
Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed - nickb
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/27/conversations-come-to-a-screaming-halt-on-twitter-users-simply-move-to-friendfeed/
======
ardit33
Maybe it is just me, but I just don't care for either. I am 27, tech savy, but
still don't get the allure of twitter, or even friend feed.

I feel old, like the average 65+yo, wondering what's up with their grandkids
staying in front of computer all day and just sending messages to each other.
Not getting it. Maybe if I was a journalist I would find it useful, but for
the rest of us, I am not sure the value of it.

~~~
akd
I don't get the allure of Twitter but I know that's because I haven't made the
investment to figure it out, and don't actually know what it does. If I signed
for an account and started using it I'm sure I'd figure out a way to make it
give me some benefit.

~~~
axod
I tried twitter for the first time last week. It was unimpressive.

It showed me several pictures of whales, and then finally I got to type in 140
characters.

IM/IRC is just a lot more useful IMHO

------
webwright
FWIW, I know a large mess of people using Twitter and I don't know a single
one who has switched to FF for this (or any other) reason.

~~~
iseff
I was just going to say this.

Two striking examples: 1) Last week my girlfriend, by far not a hacker or
nerd, said she wanted to join Twitter. She's joined, and found many of her
also non-technically savvy friends on it as well. It's becoming mainstream
now. Once it starts hitting critical mass, it'll be much harder to slow.

2) Out tonight with a bunch of geeks, and almost every single one has started
to use Twitter. Only a few didn't. These are Amazonians, Microsofties, startup
folks, etc. That is, these are early adopters. I was shocked by how often
Twitter came up in conversation. However, not once did anything about
Twitter's downtime come up, and not once did anyone even mention FriendFeed.

So, on one hand you have Twitter beginning to go mainstream, and on the other
hand you don't see the early adopter types leaving.

~~~
axod
"It's becoming mainstream now. Once it starts hitting critical mass, it'll be
much harder to slow."

It's easy enough to slow if Twitter can't deal with it still, and just disable
things, or put a cap on number of users or something.

------
n8garvie
I actually prefer the simplicity of Twitter over Friendfeed. I find Friendfeed
to busy and takes away from conversation and interaction.

This really looks bad on the Ruby on Rails guys as well, makes me hesitant to
want to develop on their platform when I see scaling _nightmares_ like
Twitter.

------
ivankirigin
I've just been searching summize for @replies. Generally, I don't like that
friendfeed comments aren't threaded, but the twitter-reply is very nice.
<http://summize.com/search?q=%40tipjoy>

------
LPTS
From the perspective of the web as a giant brain, this has got to be freaking
twitter out. Each time people switch like this, that route becomes better
greased. Each time this happens, it becomes easier for the giant web brain to
reroute it's signals through friendfeed. Very soon, the equilibrium changes
and they don't switch back. It's exactly the process ants use to eat your
oreos from your cabinet, and it's exactly how children's brains change from
one pattern of behavior to another.

But twitter can't punish the kid or poison the ants to stop people from using
friendfeed. Which means that unless they stop this trend right now, the giant
internet brain we are all neurons in will basically think twitter out of
existence. If twitter does not fix their scaling problems very soon and very
well, so to stop this pattern of behavior, it will be alta vistad. (Remember
Alta Vista? Neither does anyone else.)

Prediction. Jeff Bezos is going to get screwed on his recent investment. I
love Jeff Bezos, but he funded twitter just as it was starting to sink.

~~~
axod
I agree. The current twitter course is straight to the dead pool.

They have the money to scale. They have the users. They just don't seem to
have the brains.

~~~
gnaritas
"You can't fix stupid!" -- Ron White

------
TweedHeads
What I don't understand is why they don't invest some millions in fixing up
their mess. Like it or not twitter is a better name than friendfeed, and
features can be easily copied if friendfeed gets more functional.

