Interesting factoid while awaiting Track’s return to Twitter and debut on FriendFeed. This evening I’ve been perusing the FriendFeed message base, an increasingly enjoyable and dare I say it valuable experience. In the process I replied to a few comments from several days ago, including one from a Phil Glockner:
I just noticed Steve seems to be actively using FriendFeed, at least moderately. Therefore, I say welcome, and sorry I called him names a few months ago. :)
A few minutes later, TwitterSpy, a Track replacement service, reported the following in a GChat XMPP window:
twitterspy: stevegillmor: luckily I didn’t see them. re: http://ff.im/5UDi
Note the re: which expands to the full conversation. What’s happening is that I’ve turned on forwarding to Twitter in FriendFeed, which not only is smart enough to handle posts from Twitter by suppressing circular loops but to promote the context of a comment thread to the Twitter audience. FriendFeed’s attention to detail and nuance is a welcome development in the not necessarily ready for primetime micromessaging community.
In fact, I’ve been one of the worst actors in the drama, and deserve every bit of the hostility that some in the FriendFeed community have exhibited. FriendFeed has come a long way, and its steady innovation in the realtime space and a surprising move to open its outbound architecture bit by bit are adding up to a fast follower strategy that just may prove decisive for the growth of micromessaging. As Christopher Harley said a few minutes later in the same thread:
I always thought Steve would like FF. What am I saying? No I didn’t.
Me neither. It’s nice to be wrong every once in a while.
FriendFeed forgives you. :-)
The thread you linked to on my name has exploded with comments. Great stuff! To me, that’s exactly what makes FriendFeed great.
That’s too funny. It’s true that I always thought you’d find the platform worthwhile. But months back, when the echo chamber argument was in full press, you made me reconsider what value I could find in rehashing already disseminated information. Now it seems that FriendFeed’s greater potential has come to the fore and users have shown that finding the true value isn’t something that’s immediately obvious.
It really says something when a service’s initial critics can turn around and become its best advocates. It’s not about “my service” vs. “your service”, but about finding new ways to make connections, share information and enable conversation where it wants to be. We’re happy to have you at FriendFeed and look forward to more insights.
It’s still far too difficult to manage the firehose in FF. I guess that’s what Scoble refers to when he talks about accessing the “value in the FF database” through some kind of UI.
Nice sheep photo by the way :)
Michael Krigsman,
There is a tool to turn down the noise but it’s imperfect — still needs ability to reply in same window, but you can find it at here
Michael Krigsman,
Also, creating lists in FF helps immensely. That last sentence of above post should read “here”, without the word “at”
True, Karoli. Between Lists and JustSignal.com, I’ve got it under control. And Steve, I did what you did — fed Twitter from FF instead of the other way around.
Forget it all.