With Twitter down this morning and reports of failure all over the social Web, I figured FriendFeed would be up, if denuded by the Twitter outage. Well, sorta. In fact, FriendFeed searches are down. How the hell does a denial of service attack plague reach into the coolest service no-one will ever use, as former user Mike Arrington once put it. Is the realtime Web screeching to a halt on purpose, did rssCloud have something to do with making things too really simple, or what? For now, I’ll Blame FriendFeed.
As long as FriendFeed keeps rolling out updates to realtime, FriendFeediots like myself are smug in our uber view that no matter what happens to the rest of the Web, regardless of whether Google buys a patent-safe video codec for HTML 5, not caring whether Apple and AT&T collude to keep Google Voice out of the carrier business, not worried about whether the Sun/Oracle deal is held up for months, etc. — no matter what, FriendFeed will solve all of my social media problems before anybody else does.
Now search is back up, so I really should stop worrying. After all, one of the advantages of being small is that your problems are relatively smaller. Even as the normal realtime chatter resumes — Scoble at some Boulder startup event, someone asking how to import Twitter replies, Drudge headlines Twitter outage, Facebook “transport errors”, Leo Laporte says no Windows Weekly because Paul is in Paris and can’t get a decent connection — I still can’t get past the reality that when Twitter farts, FriendFeed becomes a complete and total gasbag. After months of innovation, revamped APIs, advanced realtime features, and Scoble pruning his Twitter follows because FriendFeed’s cloud is more manageable, FriendFeed is still a parasite on a pimple on Twitter’s ass.
Of course, I don’t feel better even now. Blaming FriendFeed doesn’t reduce my own guilt. Endlessly promoting the advantages of realtime, the ephemeral return of Track, playing Laconica and Facebook and FriendFeed off in a pathetic attempt at coaxing a response out of Twitter, goading Dave Winer into overhauling RSS. None of it in any way meaningful, when it all still comes down to whether Twitter is up or down. For all of FriendFeed’s power, it still is best at being a Twitter client. Albeit a Twitter client that is modeling the transition of micromessaging to an enterprise class backbone.
Alright, now I’m beginning to shake this off. Stream splicing is still to be released in the next 30 days, I’m told. The PubSubHubbubGlubglub integration with Google Reader is lightning fast. The RSS is better than Twitter argument thread is humming. Scoble is being attacked for starting a Twitter unfollow trend. Breathing deeper now, it’s all good. Get back to work, Arrington says less Yammering, more posting. I Blame FriendFeed.