Sunday, March 16, 2008

A Reasonable Discussion About FriendFeed, and a Possible Re-Evaluation

If you saw my previous blog posts about FriendFeed (especially this one), you'll recall that I was enthused about the whole idea of "metacomments" - an overlay of comments over the original artifacts.

Muhammad Saleem was not so enthused, and he actually stated his concerns in a reasonable manner (hint, hint). This is what he said:

the main problem i have with friendfeed, (and the lack of which i think is socialthing’s killer app) is that friendfeed isn’t simply an aggregator, it is a network of its own. for example, when you interact with someone’s stream in friendfeed, let’s say a friend’s twitter message, the interaction is posted within friendfeed and not on the external site.

socialthing on the other hand is quite simply an aggregator and not a network (at least not yet) and the reason why i love it is because when i interact with an element from socialthing, the interaction appears on the external site (from which the lifestream was aggregated) and not on socialthing itself. for example, when i reply to someone’s twitter message, the reply appears on twitter (whereas on friendfeed, when i comment on a twitter message, the comment stays on friendfeed).


In other words, the thing that I see as a distinct advantage is seen as a distinct disadvantage to Saleem (and it should be noted that Duncan Riley also sees this as a disadvantage).

I'm curious, however. Assume for the moment that Socialthing shows Jaiku messages (I don't know if it does today, but presumably it will at some point) and I see a Jaiku message that someone has posted. If I am not a Jaiku message (incidentally, I am not), and I try to respond to that message, does Socialthing prevent me from doing so?

P.S. Speaking of Duncan Riley, you may recall that I intentionally planned to reply to his Louis Gray is a c--- and a wanker post on the FriendFeed link to that post. However, after about a day or so, it seems that I was the only person to do so.

So maybe his TechCrunch statistics about a dislike of FriendFeed are right... :) I'll wait a while (yup, taking my own advice) and see if I should declare a Jim Bakker moment.

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2 comments:

louisgray said...

Another option:
http://friendfeed.com/e/2ed8b449-edc1-849d-61e4-327c2a54dbdf

Ontario Emperor said...

Louis points out an interesting item about FriendFeed - which, in my view, is actually a drawback.

When Duncan Riley posted his original post, no one commented on it.

But when Louis Gray shared the same item on FriendFeed, a ton of people commented on it.

However, FriendFeed (to my knowledge) is unable to link the two, so someone (such as me) who saw the lack of comments on Duncan Riley's post may conclude that no one is interested in it.

I'll mull this over.