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Comment by codesurgeon | Hacker News Reader

Self-proclaimed "technologist"-journos, especially those focusing on social networking and "Web 2.x" coverage, don't seem to have any sort of expectation towards the quality of their own reporting.

So this InformationWeek dude initially tries out friendfeed for a very short time and does not like it. He does so again a second time, investing "more time" and all of a sudden sees more of a light. The time he invested the second time around turns out to be a day. Even though he writes it is "too early to pass judgement", the one day experience seems to be enough to serve as foundation for an article.

Doesn't anybody strive a little more for something more conclusive?

Btw, I like and use friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com/codesurgeon) a lot. I just wonder what kind of deep insights some reporters get from a day's usage and interaction.

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Old school reporting was about doing a lot of work and then passing informed judgement. So, I think this was a little im/pre-mature.

What I've decided, having used FriendFeed for a while, is that the direction everyone needs this to go is a standards-based feature of the feed-producing platforms themselves. Having to go to FriendFeed to see what my friends are doing in a site which should incorporate the other sites is akward and annoying.

I'm not ragging on FriendFeed. I like that they're tackling this. But signing up for Facebook, then Flickr, then signing up for FriendFeed and telling FriendFeed that I use Facebook and then Flickr and then adding the FriendFeed app to Facebook and not being able to do it to Flickr is just dumb. Hopefully FriendFeed or something like it can become a de-centralized value add of any serious social network, based on an open standard, while not losing the ability to import or fake friendships for the other 75% of users.

One day, I would like to add a friend on Twitter and have Twitter ask me if I'd also like to friend her on Facebook, Flickr and [insert x here], since we both use both services.

I don't really mind that I can't interconnect all of my webservices/online personas, i.e. in the sense of all n services being connected with the remaining (n-1). This does not seem to make a lot of sense for most of those.

What I would like to be able to do is interact with the services via a central location such as ff - not just consume/aggregate.

Along those lines, the ff team has included a "feedback channel" (i.e. easy replying) for twitter which serves the purpose very well. If they'd do the same for comments on flickr, disqus, youtube (you get the idea) accounts, I'd be even happier. Their service would allow for some sort of two-way centralized communication that would save me from touring all of the respective sites for even the most mundane tasks.

In general, I agree with you on openness and standards but can't say that I'd be currently missing them WRT this domain/application.

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