FriendFeed Still Has a Lot of Killing to Do
With Twitter down all the time, the super-early adopters are getting frustrated and looking to FriendFeed as their salvation. Duncan (over at Inquisitr now) argues that it is time for FriendFeed to kill Twitter. And Jason Kaneshiro at Webomatica already has FriendFeed Fever.
Context & Ripple Effects
FriendFeed had already been cast as a potential successor to Twitter in March, even as Socialthing’s simpler interface showed that the alternative social-stream market was not a two-player contest. The immediate debate is sharpened by Twitter’s documented technical problems and FriendFeed’s dependence on Twitter as a source service.
First-order effects
- Twitter’s outages give frustrated early adopters a reason to test FriendFeed as an alternative place to follow and combine social updates.
- FriendFeed gains attention, but its position as a service dependent on Twitter limits any claim that it can cleanly replace Twitter.
Second-order effects
- Socialthing benefits from the same dissatisfaction with Twitter, forcing FriendFeed to compete on more than anti-Twitter sentiment after its earlier comparison with Twitter.
- Twitter’s reliability problems become a competitive liability even as its investor agreement signals that the company has financial backing to address them.
Third-order effects
- If users split attention among Twitter, FriendFeed, and Socialthing, social-stream services will compete on uptime and ease of use as much as on the size of their follower networks.
The trend: Early social-stream services are competing to become the default layer for real-time updates while users test whether aggregation can overcome dependence on the networks being aggregated.