Jason Calacanis has a good post about his recent shift in behavior around use of FriendFeed at the cost of Twitter. This echoes the comments of a vocal group of the early adopter digerati, basically warning that Twitter's latest stream of fail whales, combined with a dearth of new features is lining it up for obsolescence amidst competition from smarter, stabler more featureful competition.
I can't say that I disagree with many of the comments and complaints people make at this point. Twitter's been down a lot and Friendfeed has a ton of really great features. I am in the camp that believes Twitter and Friendfeed will ideally live in harmony, but I do see the potential for Twitter to lose favor and for Friendfeed and one of the many other presence announcers (Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, Indeti.ca, &c) to take its marketshare.
Ultimately, I really consider this a boring discussion, especially because it goes on and on & on & on ad naseum. It hasn't stopped for weeks. two weeks ago Plurk was the Twitter killer, most recently Identi.ca. Friendfeed is a constant... it's like market speculation: I just don't care.
The thing I liked about the recent Calacanis post is that it poses the following questions:
- What do you think Twitter should do to fight off FriendFeed? Can they?
- Is it too late for Twitter to fend off FF?
- What can we learn from FriendFeed's drinking of Twitter's milkshake?
- Does Twitter have any advantage over FF at this point?
- What are the killer features on FF in your mind?
Defensibility
Twitter has a fair amount of inertia that has spread beyond the wave of early adopters FriendFeed is currently riding, but that is not going to protect it from a massive shift in adoption. There are things that will provide real, significant defensibility. Here are a couple of tactical and strategic ideas
Tactical
These need to get done ASAP.
Stability - get stable and distributed. Why not move it all over to EC2 or App Engine?
Openness - Maintain the open APIs and make them stronger and more robust. Kill the throttle and stop killing your clients with increased throttles.
Groups, Channels & Namespaces - At the minimum, one of these needs to be implemented. Ideally, we could do them all.
Strategic
These are just a couple of ideas that would be huge differentiators for Twitter.
L10N - Build upon the Japanese implementation and spread into other strong, viral international markets. This is something FF has not begun to do at all (which isn't to say FF is not internationalized already, it's just not their big push).
Kill the web client - Make the mobile interface the default web client, but increase your dependence on SMS and 3rd party clients.
Whitelabel - Allow companies to build fully secure, whitelabeled instances of Twitter. This would be huge in the enterprise.
Break into other media - Tweets should be showing up in every media: radio, video, gaming, &c. Follow Slide's lead.
Is it too late?
No, it's not too late, especially if the tactical notions above are remedied in short order.
What can we learn from FF?
What FriendFeed has been doing has been phenomenal, and exemplary of the way businesses should grow. I have no idea how many of the features we see today were on the initial roadmap of FriendFeed at launch, but I remember when I set up my account how barebones it was. As the features have increased, they have done good work to maintain simplicity and usability, and have clearly been taking user feedback into account with each feature release. This is not shocking new stuff, but I think that FF's commitment to simplicity has been a real strength.
Twitter's (current) advantages?
There are three that are huge: broadbased inertia, brand affinity and extreme simplicity. As I mentioned before, Twitter's user base is broad and diverse, well past the first wave of early adopters; FriendFeed is still very niche. Twitter's brand affinity is really strong, even when it comes to people celebrating the Fail Whale. Lastly: Twitter's functionality is very simple for a user to understand and master; FriendFeed has a lot of inherent complexity to it.
Further on the notion of simplicity: FriendFeed implicitly requires that you have multiple feed-bearing accounts. Not all users have a Flickr, Twitter, Fb, Zooomr, StumbleUpon, Digg and YouTube accounts. Twitter just needs your to have a Twitter account.
FriendFeed killer features
Core features that rock - Clearly, account aggregation is a core feature that is massive in terms of its utility (actually in terms of necessity in my world, and clearly many others' as well.) Additionally, the asynchronous calls, hover states and general niceness of the UI are major pluses.
I think FriendFeed is doing an powerful and may potentially do a disruptively amazing job of extending the Flickr notion of Interestingness into something like Personalized Interestingness: showing me the things that I am most likely to find awesome based on the things my friends and I have explicitly called awesome, plus some secret magic juju.
Reply & thread condensing is really great. I think this is a place where most other threaded message services fail miserably.
Treehugger has a long and definitive post answering the eternal question, "Paper or plastic."
