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

The reason why some users have seen a rapid growth in followers is that they are included in the ‘top’ users list when you register. It takes only a couple of minutes to click, click, click to subscribe to all the top users. You can’t do this on twitter.

For regular users (not included in this ‘top users’ list), I would say, from my experience, that you get less followers than twitter.

10 to 20,000 users - esp. Twitter, after 2 years - spells doom - I know blogs that get that kind of activity - and serve more specific purposes. Too many sites are started in hopes of $$$, etc. These two get the notoriety - by 2010 they will be gone or consummed. It is a mathematical sequential certainty - which has been proven over and over by real store front operations over the past 50 years.

For those of you who are able to browse the net from a mobile phone and like the idea of giving a visual dimension to your status updates, I recommend twitxr.
I added the twitxr code on my blog and facebook profile and it functions well.

I have almost exactly half the followers on FF as I do on Twitter too.

For people who still only use Twitter and may feel overwhelmed or too exhausted to try a new platform, yesterday I left a Tweet with a good “introductory” example (just one) of how the experience can be much richer on FF:

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/andrewbaron/statuses/850845463

Imagine that instead of your announcement being a single Tweet, like the one above with nothing else attached to it, your announcement can take this form on the page [ex: I posted a link to an image on ff]:
http://tinyurl.com/64rzrg

Dude you have to admit, Twitter is da Shiz yo! Really cool stuff there.
http://www.FireMe.To/udi

I see much less spam on twitter since I unfollowed the spammers like scoble and brogan.

It’s a much more useful service when you follow people who have something to say instead of something to sell.

If you want to have deep, threaded conversations with a very tech-heavy audience, FriendFeed is better. If you want to have wider conversations with a wider audience without the need for threading hierarchy, Twitter is better.

If you’re trying to connect with other techies, FriendFeed is better. If you’re trying to connect to a wider layman audience, Twitter is better.

Use the “mom” test - sit an average fifty five year old woman in front of each site and see which one they figure out how to use effectively first. Twitter. Which one will power users figure out clever and effective tricks for? FriendFeed.

That points to two completely different usage classes.

The fact that you’re trying to shill for FriendFeed as a Twitter replacement indicates either (a) you’re really weak at analysis or (b) you have a vested interest that is making you steeply unbiased.

i have to agree with chris

michael

it has more to do with your status that everyone see

i think a more unbiais test would be to have an unknown user see how both compares in numbers of followers

IOHO:
FriendFeed is overall a much better, much more comprehensive answer to social networking.

In the near future, it will be no surprise to either see them merge, or FriendFeed just buys Twitter.

Bill Burke
http://wsrmacros.spaces.live.com/

PS -

An interesting statistic, if one could get such from a trustable source,
is a comparison of how much FriendFeed is used daily (globally)
compared to the usage of Twitter.

The Team
http://wsrmacros.spaces.live.com/

This is happening due to one important change in the FF signup process. Now upon signup you are presented with a list of recommended users to subscribe to. And guess who is top on the list, Scoble and Arrington. It just just one click to add them and it is a specific step in the signup.

So I don’t know if FF is really just getting that popular, or it is just because of a change in the signup process that optimizes subscribes to Arrington and Scoble. Just wanted to bring up a important point that changes the reality of this article.

Nevertheless, FF is a cool service!

Ryan

And by “some users noticing” Michael means “I am noticing”.

I see people looking for a tool for importing your twitter contacts into friendfeed
this is my favourite one
http://internetducttape.com/20.....riendfeed/

On Feb 9…
You signed up for Friendfeed… Follower starting point = 0
on that same date you had 6,709 followers on twitter.
SOURCE: http://www.twitterholic.com/twitter/TechCrunch/

As of yesterday follower numbers were…
Friendfeed = 10,177
Twitter = 20,433

Since Feb 9 you have added
10,177 followers to Friendfeed
Over on Twitter you have added 13,724 followers [ 20,433 - 6,709] since that same date. You have gained over 3,000 more followers on Twitter in the same time.

Which service is growing faster?

Is there something I am missing or overlooking?

It’s not unusual that the people who love FriendFeed would follow/friend people who talk about FriendFeed a lot. I’m sure there’s lots of interesting discussion for fans of FriendFeed (oh the alliteration) to be had by following you.

I think it’d be more interesting to compare “normal folks” (or at least people on varying levels of the social media food chain). For comparison, during my FriendFeed tenure I’ve gone from 79 to about 370 followers on Twitter, but only gotten about 56 followers on FriendFeed.

I like FriendFeed, but I’d wager that (despite uptime issues) Twitter is clobbering it in terms of growth.

Thanks Robert.

In this case, I saw a ton of noise with both of your Twitter and FF feeds … but I’m simply not accustomed to wading through that much information, again though, I think I’d be feeling differentially about both services if I had a critical mass of actual REAL LIFE friends engaging with me on the this stuff ….

Robert, do you use any of this stuff on your mobile devices? I have to think the short form nature of Twitter will mean long term success for internet enabled phones as well as plain SMS-ing.

