At Startup School last year, Paul Buchheit said that Friendfeed was an aggregator of social media traffic in much the same way that an e-mail client was an aggregator of SMTP traffic.

Paul is a really really smart guy. It makes perfect sense.

The problem is that Facebook does a pretty good job of being an aggregator of social media traffic too. You can post articles and status updates, photos, etc. I have my Twitter posted to Facebook as well. And with the addition of threaded comments and "Like", etc., in many ways Facebook has made Friendfeed obsolete.

It's almost like Facebook and Friendfeed both came up with the same idea of sharing information and being an aggregator of social media traffic. Except Friendfeed started with the aggregation features, and Facebook started by building a critical mass of users.

When it comes to sharing information with people you know, the critical mass of users wins.