This could turn into something of epidemic proportions and is not the first barren period they have had to face, as evident by the supporting data from Feedburner.

The red lines signify days that Friendfeed hasn’t been collecting my RSS feed. There could be other days that they haven’t collected other feeds as a fair amount of my online activity should be appearing in Friendfeed.

The problem isn’t even just with Friendfeed which historically has been pretty reliable – I have seen this happen at times with Facebook as well with imported notes from my RSS feed often appearing days after a blog post is first published.

On Friendfeed I have 2856 “subscribers” – of those I regard maybe only 56 as being active humans using the service.

This also isn’t an isolated case.

As an example we have a user reporting an issue twice on the Feedburner Google Group… as you might expect without any answer.

For once this probably isn’t anything to do with Feedburner… it is almost certainly Friendfeed.. or now parent company Facebook not collecting content, and thus at the same time not preporting subscription numbers.

Facebook doesn’t report subscriber numbers that I am aware of, but that may be dependent on how you add RSS content to your profile or pages.

If this is a sign of a final death knell for Friendfeed, and with Bloglines already disappearing at the end of this month, very soon 80% of feed subscribers (of those actually reported) will be in Google Reader for this blog.
When Friendfeed was added to Feedburner reporting, it wasn’t universally accepted but in some ways it did reflect a swing in attention.
The direction of that swing is very much towards Twitter and Facebook now.

Google Buzz doesn’t seem to be aggregated into the Feedburner numbers yet.

Why Do Zombies Eat Brains? (Return of the Living Dead – probably NSFW)

Update: Within a few hours of this being posted, Friendfeed was suddenly up to date – I don’t know whether they missed anything.

Friendfeed Now Counted In Feedburner

It can make quite a striking difference with Feedburner if you have a few followers there.

But even this doesn’t really account for the shifting sands in online attention.

The latter half of this post was originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

Since then Twitter has for many people emerged as the primary way they read RSS feeds, combined with various forms of lifestreaming.

The first time I see tweets and blog posts often is also on services such as Blogcatalog’s dashboard or even Mybloglog (though that can sometimes lag a little on updates these days)

Current Calculation Problems

• Blogcatalog & Mybloglog numbers are just as relevant as Friendfeed
• Twitter numbers are probably more relevant than any Lifestreaming service
• Facebook subscribers are still not counted
• Aweber & Feedblitz, along with Feedburners own RSS to Email service are included, but they are the only ones I know about. Where is the Getresponse support Simon? Infusionsoft should really offer something as well, though they don’t offer RSS to email – I am not sure about Mailchimp

The onus really is on the developers of these other platforms to report numbers to Feedburner, but I have no idea how that can be managed with Facebook and Twitter.

With both Facebook and Twitter there are 2 significant problems

• The data doesn’t always come from an RSS feed – individual Facebook apps programmers use various methods to pull data, and often Facebook items come from other sources. The source on Twitter could be any one of the many RSS to Twitter services, but equally could be a WordPress plugin.
• Items get shared – shared items in Google reader have often affected Feedburner data in the past, how does this work with retweets?

It is good to see services like Postrank now feature within Feedburner stats, as they provide various ways to filter RSS content on multiple topics, and then include only the best items for you to read.
(Niche marketers will probably find a way to make best use of that)

Note: I do have specific strategic reasons why I don’t currently display any RSS subscription options, or even an email subscription box.
This post used to have lots of comments, but Disqus hasn’t managed to sync them after 2 days.

It is amazing how long it takes for things to catch up, the following was written over 15 months ago, and the numbers are really still totally inaccurate

Originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

I have been digging around in my Feedburner stats to see how various social streaming and life streaming applications I use are reporting data to Feedburner.

Friendfeed

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feedreader & Aggregator
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FriendFeedBot/0.1; +http://friendfeed.com/about/bot)

5 subscribers

Blogcatalog

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Bot
Blogcatalog bot

1 hit

MyBlogLog

I am not sure which Yahoo service they are reporting as, so I am listing a few possibilities

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feed Readers and Aggregators
My Yahoo
A web-based newsreader that allows you to select and manage RSS headlines within a My Yahoo! account.
42 subscribers

There is also Yahoo! Slurp and Yahoo Test Bot – both listed as bots

Is Lifestreaming Subscribing?

