Why doesn’t Friendfeed let me import the people I follow in Twitter? Sure I doubt it would be doing Twitter’s performance much good at the moment but it should be relatively easy to get the info via the twitter API (I’m not a dev so I may be wrong there…).
This is the future…. where’s my jet pack and single identity provider for the web? :)
From what I’ve read about Fav.or.it (if anyone has an invitation let me know!) you can write comments within the fav.or.it platform and they are written back to the blog itself.
One of the things I like about Friendfeed is the commenting, but quite a lot of feedback and comment on Friendfeed will never be visible against the original media. It would be good if Friendfeed did the same as Fav.or.it and wrote comments back to the source and attributed those comments to me. Perhaps using a some sort of FF prefix – "Tom commented via Friendfeed:….".
This would be good for the end users as their comments would be more visible and attributed to them, and probably quite good for Friendfeed as comments on blogs, flickr etc. would spread the FF word.
After playing around with Friendfeed yesterday I just saw this useful post of on Louis Gray’s blog about Five Ways to Use the Hide Function. Good stuff.
With all the problems Twitter has been having recently there’s been a lot of talk about people moving to Friendfeed or whether Friendfeed is the future etc etc so I decided to dig out my old account details and give it another go.
Now I have to admit, when I first tried FF I didn’t really get it… I found it useful as an aggregator for all my own activity on the web – and I’ve used it for that in a few places – but I other than that it didn’t really leave a lasting impression.
Part of the reason I didn’t get on with FF was probably because I didn’t add many contacts, so the first thing I did was search out a few more people I follow on Twitter and add them. I was pleasantly surprised to find most of the people I searched for, and it was good to check out the other things they’re doing. But… that did lead to quite a lot of noise. I’ll investigate some settings to see if I can filter things out, but there are only so many ‘friend of Robert Scoble‘ posts I’m likely to read in any one day! On the plus side, I really like the comment functionality. It’s useful to see replies threaded and is something I’d love to see in Twitter.
I played around with the Rooms tab a little, it’s interesting, but (maybe I’m being stupid here) wouldn’t it be better to be able to search for rooms you might be interested in? I can’t help thinking there’s a gap here in both FF and Twitter for the equivalent of an old IRC channel, a way of focusing comment and people around a particular topic.
Overall though, whilst I do like the idea of Friendfeed… and I will stick with it in case I’m still missing something obvious… it still leaves me a little underwhelmed… to me Friendfeed doesn’t seem to have the character that Twitter has.
It’s a hard thing to describe – let alone quantify – but for me Twitter as a site and a service has a character of its own. It could be that its just me that sees character in ‘things’ I don’t know, but it’s something that I reckon can make or break a product. It would seem to be something that can be captured and used as a marketing tool – look at BMW and the Mini. Fiat are chasing the same with their 500.
So that’s it really… I prefer Twitter, even though it does seem to be built on servers made of cheese, because it has a character of it’s own. I like that :)
Just following on from my lost post, I’ve just watched an interesting piece on Channel 4 news about fuel prices and green taxes.
In the piece, one of the talking heads said something like "road pricing is far fairer [than fuel duty] by pricing on distance travelled". I can’t help thinking that this way of thinking is flawed. Surely we have to drive behaviour towards more environmentally friendly fuels and vehicles rather than away from travel altogether.
If fuel and vehicles are taxed based on the CO2 they generate, it seems to me that the carrot and stick are then acting in the right direction. Especially if some of that tax is aimed at the fuel and car companies rather than the consumer – this would incentivise them towards creating cleaner fuels and cars that can use them.
