Interesting and thoughtful ideas... - Bret Taylor

Can this be implemented? It would be awesomesauce and a definite timesaver. - Corvida

"Person-Centric or Link-Centric?": both? - minus-one

Totally agree with what you have written! - Joe Dawson from Alert Thingy

i see the benefits, but also the problems behind it. (not saying one should not try!) It would also switch intentions. people do not post answers to you if you blog about something, but they will post because famous person X has shared that for example and they answered to *that* person. putting the comments to the 'original' changes the intent. so a listing like that would need to make a tree out of that. - Nicole Simon

I think additional aggregation would be nice, but you'd open up a can of worms. For example, I often click like on the first one I see it, then may add it to my SU or other services. who get's the top spot? the one where it first hit Friendfeed which in some cases may be through twitter because they are pulled more often? - Nicole Simon

www.friendfeedmachine.com goes some way towards alleviating this problem, with some more features due in a few days, especially around aggregation - via FriendFeedMachine - Scott Goldie

Both :) IMO link-centric presentation is preferable, assuming of course UI and work flow related issues at the point of adding a link to FF directly are nicely resolved. - ǝuǝƃnǝ

I think I'd prefer person-centric but link-centric is interesting too. I see link centric as a personalised memetracker... - Andy Davies

+1 for person centric filtering first - Alex Gawley

i prefer link-centric since it would clean up FF.. but thinking that rather than accumulating events like 'Shared on Google Reader' or 'bookmarked on Delicious', it should be shown as 'Likes' on the original feed. If there is some value add, like Comments or Tweets, only then, show it as an event. - Vishy

FF already supports person-centric see http://friendfeed.com/bret/ but I guess one person at a time only. - Shakeel Mahate

@shakeel - i think the purpose of 'person centric' is to group all of a single person's activities as they relate to a specific URL into a single entry. As such FF doesn't do that right now. - Alex Gawley

I prefer link-centric. it would be great to centralize the conversation. There should be a priority tree, though. Blog>Google Reader>Delicious...etc. The item with the higher priority goes first. - Alejandro

Person-centric could be used in the user's own list of activities. - Alejandro

Whatever you call it, I want to be able to see what the content is about. Just don't tell me Person X has bookmarked a page on Site Y. I need to know the title. - Mike Reynolds

I think link-centric is intriguing. An organic techmeme, built directly on users' actions and transparent. Biggest concern with centralizing activity under one link is the echo-chamber effect that could result. I suspect that can be managed - e.g. the meme is set up in a separate tab, away from the flow of friends' updates. - Hutch Carpenter

I would always vote for link-centric. If somebody else shares it...add it into the comments. - Chris Nixon

Person-centric is probably a better user experience, but link-centric is very attractive to content producers. Especially if they can search for links to their domain. - engtech

One thing I would *love* is if FF unrolled tinyurls, feedburner links, etc. That would be necessary for link-centric - engtech

I like the exploration of ideas. However, I echo @HutchCarpenter's concern regarding the echo-chamber. Would my friendfeed be cluttered? Woulid I have to wade through gigantic posts such as this one where a ton of people have shared, liked, or commenting on the same link? Would I lose my current feeling of community if I was sucked into a massive conversation? Would interesting tid-bits get lost and scrolled by to fast by these compilations of linking behaviour? - Seek Ground

I have concerns about the merging of different comment streams (in the link-centric model). The same item from different people will have different subsets of people commenting, depending on the poster's friends. Different people will see different comments depending on their friend graph, their hiding preferences, etc., thus it would be hard to maintain a coherent conversation. - Mihai Parparita

Interesting point Mihai - Alejandro

Great idea - and it should be user-configurable all over the place. I post links to every article I write for InformationWeek in at least three places that FriendFeed picks up. As a FriendFeed producer, I should be able to configure my FriendFeed to designate which item is authoritative for duplicate links. And as a consumer I should be able to designate which source is authoritative for *others'* FriendFeeds, as well as whether to filter on a per-user or per-link basis (i.e. do I see same link from 2+ ppl) - Mitch Wagner

To the FriendFeed folks. While you do listen to us, please also feel free to ignore us. Overall, I'm quite happy with the FF UI. I also trust that you're smarter than me and I look forward to the FFFuture. - Mike Reynolds

I would love this!! Its a must have these days! Even I would go one more step further and say, it should combine same URL from more than one party (say person X and Y both dug same URL, why should discussion/comment/likes be different??) and combine them all! - Jigar Mehta

cool idea, then it become a question of aggregating based on link vs. description, and it is nice to have all comments in one place. however, would it increase backend requirements that could slow ff down? i love the reliability and speed of ff now, (unlike twitter). - Pokai

Well, in a way this will decrease the load on the system.. Imagine 100 duplicate stories being commented and liked (ff servers will get to maintain all of them and load them when user requests).. And also I, as a user will get to see more proper items on my page! (Say for example, i am not interested in a particular story which is shared by three different people in my network, I will have to hide them thrice? wouldnt it be nice if I can just hide it once!) And I am pretty sure, FF engineers will figure out some way to optimize it! - Jigar Mehta

Well thought out and illustrated. Person-centric extends the current FF experience. Link-centric would make me feel like FF is turning into something like Digg... - tagami

These are both great ideas. I'm not really sure whether I'd prefer the person-centric or link-centric models (maybe that should be a user preference?) but I do feel either one would help a lot with the duplication. - Jason Wehmhoener

amen. especially with resharing going on. Hell, I wouldn't have had to write this comment twice if that were the case! - Tim Hoeck

Very interesting proposal Bret. - fbrunel

How about making it group-centric? Every additional person that submits the same link is added to the "likes" list... and just keep comments fragmented - Rafael Robayna

And now this functionality is live! Cool. - Hutch Carpenter