adam stewart

excellent weather this time of the year - Dave Hodson

"excellent weather" = "bring insulated, waterproof clothing"... - Jules

Nice to have you visiting our fine country for the weekend. Gives me hope that you're maybe able to tell us all about some amazing "something" from the UK. :) - Matthew J Hendrickse

I am here in London for the first time and loving it. Working on getting a visit to Google's HQ with no luck so far. - Johnny Makkar

Bring thermal undies, the weather is atrocious at the moment. Not that it's great under normal circumstances. - KateB

Look forward to hearing what you're up to here Robert - Drew B

welcome. it's a lovely place - Sofia Gkiousou

Robert, nice to have you in London. What about the Sunday meet up, you talked about earlier today? - Bastian

I feel like I haven't seen much of you. When does LeWeb start? - Francine Hardaway via twhirl

Have fun... http://portlanders.ning.com is the best place in the uk ::o) here we have the only olympic site yet to be finished. the sailing. :o) - Rob Sellen

...much more complete and much faster. Plus, more interesting because we all get to participate no matter what "list" we're on. - Robert Scoble

underpaid :) - Glen Campbell

Heh. Underpaid and overworked! - Robert Scoble

paid at all? - Jeff Douglass

So true!!! - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)

Loquacious Lemmings. - Colleen

Radical democratization of media filtering. What's the tradeoff? - Chris Kenton via twhirl

splendid - Duncan Riley

... really good at scraping up bacon and LOLCAT images. ;-) - Chris Baskind

I have a new slogan. FriendFeed, free crowdsourcing at its finest! - Mark Krynsky

Increasing the number of people doesn't necessarily make the selection of material better. Plus, you also end up with a lot of duplication. - Morton Fox

Louis Wins! Flawless Victory! - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

Morton: heh, the repetition tells me it's important! :-) - Robert Scoble

Morton, with the new grouping feature, the duplication just bubbles the story up again. This promotes the "importance" angle while complimenting the "freshness". - Rob Diana

"FriendFeed: The Freshmaker!"? ;) - Tyson Key

Robert- Here is something interesting... you were asking about the permanence of the Newspaper... http://ckwebb.com/publishing/b... - Colleen

Google Reader got an interface update too. Its like Christmas on the internet. - Nathan Gilmer

Sweet, that must mean that version 2.7 is eminent. - Mark Krynsky

Played around with 2.7 a bit on WP.com and really looking forward to the WP.org release. Nervous about upgrading though with all the plugins and all. - Graham English

Unsubscribe - Jeff McNeill via twhirl

sometimes when the VCs or stock market love you, it can make you slip away from sound business practice. I am someone who always advocates giving employees some space and enough fun (we all work better when we like our job), and for flat structures and openness. But some of the things at google seemed preposterous - very dotcom excess. Excess is frowned on at the moment. - Joelle Nebbe

My point is more along the lines of: it's better to keep a smaller group of star employees happy, than to hire with abandon and then have to cut the quality for everyone. - Chris White

Hmmm. I once mocked the idea of Google selling any of its properties. Now it seems plausible. And maybe sensible too. Who knows... - Nikos Anagnostou

("Like" in this case just means interesting, in case there's any doubt.) - Bruce Lewis via fftogo

Completely agree with you Chris.... However, at this point, I wonder what choice GOOG has. IMO, to get to the nirvana stage of having a smaller group of happy employees, GOOG will have to do lay-offs and I doubt they will do something like that. - Bindu Reddy

Bindu, yes. It's just too bad that they couldn't prevent the problem while they had the chance, but I've seen a lot of companies go crazy on hiring when times are good. - Chris White

While it's good to treat employees well, I don't think it's good when the perks / benefits get so cushy that employees are more focused on them than the product that's being made. As a case in point - look at the car companies. - Jason Kaneshiro

Jason, I'm not sure that's a fair criticism of Google. In my experience, most of the people were focused on their jobs and excited about them. The perks just made it more attractive and were used as advertising for hiring and partnering. The car companies are something completely different and I have no direct experience with them, but it does seem having a profitable company should be job #1. - Chris White

Jeff, were you trying to unsubscribe to someone (or something)? I'm pretty sure typing unsubscribe as a comment doesn't do that in FriendFeed. ;) - Chris White

Jeff is not subscribed to me right now, Chris. :-) I can take it. - Louis Gray

@Chris, I didn't mean that it's happened today, but if Google keeps going on with the perks you will get there. Yahoo! is a great example of a company where people lost focus on the product. Many companies during Web 1.0 overdid it with the perks, too. Google should cut back now to avoid turning into Yahoo! at the very least. - Jason Kaneshiro

Jason, hiring more people is not as cost-effective as hiring really good people, and treating them really well. You can control how many people you hire, and therefore you can control your costs. Perks are rarely a huge percentage of your overall costs. - Chris White

Sometimes what the star engineers want most is more engineers. :-) - Kevin Fox

The article is misleading. "He says the company is 'not going to give' an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore." This has nothing to do with 20% projects. It just means that a project like Lively is not going to get an entire team working full-time on it. - Andrew Bonventre

Begs the question[s] what is innovation? what is net neutrality? how does google view invention & patents? when will users get to share in the upside of how data mining & tracking is used to drive google profit-centers? what is the value &/or definition of "privacy" & "fair use"? - Scott Moskowitz

