Twitter is the New Friendster

I did everything I could to resist the temptation of the 'new shiny' a year ago when I started seeing many 'influencers' move to microblogging (some even at the expense of their macroblogs). While Twitter exploded in 2007, I was still a doubter ... and although it may yet fade, I was wrong about it. When I was blogging several times per day plus 5-7 days a week and got tired of it, I thought microblogging would be a bit of a stretch for me. However, sites like FriendFeed have made the idea and result of microblogging much more dynamic, robust and inclusive. Ironically, because of FriendFeed I now see the need for Twitter ... but it's too late.

March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

Read the TechCrunch post and the comments for the whole dialogue ...

While some people say that Twitter has over 3 and nearly 4 million registered users, others will say that "Registered users is an absolutely meaningless statistic." That is not to say that over 1 million registered users is small potatoes. In fact, of Twitter's one million users, a good number of them are major influencers. From Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Jason Calcanis and Om Malik to Steve Rubel, Chris Brogan and David Parmet, all of these major influencers are on Twitter ... some of them even have over 20,000 followers! What does this mean? When each one of them updates twitter on what they are doing, thinking, reading or working on, that information will spread faster than it would anywhere else.

That said, Twitter is text based and too simple. It does not account for our entire online lives and would force us to integrate our other destinations into this platform. This is why FriendFeed could succeed. Rather than add a step to my online life, FriendFeed keeps track for me.

For example, I just posted 62 pictures to PicasaWeb (Google's photo property). Rather than going to twitter and inputting that activity, FriendFeed already knew (though it could operate a little faster). Think about this on a larger scale ... from sharing and starring news on Google Reader to uploading videos to YouTube, FriendFeed allows you to publish your online life ... not just 140 characters.

Twitter is certainly better than FriendFeed at certain things, but I hope they view this as a major threat or else Twitter will be the next Friendster, and not just due to the constant downtime ...