Here are some reasons Lifestreaming should count as a subscription

• Personal – with most applications views can be attributed to individual users
• Selected – unlike meme trackers, someone has made a specific choice to read your content
• Trackable – if necessary it would be possible to identify only active users
• Traffic – traffic from lifestreaming is quite visible, though it is hard to determine if it comes from a RSS subscription link, or when someone tweets about you, or maybe from being Stumbled or dugg
• Email – Friendfeed sends subscriptions by email too – does that make it 2 subscriptions?
• Active – people are actually using these services more and more, and subscription data would thus be a useful representation

There are some aspects I am not sure should be counted, but are probably more valuable data than from many feedreaders

• Profile views – MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Friendfeed all allow visitors to view content before deciding to subscribe to it in some way – whist no long term commitment is made, a lot of this activity can be attributed to individual unique users, thus could be counted as a subscriber in some way.
• Shared Social Media Links – as mentioned before, when links to your site appear having been dugg, stumbled or shared in Google Reader – whilst this can result in traffic, it might not be something that can be counted as it is not necessarily related to the RSS feed, but to the permalink.
• MyBlogLog Topics – this is based upon their tagging system (I have wanted it to link to content for ages – make sure you update and cleanup your tags) – I don’t think it would be appropriate for this data to end up in RSS subscription stats
• BlogCatalog Social Search – also recently introduced and whilst it doesn’t have RSS yet (nudge Daniel) I can see this happening in the future – again this is a search much like you would have on Technorati or Google Blogsearch

RSS Bankruptcy

Depending on how you use these sites, they can add or subtract to the total information overload you are subjecting yourself to. I am not sure whether my own usage patterns are typical, but I find I am using Social and lifestreaming more than RSS Readers.

I have 1000s of unread items in my RSS readers, though on a lifestreaming service I am not reading every item either.

If the conversation is moving away from blogs there needs to be a way to measure it, track it and possibly respond to it.

I still am not sure how to react to the new item sharing feature introduced today on Blogcatalog, where someone can share items to people following them on the Dashboard, and to their Shared widget, and leave a comment.
When I first heard that this was going to be coming just a few days ago, I immediately thought that I would be vocally against it, but it is like a Stumbleupon review or a Delicious bookmark – it is not trying to start a new conversation, just tell someone why you are sharing the link.

The problem is that people will only share content using a certain number of different methods. Isn’t it best to use the one that is most likely to be seen across multiple networks?

Disclaimer: I consult a little with Blogcatalog

Update

After a little exploring it appears Friendfeed posted about this earlier on their blog and there is further coverage on Louis Gray

I am just going to revert to bullets to make this easier to digest.

• Slapping a charge on your biggest fans is financial suicide – if someone has been evangelising your product for 2 years, and using their influence to build your business, it would be extremely foolish to damage that relationship.
• Om Malik is touting bandwidth costs possibly up to 30GB from Robert Scoble – hosting companies… even free blog hosts such as WordPress.com give that kind of bandwidth away these days.
• People choose to follow you, and you have no control of who they are – with something like email marketing you always have an option to prune your list if the costs are not bringing a return – not so with Twitter
• Even if Twitter levied $0.01 per person followed per month, with the first 50 free, they still would have problems coping with highly followed users such as Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Jason Calacanis – it would have to be how many you followed, not how many follow you
• With Email marketing, one of the biggest problems is how fast you have to deliver messages – delivering to a mailing list of 100 within an hour is no problem even for a shared host, but to deliver to a mailing list of 500,000, within an hour is a major scaling task. With Twitter, people want their messages within minutes or seconds…
• Twitter as it stands isn’t really suitable for the business use it seems most of the heavy users are using it for. Whilst you could argue it is opt-in, there is no method of clear disclosure – if an email marketer was blasting out commercial messages to an opt-in list without commercial disclosure and his full contact details, he is asking for a legal nightmare.
• Only a small fraction of messages sent ever reach all potential destinations
• Twitter doesn’t provide statistics of delivery rates – I have over 1500 followers, but if I tweet a post a couple of times it is unlikely I will see more than 20 or 30 visitors in my stats – I could improve tracking, use tracking URLs which block bots etc to get a real number, but it would need to be intrinsic to the service to be of value.

