The Last Podcast Opinionated Web 2.0 News and Commentary

Summing up: Comment fragmentation is a short-term issue

There has been a lot of discussion about comments getting detached from their original posts and heading onto Friendfeed and other aggregators (like RSS readers with comments like Assetbar or shyftr).

I wrote a bit about this in the last week, but I just want to sum up my thoughts a bit more concisely:

1) At least for Friendfeed, I can’t help but think that this is really just an issue in the short-term. It’s only a matter of weeks before Friendfeed is coming out with an API and then it is probably only a matter of days (or maybe even hours) before somebody will hack up a plugin that lets you at least display those Friendfeed comments in your blog. Given the ingenuity of a lot of developers, they might even dream up of uses we are not even yet thinking about.

2) Comments never only happened on the blog posts themselves. People email posts to each other; there are discussions on Twitter; at the water cooler. Just because we write something doesn’t mean that we have an automatic right to access to the discussion around it.

3) If anything, services like Friendfeed make it so easy to comment that it might allow a whole new group of people to participate in the discussion around any given topic who before didn’t feel like they could be part of the conversation. I think that’s a good thing. And while it is probably not representative, the more readers I have seen come from Friendfeed, the more comments I have gotten on my blog.

Steven,

Oh no item 3 sold me on FriendFeed. That is the biggest problem about communities- homogenous. To make real change- to really innovate and wear away elitism- one has to have social bridge makers slip into gaps of the social networks with new ideas.

Whether that is going to happen is part of the make-up of the community or group and the topic I think, naturally the bridge maker matters too.

I will have to try FriendFeed (knowing you would recommend quality), but I think it would be neat to have a stranger feed…kind of like roulette.

regards,
Wayne

For FriendFeed it’s definitely a short term issue and making it’s way into a bigger focus. FriendFeed was just the rock that started the avalanche.

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