While 2008 was Twitter’s hockey-stick year, Twitter’s little brother FriendFeed is also beginning to show hockey-stick tendencies in its growth. According to comScore, FriendFeed attracted 950,000 unique visitors worldwide in December. That’s a tenfold increase since June, when comScore counted only 93,000 unique visitors worldwide (and nearly double since September, when it was 550,000).
Twitter.com, by comparison, which is raising money at a $250 million valuation, has four times as many visitors (4.35 million worldwide in December). While recently there was some debate about whether Twitter has passed Digg, the real question might be whether FriendFeed can ever catch up to Twitter.
At the very least, these numbers suggest that FriendFeed has global appeal. ComScore counts only 172,000 unique U.S. visitors in December.
Update: Two counterarguments.
1. A large percentage of the content on FriendFeed are merely repostings from Twitter (see comments). So you could argue, and many do, that FriendFeed is simply riding on the coattails of Twitter and will never actually catch up.
2. This comScore data merely measures unique visitors and does not necessarily correlate with the number of users on FriendFeed. If FriendFeed gets a lot of its traffic from Google and other search engines, for instance, then those visitors would not necessarily be registered users (although they might become users once they discover the site).
first!
…but last when it comes to actually coming up with a worthwhile comment.
you are a God DAMN spammer….. Plz get rid of these people TECHCRUNCH!!!
Lol. You need to relax. What’s the big deal?
Extreme outburts like these for no real good reason are exactly why muslims get a bad name.
You need to relax Eric and think before you say something, control your personal hatred and learn to look at things from a general perspective.
haha yea along with extreme bursts of other fashions.
Just set-up my account there about a month ago. Not convinced it will ever catch-up to Twitter, though. I feel it’s not as user friendly.
I dunno, it works pretty well for me.
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It is a great service, but it targeted for a niche audience. I dont see it getting the same broad market, but it will have 5 million users in two years.
Twitter will have 30.
Yeah, Friendfeed is better for conversations.
The MySocial 24×7 sidebar for Firefox works best for me when using Friendfeed.
What Friendfeed does as a platform/infrastructure is impressive (indexing, lifestreaming hub, connections).
They have a long way to go, but they can leverage its services helping third parties to build tools around it.
My own wishlist is:
– Reducing/Eliminating duplicates (almost all the people talk about the same things)
– Helping to reach other friendfeeders and discover related news (like Popego startup)
– Visualization and may be widgets inside FF (like Salesforce, Facebook platforms).
– etc,etc,etc.
OMG, I guess its time I joined Friendfeed. I guess Twitter’s success was deserved. I guess I should explore Friendfeed as well.
http://stuckinf...es.blogspot.com
1) Every FriendFeed user has a twitter account, but not vice versa.
2) Most of the FriendFeed posts are tweets.
Those two facts aren’t likely to change anytime.
I think of FriendFeed as a good twitter extension (like tweetdeck) that provides incremental value compared to the basic twitter service.
One day, when Twitter adds conversations/rooms etc then FriendFeed will play a smaller role.
Looking at the public feed there are a large number of other posts. Personally I hide tweets except ones which have likes or comments, that keeps the content varied and the service is more interesting.
Stats from 2008, but it’s a damn sharp cliff after #1.
“The top feeds aggregated into Friendfeed now looks like:
1. Twitter (54%)
2. Blogs (15%)
3. Google reader (9%)
4. Tumblr (4%)”
FF does add value, of course, but it’s on the same level as a tweetdeck.
http://www.many...elping-twitter/
I have been running code and tracking this over time. The numbers above are in line with what I am seeing this past week. From 2008, it wasn’t that high for Twitter.
01/22/09 12:00PM
Source Posts Percentage
Twitter: 93121 52.45 %
Delicious: 9431 5.31 %
Last.FM: 1302 0.73 %
Digg: 9200 5.18 %
FriendFeed: 13743 7.74 %
Facebook: 4165 2.35 %
YouTube: 1337 0.75 %
Disqus: 335 0.19 %
Tumblr: 2645 1.49 %
StumbleUpon: 1827 1.03 %
Flickr: 1858 1.05 %
Blogs: 19425 10.94 %
Other: 19169 10.80 %
FriendFeed aggregates more than just Twitter updates so I think they are hardly doomed to be a subset of the Twitter userbase.
