And now... stories that originated from FriendFeed discussions. We are being watched... - Louis Gray

Okay, ripping the blanket of implicit FriendFeed privacy through obscurity seriously wigged me out, though I of all people should have known better. I just got a little bit less innocent. - Kevin Fox

*sigh* - Kevin Scott

Uh oh, the party's over. - j1m

"Implicit privacy" when it has a publicly accessible page offering a permalink? Not sure I understand this, Kevin (Fox)... There also was no obscurity, as I wasn't even subscribed to Kevin Scott (before) and still saw his comment. (Though I don't think that would have changed much? If the page has a permalink and is publicly accessible, that is.) - Philipp Lenssen

Just a realization that we're going from a small beta site filled with a small group of friends we know to a larger service. You wouldn't expect a pull-quote to come from your family's mailing list; I just need to remember that our family's growing. :-) - Kevin Fox

"Public" on FriendFeed means to many members "you can subscribe to me without my explicitly approving your subscription." Transporting the conversation from that environment to a widely read blog could be seen as a significant increase in visibility that the original posters and commenters had not anticipated. I immediately thought of ways of adding more fine-grained access control to FriendFeed, but I also don't want to lose the configuration simplicity of the product. I'd be curious to hear what other folks think about this -- what is a good line between "approve everyone who can see my stuff" and "public" (easy, but still "safe")? There are social limits (i.e., people within N degrees of people I am subscribed to can see my stuff), but not sure if anything strikes me as immediately intuitive. - Bret Taylor

Well really privacy can only be expected (and controlled) for FF-specific features (comments, FF shares). Perhaps a grouping feature might help: anything originally broadcasted to a group ("coworkers", etc.) will not be visible to outsiders, including any subsequent Like and Comment actions - Aviv

Bret, just fyi I was not suscribed to Kevin Scott before reading his comment/ link sharing, so I guess it was a "friend of a friend posted a link on Friendfeed" kind of thing. And even if you'd allow configuration of a "who can see me" thing, the comments threads to a given item are still public, right, and using a public permalink? (To me that's a big difference to e.g. a family mailing list, because the mailing list content is not public/ not publicly accessible.) - Philipp Lenssen

A brilliant feature suggestion for increased productivity - give me the option to limit my allowed FF page refreshes per hour (heck, by time of day even!) ;) can get quite addictive - Aviv

Literally speaking you're absolutely right. My point was just that when you're having a discussion in a public forum filled with people you know it can be easy to forget that it's a public forum, and that any public forum on the internet can be made a much more public forum very quickly. It's no big thing, and I'm not ashamed of anything I said. I was just making an observation. These kinds of social issues are taking a lot of my mental cycles right now. :-) - Kevin Fox

It would be very nice if there was a way to keep comments from being air-lifted out. This place really does have a unique character, and if it becomes popular to do things like Philipp's quoting of Kevin it may be transformed into something else. I suppose you could implement a privacy setting where individual items (and comments) were only readable by people who had read access to the item (comment) when it was created -- basically a way of screening out flash-crowds. - j1m

Hmm. Jim, Friendfeed's "imaginary friend" feature itself is an automated tool to "air-lift" comments, wishlists, diggs etc. out of other sites, removing any potential privacy-through-obscurity barrier. (But as I said, in this case the comments thread was public & had a permalink & did not need any subscription to the commenter, so I don't think I even did anything special like "air-lifting". Not more special than quoting from something you see in your feed reader like Google Reader. If I understand FF right, Kevin Scott's link also appeared on the Friendfeed homepage, because his account doesn't require subscription confirmation.) - Philipp Lenssen

Philipp: 'imaginary friends' is no different than any other aggregator. The difference in Jim's suggestion is that it provides content creators with the ability to control what of their content will be made available to the public by feed or other means. That's privacy-through-access-control rather than privacy-through-obscurity. - Kevin Fox

Philipp: Nobody's saying you did anything wrong. Really. Nothing to see here. :-) (Oh, and editing comments after someone has replied to them is weird. I've gotta think about that, too.) - Kevin Fox

I wouldn't say anything nefarious was done. Comments, e-mails and blog posts are fair game for most. Trustworthiness comes from determining what's the right thing to post and how it could be interpreted. - Louis Gray

"editing comments after someone has replied to them is weird. I've gotta think about that, too". I often edit comments to make the point more clear (if the site allows it), though not specifically *after* someone else replied... as I won't even know that while still editing the comment :) Some sites put an "edited at: timestamp" thing into the comment, and/ or they time-out the comment editing functionality. Not to say that either would be cool, you'll have to decide on these things as you have the right overview from your perspective :) - Philipp Lenssen

Hmm, not in reply to anything particular, but just testing ["user name" site:friendfeed.com] at Google, quite a bit is indexed on Friendfeed (69,000 pages at this time). If you guys go for private channels here, you might also wanna consider meta tags tweaking or robots.txt. Though Google does sometimes list results even if the URL is theoretically robots.txt-blocked... (they do so if the URL is publicly linked from another site)... - Philipp Lenssen

This could all be an artifact of the scrutiny paid to Google, and therefore to departing early Googlers, and everything they have to say about life at Google. Under normal circumstances when you're not a semi-rock-star, this sort of thing doesn't seem to come up as much. - ⓞnor

My comments on this new exposure here: http://www.louisgray.com/live... (FriendFeed Discussions Break Through the Walled Garden) - Louis Gray

TechMeme'd: http://www.techmeme.com/080218... - Louis Gray

@Bret, FWIW, I was startled to have my comments migrate from FriendFeed to Blogoscoped. Not because I was confused over who could see what on FF, but because, as Dan intimated, in a normal world no one would care what I have to say, especially when I'm making meta-commentary about press coverage of Google. :-) I don't know about everyone else, but I'm going to return to my regularly scheduled activities. Bret and FriendFeedsters, I sincerely hope that this hullabaloo doesn't persuade you that your awesome product needs changing. I for one enjoy it quite a bit just the way it is. - Kevin Scott

This is my first visit to Techmeme today... Fellow friendfeeders pretty much kept me up to date throughout the day with just the right dose of good links. Trend?? :) - Aviv

I agree with Louis that anything you put online is pretty much fair game, whether it's a photo on Facebook or comment on FriendFeed. - Jess Lee

Seeing as how one of my interests on Facebook is "getting meta", I am obligated to Like this :-) - Jeremy Raines

omg. when I commented on Kevin's post, I actually thought "What if Marissa sees this?" But I thought I was being paranoid. I'm glad they didn't quote my queasiness. - Lilly Irani

I learned this the hard way... if you comment about Google in a public forum, and display insider knowledge, it will be made part of some blogosphere sensation if not actual mainstream coverage. Philipp Lenssen already caught me in an obscure news.ycombinator.com thread. Never again. - Neil Kandalgaonkar