Today, I found yet another reason why I prefer discussing tech topics on FriendFeed over another popular social site, Twitter.

FriendFeed’s search is a big reason why you should move your Twitter conversations there. The above example shows the value in retaining search data. Twitter search only goes back a few days (I don’t know how many exactly, but it’s not that much) while FriendFeed retains much more data.

If you find yourself in need of data retrieval, I hope your data resides on FriendFeed. So how do you take advantage of this? It’s actually quite simple. You simply post a new FriendFeed entry and “CC Twitter”.

This will broadcast your your new topic to all your Twitter followers, and invite them to join the conversation on FriendFeed with a link. Some people hate this because they have to click through and go to yet another web page. Part of me understands this frustration in this “right now, do it yesterday” atmosphere, but the payoff is tremendous. Not only do you get a rich, single threaded conversation out of the deal, but the contents will be searchable a year from now. You can’t say the same about Twitter.

Robert Scoble has championed this technique for quite some time and is getting a lot of ridicule from his massive Twitter follower list. I believe he has a valid point. Your data is lost on Twitter, it isn’t on FriendFeed. It’s that simple.

What do you think? Comment here or on FriendFeed and it’ll all show up

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• Quotably Needs Conversation Context
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• FFHolic Provides The Best Of FriendFeed

I’ll admit, when I first saw Robert Scoble‘s Tweet on FriendFeed about Tweetree, I was immediately skeptical. Robert posted that it was a decent app, but not going to replace TweetDeck for him. I saw the name, and I thought: “Great, another Twitter application that’s going to try to hack conversation context“. You may recall, I wrote about Quotably back in March 2008, and their attempt to capture Twitter conversations in a nice format.

I went over to tweetree.com and saw threaded conversations which met my expectations, but I also saw something else:

Embedded media.

Dave Winer has been begging Twitter to do something like this for quite some time. Dave has went on record to state Tweetree is on the right track:

This is brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. And exactly what I asked for, which of course makes me happy!!

These guys are brilliant. Great stuff. They’ll be rich next week so be nice to them

We’ve seen threaded Twitter before. Heck, even Twitter search has a “Show conversation” link which tries to give the complete conversation context. What we haven’t seen (or at least I haven’t seen) on Twitter is embedded media.

Tweetree supports the following:

• Youtube
• Flickr
• TwitPic
• FriendFeed (Yup!)
• Seesmic
• Qik
• Lala
• Blip.fm
• xkcd

So if you link to any of the above, Tweetree shows you the associated media right on the website. If you would like to see examples, just search for the service in Tweetree’s search box.

Now I know we saw very similar functionality in Pownce (may it rest in peace), Rejaw, Plurk, and others, but this is Twitter. The big kahuna. The main squeeze. That’s the reason why it’s a big deal. I’ve been using Tweetree for less than a day, and what keeps me coming back is the embedded media.

I’ll be following this one closely. You can check out my timeline on Tweetree at http://tweetree.com/bwana.

*** UPDATE: I’ve asked FriendFeed what they think is more valuable at Tweetree. Join the conversation here.

*** UPDATE 2 I’ve performed a quick walkthrough of the interface in this video:

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