Friendfeed and Twitter: Take Two
FriendFeed’s new ability to allow users to post comments on tweets back into Twitter sure took the blogosphere by storm.
Steven Hodson says that this, together with adding the ability to import Disqus comments, represents a major change in the conversation landscape. Mathew Ingram thinks it is an elegant solution to one of the more vexing problems many have seen with FriendFeed. MG Siegler at VentureBeat is also quite impressed with the new feature and only bemoans that he can’t directly post new messages to Twitter from FriendFeed.
I wrote my first post on this just a few minutes after I noticed the new feature, so now after a bit more time of actually using it, here are a few of my observations:
- This new feature alone is going to make using FriendFeed a lot more appealing to many of the potential users who were still on the sidelines about using it.
- It would be nice if the recipient of the reply would change dynamically according to who wrote the last comment on a post or if one could chose the recipient from a list of commenters.
Right now, if a discussion starts on my own post and the commenter feeds the item back into Twitter and I comment on it in FriendFeed, but also want the comment to flow to Twitter, the default would make me reply to myself unless I write the @<username> into the post myself (and I would have to know that FF user’s Twitter name to do that!). It would be nice to see a count of the number of characters in those posts that get fed into Twitter. Eric from InternetDuctTape just wrote a greasemonkey script that does just that and allows you to post to Twitter from FF as well.- It would also be nice, as MG Siegler pointed out, to be able to post an item to FriendFeed and Twitter at the same time.
- Can you image how useful this feature would be if it displayed conversations like Quotably does?
But honestly, whatever complains I have right now are really just minor issues. Adding this tightly integrated Twitter support to its roster of features this quickly and elegantly really makes me look forward to what the FF developers will come up with next.
As a sidenote: I think FriendFeed adding Disqus support to its lineup today is going to play a major role in the adoption of Disqus by bloggers. I for one am going to look into replacing the comment system here with it now.
Technorati tags: twitter, friendfeed
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