Don’t worry. None taken.

I like your ‘scannability’ idea – even though I tend to like the chaos of friendfeed. Having said that I hate the chaos of twitter. Wouldn’t it be better if we could customise any service like that to suit our own preferences?

I see your point, and I understand that many people use Friendfeed for social engagement around posts (especially after reading all the responses to this). But do people really read the comments on everything that comes through the reader? If they do, they must have some serious time on their hands…

I think the fundamental issue is that the system is architected to be a always-on fire-hose…there is so much information coming in that one cannot help but be overwhelmed by it. The inline comments and likes just seem to add to that fire-hose for me.

That said, perhaps FF is migrating toward the comments and things inline to differentiate itself…there certainly seems to be support for it from the FF community. And…it’s OK if I’m not part of that community…

I think you make some very strong points, and it’s a very good analysis, but I think your initial supposition is flawed. If FriendFeed’s purpose was the efficient discovery of new content, than I agree with you wholeheartedly. Unfortunately I think the problem here (and this is the same problem Grazr has struggled with and still faces) is discovering what its purpose really is.

FriendFeed is like Twitter in a lot of ways, that people are coming to it and having a fundamentally different experience of the service from each other. You, in effect, craft your own experience of it by how much you engage. It’s like the post Dave Winer had a while back about Twitter where he analogized it to the blind men and the elephant parable. Each had a different conception of what it fundamentally *was*. Twitter’s interface hasn’t changed much over time because, I would argue, they are cognizant of this point. Tweak it too much for a single purpose and you may disrupt the balance for others.

If you can answer that first, very important, question then it makes decisions about things like interface easier (not easy, but a lot easier). I’ve recently become a fan of FriendFeed, but I’ve been using it as a community. Often times the valuable content *is* the comments, from people like Derrick, Mona, and “Stupid Blogger Tina”. The conversations, finding new people, and seeing who likes what is a lot more important to my experience of it than just a scannable stream. I use Grazr as my scannable stream and frankly it’s much better suited to that kind of info consumption. Unfortunately I think the “river of news” scan is a more niche problem, one for “weirdos”, and I think FriendFeeds shooting for a more mainstream (or more social media savvy) audience. They may find one overriding purpose for the service / site, but I think they’re still in the exploratory phase of what it “wants to be”.

Just my $.02