McCain is in good health and his mom is 96 if that's any indication - David Ward
as long as you keep the baby and marry the daddy, go ahead have a baby at 17. It's no problem. This is pretty much what they are saying and that's fucked up - David Jacobs
I'm actually concerned with *McCain* as President. Though, admittedly, Palin scares me even more. The platform of *winning* the war, continued isolation from a foreign relations perspective and trickle down economics would do serious harm to this country IMO. That's not even touching the social and environmental issues. - AJ Kohn
David W., McCain's dad died at 71, which may cancel out mom's longevity. Who knows? He's had cancer multiple times, vertigo, enlarged prostate, high cholesterol, and on and on. Not sure he's "in good health." - Ayşe E.
You know if the tables were turned it would be a political issue and not just a family matter. - Larry Kless
Steve: That makes no sense. Closure of Gulf oil production and fear of damage to the rigs and pipelines, not to mention refineries, should push the price up, not pull it down. - Roberto Bonini
@Roberto - gustav wasn't as bad as many feared. No damage = price goes down - Jason Kaneshiro
IMO the new high for oil is a result of combined effect of Russian (25% of Europe's oil coming from Russia) frictions with the West + continuous unrest and instability in ME and Iran + increasingly perceived bad shape of American economy. - Hayk Hakobyan
Chrome? What's that? If it doesn't run on OS X it doesn't exist to me. - Jason Carreira
I'm no Google fan-boy but what I saw was pretty interesting and could make it ever tougher for Microsoft to dent Google's search share. Sure Chrome plays nice with other search engines but people will likely use Google if they install Chrome. And the godbox may increase the number of searches. - AJ Kohn
@Jason: +1 (but I want an OS X version and soon!) - AJ Kohn
this is in part why I wrote about how live blogging events that are open to everyone is a silly exercise ... - Adam Ostrow
I'm with Jason. I don't do Windows anymore. - Carmen
At this point is Chrome *supposed* to have any awareness beyond early adopter-types and the usual crash test dummies? Would that even be a good idea? - Chris Baskind
nah, chrome is totally an early adopter thing. Firefox is practically still only an early adopter and tech thing. - Rob Diana
proud crash test *dummy* (case in point, I have Vista - it's note even out of alpha yet, right?) - acedanger
I wouldn't even go so far as to say that the tech echo chamber is all that excited. - Jim McCusker
I'm not even excited about it and I'm a web designer / developer - Jason Kaneshiro
they are talking about it some on CNBC ... though they are optimistic about most things that could push stocks higher - Adam Ostrow
It's too early in the process to make pronouncements like that, considering Google hasn't really announced or released it yet. - Louis Gray
@ Bwana.....and the rest of the world is trying to figure out how to change their myspace profiles :) - Iain Baker
Early adopters target, for a browser, is a damn good thing. Bug hunting and squashing is far more simpler than, say, a IE thing. - Claudio Cicali
Heard some coworkers talking about it that only keep up with mainstream tech news so it's making some headway - David Knight
david - don't you realize that oil price is down because of chrome launch - Allen Stern
it doesn't exist outside of the chamber, some sad number people 25%? Still think IE6 is the bees knees. - Steve Spalding
anything especially great about it? A browser seems like such commodity software at this point. At least firefox has greasemonkey. Speaking of which, anyone know if any of the good FF greasemonkey scripts have been updated for the beta? - Thomas Hawk
i love the idea of protected memory spaces for each tab. bad javascript and flash take my entire browser down way too often. looking forward to trying a Mac version. - Anthony Citrano
It went exactly as it was expected to, which says a LOT. - Art Lindsey III
Made for some animated morning reading - Mark Dykeman
I must have read a different article. I don't understand why people got so upset. - Rob Diana
If a tool helps my workflow then that's all the explanation I need. I know we need to keep the general web-surfing public in mind as we continue innovating, but surely not *every* tool has to be suited for use by retirees and CEOs and there year olds all at once. - Daniel J. Pritchett
The political description didn't really serve to bolster the rest of the article's point, but I thought the article was pretty spot on. And I usually disagree with everything Mark Hopkins writes. Kids these days. - Mark Trapp
