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The third party site traffic analytic tools were unanimous: usage of Twitter went down fairly substantially during the middle of June. That tends to happen when you service simply doesn’t work. This lead many to proclaim that other services such as Plurk, Identi.ca and FriendFeed were on the verge of rising up to take its place.

There was just one problem with that — none of those service had anywhere near the number of users that Twitter had. Now there’s another problem, Twitter usage is on the rise again.

Yes ladies and gentleman, the reports of Twitter’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. By the end of June, when the service was for the most part stable (though lacking some features), the number of users on the site reached new heights. It’s important to note that this is only for users actually visiting Twitter.com, and not for those who use the service via other means such as SMS and instant message (though the latter functionality still does not work).

The social content conversational site FriendFeed continues to grow in usage as well, but as I’ve laid out before, there is plenty of room for both of them on the Internet. In fact, their relationship is still symbiotic for many people.

I’m still of the mindset that the only thing Twitter has to fear is Twitter itself. That is to say that no other service is going to kill it, not even a more open clone like Identi.ca. Only Twitter can kill itself, by not fixing its problems. But it’s working on those, and if the rumors are true and Twitter did buy the search site Summize today, we may see those who left the service coming back shortly.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha and Chris Morrison. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

[photo: flickr/carrotcreative]

I awoke this morning with over 30 friend requests on FriendFeed sitting in my inbox. I’ve been using and raving about the aggregation/conversation site FriendFeed for about eight months now, but have not seen a rapid influx of users quite like we’re seeing today. Why is that?

It’s simple. Twitter, the micro-messaging service that has won the hearts of somewhere north of a million users (Twitter won’t give out actual usage numbers), is still not working properly. The ‘Replies’ tab, central to Twitter’s role as a communication tool, has been disabled for several days.

Because of this, just about everyone in the blogosphere is writing about the impending death of Twitter and the inevitable move to FriendFeed. In a case of life imitating art (or at least creative writing), a mass exodus from Twitter to FriendFeed has seemingly begun.

But let’s stop for a second. Take a deep breath. I know hyperbole is sexy, but Twitter is not dead yet.

The fact of the matter is that Twitter and FriendFeed are two entirely different services. Can you use the FriendFeed ‘Share Something’ link or its bookmarklet to emulate Twitter functionality? Sure, but the problem is that FriendFeed does so much else that I have a feeling using it as such would be a square peg, round hole situation for a lot of Twitter’s current users.

Even if you do consider Twitter and FriendFeed to be of the same ilk, the mentality that there can be only one of any type of service is perplexing to me. In the business world that is called a monopoly, and it’s looked down upon. Why should that mentality be any different in the world of Internet apps?

Competition is good. It drives services to improve and spurs innovation. Just because something new comes along and it’s great, that doesn’t automatically make another service that it’s kind of competing with necessarily crappy. Two things can be neat and useful at once.

In fact, it can still very much be argued that Twitter and FriendFeed have a symbiotic relationship. Among all my friends on FriendFeed, by far the number one service used to send information to FriendFriend is Twitter. It accounts for well over a quarter of the information I see in my stream. Likewise, the excellent reply-to-Twitter functionality in FriendFeed lets me send a message back to Twitter when replying to someone in a FriendFeed comment. I love this.

FriendFeed shouldn’t want to kill anyone, it thrives on other services.

Just as Facebook isn’t going to kill MySpace (both will continue to co-exist), FriendFeed isn’t going to kill Twitter. It’s just not going to happen.

That’s not to say that Twitter can’t kill itself. It can if it continues to simply not work. The same would be true of any service. When a service doesn’t work, users can’t use it. If it has no users using it, it’s dead. It’s that simple. But we’re not there yet for Twitter, and despite my dozens of posts complaining about the site’s issues, I don’t think we’re going to get there. Twitter will turn things around.

FriendFeed is brilliant. I would say I use it more than any other site. Yes, even more than Twitter now. But I’m of the same mindset as Allen Stern of CenterNetworks: FriendFeed isn’t for everyone. At least not yet.

