Sorry mate. but i cant make out which side you are on?

I’m damn glad they found out it was getting old.

That was like a left hook to the liver from Ricky Hatton. Laptop still smoking and sticky from the bottom, eyes wincing. Championship rounds!

So where do I buy these Open Pops?

I think the “social echo” effect of twitter/friendfeed is terrible too, however I think you’re overstating that FF couldn’t exist without Twitter. For me the value add has nothing to do with comments, its more about easily seeing the lifestreams of my friends and people I’m interested in from a central place. Silo’ed conversations and the @ issue are real concerns, but really, let’s not get hysterical.

“The difference between FriendFeed and Twitter:

Twitter: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.

Ten minutes later….

FriendFeed: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.”

“Well, it’s “Saturday” morning now and no real time stream.”

Oh, boo hoo hoo. Why don’t you try getting a life?

Speking of silo’ed conversations - even on this site I can’t echo my own comment back to my blog or lifestream. Futher, your Trackback service is broken:

Error 503 Service Unavailable

Error talking to backend
Guru Meditation:

XID: 974086878
Varnish

SG! Love your take on this! LOL

Let’s just call it Friend Feed = Feed the Trolls

I even created a Troll room!

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/igor-the-troll

Would FriendFeed have existed before Twitter? Probably not, so you’re right there. But that doesn’t mean if you kill Twitter you kill FriendFeed. You still have…

RSS Feeds
Pownce
Digg
Google Reader
del.icio.us
StumbleUpon
YouTube
Last.FM

Some people like things all in one place without having to go all over the web. FriendFeed is not Twitter, and never will be.

I agree with #10.

Friend feed is a great way to life-cast and let your friends know that you have a presence on the web.
And add Twitter Tweets to the rest of the list, it is like adding glitter.

I live Twitter even if it’s having some of it’s worst days !

Have to agree, all the extra services that FF supports are for me things that if I want to share then I will explicitly share them (and already do so) back on twitter. So I bookmark something on del.icio.us - do I need it to be put through FF? no, because the first place I send any link I like is on twitter! FF at the moment creates more noise, I never ‘got it’, twitter is although flawed/ugly/unstable/annoying it IS the place to communicate in a pure unadulterated fashion and I do not see that changing.

I can’t stop laughing at this part…
“Dave Winer (who has just noticed there is no Block command in FriendFeed) is busy discussing the politics of breakfast cereal decentralization in the Why We Need Block for FriendFeed room and does not weigh in here because he blocked me some months ago and doesn’t care what I had for breakfast or any other meal thank you very much.”

“my blog posts - which have completely ceased since I got sucked into Twitter in the first place”

Okay, wtf is this that I’m reading??

After all this, I still don’t understand what you’re trying to say… what is the connection between FriendFeed (which it’s obvious you don’t like) and the XMPP API that was causing problems for Twitter (which you obviously do like).

It’s one thing to claim that FriendFeed advocates should acknowledge the dependency that FF has on Twitter, but that doesn’t equate at all to a cause and effect relationship between FF and Twitter’s problems.

Also, as the Zach said, there are lots of reasons to use FriendFeed beyond Twitter. I have used Twitter more, since I’ve been frequenting FriendFeed, than I have for over a year. So, in my particular case, there’s actually a causal relationship from FF to Twitter.

Michael, aside from being insightful in so many ways, this is one of the most colorful and entertaining pieces of writing I have seen on the InterWeb for some time!

Of course it will take me months to understand every nuanced bullet point but it’s obviously more than conjecture. I haven’t done anything with my FriendFeed account but send my Twitter RSS there and I already have 10 subscribers!

BTW, they do pictures much better on FriendFeed. Just posted a few on Flickr. In seconds they were on FF. The only way they make it on Twitter is because I have an agent that pumps tinyurl links to them. BTW, you should get over the fact that I blocked you. It was for your benefit not mine. Look at how far you’ve come since then. Now you’re posting on TC and people are actually reading your rants. Gabe thinks they’re meaningful. All Hail Gillmor!

