Twitter vs. Friendfeed

As the number of users on Friendfeed.com continues to increase, it seems that the site’s competition with the highly successful Twitter has reached a level comparable to that between Myspace and Facebook. I feel that the greatest appeal of these microblog sites is the conciseness of their feeds that allow users to stay up to date with their friends’ statuses and activities in a basic, at a glance format. Despite their competition, the two are distinctly different. Twitter is the simpler of the two as it only involves microblogs which are conceptually identical to the Facebook and Myspace status bars. Friendfeed uses the same concept but brings it to a new level by aggregating from various sites into a consolidated but multifaceted feed that updates followers on a bunch of different statuses and activities. Friendfeed users can add to their feed from a series of different sites including other social media outlets like Facebook and even Twitter. Other things Friendfeed can update user feeds with are: new picture uploads from Flickr, updates on Blogspot blog posts, and even current Netflix rentals to name a few. This allows a more specific and detailed feed for users as Friendfeed can track and display a wealth of internet activity as opposed to the simple 140 character limit status line that Twitter offers. Friendfeed also allows users to create ‘rooms’ which are private feeds that only selected users can read such as family members or a distinct group of friends. Another notable feature is the conversational aspect of Friendfeed that allows users to respond to feeds and thus begin a series of follow up posts making the service much more interactive. When it comes to selecting which microblog service to frequent it all depends on what you want; a simple at a glance update on all your friends and acquaintances? Go with Twitter. Something a little bit more detailed, maybe even stalkeresque?


Some early adopters of Twitter have migrated to FriendFeed due to Twitter's outages. However, as of May 2008, Compete counts only 304,574 monthly U.S. visitors for FriendFeed versus 1.725 million for Twitter. For the mean time I am sticking with Twitter until I feel the number of updates decrease.