Some of the top bloggers on the interwebs are raving over FriendFeed. Yes, I have an account but only for the reason that I need to maintain /adamjackson on nearly every networking site. Each service that is compared to Twitter (Pownce, Jaiku & FriendFeed) is not meant to replace Twitter if it dies or can substitute Twitter when it’s unreliable. Each of these sites has their own focus and purpose.

So what about these claims that FriendFeed will replace Twitter? Well, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Twitter is simple and people like simple. Myspace, Facebook and Livejournal used to be simple and now there’s too many adds, too many applications and too many configuration options. Twitter has remained simple and the most significant thing they ever added was replies. If you look at Twitter’s business model, it’s never been about monetization and never about information overload. You get what you want whether it’s just web updates or SMS and even with SMS, you can follow people but only have certain individuals’ updates be sent to your mobile.

With FriendFeed, if I follow Robert Scoble and he adds a new RSS feed then I now have to see that in my feed that’s sent over email or when I go to FriendFeed. What if I don’t want Thomas Hawk’s Flickr feed? I can’t unsubscribe to just his Flickr feed. No, I must stop following Thomas Hawk. I can now post messages to FriendFeed and individuals can comment to them just like Twitter replies and it is the only thing about the service that outperforms Twitter but for veteran Twitter users, replies were added out of necessity. The replies were already happening and Twitter simply made it part of the service.

Twitter was made for telling the world what you’re doing and that’s it. Pownce was made for sharing events and files, Jaiku was similar to Twitter but fell short in the mobile space and FriendFeed is a way to stalk people better by following their Internet activities in one window. What about that replaces Twitter is beyond me. Arrington keeps raving about users moving to FriendFeed due to Twitter issues but I don’t see it. His circle of “tech luminaries” are posting to both sites including Michael himself. It seems like the only person raving about FriendFeed is Michael.

Twitter, as a service is not easily replaced at this point and they know that. Summize does a great job of helping me keep up replies when Twitter is freaking out. FriendFeed has no use for me aside from occasionally reading the daily email digests I get from the service. Let’s call this a rambling post but it’s just frustrating to read about people moving to FriendFeed when it’s nothing like Twitter and is too cluttered for me.