This week is Y Combinator’s Demo Day (NetworkEffect will be in Mountain View, CA, on Tuesday for coverage of one of the sessions), followed by those of AngelPad, 500 Startups and Tech Stars New York in the coming weeks. Each will feature rapid-fire presentations from the hopeful founders of the Groupon of the enterprise, or Foursquare for moms, or the Gilt Groupe of gadgets, or AirBnB for dogs (I’m mostly kidding, but you get the idea).

Demo Days are intended to attract interest from press and investors and serve as a sort of culminating experience. But these days, companies have often launched or raised money along the way.

In the case of Y Combinator, the alpha dog of the accelerator programs, the 45 presenting start-ups have already been offered $150,000 in convertible debt from Yuri Milner and SV Angel’s new Start Fund, and most or all of them have taken it. (So perhaps they’re now sustaining their late-night coding binges with fancy noodles and exotic tea.)

Some think Start Fund’s copious check-writing will mean other angel investors will have less of a chance to invest in Y Combinator companies, as the extra cash will help the start-ups skip over angels and go straight to venture capital. And many early investors, including VCs like Charles River Ventures, have already forked over investments for some of the 45 new YC startups.

The funding scene is currently so competitive, many of these companies can get money when and if they want it. And we expect to hear angels, as usual, grumble about getting shut out of the best deals.

A couple of the names I’ve heard come up as expected highlights of the current YC batch include the campus flirting site LikeALittle and the real-world friend-finding facilitator Grubwithus.

Participating founders take Demo Day very seriously. Earbits CEO Joey Flores, a current Y Combinator participant, wrote on Sunday in a blog post already viewed more than 15,000 times (the whole Y Combinator experience has become fetishized) that participating in the program is similar to joining the Marines.

It is crawling on your belly through mud with bullets whizzing over your head intense, with a looming deadline that feels like it’s going to make or break your entire existence… Everything you do between the starting of your company and that day will change how easy or difficult it is to raise money, and what value [investors] put on your company. Effectively, if YC is Marine Corps Boot Camp, Demo Day is the day we go on our first real mission with live enemy fire.

For context, the Y Combinator presentations this week will feature the six-year-old program’s largest class ever, and the first to be formally advised by new Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and co-founder of FriendFeed. Buchheit joined Y Combinator from Facebook, which recently committed to giving the program’s companies special attention and resources.

Image via Flickr user GoonSquadSarah.

The money was actually raised last fall in two rounds after the company completed the Y Combinator program, but for whatever reason it’s been kept under wraps. NetworkEffect took the opportunity to talk with co-founder Rudy Adler about his year-old start-up this week.

“The Internet was missing a past tense,” is Adler’s quip to explain the motivation for 1000Memories. The site offers a central place for mourners to contribute pictures, stories and the like, with the promise of becoming a permanent collaborative obituary and eulogy.

Sites like Facebook don’t have a great way of dealing with people who pass away, because they are designed for living participants, Adler said. Creating accounts for dead people can be awkward, but perhaps less so on a dedicated, nicely designed site.

Future premium products for 1000Memories may include custom domains, physical memory books, personalized designs and additional storage, Adler said. The company currently helps its users do things like rip and post DVDs, in part because they are often much older and less tech savvy than the average social media user.

1000Memories recently launched a groups feature that was used to memorialize those killed in the Egyptian protests. It went viral, with more than 400,000 page views, Adler said.

In addition to Greylock, participants in the $2.5 million Series A round included Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Mike Maples, Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca. It came through just a couple of months after 1000Memories had raised an angel round worth $500,000.

However, added sources, Google is fighting hard to counter the Twitter offer, so Pichai could easily stay with his current employer. At Google, which he joined in April 2004, Pichai is a VP of Product Management.

If successful, the hiring of Pichai would be a major raid for Twitter, and mark its place next to Facebook as an up-and-comer in the race to entice away top Google executives.

More importantly, Twitter could use the product help.

The San Francisco microblogging company, which just raised a massive funding, has done relatively little product development recently, in large part because its focus has been absorbed by overwhelming growth and infrastructure problems.

Pichai certainly fits the bill as a head of product for Twitter, given his job at Google. The well-regarded tech exec heads the Silicon Valley search giant’s high-profile Chrome browser and Chrome OS efforts.

Pichai was front and center at an unveiling of Chrome OS plans in November, and touted the Chrome browser’s 40 million users only a year after its debut in 2009.

