Will FriendFeed be as kind as Twitter? May 13, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , add a comment
Just read this piece about FriendFeedLinks on TechCrunch and the first thought I had was — will FriendFeed have a problem with this? After all, could you imagine a MicrosoftLinks or GoogleLinks?
Corporate lawyers live for this kind of stuff. But that was before Twitter.
Twitter really changed things by not going after 3rd-party services and the companies who used their name or likeness. Twittermail, Twitterrific, TwitterSecret — the list goes on and on. I believe the jury is still out on this trademarkless strategy as they can never reign it back in. True, they have allowed an incredible Twitter ecosystem to be created with so many tools and services they could have never built, but if the time comes where they need to expand their footprint, can they do it without squashing a friendly complementary service? I suppose they can buy out the good ones, but they can’t buy everything around them. And they clearly can’t put the genie back in the bottle and try to protect their trademark.
So, I’m intrigued to see if Twitter started a trend here by encouraging (or maybe it was just dumb-luck ignoring) unaffiliated hackers to use their name — or are the lawyers at FriendFeed just getting warmed up? The founders are from Google after all, and the company had a lot of experience in trademark law, albeit, defending their own trademark violations.
The Dark-Side, Dick Cheney equivalent is Facebook. If you’ve developed an application on Facebook or even tried running an ad, you know what I mean. They are the anti-Twitter where you can’t even use the word “face” in your app name or ad text. They allowed RockYou’s SuperWall and Slide’s FunWall as an application, but you can’t use the word “wall” in an ad. WTH?
I’ll give FriendFeed a couple of weeks to respond to FriendFeedLinks and if they do nothing, I call dibs on FriendFeederrific.
UPDATE: Saw Louis Gray had a mention about FriendFeedMachine today (and he wrote about them last month), so I guess FriendFeed is letting the trademark go and going the way of Twitter.
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