Calvin Lough - Comments + Likes

Bob Lee posted a message on Twitter

“Companies who have access to the Twitter firehose might consider forwarding it on so Twitter doesn't have to shoulder all the load.”

July 8 at 10:29 am - Link

check out http://www.gnipcentral.com/ - Calvin Lough

Mitchell Tsai posted a link

"Sorry we're OPEN" sign [Luckyred, Pixdaus]

July 4 at 8:21 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Robert Occhialini, Pascal Sijen, Bjorn Tipling and 34 other people liked this

http://pixdaus.com/single.php?... - Mitchell Tsai via Bookmarklet

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ROFL! I have had those days! - Karen Swim via Alert Thingy

For some favorite pics from the past 3 days, try http://friendfeed.com/mitchell.... My teeth are super-lousy with very weak tooth enamel. If I don't take care of them, my next dentist visit has 4-6 cavities. :-( - Mitchell Tsai

I *JUST* saw the same sign at a bar in Key West last week. - Gary Bacon II

FAIL - Voyagerfan5761

Leo Laporte posted a message on Twitter

“Biggest photo site in the world? Facebook with 30 billion images taking 540 terabytes, peak of 475,000 images/sec served. http://is.gd/LbJ”

July 4 at 11:30 am - Link

Gavin, Chris Harris, Lizunlong and 53 other people liked this

is facebook's photo portion really the biggest, or simply the most connected (aggregation of other services/photos)? - thecolor

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Can't open the Link. Just main interface... - Ansgar Wollnik

Holy Cow....it is bigger than flikr.....scarry - Matt Rider via twhirl

540 terabytes doesn't seem all that big. - Louis Gray

It may be bigger than flickr but the pictures are actually used on flickr rather than being locked up to a profile and a few hundred friends. - Rahul Das

it's a lot, especially considering they downsample images. i.e. your 1.2mb jpg gets reduced to 128kb on FB. The original resolution is lost. So 540 TB is a lot of downsampled images! - Mark J. Feldman

AFAIK photos on Facebook can be seen by anybody - http://radio.weblogs.com/01270... - Brian Sullivan

Flickr has about 2.5 billion images. - Ole Begemann

I suspect that Gmail has both more images, and more image data. Email is still what many "regular" people use for photo sharing, amazingly. - Paul Buchheit

540TB is puny for 30B images. 19.3KB/photo average. SmugMug has more storage and only ~325M photos. - Don MacAskill

Facebook limits photos to 5Mb each and 50 photos per album, though. - Prolific Programmer

again, I'll pay my yearly fee for Flickr. sorry Facebook. - Andrew Feinberg

Is that photos or images in total? Could be lots of 1-20K png and gifs for apps - Cris Pearson via twhirl

The ratio on comments on my Facebook photos to comments on my Flickr photos is probably about 20:1, despite the ratio of number of Facebook photos to number of Flickr photos being about 1:10. Comments are nice, especially for hacks like me that aren't going to get any attention -- deservedly so -- from the folks on Flickr. - Kirk Kittell

But do you trust Facebook? - Andrew Feinberg

@Andrew: Do I trust them to host my photos? Is that what you mean? Or is that a more general question? - Kirk Kittell

I mean do you trust them to host your photos and not use them without your permission? Their TOS lets them use your information for promotional purposes and sell to advertisers. Flickr lets you choose how your photos are licensed. Think about it. - Andrew Feinberg

I use a non-commercial license on Flickr. However, it's a minor issue to me how Facebook handles the photos. The primary reason I use Facebook to share photos is because I will get some reaction from my contacts. I'd trade that aspect for losing control of a few photos any day. If I wasn't a hack, I might change my stance. But I'm a hack. If I don't share on Facebook, I have no reason to think anyone sees my photos, and that's a loss, I think. - Kirk Kittell

