How the heck do you find time to read a book? I need to be on your plan of work/life balance. -Eric - Eric @ CS Techcast
oh, thanks for this, i have been wondering .. my "bobby shaftoe lives!" t-shirt is worn out, the trilogy has fallen apart ... wonder where i can buy it in india - gregory lent
@cstechcast , it is the new illiteracy, too busy to read or write - gregory lent
Where did you get a copy? It's not out until Sept according to AMZN? - David Rowley
gotta make that my next book...er, when it comes out - Hal Rottenberg via twhirl
I was lucky enough to get an advance copy. So far it's completely different from anything he's ever written. It's challenging, yet very satisfying. Might be his best ever. (Disclaimer: I was not a fan of the Baroque Cycle but adored Cryptonomicon and Snowcrash.) - Leo Laporte
Oh Leo, you are killing me now. I'm gonna go read Cryptonomicon for the umpteenth time now. Baroque cycle - book 1 was hard to get through. Books 2 & 3 were great IMHO. Crypto has been my favorite to date. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
@Leo, if you like Neal's steampunk earlier writing you may enjoy China Mieville, THE steampunker, try The Scar - Dave Martin
Remember, it was suppose to change how cities are designed. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos both said how IT was going to change the world. The balancing technology is cool, but I'd rather ride an electric skateboard than a Segway. - Chris White
Not disappointed, because I figured out in about 1975 that people were going to keep claiming that there would be major innovation in transportation, and they were going to continue to be wrong 100% of the time. There has been nothing. (That said, it looks like maybe the Tesla will actually arrive, soonish.) - j1m
I was expecting a hoverboard or jetpack - I want my frickin jetpack already! - Devin Anderson via fftogo
I was quite disappointed, though I don't recall having my hopes up that high. What I wonder is why anyone thought it was even remotely interesting. - ⓞnor
Of all the high-tech transport systems I've seen, the one I was most tempted to actually buy was Optibike - basically a power-assisted mountain bike made by a Boulder company of the same name. The bike is an awesome, time-tested solution to the problem of efficient transport, and the main way to "improve" it might be to add more power in some cheap, unobtrusive way - Charlie via twhirl
definitely....and add John Doerr to the list with Jobs and Bezos....it was disappointing to see all these respected individuals fall prey to the hype - if they can't tell greatness from BS, who stands a chance? - Adam Kazwell
I think the reason for this is that the base of users that Twitter took time to build up used Twitter to spread the word that Friendfeed was better in many respects. So a large chunk of Twitter users moved to Friendfeed in a short period of time. - Devin Anderson via fftogo
I've also been running a daily tweetscan of "friendfeed" for about 2-3 months and have seen many, many tweets of people talking about getting on friendfeed. - Devin Anderson via fftogo
I can't get into Evernote. Reason - my life is centralized with Google. - Steve Rubel
selective photographic memory. Strangely, I can never find my keys - Robert Seidman
OneNote at work and when I'm in Vista. - Pete Gilbert
I put pretty much everything into Yojimbo for storage and retrieval and use OmniFocus for GTD. - Shane Robinson via twhirl
textedit on the mac. KISS (keep it simple stupid) and link to things on web - Noah David Simon
Evernote is really awesome for its ability to read words in photos. But my digital life over the past few years is already in Yojimbo. Trying to integrate Evernote slowly. - Shane Robinson via twhirl
I mainly use Google Docs for my notes, which is extremely handy. - possible248
Switched to Evernote for note-taking on my mac last year and never looked back. It's really an incredible app. Would love to see them take the image-recognition capability to the next level though and actually add the ability to output text from images AS text. (Right now you can only search terms that appear in business card snaps etc.) - Daniel Smith via twhirl
Textpad, simple text files, and dtSearch or Examine32 to instantly find and retrieve old notes. - Sean McBride
Seriously, pads of graph paper then xfer to OneNote if it's critical - Cheryl Allin
I use evernote as well. I like how I can sync with my phone. - Devin Anderson via fftogo
I use Notepad or good old pen and paper. I like writing things down. I have a work journal of sorts - putting pen to paper helps me commit items to memory. Just checked out evernote though, gonna try that one... - Sonciary Honnoll
Tinderbox for general note taking. MindManager for brainstorming and meeting notes. Evernote for collecting things from other sources. - Jack Baty