+1 to Andrew. The WSJ clearly says "20 people" projects, which is completely different from 20% projects. This article confuses the two, in my opinion. - Matt Cutts

But isn't "hiring more people" the mistake Google has made? Otherwise, why are they supposedly cutting costs at present? Meanwhile, there are really passionate people to whom perks are completely secondary. Those that work for the love of an idea even without getting paid and for Jolt cola and a pizza. Those are the folks who work at startups. - Jason Kaneshiro

I like most things Google, but don´t care much for their UI work. - Thomas Bøhm

I'm still waiting for Chrome on my Mac. I have a feeling I'll be waiting for a long time if the vaporware GoogleTalk for Mac is any indicator of Google's priorities. - Mike English

I think they are mostly taking ideas from the mac and moving it into the windows platform under their own name. iPhoto - Picasa, Adium - Gtalk client, Safari/Webkit - Chrome, and so forth. They know mac users already have just as good apps. - Thomas Bøhm

I thought Google was going to turn into another AOL when Chrome was released & that eventually they would integrate all their stuff into it. It was quite obvious they didn't do it out of concern for the users of the internet, or they would have made the browser usable to the group of people that need a light weight, fast, secure browser the most (those running older OS's that have been abandoned by Microsoft, Apple, etc.) Google showed they didn't care when Chrome wouldn't install on anything older than XP. - April Russo

Thomas: +1 on the -1 for Google UI work. I can't put my finger on why, but much (or most) of their UIs drive me just a little batty. - Ken Sheppardson

April: I'd hope that rather than try to back-port Chrome to an older, unsupported OS (I believe MS ended support for 95/NT at the end of 2002, didn't they?) they'd allocate their resources to Mac and Linux support and on opening it up for extensions. Looks like that's what they're doing, so a thumbs up from me on that. As far as turning into another AOL, I think their have higher aspirations than that: http://www.thinkgos.com/ - Ken Sheppardson

Extensions are what would make the difference between Chrome being a dedicated Google App interface(which is how I use it now) and a full-fledged browser. @Thomas Jabber clients have been around for a while and Webkit came from KDE, so I don't think that's a supportable assertion. - Mr. Gunn

Now where's the Linux version ;) - Ian Betteridge

I've been pleasantly surprised with Chrome by the lack of features that I actually use. I've been impressed with the speed at which it launches and the minimal ui. Don't get me wrong I could really go for a picnik extensions for screen captures (bookmarklets don't work for receipt screen shots), and better greasemonkey support. - Thomas Hunsaker

@mrgunn Yeah, I was a bit vague, hoped nobody would notice;) But my point is still buried in there somewhere. Of course os x is built upon technology that didn´t originate on the mac, but I still think UX and UI ideas from the mac are being copied over to windows by Google while they also bring much of the same technology being used on the mac (as well as on the original platforms for the technology). I don´t know, they say they love macs, and are mostly targeting windows. - Thomas Bøhm

Apple does have good UI ideas, I just wish they wouldn't always screw it up by trying to control what people can do so tightly. You know what I mean? itunes would be a great media player if it'd just stop there, but it doesn't. It also wants to organize everything for you, and control where you get media files, and what you do with them. - Mr. Gunn

@mrgunn I actually like simple UIs with the option to use Applescript and the terminal for power users. And I think iTunes was compromised because they needed all that functionality in one app when they targeted windows as well. It´s actually very un-mac-like to not have specialized small apps that do one thing very well. We already had iSync, but to install iSync as well as iTunes and other apps on windows would end up not looking simple to the average iphone-buying windows user. Shame but true. - Thomas Bøhm

I am pretty sure iTunes does not control anything. I can buy/rip mp3s all day long, you can put them where you want and iTunes will leave them there. iTunes STORE, now there you have some silly controls/DRM but you can use iTunes all day long and never buy a thing from ITMS. - Bill Pennington

Mr. Gunn, in iTunes, Edit --> Preferences --> Advanced tab --> Uncheck "Keep iTunes Music folder organized," uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library." Click OK to end the harsh tyranny of having a computer alphabetize things for you ;-) - Karim

I like Chrome. If it had extensions and allowed me to seamlessly utilize less MS products I would likely use it much more frequently. For the time being I'll continue using ff 90% + of the time. - Doug Vanisky

Chrome rocks, and these extensions will make it much more attractive to users and developers alike. - Tim Ake

@Karim still no cure for ITMS. One theory is that itunes is an outlier in terms of power-grabbing behavior, but now with the iphone->appstore and bricking of unlocked phones it gets harder to assume incompetence instead of intent. Seems to me like it's a play for marketshare using the same old tricks Microsoft was guilty of using with IE. They're becoming the antithesis of open source. Not to turn this into yet another apple thread, though. - Mr. Gunn

here at primal, we have been using google apps from the very begining, [i am a huge google fan] and i almost work everything in the cloud, my mail is gmail, my agenda is via google calendar, even my construction sites, and clients are on google maps, with photos tagged with gps position. now i am looking at action method [actionmethod.com] to have a project management tool, if google joins all this products at one fair price, it would be a blockbuster for small companies like us - hector juarez

Convince Google that folders in email are a good thing and I would be sold. Their insistence that folders are not needed or wanted leaves me cold. - Robert Miller