I find the term "early adopter" misleading at best. These people do not adopt "the next big thing" before growth comes. They simply adopt anything, especially what will enable getting more followers. This has nothing to do with the usage pattern of an average user. - MySites
Not all early adopters are doing it to get followers. Some just do it because they can afford it and are complete gearheads. - AlexScoble(Robert'sBro)
I think my brother truly likes trying out new stuff, the fact that he has people that pay attention to what he uses is secondary. As far as I can tell, he's driven to do that more internally than externally. Personally, I like having my own professional canary in the coal mine. - AlexScoble(Robert'sBro)
I liked the article and am a bit confused over the agressive tone of a lot of commenters. I must be getting old. - Alexander van Elsas
@alex I've always liked your brother, and he's part the reason I tried out a number of tools. the article wasn't a personal attack on Robert. I think I said two or three times that I was describing a stereotype - one I gathered, by the way, by polling folks who aren't A-list bloggers in my personal circle. I was pretty disturbed by the personal attack he made against Mashable in his response. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
@mark again, that was something that someone I talked to said "make sure you include that" because it's pretty true for the majority of early adopters. It's just how the demographics skew. If you look at Mashable's own coverage, our Obama posts outnumber McCain posts by at least 5:1, if not more. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
Sorry, I should have said in my comments that I was responding to what MySites said. - AlexScoble(Robert'sBro)
Checking in from a brief vacation, a bit surprised to see the huge uproar over this post. Perhaps could've done without the one or two lines touching on politics given Mark's known affiliations, but I'm not sure why people interpreted it as such a personal attack. - Adam Ostrow
Mark: I agree that it's true, but it doesn't do anything for the rest of the article: it's just sort of there, getting people upset about you pigeonholing early adopters as Obama supporters instead of focusing on the meat of your article. You could've removed that sentence and your argument would not have been affected at all. Either that or your article could've used a better argument of how early adopters supporting Obama proves how out of touch they are. Or are you arguing that before supporting Obama we should make sure our mothers would use him? Or that he's a time-sink? But hey, it's one sentence out of many, and like I said, I thought you were right on the mark with it. - Mark Trapp
If half of the likely voters are going to vote for Obama, I hardly think that it makes an Obama supporter out of touch. - AlexScoble(Robert'sBro)
Alex: sure, but if there was a cogent argument linking the claim that Obama supporters are out of touch to the fact that Obama coverage with early adopters is huge, it'd make more sense that Mark talked about it in his article: it'd be a simple a fortiori argument. - Mark Trapp
The idea of me leaving it in there is to show how the majority of early adopters sort of live in this monoculture vacuum. We talk to other early adopters continually due to the tools we've early adopted, so we think more and more alike. This gradually pulls us away from thinking 'how can i pitch this to my friends" to "how can i pitch this to other early adopters." It ends up pushing our tech into a increasingly smaller concentric circle, instead of wider ones. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
I figured I had two choices - I could write another echo-chamber post about how we're in an echo-chamber, and just go super meta on the theme, or I could write something that nudged the early adopters in the ribs and said: "hey - insular cliques are about as annoying to folks who aren't a part of them as they were in high school." It's fun to be a part of them, but if our goal is convincing others to use the tech we like, it's not particularly effective. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
Mark: I'm glad you gave 'em a poke in the ribs. They need it every now and then, especially considering how divorced from reality a lot of them are. Secondly, the Obama thing made perfect sense. When you're painting a stereotype, it's always helpful to employ as much data as you have (and frankly, it's true!). I really liked the piece. One of your best ever. - Vincent Ferrari
"Follow" is indeed clearer language -- clearer than "subscribe" I think -- especially as we move beyond desktop-based RSS readers to just having friends or contacts online... it's also less weighty to "unfollow" someone, rather than "unfriend them". And, it abates the whole overloading of the "friend" terminology.
