FriendFeed Optimization Feature Requests

ageor — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:55:05 +0000

As I mention from time to time, I never have enough of a good thing. FriendFeed is more than good, it’s great. Greatness has a tencency to increase expectations. These are a few optimization suggestions to raise the experience from “great” to “near perfect” (as new requests will probably always exist):

Discussions is a great strength of FriendFeed. Threading keeps all comments together. However, when following an interesting discussion, one needs to scroll all the way up to comment. Please also give us a “Comment” option after the last comment.
Lots of people, including myself, have asked for a Twitter-like direct message (the only thing it does FriendFeed does not). An opt-in email-based scheme has been suggested as well. The only reason against direct messaging I can think of is desire to keep all conversations public. If this is the reason, please, go ahead and say so.
RealTime is great. However, it does lack some options otherwise available, like “hide”. Please unify the experience across all views. This would include a Realtime option for every view as well.
A person’s badge available everywhere is indeed very handy. It would be nice to also appear on mouse over the person’s picture and name in the title of a thread and on top of his/her feed. Even more important, subscribing to the author of a comment from his badge in the middle of the thread should not return us to the top of the page, especially with comments appearing collapsed, driving productivity way down, not to mention frustration.
Rooms are indispensable. However, when posting, we are asked to choose our feed or one single room. This results in the posts not reaching all their potential audience, unless effort is duplicated. Please support multiple destinations for posts.
Many posts are actually links. The same links are often posted from different people at different times. They also result in interesting and informative conversations which end up being held in different parts of FriendFeed. Please merge all posts referring to the same link to the same thread. More posts of the same link can become “like”s and comments can all contribute to the same conversation.
FriendFeed Feedback serves, among other things, for feature requests. Chaotic as it is, it is impossible to marshal all these ideas. Please officially use a rating system for feature requests, so people can vote the most important ones in an orderly manner and FriendFeed can respond onte time for each of them.
When I read posts I often catch myself subconsciously filtering by author, instead of by content.Please give us an option for a view that hides or moves the author at the end of posts (maybe in small print).

Finally, on a personal issue: I tried for a while to rely on RSS to read my FriendFeed feeds. To my surprise, Google Reader does a very poor job on catching these feeds. Consequently, I end up with 40 entries every 3 hours, instead of what should be around that many per minute during peak hours! Is this a Google Reader flaw, a FriendFeed flaw, or a matter of communication between the two systems? Can something be done about it?

My only real complaint with FriendFeed is in requests feedback. And I’m hopeful they will respond and optimize it and their response. They constantly improve things, so it’s only a matter of time.

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News Reading Thoughts

ageor — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:46:27 +0000

I never have enough of a good thing. The first time I read the online edition of a magazine I immediately wished for a filtered edition which would only contain the articles of my choice. When Greek Naftemporiki newspaper’s online-edition provided filtered, personalized content, I immediately wished for a method to push the content to me, instead of going around the sites and soon after that RSS appeared (what I like about technology; it always catches up).

Now RSS is commonplace. Filters increase, but the implementations are still early and immature. For example, except for Google and similar sites, filters usually apply to a single site; that of the content source (like http://naftemporiki.gr -only in greek). RSS makes it easy to gather information from multiple sources to the feed reader of choice, but by itself provides no filtering in the source, except in the form of multiple feeds. So, where should filtering apply?

The tools have been expanding and improving. From the days of raw content we now have search, filtering, RSS and a multitude of clients to put them to good use. I tried the very good BlogBridge for a while for its keyword-based virtual feeds (thanks, karagos, for suggesting it). It being offline and other problems I had (bad greek support and hitting the 600 feeds limit of the free edition while not convinced to buy yet) made me return to Google Reader. Regardless of reader, my everyday struggle to get and keep informed about the news and my interests has been getting very time-consuming, mainly due to increasing volume (never have enough of a good thing, remember?).

How many sources and how many pieces of news and info am I talking about? A quick count showed around 2800 items from my (ever expanding collection of) ~750 subscriptions in Google Reader in the last 12 hours. This includes my ~450 FriendFeed subcriptions feed, but not my ~900 people Twitter feed (strangely, only a small count of the tweets I follow make it to the RSS feed). Thankfully, a good portion of the tweets make it to FFd as well (although I fear not all FFd posts make it to the RSS feed, either). At this rate of incomings, it takes me 10-20′/h to browse everything, read and microblog about whatever catches my eye.

This is way too much time. In practice, I browse some of the titles when there’s time and only read the interesting items among them. I do use the Google Reader Filter GreaseMonkey script to highlight items containing an increasing number (~100, so far) of keywords and it is helpfull. But the real problem is with the multiple sharing of the same (great) URLs in FriendFeed, which in turn produce multiple different (as they come from different users) items in Google Reader. Those are not caught by the script’s “hide duplicates” option.

So, for the time being, I consider avoiding duplication my #1 goal for increasing my news-reading productivity. I hope Friendfeed will listen and convert duplicate link posts to likes or comments of the first such post. This would also result in a major added benefit: aggregating all the relevant discussions in one thread, as discussed here. I find it so important, I even requested Robert Scoble to lobby for this here (I guess it’s impossible to read everything, even for him)!

#2 goal is to reduce sources that produce similar content, like press releases etc. Google News does well about it but doesn’t track all the sites I do. Mechanisms of bookmarking sites like Delicious might also help, as they keep URL scoring. While I work on a plan, I’ll stick to goal #1. Please join!

DiPot: Ice Tea tech » filtering

FriendFeed Optimization Feature Requests

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