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At some point a new system will appear that makes a quantum leap in functionality or usability compared to today's Twitter. The functionality will have to continue to evolve or else, eventually, it will be abandoned.
Having said that, I think that Twitter is safe, because of the size of its community, until that next big shift happens (or else it collapses due to weak architecture). Friend Feed seems to be a bit earlier in its cycle, so who knows.
I nearly agreed here saying 'critical mass' but then I realised, for me, it would mean 'my community'. The FriendFeedFaction (FFF) could move en masse to purplecondoms.com tomorrow but if my small but perfectly formed band of friends remained on FriendFeed, then so woud I.
While it may not be listed as a 'feature', it is inherently obvious.
In fact, I think of the size (and demographics) of the 'community' a lot, every night as I lie in bed wondering how FF/Twitter/Pink condoms will attempt to monetize the service.
It's like following The Clash - do you want them to sell out and do Top Of The Pops (or not) ?
That said, I think you are spot on about community being a big driver above and beyond features. A lot of people tolerated MySpace's crappy execution because everyone one was on it.
One has a massive, established, loyal 'community', preaching evangelism from the rooftops while the other has a far superior product, an interface that was actually designed, with a small, discerning, informed, 'early adopter' user base but is struggling to make inroads.
This may well change in the future however.
Yes, it'd take a lot to get existing fans of say, Friendfeed, to move. But Friendfeed now has... 0.3% of Internet users? 0.1%? What about the other 99+%? Where are they going to go?
They're gonna go to...
1) Whatever site "feels" or "looks" most like them.
2) Whichever site offers a compelling set of features.
3) Whatever site has the lowest startup costs (note I didn't say *switching* costs).
That site *may* be Friendfeed. But it may very well not. And it won't be about "community" per se, because frankly I don't think you can really understand or feel a community until you're a part of it.
Look at Friendster. I'm betting that a huge chunk of the early adopters of that site stayed with Friendster and may not be on Facebook or MySpace. But early adopters equals, again, what tiny tiny tiny fraction of users of that service? And where did most subsequent Internet users go? That's right... Orkut, MySpace, and Facebook (and I suppose Hi5, etc.)
As I'm fond of saying, this is not and should not be a zero-sum game. As Shawn rightly suggests, there can be many winners, many communities, many happy people on different services. But -- as much as I like Friendfeed -- it's still way way way too early to declare any sort of a turning point or that sort of thing.
In terms of your analysis of Profilactic's approach to features or community or product, you could do a little better than quoting a two-month old blog post where we are comparing the two services. In many comparison posts, things end up getting summarized in bulleted lists and quantitative distinctions. To try and sum up our product strategy based on one post seems to be a lack of effort on your part. And where did we ever say that it is all about features? You're putting words in our mouth in order to try and make your point.
It's obvious that you love FriendFeed *a lot* and that's great. However, if you're going to do these types of posts, why not reach out to the sites that you're claiming don't understand what makes a great product? If you had bothered to do that, you would have learned that we're not much like FriendFeed at all from a feature or strategy perspective.
Feel free to contact me directly if you'd actually like to learn about what we're trying to do. shawn at profilactic dot com.
Happy to talk to you more about Profilactic. The time is still young in this market, especially if you choose to engage with a different set of users than Friendfeed or others have. As for frequency of posting, I did cover a FriendFeedMachine update yesterday, after being notified by the developer, but also had posts on Google Reader, Shyftr and TheStatBot - each of whom I like a lot as well. There's no quota.
And I'm not disregarding my post. I objected to you using that post (and only that post) to claim that our strategy is only about features. I find that interesting for someone who is an early adopter of social web technologies. You didn't bother to reach out to us at all before summing up our strategy after reading one blog post.
And why is this about "winning." Can multiple services not co-exist?