jarkolicious

FriendFeed Over Twitter?

• friendfeed, microblogging, twitter

I am one of the FriendFeed early adopters, signing up for the service the moment I heard about it after they initially launched their closed beta. I’m not too sure when I started mucking around with FriendFeed but I can tell you that I fell in love with it immediately. The simple interface and ability to aggregate my various social interactions from around the net really excited my geek-loving loins.

But my interest with FriendFeed stems from more than an interest in what many call lifestreaming or aggregating. I really adore FriendFeed because I love the idea of aggregation. I really wanted to launch a similar lifestream-like net-interaction aggregation site. Right after Chris Davis released his lifestream plug-in for Wordpress I thought it would be a lot of fun to create a site which aggregates peoples interactivity, essentially similar to what FriendFeed is currently doing. Through my own lack of free time I was never able to get far on the site. If you think you might be interested, head over to lifestre.am for a quick looksie.

But I digress.

What I really want to talk about is using FriendFeed over Twitter. The latter has been plagued by horrible outages essentially throughout it’s entire life. I can not really think of a solid period of time where Twitter has not seen a lot of downtime.

This is in start contrast to FriendFeed, which I have yet to see go down hard like we are all so used to seeing with Twitter. It’s no wonder either; the guys behind FriendFeed helped engineer Google Reader and Gmail. These folks know what they’re doing, and know about scalability. This is not to say the Twitter folks are clueless; in fact, quite the opposite. The same team which brought us Twitter also brought us Blogger…another exceptional service.

FriendFeed can be used in much the same manner which Twitter can be used, but without the limitations or downtime. I propose using FriendFeed over Twitter by building a Twitter-like interface for FriendFeed which makes sole use of FriendFeed entries for micro-blogging. Rather than having this interface display the aggregated data which you see on FriendFeed, it should only display “friendfeed” generated data from the “share something” dialog within FriendFeed.

Using an interface, and FriendFeed data, in such a manner should be a simple, drop-dead, drop-in replacement for Twitter. The nice thing about such an idea, at least in my mind, is following conversations on FriendFeed is so much easier thanks to commenting on entries whereas on Twitter it’s quite difficult unless a conversational search engine is used. Developing such an interface should be fairly easy, thanks to the FriendFeed API.

I think this type of interface is important for two reasons. For one, it is a dead simple replacement for Twitter, performing the same “communications platform” functions which Twitter currently handles decently. More importantly, the noise is removed from FriendFeed, allowing people to focus on a single, well executed idea. I love all that noise, and find much of it very valuable, but quite a few people who adore Twitters minimalism and simplicity point to FriendFeed’s noise as a reason for disliking the site. It is vital to offer a more simplistic, less noisy interface in order for FriendFeed to see widespread adoption…and this idea accomplishes just that.

Given the nature of the lack of free time I have I do not know if I can pull this off. It seems like FriendFeed could do a great job integrating this in to their own interface somehow, but I get the feeling a third-party developer will need to do the leg work ahead of time.

What do you think? Will such an idea work? Is it even worthwhile? More importantly, do you even use Twitter?