+1 from me. This should definitely be something we use in DiSo. - Chris Messina via FriendFeed MT Plugin
I like it. It makes more sense. Hope it makes it easier to explain to people. And interesting that the nomenclature for these actions seems to be spreading from Twitter, FriendFeed, and their ilk. - Josh Bancroft
There are two simple ways to address the problem... (And I second Mark's concern):
1. use rel-follow (not a great convention, but something along those lines) to suggest a "followable" link... it could add the blog to Google Reader if you're a GR user (I imagine this would be the default for Blogger members) or you could change it to launch a local application or your own external blog aggregator.
2. In the case of DiSo endpoints, I believe we'll have some kind of callback mechanism that is advertised on your identity provider/data broker that expresses where you maintain your followed sites/contacts/friends. For example, when sign in to Blogger with your OpenID, your follower list would be advertised as a service in your XRDS-Simple (Discovery) profile... If you click a "follow" link, Blogger would send and OAuth request back to your identity provider requesting permission to add the feed to your followed list; should you grant the OAuth token, you'll now be subscribed to updates from that person/blog.
I - Chris Messina via FriendFeed MT Plugin
Excellent analysis, Chris. For years I've railed against the implied obligations of the "Friend" terminology and then when it switched to "follow" I didn't even notice that I'd finally gotten my wish. We are free at last! - Daniel J. Pritchett
I like it! I am sure Google has done a lot of UI tests and found it to be more effective, or they wouldn't roll it out. Does this mean YouTube is going to change from "Subscribe" to "Follow"???
At Mefeedia, we have received lots of feedback from "mainstream users" that "Subscribe" is confusing. It makes people think that they have to pay for subscribing to a video feed - believe me, it is one of the most common emails we receive (asking if the subscribe service is free)! May "follow" Google's lead...:) - Frank Sinton via FriendFeed MT Plugin
I thought Facebook would do something like this to mainstream RSS...still can't believe they haven't integrated "real news" into profiles - Ethan Bauley
Next step is to connect Orkut (+OpenSocial +Lively) with Blogger such as Wordpress is going social with its plugins. Don't you think? - krisalis78 via FriendFeed MT Plugin
This is very good news! Any name with a potential to proliferate must be self-explanatory and obvious. RSS had three words all of them ambiguous and in need of explanation. - Hayk Hakobyan
Great. No more feeling uncomfortable about friending, unfriending and - Just Do Not Follow! - Marcus Schroefel
till not interested in rss ... it is just reader's digest in e-form .. a relentless river of boring .. not nearly as good as my intuition, manually enabled or not - Gregory Lent via FriendFeed MT Plugin
I'd say being an advisor has its privileges, but this bib arrived even before our kids. Sarah can't wait to get her hands on an RSS feed reader and start sharing stuff. She just needs to get her own dang laptop. - Louis Gray
AWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!! How adorable. The kids are too of course ;) Do they know Ajax yet? - drew olanoff
Louis, in the name of transparency, I ask that you declare whether this is a paid endorsement. If so, how much can I rent ad space on one of your twins for? lol - Slippy Lane
where is their disclaimer? bib before (how much before...) how sloppy can you be)... - Arne-Per
Kinda saw this one comin' :) She's soooo cute! - Charlie Anzman
I'd like to also say that this bib was sent pre-advisor role as well! :) And that I like turtles. - drew olanoff
Absolutely. I already work long days and then battle burn out at the end of those weeks. Having that home day would enhance my personal life and likely increase my efficiency in the office. - Jason Toney
Yes, but some days would be too long for me... But maybe I could do more with my show then... - Mike Wills
No. I'd prefer, crazily enough, six shorter days. ideal schedule would be from 7am to 1:30, Monday to Saturday. i like my afternoon and evenings free. - patricia elizabeth
Yes. I need to stop driving so much. I'll take Fridays off please. K Thanks Bye. - Ernie Oporto
I worked a 9/80 schedule and really liked it. Unfortunately, the Friday off tended to become a Honeydew day. - Victor Ryden
