I stopped reading after "Dave Winer recently asked what FriendFeed would be if it didn’t pull in Twitter - the answer is simple: a service with very little activity." Wrong. I turned off Twitter in Friendfeed weeks ago and there's more than enough activity. - Leo Laporte

Leo++. I guess it's the Twitterheads that think FF actually NEEDS Twitter to be useful when it's actually just another drop of water in the stream. Ok, I'll even upgrade it to tributary status, but it's one tributary among MANY - Rahsheen the Dream

Leo, yeah i have a few nits to pick with this one too, but he's right about the comments from blogs stuff at the end of the post. Zee has a thread up on this as well with a bit of discussion. I commented a bit more there: http://friendfeed.com/the-nex... - Chris Heath

Leo: Agreed, but it takes time for your twitter followers to find out about friendfeed and start to use that. I made the mistake of not putting all my twitter users into a group on FF, so now I get all the tweets in the mix of the FF content that i don't really want to see there. - Jay McCormack

Hey at least I got Leo to read up to that - I don't think I've ever had Leo comment on one of my posts! I probably could have left out Dave's comment looking back at the post it could have been a different post. - Allen Stern

Allen, one more thing... i'm checking the reply to twitter box and commenting here on ff - you do know about that capability right? because you made it seem like you didn't - Chris Heath

allen, you're right! http://friendfeed.com/search... - Chris Heath

Jay, you can fix that - http://friendfeed.com/friends go thru and spend the time to organize your friends, stay on top of the organization - it's the same as doing little chores around the house so you don't have to do one big cleaning every couple weeks (bad analogy, but you get the point) stay on top of things - it takes a little effort now and then, but you're better off for it in the long run - Chris Heath

Chris: Have been doing that slowly. It's kinda hard now to know who came from twitter exclusively in that window. So every day I start by moving people who's tweets i'm only vaguely interested in into the 'twitter' group. I think by the end of the month I should be sorted. I'd love a way to reverse out all those people and then add them in again in the right group. - Jay McCormack

Jay, yeah that's a good way to do it - Chris Heath

i am not sure if the send the comment to twitter is a pro or a con - on the surface it looks like a pro but might be a con worse - Allen Stern

I use the comment to twitter when I'm directing it at the author of the original tweet. Just to make sure I got their attention if I don't see them here very much. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

But the twitter discussion seems to miss a lot of the point of Allen's article. The point is the disconnect and disjointedness in all of the discussion that we all participate in. It's one thing for the power geeks to handle it, because a lot of us have learned how to deal with multiple in-flows and out-flows of data. But as Allen said, think of the poor masses who read some of this stuff. They cant/won't and most importantly aren't follwoing the whole discussion. They respond to pieces of it here and there, and don't ever see the whole thing. And in a lot of cases, neither do we. None of us see all the comments on the blog posts that we write that get shared by random people into Facebook and commented on there. Those comments are stuck there. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I think the point of the article is valid. Duplicate posts and fragmented comment streams are a reality. I think there is probably a way to get some clarity with backtype or ubervu, but it's not a perfect solution. - dthree

I'm intrigued with backtype, and going to look more into that - looked much more like what I'm looking for than Disqus. Disqus would be cool if it was able to track with the notification posts on FriendFeed, and make some way to track threads on Twitter (hashtags or thread serialnumbers) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

btw fred wilson replied and blames friendfeed for poor disqus implementation - Allen Stern

My question to that, is: Is it up to friendfeed to implement inbound services, or up to disqus to provide the feed in the proper manner? I know that it's certainly up to me to setup the outbound feed on my blog correctly for it to import correctly into FriendFeed. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Finger pointing probably isn't constructive, since either side could probably push the changes necessary to get things working right but in the end they really have to work together to optimize it. On FriendFeed's side, they're providing the option for me to bring my comments in as entries. On Disqus' side, they could push blog comments over as comments on the corresponding entry already in FriendFeed...but what do you do if the commenter isn't a FriendFeed user? - Ken Sheppardson

And given that any number of users can create as many entries as they'd like pointing at the same blog post, you really have to have some way to know which one is the "official", canonical entry ala http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Ken Sheppardson

Aggregation will always have this problem, and I doubt it can be solved easily. I beleive one of the underlying problems is that services like Friendfeed make it too easy to share things using RSS feeds. Aggregators would improve heavily in quality if the content that gets aggregated is hand picked and entered. Quality over quantity. But that defies all current web business models, so it isn't likely to happen - Alexander van Elsas

Yeah, I think this distinction between articles in a "feed" and the stream of comments related to that feed causes fits when there's an impedance mismatch. In this case specifically the concept of a comment on Disqus doesn't match up exactly with what a comment is on Friendfeed. Maybe if we could move to a world where we just had "messages" that could be anything from a full blog post to a pointer to a blog post to a "Like" or a comment, all of which with anin-reply-to pointer, everybody's job would get easier. - Ken Sheppardson

My point wasn't finger pointing, but trying to discover the correct party to fix the situation. Obviously all the parties will really need to work together to solve the issues. And it's a very good question about what to do if the commenter isn't a FriendFeed user. I have thought about the issue of determining the canonical entry. That is problematic, especially considering re-shares and so on. I like the idea of the "in-reply-to" pointer. Perhaps some standardized messaging protocl will need to be worked out? - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Ken that's a cool idea, a Like as a notice variant with an in_reply_to id - Brian Hendrickson

Rob: I'll refrain from pointing fingers RE who I was talking about RE pointing fingers ;-) Let's see... what protocols might we already have sitting around that let us exchange messages containing text and media; distribute them to one or more users, groups or services; thread via in-reply-to pointers; support real time to the extent that the servers on each end of the connection can handle it... what we really need is some sort of, you know, simple message transport protocol. - Ken Sheppardson

Interesting. I guess the real question is can we get the commenting systems to use it, and how would that or would that not open the whole field up to more spam? - guruvan (Rob Nelson)