Will Twitter go the Friendster way ?
Twitter, who recently secured their second round of funding, has fueled the microblogging phenomenon. As more people caught on to the “What are you doing” culture, folks at Twitter have hardly kept up with the increased load. The site has faced several prolonged downtimes, which have gotten only worse over time. Not a week goes by without someone whining about Twitter’s downtime.
It makes you wonder about why frustrated users havent already switched over to other competitors ?
Well, truth be told, there werent any worthy alternatives out there to which people could switch to. Jaiku seemed a formidable foe, but new signups were closed after the service was acquired by Google. Pownce emerged as a likely alternative, but wonder why it was never able to take advantage of Twitter’s problems and cannibalize on that. Inspite of the problems, Twitter grew like crazy, while traffic to Pownce seems to have stagnated.
Lately though, it looks like Friendfeed has emerged as the most likely Twitter alternative. Several high profile users have already given up or are on the verge of giving up on Twitter and moving over to 
Friendfeed. Friendfeed may not be excatly the same as Twitter, but offers the same value as Twitter - the value of conversations. As soon as more conversations shift from Twitter over to Friendfeed, more people will make the jump.
This scenario is eerily similar to Friendster way back in 2003. While Friendster was having scaling issues, MySpace swooped right in and capitalized on Friendster’s woes. In other words, MySpace grew at Friendster’s expense and went on to become the world’s largest social network.
Unless Twitter folks make corrections, address the scaling issues and add some much needed features, I see the cards being dealt in Friendfeed’s favor. Not only are the Friendfeed guys releasing great new features, they also have the much needed positive momentum from users and blogosphere.
What do you think ? Do you prefer one service over the other ? Would you switch completely from Twitter to Friendfeed ?
July 1st, 2008 at 8:50 am
While i’d still grumble about twitter being ’stressed’, i think it scores on simplicity.. yes, friendfeed does offer way more than twitter plus services, but then again, a lot of users don’t need all that ‘complication’ about multiple conversations and multiple locations, since many on twitter are only using it for mini conversations and not serious debates..and there’s always the lethargy of moving to a new neighbourhood
July 1st, 2008 at 12:44 pm
“since many on twitter are only using it for mini conversations”
Most of the times mini-conversations between your friend and some other person you don’t know about get annoying.
I am a regular twitter user and created FF account a couple of days ago. Initially it looked confusing, but I get it now.
I think there shouldn’t be any comparison based on scalability between Twitter and FF at this time. Twitter has way too much traffic than FF http://tinyurl.com/6ee9rs
July 1st, 2008 at 10:15 pm
@manuscrypts — “lethargy of moving to a new neighborhood” — I agree. Since folks have spent time and effort to build their social graph on Twitter, moving to FF makes it a bit more difficult. you have to again build your relationships etc.
@gaurav - I agree. traffic to ff is still peanuts as compared to Twitter. but then, the monthly % change for ff was way up than that of Twitter (as per compete)