The Twitter vs. FriendFeed Smackdown

I've recently migrated from using Twitter on a regular basis to instead trying FriendFeed. FriendFeed (FF) is a social networking application that allows one to follow specific people's posts from up to forty one applications, Web sites and services. It also allows one to post directly on the FF site. Why this defection, you ask? Because, as Tinfoil + Raccoon so eloquently expressed the other day, Twitter has been so full of fail recently that it's been breakin' my heart. I mean, what kind of application lures me in with promises of constant connectivity and cracklike social networking capabilities and then is broken in one way or another for weeks at a time? I don't like being taken for granted as a user. These days, we have enough viable choices that if an app is frequently broken or hard to use, people will leave it (we in Libraryland should know this better than most, right?). And so, even though today Twitter is functioning perfectly, it is with great reluctance and and a heavy heart that I follow my libr* peeps over to FriendFeed.

Here are some of my initial thoughts about FriendFeed:

• I love that it keeps discussion threads together, which makes them very easy to follow.
• I enjoy seeing which posts get rated favorably with "like".
• Some folks are taking advantage of FriendFeed's aggregation functionalities to display their posts from Flickr, del.icio.us, Pandora, their blogs, and more. While I for some reason feel reluctant to aggregate my entire online life in one place, it is kind of interesting and handy to see other people's stuff all in one place.
• FriendFeed also allows one to create rooms (such as the LSW room) that allow one to easily share posts with a specific group of people. This kind of room doesn't facilitate the social chattiness of a meebo room, but it still could be useful for asynchronous communication.
• I loved being able to direct message people via Twitter when I wanted to say something to a specific person more privately, so I'm disappointed that FF doesn't have this feature.
• FF makes it very easy to post links, especially since there is no 140 character restriction.

Presently, my loyalties remain divided. Time will tell whether Twitter can win me back or whether FriendFeed will ultimately triumph.