The Inquisitr: It’s Time For FriendFeed To Kill Twitter
Shey
· 1 year ago
I hope FriendFeed isn't the one to kill Twitter, most FFers filter out tweets anyway. But if there can be a way to separate Twitter-type conversation from the other aggregated content in FF, then Twitter will be in trouble.
Any chance their recent funding will help them stay alive?
Duncan Riley
· 1 year ago
shey you've hit it on the spot "But if there can be a way to separate Twitter-type conversation from the other aggregated content in FF, then Twitter will be in trouble." I believe of every company scaling in the 2.0 conversation space, FriendFeed is best qualified to offer this in the future.
dave
· 1 year ago
I was with you up to the point where you said FriendFeed is already dealing with as much data as Twitter. It's not remotely in the same ballpark. FriendFeed is a quiet little cul de sac and Twitter is Interstate 80. Huge difference is amount of flow. The FF guys probably know a lot about scaling but their system hasn't been put to the test yet. To get an idea of the scale of Twitter have a look at this readout.
How many followers does Scoble have on FF? How does it compare to the 25K he has on Twitter? Look at the numbers, they're huge.
loupaglia
· 1 year ago
Dave: I'm with you on this one. Do I think FF could build a messaging service to compete head-on with Twitter, absolutely.
But the numbers are not comparable right now so it is a leap to make the assumption that FF can already handled the throughput. The main false assumption is that everyone on Twitter is on FF and that is a giant chasm from the truth. There are many more people hammering the messaging service of Twitter and only a fraction of those individuals are being followed by someone in FF and having that data pulled into FF, never mind messaging against it.
The scale of what the two services are dealing with aren't comparable right now. Could be in the future.
TheDudeAbides
· 1 year ago
It's one thing to use API's to grab data from services that do the heavy load (aka twitter), so I don't think it is as simple as FF to tweek some code and replace all the features of twitter. The SMS and Jabber stuff is most likely what FF would not want to deal with. But I know I am using FF much more now and will continue to use it as a great tool.
dc crowley
· 1 year ago
I admit to using twitter for only a fraction of the time compared to 6 months ago. But I am also fed up of all the moaning about twitter. Fact is, Friendfeed which is the only alternative I take seriously does not have to do much heavy lifting compared to twitter. My ''wild guess' is that it does not even have a third of the users of twitter. So we don't know if Friendfeed can cope with 1.5 million users. Is FF being built as a messaging service or as a microblogging (CMS) service? FF does not look like a fully fledged messaging service to me.
curiousyellow
· 1 year ago
Twitter is still the Golden Goose. Friendfeed is great but it does not replace Twitter. Once the scaling problems are solved, this whole discussion will be forgotten. If someone wants to start an open-source non-proprietary rival to Twitter, as the discussion has suggested, why not? However, nobody appears to be doing it.
ajaypathak
· 1 year ago
i love both of ff and twitter but twitter is very easy to use
Benedikt Köhler
· 1 year ago
You're right, scalability is absolutely crucial for a service like this. I believe the largest differences between FriendFeed and Twitter appear when it comes to community aspects. Twitter can now be considered a (brand) community while FriendFeed has not arrived there yet. Every night on Twitter many of my followers wish a good night. Never heard anything like this on FriendFeed. I'd say, when there are regular "good nights" on FriendFeed, it's starting to be a serious rival.
Rob Enslin
· 1 year ago
Sounds like you have back-tracked on your original post [I need to emphasize one thing: I do not believe that FriendFeed as it currently stands can or will replace Twitter]. It'll be big ask to replace Twitter. I believe Twitter will iron out their stability issues before we find a replacement or Twitter self-destructs.
Blowski
· 1 year ago
Isn't this what Louis Gray said in March, to which you suggested he see you next Tuesday.
'No serious startup (note startup, not big players) is going to build a system that doesn’t in some way provide them direct benefits going forward': interesting that you would write that on a blog powered by Wordpress.
Lionel_Menchaca
· 1 year ago
I still prefer Twitter. I like its ease of use and its singular since of purpose: conversations in short bursts. Add to that the slick interface options brought on by effective Adobe Air apps like Twhirl and I'm hoping that Twitter sticks around.
That, said, I'll still use Friendfeed as well.
Timothy Neilen
· 1 year ago
While it may be time for FriendFeed to kill Twitter, FriendFeed has had no where near the amount of users that Twitter has. It all has to do with the scaling, but if FriendFeed has that down pat then only time will tell.
Alex Hammer
· 1 year ago
I've noticed in my own usage that my increased use of Friendfeed does seem to come at some expense to Twitter (and also Facebook). Twitter has become more transparent/descriptive of their uptime and architecture issues on their blog. That's not as good as fixing their problems, but it's a start. One of Friendfeed's major advantages (but not the only one) is the ease of threads that promote conversations (also merging of data across networks). However, every social network in the feed space is catching up with each other, so advantages tend to be short lived, and Friendfeed, while extremely innovative and with good execution (Bret Taylor and Paul B are brilliant) still is at a funding/scale disadvantage. Will be interesting to see how Friendfeed scales, who invests in the company (and how much) etc.
As Steve Gillmor said: Friendfeed: welcome to 10minutes ago. I can't agree more. Twitter is where the conversation is happening, and the people most upset are the ones with so little to do all they can do is write about how Twitter is down.
Yann Lebout
· 1 year ago
In fact, Friendfeed is quite the same that the Pulse function of Plaxo V.3. I will test this service to see if it faces the same lag problems as Plaxo Pulse.
The risk for this kind of service is to stay dependant of the providers of feed and to not be used as a primary content producer. What wuld make someone change from Twitter to FriendFeed if he can put his Twitter onf FF. Twitter has the unbeatable advantage to be the first of this market, and is already implemented in a lot of others network (MySpace, Facebook,...). It is surely its weakness (a bunch of request every second) but as surely its strengh because all runners will have to run very fast if they want to catch the train before it leaves defintively...
All Comments
Any chance their recent funding will help them stay alive?
you've hit it on the spot "But if there can be a way to separate Twitter-type conversation from the other aggregated content in FF, then Twitter will be in trouble." I believe of every company scaling in the 2.0 conversation space, FriendFeed is best qualified to offer this in the future.
http://twitter.scripting.com/spewage.html
How many followers does Scoble have on FF? How does it compare to the 25K he has on Twitter? Look at the numbers, they're huge.
But the numbers are not comparable right now so it is a leap to make the assumption that FF can already handled the throughput. The main false assumption is that everyone on Twitter is on FF and that is a giant chasm from the truth. There are many more people hammering the messaging service of Twitter and only a fraction of those individuals are being followed by someone in FF and having that data pulled into FF, never mind messaging against it.
The scale of what the two services are dealing with aren't comparable right now. Could be in the future.
'No serious startup (note startup, not big players) is going to build a system that doesn’t in some way provide them direct benefits going forward': interesting that you would write that on a blog powered by Wordpress.
That, said, I'll still use Friendfeed as well.
The risk for this kind of service is to stay dependant of the providers of feed and to not be used as a primary content producer. What wuld make someone change from Twitter to FriendFeed if he can put his Twitter onf FF. Twitter has the unbeatable advantage to be the first of this market, and is already implemented in a lot of others network (MySpace, Facebook,...). It is surely its weakness (a bunch of request every second) but as surely its strengh because all runners will have to run very fast if they want to catch the train before it leaves defintively...