Chris, thanks for the comment. At least the advantage with Friendfeed is that anyone can at least look at the conversation via a direct link, as opposed to a completely private mailing list (actually it occurs to me that this is not immediately obvious when one lands on the Friendfeed front page - which probably doesn't help)

If you follow this link anyone can see the conversation around the original post whereas if you go here you can find the commentary on the current post. And if you go here you can find conversation and click through to another item where I have been roundly told off. So it is all accessible but from the outside you wouldn't necessarily be able to connect it all up except by, for instance, grabbing the RSS feeds [1, 2 off my own Friendfeed and that of items where I have commented.

The question is whether that is compelling enough to make you want to join up for the conversation.

There is also something here about intrinsic timeframes of the various discussions on different services that don't map onto each other that makes it difficult to bring everything together in any meaningful way.