Every so often you see rumbles on Twitter about the likelihood of someone building A Better Twitter, with the idea that everyone will jump ship after getting fed up with Twitter’s downtime. Arguably, Pownce already is a “better” Twitter in some respects — yet the jump hasn’t happened.
I could be wrong (sources say this has happened before), but I think FriendFeed makes a new, improved Twitter… well, basically unnecessary.
And I’m not actually suggesting that people use FriendFeed itself as a Twitter replacement… although you could do that, since you can share short messages or links directly.
No, what I’m thinking is, there is nothing to stop everyone from simple keeping a separate blog or RSS feed which they simply dedicate to small, Twitter-size bites — and then just adding that feed to FriendFeed. Pow! Instant social network; your FriendFeed friends could see and comment on your “Tweets” (or whatever), communication and the flood of information ensues as normal… no Twitter or Jaiku required. Your feed can be anywhere.
So why is FriendFeed any different from Pownce in this respect? Simple… with Pownce, you need to recreate your group of friends all over again. If they are heavy Twitterers, chances are they are not going to be heavy Pownce-users (in most cases).
Isn’t FriendFeed the same, in this respect? Don’t you need all your friends to move over there for it to be useful? Not exactly. FriendFeed allows you imaginary friends, and there are even scripts (well, one, at least) to allow you to try to migrate your peoples en masse.
As weird as it seems, this is a killer feature. If I have my stuff showing up on FriendFeed, and I can see what all the Twitter people are saying even if they haven’t decided to use FriendFeed… Well. That’s pretty slick.
To me, it seems a little ironic. Applications like FriendFeed might (arguably) not exist but for the success of Twitter. But Friendfeed’s ability to scoop up any RSS feed could make Twitter itself, or it’s replacement… unnecessary.
totally agree.
One important difference. I've actually set up a pseudo microblog for the day, but I do not have the capability to send a public message from my microblog to your microblog – in other words, the equivalent of the @replies feature. I will share my thoughts about this on FriendFeed in a few minutes – once my microblog post shows up in the feed.
That's true. In my recent few posts, I've been musing as to whether an open API could be built which would allow us to do just what you said there… or, possibly, if Google's OpenSocial or Friend Connect would enable hacks like that.
That would be pretty cool.