Friendfeed is a leap in communication. Using RSS and proprietary activity stream APIs, you can track what people are doing across the web instead of just on one site. Facebook has some inklings of this as well. Whoisi adds wiki functionality which is parallel to imaginary friends on Friendfeed, where you can follow an activity stream of someone who didn't sign up or import a certain stream. XMPP will make the stream real-time and less intensive on networks.This is all well and good, but there is still a problem. Comments. For one, Friendfeed doesn't thread the comments, which makes it too hard to have a conversation. But even worse is the fragmentation. Other sites, such as Reddit, will maintain a single page of comments for any particular URL. But Friendfeed can create several, and there is no way to find them all. There could be the original import of the item (maybe a blog post or image on Flickr) from the content creator, followed by any number of others' links to that item from Google Reader, Twitter, Digg, and the rest. And when those actions appear on Friendfeed, they all have the potential to create yet another silo of comments. You may see something interesting and be completely oblivious to a huge discussion happening around it. An app built on top of Friendfeed, Noiseriver, is trying to fix this. But Friendfeed is just a microcosm of a data siloing problem that the entire web faces. We're seeing a huge movement for something called "data portability", but this seems to have nothing to do with comments and everything to do with profile information and friends lists.
This is important too, but not the same goal. Sure, it's great to meet up with your friends on a completely different site, but does nothing for helping you connect with complete strangers. The real key to connecting people digitally is unifying the conversation. The argument against this is wanting to talk exclusively with one's friends, but this is unfounded since the program could easily bubble friends' comments to the top and only display other comments upon request. So I'm asking for a solution to comment fragmentation. We need an open API for posting threaded comments across the web. Any site choosing to accept open comments should accept a POST request stating,
"I am commenting on this URL in reply to that comment, and here is the text or URL of my comment".
And then of course you could GET for the current set of comments. Now anyone or any app involved in the discussion around a URL will be on equal footing and have access to all that is being said about it, because the silo now has a series of tubes running through it. Perhaps we can't realistically expect arbitrary sites to handle this kind of load, so some kind of glue, such as Gnip, may need to get involved. But this is the solution, and it will kick ass when it is created and people start using it. There is so much that the internet makes possible, so there is no reason to believe that what we have now is as good as it gets.