Twitter is still far larger than its much younger competitor Friendfeed in aggregate terms. But an interesting trend is developing - many longtime Twitter users are noticing that the number of followers they have on Friendfeed is growing far more rapidly than on Twitter. And the conversations at Friendfeed are better, too.
I joined Twitter when it launched in mid 2006 (about 24 months ago), and have, as of today, 20,464 followers.
I joined Friendfeed on February 9, 2008 (about 5 months ago), and I now have 10,177 subscribers, nearly half Twitter count in less than 1/4 of the time.
Like many others, I’m also noticing that the discussions occurring on Friendfeed are more more interesting (and longer) than the equivalent conversations at Twitter. It’s often 2-to-1 on the number of comments. Which means that those Friendfeed users are far more engaged than those on Twitter.
And over the last couple of weeks, as Twitter has been forced to turn off some of the conversational features of the service, I’ve seen this difference increase dramatically.
There are a whole host of reasons - Twitter downtime plays a big part, but Friendfeed is also good at recommending people for you to follow, and the commenting or bookmarking a post is very easy. Twitter’s inability or unwillingness to open up the data pipes is also a factor.
Is this a bad trend for Twitter? Yes, particularly since they are still struggling with their architecture and stability, while Friendfeed sails on in seemingly calm waters.
If the early adopters move on, there’s a reason (they never abandoned YouTube for the shinier competitors that popped up over the years, for example), and it doesn’t bode well for Twitter in the long run.
By the way, that dip in traffic on Twitter, if real, and coincides with recent downtime issues. Twitter’s runway may be shorter than people think. Open source/open standard competitors certainly don’t help things, either.
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Do you really see these two as direct competitors?
If so, do you think FriendFeed is one of the shortlist of companies getting a direct XMPP feed from Twitter (as Summize is, and Gnip is not).
Interesting…
Number like this mean nothing
How many of the people that joined are regularly using either service?
Most Twitter users joined friend feed like me.
I prefer twitter but use friendfeed to auto post my tweets to Facebook as it seems the only reliable way to get them there.
My point is as first stated of what use is statistics like this. It would be good to have data that showed actual daily usage by individual users and as I use friendfeed to load to facebook is this considered using friendfeed really.
Just some thoughts
Everyone has been talking about Friendfeed this way. I have noticed that my friend prefer to spend more time on Friendfeed. I feel like I engage more directly with my friends there than on Twitter or Tumblr. My favorite feature on Friendfeed is likes. You can like what someone else posted and the number of likes you get increases your visibility on the site. It’s kind of like Tumblr reblogs, but more organized. I love this post. I just linked to it on my friendfeed account: http://friendfeed.com/sarahaustin
Why is friendfeed so far behind Tumblr and Twitter when you look at their monthly visits on compete? Is Friendfeed only for geeks or will it catch on?
I am curious to see how pronounced the slowdown of FF followers will be … that will be the real test. My guess is that the migration will continue at a very fast rate through the upcoming week. After that, it should slow down slightly. I am not that shocked by the amount of followers you and other major influencers have gotten on FF recently… you shouldn’t be either… Most of your enthusiasts here and on Twitter have likely already made the move to FF…
I have found the same thing with almost 15,000 followers on FriendFeed.
I think Friendfeed has a far more dedicated user base than Twitter and, therefore, a smaller potential market. I *assume* that the majority of Friendfeed users set up accounts to aggregate their own data for others to see. Conversing with total strangers (a.k.a. internet “friends”) will never be as meaningful as more focused collections of people like Facebook groups, forums, or smaller social networks.
Robert: your FriendFeed / Twitter ratio is higher than Mike’s actually, since you have 28k Twitter users: http://twitter.com/scobleizer
Unless Twitter’s servers just flat out shut down, there is no way that FriendFeed will catch up. This is just a matter of Arrington wanting FriendFeed to catch up and doing everything in his power to do just that.
Well I personally don’t see anything special with FriendFeed. Twitter is by far the most visited and most liked website. FriendFeed is very new. You can’t compare the two.
I haven’t signed up with FriendFeed and don’t intend to. I follow the 37signals theology in that less features = better.
I think its unfair to compare both.. both have different business model. Twitter is true micro-blogging service where as friendfeed is a kind of data collector from various services and keep you up-to-date with what your friends are sharing. Twitter ask you “What are you doing ?” where as FF tells you “What your friends are doing ?” So i guess it’s obvious to have more followers in one than other or glitches in service.
Nik: I like FriendFeed a lot more. The people there are more interesting than Twitter. Plus the tech is a lot more reliable and the search engine is magic.
Michael you should come comment on Friend Feed more often.
How are the people more interesting on Friendfeed?