@Andrew Feinberg: I think that's an excellent point, but I think you'd be shocked at how many people just don't care. First, the re-use of their photos isn't important to them, second, they think their photos aren't worth re-using, and third, they think of it as a cost to pay for the free service. I don't get it, but tons of people think that way. - Don MacAskill

Photography for me is a hobby, so I don't care what anyone does with my pictures. Indeed, all on flickr are CC-licensed. - Prolific Programmer

Mine are CC also and have been used by some high-traffic blogs and others. But, the choice to allow that is mine alone. Facebook has enough money and user data, they don't need anything else from me. - Andrew Feinberg

@Andrew - I'd trust Facebook over Flickr, since it's not Flickr's policies you should be worrying about, it's Yahoo's - and they definitely have not been playing nice with Flickr users since they took over ... - cerement

@Prolific Programmer The limit for photo's is 60, 3 pages of 20! - Joe Dawson

I don't think that comparing sheer volume really tells anyone anything useful. It's not surprising to me that Facebook would lead on this metric - people literally dump their whole memory card there, uploading hundreds of snapshots from the same party. But all photos are not created equal, and what I've never seen on Facebook though is anything that might be considered *photography*. For that, Flickr clearly rules the roost. - Eric

Paul Buchheit posted a link

Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant

June 24 at 7:58 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

hank, saku7up, Luigi Centenaro and 88 other people liked this

"I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues. Let me give you my experience from yesterday. I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there. The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up. This site is so slow it is unusable. It wasn't in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45..." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

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This email nails it. So I wonder, if Bill Gates knew and experience the flaws of his own product in 2003, why no action has been taken to improve it? The Microsoft website is still a mess and Windows is still Windows. - fbrunel

"I reboot every night," Priceless... - Christian Sonntag

Christian, I noticed that, too. But it's strange. I never reboot XP, just put it to sleep at night and it works perfectly. - Sprague D

This is real? I can't believe this is real. This is like every user experience with Windows ever: if the Chairman of the company who makes the software has the problems (and is pissed off about it), and most of the issues he's talking about haven't been fixed after five years, 1) how much power did Gates really wield, and 2) what the hell? - Mark Trapp

http://www.betterdesktop.org/ - If Bill Gates actually sent mail like that every day, there is no way Windows would work the way it does now. Want some cool insight on usability - check the link out. - Tim Hoeck

Pwned! - Ashwin Bharambe

Here's another article about Microsoft executives and their troubles with WIndows: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03... - Gary Burd

I'm sure it's real, this is classic BillG. But getting flamed by the CEO is one thing, actually making a giant complicated mess of an organization and a giant complicated mess of an operating system work in a nice simple way is hard. - ⓞnor

If he truely sends emails like this every they, then I think they are falling on deaf ears. - Ryan McCutchen via twhirl

And Gates should be praised for actually USING his products. Some executives don't. - Ontario Emperor via fftogo

I respect Bill Gates a lot more for reading this. Now all they have to do is do something about it. - Stuart Woodward

@stuart: They did fix some. Try going to microsoft.com and downloading movie maker via downloads. My main annoyance was two pop-ups, one for silverlight and another for a survey. The e-mail is from 5 years ago. - nadim

You see I wouldn't call that a 'rant' or even as Gates titles it, a 'flame'. It is simply honest, constructive criticism echoing the valid concerns of thousands of end users. More power to Gates. What concerns me is that Microsoft have senior people in place who are unable to discern that. This quote is just brilliant 'So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.' You simply could not make it up. - Andy C

I wonder what he thinks of Windows usability in general. I feel it's getting worse. - Philipp Lenssen

@Stuart Woodward I completely agree with you. I'm a Microsoft solutions architect and my respect for MS has just leapt ten-fold - Jonathan Nguyen

it is good to know that Gates has similar issues as me... to bad for him he can't ditch MS for Linux or Mac like I did. - nick carrasco

