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More importantly, I think it should be pointed out that Twitter is a medium for "now sharing", no matter where you are. Sure the iPhone and other mobile data devices can access FriendFeed 24/7 if they're glued to their user base, but the real difference with Twitter and FriendFeed is the same reason the updates are limited to 140 characters. SMS input.
Anyone who isn't willing to understand both of these services and use them accordingly are only selling themselves short. Hell, I even use Tumblr for god's sake, and lord knows that's just to fill in the gaps between [Twitter] > [FriendFeed] > [Tumblr] > [Blog] - it's almost like micromanaging your sharing, but for me it works - at the very least, pick 3 of those, just make sure your choice includes Twitter & FriendFeed.
Of course FF will grow, especielly if they tweak it some more.
Go FF, and go Twitter.
We support both ;)
I understand you're a fan of FriendFeed - do you genuinely believe that it won't catch on, or are you saying that people need to get better at filtering all the noise on FriendFeed, and that this is the way forward? Apologies for missing the subtleties of your argument. :-)
Imagine if you could talk to its database like this:
"show me all youtube videos that include the word "Obama" and that have two or more likes AND two or more comments and that were made between November 1, 2008 and November 7, 2008."
If you get that kind of ability to query the database in live time, you'll see something very magical, which is why I don't mind that I spent more than 1,000 hours on FriendFeed this year.
Tink *~*~*
what percentage of friendfeed.com do you own? Or are you just on the payroll? I Cannot find the info on ff nor on your sites but think I read that you are a shareholder somewhere? Would be nice if you could clarify. I like your posts a lot but early this morning had to stopp following you on twitter as I did not see any other friends updates anymore since you post 24/7 on Twitter. I rather subscribe to scobleizer.com Regards
So I still think FriendFeed is too confusing and Twitter lacks in management. But hey! Thats just my opinion...others might disagree.
I'm not sure why there is this need to compare them. Most people that really dig FF also like Twitter, which is how I even started using Twitter on the regular. I just don't think Twitter is good for conversation.
For instance, take this comment thread, prepend @scobleizer or @whoever, where appropriate. Now, how useful would this discussion be if you could only see the pieces of it from those whom you had previously subscribed? Actually, since they would be @'s, you may not have seen any of the replies at all unless they were @ you. How useful is that?
Did Ruffini end up surrendering the account to Obama's staff?
Hilarious post, by the way, but there are millions of people in the U.S. for whom both Twitter and FriendFeed are too complex. Twitter may be easy to use, but it's nowhere near as easy as a telephone - or a pen.
They key here is choice. You want simple - buy a netbook/use twitter. You want high-end flexibility, use a purpose-build UMPC/Friendfeed.
It's so nice to have choices - nothing is ever a failure.
Steve
Btw... You forgot "newscast director in small, midwestern city"
-Adam
@RockmanAC
IMHO, the point is to aggregate all your disparate and multivariate virtual presences into one spot. Everybody is fed up with trying to keep up with everyone else. My friends want me on facebook, they send me sites over delicious, they complain because I don't keep up with their flickr feed, or their google reader shared, or whatever. It's maddening.
Friendfeed is a "virtual presence" feed. One feed. That's it. The idea of it is that you never have to touch it. It's automatic.
If it's important that people know what you are doing every 3 hours, then you can even add twitter to it if you want.
I thought my aggregator was bad! You couldn't read all that if you wanted. If you did nothing but stare at the real time update, you might be able to read it all, in real time. It would be a full time job.
Maybe we all just need to realize that other people aren't as interested in everything we do as we might think.
And reading Twitter is like trying to drink from a firehose, Chris Walker, not FriendFeed. There you can slow it down to a trickle.
Are you personally invested in friendfeed? Do you have shares of the company or do you work for them? Thanks for the info
Robert, only at the weekend you were dissing Twitter's DM function. You mischievous scamp(!)
At least on Friendfeed I can find the darn thing without having to type in search.twitter.com, and Friendfeed's search offers a more open conversation portal then Twitter search does!
blessings,
Wendy
If a gun was to my head and a friend (who never really 'got' social media) asked in order to catchup what my advice would be?
Leapfrog twitter and start on FF.
