Louis Gray

"Broken" seems like an incorrect characterization."Does not agree my world view" is perhaps a better way to describe the situation. - Brian Sullivan

No it's not. - Hutch Carpenter

Brian - agreed. - Hutch Carpenter

+1 Broken, but I guess I just share Alexander's world view. Not quite directly on point, but IMHO nothing has done more to fragment the conversation more quickly than FriendFeed's current work flow of adding a top level item every time someone diggs, shares, bookmarks, or posts a direct link to somebody elses content. Take this post, for example. I think the original article should be the anchor point for the conversation in FF. Not the fact that Louis shared it. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, but I would never have even seen the post had Louis not shared it. The web is fine, it's the people using it who are broken. :-) - Robert Seidman

That all depends on how FF "fixed" it, Robert. FF can certainly connect subsequent mentions of/links to the same URL back to the original item. The fact that Louis shared it is really no different than him commenting on it, and either action could raise the item in your stream. UI mockup here :-) http://www.flickr.com/photos/k... - Ken Sheppardson

I think there is a desire to control conversation that is a hold over from MSM media ideas from the 20th century. It seems to pop up all over even occasionally in people like Scoble that claim to have fully embraced social media (to be fair to Robert though his dalliances in control need seem short lived) - Brian Sullivan

The fact is, I saw it because of Louis. The fact is, busted as you may think it is, Ken, more people saw the post because of a "busted system". My conclusion is that the busted system is therefore better. That is not to say FriendFeed can't (and won't) improve how it presents the information. - Robert Seidman

Agreed, Robert. I just think we have a long way to go. For me it's not a matter of controlling the conversation so much as bringing together people with a common interest. Sure, it's nice to have 50 little conversations between three or four folks, but the technology could be used to 150 people together in one well structured exchange of ideas. To me the latter seems much more significant than the former. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, these are definitely still very early days not just for friendfeed. That said I don't agree with your contention that more is better. If you get 150 people aligned around a goal and are actually looking to get "results" I agree with you. The results most bloggers seem to be looking for, however, is traffic. - Robert Seidman

Robert: I'm not looking for more traffic. I'm looking to have interesting conversations with interesting people. Personally, smaller conversations are usually more interesting. - Robert Scoble

Heh. Traffic. Yep. Like I said. Broken. ;-) - Ken Sheppardson

Robert Scoble: you are definitely NOT "most bloggers" :-) I agree with you 100% and don't find anything broken about it. - Robert Seidman

I disagree with the premise that comments were once centralized. Conversations happen all over the place -and always have: newsgroups, blogs, forums, etc. twitter and others simply added one more place. - LPH™

the main ff page is the watering hole, and the other comments elsewhere are like the copy machine chatter.. :)- nada thing wrong with both.. just need to keep ears close to the ground to hear which calvary is coming :)- - Peter Dawson

LPH: Twitter may add one more place, but FF adds another discussion every time someone makes note of something on another site. If both Louis and Robert, for example, bookmark this article, there are going to be at least two parallel conversations. The larger your following, the more people you'lll have in your conversation about somebody elses idea. I don't really see anything evil or wrong with that, I'm just somewhat disappointed in the paradigm. - Ken Sheppardson

For years one of the main areas of development on the web has been the search engine technology. Tracking down all the "conversations", so to speak. I know, I know, entropy's going to increase. That doesn't mean I have to like it. :-) - Ken Sheppardson

it's not broken, it just reforms and reorganises around human bahaviour - we have known this for many years and we see it again and again and again: human behaviour routes around problems and keeps going, not broken! - Ivan Pope via twhirl

Hey I just found this (its a fragemted conversation snippet, great! love that!. but did any of you, besides Louis note that the thing that is broken isn't comment fragmentation? I love fragmentation in conversations, just like in the real world. I was referring to having to have so many different online identities forcing people to start using services like ping.fm. If everything was centralised around the user we wouldn't need ping.fm or any service like that ;-) - Alexander van Elsas