I'm not entirely sure this email is genuine - but even if it is almost every issue raised has been dealt with... if it was even true in 2003. As someone who uses and supports Linux, OSX and Windows Vista systems both personally and for clients the simple reality is that Vista is a good desktop OS and Server 2008 is a SUPERB server OS. - Soulhuntre

I am not sure how Linux and OSX have better usability than windows.. not the case for me and a lot of people I know.. - Adriano Gonçalves

@Soulhuntre - It's real. What people don't understand is that it's his *job* (okay it _was_ his job) to send emails like that all day. - Jordan Hofker

Paul Buchheit posted a link

1.5 Million Australian Students Dump Outlook/Exchange For Gmail

June 23 at 7:42 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Derek Collison, Mario Sundar, Tobias Verhoog and 97 other people liked this

Go Gmail! "The cost savings are substantial. The Outlook/Exchange platform involved a AU$33 million contract and took four years to go live, although it’s unclear why it took so long. The Gmail/Google Apps rollout, which is being completed by subcontractors, will cost just $9.5 million and should be live by the end of 2008. User storage will increase from 35 MB to 1 GB." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

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Sounds like a no-brainer to me. - Tad - the Meme Maker

wow! - JA Castillo

So they hired the worlds LEAST competent exchange admin? - Soulhuntre via twhirl

Administering 1.5 million exchange mailboxes may be harder than it sounds (and of course it's a government contract, so...) - Paul Buchheit

That is quite a shift. I wonder if this is the first of more massive moves to Google Apps if this scales well. - Paul Jacobson via twhirl

email what is that? - AnotherⓃⓄⒶⒽ

This is small compared to the rest of Gmail, so scaling isn't an issue. - Paul Buchheit

Has anyone ever played Warcraft and clicked on a sheep until it exploded? That's what I want to do with the "like" button on this link. - Phil Glockner

My guess is that the Exchange contract involved having many local servers and administrators (managed by Unisys), while the Gmail contract involves just letting Google do all the work in the US with SMS only doing the local integration. This is all fine and dandy until some ship cuts the submarine cable to your continent and your email doesn't work for a week. - Gabe

I work tangentially to this stuff.. the next step has to be a Apps rollout (or at least replacing Office with OpenOffice) - Nick Lothian

Of course, if the submarine cable gets cut, email won't work anyways. - Jim Norris

Presumably they're spending millions of AU$ so the students can email teachers and other students. One would hope the Exchange-based system wouldn't require transoceanic cables for teachers to email their students. With Gmail you can't even edit a draft without a decent Internet connection to some Gmail datacenter. - Gabe

There may be datacenters in Australia by now. - Paul Buchheit

All your mail are belong to us. - l0ckergn0me

Australia has something like a dozen undersea cables connecting it to a variety of destinations in Asia and the Americas. Events that would disconnect Australia from the world, or shut down Google's data centers, are so much more rare than Exchange downtime that it's not even worth talking about. There are plenty of valid reasons to prefer locally served email over a hosted solution, but undersea cable cuts aren't one of them. - ⓞnor

Gmail is a great choice, but the funny thing is that Exchange seems like a really awful choice for this situation. To give email to a million students, it seems like some big-ass conventional IMAP servers would be a lot cheaper and easier to manage. Maybe they were sold a bill of goods about how Exchange/Outlook would integrate with educational courseware? - ⓞnor

The problem really comes down to local vs. hosted services. The article techcrunch incorrectly quoted said the email would be hosted by Google overseas, meaning there are dozens more points of failure (a submarine cable being merely one). My guess is that it was Unisys (the low bidder in 2003) that chose Exchange as the platform, and that SMS (the low bidder this year) chose Gmail. I would also guess that there is no SLA in the contract. - Gabe

gmail is so much more reliable then anything microsoft could ever manage in underfunded corporate IT environments - why even try and compare - ben rogers via twhirl

What does a GMail/Google Apps "rollout" involve? I'm assuming it must be some sort of customisation/integration? - Mike Gardiner