I used tiddlywiki for a while - in the process of switching to Evernote. - David Worrell
... and then I think, has Andy shared anything of mine in the last 30 days ? Am I on the hit list ? - Michael C. Harris
Someone else mentioned a similar blog cull (need to dig out the link) but I increasingly find myself scanning >250 feeds in GR and not reading or enjoying the majority. This was reinforced by another FF thread that mentioned scanning forward specifically for blog posts. Probably merits a blog post when complete. - Andy C
The BBC obstinately use partial but they may be one exception. I simply can not revert to perusing the BBC Web site. That is just so 1990's. - Andy C
@michael I use a river of news but your blog is one I actively look out for so rest assured. I also think I need to follow more Habari folk and 'personal' blogs too. - Andy C
You do wonder why the BBC won't make full feeds, its not like they are going to miss out on on-page advertising. I did a blog cull of Wordpress/Windows feeds- got GoogleReader down to a good 60% of original beastly size. - Adam Wilcox
Matches up exactly with the comic - one of the few things that did. Lucky actually, since they didn't get Eminem to play Wesley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...) Great comic series by the way! -ugh, URL parses incorrectly. - Vince DeGeorge
Never read the comic, but I thought the movie was pretty badass. - Devin Anderson via fftogo
"What the F*&K did you do today?" Quite possibly my favorite final line in any movie ever. Tempted to get it tattooed on my wrist - ok maybe not but you get the point - Marco
I can't wait to see this movie. Looks adrenaline pumped! - Natitude
Isn't my blog my home base? Contrary to *some* beliefs (giggle) I still engage in comments - Erin Kotecki Vest
Rob - I've never been a blogger, except for microblogging and that doesn't count. I'm not a content creator, per se (I don't lead conversations) - I engage and contribute to them. - Sonciary Honnoll
Sonciary: yup, that's a good point. Plus, FriendFeed gets into Google. Google is how most people find new places to go on the Internet. - Robert Scoble
chris: ff is an aggregation of all of our home base(s) easily available in one simple interface - put a different way "all your base are belong to us" - happy 4th to you & yours btw :) - mike "glemak" dunn
Glemak: Thanks and to yours, too. Nomads. Is Mr. Rubel finally right in his most recent few posts? Have we snuck off into RSS, only to leave a tiny trail behind for the non-edgelings? - Chris Brogan
Robert- Huh. I saw 2.0 but not 2.1. Neat new stuff there. (or if it's always been there, I guess I missed it the first time). - Chris Brogan
I comment a lot here, but FF & Seesmic have got me blogging again - this time visually with images & video. Example: my HD interview with FF founder Bret Taylor: http://www.deanterry.com/blog - Dean Terry
Louis, this is one of two you know of coming soon, right? If you're there and interacting with the devs - word of advice - tell them to just go ahead set aside Scobleizer and avoid all that that involves. - Vince DeGeorge
Kwippy's feature list looks like FriendFeed applied to Twitter. - possible248
I'm releasing one soon. without any code. free. opensource. :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
Nope. Still not going to work. Not much difference between them and Twitter other than switching Python/Django for Ruby. Next? - Cyndy
directeur, is it going to be on Google App Engine? - Dewald Pretorius
I predict Q3 will see 3-6 more clones. The next 2 will get a 5-10K user test drive like indentica is getting. The rest won't. Twitter stability will increase, XMPP and track will come back online. Google will launch Jaiku 2.0 or fold enough features into gtalk to make it a reasonable substitute. Twitter/Google will battle while the remaining effort congeals into an XMPP OSS architecture/ref imp. FF will learn to group by URL rather than tagger, improve their comment sys, and become the common dashboard. - Ken Sheppardson
This isn't one I was thinking of, but I hear you, Vince. - Louis Gray
Grouping by URL is THE implimentation change I'd love to see. All referents to a given URL should be in one place, filtered by who I subscribe to and what I like. As is ... there's dupe data everywhere. - Alexander Williams via NoiseRiver
Dewald: Not necesserly. It'll be really distributed. free. standard and open :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
I'm willing to bet money that they use a relational database for this. Nobody seems to learn from Twitter's mistakes. (Of course I have no proof) - Eric Florenzano
Here we go. The open source, build a better bridge game. I'm going to keep tally and see if the number of Twitter clones matches the number of Linux distributions. - Bwana McCall
