Hi Justin

It seems like you are still looking at FriendFeed as a Twitter replacement which, although it can be that, doesn't need to be a replacement. You are currently using FriendFeed and that is great for me because it gives me another point of contact for you. I can follow your updates there too and comment on them in FriendFeed. I guess the question is whether you would respond to a comment posted in FriendFeed?

I am not convinced that because we have become accustomed to conversing using the “@” convention that we are fixed in that mode and can't change. Obviously if people are happy to use that convention to have conversations there is nothing wrong with that. I just believe that the “@” convention is clumsy and inline comments are far better for conversations. You miss too much on Twitter to have meaningful conversations with people other than the person you are conversing directly with.

It looks like we will simply find different communities coming together around FriendFeed than we would have on Twitter (and elsewhere). I would like to see better tools attract a bigger following but time will tell. I also tend to be a pretty early adopter so the shift may yet happen, if it is going to.