Last month Facebook released the first version of mini-feed comments. I claimed that it was another step for Facebook toward FriendFeed functionality. Apparently not enough people were commenting though because Facebook has since made a slight change as MG Siegler pointed out yesterday. Rather than displaying a plus sign which potentially didn’t signify “comments” for some users, so Facebook has decided to go ahead and spell it out.

Ultimately this is an extremely small change but if Facebook users aren’t commenting on mini-feed stories, perhaps the concept of FriendFeed is just a bunch of Silicon Valley hype. Personally, I think it’s a little hype combined with great functionality. I think what Facebook is instead missing is comments from their main feed. Most users don’t spend a lot of time navigating their friends mini-feeds (as far as I know).

Conversely when a user first logs into Facebook the first thing they see is newsfeed items. Rather than going to a user’s profile and posting on their wall about a news story, it would be easier simply to comment directly from within a news item. Even with good design, it may be that users simply don’t want to comment on each others’ news stories. If that’s the case, FriendFeed is officially a bunch of hype and will remain limited to an extremely small group of users.

I don’t think that’s the case though. Do you think FriendFeed is more hype then actually being useful? Are you a regular FriendFeed user? Do you comment on peoples’ mini-feeds in Facebook?

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?

Last night FriendFeed announced a new version of their site that is optimized for the iPhone. Immediately there were postings around the web about the update rejoicing that finally the site is easily accessible by all those iPhone addicts. The FriendFeed buzz has been increasing over the past few weeks and based on the Alexa traffic data, it appears that the buzz is paying off for the company.

I’ve become more active on the site but I’ve also noticed that it is practically impossible to follow everything that is going on. There is simply too much noise. Facebook has been working to resolved this problem by generating an automated filter. FriendFeed also has a filter which displays the most popular items over a given period of time but it appears to be based on the volume of comments posted on a given item.

I’m sure this new version will be extremely popular. After sitting next to Robert Scoble on a train back from New York City and seeing him obsessing over FriendFeed on iPhone, I know at least one person who will be satisfied with this new feature. Are you using FriendFeed regularly? Have you had a chance to check out the new iPhone version of the site?

Last night FriendFeed announced that there are now filtering features that help users find the best posts from within your feed. Just yesterday I wrote about how social media needs filter and this is clearly a step in that direction. Facebook is currently the only other site that I know of that offers extensive filtering features. Just as with Facebook though there is very little user control for what is filtered and what isn’t.

Instead, the new filtering feature simply pulls up the feed items that received the most comments in the past day, week and month from people that you are connected to. The one problem I noticed is that popular stories that are popular today also fall into the most popular stories of the week and month. Rather than making a higher cutoff for popular stories, FriendFeed simply adds more stories for you to look through.

While I think this is a step in the right direction, social media filtering still has a long way to go before we can effectively cut through all the noise. It is clear that social relevance will be one of the most important things but aside from that, it’s anybody’s guess as to what will make filtering more effective. Message overload may just be a part of life in this digital age.

Do you know of any other effective social media filtering tools?

I have previously been critical of Disqus, the blog commenting platform. My main criticism of the platform is the inability to store comment data on my own servers granting Disqus complete ownership of my site’s comment data. Yesterday I watched an interview between Robert Scoble and the Disqus CEO in which he stated that they have plans to make changes which give the ownership back to the blog owners.

Over the past few days I have been spending more time experimenting with FriendFeed given Twitter’s downtime. The service has been growing on me and one thing that I’ve noticed is that when people post a comment on my blog it doesn’t show up in FriendFeed but when they post a comment on Disqus it does because Disqus is a supported service on the site. While I won’t spend time discussing why I now use FriendFeed in this post, the one thing I will say is that I enjoy conversing with this small hyper-connected group of individuals who I barely know aside from the comments we share on a daily basis.

Not having peoples’ comments show up in FriendFeed means a lost opportunity for promotion of my site. As such I am slowly being forced into integrating Disqus into my blog. While I haven’t made the change yet, I’m extremely likely to make the shift when the new version of the platform is released. While FriendFeed is one of the few sites that provide support for Disqus postings, my guess is that this trend will continue and we could soon see integration on sites like Facebook which also provide newsfeed functionality.

While Disqus is still an extremely early-stage service, it appears that they are gaining substantial traction and slowly one blog after the other that I use is integrating it into their site. I’m being a resistor to change because I think it will help improve the service for the time being. Additionally, the first version of a product tends to have a number of flaws (take the iPhone for example).

The most interesting thing about Disqus is that the benefits could soon outweigh the cons and the company will have succeeded in “out opening” my blog comments. It’s similar to the battle taking place between OpenSocial and Facebook but on a much smaller scale. Disqus is growing one blog at a time rather than one social network at a time. I can envision similar functionality from utilities on Facebook and other social networks including image uploading and wall postings.

The second that those features are opened on social networks is the exact moment that FriendFeed will have “out opened” social networks but that conversation should be saved for another time. For now, I have come to realize that the Disqus will soon succeed at forcing me on to their platform.  I have no other option.

This past weekend, while most people were away enjoying the beginning of summer, uber-geeks sat around and discussed the ongoing troubles facing Twitter and how FriendFeed would deal the final death blow. If FriendFeed was consuming most of my discussions nowadays I might agree but unfortunately it has yet to win me over. While FriendFeed is beginning to drive traffic to my sites, Twitter still reigns king and Facebook still beats FriendFeed.

