"McCain aides said that the senator's journey to the Internet will span five days and will take him to such far-flung sites as Amazon.com, eBay and Facebook." - Kevin Fox via Bookmarklet
Yeah, but I wanted to talk about it with *my* friends. Is it a social faux-pas to try and enforce comment consolidation of someone else's entry? - Kevin Fox
I just noticed how useful it was for Scoble to post that crosslink here -- I wish Friendfeed would find and display these crosslinks automatically. One often misses interesting discussions for lack of crosslinks. - Sean McBride
Kevin: I don't know. I figured your friends might like to know about an interesting conversation going on with my friends. :-) I wish FriendFeed would show where other places a conversation is being discussed. - Robert Scoble
Whoops - hope I didn't step on Kevin's toes by endorsing the interesting crosslink. - Sean McBride
Sean: yeah, I guess Kevin wanted to open a private room here for him to discuss this ONLY with his friends. I think FriendFeed needs to have a construct to make that possible. Maybe my taking items like this into a room where only the friends of that person can get into it? - Robert Scoble
Robert - Kevin raises a valid point when you think about it -- no doubt a software solution is available upon reflection. In any case, I am enjoying the crosslink. - Sean McBride
So my comment about consolidation was intended mostly to initiate a conversation on the subject. Success! To my mind a lot of the value of FriendFeed is the ability to have conversations scoped by friend connections. I actually saw Michael Markman's twitter first, and decided I liked the story, and would like to share and talk about it with my friends, rather than the strangers who were talking about it on that thread. Personally, I wouldn't want someone siphoning off my conversation to the stranger conversation, because the point of my sharing the item is to talk about it with people I know. Also, in this particular case, the phrasing "We're already talking about this over here -->" felt more like an accusation rather than an invitation. Thoughts? - Kevin Fox
Kevin: get over it. I'm going to keep joining these things because I want MY friends to see all conversations on a topic. :-) Of course, if you take it into a room, then I'll probably leave them there. I don't get why you didn't just "Like" the original item, which would have shown your friends the item and gotten them involved in the conversation. What, you don't want your friends to hang out with my friends? I don't get the value of having just your friends see something... - Robert Scoble
Kevin: my thought: Friendfeed should be infinitely flexible. Users should be able to organize conversations every which way, with any level of inclusivity or exclusivity. You've got a valid point and raised an important issue about social protocols here. - Sean McBride
By the way, I'd love to debate this face-to-face on video. I bet it would get something very interesting going. It also explains some of the design behind FriendFeed and why many people I show it to say "it's too noisy." - Robert Scoble
Scoble is operating in the Walt Whitmanesque universal embrace of the cosmos. :) - Sean McBride
Marco: no. But it would be interesting to know your thoughts. - Robert Scoble
"I wouldn't want someone siphoning off my conversation " , Kevin I agree. There are topic and threads which are 'yours' , regardless of whereelse the conversation maybe happening. I would not want (a) somebody to inject themselves into my thread and hijak the conversation (b) to redirect my friend to another thread. We kinda forget our common good sense manners when we get into convos on FF. Both items(a and b) , would be considered rude inturruptions in RL life . Just my way of thinking and I maybe wrong ! - Peter Dawson
I admit, I liked this thread for the FF comments, not the article. - Hao Chen
Robert: It didn't sound like your purpose in commenting was to make sure your followers saw this conversation, but to consolidate the conversation into a single thread. Please don't twist this into a 'what, my friends aren't good enough for you?' I believe that conversational diaspora is a good thing, and that artificial comment consolidation is not. If I had something to say in the other thread I would have not had any qualms about contributing to that conversation but, as I said earlier, your comment read as if you were trying to create a single conversation and cut my own conversation with my own social circle short. If that was not your intention, then I apologize. - Kevin Fox
Actually, the only thing that frustrates me in this thread is that by the time I finish writing a comment, 5 other people have written new comments, making it look like my comment was written with the awareness of those comments. Ugh! Definitely a user experience issue. :-P - Kevin Fox
You know, I'm sure Michael Markman didn't appreciate the siphoning off of comments from his thread when Kevin Fox, authoritative Friendfeed person tons of people are following, reposted the same link. Or maybe it's good to just not worry about where conversations are going? Isn't that the value of Friendfeed? Who cares who's siphoning from whom? Who cares where links are re-shared? Oh, and hey, one more for the road: maybe it's better to assume good faith before having a public, highly visible, comments brawl. - Mark Trapp
