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.

• Sphere It
• 

FriendFeed, the popular social network feed aggregator, has released a new version of its site that has been optimized for the iPhone. While FriendFeed has always featured a relatively spartan design, the standard version sports small fonts that make text difficult to read on the iPhone’s screen. The new version has increased the font size, and has further tweaked link placement and picture sizes to make the site more accessible to mobile users.

The site also includes a new “Post photos from your phone” link that will let users submit photos to FriendFeed straight from their iPhone. Each user is assigned a unique email address (something like jason+nota483realone@mail2ff.com). To submit a picture, users simply send photos chosen from the iPhone’s integrated photo viewer to the assigned address. The feature works well, but you’ll need to manually enter the obfuscated email address - there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to save it to your address book.

You can read more details at the the official announcement here.

• Sphere It
• 

There has been much talk of Twitter users moving over to FriendFeed since Twitter replies were down for the majority of last week. Twitter announced that they were back on Saturday in their blog, but seeing as the outage may have inspired some users to flock to FriendFeed, I decided to take a look at the 3rd-party applications and scripts that enhance the FriendFeed functionality.

For those of you moving on to FriendFeed’s greener pastures, here are 13 essential tools for an organized, “noise”-free experience.

Gridjit is a new web application, that is currently in private alpha, that organizes your FriendFeed and Twitter timelines into columns. It spreads out your timeline by user and shows that user’s most recent posts in boxes that are distributed across three columns. You can also post to Twitter and FriendFeed from the site. It’s a very new service, so there may be bugs, but if you’d like to try it out, Gridjit has supplied us with 250 invites. Enter the code dde60be to try it out.

Alert Thingy enables you to see your FriendFeed timeline from your desktop and receive updates through notifications (covered here). You can post updates and comment from the application, as well as post to Twitter or Flickr. Alert Thingy runs on Adobe AIR.

Twhirl, a popular desktop application among Twitterers, allows for FriendFeed posting and has a timeline tracker. It also supports posting to Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku, and allows for filtering news by “rooms”. Since Twhirl is a widely-used Twitter client, this should allow for an easier FriendFeed transition. Twhirl runs on Adobe AIR so it is available for Windows and OSX.

bTT by Sobees is a desktop FriendFeed application that is part of Sobees’ desktop suite bSuite. It is currently available for download independently of bSuite. bTT allows FriendFeed updates, comments, comment replies, and likes. It is currently available for Windows.

MySocial 24×7 is a Firefox plugin that allows you to access your FriendFeed timeline from your sidebar (covered here). You can filter your timeline by friend, or by feed source (Youtube, Amazon, RSS). MySocial 24×7 has also released an Adobe AIR desktop application (covered here). The desktop application provides the same functionality of the Firefox sidebar in an attractive desktop application.

NoiseRiver is a new web application launched yesterday, from FeedEgo, that uses FriendFeed’s API to filter out some of the noise. You can login through the site, and import your keywords from del.icio.us, or input them manually, and NoiseRiver will color code your feed according to your interests or neighborhood. When you input your keywords, you can rate your them with a slider from “love” to “hate” and from then on your timeline will be color-coded, green or red, to show what you’ll probably like or not. NoiseRiver provides a full FriendFeed user experience, allowing for sharing and comments.

FriendFeedMachine is a web application that allows you to organize your friends list into close friends, and people you just want to follow. It does a lot to clean up the problem of “noise” in FriendFeed, by making sure that what your friends say doesn’t get lost in the mix with heavy posters.

Feedalizr, enables you to post text, links, images and video to FriendFeed from your desktop. You can drag and drop images into your post, or you can take a picture with your webcam. You can also post video through Feedalizr through your webcam. It hosts the video on the Feedalizr site, and includes a link in your post. You can filter your timeline, and just yesterday they added a new feature that allows you to take advantage of tabs. You can open new tabs with specific user’s timelines, separate from your main friend timeline. Feedalizr runs on Adobe AIR.

Filter by Service is a Greasemonkey script that allows you to filter your timeline by service. It displays a box with all of the service icons, and you can filter the public timelime, your friends timeline, or any user’s timeline by service. For example, if you are browsing TechCrunch’s timeline and click on the Twitter service icon, you will see TechCrunch’s tweets. A similar script, Filter Icons, places the service icons in a neat row on the top of the timeline, but it does not display all of the service icons, just the ones that are used on the page.

Remove Visited Links, a Greasemonkey script, removes links that you’ve already visited. A very useful script that really cleans up your timeline by removing content that you’ve already viewed.

Read Later, is a Greasemonkey script that adds a “Later” link under every post, and adds a “Read Later” tab to the top. This enables you to bookmark things, within FriendFeed, that you find interesting and want to save for later.

FriendFeed Comments is a WordPress plugin that can take comments and likes made on FriendFeed, and place them into the related post on WordPress. On your blog, you will see the comment along with the commenter’s FriendFeed image and link. The plugin also allows (as an option) a separate FriendFeed comment entry, so your readers can enter FriendFeed comments from your blog page.

FF To Go is a mobile site that you can access from any mobile phone’s web browser. It has a simple interface that shows the 10 most recent posts from you, your friends, or the public timeline. It adds no special features, but remains consistent with the FriendFeed user interface.

