Bloggers have always been somewhat nervous about 'comment fragmentation' when it comes to services like Blogged, but there can be no doubt that these services also bring new readers to these blogs. The new widget that Blogged introduced today should help to alleviate some of these fears, as it will allow bloggers to showcase the discussions about their posts on Blogged back to their blogs.

After this redesign, Blogged definitely feels like a mix between Google News and the Facebook news feed, which is not a bad thing. The blog directory, which once formed the basis of Blogged, has now been relegated to the back pages of the site, though it still provides a valuable service in its own right.

First, MySpace is taking the unorthodox move of giving applications some access to their PR department. MySpace announced on Monday that it is looking for a few good apps with whom to put out joint press releases. This is undoubtedly a good move for MySpace PR because it allows them to create a more continuous buzz about the platform. But like the platform itself, sharing the stage with app developers is a surprising shift from old policies for the News Corporation-owned social network.

This is, after all, the same News Corp. whose President and COO Peter Chernin said in 2006, by way of introducing plans for MySpace to compete with many of the companies that had helped it grow, "If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flicker, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace."

It's the same Fox Interactive Media (the arm of News Corp. that controls MySpace) whose Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett said last year, "We probably should have stopped YouTube. YouTube wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for MySpace. We’ve created companies on our back."

And it's the same MySpace that famously blocked widgets (such as YouTube and Photobucket -- the latter of whom it eventually bought) that competed with products of its own.

But a lot has changed in the past year. Not only has MySpace embraced the idea of an application ecosystem and launched a developer platform, but they also announced plans in January to create a startup incubator. Is it too little, too late, though? Will MySpace's platform be as successful as Facebook's has been?

Apps in the News Feed ... Er, Friend Subscriptions

Yesterday, MySpace also announced that it would begin pushing notifications of app installations to its Friend Subscriptions -- their equivalent of the Facebook News Feed.

Interestingly, while MySpace is just rolling out this feature, Facebook has recently begun to impose restrictions on how applications interact with the News Feed in an effort to combat information overload and growing noise. It will be interesting to see if MySpace repeats the same mistakes Facebook has made, or learns from them and implements tighter restrictions on it Friend Subscriptions from the start.

Fellow venture capitalist Brad Feld voices similar concerns, in a post entitled, "I Need A News Feed For My News Feeds." The solution for each of them lies in the creation of some sort of universal feed dashboard that manages your social activity feeds and determines which items require action and which are of interest.

For consultant Jevon MacDonald, who thinks that lifestream aggregators are starting to become "noise aggregators," the solution to the problem lies in the development of filters that learn what you want to read. "If I give someone's del.icio.us bookmarks a thumbs down every time I see it, then you should stop showing it to me. If I give a thumbs down on ever single del.icio.us bookmark I see, then make sure you never show me one again," he writes.

Interestingly enough, it was Facebook that really pushed this whole activity stream idea into the limelight in the first place, and it is Facebook who seems to be taking an early lead in developing tools to filter them. The Facebook News Feed is already filtered algorithmically, and Facebook offers a couple of tools to help users tailor the filters to their interests (including the thumbs up/down method that MacDonald espouses).

According to Marshall Kirkpatrick, the concept of the News Feed has been a more important contribution to the social media space by Facebook than their vaunted platform. It could be that Facebook will also take the lead in tackling how to cope with the information overload that has resulted from the numerous activity streams we're now tracking on various social services.

To be fair, lifestreaming and lifestream aggregation is in its infancy. The Facebook News Feed only appeared about a year an a half ago, Twitter only gained real attention about a year ago, and FriendFeed and similar services are even newer. However, dealing with information overload is clearly a problem that these services will need to figure out how to address -- whichever does it best will likely be a big winner.

While Facebook certainly led the adoption of this 'feed paradigm' in social networks, in the area of integrating external web services, Facebook clearly has lagged. Startups like Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, and Iminta are integrating content streams from other services and Facebook may well be doing this to compete with those offerings.

I think FriendFeed has a slightly unique approach (see the differentiators section of our coverage on FriendFeed & my interview with two of the founders on Read/WriteTalk.) Regardless, the point is that Facebook is clearly playing catch up in this area. Also, it's worth noting that earlier this week FriendFeed announced that they had closed a $5 million series A round and have officially launched the service (it was previously in closed beta).

Not Enough ... Enable Sharing

Unfortunately, I don't believe that what Facebook is planning will be enough. Until Facebook allows users to take their Mini Feed and News Feed with them to other services, the sharing is all one way (to Facebook) and not compelling relative to these other services. Users should be able to share their Mini Feed and News Feed data back out of Facebook.

