FriendFeed vs. Plaxo Pulse… well sort of
A while back, I challenged my friend and co-blogger Kari to a duel; he should write about Plaxo Pulse, which he did and I’ll write about FriendFeed. Ridiculous really, because is there a competition? Take a look at these two logos:
vs. 
You’d think I’m trying to coax you into the one direction (click left, left!), but really, I just took the natural size that the logos are presented to you on each site. Clearly, FriendFeed has thought more about their image than Plaxo. And just to add a little bias to it anyway, which do you prefer, a service that’s all about FRIENDS, or one which sounds like a plaque-removing toothpaste?
These are just little things, but in a world filled with noise, it is the service with the loudest and clearest value-proposition that wins.
I can’t really review FriendFeed in detail, I am more like one of those “voyeurs.” I’ve added all my rss-feeds, but in the last few months, I’ve only “liked” one thing, and would prefer to hide 99% of it. And I’ve never used Plaxo (though I have used the toothpaste) and can’t say much about that.
I can judge FriendFeed as opposed to Twitter though. Let’s see:
Twitter’s value-proposition is that it’s a short messaging service (SMS), which works on the internet & mobile; it has lot’s of users and its API is supposedly the most popular aspect of the site, also allowing lots of 3rd party apps to work well with it. Twitter’s cons are its lack of stability, which has lead people to look elsewhere… though they always come back, and eventually these problems will solve themselves. It also lacks a number of interactive features that FriendFeed does possess.
FriendFeed has a number of things going for it:
- No. 1 is that it works with Twitter. The latter has clearly become a platform now and any service (e.g. identi.ca) that doesn’t work with it, will not get adopted.
- No. 2 is that it spawned out of Google-magic, which has both consequences on its excellent stability and general well-thought-out features.
- No. 3 is that you can hide items (I would really like this feature for Twitter), however it doesn’t work in the FriendFeed-mobile-edition, which is apparently third-party owned (send hate-mail here).
- No. 4 are the number of Rss-feeds, which you can feed to FriendFeed, though Twitterfeed works pretty well with Twitter, and the rss-feature is only as good as the service that provides it. For instance, I love the Last.fm loved track feature and the Disqus-comments. But I would love an rss-feed for all the comments that I wrote from my Wordpress-, Typepad-, and Blogger-profiles as well. Shame for these services to be so web 1.5. Comments are the most undervalued entities on the web.
- No. 5 is that there are no limits to the amount of words you can write… at least afaik… nor the other content (pictures, videos, etc.) you can post. The advantage is that word-lusty people like me can write; the disadvantage is that it won’t work well with mobile SMS (does it work with mobile SMS?), though who came up with a silly 140 letter-limit in the first place, I don’t know.
- No. 6 is the style of conversation, which is very different from Twitter, but perhaps similar to how Facebook is starting to look. As a user you can comment on every item that is posted, along with liking or hiding it (though once again, that doesn’t work on the mobile… ridiculous!). The pro is that you can easily follow a conversation, the con is that your “channel” can often be filled with a lot of noise, as apparently everyone has something to say on everything… again, a hide-button helps tremendously in this situation.
More experienced users will probably have more to say about this, and I encourage you to add a comment about FriendFeed below or on FriendFeed, or about Plaxo on Kari’s post.
I have just one question: So who won? 
Vincent van Wylick is a co-author on Tech IT Easy and likes to win duels.
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Business intelligence, Entertainment, Friends, Globalization, Google, Internet, Review, Twitter, blogging, innovation, marketing, user-generated content, web2.0, web3.0
So, err.. should I start using FriendFeed?
I think we all agree that Twitter is the king of the hill right now, so what’s the benefit of ff?
I think the benefit of FriendFeed is the conversation—the feature-set is better designed for more focussed topics, while Twitter is centred around individuals—and the increased stability over Twitter—also because it works perfectly well in symbiosis with that service.
That said, should you or shouldn’t you use it? If the aim is to be connected to people, Twitter already does that job. If the aim is to consolidate all your web-activity, FriendFeed works… as well as Twitterfeed, as well as, I’m sure, Plaxo.
Until the value for FriendFeed or any other web-network is clearly defined and measurable, I’m afraid I can’t give you a definite answer either way.
What is sure is that people have an attention-limit ; I won’t be using Plaxo Pulse anytime soon, because there aren’t that many people on there, and I’m sure people feel the same about FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, and the list goes on.
To add a final thought. I think that both Twitter, FriendFeed, and perhaps Plaxo all contribute to information-overload in general. They make it very hard to filter out noise and focus on specific issues. This is a general problem with an rss-filled world.
Whomever can solve this challenge, while providing the largest number of users/choice, will be the winner in my book.
Does comparing a service you have never used to one that you hardly use really contribute to the quality of online discourse?
@McCrea: maybe you’re right, I could’ve definitely devoted more research to my review, more like the way I review books.
But FriendFeed (and Plaxo) is not like a book. It’s the users that add the content, while FF is just… an rss-feed with some interactive features. Not much to say about that, in my opinion.
[...] twitter, user-generated content, web2.0, web3.0 — Vincent van Wylick @ 7:43 pm Hello again. Yesterday, I was, rightly, criticised for diminishing the conversation. Perhaps I’ve been out of the [...]
You know, now that I’ve used it for 15 minutes, I start to understand what’s so cool about friendfeed.
It’s for a bit different audience and use cases than plaxo’s pulse, but they are competitors in the big picture.
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