A Tale of Two Platforms

Why do some platforms succeed in gaining mass user adoption, while others remain marginal?

Consider for the moment, two services: Twitter and Friendfeed.

I have heard buzz around Friendfeed for some time, but nearly all of it comes from early adopter types who are into trying out new and different things. Friendfeed never gained the kind of mainstream prominence, never saw the continual rapid growth month after month, that Twitter has had.

On the face of it, these two services should not have been in competition. On Twitter, the question is "what are you doing?" Your answer must be 140 characters or less.

Friendfeed has no such constraint, and its focus was never so narrow as what you're doing at the moment. Friendfeed is a platform for sharing images, videos, links, and thoughts. Every post can be commented on, allowing extended conversations to take place. Every post can also gain some simple positive feedback in the form of people who select the option to "like" it.

Twitter was nothing like that in the beginning, and yet, that is exactly what it has turned into. Using URL shorteners to keep within the 140 character constraint, people have turned Twitter into a serious intermediary for content. With the dedicated feed for displaying every tweet that has @ next to your username, Twitter has also become a platform for conversation. With the new retweet functionality that they're planning on implementing, the ability of users to share content will only grow.

Though Friendfeed set out to do this in the beginning, its users have largely not ended up using it this way. As the co-founder Paul Buchheit explained, Friendfeed was supposed to be about sharing. Yet in the end it has ended up being used as an aggregator for other social networks; you can have it automatically update your feed whenever you share content on Google Reader, post on your blog, bookmark something in delicious, post on Twitter, or put content in any number of other places. That's all well and good, but the original idea is that the bulk of the content in your feed would be put their directly; the aggregation feature was just a way to make it easier on you if you were also sharing somewhere else--particularly if you had a blog and didn't want to have to manually put in a link to it each time you posted.

But because a lot of those other platforms were a lot more popular, many of the people who did use Friendfeed would just use it to aggregate what they were doing elsewhere. In this end, this made Friendfeed somewhat redundant--but through no fault of their own. The functionality was all there, Friendfeed could easily have succeeded if it had managed to get enough users who made it their primary outlet for sharing.

In fact, Facebook's strategy in competing with what Twitter has become has almost entirely been made up of copying Friendfeed. Right down to having an option to "like" particular items. And if you ask me, the entire reason Facebook decided to just buy Friendfeed is because the latter company was doing everything Facebook wanted to do already, while Facebook actually had a large enough user base to put the tools to go use.

Twitter's success has been almost entirely user-driven. In as much as the company can take credit, it is in their willingness to quickly adapt to how their platform is being used. It was not originally a conversational platform, but users started @replying one another, so Twitter's staff turned that into a supported feature. There have been innumerable little features like this that have been born exactly this way.

I take it back, there is one other very smart move that the Twitter team has made--and that is the release and maintenance of their API. There are an enormous number of third-party applications that make use of Twitter's API, many of which have facilitated Twitter's role as intermediary for picture and video content. For example, when US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson, a picture of the plane was taken by someone on the boat going to rescue the passengers, and shared on Twitpic.

However, the fact that you have an API doesn't mean that developers are going to do anything with it. It's true that once they're there they can attract additional users because of the functionality that their apps add. But you need the initial base of users to attract the developers in the first place.

Which brings us back to the mystery of this story: why do some platforms succeed while other platforms with just as much functionality fail? Why did Twitter become the rising star while Friendfeed remained fairly marginal, eventually acquired by a larger company?

I'm sure a lot of it is chance, but is that all there is to it? Did the 140 character constraint actually give Twitter an edge? Even if it did, is it enough of an edge to explain the gap in the success between the two platforms?

I don't have an answer. File this one under "food for thought".