Gmail may be 100% reliable, but that doesn't matter because the Internet isn't even close to reliable. All it takes is one kid running BitTorrent to make every student in the school (or district) unable to access email. - Gabe

Does it frequently happen that you can't get to Google because some kid is running BitTorrent? - ⓞnor

Kids these days are spoiled. I remember using 'ed' and 'mail'. We used to have to get up at 5am and lick the street clean wi't toungue but we were 'appy. - Andy C

Of course, if the University was really clever, they could have secured 1.5 million free Gmail invites and saved a further $9.5 million. - Andy C

*like* @Andy C's comment - sebmos

@ⓞnor - bittorrent isn't too much of a concern AFAIK in most schools. What is the big concern is the cost of bandwidth. Telstra (the incumbent duopolist) signed a lot of schools up to very expensive contracts with capped bandwidth (esp in remote areas). It's expensive enough that at some schools they disconnect the internet once the cap is reached (although this isn't in NSW AFAIK) - Nick Lothian

@Andy C: Google Apps has features that not possible with unaffiliated accounts: integration with organizaton's user directory, single sign on and more. - Gary Burd

@Gary: I know. It was a weak attempt at humour. Next time I will append a smiley. - Andy C

It doesn't matter whether it's a broken cable, BitTorrent, a misbehaving router, or any of the dozens of other causes that could make the Internet unreliable; the point is that the Internet is inherently unreliable. Anything that relies on the Internet will eventually fail, and at some point it will fail the day before the big project is due or the final exam, and there won't be anything the school will be able to do about it. - Gabe

Yeah, but it's all about failure rates. Everything fails sometimes, including Exchange servers. Microsoft themselves, for example, have suffered *weeks* long company wide email outages while they struggle to repair broken Exchange installations. If I cared about reliable access to my mail, I know which one I would pick. And there's no secret mystery failure here: you can just ask people "is it OK if your email is approximately as available as Google?". They know how available that is to them. - ⓞnor

I don't know about you, Onor, but I check Gmail dozens of times each day; I use the rest of Google perhaps 3 times a day. The reason I still use Outlook (instead of forwarding that email to Gmail) is that some mail I need access to even when there's no Internet. - Gabe

@gabe: imap with gmail. you can get a local snapshot if you want without the hassle of having to manage an email system. - Ashwin Bharambe

Sanjeev Singh posted a link

Google: sorry, that search is too expensive

June 22 at 2:34 pm - Link

Berker Peksağ, Vijendar, Ralph Poole and 18 other people liked this

My best guess, since it looks like it runs for a little while before showing the error page. Also, the same query with one less zero works fine. - Sanjeev Singh

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I got a 403 Forbidden error page, saying the query looked similar to automated searches performed by computer programs. Really weird. - Voyagerfan5761

"Sorry, but looks like an automated search" here too. I wonder how they decide.. - Jonathan Tang

like how the error comes from sorry.google.com. - Karim

I wonder when google is going to put an updated logo on their error pages. At least I know where to go when I want to feel nostalgia for 1998. - Calvin Lough

I wonder who thought of creating this sub-domain-name.. http://sorry.google.com/.. Wondering if there is http://youarestupid.google.com or http://thankyou.google.com!! - Jigar Mehta

The logo isn't out of date -- it's text. For some reason, it was decided that error pages couldn't have images. - Paul Buchheit

Numrange queries are probably an order of magnitude more expensive than the average query, since they have to either merge all the terms that fall in that range, or use some alternative indexing scheme that eats up memory. - Jim Norris

I think numrange uses some exponential scheme so that it only has to search O(lg n) terms. It's probably only used by people searching for credit card numbers though... - Paul Buchheit

I still want to see results past 1,000. - Louis Gray

Really? I thought it was all done in MySQL... - Jim Norris

I use it to find Fedex tracking numbers. I like to know that everyone got their stuff okay. - DeWitt Clinton

