I’ve been pulling the night shift with the new baby lately, so I was up at 2am when Ashton Kutcher and CNN were in the heat of their battle to 1 million Twitter followers. That next day Oprah had her big Twitter show and sky rocketed the Twitter userbase by over 2 million people. Later that same night I watched Larry King interview Kutcher, P. Diddy and Jimmy Fallon about the wonders of Twitter. I thought this a little too well orchestrated and it seems I’m not the only one. Twitter’s @SteveOuch exposes how almost half of all the many Twilebrity’s followers are fake.
Regardless if this was an elaborate publicity stunt or not, Twitter has begun to lose it’s luster. It’s no longer the next cool thing. Twitter was featured on Oprah, it doesn’t get much more mainstream than that. So where is an uber-geek/early-adopter to go when they want to socially network away from the maddening crowd?
Why The Cool Kids Are Flocking to Friendfeed
While there are many reasons for you to spend more time on Friendfeed, below are a few of the more refreshing aspects of a much under utilized service.
1. A More Coherent Conversation
Often when posting a link to Twitter many people send me comments on what they think about the post. Unfortunately these comments aren’t apparent to others who have seen or commented on the link. On Friendfeed, not only do people have the ability to ‘Like’ the content you post, making it easy for other users to find quality content, they also have the ability to add a comment, making it very easy for a conversation to develop. Often times a simple post is elaborated through commentary into a much larger revelation.
2. A Better Aggregation Of Content
Friendfeed is after all a collection of your personal feeds. One place for all of your Delicioius, Digg, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube and Facebook posts and favorites. Of course the same thing can be accomplished on Twitter using third party services such as Tweetlater, but on Friendfeed it is super easy to focus on the links from one particular service so that you can see only the posts from someones Digg feed for example. Also Twitter only stores your posts for about 2 months (unless you use another third party service such as Tweetake) whereas Friendfeed holds the data from your feeds indefinitely acting as a defacto social bookmarking service.
3. Improved Social Networking
A huge part of social networking is meeting new people. The ability to comment and converse on a particular thread helps to elucidate your personality, inspiring healthy debate and fostering deeper connections. Also an intelligent comment placed in the right spot can get you noticed by some of the blogosphere’s heavy hitters such as Robert Scoble or Louis Gray. Of course let’s not forget about Friendfeed rooms which allow you to congregate with other users with similar interests such as food or greasemonkey.
4. Real Real Time Search
Not only can you search items posted to Friendfeed from Twitter but also links posted from Digg, Delicious, etc. in real time. Friendfeed’s advanced search operators allow for some powerful search possibilities as well.
…Don’t Unplug From Twitter Just Yet
I’m not suggesting that you should abandon Twitter for Friendfeed. Twitter is simply a part of your FF experience as much as Stumbleupon and Facebook. It is the place where you can comment and discuss on the whole of your online experience. The place where the all of you hangs out with the all of everyone else. Friendfeed, while not exactly an infant startup, has yet to be adopted by even many ’social media experts’ 
Sign up today and learn the ropes before the rush. Be careful though. You thought Twitter was addicting 