Unfortunately for the early adopters who believe that FriendFeed will become the online leader, there is still the majority that needs to be convinced and currently those people are spending their time on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. I completely understand the benefits of using FriendFeed but isn’t it really just a feature that other social networks sites can easily embed?

In the battle for attention, FriendFeed comes nowhere close to Twitter. Just take a look at the chart below and you’ll notice that the early adopters such as Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmore have an argument which is not based on reality. Conversely, while writing this tirade, I’ve received 5 comments on one of my FriendFeed items. I still just don’t see FriendFeed going mainstream though.

Do you use FriendFeed actively? Do you see FriendFeed successfully competing with Twitter? Are they even competitors?

Last night the big news in the blogosphere was that FriendFeed added rooms. I have to admit that I rarely use FriendFeed even though I have an account. I just don’t see enough reason to use it yet. Even though I don’t use it, I can understand how FriendFeed can be used as a valuable tool. What I don’t understand is why is there so much discussion about being able to privately share things.

Can’t you already do that on a wiki? How about a whiteboard in basecamp? How many ways can you cut a pie? While I don’t consider the stuff that I write about everyday of the utmost importance and typically have fun while writing it, when we see much ado about nothing it occasionally frustrates me. Our over obsession with efficiency tends to drive the web industry to come up with more efficient organizational systems when they really should be focusing on getting real work accomplished.

I sometimes fall victim to obsessiveness over organization but the reality is that sometimes it’s better just to keep on trucking with the work. How often do we talk about more efficient delegation and management practices that help us to reduce our workload? I can already bookmark something on del.icio.us and save it for one of my friends. I can also email a blog post directly from my Google reader to an internal company list.

Is it wrong to think that sometimes the applications just aren’t solving real problems? Am I just becoming a pessimist and a cynic?

Hutch Carpenter has posted an article suggesting that the attention of early adopters is migrating to FriendFeed. He uses quotes from Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk and Steven Hodson to support his argument that people are spending more time on FriendFeed. Robert Scoble for one is as early adopter as you can get.

I would argue that Robert Scoble is not always most accurate in determining future trends. Conversely, if Scoble ends up using a product on a regular basis, it may just eventually become a trend. I consider myself an early adopter but it definitely takes some effort to get me to become a regular user of a new product or service. For instance, I’ve been on Twitter for a long time but only started using it regularly back in December.

Robert Scoble said that FriendFeed is taking more and more of his attention away from RSS feeds. I don’t have the same issue but I can say that Twitter definitely has because I now find breaking news via my Twitter feed. I could see a similar transition taking place to FriendFeed if more of my friends were commenting on items on the site, but currently they aren’t. That doesn’t mean that my experience is the same as others though. I’ve included a poll below to see what peoples’ experience is with FriendFeed. Are you using the service more often?

The battle for the desktop internet browser has raged on in the 90s and returned at the beginning of this decade with the launch of Firefox. That was the last desktop web centric application battle that we witnessed. When Adobe Air launched last year, many were predicting the future integration of desktop applications and web based services. Honestly, that’s like saying that something big will come out of this thing they call “the internet”. We know something will happen but we don’t know what it will be.

Well it appears as though the first battle has begun for desktop based applications that integrate with web services. Mike Arrington calls it “The Twitter/Friendfeed Desktop Client Arms Race.” Both services are extremely early but yesterday when AlertThingy launched with FriendFeed integration I figured it would truly be the end of Twhirl. That shows how much I know.

Within days, Twhirl added FriendFeed support and Twhirl is back in the lead again. I could cover all of the minute adjustments made by both these applications but considering that this is sure to be constantly evolving over the coming months, I’ll stay away from writing about it too much. One thing that I will say is that FriendFeed has now made its way onto my desktop. Even though I haven’t been a huge fan of FriendFeed, having alerts showing up on my desktop makes a lot of sense.

Do you use FriendFeed? If not, check out the new Twhirl application. It looks promising.

FriendFeed is on a tear. Tonight they announced the release of the FriendFeed API, opening up all the features and enabling developers to also publish to, not just read from FriendFeed. Want to let people know that a FriendFeed user posted a comment on your blog? Now you can post it as an activity on FriendFeed. Over the past month I have been highly critical of FriendFeed, arguing that the value is in the filtering but ultimately, at least you can track an infinite number of online activities now.

This is a direct strike at Facebook’s Beacon service which provides your friends with notifications of your online activities outside of Facebook. Rumors have previously surfaced that Facebook will be opening their newsfeed to activities outside of Facebook but as for now, the change hasn’t taken place yet. I have been complaining about FriendFeed for a long time now but they have been rolling out new features on a weekly basis recently.

Just yesterday I asked the readers if social networks would continue to exist 5 years from now. The readers said yes, while Charlene Li suggests they won’t and for the most part I agree with Charlene. While we still need a center for conversation that center is rapidly becoming Twitter for me. Also, FriendFeed fulfills all my stalking needs so what else could I possibly need?

I have to admit, if FriendFeed added filtering, there would theoretically be no need for Facebook or MySpace. That seems like a dangerous statement given that I am probably one of the largest Facebook evangelists but FriendFeed has accomplished something incredible in an extremely short period of time. Let’s see how Facebook responds to this. Do you think this could be the downfall of social networks as they exist today? Can FriendFeed take on Facebook?