With Twitter down all the time, the super-early adopters are getting frustrated and looking to FriendFeed as their salvation. Duncan (over at Inquisitr now) argues that it is time for FriendFeed to kill Twitter. And Jason Kaneshiro at Webomatica already has FriendFeed Fever. He thinks it can not only replace Twitter, but also Facebook, Google Reader, and Digg!
FriendFeed certainly has a lot of potential, but it still has a lot of killing to do. Not much data is available for how FriendFeed is actually doing, other than blog headlines on Techmeme. The life-streaming service does not even register yet on comScore, for instance. Compete counts only 150,000 monthly U.S. visitors, versus 1.2 million for Twitter (and that only takes into account visits to Twitter’s Website, not all the other ways people use the service—other apps, mobile, etc.). Just to keep things in perspective.
And, of course, let’s not forget that there are other forces afoot on the Internet at large, specifically the dream of true data portability, that could in turn kill FriendFeed.
So is FriendFeed the future, or merely pointing the way to the future? Only time, and the execution capabilities of the team at FriendFeed, will tell.
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I don’t get all these Twitter and FF comparisons, in my eyes they’re not the same service and can’t compete with each other.
I think friendfeed is a really good idea, but i still dont ever think it will become as big as twitter. Places like friendfeed are just basic applications that the average user will only use once or twice.
I think sometimes you can have too much info to even think about controlling. Friendfeed was needed because no one else was doing it in a simple format. But it is very overrated. Simple idea, well executed, limit lifespan!!
Alex Brooks that’s quite a naive way of looking at it.
good luck to both of them !
The echo chamber is amazing. For all the blog hype, Twitter is still a niche service. On the other hand, Friendfeed isn’t even big enough to call itself a niche service yet.
Friendfeed is going to kill Facebook? Yeah, right. A few months ago I pointed out at http://www.25hoursaday.com/web.....sFeed.aspx that it would be trivial for Facebook to enter this market and they already have a critical mass of users’ social graphs. And as expected, Facebook’s announcement at http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=17720842130 brings them also on par with the number of services Friendfeed was aggregating when I first heard of the service.
Friendfeed needs to differentiate if they don’t want to be road kill. So far all they’ve done is piggy back off of Twitter which wouldn’t even be happening if Twitter’s downtime wasn’t so ridiculously high.
FriendFeed is an aggregation tool. Twitter, a communication tool.
They may be serving the same market (early adopting tech geeks), but not the same purpose.
Without Twitter, FriendFeed would have one less source of content, but still not serve as an outlet for quick (and sometimes strange) thoughts.
Early adopters talk about FriendFeed long-term perspectives, not the current state of affairs. _Potentially_, FriendFeed is much bigger than Twitter.
….what Dare said.
FriendFeed has replaced Twitter for me 1000%. With FriendFeed I get everything I got from Twitter but so much more. It has also completely replaced RSS for me.
@Travis, you are wrong about FriendFeed being an aggregation tool and Twitter a communication tool. It depends on how you use it. For me it’s definitely a communication tool. Marshall Kirpatrick and I were communication real time in it yesterday as I turned the RWW room over to him live online.
Until you’ve spent a good 3 days or so inside of FriendFeed following at least 300 people or so it’s hard to adequately share why this absolutely is the next thing.
The “hide” feature seriously allows you to manage noise and news is breaking inside of FriendFeed faster than Twitter and Techmeme. FriendFeed is where 90% of the stories I’m blogging now are being sourced.
Most of all FriendFeed is simply fun. The conversations there happen almost real time and there’s a new interesting one to jump into whenever you want 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
@Travis again, to say that FF is not a communication tool is naive.
It’s communication based on said aggregation.
To follow what is being said about this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/d99435.....165e2f73d5
so friendfeed has taken over from facebook which took over from digg as new prince of silicon valley.
its alright and I like the new room feature but I hate the design, interface and name.
i am reading the biography of Gen’l George Doriot, the father of the modern venture capital business, recently written by Spencer Ante of Business Week
in it he quotes Doriot as saying:
“every company must understand that somewhere there is another company building a product that makes yours obsolete”
so of course, both Twitter and FriendFeed are vulnerable.
the only way to keep the user base is to keep innovating and improving their services.
i think twitter’s challenge is clearly reliability, availability, and scalability. dave winer has some interesting stats on his blog, scripting news, that sheds some light on that challenge
i think FF’s challenge is building a simpler more mainstream service. i am a geek, i love social media, and i can’t get any value of out FF. so it’s got a long way to go on that front.
hopefully the competition between the two will make both better
fred
Here’s a non-technical viewpoint of a twitter user:
I signed up for Twitter because the blogosphere told me to; more specifically, the techosphere. When I first signed up I ran a gmail contacts scan to see if any of my friends or family had signed up for Twitter. I found 0. This was out of a scan of roughly 400 contacts. Thus, I was discouraged and never took to using the service.
