Twitter Vs. Friendfeed: Both of these services offer value and have many different use cases. Twitter has been around for almost 1.5 years and friendfeed is less than 6 months. While many propeller heads keep trying to say that friendfeed is a twitter killer; I disagree.

The 2 services are only slightly similar. Friendfeed is more like facebook than twitter (albeit in it’s infancy). Trying to compare the 2 services is like comparing apples and oranges.

A Few Key Points:
Member Numbers: Twitter has Metcalfe’s law on it side and more members for now
Reliability: Friendfeed has had much better reliability
Rooms: Friendfeed has this new feature which will help it to move forward and gain users because the concept of a “room” is something that most people can quickly grasp.
3rd Party API services: Twitter has over 200 hundred 3rd party web sites that are built off of the twitter API. For now that is an advantage but might dilute twitters long term ability to monetize.

Twitter acts more like a broadcast mechanism with a way for people to follow what you are broadcasting. It also acts as a way to listen to what people are saying. Think of twitter as a way to text short messages (140 characters) to many people all at once. It also has some conversational characteristics that many people find very valuable.

Friend allows that same sort of functionality. But here is where Freind feed is very different: Friend feed allows you to “like” & “comment” to a post from over 35 services (twitter, flickr, pownce, last.fm, youtube, blog feed, google reader, facebook status, stumbleupon, etc.).

Friendfeed is much more of an aggregation service and a central place for me to publish my social stream. It also allows people to publish back to friendfeed directly under those comments; making it a much more threaded conversational experience.

The bottom line for now is that both services have many use cases and I can see great value in both. Friendfeed has a nice feature that I think will help it gain traction: Rooms. Rooms allow conversations to occur around a specific subject matter or topic. This has great value in attracting conversations. Twitter is missing this feature.

Technorati Tags: friendfeed, twitter

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