Comments let everyone participate. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Friend-of-friend feature brings tons of people into your view. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Hallelujah! - Sally Church

I wish we could make FriendFeed into JUST an aggregator. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I think a simple switch that let you turn off FoaF completely, and/or only show FoaF for comments, not likes, would go a long way to cleaning things up. - Ken Sheppardson

Even though there is conversation on FF, we can't have proper threaded conversation and that results in noise. - Veetrag

I mean the options are there to turn off FoaF once you "Hide" an item, but they're buried. - Ken Sheppardson

Robert: so, you're not interested in having an open conversation on friendfeed anymore? That surprises me. - Joel

Ken: you can turn off FOAF: click on hide twice. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I noticed you're not following me but I didn't take it personal. I'm still following you, I learn a lot from you so keep smiling buddy. I still think you're the shit. :) - Jeunelle Foster

Couldn't agree more~~ Just too much information to handle by a human beings - Yunkwan Chen from feedalizr

Joel: I am but most people are not. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Interesting that this item only got one response on Twitter so far. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Sean: cool, I have trained you well! :-) - Robert Scoble from iPhone

@Scoble one response on twitter shows that, people like to see what others are replying too. We can't see that on Twitter. - Veetrag

Robert, you can easily turn FF into just an aggregator. Feed your services in and don't interact. The only thing missing is an account setting to automatically disabnle comments on all of your posts, which can easily be requested in the Feedback room. Or, make your feed private so no one can see items to commeent upoon them. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina) from fftogo

Robert - So, how does this insight affect your view of FF now? - phil baumann

Phil: it makes me want better display options in FriendFeed. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

This real-time group discussion on FriendFeed is totally different from Twitter but I can't help but feel if you spend your time here, you might miss out on the general Twitter feed. - Ken Seto

Ken: What is the advantage of general twitter feed, if all the twitter feed is anyways directed to FF? - Veetrag

Robert - what kinds of additional options would you like rolled out? - phil baumann

Well I'm not seeing anything happening on FriendFeed other than comments in this discussion - Ken Seto

Phil: it also makes me want real mobile clients. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I need a TweetDeck for FriendFeed :D - Ken Seto

Robert, do you think to get 'real' feed mobiles have to support flash. because i believe with heavy JS would be unstable on mobile platforms. - Veetrag

Ken - Have you tried PeopleBrowsr? - phil baumann

Robert, the way I see it, everyone's definition of "social media" is different. Some people will tolerate a little higher noise in their S/N ratio to glean extra information from open conversations on FF/Twitter. Others may want to eliminate the noise and just focus on a few select feeds. That's the beauty of social media, you can (within limitations of the software you use) determine your own level of interaction. - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

Will take a look at PeopleBrowsr, thanks - Ken Seto

Phil: I want to see a TRUE river of news. No popping up of things that get engagement. I want to see NO comments exposed. I want a REAL best of day (the ones I currently get show me old items. That is a start. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Jack: that is true which is why we need better display options. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Robert - so perhaps an option to for a collapsed view (text only - sort of like a reader) with options to define what comes up in the view. (I guess that would bring us back to some sort of modified social RSS :) - phil baumann

Phil: yes!!! - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Phil : We would also need a way in which we can like/unlike comments too. That will help us read only priority content. It can be one way around smaller screens. - Veetrag

Robert - this somewhat reminds me of Muhammad Saleem's post comparing FriendFeed and SocialThing from March 2008. His goal was an aggregator, not another social network: http://muhammadsaleem.com/2008... - Hutch Carpenter

But wouldn't using FF as an aggregator just make it more like a social RSS feed service? For my personal social media paradigm I would miss out on the conversation part of FF. Of course your paradigm may be different :O) - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

Jack: I would keep that option on FOR ME but tons of others tell me they hate coming here because of the noise. I totally grok that now. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I'll use Twitter and FriendFeed though, both were just great. - Vince Ong

Understood. I appreciate that Robert. One of the things that initially drew me to FF was the ability to interact with people such as yourself. I would truly hate if we lost that ability, Of course I am sure your noise is a whole heck of a lot louder than mine :O) - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

Until FriendFeed makes hide even easier, this will continue to happen. People are generally too lazy to use hide to the fullest. I don't know if it's a design issue or a user issue, but people don't like to use it. - Bwana ☠

I think it is a design issue. There are too many features stuck under the hide link. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Good point Robert. But where else do you put those links?? - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

I've been loudly raising precisely the issues which Robert Scoble mentions in this post for over a year -- with zero feedback from Friendfeed developers. This is why Friendfeed's growth has been flat and will continue to remain flat. (But Friendfeed is still a great platform, even in its imperfect and much too noisy state.) - Sean McBride

It amazes me that as of August 9, 2009, Friendfeed's developers, who seem to be brilliant in most respects, still have no appreciation of the importance of elementary design features like list view and the separation of unread from read items. The mind boggles. I really don't get it. And they don't seem to be interested in the hottest field in news reading and management: smart news recommender systems. - Sean McBride

A fact that seems relevant to this thread: I discovered this post in the FFHolic Most Discussed feed in the Featured Sources box on Feedly's My Digest page. I stopped trying to read the chaotic torrent on Friendfeed's home page a long time ago -- a poor investment of one's time and energy. Without Feedly's elegant user interface, I wouldn't have seen this post. - Sean McBride

I think the second thing i did on FriendFeed was to remove friends-of-friends because of you. - Sam Pullara