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There I said it. Is it true? You tell me.

Comparing FriendFeed to SocialThing is not like comparing gelato to ice cream (regular, fatty kind). Rather, they are really two sides of the same coin. FriendFeed aggregates your activities. SocialThing aggregates your friends’ activities.

Why people get into flame wars over this is beyond me. But clearly, people feel strongly either way.

Unfortunately, during this heated school yard brawl, I fear a very important question is going overlooked. Regardless of how aggregating services collate all the information, what is their strategy for propagating conversations back to the original source? FriendFeed’s strategy is to start a completely new thread of discussion. SocialThing instead attempts to back-propagate to the original source (at least in the case of Twitter).

Setting aside the emotions and hype, which model is better? Is it better to have parallel threads of discussion? Or should all conversations be funneled back to the source? Which model do you prefer?

Update: Lifestream Blog has an interesting take on this. Mark argues that instead of blog authors and their visitors discussing in a vacuum, peers (in Twitter/FriendFeed) get instant gratification by being able to discuss these same issues within a close circle of friends. But those seem to be two mutually exclusive use cases. Bloggers will want to have conversations with their visitors, and others should be free to discuss elsewhere too.

Wouldn’t you as a blog author want to stay informed of all the peripheral discussions about your posts? This just doesn’t seem possible if FriendFeed keeps comments limited to its own networks without propagating back to the original source/blog.

Update: Coincidentally, Jason at Blog Herald brought up the exact same point today. The ironic thing is that I found out about his post from a discussion outside his blog.

Update (Mar 24, 2008): FriendFeed seems to have been listening. They now feed comments back to Twitter (ala SocialThing style). More coverage here.