Yesterday, a new service launched which aims to solve a “problem” with Twitter. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, its purpose is to answer the question, “What are you doing?”, so it’s easy to wonder why you would even expect a response. At any rate, Twitter has evolved into something that no one predicted: The stock trading floor of tech. Except in this case, it’s not stock that’s being traded, it’s tidbits of information.

One of the issues of this phenomenon, is tracking conversations. If Robert Scoble responds a question from someone on Twitter that I’m not following, I lose the context of the conversation. It’s a frustrating task to keep track of what’s going on. Enter Quotably which aims to solve the “problem” of conversation tracking in Twitter.

On paper, it sounds like a great idea and will make all of our lives easier. You simply go to the website, input your Twitter username, and out pops your Twitter conversations. When I first heard about it, I was instantly skeptical, because I knew the initial design of Twitter did not consider conversations, but only blast messages to the world on what you were doing. I took a quick look at Quotably, and my assumptions were correct, conversation context is guessing game. It’s almost impossible to determine the context of any conversation. If user A responds to user B’s tweet from yesterday, quotably does its best to fit the conversation in the right thread and most times it gets it wrong. It’s inevitable, but I commend Quotably on their efforts.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe Quotably has dramatically improved the way we look at Twitter, but it doesn’t fix the underlining problem: Twitter needs a re-design. Eric Rice agrees. There is no way to accomplish this functionality accurately without going to the root of the issue. To try to aid the issue, I sent this suggestion to the quotably author for consideration:

I believe this will aid the issue, but it will not fix it. Only Twitter can fix it. If you think I’m full of hot air, I took a screenshot of a conversation of Eric Rice and the Twitterverse about this very topic. Quotably tries, but fails. While you can make out some of the conversation, it tends to go way off topic.

Is this is a blog post to try to promote FriendFeed over Twitter? Absolutely not. As with SocialThing, they can’t be compared. As a matter of fact, I would love to have richer conversations on Twitter, but it’s a lost cause. Twitter needs work. It’s not completely their fault either. We have transformed it into something it wasn’t meant for, so now Twitter has to adjust. As for Quotably, I offer this:

And you can “quote” me

Related posts:

• Quotably Adds User Powered Context
• FriendFeed Still Reigns As Conversation King
• Tweetree’s Value Is Embedded Media

There has been a firestorm in the blogosphere regarding the recent hype surrounding Friendfeed. Lot’s of so-called “prominent” bloggers have went on record approving or disproving the service.

A relatively unknown blogger (at least to me), Louis Gray, shed some light on the service for me personally. At first glance, I dismissed FriendFeed as yet another social aggregator with no real value. Louis said this which prompted me to try it again:

FriendFeed has been described by different folks as a social Web lifestream, by others a Web services aggregator, or as a conversational platform. But it’s not just one of these things – it’s all of these things. There are a definitely a wide number of sites out there that let you share all your activity in one place, or to track friends’ activity, but FriendFeed is the only one that lets you share items directly to the feed, elevate discussions through comments and show “likes” to highlight individual posts.

Wow, ok. So FriendFeed “elevates discussions” started elsewhere. Interesting. I took 30 minutes to explore FriendFeed and began to contribute. All of a sudden, I got it. I understood completely.

Recently, a service called SocialThing (invite only) launched which allows you to aggregate many social streams into your profile. SocialThing had a bumpy start once it was techcrunch’d and has since removed some of their services. (they’re now down to 6) I haven’t had a great experience with SocialThing since they haven’t scaled appropriately yet and are still working out the kinks, but when it did work, I got what I expected: An aggregator with the ability to direct respond to stream items.

There are many articles out there which seem to want to compare SocialThing to FriendFeed, and I offer that they shouldn’t be compared. Why? FriendFeed is a social network, SocialThing is a social aggregator.

If anything, FriendFeed should be aggregated into SocialThing.

While FriendFeed gives you the ability to aggreate many services (actually the most out of any out there), it’s main focus is the community. This community layer discusses topics that are posted elsewhere, and while you think it may be unneccesary, I find that it enhances the discussion greatly. SocialThing has no community, it’s an organizer. It’s there for you and you only. You can track all of your social networks and as a big bonus, you can reply directly the tweets, pownces, etc. There’s nothing really wrong with SocialThing (other than it can’t scale at the moment), but I feel that FriendFeed is better for my purposes. I don’t need a pure aggregator per se, but I do love communities and discussions.

It’s almost impossible to track and contribute to discussions on Twitter since it wasn’t built for that. @Replies are sparse and don’t work. Jaiku and Pownce had the right idea with comments, but I think their interfaces weren’t quite right. FriendFeed’s interface is almost perfect for what you need to do. You don’t need to drill down to a topic to see or comment on it. It’s all fluid. So what about the comments on the blog posts, tweets, pownces, jaikus that I’m missing from the source? I’m not missing them. Why? I only care what the FriendFeed community thinks about them. That’s the beauty of a community, you don’t need to go outside of it for a great discussion. There’s nothing wrong with building another layer around content. If you don’t use FriendFeed and don’t see this layer, so what. You’re missing out It doesn’t take away from the original layer, it merely adds to it.

I’ve found so many great sites and people through FriendFeed. I’d say about 3 times as many as I found on Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku. Why? The information is well organized. I can subscribe to 100s of people and still digest the right content. Again, I can easily contribute! I can’t stress that enough. The power of FriendFeed is participation.

One sentence summary: SocialThing is for aggregation/integration of the social web while FriendFeed is for community discussion surrounding the social web. In my mind, they can’t be compared.

Related posts:

• Quotably Needs Conversation Context
• FriendFeed Enhances Podcasting Interactivity With Audio Sharing
• Feedly’s FriendFeed Aggregation [Do Want]