Gordon Vaughan › Comments

"Sorry about your dad. His was an interesting observation. My dad died right before I graduated from high school (he was a lot older than my mother), so it really did seem kind of that way to me. Who knows, YMMV. What's toughest was when I'd think of some future event in my life and realize he wasn't going to be a part of it. What's surprising is how, as I get older, I find myself looking (and to some extent, acting) more & more like him." - Gordon Vaughan

"What I keep wondering is, why doesn't Yahoo buy a major blogging platform? I have been arguing for a couple of years that Xanga would be a pretty good fit for them. It's kept growing its functionality over the years, even though it certainly doesn't seem to be nearly as popular as it once was. While Xanga has fairly nice photo and video features, Yahoo could couple Xanga's blogging features with Flickr and move its messaging capabilities to AIM. Xanga also has had a Twitter-like feature, Pulse, for the last year or two. Integrating all this into a seamless user experience could be pretty powerful and one way to remain competitive against Google and Facebook." - Gordon Vaughan

"It's the simple things on the internet that turn out to be really powerful. Twitter is an example and so is Tr.im. You guys took URL shortening features forward enough to convince me that there's a LOT of innovation still to come. I've experimented some with Tr.im and would like to do more, so am glad to learn it will continue. You already have a nice feature set and it will be hard for anyone to come up with a better URL, which is important. Certainly there's considerable value there. BTW, I never use Twitter's URL shortening, in my experience it's quite erratic and undependable! I always go to Tr.im to shorten URLs for my tweets. It isn't much of a burden since the stats were right there on the page so it was an easy way to keep track of them. The whole Twitter/Bit.ly vs. Tr.im thing is just a mirage, IMHO." - Gordon Vaughan

"Yeah, there's some level of refinement of filtering needed so you can better control your tweet stream. It's powerful to be able to follow hundreds of people, but practically you only want to read most people's tweets occasionally when there's something of interest. Filtering by terms, etc. is clearly needed. Even more, if there was a way to gradually "dial back" tweet inputs from folks until you reach a comfortable level, and temporarily turn on/off if they were blasting a lot of tweets, for example from a conference that was/wasn't of interest, that would take Twitter or a clone (or even better, something that consolidated streams like Friendfeed) to a whole new level." - Gordon Vaughan

glad to hear that Rocky's joining you. - Thomas Hawk

Good luck & glad Texas is going to get more Rocky & Scoble, that's got to be a good thing :) - Gordon Vaughan

Yeah, great example of how von Braun's political skills. It's so rare to find the technical, managerial, leadership & political skills all in one person. Kelly Johnson had the first 3 but apparently was lacking in the fourth. Of course, this was long ago, and von Braun knew Congressmen didn't know squat about computers saying something like that! - Gordon Vaughan

Very interesting development. - Warren Butler

It seems like improvements in Safari 3 & 4 are giving it a boost vs. Firefox. I never liked FF on the Mac and used Opera for a while, but Safari has really come a long way. - Gordon Vaughan

Mobile Fotos, Tweetie, and LastFm, and i been using the "Thats what she said" app - Fee501st

Qik , Evernote Twitterfon - johnpiercy

Yeah, the news-style format makes the show seem kinda freaky. I'm a Christian but have never understood some folks' fascination with prophecy/predicting the future, etc. That gets pretty crazy. It's been suggested it's just escapism, avoiding dealing with reality. Sounds about right. - Gordon Vaughan

Is the Apple store really busy now? - Michael Krigsman

Apple stores can seem intimidating the first few visits. I'm 45 and still felt kind of out of place at first, even though I've used Macs since 1984! While salespeople always greet me, I've felt more like I "fit in" since having a nice conversation w/a guy at the Genius Bar. So advice: teach the salespeople to start discussions w/customers, at least older ones who are probably serious! - Gordon Vaughan

Now I'm hanging out in the Apple store where Jobs shows up frequently. Will let you know if I learn anything. - Robert Scoble

Now that Jobs has made his January 5 announcement, we can all reflect. In my view, even if they didn't know anything, Apple & Jobs should have made some sort of statement in December, when the Macworld announcement was made. It wouldn't have been perfect, especially since they may not have known about the hormonal imbalance at the time, but better to say something than nothing. If nothing else, it would have kept Robert out of the yogurt shop. :) - Ontario Emperor

