Twitter Dominates the Lifestream
By using FriendFeedStats, which creates service-level usage statistics from lifestream aggregator FriendFeed based on its public timeline, we can see which services are the most popular. Specifically, Twitter tends to dominate the conversation with about 44% of all activity on the service. Eric, over at Internet Duct Tape, spent the time to helpfully compile the stats and identify some trends.
What he found was that just 8 services out of the 35 it now supports account for 90% of the site's activity. Twitter, Blog, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, YouTube, StumbleUpon, with Twitter accounting for about 44% (slightly more when he made his analysis).
That's a little misleading, because these stats measure updates, and Twitter is basically a chat application, so updates come fast and furious all day. But what is more interesting is that in each service category that Eric looked at, the market leader dominates the activity on FriendFeed -- i.e., Digg is the most used bookmarking site, Last.fm the most used music site, Flick for photos, Twitter for status updates, etc.
The conclusion to be drawn from that is that getting early position is very important in the web 2.0 world and that the most important aspect of any web 2.0 service is users. "You can't ignore the network effect," writes Eric. "People will use the service that the people they want to network with use. Once an incumbent has a critical market share, it is very hard to oust them."
Another thing to keep in mind while looking at these results is that FriendFeed is still the playground of early adopters. People who don't do things like read ReadWriteWeb probably also don't use FriendFeed. These numbers give a snapshot into which services are resonating with the web 2.0 early adopter crowd, but perhaps not necessarily which will make noise in the mainstream. For example, Google Reader shares are actually more popular on FriendFeed than del.icio.us bookmarks. Neither of those is really a mainstream service, but generally looking at the number of items shared on the tech-dominated Google Reader vs. the number of items bookmarked on del.icio.us paints a different picture.
What other conclusions can you draw from the FriendFeed usage stats? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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What I conclude is that you guys spend far too much time writing about FriendFeed!
Perhaps, though this post isn't really about FriendFeed at all. It's about all of the sites it gathers information from. FriendFeed just happened to be the point of entry for the data.
FF is the best new service ever!
But what I like about FF is you can see others' Google Reader Shared Items in (nearly) real-time. I find more great stuff in FF these days than by using my RSS reader.
how is it interesting that the market leaders are leading the market?
all this shows is that the people who choose to use friendfeed are also the ones who choose to use twitter, etc. (a non-point since friendfeed is useless without the other sites)
this does not compare the sites themselves at all. i.e. the ratio of twitter use vs. flickr use on friendfeed is probably no where close the use of the two sites globally.
@Keith: Eric (who authored the post I referenced) didn't compare Twitter to Flickr -- he compared Flickr to Picasa, SmugMug, etc.
What is interesting is how dominant the market leaders are, and that in each segment there is a clear market leader. That points to the network effect trend for many of these sites -- people go where their friends are and once that site hits a certain mass, it is very hard for any other service to make a dent.
It's interesting to me anyway... your mileage may vary... ;)
Stranger. On LiFE2Front, Flickr and Delicious dominate my users lifestreams :o" .oO(I'm alone to separate content against activity)
Funny thing is that friendfeed itself is the perfect example that you don't have to be the first mover to make it in the webworld. remember: suprglu in 2005(!) was the first lifestreaming-service.