But not everyone is so sanguine. Paul Buchheit, founder of Gmail (and FriendFeed) predicted a very short life for Google’s still-in-beta Chrome OS, noting–on Twitter in December–that he thought the product would be axed or fused with Android in 2011.

As Mobilized’s Ina Fried wrote at the time:

Google originally hoped to have Chrome OS-based computers for sale this year, but has run into some delays. Last week, the company released a beta version of the software and distributed to testers an unbranded laptop running the operating system. However, it’s worth noting that in doing so, Google has hardly made the strongest hardware case for the operating system, using a relatively bulky netbook with a reliable, but hardly power-sipping Intel Atom processor.

The idea of merging the two operating systems has some merit. Doing so would pair a top-notch browser with an ecosystem that already has a lot of applications and developers.

For now, the operating systems are distinct, with Android running hundreds of thousands of applications and used largely on phones, along with a few tablets, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. However, Google VP Andy Rubin confirmed after his appearance at last week’s D: Dive Into Mobile that the company is working on a new version of Android, known as Honeycomb, that is geared exclusively to tablets. (The full video of Rubin’s onstage appearance was posted on our site earlier today.)

Acer and a couple of other hardware makers have said they plan to do Chrome OS netbooks next year once the software is ready.

If hired, Pichai would fill an open spot left by the departure of longtime Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman, who stepped down at the beginning of December.

The attempt to bring on Pichai to lead product brings into question former CEO Evan Williams’s role at the company. When he stepped down as CEO, Williams said it was in order to focus on product strategy, and when Goldman gave up his position, many assumed Williams was the natural substitute.

While Pichai would be a strong choice for the job, he has not been an active user of the product.

Until recently, that is.

Pichai’s own Twitter account has a grand total of 118 tweets, with about a third of them posted in the last month.

Yesterday, in an interview with BoomTown’s Kara Swisher at D@CES, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said some product goals for Twitter included a better experience for passive users and a more “agnostic” experience across platforms.

Costolo also mentioned a new zero tolerance policy for infrastructure problems, and said that Twitter does not consider itself a “platform company,” but rather one that has APIs.

The Google-Twitter connection is strong, and not just on the we-want-to-buy-you front–Google has often cast its acquisitive eyes at Twitter and still does.

And many Twitter employees were formerly Googlers, although not all in the same era or area.

Costolo himself came to Twitter after being at Google, which had acquired his last start-up, FeedBurner.

Other former Googlers include many on Twitter’s product team, such as Othman Laraki and Elad Gil, who were product managers at Google Mobile Maps and Google Toolbar before joining Twitter through its acquisition of their geo start-up Mixer Labs.

In addition, last year, Twitter nabbed Google lawyer Alexander Macgillivray as its general counsel.

And, of course, Twitter co-founders Williams and Biz Stone had worked at Google after it bought Blogger. They created Twitter after they left the company.

It’s possible that Pichai leaving Google might have something to do with the company favoring the Android mobile operating system over Chrome OS, but seems more likely that the Twitter role would just be a compelling opportunity for him.

Twitter declined comment, and Google has not responded to an inquiry about Pichai.

Until this nail-biting talent raid has a resolution, here’s a video of Pichai talking at the Web 2.0 Summit in 2009:

In posts on FriendFeed and Twitter, Paul Buchheit said on Tuesday that he thinks Google will axe the product next year, either fusing it with Android or killing it outright.

Chrome OS will meet that fate, Buchheit said on FriendFeed “because ChromeOS has no purpose that isn’t better served by Android (perhaps with a few mods to support a non-touch display).”

Buchheit is certainly not the first person to question Google’s dual-operating-system strategy. (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer notably did so at last year’s D8 conference, although the soon-to-be exiting Ray Ozzie followed up that he actually sees Android as a bet for the present state of mobile while Chrome OS is a bet on a cloud-based future.)

“Yeah, I was thinking, ‘Is this too obvious to even state?’, but then I see people taking ChromeOS seriously, and Google is even shipping devices for some reason,” Buchheit wrote on FriendFeed.

Google originally hoped to have Chrome OS-based computers for sale this year, but has run into some delays. Last week, the company released a beta version of the software and distributed to testers an unbranded laptop running the operating system. However, it’s worth noting that in doing so, Google has hardly made the strongest hardware case for the operating system, using a relatively bulky netbook with a reliable, but hardly power-sipping Intel Atom processor.

The idea of merging the two operating systems has some merit. Doing so would pair a top-notch browser with an ecosystem that already has a lot of applications and developers.

