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FreundeFeed: It’s for real

There was a minor ruckus about what looked like it was going to be a German FriendFeed clone called FreundeFeed (=friendfeed in German).

FreundeFeed is still in stealth mode, but given its name and the fact that  it used a clear copy of the FriendFeed logo, it seemed reasonable to assume that it was going to be a very straightforward clone.

The German speaking blogosphere (clearly unhappy with the title of the TechCrunch story started digging a bit deeper and German blogger Martin Weigert managed to talk to FreundeFeed founder Vincent Nicolai and got some more details about the service from him.

Judging from Weigert’s post, FreundeFeed is indeed going to be a direct clone of FriendFeed – however, Nicolai also hints at the fact that FreundeFeed might not be the final name of the project (I assume this was influenced by the discussion about it on TechCrunch).

The service is going to focus on aggregating German language services (like German Twitter clones, I guess) and Nicolai is planning to work with a number of German services and especially on getting them to develop APIs for their services (something German companies aren’t really doing yet).

Interestingly, he is also planning on aggregating Facebook feeds, though it’s unclear how he is going to do this, given that even FriendFeed has been unable to do this so far.

Given that FriendFeed is very US (or at least English language) centric in its choice of supported services, I guess it makes sense that developers are going to jump into the breach here and develop copycat services for their respective language communities.

At the same time, though, most German early adopters are already on FriendFeed, Twitter etc, so it remains questionable if there is even a market for FreundeFeed. I gather time will tell. If anything, more competition in the ‘lifestreaming’ market is always a good thing – as long as FreundeFeed develops on the idea and doesn’t just copy FriendFeed.

If FreundeFeed is done well with a name change a decent community ethics relative to FriendFeed, I would be very surprised if early adopters who happen to be German wouldn’t also subscribe to it. Typically one is not agnostic about their native language even if they will stretch and use English to get access to stuff that would otherwise not be available. Hope they do the right thing.

Good point Janet – I just wonder if people will switch over to a very similar service after they have already made an investment in creating a social network in FF. And for the time being, services like FF very much rely on early adopters as their core user base (though that will, I think, change over time).