FriendFeed Is Forever, Twitter Lives In The Moment
After dabbling with FriendFeed pretty consistently over the last few days, there is one (of many) elements of the service that really sticks out for me. And it’s based around memories.
Yes. Memories.
With Twitter’s almost exhaustively linear form, there is only so much information that can be retained, and only for a brief period of time. Without an internal threading system, conversations get lost within the noise rapidly.
FriendFeed, on the other hand, encourages users to “Like” an item, and to comment on specific pieces of imported streams. The threading system of FriendFeed sets aside a little nook for each separate piece of information. And this nook is always there for you to come back to, and to add more towards if you so desire.
This is not to say that Twitter is an inferior service. Just like with daily life, living in the moment can be extremely exciting. But there are just times where you want to pull up a chair, get lost in the stream, and reflect.
Twitter doesn’t leave much room for reflection, other than with its underused Favoriting system. And even that only allows for favoriting single tweets, rather than threaded conversations.
Filed under social |4 Responses to “FriendFeed Is Forever, Twitter Lives In The Moment”
Leave a Reply
I must confess, I have not been giving Friend Feed the attention it deserves. Thanks to you, I may give it a second chance. May the tweet force be with you and have a smashing week-end!
and the negative side to that is centralization.
It would be a better marketing tool because ff centralizes conversations to one idea. This could be a bad thing. If a topic were to get started like say something controversial (ahem) a thread could really monopolize and the wouldn’t be any way to stop it without blaming some guy who might of started a meme innocently enough. Not to mention of ff I noticed this blog post caught the attention of Robert Scoble, well of course if you have 5000 plus friends then ff would be for you because your threads will pop back in. On twitter I can get thrown out and back right into a scene pretty easily and in fact enjoy myself better with fewer followers and follows. Not so with friedfeed. With friedfeed if you become unpopular, assholes are forever.
[…] on Twitter just can’t. Conversation can quickly get lost in the Twitter stream but, as Andrew Dobrow says: The threading system of FriendFeed sets aside a little nook for each separate piece of […]
unless you have a friendfeed panopticons….
then your popping yourself back up…
ff has more wholes in it then twitter… but for now at least it isn’t crashing