The Friday Gillmor Gang podcast featured special guests Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, the creators of FriendFeed. Along with Twitter, FriendFeed has become a poster child for the next wave of communications tools favored by the cybernauts.
Steve Gillmor seems to think that Twitter will become the predominant messaging backbone for the social Web. If the company behind Twitter can't make it happen, Gillmor suggested that FriendFeed should do it.
Buchheit, who was employee No. 23 at Google and suggested the now famous "Don't be evil" motto, said that FriendFeed wasn't designed to kill Twitter. "It's about making services you already use more useful," he said. "We think of FriendFeed not so much about displacing services, but about making them more useful."
He characterized FriendFeed as a content discovery tool, allowing users to view content through the eyes of the people they know. FriendFeed also allows for comments and has "Rooms" for groups of people to gather, as well as application programming interfaces that expose all the data in the system. Twitter is more of a messaging service.
Taylor said he created FriendFeed because what he defined as the nucleus of his online activity was different from that of other friends. "Over the past five years with the proliferation of syndication and APIs, the data isn't necessarily siloed."
Gillmor tried to make the case that most people don't use a lot of services. Buchheit agreed that most people use one service, but added that not everyone uses the same service. "Part of what makes FriendFeed so powerful is that we all use different services, such as Google Picassa, Flickr or SmugMug (for photos). You can see them all even though users are using separate services," he said.
Gillmor and Robert Scoble recommended that FriendFeed support XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol--an XML technology for real-time communication), which would give it Twitter-like capabilities. "We want to pull in data and make it available anywhere, such as in iGoogle gadget, Facebook, and RSS feeds. Adding XMPP would fit in logically," Buchheit said.
The FriendFeeders said they plan to add a blocking feature. "We are adding features as users request them," Buchheit said. "We have been thinking about the right way to implement blocking for FriendFeed and it's a bit more complex (than Twitter blocking)." Nor does FriendFeed have the track feature of Twitter (which has been disabled of late), but it has search, which Buchheit said provides equivalent functionality.
FriendFeed's developers are also working on improving the user interface, which suffers from information overload. Buchheit said they are testing summarization of the best content from a period of time, so users don't have to sift through to find the best stuff, and combining items that are duplicated or related.
They also maintain that the fragmentation of conversation by having separate comments for each entry is one of the best features. Users don't necessarily want to participate in aggregated public forums, preferring to converse within the social groups they care about. For example, you might not want to combine co-workers comments with your mother's comments, Buchheit said.
Lately the echo chamber of the blogosphere inhabited by the Gillmor Gang (of which I am a member) has been caught in a loop of Twitter-FriendFeed convulsions.
Steve Gillmor believes that Twitter is the communications medium of the future. Send out a message to your followers and track (when the feature is enabled) the loosely coupled conversation as it wafts deeper into the cloud. FriendFeed, on the other hand, aggregates feeds from Twitter and many other sources, creating an index of the content (gestures in Gillmorspeak) an individual chooses to share with followers.
Twitter's friendly API allows applications to be built on top of it (when the site is up), letting FriendFeed and other services tap into the Twitter stream. In addition, FriendFeed allows users to comment on the contents of the aggregated feeds and has "rooms" for discussions among a group of people.
Steve Gillmor makes the claim that Twitter is being strangled by FriendFeed and that his pal Robert Scoble is hijacking the conversation away from the unreliable Twitter site to FriendFeed. It's much ado about nothing. Users have the freedom to head to their communications medium of choice. The Twitter conversation stream isn't locked into a walled garden--tweets can flow like water into applications such as FriendFeed, Summize, and Facebook.
It's not clear precisely where this latest twist on instant messaging and feed aggregation is heading, but just let it evolve without the prejudice in its own Darwinian way. That doesn't mean to back away from criticism or debate, but to do so in the context of open networks that provide ways for individual users and groups to shape their online experience.
Steve Gillmor prefers the Twitter funnel, while Robert Scoble likes the FriendFeed blender, which can include Twitter streams.
To this point, I have avoided getting into the conversations weighing the value and future of Twitter, FriendFeed, and the latest generation of community communications services. They clearly represent an evolution of instant messaging and the triumph of the feed.
Twitter is an early adopter service (see Kara Swisher's post) and hasn't yet caught on with mainstream Web users. The Twitter population is a rounding error compared with Web mail or Yahoo Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger.
But Twitter adds a new dimension to instant messaging beyond its SMS-like 140-character constraint with the concepts of following and followers, enabling a kind of broadcast model.
In July 2007, Dave Winer described Twitter as "a network of users, with one kind of relationship: following." He also called it a micro-blogging system with a "relatively open identity system."
Steve Gillmor describes Twitter as creating a social graph of who you follow that intersects with the social graph of who follows you.
"The asynchronous nature of follows creates both a star system and an equal opportunity for anyone to get involved," Gillmor said. "You can build your own sphere of influence. You can create a microcommunity that links up with other microcommunities that forms an expanding circle of influence. If I say something and Scoble replies, his complete orbit doesn't follow but they see we are talking [Tweeting], so I get a bunch more follows. The net result is my sphere is increased by the addition of more strong followers." The APIs have made Twitter more extensible and viral, such as flowing Twitter into Facebook status pages or FriendFeed.
Winer just posted some data, taking into account the number of followers and number of posts, and coming up with an indicator of what he dubbed the amount of noise or "spew" issued by a person using the Twitter transport.
It's not exactly a measure of influence (more an indicator of overall reach), but it can be a huge number. In Winer's calculation, Robert Scoble has the most followers on Twitter, with 21,310, and 10,713 Tweets, which multiplied together yields 228,294,030 potential impressions. (It would be less given the ramp up in followers and Tweets but still a big number.)
In this context, Twitter is a highly efficient way to share, discover, and market ideas. My journalist/blogger friends have taken to Twitter broadcasts of their posts, and on occasion I have Twittered live events, broadcasting my notes and observations to followers, who receive it in real time or for later consumption. You can also "Track" keywords to follow people or concepts without signing up to follow them. "It creates a public/private scenario where discoverability and special social interactions can happen," Gillmor said.
Where is Twitter heading? First it has to get a more stable infrastructure. The company is taking on additional funding of $15 million to $20 million which should help in the scaling up department. With the new funding, Twitter will likely start adding new features. The danger is in messing with the simplicity of the service, but it seems inevitable if you look at how instant-messaging applications evolved. Below is a look at where Twitter came from and where it might end up in the next year or so.
Jeff Clavier (an investor in Seesmic which recently acquired the Twitter app Twhirl) views Twitter as a "quick return on the attention investment":
This micro-chunking of the information - the arbitrary limitation to a few tens or hundreds of characters in a world of Gigabit networks - drops the time commitment barrier to a couple of minutes tops. Most people can't commit large chunks of time to read/write/comment on blogs, but everyone has a couple minutes to spare a few times a day... not too far away from a phone or a computer. Offering broad access on the web, on the phone, one message at a time or through applications, in real time (even if you are not pushing it like Scoble does) or in batch mode, allows time (and CPA ?) challenged users to get a quick return on the attention investment they choose to make at any point during the day.
Twitter adds to the overflow of information, but if you find the right people to follow, or lead, it does offer a good ROI for the time spent consuming 140 characters at a time.
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