Today’s meta-meme is about Twitter employee Alex Payne supposedly laying all of Twitter’s problems at the feet of so-called “super-users”, aka Robert Scoble. Read the post and tell me if you don’t think Scobleizer overreacted.

The deeper issue is this whole FriendFeed vs. Twitter meme, with several prominent blogger/tweeter types recently proclaimining in favor of FriendFeed. It’s sort of like a superdelegate coming out in favor of one of the Barack or Hillary – it’s big news and gets echoed repeatedly.

Scoble is firmly on the side of FriendFeed, and it’s not just about Twitter’s scalability problems. Here’s the real reason why: On Twitter, he’s just one of many people you may follow. On FriendFeed he’s a big fish: he gets to start and own “conversations”, with people piping in to contribute to memes that HE started. He posts a one-liner with a link and gets dozens of people following up on his entry.

Twitter is democratic; FriendFeed is oligarchic. Twitter is loose and unpredictable; FriendFeed reads a lot like the blog posts at the bottom of Scobleizer.com. If I wanted to hear a bunch of people agreeing with Scoble I’d just go read his damned blog.

So if you want a bunch of me-too bloviating, by all means go follow Scoble on FriendFeed.

Twitter is a different animal – lifestreaming in the truest sense of the word. I enjoy the glimpses of things happening that go by; I like being able to jump in and out of the tweetstream; and I enjoy the brevity that Twitter forces on me (and the people I follow).

I also enjoy the fact that I don’t need to go back and read all the tweets I “missed” while I was offline. Mathew Ingram, whose name in Latin must mean the aggregation of the terms “echo”, “meme”, and “ex post facto”, doesn’t like this – he wants to go back in time and “catch up”. Man, if you think Twitter is about catching up, you don’t get Twitter at all.

In this battle, make sure that you vote properly: are you in favor of being a super-user groupie (FriendFeed), or a first-order participant (Twitter)? Choose wisely.

(If you love Twitter and liked this post, follow me at http://twitter.com/anthonyrstevens)

@Scobleizer on Twitter last night:

Can anyone stop Amazon’s Jeff Barr?

Clicking through to http://tinyurl.com/39luq2, we read:

But it don’t matter anyway. It’s almost too late for the others to get into the game. It’s amazing (or maybe it should be “amazoning”) to me that Ray Ozzie over at Microsoft has let Amazon have so much runway.

So, I ask you, can anyone stop Jeff Barr and Amazon from totally taking over the corporate data infrastructure market?

This morning all of Amazon’s Web Services went down:

Friday morning (February 15, 2008) Amazon Web Services experienced a system-wide outage of their Simple Storage Service (S3). This outage has affected thousands of websites and Web applications, including Twitter and Raven SEO Tools.

Whoops!

One thing about Scoble: he’s smart, but sometimes he lacks perspective. S3 and cloud computing in general are a great idea, but it’s still a bunch of geeks walking in the garden and looking at the first dew on the rose.

I nominate Philip Seymour Hoffman: