FriendFeed v. The latest Google Reader rev

First up, just so’s you knows where I’m coming from, I love FriendFeed and I love Google Reader. One of the things that’s been frustrating me a bit with Google Reader is the inability to add a comment to the things I share - I mean, sharing something is works but it seems kinda naked without the context of why I’m sharing it. Really, I mean, what if I just want to make fun of something when I’m sharing it and I don’t want people to think that I’m really down with whatever I’m sharing. Y’know?

It was with great pleasure that I read the post from the Reader blog announcing this very feature! They also announced a bookmarklet to let you bring anything on the web into Reader, but there’ve been a couple ways to do that already, I was using the Instapaper route and there’s also a different bookmarklet. For me annotation is the big noise and as Reader gets more fully featured comparisons between it and other aggregators is inevitable, FriendFeed por ejemplo.

I agree with pretty much everything Mathew says in his post. FriendFeed is better at being a community what with the commenting and the feeding back into Twitter and perhaps one day soon Disqus as well. Reader is ready to allow comments - the way they’ve built the note into the feed leaves easy space for more comments to be added (although I find it odd that they are actually embedding the note into the copy of the feed itself, in addition to a separate xml tag, I suspect the duplication is a shortcut that’ll be removed at some point) and they’ve said as much before. While resistance was high to adding such a feature I think FriendFeed shows why fragmented conversation is inevitable.

Nevertheless, I believe that they still occupy different niches or at least that they will appeal to different sorts of users. What I like about Google Reader is that it’s very deterministic - everything shows up in a fixed order of appearance and it keeps meticulous track of the state of everything, read, starred, shared, noted - you know very easily the state of every item in your feed. To me this is very important - it’s easy to know you haven’t skipped something. It’s easy to go back and find things you’ve starred or shared. The search is awesome and being able to search over starred/shared items is fantastic. It’s a powerful archiving and research tool. And I can go through a lot of information fast since I can view headlines but easily click into an article without needing to go to a different page to see it.

FriendFeed, on the other hand, being a much more social animal is a great means of seeing what the conversation on the internets is at this particular moment. It’s aggregation of content paired with user comments is an unparalleled view of the current moment on my slice of the web (where I’ve defined my slice to be the people I’ve chosen to follow and those who have chosen to follow me). But it’s much more fluid than Reader is, threads keep bubbling to the top as more comments are added and there’s not really a read/unread state. You can “like” something or comment on it, but everything is public, there’s currently no way to simply note something for future reference and the search definitely leaves a bit to be desired.

So I find these two services to be quite different - I know some folks have more or less switched off Reader for FF but I find them complementary. I’m curious what will happen if/when Google adds commenting to it’s repertoire and how they’ll deal with the UI issues that will raise. As for now, adding notes to Reader makes my life much easier since FF properly shows it as a comment I can now simply share and it’ll show up right on my Reader feed in FF. I used to have to decide whether to share and/or post to FF.

Ah well, what do you think? You using either of these sites? Check out my Reader Share feed or else hit me on FriendFeed if you’re so inclined.

Also, I’m super happy that they put the sharer (with avatar even!) in the feed source column in reader instead of the actual source of the shared feed - it’s much more helpful that way.

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