I've noticed that I'm getting tired of it too. We really need a much better way to talk to the database on FriendFeed. I'd love to see all items in a real reverse-chronilogical view (no bubbling up of attention-getting items), along with only displaying items that get two likes or more and one or more comments. Imagine if you could do that? Now imagine if you could filter out things. Like, remove anything with Obama or McCain in them. That would let me build a much better news river than I can get anywhere else. - Robert Scoble

I think that the bubble effect works well if you have subscribed to just a few people but I would think that if you have thousands of "friends" then it would be almost impossiable to keep up. I did like the idea that somebody suggest of being able to tag some of you friends as real and then either giving them higher priority or creating another tab with just their feeds in. - John Cooper

Forgiven ... for now. - Charlie Anzman

Good point, Robert, I would filter out "iPhone". - Ryo

When TiVoing the Olympics and not wanting to read spoilers, I'd filter out Olympics, Phelps, etc. - JD Lasica

I agree a keyword filter would be great, and it should be reasonable to implement a feature like that. As for the bubbling, I'd like to keep that for me. - Thomas Frütel

the true leading edge doesn't have a community, as there are very few who are there - clarke thomas

if they only displayed items that inky had 2 or more likes, or at least one comment, then no one would see anything, since in order for it to appear, it needs to be liked. In order to be liked, it needs to appear. - Andru Edwards

I think Robert (and the rest o'yaz) are right that better filtering is needed. I know noiseriver and some others are working on this (and of course the FF team.) Would be great to "weight" people, services, and keywords... - Anthony Citrano

Some of you apparently need a "Web Service of the Month Club" membership. ;) - abacab

Filtering and chronological sorting, setting like tolerances is all possible with the current API. Adding data to people (like weights) would requires a database. I think it would be cool to have a 2 column layout, the left column in true chronological order and the right with standard "bubbled up" content. - Paul Reynolds

Bubbling is essential to maintain a conversation. Without it, everything becomes even more ephemeral. Just hide what you're done with. - Logical Extremes

Robert - I found this item through Google Reader (I subscribe to Friendfeed - Best of Day, which I flow to my A feeds folder). Because of the noise and information overload issue, I've pretty much given up trying to use Friendfeed by browsing from http://friendfeed.com/ - Sean McBride

@Scoble - sounds like mioNews might do what you want if I could just get the relevance ranking engine turned back on. It is designed to auto-filter out the stuff you've "hated" in the past and bring up to the top the stuff you've liked in the past. - Patrick Lightbody via mioNews

Allowing you an *option* to rate your contacts on a 1-10 scale and then allowing a best of hour, day, week, month incorporating these ratings into the algorithm would at a minimum produce an alternative "best of." And probably more relevant than relying only on social metadata (likes, comments) alone. This tool could also be used for custom filtering certain subsets of contacts as well. Eg. Show me content from all contacts rated 6 or higher, etc. - Thomas Hawk

I love it more than ever. Last week though, I did do some artful pruning of my subscriptions, and that has toned up my experience. Agree strongly with the request for friend grouping and friend weighting. Vital. In my opinion this functionality is FriendFeed's "fire alarm" and it's what they need to implement soon to balance things out. - Steve Isaacs

If enough users begin to filter out items based on the number of comments and/or the number of likes, how would anyone see anything at all? Everything would be filtered out and nothing would get through. What am I missing here? I understand filtering certain types of content (e.g., Twitter, etc.) but I don't understand filtering based on the number of comments or likes. - Gregory Pittman via twhirl

You just can't treat FriendFeed like Twitter, subscribe to a massive number of people, and expect a good experience. Although I like the ideas that Robert suggested, and would like to see them implemented, I also think that the best way to control the noise, at least for now, is through thoughtful subscriptions. FriendFeed currently remains for me now what Yahoo! was for me in 1996: the center of the web. - Akiva Moskovitz

Gregory: there would still be those of us who like seeing all the noise and "liking" the best of it. - Robert Scoble

Robert, that's a good point. I guess I would be one wanting to see the noise for fear of missing something no one else thought was valuable. For now any way. - Gregory Pittman via twhirl

