Kevin Fox has started an interesting conversation here: http://friendfeed.com/e... about whether he should be able to start a conversation and have it just for his friends on FriendFeed. What do you think? - Robert Scoble

I want only my friends to comment on this. Thanks. - Robert Scoble

See, Kevin, this is how you handle it if you want only your friends to comment on something and you don't want it joined into some other conversation. - Robert Scoble

There's no reason two conversations in separate circles about the same thing should be consolidated into one place. - Dominik Hofmann

Arrrggghhh, I meant to link to this: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Robert Scoble

Robert are we friends? My friends list says we are so I am making a comment. Thanks for doing what you do if not for you my FF, twitter and many other sites would be boring. - Admiral70

and lets loop the loops on why this started.. scoble injected a link and every1 crys foul (me 2!!) http://friendfeed.com/e... . then open another thread to discuss Comment Clustering ..(Btw I hope McCan joins the convo !! ) all in all a good tapestry of healhty converstions and user centric thoughts and behaviours.. - Peter Dawson

The question is, what makes one a friend? The fact that i'm following them? What if they're not following me, then i'm not their friend? For example, Scoble's not following me, am I not able to comment? - Les Zaldor

you are quite free to start up your own cluster but he has every right to discuss it with *his* friends. thats the way the world works - Jamie

I'm sorry if I misstated my intent. My intent in starting a new thread was not to *limit* the conversation to my 'friends' but rather to *seed* the conversation with my own friends, and the friends of those people who thought it was interesting enough to comment on or like (as FriendFeed was designed to facilitate). The other conversation was already exposed to over 15,000 people who were not friends or friends-of-friends of mine, and I found value in initiating another conversation in another context. - Kevin Fox

Jamie, I've no problem with Robert discussing or sharing the conversation with his friends. This would be accomplished by 'liking' or participating in the conversation in any manner. The difference was that the comment he left seemed to be an explicit instruction to participate in a different ongoing conversation instead, and seemed to defeat the specific purpose of my sharing the item in the first place. (EDIT: I am dumb and misunderstood Jamie's comment) - Kevin Fox

Kevin: if you had stated your intent, I would have respected that. I figured that you just started your own comment cluster and wanted people to know we were already discussing that somewhere else. - Robert Scoble

Here's my dumbass 2 cents: Scoble... I think your comment look like a "Hey you don't need to start this again we are already doing it" type of statement. I don't know if it was but some received it that way. When received that way it takes away from the idea of FF. Again not claiming you meant it that way just saying that's what it looked like and that's what touched nerves. - Cody Heitschmidt from fftogo

Kevin, not sure if you misinterpreted my comments but I was agreeing with you. The world discusses the same things in their own, smaller social graphs. This is simply replicated with FriendFeed. This isn't a forum where the same threads appearing multiple times hinders the conversation . FriendFeed is different in that the experience is defined by who you deem as a friend. So yeah, I agree with you - Jamie

"The difference was that the comment he left seemed to be an explicit instruction " - Kevin you own your own thread.. delete Scobles comment if you dont like it.. I would do it without even blinking .. ! - Peter Dawson

Peter makes a great point. - Robert Scoble

Methinks we've wandered into a dizzying social and mental loop. - Sean McBride

@Raymond those are valid points and it would be nice if FF could add a BFC feature ("big fucking cluster") whereby all comments pertaining to a particular URL are aggregated to allow you to view all comments and see other viewpoints. But likewise the ability to have lots of clusters around the same URL is important IMO. - Jamie

Thought about deleting it, but somehow that seemed overly aggressive. Ahh, hindsight! :-) - Kevin Fox

I thought Robert's first comment was more along the lines of Lets Not Reinvent The Wheel than it is was a challenge to you. If everybody's comments are together we all learn. Plus, it makes no sense to have to pick which conversation to join. That said, you have every right to respond that you only want "your" friends in the conversation, but isn't that what rooms are for? - Victor Ryden

Finally after reading through to the last comment (so far) I 'get' the meta convo. It reminds me of (for English speakers) the oft repeated passenger-to-driver-giving-directions-in-the-car tower of babel: "Turn Left here?"..."Right."..."--Right--?"..."No. LEFT!"..."Next street?"..."No, right here."..."So, Left right here"..."Right, Left right here - right now - go!"..."That was it right there?"..."Umm, yeah, we passed it, so turn around and then it'll be on your right, not left"..."Right."..."Right". - Micah Wittman

+1 Sean McBride - me too!; +1 Jamie - BFC is funny idea!; +1 Jason - smart "room" idea. - Susan Beebe

