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Via de nombreuses sources dont, Techcrunch, nous venons d’apprendre que Facebook fera l’acquisition de Friendfeed. C’est une information qui peut paraître anodine aux non-initiés. Pour ceux qui connaissent Friendfeed et qui ont lu un récent article de Wired Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out, cela apparaît comme l‘élément clé d’une stratégie de pénétration et de domination éventuelle du Web, prodigieuse et vraiment très futée. Friendfeed est un agrégateur d’informations personnelles qui est disséminé via les médias sociaux. Ainsi, sur Friendfeed qui n’est pas encore très populaire (sauf pour les geeks comme moi, voici d’ailleurs mon adresse friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/blanc ), sur le même profil on peut retrouver les twitts, les statuts Facebook, les photos Flickr, vidéos Youtube, les billets de mes différents blogues et une myriade d’informations qui sont encore, pour la plupart, invisibles à Google. À terme, lorsque Friendfeed sera développé à son maximum, ça pourrait être un équivalent de Facebook encore plus puissant que celui-ci. Il était donc crucial pour Facebook de sécuriser ses données pour lui seul surtout à la lumière des paragraphes suivants, tirés de l’article de Wired :

To understand Facebook’s challenge to Google, consider my friend and neighbor Wayne, a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley and a veteran of many big-time programming jobs. I know a lot about him because we are friends. I know even more because we are Facebook friends. On his online profile, I not only find the standard personal-blog-type information—his birthday, address, résumé, and pictures of his wife, son, and step-kids. I also discover that he likes to make beer, that he had dinner at one of my favorite restaurants last week, and that he likes to watch cartoons. Indeed, he has posted something about his life almost every day for the past two months—wondering whether his son’s Little League game will get rained out, asking his friends what the impeller in his central heating unit does.
But if I type Wayne’s name into Google, I learn very little. I am directed to an old personal Web site, with links that have almost all expired, and a collection of computer-science papers he has written over the years. That’s about it.
Hardly any of Wayne’s Facebook information turns up on a Google search, because all of it, along with similar details about the other 200 million Facebook users, exists on the social network’s roughly 40,000 servers. Together, this data comprises a mammoth amount of activity, almost a second Internet. By Facebook’s estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information—news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. But anyone wanting to access that stuff must go through Facebook; the social network treats it all as proprietary data, largely shielding it from Google’s crawlers. Except for the mostly cursory information that users choose to make public, what happens on Facebook’s servers stays on Facebook’s servers. That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for Google, whose long-stated goal is to « organize the world’s information. »

Watch out Google, here comes Facebook…

MAJ
Scobleizer, l’ancien blogueur évangéliste de Microsoft va dans le même sens que mon analyse dans son billet Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

This is Facebook firing a shot at Google, not at Twitter. Twitter is mere collateral damage but Facebook knows the real money in real time is in search. FriendFeed has real time search. Google does not (although it’s bootstrapping there very fast, some of my FriendFeed items are showing up in Google within seconds now). Facebook has 300 million users. FriendFeed and Twitter do not. Google has Wave coming, along with some other things this fall and that forced a shotgun marriage between FriendFeed and Facebook.

et une belle parodie de ces observations dans le clip Downfall — FriendFeed