Can FriendFeed Overthrow Twitter?
You can’t now seem to pick up a newspaper or watch television without the word Twitter being mentioned at some point. Twitter, in case you have been living on the moon for the past year is a social media and microblogging website which enables its users to send and read updates regarding information posted via “tweets”. Twitter is the buzz word and is becoming the main social media website to be seen and heard on.
According to new study by Anderson Analytics, the average social network user goes to social sites five days a week and checks in about four times a day for a total of an hour each day.
Twitter has the glitz and glamour of celebrity status and backing, but there is another challenger out there for Twitter’s crown which is slowly growing in its shadow – FriendFeed.
FriendFeed is simply a message board that brings in content from social media websites and feeds from across the internet. In more technical terms, FriendFeed is a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates.
Advocates of FriendFeed prefer this social media website because it allows you to have threaded conversations, real-time refreshes of content and many cool features. One of FriendFeed’s features is it gives the user the ability to attach files (such as pictures, PSD files and even MP3s) to FriendFeed messages.
To emulate and compete with the likes of Twitter, FriendFeed has also recently launched a new search engine for their social media website.
If you’ve used Twitter’s search facility then you will be familiar with FriendFeed’s new real-time search to the point where the interface is almost exactly the same. FriendFeed have distinguish their search facility from that of Twitter’s by offering results that automatically update without the need to refresh the page.
The other main differentiator is that FriendFeed’s search engine facility pulls in data from a wide variety of social media sources such as Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn, Flickr, Photobucket and YouTube to name a few. You can even include your own blog’s RSS feed into their search engine by adding it to FriendFeed yourself, but only feeds manually added will be included. FriendFeed’s search engine also includes the option to save searches or view them in a smaller, pop-out window.
FriendFeed isn’t infallible because queries in their search engine are still quite random. However personally I think FriendFeed is a pretty cool social media website and a great platform to see what people are saying about any given topic at any given time across all the social media networks. It is a great way of tracking social media activities almost as they happen. But don’t mistake FriendFeed as just another company joining the growing list of online players who are trying to win the race for comprehensive and quick real-time search, it isn’t simply another search engine.
FriendFeed, like Twitter, is community based. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is more then just an online community because of its scope across all the social media websites. I would call FriendFeed a social community for social communities. Even though FriendFeed sucks in information from a variety of online sources, the conversation continues within FriendFeed’s own interface.
But like all social media websites its success will depend entirely on the level of people using the website, but my advice is this; like Twitter and Facebook it will not be wise for businesses to overlook the power of any social media website, including FriendFeed.