Eric: Kwippy says at Dewald's link "MySQL - a really fast database that can scale, all of us have experience with it hence the default choice." Uh.... yeah... good luck with that. - Ken Sheppardson
Ken, I really like your prediction. Won't be surprised if it turns out to be spot on. - Dewald Pretorius
If they all support the OpenMicroBlogging specification (not that I'm sure that's great, but it's standard) then it's great if there are more open source Twitter clones. - Michael C. Harris
There will be many standards to emerge and none of them will be compatible with each other. When it comes to open sourced projects, I'm a giant pessimist :) - Bwana McCall
Bwana: You're pessimistic about open standards or open source? - Eric Florenzano
directeur, don't waste your time with a Twitter clone. You've got a winner with NoiseRiver. It's scalable, being on G Apps. Ferret out every single requested FriendFeed feature, and build it into NoiseRiver. You won't regret it. - Dewald Pretorius
Dewald: Oh thanks! :) No, Actually what I'm talking about is more a philosophy than a technology. It won't take me more than a week to implement, I humbly think :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
Michael, with OpenMicroBlogging your scalability is not only dependent on your own infrastructure and architecture, but also on the latency of the web connections between your site and other nodes, as well as the infrastructure of those other nodes. - Dewald Pretorius
+1 Dewald. It's like you have one operating system with SLOW (I say SLOWWW) IO operations - directeur via NoiseRiver
Dewald: Totally disagree. Your scalability has nothing to do with the latency of your connection with other OMB-conformant feeds. Maybe your performance, but not your scalability. Anyway, you could say the same thing about RSS, but Google Reader et all do just fine. - Eric Florenzano
Bwana, open source in itself offers no reason to be pessimistic. We're probably talking here on a Linux server. :-) - Dewald Pretorius
Eric, I hear what you say, but if your performance suffers due to too many concurrent slow connections, isn't that a scalability issue? - Dewald Pretorius
Dewald: I see what you're saying too, but IMHO you'll only have a scalability problem if you design your architecture poorly. With any of these types of services, you must rely on asynchronous processes to do the polling. So actually, you shouldn't even have performance problems, just maybe staleness issues, which is pretty orthogonal to scalability. - Eric Florenzano
I like the disclosure of their scaling plans.. But what's with all these clones? They need to bring something extra and different to the table.. - Winston Teo
Eric, the primary scalability challenge with micro-blogging lies in accurately and freshly composing a user's subscribed stream. Unless one does predictive polling (at the risk of redundant bandwidth consumption), I don't see how one can get away from synchronous polling of remote servers. - Dewald Pretorius
well at least they would have the verb "so and so just kwipped something of interest" - even sight unseen I'd be interested in seeing this one in action - Steven Hodson
Dewald: Do you think that FriendFeed goes and checks all of my friends' services synchronously every time I visit the front page? No way. They've got asynchronous processes (probably distributed among many different nodes) which aggregate all of the relevant information and stores it in their own systems and data storage clusters. This is the same technique that the federated microblogging services could use--and my argument is that this type of system isn't inherently unscalable. - Eric Florenzano
Is it time to create some sort of microblogging technology room to consolidate all these convos? Here? Google group? - Ken Sheppardson
Eric, you're right. The only scalable federated microblogging architecture would be an XMPP PubSub per-user-feed model, with full local replication of the remote "tweets", plus local memcached implementation, so that presenting a user's feed consists only of reading from the cache when the user refreshes their page. - Dewald Pretorius
OK, who's going to set up the repository? Git? Subversion? - Ken Sheppardson
What if you just use flat file logging for each user+friends feed? You could push items out via SMS and whatnot, but whenver someone requested RSS, Atom, or a web view you wouldn't need to hit a DB, you could just read straight from the filesystem? - Ken Sheppardson
Ken: Totally, I'd do a folder for each user, and a subfolder each for their archives and replies. Then, getting their friends tweets is as simple as globbing the directory by date modified. Alternatively to that whole scheme, I actually think CouchDB could fit the bill extremely well too. But Dewald's suggestion of memcached could sit even between that layer, providing an even better performance win. - Eric Florenzano
