What Friendfeed has to have is some kind of inflection point where its inherent greatness pulled through, was recognized by all, and contributed to some greater good.  The key, of course, is that “inherent greatness” — as Scoble points out, there are a lot of things it kind of does well, but hamstrung by a manpower (and goodness knows what else), its become easy pickings for Facebook to merely mimick the features off of.  That is to say, if Scoble can’t pin down a few singularly great things about Friendfeed, what hope does any of us have when we try and describe it to would-be fans?

Allen Stern describes it as something like a forum.  I would agree … but perhaps what Friendfeed needs to do, or become, is something more evolved than a mere forum.  The thing that blew my mind about Friendfeed wasn’t just how it was an aggregator, but how it enabled real-time conversations that were impossible to track with Twitter.  Perhaps what Friendfeed lacks, then, is the magic sauce that powered Twitter through its would-be-Nobel-nominating efforts in Iran: its ability to be used through text-messaging and SMS-services.  Imagine, for a moment, the kind of impact that secure and private rooms for conversations to be had, in real time, on the fly, off your desktop for would-be revolutionaries in Iran (or, anywhere, for that matter).

There’s still time for an inflection point to happen with Friendfeed, but I’d agree with one of Scoble’s assertions: to make the transition from good to great, they are going to have to think of something clever that Facebook can’t just copy — Facebook has the manpower and resources to continue making Friendfeed a “feature” without it.

There are a lot of dimensions to this issue.  I sympathize with Allen because not every blogger is doing this for the hobby and the egotistical pat on the back that traffic and comments bring (myself included) — some are trying to make a go out of it.

Traffic DOES matter when you’re trying to sell ads to support yourself or business.

But let’s rephrase the question another way — do a lack of comments mean that there’s a gap in reaching the maximum traffic potential?

As part of a larger discussion about the utility — or futility — of socially driven traffic, I’m not so sure.  I love Allen (in a brotherly blogging kind of way), but when your bottom liine is governed by pageviews and uniques, I would argue that the level of user engagement is but a secondary metric. It is neither a necessary, nor sufficient, factor for success if your primary goal is traffic.

That is to say, I am of the opinion that in some (most?) industries, the percentage of active commenters are likely small with respect to the actual traffic coming in; and as a corollary, a lack thereof probably does NOT represent a giant gap with respect to maximizing traffic.

Furthermore,  I think its possible that traffic that is commenting is probably the exact opposite of the kind of traffic bottom-line bloggers want — they actively visit your site, and as a function of familiarity with your blog, they probably develop ad-blindness the fastest.

Factor in the first-adopter-ishness of Allen’s blog, and you can probably double, triple, or square, if you like, the likelihood of ad-blindness (and therefore, lack of clickage, and therefore, a lower CTR all things being equal) on all display ads.

Call me a [whatever you like], but for folks who are interested in the bottom line, the best kind of traffic is probably search-related traffic where people have absolutely NO allegiance are morely likely to read, and then move on — and possibly click on an ad in trying to find what they’re looking for.