I noticed this last night and was simply floored. At NO point did I ask for MobileMe to be installed on my system. - Bradley McSpinn
Maybe I'm just beaten down by years of being abused by computer hardware and software companies. I wasn't even aware of this until your post. Sure enough, the icon is in my control panel. Do I care? Not so much. I have like 200GB of drive space left, there are 56 items in my control panel and I only ever use...5 of them. - Robert Seidman
yeah I noticed that when I installed the new iTunes. I thought it was just one of the necessary evils associated with managing my iPod. - Rahul Das
Combine this and the "force install" of Safari on the Apple Updater for Windows, Apple is getting very close to becoming a spammy company. - Haggis
Doesn't uninstalling "Apple Mobile Device Support" also break iPod/iPhone syncing? That's not much of a solution if that's the case. - xxdesmus via FriendFeed MT Plugin
Months ago I removed all Apple software from my pc out of irritation.
Quicktime kept trying to take file associations and was causing browser crashes.
My browser has been much more stable without it. - Lurking Grue via FriendFeed MT Plugin
Apple is evil. I love OSX, my macs and mi iPods, but apple just does not get it. They get away with so many things (iTunes songs only playable on iPods, pushing software that you do not require, suing blogs, etc.) just because they are apple. They might be less evil than MS but they are. - Arturo Servin
Is it April 1st? No !! Say it ain't So. I love gracefulness in bowing out, but questions are still not answered. I know you have better ways of getting publicity but this is not how i thought it would come to close. I'm sincerely hoping this is an MJ /Jay-Z type of decision. - Tatenda Mbavarira
Didn't you read that blogging is dead? Twitter is the New Blogging and video content is taking over. - Eric_T
May be it is like Cher, they announce that they are retiring and the next year they in a new tour. =) - Arturo Servin
I have been using it for a month and it is quite useful. If you mix it with yahoo pipes and friendfeed you will get very good results (and without so much noise) - Arturo Servin
JD-1027 writes in to kick off a discussion of OS X Snow Leopard. Apple's stated goal: "Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard's enormous innovations by delivering a new generation - Leo Laporte
I see his point. Radiohead is kind of like rock castrated. I think the art crowd need two things. A steak dinner and a reminder that rock n roll is still about fucking someone's daughter. - Noah David Simon
...and now I read the article and I think Gene should stick to the fucking part because I'm going to download one of his songs. - Noah David Simon
Just think about it. Radiohead and NIN produced great albums and even they where free, people paid for them. In the other hand Gene Simmons and Metallica have not produced any decent material for the last 25 and 10 years (at least). So, what do you think they have to say - Arturo Servin
Funny how it's all our fault, apparently. Maybe if the record industry had wised up earlier and changed their business model, they wouldn't be in the crapper that they are in now. - Nick
Totally Agree, I love scoble but we need to start using friendfeed for something other than talking about friendfeed and twitter - Michael Sheehan via Alert Thingy
Lets talk about the mars landing thing! - Gadiel Rivera
I gotta wonder, does Scoble get some FF options every time he mentions FF? - Bob Ngu via twhirl
what, did you invest in SocialThing? What's wrong with pushing products you believe in if you're not even attempting to claim you're doing anything but talking about things you find interesting? Did the Graham family give you a lecture on objectivity or something? Get real. - Andrew Feinberg
Mike are you Link Baiting us with your Rant about @Scobleizer the link is to TC Google post! - Igor The Troll
What's most interesting about this is the 180 from Michael Arrington once promoting the service and Duncan not doing so as much to Duncan now liking FriendFeed and Michael posting things like this... - Louis Gray
Maybe Mike holds some venture capital in Twitter? - Igor The Troll
We all need a place to go when Twitter is on the outs. Nothing wrong with a little FriendFeed... - shanebe
@Louis...your on to something there Louis!! ha, ha!! bingo!! that where the sore spot really is! toooo close to home, ha, ha!! - Susan Beebe
I just mentioned it on a podcast. So? - Robert Scoble
Scoble, ignore Mike...he's not clued in yet! - Susan Beebe
Susan - You came in at the end of the podcast. Scoble said Friendfeed :) - Charlie Anzman
actually Mike never said anything about mentioning it in a podcast... - Shey
I know I missed you guys darn it!! I was just logging in and everybody bailed..damn I hate it when that happens (reminds me of high school!) *rejection is so painful* ha, ha!! - Susan Beebe
Scoble - you should really turn on the FriendFeed JUICE and annoy the hell out of Mike - he's totally asking for it! LOL - Susan Beebe
Arrington should be totally blind by now! I think he'll "kill myself" within the hour? - Susan Beebe
You and @Scobleizer just Pumping the Volume! - Igor The Troll
you guys ahould just take up your pee shooters, stand back to back, walk 10 paces, and fire to end this... - Jeff Day via fftogo
hmm.. and i thought the 404 is when it works :) - Naor
When I was writing a blog post about SEO, I thought it would be great to have this guy saying "Leave SEO Alone!!" "Stop Keyword Stuffing!!" - Bill Stevens
Well, crap. There were actually some really good ideas in there. Damn you, RWW! I had convinced myself that I didn't need Facebook! I don't want to get involved in yet another social network! ;) - Nathaniel Payne
with such high degree of user lock-in and an army of app developers (from other services) tripping over each other to pump data *in*, Facebook doesn't have any real incentive to transform their walled garden into a two-way street and let data *out*, do they...? - Andrew Terry
