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Beyond what's just happening now, I also like the search only your friends feature on FF. This allows me to follow 1,000 people whose opinion that I care about, but then restrict it to topics that I'm only interested in. If someone in my lifestream has something to say about Apple, it will probably put me to sleep, but if someone is talking about TiVo or DivX, you can bet that I care very much about the opinion they are expressing. By only following 50 - 100 people you don't get enough content to make these filters very useful. While you raise good points and I do think it would be better if we could distinguish between following someone and being their friend better, but at the same time, the firehose of content has advantages too.
I don't understand your sentence "I know that I won't get to ever Tweet or FF post, so I don't try and use it that way"?
The native topic restriction function in friendfeed can be had in twitter apps like Tweetdeck no?
The biggest and most obvious benefit of ff over twitter is the size of posts. The 144 character limit in Twitter drives me nuts. And, as you point out, you can start really good threaded conversations in friendfeed that you can't in twitter. I wish friendfeed started first because it is clearly superior.
You also made a good point in your emails to me that you can have more influence as a thought leader in ff than you can in twitter. You can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. I completely agree with that too.
I haven't abandoned ff for sure. It's just put aside for now. I still dabble there. I use it mostly as the live feed whenever I watch one of LeoLaporte's Twit.tv live video podcasts. It serves as a terrific interactive conversation with those watching the same video podcast live.
But, alas, I only have so much time in the day and, for now, my time is spent on Twitter.
FF's killer app is the ability to comment on other's posts and have that conversation aggregated into one place. With Twitter, it's hard to just insert yourself randomly into a conversation with someone you don't know. On FF it's one of the best parts of the community. It allows everyone to benefit from the conversation instead of just the person it was directed @
The relaxed character limits are nice too especially because I tend to struggle keeping things brief. Being able to add a photo, embed a video or include an .mp3 of a podcast w/ a post is also pretty cool and allows for a richer media experience.
I think that influence on FF works differently then Twitter. With Twitter people need to know you outside the service for your Tweets to have any kind of reach. If you're the CEO of a startup or some exec or celeb enough people want to communicate with you that a single tweet can create a huge wave. With FF it's different. The conversations bump back up to the top everytime you like or comment something, so social interaction is rewarded even more than fame.
As FF grows up, what I see happening is that these super popular people are going to serve as hubs where new users will congregate and get to know each other around their posts. The larger your network, the better you can bring people into a conversation around the topics you care about most. With FF being as young as it is, 100 followers today will be worth 2,000 in the future. For those who missed cementing their influence on Twitter early on, I see FF as a mulligan.
Comes down to a question of which pool do you want to swim in, today's pool or what 'may' become tomorrows pool. And, how much time you have. I'd like to have the time to play in your ff pool too. I just don't. The benefits of a possible better tomorrow on ff don't, for me, outweigh the reach of today's twitter.
But, as I said, I do hope ff catches on. I'll happily move there and be a smaller fish than I otherwise would have been, if/when that day comes.
I do wish Twitter's email notification did what Topify does - especially including the profile. I'm surprised Twitter's new follower notification emails don't do that.