I like having each service as an individual contact. Much easier. Can we see the same for Pownce?
- Chris Nixon
Well, IMified has taken bot to a next level.. I even created a customized option to check my google calendar appointments for today (a quick schedule for today) by interacting with bot! Not sure, if they have one for Pownce..
- Jigar Mehta
from bTT
One year later. Just bumping this because it's the one year anniversary of the only item on FriendFeed to get more than 400 likes. (452 at the moment)
- Ken Sheppardson
#4 you look for the like button on Twitter - haha more often than I'd like to admit
- Alistair (alpinefolk)
Check, check, check, check, check...wow. Especially on the "like"ing. I try to like things everywhere. I spent like five minutes trying to find the "like" button on Facebook yesterday.
- Jandy
Heh, I've never looked for a "Like" link on Twitter, although I did on Facebook once.
- Tyson Key
I know I'm addicted to FriendFeed when I attempt to hit the "G+A" Google Reader keyboard shortcut to get new posts on my FriendFeed home feed - this happens all the time...
- Nathan Chase
I swear I'm not addicted (not denial) but you all sure make it fun.
- Eric Matas
#7 made me laugh out loud... call your mom people! (I'm only saying 'cause I talked to mine yesterday--in the clear for another week.)
- Trish Haley
heheh I need intervention... glad Arrington's on hiatus!
- Susan Beebe
worse when the friendfeed addiction is followed quickly behind by an rss feed addiction
- James Fridley
When you complain and nit pick about it but still on it everyday. :)
- Mona Nomura
I find myself thinking 'CTRL+F' when I'm reading an article in print that is long and I want to quickly find if the article addresses what I believe is the core issue.
- coldbrew
I nearly did @replies when i was SMS'ing this morning. :)
- Roberto Bonini
Your butt is wider than your shoulders.
- Phil Boiarski
I think @replies and DMs that don't come from FriendFeed could probably be responded to on Twitter, but all other activity we should try to do from FriendFeed.
- Jesse Stay
LDSNana, for the hashtag, we could also use #friendfeedfri - want to keep this unified though.
- Jesse Stay
I do that a lot now anyway so I'm all for it. Good idea Jesse.
- Larry Lewis
Why perpetuate the false dichotomy of FriendFeed vs. Twitter? Both tools are complimentary, not competitive. Anything you post to Twitter can come into FriendFeed, and vice versa: what's the value of using one at the exclusion of the other?
- Mark Trapp
I like this idea... of course its Saturday here now, but I'll keep this in mind
- Alistair (alpinefolk)
Here's another option - instead of postfixing all your Tweets with #friendfeedfriday, just state one thing you love about FriendFeed, with the tag
- Jesse Stay
Sounds like an intriguing idea, but it'll need a little bit of Thursday setup.
- Ontario Emperor
"Focus on Breaking Down Structural Barriers to the Flow of Knowledge Between People Who Have It and Those Who Need It--Not on Changing the "Culture""
- Kevin Gamble
"And that is precicely where the internet has a problem. What we read on the web is shaped almost entirely by what our friends recommend to us or what other people have decided is popular. And because what's popular is meanness, that almost all that we read – page after page of cynicism, meanness, ranting and rage."
- Patrick Chanezon
OMG - this song is a trip. I just bought all my Information Society on iTunes years after putting the cassettes in the great garbage bin in the sky. Total flashbacks.
- Louis Gray
"I asked some of the most influential and widely respected practitioners in UX what they consider to be the biggest misperceptions of what we do. The result is a top 10 list to debunk the myths. Read it, learn it, live it."
- Chris Messina
from Mento
A big part of why I wrote this post and have it running in my number one photo spot on Flickr right now is because I want more of my photography friends to sign up for the service. I *love* seeing photos here on FriendFeed and there are so many talented photographers who are not here yet who need to be. If we can get more of them to sign up, you guys will love their work. Of course there are many great photographers already on here but still a lot more who could join.
- Thomas Hawk
I had to re-share this with all my FB friends. :)
- Kelly W.
Still trying to figure out this whole friendfeed experience. I've had the account for a while and see lots of my twitter friends posting via ff
- Demetri Mouratis
Hi Demetri =) Different people use FF different ways because they want to get different things out of it. What are you hoping to get out of it?
- FFing Enigma
Thanks for the tip. I had FF but really never 'got' what it was for. This helped!
- Molly Nichelson
from twhirl
TH - for those photographers that are not on here, I put their flickr id into my Flickr Imaginary friend and see their images that way. However, it would be nice to get more photographers on here with their reader shares and such...
- Justin Korn
This is definitely the best "Why Friendfeed" post I've seen.
- Nick in Manila
Justin, agreed. I have a bunch of imaginary friend accounts for Flickr/Zooomr users as well. But it is nicer when they actually have accounts here, their work can be liked and commented to the larger FF community, etc. It seems like a few new people signed up today based on this post so I'm happy for that. Thanks Nick!
- Thomas Hawk
I have AlertThingy FriendFeed Edition as well as AlertThingy v2
- Outsanity
Did you just reformatted your post, Thomas? It a lot easier to scan through now.
- Alan Le
Alan, a lot of times I post first and edit later. I probably shouldn't do that, but yeah, after posting I broke up some of the paragraphs better, bolded a few things etc., to make it easier to read.
- Thomas Hawk
That's great. Make sure to check out Windows Live Writer for formatting blog posts if you haven't already yet. By the way, I love the new blog design. It's much better than when I helped you with the html way back. http://thomashawk.com/2006...
- Alan Le
Barlow, Im currently developping an Adobe AIR tool for FriendFeed: we comin' !