As you would expect, Robert has plenty of discussion – I don’t think it is quite the IO Hell that Dare Obasanjo suggests – as an example I only switch on Twhirl for 1 or 2 hours per day.

You don’t see people moaning on Techmeme about Skype, when you suddenly get a batch of messages from 2 days earlier that were posted to a group.

Friendfeed has the benefit of hindsight, the demand and problems Twitter faces were apparent before FriendFeed was conceived, and Friendfeed really meets a different purpose.

Just remember one of the other pet topics on Techmeme, slow delivery of email messages with Gmail, or slow Google Reader updates, even with resources far beyond the reach of a startup.

As for a viable business model… Twitter have my email address, they should use it, possibly to promote other startups for a small amount of cash or equity. I can easily stand a Twitter email once a week with updates on new features, other Twitter news, and a mention of a few 3rd party services.

“feel free to invite others to this room – as long as they are bloggers and/or are interested in the ProBlogger type topic I’m happy for anyone and everyone to join. I’ve invited all my contacts on FF. Pity there’s no list of public groups for people to join.”

Whilst there isn’t a public list, in many ways Google with a site search query these days provides a very real alternative.

Here is the query I used:-

http://www.google.com/search?q=%3Asite%3Afriendfeed.com+inurl%3Afriendfeed.com%2Frooms%2F&pws=0&gl=US&num=100

Here is a clickable search link for Friendfeed Rooms in Google

You can always add an extra keyword term to the search to find rooms related to specific niche’s or maybe rooms where specific people have interacted.

In other Friendfeed news, it seems Steve Gilmor doesn’t like Friendfeed much, and I love this line:-

Nowhere in this debate (most of it mercifully hidden forever behind the FriendFeed black hole where conversations go to die)

this seems to be the weekend bitchmeme so I thought I would at least add something useful.

Don’t forget to:-

1. Sign up and use Twitter
2. Sign up and use Friendfeed
3. Add both to Technorati
4. Ping both
5. Ping your friends

Interesting charts

True Rumours (rumors)

Update

It looks like Technorati have currently hit the Friendfeed aspect of this with a nerf bat – this means that any comments on Friendfeed are now going into a Technorati black hole. It was working late last week when I first drafted this post and discussed it with a few friends on Skype.

One of the most important factors would almost certainly be the comments.

What is one of the primary reasons people click through from an RSS feed to actually visit a blog?

Almost certainly it is either to read comments others have made, or to make one of their own. It is not to view advertising… at least for most.

How would a machine, such as Google differentiate between original source and whether a piece of content is valuable to include in its search index?

Factors could include:-

• The content within comments – keywords, language structure, length etc
• The number of comments
• Update frequency of the page (gaining additional comments over time)

Sure there are other factors, such as links

People link to comments on blogs, typically using a #fragment – the link is going to the blog permalink page

How many times have you found the answer to a question by reading a blog comment?

For me it is actually quite frequently – comments quite often provide alternatives to the original content that offer improvements.

A large part of blogging is engaging your audience in conversation

Business blogging is about engaging your customers

It hasn’t happened yet, but soon a blog might become no more than an RSS feed that is read on another domain, and discussed in small communities of friends, sometimes private, sometimes public, but still fragmented conversation.

Sharing In Google Reader

I have probably been the most vocal in my dislike of Google Reader sharing.

Google reader is one of the most effective tools for creating splogs
RSS Readers should provide publishers with a choice as to whether their content can be easily shared further than the original subscriber.
Bloglines have discussed and implemented access control, and Facebook even uses it

Fragmented Comments

I totally understand Paul from Friendfeed in his analogy with films, that he wants to discuss a film with his friends, and that YouTube isn’t exactly the epitomy of stimulating conversation.