And use rooms effectively. They can be a great asset if the right people join and participate - Deepak Singh

While the FF UI is far from perfect at this point, it's pretty annoying to hear a certain class of people who incessantly whine about how they suffer from information overload when they subscribe to thousands of people. Allow me to humbly suggest that the problem *isn't* some deficiency in the UI, but rather the problem is that *you subscribe to thousands of people*. The unmanageable noise level is your own fault. - Eric P

The biggest feature for me would be to auto-detect and merge the multiple posts about the same article... Make the new submission a like or comment on the original, but keep it all in one place. - Jason Carreira

Eric, I wouldn't go so far as to say that 'you're doing it wrong'. Those use cases are valid ones. You can't design a customer-facing product and then demand that they only use it within a strict set of guidelines. FriendFeed needs to mature to handle the Scobles of the world as well as the Moskovitzes. Although I think that subscription maintenance is part of the process, at least for now, I don't think that wanting the product to fit your personal use case is call to accuse anyone of 'whining'. - Akiva Moskovitz

Eric -- at the moment I am subscribed to 78 people (not thousands) (and have 117 people subscribed to me). The problem is fine-tuning the stream to push the best *combinations* of people, topics, links and comments to the top of my queue. So far I am relying on Google Reader to try do the job. When Robert Scoble remarks, "I've noticed that I'm getting tired of it too," perhaps one should listen and understand. - Sean McBride

Keyword filter is essential. Meanwhile, keep FF #'s low. - Malcolm Gault-Williams

I have a problem with only wanting to see items that are liked. Then you only see top 10ers. If I have something to contribute, you may never see it. Kind of turns it into Digg. I like the fact that it's easy to see smaller conversations easily. Filters for keywords would be nice, though. - Eric @ CS Techcast

Sure Friendfeed could continue to evolve and improve its service. However, I would posit a theory that perhaps the "shiny newness" of it all is wearing off. It is the problem with the echo chamber, it is too hard to stick to the new services when it takes so much time to play with new things coming out in a torrid pace. Sure some will disagree with me but I think this contributes to it to a great extent. - Lou Paglia

I was using it a lot less lately myself and wondering the same thing. I've unsubscribed from a lot of the social net noise and found that this has freshened up the experience a lot. - Nick

What Nick said. I think it's a much more interesting place if you avoid those who are FFing about FF and so on. - Anthony Citrano

I think it's Shiny Object syndrome, too (not referring directly to Robert here). FF has been slow on releasing new features. Some overhaul of the interface and taking up the many suggestions forwarded by its most active users would be a well-timed move. - Chris Baskind

Too much noise on Friendfeed, and by the time I get around to replying to it, the conversations are over. - Francine Hardaway

Francine: how can the conversation be over if you have something to say? - Brian Sullivan

I still really like FriendFeed, but when you are busy doing many things, it is harder to keep up with the key discussion items and people you need to follow the most. I think FF will find ways of making this easier in time. I find I need breaks from all socnets periodically to keep my life and focus in balance. The breaks help prevent "Shiny Object Syndrome" and fatigue.;-) - Cathryn Hrudicka

@francine: two things cut down on the FF noise for me: 1) i 'like' all of the threads i find interesting, and then go to the 'ME' tab to keep up with them or comment on them later; 2) i 'hide' everything that's not of interest. - .LAG liked that

Firstly, no one should need to apologize that they are using a website or not. Really! Anyway, I've always likened FF to chat, and I'm not a big fan of chat rooms. Something about FF seems to emphasize the immediate. I think this is what Francine refers too. There are some vauable nuggest of info, but I'm really not seeing the same richness of 'conversation' I find in blogs and blog comments. I think the non-linear exchanges between blogs (and occasionally in blog comments) tends to generate more thoughtful (and more valuable) exchanges. That sums up why I've been neglecting FF. - bernie

My FriendFeed experience is still good. Agree with those who recommend "thoughtful subscription". Remember too - it's searchable. I think the archival aspect is just as important as the real-time aspect. - Neil Saunders

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - FriendFeed needs the ability to collect friends into groups - and be able to view the feed of a single group. - Jonathan Beckett