Agreed. - Kevin Fox

Definitely! - Evan Sims

And actual blogs should be separated from other unsupported feeds (and each other, for granular control). - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

just call them feeds and give us an option to choose the icon for them ;) - Christian Van Der Henst

I'm thinking "feeds" too. And why not import the site's favicon? - Tanath

+1 - Peter Hoffmann

agreed - Dave Winer

Why do we have to specify the service that the feed belongs? FF should recognise the service automatically. Also I agree that actual blog feeds should be separated from unsupported ones and something has to be done about the icons. - endiaferon

Agree! - AJ Batac

Ideally FriendFeed should have an XML namespace with an element that specifies the verb, noun and service to use on the feed. - Bruce Lewis

Bruce, I think that'd be overkill. - Carlo Zottmann

@Carlo It only sounds like overkill. I doubt it would be much to design and implement on FF's side of things. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

I like Bruce's idea in principle, but in practice it would be difficult for non-power users to implement. Most of us let tools generate feeds for us, and most tools don't support adding to/modifying the XML template. Like Blogger (which FAILs). - Voyagerfan5761

News flash: See the FriendFeed blog re. custom RSS feeds. Voyagerfan: Tools will get better when they get jealous. - Bruce Lewis

Shouldn't it just stay true to FriendFeed's name and call it a "Feed"? - Tyson Key

FYI: There are now separate 'Blog' and 'Custom RSS/Atom' types. - xero

@xero - Cool, I didn't know about them until you mentioned - Tyson Key

In a perfect world there should just be feeds and the configuration system for a product like FriendFeed should just say: Enter the address of the feed here. - Dave Winer

When FF says they added support for 22 products my heart sinks. The whole point of RSS was that compatibility not be expressed that way. That's how ecosystems die. - Dave Winer

@Dave - In a perfect world, everybody would be a geek and know exactly how things work - Aditya Mukherjee

Seems to sort-of solve my GitHub problem, but having links to the activities on GitHub would be useful (it seems like a binary "unlinked text or nothing). - Tyson Key

It's like Mozilla saying they just added support for MTV's website. - Dave Winer

Having played with it, it'll import the feed and add links, but only to the GitHub homepage and not to feed items. I can live with that, though. - Tyson Key

@Dave - Not all of the services are RSS feeds. Plus, it just helps with usability. If anyone knows that not everyone knows what RSS feeds are then it should be you. ;) - xero

Anyone else noticed that a few new services (mostly Japanese, as well as LiveJournal and a few news/Misc. sites) have been added? No more Pownce, too. - Tyson Key

xero, I get that, but some of them are barriers to entry. - Dave Winer

It would be nice if all content providers and aggregators offered both an RSS and XMPP link to content. RSS for archival or more static use and XMPP for real-time synchronization between all nodes. RSS feeds to me are not conducive to real-time updates. The problem I have with FriendFeed for example is these RSS update floods that come in waves. I would like to get this content as soon as it is produced. Then you get into polling, which is only one side. When a service updates a feed is another. - Rolf Schewe

If someone put up a very very simple REST interface to push an update out through XMPP, I would: 1. Implement it in Scripting News and 2. Promote it to other developers. In other words, I'm willing to do what I can to make it happen. But someone has to step up first and provide that ultra-simple brain-dead easy API. - Dave Winer

I wish we could "Like" comments. To me, Dave's last comment on XMPP should be linkable or be able to be expanded upon. At least a star system such as Google's would be good. - Rolf Schewe

Your wish is my command.. http://bit.ly/O68W - Dave Winer

I just "wish" that was a feature in FriendFeed and you wouldn't have to do that. But thanks. It's an important issue that should not get lost in a comment thread. - Rolf Schewe

Now fixed, as of yesterday's Bug Friday update. - Phil G

Rolf, have you looked at FriendFeed's SUP proposal? It's still polling, but much more efficient. - Bruce Lewis