DISQUS

Rob Diana · 10 months ago

Allen, I do not believe FriendFeed is a conversation stealer, it is just another site to have a conversation on. This would be true of most social media sites including digg, mixx, reddit and others. Conversations happen in different places all the time.

Rob Diana · 10 months ago

Yan, I agree that people are lazy and there is no universal solution. Combining the conversations from the blog, FriendFeed and other sources may actually be a bad thing. If you look at this post on the blog, Louis Gray has comments from FF being sent back to the blog. There is a disjointedness to the conversation that may not be beneficial.

Louis Gray · 10 months ago

Post by Rob Diana: http://www.friendfeed.com/robdiana

tobiasverhoog · 10 months ago

I agree we miss something by not seeing the comments. It would be nice to have some sort of fold out comment area so we could read them and react from our reader itself. There's a lot of work to be done managing comments and showing them to all the readers of a post, whether it's on the website, rss reader or friendfeed (and react on twitter)

James Fridley · 10 months ago

I would say that no, we are not missing the conversation. It is likely that the original web site maybe though as the conversation moves here, to friendfeed.

Yan · 10 months ago

It would still be better if FF could show comments from the blog post (including from non-FF users) and also post FF comments back to the blog.

V Mary Abraham · 10 months ago

Yan's suggestion is excellent. That would really make FF THE place for online conversation.

Allen Stern · 10 months ago

actually yan, it would be better that you visit the site that spent time creating the content (video, audio or text) and give them the credit and then let ff take it that way - but push people back to the site - ff is a conversation stealer and continues to be that way

directeur · 10 months ago

Allen, you're right. Looking for a centered solution in the web is -by definition- "wrong". And Yan, I don't think they'll be able able to do it. There's many commenting systems for blogs, some are hand-made or use javascript (which will be hard)

Amani · 10 months ago

Good point about getting comments in the RSS Feed. That is a good idea. Perhaps we can get a message to them now.

morganb · 10 months ago

This is just one of those posts that hits you between the eyes with how our behaviors greatly influence our view of the world. I too, spend 99% of the time in my Google reader reading just the source posts, it's rare that I click through to view the comments, and even rarer still that I leave a comment. The volume of information that I'm consuming is the culprit for this, but clearly it's degredating the experience.

I've tried to use BackType more often as a way to track commenting by people who are important to me so I can see where a conversation is forming that I might be interesting in participating. However, that limits me to visibility to only conversations where I'm following someone on BackType. I'm sure there's some way that Google reader (or someone else) could include comments with the post, and expand or hide them using some nifty AJAX/J-Query code. But wonder how that would change my behavior, if at all.

Great article!

robdiana · 10 months ago

Morgan

I also rarely click through to the post and that is what got me thinking. There is a lot of work to be done on the conversations of the web, and we are just seeing the beginning with the third party commenting systems and aggregators like FriendFeed. I would not be surprised if we saw extensions to RSS feeds to enable comments to be embedded.

Edwin Khodabakchian · 10 months ago

Hi Rob, if you are a firefox user, then feedly can help you address part of this problem: when you read an RSS article in feedly, feedly will try to integrate in real-time, all the friendfeed conversations, the digg comments and if the source is powered by wordpress, the last 25-50 comments. More on the friendfeed integration later this week.

Edwin Khodabakchian · 10 months ago

Here is the example of how feedly integrates in real-time the conversations related to this blog post. http://www.flickr.com/photos/65995199@N00/32469...

robdiana · 10 months ago

I admit that I have not gotten into feedly yet. Sorry about that. I have it on my list of things to try. That screenshot is very interesting though so I may be taking a look at it soon.

Jordi Soler · 10 months ago

Only 2 solutions to this dilemma: either allow FF to publish full posts and integrate your blog comments in FF, or allow Google Reader to publish comments through Ajax or via Disqus.

Gregg H. · 10 months ago

The first thing that came to my mind that we're missing by reading an RSS feed is a lot of distracting ads we would otherwise see by going to all those websites. But I don't mind missing those. As far as missing conversation. I think an XML data type relationship that is needed is posts:comments, that would show up in RSS letting you know there are comments relating to that post.

