i disagree with your opinion, its already superior. so unless you are using multiple accounts here on FF, you will have to use FF a bit longer to form a better opinion of the service. Furthermore, I will use your own words against you: "I have never really used Friendfeed in any really engaging way." Once you become a bit more active and engaged you will see how its far superior in just about every way. Also, Welcome To FF. - Carlos Ayala

I really hope so. I don't know what you want to prove by pointing out that I haven't used friendfeed for very long, so can't comment on that. Friendfeed is fairly simple so it doesn't take long to understand what it does. But what I know is that, especially bloggers and news reporters, frequently use responses they get to questions posed on twitter in their final stories. Such responses would be impossible to link to here on friendfeed. And if friendfeed can't persuade bloggers and newsmakers to come over here, friendfeed will have a very hard time getting a substantial userbase. I hope I'm wrong as I believe frienfeed has more value in terms of archiving conversations than twitter does. With twitter the conversation is now, and it would be hard to locate the different comments later on unless a very specific hashtag was used among all participants. - Kasper Sorensen

I truly like that you are able to have a full conversation with friendFeed and not worry about going over your 140 characters. A plus on friendFeed. - Keven

@Kasper - I think Carlos was trying to point out that since you haven't used the service for very long you may not realize what the benefits are compared to Twitter. FriendFeed has a loyal following and community, many of who prefer it to Twitter for their day to day communication with others online, and take offense to Twitter being referred to as superior since that is a very relative opinion, especially from someone who hasn't used the service enough to make a valid comparison. It may SEEM simple on the surface, but there are levels of complexity that you have to discover and modify to your preference when you participate more. There are many many discussions/debates here on the best way to do that most efficiently. FriendFeed outshines Twitter in many ways, and is much better for conversation in my opinion. I think it would be relatively easy for the devs to implement a permalink to comments here if they wanted (appending a hashtag id to each in the url and allowing access to that link in the little balloon icon next to the comment would probably work). But I don't think that's been a very often requested feature simply because comments out of the context of the conversation are kind of useless anyway. - Lindsay

Sorry to be so frank, but Twitter BLOWS. ;-) - Brad Williamson

@Lindsay D. Thanks for your thoughts, I knew this would spark a debate just by the wording I used in the headline. I also anticipated that my comment would be tweaked towards an anti friendfeed thing. Even though I haven't used the service for very long doesn't mean that my opinion is wrong or ill supported, I don't think so anyway. Maybe that's the real reason why twitter is still more popular than friendfeed, it doesn't require you to spend hours and hours before you get used to the system? As I outlined in my second comment, I personally prefer friendfeed for conversation, just to get that clear and keep this debate from being about my personal view and discuss the objective element in my statement. I believe that in order to gain momentum, they have to get the mainstream bloggers and media outlets to use frienfeed in a similar way to the way they use twitter. LOT's of bloggers link to individual comments, whether they are worthy linking to out of context or not, they can't do that on friendfeed, and I believe that until that feature is implemented, bloggers will continually prefer to use twitter comments in their blog posts. But I agree that on all other fronts, friendfeed is better for conversation than twitter. I could rewrite my headline to something like this: Do you think the lack of permalinks to individual comments are preventing bloggers from linking to ff conversations? - Kasper Sorensen

My take on blogging since joining FriendFeed is that it's not nearly as attractive as it once was. I get much more interaction here than I ever did on my blog, and I've noticed that I'm not the only one here who has ended up basically abandoning their blog (which is difficult to get traffic to and limits you to a small number of topics in order to cultivate an "audience") in favor of easily getting conversations started here. So I would suggest that FF's goal may not be to have bloggers linking comments in their blogs, but getting the whole conversation here instead. You can use your feed basically as a blog, pulling in all the stuff you do elsewhere on the web in one handy, dandy place for people to keep up with you... and your posts can basically be a blog in themselves, especially now that you can make comments with unlimited length. I think the people who prefer Twitter are not the same as the people that prefer FriendFeed because they have different needs and expectations. Twitter has risen to popularity because of some celebrity endorsements and because it's been around longer, but that doesn't mean it's superior to FriendFeed, especially when it doesn't suit the people's needs who prefer FriendFeed. To each his own opinion, but saying apples are better than oranges isn't really a useful argument. - Lindsay