It’s getting closer with solutions such as “Rooms” (which I’m finding to be possibly the most useful feature of the entire site — more on that to follow in the weeks ahead) and “Show best of day/week/month,” but it has a ways to go. It’s still a young service and it looks to have big goals — goals much more expansive than Twitter.

Twitter, almost comically, has remained basically unchanged since day one. It even still has the “What are you doing?” question above the input box, even though many people do not use the service in that way anymore. You might think it would change that to be something more like the new service Plurk, which lets you set your verb depending on what you want to say, but it hasn’t. And it’s actually quite brilliant for that.

In a world of more, more, more, Twitter is all about the K-I-S-S, keep-it-simple-stupid — Patrick Ruffini calls this exactly right. Whether it’s doing that on purpose or because it doesn’t have the ability to add new features is another question, but the fact remains, it’s sublimely simple. That’s why eventually I think it will go mainstream.

So we’re seeing a large group of users hop on the FriendFeed train today, but you know what? A lot of Twitter users still have no idea what FriendFeed is and simply don’t care to leave a site where they already have established connections. You know what else? When Twitter is fixed, a lot of those users who switched to FriendFeed today will hop right back over to Twitter, with a lot of them keeping one foot on each — just like I’ll continue to do.

This isn’t like the movie Highlander. There can be more than one.

[photo: 20th Century Fox]

(Update: One of the founders, subtly nicknamed “Plurk Overlord,” has contacted me, to correct the misinformation I had posted about Alvin Woon being a sole founder of the service. Plurk is funded, based in Ontario, Canada, and has a team of seven)

While perusing the internet recently, I stumbled upon a cool new site called Plurk. The site, launched January 23 by user interface specialist Alvin Woon, looks a tiny bit familiar. That’s because it combines features from micro-blogging service Twitter, with a touch of Friendfeed, the social conversation aggregator, and privacy features that closely mirror Facebook to put “your life on the line.”

The service, still in private beta, is pretty straightforward. After selecting a username and password upon registration, users are then directed to a page mostly filled with a timeline news feed (see screenshot below), or “plurks,” that other users have posted. Featured below the timeline are the top, recently joined, and random plurkers.

I’ve complained for quite a bit about the less than stellar user interface on Twitter, which could be a barrier to entry to mainstream adoption, or at least the HSTG (high school teenage girls) audience which Plurk’s Woon is targeting.

Plurk, for the most part with its threaded conversations, timelines, and easy-to-find buttons and features tackles the UI problem pretty effectively.

Skipping on over to your personal Plurk page, you’ll be able to check your stats — users get karma depending on the quantity and frequency of their posting — friends and fans, as well as see all threaded conversations in the timeline, and of course, a big fat message box for posting 140 character messages.

One twist to Plurk that may help us grammar nuts: users have options on which verb to use for the message. Choose between loves, hates, likes, shares, gives, wants, wishes, has, wills, asks, was, thinks, says, and of course — is and freestyle (blank).

A button in the bottom right hand corner allows you to toggle between just your plurks and your friends’ as well.

A timeline could potentially be annoying, with the burden of scrolling back and forth between days, and then returning to the current time, but as you hover over either far side of the screen, you can return to start.

Click on the plurk on the screen, and you can see the threaded conversations, viewing and responding to all the plurks, and in a hat tip to Friendfeed and Facebook, you can watch content (screenshot below) directly in the plurk.

Privacy settings will be familiar to Facebook users — you can allow the whole word to see your plurks, friends of friends, just friends, and lastly your lonesome self.

Finally, the service is integrated with AOL Instant Messaging, so you can send and receive plurks directly from your chat client. It also has an embeddable widget, which Woon has posted on his blog.

All in all the service is pretty nifty for a one-man creation, and the Twitter team should look at hiring one Mr. Woon to help solve their user interface issues, even if he can’t help them scale.