I need a comment aggregator.
Between the number of people I “know” (in the modern, electronic, netspace version of the word) who have accounts scattered among various online services and my ongoing attempt to own myself by claiming my name (either given or the online pseudonym of ‘djwudi’) across the ‘net, I’ve ended up with accounts on a multitude of websites. In order to try to ensure that all of those various people have a fair chance of keeping up with whatever trivialities burble to the surface of my brain and escape out into the electronic aether, I use services like ping.fm, WordPress plugins, and RSS aggregation options to mirror my output across all of those websites.
The upside to this is that whether I’m posting a short tweet, a link to something neat, or actually writing a post to my blog, the content automagically appears in one form or another across the sites I belong to.
The downside is that I only have so much time to actually check into all those various sites. My weblog, Flickr and Twitter accounts get frequent attention, Facebook gets semi-regular attention, Friendfeed gets slightly more than occasional attention, and the rest tend to fall between the cracks, often not getting checked in with unless some automated message tells me that someone’s trying to get my attention, add me as a ‘friend,’ or some other sort of administrative fiddlybit. Then, when I do log into one or another of these sites, I often find a number of responses and comments that have been sitting ignored (unintentionally) since their appearance.
What I need, then, is some form of comment aggregator service that would track when a particular post (of any form) is made, monitor its status on each of the various services, then either collect any comments at a central location or even simply alert me when a comment is made.
While I doubt such a service could be effectively constructed, due to the number of competing services that would have to integrate in some form, part of me wonders if this could be added as some form of extention to the Ping.fm service: since I assume that ping.fm has to get some form of ‘ok’ response when it sends my content out to that service, if that ‘ok’ response could include a reference to the item ID on the target site, perhaps ping.fm could store links to those URIs along with the original item in the ‘Recent Posts’ tab. Some form of notification would be even better, so you didn’t have to go check the ‘Recent Posts’ tab to keep track.
I’m sure there’s a number of reasons why this wouldn’t work, but you get the idea.
How do other people handle their distributed conversations? Is there a magic button (other than the “off” button) that I haven’t stumbled across yet?