Blame FriendFeed
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Twitter was down due to a bug in their Jabber APIs.
Although FriendFeed does not use this API, I obviously don't know that, so I'll pretend to act smart and smugly blame them for Twitter's downtime.
Also, FriendFeed has nothing going for them minus Twitter. Forget about their 34 other supported services, evangelical community, and the fact that we already proclaimed them this years Twitter (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/14/friendfeed-is-this-year...). Yup, nothing.
Now if you'll forgive me, I must return to sucking on the teat of my God that is Twitter.
In other news, I am high as a kite.
I don't use friendfeed, but whenever I see friendfeed widgets on people's blogs, they have nothing but Twitter messages and RSS entries - I can get those elsewhere, with no trouble at all. If Twitter blocks friendfeed, what else do they have going for them?
I disagree with the post because it contains over the top sensationalism, misinformation, and trivial matters -- not because I've a FF evangelist like some others noted in the post.
Those things being said, I do think they have a few things going for them (Disclaimer: I was interested in interning there this summer, but had committed to a position by the time they got back to me):
Minus Twitter, they're still supporting 34 other services. (http://friendfeed.com/about/faq#services).
Their team seems pretty strong if you ask me, or anyone with a clue (http://friendfeed.com/about/team).
Some people obviously like the service (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/?metric=uv).
There's a few other things but honestly, to me, by and far the strongest point about FF seems to be their vision as a content discovery service (http://mashable.com/2008/03/25/podcast-friendfeed/). They're gathering a lot of data, and while it may not seem very useful or valuable yet, I think when they work it all out, it will really be something special. You might want to read Paul Bucheit's (one of the co-founders of FF + Gmail creator) post on this (http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/04/power-of-links-and-...).
To be fair, I do think they have a few things going against them as well:
Out of the box, there's way too much noise on the service right now. Although they've given users fairly good tools to deal with it (Subscriptions, Likes, Hiding, Views, Rooms, etc.), it's still not good/easy enough for most users. I just want to see interesting content without any work or knowledge on my part. Even simple things like sorting by most likes or most comments (or some sort of magic 'ContentRank') would go a long ways. They are working on this, so we'll see how it goes (in the meantime, you could check out http://friendfeedlinks.com/, but it doesn't seem very satisfying to me because it's only for the link/digg entries of FF).
Facebook seems to be trying to get in on this space by integrating external services (http://mashable.com/2008/05/23/facebook-friendfeed/) as well as their upcoming profile re-design: "As part of the redesign, Facebook is dramatically playing up the role of its News Feed" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9949475-7.html). To be fair, they are in slightly different groups (Subscription Model vs. Friend Model - Relatively Open vs. Relatively Closed), but FB still poses a very big threat (not to FF's current user base, who all seem think FB is old and lame, but to their potential future user base).
To get perhaps get a more qualified (though obviously a little biased) perspective of what they have going for them, you might want to check out what some of their users think: http://friendfeed.com/e/cf6b48c8-29d8-11dd-92fc-003048343a40
P.S. You note that when you see widgets on people's blogs, they're twitter loaded. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it, I mean how often do you post photos on Flickr versus sending out a tweet? Again, this is an issue with noise. You'd probably be way more interested in their non-tweets if only they'd show up.
or here: http://news.ycombinator.com/submit
to get other content to the front page
I, for one, wish there were a ban on all Twitter related posts...
And it seems to me, the fact that friendfeed is entirely parasitic makes one wonder how it can survive once it actually starts to compete with the sites it aggregates. Of course the same thing could have been of google once upon a time.
P.S. Since you didn't seem to notice, "perhaps" was sarcasm on my part. FriendFeed will most certainly create some additional traffic and/or visibility for the sites it "leeches" off of. It is important, however, to note that traffic != visibility. Sometimes times visibility detracts from traffic because there's no need to visit the source (i.e. Google Maps, YouTube, Scribd, etc.) but other times it creates traffic because the source provides added value (i.e. Thumbnails -> Larger Image, HN Links -> Stories, etc.). It's also worthwhile to note that the former (increase in visibility, decrease in traffic) still has benefits, as your service becomes more well known (creating future traffic). I'll leave you with this: http://friendfeed.com/e/d1ffcc73-040a-5609-6168-993c4549591a
From a practical viewpoint (and this is why I used the word parasite - not to be pejorative, but to indicate that FF is entirely dependent on its hosts), Friendfeed could be shutdown tomorrow by the sources. If they're using APIs, then just about every api out there is for non-commercial use, and if they're scraping, then an appropriate robots.txt, backed up by IP blocking and lawyers, does the trick.