Comments for Twitter is Down - Come Join Us in Our FriendFeed Room

Twitter is Down - Come Join Us in Our FriendFeed Room

2008-05-23T23:24:05Z

"Goodnight ma!" "Goodnight pa!" "Goodnight, John Boy!" That's what they used to say in every episode of the TV classic The Waltons (see below). That same kind of repetitive chorus has grown more frequent around the web announcing that yes, the Twitter website and API are down again.

What do you do when one homestead on the frontier range gets more leaky than you can bear? You pick up and move to another one. We'll discuss one particular alternative to Twitter below, but more important is the matter of data portability.

]]> Vendors need to make the resources we compile with them easily exportable, and allow import from other services, or else there's a frightening disincentive to invest much in any service in particular. Because it might end up going down all the time.

For those of you ready to spend some time in a different forum, we'd like to invite you to join us in the brand new RWW room over at FriendFeed. Rooms are like groups and they were just introduced at FriendFeed. Ours is a place we can discuss any number of things and an easy way for RWW friends and family to share links with each other and RWW authors. Thanks to Thomas Hawk for reserving the room for us.

How FriendFeed Works

FriendFeed is a great way to share not just messages, but all your activity across diverse social platforms. The way I explain it is this: It's the people online that I'm most interested in following and I like the way FriendFeed lets me see friends' activities on other networks that I don't participate in. I don't do Netflix, but I like knowing what my friends are renting. I don't do Pownce orStumbleUpon, but I like knowing what my friends do there. It all comes into FriendFeed.

Where You Can Find Us

If you'd like to join in the conversation at FriendFeed with ReadWriteWeb authors, here's our room again and below are our individual account pages you can add as friends if you'd like.

Richard MacManus
Marshall Kirkpatrick
Sarah Perez
Alex Iskold
Corvida

If other RWW folks are on FriendFeed and I've missed you (I'm looking at you, Josh Catone) go ahead and edit this post to add yourself.

It's Not Just About Twitter and Friend Feed

Startup web apps break, all the time. People complain about Twitter going down all the time, and it's maddening, but we test new apps all day long and can tell you that they all break far more often than you'd like if you use them regularly enough. FriendFeed in particular has been pretty good so far. You can't depend on any of these edge cases though; we use what works, when it works, we enjoy the new functionality that small startups are able to offer and then some of them win, get big and often stop innovating.

Last night we wrote about why it's in vendors' best interests to support data portability. That discussion was mostly in terms of big vendors like Facebook and Google. Small vendors like Twitter and Friendfeed and countless other, smaller startups would also benefit hugely from being able to promise users that data compiled in their service could be easily taken back home to another service if the user so chooses. That's the kind of insurance that will allow users to give a new service a fair and meaningful trial. Right now all these startups are largely a series of black holes

If you're a Windows user you can try out Engtech's Twitter to FriendFeed friend importer. Otherwise, loss of all our data appears to be the risk we take in the wild west of web 2.0.

Comment from Bob Uva on 2008-05-23

2008-05-24T01:20:13Z

EngTech's Twitter to FriendFeed Importer is working like a charm! Thanks.

Comment from Jon on 2008-05-23

2008-05-24T02:30:58Z

Yeah, lots of services go down for maintenance or upgrades or just plain old "oops", but nobody does it as good as lijit. I love the video they send you to when their tubes are down: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlAR10ZaIZw
That video makes them one of my favorite complanies of all time.

If the service is good enough, do we really care if they're down for awhile? There are a couple of services that I like so much, I'm willing to put up with a flub or an oops every now and then.

Comment from The Masked Millionaire on 2008-05-23

2008-05-24T04:59:01Z

Who would have thought that the Waltons would have made it to the Internet? Maybe Sam Walton...But John-Boy?

Live From Las Vegas
The Masked Millionaire

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2008-05-23

2008-05-24T05:18:50Z

Brilliant new feature from FriendFeed! I must admit to not being a daily FF user, but this may change that.

Comment from Tell on 2008-05-24

2008-05-24T11:36:14Z

I don't suscribe to RRW's point of view and I don't support Friendfeed. Friendfeed is just an aggregator and pretty much nothing else.

1. Bloggers, stop fooling everybody telling that Friendfeed is social.
Friendfeed desn't support any Social Network. The reason of that? Very simple, it is a consequence of the technology they use and the background of the founders. They worked at Google, so they believe in crawling. Thus as Facebook pages are private you won't ever see any update from your friends in Facebook, neither any Social Network. This had to be said.

2. Friendfeed isn't a sharing service that rocks.
Threre are plenty others that are far more convenient. Hence all those leveraging drag&drop instead of copy/paste. The copy/paste of urls is a so boring and old-fashioned way of sharing that I just can't believe that bloggers didn't bring that on the table.

3. Friendfeed is overwhelming.
It was supposed to simplify my Social life aggregating updates that matter in one single place. The result is that it is not possible for a normal internet user to read all they gather in my page. Obviously, except professional bloggers that have time to do so and that are eager to expose themselves as much as they can. No filters in Friend feed to help me check that I want. Other services focus on that as it is key.

4. Friendfeed is not live.
As it is a website, no live updates! As simple as that. You need to refresh and refresh your page again and again. As well, their machines do not crawl the web live. So you will always have a delay in your updates. Alternative choice of Friendfeed are client or browser-based solutions.

5. Friendfeed is a one-way communication service.
No IM in it. Plenty of competitors have this feature. Ok they have just launched Rooms. Well, isn't that a Forum? What a breakthrough!

Well having said that, I do like Friendfeed for some purposes. What I don't is the artificial build-up of a new Silicon Valley Icon. Friendfeed is ok for some usages and for some people, mainly bloggers. But they are not mainstream, not social, not for youngsters, not fun at all to use. Friendfeed's core value is that it is an aggregator. Don't try (like the Founders) to let us believe that there is something else hot.