The Product Guy › Likes

Gary, you can turn off updates from friends of friends. If you see it, click on "Hide", "More hide options" and you can find the option there, as "Hide ALL stuff from friends-of-friends". - Louis Gray

I just want the ability to create subsets of friends without doing it in an RSS reader. - Ryan Brenizer

I'm big on filtering too. FF doesn't have as much noise as GReader, but filters would be nice. - Mike Reynolds

Holy cow, yes. I would *love* to be able to filter out all the political posts... - Matthew Freeman from Alert Thingy

Actually, Friendfeed should highlight all entries containing 'ubuntu' imho. ;) - roel

haha hide ubuntu ;) - Tyler Gillies

It would be nice to work the other way and bump up stories containing a keyword of your choice. Kind of like track, Would be useful to follow discussion on your company - Jamie

Sounds like a perfect job for a Greasemonkey script. - TranceMist

There is an urgent need to PRIORITIZE (recommend) new/unread Friendfeed items by personal relevance/importance. Is anyone working on this? In its current incarnation, Friendfeed is an unwieldy mess and time waster compared to Google Reader. - Sean McBride

I think some of this was the idea behind "rooms" where someone could, say, create an "obama" room and everyone (how do they find out?) would join up and then only post obama stuff to that room and not in the general feed. Then it'd be up to you to join that room or not. Then it also filters accordingly, too. - lilbyrdie

but don't things that you post in a room still show up to everyone following you? - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, only if your followers also belong to that room. - Mark Trapp

ahhhhh, ok, that's what I wasn't getting. That makes more sense now. Thanks Mark. - Thomas Hawk

Or just use a client to apply the filters. Anyone know of one? - Roberto Bonini

Step By Step Directions...1) Click 'Hide' on a Friend of a Friend entry. 2) Click 'See options for hiding other items like this'. 3) Select the option you want and select 'Hide Entries'. - Charlie Owen

Ha Ubuntu....Wait! - Anthony Farrior

sounds like a job for the greasemonkey filter script...via feedalizr - Ben Reierson

Personally I like the friend of a friend feature - gives more variety. Just so long as you have a limited number of friends and/or subscribe to Scoble and his 10000 friends. - Roberto Bonini

FILTERSSSSz!! and tags so I can SORT and categorize my own feed stuff! Need to be able to organize the slew of stuff I see in my feed...grows daily! wow! - Susan Beebe

There is a link back to the source on FF - Glenn Slaven

What's the problem with discussions taking place in different locations? It's not like someone is jumping from one to another making them confusing. - Alejandro

Alejandro, there is no problem with it! There is just an ongoing complaint of some about the fragmentation of "comments" and this is further fragmentation. But it's not the fault of friendfeed or any software -- it's just how PEOPLE work. Many different people wind up having the same conversations. Some people participate in the same conversation with different groups of people. That's how people work in real life and...anywhere else they are. - Robert Seidman

FriendFeed's search capability mitigates this somewhat. If I were at a computer, rather than my phone, I could search for "one failing of FriendFeed" and find the relevant conversations. - Ontario Emperor

Discussion fragmentation will happen on various sites. The problem the author has is that even on FriendFeed there is not one place to collect comments. This has to do with the fact that friendfeed really does not look for duplication. Several people can share the same story, but they are not linked in any way. This is definitely something friendfeed needs to fix or they will become a victim of their own success, the noise will become too great. - Rob Diana

Rob, if FriendFeed were a tool designed for bloggers and used only by bloggers I'd agree with you. Right now, there is a much higher percentage of bloggers subscribing to feeds of other bloggers than there will be as time passes. I'm pretty sure it won't be the only use case for FriendFeed. - Robert Seidman

At least we have Yacktrack, thanks Rob :) - Shey

Yes, conversations are distributed. Sometimes that's a good thing. - Mike Reynolds

I agree with Mike -- it allows conversations to take different directions on the same topic - Shey

