Jan
29
Next Frontier: Comments
January 29, 2008 |
As I wrote and read about Friendfeed and other services that pull together our output on different web services, I started thinking about how this, in some way, is a one-way street.
What got me thinking about this was how people started commenting on items I posted in Friendfeed instead of on the original blog or commented on a Twitter item instead of getting back to the original author.
Basically, I guess I am wondering about how we can not only pull the information together, but then also disseminate the actions we take on the aggregation site back to the original item.
As other aggregation services, like AssetBar, start adding comment functions, this might become more and more of a question.
I guess much of this really hinges upon the question of ‘identity’ on the net. Maybe with the adoption of OpenID, it might become trivial to pull all this info together and then disseminate it again. Maybe some OpenID providers could add this as their value add as well.
Of course I have no answers for this right now, but that never stopped me from asking. Any thought?
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I am one of the founders of FriendFeed. We have lots of conversations about comments on FriendFeed, and we have discussed many of the issues you bring up in this post.
Initially, we talked about, e.g., reflecting comments in FriendFeed back to the original blog entry or Digg story. The main issue is that conversations in public forums (like Digg or this blog comment section) are extremely public, so they tend to devolve to the style of conversation typical in public discussion areas (the worst case being YouTube comments). Discussions on FriendFeed are entirely distributed, and limited to the social group of the person who shared the link. So if two people share the same item in Google Reader or Digg the same story, those people’s social groups will discuss the item separately. The discussions look a lot more like private conversations (i.e., they look like a private email thread) because the people talking about each other are directly or indirectly in the same social group. Consequently, the quality of the discussions tend to be a lot higher. We have found this to be one of the most appealing parts of FriendFeed: now you can informally discuss a blog post or YouTube video with people you know rather than with everyone in the world, which is surprisingly to difficult to do otherwise.
So, technical issues aside, I think there are a lot of complex social issues with aggregation and comments that we are just learning about now.
I’ve actually thought about this a lot. I found the same problem to be true with Plaxo Pulse. A nice “band-aid” would be a widget or plug-in that would allow me to display all 3rd-party commentary about my post or posts in a separate section right next to the native comments.
As someone with a small blog audience, I care more about having people read my stuff than I do about aggregating all conversations about my post in one place.
Bret, thanks for the comments and congrats on developing such an excellent product.
I agree with you about the quality of the conversation beinga lot higher if you are just talking to your friends. I’m simply fascinated by how we have started producing within aggregators (and I just singled out Friendfeed because it is the one I use the most right now). I guess in the long run, we might need yet another layer of meta-aggregators to really collect everything we write.
I’m also looking at it from the perspective of somebody with a small audience. Do I want me readers to comment on my blog, or in FF or AssetBar?
Charles might be on to something here. Maybe FF could offer such a widget in the long run.
[…] for everywhere in one place. I want integrated socialization, and especially threading and integrated commenting. And I think we can do it! Read on for a recipe for the perfect blog […]
I wish I would’ve saw this earlier. I’m going to edit my post later to include a link to this. It’s great and way more simplified than my own rambling post. I’m still trying to find my way.
But I agree that there may be a solution to the problem in OpenID.
Corvida - I liked you post on this and if that is ‘finding your way,’ I expect to see great things from you in the future
It’s going to be very interesting to see how this plays out in the long run.
If aggregation sites are only successful when they add commenting features, then we might just end up in a never ending circle of aggregation sites that aggregate other aggregation sites…
The only way to break that cycle is going to find some way of centralizing comments somewhere - but that works against the small group discussion feeling of a place like FF…
[…] If you want to know a few reasons why it’s so controversial see my article entitled "@Social Aggregators: Give Me My Comments Back" or Frederic of The Last Podcast’s articled, "The Next Frontier: Comments." […]