A few weeks ago, I got a chance to sit down with FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor. If you haven’t heard of FriendFeed, well, it’s been getting tremendous buzz this year as the next Faceboo k, Twitter, or whatever. It hasn’t drawn a huge mainstream following, but like Twitter, it’s attracted a lot of hardcore, social media types. What makes this (maybe) more than hype, though, is that the four co-founders all have strong pedigrees. Each spent time working at Google and made significant contributions. Taylor, for instance, was a product manager who helped launched Google Maps; Jim Norris was a software engineer who helped develop Google Maps; Paul Buchheit was one of the main engineers behind Gmail; and Sanjeev Singh also worked on Gmail. FriendFeed launched a little less than a years ago. Essentially, it’s a place that aggregates all of your social media activity. As people join more and more social networks or Web 2.0 sites, they face a problem of tracking all their activity across all these platforms. FriendFeed tries to pull all of that together in one place. In a way, it’s like Facebook stripped of all the social networking tools (no profiles, for example). Instead, it solely focuses on the feed aspect. What’s interesting though, is that users have decided its also a great spot to discuss their various pieces of content, a development that the founders had necessarily intended or expected. “One thing we didn’t anticipate is that conversations would be a driver in the growth of our product,” Bret Taylor. “But it makes sense. One of the things you want to do when you discover something interesting is that you want to talk about it.” I discussed the background of FriendFeed with Taylor and where he sees the service going next. Less