But the intent of a movie or YouTube isn’t to stimulate dialogue at the venue, otherwise they would improve the venues. In fact YouTube was purposely designed with viral intention, for the content to be syndicated and for conversations to happen elsewhere. With the YouTube API, Google wants to hand off being the publisher (and their legal problems) in return for advertising $.

Many bloggers on the other hand blog to stimulate conversation on their own blogs, to generate page views, and maybe make a little money from advertising or services.

Engtech @ Internet Duct Tape

As a content producer it’s really nice to see discussions happening around the content I’ve created.

But at least I know how people are reacting… with the explosion of social media / social networking I have no idea what people are saying unless I’m actively a member of those communities.

As a content consumer it’s much more convenient to respond to content on the community where I found it from.

The fragmentation of discussion might be bad for the content producer, but it makes things so much easier for the content consumer. I know which way this trend is heading…

(A smart person would build a social network scraper to reimport the comments from there into their blogging engine software — if you know of any plugins like that then leave a comment)

Nico in a recent comment on my post “How To Add FriendFeed to Technorati”

Thanks for that information. I got everything running now.

I hope it gets me some fresh content in form of comments to my blog posts.

A very simple wish, but the chances of it happening are remote, especially for a foreign language blog unless FriendFeed becomes popular in Germany.

Warning Signals From September

Whilst the writing was on the wall before hand, especially in hindsight, when news leaked about a potential commenting system in Google Reader, there was a fair amount of controversy.

Whilst Google have since implemented the sharing of items with your gmail contacts automatically in Google Reader, nothing has appeared regarding activity streams and commenting.

Isn’t that odd?

The thing is, if Google implement this, there would be public outcry – it is not just bloggers publishing RSS feeds, but also major news corporations.

How convenient that Friendfeed was launched a few weeks later by a bunch of former Googlers

I don’t think there was any kind of conspiracy, as an example Paul Buchheit had been outside Google for over a year, and other founders were also working outside Google on new projects.

Previous relationships would however potentially make Friendfeed a very comfortable acquisition target after it had matured and the public opinion was appeased.

Add Comments to RSS or RSS to Comments?

First off, I expect someone to come out with some kind of Greasemonkey script very soon to work in Friendfeed, so that you can pull in items from the original site without leaving Friendfeed. I am amazed it hasn’t happened already, as there are already scripts for use with Google Reader.

Then think of Flickr – I have already seen this wish from Marshall Kirkpatrick on Twitter

wish FriendFeed added some AJAX, hover-over lightbox Flickr photo popu action

You could probably do that in Greasemonkey for the early adopters, but eventually add it to the main Friendfeed interface, and people would never have to visit Flickr to see full content pictures.

Alternatively it would also be easy to integrate Friendfeed comments into Google Reader

Disqus Too

FriendFeed are not the only possible solution in town – recently funded Disqus (and a number of others) for instance would make a great replacement for the ailing comment system on Blogger. Blogger commenting stinks.

At the same time why limit Disqus commenting to only blogs that have installed the javascript code? Wouldn’t it make sense to allow Disqus commenting for any blog or RSS content, whether they ran the code or not? People using Disqus would still see it, and possibly trackbacks could be sent to the blog that there is a dicussion just so the author is aware of it, and encouraged to join and maybe switch commenting.

RSS content could also be pulled into Disqus at a later date, it would enhance conversation to have it all tied together on one site… like it used to be, even if it is only as an iframe pulled from Google Reader (why show annoying advertising)

Smart Business… Maybe

Fred Wilson actually wrote a little about Friendfeed as well, I do agree with him on this specific statement

So now, in addition to this blog, my tumblog, and twitter, I have to pay attention to whats’ going on in FriendFeed. So it’s gone from being an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention. Good for them. That’s the way to play the game on the web.