Fast forward three months. Twitter is exploding. Every 3rd post by Mike Arrington is about Twitter. So I became curious again. I logged onto my old account, ran an email scan, and found 2 friends. Two! And worse yet, they happened to be big names in the online tech world that I had e-mailed for various reasons in the past.
Anyway, my point is this: For those of us who follow careers paths outside of tech and have no interest in staying up to date on the latest breaking news of silicon valley will unlikely use Twitter any time soon, if ever. Also, us non-techies all hit an age where the Facebooks and Twitters of the world serve very little purpose in our lives.
Add SMS.. catches up Twitter in no time..
“true data portability”…
I’m kinda with Rubel on this one. http://www.micropersuasion.com.....eed-t.html
they are both terrible services. simply because they aint got no girls i can give the business to.
Rubel just said that by end of summer FriendFeed is likely to be his browser’s homepage. That’s saying alot. http://friendfeed.com/e/25c306.....7643648b6e
man i just signed up for friendfeed today…this site is soooo tight!!! luv it!
The thing about FF taking over for RSS and other info sources is that someone has to actually read other news sources and bring them into FF (unless the blogger uses FF, of course). I get lots my info from outside the blogosphere for things like the finance industry, enterprise, Supply Chain, and so forth. It’s good for the consumer tech info though. Youtube, flickr, and those types of sources bore and distract me.
The thing about FF taking over for RSS and other info sources is that someone has to actually read other news sources and bring them into FF (unless the blogger uses FF, of course).
Frank, actually not exactly. You can set up imaginary friends in FriendFeed. I’ve set up imaginary friends for 100 or so of my favorite Flickr/Zooomr photographers so that I can continue to see their work even though they are not on FriendFeed yet. You can do the same with your favorite RSS feeds or any non FriendFeed user that is on any of the social networks that they support.
I subscribed to an imaginary friend for breakingnews from Twitter for instance, even though this account is not on FF yet.
@Thomas Hawk - “Until you’ve spent a good 3 days or so inside of FriendFeed following at least 300 people or so it’s hard to adequately share why this absolutely is the next thing.”
Why should any service in the near or long term that wants to become the “next big thing” be dependent on regular users friending or following 300 people to understand how useful it is?
Great communication tools are really good at 1 on 1 communication, additional people in the conversation is the added benefit that enhance the service not define.
Most users will quit the using the service if they don’t get the full benefit at 10 users let alone 300.
@fred wilson Totally true.
Twitter is great because it is simple to use. So simple that my grandmother can just start using it.
But Friendfeed is different, it is tougher to use for mainstream users and there is too much irrelevant content.
@Michael - What point does Rubel actually make in his post? He says he likes the service but nothing more.
He doesn’t justify why “Friendfeed the Next Big Thing or are We Just Bored 2.0?”
Why should any service in the near or long term that wants to become the “next big thing” be dependent on regular users friending or following 300 people to understand how useful it is?
Samson, very true. I’m just saying that for the early adopter who might want to try it out, you may need to spend more than 15 minutes on the site to realize it’s potential. It took me a bit of time and actual using it for it to sink in.
I suspect that FriendFeed’s biggest weakness at this point *is* that there are certain things that are not intuitive and that it takes time to learn. I do suspect though that simplifying their UI is just a matter of time and what makes it sticky in the future will become more accessible. The “hide” feature for instance is invaluable, but unless you play with the site and learn how to use this you don’t feel the power of it.
FriendFeed is the most addictive crack like thing I’ve played with on the web in a long time.
@13 fred wilson - I think you are incorrect in looking at Twitter’s challenges - backend commodities shouldn’t be challenges - the challenges for them are: more user growth and overcoming boredom. They should be studying IRC every day to see - I’ve been there forever and I can tell you that most get bored and leave. I believe this will hurt Twitter. Twitter also has the “ego factor” and that’s it’s greatest asset - by far it’s greatest asset.
FriendFeed is a good aggregator but it has no concept of conversation.
@17 arrington - rubel says in his post, “Eager to hear your thoughts either here or on Friendfeed (or here or here, or wait, here - yikes too many comments in too many places)” - this is why FriendFeed is in trouble. I’ve suggested a way they could easily fix this issue and create a more powerful medium. Click my name to read the details on my suggestions.
@Thomas, Thanks, I hadn’t tried that “trick” yet (Hell, it took me 2 months to use Twitter’s ‘track’ feature). So, FF is being used by many AS an RSS reader.