• Sphere It
• 

A key feature of Twitter has been down most of this week: Replies. The core Twitter service itself is alive, but the team took the Reply feature down on Tuesday when the service started to slow. As of now, Friday afternoon, Replies are still down.

Disabling certain features is Twitter’s recent attempt to keep their frail architecture from failing completely. They tried it out during Apple’s recent WWDC keynote and it worked, so they’re clearly using this approach more often now to deal with problems.

But here’s the problem - Replies was the wrong feature to turn off (whether there was a choice in the matter or not). The beautiful thing about Twitter is that spontaneous, diverse conversations erupt that are almost synchronous, or chat like (see our post about Quotably, which pulls these conversations out and highlights them). Conversations are what makes Twitter magic.

But that magic is created by the simple Reply feature - when you add “@TechCrunch” to a Twitter message, it tells me you are saying something directly to me, to start a new conversation or reply to an existing one. Without Reply, Twitter turns into a one way telephone conversation. Pulling the feature out is equivalent to a frontal lobotomy - Twitter is still walking around, but there’s a blank stare in its eyes.

So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.

This message, for example, is one that I would have written to Twitter if the Reply feature was working. Instead I posted it to Friendfeed, and the conversation picked up without a hitch.

If I was Twitter I’d be very worried about Friendfeed. Their young competitor seems to have zero stability problems, and is quietly in the process of pulling away all the special parts of Twitter.

Twitter was mentioned on yesterday’s Daily Show (at about the 10:00 mark). Let’s all hope that when we look back, that mention by Jon Stewart didn’t mark Twitter’s peak, just as Friendfeed ascended.

• Sphere It
• 

I still haven’t decided if FriendFeed, which aggregates activities from other websites like YouTube, Twitter, your blog, Flickr, etc., is the ultimate walled garden of our personal data or possibly the answer to the Centralized Me problem.

I keep pushing FriendFeed to take the lead in the DataPortability wars by allowing users to export all that stuff they gather. For now, their feeds and APIs allow access to that data, but it all links back to FriendFeed in one way or another. Over time I’m hoping they start to release the actual data in a responsible way. From my discussions with them, they seem to want to do that, and I believe them (I generally don’t believe the big social networks when they say the same things).

In the meantime though, the service just keeps getting more useful. Tonight they released yet another feature called personalized recommendations. You can now view the items posted by your friends based on how interesting the network thinks each item is. You can view results by the last day, week or month. No RSS feeds for now, but co-founder Bret Taylor says they’re coming soon.

This essentially slices data two ways. The first filter is people you’ve subscribed to, so presumably you’re somewhat interested in what they have to say. The second filter takes a look at how many people are commenting or bookmarking the items to determine if it should be highlighted.

A natural next step is for them to release the feature without the first filter, so results are shown across the network. Allow people to tag items, and you’ve got yourself a breaking news engine that may be incredibly useful. Taylor says this is something they might do in future.

• Sphere It
• 

Who knew Duncan Riley was such a Greasemonkey? My former colleague just made FriendFeed a lot more useful for people on Firefox. Using Greasemonkey, an add-on to Firefox that lets developers customize Webpages through the browser, he created some scripts that add tabs to FriendFeed and that make it even more of a super start page than it already is.

He got the idea from this app called FriendFeed Tabs that lets you add Techmeme as a tab. When you click on the tab, news aggregator site Techmeme appears within FriendFeed.

Duncan went further and added scripts to add tabs that show Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Netvibes, Plurk, ReadBurner, and his own version of a Techmeme tab inside of FriendFeed. He also created scripts for TechCrunch and CrunchGear. (Thanks, Duncan!) You need to add Greasemonkey to Firefox before you can install any of these scripts. But once you do, and relaunch your browser, whenever you go to FriendFeed the tabs will appear and you can scroll through the sites at your leisure.

Some of these tabs are redundant with FriendFeed itself, which lets you bring in RSS feeds and your Twitter feed, for instance. But the tabs let you access these sites and services in a more traditional view, and you can always toggle back to the FriendFeed stream. And now, for people who check more than one of these sites on a daily basis, they can simply access them all from FriendFeed. (Note: these scripts are essentially a hack, and there may be some issues, which Duncan describes in this post).

• Sphere It
• 

Robert Scoble. Blame FriendFeed. Steve Rubel. Blame FriendFeed. The Shel puppet. Blame FriendFeed. Dave Winer. Blame FriendFeed. Etc.

FriendFeed is a parasite service built on the back of Twitter. Let’s get this straight. No Twitter, no FriendFeed. Want to kill FriendFeed, as I certainly do? Cut off its oxygen. Take a page from Facebook’s incompetent UnFriend Connect gambit and refuse to pass Twitter posts through non-compliant ex-Google engineering scams.

OK, I’m way off my meds since the company has finally admitted on the Twitter Excuse page that they’ve figured out what the culprit is in the continual service meltdown. It’s the Track command, which as a result of my no-@-sign campaign to evangelize the Twitter XMPP Gtalk gateway, has now reached enough adopters to qualify as an actual threat to Twitter’s massive server farm or whatever access to Fred Wilson’s credit card and an EC2 account buys.