Grabbing attention and content is smart business, but what happens when you have to monitor conversation on 20 or 30 different comment aggregating services, not all of which have an open API (of that I am confident at least some will provide)

Traffic, SEO and Accessibility

Disqus currently have some problems with this – it is javascript, a blog owner loses long tail traffic directly to their blog.
It also poses usability problems for people using non-javascript browsers. They don’t even get to even see that comments exist somewhere – that is likely a legal issue in lots of Europe.

There are benefits – serving comments is a database hit, and a comment being updated changes the cache or part of the cache serving the blog post – comments should really be served as an embed or in an Iframe, with javascript enhancing the content, not serving it.

In general, comment systems are fairly prehistoric, and could actually bring in more traffic. Rather than being extra content to an original article, they could each be treated like a twitter tweet, and then served on a page with its own title, that is also used as anchor text linking to the comment on a permalink page. That would turn a blog post with 50 comments into 51 pages of unique content – some would be a little weak on content, but others would be substantial.

This isn’t new, it would be just like old threaded forum scripts.

If data was stored with timestamps in XML, then it would be easy to integrate it and possibly cross-pollinate the conversation, but would commenters always want an author to know about their conversation?
Thus you would need various privacy settings and discussion groups.

The Race To Kill Blogging

I don’t think in this scenario blogging would really exist – you would have original content producers, but there wouldn’t really be a need for the blog platform. A blog post would purely be the starting point in a distributed conversation thread which would contain other blog posts, or just simple comments – it is just another node in the conversation.

Back to CompuServe, Prodigy, Usenet, FidoNet, CIX and AOL

Fragmented discussions are nothing new – once the fragments are joined back together, it is a bit like a timewarp or things going full circle 20 years.

Actually 20 years ago was so much easier. I was on CIX – you could use an offline reader and “blink” to download your threaded discussion messages – a much more efficient workflow and very little if any advertising or spam.

Sure you would present the data differently – in those days my Commodore Amiga with 4MB of memory was a beast, these days that could be taken up by a single webpage.

Do you really want to go “Back To The Future”?

I have been using Twitter a little more than normal over the last week, maybe it will last. During that time I have been looking at the reliability of consuming Twitter content via various tools (no I haven’t tested everything).

Last night was actually a very good opportunity to do some data analysis, because Robert was very active on Twitter, with lots of updates in a very short period of time.

Could you follow the conversation on every platform?

Twitter Web Interface

The first interface I tested was the Twitter web interface.

I grabbed a screenshot of Robert’s twitter updates, and then went to my friends feed on Twitter to compare how many of Robert’s tweets actually made it to my Twitter Web page, to allow me to follow the conversation.

What I have done is highlighted in yellow the tweets that didn’t make it though to my feed.

4 out of 20 messages made it through to my Twitter home page “with friends”

20% Deliverability = Fail

FriendFeed

This is a slightly different situation to the main Twitter web interface, because of the clumping I previous objected to. They only pull some of the updates.

When you click on that huge lump of tweets you get something like this

I have used numbers to represent the order that the tweets were actually written, and you can see that they appear out of order on FriendFeed.
When grabbing the tweets in the clump, Friendfeed is able to make a specific call to retrieve Robert’s tweets for that time segment using the Twitter API, thus all the tweets appear.

To follow people who don’t tweet very often and to be sure that you see every one of their tweets, Friendfeed might actually be a better interface for twitter than twitter itself, if it wasn’t for the clumping of high activity.

If Twitter continue to only deliver 20% of tweets to other interfaces, it makes more sense to use Friendfeed, but reading them out of order, you might as well click through to Robert’s timeline on Twitter.

Tweets in clumps out of order = fail

Twhirl

I have been testing out Twhirl for a while, and used the same data to see what is picked up.

I haven’t used the same screenshot as for the web interface, and the data was compiled from my Twhirl history probably 3 hours later than the first screenshot.
You will see that Twirl again only has 4 out of 20 tweets

note: I only have Twhirl pulling in data 40 times per hour – as it is only pulling data that is the same as on the web interface, this isn’t an issue.

