Why Twitter Is Better Than FriendFeed

This special post comes to us from new occasional contributor Fake Steve Gillmor

As the space program tries to recapture the spirit of the 60’s by digging for Martians, a tiny speck messages earth through the psychedelic goodness of the Twitter. I recall during one Star Trek episode shown in repeat in 1973 that the line Scotty beam me up was used, and who controls space, controls the imagination of short message services.

One of the failings of the iPhone was a lack of support for MMS, a sort of short message service with pictures. Pictures speak thousands of words with a brevity of length that is available on web short message services. Web based services have completely taken over from desktop clients. I no longer need to use Microsoft products, and the daughter knows nothing of desktop wordprocessing.

Once desktop wordprocessing is discussed, desktop developers hunt and gather. Circling around a wagon western style they ponder why they can no longer find prey. The concept of free has replaced paid, but for the hunters of desktop users, free equals expired.

Hilter expired in a bunker in Germany in 1945, by his own hand according to the official reports, but during a trip to Chile in 1981 I saw a man who looked just like Hitler. Why did wearing a mustache fall out of favor? Did Hilter scare people, or was it this photograph of Theodore Roosevelt?

Another Roosevelt saved America from depression and saving the British until 1942. FDR was a builder. A builder of highways. Super highways that carried cars. The super highways of today carry data.

Google owns large chunks of the superhighway. A cunning and devious plan to purchase dark fiber at the bottom of the market has created hidden value that isn’t represented properly in their share price.

How do we identify cunning and devious? If cunning were a plan it would be a Rowan Atkinson comedy, but is devious Henry Blodget in a Wall Street pit? If devious were a computer, it would have been programed by Google engineers, bent on total world domination by any means.

The engineers behind FriendFeed came from Google. That is why Twitter is better than FriendFeed.

(img credit: Wikimedia Commons)