Online Media Cultist

Michael Arrington wrote something that I related to in the comments section of a story about Twitter’s recent technical problems: “Friendfeed is great for keeping track of an information stream. Twitter is about conversations. very different things.”

Somewhat by accident, or so I thought, that’s how I’ve come to look at my use of Twitter and Friendfeed as well. I think it may have something to do with the fact that like most people I discovered Twitter before Friendfeed. As Arrington also notes, “Twitter has created a de-facto monopoly in the micro-blogging space” (and complains semi-seriously that I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me).

Because it has become such a great place to quickly get a read on what’s going on amongst dialed-in and diverse people throughout the world, I find that I’m somewhat discriminate on who I choose to follow on Twitter. If someone is kind enough to follow me, I’ll check them out if I can to assess if their micro-blogging “tweets” are something that I’d like to add to my daily informational plate. (My profile is here – and if I missed your Twitter profile of excellence for some reason, please feel free to hit me up and demand that I follow you!). It’s not that I want to shut anyone out, it’s that I’m trying to take some care in lining up a valuable collection of people to interact in the so called Twitterverse.

I’ve come to think about Friendfeed somewhat more casually, meaning that I too use it as an “information stream” as opposed to a place where if I miss something, I’ll feel anxious or guilty about it. Because people on Friendfeed can choose to share stories they’ve read on Google Reader, stories they’ve voted for on Digg and Reddit, or submitted to StumbleUpon amongst many other things (including Twitter posts), it’s a platform that encourages massive information distribution by its very nature. Therefore it’s a really nice place to check out to get a top level view of what’s going on in the world.

Maybe it works out well this way – or at least for me – because the relatively smaller community on Friendfeed seems to be intelligent, tech-savvy, and wildly active sharers of news and information. That’s not to say that the people on Twitter aren’t all of those things, but it’s a much bigger crowd, and it’s a more conversational place where you can say things like what I wrote on Twitter late last night when I was tired and loopy and clearly on the cusp of going insane while flipping through the channels before passing out to bed:

News Alert: Ferris Bueller has been absent *nine times* this semester. Thank you.

Susan Mernit has an interesting take on this as well, writing that Twitter “is a key tool in supporting” a global community that is in contact with each other 24/7, while Friendfeed as well as blogs, IM, skype, e-mail, and flickr all play a role as well.

My friend and popular blogger Steven Cohen also is attempting to manage his relationship with Twitter, and interestingly notes that Twitter is his first foray into “social networking,” which recalls my earliest thoughts on Twitter and other services like MyBlogLog, and how they’re sort of helping to cross the blogging and social networking divide.

And to add an even further layer on top of all this madness, Louis Gray passes along his thoughts on FriendFeedMachine, “which lets helps you filter between your true “Close Friends” and those you just want to follow, and gives a new approach to making comments, open items within the Web page, and even marking items as previously read.” Because Twitter and Friendfeed have open APIs, they encourage application development by their fans that create more value around these services.

So while clearly both Twitter and Friendfeed can soak up a lot of your time and attention, they can be extremely valuable, depending on what you’re looking to get out of each and how you choose who to follow.