FriendFeed should be my own personal Techmeme
UPDATED: Tue Apr 1 14:27:25 EDT 2008
I know, I know, too much FriendFeed and not enough iPhone. ;) Just this one more and I’ll stop for awhile. You know, when you’ve got a little obsession you just gotta go with it for awhile, work through the demons.
A lot of these thoughts were swirling around my grey matter for a bit, but I find that using it on the iPhone kinda gelled them into more coherent thoughts. Here’s the fundamental point of this post - right now FriendFeed does some grouping by person and service - so if you twitter a bunch, reply on a few Disqus forums or upload some Flickrs it will group those and if there’s several of them only show a few with a more link. Which is a fine and reasonable thing to do - not doing that would cause the site to become, more or less, a big Twitter client.
But it would be a lot more interesting to also group things, where possible, by the thing they link to. I see it constantly that someone posts something on their blog, then they twitter it, then a few other people share that on their google reader and also comment on it on Disqus and then retwitter it and digg it, you get the picture. Each one of those is a separate entity. Frustratingly, a lot of times, since I don’t FriendFeed constantly, I’ll miss the original post and come across a discuss comment or a share of it - it’s a pain in the butt to travel back in time to try and discover the original FF post and see what comments are there. Which is to say that FF doesn’t just fragment the conversation off the original sites, it fragments it on FriendFeed itself!
Instead of that, they could do some kind of super fancy voodoo and aggregate all the postings to a given link into one post - they could grab discuss comments, diggs, reader shares, etc… and group that all together so you could get a sense of who was interested in what and all the conversation on FF would be bunched up. Beyond that, if it’d show people who weren’t my friend (or friends of friends) it’d be a great way to discover new and interesting voices. It would also provide a meter to see how popular various posts were - which would certainly be something interesting to see.
Obviously, that’s not really what Techmeme does, but it would be a first step towards that. First unify all the things on FriendFeed. A much more ambitious step would be to subsequently analyze posts to see who’s linking to them - and that would be very Techmeme’y - but it would be better because I would see discussions of things that were more likely to be pertinent to me since all the original matter would be things my friends had posted.
These are big things, most likely not easy to implement, but I would love to see something like that - I think it’d be incredibly useful. Have you been using it? Does this make sense to you? Or am I just silly.
Since this’ll hopefully be my last FF post for awhile if you’re still jonesin’ for more, you can always check out FriendFeed Watch for your FF Fix.
UPDATE: I was thinking about this a little more - if whenever someone relinked to something it went to the top (as it works now - if you comment something it goes back to the top, I think?) this also sort of becomes your own personal digg. The best part is that it can be totally meritocratic - if someone starts spamming links? You unsubscribe from them or block their posts. Huh.
May 4th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
http://www.friendfeedmachine.com provides an alternate way of viewing FF, and includes some deduping, as well as filtering and sorting options (with more on the way in the next few days).