Library clips

Moopz comes to the rescue for a concern I too have had about Friendfeed, and that is, fragmented conversations within Friendfeed itself.
The issue is that there may be conversations around multiples of the same item:

- just say my blog feed posts my latest item to Friendfeed (it’s a post about something I have on Slideshare)
- my latest Slideshare activity will post an item to Friendfeed as well
- and someone bookmarks that blog post or slidedeck URL on del.icio.us which then shows up on Friendfeed
- someone tweets about it, and that shows up on Friendfeed
- someone may even post directly into Friendfeed about the slidedeck

As you can see above there are 5 opportunities to initiate the same conversation about the same thing within Friendfeed, and the most thriving conversation may be around someone’s bookmarked item of your post, rather than around the feed item of your own post.

As Read Write Web point out, at the moment your re-syndicated blog post may not have any discussion in Friendfeed, but an A-lister who bookmarks your blog post will have lots of discussion around that item in Friendfeed.
This is a new dynamic as now people are becoming a hot spot, a community onto themselves, for not only their own content, but content of others.

Moopz plans to prevent this fragmentation from happening.

For starters it only displays content that has links, so you won’t see tweets saying “Good morning Twitter!”

If a new link that appears is already linked to in another Friendfeed item, then they will be merged (clustered together) preventing fragmented conversation from even happening.

Another good thing about this is that we don’t have to see duplicate items.

And each item is auto-tagged meaning you can browse conversations on a topic

I guess this is a memetracker of sorts based on clusterings, and what gets on the frontpage is decided as a result of people using the system. This makes it a more self organising version of Techmeme and Megite…and a more limited version as it’s only based on content that comes from the aggregate of user profiles.

Megite allows you to enter your OPML, and displays most popular and recommended posts from people you care about (rather than all items ranked), but it’s not a conversation platform. It also displays memes by topic.

At the moment Moopz only has a public timeline, hopefully soon it can be personalised to have a friends timeline.

Like Megite and Techmeme, Moopz will display popular memes based on links, but it doesn’t scour the web for these links and cluster them, instead it scours content people have re-syndicate into it’s own system…the former Memetrackers also use other methods like concept analysis (as two items may be about the same exact thing yet they both don’t point to a common link).
Moopz also has another aspect to popular memes, and that’s based on the amount of conversation that happens within Moopz (Friendfeed) itself.

More

Also checkout how Read Write Web and Louis Gray are incorporating Friendfeed comments back to their blog (the original source)…Read Write Web also allow posting to Friendfeed from within their blog.

Louis Gray has some great Friendfeed tips every Friday, the first one on the hide funtion is a great way to reduce the noise, and same with advanced search.

NoiseRiver (via LG)

Another way to filter the flow by a feature called “My Interests”, enabling you to use a drop down menu to filter in or out items containing a certain keyword, the filter choices are:
I love it so much!, I love it, I like it, This is nice, It’s OK, I don’t care, It stinks, This is bad, I don’t like it, I hate it, I hate it so much
There’s also a feature called “My Neighbourhood” to filter items from people on a similar filtering menu.
I also noticed:
- you can re-share an item (this posts it as a FF post)
- there is a reply icon next to each item and comment so your comment is pre-pended with that person name eg. @louis
- each item has auto-keywords (not sure why you can add/delete them, you can also filter rate these keywords as explained above)
- “hide all entries with this URL” is a manual way of doing what Moopz already does.

FeedMachine (via LG)

This brings an element of an RSS reader because you can mark read/unread

Friends view - contact list where you can choose a contact and click on a source icon and a box displays latest content from that source…it lacks latest content from all a person’s sources

Good Friends View - When you click on a profile it allows you to tick that person as a good friend, this will add them to your Good Friends section

Stream View - latest items from all friends
When you click on the info icon it loads the original item on the right and the FF comments on the left, where you can post a comment
- sort by: newsest, oldest, unread, user, service, item text, comments, most liked, least liked
- hide duplicates

Just like NoiseRiver and Moopz you filter out entries by keyword, as well as user, service, hide read items, and hide “@” items

Mio News (via LG)

This turns Friendfeed into an RSS Reader, kind of reminds me of Spokeo.

On your subscription pane you have an icon to see your FF stream (mark as read).
You also have an icon for each friend, clicking this will stream the latest from a friend (mark as read).
You can group friends into folders, click on a folder will show you the latest from just those friends in that folder (mark as read).

But, you can’t filter your whole stream, a folder stream, or one friend by service.

This has an MS Outlook feel, as when you click on an item you see the full-text on the 3rd pane, from here you can:
- mark as read, share on FF (also share to your blog, twitter, and email), comment, like, hate, goto native item

There also a bookmarklet and blog and Twitter integration.

