FriendFeed Now Sends Replies Back to Twitter

Posted on March 25, 2008

FriendFeed is an aggregator of personal social media feeds. You can broadcast all your personal feeds on FriendFiend and include your blog feed, Twitter feed, Delicious feed, Amazon wishlist, Flickr feed, and so on. FriendFeed has been letting its users reply to items posted on FriendFeed including tweets. This was creating a problem because people would reply to a tweet on FriendFeed but there would be no echo of this tweet on Twitter. To solve this problem FriendFeed has added a feature that will send an @reply back to Twitter.

There is now a checkbox that lets you also send the comment as an @reply on Twitter. You will have to provide your password to have the tweet sent as an @reply from your account.

FriendFeed's tweak helps solve a discussion fragmentation problem that Mashable says has been discussed a lot lately.

There has been a lot of conversation in the circle of folks that dips into my FriendFeed stream regularly on the topic of comment and discussion fragmentation, which essentially means the problem of posting things on your blog, them ending up in your lifestream at Twitter and FriendFeed, and the ensuing conversation never making it back to the original posting place. This little bit of functionality actually re-unites a bit of the conversation from the FriendFeed fragment (shard?).
I wonder if this means that they'll be working on further comment fragmentation formulae? We'll be interested to see how this develops.

Expect more services that attempt to interact with Twitter in a similar manner. Twitter has been growing faster than ever lately. There are 948,895 twitter accounts according to Twitdir.com. A lot of web companies are going to find the idea of adding services that interact with that large userbase very appealing.