20% Deliverability = Fail

20% Delivery = Low Traffic

If you were using an email marketing solution, and it offered only a 20% chance of the message being delivered to your prospects’ email box, without allowing for open and CTR, it would be a major business liability.

What is the point of having 10,000+ Twitter followers if your messages are only going to be delivered to 20% of them?

In addition there is the problem that only a small percentage continue to use Twitter – heavy attrition.

Direct messages seem to be a lot more reliable, and I haven’t got the patience to manually determine if this deliverability affects people with less than 100 followers.

Twitter is not reliable, they just throttle the amount of updates you see

Update

A number of people have raised one issue with this post, the use of @

What is being filtered from what you receive are @ messages to people you are not following, but this isn’t a universal rule.

As an example, here is a tweet from Rob, Former Fat Guy to Chris Pirillo

I don’t follow Chris, maybe I should… but then I am only following just over 300 of the people who are following me – there are others I am not following, I am slowly increasing the people I follow, but priority is regular readers and commenters – my core audience.

For me seeing @ messages to people I might not be following is extremely important, as it plays a vital role in discovery of other friends using Twitter.

People use the @ reply mechanism to ensure that people who would be most interested in the tweet see it, not just as a reply in conversation.
They are not aware that by using @ they are also preventing, or reducing the number of other people the message will be sent to.

Just imagine Robert discovered through his Microsoft contacts that a Yahoo deal was finally on the table. Rather than use a normal tweet, he uses @techcrunch to make sure Michael Arrington sees it.
That would then potentially limit who sees that message to those following both Robert and Michael, plus an arbitrary number of additional random people who are just following Robert, or maybe none if there is some kind of threshold based on the number of people following both.

Go to your account on Technorati, and use the URL for your personal lifestream on FriendFeed to start the claim process.

http://friendfeed.com/andybeard

What you now need to do is be able to get a typical Technorati claim code to appear within your feed on FriendFeed

<a href="http://technorati.com/people/technorati/AndyBeard" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>

The 2 easy ways to do this are:-

• Twitter the code – it is short enough so that the URL doesn’t get changed to a TinyURL
• Leave the code as a comment within FriendFeed

There are other possibilities such as including it as a description in Delicious, as that appears as comments to a link, and in the near future the same may be true of Stumbleupon – I haven’t tried with other bookmarking tools.

Why Add FriendFeed

• It is a feed and you own it – it is one way for other people to discover it
• It might provide some links either for you or the content you share in various services, through other 3rd party aggregators
• It might contain some totally original content in the form of comments
• If you want comments to get indexed on Technorati, one way they might determine spam is whether a feed is registered
• Technorati have one of the best implementations of microformats, that can be used by the Google Social Graph API, and that ignores nofollow, thus it could be looked on as important to link your profiles together both for discovery, and possibly for any ranking benefit in the future.

I have done the same with things like my Twitter, coComment, Clipmarks, Gooruze and Stumbleupon accounts – I have a few more I should probably claim as well.

FriendFeed OPML & FOAF

Revealed earlier tonight was how to get and OPML list of services and a FOAF list of people associated with a FriendFeed account.

This my services would be:-

http://friendfeed.com/andybeard?output=opml

My Friends on FeedFriend would be

http://friendfeed.com/andybeard/subscriptions?output=foaf

If you plug those into some recursive PHP, you can extract some fairly useful data even without an API

There are lots of posts about how wonderful it is, or pointless but very few delving into some of the flaws or missing features. I know they have support and feedback on Google Groups… but I hate Google Groups, and the feedback from the groups isn’t necessarily making it out into the blogosphere.

I am going to keep this a little shorter than normal, I am working with Blogcatalog who have a couple of competing features (their dashboard and activity widget) thus it wouldn’t be fair to delve into this too much.