Lastly there is a “Topics” feature where you list keywords (also organise in folders)
- clicking on a keyword will display all items from your friends about that keyword (not sure if it’s “about” or just the appearance of the keyword)

At the moment you can’t view rooms, or share an item to a room.

This could be a replacement for Google Reader, it would be good if you could manually adds feeds from non-FF people so I don’t need two RSS Readers.

Related:
FriendFeed Rooms : Interactive topic streams
Friendfeed : social filter conversations

Friendfeed have joined other lifestream services, onaswarm and Mugshot, in adding a groups to their feature set called Rooms.

Set up a public, semi-public (non members can read and comment) or private room where people can post messages and links and comments…this is something Twitter has avoided so far.

If you are member of multiple rooms you can see all content in your “all my rooms” stream.
You can also check a box so the content of a room also appears on your main friendfeed page (this saves you from having to add a Rooms feed to your main page…actually what is my main page, it must be my friends page)

This “Rooms” feature is moving away from the lifestream mainstay, is basically sharing messages and links with a group. This is different than on-the-fly tags (hash tags, Jaiku Channels), with Rooms you actually have to join, perhaps get to know the members…more of a community (I don’t know about that when the numbers get too high).

Rooms also streams feed content…an idea would be to have an option for 2 streams in a Room, one for links and messages, and one for external feed stuff.

The external feed stream makes Rooms powerful as it can be used as a topic stream as well as interactive manual submitting of links, text and comments.

Mugshot and Ziki are a similar group lifestream concept, whereas FriendFeed Rooms don’t stream the lifestream of its members into one stream, it’s purely just a place for a group of people to share text, links and discuss. Just the same Mugshot Groups allow you to submit messages and links and comments, group chat, and even chat around an item…as well as stream external feeds.

Steve Rubel is using a private Room to save links and notes…kind of a read later stream, or even a link blog/stream like del.icio.us and Google Reader Shared Items.

BTW - I finally found a mobile version of FriendFeed.

The FriendFeed Apps page has some interesting hacks that increasingly makes it an alternative to Google Reader:
- read later
- creating group streams (above I mentioned that Mugshot and Ziki have group streams, well this is a similar thing…I guess it’s like grouping people in folders and displaying a folder stream)
- filter by service
- remove visited links
- Twitter enhancements

Related:

Friendfeed : social filter conversations

[ADDED 7/7/08: 13 FriendFeed Tools for Twitter Refugees]

[UPDATE: I should have read the Podchains blog post properly:

“…we’ll be putting the old Podchains back up shortly at it’s new location.”]

How would you like it if this happened to you…

You find a website that allows you to bookmark websites, it’s not an ordinary social bookmark website, it’s one for podcasts.

When you see a podcast you like you bookmark the mp3 file in the URL field, the title in the title field, add some tags, and add a note (this can be used to enter the URL where you found this file).

After a year you have 100’s of great podcasts bookmarked, browse them by tag…what a great audio library.

This library also gives you some space to upload mp3 files…but you don’t use this feature, you just bookmark mp3 files.

One day you go to bookmark a new podcast and find that this service is no longer a podcast bookmark site.

First thing you say is WTF!!!!!

Where all my stuff?

Where’s my data?

All that work creating a library of my favourite podcasts is gone.

All the time I spent creating a library of my favourite podcasts is wasted.

This is what happened to me with Podchains.net.

They were a podcast bookmarks site, now they are Video Production and Distribution for the web.
Here is an announcement of their new service, pity this blog post doesn’t allow you to add a comment.

They changed their service without telling me, so now I’m at a loss.

I emailed them, but have not got a response.

I tweeted this hoping I could connect with other victims, but no response.

I want my data so I can take it elsewhere.

It’s a pity Data Portability is in its infancy, but this is one of the reasons that confirms the need to make data portable.

I at least want a way to export this data into another service, just like some social bookmarks allow you to import your bookmarks from another service.

I’ve posted about Podchains on various occassions, if anything I have promoted them, the least I want in return is to be able to import my data into another service.

My Podchains feed no longer works
http://podchains.net/feed.php?id=a54bd677ced76a515a0cefdbac3fe255

I made a Grazr from my Podchains feed, but this no longer works.

The only thing salvaged is my Ziki lifestream, which re-syndicates all my content, so I do have some stuff I collected at Podchains re-published at Ziki, thankgod for profile aggregators.
I’m not sure if this has my whole collection as I’m not sure if the Podchains RSS feed contained every item from my collection, but thankyou Ziki.

Has anyone experience this with a web 2.0 service?

After getting burnt, I’m not sure who to trust anymore!