Speaking of comments determining your reputation I wonder if friendfeed has any plans to roll out an official comment reputation system in the future. - Devin Anderson via fftogo
Not sure if this would be a good or bad idea on friendfeed. Plurk has a karma system but I haven't really found a use for it yet. - Devin Anderson via fftogo
I wonder if one could be created with a greasemonkey script? - Devin Anderson via fftogo
The karma thing at Plurk kinda turns me off. I think reputation on FriendFeed will be determined by individuals in whether they choose to follow someone or not, or in the worst cases block someone. - Hutch Carpenter
Yeah, I get it as a driver for the source code, which is good in terms of distributed microblogging. I'd just like to see something original versus a copycat launched before it's fully feature-ized. - Jennifer Leggio
Hasn't been working well for me and many others. Had to post through ping.fm earlier. But yes it's still very new. - Devin Anderson via fftogo
Bwana - Maybe it's my enterprise tech snobbery but I always find it baffling how in the consumer world it's OK to put out something half-baked and it can be adopted but you can nary pull that off when servicing businesses. - Jennifer Leggio
I wouldn't even consider identi.ca part of the consumer world. It's in the early early early early adopter phase. It's going to be half baked, half done, half featured, and broken. - Bwana McCall
Well, I'm not one to jump on a bandwagon so I'll watch from afar and see what comes of it, mostly in seeing what companies do with the code when there are more available features. Half the people around here can barely sit down since they are too busy running from one shiny object to another. - Jennifer Leggio
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, I don't have a problem trying these services, analyzing them, reporting my findings, then moving on. It's a hobby of mine. I love testing software. - Bwana McCall
check out what @corvida wrote about it http://shegeeks.net/ - expect all those features and more... they're doing pretty well for day 2. :) - Lucretia Pruitt
Not a thing wrong with that. Your insight is always great and balanced. It's the jumping up and down and waving of the arms and the screams of "look! I am an early adopter!" that are kind of pesky. :) - Jennifer Leggio
Identi.ca needs search for sure...still, it's easier to use then Plurk in some ways... - Tom
Erin: I'm watching Brazell over on the "Everyone" tab and it, indeed, is funny. - Robert Scoble
He's taking it out on poor Dennis. Ahhh, these rage filled tech kids and their ego ways. I think I'm going to fill my reader up with more left wing Obama stories to throw him over the edge tonight. - Erin Kotecki Vest
Dennis: because I'm trying to learn how the software works and think about the impact that this stuff has. - Robert Scoble
And the reaction by someone who has been blocked is that they go nuts and start yelling at you on Twitter. So be careful. :-) - Louis Gray
@louis - so now would be the perfect time... - MG Siegler
You don't want them to show up in your everybody tab either? I rarely look at the everyone tab so I don't think I would care. - Devin Anderson via fftogo
MG: that's funny! Louis: that's OK, because if you yell about someone incessantly because that person blocks you on FF that proves you are off your rocker. - Robert Scoble
"think about the impact that this stuff has" - on what ? (a) on a person, (2) on a views, (3) on others of FF ?? Like what is your thought process on this item and most important is what do you recommend after u figure things out ?? - Peter Dawson
Devin: I don't care about them showing up on Everyone tab. After all, it's called "Everyone" for a reason. - Robert Scoble
sorry the Term Blocked only gets me that Shel Puppet image and sound :) - Fred Grott
I've only blocked two people and have no regrets - everyone else I see is absolutely fantastic. - Vince DeGeorge
Peter: I wouldn't have figured out that I can still see blocked users if I hadn't done this. Obviously I'm sharing what I learn. Also, I want to see how it changes the conversation and what leaks through the block wall into other conversations. I will share if I learn anything interesting. - Robert Scoble
disregard above. I hadn't seen the rest of your comments yet. Didn't understand what you were saying. - Devin Anderson via fftogo
I've never blocked someone, but then again - I don't follow that many people. Curious to know what justifies a block? - Sonciary Honnoll
