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.
George Williamson on July 21, 2012, 3:58 a.m. Reply
Do I understand it correctly. By this plugin I am going to creat an own facebook like wall on any on my commenters on my blog post. Right?
extenze on September 5, 2012, 3:09 a.m. Reply
Mark’s site is really good, I think plugins like this are great, especially since social media is so big these days.
Martha Roberts on September 5, 2012, 11:17 p.m. Reply
Can I use this to make something like a small social networks for my friends?
dax on September 11, 2012, 12:05 a.m. Reply
I get it on the same way and it is a really cool feature.
Uti on October 17, 2012, 8:19 p.m. Reply
It would be great if the plugin gives an opportunity to add some text to the imported text. By this way it will give uniqueness to the new text in the blog.
Mark Davids on November 1, 2012, 9:13 p.m. Reply
Seems like a great plugin. However, how it deals with the duplicate content? Is it possible to be banned from Google for it?
iwin.vn on November 5, 2012, 11:06 p.m. Reply
This is too little too late! I ran Movabletype a few years ago, and I’ll never go back. Wordpress can do pretty much anything.
Peter Ebdon on November 6, 2012, 7:28 a.m. Reply
Go there to your Wordpress, what do you want here? Wordpress has almost nothing compared with Moveable type. Does Wordpress do what FriendFeed can do? No. What can I say more?
CarryP on November 16, 2012, 4:06 a.m. Reply
This is a great plugin. However, very few of my readers know about FriendFeed, but most of them use Facebook. Is there a similar plugin for Facebook?
Marla on November 27, 2012, 2:21 a.m. Reply
mt-hacks.com is a great site, but most of the hacks are too expensive. For example Facebook MT tools set. Does anybody know where we could find some plugins which do the same things but are free of charge?