I've seen this error before, I was searching for "Powered by phpbb" (for good reasons though ;) ) - Hassan Ibraheem

Paul Buchheit posted a link

The Evolution of Pre-Launch Gmail In Screenshots

June 6 at 2:38 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Rohit Srivastwa, Harun Baris Bulut, BeeLing and 87 other people liked this

I'm so glad that these screenshots have survived and (sort of) been released. I wish the content weren't blurred though -- I'm pretty sure it wasn't super-personal or anything -- I was usually careful to avoid that. It would also be nice to have the actual screenshots instead of photos of screenshots. - Paul Buchheit

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We should ask Keith if we can get real screenshots since they've made them available for photographing anyhow. - Kevin Fox

I'd love to see the pre-release logos TechCrunch blurred out. Would that violate some policy? - Voyagerfan5761

crossing fingers that the real screenshots make their way onto FF - Adam Kazwell

I love how they started off looking like other web-based mail readers and then quickly moved to the trademark UI. Very, very neat. - Jake

This is great! All of those interface changes were crazy! - Brandon Titus

The logos were just random placeholders (such as the trout, which wasn't blurred out for some reason). They really weren't particularly interesting or meaningful. - Paul Buchheit

I think Gmail has always been missing something since it eliminated the trout... - Chris Reed

There are great, especially given what Kevin said in Philipp's recent interview about not being able to discuss what Gmail looked like before release. Now, the trout... does that have any relation to TroutBoard.com? ;-) - Tony Ruscoe via fftogo

Yes, I was inspired by the "Trout Farm" in eXistenZ - Paul Buchheit

i like some of these layouts better than the current one :) - Tim Hoeck

Trout, fail whales, something's fishy. - Alex Haar

lol@Alex :D - Voyagerfan5761

very cool - john conroy

Paul -- another Cronenberg fan! Glad to know there are a few of us oddballs out there. - Phil Glockner

I'm being honest when I say "inspiring"... I've built some homemade Intranet stuff at work and I love to see the evolution of the design. I want to go back and redesign everything now! Fantastic stuff. - Vince DeGeorge

Louis Gray posted an entry on louisgray.com

louisgray.com Experiences 100% Uptime During WWDC Keynote

June 9 at 4:20 pm - Link

Cap'n Andy Tinkham, Calvin Lough, Blake and 39 other people liked this

you're one stable guy Louis :-) - Dobromir Hadzhiev

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Louis you are a scaling monster! - Caleb Elston

Love it, lower the bar so low one can just shuffle over it. - Jason Kaneshiro

Smart is what smart does... - Anthony Farrior

I know which site I'm going to on election night! - Hutch Carpenter

How did I get this on my friend feed? - Patrick Beard via twhirl

Amazingly...Techmeme http://www.techmeme.com/080609... - Hutch Carpenter

@Hutch, but just for a second. I think Gabe scrubbed it. It doesn't even show up in the front page's history. :-) - Louis Gray

Louis is one TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOW!! awesome example of how to do things RIGHT!!!!!!! - Susan Beebe

Louis, it's the first item of "More Items" for me, and off topic but congrats to Hutch for his discussion link as well. - Robert Seidman

Did Louis make a funny? - Charlie Anzman

Absolutely the best WWDC coverage of the day. - Todd McKinney

Why isn't this in LouisGrayish? I nearly missed it. - Cyndy

MG Siegler posted an entry on VentureBeat

Google launches Gmail Labs tonight

June 5 at 2:03 pm - Link

wakao, Calvin Lough, mr-mojo-risin and 61 other people liked this

I would like to thank FriendFeed for help me find my comment since Twitter, you know, has no search. - MG Siegler

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i'm excited to see what they roll out for gmail. there has to be a time they take it out of beta though right? i mean 10 million users and still in beta, really? - Morgan

well i know what the friendfeed is gonna look like tonight - Anthony

snake? really? ok, yes, I will try it :) - Tim Hoeck

They have way more than 10 million users Morgan. - Paul Buchheit

Ooh, this is cool. Google really knows how to cater to their power users. - Eric Florenzano

