In keeping with his programming background, Buchheit produced an organized list of reasons to support that assertion.  He began by writing, "They take big risks. . . .  If everything you do works, then you’re not taking many risks and probably aren’t innovating either."

Then, along the same lines, Buchheit stated, "They are willing to build new technology seemingly unrelated to the core business."

Buchheit’s third reason may be a little more debatable.  He argued, "They compete in positive ways.  Many companies compete in ways that actually destroy value, such as using patent lawsuits to slow down or kill competitors.  Google’s weapon of choice is more often open source and open standards."

Finally, drawing on his own experience working at Google for about seven years, Buchheit observed, "They don’t seem to mind honest criticism."

Buchheit’s list should relieve Google fans, many of whom were a bit alarmed by his earlier criticisms.  The list could act to fend off Google’s detractors, too, since Buchheit, who’s known for making good calls, clearly contended that these advantages outweigh problems within the company.

Items from a room can also be optionally viewed on your FriendFeed homepage. Should you decide to do this and a shared item from a private room shows, a lock item will be displayed next to it. This new feature also means that when you hit the “Share something” button now, there’s a selection box to select either your main feed or another room. Also, there is now a “Reshare this entry” link in the More menu, which lets you to copy an item you see in Friendfeed to another room.

The rooms feature seems very interesting, and I’m curious how useful it’ll be in the long run, as it’s a bit early to tell. FriendFeed’s Paul Buchheit explains to me that a room “is like a mini-FriendFeed.” Paul says, “We’ve been using it internally and have already found it to be really useful for sharing things with a specific group of people, or for discussing a specific topic.”

Even if you decide to make a room public, it may be a way to create discussions with some distance to the rest of the main FriendFeed stream created around your subscriptions and subscribers; another way to shard your FriendFeed view, and another way to subscribe to news topics. As a potential downside, rooms may also require more user understanding in regards to what is public and what is private on FriendFeed, and could add some confusion here and there as to how the system works… alongside some perhaps small risk people accidentally share something in the wrong channel. On the other hand, when people understand that everything that’s not a private room must therefore be public, it may also clear some debates that previously existed on FriendFeed in regards to whether or not a certain discussion is public.

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The one business that has most gotten my attention, other than Qik.com, so far this year is FriendFeed. They are growing very quickly, 25% every few days.

Today I was fortunate to meet up with co-founder Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit. If you don’t read these two guys’ blogs (here’s Paul’s and here’s Bret’s), you really should, they have written a ton of stuff that entrepreneurs should read.

It’s long, 46 minutes or so, but today I visited FriendFeed’s offices and met up with their team, which includes some of the original authors of Google Maps and Google Gmail, who left Google to start FriendFeed. We cover a LOT of ground.

We learned a lot (there were people asking questions on my cell phone thanks to Qik) and we learned that they are attempting to build a new, scalable, culture.

At 2:57 we cover what FriendFeed is, that’s really where the interview starts getting interesting.

What do you think? Does your opinion of FriendFeed change after getting a chance to spend some time with Bret and Paul?

The first video ends abruptly when the 3G disappeared, we restarted the phone and finished off the interview here.

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