It’s a surprise to me that with all this export and re-feeding of comments, there isn’t a infinite loop of comments moving from one service to another and causing the Internet to break down with all the traffic!

And Allen, though the bulk of internet users don’t care about realtime, this is likely because they don’t know to yet. The same arguement could have been made about the internet in general in the 90s – the bulk of the population didn’t give a crap about the internet then. But now they realize how much they depend on it. Don’t you think that realtime will be the same?

FriendFeed has mechanisms to deal with noisy services like Twitter & Disqus: You can hide them. I do agree that they could do a better job at grouping similar content though.

As for your article title, what did this have to do with “real-time”? And what does it have to do with Facebook?

they could do so much better with them

I think realtime has just replaced web20 in buzz word and maybe we stopped off at social media on the way :p

We all love Facebook, because it does it all in one place and it does it well. It may not support all services FriendFeed does, but it supports the major ones.

The problem you mention with re-posting I personally call “echoes”. Until there’s meta data associated to each activity item (for example, a GUID URL), echoes will continue to add noise and make our lives more and more miserable.

Friendfeed will most likely play second fiddle to Twitter and Facebook unless, like you said, they can find solutions that will allow them to go mainstream.

But would you really like Kutcher to be on Friendfeed?

P.S. Should I just comment here or should I copy/paste to Friendfeed?

I also agree that it feels like we have taken one step forwards and three steps back…but over time I am sure we will get there.

I do think that some of the commenting services are working hard to solve this problem, but its a tough one to solve.

Not only do we need to integrate the blog with twitter, and aggregate all the comments on FriendFeed, but the comments you might get on it in Facebook are just left in isolation.

And the real losers in this process: The non-early adopters – The non-power-users. People who don’t understnad the way the data flow is working, and thus don’t see the flow of the disjointed discussion. They’re not just confused, but they’ wind up confusing other participants in the discussion because they aren’t up to speed with the few of us who are.

The other losers in the process are the people who depend on and need the discssion, blogwriters like yourself.

Back to the plugin boards to see about more solutions!