I don't use FriendFeed very actively, its home page drives me crazy at times. The items whoosh past the page really fast. A great deal of the active users who contribute interesting content are half way round the earth from where i live, which means most of the interesting stuff whoosh past when I'm asleep. And looking beyond Page1 of everything has always been a painful thought to me.
FriendFeed has a neat way to keep actively discussed items within the first pages, it pushes recently active items towards the top of the page. But what i want is it to be more slower so that i can spend time enjoying and discussing the item and not miss all the cool stuff. On a feed aggregator like Google Reader the items would pile up so that i can take all the time i want and do all the thinking i want and finally just mark it read.
A possible way of doing FriendFeed this way would be to use a sort of ranking that decays. Posts are ranked by their points. Each post would receive points based on several factors like number of comments, number of likes, number of comments and likes by friends, number of comments and likes by friends who have high like compatibility with user, semantic filtering etcetera. So now the items are in an order where items on the top are the ones that is hot and is interesting to the user. The next addition is decay, it is the product of amount of idle time and a decay factor. The decay is subtracted from the total points gained in the previous procedure so that an entry would slowly fall out unless there is some activity. Decay factor is a value that depends on the aggregate activity on an item, it would be more for a newer entry and less for an item which has a lot of comments and likes, this ensures that newer entries that are less discussed fall out faster than the more discussed ones. Every new entry would start with a point greater than the rank 1 entry, so that every new item is sure to appear on the top and in the front page just long enough for people to evaluate and start discussing it.
I am not a regular user of FriendFeed, nor do i have enough understanding of how FriendFeed works to defend this system. These are just some of the insomniac stuff that i think up late into the night.
