As FriendFeed has increased in popularity throughout the blogosphere, many tech bloggers have started to express concern over how conversations are becoming fragmented. Taking a step back, FriendFeed is a social aggregator much like Facebook News Feed. It allows you to import your activity around the web (like Movable Type supports via the Action Streams plugin), chooses what to display to your friends, and allows rich conversations to emerge along with a simple "I like this" just like Vox has "[This is Good]". While FriendFeed is great at encouraging new contributions by continually showing you active conversations, popular content your friends have created, and making it simple to contribute, these conversations don't permeate their walls. FriendFeed isn't trying to own these conversations -- they do have a rich API -- but comments that might have been posted on a Flickr photo, said on Twitter, or left on a blog post in the past are slowly occurring more frequently elsewhere.
Last week, Mark Carey (a prominent member of the Movable Type Open Source community) released a plugin to help bridge these conversations. This plugin allows you to import all of the comments on one of your posts that readers have left on FriendFeed instead of directly on your blog. Additionally when commenting directly on your Movable Type blog, a commenter is able to choose if they'd also like to share their comment on FriendFeed too. This is a great example of enabling a bi-directional flow of conversations and how the web is evolving with rich APIs. You can see it in action over on ReadWriteWeb and in the screenshots below:
While this is only one piece of the problem, it's something we're certainly thinking about and have experience from the past with technologies such as TrackBack. That said, it's great to see the Movable Type Open Source community building and shipping plugins which are immediately useful to great bloggers. You can learn more and download the plugin (after a free registration) on Mark's site mt-hacks.com.
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