Sonciary: I wrote a few days ago that anyone begging for followers would earn a block. It got me to block Calacanis for a few days, and now Aaron Brazell is blocked. I also blocked a troll and a jerk, don't need to invite them into my living room. - Robert Scoble
Sonciary, trolling, abusive/ hate posts (we had one of them) are two reasons I've blocked people. Having said that I haven't blocked many people either. 99.9% of people offer a positive contribution - Duncan Riley
Very helpful Robert. I've always wondered what happens... - Mitchell Tsai
Scoble's wrt to "see how it changes the conversation " , yes I agree .e.g if you block some1 , I wont see <Mr/MS-ABX (friend of Robert Scobles) post being made .This impacts "Show best of: day - week - month" algos too ( i think).So the tapestry of conversations is certainly unique as with the view points. No two people can computationally have the same views , at the exact same time /sec. A very different paradigm in terms of conversations, flow and content views - Peter Dawson
and knowing is half the battle. GI joeee - Hao Chen
Funny that Brazell already has seen this cluster, so he's already figured out how to get around my block too. I guess if I really want to punish someone I can't admit to anyone that I've blocked them, because it gets them more attention than if I had just ignored them. Human psychology is so fun to play with, isn't it? - Robert Scoble
Robert, Ducan - Got it, makes sense. I have to say I'm surprised to hear of Calacanis 'begging'. :) - Sonciary Honnoll
@Sonciary Obviously you don't follow him on Twitter :P - Shey
@Robert: When you block someone he still can see your comments - I already reported this to the FF team - directeur via NoiseRiver
Yes playing with Psychology is fun..but you are not suppose to mention names that takes half of the fun out of it :) - Fred Grott
@shey Actually, I do, but clearly not very closely. - Sonciary Honnoll
i've block a few irritants w/ high noise ratios awhile back - anybody know of a way to see who we've blocked? - mike "glemak" dunn
5. They cease to exist. (feature currently being beta tested) - Karim
I thought I heard that some people who have been blocked are setting up rooms and adding feeds for the people who have blocked them. Has anyone else heard this? If that is possible then I would consider that a bug. - Mike Doeff
Mike: you couldn't fix that unless you blocked RSS feeds in rooms. Igor the Troll currently does it in his room for Robert Scoble. - Mark Trapp
Erin, I have an adorable pink shirt with the Obama Mama tagline and logo. When's your next show again? I can loan it to you. - Cyndy
A lot fewer troll-types on FriendFeed than UseNet 1982-1986. We used to make big KILL files with all the people we didn't want to hear. Hopefully FriendFeed stays pretty good. We'll have to figure out what to do if "roving bands" show up like they did in Second Life. - Mitchell Tsai
All of this - and I still can't quite figure out the block feature... but it is fun to watch tonight's game. You can't say he didn't ask for it specifically! :) - Lucretia Pruitt
And what happens when someone with 14000 friends blocks you is that you stil see their posts a FoF - :) - Aaron Brazell
This some kind of morality play? Kind of a Zen back story... - Mark Forman
I like mundane tweets! keeps people human and lets you know what their lives are like! three cheers for non-tech tweets! - Marshall Kirkpatrick
please let us know when you're going to pop over to the
post office. Inquiring minds want to know. :) - Brett Kelly
This thread cracks me up. And also reminds me that I haven't been to the grocery store in over 2 weeks. My husband probably wishes I was tweeting about going to the grocery store... - Sonciary Honnoll
The suspense is killing me - I can barely stand it!! - Devin Anderson
woo! this is so exciting i am glad i stayed up for this - if he was using brightkite we would know when he picks up the can of peas and the large dozen eggs :-p - Allen Stern
Shit. If he was using BrightKite, we'd know exactly which aisle he was in - and then we'd know exactly WHEN he gets the milk - and if it's dairy or soy. - l0ckergn0me
You fools. Leave Jeremy alone. Your life is so empty, you have to attack his tweets. Losers! - Steven E. Streight
now see Hao - that was a perfect opp for a rickroll - you missed it! :) i am a 1% guy but will do 2% if the expiry date is better! never skim, never full fat - Allen Stern
twitter, email, friendfeed, occasionally google reader, andrewsullivan - Robert Stribley
widsets is quite good. readbag - for all the content I haven't time for, bloglines feeds and that's it for reading. why not gaming? :) - Sasha Kovaliov via twhirl
widsets is quite good. readbag - for all the content I haven't time for, bloglines feeds and that's it for reading. why not gaming? :) - Sasha Kovaliov via twhirl
