Once again, the discussion of FriendFeed taking over Twitter is playing out again this weekend. I guess it’s the bitchmeme of the weekend.
I’m on the side that says FriendFeed will not kill Twitter. Sorry, I just don’t see it happening and screw the statistics…well not all of the statistics.
#1 Reason? They’re Not In Competition
The two services are not in competition with one another, direct or otherwise. The number one irrefutable reason why FriendFeed cannot over take Twitter is that they don’t want to! Game.Set.Match. They don’t want to and they’ve already made it known that it’s not what they’re trying to do or even the direction that they’re moving in. They’ve made no moves to "dethrone" Twitter, and Twitter has enough problems already, who are they to try to fight back if it were to happen. All in all, FriendFeed doesn’t replace a thing and I wish people would stop saying that.
- Google Reader Items are aggregated into FriendFeed, if everyone stopped using the service, a lot of content would stop flowing in, effectively devaluing FriendFeed.
- The same goes for any other service you can think of including blog posts that are aggregated into FriendFeed.
- Kill these services and revert to "Twitter-like" messages only and then you can talk about FriendFeed dethroning Twitter or killing every other service you might want it to kill for some illogical reason or another.
FriendFeed is the glue to a lot of the services that everyone is talking about killing, not some charming prince to overthrow the tyrants. So quit your bitching!
Other Reasons
I’ve already stated that FriendFeed isn’t Twitter in The Problem With FriendFeed(ing): It’s Not Twitter. To recap:
FriendFeed isn’t Twitter and in turn, shouldn’t be used like Twitter.
For one, FriendFeed doesn’t have near as many API hits as Twitter. While FriendFeed aggregates a lot, it’s chores are arguably a lot simpler than Twitter’s.
Number two, FriendFeed doesn’t have nearly as many users as Twitter.
Number three, while FriendFeed’s odd outages are just "odd", only time will tell just how "odd" that number will continue to be. It’s still too early and as FriendFeed grows exponentially like Twitter, these "odd" outages are also occurring. The only difference is FriendFeed may have a better and more experienced team to help solve the issues.
Now could we please stop comparing the two? Sharing similar functionality doesn’t equate to being a real competitor.
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