Eric, while there's no commenting here on FriendFeed, your article is the "Most Popular" on Shyftr right now. Take a look and see. http://www.shyftr.com/item... - Louis Gray

Yeah, noticed that it was picked up over there the other day. I was a little unnerved that Shiftyr basically pulls your full RSS feed and creates a community around that (without the publisher's consent)... am I missing something? - Eric Berlin

Eric... it's essentially an RSS reader with comments (just like everybody wants Google Reader to grow up to be). Anybody having issues with comments there instead of the blog should have them with FriendFeed or anything else (Digg/Slashdot/etc.) We first wrote about them in March: http://www.louisgray.com/live... - Louis Gray

Louis, I don't care what you call it, pulling someone's entire blog posts and then making money around that (which is what they'll eventually do) is content theft to me. Shit by any other name still smells like shit. If they ever pull my feed and use it there, they can expect to get hit with a DMCA take-down notice. It's really uncool to do that. Google Reader is a feed reader. Period. You have to subscribe to a feed. A reader of my posts makes me money, in one way or another. FriendFeed only posts links. - Raoul Pop

Louis, interesting piece and Shyftr seems to be attempting to provide a valuable service... but I remain uneasy. Essentially Shyftr authors are helping to seed a community that they have no control over, no voice in, and have not agreed to be a part of. I may not have even known that my piece was doing gangbusters over there unless you told me, for instance ! - Eric Berlin

I'd distinguish it from Friendfeed because you're not seeing the full text of the article. There's a "danger" in friendfeed too I suppose in that aggregators have the power to sap strength from individual publishers, AND publishers like you and I are providing RSS feeds on our work as a tool to let others read it more easily... but there's a line here where the publisher is getting abused, I'd say. Don't you think that Shyftr (man, that name is difficult for me to spell without extra care!) is... - Eric Berlin

...at the least creeping up on that line? - Eric Berlin

By the way, this is all great grist for a blog post ! - Eric Berlin

Raoul, I'm surprised that no one commented with same sentiment on Louis' fine coverage of the site. I don't know if I feel quite as strongly as you but am troubled. And to bring friendfeed in, it's slightly troubling that this conversation is taking place here instead of on one of our blogs.... it all gets sort of bizarre and confusing and fuzzy when you start to play it out, but a great conversation to have nonetheless. - Eric Berlin

It sounds like good discussion for a blog post. It's clear there are multiple opinions here. But the time for RSS readers and social aggregators to be passive without comments is gone. If we're still needing transparency for two-way deals, sure... but I bet I can find your content, in full, in many other places. Have you seen Social|Median? Same deal. It's the way things are going. - Louis Gray

Eric: I posted on this here: http://www.louisgray.com/live... - Louis Gray

Have to say I'm leaning towards Eric's view on this one -- and Jason's as well. I just posted on it here: http://www.mathewingram.com/work... - mathew ingram

maybe it is time for a fully distributed post/read/comment anywhere ecosystem - tagami

not certain that there is going to a widespread amount of adoption in that regard, there are already voices clamoring about wanting to put all their content back onto their blogs- but if there is a way that the post/read/comment anywhere system can also be accumulated in a single place at the same time, then you might just have a solution. - Nathan Eckenrode

@Raoul Pop I can't see the diference between what google reader does now and what shyftr does, The intent of both is to make money around pulling your feeds and delivering them to users outside of your site. I don't see how having to subscribe to a specific feed is relevant at all, maybe you can explain. It's only theft if you don't credit the content creator, which is not the case here. - Mario Romero

I commented over at Louis' blog but the short version is- the amount of work chasing around the conversation will probably shove me to a point of not caring and pulling it all back in, so I can be more magazine-like. When everyone is in the conversation, it's just loud. And suddenly, I hate to realize that I'm thinking Old World and all, but yeah. Shit happens. 2.0. Or something. - Eric Rice

This debate shouldn't even be about Shyftr. Plaxo Pulse operates in the same way: http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse... - Louis Gray

I admit I don't get the discussion - once I publish my posts, I'm neither in control of the discussions around it, nor do I want to be, nor do I feel the need to know everything everybody might be saying about it. Besides that, what does Shyftr do that Google Reader, FeedGator, Netvibes and others haven't been doing for years already. - Frederic

Jason - absolutely - they cross every moral line. I'm working on a long post about spammers and scrapers - hope to publish it next week. That's a really dirty and slimy sub-culture... - Frederic

I wonder if CommentsPortability.org or OpenComments.Org are available? A system must be devised to send the comments back to the blogs. An open standard will come out of this. I can see Disqus being one of the early players. As for the offenders they are too numerous to name. Disqus, Digg, Del.icio.us, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Shyftr, Mixx, etc. Anyware you post a link and comment not on the original blog would be included. I think this applies to linkers as much as the sites that pull the full text RSS. - Franklin Pettit

Very interesting Franklin, would love to learn more about this. This is basically what Scott Karp is calling for in his piece today. - Eric Berlin