Jun 21
Saturday
Tech : Fake Steve Gillmor
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)

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  • June 22, 2008 at 1:59 am David Adam
    I actually found that more intelligible than Gillmor's latest post.
  • June 22, 2008 at 2:30 am metaverseoz
    That's gold ;)
  • June 22, 2008 at 3:56 am Sean Dunn
    That's one of the funniest things I've ever read :P
  • June 22, 2008 at 6:11 am Todd McKinney
    This is hilarious. Probably could be more obtuse (and a lot longer) to get the full effect.
  • June 22, 2008 at 6:38 am Elliott Ng
    Whoever controls the ability to exert veiled mind-control through pontification controls the strategic high-ground of meme distribution. That is why there is a dangerous nexus of power between TinyURL and Steve Gillmor.
  • June 22, 2008 at 6:43 am Jim Jannotti
    well done, sir.
  • June 22, 2008 at 7:48 am Michael Carter
    That was great! Something tells me that this will not get a "like" from Gilmor.
  • June 22, 2008 at 7:52 am Hutch Carpenter
    Outstanding Duncan! That is first rate.
  • June 22, 2008 at 10:54 am Adam Lasnik
    When I saw the title, I was grumpily thinking, oh no, not another [x] is better than [y] piece o' crap... but then I realized it was a parody and quite an entertaining one at that. Still, a little *too* intelligible. Work on making it more pompously obscure, please :)
  • June 22, 2008 at 11:39 am Ryan Kuder
    LOL. You should conclude each of these with http://heresabunnywithapancakeonitshead.com/
  • June 22, 2008 at 8:56 pm Vic Podcaster
    Its like comparing IceCream and Sugar. They both are sweet but serve very different purpose.
  • June 22, 2008 at 8:58 pm Vic Podcaster
    On second thought, Friendfeed is piggyback riding on Twitter - while it is not true other way round.
  • June 22, 2008 at 9:46 pm Duncan Riley
    Vic, this is Steve Gillmor we're talking about, it's like comparing rice cakes to Jimmy Carter :-)
  • June 22, 2008 at 11:19 pm Ryo
    However. I discover using Friendfees INSTEAD of Twitter.
  • June 23, 2008 at 4:30 am jeezler
    How to improve the writing style in one word: shrooms.
  • June 23, 2008 at 4:41 am David Adam
    @Vic While that may have been true initially, I think that Friendfeed is now capable of continuing to thrive even if twitter were to die. Friendfeed "share something" messages are, in essence, tweets after all. I've certainly seen people using them in that way, at least. The only reason I still use twitter at all is because I like to aggregate each day's tweets at my blog, like a digital diary. I haven't been able to replicate that functionality for friendfeed just yet, without catching all the other things in my feed. Oh errr and sorry for posting such a serious comment about a satirical post...I couldn't help it ;-)
  • June 23, 2008 at 4:43 am william stewart
    With Twitter i keep thinking someone has SMSed me. Then I find it's just some random twitter contact of mine ;-)
  • June 23, 2008 at 4:56 am Noah David Simon
    if you say so
  • June 23, 2008 at 5:41 am Chris Qie
    lol..the author is friendfeed fans.

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