This is a repost of a comment I posted earlier in Igor's thread discussing tagging functionality (http://friendfeed.com/e...): What FF needs more than tagging and many other features is to eventually move away from the "flat" nature of friendships. I don't think my subscriptions should all be treated equally (ie. it's okay for Scoble's entries to slowly fade away and potentially go unnoticed, but I should never miss a Flickr gallery my wife posts, even if I don't log onto FF for a month). Right now it's still okay, but such capability will become critical as more and more users discover FF and we continue to befriend around here. - Aviv

Well, discuss :) Is this something you think FF should introduce, or is this where third-party FF-enhancing services come into play and offer as an added-value to its users? - Aviv

Well, since you pay more attention to your wife than Scoble, you can simply go directly to her page, and go through her history/services to see what you've missed... - Tanath

That's easy to do with one person, but what about all my siblings, Best Friends, and others I want to pay attention to more than others? - Aviv

I know that the team is aware of this. They need a way to show "what you've missed since last login". Implementation seems easy enough but perfection is impossible. - Benjamin Golub from fftogo

IMHO, right now most Friendfeeders are being unusually selective in their subscription decision-making process, but as FF grows in popularity and users get to spend more and more time getting their FF fix they're likely to loosen up and befriend "just one more person because I really liked that last comment they made" a few times a week - slowly building up a 500-person FF subscription rolodex. - Aviv

Benjamin - right, that's certainly helpful (see "How far back" at http://ffapps.com/flowcontrol/), but what happens when you're away for 2 weeks and have 1000 "new items" waiting for you? Once again your co-worker's must-read blog entries get the same treatment as Scoble's hourly tweets ;) At which point some "sorting" method will be needed (ie. most commented, most liked), one of which could be "most important people". Or not :) - Aviv

Tony Ruscoe's "imaginary room" idea http://friendfeed.com/e... seems like one of many great tools which could help the "scaling" issue. Allowing people to make imaginary "trees" of rooms would be allow us to make our own directory structure, where all posts filter down to the root of the tree, and we can choose which branches/intersections to listen to. Entirely "imaginary" so we can each construct our own "imaginary trees". - Mitchell Tsai

Mitchell, http://ffapps.com/filters/ is probably the closest you'll get to such capability at this time. I added the ability to filter specific services within groups last month, in addition to individual friends. - Aviv

Thanks Aviv. Thanks for making a great tool!! Creating a "imaginary tree of filters" (my own custom directory structure of "friends/peopleIfollow") is what I'm desiring... I'm still on Safari, after switching out of Firefox due to memory leaks in poor software design, so unfortunately I haven't tried your work yet. Waiting for FF3! - Mitchell Tsai

Aviv, Thanks for the suggestion. We're looking into this so stay tuned... - Ross Miller