I think this is huge - not just for users, but I think it'll really inspire Googlers to do a ton of really great stuff. And thus innovation is born! - felix

A bit underwhelming at launch but I could see a lot of potential in this. - Benjamin Golub via fftogo

looks like the 10 million figure was from Techcrunch....."There are currently about 10 million active Gmail users." - Adam Kazwell

I'm curious about this... - Kemal Yaylali

still don't see it on my main account, but all lesser accounts now have it - MG Siegler

I see it but I'm still wonder what all the "excitment" is all about - Steven Hodson

looks like they're still rolling it out - doesn't show in any of my accounts yet. The official GMail blog has the announcement up now, though: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/... - Frederic

I still don't see it. - Morton Fox

Steve Hodson - the excitement I find in this is Google moving the evolving edge of the engineers' 20% time out to the market while the paint is still wet - to more directly involve the participation of the user-base as to the evolution of the product. It is a more direct-democracy, a more intimate relationship with the evolution of the software.. a decentralization and greater inclusion for the decision making process. - sedgewick

Its already available - See here - http://myblogposts.com/what-is... - Diana Valerini

Mine has shown up, 11pm pdt - Anthony Citrano

@sedgwick .. wow does that ever sound like marketing speak .. well if that is the case I sure hope they are using their 20% time to come up with something a little more eviolutionary that random signatures. That one must have left the engineer with at least 9% left of his/her 20%. - Steven Hodson

Steven - really? marketing speak? ...perhaps I should apply for a job. ;p - sedgewick

but if you don't like the 'signature' schtick.. perhaps, others wont, it wont gain traction, and wont evolve, fall to the way-side.. better they get feedback regarding it's stupidity now then after they've invested more time and resources to it. the free-market strikes again.. - sedgewick

wish the labs functionality was available in google apps for domains though - Chris Jones

Paul Buchheit posted a link

Blame FriendFeed

May 24 at 2:31 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Mitchell Tsai, Chieze Okoye, Will DeLuca and 25 other people liked this

"Remember: I blame FriendFeed for this, and Robert Scoble, Steve Rubell, Dave Winer, and all the rest of the puppets and ex-Techcrunch analysts who, by appearing to rationally debate the pluses and minuses of FriendFeed versus Twitter, suggest FriendFeed even exists in the absence of Twitter. Nik Cubrilovic doesn’t help either with his cogent (except for the Rails part) analysis of Twitter’s scaling problems. Nowhere in this debate (most of it mercifully hidden forever behind the FriendFeed black hole where conversations go to die) was there a word spoken about the fatal Track bug until Jack hit the Off switch. Now, in the cool clarity of no pulse whatsoever can we begin to rationally approach a solution. Forgetting that Hillary has shown no indication of processing the similar lack of pulse in her White House aspirations, let’s put the blame for all this squarely on the parasite API suckers and their dark master FriendFeed. Good." - Paul Buchheit

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? - Paul Buchheit

I accuse my parents (a little MST3K humor) - Mark Dykeman

My guess is that a good deal of folks who are otherwise technology experts haven't yet mastered the "Hide" option, and seeing Twitter in FriendFeed makes them feel it's simply an echo chamber for Twitter. Hiding Twitter, and/or utilizing the many other sources that are not Twitter here in FriendFeed makes it more valuable. - Louis Gray

Someone pass around what Steve Gillmor is smoking. That is some heavy stuff he's got in his stash. I think I counted 10 words he seriously made up for that post. And why is friendfeed to blame for the XMPP/Jabber shutdown? - Mark Trapp

WTF? This guy reminds me of Gary Busey, but angrier, if that's even possible. - April Buchheit

This article simply doesn't make any sense. Please reword for clarity. - Eric Florenzano

