• TechCrunch, Monday, June 30, 2008 11:30 AM

Twitter, the popular microblogging service, had to take its "Reply" feature down when the service started to slow on Friday. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington notes that Twitter has taken to disabling certain features to keep its infrastructure from failing completely, having successfully tried the tactic out during Apple's recent WWDC keynote. "But here's the problem," Arrington says. "Replies was the wrong feature to turn off" because part of Twitter's "magic" is its ability to spawn "spontaneous, diverse conversations...that are almost synchronous, or chat like." Turn off the ability to reply and there are no more conversations, "Twitter turns into a one way telephone conversation."

Now, it seems, the service's users are heading over to FriendFeed to have their conversations. FriendFeed used to be a place for users to bookmark their activities on other social networks, but it also facilitates Twitter-like conversations, and more and more users are catching on. Arrington uses the example of a message he would have written on Twitter had the Reply feature not been taken down. Instead, he posted it to FriendFeed, "and the conversation picked up without a hitch."

He adds: "If I was Twitter I'd be very worried about FriendFeed. Their young competitor seems to have zero stability problems, and is quietly in the process of pulling away all the special parts of Twitter."

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