Can I do anything about this, is it legally my data…I didn’t read the fine print?

I’ve already mentioned FriendFeed, but I thought I’d elaborate as finally we have a simple to use lifestream service, but most of all it’s got my community (similar to my Twitter and blog network).

Now the idea of a lifestream is to bunch all your profiles and content into one place, but even just as much fun is that you can add friends who are doing the same thing, basically a friendstream, and not only that but you can discuss the web with your social filter.

This is really the winning feature, up until now I use web 2.0 to subscribe to my trusted social filter (people who publish and point to stuff), now I’m extending that by discussing with them, but not in a scattered way, instead these discussions are all on the one Friendfeed site.

Like only a few other lifestream services you can add imaginary friends, and Friendfeed also recommends friends and has statistics.

Comments

Like many of the lifestream services you can even add inhouse content in the way of text or a link, and even leave comments on any item…Louis Gray seems to think this is unique for some reason.

Now this leaving comments brings up Duncan Riley’s point, why would I leave a comment on a blog post or a Twitter post within Friendfeed, why wouldn’t I just do it at the native service.

Now I tend to agree to an extent as I’d like comments to my blog post on my blog, but according to the podcast on Read/Write Talk there is a subtle difference. This is a way for you, your friends, and their friends to comment on stuff, you will not see comments by other people who are not connected to your extended network.
So it’s a quality discussion limited to people in your network, this sort of thing doesn’t happen on blogs
eg. imagine you could filter all the comments on TechCrunch to just your friendfeed friends, see more at the Lifestream blog.
But is this really unique, you have this same functionality at Jaiku.

Mugshot and especially their groups feature has this down to an art, but they are going down the group member road, whereas Friendfeed is doing it via your network…Mugshot has plenty of other features like swarming, chat, share link, externals feeds, etc…

A real difference with Friendfeed to other lifestream services is that comments are not linear.
eg. on Jaiku when there is a new comment it appears underneath the item being commented on, but it also becomes a new post of it’s own.
Friendfeeds approach is for comments to not be a post of their own, but to only be threaded underneath the item.

So how do you know when there is a discussion around an item that is a day old and has rolled of the page?

Well, it doesn’t roll off the page…sure Friendfeed is a river of news of recent items, but if an older item is being commented on it moves back up the river, so it’s on the front page where you can see it.
The idea here is that these discussed items are popular and the discussion needs to be seen, it won’t pass you by.
In Jaiku you can be updated with recent comments in a discussion, but the discussion is not promoted, in fact if you miss it, it will pass you by, whereas Friendfeed tries to keep conversations visible (on the frontpage)

Basically, if you are tracking discussion you never have to leave the front page of either your “friends” tab or “me” tab. Heavily discussed items on both these tabs will always be on the front page, this is very much in contrast to the linear approaches we have seen so far. In fact this could make it a “hot news” ranked page based on comments and voting, so it’s kind of in TechMeme, Twitter, Digg territory.

Only thing I forsee is if this site becomes the discussion, where most items are discussed, then when I login, I indeed may have to go 5 pages back to see all the days hot discussions. I’m sure in the future they will a separate stream or tab for ultra hot discussions.

But is this exhaustive enough to make sure you have tracked every comment people make on your items. The Fast Wonder blog has a solution to create a feed of comments made to your stuff on Friendfeed.
Hmmm…the settings page says “Send me email when people comment on my feed and I haven’t logged in recently”

Search

And now they have search, which I see is kind of competing with my Google Reader search, as I can search just me, or my friends…or as TechCrunch say a “destination site”.
If “Tibet” is the news of the day, I can search my friends to see who is talking about it.
In Google Reader I’m most likely just subscribed to their blog feed, but here I’m subscribed to all their stuff.

The advanced search enables you to search just one person, and even filtered by service…this is awesome.

Hang on, this isn’t full-text search, but it’s still good…and it generates an RSS feed.

I am using TweetScan (core network) to track the term “friendfeed” amongst select Twitter friends, I can now do this with Friendfeed itself, both of these services generate a search feed.

NOTE: I couldn’t do without Google Reader

Icons, filters, full-text, bi-directional

Another good feature is that you have a view for all posts you have commented on.

I’d like another view for my items people have commented on, I know these will be on the front page, but once there are no subsequent comments, they roll of the page. But I guess on my own blog I can’t filter to see only posts that have been commented on…in the meantime we can use the hack linked (Fast Wonder blog) to above.

Next to each item is an icon from the service it was originally published on, if you click this you can see just content from that service.
So if you are on your “friends” tab, and see an item from Twitter and click the Twitter icon, you will now only see Twitter items from all your friends…this is almost like being on Twitter.