So if you and Arrington hate FriendFeed so much, why do you both maintain accounts there?!

ditto on this… as much as Scoble as been pimping Friendfeed, twitter is much more widely used and the constant outages @ twitter are getting questionable. Maybe with the increased VC funding, Twitter can afford better servers and people to manage the chaos.

I may speak for the minority, but I actually wish FF had a no twitter option. I find the FF information I get about my friends interests and activities from non-twitter sources more valuable. Turns out I don’t give a s$&t what you had for breakfast.

Scott (#20) - you can go Twitter-free in FriendFeed by using the Hide feature. I think you need to do that for each person that you’re following though.

I give Twitter a lifespan of about 2 years (probably 1) before a newly decentralized system kills it, and proves all of the clueless pundits that there is nothing fundamental about the way Twitter works that precludes federation.

Or go Twitter-free by waiting for the next outage.

I like Twitter, no I like Friend Feed, no I like the Puppets, no, no I like RSS!

Hello? How old are you guys?

22

I’m heading over to the Clueless Pundits room to debate that point along with all the other decentralization experts who ignore the fact that Twitter can stop decentralization by failing to fix the XMPP gateway. Today it’s just a technical issue; tomorrow a licensing one.

Seriously. I couldn’t understand a *word* you just wrote.

“FF vs. Twitter” is one tired meme. They’re tools. Use them. Or don’t.

One good use of FF is rounding up items shared on multiple platforms into a FF blog widget that approximates real-time blog updates without having to go through the hassle of writing a full post. That’s enough value-add for me.

You see this is what happens when you drink your first beer. I acted pretty dumb when I had my first beer, but then again I was 13 at the time.

I thoroughly enjoyed this post so much so that I shared it on FF, digg, twitter, and probably 10 others that I do in my sleep.

Nice one.

I’m sorry. Having been involved in the past, I respect Techcrunch and its current set of contributors (as Mike surely knows), but this post is a crock of shit. Can we stop the nonsense now and have you blog elsewhere? Now I know you bring in a few extra eyeballs and all, but this whole post was useless.

I love how you try to play the “look at me being pseudo-techy” rails card after saying that xmpp is to blame a few paragraphs earlier. Which one is it after all, sir? Stop spewing bullshit and go have some sugar pops. I sound like someone on PMS, but I swear I’m not. It just makes me kinda sick that this is the kind of content I see under the TC name these days.

Just because they are ex google, doesn’t mean a thing (as you have stressed in the past). Glad you are coming to your senses. Copycats never survive. Come up with an original idea. Why do I get a feeling that their users would be just tech savvy folks in silicon valley if they survive.

What the hell is wrong with you, I hope that was freakin sarcasm. TechCrunch just lost allot of credibility based on that article. You should be fired.

As amusing as I find it to read all the whining each and every time Twitter has an outage, it just re-emphasizes to me why I avoid social networks, ignore Twitter and don’t bother with FriendFeed. Seems they have a signal to noise ratio that makes hanging out in random IRC channels suddenly seem like a productive use of time…

OH MY GOD!!! I thought I was going to get through a (rather enjoyable) Gillmor post without some mongoloid showing up with, “I didn’t understand a word” …

#26 - Joshua, if you can’t understand plain English then you would be wise to keep that fact to yourself next time… you’ve only succeeded in demonstrating your own idiocy and have done nothing to belittle or otherwise distract Steve. You haven’t gotten that, have you, (or any of “your kind”)? It’s borderline sad, people. (Although it’s a frightening testament to the state of the lesser web… look how many straight up ignorant trolls are polluting the industry. It’s a god damn shame.)