I think the way a 4 day work week is usually talked about is having 4 8 hour days... I think we'd all probably get just as much done and have more time for our families and friends. Better yet is to measure people on what they get done, rather than the time they spend on it. - Jason Carreira
I had a schedule where I worked alternate 4-day, 5-day weeks. I enjoyed it. Like many, I work a lot of hours anyway. I could probably switch to that schedule now if I really wanted to. - jbrotherlove
I used to work four 10s, M-Th, and loved it. I'd probably go back to it, too, especially if they'd let me work the extra two hours per day from home. - Akiva Moskovitz
I'm on a 4 / 10 right now, it's really sweet. - Jason Kaneshiro
Interesting to look at the quote that apparently started the thing: "I heard from an employee close to the deal that the Mormon church’s genealogy business made an unsolicited bid to acquire Facebook." http://secretenemyhideout.com/... Too many vagaries in the sentence, not only regarding the source, but in the reference to "the Mormon church's genealogy business." One could be a little more specific on the actual entity doing the bidding. - Ontario Emperor
The Vatican owns Coca-Cola. And we are allowed to drink it out of the Grail. ;) - Cyndy
Great, personal point of view and explanation, Louis. - Rex Hammock
wow...yeah I'm also used to this kind of crap, but this one's just stupid. For one thing, at least locally, I've heard Church leaders cautioning youth not to mess with MySpace because of the risk of predators and questionable content so I can't see them suddenly deciding that Facebook is a good idea (despite the fact that I'm connected to several members via Facebook so we're obviously using it :) ). Oh well, I'll go complain to my many wives now LOL. - Rob Neville
My wife and I had a good laugh on this one last night. Too absurd to have taken seriously. - LiquidLag
Lots of rumors don't pass the smell test, but that doesn't stop the more stupid among us from repeating them. Think of all the stupid crap we've heard--are still hearing--regarding Sen. Obama from members of Congress and the media. I can think back to all the LDS rumors from when I was a kid. They were dumb, but nowhere near as harmful and ignorant as the rumors that we Muslims had and have to deal with day from the willfully stupid. - faboo mama
I guess you've read Steven Hodson's follow-up post, in which he took the "nonsense" comment personally. In his defense, it should be noted that Hodson did at least cite his sources. And if one takes the tack that the Facebook-LDS story should not have been posted without confirmation, does that also mean that the Inquistr and other outlets should have held off on the Bigfoot story? (I'll grant one difference. The LDS Church has listed contact information. Last I checked, Bigfoot did not.) - Ontario Emperor via fftogo
@Ontario Emporer: I always heard that we (LDS) owned the Pepsi company. - Jason Shultz via twhirl
Ontario, I have a long record of appreciating Steven's posts. We've been peers and friends for about two years now. That he and I rankle each other now and again is absolutely fine. I think the story was nonsense, but I think he and others who wrote on it are good folks. :-) - Louis Gray
@Ontario, and if you contacted them, what would you expect them to say? The answer is the same whether it's true or not, 'cause you don't talk about deals before they're done. - Jason Carreira
Jason, the allegedly acquiring entity could issue a strong denial (we will not acquire Company X), which would close the issue. Or they could say "no comment" or "we have not made a formal offer," which means nothing one way or the other. - Ontario Emperor via fftogo
Ontario, any idea how many times companies deny something is taking place when it really was taking place? The corporate pull quote is something you stick in there to show that you were open to hearing from them, but generally, it's not truthiness. - Cyndy
Summixe- excuse me, Twitter search-- can be a bit-hang-uppy at times. It's funny as the replies tab for Twitter.com, searching "@username" on summize, and the @ tab on Twhirl all seem to be tracking differently. that's gotta stop - Doug Haslam via twhirl
I saw one person say that it was late by about 30 min - early this morning... is it even slower now? - Brad Parler
looks like the twitter crew finally got it fully integrated :) - acedanger
Twitter is going through a bit of restructuring and from latest reports around the web they are right about now moving ex-summize code to their servers, so the delays are to be expected - Stepan Mazurov
excellent, good luck with the funding. will you be announcing the final investment numbers? - Rob Diana
