Twitter is Old and Busted. FriendFeed is the New Hotness. (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft
(This post started as an email to @verso on Twitter, in response to her question “I’m wondering how much longer #pdx will take it from Twitter. “Come on baby, you know I love you” won’t work forever will it? Alternatives?“) I had been trying to reply via Twitter itself, but it’s been either down or eating my updates - oh, the irony!)
FriendFeed finally sucked me in this week. I finally “got” it. It’s the next logical step up from Twitter, because it is a superset of Twitter - I see my friends tweets, often before I do through Twitter itself, and I can reply to them once, and have it go to both places (FriendFeed and Twitter). Plus there’s so much MORE FriendFeed can do - import and show people’s blogs, shared items, photos, etc. It kicks ass, seriously. I highly recommend you give it a try. Twhirl, the popular Twitter client, works with it (though I haven’t got that working well yet), and http://fftogo.com is an awesome mobile interface for it for your phone (looks and works great on my iPhone).
The thing that got me to accept it (I’ve been resisting for a while now) was there was finally enough “social gravity” - enough of my network was participating there, and there were conversations happening on FF (a LOT of them) that I was totally missing out on because I was staying completely in Twitter.
It’s not a Twitter-alike, with a few differentiating features (like Jaiku and Pownce). It’s a whole new, better, crack-like way to interact with people. It is the evolution of what Twitter started.
I’m jabancroft on FriendFeed - feel free to subscribe to me. I’m still going to use Twitter as my “micropost” method, until it croaks completely. But in my FriendFeed, you’ll also see my blog posts. photos I upload to Flickr, things I share on Google Reader (with my commentary), and more. And the coolest thing about it all is that there’s CONVERSATION happening around ALL of those things. It’s amazing. I love it.
So come join me. You don’t have to give up Twitter, or Jaiku, or whatever. You can connect them up in FriendFeed. But don’t limit yourself to just one channel of conversation, when you can have so much MORE on FriendFeed. It’s fun, it’s easy, it makes me smarter, and a big part of my network is already there. I’m convinced! 
Update: Phil mentioned below that he posted his comment to this on FriendFeed, and that reminded me of something. If you’re not a FriendFeed user, you’d be missing out on the discussion around this post that’s happening there. That’s why I’ve installed Glenn Slavin’s excellent FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin. If you are looking at this post on its own page, where you can see the “normal” comments people have left, scroll down, and you’ll also see the “Likes” and comments that people have left for this post on FriendFeed. Post get sucked up into FriendFeed, and great discussion happens there, but this plugin brings the relevant discussion back here, to the original post, so you don’t miss out if you’re not on FriendFeed. I love it.