According to Facebook’s blog, the popular social utility just added a bunch of new feeds to its recently launched “import feature”. Product manager Peter X. Deng writes:
A few weeks ago, we told you about the new ability to import stories into your Mini-Feed from other sites. Since then, we’ve been working on increasing the number of sites that work with this feature. We’re happy to report that now, you can import activity from YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, and Google Reader in addition to Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp and del.icio.us.
Facebook is clearly seeing value in the “aggregator” market opportunity pioneered by Plaxo [reminder/disclaimer: I head up marketing there], with their “Pulse” offfering, and popularized with the early adopter crowd by FriendFeed. I’m a big believer that Aggregators will play a vital role in the emerging ecosystem of the Social Web, giving users a convenient way to stay on top of what their friends and family are doing at a large and growing list of socially-enabled sites. Aggregators will perform the vital function of “social discovery” in the virtuous cycle of the Social Web, visualized below:
In his coverage of this news, Mashable’s Adam Ostrow points out the parallel with what Plaxo and Comcast are talking about:
The Hulu integration is a pretty cool idea also that was hinted at earlier in the week – now your Facebook friends will know what TV shows you’re watching on the video service – similar to what Comcast appears to have in mind with its Plaxo acquisition.
Other early coverage and analysis by VentureBeats MG Siegler with a piece entitled, “Facebook triples the number of services you can import into your feed — moving in on FriendFeed?“.
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