Online Media Cultist

The other day I mentioned to a friend that FriendFeed is “red hot” right now. I then paused a moment, and dialed back to say that it’s really popular with the early adopter set and has the potential to blow up huge.

That led me to think about who is winning and losing, relatively speaking, in the microblogging/”smart people network” space these days. Or in other words: are competing services gaining on our old friend Twitter?

Ah, Twitter. You’ve allowed the term fail whale to enter the webby 2.0 lexicon (for the large whale in the sky buoyed by flittering twittering birds that appears when Twitter is feeling sickly), yet you still seem to keep on trucking stronger than ever. Or do you?

Louis Gray alerted me to the fact that there is now – after many months of intermittent and at times severe service outages – seriously screwy things going on with Twitter stats, namely friends and follow numbers. To any serious Twitter user, this is terrible news. Your numbers – how many people you follow and how many people follow you – say a great deal about your credibility, popularity, and overall presence in the Twittersphere. Jerking with those numbers, even a little, may cause as much damage (or more) to Twitter’s loyal but fearful user base as the performance issues.

The latest from the Twitter status blog is that “we’re still in the process of recovering from the missing follower/following problem that occurred earlier today.”

Meanwhile, relative newcomers Plurk and Identi.ca are receiving lots of new kids on the block love these days. Plurk, a sort of “Twitter with a timeline” service, has seen particularly impressive growth, skyrocketing into the 30,000 Alexa range after launching (I believe) sometime late last year or early this year.

Still, that pales next to Twitter, which has the lofty yet weighty honor of hovering around the 1,000 mark.

Circling back to my comments above about FriendFeed, I still have to believe that they have the ability at each and every turn to simply encompass and morph every new upstart into its one-aggregator-to-rule-them-all borg. Duncan Riley notes in fact that FriendFeed has just added support for the very same Plurk and Identi.ca.

As I’ve noted several times over the past few months, FriendFeed’s feature rollouts have been nothing short of spot on and continue to be just so.

My overall takeaway right about now is that it certainly seems as though there’s room for a number of winners in this space. Just as social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are enjoying massive worldwide audiences, there’s no reason to think that people who enjoy blasting short messages and sharing/consuming information (a somewhat different breed from the social networking set, I’d wager) can support a number large audience platforms.

So looking forward, you’d have to think that in any set of overall big winners (meaning millions of worldwide users), it’s going to be FriendFeed and one or two or three others. Recently Twitter would have seemed to be a shoe in, but now…?

So if you want to play the conventional wisdom game (and come on, doesn’t everyone?), it’s looking like:

Rising
* FriendFeed is strong as oak and getting stronger. It’s the social media story of the year, and may well set its eyes on the biggest players out there.
* Plurk is the new sensation, but may hit a ceiling at some point, limited by those who have many Twitter-like services to choose from (including Pownce and Jaiku) and don’t want to deal with its timeline interface.
* Identi.ca is being heralded as the new Twitter alternative.

Falling
* Twitter. Performance issues combined with data loss/inaccuracies is a very very bad sign. They need to get their technical and infrastructure house in order about yesterday or so.
* Pownce and Jaiku… because there’s not a lot to say about them right now one way or the other.