(That friend was really me)
Just wondering...
also,twitter has just one goal-what are you doing? comparing ff to twitter is like comparing an apartment to a swing (ha ha,i fail to find a better one)...in apartment you can cook in kitchen,in swing you can only swing - kitchen is not for you. in bathroom, you can bath, in swing you can only swing, bathroom is not for you...
My thoughts.
Any service that provides an RSS feed can be brought into Twitter via Twitterfeed. I pipe about a dozen of my online services into Twitter via Twitterfeed and use it and Facebook as my main social networking hubs. I have a FriendFeed account, but it is secondary
I'll cancel my friendfeed account when 140 characters feels garrulous.
Friendfeed is a stand-up buffet meal after a religious service.
Twitter is a city center railway station at rush hour.
Pownce is a unisex smoking club.
Sad about Pownce.
The problem is convincing people to use it, or at least sign up for it. What I would like to see with FF is a way to request individual feeds, like sending a request to a facebook user that would allow me to grab their facebook updates into my FriendFeed list. This would present problems, but it would allow me to use FriendFeed to aggregate the information I want without having to convince my friends to join.
Maybe there is another service that already does this?
Really, a troubling part of FriendFeed for me is that I'm not really sure where all the comments and favorites all reside.
Twitter's API means lots of web apps and blogs can capture, redistribute, re-broadcast, and ARCHIVE tweets I write.
Many friends on FaceBook have no idea that my status updates are tweets.
FriendFeed seems more like FaceBook in that it imports a lot but doesn't export a lot.
I find Jaiku an indispensable forum for like-minded technologists. For me the core set of features Jaiku provides are just perfect for the effortless publishing of my views, emotions and happenings. While Jaiku headlines/titles (or just jaikus) are generally limited to 140 characters (via SMS or the web), comments can be as long as you need if you input them via the web interface (mobile and regular). Basically you can elicit discussion from your followers with a terse message and only follow up with lengthier opinions if the issue seems to interest people. I think this balances the noise vs. substance quite naturally if you follow an etiquette where you try to refrain from long comments until somebody has first commented your headline (in effect waiting for the subject to "sell"). Somehow without a true comment feature I find Twitter a bit like graffiti, or rumor-like, which to me feels like impeding the exchange of views. If it worked more like instant-messaging with a single line of discussion, I feel I could grok it way better. Now the split view between peoples related tweets is just confusing.
P.S. There is a Twitter add-on (or whatever you call it...a service!) that allows you to post pics and videos on your Twitter page but I can't remember where it is, or its name!
I do hope more users cross over. I get tired of seeing mostly tech centric content. More people will mean more variety... and that will be a good thing.
Great post Sir Scobleizer.
"Maybe there is another service that already does this?"
I find this today.
"Social Inbox essentially allows folks to aggregate not only their web services but also their communications services such as AIM, Gmail, Yahoo and AOL mail into one place."
Interesting, looks like I've got yet another social service to take a look at.
Those things are actually true.
Just because we have a technology doesn't mean we need to utilize it. More queries and so on aren't necessarily a good thing. Twitter is great because it's simple. It's text messaging for the web.
There's this old theory out there that says that as time goes on, people will use richer media. So instead of reading books, they'll listen to audio, and instead of audio they'll watch TV. That's the out-dated theory that the video phone will take over the world (I don't even have a webcam).
But with SMS (and Twitter), that media richness seems to have taken a step back.
Another reason I haven't jumped on the Friendfeed train is because nobody I know uses it. Barely anyone I know uses Twitter, in fact. They're still on Facebook and instant messenger.
You know, any old people I talk to seem to all be convinced that all the highschool and college grads these days "understand computers." I don't even try to convince them that most of them barely understand MS Office.
Interesting how the further away you are from the technology, the less distinctions you can make about it and the people that use it.
Because Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal and other are just too hard.
Also, would you agree that Facebook's new design turns it into somewhat of a FF already (while having a bit more of an actual friend social graph - though not by that much anymore...)? Theirs and FF's, MyBlogLog's, etc. aggregation designs are still quite clunky and visually inelegant, to the point that, you're right, it gives most people somewhat of a headache...
Cheers,
sweethomeimprove.com
sain-web.com