{"id":63,"date":"2008-05-29T21:20:28","date_gmt":"2008-05-29T21:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/05\/29\/the-silly-reason-i-prefer-twitter-to-friendfeed\/"},"modified":"2008-05-29T21:20:28","modified_gmt":"2008-05-29T21:20:28","slug":"the-silly-reason-i-prefer-twitter-to-friendfeed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/05\/29\/the-silly-reason-i-prefer-twitter-to-friendfeed\/","title":{"rendered":"The silly reason I prefer Twitter to Friendfeed"},"content":{"rendered":"

With all the problems Twitter<\/a> has been having recently there’s been a lot of talk about people moving to Friendfeed<\/a> or whether Friendfeed is the future etc etc so I decided to dig out my old account details and give it another go.<\/p>\n

Now I have to admit, when I first tried FF I didn’t really get it… I found it useful as an aggregator for all my own activity on the web – and I’ve used it for that in a few places – but I other than that it didn’t really leave a lasting impression.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason I didn’t get on with FF was probably because I didn’t add many contacts, so the first thing I did was search out a few more people I follow on Twitter and add them.  I was pleasantly surprised to find most of the people I searched for, and it was good to check out the other things they’re doing.  But… that did lead to quite a lot of noise.  I’ll investigate some settings to see if I can filter things out, but there are only so many ‘friend of Robert Scoble<\/a>‘ posts I’m likely to read in any one day!  On the plus side, I really like the comment functionality. It’s useful to see replies threaded and is something I’d love to see in Twitter.<\/p>\n

I played around with the Rooms tab a little, it’s interesting, but (maybe I’m being stupid here) wouldn’t it be better to be able to search for rooms you might be interested in?  I can’t help thinking there’s a gap here in both FF and Twitter for the equivalent of an old IRC channel<\/a>, a way of focusing comment and people around a particular topic.  <\/p>\n

Overall though, whilst I do like the idea of Friendfeed… and I will stick with it in case I’m still missing something obvious… it still leaves me a little underwhelmed… to me Friendfeed doesn’t seem to have the character that Twitter has.  <\/p>\n

It’s a hard thing to describe – let alone quantify – but for me Twitter as a site and a service has a character of its own.  It could be that its just me that sees character in ‘things’ I don’t know, but it’s something that I reckon can make or break a product.  It would seem to be something that can be captured and used as a marketing tool – look at BMW and the Mini.  Fiat are chasing the same with their 500.<\/p>\n

So that’s it really… I prefer Twitter, even though it does seem to be built on servers made of cheese, because it has a character of it’s own.  I like that :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I prefer Twitter, even though it does seem to be built on servers made of cheese, because it has a character of it’s own. I like that :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[111,24],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-friendfeed","tag-twitter","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}