The whole point of FriendFeed is to have many great conversations around the same topic. "FRIEND"Feed... I don't want to see the entire conversation in one place all the time, I want to see what "this cross section" of people are commenting on: my Friends. In some cases, yes, the OPTION to aggregate the entire conversation would be phenomenal but it is not a good idea to make this the default behavior.

Blog post comment threads have long been a poor conduit for conversation because they are relatively devoid of individuals with any correlation to one another. This is not going to change, even with SezWho, Disqus, or Intense Debate enabled. This is *one* of the reasons FriendFeed has resonated so well with people... FriendFeed introduces a simple way to hop into very fast moving conversations around all sorts of interesting items and engage with what your friends are engaging... not just blog posts, but everything from Netflix rentals to music to Amazon wishlists. Many bloggers are closing one eye and averting the other when it comes to FriendFeed in particular. Obviosuly, they are not the "one aggregator to rule them all" for more reasons than can be covered in a comment... most passionate users of FriendFeed still are unwilling to part with their RSS Reader (which is also an aggregator... it's just aggregating fewer types of content and doing it in a more managed and tabulated/accountable environment.)

These past couple days have really inspired me. So many fantastic opinions coming from so many different points of view. In the interest of the 4th paragraph I will go ahead and disclose that I'm the lead developer at Shyftr, a service you love to hassle at every opportunity. :-) hehehe ... And I appreciate your opinions of the service, even if they are hard to accept at times... we are always looking for ways to engage every angle of the community so we can improve our service and perhaps develop interesting solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems, even if it takes time to get there (we are a small team). I would seriously welcome the opportunity to open a 2 way dialogue between us so we could really vet one-another's views. There is an animosity that exists between us, and we have never even met (See Louis Grays post: ). I'd like to get to know you a little more and consider your mind-set in the future of our service... you are not alone with your opinions and they need to be considered as the Shyftr community evolves.

A *fleeting* part of me often wishes I could go back in time and ask our community not to be interested in your story that one day, perhaps refrain from my own comments even... but I can't (wanna go halvsies on a Delorian and a flux capacitor to see if we can't make something happen?) ... Seriously though, the fact is you are a well spoken person who can really inspire the right group of people to spark up some chit chat. (The conversation that developed that day was one very focused on our service and it was conducted by a core group of friends and family that have been with us since before we launched). Many of our users venture out into the blogosphere to leave comments, or go to FriendFeed for conversations with other groups, and yes, sometimes they like to fire up conversation at Shyftr as well. We like to think conversation is a big part of what people want when they sit down and consume the web... at least this little corner of the web that you and I enjoy so much. Conversation was born to be free and users ought to feel empowered to have their conversations where they so choose. The complicated issues that exist are ones for people like you and I to solve as a team (and not you and I specifically but the entire amalgamation of you's and I's involved in this great medium), and "we" need to do so for the users. It should never come down to users being berated for their choices (or for their demands to be given choices... demands that we, at Shyftr, heard and heeded to the call, come what may).

As far as "bottom line of the online publishing economy" is concerned, well, "online" is a dynamic marketplace. The "Pageview" is quickly becoming last decades revenue model... does this spell the end of professional blogging? Not a chance... as long as there are talented writers (like yourself) contributing amazing ideas to the global conversation then the money will find these people. It's not a reality today, or tomorrow, but trust that the same brains that are thinking up the "Social Media Communities" are also thinking up the next applicable revenue models as well... truth be told, I think the Google AdSense model is an insult, if not a vicious slap in the face, to many a fine blogger. You deserve more than a dollar a day and a bologna sandwich. The "minimum wage" in the blogosphere is an idea that needs to be abandoned. The lackadaisical are better suited to selling plastic by the pound on EBay, and the intrepid are worth much more than the current landscape offers. The $$ thing is a conversation to be had... Shyftr does not sell advertising and does not believe in trying to monetize on your intellectual property... as Duncan Riley aptly puts it: such behavior is "Morally Repugnant" (When someone says it best, it's always better to just quote them). The optional possibilities of the future are things we need to get into detail over when we start talking personally... something I hope we can do very soon. :-) Shyftr is not out to get you, or your audience... if anything we are out to introduce an audience to you. The landscape is changing, we want to be there with both sides through the transition and see everyone come out on the other side better off than they were when it all began. We need you, and we feel like you need us, too.