Besides, it is entirely possible for a site to start out growing with a high attatch to another service, and then grow beyond that. An extreme example is YouTube’s early symbiotic relationship with MySpace.
It goes to show: a company with decent ideas can still grow, even in this blah economic climate.
It doesn’t show that at all. The service is free.
FriendFeed is great for keeping track of all of your on-line contributions and articles. I track all things I have written and comments I have made such as this one.
Cool news, but … most non-techies hate FriendFeed (bad UI, not readily clear how to get the most out of it).
I would really like to see them succeed, but for an early product to have so many people hate it? It’s a challenge.
I love FriendFeed though and I think with some changes they could compete with Facebook (not Twitter. )
users != visitors
I just started checking FF out, it looks good.
I just started checking FF out, it looks good.
I don’t think there is any potential for FriendFeed…. I see Twitter as an Gigantic explosion…. its already a blast,,,, ,but the the nuclear weapon will explode once everybody finds out about it…
Akmal, I think I know what you are saying. And, if I do, I agree. Considering all the talk I’ve heard around Twitter from organizations with commercial interests, once it has achieved a marketable critical mass, it is going to be a huge spam playing field. Then, we will move on to something else.
If you want to see real data from the APIs about how much usage of FriendFeed is via what other services, and to see how much of FF traffic is twitter, I have a post with that data:
http://www.many...elping-twitter/
Wrote some code to test the APIs and have been storing the data for my own research purposes.
tanx
FriendFeed is Twitter in drag, just a colorful add-on
Twitter should crush it if it’s smart by restricting access to its API.
Like both Twitter and FriendFeed,they supplement each other very well.
Just a quick note about number of users on FriendFeed.
FFholic (aka FriendFeedHolic) tracks 185207 public and 23445 private users on FriendFeed.
Also, there are 14008 public rooms and 343 private rooms.
IMHO you can’t really compare FriendFeed with Twitter as both services serve a different goal.
Twitter is about ubiquitously spreading short messages in an easy way. You can do it with a computer or with your cellphone.
FriendFeed provides 2 distinct services that make it rather unique. First there’s the concept of a “life stream” that allows one to aggregate digital identities in one place: the “life feed”. Second, there’s the concept of “rooms” where people in the room can share ideas etc.
You can compare Twitter and Friendfeed to a certain extent, if you use only a subset of Friendfeed’s functionality (commenting, replying, following and liking).
Although I have a Twitter account I rarely use Twitter as I have no real need for using it. It’s more of a fun thing to do at times.
FriendFeed on the other hand is a service I use almost daily. Although I have no “need” for aggregating my “digital selfs” into one place I liked the concept hence I applied for an account. The main reason for using Friendfeed for me is not that aspect anymore though.
Sharing reads on FriendFeed is a piece of cake. Discussing project related matters within a close group of people in a project team is invaluable.
Who cares! Neither company is in the black. If someone gave me a ton of cash to make cars for free, I can assure you I’d have many more customers than any other car company. You keep pointing out com scores, but in todays and tomorrows economy, it’s totally irrelevant! The bottom line, capital, is who will win and who will fail.
Sorry, I don’t mean to be critical, but most of Tech Crunch’s articles are about visitors and page ranking. You are living in the past, get over it! Profit, not users!
The growth may have slowed but it is still a great site. I think 2009 will see FriendFeed really take off.
I’ve been using Friendfeed for a month now. I’m completely in love with it.
Friendfeed and twitter serve different purposes for me. I like FF’s integration with many other services, including twitter, as a way for me to up my visibility: people can use it as a sort of buffet for viewing other’s online activites, Especially when you set it to tweet your latest updates. It truly answers “what are you doing today?” rather than twitter’s “what do you want people to know you are doing today?”
I just started checking FF out, it looks good.
FF and Twitter can’t be compared because Twitter is merely microblogging, while FF is an aggregation of feeds from different services.
Additionally, I feel that FF is more of a community and you actually start getting to know people by their comments and feeds. Twitter is usually for news and business.
They are both great tools and shouldn’t be compared.
friend feeds is very good twitter’s extension the same twitter’s platform but both of them are very useful. thanks.