• It seems to take forever for FriendFeed to update StumbleUpon (8+ hrs) – that is forever in Social Bookmarking and news
• Stumbleupon reviews are not included with the listings, though for some reason Delicious bookmark descriptions are imported as comments
• Whilst the friend suggestion interface is great, reciprocating 40+ friendships of people who have just joined is just an impossible task – I need to see who hasn’t been friended yet, and some nice Ajax to reduce page loads to a minimum (Mixx has this similar terrible problem)
• How many people are actually following me? There doesn’t even seem to be an obvious total count.
• Not storing username and password just isn’t enough – I honestly hate any application that thinks it is ok to share Google account details – do you really want to give them access to your private email, Adsense and Adwords account? For ex-Googlers to think this is OK is extremely perplexing, or even worrying

However my biggest gripe with it, which some people seem to love is the way it takes away part of the conversation from the original source. Duncan highlighted this FriendFeed flaw very well today (warning strong language)

if I want to participate in a conversation about a blog post or similar content, I’ll leave a comment on that blog, not a third party app, because if someone writes something worthy of conversation, they should have first call on the conversation, unless of course the topic is one that requires a blog post in itself.

And going on to express this even stronger

Correct, I didn’t “like” anything because when I want to comment on an item, I’ll do it at the source, like the vast majority of people would. If it’s a Tweet I’ll reply on Twitter. If it’s a blog post, I’ll leave a comment. Why the f#$% would I want to use a third party service? Why the f#$% would I want to comment on a Tweet on FriendFeed? Or is it that I should just because he says so? Pass the bong…

I agree with Duncan

I am not sure how someone will achieve this, but what is needed if commenting is included in Lifestream services is a way to respond in the medium of choice or origin, and that includes responding to blog comments, but Lifestream applications are never going to be able to keep up with the speed of conversation on blogs, or Twitter.

You effectively create a comment echo chamber, and fragmented conversations often with people not even reading the original content.

For a content producer that causes major problems.

Fav.or.it may be the answer, in private beta -I generally don’t sign up for private betas in areas Blogcatalog could be potentially working on, even if I am not aware of it which is quite frequently.

Don’t Expect Me To Respond To Comments On FriendFeed

It might seem anti-social or against the ethos of social media, but as Brian Solis explained, my account on FriendFeed isn’t actually intended for me.

It’s not about you per se. It’s about those who enjoy following your activity online. And yes, there are many tools that do this, but at the end of the day, why not make it easier for people to connect with you using the tools that they’re most comfortable with.

New Social Neworks?

I haven’t looked at Social Thing yet, Read Write Web compares them both – honestly the only service that will get all my passwords is a desktop application, and even then it will be encrypted on my HD.

FriendFeed use a secure page (probably need account to view page) for providing your account data – they know it is sensitive – why would you share it with them?

Lumpy Porridge

When I was a kid I hated lumps in my porridge, I suppose that has never changed.

Whilst writing this post, FriendFeed finally caught up with my Stumbleupon submissions, but they are provided as “clumps” of posts and updates unless there has been specific FriendFeed activity on the item, such as a comment or someone “likes” and item.

I am aware that they are having difficulty with access restrictions to 1000s of feeds on the various services, and this will represent a scalability problem, especially with the new influx of users.

This occurs in every interface – online, Facebook, email daily broadcast, iGoogle – they are choosing what I should see at a glance

MyBlogLog API & Blogcatalog API & Social Graph API

When I visit any of these aggregation services, they don’t know who I am, and who my friends are. The best they can currently manage is to use Facebook, and in fact Facebook is currently the best way to add friends to FriendFeed.

MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog know who you are – using a combination of what you have defined within your profiles, and possibly using Google’s Social Graph API a lot more is possible, allowing you to collate friends from multiple services.

Note:Plaxo is meant to do something using the Social Graph API, so when creating an account I added my MyBlogLog Profile which provides tons of data, and to be honest with recursive use of the API it should be able to find a number of profiles, blogs etc.

Privacy advocates might think I am odd, but when I arrive at a new service, I just want it to have all my public data available, that can be reasonably obtained. I don’t want to have to provide private data such as passwords.

No one has quite got things right yet, more on Techmeme

I do benefit potentially from long term promotion of Blogcatalog and by giving their competitors equal coverage I also gain a benefit, because if for instance MyBlogLog becomes a massive success, the value of competitors as a viable business also increases.

