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FriendFeed Starts Sucking Up the Conversation

Posted by Nick O'Neill on July 7th, 2008 10:18 AM

If you avoided the grid for the weekend you probably missed out on a conversation going on yesterday about the default users recommended when you start FriendFeed. Then today a new conversation began about how FriendFeed is sucking away the conversation from blogs. Allen Stern suggests that commenting traffic to a blog can generate upwards of $100,000.

Losing out on these comments is a big deal. It has gone so far as reducing some bloggers (like Jeremiah Owyang) overall output. While I agree that some of my comments are going to FriendFeed, most of the comments on FriendFeed are not from people that were already commenting on my blog. As long as the users on FriendFeed have to visit my blog, there’s no substantial problem.

There appears to be a larger problem at hand though: thought leaders are reaching their conversational threshold. I for instance have a number of conversations taking place on Plurk and FriendFeed. Add in Twitter and recently launched Identi.ca and you are facing a serious issue. We now need to choose where to have the conversation and with conversations happening all over the place it is simply no longer sustainable to talk everywhere.

FriendFeed clearly acts as a solution to the noise though and my guess is that we will begin to see much more activity taking place on the site. I for one have now begun to actively participate in the FriendFeed conversation. While the conversation may be shifting it is still hard to monitor all of it though. I am now using Ping.fm to post to all the sites I’m active on. This still doesn’t solve the problem of reading comments to my posts though.

FriendFeed actively imports comments from Twitter but they have yet to do the same for other sites. Once I can manage all the conversation in one place, my conversational overload will finally be solved. For now it looks like I’m just going to have to be part of the conversation in one more place. Have you noticed the conversation shift to FriendFeed? Are you having conversational overload?

Posted in Social Media
  

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 10:18 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    Looking at other blogs, there has been a shift in the conversation. Yesterday I posted about comments going through a rebirthing process (Commenting is Dead, Long Live Commenting!).

    You're right, there will be tools to loop comments back to the original post, but I still think the the ink is in the pool now and we won't be able to go back and siphon it out.

    It may be that we're seeing the beginning of a new way of blogging.

    So far FriendFeed seems the most intelligent conversational medium.

    I do find some of the commenting on a blog fed into FriendFeed to have a different ambiance than on the original post. Could be the people, but I think it's the user interface. It's quick, tight, and although not truly threaded yet, it's easier to collect evey commenters' ideas.

    I'm curious to see how things look in a year. By then we'll know the state of comment fragmentation and how much financial and other impacts it has.

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