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.
Nice try at playing Mark Pilgrim - evidently you disagree with the article. You're right that Friendfeed probably doesn't use the Jabber API, but what else is wrong about it?
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 don't use the service either, but my understanding is that while yes, you could use a standard RSS reader such as Google Reader or NetNewsWire to aggregate this info, but if you did, you'd be likely to start wishing for more custom support of the specific services you're aggregating, and providing those services is their value proposition.
So, I don't think I'm really the most qualified person to answer this question, as I don't use Twitter at all (I do understand the potential value of it, but I think the fanaticism surrounding it is beyond silly) and have only recently started to scan FF (sometimes I'm able to pick up a cool link or two with minimal time investment, which is good).
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):
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).
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.
I'm not a big fan of Mr. Gillmor, but some of this was nearly cogent, and even funny.
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.
I don't know, maybe by perhaps driving traffic back towards the original site? Yeah, I think that's how it worked for Google (and all other services that have APIs). You might even have heard of the little known market known as SEO these days (or in more familiar words: parasite baiting).
"Perhaps" is a good word. Not to be snarky, just that the result is still in doubt. You have to be large relative to the sites you're aggregating to "drive" traffic.
It seems like it's really just a matter of personal semantic interpretation to me. Did Hacker News not drive some traffic to TechCrunch as a result of this post? How much bigger must Hacker News be relative to TechCrunch for it to begin "driving" traffic as opposed to some other verb? According to who? Either way, call it whatever you'd like, but the point remains that driving/sending/adding/creating/dispatching/routing traffic and/or increasing visibility is what these "parasites" have going for them. Whether or not that's worth the cost of letting them "leech" is debatable, but I'm going to go with yes given that people keep on cranking out APIs.
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
There's one rather large difference between Hacker News driving traffic to Techcrunch, and FriendFeed driving traffic to twitter. Hacker News doesn't actually scrape techcrunch or get it's content via an api.
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.
TechCrunch didn't exactly have a high bar for technical knowledge before, but Gillmor is definitely lowering the bar. He's the John Dvorak of web 2.0. He's perfect for TC's style of throwing shit up against the wall and not linking (and possibly blocking) anyone that refutes it.