The one problem is that in the B2B world, many of the sites I read do not have RSS yet (probably never will), and others are paid/ authenticated feeds, so a desktop RSS reader is my only choice for a one-stop-shop.
well…. I’m kind of with Alex Brooks on this one, but I’m also with Dare, and agree with Pavlo…. basically I don’t think that they are truly competitors even though the market is making them out to be. While FriendFeed, SocialThing and even the new Facebook additions may compete relatively head to head, I don’t see Twitter in this competition. Twitter is for posting and the others are for viewing and tracking (yes I know you can post with all of them, but this is what Twitter is designed for). Besides doesn’t the majority of the content on these services come from Twitter…. Twitter is so embedded in these services, what would be the point to try an knock out? This said other than posting to Twitter (mostly via SMS and IM) I don’t think that I’ve actually logged into it in months, I’ve been using FriendFeed and SocialThing to track it all. I personally prefer the UI of SocialThing, but FriendFeed has simply matured at a much faster rate. Anyways… I can’t see any reason why I would stop posting to Twitter especially based on the fact that I’ve got most of my other ’status’ (facebook, plaxo, etc) all synced with it. As for replacing GoogleReader (or in my case Bloglines)… don’t think so, well at least not for me…. FriendFeed is for social purposes, readers are for News, Blogs and other long text feeds.
@Thomas, Thanks, I hadn’t tried that “trick” yet (Hell, it took me 2 months to use Twitter’s ‘track’ feature). So, FF is being used by many AS an RSS reader.
That’s what I mean by you kind of have to get into FF a bit before you really discover how powerful it is, “hide” “imaginary friends” etc. are all kind of geeky, less than intuitive features that I suspect will get more accessible with development on the site over time.
I have a fever, and the prescription is - more FriendFeed.
Twitter is for communicating, Friendfeed is for aggregating.
The link is not working for inquisitr.com - missing the h in the address.
The thing that’s so sticky about Twitter, for me, is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time on it or do a lot of tweaking for it to be effective.
I already have an RSS reader that I’m happy with. I don’t need to spend the time to hack FF into yet another RSS pipe. And frankly, I don’t feel any need to spend my time trying to evangelize all the people I’ve encouraged to try Twitter into moving to some other service.
Clearly, the bleeding edge crowd has anointed FF as the next big thing. That’s great, but Friendster was once considered bleeding edge too.
this is cause for a post? well, congrats. at least you got ingram to write his dutiful follow to your follow of duncan’s follow (wow, that’s some string!) if duncan ever had a original and interesting thought, i’d bronze it for posterity. but no worries: that’s never going to be the case. now, back to enjoying saturday
WHOSE DREAM IS OF DATA PORTABILITY? IT IS A BALOONEY REQUEST WHEN THE SERVICE IS FREE. WOULD TECHCRUNCH ENFORCE THE DATA PROTABILITY ON COMPANY AND OTHER PROFILES? PLEASE BE REALISTIC AND NOT MAKE A POINT FOR THE SAKE OF IT. IT IS NOT LEADERSHIP BUT FOOLISHNESS.
Hope this won’t be considered spam but I’ve developed a fully-functional social network aggregator like FriendFeed and am looking to sell it as I’m working on another project. It aggregates from the below sites using APIs and RSS;
Facebook
Myspace
Bebo
Imeem
iLike
Twitter
Last.fm
Flickr
YouTube
Xanga
RSS Feeds
If you’re interested, please contact mnewsfeed@gmail.com
Both of these companies are attempting to solve the next billion dollar problem: Information overload.
My gut feeling is that pub/sub has the potential of being the “personal information filter” of the next decade. Whoever owns that space will be the next Google. With a smart strategy and good architecture, Twitter actually has a shot at being the orchestrator of this giant ecosystem.
The field is wide open. There will be more players.
Dare, users may want something different, but first they want something that actually works.
@ThomasHawk said: “Until you’ve spent a good 3 days or so inside of FriendFeed following at least 300 people or so it’s hard to adequately share why this absolutely is the next thing.”
they’re going to have to rebrand if they have a chance after statements like this, i mean it’s devastating…. their usability people apparently have a LOT of work to do
I just wish Twitter was working, then the FriendFeed discussion would largely go away. Though I’ll admit FriendFeed is kinda cool so far.
“true data portability… could… kill FriendFeed” — that is true.
Erick,
You might want to update the Inquisitr link. There’s a typo in it.
times wasters. 5m each has raised. what are they expecting as an exit? seriously no value in either app, the culling of 2.0 companies will begin soon, same story for so many companies 3-5m in funding, good traffic, no monetization schedule, no future upside.
I understand that Twitter is winning this battle. But have you compared the amount of twitters vs. the amount of friend updates on Facebook and MySpace? Who’s to say that these friend updates won’t expand to 140 characters and become what twitter aspires to be?
Twitter and FF comparisons is diffcult?
Myspace and Facebook is diffcult?
friendfeed does everything twitter does (the one thing actually). and bit not only does “all” that…it does it better (faster, more reliable). i dont see twitters popularity last long.
I would agree. I think the $4 gas per gallon will change a lot of this..
Experimented a little with creating an Jabber IM bot that allows you to “tweet” to a FriendFeed room or your personal feed. One stop closer to being more twitter-like? Not sure if that’s a good thing, but people do want it. http://mojipage.com/pages/bot/