This is such a stupid article. I've got 700+ followers on twitter and 34 on friendfeed.. I had one of the firsr accounts on both services... Arrington gets so many followers on friendfeed because he keeps pushing his account there...
Why does TC keep comparing Twitter vs. FriendFeed as if one's success will bring the other's failure?
They are completely different services that do completely different things. FriendFeed is built for conversations - Twitter is built for short status updates of 140 characters or less.
Arrington consistently bashes Twitter (it seems weekly), he has even personally attacked their previous head architect.
It's possible Arrington is trying to get revenge on Twitter for unknown reasons (other than it being down all the time) by continually publicizing that FriendFeed is better. Almost a bullying tactic, "don't mess with me or I'll write blog posts about how much you suck and thousands of people will read them". Though, at least in the past few months, the publicity has contributed to Twitter's growth.
Alternatively, he has come to rely on Twitter so perhaps his anger is justified beyond an emotional outburst.
If not for Erick Schonfeld, the site is sensational and editorial and thanks to Gillmor, largely unintelligible.
Simple - it creates controversy on slow tech news days.
What better way to ensure decent traffic numbers than to loudly proclaim that the "sky is falling" to readers who are more than likely your most avid readers (being a weekend).
It makes people argue over what is essentially a non-story - Michael Arrington has managed to grab 10k friendfeed followers in 5 months?
And? How is this tech news?
Flipside, Lets take Alex Albrecht - he's managed to gain about 30k twitter followers in 3 months. 3 times the followers in nearly half the time.
That would suggest that Twitter has still a lot more life in it than people are giving it credit, even if a lot of the tech crowd is loudly proclaiming that "Twitter is dead", realistically we, the tech crowd, make up the minority of its total users.
I think in general, tech people forget that we only represent a small portion of the total Internet.
BTW, I respect Michael, so hopefully nobody takes this as an attack on him (because its not meant to be), I'm just trying to illustrate a point.
