legion of one

One of the most powerful features of Twitter is the @name reply. With it, you can communicate with any Twitter user, whether that person is following you or not.

After having used FriendFeed for a little while, I’ve discovered that FriendFeed comments (and likes) wield nearly the same power, albeit not as direct as Twitter @name replies.

On FriendFeed, if you want to catch the attention of high-profile users like Robert Scoble or Louis Gray, assuming they’re not subscribed to you, here’s how to do it.

Step One: Post an entry that will be of interest to the person.

Step Two: Wait for someone they do subscribe to, to either like or comment on your entry.

When that happens, your entry is shown in their feeds as “So-and-so (friend of so-and-so)…”.

From your perspective it’s obviously less exact than the Twitter approach, but, it has the advantage that your entry is shown to them as having been endorsed by someone they subscribe to, which adds credibility to your entry.

From their perspective it’s actually a better solution because they only see entries that were endorsed by folks they trust and follow. So, for them the exposure to @name reply spam is virtually none.

FriendFeed added a much needed feature, namely the ability to block another user.

When you block the user, they become invisible to you. You don’t see any of their entries, and more importantly, you don’t see any of their comments on other people’s entries.

They also don’t see any of your entries.

Number One: Don’t refresh the page when one subscribes to someone from the pop-up box when you hover over a person’s name.

This kind of “inline” subscribing is very useful, but when you’re way down the page, still reading entries and comments, it’s frustrating to lose where you were when the page refreshes with new content in possibly a different order.

Number Two: Give us the ability to subscribe to someone when you’re viewing an individual entry.

Number Three: Gives us a tab where the “friends” feed is sorted strictly by the time of the original entry, newest entry first.

New (unliked or uncommented) items often disappear too quickly from the first “friends” tab page, if there are very “busy” items being liked or commented on.

Number Four: Sort the “search” results by the time of the original entry, or at least give one the option to sort them that way.

Number Five: Give us dockable tabs.

When one views an individual entry (which is useful when it’s a busy entry and you want to focus on the new comments coming in), you lose the entry when you quickly want to see what’s going on in the general “friends” feed.