This is all based on the interpretation that I wanted to have a conversation that would be limited to my friends, but that's not the case at all. The idea of FriendFeed, and a major differentiator over say, Digg or Reddit, is that a single item could be shared by several people in different areas of the social geography and they could have different conversations about the same item. This often makes it more valuable than just adding a comment to the blog or YouTube video's page. To my mind there's nothing wrong with sharing an item with people who are following you, starting a new conversation about that item; a conversation that is seeded with the people in *your* social circle, but *not limited to* that group. If such behavior is seen negatively, then what makes FriendFeed different than Reddit? - Kevin Fox

I think that assumption is an interesting one, but at least partially faulty and VERY poorly implemented. - Robert Scoble

I will do a video to explain why it is a bad assumption and poorly implemented. - Robert Scoble

@Scoble I think you linked to the "McCain" entry instead of the conversation. :) - Shivanand Velmurugan

Robert: I'll be happy to see it. I do hope that while making it you'll keep in mind that your own usage of FriendFeed is definitely not the norm, and that by any metric (followers, subscriptions, feed velocity) you're all the way at the left end of the power curve, and that may make your expectations and ideals different than most users. - Kevin Fox

I'll say this - understanding that my view is probably the minority by a long shot - 1 really interesting thing about the duplication that FF currently allows (forces?) is that it provides a quick (albeit highly unscientific) survey of which stories, blog posts or conversations generate interest and which don't. I went to the everyone tab and searched for "McCain New York Times" and "McCain Internet" to further reinforce something I suspected I had already picked up on: the internet story reigned supreme - Marco(aureliusmaximus)

Kevin: I have a great understanding of that. I've shown FriendFeed to a TON of people and they say that their #1 hatred of FF is the noise and the duplication that they see. That's what I'm trying to solve. - Robert Scoble

Apparently Kevin because Robert stumbled on your thread, he was already your friend or perhaps in some other way in your Friendfeed vicinity -- and you say you wanted to discuss this with friends -- so from his point of view your entry may have looked like a dupe. And dupes among segments of friends are indeed a problem on Friendfeed. Nobody minds the dupes we don't notice, but we may mind having the conversation on the same thing split up among segments of our friends. - Philipp Lenssen

[sorry for the cross post, but I'm seeing this thread in two locations] - Philipp Lenssen

Philipp: exactly. I try to remove duplication when I see it, or, warn one group of friends that another group of friends is talking about the same thing. If someone is talking about something I am interested in, I hope someone pulls that into my view, too. - Robert Scoble

I agree that duplication of content is a huge opportunity to improve FriendFeed, but I disagree with the idea that combining conversations is the right way to do it. Clustering is. People who have a modest number of subscriptions will see only one of the conversations, the one filled with people who have greater social proximity. Your method of combining conversations forces them to partake in a single conversation with a far greater number of people with a much more distant average social proximity. It actually makes their experience noisier and decreases relevancy. Clustering, on the other hand, would take the different threads that you could already see and groups them together so you can read and participate in the different conversations in the same place while maintaining their individuality of tone, of social narrative, and of scope. Just because I can see 5 people having conversations about the same thing doesn't mean that everyone involved should see all 5, just because they know the author of one of - Kevin Fox

them. - Kevin Fox

The most important question: Would Kevin prefer to A) Remove one word from the larger comment, or B) Ask a colleague to make the comment field to be 5 characters larger, or C) Let the word "them" hang? - Louis Gray

Bret Taylor wrote a blog post a long time ago proposing two possible alternative views for Friendfeed (link-centric and people-centric). The link-centric proposal seemed to make sense to me at the time. I've thought about using the API to implement the idea to see how it works in practice, but of course I haven't had the time. I think Moopz attempts to do it to some degree. I dunno though. I can also see Kevin's point, there's some value in the chaos and fragmentation. - Jason Wehmhoener

It's a real pain to make a comment longer than the comment field allows, and I didn't know it would clip till after I sent it. Editing a long comment is similarly hard, so I opted for the humor value and just added the word. ;-) - Kevin Fox

The clustering is great as long as you don't see too many dupes Kevin. Wouldn't it drive you crazy to have to follow 5 different conversations on the exact same thing in your community of friends (and potentially state your same argument over and over if the conversation heads in the same direction)? Not to say there's an easy solution... just merging different threads by posting a pointer, like you might do in a more traditional forum, does not work perfectly with the Friendfeed system. - Philipp Lenssen

