Tide is changing in microblogging but it isn’t choosing one service over another
June 28, 2008 by Tris Hussey
Filed under Business
Ah Twitter. The blogerati are raising their glasses to you in homage of your passing. FriendFeed is standing in the corner being polite, warm, and charming. At the bar, people are shaking their heads, talking about going to FriendFeed’s place after the wake…
Hold on a second here. I’m not seeing a huge decline in Tweets, course it’s a little hard to tell since I can only pull 20 reqs/hr through Twhirl.
The discussion and debate about Twitter’s untimely (maybe ironic since they just got a whack o’ cash) demise seems to focus on the Replies tab being toast since Tuesday (yeah like Allen Stern muses, why not just have it click through to Summize even with a build in search query for your ID?), okay yeah. Okay Twitter isn’t the most reliable of services at the moment. However as Steve Hodson notes..
Surely there is something else to talk about other than whether or not the Twitter bird has taken a crap on your forehead. Source: WinExtra » What’s more irritating – a dead Twitter or whining users?
Yes there is something else to talk about. We look at this as a chance to help Twitter and FriendFeed and all to follow to do some cool ass shit.
I like Twitter for its immediacy and brevity. It’s just there and (when it worked) simply elegant. I like FriendFeed as well, granted I haven’t been on it as much lately because I’ve been busy, but it’s different.
As I read the commentary about everyone moving to FriendFeed (odd no one is mentioning Jaiku or Pownce or Plurk), I’m just not buying into it. Twitter has a great place in our communications world. I believe that we’re at a point where we can see what is important for us:
- We like rapid communications to people without needing to write a post or send an email.
- We like commentary on what we send out there
- We like it to be fast, stable, and able to be used from a variety of devices in a variety of ways (SMS, IM, etc)
- We like to be able to send other information into the stream (e.g. RSS feeds)
I don’t see FriendFeed doing all of that right now. Pownce and Jaiku do a lot of this, but haven’t been able to capitalize on the opportunity to increase their user base (or at least participation rate).
This is my idea (it’s just forming so forgive any gaps) … no one service can do it all. It seems to be too, too much.
Twitter, you’re great at sending messages out, so maybe become like a POP server? FriendFeed, great at aggregating, find other ways for us to get brief updates. All the other tools … FriendFeed started the trend to pull things together, take this as a the universal inbox idea.
So, the time might be right to work together. Find a way for it to become irrelevant that you prefer Twitter or Pownce or Jaiku (or whatever) just you send stuff out, people read it, they reply you get it—in the place where you sent it.
Right now I have Twitter open in Twhirl and in Firefox. I have FriendFeed in Twhirl and Firefox. And having discovered Summize this week that’s open too … now I don’t think FriendFeed has all the parts here, close, but not quite.
This might be the “what’s next” that I’ve been waiting for. The 21st century version of the email revolution.
Let’s hope so.
I only started using Twitter recently, but I’m one of those who think the UI is very, very useful, elegant, swift, effective …shall I go on?
I joined Friendfeed this past week, but it’s not nearly as elegant or immediate.
I DO NOT want Twitter to die/ go away/ wither.
Here’s what I like about Twitter, and what I don’t see the other services doing in the same way: that I can see who is being followed, who is following whom, what I might want to grab/ latch on to/ learn from, who I might want to send to …all those things. Friendfeed is way too difficult to do that in — for me at least.
Why? Twitter somehow manages to focus the noise. I like that — because I have great ears and perfect pitch. I can find what I need and want, and Twitter is useful for my noise tolerance.