Great article. The key to the noise issue is liberal use of the hiding features. - Aaron B. Hockley

agreed, nice primer - i tend not to use hide that much i just move on by since ff flows pretty quickly - i do tend to block more often lately though, mainly for those w/ high irritation tendencies - mike "glemak" dunn

Thx Aaron. Particularly with microblogging platforms, definitely, but as I noted, I don't do it for blog posts (well foreign language sutff aside) because the good stuff is usually in something someone had taken effort in writing, as opposed to say a Pownce/ Jaiku/ Twitter update - Duncan Riley

Great stuff! I do take a different opinion about duplication in syndicated streams, but otherwise very solid tips! Thanks! - Phil Glockner

J. Phil, one thing to keep in mind, if you start duplicating too much, people start hiding you. It's why I pulled things like Plurk out of my blog feed, and didn't add Identi.ca. The irony of course is that this is suppose to be a lifestreaming service, but I think we're starting to move past that very basic premise. - Duncan Riley

Duncan - I will agree, people start hiding some of the duplicate content. Hopefully just enough so that they are no longer seeing the duplication, and they have chosen the services they prefer (like diigo over del.icio.us in my case, or mixx over digg). And if a conversation springs up, if they did the hide right, they will still see it. - Phil Glockner

I need to start hiding things more. Also, when did you start integrating TradeVibes into posts? - Ben Parr

Here is my argument FOR duplication when necessary, and I guess I could make this into a blog post: I like an article, so I bookmark it and digg it. In theory, this generates FOUR entries in friendfeed: Diigo and del.icio.us, Digg and Tumblr. Looks like spam if you aren't filtering it, but some people will want to find me on digg, and others will want to see my tumblr. Why should I deny them? - Phil Glockner

My "like" here actually means I liked this. The one that really rang true with me is reciprocal follows. If you don't follow me, that's cool. But it's not likely I'll follow you long. FF really is a sharing kinda thing. If I wanted broadcast, I'd still be on Twitter. - Chris Baskind

I hide everything I've read. In fact, at one point I was hitting the daily limit on hides and when I'd hit the link the little loading icon would sit there and spin. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken - that's one of the more extreme uses of Hide I've heard. But then, I guess you won't see this comment... - Hutch Carpenter

I REALLY want to see the URL treated as the top level object. Six people each bookmarking and sharing and twittering a link shouldn't result in 18 new items in my feed...at least not by default. By default I'd like to see each of those actions appear as a "comment", and pop the item onto my list the same way a comment/like would. Here's my UI mockup :-) http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Ken Sheppardson

Agreed a great article!! I am new here and need all the help I can get. - Mel Buckpitt

No, saw your comment, Hutch. Because I regularly go back and look at the items I've commented on or have hidden. I switch back and forth from "discovery" mode where I'm hiding stuff that's in my "inbox" to "converation" mode where I go back and follow-up on stuff I've seen/liked/commented on. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, but then who owns the thread? Right now, the moderator of a thread (and owner) is the person who published the item on which the discussion resides. But if there are multiple people publishing the same story, and they're all now part of one single feed, who gets top billing? And how would you handle reshares, or bookmarklet shares? - Mark Trapp

If we take the time to 'clean up our own' stuff occasionally and throw a pointer to the primary thread (like this one already has) it will help for now. i have a lot of faith in the FF gang but right now, it's all in how you use it. First timers need to learn BEFORE they drop out. - Charlie Anzman

As a strawman I'd say the first person to post the URL "owns" it (does posting an item really give you any form of "moderation" functionality??) Any subsequent twits, shares, likes, comments... whatever... show up attached to the original post. There's be no point to "reshares". Commenting or liking an item would serve the same purpose. A bookmarklet share would appear the same way (as shown in my mockup) - Ken Sheppardson

Ken - I can see link aggregation for a particular user's stuff, but link aggregation between users would cause a lot of confusion. - Phil Glockner

Ken, the other thing with consolidation is a lot of times, merging conversations wouldn't be interesting to people. One group of people might have an entirely different discussion about the content that a different group of people may have. Merge all the items together, we all have to have the same conversation. It's been brought up a few times tonight, but every time Friendfeed takes away the control from the individual experience, you run into problems. It's what makes Friendfeed Friendfeed. - Mark Trapp

The forced merge of conversation doesn't seem to be the answer. - Mark Trapp

Perhaps there's some compromise where FF could add a drop down list of all the conversations associated with a particular URL, next to the "More" link, for example. Could list the action, number of comments, and number of likes. Or somebody could just come along and write a full blown desktop client that would let us slice/dice the feed the way we want to see it (ala email) - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, re the overall duplication: absolutely yes. I'd love nothing more than for FF to say list the primary link, the offer a supplemental list underneath of people who have Dugg, bookmarked, whatever under that. J.Phil, that goes to your point as well, although what I'd say is that although you can't avoid some duplication, but that doesn't mean you cant reduce it. If you're ping.fming Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku etc with the same message, do you need all three or more feeding into FF? - Duncan Riley

Ken - There is a point to re-shares. If we start re-sharing to FF rooms, that concept will gain more wide-spread acceptance, and possible help all of this. - Charlie Anzman

Duncan, I especially appreciated the unsubscribe without return follow tip. - Michael C. Harris

Duncan, I think the user bears a HUGE responsibility not to pollute the stream by feeding three or four copies of everything into their account (e.g. blog RSS, tweet of their post URL, FF note of their post URL, etc) and to just perhaps designate one bookmark services as feeding FF (I don't need to know somebody bookmarked AND greader shared AND dug etc an article) - Ken Sheppardson

Charlie, Good point RE rooms. Seems like it might be nice to just be able to tag an item and have it appear in the room as-is, with comment stream intact. - Ken Sheppardson

What about merging feeds just on a user's account? It wouldn't do anything for multiple people sharing the same stories, but it'd mitigate the problem of people sharing their stories to multiple services on their feed. It would still allow for water-cooler fragmented conversation, as well. - Mark Trapp

+1 Ken - Cyndy

I have to agree with a lot of what you said here, especially the bit about unfollowing people. I cleaned out a lot recently for the very same reason. - Ross Maguire

This just happened to me. There was a post with a tinyurl redirect. When tinyurl goes down, then link gets lost. Thus, duplication of the article occurs or the link gets reposted somewhere in the comments. I see this often on Slashdot when servers get slashdotted. - Franklin Naval

Great article! Agree on the duplication of content. Sometimes it's just damn hard to think of all the possible ways, that the services will interact with each other. Will do it later on this week. - Sasha Kovaliov = ♂♥♫☺

Very good points, especially about the duplicates - there's nothing more annoying than to see the same links from the same person repeated 5 times from different services. The one point I don't get is the reciprocal following - I do have some "friendship" subscriptions & subscribers, but when I subscribe to someone who shares good links on a subject I'm interested in, I don't expect them to follow me in return. And when someone subscribes to me, I look at their content before deciding if I return-subscribe. - Andrea Sturm

Thanks for the tips. Don't know if I could unsubscribe from those that don't follow me. I've only got 8 now and I want to keep each and everyone! That being said, thanks for the encouraging words towards the "hide" feature. I'm just figuring out the benefits of that. - James Hull

I like this ... do you think "participation" sometimes though is 'you scratch my back and I will scratch yours'? - Mrinal Desai