Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed

techcrunch.com

19 pointsnickb20 comments

Maybe it is just me, but I just don't care for either. I am 27, tech savy, but still don't get the allure of twitter, or even friend feed.

I feel old, like the average 65+yo, wondering what's up with their grandkids staying in front of computer all day and just sending messages to each other. Not getting it. Maybe if I was a journalist I would find it useful, but for the rest of us, I am not sure the value of it.

I used to be like that. It very confusing to an outsider what the allure is, so it's more a call for an explanation.

Personally, I didn't "get it" until I signed up and had a couple of friends on it. It's kinda nice to see what people are up to without having to read a blog post about their life or whatever.

Because its short, its easy just to glance at and see what the other person is up to.

Its a good place for a quick discussion or poll, ie. you can broadcast, what mail software do you use? and have your friends reply and possibly other people.

I use Twitter as a sideblog (a part of my blog sidebar where I put any posts that I don't feel like developing past the 140 character mark.) I've never once gotten into a conversation on Twitter, nor, I think, would I want to. But, of course, I still use it, because it has a killer app that none of the other sites seem to appreciate: it's embeddable without needing a whole bunch of gaudy "widget" framework.

I don't get the allure of Twitter but I know that's because I haven't made the investment to figure it out, and don't actually know what it does. If I signed for an account and started using it I'm sure I'd figure out a way to make it give me some benefit.

I tried twitter for the first time last week. It was unimpressive.

It showed me several pictures of whales, and then finally I got to type in 140 characters.

IM/IRC is just a lot more useful IMHO

FriendFeed is very impressive - among other things, I like that it posts my reddit upvotes and Amazon wishlist updates to my facebook feed - keeping my friends up-to-date on what I'm looking at.

I am under the (possibly mistaken) impression that Twitter really only comes into its own when posting from a cell phone, where its radical simplicity becomes an asset, rather than a liability.

What I don't understand is why people consistently feel the need to say "I don't use Twitter" every time it's mentioned.

A lot of people like it. If you don't understand why, that's fine. Nobody cares whether or not you use Twitter.

That's true, but we get so many Twitter articles posted in here, that it must be important. I am trying to understand why do some people feel it is important, and how it is useful to them.

People like it because it's blogging but with a captive audience, and the 140-character limit keeps you from writing Steve Yegge-style blog posts. You make a point, your friends are forced to read it, they can reply. That's twitter :)

FWIW, I know a large mess of people using Twitter and I don't know a single one who has switched to FF for this (or any other) reason.

I was just going to say this.

Two striking examples: 1) Last week my girlfriend, by far not a hacker or nerd, said she wanted to join Twitter. She's joined, and found many of her also non-technically savvy friends on it as well. It's becoming mainstream now. Once it starts hitting critical mass, it'll be much harder to slow.

2) Out tonight with a bunch of geeks, and almost every single one has started to use Twitter. Only a few didn't. These are Amazonians, Microsofties, startup folks, etc. That is, these are early adopters. I was shocked by how often Twitter came up in conversation. However, not once did anything about Twitter's downtime come up, and not once did anyone even mention FriendFeed.

So, on one hand you have Twitter beginning to go mainstream, and on the other hand you don't see the early adopter types leaving.

"It's becoming mainstream now. Once it starts hitting critical mass, it'll be much harder to slow."

It's easy enough to slow if Twitter can't deal with it still, and just disable things, or put a cap on number of users or something.

Not only that, but I've been using replies these last few days and they worked fine???

I actually prefer the simplicity of Twitter over Friendfeed. I find Friendfeed to busy and takes away from conversation and interaction.

This really looks bad on the Ruby on Rails guys as well, makes me hesitant to want to develop on their platform when I see scaling _nightmares_ like Twitter.

I've just been searching summize for @replies. Generally, I don't like that friendfeed comments aren't threaded, but the twitter-reply is very nice. http://summize.com/search?q=%40tipjoy

From the perspective of the web as a giant brain, this has got to be freaking twitter out. Each time people switch like this, that route becomes better greased. Each time this happens, it becomes easier for the giant web brain to reroute it's signals through friendfeed. Very soon, the equilibrium changes and they don't switch back. It's exactly the process ants use to eat your oreos from your cabinet, and it's exactly how children's brains change from one pattern of behavior to another.

But twitter can't punish the kid or poison the ants to stop people from using friendfeed. Which means that unless they stop this trend right now, the giant internet brain we are all neurons in will basically think twitter out of existence. If twitter does not fix their scaling problems very soon and very well, so to stop this pattern of behavior, it will be alta vistad. (Remember Alta Vista? Neither does anyone else.)

Prediction. Jeff Bezos is going to get screwed on his recent investment. I love Jeff Bezos, but he funded twitter just as it was starting to sink.

I agree. The current twitter course is straight to the dead pool.

They have the money to scale. They have the users. They just don't seem to have the brains.

"You can't fix stupid!" -- Ron White

What I don't understand is why they don't invest some millions in fixing up their mess. Like it or not twitter is a better name than friendfeed, and features can be easily copied if friendfeed gets more functional.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com