Louis: would you gladly pay him Tuesday for a cheeseburger... I mean angel investment deal... today? - Mark Trapp
Rob: We've raised just under $600k to-date. Washington Post, as well as personal investments from Goldberg and angel investors such as Allen Morgan (Mayfield Fund), Reed Hundt (Former Chairman, FCC), Gordon Crovitz (Former Publisher, WSJ), Julius Genachowski (founder, LaunchBox Digital) and Johnny Taylor (CEO of IAC's Rushmore Drive). Raising additional $300-$500k now, from angels only. - Jason Goldberg
Louis: will you be completing a qualified investor form for your $25? - Jason Goldberg
VC Microfinance..... hmmmm.... Why not? Lets do it. Lets build a company together right here on FriendFeed. Now there's a social networking story... ;) - Brad Nickel
Microfinance is a real good concept tho - Especially since I've a coupla projects stalling due to lack of Microfinance :) - Yuvi
Me too. Lets build it with our companies as the frist funding examples. - Brad Nickel
Hmm... well, I'll test it for you, 'cause I need some financing for a project as well ;) - Jason Carreira
Jason - congrats; I would also like some microfinancing for my company... i love the idea - andy brudtkuhl
the challenge with VC via microfinance is that technically one must qualify via a fairly rigorous standard to invest in early stage companies. That said, I'm willing to bet that something could be worked up/around there, and that FF or LinkedIn or the such could be an interesting micro-financing pool for early stage companies. - Jason Goldberg
So would that mean that anyone who creates a product and posts it on the internet for free can call a PayPal Donation button a "VC investment acceptance system"? :) - Nathaniel Payne
Yea it would be hard to distribute "shares" at that micro level. If someone can pull this off - it would be HUGE. - andy brudtkuhl
Indeed an experiment. I wonder if the SEC considers Tweets to be public solicitation for investment in unregistered securities. Keep us posted ;) - Aviv
I wonder if you can take the lessons from Politics about financing: maybe get VC "bundlers" who take all the micropayments and combine them into one large payment. They take care of all the paperwork, as well. - Mark Trapp
yeah but Jason had contacted TC and if TC Blogged about it , then it would be ok ?? Its like a two faced act.. remember HIS post about FM seeking more FUNDS ?? I wish people will remember these facts . TC blog is so full of BS - Peter Dawson
see the comments in the techcrunch string. I deleted the tweet. wasn't worth the headache. I'll say that I "probably" made a mistake on this one but frankly isn't worth the headaches to argue whether it was a mistake or not, or debate the legalities, etc. It sure has made for a good FF string though! - Jason Goldberg
why give up so early?! should be cleared if asking for interested investors = selling stocks? - cem
If it wasn't for the SEC we'd have seen a tipjoy.com-like service for micro-investments a long time ago. - Aviv
I am thinking along the lines of an Angel Network and a ShareBuilder micro share model with social commentary and voting on the investments merged with a flat investment for a flat percentage on every company model. Kind of like YCombinator meets Sharebuilder meets Prosper. This is not a public offering, but I am going to write an initial doc on this and create a mockup. Anyone interested in helping, participating, etc. contact me at brad at clickbrain dot com. I can see the community deciding together... - Brad Nickel
Good luck Jason! keep us posted on how things develop! - Caleb Elston
IMHO, TC is a douche bag.. :he love taking the juice outa of another person fun. If he had got the 'scoop' he would then write pretty words.. I still stand by what I said earlier - Peter Dawson
or separately on each deal. Commentary on the business plan and the technology, etc. May need a membership model for privacy, etc. Anyway, this is just a big brain dump by me, but seems to me it could make a lot of sense and it ties in perfectly with my current business model. The idea of a community investment model and input sounds good to me, but will take a special kind of entrepreneur. - Brad Nickel
I agree....why can't we just have a micro-investment company that owns all the shares and pays out to members upon liquidity events. Basically a VC company for micro early stage investments. Any lawyers or VCs out there want to comment on the legality or structure? - Julie Kentwood
