Online Media Cultist

In webby world, Twitter is “old” and FriendFeed is (shiny and) “new.” The ongoing storyline of whether or not people are abandoning Twitter for FriendFeed continues into the post-July 4th holiday with a slew of posts about how a small group of people quickly assembled a large following on FriendFeed (answer: a locked small group of “A Listers” appear as default subscriptions on profile front pages) and a few related topics.

Jason Calacanis is convinced that FriendFeed is poised to drink Twitter’s proverbial milkshake, and asks several open ended questions at the end of his post.

I’m most interested in question #4: does Twitter have any advantages over FriendFeed at this point?

My first inclination is to answer “yes, for now” but the truth is that they’re somewhat different kinds of services, and both have the potential to find great success. One key advantage is its still sizeable lead in audience, but it’s important to look at why Twitter got to where it is in the first place, which boils down to simplicity, mobility, flexibility, and general Twitter-y addictiveness. Yes, FriendFeed has many great features and has done a remarkable job of layering in new wrinkles to please its adoring early audience, but that doesn’t mean that similar features would work on Twitter.

The most important thing that Twitter can do is to solve its infrastructure problems once and for all. If it can do that and hold onto some chunk of its core audience of users, it should be fine.

I still think that Twitter and FriendFeed work well as complimentary services. I enjoy quickly scanning the stream of tweets of the people I follow on Twitter, and it’s become habit for me to add quick thoughts, links, and ideas that I have during the day into the Twitter-sphere.

FriendFeed sits on a different place on the social media mountain, or pyramid, or something. It pulls in a much larger range of social media activities, and it also provides threaded comments. Those factors plus the ability to write at any length you like makes it a natural place for deeper conversations to take place over a wider range of topics.

But that doesn’t mean that Twitter can or should copy FriendFeed. The limiting cap of 140 characters remains an advantage, I’d argue, creating a unique atmosphere where thoughts must be crushed down to essentials. Calacanis argues that Twitter must “show images and videos in tweet stream (when linked to).” I’d see such an added feature as peripheral. Alternatively, the ability to leave video comments (with a 30-second cap, lets say) directly to your Twitter stream would be more interesting to me.

I suppose my overall take is that I like and use both Twitter and FriendFeed in different ways, and enthusiastically hope that both continue to succeed. Over time I see Twitter having more of a “mainstream”/Facebook-style audience. That said, the ability to carve out a personalized Twitter community will continue to be one of its greatest features. FriendFeed’s future is more difficult to predict: it’s such a highly flexible platform that it could be become one of the top web utilities and communications platforms out there in a year or two.