For now, the operating systems are distinct, with Android running hundreds of thousands of applications and used largely on phones, along with a few tablets, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. However, Google VP Andy Rubin confirmed after his appearance at last week’s D: Dive Into Mobile that the company is working on a new version of Android, known as Honeycomb, that is geared exclusively to tablets. (The full video of Rubin’s onstage appearance was posted on our site earlier today.)

Acer and a couple of other hardware makers have said they plan to do Chrome OS netbooks next year once the software is ready.

Dave Morin

All three companies make mobile apps (primarily on the iPhone) that allow users to take and immediately share images with friends. It seems kind of simple and mundane, but all these smart people seem to think photo-sharing is the future.

Morin and Path are the most convincing about there being a larger idea behind what they’re doing. San Francisco-based Path is stubbornly focused on close personal connections–a.k.a. real friends.

Unlike every other social site, where there’s an implicit pressure to collect as many friends and followers as you can (and at the same time increase the site’s user numbers), Path is only for the people you really know and trust.

In order to force and foster that kind of sharing, Morin’s team has left out many of the social Web features we’re used to. Users can do only two things on Path: Share photos and view them.

There are no reciprocal friend relationships, no likes or comments, no fun photo-editing filters, no publishing photos to services like Facebook and Flickr, no editing something after you post and no global user search (you have to know the email or phone number for anyone you want to add).

And there are additional restrictions. Users can only ever share with a maximum of 50 people (though they can follow more than 50 people, if invited). Every single post has its own privacy settings–you can share with either only the people tagged in it, or only your share list. If you get sick of someone who’s sharing with you, you can “pause” that person until further notice. Users who don’t have iPhones can view photos on the Web.

The most interesting feature for me is that users see which of their contacts have viewed any one photo. So on Path, you can’t lurk in peace. People know when you’ve seen their posts. This might be a little creepy, but it also could cut down on those annoying awkward conversations that sometimes happen when you’ve seen someone post about something online and then they start telling you about it in person.

Photos are tagged with the location where they’re taken automatically, and users can add people and tags. If someone else takes a picture at that same location, tags that have been previously used near that place recently will be at the top of the list.

The idea is those tags will be used to help users relive their memories stored on the service. So, for instance, someone Morin shares with could retrace his “path” of wine tasting in Napa by zooming in on a map of the pictures he posted from California wine country.

But the thing is, if you want to go try Path (which you’ll be able to do in the U.S. and Canada as of 9 pm PT tonight by going to Apple’s App Store, and in the rest of the world within a few hours), it’s going to seem rather empty at first. You’ll have to seek out friends to share with from scratch–but even worse, nobody will be sharing with you until they decide to add you.

Unlike just about every other social service, Path is not really viral. At all. So even though it’s interesting, its numbers are highly unlikely to correspond favorably to those of competitors like Instagram. And after all, how many mobile photo-sharing apps are you really going to use?

“We really prioritize slow organic growth over hyper-viral growth and going after influencers to build this really steep graph,” said Morin, who formerly helped lead Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect before leaving the company in January. “We are building Path to be a 30-year brand.”

He added, “Many of the photo-sharing apps are photo-blogging apps and popularity contests. On Path, you should always feel comfortable being yourself.”

This antiviral stuff almost seems like overkill, but Morin grounds Path’s feature decisions in the theories of the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (known for the oft-cited “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 acquaintances, he also proposes that 40-60 people is the outer bound of our personal networks) and Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who talked about the difference between experience and memory in a well-received TED Talk on happiness).

If this hyper-personal stuff works, I think Path could potentially create a third major category of social network, distinct from the kind of relationships found on the two current giants, Facebook and Twitter. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves–and c’mon Dave, you should really let people comment on and like their friends’ photos.

Path was co-founded by Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, both formerly of Napster. The staff also includes Mallory Paine, who helped engineer the iPhone photo and camera apps for Apple, and Matt Van Horn, who formerly did business development at Digg. Fanning is chairman and landlord of the company but is working on his own other projects day-to-day.

Path has already raised a jumbo seed round with Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Betaworks. The company also provided us with an extensive list of individual angel investors: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Dustin Moskovitz, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Anderson, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Fadi Ghandour, Matt Cohler, Sam Lessin, Bill Randuchel, Karl Jacob, Paul Buchheit, Ruchi Sanghvi, John Couch, Michael Parekh, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Maurice Werdegar, Don Dodge, and Chris Kelly.

