Have you heard about the new Friendfeed page that is currently in beta mode? If you haven’t, you might want to check it out. The new home page design is a big upgrade from the current cluttered and disorganized Friendfeed site. And if you’re both a Friendfeed and Twitter user, you’d immediately notice the striking resemblance between the Friendfeed in beta and Twitter’s home page.The fact that the new Friendfeed home page looks similar to Twitter’s home page has elicited various reactions from those who have been actively using these two lifestreaming services. TC’s Arrington says Friendfeed could become the coolest web app that nobody uses. But Scobleizer was quick to react by asking what could explain the activity in his Friendfeed account.
Interestingly, if we are to take a closer look at these two lifestreaming sites. There is actually a big difference in how they approach the lifestreaming niche. Friendfeed is more of an aggregator rather than a microblogging site. Friendfeed allows you to post not just links, but actual photos, and videos onto your Friendfeed streams. And with the new home page design, Friendfeed would also be making the task of posting personal updates easier. Something which Twitter is best at.
Friendfeed’s new features include the following:
- A consistent look for entries, no matter where they originated from, to help you focus on what your friends are sharing
- A new and improved share box that can now post entries to multiple feeds
- The ability to send and receive direct messages
- Filters so you don’t miss a post from a certain friend or an entry about a specific topic
- Keyboard shortcuts for the most common commands
- And, one of the most defining features of our redesign — and what we believe will underlie everything about FriendFeed from now on: real-time. There’s no longer a need for refreshing — every view in FriendFeed now updates in real-time.
While these are all well and good for Friendfeed as whole, one can’t help but notice some flaws in it. Stan even offers five ways to improve Friendfeed. And I can’t help but agree more with these five ways.
But the bottomline here is not whether Friendfeed is better than Twitter or vise versa. More importantly, whether these two lifestreaming services are able to fulfill what their site promises to do for the users.
There are many lifestreaming services available today. Twitter and Friendfeed are just two of the most popular. For as long as both of them serve users needs, I don’t think that they should be pitted with each other.