I can't help but think of Twitter every time someone mentions FriendFeed. I know I'm going to get a lot of flack for saying this, but FriendFeed now is exactly how Twitter was at the time of the SxSW rage. Everyone who wasn't using it "didn't know what they were missing" and it was going to be "the greatest thing since sliced email" and whatnot... Flash forward just several months, and the fad is over. These things can't sustain themselves, they take too much work, they're huge timesinks, and they have no real & tangible long-term benefits for their users. They may be fun at first, but as soon as the novelty wears off the number of users will also drop - as will he number of hard-core users that can't hear the service's name without wetting their pants in excitement.
There is obviously demand to write 'tweets' and always will be. So long as FriendFeeder and similar sites can role that functionality into it, then Twitter doesn't have much of a competitive advantage, that's all I am saying. That's my point.
Twitter has a developer community writing to its API, but those innovations come from outsiders.
