Came across this New York Times article about FriendFeed, a new service that is reminiscent of what we were looking to achieve with SuprGlu. FF allows you to subscribe to your friends’ Internet activity, e.g. music they listened to, entries on their blogs, or photos they shared, all with the convenience of just one feed. With SuprGlu, which already had the aggregation covered, we had planned on rolling out a feature called SuprFriends, which would’ve allowed you to subscribe to your friends’ Internet “life-streams.” What prevented us from proceeding down this path was:

1. We were self-funding SuprGlu and it had no revenue model–and we disliked pursuing an advertising model at the time
2. It became really tough to scale our technology without additional funding once we had a decent userbase and a TON of data to deal with

So lacking a revenue model and being simply not interested in the venture capital (despite inquiries) because we thought VCs were evil, we decided to work on something else.

It’s not to say that a service like this would be great to have for the masses, so we’re glad someone’s working on it, two years after we tried along with the likes of PeopleFeeds (offline) or Ziki (changed business model).

Public relations is something we’ve been thinking a lot about here, so backstory aside, this post is about PR, and these guys know how to work it. The service is in closed beta and yet they managed a story in the New York Times. Since we like to de-construct what makes a good story, here are some thoughts we think makes it a compelling story despite the early stage of the product: founders are Google/Stanford alumni, service plays with top, well-known social services (YouTube, Digg, Facebook, etc.), and maybe simply good relations with the press.

Around the time when we launched SuprGlu in 2005, a writer from the magazine Business 2.0 decided to cover our service after seeing a demo and the crowd reaction at a New York Tech Meetup. The article was written after several interviews/phone calls with us, and it seemed like we were about to see ourselves in print. Unfortunately, the story did not run in the end despite having been fully written. Had we been a little wiser about PR, we would’ve pursued the matter further and presented it with even more socially relevant angles.

While it may have been an opportunity missed for us, we couldn’t be more excited about the stuff we’re working on today. We wish the FriendFeed guys well on their venture and look forward to seeing where they take their service!