I just saw a tweet from @disqus declaring that you can now pull/post Disqus comments with FriendFeed!  Of course, I have immediately enabled it, and we will see how well it works.

The process to enable the integration is fairly simple (steps blatantly stolen from the Disqus blog post):

1. Visit Account Services
2. Click Enabled
3. Retrieve your FriendFeed Remote Key and fill in the blanks
4. Then, visit The Administration Panel
5. Choose Your Site from the drop-down
6. Click the Settings tab
7. Check FriendFeed comments

If you don’t already have your blog in FriendFeed, add these additional steps:

1. Visit The FriendFeed Services Page
2. Click Blog
3. Add your RSS feed

If you want the full story with illustrated steps, I recommend checking out the Disqus Blog post.

In the past week or two, I have been playing with a number of new toys that promise to tie the social networks Twitter and FriendFeed to my blog a little more tightly.

TweetSuite

First, there’s TweetSuite by Dan Zarrella.  This is a err.. sweet little self-contained plugin that makes your WordPress blog aware of the Twitterverse.  There are four main components that make up TweetSuite:

1. A tweet this button that can be floated in the upper-left or upper-right portion of a blog post.  Very similar to a Digg button.
2. An area below the post that tracks tweets about the article and lists them, complete with the optional ability to include a re-tweet button next to them.
3. Four fun Twitter-related widgets that can be dropped in the sidebar: Most, Recent, Last, and Favorite Tweets.
4. Last but not least, TweetSuite will optionally update Twitter when a new entry is posted.

I am not so invested in Twitter that I can tell if TweetSuite is catching all the Twitter buzz surrounding my entries.  It did detect one tweet on my last entry and a couple more on older posts.. but that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this post!  To see if it works.

FF2Disqus

Second, I am using a cloud-based app called FriendFeed-to-Disqus (or FF2Disqus).  This little utility is by Carter Rabasa, the guy who wrote Twitter2FF, a handy utility for synchronizing your Twitter and FriendFeed friends.  Anyway, this web app isn’t a plugin, and in fact hooks in to FriendFeed and Disqus, so it isn’t specifically bound to WordPress blogs at all!

What it does is monitor a service on FriendFeed (say the RSS feed for your blog) and utilizes the Disqus API to push any new comments on the relevant entry in FriendFeed to your blog entry.  So in effect what this does is bring the comment activity back in to your blog.

There have been a rash about this utility and the value that it brings to blogs and FriendFeed.  I have to admit that I share a few reservations about deploying it full-time on my blog.  But I decided, I would jump in with both feet and see how everything turns out.  Hopefully, everything will be great.

Final Note

I have disabled Glenn Slaven’s excellent FriendFeed Comments plugin for the moment in order to avoid redundancy.  But don’t think I don’t like it – far from it!  If FF2Disqus doesn’t work out I’m going straight back to using this plugin!

As the new year starts, I am increasingly thinking of changing my follow habits that I have maintained since I first logged in on Twitter and FriendFeed. 

Mutual Respect

My attitude was, mutual respect. You follow me, I follow you. I can learn from everyone. I still think it’s a good attitude to have, and I wish it was the right one. But increasingly, especially on Twitter, I don’t think it is. 

I’m going to rant a bit here, just warning you.

For months, I have been using FriendFeed and Twitter actively. At the beginning, I followed anyone who looked interesting and didn’t care about who followed me back. I maintained what I thought of as a fairly altruistic policy toward both services, just concerning myself with finding great people.

More recently, my active search for new great people has begun to taper. First, I found tools for both services that figure out who my ‘mutual followers’ are.. and I have to admit, they have shaken my original innocence.. people who I thought I had connected with weren’t following me. I was disheartened. 

I briefly thought of whining.. but that doesn’t feel right to me. It’s very difficult for me to impose myself on other people. That’s why I can’t effectively use services like Digg and Mixx.

Anyway, I maintained my mutual follow policy. On FriendFeed, I just try to keep myself ignorant of any gaming that happens. I follow those who follow me, and I hope they respect that. Twitter, though, is a different story. With the rise of tools like Twitterless and SocialToo, I can see exactly how much ‘gaming’ is going on.

Gaming

And Twitter gaming is seriously on the rise.

I could (and perhaps will) write a whole different post on how people are gaming Twitter.  But the behavior that is really irritating me recently are these folks that follow a lot of Twitterers and then, 10 minutes to two days later, un-follow all of them in the hopes that a certain percentage follow them back.

Why do they do this?  Because Twitter now has a follow ratio that prevents people from following X number more than they have followers.  It seems fairly arbitrary and people now see it as a challenge to defeat.

