New comment handling

I've made some changes to the way Friendfork deals with new comments. Previously, once you marked an item as read in Google Reader, that item would stay marked as read even if new comments were added. Now, Friendfork will create new items when there new are "interesting" comments:

• Comments and likes on items you posted.
• Comments on items you liked or commented on.
• Comments by any of your friends.

This change will ensure that you'll see the conversation, but it will also cause you to see items multiple times in some cases (no more than once per Reader crawl cycle). I may make changes to the rules above (or make things configurable) to adjust the noise level. If you're already a friendfork user, you'll see a one-time batch of duplicates when this change takes effect.

FriendFork launched

I've launched the initial version of FriendFork, at http://friendfork.appspot.com. It's still very rough around the edges (especially the initial setup process), but I think it's complete enough to be useful.

The main goal of FriendFork is to adapt the FriendFeed API so it fits a little better into Google Reader (at least for my style of reading). The main changes are to produce separate feeds for different groups of friends, and to replace FriendFeed's "Someone shared an item on Google Reader" links with the real Reader shared items (unless there are "likes" or comments). Since I'm rewriting the feeds anyway, I took the opportunity to make a few other improvements, such as the addition of timestamps in comments and better rendering of YouTube videos.

If this sounds useful to you, go to FriendFork to create your customized feeds.