I'm glad this has spurred this sort of discussion. Oh, and these people keep emailing me about their interest in investing in this company that i didn't solicit them to invest in. ;) - Jason Goldberg
I love it Jason. Let us know the outcome. My expectation is you won't ever have to worry about this and it will be worth it. - Brad Nickel
Brad, you might want to look into what pvcse.com was doing. Look it up on archive.org. - Aviv
Oh there's no worry. Mike hit me on the chin cause he could. I sorta asked for it to. No blood no foul; play on. Did someone say mashable posted something on this? - Jason Goldberg
@sprague no worries. our focus is product, product, product. if the product is good that will speak loudest. i screwed up today by focusing on something other than product. another lesson learned. - Jason Goldberg
Sprague: An email could be friendlier but it is no publicity. And in this manner Jason received tons of coverage for his intention to raise further investment. Very clever! - Svetlana Gladkova
Don't want to be a mood spoiler or anything but potentially getting in serious legal trouble isn't worth the publicity IMO. Mess with the SEC rules and end up fined or worse. I hope for your sake, Jason, since you deleted the tweet that the SEC sees this as unintentional and/or not worth their time to pursue. - TDavid
@TDavid: What I actually see here is that we often view the entire web 2.0 business as somewhat laidback - thus the mistakes. - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl
The intent was in no way to be clever. We've had several of our users previously ask us if they could invest in socialmedian. The tweet was intended to let those people know that we are now considering investments from qualified investors. My mistake was in the wording of the tweet. The intent was good and fine. - Jason Goldberg
Oh and arrington's story was the #1 most popular story on socialmedian this morning, meaning it hit the in-box of thousands of socialmedian users and followers this morning ... and in good social media form and transparency, we did nothing to stop that. - Jason Goldberg
@Jason: Actually I'd prefer it to be a calculated move on your part to get publicity and investment as a results. But even if not, it was still an interesting even to witness for many of us anyway so keep going. - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl
"This is very true ... the line gets moved for certain blogs, which makes everyone else (bloggers and journalists anyhow) think an embargo was broken, when in reality, the PR person told them they could publish early.
I've also seen situations where the PR person actually tries to give everyone the same embargo time, only to have someone at the company go around them and tell a publisher to go ahead and print their story, which makes both the company and the PR firm look horribly unprofessional.
On the other hand, other times when embargoes are broken it's simply an honest mistake by the publisher. Overall, the issue is probably overblown and really only important to those of us that follow TechMeme, which, truth be told, doesn't really care that much if you publish 5 minutes before everyone else, it's about the source ranking and links." - Adam Ostrow
Don't worry. A few years of retirement and he'll balloon up nicely. :) - Kevin D. White
I was probably pushing 5-6,000/day back in college when I played basketball a couple hours a day ... not so much anymore now that I'm a sedentary blogger :-) - Adam Ostrow
I so don't see a mistake coming. Especially if you stick to our deal and just let me blog about the good stuff you find out. We did have a deal, right? :) - Rahsheen
I've always found it weird that people are willing to use the phrase "opening the kimono" in an otherwise polite, decorous and respectful business context. - ⓞnor
@nor, it is weird and I almost didn't use it, but it is an understood phrase. The alternative, and even worse, term, is "a complete upskirt". - Louis Gray
I am a bit late now – but first of all my congratulations for you joining ReadBurner’s team in an advisory role/equity owner You have been doing such a great job over last months with your blog that has benefited many of us (me included), I just hope that to continue. And about monetizing your blog – I think you should do it as well, I assume you spend quite a good amount of time researching and writing in your blog and that should be compensated. I few unobtrusive ads will not bother the great majority of your blog readers, I would assume. - Joao
I'm sorry... I'm not interested in seeing what's in Louis' kimono. - Cyndy
Cyndy - You may have no choice ... It'll probably be on SmugMug - Charlie Anzman
