On the search side of microblogging I was surprised that people don’t perceive a gulf between search.twitter.com and elections.twitter.com. In the former you are reduced to paying excessive attention and reloading like a trained rodent while the latter produces a river of posts that you can pause or dip into at leisure. Track.twitter.com would be the behaviour of the latter with the configurability of the former. Rather like the FB live news, which is clever enough to pause automatically if you shift to another tab.

I think Steve’s observations are very fair and it will be true for sometime that the identi.ca rebel alliance will struggle to take share from the incumbent, who having built their market share and believing the network effects will shield them from consequences have dumped some countries out of the SMS club and removed features some consider essential.

Of course the choir, who are generally those impatient with waiting for the proprietary “walled-garden-to-maximum-extent-without-pissing-off-too-many” to collapse, as it inevitably will, will move to laconica early.

As for migrating more, Leo’s on identi.ca, so that’s a few thousand twitter followers who know the option exisists, perhaps Scoble and/or Calacanis could make the move and that should set it on fire. But wait, as noted, premature success can burn down the house. Perhaps despite our excitement and appreciation of the benefits and inevitability, we ought to wait just until the house is in order before holding a real big housewarming.

Friendfeed I too regard as an aggregator rather than an originator, its a choice embedded, or inherent, in the incorporation of other non-microblogging sites. Sure I feed del.icio.us, twitter, my blog, Google shared items, et al into FriendFeed, but I don’t post directly there much at all.

FriendFeed is a “some assembly allowed” FaceBook, nothing like a microblog, IMHO.

And even with an API, it’ll be the delay Steve identifies *into* Friendfeed that will render this irrelevant.

I don’t think it will be sufficient of a draw to overcome the inertia, general satisfaction, buzz and market share that Twitter has assembled. It will need to be a very attractive proposition.

But tr.im certainly raised the bar on TinyURL.com, as far as i know… It’s a move I’d make.

I agree with you about aggregation, but aggregation by itself is just another layer of stuff. I don’t need stuff in real time. So either i’m using it to discover new stuff, new people or new information.

Until now, FriendFeed has been an aggregated archive for me. A way to track my lifestream and access something easily. The conversational aspect of friendfeed actually frustrated me because I never thought to check for comments on my stuff, figuring I’d see them in twitter or on my blog, or my Flickr photos, or whatever.

The real-time incorporation causes me to look at it again as something more useful, but I still think tweaks need to be made, or 3rd parties need to build on their API for it to realize its potential.