Friendfeed is finally getting that gigantic jump in users that Twitter experienced in 2008. However, is Friendfeed’s success based on its own merits or are they piggybacking on Twitter’s rise?

While it appears to be true that over 50% of Friendfeed’s total content is arising from Twitter, can that explain its rise in unique visitors? Friendfeed has about 1 million uniques per month compared to 550,000 in September. It is a big possibility that a lot of these unique visitors are finding Friendfeed through search engines that are crawling Twitter’s content. In that case, it would not be particularly impressive.

But Friendfeed and Twitter are different beasts. A lot of people discuss some kind of competition between the two, but this seems unnecessary to me.

Frienfeed’s real competition when it comes to functionality is the Facebook News Feed, which does something very similar to what Friendfeed does, and is frankly Facebook’s best feature. Twitter does not yet offer the kind of connectivity to other social media that Friendfeed offers. For now, Friendfeed has a big shot at being a player, and the added traffic shouldn’t be downplayed.

One problem I’ve noticed in using Friendfeed is redundancies. I recently joined Brightkite and added Flickr, but notice that when I add something to Flickr, it appears in Friendfeed through both Flickr and Brightkite. This is annoying. Having all of your Tweets, Diggs, and Flickr photos posted is a lot of content to sift through on a layout some people find annoying. Making Friendfeed less noisy without forcing the user to constantly edit it will be a struggle.

The these are problems Facebook also deals with, so in my opinion, the service that best manages noise will be the favorite of the techies. And then, perhaps, the general public will follow.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 11:56 pmand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.