If FF added the ability to search for a particular link in the API bloggers would be able to pull the different conversations back into their blogs... I think conversations going in different directions are interesting - Sean Reiser from twhirl

@Sean the various conversations are good, and yes the links are missing. As Shey said, I developed YackTrack which does put all of the conversations for a URL on one page. I think FF needs to make it easier to figure out that there are comments on multiple shares. I know you can search and various other multi-step things, but it really should be easier in an aggregation service like this. - Rob Diana

Is it possible to search via the API? If you did a search for a post title instead of the URL then most related shares would be returned. - Colin Walker

@Colin there is a standard search in the API which can be used for both keyword and URL searches. They work fairly well. The bigger question is whether duplicates can be grouped or linked together to make it easy to find the conversations. I know they can be, I don't know if it is on the FF roadmap. - Rob Diana

@RobertSeidman I think if more people join FF, the problem will just be spread out more. So, we would still see a decent amount of "share" duplication but it won't increase exponentially. As "early adopters", we tend to find the things that make a site more difficult to deal with than it should be. If we make FF easier to use, everybody wins. - Rob Diana

You guys should check out Bret Taylor's post on exactly this subject. http://friendfeed.com/e... - Hutch Carpenter

Rob Diana, it depends on what you want the product to be and how closely that mirrors what FF wants it to be. What if for example, a guy like Steve Rubel who is seemingly at least 2-3 days behind Louis Gray in the links he posts. And what if he has many people following him that don't follow Louis. is it bad for the link to show up again to Steve's followers as a link from Steve? - Robert Seidman

Robert Seidman, first let me say FF is doing a fantastic job and I am just suggesting. Also, by removing duplication I am saying group the links in some way so that we can see that two people shared the same thing. This may be getting away from the "people-centric" idea but that is just the idea that I had (see yacktrack). Everyone who shares a link should get credit in some way. - Rob Diana

@Hutch The Bret Taylor post makes sense for FF as it is totally person centric. I am not sure if link centric idea really works in their model, but I am sure they could find a way. Everyone, I promise I will shut up soon, this topic is obviously very dear to me. - Rob Diana

Rob, I hope you never shut up about that which you're passionate about! I'm all for de-duping and FriendFeed needs it. my preference is that individuals can set the preferences (much like w/"hide") rather than anything systemically done on FriendFeed's end. - Robert Seidman

This should like be like the word press feature just implemented. http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008.... FF comment/content recommendations based off the most active topics. With the main goal of allowing you to show were the topic started, and the option to go to that thread or others on the topic. The feature is there currently via the search function, lets make it automatic. - Mike Fruchter

I think the problem with removing duplication is the end result: another Metafilter. Keeping conversations decentralized allows comments to remain at least somewhat orderly and at least centered around people you know and people they know. Instead of combining things into single, massive comment threads, I'd rather see links to other instances of that shared something so you can see what other people are saying about it. - Akiva

We all have the same problem, seen the same items multiple time. But you have to keep in mind that because this aggregates all your activity if you read a post and bookmark it on any of the services you have connected to FF it will show up here, so even if you don't want to, you are contributing to the problem. - Gadiel Rivera

What if FriendFeed created a search "view" where you could enter the url you want to track ALL references to (through various services and people) to aggregate all the comments there grouped by discussion. At least then a blogger could find and participate in those conversations (which they may not be aware of otherwise) and FF could create a blog wiget for that so it would be easy for bloggers to include the conversations from FF in their posts. Everyone wins. - Lindsay

Lindsay, that has been done by other services as well. YackTrack is one that does what you ask, though it does not yet post back to the comment stream. Akiva has a good idea with the links to other posts and it may stay in line with the people centric approach of friendfeed. - Rob Diana

Hmm, YackTrack sounds good but which url do you use? I just tried the one for this conversation (http://www.technovia.co.uk/2008...) but get no results, though I would expect this entire conversation to appear there... - Lindsay

