FriendFeed vs Twitter

I’ve been using Friend­Feed for over a year now. It’s a great lit­tle aggre­ga­tion site that con­sol­i­dates my activ­i­ties from sev­eral social media and net­work­ing sites. Friend­Feed is run by a few Google alumni, and yes­ter­day they released a beta ver­sion of the site’s inter­face at http://beta.friendfeed.com. It looks a lot like Twit­ter, even though Friend­Feed offers many more fea­tures than Twit­ter does.

Lists and fil­ters are impor­tant tools for using FF well. Oth­er­wise, it’s very easy to be over­whelmed by FF. The real-time updates in Friend­Feed, in which new mes­sages are con­stantly scrolling down the screen, is impres­sive and intimidating.

Ryan Ozawa, a fel­low Oahu-based blog­ger who also uses Twit­ter and Friend­Feed, posted an arti­cle this morn­ing called “Friend­Feed: What If Twit­ter Worked?” It’s worth­while read­ing, as Ryan makes his case that Twit­ter suf­fers from sta­bil­ity issues, some­times referred to as the “fail whale” syn­drome. Twit­ter is a sim­ple enough ser­vice, so it’s attract­ing thou­sands of new users every day. As more users join Twit­ter, the ser­vice has prob­lems sup­port­ing the added volume.

I like Twitter’s UI — it’s min­i­mal, and a bit like Google. MySpace and Face­book have as much visual clut­ter as Yahoo.

Ruby is tak­ing some of the blame for Twitter’s twou­bles, as Twit­ter API devel­oper Alex Payne announced that Scala is the new lan­guage of choice: see Twit­ter jilts Ruby for Scala for some background.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

9 Jan­u­ary 2009: Phish­ers hit Twit­ter
7 Jan­u­ary 2009: How Twit­ter got hacked
15 August 2008: Mobile social media sites
31 July 2008: Manoa Geeks meet­ing and social net­work­ing
9 July 2008: Is email in dan­ger from microblog­ging?
23 May 2008: My social net­work­ing activity

Tagged as: friendfeed, rss, social-media, twitter, usability