I am going to submit this beast of a comment now... hoping that my first comment here (long time listener first time caller) is not going to further instigate a rivalry but rather forge a friendship. I look forward to hearing back from you. :-)

Hi Matt - First of all, wow... great and long comment, lots of interesting ideas and thoughts. Thanks so much for taking the time to bring all of this to the table, and I apologize that it's taken me 18 hours or so (thanks for letting me know, Disqus!) to respond.

Second, totally open to a friendship, a two-way dialogue, whatever you like. One of the reasons that I mention Shyftr a lot -- and perhaps I've never expressed this clearly -- is that it's an interesting service, and it also helps to shed some light on some complex issues.

As I've said a number of times and won't fully elaborate on here, I think Shyftr does operate in a way that works against publishers, but I've also noted that I believe that the intent isn't necessarily to be harmful.

You've noted that Shyftr doesn't advertise against this content at present which forces me to then ask... how do you plan to make money, at the least to keep the servers humming and the lights on?

You bring up good points about blog post comments areas not always being a great place to forge community. I agree -- but do think that the best bloggers overcome this barrier by actively engaging the community and becoming a community on top of and addition to being the "thought leader." Those bloggers that can do both consistently and well tend to be more successful than others.

I have more to say here, but it's Friday night and I need to run! I'll try to add more later, but in the meantime please feel free to contact me at dumpsterbust@gmail.com

Cheers, EB

Eric - something that I find fascinating is doing the 'everyone' search on FriendFeed for a blog post title. Great way to see who is interested in what subjects, and you can see the conversations among the various tribes. As a blogger - no problem with that at all. I really don't need them tied back together into a single spot. That FriendFeed search provides exactly what Mathew Ingram is looking for.

But a lot of bloggers would like a more integrated approach. Either a bunch of APIs back-n-forth or one centralized portal for a single view. Maybe there's a business opportunity there.

Hutch, I think that FriendFeed has enormous potential as a data and communications platform, and that the surface is just getting scratched. One of the reasons that it's popular with those who have come across it, I think, is that it provides a symbiotic relationship between blogger and content aggregator community, so to speak.

But the uniquely cool way that FF aggregates a host of data/link streams means that it's a great basis to pull back all kinds of interesting things.

great post. neutral. haven't read a neutral post for some time in this comment wars.

I say I agree. Those who will embrace the future will reap the most benefits. Those who chose to wait-and-see will be left behind. Could there be a sudden switch? The less known becoming the popular and replacing the current ones?

Probably, just because of aggregators and defragmenting comments. Bottomline, we're all building communities, defragmenting comments is one major way of achieving a healthy community.

This also in fact, crosses the line of the forums. Once comments are defragmented, do we still need forums?

Thank you !

I think that forums are such a standard for some people; it's a community environment that doesn't need the "anchor" of an original post as opposed to the norm of the blogging world. So I think they'll always be around in some form or another.

Yes that's true, but if you do a side-by-side comparison, they're starting to have similarities.

Comments 2.0	Forums 1.0
Original Post	Thread Starter
Defragmented Comment System	Post Replies

Discussions are built around the "Original Post" or in Forums "Thread starter". By defragmenting comments across the web and give a way for these defragmented comments to also show on the original/Source post (as DISQUS does), it becomes a forum in itself. A forum that is not restricted to one domain and is distributed across different sites and platforms, and yet shows up on the original post or the original post shows up on those "other" sites.

Suddenly, the world wide web becomes a huge forums.

Dunno, but the way I see it, once Comments 2.0 goes to full blast, it will greatly overlap the forums. Instead of isolated communities, we're all becoming ONE World Community (sounds Biblical lol :p )