Sarah: Dave Winer says they are more interesting on Twitter. I like them a lot more on FriendFeed. Discuss: http://tinyurl.com/twitterbright
Twitter vs. Plurk vs. Friendfeed
Twitter: Easy to use. Simple. Lots of interesting users. Down time has become a major problem.
Plurk: Interface is clunky. Friends and Fans, what is the difference? Many of the same folks from Twitter are already there. Usage and number of posts is much less for the folks I know. The conversations for a post are a nice feature.
Friendfeed: Never got into it after signing up. Will give it another shot.
Is there a way to import Twitter folks to Friendfeed? Most are not in my email address book.
The winner [one of these three or something else] will be the service that gets the thought leaders. IMHO people will go where the content is or where they can be part of creating it.
What do you think?
Wait a minute, without twitter, where is friendfeed? Take away the twitters on friendfeed and what do you have?
Andrew: we go through that exercise nearly every day because Twitter is down so often. FriendFeed keeps cooking along just fine. You really need to do more homework than that. Only a small portion of the content on FriendFeed comes from Twitter.
I just “got” friendfeed tonight. When you can see what others are digging, bookmarking, posting photos, commenting on twitter or friend feed - the elongated and linear conversations on friend feed - aside from the “design”..friend feed is WAY ahead in my opinion… and I just got that tonight.
What next ?
We will see another post by Mike, linking back to this post saying, friendfeed pass twitter .. in just 2 moths..
This what happens when a start up is started and backed by veteran’s from google, intel and other reputed comp’s..
Toooo Bad there are not many Intern Openings at FriendFeed..
I Hope they grow BIG BIG BIG and hire more interns and more people…
Cheers, Nag
No one took the bait.
Should Twitter view FriendFeed as competition?
If so, should they be giving them an XMPP feed (as they are for Summize), while denying it to others (such as Gnip)?
I’m not asking from a “what is right?” perspective, but from a “what would you advise?” perspective.
As in, should you feed your competitor preferentially? Does that make them stronger or more dependent?
These are the sorts of questions that I find interesting. Anyone else?
coincidence or am I one of these “people on twitter” having tweeted and FFed this a few hours before this post:
http://friendfeed.com/e/70ad5d.....d-5160-on/
great minds come together?
Do either of these companies generate revenue?
Nik? Steve Gillmor?
Hi John,
I’ll take the bait. Ha!
I don’t think they should take FriendFeed as competition. FriendFeed is different so Twitter should give them an XMPP feed.
FriendFeed is already contributing content to the site by allowing people to tweet their comments there to Twitter.
I think it’s the bloggers who decide competition.
Robert, why don’t you report on Friendfeeds actual breakdown, rather than chiding in on people to do “their homework”- that’s your job isn’t it? I think for most casual users their impression of FF is that it’s dominated by redirected tweets.
True, the conversations are more dynamic, but they also include alot more shrill flame wars as well. Scarcity, in terms of the 140 character limit is a huge upside. This is doubly true for mobile. In short, while FF stands tall in the über geeky forum chat on steroids, Twitter has (at least when it’s working ) a firm grasp on the burgeoning microblogging “communications utility”.
For those who missed Celley Nye’s post last week, I built a guided tour from it for the FriendFeed converts ;).
http://www.jogtheweb.com/reade.....rackId=165
Seemed only fair as I’d posted a similar track for Twitter:
http://www.jogtheweb.com/reade.....rackId=148
Fu%&em both
Panama Jack, Go to Twitter’s blog and see how often they’ve been down or doing maintenance in the last 10 days. How would you react to that if this was your company or a pay-service? That’s completely besides the point too … Twitter is myopic, even if it were stable. It is 2008’s Friendster.
I think the reason for half the number of followers is very simple.
if you follow one or two a-list bloggers you get their friends (IE other alisters) in your stream so you end up following them too. Most normal users don’t have this and there is not the same mutal follow culture neither. I do prefer the conversation model over twitters. Twitter could fix this with a new message type that is public but not displayed to every user just the one you are responding too.
All I can say is that Mike’s ratio isn’t a direct comparison of FriendFeed’s actual growth. People follow Mike wherever he goes due to his popularity. Compare actual stats and Twitter is still the #1. Besides, Twitter and FriendFeed’s similarities are very few.
I wrote this just before Mike’s post:
http://dailytechtalk.com/comme.....64_0_1_0_C
I don’t follow.
You recently said:
”I agree that Twitter is on track to become an indispensable service. In April I said “Twitter is becoming an Internet utility,” and meant it. Twitter is still a relatively small service, but users are averaging at least 15 twitter messages per day, meaning they are highly engaged. If they can get the platform stable, I believe they will eventually become as ubiquitous as email, instant messaging, sms and other forms of communication.”
