Twumblefeed
Picking up a thought I was twittering about earlier: Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed — it’s strange and interesting how similar all these services are on a technical level. Thinking about the current discussion of how FriendFeed may kill Twitter (which has been suffering from severe cases of offlinitis lately), I figured it’s not going to happen, since the two services are so different (Twitter being a communications tool, Friendfeed being a content aggregator). But the two services are really closer to each other than I thought — the primary difference being a clearer (and clearer communiated) focus of Twitter as a communications tool, and some technologically unspectacular, but signature features like mobile integration and live keyword tracking.
The similarity may be a bit more obvious when comparing FriendFeed to Tumblr; Tumblr of course markets itself as a (tumblelogging) CMS, but it also lets me automatically import all my feeds from across the net, essentially letting me use it exactly the same way as friendfeed.com if I wanted to (including allowing me to subscribe to friends and getting a nice dashboard view with all of said friends’ items).
As an engineer, it’s easy to think that it is the big, complicated, game-changing features that make or break an application; but just look at how a simple difference in marketing and design can have such a huge impact.
