The FriendFeed and Twitter connection
On Friday, I noticed (via Twitter and thanks to Michael Parekh – which I discuss more fully here) a link to a chart on Compete that I found pretty startling. FriendFeed has over the past few months overtaken Pownce, a Twitter-like service.
As we can see in the chart, FriendFeed is climbing while Twitter continues its rapid assent, the latter climbing over 1000% over the course of a year.
I then became curious to see how these sites were faring in comparison to Jaiku, another service that holds a lot in common with Twitter. I also wanted to get other confirmation that FriendFeed had overtaken Pownce. Interestingly we see that – at least according to Alexa – that over the last six months, Twitter and FriendFeed are trending up (with Twitter threatening to break into the elite top 500 sites) while Jaiku’s and Pownce’s growth is flat or slipping slightly.
This data kind of jives with something I’ve been thinking about over the weekend: that Twitter and FriendFeed compliment each other rather well. From my perspective at the least, I discovered FriendFeed through Twitter and it appears that other Twitterers are streaming over to FriendFeed and joining up as well.
FriendFeed is an aggregator of social media activities, allowing you to get a read on what people are reading, writing, commenting, and collecting in close to real time. It’s a service that lets you pick up on Twitter feeds as well as blog posts, Google Reader article adds, Flickr uploads, and a whole host of other services and applications. It’s customizable so that you can choose to include the specific services that you like. Keeping up with FriendFeed can be a little challenging, but in a way I think if you’re a Twitter fan and user already, you’re well trained for the river of information that FriendFeed will throw at you.
By the way, I think Jaiku and Pownce are solid and differentiate themselves from Twitter in some ways. But I think that Twitter got in early, grabbed market share, kept it simple, and also allowed a huge number of related services and additions get tacked onto it because of its open API.
I wonder how far Twitter and Friendfeed will go. Gabe Rivera of Techmeme passed along a link last night (via Twitter of course!) from CNET that polled 55 tech journalists and found that only 23% use Twitter. I bet that number will be far higher a year from now. And as for FriendFeed, I think it will become increasingly common for those people who blog, use Twitter, and are into social media to have a FriendFeed account as well.
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