As Frederic at The Last Podcast was one of the first to notice, the up-and-coming “lifestream” aggregation engine FriendFeed now allows users to post responses back to Twitter from the Web service — responding to one of the main criticisms that have come from some reviewers. Until now, you could read Twitter messages and comment on them, but those comments remained on the FriendFeed site and therefore weren’t visible to the person who posted unless they came to the site.
More than one person said that this made FriendFeed into another destination social site, rather than purely an aggregator of services, something I wrote about in a previous post. As I mentioned in that post, I can see the appeal of a group of friends having their own discussions, removed from the hurly-burly of the broader Web — which co-founder Paul Buchheit described as one of the benefits of FriendFeed — but I also think a tool like Twitter is designed for back-and-forth, and the more there is of it the better. The new feature posts a comment to FriendFeed and also posts it as a response directly to Twitter if the user wants.
That’s an elegant solution, and it only took a matter of days for the team at FriendFeed to implement it — along with several other cool features, including the ability to track your Disqus comments through the service, something Fred Wilson and others had suggested would be an appealing addition. Nice work by the FriendFeed team.
