It’s not people telling me what to do; it was the realization that there were tons of people talking about my writing and I had no idea what they were saying, nor could I respond. Loic Lemeur pointed out yesterday that while he rarely gets 30 comments on a blog post, he nearly always gets at least that many in FriendFeed.

I don’t like it. I don’t understand why it makes more sense to people to click out of FF to a blog, read a post, then click back to leave a comment. It’s a huge time suck. But from a marketing standpoint, how can you afford to ignore it? I don’t feel that I can.

As for the “try” part of what I said, let me clarify. If my comment is directed to the author or is about the original topic of the blog post, my comment goes on the blog. No question. Where it doesn’t happen is when the FF conversation forks and I’m replying to someone else in the thread and it would make no sense to also copy that reply on the blog. I am still an author, first and foremost.

And actually, no, FF doesn’t make it easy to reply on FF. You know how long-winded I can get in comments, and FF limits the characters. ;)

My feelings, unlike some of the others (Duncan Riley) who have talked about their dislike of FF, have not changed. I don’t like it. Believe me, everyone there knows that I don’t like it. But just as I’ve been dragged into Twitter, I also feel that I can’t afford to NOT use FF.

It “pulls” data from all these other services, so why can’t it “push” comments back out? Sure, there’s captchas, logins, etc. to deal with, but a lot of that can likely be intelligently dealt with, for at least 90% of standard cases (there will be outliers, like blogs that don’t accept comments at all, which FriendFeed can still serve as a message board for).

A second thing is the different forms of commenting. There are pithy comments on the content itself, lightweight agree/disagree sentiments and meta-comments. The first two are what people leave on blogs. And that won’t stop. Meta-comments are those that are less directly about the content itself. They may reflect on a general meme, of which the blog post is a part. They may be comments to other people who have commented on the link in FriendFeed. They may be comments about the blogger, which probably aren’t appropriate to be directly on the blog.

Should those conversations be restricted? Who is the person in charge of conversations on the Web?

Let people be themselves, let them comment where they want and with whom they want.

BTW – my simple solution for the dispersed comments on FriendFeed is to search for a blog post title. Frankly, it’s pretty neat to see different tribes talking about something.

FF makes it easy to comment on FF right? Thats why you said, "I try" instead of "I always do".

Great Piece…could not agree with you more.

-Jitendra

People will use it until the next thing comes along and then that new site will be really cool but fatally flawed, until the next site comes along…

Comments on FriendFeed mean something’s getting attention. And in order to comment, people will want to read the post. They’ll click on the FriendFeed link to a blog. They read it and may (i) comment on the blog; or (ii) comment on FriendFeed. Either way, the blogger just got exposure.

As a user, I really am enjoying the trusted referrals of FriendFeed. Human filtering via my social network. And the experience of commenting and ‘Liking’ is very easy. So I’d say it also benefits the user.

That’s one person’s view on it.

"wave of innovation and excitement"?  that’s a good one :)