Wow. I just made a more verbose similar point: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Admiral Anika

Not sure what you mean, Shawn. Are you talking about people who post stuff directly rather than feeding items in? - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Anika's comment over there is a good one. People really need to not complain about noise and clutter on FF. That is what it's supposed to be. A real-time fire hose of content without any kind of filter. You participate with what you can while you're looking at it, but don't worry about it when you're not. You're not supposed to sit down and catch up with the day's threads on FriendFeed. FF is now and only now. - Matthew DeVries

You relay the things that catch your eye or interest you to your "slower" mediums (blogs, facebook, meebo, I'd even say twitter) and refine it there on your time. - Matthew DeVries

I just feel like things are more likely to be ignored if they aren't posted directly to FF. Kinda lame. I check FF for activity constantly even if I post something on a different service. - Shawn Farner

I post to FF directly because most of my content comes from GReader. Even if I share it with a note (which is a pain to copy & paste in since GReader doesn't have an option to make the summary an automatic note) it imports here with no image which means it sinks like a stone. And I don't use a lot of other services often, so if I relied on them I wouldn't have much here. FF gives flexibility in how to use the service, so to each his own. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

FF is an aggregator, a discussion place, and a popularity tracker. I'd rather have people stream all of their feeds in. Leave it to the consumers of that information to do the blocking, listing, rooming, hiding, and other filtering to suit their particular needs. - LogEx

Speak for yourself. - Josh Haley

Shawn - you're hitting on a powerful, if subtle point. The direct posts mean, "I want my FriendFeed peeps to see this. And let's discuss it." I think it hits closer to the social networking aspects of the service. But your use case of following feeds (+ new advanced search) points to another use of FriendFeed: the uber info management service. - Hutch Carpenter

Matthew, there are many ways to use FF. Sure, it's fine as an ephemeral and transient "what's happening right at this moment?" tool. But also, because it's an aggregator, I use it to keep up with what's been happening with closer friends - the history is important. It minimizes the number of services that I have to interact with, and the frequency of those other interactions. - LogEx

Logical Extremes (Good lord your parents must have hated you to name you that) - I think that most of these critques come from people complaining/lamenting about what happens on their Home feed. Home feed should be an unrefined data storm. I think a lot of these issues that people have are because they're unwilling to put the time/effort into making effect sub-feeds, lists, rules, and rooms. I agree, if you want to talk to your friends in a less cluttered manner, you can easily set up a separate feed.... - Matthew DeVries

...with stringent filtering and brandy snifters and good pipe smoke. For some reason people just don't do that. - Matthew DeVries

I have started posting some more things directly to Friendfeed because it is a bit weak with some feeds. Books from librarything or goodreads don't have the image, links from diigo dont have the comment/description added, and many other feeds come without an image when the rss contains it. So when I think something is really going to be an interesting discussion and I dont want it to sink without a trace, I manual post it - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

I see many posts today debating the path FF is taking. My view on this subject is: let users decide what they want to do with it. Each one will find a different usage, and eventually we'll all go where the majority goes. One day somebody will develop a new tool from Friendfeed's API and... - Jordi Soler