Conceptually: Attention Should be Portable

We've covered the attention economy regularly at ReadWriteWeb and encouraged these Attention Silos to open up. Interestingly, in the post on Attention Silos, Alex Iskold commented:

"Modern services like del.icio.us and Flickr recognize the importance and the benefits of being good citizens and letting other services access their information, but among older web players opening up this way is a taboo."

I find it amazing to say, but Facebook is still behaving like the 'older web players' in this area. This is especially remarkable, because Facebook has joined Data Portability Working Group. A group whose purpose is to:

"...put existing data portability technologies, techniques, policies and initiatives in context in order to facilitate translation, education, advocacy and ultimately implementation. Portability is defined as both physically moving data or simply porting the context in which the data is used."

Ultimately, these feeds are a reflection of my attention and my network's attention and conceptually I should be able to share this with any other services I choose.

Pragmatically: User Benefits

A few times I've heard Dave McClure point out that 'open isn't better nor is closed better ... better is better.' I completely agree with this. Therefore, while I think there is a solid conceptual argument for Facebook to allow users to share their News and Mini Feed, ultimately the best reasons are that both users and Facebook would benefit. Specifically, I see three benefits:

• Display Facebook activities across the web
• Accelerate learning on other web services
• Stay up to date in my feed reader / start page

Display Facebook Activities Across the Web

If Facebook was the only place on the web to interact with content, this wouldn't be meaningful. However, obviously many of us maintain other digital identities on the web such as blogs, Tumblr pages, and even other social network profiles. On these other sites, it would be great to create dynamic Facebook badges, similar to what I can do with my Twitter Badges.

Facebook would also benefit from this by increased exposure and reminders to visit the site. While they certainly aren't struggling from a lack of awareness (they're even featured in the latest iPhone ad), I'm pretty confident that these dynamic widgets would not only be valuable to users but increase engagement with Facebook.

Accelerate Learning in Other Web Services

As data flows more and more freely across the web, it's interesting to see how other web services are able to leverage interactions. The most common example, is discovering friends on one service and adding them to another service. Facebook even does this by allowing you to discover friends based on people you email with. While finding friends is a great, simple use case, the News Feed and Mini Feed are a reflection of the activities and interests of my friends and me personally. I imagine a whole ecosystem of entirely new and creative services built off interpreting these attention streams, such as product recommendations based on your behavior in Facebook.

Stay Up to Date in My Feed Reader / Start Page

I'm sure this one would be more controversial inside Facebook, but one of the reasons I log into Facebook is to check my News Feed. I would love to be able to subscribe to the News Feed in my Feed Reader so I didn't have to login exclusively for this purpose.

While this would certainly decrease the number of times I visit Facebook just to check that feed. I actually think it would increase my engagement with Facebook, because the number of meaningful visits I make to the site would increase. My reasoning is that the significant visits are when I see a friend's action that I'm interested in learning more about. I'd still see these activities and be driven to Facebook to do this investigation.

There is no doubt this would be valuable to me as a user, I actually think it also would be valuable to Facebook as well, since engagement is ultimately what matters as long as their advertising is primarily based on cost-per-action metrics.

One Challenge: Filtering

Creating filters that appropriately share the correct information is obviously going to be an important issue to work through. This is especially true with the News Feed (more than Mini Feed), because it includes other people's behavior.

The Problem with Current News Feed Filters

I highlight this because I don't find the current News Feed preferences very empowering for filtering. Only some percentage of my actions actually show up in my friend's feed and more importantly only some percentage of my friend's actions show up in my feed. The current empowerment is limited to tweaking parameters by which certain actions are chosen and others are not (see the screen shot below).

Beyond manually adjusting these preferences, Facebook also empowers their users to 'thumbs up' certain activities from their friends to indicate an interest in receiving more similar items (see the screen shot below).

I'd specifically like the ability to do at least three things:

1. see all my friend's actions that could have shown up in my feed
2. apply my own filters to the feed
3. understand why one specific item was delivered to my feed

I appreciate that the interactions are a tough to get right, however, Facebook has a lot of smart engineers and designers and I'm confident they can tackle this. Plus, I'm sure I speak for entrepreneurs everywhere when I say that any number of startups and would be happy to help.

Conclusion

Even acknowledging that the appropriate method of filtering is a difficult problem to tackle, I think Facebook has to move to completely open up the Mini Feed and News Feed for sharing across the web. This is a topic I'm sure that will come up in my upcoming panel at Graphing Social Patterns - Social Networks and the NEED for FEEDS. However, I thought it would be appropriate to attack this lack of functionality Facebook style. Therefore, I've created a group in Facebook to request it. Please consider joining the group and I look forward to your feedback in the comments below.

Full disclosure: Sean Ammirati is the co-founder of mSpoke, which makes a product called FeedHub that filters aggregated sets of content feeds. Therefore, this is an area he has a vested interest in.