Twitter is still far larger than its much younger competitor Friendfeed in aggregate terms. But an interesting trend is developing - many longtime Twitter users are noticing that the number of followers they have on Friendfeed is growing far more rapidly than on Twitter. And the conversations at Friendfeed are better, too.

I joined Twitter when it launched in mid 2006 (about 24 months ago), and have, as of today, 20,464 followers.

I joined Friendfeed on February 9, 2008 (about 5 months ago), and I now have 10,177 subscribers, nearly half Twitter count in less than 1/4 of the time.

Like many others, I’m also noticing that the discussions occurring on Friendfeed are more more interesting (and longer) than the equivalent conversations at Twitter. It’s often 2-to-1 on the number of comments. Which means that those Friendfeed users are far more engaged than those on Twitter.

And over the last couple of weeks, as Twitter has been forced to turn off some of the conversational features of the service, I’ve seen this difference increase dramatically.

There are a whole host of reasons - Twitter downtime plays a big part, but Friendfeed is also good at recommending people for you to follow, and the commenting or bookmarking a post is very easy. Twitter’s inability or unwillingness to open up the data pipes is also a factor.

Is this a bad trend for Twitter? Yes, particularly since they are still struggling with their architecture and stability, while Friendfeed sails on in seemingly calm waters.

If the early adopters move on, there’s a reason (they never abandoned YouTube for the shinier competitors that popped up over the years, for example), and it doesn’t bode well for Twitter in the long run.

By the way, that dip in traffic on Twitter, if real, and coincides with recent downtime issues. Twitter’s runway may be shorter than people think. Open source/open standard competitors certainly don’t help things, either.

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SMSGupShup is a community site that enables users to join groups according to their interests and receive updates through their mobile phones via SMS. Very similar to Twitter, in that you can send and receive mobile updates to your friends, family and other group members (without the downtime). SMSGupShup has over 7 million subscribers and 300,000 publishers. They see a much lower proportion of web visitors as there mobile phones outnumber computers almost 7 to 1.

While Twitter is mostly used for casual communications and notifications, SMSGupShup is used for services that are critical to a lot people. For example, fishermen can receive tide and weather information, and people can pass along emergency information to locals who don’t have televisions or computers. The site has seen a huge rise in growth, with the SMSGupShup community having grown from 1 million subscribers in January to the current 7 million.

Webaroo, originally launched as a service that allowed users to see cached web content when they are offline. Founders Rakesh Mathur (founder of Armedia, Junglee, Stratify) and Beerud Sheth (founder of Elance) presented their startup in July 2006 at the TechCrunch-sponsored Connected Innovators program at the Supernova conference. Two years later, they have changed their approach, focusing on their core offering, SMSGupShup. Webaroo also offers their original product Webaroo for Notebooks, a mobile client, a search utility called Search Radar, and a Wikipedia browsing tool called WikiSlice.

Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures join previous investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners ($1.5 million Series A), and Cambrian Ventures, Lloyd George Asian Plus Fund, and HTSG ($10 million Series B), bringing their total funding to $21.5 million.

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Is nothing going on? Has the TechMeme conversation dried up, as Robert Scoble entertainingly baits? Are FriendFeed conversations more viral and link-inducing? Of course. There’s nothing like a few days off to cull the herd and make it achingly clear how parochial the “news” can become. But let’s use the quiet after the cherry bombs subside to measure how far or not we’ve come.

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When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems - which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program.

But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”

Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message - “Just left you a VM, it’s important” - just so you know it’s there.

There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.

The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag Yap and Jott, for example).

More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).

For now most people don’t have voicemail transcription services. So think before you voicemail, more and more people just find it annoying.

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One blogger is pointing out, though, that the tool may be going a little too far - by, for example, linking the term “underage girl” in a recent article about Ashley Dupre, the prostitute that led to the downfall of Eliot Spitzer. The Yahoo Shortcut helpfully links to a set of flickr pictures of underage women.

This is probably a term that you want to add to the blacklist, Yahoo.

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