Paul Buchheit

Buchheit has joined Mountain View, Calif.-based Y Combinator as a partner, a move that wasn’t altogether unexpected as he had been closely affiliated with the start-up incubator program. As an angel investor, Buchheit is the all-time leader for total YC companies backed. By the time the last three-month YC session had ended with a public Demo Day presentation to potential investors, Buchheit had already funded five of the 36 companies.

Buchheit is most famous for his work at Google, where he created Gmail, built the first prototype of AdSense and came up with the motto “Don’t be evil.”

Today is Buchheit’s last day at Facebook, where he had not held a particularly public-facing role. That’s in contrast to his FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor, who quickly rose through the ranks at Facebook and was named CTO in June. FriendFeed had been acquired for $50 million in August 2009.

In a blog post announcing the move, Y Combinator partner Paul Graham said of Buchheit, “He’s a good friend as well as one of the world’s best hackers; for years we’ve considered him an honorary YC partner.” Within the Y Combinator community, Graham is known as “PG” and Buchheit as “PB.”

Harjeet Taggar

Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston said that the new expanded team of six partners should allow the program to invest in more companies. YC classes have grown significantly over time; the first session had only eight companies.

“I changed my privacy settings to be more public. I like the ability to share things with people more easily,” said Buchheit, whose company FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook. He sets all of his information to be open to everyone except his phone number and email, he said. He features a photo of himself with his wife, and even lists his birthday (although only the day, not the year).

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Yes, that’s Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in shorts, knees and all, in a picture taken right “after signing the papers” to acquire FriendFeed for $50 million. The deal was announced today.

One of FriendFeed’s founders, Paul Buchheit, posted them on his account at the online content-sharing site, to much merry comment.

They look like they were taken at night in someone’s driveway in Silicon Valley (nice fence!), although the person who took the shots is not identified.

(BoomTown is assuming it was not Twitter’s Biz Stone, since it would be a total geek rumble.)

From left to right, above: Vaughan Smith, Facebook’s deal guy; FriendFeed co-founder Jim Norris; Buchheit; FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor; and Zuckerberg.

Buchheit said in a comment that the last co-founder, Sanjeev Singh, was boarding a plane and was not there.

In the second picture, below, social networking czar Zuckerberg is seen bathed in the light of one of his very best friends, an Apple (AAPL) MacBook Pro, yukking it up with his new minions–ex-Google (GOOG) execs, who will soon discover that one Mark decree is equal to one Sergey order plus one Larry declaration from on high.

After Facebook announced today that it had acquired online content-sharing site FriendFeed, BoomTown had a short chit-chat with Facebook’s Director of Product, Chris Cox, and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor.

Although neither budged on telling me about the purchase price, which various Silicon Valley venture capitalists I spoke to estimated to be about $50 million in cash and stock, they both talked about how copacetic the two companies were.

Benchmark Capital and angel investors had put about $5 million into the start-up, which–while innovative–has failed to garner the red-hot growth of either Twitter or Facebook since it was founded in 2007.

(I mean, even if No. 1 FriendFeed Fanboy Robert Scoble said that too, it must be so!)

Cox and Taylor said the companies came together after several months of casual conversations, probably sometime after Twitter spurned Facebook’s $500 million stock-and-cash offer last year.

But, as in failed love affairs, moving on is the next best thing to do!

“At its core, we have the same vision for these types of products around real-time sharing and discovery,” said Taylor. “The ideas we have and view from Facebook were converging, so this made sense.”

He also noted that Facebook’s huge user base of upward of 250 million people–especially compared to FriendFeed’s one million monthly unique visitors–”was an offer we could not pass up.”

While in a previous interview with me Taylor and one of his other co-founders, Paul Buchheit, said they wanted to remain independent, the former Googler said “this was right thing for our company.”

And how, since Facebook was working on a lot of the content- and update-sharing features that FriendFeed had been pioneering so well, and Twitter had pulled so far ahead in the horse race.

Taylor agreed, referring to Facebook. “When such a large successful company is working on solving that problem too, we realized we could work more effectively in their organization,” he said.

Facebook’s Cox agreed that one-plus-one equaled Twitter-killer. (Well, he did not say that–I did!)

“We have watched [FriendFeed's] products from the beginning and the people themselves are just amazing,” he said, making the purchase sound a lot more like a talent acquisition than anything else.

Cox noted that time was a-wasting too in the real-time and sharing arena.