- David Guyon
Y'know... I must've spent two months randomly Tweeting things like "Will someone PLEASE explain to me why I should be using FriendFeed?" ... And then two days ago I start using my account (I'd had one for a while)... and NOW someone finally makes a post outlining why I should be here. You're two days late, Mr. Hawk, two days late. :P
- Lou
actually, there's no search for Russian word forms on Frf. For me that looks as if there's no search at all
- orie
hmmm.. I didn't know that orie. It seems like there is a lot of international users on FF, that's surprising to me.
- Thomas Hawk
I've been trying to make sense of FF for months now, but every time I come away confused. As it is I feel like I'm drowning under all the social networking sites available. I use Twitter, Plurk and Facebook the most, and I use Ping.fm so I only have to post status updates once. How can I integrate FF into this without making things even more confusing?
- Chris Taylor
oooh! I found the zooomr version of this post with no formatting and I whined somewhere else in my FF feed. This one with all the formatting is better :D
- Tamar Weinberg
Mark - agreed. Also, Thomas ... very nice blog. I like.
- Amani
Good post Thomas. I was thinking it would be hard to find 10 points, but I agree with all your points, and am sure there are probably many more.
- Peter Efland
@Tamar, the unformated text was a problem on the Zooomr image. Kristopher's fixed that bug now so text in descriptions on Zooomr photos should format correctly now.
- Thomas Hawk
I wasn't using FF, but signed up after your post. Now let's see if it is really so useful ;-)
- Marcel Körner
@Marcel also take into consideration who you are subscribed to. Aside from maybe four on your current sub list, they are not very active at all on FF. This will affect your experience here.
- Carlos Ayala
Didn't know there was a "Porn" room on FF (see screenshot)...
- David Young
how did you see that they are not active on FF?
- Marcel Körner
David, the "porn" room on FriendFeed isn't all that active actually. I'm not really interested in porn per se, just thought it was a good group name to claim in the great FriendFeed land group name grab of 2008.
- Thomas Hawk
@Marcel by their numbers, and the fact that i know most of them and can tell you first hand that they are not. (if you hover over people's names you will see their numbers)
- Carlos Ayala
Some metrics are easier to compute than others, but sometimes they mislead — you end up picking the worse solution but the metric makes it look good.
- Amit Patel
Remind me again why Mankiw's blog doesn't tout his job in the Bush admin?
- j1m
It's redistribution and reassignment, which I approve of. "Unemployment" is such a bizarre concept if you think about it: Skilled people are sitting around at home wishing they could do something useful, and this is somehow a difficult "problem" to solve? Capitalism is weird! So the stimulus is a way of saying "Bored at home collecting unemployment checks? Hey, come help us build this bridge!". Because, then, you know, we have a bridge, which is convenient for, like, crossing bodies of water.
- ⓞnor
I bet they would choose a non-dream job, most unemployed aren't all that picky. Of course it's sort of hard for me to get too excited about bridges. Now, if we could get Caltrain, BART, and Muni to stop farting about, and build an integrated sensible Bay Area transit system that I could use to get to all that tasty food up in the city, hell, I'd double my taxes for a decade for that.
- ⓞnor
But would you quit your current job to pick up a shovel* and take a job building said calartunitrain? [*note gratuitous reference to shovel cliche]
- j1m
I'd volunteer a few months, if there was some assurance that my effort wouldn't be wasted (and wouldn't be far less productive than my effort applied elsewhere -- note, I'm not sure my effort is very productive currently, so this isn't an impossible bar). Transit systems do involve computers. Of course most people figure government projects will be hugely wasteful and horrible to work on. Will Obama change that?
- ⓞnor
oh wait, that doesn't help with unemployment, does it?
- j1m
Most large organization projects seem hugely wasteful (but not horrible to work on as long as i keep getting free lunch), but it does seem like NYC Transit is even more inefficient at capital projects then they should be. Is there a good analysis why? Do I just hugely underestimate the amount of work involved?
- Larry Greenfield
Caltrain/Bart/Muni will stop farting about when pigs fly. In fact, one might want to start drawing up plans for flying pig-drawn trains for use by the combined system.
- Andrew C (✓)
My experience with people asking me to write programs for them is that people underestimate the amount of work involved in another profession.
- Amit Patel
I find it interesting that one of Mankiw's favorite metrics is "can I pay for the college educations of all my grandchildren with a few hours of extra consulting work as a highly paid economist?" He complains that high marginal tax rates in the top brackets serve as a disincentive to work, but based on the utility of his work for Bush I'm not convinced that such a disincentive is a bad thing.
- Jim Norris
Wishing doesn't get you there. Why not just work for yourself? Everyone knows how to do SOMETHING that others will pay for or can certainly LEARN something. The solution to all issues is to return to self-sufficiency instead of counting on governments and corporations to "fix" things. The more they do the worse it gets.
- Gail Gardner
"With the 25- to 34-year-olds, what you are seeing is a mixture of the fact that they are natural internet users, they know their way around the web, with their movement towards more mature types of lifestyle management as they themselves mature."
- Will McInnes
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
I like most things Google, but don´t care much for their UI work.
- ɯɥøq sɐɯoɥʇ
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.
- ɯɥøq sɐɯoɥʇ
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
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
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.
- ɯɥøq sɐɯoɥʇ
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.
- ɯɥøq sɐɯoɥʇ
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
@robert miller but tags/labels, are like folders... in a more dinamic way. i use to have the same problem with folders, but then i realize that one information may correspond to several sources or viceversa, so tags are a better and more flexible way to archive
- hector juarez
I just wish they would fix the Chrome/Gmail interaction so that speed keys worked. :( :( :(
- Justin Long