With the recent chatter about the growing popularity friendfeed, I’ve been questioning whether it’s really worth it to try to add features to a twitter client (web page thumbnails, ink, and so on). After all, isn’t the current action over on friendfeed?
Yeah, for the leading edge folks I might be a little late to the game here. But oh well, I still think that for those of us who use twitter’s service that a better client will make it even more useful.
Also, twitter is a baseline communication service and outside of friendfeed’s commenting ability, friendfeed is more an aggregator. Two different animals.
But what does all this mean, for instance, if you want to draw a cartoon for instance and share it with others. In a sense, posting a drawing to flickr and relying upon friendfeed for others to see and comment upon it is not a bad idea. It avoids people having to broadcast particular items here or there on twitter. Maybe the self-selection on twitter is a good thing though. It sure cuts down on traffic. Of course, friendfeed doesn’t have an inking panel for drawing anything and posting it so for creating comic content friendfeed isn’t going to hack it.
On the other side, I also can see that friendfeed does a pretty job with listing videos. In fact, looking at what people share on twitter and what you see on friendfeed–at least for the people I follow–there are a lot more people interested in videos that what twitter lets on. This kind of suggests how twitter’s text-only mindset is maybe too limiting.
Well, back to my original question: Is it worth it to keep dabbling with a twitter client? Hmmm. At least a little bit more. If the growth continues on the friendfeed side though, it may simply be too late.