The other day I wrote up a post about an interesting new service called FF2Disqus which was intended to let bloggers pull in FriendFeed comments about a post in to their Disqus comments on their blog (as log as they use Disqus that is). In turn it was also meant to let Disqus comments be pulled into FriendFeed in the correct place under the post announcement in FriendFeed.
Confused?
Ya it’s easy to get that way; and really the only ones that will care about that explanation are the bloggers who use both FriendFeed and Disqus. For the rest of you the simple explanation is that your comments on posts show up on both the blog and FriendFeed regardless of where you made them. Except for one thing – it didn’t work. In fact it created what many people using FriendFeed were afraid would happen – a looping of comments.
Now I explained in my original post why I thought it was a good idea because in plain truth the current implementation of importing Disqus comments into FriendFeed – suck. One of the biggest argument points that both bloggers and the more avid blog readers had in ‘08 were that conversations over blog posts had become scattered and fragmented. When it came to importing Disqus comments into FriendFeed the idea was noble but it in my opinion only adds to this feeling.
Currently when a blog gets announced on FriendFeed by being imported only the headline appears under which you can see any comments made on FriendFeed. However when comments get made on the blog those comments are imported into FriendFeed as separate and distinct items .. each and every comment is a separate item. There is no sense of where the hell those comments belong. Sure you can click through to the original blog post but that’s just an additional pain in the ass.
Instead what should happen in my opinion is that comments made to a post that is also displayed on FriendFeed should appear under that FriendFeed post entry. After all it is a comment on the post; not a stand alone subject. The way it is done currently is more of an irritation to both the readers and the authors.
This was the thing that FF2Disqus had hoped to fix but as it turns out this was yet again another service that was released before it was ready. As well this is a problem that didn’t need a third party solution in the first place. This is something that both the developers of Disqus and FriendFeed should have realized and figured out a way to make it work right.
The way it is right now this setup isn’t doing a single thing to help further a coherent conversation thread. Unfortunately though this isn’t something exclusive to FriendFeed or Disqus either.
It seems that no matter how we talk about the importance of the conversation everything we do spreads it farther afield. We seem to be more interested in the tools that we can build around an originating service than we are in making existing services talk together better.
With Twitter for example - it’s a fist full of services that try and do Twitter one better because Twitter doesn’t want to do it themselves. So users are left having to spread themselves over multiple services just to get what the originating service should be supplying in the first place. Don’t bother giving me that the community will build it crap either.
Saying that only shows how myopic we are in assuming the little community of developers is a stand in for the millions of people who couldn’t give a shit about a developer community. They just want to be able to use the services the way they should be used. Millions of users are not developers and they shouldn’t be expected to have to use a half dozen auxiliary piece of web code to be able to experience the full extend of what a service can do.
Building service additions to things like Twitter and FriendFeed or apps and widgets for things like Facebook might be fun in the beginning – especially for the small developer crowd typically drawn to new services but at some point they should become integral not auxiliary. At some point in a services life when the tools needed to use it to the service’s fullest become more of a necessity the millions of users you are going to need to survive are going to say forget it.
And really I wouldn’t blame them one bit.
Similar Posts:
- A better Disqus integration with FriendFeed
- Disqus Has A Public API - Now What?
- A slight change in the Comments system
- An interview with Daniel Ha from Disqus
- Attention Bloggers - FriendFeed is your new nerve center
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