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.

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.

My interest in Twitter has had a huge resurgence over the past few weeks. Will be interesting to see if I drift away from it again or if it becomes an ongoing integral part of my interwebs activities.

For anyone who doesn’t know what Twitter is and wants a quick video explanation, I found several pretty decent ones.

This one has pretty cool animation.

The guy in this one looks like the dude who got eliminated during this week’s edition of Top Chef.

Differences between Twitter and Jaiku.

There are lots of people examining Twitter competitor Jaiku over the past several days, with lots of oddball and new-fangled terminology thrown around like “co-presence” and “social peripheral vision”.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to access Jaiku to check it out for myself (I’ve tried several times over the weekend – not a great sign), so I’m going to stick with Twitter for now, an application that has wound its way into being a part of my everyday communicating, web geeking, and activities.

Part of the buzz over Jaiku stems from the fact that Leo Laporte is jumping ship to Jaiku because of feat that his podcast, TWiT (This Week in Tech), might get confused with the name Twitter. Tony Hung over at Deep Jive Interests says that “walking away from Twitter isn’t going to solve any potential confusion — if there was any in the first place,” and I quite agree.

Co-presence and social peripheral vision aside, Twitter works and is exploding in popularity because of how simple and easy it is. Send short messages to a group of friends, and receive messages from those Twitterers you choose to follow. Take part in Twitter via web, IM, or mobile device. And that’s it! From there it’s up to you.