It used to be that if a user posted a link on FriendFeed, they would get a few comments and likes and that would be it. If someone reposted that link, it would have its own set of comments for the user who reposted it. If that was a popular link, there could be 10 reposts and 10 sets of comments. Then Moopz came along.
Moopz is a site that aggregates comments about the same link, and puts them into one place. The front page displays recent active FriendFeed posts and conversations. Instead of just showing the conversation that occurs on that posted link, it gathers and threads all of the the subsequent activity from FriendFeed. I’ve provided a before-and-after example with a recent active TechCrunch post.
The standard FriendFeed conversation looks like this:
The same post on Moopz (only a section, for the full page click on the image):
The FriendFeed conversation has 24 comments and 51 likes and the Moopz conversation shows 35 comments, 3 FriendFeed reposts, 7 Google Reader shares, a Digg, a Reddit, a Twitter post and more likes than I’d care to count.
Users can find the most popular content in the sidebar or in the Hot section (available by clicking “More” under the popular links section of the sidebar). This makes Moopz a very useful news source, like Twitturly has proven to be.
Moopz comes from developer Mark Carey, the creator of the FriendFeed MovableType plug-in, a bi-directional comment plug-in for FriendFeed and MovableType comments. Moopz is actually powered through MovableType, and largely by that plug-in.
FriendFeed was started so that users could keep track of what their friends were doing online. But like many other sites that were meant to do one thing, they’ve been used for something entirely different. It’s being used for content delivery and discovery and everyone knows it – except FriendFeed. Instead of adapting to be what users want, it’s trying to be something else, leading to excess noise and distributed conversations. But thanks to tools like Moopz and the many others out there, FriendFeed can become a little more usable.