I consider myself a pretty in tune with the social media atmosphere, in all honesty, I have to be or else I couldn’t possibly be writing for Techgeist right now. As of lately, I have been a pretty big on using Friendfeed, it has a great community, great for sharing and most importantly, great for discussion. With all this though, I still find myself going back to Twitter and I am going to try to put my finger on it as to why this is.
Never Fear – You Can Always Update
I am not an owner of the iPhone, there are various reasons for this of which I will not delve into. I am an owner of a smartphone though, but it definitely isn’t the best oiled machine. My phone is a T-mobile shadow, running WM 6.1 and I must be honest, I hate it. Mobile web browsing is particularly horrid and even with the likes of Skyfire I am still pretty limited at what I can do. This is where Friendfeed (for me) is not a friendly platform.
The Twitter site works on nearly any phone with a mobile browser, making my mobile experience on my T-mobile shadow a rather pleasant one. As for Friendfeed though, they only feature an iPhone web client which is completely incompatible with mobile Internet Explorer and Skyfire. There is also one other thing I sorely wish that Friendfeed had, SMS support. There are many times that I update my Twitter account via SMS because it eliminates steps and is amazingly quick. This means I am always connected to the Twitterverse somehow or another. Now granted, I can update my Friendfeed by opening up Palringo, but that takes time and is the main reason why I update my status via text on the go.
The Community
I love the community on Friendfeed, truly, I do. I have participated in some wonderful discussions with some awesome people, but the fact of the matter is, more of these great people are on Twitter. I really don’t know of anyone in my niche (technology… if that is a niche?) that doesn’t have a Twitter account, but I know plenty of techies who don’t have a Friendfeed account. Sure it takes a little more digging to find the great people on Twitter due to spam, but nonetheless the majority are on (and active) on Twitter.
Real-Time is On My Terms
One of the biggest (and greatest) features of Friendfeed is real-time, and while I particularly love it, I don’t have a seperate monitor dedicated to Friendfeed like Robert Scoble nor will I anytime soon. Using Twitter via the web interface I don’t have to worry about pausing anything or worrying about missing a great piece of content because my feed is going to fast. It’s all completely at my pace, on my terms.
Search
I am absoultely in love with Twitter’s real-time search. Sure, I know that Friendfeed has real-time search also and many claim it to be better. But for some reason I feel that Friendfeed isn’t giving me the “pulse” of the web I desire and breaking news seems to be always coming from Twitter, not Friendfeed. If I am doing a real-time search I want to know what is going on now not later.
Apps
There are an amazing amount of things you can do with Twitter and developers are all on it. With the client wars heating up and soon to be mobile app wars Twitter users have access to a great number of products. Friendfeed, while there are some nifty apps in existence, definitely do not have the developer backing that Twitter has. I am not a developer so as to why developers have flocked to Twitter rather than Friendfeed is beyond me, but it has created an environment of great applications coming up every day.
It’s So Simple
140 characters – update. You have now created content for the world to see.
With all this though, I visit Friendfeed every day and I participate in one discussion or another. I really like Friendfeed as a platform for discussion and that won’t change anytime soon. It is just Twitter has me hook line and sinker and I don’t see myself letting go. What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
