The next Big Thing - Friend Feed

Paul Buchheit built the first version of Gmail in one day. Then he built the first prototype of Google's contextual advertising service Adsense, in one day as well. Now he's working on a much-watched startup called FriendFeed that he believes just brought to market the next big form of communication online: flowing, multi-person, real-time conversations.

"The open, realtime discussions that occur on FriendFeed," he says, "are going to become a major new communication medium on the same level as email, IM and blogging." That's a pretty ambitious claim, but Buchheit has the credibility to make it.

Things are changing fast at FriendFeed. Buchheit says that the company believes aggregation to be less important than real time conversation. "The open, realtime discussions that occur on FriendFeed are going to become a major new communication medium on the same level as email, IM and blogging. The aggregation component of FriendFeed is a convinient feature and a component of that openness, but not as central as the discussions."

Do you buy that? I'm not sure. But if anyone can lead the charge against incumbent technologies with a new paradigm that combines powerful richness and ease of use - Paul Buchheit might be that person. He did it with Gmail, now time will tell if he can do it with FriendFeed.