Just to follow up on our story from Friday, FriendFeed has now implemented the feature that will allow you to disable comments on individual threads.
This move is in response to ours and others’ concerns that while FriendFeed’s real-time commenting component is great for conversation, it also can fuel the mob mentality, and quickly get out of control. Previously, you could only go through and delete individual comments, which in huge threads was simply not workable.
With this change, we’re more than happy to reinstate our official TechCrunch FriendFeed account that we pulled several weeks ago, following an incident. Michael talked with FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor and Robert Scoble about the situation at our CrunchUp event on Friday (video below). There, Taylor also revealed that FriendFeed was thinking about other solutions, such as making it so only contacts of yours can leave comments.
Says Taylor about this feature, “You can use the feature to stop conversations that are getting out of hand, or to post entries for which you don’t want any discussion. Likes will continue to be allowed when comments are disabled.”
FriendFeed’s Kevin Fox is not as pleased (with our headline at least): “Seriously, dude. Arrington insists that a feature is essential and *must* be put in, and when we do TechCrunch writes a headline likening it to tear-gassing people? *sigh*.”
[photo: Foxboro Jaycees video: Alexa]
If the general public want a feature, the company better implement it
Seems like techcrunch is bigger than friendfeed.
Yes, bigger enough to get a feature that the public wanted to implement. This feature actually gives so much liberty to users. You can avoid unwanted comments and at the same time, allows users to like the comments.. Thanks Michael for being instrumental in bringing it change.
Why not just have a button that says block certain users from commenting on this post or any post… because why should one bad user screw it for everyone? The problem with tear gas is it also scares away the legit peaceful protesters.. not just the bad asses.. maybe what you need is RAID…
An aspect of FriendFeed I don’t like is that, like blogs, there seems to be a certain amount of trolls who can derail a decent conversation. I wish there was some action between a free-for-all and disallowing all commenting. I can understand it for controversial bloggers but I think if someone I follow started disallowing comments, in general, I’d stop following their updates. It would just be a monologue.
My rules for using this new feature: http://friendfe...-new-feature-of
Nice headline, made me chuckle.
My profile on Friendfeed doesn’t generate many heated discussions so it’s unlikely that I will be using this feature for a while.
The introduction is a good move and I feel it will allow Friendfeed to appeal to mainstream media like maybe radio and television. They provide the ability to embed discussions and it’s only a matter of time before the benefits are realised!
Wow MG! You are on a roll with the death and destruction pics for you posts – first the Google Chrome mushroom cloud and now a slight step back with this tear gas shot…Not hating though – like the dramatization
Could you post a link to your friendfeed account? Search isn’t finding it for me.
An apostrophe is not to be used to indicate possession with the pronoun ours. See above:
This move is in response to ours’ and others’ concerns.
If the possession of concerns is joint, only the second pronoun above (others’) would receive an apostrophe.
Who cares, no one uses FriendFeed apart from Scoble.
More TMZ less FriendFeed please.
Alot of people often wonder how does Friendfeed make money, because there are no ads seen on their social networking site
wow ….
How does friendfeed make money?
I don’t know what FF are complaining about – any publicity from TechCrunch is good publicity.
I just don’t know *anyone* (beyond Scoble & Leo Laporte) that uses FriendFeed as a destination.
In fact, even after having played with it for several hours, I can’t see why a ‘normal’ person would want to use it. Average people just don’t get *any* activity around their stuff on FF.
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