DISQUS

Corvida Raven · 1 year ago

At the same time, comments can still be made by groups of friends on the original sites.

Fragmentation isn't horrible or even bad. I just know that I'd love to have the option to pull comments back to some of the original items, more specifically, back to my blog.

slippylane · 1 year ago

Oops. Old post bumped. Apologies.

khodabakchian · 1 year ago

Hi Paul, Great article: it is true that the ease of use of FF commenting system and the friend context lowers the barrier to contribution and makes friendfeed more social and friendly. What would be nice would be an option for the source of the discussions to track back those discussions so that they can be seen from the source (= I would be very interested in understanding how many discussions this post sparked and be able to scan through them both to understand the different point of views and meet with new people to subscribe too).

paulbuchheit · 1 year ago

Thanks! I agree that track backs might be the right sort of compromise. We'll probably add something like that soon.

Eric Eldon · 1 year ago

@khodabakchian. i've actually been asking a certain commenting-system startup to work on the idea. now what was the name of that startup, again? i can't seem to remember ;)

Daniel Ha · 1 year ago

It's probably something with a funky web name... with letters like a Z or even a Q.

Michael Nielsen · 1 year ago

> However, there's a question that no one is asking: Isn't all that fragmentation > bad?

Cass Sunstein's books "Infotopia" and "Republic 2.0" contain thoughtful extended discussions of the effect of internet-induced fragmentation on society, documenting positive, negative, and other effects. Republic 2.0 is largely focused on the effects of fragmentation on politics, while Infotopia has a broader ambit. I highly recommend "Infotopia"; I'm reading "Republic 2.0" right now, so I'm not sure it's as good.

Neoryder · 1 year ago

My two cents is that the fragmentation is good in a sense because sometimes people speak just to bounce ideas out to people who they know or/and trust. The personal relationship mean something ang it isn't really going to be captured effectively just by linking back to the original site. Context is very important both locally and overall.

lgedeon · 1 year ago

This really does not have to be an either/or situation. You can have trackback or even direct posting of comments as an option. So if I want to discuss with friends a site that does not handle comments or that I do not have an account for I still can, but I can also let the site owner easily see the discussion that is out there.

Ontairo Emperor · 1 year ago

It turns out that FriendFeed's new search capability offers the best of both worlds. The discussions can remain separate, but you can use search (e.g. for terms such as more hyped yawn) to find other discussions that were launched by the same artifact.

Ontario Emperor · 1 year ago

And yes, I can't spell my own name. Have mercy on me, it's late. :)

geekygirldawn · 1 year ago

I'd love to see the FriendFeed comments available as a separate feed, too. With high volume FriendFeeds (twitter, etc.), it can sometimes be really hard to find the comments amongst all of the content. I managed to hack together a FriendFeed Comment Finder feed using pipes that a few of us are using, but it's pretty kludgey. I'd love to see a native feed of just the comments for those of us who live in our rss readers!

mathewi · 1 year ago

Paul, could you do me a favour and contact me via email? It's mathew@mathewingram.com

WafflesRevenge · 1 year ago

a unified discussion would be like trying to crowd all the american voters into a room and pick a president...

slippylane · 1 year ago

Wow, eye-opening article! I was previously advocating (a lot!) the merging of posts with duplicate target url's or titles, but your post has given me a slightly different outlook on the fragmentation factor - I hadn't considered that such an effect would be useful to more people than it would annoy, Your post here has changed my opinion, and for that I thank you.

What I find myself wondering now, is whether there is some course of action which could satisfy both arguments.

I'm thinking, perhaps, something along the lines of a checkbox on the feed page which, when selected, will selectively search for items with duplicate target URL's, but only in the items posted by immediate friends (perhaps a second checkbox for friends-of-friends). Or perhaps even similar functionality at post/scrape time. This, at least, will reduce some of the noise caused by duplication on one's own friends page, whilst still allowing one to participate in multiple discussions on the same subject.

Does that sound reasonable?

Lol, I just realised how old this post is. Serve me right for reading friendfeed in Google Reader, ordered by oldest posts first!

davedash · 1 year ago

I like your explanation for fragmentation... I do like the steps FF has taken to integrate back with twitter - and as a del.icio.us user-neer (engineer+user) constantly find myself finding a lot of great del.icio.us links in FF, that I'd like to save while perserving some of the extras we get by saving via delicious.

I'm not sure I'm explaining my want very clearly. Essentially if I see a delicious post on FF, I'd like to click a button to save it to my delicious, and still get the tags that my friend used as suggested tags.

It seems like any service would want this deeper integration with FF :)