Twitter On Its Way Out?

It’s amazing to me, but the buzz around the Internet over the last couple of weeks has been over a new Twitter-like site called FriendFeed.

Jason Calacanis, who is a highly-respected entrepreneur in the new social media space has written that FriendFeed is actually better than Twitter feature wise, and has suffered none of the down-time that Twitter has.

Leo Laporte, who has one of the largest followings on Twitter with 46,000 followers, says he doesn’t use Twitter much any more. That he uses other tools like FriendFeed and Twirhl that link into Twitter.

It seems that Twitter is on its way out with the highest-profile users. Now I’m not going to call for the “death” of Twitter. But the scenario I see happening is that Twitter will become the underlying infrastructure and people will prefer to use other tools to interact with the service instead of the web site Twitter provides.

Now obviously if Twitter continues to have stability problems with it’s infrastructure, then other services will come along (and they have) to fill the void. If Twitter @ replies have been taken offline for a bit, people will start using another commenting system.

From everything I have heard about FriendFeed, it has some very compelling features Twitter doesn’t have. Time will tell if this new service will take root and take over. But it might not be that much time before we know. Stay tuned.

(Add me on twitter, at http://www.twitter.com/scottjduffy or FriendFeed at http://www.friendfeed.com/scottjduffy )