Lindsay, I have tried searching for the url that got shared, but it is a url for feedburner so I am not sure exactly what is happening there. The main story url will not show these comments either. So, I will look into this as most of the google reader stuff will be through rss of some sort. - Rob Diana

Rob, iIf you get all that sorted, and it can resolve urls back to their source too (if the link was posted from the feed) then it will be quite an awesome tool. I'll keep an eye on it. :) - Lindsay

The problem with totally decentralised comments from my perspective is simple: I like to read what a wide range of people are saying about something I've posted, so I can better understand their points of view. If I post something and someone comes up with a great critique of it in a comment I don't see, I'll never be able to learn from it - and that's a bad thing. - Ian Betteridge

Happy G-Day! - EricaJoy

I'm going to be away for mine :-( - Neil Dunn

I've been waiting for someone else to make this point. I see investors making decisions purely based on domain names. That's nuts. When is the last time you didn't find what you were looking for when you knew what it was? Right... - JonathanJoseph

I even use Google to find old posts of mine... just by putting in my domain name and keywords or the title. Google finds it faster than I will - Louis Gray

@Ole Begemann - that time is now. Google just doesn't report it. I've seen the stats for (the largest) broadband ISP in the US. Their portal has a search bar, and the most commonly searched phrases are, in this order: google (ironic, because it uses google search), yahoo, amazon, ebay. The rest of the top 10 most searched for phrases are sex, yahoo.com, ebay.com etc. - Ross McKillop

Seth Godin suggestion of “Drop the dot?” is not cool. I do a *.org and *.tv sites. - Mitchell Tsai

Lots of people (used to be 40-50%) type URLs in any search box they see (not just Google). At HCI (Human-Computer Interface) conferences in 1993-2000, a lot of companies presented data that URLs were 40-50% of the items typed in their search boxes. I'm 8 years out of the loop, and don't know the data for today. But I help a lot of people who still type URLs in any search box. - Mitchell Tsai

A search technique - "Manual Trackbacks" - I used in the days of AltaVista/Hotbot was to (1) type in the URL of an article I liked (2) look at all the webpages that referenced that URL (3) track back using the URLs to other webpages (4) Often, I could find an expert in the domain who had made a master page for Domain X linking to all the top pages. - Mitchell Tsai

Hey FF devs, if you can figure out how to do "Group Similar" to keep these kinds of items not only together, but also ensure the comments stay in one place, that would be awesome. - Vince DeGeorge

You give it to Scoble, the originator of the content. Other benefits would be that as Scoble has more followers, your "Like" will be exposed to more viewers, especially as the story goes up the page. With the FriendFeed community growing, if we all "liked" shared items, which are frequently duplicated, we'd be in a spiral of happy feelings. (BTW - That's my 1000th FriendFeed comment!) - Louis Gray

it's an interesting question - but we might not have to answer the "who's first" question....rather, why not share likes universally? If Scoble shares a link and I "like" it, and then someone else shares that same link later on, Friendfeed could notify them that "x number of people" have also liked that article....rather than re-bubble all the links up to the top, maybe only the original link that was submitted gets bubbled up. - Adam Kazwell

Louis, you are a writing machine. How many words a day do you type, and what's your typing speed? - Vince DeGeorge

@Vince, your suggestion seems to be quite valid - Varun Mahajan

@Vince: They have the ability to group similar, but they choose not to because they don't want to. They want each instance of the post to have its own community. - engtech

Ginger - I agree with Louis. You should give it Scoble since he is the originator of the content. And thanks for kind words. I will keep posting great stuff. - Atul Arora

@Vince, it's been a long time since I checked typing speed. I should do that some time. But writing for me is pretty easy, and fun too! - Louis Gray

I'll like the same URL multiple times. - Mike Reynolds

if you give it to somebody else than the "original" then I assume there is something you like about this specific entry and not the original. [which is also why I asked for the bookmarklet to find stuff because I want to find the original. - Nicole Simon