We found an errant API project eating way too much of our Jabber (a flavor of instant messenger) resources. This activity (which we’ve corrected) had an affect of overloading our main database, resulting in the error pages and slowness most people are now encountering.

We’re bringing services back online now. Some will be slower than others for a while, and we’ll be watching IM and IM-based API clients very closely. We’ll also be taking steps to avoid this behavior in the future.
Thanks for your patience!

Update: We’re turning off IM services for the evening (Friday) to allow for the system to recover. We hope to turn things back on Saturday.

In other words, an errant API project sucking Track clouds out of the Twitter core finally reached the critical mass necessary to hip Jack, whoever that is, to the reality that without the XMPP real time gateway, Twitter could just as well be FriendFeed without the siloed conversation spamyards. Further, Twitter engineers are working to minimize slowness and error pages by turning off the only distinguishing, disruptive, essential part of Twitter until the audience goes away at which point the problem will subside and we can turn it back on on “Saturday.”

Remember: I blame FriendFeed for this, and Robert Scoble, Steve Rubell, Dave Winer, and all the rest of the puppets and ex-Techcrunch analysts who, by appearing to rationally debate the pluses and minuses of FriendFeed versus Twitter, suggest FriendFeed even exists in the absence of Twitter. Nik Cubrilovic doesn’t help either with his cogent (except for the Rails part) analysis of Twitter’s scaling problems. Nowhere in this debate (most of it mercifully hidden forever behind the FriendFeed black hole where conversations go to die) was there a word spoken about the fatal Track bug until Jack hit the Off switch.

Now, in the cool clarity of no pulse whatsoever can we begin to rationally approach a solution. Forgetting that Hillary has shown no indication of processing the similar lack of pulse in her White House aspirations, let’s put the blame for all this squarely on the parasite API suckers and their dark master FriendFeed. Good.

What is FriendFeed anyway? It appears to be an aggregator of all things social. For me that means my Twitter feed - which already is pumped indiscriminately and obliviously through my Facebook status updates - and my blog posts - which have completely ceased since I got sucked into Twitter in the first place. As the puppet says: Fascinating. FriendFeed is Twitter, only slower. Here’s my demo of 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.

FriendFeed value add: A conversation cloud forms around the Sugar Pops meme. Louis Gray is having a pre-release alpha bowl of Open Pops, but 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. Another comment refers to the Winer tangent, several folks debate whether Sugar Pops are still on the market, and Robert Scoble broadcasts the whole mess back to Twitter as a TinyUrl… 20 minutes later.

By the way, errant API suckstreams reamplify all this with even less coherence than @replies provide, since remember: FriendFeed conversations have no way of pointing at each other with the possible exception of a Twitter link… and around the horn we go again. The new Rooms feature has initiated an ICANN-like squatter crisis where we are all encouraged to grab our names before the puppets get to them, which of course spawns another shitstorm of completely hidden conversations - wait, there’s Bob and Shel’s sequel book title. They better hope Loren is reading this in FriendFeed ten minutes later.

Update: Well, it’s “Saturday” morning now and no real time stream. I’ve been using a nifty combination of Summize and its Realtime results page (click refresh to see 2 new posts, or wait until Summize engineers work out the computer doing the refresh for us thing) and Twhirl, whose point and click @reply feature is a joy to use to send irate messages to Jack, whoever that is. Except I don’t blame Jack. I blame FriendFeed. On Twitter.

• Sphere It
• 

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.

• Sphere It
• 

Activity stream aggregator FriendFeed launched a new feature called FriendFeed Rooms this afternoon, which are effectively topic-based accounts that anyone can create or join (depending on privacy settings). Users can then add links and messages to relevant content.

The main difference between Rooms and a normal FriendFeed account is the fact that multiple users can author it, and that you can’t pull third party feeds into the service.

FriendFeed usage continues to grow steadily, and has clearly gained from Twitter’s (a competitor of sorts) constant downtime. I still haven’t gone religious on it, though, as some have. That’s mostly because i don’t like having a third party service centralize all this data about me and then not let that data back out again. See my rant on the Centralized Me for more on that.

• Sphere It
• 

MySocial 24×7, a Friend Feed/ Twitter Firefox sidebar Michael wrote about in April has launched an Adobe AIR application.

Like the Firefox sidebar, the AIR app allows users to filter the view by type of data, comment or bookmark any entry, and users can also reply via Twitter.

The big selling point for the new app is an inbuilt movie/picture viewer, allowing users to view content without the need to revert to a browser window.

Hands on its definitely one of the nicest looking desktop apps in this space, content is rendered clearly and attractively, compared to say Twhirl which isn’t super pretty out of the box. The app though does lack many of the features that have made Twhirl popular, such as click support for direct messaging in Twitter, color customization, and easy access to archives and user details. In its defense it is an alpha release, and not all users will want for the extra features provided by Twhirl. Definitely worth a look if you’re a Twitter and FriendFeed user.

disclosure: Michael is an investor in Seesmic, which owns Twhirl

• Sphere It
•