@Linsday D. That's a very fair point. As you will see from my other entries, I too believe that friendfeed and twitter suits different audiences, or rather, that there's a place for both of them. Indicating that I was comparing apples and oranges isn't really a fair observation, considering you read my follow-up comments. But an interesting take, that friendfeed is trying to steer away from individual comments because they want to focus on the whole debate. I think individual comments can be worth more than that, and a feature to like comments or link to them would be very useful I think. For example; a question about someone's opinion on X, is encouraging opinion regardless of context and would give a lot of individual viewpoints that likely could be very worthy, even out of context. - Kasper Sorensen

Collected some of the main points in this post: http://friendfeed.com/kasperb... - Kasper Sorensen

Interesting in your post you say "To me it suggests that people expect more intimacy on Twitter than they do on friendfeed, or that Twitter users expects some kind of selective sharing, where on friendfeed you are expected to share everything by default." I find it quite the opposite... I don't prefer Twitter because it feels much more like a simple broadcast medium to me. Unless someone is subscribed to you, you can't have a two-way conversation with them (unless they are monitoring their @replies actively). Twitter seems a lot more cold and impersonal to me than FriendFeed. On FriendFeed I can talk back and forth with people and get to know them pretty well with the self-contained discussions. Even people I haven't met before I can suddenly befriend via FoaF and decide whether I want to extend that relationship with a subscription by participating in several discussions with them before I've ever subscribed. In regard to the idea of importing your RSS feeds as spamming, the difference is that most of the stuff you're not interested in is easily ignored in FF. You can hide whole services from someone if you don't care about them (people frequently turn off Tweets for instance!!). And then only the content you really care about is there for you to interact with. That strengthens your relationship with other FriendFeeders because it emphasizes the stuff you have in common instead of the stuff you don't. - Lindsay

I think most twitter users do monitor their @replies actively, or as actively as you are monitoring your discussions here on friendfeed. And you don't have to be subscribed to someone to send them an @reply, or for them to respond. It's interesting though, that twitter might be seen as a broadcasting medium, considering the technical knowledge required to set it up to be (like rss postings etc). Friendfeed on the other hand is completely different, it encourage you to broadcast everything. But as you say it's a completely different ballgame over here, we have more control over what we see and it's therefore more acceptable. But I think it's an interesting debate. - Kasper Sorensen

I think that will be coming. I think it' already happening some places. For example when you comment on readwriteweb you have the option of sending it to friendfeed as well. I also think that some services like Disqus do this with Twitter reactions, so I see no reason why it wouldn't be comming to friendfeed as well. - Kasper Sorensen from IM

One thing that has always seemed odd to me on Twitter is that when you send an @reply to one person it feels like you are spamming all your other subscribers who weren't part of that conversation. On FriendFeed if you comment on something the whole conversation pops up in your feed but you may not know why... If the conversation isn't interesting to you, you just scroll past it, but the @reply in Twitter is something you have to read and ponder for a minute to figure out if you know the context... It requires more mental exertion to dismiss. Again, one reason Twitter feels more like a broadcast medium than a conversation medium to me. Twitter, to me, is like walking down the street and catching bits of people's conversations. FriendFeed is more like a cocktail party (to use an analogy by Robert Scoble) where you can pop in to conversations whenever you want (and someone is keeping notes for you to catch up on it if you come in late) and ignore the ones you're not interested in. - Lindsay

@Lindsay, I can assuage your anguish in this regard a bit :) Unless your followers have taken the proactive step of changing their default setting to "Show all @ replies", they will only see those that you sent to someone they were also following. Which kind of sucks as a default if you ask me, as a lot of people are missing out on good conversations. The default understanding on Twitter is openness, everyone is free to consume as much or ignore as much as they choose. It's not really a spam problem unless the messages become purely self-serving/promotional. - Alex Schleber