Stay N' Alive - Latest Comments in FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

Johan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:28:40 -0000

Concerning the community communication collaboration [ccc] methodology:

I created a room for all the Simon's Town issues (pulling in news feeds, related twitter account feeds, blogs, etc). It's clear from this post that we don't need to use twitter anymore.

All I have to do is get the community to register with Friend Feed and and get them to join the room.

They then need to download http://www.twhirl.com and add their remote key https://friendfeed.com/account/api .

When they have Twhirl open on their desktops they can go and click on the # to select the room. Here they can comment and read all the related news.

The question:

How do I add their Simon's Town related news and questions to the Simon's Town room? This is what I did for one user: I added the rss feed of the user to the room. But this implied that I knew the user. What if a Simon's Town community member join without notifying me? I suppose the best is to define searches to identify related news and then invite them to join the room.

BTW: There is one reason why I would suggest people with critical info to share use Twitter; they can sms their news wherever they are. (I cannot see a way to do this easily for people who never venture further than email).

The next step is to train 10-20 to get the CCC ball rolling. Thanks

Johan

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

jessestay — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:16:38 -0000

Johan, where is your village? You may want to try http://fftogo.com
if you have a slow connection - you may be able to get it up faster
that way, although you won't get all the functionality of FriendFeed.
Let me know how your efforts to get them to join FriendFeed goes.

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

Johan — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:53:53 -0000

This is a great post on how to use friendfeed. I am trying to use twitter and friendfeed to get my village community to share info in the *public* but it's slow...very slow. Goodness. I never knew about twhirl and what they can do. I like what I see. Here is my attempt at getting them to join. http://friendfeed.com/e/52ecb789-1533-498d-2e69...

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

jessestay — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:15:05 -0000

You choose - I'll see it either way. If you're on Friendfeed and like to
comment there, comment via friendfeed - I do really like comments on
FriendFeed because IMO at it's current stage it's more social and viral.
However, Disqus isn't so bad either and soon will integrate right with
FriendFeed, so I hear. I'm toying with both for now and we'll see which one
makes more sense in the long run.

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

rpetty — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:06:40 -0000

Jesse, great post. Do your readers get confused over whether to post a comment via Disqus or FriendFeed on your blog? Where do you prefer the comments?

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

jessestay — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:07:08 -0000

chacha102 messaging is clearly something FriendFeed hasn't worked out yet
(and who knows - maybe they won't!). SMS has been one of my issues too, and
IMO that's one of the reasons Twitter is still around. Thus far, maybe only
Jaiku is the only service that supports SMS for messaging in competition
with Twitter.

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

chacha102 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:59:27 -0000

Another Idea, I don't think there is going to be much of a way, except for smartphones with internet readily available, to implement receiving SMS from Friendfeed. Most of FF is focused on links, websites, and media that can't be sent via SMS. So I don't think they are really going to try to get an SMS feature if they don't head into the messaging field.

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

chacha102 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:59:06 -0000

I think the main point of the twitter @reply features is to beable to
point to a user, allow that user to see your post, and show that user
that you are talking about them along with acctually replying to the
post. Although I do agree with your point that today when I got replies
back, I couldn't figure out who sent a reply to what, which creates a
confusing atmosphere. Threaded replies I think would definatly make the
conversation easier, but then it would require reworking the Tweeting
system in a way that would allow for it

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

ontarioemperor — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:49:38 -0000

I would, but I don't have the talent. My only professional programming experience is in HyperTalk.

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

ontarioemperor — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:48:36 -0000

Good point. However, Twitter @reply conversations work best when you and your followers don't tweet that much. If you're a heavy Twitter user with 10 tweets an hour, replies are hard to follow. Let's say that I tweet Jesse at 8:00, then issue 10 more tweets until Jesse replies to me. Because Twitter doesn't have threading, it's not programmatically possible to tell the specific tweet to which Jesse was replying. (Things get even more complex if I send two tweets to Jesse, and he replies to the second one first).

