FriendFeed + GTalk = Twitter Alternative?
So, I’m goofing around with possible Twitter clones and decided to leverage FriendFeed‘s aggregation of GTalk’s status update messages and see if that would work.
Here’s what it looks like:
Pretty nifty if you are using FriendFeed’s web service or using Twhirl to watch FriendFeed.
Plus, there are comments and groupings ftw.
Twhirl and FriendFeed Room Sharing Coming Soon?
Twhirl (recently acquired by Seesmic) is the most interesting of the Twitter desktop apps. I’ve never been a big fan as I relied heavily on Twitter’s GTalk integration to get real time updates and use Track via XMPP.
However, for FriendFeed, Twhirl rocks.
So, I found this note from Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur interesting…
I’ve been playing with FriendFeed’s Room feature in the Affiliate Marketing Room. It’s fairly nifty and should only get better.
Loic mentioned on a Gillmor Gang podcast a few weeks ago that Twhirl is working on a feature to allow for XMPP to flow through its service in Twitter as well. If that happens, I might be using Twhirl a great deal more.
Twitter Track
I’ve been arguing that Twitter users should abandon desktop clients (until Twhirl gets their xmpp gateway going) and use GTalk for Twitter. Not only is the GTalk gateway real time, but there are a few key benefits that enhance the Twitter experience.
Here’s a great post from @tw3nty3ight about how he uses Track and GTalk for Twitter in a similar fashion that I do (on the desktop and on the BlackBerry):
Tw3nty3ight.com: How I Get The Most Out Of Twitter: “There is a very useful Twitter command that is overlooked by many. The TRACK command is the most underused command on twitter. In order for me to be notified of someone mentioning anything pertaining to myself I simply utilize this feature. There are two main ways to use this command, text (SMS) or IM with Google Talk. “
I follow around 1500 people. Watching that kind of a stream all day would render Twitter pretty useless for my needs. So, with the device updates setting on IM, I’m able to “turn on” just the 50 or so people that I’m really interested in following and use Track for my name or topics I want to hear about to catch the rest.
Give it a go if you need to cut the signal-to-noise ratio.