Why I Won’t be Leaving Twitter for FriendFeed, Bivings Group.

I’m currently following around 160 people on Twitter. Some of these people I know well in real life. Some casually. Some not at all. I’m able to follow and learn from this large group of people because all I see is what they type in their Twitter status bar periodically. Sure, some people tell you what they had for breakfast. But most people exert some level of editorial discipline on themselves, and only write when something at least semi-interesting happens.

They don’t tweet about every meal they have, just the really, really good ones. They don’t share every item they come across on the web, just the interesting ones. The result is a usually compelling stream of anecdotes that is updated throughout the day.

FriendFeed has no such editorial discipline. In addition to receiving those few choice anecdotes each day about the people you follow, you also learn what they are listening too on Last.fm, what is in their Netflix queue and what they dugg on Digg, among other things. I might be interested in knowing that stuff about my 10-20 closest friends, but certainly not about all 160 people I follow on Twitter. It is just too much.

Vint Cerf Says Government Needs To Encourage Internet Competition, Information Week.

Vint Cerf said this week that he never intended to seriously propose that the U.S. government should nationalize the Internet. But he does think the Internet is seriously broken, with an economic system that discourages competition and innovation and encourages harmful monopolistic practices. He argued that the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which governs Internet service providers, is obsolete and needs to be revised.

Cerf, who is VP and chief Internet evangelist at Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and sometimes called the "father of the Internet," told a TechCrunch reporter recently that "the Internet should be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways." But after I blogged about the TechCrunch article, Cerf posted a comment here, saying nationalizing the Internet "was not intended as a serious proposition."

Is Email In Danger?, ReadWriteWeb.

Email is perceived as work, while Twitter is still thought of as fun. Twitter messages are short, use is casual, and Twitter is a cute piece of technology loved by the earlier adopter crowd. People send Tweets complaining their Inbox is full.

The Twitter experience is lighter because of the user interface. With Twitter, we're presented with a scrollable list of messages.

With email we need to select the message and drill into it. Traditionally email clients show only the subject line, so even if the message is short, the user needs to click. And all these clicks add up.