Allow me, if you will, to pitch an idea to you; one I believe in and am excited by. I’ll give you my reasons and once you’ve read them do you promise me you’ll at least think about what I suggest?

Here’s the crux: If you’re a Twitter addict who loves the fast-paced discussions and news sharing that can go on there, chances are you’ll love the social side of FriendFeed.

Now – you might well be tutting right now. You might have tried FriendFeed in the past, set up an account and then never really looked at it again. Maybe you think of FriendFeed as a place that puts all your output from around the web; blogs, photos, videos, tweets etc, in one place. Well yes, it is but it’s so much more than that!

With its latest redesign, taken out of beta yesterday, FriendFeed is now a realtime discussion engine beyond compare. Twitter addicts are used to posting a Tinyurl link to something interesting and then getting a disjointed conversation with their followers. It’s not very efficient and it can be hard to keep track of the discussion.

With FriendFeed you can get conversations started based on anything – items you’ve imported automatically via RSS feeds or posts (complete with links and pictures if you like) that you’ve made directly to FriendFeed. Comments are then listed below each item making it easy to discuss anything and keep track of what people are saying.

The best bit is it’s all in real time! As soon as someone posts something it appears at the top of your feed. It can seem a bit too much if you’re subscribed to a lot of people’s feeds – items can pop up one after the other like a waterfall of information at times, but there’s a ‘Pause’ button you can hit at any time to relax and take stock.

Twitter addicts regularly complain about the lack of easy ways to separate your friends into different groups. With FriendFeed that’s easy.

Twitter addicts complain about keeping track of search terms being more difficult than it should be. With FriendFeed you can save searches for keywords across a wide range of Social Media services with ease. Want to know what’s hot in your area of interest? You can set up searches as simple or as complicated as you like and get an instant view of what’s going on.

FriendFeed handles media better than Twitter too. Twitpics are displayed inline, as are video and audio links – in many cases you can play them without leaving the current page.

As you can tell – I love FriendFeed. It’s not perfect – kinks in the new realtime interface are still being ironed out but as a discussion platform I much prefer it to Twitter. The main problem with it is you’re not there! I currently interact with hardcore FriendFeed users and it’s enjoyable enough but I miss the community of Twitterers that I regularly talk to.  Our discussions would be so much richer, and enriching, with FriendFeed.

So, you’ve heard my pitch. What do you think? Sign up and give it a go. Give it a week or two of interacting with the service before you pass a judgement.

My profile is here – subscribe to me and some other users you find interesting and let’s see if we can help the service gain some more traction. It’s well worth the effort!