It's a pretty good idea, and they've raised a lot of money. But there's a big problem here. It's a problem that's systemic to most of the Web 2.0 headspace these days, so I'm not surprised so few people are paying attention to it. Look at where the focus lies: "keep up-to-date"; "use your social network as a tool for discovering interesting information." Like your friends are only there to push cool stuff for you to look at. You don't really want to talk to them; you just want to subscribe to them. Real interaction is almost totally ignored, both in the pitch and the execution.

It's a little unfair to single out FriendFeed; it's like this everywhere. The basic mode of interaction on blogs has remained remarkably static since blogging was introduced: an author writes an article, his or her readers leave comments under (always under) the article, and if a discussion happens it's subservient to the post itself, which sits aloof and pristine above the rabble. FriendFeed is no different: they gesture weakly toward "discussion," by which they mean comments left below posts — naturally, in small light-grey text, as if even the interface wants you to know how unimportant they are.

Here's what I'm wondering: what would happen if discussions were presented as more important than the posts that spark them? What if "commenters" could look like bloggers in their own right instead of being pushed to the back of the room by the author's ego? What if replies felt more like singular posts instead of like annotation to a larger piece? What if a person's activity stream were treated as the basis of interaction among their social circle instead of as the total embodiment of their online persona?

There's no doubt that aggregators like FriendFeed are useful; it's clear now that the walled gardens are giving way to smaller, more specialized services each doing what they do best. But interaction needs to matter, and I feel like it's getting trampled in the race to deliver relevant content and separate signal from noise. Really, though, these concerns don't need to be decoupled; there are easy ways to leverage discussion to make good content stick out. Here on Streem, fresh replies show up at the top of your crowdspace, and one click flips open the item they're attached to — the result being that content deemed interesting by your friends will hang around for a while, staying alive as an active discussion, while uninteresting content will quickly drift away. As an interface feature it's not that noteworthy, but in practice it does a surprisingly good job of cleaning up the signal, and it makes the user experience much more engaging.

What I'm after, I think, is some kind of synthesis of lifestreaming and social messaging: a place to dump your life and share stuff with your friends, where content gives rise to rich, fluid interaction and the interaction, not the feed, is what keeps you coming back. What I've found so far are solutions that are so simple and hindsight-obvious that I'm sort of baffled by how it's 2008 and still, on basic levels of communication and usability and interactivity, we're failing to fully capture the potential of this internet thing.