I have been posting some ideas and thoughts about Twitter and friendfeed on both of their services. Mostly questioning how they compare or differentiate. I believe they contemplate each other in one way or the other, but haven’t really figured out how they fit together just yet.

It seems like hardcore twitter users are mostly trying to compare the two services, and friendfeed users take pride in separating the two.

I have been describing friendfeed as Twitter on steroids which I believe to be true to some extend. At least to someone who’s not familiar with friendfeed but is using Twitter like nobody’s business.

Some of the stuff that to me shows their differences are the fact that, you can’t link to individual comments and on Twitter we hate when users are simply spamming their streams with automatic rss feeds, where on friendfeed we love it. To me it suggests that people expect more intimacy on Twitter than they do on friendfeed, or that Twitter users expects some kind of selective sharing, where on friendfeed you are expected to share everything by default.

A lot of features separate the the services. Friendfeed has an impressive set of features that Twitter lack. This will undoubtly make friendfeed more popular by tech geeks and social media addicts who are used to dealing with lots of information and needs these filtering options. But, it seems like only a very small amount of friendfeed users can actually handle that amount of info, as only a small percentage of it’s users are actually subscribed to more than 40 friends. Or, is that just a snapshot of the active user-base that friendfeed currently has? Is Mike Arrington right after all?

here are some of the responses I got on friendfeed. I’m sorry I can’t link to them ;-)

friendfeed will not be superior to twitter for conversation before a feature to easily isolate, and link to individual comments is released.

I say:

[E]specially bloggers and news reporters, frequently use responses they get to questions posed on twitter in their final stories. Such responses would be impossible to link to here on friendfeed. And if friendfeed can’t persuade bloggers and news-makers to come over here, friendfeed will have a very hard time getting a substantial user-base.

Lindsay D.:

FriendFeed has a loyal following and community, many of who prefer it to Twitter for their day to day communication with others online, and take offense to Twitter being referred to as superior [...] FriendFeed outshines Twitter in many ways, and is much better for conversation in my opinion.

Lindsay D.:

So I would suggest that FF’s goal may not be to have bloggers linking comments in their blogs, but getting the whole conversation here instead. [...] I think the people who prefer Twitter are not the same as the people that prefer FriendFeed because they have different needs and expectations.

I say:

[A]n interesting take, that friendfeed is trying to steer away from individual comments because they want to focus on the whole debate. I think individual comments can be worth more than that, and a feature to like comments or link to them would be very useful I think. For example; a question about someones opinion on X, is encouraging opinion regardless of context and would give a lot of individual viewpoints that likely could be very worthy, even out of context.

This was simply some selective highlighting of the main points, but if you want the whole picture and participate in the discussion, I recommend you take a look at the original friendfeed entry.

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