Thus it is actually with a very heavy heart that I am going to write what might be my first ever critical review of MyBlogLog.

It is my hope the MBL guys take this as constructive criticism, which I haven’t honestly seen on any other blog over the last couple of days since the features were announced, other than what seemed to be a universal yawn.

What Is Wrong With The Activity Time Line?

MyBlogLog have so far added 42 services, and I am only looking at a few of them.

However based on a comment over at Brian Solis the LifeStream currently supports

- Bebo
- Deli.cio.us
- Digg
- Flickr
- Jumpcut
- Last.FM
- MyBlogLog
- Netflix
- Stumbleupon
- Twitter
- Yahoo Answers
- Yelp
- YouTube
- Upcoming

Here are some quick annotated notes in a quick screenshot

Now I wouldn’t be so harsh if I hadn’t already read this comment by Eric on the Techcrunch writeup

Sadly, this feature has been ready to launch since June of 07, when it would have been a pioneer instead of a follower. Regardless, I’m psyched that the rest of the team had the temerity to stick it out at Yahoo in the belief that they would get to start launching killer features.

If this has been ready for 8 months and just needed pushing out of the door, you would expect a few refinements.

I have seen a few comments on the Techcrunch article suggesting that there is a lack of control of what you see in the timeline, either for privacy or information overload.
It is true that Blogcatalog have this side of the feature set more refined, but at the same time I am not a great fan of micro-management, and it is not needed with the current maximum of 40 people you follow… possibly because not enough people have added their services yet.

Tags

The way MyBlogLog has tagging implemented has always bugged me – all tags on the site still lead only to people and communities that have been tagged manually in the MyBlogLog system, rather than using the tags supplied within content with rel=”tag” or categories.

Here is an example

Those tags from Matt’s delicious feed lead to MyBlogLog’s internal tagging system, not where you would expect… either Matt’s or the global tags on Delicious. Very annoying.
It is equally annoying when you click similar tags below RSS items and again you are not presented with content.

No Mentions of Blogcatalog

Here are some reports on the MyBlogLog new features, but they ignore Blogcatalog

ReadWriteWeb
Techcrunch
Mashable
Louis Grey
Cnet
Brian Solis (Brian I am disappointed)
Webomatica
Download Squad

Best of all, Read Write Web did a round up of 35 Life Streaming sites, and for some reason Blogcatalog didn’t make that list either.

I know everyone is talking about FriendFeed which has some useful viral ideas to encourage everyone to sign up, and their Facebook integration really kicks butt.
I have a problem with FriendFeed – it is trying to grab the conversation from the various services with an internal comment system. I am not sure that is healthy.

MyBlogLog have added some kind of blog comment monitoring system, that is a good idea and something I have nudged the Blogcatalog guys about a few weeks ago, but moving the comments to FriendFeed? I am not happy with that.

If you want to compare, here is the current list of “LifeStream Supported” services on Blogcatalog

Amazon Wishlist, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Myspace Blog, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, YouTube

I believe there are 15 others on the way soon.

There are some inherent problems with all of these platforms… information overload and lack of specific topical areas or niches. Once you go beyond your core friends, the noise increases.

I really want to throw a wide net for information retrieval, but I only want some of it.

Update

For those unaware of some of the features introduced by Blogcatalog over the last 6 months here are some links to relevant articles.

For the programming geeks, you might be interested in the BlogCatalog API which was introduced August 2007

If you are looking to differentiate between MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog, I wrote this article back on July 2007 and it covers many of the differences which are still true today.

More recently, Blogcatalog partnered with SezWho to enable a comprehensive comment feedback system. At that time they also surpassed MBL on Alexa, though as everyone knows Alexa stats are not the most accurate to go by, and the unique differences between the services create a different usage profile.

To compare social graph features, I would suggest my article from when Blogcatalog introduced their dashboard 2 weeks ago. Of particular interest for many are the very specific controls available to protect your privacy, or to control which information you receive from different people.

p.s. I don’t class the problems previously with the messaging system as a negative review – I think that was more a general outburst from the whole blogosphere.