#30 - Conflict much? Your shop “specializes” in “developing” actual products for actual paying clients in Ruby on Rails… You’ve thrown together some basic promotional materials on a couple of occasions … how does that make you “involved in the past”? Talk about “look at me”…

The problem is how Twitter was built. Without rewriting the entire application with scalability in mind I don’t know if they can increase the performance and reliability of the service. That many updates and connections from so many different sources is just too much for a small company to handle. When Kevin Rose posts to 20,000+ people it creates a tremendous amount of updating and with even more and more people joining and posting each day it is getting worse. We have a real time chat application called Signalfire that in not unlike Twitter that can suffer from the same issues within so many simultaneous connections. I was at a talk where DHH had mentioned that if you plan to develop something that takes off in this fashion your going to take a hit on performance. It is not just rails, the database or the host but the structure of the application itself. It is just resource intensive and you must have understood that when you built it. Unless of course you never thought it would go anywhere which I think is the case here.

Now tha FF have introduced ‘rooms’, there are a lot more conversations starting in FF (rather than echoing twitter first), which will make it a lot more relevant with or without twitter.

However, the ‘rooms’ still have their issues… partially closing off the conversation, but also increasing the liklihood of spam - will be interesting to see how it all pans out over the next few days.

FF Rooms are kind of like Twitter on steroids for new users - join a popular room and it’s like you instantly gain hundreds of followers (whether they actually want to follow you or not)… good or bad? I’m not sure yet.

That was really poorly written.

All ff is good for is to add to the noise on the network. There is no need for ff to exist at all. You can achieve the same thing that ff does if you have your own blog or website by pulling in the data there. FF design is also ugly as sin. It makes myspace look like artwork. Maybe if we just ignore the damn thing it will go away.

By the same points Steve Jabber, GoogleTalk and etc can also to be the blame a they are XMPP gateways although at this point whose numbers are greater FriendFeeds or GoogleTalk’s?

As someone who currently has all Twitters hidden (unless they generate comments) in FriendFeed, I can say that it’s actually a much nicer experience WITHOUT Twitter. Having said that, I can also say that FriendFeed most definitely could exist without Twitter being around and they’re quite loosely coupled. Steve must have just been having a bad day. I think he ate some spoiled Sugar Pops this morning.

That made no sense and was annoying to read. Save it for ProseCrunch.

The two are different services. Anybody who doesn’t get that should think about it a bit more in really simple terms. Let’s define the two: FriendfFeed is an hyperaggregator that allows comments and Twitter is a microblog that allows replies.

There are countless feeds that can be brought into FriendFeed to be shared and discussed - if ppl can’t get the value in that, they might wanna get off the tech elite celeb train. Sometimes the tech elite can’t see the forest for the trees. Sure, Twitter is valuable, primarliy for being simple, but so is FriendFeed, primarily for not being so simple.

“… let’s put the blame for all this squarely on the parasite API suckers and their dark master FriendFeed.”

What has FF got to do with any of this? Why should whichever value-add service that was causing the Jabber/XMPP traffic that overloaded their servers have anything to do with FriendFeed?

You seem to be saying that this is all a FriendFeed-instigated conspiracy to take down Twitter, thus raising awareness of Twitter alternatives, which is ridiculous since FF is an aggregator, not a broadcast IM system like Twitter.

Given that Twitter provides ~50% of FF’s traffic, it would seem that Twitter’s downtime hurts FF, rather than helping it.

Can we _please_ change the title of this blog to “Blame Canada”?

Another twitter alternative: Chatterous. Chatterous doesn’t need Twitter to survive either.

Try Jaiku.

Threaded conversations and Channels. Heck, you can even import RSS Feeds from anywhere.

hit me up for an invite. digisal at gmail dot com

Steve,

Please learn to write coherently. Thank you.

this might make more sense if it made sense.

Were you drunk when you wrote this?

I hear this sort of argument all the time.

Usually it’s coming from 65 year old “professional” photographers who try to argue with me about how shooting digital is not only inferior to film but it’s some type of betrayal of sorts as well.