This is very amusing :-) - j1m

I was afraid when I saw "?" there. And now...no comment... :S - Erhan Erdogan

Is he kidding? I hope he's kidding. FriendFeed exists with or without twitter. In fact, I would love to see twitter removed from FriendFeed altogether. Guaranteed there would still be plenty of conversations revolving around the links shared, the pictures posted, etc. - Erica Baker

I don't follow Twitter at all on FriendFeed. I find it somewhat ironic that one of Steve G's big passions was (is?) "Attention Metadata" and FriendFeed via likes, comments, etc is actually a service that makes great use of attention metadata! - Robert Seidman

I enjoy that this Friendfeed post has more comments than his post on TechCrunch. - Mark Trapp

This is the most buzzword-laden web 2.0 rant I have ever read. It's like he is making words up to describe stuff every other paragraph or so. And.. what's this jab at Clinton in the middle? How random. - Phil Glockner

FriendFeed direct posts are really similar to Twitter in my mind. - Hutch Carpenter

@Paul can you share the percentage of FF users that hide twitter posts? - Erica Baker

Gillmor refuses to realize that the comment feature of FriendFeed does indeed add value that Twitter lacks. That's probably the key reason why I MOVED MY conversations to FriendFeed! Also, the sharing feature is the reason why I like FriendFeed! IF I merely wanted the 'stream of consciousness' of Twitter, I would just use Twitter! I think that FriendFeed 'exposes' the 'chinks in Twitter's armor' - Thomas Ho via fftogo

I think that Mark Trapp's observation is 'priceless' - Thomas Ho via fftogo

It sounds like Gillmor hasn't given FriendFeed nearly enough time if he thinks it's only "Twitter, but slower". I have a great time on here with Twitter hidden half of the time. If anything, let's blame Twitter for so much noise and/or so much conversation due to their issues - Andrew Dobrow

FriendFeed can definitely make it without Twitter...so many conversations occur without Twitter being involved at all. - Chris Rossini

That... made no sense to me. Still dazed from the insanity of it all. I see more conversations here on links and such than on tweets. And really, why is FriendFeed to blame for the Jabber shutdown? Seriously! - Voyagerfan5761

Hilarious - Aviv

Twitter is probably the least interesting feed I see on FriendFeed. - Adam Thorsen

funniest ever on tc - kosmar

This whole article was most undirectional article, I have read in recent times. I read it twice, and can't make out, what he want to say. - Varun Mahajan

Adam, same here. I personally find the vast majority of twitter messages to be extremely boring and of no use to me. - Aviv

Where are these "siloed conversation spamyards" to which he refers? You could say that about any chat system (if I understand his rather obtuse meaning) and FF discussions are quite cogent and open. (And seem especially so if you've ever spent any time in the Digg comments.) - Ňicķ

I usually keep the Twitter FF feed open. FF is definitely NOT the only app pulling on Twitter's API. Hundreds of sites, clients, etc?. Twitter had (maybe has) time to distinguish itself. Just 'come clean' with regular community updates. (PR time?) So far it's been lame. In the meantime, there's no doubt Friendfeed will continue to increase it's pull. Twitter put the API out there. THEY need to deal with the results, whether they were ready or not - Charlie Anzman

FriendFeed is what you put in to it. If you add all your Twitter friends and nobody else, FriendFeed will appear to be Twitter with siloed conversations, but in that case that's exactly what you asked for. If you don't add a thousand people as friends and convince a thousand people to follow you then you won't see any of this 'spam graveyard' Steve talks about. You get what you ask for, and irrelevance is what you get if you add irrelevant friends. - Kevin Fox

It's also worth noting how much FriendFeed thrived when Twitter had its difficulties this week. That would seem to put a hole in the argument that FriendFeed is primarily a downstream service to Twitter. - Kevin Fox

Whoah, such bitterness. Did someone turn Steve Gillmor down for a job at ff? Or did he post something that nobody read? Me, I think twitter is the one thing that mars my friendfeed experience. - Slippy Lane

