related thread, and impetus for this one: http://friendfeed.com/neilfws... - Bill Hooker

Should distinguish using FF for groups such as this one, and using it for aggregating and sharing personal content? How important is it that the same platform provides both functions? - Eric Jain

Eric, I think you are absolutely right. FriendFeed seems to fulfill two different roles for many of us at the moment: discussion among users and aggregation of content. In my view, the two do not necessarily have to go together. Once content has been aggregated, it can be forwarded to other services, which could be where the discussion happens. I don't see why both jobs would necessarily have to be done by the same tool. - Lars Juhl Jensen

Actually, I personally love to have it all in one place. I display my feed on my homepage and without discussion, there would be less of a reason to display it there. - Björn Brembs

Björn, my point was that you could have one tool that aggregates, and a second tool that is used for discussing the aggregated stream. You would obviously want to put the latter on your home page, but that does not mean that this tool would itself have to do the aggregation. For example, I could imagine using Yahoo pipes to aggregate a bunch of RSS feeds and then have Buzz import the aggregated feed to allow discussion. - Lars Juhl Jensen

My read is that the aggregation is good, that the aggregation feeds the discussion, which is good. However, the discussion is separate from the source (possible with its own discussion), which is bad (but perhaps fixable through a back feed like Disqus). Also, there seem to be a bunch of folk who are "nominally" on FF and whose content gets aggregated here, but who never turn up to discuss. So commenting here on their content can be a waste of time. I know I can turn comments back to tweets, but that has all the limits of tweets that FF otherwise overcomes. - Chris Rusbridge

I think you have a point, Dorothea, because the number of comments an item (a blog post or even a tweet) gets here is greater than the number of comments you'll tend to get on the post or tweets you'll get in reply - not to mention that having a three or more person discussion on twitter is annoyingly inconvenient and hard to follow - the conversation always fractures into a bunch of one on ones. Blog comments are harder because there's more friction - having to log in or fill out details on every blog isn't as easy as just commenting here....we've talked about all this before. Just wanted to add the "separation on comments from source" is a new argument in addition to those. - Mr. Gunn

Repeating a comment from the original thread: "I was figuring one full-time pro with crowdsourced help from the community could maintain a Tornado install. Better IT minds than mine might want to beat on that assumption, but what would that (or a better assumption) cost? What would hosting and bandwidth cost?" Let's toss some numbers around and compare those with the results of the survey (a whopping 25 responses so far, but it is the weekend after all). - Bill Hooker

Costs are heavily dependent on the number of users, so we need a good estimate for that before we can really say anything. Note: Tornado is just a webserver. You still need someone to write a FF-like application on top of it. That is most of the job and it will cost money. I am only a dabbler in web-coding, but it is not clear to me that we even need Tornado because it is designed to handle thousands of simultaneous real-time users, but a community-driven offshoot site would not need anywhere near that. Standard web technologies may well work just as well. I'd recommend contacting some web-development/design companies to ask for a rough estimate. - Matt Leifer

Here's a Life Science group for cliqset for those wishing to try it out. http://ff.im/gI1ov - Mr. Gunn

I can't even log in to cliqset at the moment. Edit: yes I can, it just took several minutes and then a reload. Blech. The holdup seems to be at s3.amazonaws.com. This is a pretty fundamental flaw. - Bill Hooker

He did say in the other thread (or maybe his profile) that they did some hardware upgrades recently. Amazon S3 is highly scalable, so maybe he just needs to turn the crank there a little to meet increased demand? - Mr. Gunn

For me, aggregation and discussion are important, but so is the possibility to keep several separate information streams (multiple groups, e.g. those housing my HubMed alerts) in one convenient environment that can be blended into the aggregation and discussion streams (e.g. by posting something to multiple groups at once, and by hierarchically structured lists). No idea to what extent this would be possible elsewhere. - Daniel Mietchen

Speaking for myself, I would. However, only if everything (and I mean everything) was archived, downloadable in a sane format and accessible by date / user. I'd possibly pay what I pay for flickr yearly. But it also depends on whether other people I interact with also would. FF is not its technology, but its users. The ability of the site to fade into the background (unlike facebook) is, for me, one of the qualities that make it special. - Goran Zec