I didn’t bother writing about the Microsoft/Yahoo non-deal yesterday - there are others more qualified to take apart the minutia of this event.
What was interesting to me yesterday, though (and apparently also to Robert Scoble), was that the conversation on FriendFeed was so much more interesting, in-depth, faster and interactive than anything I was seeing on my Twitter feed at the same time.
I think there are a few reasons for this:
- no time delay before posts appear
- friends of friends feature exposes discussions you wouldn’t see otherwise but that your friends are involved in
- the full discussion is exposed - not just one side you follow on Twitter and it is formatted in an easy to read format
- everybody is now on FriendFeed - I can barely think of any of my Twitter friends who are not also on FriendFeed just as often
Even the discussion of items originally posted on Twitter is usually better on FriendFeed than on Twitter itself.
What can Twitter do?
Loic Le Meur has announced that Twhirl is going to switch to XMPP - which is going to make Twitter much more interactive as posts appear in real-time. For the discussion of breaking-news items and to have a real discussion, that’s a must.
Twitter should also focus more on its mobile offerings. The group SMS service it was conceived as has been forgotten a bit as Twitter was turned into a chat room through 3rd party clients.
Sidenote: it’s interesting that the innovation is mostly coming from outside developers and not from Twitter itself.
The Twitter crew should only be oncentrating on one thing right now - uptime with scalability. Until they have that problem sorted out there is absolutely no point in trying to add features to what is basically a broken sub system,
I remember getting yelled at when suggesting that a threaded feature on twitter would make sense— keeping the conversations coherent. “But I love twitter because of it's simplicity!” and well, yeah, here we are. Friendfeed. With a more-or-less 'threaded' thing. Oh how fickle we are!
I remember when it was SMS only (and spelled Twittr, no 'e'), and have always been amused that the availability of the API made it have so many ways to sit on our butts at a computer and ratatat-tat away all damn day long.
At least the some of the third parties have revenue models.