Due to scalability problems, the micro-blogging platform Twitter has struggled mightily to stay up and running the last few months. As a result of the problems, a lot of folks are threatening to abandon Twitter for the social aggregator service FriendFeed.
I personally won’t be abandoning Twitter for Friendfeed. Here’s why:
(1) There is too much noise on FriendFeed.
I’m currently following around 160 people on Twitter. Some of these people I know well in real life. Some casually. Some not at all. I’m able to follow and learn from this large group of people because all I see is what they type in their Twitter status bar periodically. Sure, some people tell you what they had for breakfast. But most people exert some level of editorial discipline on themselves, and only write when something at least semi-interesting happens.
They don’t tweet about every meal they have, just the really, really good ones. They don’t share every item they come across on the web, just the interesting ones. The result is a usually compelling stream of anecdotes that is updated throughout the day.
FriendFeed has no such editorial discipline. In addition to receiving those few choice anecdotes each day about the people you follow, you also learn what they are listening too on Last.fm, what is in their Netflix queue and what they dugg on Digg, among other things. I might be interested in knowing that stuff about my 10-20 closest friends, but certainly not about all 160 people I follow on Twitter. It is just too much.
(2) I have no desire to recreate my Twitter network on FriendFeed.
I’ve been on Twitter for close to a year and a half now. I’ve amassed a modest network of followers and, more importantly, have developed a good list of people I follow. This happened organically over time and I have no desire to start over on FriendFeed. I’m not Robert Scoble - I can’t just say I’m going over to FriendFeed and have everyone move with me. I’m in the same boat as Patrick Ruffini, a fellow poli-tech blogger who wrote:
But the main reason I can’t brook switching to FriendFeed is the sunk cost of building up my Twitter network, and the fact that FriendFeed is still mostly for elite tech blogger groupies. I now have 898 followers on Twitter, and my posts still generate far more conversation on Twitter than they do on FriendFeed. That’s because most of my followers are interested in politics, and political users aren’t (yet) over on FriendFeed.
(3) For whatever reason I don’t like the FriendFeed user experience.
Tantek Celik wrote a great post a while back about how Twitter is successful due to its dead simple interface that minimizes keystrokes. On the occasions when Twitter is working, it feels much less like a website than a utility that is part of you. For me FriendFeed still feels very much like a website, and a slightly disorienting one at that. It is just not the same.
| Trackback URL |