What you can’t do is post back to Twitter or comment on a blog, unlike SocialThing, or favorit.

Should Friendfeed be a two way thing, where you can post a comment back to appear on the original service…and at the time of commenting have the option to, “comment just here”, or “comment here and the original”.
[UPDATE 26/03/08: Just in…when commenting on a Twitter feed, you can send it to Twitter as a reply]

Another thing Duncan Riley mentioned was that to actually read blog posts you have to go to the original source, then come back to Friendfeed to leave a comment. Once I go to the original blog post, I’d probably comment then and there, so I think Friendfeed needs to work out a way to keep you from leaving. Perhaps they could do like Ask/Bloglines search where the full-text of an item displays when you hover over it.

Getting back to the icon view, eg. just see Twitter posts from your friends, I wish there was a list of these icons on the sidebar ie. a list of icons of all the services your friends use…more easier like Spokeo.
I’d like this for me as well, but the icon list representing all the services I use will launch to the native service when you click

…and where is an “FF” icon for my inhouse friendfeed posts.

Another thing is that I’m adding my Twixtr photo blog feed and my LibraryThing feed using the blog feed icon, this means if I filter a search with this icon I will get more than just my blog posts…darn.

Duplicates

I really like how it collapses items, so the stream is less congested, this is all part of the pleasant user experience.

You can also reduce the noise by hiding a service from a given user, meaning if you do not want to see userA’s flickr photo’s, you can turn that off, see more.
I’d like to do that for my whole Friends stream, ie. turn off the Flickr service from all my friends. There is a hack available to do this sort of thing for the moment , eg. Friendfeed minus Twitter.

But what about duplicate items?

eg.
- my del.icio.us links are in my blog feed (via Feedburner)
- my del.icio.us links are in my Twitter feed only because my blog feed is in my Twitter feed (via Twitterfeed)
- some items I share in Google Reader, I also bookmark in del.icio.us

So you see what’s happening here, if I add my:
- del.icio.us feed
- Google Reader Shared Items feed
- Blog feed
- Twitter feed

You will see an item I bookmark in del.icio.us appear in my Friendfeed 4 times.
You will see my blog posts appear 2 times.

There must be a way for Friendfeed to de-dupe URL’s or titles.

Identity

This could become a lifestream social network like Ziki where you can private message friends…public message would be good as well (also the ability to share or push an item to a friend).

If they want people to live in Friendfeed, I’m guessing in the future they would add ways to contact people, just like Ziki allows you to add sidebar links or widgets:
- GTalk me
- Jaxtr me, etc..

Why not go the whole way and have people tags.

But let’s not get excited as Friendfeed may want to keep it simple, as simple is the reason why people like del.icio.us, Google, and Twitter.

Mobile

I’m using this mobile version I found via Steve Rubel:
http://friendfeed.com/embed/googlegadget

Only thing is I can’t post or comment on my phone…when is Friendfeed mobile coming!!

More

Steve Rubel also has a post on using the Imaginary friends (private feature) and as an ego aggregator of sorts. You could use this feature to subscribe to all your Friendfeed searches, kind of like an inhouse watchlist.

Lifestream blog has picked up on a way to subscribe to a friends comments and likes, but it seems this is now a feature, you can go to a profile and get a feed for a friends likes, comments or both.

…and OPML.

The Facebook app is full featured, very nice…not sure if there is a general widget yet.

I wonder if it may include a newsfeed type feature where it tells you when a friend adds a new friend, it already displays when a friend comments or votes something.

What exactly is friendfeed?

- Personalised Memedigger/Breaking news based around my OPML (social filter and extended network)…the search feature is great for hot topics
(will we soon see blog post footer buttons saying “Share on friendfeed”)
- Conversational Web (based around my social filter)
- Lifestream/Friendstream
- Identity page
- Expert locator (if it added people tags)

I’m getting the feeling due to the comments feature that friendfeed is reminding me of the immediacy of Twitter conversations, but friendfeed discussions are more in context of an object.

Is Friendfeed going to cut the lunch of the new breed of social network RSS Readers like FeedEachOther?
I’ve been wanting Google Reader to be a social network, but now Friendfeed is just that and more, just wish you could fwd or share a link with another Friendfeed friend.

Google Reader is still my tool for essential reading, but Friendfeed may become the new conversation and recommendation/discovery place…to complement Twitter, and in a way to achieve what I hoped would happen on Facebook, ie. an aggregated conversation and link sharing social network.

I like this quote by AVC, as a result of a new place to see comments on his stuff and other conversations:

“…an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention”

The essence of Friendfeed:

“FriendFeed is for community discussion surrounding the social web”