According to a post on the Facebook blog, Facebook will add the ability to comment on items in the Mini-Feed today, making it even more similar to Friendfeed. Within the last few months, Facebook started to allow users to aggregate their items from various external social media, photo, and bookmarking sites such as Flickr, del.icious, and StumbleUpon.
With this latest announcement, Facebook is starting to encroach even more on Friendfeed’s territory.
According to the announcement post on the Facebook blog, you can now “easily converse around friends’ statuses, application stories, new friendships, videos, and most other stories you see on their profile. Just click on the comment bubble icon to write a comment or see comments other people have written.” This is, of course, exactly what you would do in Friendfeed.
Facebook will also handle long comment threats very similar to the way Friendfeed deals with them. The feed will show up to 8 comments by default, with the ability to click and show more – which is exactly the way Friendfeed handles this as well.
Facebook, however, is not going to change the order of items in the Mini-Feed the way Friendfeed does. Friendfeed pushes items with new comments to the top of the page. This approach would probably not be too useful in Facebook, where users typically see far fewer items in their feeds than the typical Friendfeed user.
While Friendfeed aggregates items from a far larger pool of services than Facebook and has a lot of features that Facebook still has to copy, it is clear that Facebook is at least getting some ideas from Friendfeed’s (and also Plaxo’s) playbook here.
