Social Times - Latest Comments in The True Test for FriendFeed: Facebook Comments

Re: The True Test for FriendFeed: Facebook Comments

Shaun Connolly — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:23:13 -0000

FriendFeed provides one-stop-shopping for viewing and commenting on your friends' activities; convenient and easy.

Facebook requires you to navigate to each friend's Mini-Feed to add comments; NOT convenient and NOT easy.

Adding comments to the main News Feed will help, as long as they also include any comments from friends to my news item in the same feed AND they include any items that I have chosen to comment on in the same feed.

I want one-stop-shopping for all of this back and forth commentary.

I also agree with Manogr on having a comments area that enables you to access historical commentary (ie. comments no longer visible in main feed).

Re: The True Test for FriendFeed: Facebook Comments

Manogr — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:39:25 -0000

I really agree with you Nick and with the comment made by Kevin. I don't think that comments will ever "fly" if they remain hidden in the Mini-Feeds... Most users don't have time to visit hundreds of mini feeds everyday so they mostly read the main news feed...there it will be easier and more fun to comment on the various news.
Moreover there should be a "Comments" area where we will be able to visit and see all comments made to our comments or our friends. Otherwise commented news will be lost in a few hours as the news feed is moving.

Re: The True Test for FriendFeed: Facebook Comments

Kevin Bondelli — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:25:24 -0000

It surprised me that when they rolled out the commenting feature they did not include the ability to comment on your main news feed.

I think there are a couple reasons why the commenting hasn't taken off yet:

1)Like you said, it is restricted to individual mini-feeds that most people aren't looking at. It also may seem a little creepy to be commenting on someone's mini-feed, it has a stalker-like feel to it. It would help big-time if the integrated it into newsfeed.

2)It is hard to have a conversation with it because as far as I know there is no way to tell if someone else has commented on the item you commented on without going back and checking.

3)This is where spelling out comment might help. A lot of people I know had no idea that this function existed. They will probably realize it now though.

I think that Facebook would need to make it a news feed feature and dramatically alter the way news feed works in order to get a Friendfeed-like functionality. Until then, I don't think it will really take off.

Re: The True Test for FriendFeed: Facebook Comments

Deon Gordon — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:12:48 -0000

I don't think FriendFeed is over-hyped, or anything similar. I believe it all just boils down to the "culture" of each respective community. FriendFeed seems to promote dialog and conversation. Facebook, on the other hand, is used more so for sharing photos, sending messages, etc. I guess it's unwise to suggest that Facebook users won't take to the new FriendFeed-like aspects -- it just seems like it will take longer for users to adopt it.