I'll repost my translation from Hacker News in case anyone still doesn't quite understand this post: Twitter was down due to a bug in their Jabber APIs. Although FriendFeed does not use this API, I obviously don't know that, so I'll pretend to act smart and smugly blame them for Twitter's downtime. Also, FriendFeed has nothing going for them minus Twitter. Forget about their 34 other supported services, passionate community, and the fact that we already proclaimed them this years Twitter (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008...). Yup, nothing. Now if you'll forgive me, I must return to sucking on the teat of my God that is Twitter. In other news, I am high as a kite. - Randy Pang

Yea Cat fight !!!! - viki saigal

OK friendfeed is NOT twitter. Its something else, and I like both. (sticks out tongue)...via feedalizr - Photo Larry

He shouldn't drink before writing for TechCrunch - Alejandro S.

man, I honestly care jack shit about what people post on Twitter, but I find FF incredibly useful. Gillmor is seriously off his rocker with this post (which is the least legible I've seen on TC in a long time). - Chieze Okoye

Robert Scoble posted a message on Twitter

“@Dazed_Deviant FriendFeed won't go down. Not like Twitter. Why? Look into the team. The guys who built Gmail and Google Maps did FriendFeed.”

May 3 at 8:11 pm - Link

Mitchell Tsai, Jonathon, Calvin Lough and 10 other people liked this

And this is why I chose FF over SocialThing when I first heard of them. One worked, the other didn't. Amazing isn't it. - Bwana McCall

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how do you get friendfeed to auto refresh? - Nailed Jello

you can use alert thingy for an autorefreshing friendfeed stream - Nick Malaguti via Alert Thingy

Nathan: I just click the refresh button in the browser, I don't autorefresh. But Twhirl autorefreshes, if I remember right. - Robert Scoble

Twhirl allows you to set "refresh" intervals, e.g. every 1 minute - Susan Beebe

yeah i have been doing that as well- i just thought you were using some special mojo trick! - Nailed Jello

I think I like FF better than Twitter now because its easier to follow a multi-threaded text-based conversations without having to cram your replies into 140 chars. I just responded on Twhirl and had to think long and hard about fitting it into 140 chars. Also easier to follow the threading. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a big Twitter fan, but conversations on FF seem to flow a lot smoother. Plus you can edit and moderate your comments. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

@Brian- I cant exactly say I like FF better than Twitter because almost all of the conversations here starts because of someones Tweet. Plus I feel like you, theres still something in me that cant let go of twitter. - Gadiel Rivera

@Gadiel. Exactly. It's still very hard to follow these conversations across socnets though. We need something like Yahoo Pipes to unify comments streams across these micro socnets. Using Quotably, Tweetscan, FriendFeed, responding to blog post comment streams -- It's still too hard to follow/track the conversation, especially with things breaking so quickly these days. Furthermore, I have different "Friends" on each of these socnets, which means some people miss out on the conversation. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

@Brian I think today events just supports your argument that we need something to unify all these conversations going on. That for sure is gonna be the next big thing. - Gadiel Rivera

Calvin Lough commented on a story on Digg

Can a penny dropped off a high building actually kill someone?

December 3, 2005 at 7:06 pm - Link

"even then, i don't think it would come close to killing someone. pennies obviously aren't made for killing so they are not very aerodynamic. if you were to throw down something with a little bit of weight to it, even a metal pen, that could probably kill someone. but maybe not - i really dont know." - Calvin Lough

Calvin Lough commented on a story on Digg

Can a penny dropped off a high building actually kill someone?

December 3, 2005 at 6:36 pm - Link

"yeah im from canada too and i thought that was really weird.." - Calvin Lough

Calvin Lough commented on a story on Digg

Google Paying for Firefox Installs

November 5, 2005 at 3:24 pm - Link

"Yeah i noticed that count error too. Weird. It says there is 15 when there is 8." - Calvin Lough