Are they really that direct competitors?
FriendFeed is about simple sharing and discussions. bbgm gives a great example in another comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550126
During the live show that lead up to this blog post, there was a very active realtime discussion on FriendFeed about the show (and MA's Twitter/FriendFeed claim): http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegillmor/1059c36c/gillmor-gan...
Regardless of what people think of FriendFeed and these spontaneous, lightweight conversations, it's pretty clearly different from Twitter.
That said, Friendfeed is a lot more like Facebook. And in many ways, Facebook has evolved to become like Friendfeed. The social media aggregation and conversation features have a lot in common.