One thing we talked about was how nice it would be if it had a PlugIn that showed you, when you visited any web page in your browser, the FriendFeed commentary on that site, customized for your FriendFeed identity, of course.
But what I really want is something that digests all other comments on the web, gives them the FriendFeed treatment, and allows those comments to be displayed in FriendFeed and on the site they come from (via PlugIns and for-your-domain API).
Let me give an example. You pull up FriendFeed, and find link to this article on TechCrunch. Today if you look at that article you'll probably find some comments by people you follow, like comment #1 by Dave Winer, but lots of comments by people you don't, and to be honest there's a lot more discussion there than I really want to read.
Fast forward to the bright bright future. FriendFeed digests a blog's comments when a blog post is fed. It sees that I follow the user whose string name is "Dave Winer", or at least that I follow "Dave Winer" on techcrunch.com, and his comment appears in FriendFeed with all my other comments. It's also linked to the original url for that specific comment on TechCrunch so I can click through and pick up the discussion on TechCrunch. But wait. FF has also parsed out the @1s in the TechCrunch comments, so I also get to see the reply comments from Joe Bowers and Michelle McCormack. Hey, that's the 3rd time this week I've seen an interesting comment from Michelle McCormack. I sign up to follow her comments too.
How does FF do it? The key thing is it's willing to let me follow any commenter anywhere on the web by following their string name, or their string name restricted to a particular blog. It doesn't even matter whether it manages to figure out that "Dave Winer" at TechCrunch is the same Dave Winer as on FriendFeed, though in this case it can do that easily, because Dave identifies himself on TechCrunch with the url http://scripting.com, and lists the same url as one of his blogs on FriendFeed. For initial discovery, the More menu contains an option to show all source comments from the feed item.
Finally, FriendFeed also enables this same comment filtering when I'm reading the article on the blog. Often enough, I just read down to the end of the article and look through the comments. The problem is, there are usually too many of them for me to look through, especially on broad-interest sites like DailyKos. So what to do? FriendFeed provides the same set of filtered comments I mentioned above for display on the blog. It does this in 2 ways: with a little piece of javascript that site owners can put into their blog template, and with a firefox extension that lets me pop them up, for sites that don't use the badge.
Fast forward to the bright bright future. FriendFeed digests a blog's comments when a blog post is fed. It sees that I follow the user whose string name is "Dave Winer", or at least that I follow "Dave Winer" on techcrunch.com, and his comment appears in FriendFeed with all my other comments. It's also linked to the original url for that specific comment on TechCrunch so I can click through and pick up the discussion on TechCrunch. But wait. FF has also parsed out the @1s in the TechCrunch comments, so I also get to see the reply comments from Joe Bowers and Michelle McCormack. Hey, that's the 3rd time this week I've seen an interesting comment from Michelle McCormack. I sign up to follow her comments too.
How does FF do it? The key thing is it's willing to let me follow any commenter anywhere on the web by following their string name, or their string name restricted to a particular blog. It doesn't even matter whether it manages to figure out that "Dave Winer" at TechCrunch is the same Dave Winer as on FriendFeed, though in this case it can do that easily, because Dave identifies himself on TechCrunch with the url http://scripting.com, and lists the same url as one of his blogs on FriendFeed. For initial discovery, the More menu contains an option to show all source comments from the feed item.
Finally, FriendFeed also enables this same comment filtering when I'm reading the article on the blog. Often enough, I just read down to the end of the article and look through the comments. The problem is, there are usually too many of them for me to look through, especially on broad-interest sites like DailyKos. So what to do? FriendFeed provides the same set of filtered comments I mentioned above for display on the blog. It does this in 2 ways: with a little piece of javascript that site owners can put into their blog template, and with a firefox extension that lets me pop them up, for sites that don't use the badge.
