Big news yesterday included the rollout of the new FriendFeed beta, coupled with a day full of Fail Whales, Unscheduled Maintenance Caterpillars, Just Chill Ice Cream Cones and Backwards Birds for Twitter. The two big questions of the day were what was causing Twitter to have such spotty service, and whether or not FriendFeed was copying Twitter in the hopes of being seen as a viable Twitter alternative for loyal Twitter users.
I don’t know the answer to the Twitter downtime question, though I do have a working theory that FriendFeed’s default CC:Twitter setting on posts was a significant contributor to a service already being taxed by the pressure of going mainstream at the speed of light after two years of being able to operate its infrastructure at a certain level for a certain number of users. To go from a steady rate of growth to an exponential one has to be wreaking havoc behind the scenes, though I’m sure it is the best kind of chaos for Twitter’s success.
As for the second question, is FriendFeed copying Twitter with an eye to being a viable Twitter alternative (or in some cases even a replacement)? I would have to say yes. From the addition of Direct Messages to the live, automatically refreshing stream of content on the Home page, FriendFeed has definitely gone into the microblog platform’s territory with its eye on the prize. In a few instances, FriendFeed even upped the ante a bit, challenging Twitter with the addition of threaded messages and the ability to send Direct Messages to multiple people, as well as to search Direct Messages after the fact – all things that Twitter users have been hungry for over the last year.
In spite of a solid effort and a much improved design over the original utilitarian appearance, FriendFeed still lacks a certain something that Twitter seems to have. It is a great microcontent and content discovery site, but it remains difficult for people to connect. It is the easy connections you can make on Twitter that continue to keep it on top as it faces challenge after challenge. FriendFeed’s improvements make it prettier to look at and made it a better feed aggregator and content system, but make it harder to see and connect with new individuals easily.
The Home stream moves at the speed of light, especially if you have hundreds or even thousands of people you subscribe to. Luckily there is a Pause button to handle that, but it would make more sense to me to slow down the refresh rate a bit to give people time to connect. As it stands people using FriendFeed in earnest will need to create and rely upon filters. You are automatically set up with a few filters in the beta already, for your discussions (a handy improvement), your own posted items and messages, the best posts of the day as determined by comments and “likes”, and a few others.
I do like the filters, as well as the ability to create feeds. In fact, if you are wondering where your Rooms went in FriendFeed, they have become feeds now. It feels less private, and several users have commented that they used the Rooms as a way to get more personal with people about chosen topics, and that the feeds feel more impersonal. I’d have to agree. They are a more efficient content delivery system sorted by interest or topic, but foster less new connections.
Can you meet and get to know people on FriendFeed? Absolutely. Lasting friendships have formed there, with real life connections. However, if FriendFeed wants to be a real Twitter replacement or even a contender, they need to make the connections easy and intuitive. There are many valuable conversations or debates that group around a topic on FriendFeed, but the question remains: where do they go from there? Not as many on FriendFeed make it into real, effective, concrete associations as compared to Twitter, where the trust network and conversation-like interaction make it easy to take things to a new level quickly.
Over all I’d have to say I agree with Adam Ostrow from Mashable that FriendFeed is trying to copy Twitter. Louis Gray has a nice write up of the nuts and bolts of the beta, with a good glimpse at the behind the scenes reasoning behind it, over on his blog. For me, I’d have to say that so far I am feeling nothing but positive about the FriendFeed beta upgrade. I use FriendFeed and Twitter for very different things, so it won’t replace Twitter for me, but I find it much more palatable to spend more time there now. That can only be a good thing.
Words of Caution: Currently, Direct Messages on FriendFeed default to public. Be sure to check your settings and unclick “My Feed” to precent this from happening. Also, the check box for posting to Twitter defaults to checked. You may want to click the settings button next to it and change that the next time you post, so that it then defaults to send messages to Twitter only when you tell it to.
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