It irritates me no end. I’ve taken to blocking the people who exhibit this behavior with me. For example, recently one dude (TheBobBlog on Twitter) had the balls to follow me, send a robot DM when I followed him back, ignore a separate DM that I sent him asking about tumbling his photos, and then un-following me the next day!  BLOCKED.

Ultimately, I don’t want to be reactionary with a new follow/discovery policy going forward.  That’s why I have taken a step back and started thinking about what I really want to do going forward.. and help me in more ways than just addressing the gaming going on.

Two Paths

The way I see it, there are two ways I could go. I can go all-inclusive: Open the floodgates and follow thousands of people on both services a la Robert Scoble and just filter out the stuff I find interesting on the back-end; Or I can go exclusive: Start hand-picking those people I find interesting, go in-depth with them and re-grow my social circle with care.

Either way, I would not actively try to influence who is following me. And I am aware that going to exclusive route can have some negative backlash if folks place a lot of emphasis on mutual follows.

However, I am starting to think it is worth the risk.

Why?  A few reasons:

• I fear I am missing too much from folks I respect as well as new people I follow, due to the increased amount of noise.
• I am spending more and more time just trying to keep up with what is happening in FriendFeed, much less exploring what the folks on FriendFeed are doing on their own blogs and other services.
• I wonder if I am missing opportunities to connect more with great people, as the crowd I follow gets ever larger.
• I find myself getting frustrated just using the social media tools that I found so enjoyable a scant few months ago.

Taking A Risk

So, you might notice a change as I radically upset the balance of followers to following.  And if that’s the limit for you, I don’t blame you.  But I can promise I’m not ‘holing up’ and disconnecting – just the opposite.  I won’t be surprised if I end up following more people than I am now.. but I will have arrived there with a different methodology, and hopefully with more to offer those following me.

I came across a quick post from Benjamin Golub in his blog about SUP (no Wikipedia page yet, anyone want to write one?), a protocol developed by FriendFeed and described in their blog. 

Benjamin created a small YouTube video showing how SUP works.

Benjamin Golub demonstrates SUP

So naturally, I now have a bit of SUP-envy, since I run a WordPress blog and not my own home made cloud-based blog platform like Ben.  Which means my next step was to perform a Google search for ‘WordPress’ and ‘SUP’.  To my great surprise, a small SUP plugin has already been written!

Enter WP SUP, a small plugin that does exactly what’s necessary, which is to say add a bit of code to the RSS feed to make it SUP-enabled, and ping FriendFeed when the feed is updated.

Done and done.  Thanks Derek van Vliet!  Everybody go friend him immediately on FriendFeed.  Thanks!

WP SUP home page

Update: Feedburner seems to be stripping the SUP information out of the RSS feed header.  I’m looking in to it, along with Josh Haley and Benjamin Golub

Ha!  Got your attention!  Sorry, but this article isn’t about the Space Mountain at the Magic Kingdom (or any of the knockoff rides at other Disney parks) but about FriendFeed.

Wait.. what?

I’ll break it down.  FriendFeed is a space mountain.

To wit, interacting with FriendFeed is like interacting with a mountain in space, in that it takes an enormous amount of effort to get the mountain to do anything, but once you have it moving, it’s not stopping anytime soon.

In metaphorical terms, that is what is required to really appreciate FriendFeed as an experience. To extend the metaphor further, we could say that the space mountain (or asteroid, perhaps) isn’t frozen out in deep space.  It’s more like a solar comet, spinning about a trajectory closer than Mercury.  This mountain is active.  It is almost paradoxical that a place that is so overwhelmingly active can start out being fairly slow going for the noob.

So, keep this in mind.  We can’t all be Mona — don’t give up if you aren’t a FriendFeed hero overnight.*  It’s best to start putting in your effort steadily, in the form of following interesting people, commenting on entries, showing yourself through stuff you find online via the bookmarklet and feeds.  But most of all, interact.

Comment and like.  A lot.  At first, you won’t get a lot of response from anybody.  But keep plugging away, and people will notice, and the discussion and interaction will start happening.

Consider this:  Even the least liked people on FriendFeed are well known simply by dint of their diligent effort.  Oh, they enjoy their status as underdogs, but the point is that even with many many people blocking them, they still generate conversation due to their notoriety.

So, buckle up, be patient, and enjoy your ride.

* Tamar Weinberg on FriendFeed follower activity level.

I’ve been on a hiatus from blogging.  Hopefully, loyal readers of Scribkin didn’t miss me too much!  The first week after my last post, I tried to stay away from all the tools I have been using to keep up with social media stuff.  Basically, what I ended up doing is checking my email a lot and going to web sites that update frequently, like news.com, CNN and Engadget.

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