AccMan never knowingly under opinionated

Another tweak: FriendFeed comments plugin

This morning I added the FriendFeed WordPress comments plugin. If you’re not familiar with FriendFeed it’s a way of aggregating all the places where you have a presence that are supported by FriendFeed. These include RSS feeds, blogs, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter – the list goes on. From the plug-in blurbs:

This plugin will allow you to display on your own site the comments that people make on FriendFeed about your post.  I keep trying to think of a more succinct way of writing that but I can’t.  It always sounds more confusing than it is.

Here’s the deal.  FriendFeed aggregates your online life (but isn’t lifestreaming), and one of the things it can aggregate is your blog.   People can then comment on this.

Here’s an example:

As you can see I tried a ‘test’ comment to see how well it works. The one nit I have is that it requires you to know your FriendFeed API Key each time you comment. This is a bit like a password. Assuming you have a FriendFeed account, you can click on the question mark to access the key, copy and paste into the field and you’re done.

Why include this? I already include Seesmic video comments plus regular comments to this site – isn’t this a touch of overload?Not really – at least not in my opinion.

FriendFeed is another way to create content which includes adding in blog posts. It also allows you to say whether you ‘like’ the post or add a comment direct to your FriendFeed stream. Those extra ‘bits’ of content don’t appear on your blog so adding the comments capability allows you to comment both in FriendFeed and at the blog. Think of it as sort of synchronizing your comments across different media. Here is an example of what a well commented blog post might look like in FriendFeed:

Notice how in this case, people have both commented and signaled that they ‘like’ the post? Anyhoo – it gives readers yet another option for interacting with this blog. Enjoy.

As an aside, I use AlertThingy to help keep me up to date with material from those who are in my FriendFeed ‘friends’ list and Twitter. AlertThingy also allows me to Tweet message and share random thoughts. For me, it is the simplest way to apply comments to posts, Tweets, blogs and anything else that AltertThingy can pick up. See below for an example..