"No wonder he's so popular :)" - Gordon Vaughan

Heard about cool stuff happening in that area. Best of luck on the move man. - Gus Perez

congratulations - welcome to the beautfiul northwest - Andrew Clinick

"Tend to agree. FriendFeed is going in too many directions at once to be useful for me the way Twitter is. Maybe Robert Scoble is right that it's something to build custom news/etc. feeds on. This is useful, too, but the simplicity of Twitter is really appealing to me because I can use it while I'm doing something else & so keep it "tuned in" like the radio most of the day. So I hope that we'll see an enhanced Twitter that fills in this middle ground. The addition of graphics would certainly be welcome, I can't see why that would harm the simplicity of Twitter. It's the discussion features of FF that get it started going off in too many directions from me to keep up with it." - Gordon Vaughan

This works in the web 2.0 world, where a reliability failure (like twitter's frequent outages) has no real consequences. I would not want my bank to take this attitude to its accounting software, nor would I want the medical X-ray manufacturer to take this attitude --- "oh yeah, the worst that happens is we kill a couple of folks while we push a new release." For good reason, you don't see car owners lobbying for an elimination of crash test standards and other expensive checks. - Piaw Na

in Russian http://spring.jumpidea.com/2008... - Roman Zolotarev

I think this proves the focus on numbers is the wrong focus. Quality over quantity wins again. For example - Twitter follow 20 people and interact, more influence then Twitter follow 80 people with little interaction. - Christine Dattilo

What sucks for me is just when I've decided to unfollow someone, they go and post something relevant to me for like 3 days in a row. - Admiral Anika

I felt like Lucy in the bottle cap factory till I found that pause button! Fascinating, though, all the information flows coming onto one page. - Gordon Vaughan

Following - Robert Miller

Followed, but only because he's moving to NY. :) Otherwise I would not normally follow someone without a proper picture. - Chinkerfly

Really can't imagine too many people being in a hurry to buy a house right now, which is a lot of the problem (besides increasing oversupply as foreclosures continue). We went through all this in the 80s here in Texas, it was really rough, but we learned a lot. Need to write about that sometime. - Gordon Vaughan

I love the Big Picture. The photos there are always incredible. - Robert Scoble

How does Boston.com get such great photos for The Big Picture? They're always of such high quality. I thought that paraglider was stuck in the tree, just like a kite! - Gordon Vaughan

Guess I need to read this - Shannon Clark

Thanks, I needed that! Want to find out how to cut back info coming in so I can track the handful of conversations that are particularly interesting to me. - Gordon Vaughan

"Ditto for Houston's Astrodome. Wasn't that great a baseball stadium but would hate to see it torn down." - Gordon Vaughan

"Yeah, we need more simple ways to make short blog posts. I still write long posts occasionally, but short stuff usually ends up just as comments on someone else's blog or on Twitter. ... not that there's anything wrong with Twitter!" - Gordon Vaughan

I got to learn how to use FriendFeed. OK, here's the same comment I just left on Facebook! "Apple ought to make a miniature version of the arm they had on the 2nd gen iMac. That would be a cool way to hold an iPhone :)" - Gordon Vaughan

Crowdsourcing does not always provide the answers that you expect. I wonder what would be on the front page of the NY Times if popularity was the determining factor for what stories got published. Celebrity gossip? If so, would they be obliged to hire Perez Hilton as their managing editor? People also tend to not like depressing news like people dying in wars, world hunger, pollution,... more... - scott anderson

As an aside, I have been blocked from commenting on Dave Winer's blog, for reasons that aren't clear to me. That's why I haven't been involved in the discussion over there -- not a lack of interest. - Pete Forsyth

Yeah, I love all the Bullwinkle cartoons :D - Gordon Vaughan

OK, playing with it a little more. The FF interface seems really noisy to me, with items continuing to move around as they're updated. Twitter, OTOH, is very chronological. Realized I'm going to have to aggressively use the Hide button in order to gain some clarity. - Gordon Vaughan

"Yeah, seems to be a pattern. Made me think also of X-Plane creator Austin Meyer's adamant email about how he couldn't produce a version of X-Plane for the iPhone, sent days before announcing just that. Wonder if he picked up that idea during couple of weeks he spent in Cupertino getting X-Plane for iPhone ready. I'd love to see some smaller-format and less-expensive Macs, it's amazing what you can buy on the PC side these days. Apple is once again losing ground on price." - Gordon Vaughan

"Yeah, he's right that we're really short on true leaders at the top right now. Sadly, there don't seem to be a of lot of good prospects in the pipeline, either. If the Republican Party was a baseball team, it would be long past time to fire the General Manager." - Gordon Vaughan

I would like a twitter app that would make twitter work :) - (jeff)isageek

I like the group service, but I love the Summize integration more. I've watched my search for TweetDeck just blow up today, and the app hasn't crashed once or locked up - which is saying something despite the fact it's been open all day. - Louis Gray