1FPS|by David Chartier

FriendFeed is, of course, a clever service that lets you aggregate all the content you create at various sites into one single lifestream. Basic social networking features allow users to follow each others’ streams, and comment on each item in a stream. Simple enough.

Something has bothered me about FriendFeed ever since I began tinkering with the service, and recently it finally clicked: In addition to aggregating all the stuff a user creates at various communities, FriendFeed should also aggregate the conversations happening around these items from those other communities.

A while ago there was a lot of talk about services like FriendFeed and Twitter hijacking “the conversation” because things like comments on blogs and Flickr photos are moving to these new, simple services. As FriendFeed, Twitter, and their lifestreaming and microblogging competitors increasingly become places for discourse about media published elsewhere, they can dramatically increase their value both to users and visitors by bringing all those external conversations along for the ride.

For example: when you publish a photo to Flickr, a thumbnail and link appear in FriendFeed. Perhaps someone shares a link to the photo on Twitter, most likely doing so with a TinyURL to leave room for their own comment in Twitter’s SMS-friendly 140 character count limit.

People can comment on the photo at Flickr, on the FriendFeed entry, or reply to their friend on Twitter who posted the TinyURL link. The conversation about that photo is in at least three places now.

FriendFeed, or a more useful competitor that has yet to emerge, could offer a major value to users (and perhaps charge a nominal “pro” account fee) by harnessing comment RSS, website APIs, and some clever Twitter magic to aggregate all these conversations. They could be syndicated and linked on each content entry, along with any other comments that users leave.

We already have more than enough lifestreaming services to chose from. Which one will be the first to add “convo-streaming” as a feature, and do it right?

Remember The Milk (RTM), my favorite task management app with a ton of integration, now ties incredibly well into Gmail. Via a Firefox extension, a new customizable Tasks panel can be displayed next to messages. Every aspect of tasks can be edited (time estimates, due dates, tags, location, etc.), and RTM tasks can be tied not only to Gmail messages but Calendar events and even contacts as well. This is really, really impressive. You have to check out the post for yourself to see how good of a job the team did here with a half-supported Gmail API.

Now I’m primarily a Safari man myself, but I typically have to have Firefox running for a variety of reasons such as working in the Ars CMS. I’ve resisted temptation from other extensions to use Firefox a lot more, perhaps even as my primary browser, but this is the first one that’s getting me to seriously think about it. Remember The Milk and its plethora of useful task features and integration has literally changed the way I work and get things done in the rest of my life. Bringing Gmail and RTM together like this is really exciting. I can’t wait to give this a thorough run-through later today.

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