friendfeed the place to be

Apple finally caught me.. all my cynicism was used up on the launch of iPhone last time.. now they have gone and added the things I wanted to the new version.

So even I was trying to keep up to date on what was going on at the Apple WWDC - enough info had been leaked that I knew this device was going to be a phone worth having (and you have no idea how much it pains me to say it). Everyone knew Twitter was going down at some point and there were numerous posts on friendfeed saying it did - it certainly slowed down early on and I saw features being switched off all over the place. In the end I stopped using Twitter so I only know from other peoples’ comments that it did go down. I always check Techcrunch and even that went down for a little while.. the one site that seemed to stay up was FriendFeed and that’s where a lot of commentary was being done. Could this be the turning point against Twitter?

Now for FriendFeed to add Twitterlike functionality or maybe people could use services like Pownce/Jaiku etc and bring them all together inside FriendFeed.

Oh and the Friendfeed Room feature was a godsend.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Lots of people are thinking of ways to use twitter as a mechanism for getting their message out. The trick is I think to do it in a way that benefits the people you are telling.

Is this an example of how to do it?

You receive an email saying is now following you and then on going to the link, it is one huge background with their website and contact details. The usual reciprocal follow would then result in spam appearing in the Twitter stream (though in this case it did seem to be being used for everyday use).

For me this is not the way to do things, and I am inclined to block rather than follow. I sure hope this is not a trend. Whilst it will not affect my Twitter stream (unless I reciprocate the follow it will not appear), it is spamming my email address and I’ll have to switch off the updates telling me who is following me.

Popularity: 6% [?]

sighs. I signed u to Pownce, the twitter type service. It looks great, and supposedly doesn’t have the downtime. No one seems to talk much in there though many people seem to have accounts. What would be great is if I could cross post to both Twitter and Pownce.

Step forward Twhirl.

My favourite twitter client just rolled out Pownce cross posting. I spent a short while celebrating thinking great I can slowly switch to Pownce now. But problem. Twhirl only shows me the twitter stream so its great I am posting to Pownce.. but I cant track the conversation without going to the website.

What I need is an aggregated (or tabbed?) stream. One for Pownce and one for Twitter. In the meantime I guess I’ll stay on Twitter.

Popularity: 6% [?]

For those of you using Twitter, there is a great client out there called Twhirl (recommended to me by Tom Raftery) which I have been using for a while. They have just released v0.6 and improved its memory usage. I guess I’ll find out how much soon - it will be interesting to see if it hits 150MB of memory again.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Scoble has set a fire under Facebook for not letting him move his data out of their network and into another network. He has posted about it here.

Data portability (and interchange) is going to be an important part of 2008 with people using more and more services to meet their needs. Amongst the tech crowd, people seem to be using Facebook less and less and moving to specialised services like Twitter, tumblr and Flickr for “status updates”, life feeds and photos respectively. The ability to move between services can only be good for the consumer - increasing competition amongst similar services and providing better functionality. I am hoping this will allow for better attention based tools to come to the fore - Twitter is definitely better at putting quality information in front of me than the Facebook currently because of the tighter audience. Of course, if Twitter took off in the same way as Facebook then it too would suffer as it would need to prioritise or at least group messages.

There is a new group I have just joined called dataportability.org which is looking to help this happen. It seems to make sense.

I wonder if this idea could be replicated at the operating system level? It would make for more interesting competition - the ability to remove microsoft’s components and replace them with others. Is it technically feasible? It would need Microsoft to open up the OS significantly.

Popularity: 18% [?]