Yan · 10 months ago

@allenstern I agree that that is the polite thing to do, but people are lazy - if they see content somewhere else (FF) and can comment on it there they will. I know there is no universal solution, but maybe tackling the big ones such as WordPress, Blogger and TypePad (for example) plus improving Disqus integration would give us 80% and others would then follow suit, especially if some standards are created for doing it.

Rob Diana · 10 months ago

Jordi, at the most basic level, comments could easily be reproduced in the RSS feed. Publishing the full post and integrating comments in FriendFeed or any other aggregation service is only part of the issue.

Meryn Stol · 10 months ago

I think a good blogger will try to learn from all conversation his post has sparked, and include this in future posts. A blogger could demonstrate the "consensus opinion" of him and people who engage in conversation with him. Even better - but not suitable for all blogs I think - might be to also include "dissenting voices". E.g. : "Last week, I wrote that all swans are white, but Nicholas (Taleb :P) didn't think so, as expressed in his comment on my post."

redhat · 10 months ago

Indeed interesting, doesn't this prove that an aggregating comments and posts is not enough, the ability to merge relevant posts from "friends" is also required. Something could be posted multiple times and be commented on multiple times on multiple sites and the conversation is so fragmented that two good ideas in different environments are never recorded.

For example this message will not reach people who read the rss or who are not connected to me or Rob on FriendFeed.

courane01 · 10 months ago

A plugin that syncs Google Reader comments to the Disqus for posting abilities would be handy. Disqus does have a custom footer to put into your Feedburner account to see a feed comment count. However - it's still up to the reader to navigate there to read the comments.

Craig · 10 months ago

If interested in the conversation, then you are going to miss out if you strictly stick to RSS. Of course you still have the option to go to the website and join in. It's an opt in opportunity and is there for those who want it. So I don't think you miss the conversation because those willing, will go out of their way to do so. Those who just want to skim an article, will do that option.

robdiana · 10 months ago

Craig

When you read a lot of RSS feeds, it is very difficult to go to every site. If the comments could be embedded in the feed, then I could decide to participate if I wanted based on the current conversation.

GrowMap · 10 months ago

Your idea to add the comments to the feed is a great one - and being able to read the comments will pull more interesting comments into the best conversations. Backtype didn't do what I had hoped it would (find ALL of my comments and aggregate them). I'll have to check into feedly as a possible solution.

Perhaps there is already a feed reader that does this? Yacktrack is interesting but we're not likely to manually search for comments on many posts - probably just our own and a few that are the most interesting.

I already see an issue with using Yacktrack - it attributes quotes we share as though we wrote them. That is confusing and could potentially cause some major issues.

KathleenLD · 10 months ago

Don't have much to add, but I thought this was a really great point about comments and the way we consume blogs. I hope that comment feeds are incorporated into RSS feeds somehow!

GrowMap · 10 months ago

Thank you for highlighting the importance of this quote you pulled from my post. Many times the content of the discussions posts start far exceeds the value of the original post. I often add the best comments I read as additional comments under posts I share at FriendFeed. I do that partly to highlight insights and partly to encourage those who are interested to click through and read more.

Given the enormous number of blogs many of us read we will probably have to be content with regularly visiting a core group of blogs we most enjoy and dropping into others when the topic is of particular interest.

Internet Strategist · 10 months ago

@Rob Diana I found it very interesting that this post is on two blogs yet all the comments ended up on LouisGray. I suspect that is because of the comment link showing multiple comments while there were none at guildfa.net. I couldn't resist adding one there just to see if you were intentionally sending them over to LouisGray or they were all made over there. Is it necessary to manually compensate for the duplicate content issue? If so, how?

Rob Diana · 10 months ago

The post should only be on LouisGray.com. I was not aware of a guildfa.net. That site also looks like it is scraping content from various sites.

Richard Bradshaw · 10 months ago

I'm reading this in Feedly from your RSS, then commenting using it as well. I guess less sophisticated readers have this problem, but newer ones more than make up for that.