The reason? Twitter wasn't built for replies. In the beginning, Twitter assumed the "what are you doing?" model of one way conversations, and as the users started to send two-way messages, replies were added at a high level. However, the underlying architecture doesn't support threading, so you have all of these messages floating around which are difficult to link up under certain conditions.

(Of course, this assumes that replies are even working at any one time. Lately, replies have been turned off at times to mitigate load issues.)

If, for whatever reason, FriendFeed chose to support public or private messaging between users, and supported linking between these messages and their replies, then one of Twitter's main advantages would disappear. Right now it doesn't make business sense for FriendFeed to support this, but it enough customers demand it, FriendFeed will do it whether it wants to or not. That could harm Twitter, Jaiku, and the others.

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

jessestay — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:43:10 -0000

Ontario, FF2Go is open source now, too - be sure to contribute back if you
have the opportunity!

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

jessestay — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:42:09 -0000

chacha102 you're right on that one. Currently there is no messaging
capabilities in FriendFeed. You can't send direct or public messages to any
individuals, at least not very easily. There are still features that
FriendFeed lacks, I agree.

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

ontarioemperor — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:38:40 -0000

Thanks for the mail2ff tip, which I just successfully tested.

Of all of the applications that you named, the one that I use most often is Benjamin Golub's fftogo, which is absolutely wonderful.

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

screwTheMan — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:46:19 -0000

Great compilation! I also made a graphic of how I'm currently interacting with Twitter as I ween myself off of it: http://www.screwtheman.com

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

chacha102 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:36:12 -0000

Yes, you might be able to consolidate all of your status updates into
FriendFeed if there was a SMS feature, but another big feature of
Twitter is the @reply function that allow for conversation (anyone on
Twitter, whether you follow them or not, can start a conversation simply
by directing a message at you). And at its current state, FriendFeed
doesn't really support that, and I don't really think its going to for
awhile untill it finishes everything it wants to accomplish in the
sharing field

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

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Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

jessestay — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:28:06 -0000

I agree with most of your points chacha102. However, the point I'm getting
at there is that FriendFeed has the *potential* to compete with Twitter via
it's "share" functionality. FriendFeed in many ways is trying to become the
Google of the Social world, which I don't believe involves just search.
They breach competition in multiple areas and have the potential to continue
doing that and entering in more and more on services like Twitter's
territory, where they will eventually no longer be able to compete in the
future. I think if FriendFeed were to simply implement SMS for just the
"share" functionality, there would be no need to use Twitter any more as I
could then consolidate my status updates into one service instead of many.

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

jessestay — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:28:05 -0000

I look forward to seeing your posts there Joseph!

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

chacha102 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:16:56 -0000

I completely agree with a lot of what you are saying .. but in perticular, "but it just can’t replace Twitter until you start using it." is kinda the sentence I'd like to comment on. The fact is, FriendFeed is, and has been, and probably will be unless major work is done, a news aggregator and commenting system. There is no way, no matter how you use it, that it can replace all the things Twitter does. And why should it? One of the reasons FriendFeed is great is because it gathers all of your information into a single feed, and this feed is comprised of all of your Feeds from different places. Louis Gray Posted : "Twitter is just a topping of FriendFeed's pizza. Not everyone agrees on toppings.". Like she said, Twitter is a website to use on top of Friendfeed and in conjunction with it. Twitter is a Status Microblog, you post your current status to it, hence the "What are you doing?" phrase at the top of the update box. FriendFeed simply allows you to share things easily, comment on those items, and carry on a conversation. It doesn't matter what site you use to create the items. You can stop using Twitter, and start using FriendFeed, but you can't move over. They are very different sites.

Re: FriendFeed: A Guide for Twitter Users

Joseph McLaughlin — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:16:29 -0000

Awesome post Jesse! You've inspired me to try it out!