Was has Twitter been sitting there with it’s thumb up its rear failing to fix the downtime issue? These guys can raise money at the drop of a hat so why let the sore fester? And the data pipes is also perplexing. Open doors to let other players jump on your bangwagon … it’s a no bainer.

David Damore: “Is there something I am missing or overlooking?”

Yes, the fact that this post (and similar ones) are shills for FriendFeed and not quality analysis.

Points well taken Michael, I use FriendFeed more lately too (though I have nearly nothing compared to your following) but one thing FriendFeed doesn’t do well - work on my mobile phone.

And I doubt it works all that well on anyone’s Mobile Phone - I mean it works in that I can see the stories, comments and activities - but due to the javascript limitations, I can interact with FriendFeed on my mobile phone.

That’s a big problem.

For me, one of the things that makes Twitter so nice (when it works) it’s lightweightness - the ability to have it work anywhere.

Let’s take a comparison - when the Mars probes were designed (ie: Mars Surveyor, etc) they were built to do very low tech things well - because they had to survive radiation and extremes of temperature - so they capabilities were limited - but they worked in a Martian landscape.

Twitter is not a perfect comparison, because it’s down a lot, but in other was, Twitter’s approach mirrors the NASA approach - Twitter can work on almost ANYTHING.

Can FriendFeed work well on ANYTHING…. no.

Maybe in 6 months or a year, it’ll be different, but today, I have very limited ways I can interact with FriendFeed on my TMobile Sidekick Slide - and I’m not alone.

I don;t think friendfeed can compete with twitter. I still find twitter better.

Michael interesting observation on the quality of content generated at such sites. Staying with the same thought, what is your take on the concept of Lifestreaming through sites like Lifeinlines.com, Dandelife et al. The content there seems to be much richer and so are the conversations. Do you think with multiple input channels these can give Twitter/Friendfeed a competition?

Marshall: FriendFeed is awesome on an iPhone, which is where i use it a lot.

David Damore: in your examples FriendFeed is growing faster, not Twitter. When you use these things you’ve got to look at percentage growth. That’s all that really matters. After I used Twitter for four months I only had a couple of thousand followers.

wait a minute: what if Twitter adds other services as Friendfeed is doing? Who do you think will survive in that case?

I have almost as many followers on FriendFeed as I do on Twitter. That’s irrelevant though. FriendFeed represents the future, where things are headed. Twiter = the past, where things were. FriendFeed is a vastly superior communications platform in very fundamental ways, and I’m not just talking about uptime.

If you look at FriendFeed’s most recently monthly growth rate, they will eclipse Twitter in users in less than a year at that clip — and that’s saying something because Twitter is already growing very fast themselves.

@ 11 Kevin - LOL. “Business model”? Neither of these has a business model. Praying someone will buy your company is not a business model.

What is all the fuss over FF. I’ve signed up, have about 30 friends and quite frankly, find all the feeds very annoying. Way too much info to keep up with and consume.

Also, don’t you think Facebook can squash these guys when they open up their import feeds feature to more services? Seems obvious too me.

These platforms are no different than message boards. At the barebones, message boards are nothing more than communications platforms. it’s a little fun to watch everybody migrate from giant profile pages like myspace to 120 characters on twitter to single lines on friendfeed like traditional message boards, which have been in business since the start of the web. in a converged market, sites will either be utility or entertainment, in my opinion. this is an example of the utilities finding their way.

Its really so important to have a huge number of followers?
I prefer quality versus quantity.

I’m a huge fan of Twitter and think they will win out in the long run.

Thanks for another great post!!

#73 Robert Scoble
Thanks. You only had a few thousand followers after a few months because you were a very early adopter. More people now see these services as mainstream and are joining them.

Was there an event in March or April that caused these services to go mainstream? SXSW perhaps?

In most instances wont new services grow much faster than those that are more mature [not that Twitter is mature yet]?

Which is more important, the total number of users or growth rate?

Each additional follower is a connection to the TechCrunch brand. Since Feb TechCrunch has added 3,000 more Twitter followers than Friendfeed. Those are people who see TechCrunch ads now [$ for TechCrunch].

Are ad prices on the TechCrunch site based on total users/page views or on growth percentage of referrals?

Friendfeed followers may be more valuable if they provide more hits and page views to TechCrunch. Perhaps they are a more lucrative demographic for ads as well.

While Friendfeed appears to be off to a very fast growth rate the total number does not and may not ever match Twitter [My bet is that it will, probably by the end of the year]. Growth rates project into the future value that may or may not occur.

Since this post was put up I have engaged a bit more with Friendfeed and have found it to be a bit more interactive. Many different sites can be shared. That is powerful differentiation. It may take a few more months for it to really take off [large user base].

Been nice to interact with the fabulous readers and contributors of TechCrunch.

Thanks for reading my comments. Your comments and thoughts are appreciated.

Mike,
Can you say if you get more tra