Friendfeed versus Twitter

Twitter might be the newest new thing for millions of Internet users but, for most of Silicon Valley’s hardcore geekerati, it is Friendfeed that remains the hottest social networking application. If Twitter is emerging as the Microsoft of the emerging real-time Web, then Friendfeed – which unveiled a major upgrade to its interface last week -- is akin to Apple in its ability to muster a noisy following of hardcore evangelists.

Friendfeed, which was founded in 2007 by a group of ex Google engineers, is a real-time aggregation service that automatically incorporates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and any other online content published with an RSS feed. Dramatically more subtle and complex than Twitter, Friendfeed is currently the most ambitious social media application on the Internet, particularly in the ways in which it empowers real-time public and private conversation between its subscribers.

What is striking about Friendfeed is the remarkably passionate responses it elicits from normally sane people. For me and other mainstream web users who crave simplicity and ease-of-use from their Internet tools, it remains an irritatingly over-engineered and elliptical application, the Internet version of Rubik’s Cube. And this may explain why Friendfeed currently has less than 7% of Twitter subscribers and has fewer users now that it had six months ago. Yet, for highly credible Silicon Valley pundits like my fellow Gillmor Gang members Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Steve Gillmor, Friendfeed represents the next big thing in social media.

In spite of my own admittedly rather irrational antipathy to Friendfeed, I certainly urge everyone to sign up with this free service and try it. Whatever one thinks of Friendfeed, this real-time application is, without question, a major technological achievement which, in some shape or form, represents the future of the real-time Internet. The most interesting way for non-geeks to try Friendfeed is to test-drive it alongside Twitter. The chances are that you’ll either love or hate it. Like a good Rorschach Test, your reaction to Friendfeed is probably an accurate indicator of your general attitude to the conversational value of real-time social media.

Given Twitter’s phenomenal popularity with mainstream Internet users, it’s hard now to imagine that Friendfeed can now effectively compete as a straightforward consumer application. As Techcrunch founder Mike Arrington wrote last week, “Friendfeed is in danger of becoming the coolest app no one uses”. But perhaps Friendfeed will emerge as a platform for third party social media developers who can add useful new features – such as real-time video or audio.

That said, I do think that it is unwise to ignore the significance of Friendfeed’s hardcore evangelists. A year or two ago, many people (including myself) were sneering at the value of Twitter. But early adopters like Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Steve Gillmor persevered with the service and now Twitter is growing by more than 30% a month and, according to the web metrics firm Comscore, had around 10 million unique visitors in February. Maybe it is Scoble, Laporte and Gillmor, and not me, who are right about Friendfeed. I hope so. Little would please me more than to be proved wrong about the value of Friendfeed.

Comments

[Jim Connolly]

I love FriendFeed - massively more usable than Twitter AND it actually works!

The new beta is exceptional. I agree with the writer of this excellent post; I think everyone should give it a go.

TheTechNewsBlog

[AC]

The real action is in the client you use. Sure most people start with the webpage but quickly move to an AIR app like Twhirl, tweetdeck or seesmic desktop.

These clients are now starting to integrate all the main microblog tools in one place (twitter, friendfeed, laconica, facebook status, facebook IM and seesmic) with realtime updates, search and even presence/IM.

It doesn't matter what micro blog tool is hot right now but which AIR client has market share because they are beginning to become as important has a general web browser. You could view them as specialist web browsers for microblogs/IM.

Tweetdeck is number 1 at the moment but seesmic desktop is catching fast. Twhirl is currently the best at integrating different services and there are many iphone apps.

[Sascha]

'Non c'entra niente' but I think you may be interested to know.
As you probably have heard, there has been a massive earthquake in Italy, at L'Aquila, with widespread destruction and hundreds of dead.
Obviously, it is on tv almost 24/7. A few days ago, one of the main news programs, the TG1, boasted on his high share of the audience, beating off the others news programs.
This has been widely criticized on the Internet, rightly so.
But, on the other hand, the blogosphere is boasting that the news of the quake were diffused on the Web and Twitter well before television and trumpeting another victory of the new over the old media, at the cost of only a few hundreds dead...
Just a few days ago Nicholas Carr on his blog wrote a post on twitter and earthquakes... I wonder how many people died because they thought first to twit or just phone before running away from houses about to crash...

[Claudio Soares]

Hi Andrew, a friend of mine showed me your blog. Nice blog. Your book 'The Cult of the Amateur' has just been launched in Brazil. Since last week, I'm doing the twitterization of my 2006 novel 'Santos Dumont Número 8' [ http://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/10/170223 ]. In the story, at one scene, a character quotes Seneca: "It is commendable to know some things, it is disgraceful to refuse to learn." It is exactly our current relationship with internet. We study it, understand it, and test it. In my case, taking the view that internet is a new space for the creation of narratives, I'm trying to understand how the functioning of a narrative is impacted by technology. It is not only an issue of translate what we have today in the paper to digital media. That's thinking small. And we would be wasting time if we put all eggs in the basket of a single solution or social network, what we see on screen is a software product, today we talk about Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc, tomorrow we'll talk about others. The important thing is to seize a process. This is what I'm trying to do on Twitter, I created 8 profiles that are telling the story. The main profile is @sd8. The project will last till July, 20, and all my discoveries are being documented in http://www.santosdumontnumero8.com.br. Best regards.

[Ian Thorpe]

Since when did quality, originality and usefulness count for anything on the web. The application that kills Twitter will have to be more idiotic than Twitter.