You had to know that a post like this would show up at some point now that FriendFeed has opened up its doors and folks like Robert Scoble are jumping on the bandwagon, but the fact is that I do think that FriendFeed could give Twitter some very serious competition. Some would suggest though that this can’t happen because FriendFeed is a different beast from Twitter.

Is it though?

Yes there has been a whole ecosphere built up around Twitter and it is starting to get some major mainstream press which is greatly increasing its profile as an Internet tool. With FriendFeed though I think it has taken the concept of Twitter as a communication tool and pumped it up with the ability to easily share the things we find interesting with our friends.

Much of the attention around FriendFeed at this point is this ability to share the things we post to Twitter, our blogs, Flickr or any of the many other available communication hooks FriendFeed has. Behind this however is something I think is much more powerful that even Twitter; or any of its competitors, can equal. That being the ability to have semi-threaded conversations centered around both comments made directly on FriendFeed or the things you have posted elsewhere and show up in your FriendFeed page.

On one page you can have a multitude of easy to follow conversations with your various friends over things that have been posted - you can’t do that with any other service that I know of yet. Now I say semi-threaded because at this point all comments appear equally under the initial posted item as you can see in the screen capture below.

While this is a vast improvement over the flat hierarchy used by Twitter it still could be improved on in my opinion by allowing for true threading where your reply can show up under the person in the comment chain you are replying to. Still though - like I said - this is an overall usability improvement.

I know myself that I am starting to spend almost as much time involved with FriendFeed as I am with Twitter. I also know that I am beginning to get more value from FriendFeed than I am from Twitter and that doesn’t bode well for Twitter. I am more likely now to follow a story link from FriendFeed than I am from one linked to in Twitter especially if I see that any of my friends in FriendFeed have liked it or commented on it. It is like having a built in reputation system which for me is another great feature; and is something that Twitter doesn’t have.

There are two thing lacking though with FriendFeed in my opinion. The first is the fact that I have to manually reload the page in order to keep abreast of what is going on. Sorry but this is the lazyweb isn’t it? How about some AJAX here guys instead of me having to remember to refresh all the time.

The big thing though that I think could make FriendFeed a real breakout is getting a good solid two-way API for the service into the hands of developers. If they can do that I really think that we would see a proliferation of clients just as we have seen for Twitter and as with Twitter those clients could greatly increase the usability and popularity of FriendFeed.

At this point I was going to mention a couple of possible do’s and don’t for using FriendFeed but I see that Frederic over at The Last Podcast beat me to it with short and sweet post on the subject so head over there and give it a read. [Addition] Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped has a good post up as well on 10 ways to get more out of FriendFeed.

In the meantime you can find my FriendFeed page here but don’t feel slighted if I don’t return the “friending” right away as I am being much more selective than I was with Twitter. After all a cranky old fart only can handle so much noise

Conversation Tags: FriendFeed, Twitter, micro-communities, social networks