FriendFeed Waxes as Twitter Wanes For Me

I’ve hit the point where I’m really just totally sick and tired of Twitter. Long ago, I thought it was too frivolous to care about and last fall I gave in and joined. Over time I changed my mind and decided that I generally liked the concept behind it while still not being happy with large parts of its implementation. That it has three entirely different interfaces for interacting whether you are talking to everyone, one person publicly or one person privately is ridiculous. The threading model is non-existent and having functionality like track that existed via IM but not elsewhere was just nonsense.

Similarly I’ve been fighting FriendFeed as well. It seemed too busy and overwhelming for me to want to be a part of it. I hate the “new SNS busy work” effect where you have to duplicate all the crap you’ve done on every other SNS. I had a few burbles with it but it seemed OK. When I hooked it up to Twhirl it really came alive though. I like the way conversations stay together and don’t spread out into an illegible mess like on Twitter. I’m less enamored with the FriendFeed default of showing me stuff by “friends of friends.” If I cared about those people, they’d be my friends. That was the very first thing I hid. I also like being able to hide categories globally, categories by person, etc.

So my Twitter account while it still exists is deprecated. I expect that whether or not I eventually leave, I’ll be moving slowly over to my FriendFeed account for this sort of interaction. I also have a Pownce account as well, although at the moment it really is only a backup of my Twitter. It has only ever received duplicates of my Twitter posts and probably that won’t change anytime soon.

Overall, I’m happy with FriendFeed after a few hours, in a way that took me months to get with Twitter. At this point I think absolutely the only thing Twitter has to offer is the user base. At its best, most of its model and interface sucks and lately you take the sucky baseline and add on much downtime. I honestly don’t care if it disappears, now that we all have a better alternative.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

One thought on “FriendFeed Waxes as Twitter Wanes For Me”

  1. Agreed, Dave. You hit upon it earlier with the fact that we were all just kind of living with something originally shoehorned into SMS. 140 character haiku, yada yada…whatever. It was first pass, a neat demo; time to move on. As always, picking up your friends and connections to move causes a lot of the pain, but the fact that FriendFeed is in one sense an aggregator of other stuff (like Twitter) helps with that quite a bit. You can incrementally move over with somewhat less difficulty.

    I just set up Twhirl for FriendFeed as well; nice! I see this picking up steam for me pretty fast.

    However, I also struggle with the centralization these sorts of services do; the way in which they pull the conversation away from the “primary source”. I saw the notification for this post in FriendFeed, for example, but I deliberately chose to respond here. I think both styles can work, but I don’t want to lose commenting directly at blogs b/c we’re all interacting in meta-meta-meta services. I guess it’s just a balance to be aware of.

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