Trebor: To reiterate, I wasn't trying to 'only talk to my friends'. I was trying to start a conversation in my social circle, and the audience would expand as people responded. This is why the 'Rooms' suggestion doesn't work. As for threading, the challenge is that you have to do it in such a way that it makes sense for the person who can only see one of the threads, two of the threads, 10 of the threads and everything in between. That's basically what clustering is. It's "Of the things I can see, put the redundant ones together in a cluster." The point is that my cluster won't look like your cluster or Robert's cluster. Just because 10 different groups of people are having conversations about the same thing on FF doesn't mean that I should, by default, see all 10 conversations just because someone I know has participated in one of them. - Kevin Fox

I'll be filming a Qik video in a minute or two at http://www.qik.com/scobleizer - Robert Scoble

It's up at http://qik.com/video/135273 - Robert Scoble

Film @ 11 is already up on the tubes! man you're fast Robert! ;-) I like it! distributed comm or single mode...interesting - Susan Beebe

I agree Dupes are a problem. FWIW, on Philipps' forum , if we try to open a thread with a same URI and/or combo of words, then the s/w is intelligent enough to warn us. In this manner, the commnity does not create dupes and we do have VERY VERY intelligent conversations on and about GOOG's mostly and watching Scobles video - will comment here after I watch that . - Peter Dawson

".. I have 5 friend too - off course I have more".- Scobles :)- !! Anyhoot, why do you think that you are a content connector ? Dont you think that the users are aware of this and they need turn the knob on themselves to gain that insight from the micro to the macro viewpoints ? Secondly, if you wanted to really connect people you could have your own thread which said (a) Good convo here and then (b) heres another link with same topic ..and so on.. - Peter Dawson

I really like Kevin's clustering idea. - Jason Wehmhoener

@Robert: Nice video !! But I think that room-based approach will not scale coz a room needs a moderator who needs to screen people every time he gets a request to join. Its like people knocking on the room and someone telling that they're not allowed inside. A much more scalable approach is for the person who's posting to actually share the item to only a few friends of his, that way only those friends should be able to see it and discuss it as I said here http://friendfeed.com/e... - Krishna Gade

Certainly Not. I've watched Robert's video and I couldn't agree less with him. It would be terrible if lots of conversations were carried on behind closed doors - which is what he's advocating. It would completely defeat the purpose of having an open system where people can actually move through the social network and discover each other. Likewise it would be terrible if all of the conversations about the same content were aggregated together automatically just like reddit. - Robin Barooah

Has anyone stopped to wonder why it is we love FriendFeed so much? I think the quality of the conversation has a lot to do with the fact that it is seeded in small groups and then grows across the social network. Duplicates may be annoying some of us, but are they such a problem that we should risk destroying the community to get rid of them? - Robin Barooah

(happily duplicating my comments across two separate threads - it's worth it for this!) - Robin Barooah

they could use a "Save as Friends/Publicly" option in the bookmarklette. But, as for the google reader example, that's hard. Sometime friendfeed is in the back of your mind when your favoring things. On news stories, the commenting would be intense, and in multiple languages. And on flickr, you could be favoring 3 year old photos. - InsaneNinja

@Robin I agree, that the seeding part is one of the things that I like the most in FF. It's interesting to see what gets picked up by various circles. But I would like to see a decrease in the dupes. Robert, your vid was great in that it brought the "questions" to light. One of the drawbacks to me with Digg is also one of it's strengths- "checking for duplications" it slows down the process for me when I'm trying to share something that A. I know is original. B. Is trying to correct an original source. - michael sean wright

Thanks for the video, Robert! I've left my mega-response (at least in terms of FF comment sizes) on that item's thread, to keep the content closer to its referenced content: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Kevin Fox

Man, I just caught up on this conversation, and it's one of the best I've seen on Friendfeed to date -- there are some very smart people on this service who are wrestling with some of the most interesting issues on the cutting edge of interfaces for social communication. Fox and Scoble have convinced me that some conversations on the same topic should be entirely disjunct, some should intersect and some should be unified. Deciding which should be which should be a matter of free choice and negotiation. - Sean McBride

I follow 490 people including Kevin and Robert. I saw Robert's comment on Kevin's conversation early in that conversation. What I don't understand is how those long conversations disappear in my feed, then randomly reappear. I am following too many people? I really notice this when I go to Best of Day and find long conversation I did not know existed. - Russellreno

Once again I am talking to an empty room. - Russellreno

Russell, I think we are all trying to figure it out. I tack the link into my playboy room and thats how I track good conversations, even after days.. :)- In fact the convo has moved from this thread and onto another thread here <http://friendfeed.com/e...> Now I wish that FF has a lock this thread feature :)- - Peter Dawson