Bold statements. My how quickly the attitude changes.
I just think its comical how people are just out there living, solely to ‘flame’ Arrington… i love it.
Panamajack: according to FriendFeed about 1/3rd of stuff coming through FriendFeed is from Twitter. But, that only shows you raw message traffic, not what gets “Liked” or “Commented” on. As for “shrill” stuff, I’m watching every single conversation going through FF and I just don’t see it. Maybe you’re looking at a different FriendFeed than I am. Of course you won’t even give us your real name, so we don’t know your biases. Maybe you work for a competitor and don’t want anyone to know that?
i used to be anonymous on google, a couple of art reviews, that was it … now, crikey, pages of the stuff i have blathered about on ff, twit, disqus
anonymity over
so might as well really go crazy
Notifications on FriendFeed, is still the key thing that is stopping me moving totally to FriendFeed for microblogs. I’ve found a small workaround for this :-). I now get my FriendFeed notifications via IM (Google Chat in my instance). Read about how to do this using imfeed and FriendFeed: http://blog.sherifmansour.com/?p=222
Isn’t it the case that when an interesting community of early adopters becomes successful, more people join and the signal to noise ratio falls? Will friendfeed users migrate to a new community in 6 months as more people pile in?
Ha! I’ll take that as a compliment Robert! I’m a nobody, barely early adopter who still has trouble getting my peeps interested in anything more than their Facebook status updates. The only friend I’ve convinced to use Twitter is doing so for the SMS ability, as he doesn’t have a cell phone but can get through to me via one - now that’s something a new “global communication utility” can boast.
Every FF thread forwarded to me (undoubtedly through Twitter) has resembled a bulletin board style flame war (the Shel Israel - Feldman thing comes to mind in particular), that’s not to say that this makes FF threads all useless, but it’s totally different from using Summize.
On one hand we have folks like Robert Scoble taking the “more the merrier” position, engaging with as many interesting people in what I can only imagine is a stream of conscious type level … amazing really.
Others take a completely different tack, preferring to carefully select who they choose to follow and in turn sacrifice some of their time and attention. Perhaps FF is the superior model for folks like Scoble.
I like Twitter better, and think my friends currently content with Facebook status updates will agree with me in the future, assuming of course they sort out their uptime problems.
I have found that I am still getting more Twitter followers than FriendFeed ones.
Michael:
I can see why you love twitter, friendster and any other service that allows you to have over 20,000 adoring fans following your every tweet. But with all due respect, why would anyone else actually want your or anyone else’s tweets ?
Beyond the beneifts to brand aware users looking to get exposure, no one can explain the attraction. Please give it a try.
Panamajack: I will put this feed: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/discussion up against anything on Twitter. Twitter has a LOT more noise than FriendFeed does. In fact, here, look at all the Tweets going into FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/public?service=twitter
Twitter has a TON more noise. Seriously, compare the two URLs. Now do you see why I’m having so much fun on FriendFeed? Conversations.
Sleeplessinseattle: I love reading other people’s Tweets. Why? It connects me with them. If you think I’m using it to just get exposure I have a neat bridge to sell you.
Panamajack: weird. I actually see a lot more noise on Twitter. Here, take a look at this page that I keep on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/discussion
I can only post one URL per message here, so in the next message I’ll post another URL that I want you to compare it to, which will be all the Tweets that are flowing through FriendFeed. See, if you learn to use FriendFeed’s search engine properly you can really get some wild slices of stuff.
Sleeplessinseattle: for me this is NOT about trying to get exposure, but rather having two-way conversations. I love reading stuff and participating in the conversation (see the above URL for evidence of that).
Panamajack: here’s all the Tweets coming through the system: http://friendfeed.com/public?service=twitter — compare these two URLs for noise and whether there’s a conversation going on.
I am a non-adopter of twitter. My decision has left me feeling about as conflicted as I did when I decided to never watch Batman (1989).
arrington, seriously do you have nothing better to do than whine, moan and babble about twitter? they’re not even paying per post like you’re used to.
I’ve tried FF and found it to be a bit overwhelming. I was wanting to give it another try but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I think the main reason conversations are longer on FriendFeed is because most people using it are sitting at their computer with a nice keyboard. On Twitter most users are on their cell phone which no matter what phone you have is not nearly as comfortable or easy to use as your desktop computers. So, just by the nature of the interface to the service FriendFeed is easier for people to have conversations on.
I like twitter. Ts short and crisp and minimal. People like scoble should be ignored. Dey hv nothing else 2 do than converse throughout the day. And dave winer stop whining all the time….
for gods sake just call it like it is, Twitter has jumped the shark