The August numbers are in. For the past 3 months I've been tracking compete.com's traffic report for FriendFeed vs Twitter. For the previous 2 months FF has had a faster growth rate than Twitter according to compete. This month though paints a much less optimistic picture for FF with FF actually going negative (barely) in unique visitor growth while Twitter turns in a healthy 17.7% growth rate. Take it with a grain of salt of course, compete is flawed, inaccurate, etc. etc. blah blah blah. - Thomas Hawk from Bookmarklet

Friendfeed seems to have a fairly international user base, so hard to know whether that paints an accurate picture in terms of overall growth. Interesting that their growth in the US is slowing though. - grag

it felt slower to me for most of August, but felt like it was picking up again after the launch of the beta. It will be interesting to see what the Sept. numbers look like. - Thomas Hawk

Twitter had the BIG jump right about the time of last year's sxsw, FF is just getting started and the convo is a BIG + here. - Dave Martin

Dave, I agree that FF is just getting started. I'm just curious as to why their growth stalled last month. It felt slower to me last month than in previous months. Hopefully the launch of the beta rejuvenates things. I think one thing to consider is that the pace of new development slowed in August. Maybe it's better to release little features weekly than a big beta every six weeks. Who knows. I used to think that FF would surpass Twitter in 6mo, in one year, the momentum felt that strong in the past. - Thomas Hawk

I still don't get this comparison/competition thing between friendfeed and twitter. They are completely different kinds of services. The key to friendfeed is the aggregation. The point of twitter is status/micro-blogging. The only similarity is that friendfeed can be used for micro-blogging but nowhere nearly as simply as twitter. - ·[▪_▪]·

http://www.quantcast.com/twitter... Twitter.com is a top 1,000 site that reaches over 1.5 million U.S. monthly people. The site caters to a more educated audience.The typical visitor reads Daily Kos and subscribes to Vanity Fair. - A.T.

http://www.quantcast.com/friendf... This site reaches approximately 67,512 U.S. monthly people. The site appeals to a 35-49, slightly more male than female crowd.The typical visitor reads prisonplanet.com and attends the University of Virginia. - A.T.

i.e. I always thought that all these quantitative research tools shall be taken with grain of salt - A.T.

let's see what the winter brings. - Carlos Ayala

Hopefully I'm wrong and this graph is misleading. But it feels like it's slowed to me. Where are all the greasemonkey scripts for instance? It doesn't seem like anyone's developed any for the new beta. I think we need profiles and lots of other things. I also think the UI still needs to have a dumbed down version for mainstream users. Not sure what the right answers are though. - Thomas Hawk

i m not surprised, friendfeed makes too much noise - tintin from twhirl

I definitely don't want friendfeed profiles. I already provide service links to plenty of sites that store my profile. - ·[▪_▪]·

actually what I do want from Friendfeed is technically not _that_ difficult, only I have no single big chunk time in next few weeks to start it as my project... barely,it is all about creating own mirror of what I consider as valuable from Friendfeed; and some sort of "Friendfeed on Gears" i.e. semioffline sync-ability using http://gears.google.com/ - A.T.