If you’re concerned that somebody will insert a few hundred carriage returns just to be a pain, maybe you could set your system to strip all returns past the second, resetting the counter whenever it encounters the text of a new paragraph?

The nofollowing definitely added to my displeasure, and certainly would have deterred me from doing as I had initially planned to do, and uploading photos directly to my FF profile and posting a little writing to it as well, to give it some unique content of its own. If a user is doing the work to create the content, and people like the work enough to link to it, for the user to enjoy some of the benefit of that is just simple fairness. Think of the link juice as a kind of currency. If I’m bringing money into a business through my own hard work, and the business is never willing to even pay me a commission on the profits I’m bringing them, how long am I going to continue working to that business’ benefit, on those terms? How long should I be willing to do so?

But that was not the only problem. Having added a few blogs to my account, I soon leaned that while the content then on the feeds for those blogs quickly appeared on my new Friendfeed page, the page never updated on its own. Days would pass, and new content visible in the feed, would not appear on my FF page. I wrote to user support about the problem, and never heard back.

To what should have been my amazement, I found that the users of this service took the position that whether or not the service actually functioned was quite beside the point. What truly mattered was that the service was being run by a bunch of volunteers, who were working without pay, they said – apparently out of some sort of clubhouse, I take it. Really, I asked, then how did they explain the fact that Facebook, a corporation that has been priced at $82.9 billion dollar by Businessweek, had listed Friendfeed as one its subsidiaries? If our “volunteers” were playing in a $82.9 billion clubhouse, one might imagine that it must surely be a well furnished one. No, they said, this was a charity, because Facebook had passed on doing anything to make money off of it.

In other words, poor service is being defended by the user base on the basis of bad management. Amazing. Conclusion: Friendfeed allows one the chance to hook up to an ethically challenged community of fools, using worthless software as one does so. I can only hope that this will be a once in a lifetime opportunity. I can say that it is, by far, the worst functioning service I’ve ever seen online, and as somebody who does social bookmarking, I’ve seen a lot of them. Other services would have irritating breakdowns, flaws in their service, but they’d at least provide the service they were there for, however imperfectly or even poorly. Friendfeed is the first web service I’ve ever seen that failed at its core purpose, altogether.

It’s a good place to avoid. By the way, Tim, did you notice that you’re nofollowing comments, yourself? You are free to do so, but you do understand that given your own complaint, you’re opening yourself up to a lot of not very good natured teasing?

thanks for the heaps of info you share and i’m learning so much and have seen more traffic to some of my sites already..