• TechCrunch, Tuesday, April 7, 2009 12 PM

FriendFeed, a social media aggregator that tracks activity across different platforms and lets users subscribe to one another, "is in danger of becoming the coolest application that no one uses," says Michael Arrington. The service allows photos, videos, blog posts and anything else that's published using an RSS feed to be viewed by anyone who wants to subscribe to you. "All in all, it's a service that should be bound for success," says Arrington, but instead, it is Twitter, FriendFeed's competitor, that is getting all the attention.

And rightly so. According to comScore, Twitter is growing at approximately 33% per month. It generated just under 10 million unique users in February, compared to 1.2 million in February 2008. But most importantly, Twitter is all over the news, with talking heads in the media increasingly pushing their Twitter accounts as their primary online identity. "That kind of mainstream attention is driving users by the boatload," says Arrington.

FriendFeed, by comparison, is "languishing," he says. The service had just 637,000 unique users in February, which is equivalent to roughly 6% of Twitter's total. Perhaps most surprising: FriendFeed has less users today than it did last October (per comScore). Co-founder Paul Buchheit disputes that claim, but even if that isn't true, "it's clear that the service hasn't grown much in the last few months," notes Arrington.

Read the whole story at TechCrunch »