the primary objective of getting its founders, the creators of the Firefox browser, on board. It's also well-known that Facebook tried hard to acquire Twitter--which would've been a far more significant acquisition than FriendFeed--and was turned down. (Well, there was also ConnectU, whose assets Facebook acquired pretty much just to get that pesky lawsuit off the table.)

The release from Facebook repeatedly hinted that this is about talent more than product.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the statement. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

Yup.

"As we spent time with Mark (Zuckerberg) and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they've built, and their desire to have us contribute to it," FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, another ex-Googler who was instrumental in building Gmail, "It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook's engineers are about creating simple, groundbreaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group."

But Facebook director of product Christopher Cox said to CNET News later, "I wouldn't call it a talent acquisition." He elaborated, "We really have a vision that's focusing on Facebook being not just a destination but being a service...We think FriendFeed's been focused on how that's going to work in an open way, and that's something we're excited about, not just the people but the product they've built."

FriendFeed earned praise from prominent voices in Silicon Valley--most notably Robert Scoble--but its aim to aggregate all of a user's social-networking activity feeds in one place didn't catch on with the mainstream. But Facebook eventually began to mimic the FriendFeed model through upgrades to its central "news feed" feature, letting members pull in select third-party updates.

Bret Taylor said that FriendFeed wasn't shopping itself around. "We weren't up for sale. We had a healthy amount of financing and a really efficient company," he told CNET News. "As we noticed our products were really converging in terms of product vision, we started having casual conversations with Facebook."

It's not clear what will happen to the FriendFeed service, because it sure sounds like Facebook is eager to get its team onto the engineering fast track. "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being," a post by Taylor on the FriendFeed blog read. "We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team."

Taylor elaborated more to CNET News later on Monday: "Anything that we would do would be more of a transition, not shutting down. I think our users have invested in our product by putting their data in it, sharing it with their friends...We absolutely wouldn't shut (FriendFeed) down."

More to come...last updated at 2:04 p.m. PDT.

Twitter tanked Thursday. The outage, caused by a targeted denial-of-service attack, had ripple effects continuing into the evening. I wasn't able to post a tweet with a link in it.

I was reminded of an era not long ago, when it was more newsworthy that Twitter was up. In an homage to those less-stable days, I thought I'd outline some of the better alternatives we can take advantage of during those moments Twitter isn't cooperating.

Other options

FriendFeed is the first place to start when Twitter is down. Although it's designed to track updates to all your social networks, it's a fine communication platform itself. The site will let you chat it up about important topics, follow other friends' many social-networking updates, and more. It's an ideal alternative to Twitter.

FriendFeed is a fine alternative to Twitter.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

But if you're looking for something a little more Twitter-like, there are several options. You can try out Plurk. It's a nice platform, but beware that there are very few users on the site. If people are updating their friends about their lives, they're not doing it on Plurk.

That said, it does provide a really neat timeline display and a unique way to spread your feelings. Instead of giving you full control over your message, it asks you to use one of several keywords, including love, like, wishes, hates, gives, and more. It's not bad.

Plurk has a unique layout.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Managing social network profiles is getting more difficult. As we sign up for more services, we need to split our time between multiple sites. But with the help of social aggregators, we can limit those issues. The following tools do a fine job of keeping your social life in one spot, helping you to monitor it more efficiently.

I should note, though, that these won't be your path to social networking bliss. Some folks find aggregators too overwhelming. They believe these resources only complicate matters. You might agree after trying some of these tools.

I should also note that Facebook Connect--Facebook's single sign-on service that competes with OpenID--might soon match these aggregation services. Users can already bring some items with them to Facebook. It might only be a matter of time before the service allows users to pull full social network feeds into Facebook.

Social network aggregators

Atomkeep Atomkeep is designed to help you sync all your profile information across multiple social networks. When you change your profile information on the site, all the networks you sync with it will be updated automatically. So, if you're moving to a new home, you can go to Atomkeep, change your address, and it will update that information on Facebook, Bebo, and other social networks. The site is in private beta, so you'll need an invite code to try it out. For a full CNET review of Atomkeep, click here.

Sync all your accounts in Atomkeep

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Digsby Although Digsby is installed on your desktop and isn't quite a Web tool like the others in this roundup, I thought it appropriate to include it, since it does require the Web to work and it aggregates all your social network data in one place.

Digsby provides a three-pronged approach to aggregation: instant messaging, e-mail, and social networks. You can sign in to practically any IM program in Digsby, including AIM, Yahoo IM, and others. If you're a Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail user, you can also use Digsby to manage your in-box. But its integration of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn is quite appealing. The tool alerts you when you receive updates on your networks. Its news feed gives you constant updates about what your friends are up to. And when you want to update your own status, you can do it in Digsby without going to the individual social networks. But beware that right now, Digsby only works with Windows PCs. The company is promising Mac OS X and Linux support in the near future.

Get all your Facebook alerts on your desktop with Digsby.

(Credit: Digsby)

FriendFeed's new look, which was launched as an optional feature for brave beta testers, is now the default for all. The company flipped the switch on it this afternoon, and like previous redesigns there's no way to revert back to the old version. Going to beta.friendfeed.com simply brings users to the normal site.

Along with the new look, the company has updated its post-by-e-mail tools. Previously users had a special e-mail address they could send items to that went directly to their home feed. Users can still use that one, but there's now a central address that anyone can send to (share@friendfeed.com) which figures out your account by the address you're sending it from, then sends it to the right feed. It also lets users send direct messages to one another with a username@friendfeed.com e-mail address.

For users who miss the old design, there's a GreaseMonkey script called Cleaner FriendFeed that nixes the new gray background and makes some slight font and size tweaks to make it look as similar as possible.

The updated e-mail sharing system forgoes special e-mail addresses for a universal address anyone can send to--including direct messages to other users

(Credit: FriendFeed)