Honestly, I have grown to enjoy Twitter.  Is it something you need to be on?  Not really, but it is incredibly simple to use.  Nonetheless, the downtime of this free product has been annoying–keeping in mind you get what you pay for.  Given this, the most recent exhortation to flock to FriendFeed really started to grind my gears.

I’m spending 80% of my time on FriendFeed instead of here. Move over there, slow adopters.

Sure, I have a FriendFeed account, and it does some interesting things I like.  Still, FriendFeed to me is just an aggregator.  It relies on folks posting items–links from Google Reader, links from del.icio.us, blog posts, flickr photos, LinkedIn, and other things–to build their FriendFeed content. You still need things like GoogleTalk, Twitter, Pownce, and your blog.  People: use common sense.  FriendFeed is an aggregator of your various points of presence on the Interwebs.  It is nothing more.

My other complaint is how everyone is crowing about “the discussion is happening over on FriendFeed.”  Better yet, I am moving from Twitter to FriendFeed since I can have a discussion.”  If I wanted to have a discussion with people, I would send them an instant message, send them an email, or, for chrissake, pick up the phone and call them.

We have comments in blogs, and that is, quite frankly, where most normal folks who actually have things to do will engage in their “conversations.”  Most normal folks do not have hours on end to comment on someone’s blog post on yet another aggregator.  Call me myopic, but I do not see how FriendFeed is the technical equivalent of the second coming of Christ.

Great, people can comment on my blog, my flickr photos, and my various tweets.  .  Are they commenting on my blog?  On a photo on Flickr?  On Twitter?  No.  They are commenting on someting in FriendFeed.  You know what I call that: FAIL.

At the end of the day, FriendFeed allows me to catch up on things when Twitter’s infrastructure is a smoking mess of plastic and silicon.  Nonetheless, it is just that.  To borrow from William Shatner in a classic SNL sketch:

GET A LIFE, will you people!