Kevin: I wanted to do both. Your friends should know about an interesting conversation happening about that topic somewhere else, and should be able to discuss it amongst themselves too, here. Personally, you should have loaded a comment that made it clear what your intent was. If I want to talk about something with just my friends, I would have loaded a comment with a link to the original, but with a comment saying "I want to talk about it just with my friends, to see what you think." - Robert Scoble
Re a F2F conversation on video: that would be cool. I've been meaning to write a blog post on 'who owns the conversation'. I've got some concrete ideas on the subject, especially how it pertains to conversations about blog posts that happen off-blog, but I also don't feel any one person has the right to speak for others in a 'this is how things should be' kind of way. Definitely one of those social issues that is still contested because it's so new. - Kevin Fox
I actually just made a private room last night just for my real friends (in case any actually decide to join). I think a private place to have conversations is probably a good place to start for people who don't want want to fully expose themselves online. Also, time can be a limiting factor some times and when it is they're the ones I'd most like to engage with. That being said, it would be cool to view all the public conversations on a particular link, so I can jump into the best one. - Raymond
There should be an easier way to view all the conversations on a particular piece of content. FF should connect all the threads in the background through some unique identifier for the content (like the URL that this link points to), then let people decide whether they want to view just their friends' comments or those from extended community (including imported Disqus / Intense Debate comments for the same URL). - Joe Lazarus
Now we know why McCain has not visited The Internet - Shakeel Mahate
@scobleizer on the original McCain/internet piece or the discussion over comment fragmentation it has morphed into? lol - Marco (aureliusmaximus)
In Geoff's best McCain Voice "I need The Googles installed please" - Geoff Schultz
don't have to read the article... the title is priceless - Rob Reed
I'm not quite sure what is "historic" about a septuagenarian visiting the internet. Are we meant to be impressed? My mother is 72 and does quite a number of tasks online, as do many people of her age and considerably older. - Ian May
Apparently Kevin because Robert stumbled on your thread, he was already your friend or perhaps in some other way in your Friendfeed vicinity -- and you say you wanted to discuss this with friends -- so from his point of view your entry may have looked like a dupe. And dupes among segments of friends are indeed a problem on Friendfeed. Nobody minds the dupes we don't notice, but we may mind having the conversation on the same thing split up among segments of our friends. - Philipp Lenssen
@Kevin - allow sub-comments which are comments to comments to make it easier to allow people to talk the person who's talking. Again making this a simple UI is of a challenge as it may soon turn out to be ugly... Also, please allow to scope your post/comment to only your friend/family/colleagues etc So that you dont want every one to see them... I sort of agree with your point of the need for having private/protected/public conversations on FF. I even posted this in the ff-feedback room a few weeks ago. Looking forward to some progress in this direction :) - Krishna Gade
@Mark Trapp... thank for looking out for my feelings. But I don't feel any ownership in discussions about something that Andy Borowitz wrote. Now, if I had written the original piece, I might feel differently. - Michael Markman
@Ian May It's a comedy bit that combines a) McCain's having disparaged Obama for not visiting Iraq and b) McCain's boast to the NY Times that he's learning to get online. - Michael Markman
Andy's piece is well-written. Thanks for sharing, Kevin, wouldn't have seen otherwise. - Stephen Mack
Why is this thread being highjacked to discuss FF features?! I thought it was about McCain visitng the "Internet" :) - Shivanand Velmurugan
This thread keeps growing and still going nowhere. It is really simple: if you want to discuss things only with your friends, make a private room just for you and your friends, and post "friends only" stuff there. No one else needs to find you've created a separate thread of "their" topic somewhere else. - Dread Pirate PJ
I have a very simple model of ff, which is perhaps a lot like Kevin's. I come here to discuss things with my ff friends. Many of them are people I don't know at all in rl, but it's important to me that these conversations are mostly with the same 100-200 people, over and over again. As a result, rooms are not very useful to me, since when I comment on something in a room, it is not automatically placed in the feed of all my friends. Rooms are at least useful for finding content and resharing it..... - j1m
The feeds of people with very many friends, like Robert, are not very useful either. With so many people commonly commenting on his thread, I mostly don't remember who any one person is from one encounter to another, and for me that makes conversation a lot less fun. So Robert's feed, also, is mostly useful for resharing. - j1m
I do really wish that ff would organize feed items that share a url, by presenting them all (that is, all the ones I can see) right next to one another, or joining them into a single nested feed item, that has the different conversations hanging off of it. - j1m
I made a private room with just myself in it so I could discuss this. - Chris White
