There needs to be a way to funnel all this data
Over the last few months, it’s been getting more and more difficult to funnel conversations from all these blog posts, tweets, diggs, plurks, friendfeeds, pictures, and videos in one place. Most recently, Plurk as come online which has the advantage of self-contained conversations, but with the disadvantage of not seeing friends’ plurks inside those conversations. That means that unlike Twitter, you can’t just jump into something, or see a reply with a URL that might interest you.
FriendFeed tries to do this, but doesn’t succeed 100%. It pulls posts that your friends make on other sites, but the replies to those posts don’t necessarily show up in the friendfeed itself.
For example, if Bob makes a blog post about the pictures he takes, they’ll show up on FriendFeed under two categories: 1) the blog post itself, and 2) the new pictures on Flickr. From there, you can post on FriendFeed “hey, nice pictures”, but the people on Flickr won’t see those comments. Conversely, people on Flickr won’t see the comments on FriendFeed.
Ping.fm is not a new service, but now that Twitter has been going down more often than an <insert dirty joke here>, people are turning to ping.fm to broadcast their microblogs to several services like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk so that they reach the most number of people.
That’s fine, and I’m thinking about doing that myself, but then where do the comments go? If Twitter’s up, some replies will go there, some to Plurk, and maybe some to Jaiku (for the three people using it).
I started drawing a diagram of all this and it became a mess when I tried to handle FriendFeed reading in replies to tweets and replies in Pownce.
So how do we resolve this? Currently, I can’t find any service that properly manages it all. Something needs to aggregate all your feeds from all your subscriptions, and filter out what’s redundant, while posting in the appropriate places. That’s not a good solution for now since there are multiple services, but that’s the best that can be done until someone comes up with One Service To Rule Them All.
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“One Service To Rule Them All” is the key. Plurk seems to be leading that charge. Having an ultimate aggregation site is not the answer.