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
