Users leaving Twitter for FriendFeed? Not quite.
According to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, this week’s Twitter controversy involving the deactivation of the Reply feature is resulting in people moving to FriendFeed.
“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.”
I have to disagree with Mr. Arrington on this one – at least partially. There are certainly those who have begun to sing FriendFeed’s praises – and no doubt use it as a substitute – but the reality is not nearly the seachange that Arrington quips.
For one thing FriendFeed is still largely only on the radar of the early adopter crowd – and even in this realm there isn’t complete agreement as to its utility or value. Even amongst earlier adopters there are still those that swear against it as a source of comment fragmentation and excessive noise. The rest of the internet has arguably not even heard of FriendFeed.
Importantly too it’s equally arguable that later adopters don’t rely on Twitter nearly as much as early adopters do and are therefore far more tolerant of the outages. As I discovered during my Twitterless week, the implications of moving away from Twitter to something else are a virtually complete loss of one’s social network – unless of course you’re truly embedded in the early adopting tech crowd and can inspire people to follow you anywhere in the way Michael Arrington or Robert Scoble can. For the rest of us the pricetag is just too high right now.
Furthermore dedicated Twitter users seem to prefer the minimalistic sensibilities that Twitter offers, in which content updates largely revolve arond 140 character posts and perhaps the occasional link. FriendFeed’s tidal wave of content from a myriad different sources and formats is a far different kettle of fish that won’t necessarily be seen as a desireable substitute.
Plurk is probably more of a real competitor to twitter than FriendFeed.
Plurk is like twitter but more appealing to right-brainers due to its ambiguous nature, visual format and personalized and organic-feeling. Little more conversational as well.
http://plurk.com
I am a Twitter user and use the cleanness of Twitter, short post and nice interfaces is what makes it for alot of us. I have Friendfeed and am trying to shift to it but am finding it difficult. Maybe some one knows whats a good way.
This is how I use both in conjunction with facebook. I post to Twitter, Friendfeed picks it up and posts it into Facebook Minifeed. Works a treat.
Twitter has been getting very frustrating though with it falling off the system and bit of it failing to function.
What would suite me if I could post to Friendfeed and get it automatically on Twitter. That way I could have the best of both worlds. Don’t know if this is possible.
Re: Plurk {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/TfYIYxPsU1_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”Re: Plurk ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/eP04G1oskN”}}}
Hi Shane,
FriendFeed does support posting to Twitter, but only as replies. For example if you wanted to comment on the Tweet of another user (that has been imported into FriendFeed via the share tool) you are given the option to “Also send this comment as an @ twitter”. Ticking this option when leaving the comment will result in the same text being sent to Twitter.
Not sure why they haven’t rolled out the creation of tweets yet though. Given the amount of time some people are spending on FriendFeed you’d think it would be a very popular feature.
Cheers,
Mike
[...] Michael Arrington from Techcrunch wrote about it, iJustine who is the Internet wrote about it, TechTicker wrote about it, & several other posts & “influencers” in the Social Media world [...]
Use ping.fm and then you can post to all your social networks in one hit. Current beta code is pingbewithyou
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