“I think all this stuff is evolving very quickly and and at the speed of light and there are not many that understand it at a deep level,” said Cox. “We just feel it’s important to have those people in the room and in the building, and not just on Facebook.com, but everywhere in the world.”

While it is unclear what kinds of products would evolve, both said a “culture match” would facilitate good things.

Not that it will be easy, said Cox: “Facebook operates at such a scale that we approach this with a high degree of humility.”

Neither would comment about my question of which side would have to now reign in FriendFeed fanatic Scoble, who loves the service the way a tween girl loves Robert Pattinson of “Twilight.”

Here is my video interview with Taylor and Buchheit last December, as well as a tour of FriendFeed’s Mountain View, Calif., HQ:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090810/take-that-twitter-facebooks-cox-and-friendfeeds-taylor-talk-about-the-acquisition-but-not-the-price-at-which-boomtown-makes-a-guess/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090810/facebook-acquires-not-twitter-oops-friendfeed-plus-the-full-press-release/ http://allthingsd.com/20090810/facebook-acquires-not-twitter-oops-friendfeed-plus-the-full-press-release/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:26:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17251

Facebook said today it is acquiring FriendFeed, the online content-sharing site.

It is a logical fit for the huge social networking site, which has lagged behind microblogging kingpin Twitter in the real-time news, search and status game of perception in Silicon Valley.

Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed has also trailed well behind Twitter, despite its top-notch pedigree of ex-Google (GOOG) staffers, such as Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The other ex-Google co-founders of FriendFeed are Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh.

Benchmark Capital and angel investors had put about $5 million into the start-up, which had been a darling among the digerati.

Despite that, the start-up only broke one million unique visitors recently, according to several reports, while San Francisco-based Twitter was reported to have upward of 44 million in June.

But FriendFeed will surely get a turbocharge from its Facebook ownership, especially as its technology is fed to its 250 million users.

While Facebook–which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.–has added some of the same functionality that FriendFeed has innovated into its famous News Feed, it will surely get its own boost from adding FriendFeed’s dozen employees, 11 of whom are engineers.

Terms were not disclosed, but the purchase price is likely well under the $500 million Facebook offered Twitter last fall.

In fact, sources estimate to me that the price was about $50 million in cash and stock for the company, which was founded in 2007.

It is also unclear what will happen to the standalone FriendFeed service in the long run, although Taylor said in an uber-cute blog post (see below) that it would remain intact for now.

This move, although prominently unmentioned by Facebook in its full press release below, is most certainly a shot across Twitter’s bow.

Here’s the official word from Facebook, as well as that blog post by FriendFeed’s Taylor about the acquisition:

Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed

PALO ALTO, CALIF.–August 10, 2009–Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “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.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “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.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.”

FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request

We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle…

The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop–keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.

What about the FriendFeed API?

The FriendFeed API will also continue to operate normally. As above, we will let you know as we settle on our plan to more fully integrate with Facebook.

Check out the official press release for more information.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090810/facebook-acquires-not-twitter-oops-friendfeed-plus-the-full-press-release/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081208/kara-visits-friendfeed-now-in-six-new-languages/ http://allthingsd.com/20081208/kara-visits-friendfeed-now-in-six-new-languages/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:00:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=7389

This morning, FriendFeed, which is a kind of content delivery version of Twitter, went international, launching in six new languages–German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified Chinese.

Now live, the move is a natural extension for the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up–which was founded earlier this year by a small gang of ex-Googlers: Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh. The company says that one-third of users already use FriendFeed in languages other than English.

More languages are planned, said the company, which specializes in super-aggregating updates of all kinds for social-networking and news items in an ongoing feed from places like Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Twitter and Flickr.

Given all the dissipated ways people communicate on the Web, FriendFeed lets users collect all these links, some of them in rich media and some just text messages, to share publicly or privately.

I find the service very useful and compelling, so I paid a visit to its HQ last week to chat up Taylor and Buchheit.

We talked about a range of topics, including–my favorite–monetization, or lack thereof, of a lot of terrific Web 2.0 services like FriendFeed and Twitter.

The pair, in a less overt manner than Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams, did acknowledge the focus on growth over revenue, although they did seem intent on figuring out a true business plan sooner than later.

FriendFeed certainly has time to do so–it is a small and inexpensive start-up with a dozen employees, funded with only $4 million from Buchheit and Singh and $1 million from Benchmark Capital.

Here’s the video (excuse my gruff-cold-and-cough voice):

[ See post to watch video ]

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