I've said it before and I'll say it again...there is nothing inside of Facebook that I can't do outside of it. Everything you can do in it is just an interface to something you would normally do outside the wall. Maybe I'm just too much of a geek to get the point. - Rahsheen Porter
FF needs a mobile version ASAP - they've rolled out other stuff so fast - where's my m.friendfeed.com???? - Morgan via twhirl
it's early still, they are making rapid progress and advancement regularly. Give it time to mature and refine for a mainstream audience and then give someone like Yahoo, or Google or Microsoft (who buys it) with a platform to distribute it and you've got a winner. - Thomas Hawk
While we were all talking about this Microsoft put out a press release about Yahoo. Noise or news? Hmmm. Guess that PR still works even in a Friendfeed world! - Steve Rubel
@Morgan I've heard a lot of requests for a FF mobile app; I hope the FF guys or someone else are working on it - Shey
I like the fact that you addressed enough reasons in one direction to convince and are taking up the challenge to tear your own argument apart:) Bravery fully embodied:) - Roney Smith
Content creators don't want the discussion to leave the content and go to FF. FF has an API, right? Bring FF back to the content... - Rahsheen Porter via twhirl
@Steve, of note, I haven't seen the MSFT/YHOO news, but I have seen this. So what's more relevant to this community? - Louis Gray
@Louis This is where Friendfeed, Techmeme and Google News work in tandem. - Steve Rubel
FF will def go mainstream, just as soon as they think of a way of getting your social networks from different apps into FF without each person needing to join FF. Also, it requires people to be using a few different services, which most of my friends are only just starting to do. - Samuel Bostock
Why on earth would FF go mainstream when most people still can't figure out why they'd need a feed reader? It's not going to pass the non-techie test any time in the near future, that's for sure. - Cyndy
In repressive societies, it is a practice of dissidents to write disputations "disproving" a heretical viewpoint. But when you read closely, the heretical argument somehow comes out stronger than the refutation. Which Scoble post is the heresy? Which the orthodoxy? - Michael Markman
hope you're wrong, i love friend feed. - Travis Cooper
I think you should both kiss and get it over with @LouisGray ;-P - ChangeForge via twhirl
It will go mainstream. In fact I have seen people from real estate using it - Varun Mahajan
I like FF ( and no, that is not FireFox) more and more every day - Denis
The truth is - FF isn't even close to being finished yet. We're just impatient geeks that want full meta-semantic-integration and yesterday. This stuff is hard - harder than complaining about it. Perhaps we should be constructive and offer improvements vs. just judging its life a few months after it was born. Baby, bathwater... I'd hate to walk underneath the bathroom window of a geek :-) - Brandon Werner
To answer the question about bloggers' conversations occurring on FF instead of their comments: you could just post a link at the end of your blog post to the FriendFeed page for that post (once it's available) and say something like "to comment on this post, go here". I'd like to see someone try that out. - Nathaniel Payne
There is already a plugin to pull the comments from ff and stick them on your WP Blog. Sounds like we are not that far off. - Rahsheen Porter via twhirl
I think us bloggers are going to have to learn to accept that conversations about our content will occur outside our blogs. People are able to talk about religion without having to go to a church to do it; people who want to complain about Katie Couric aren't expected to make their statements only to CBSNews.com. What we'll benefit most from are discovery tools to find out where people are talking about us and what they're saying - Summize, etc. - Todd Mundt
That's an idea, Nathaniel, but the problem is that the conversation becomes splintered. It won't stay on that discussion thread alone. Someone will tweet about the post and it'll continue there. Someone will share it in Google Reader and it'll continue there. The conversations aren't tied to just one place, they're everywhere. - Shawn Farner via twhirl
Multiple discussions occuring in different places about the content you created. This used to be a Positive for marketing... - Rahsheen Porter via twhirl
@Shawn - from my perspective, comments are great for discussing ideas, wherever they occur. In adding FriendFeed links to my blog posts, I actually included some to another person's Google Reader share of my blog post. Why? The conversations were better there. So someone else gets the comment action. Not a problem. I can always find it via searching FriendFeed. - Hutch Carpenter
@Rahsheen - a positive for marketing buzz, but a negative for brand management - I can see bloggers' concern, but like Todd Mundt just said, we have to accept that conversations are allowed to exist beyond our blogs and that we can't contain it all - why bother trying? - Nathaniel Payne
Exactly, Rahsheen. I don't get why people are so resistant to discussions happening in more than one place. - Brent Newhall
I've even had conversations about blogs with people offline and neglected to post transcripts back into the stream. So, maybe they don't even exist. - Michael Markman
if the discussion takes place away from the blog, it reduces the page views and consequently the potential ad revenue - Paul Metcalfe
That sounds logical, Paul. But I think this argument is akin to the music industry saying they lose money when ppl d/l mp3's - Rahsheen Porter via twhirl
Cliffnotes of Part I: "Normal people (ie, those who aren’t on Twitter 18 hours a day) don’t like noise." Seriously, I think that sentence is really the key point and largely crystallizes your whole argument. - Deva Hazarika
Paul: A discussion on FriendFeed may generate *more* page views (and thus ad revenue) on the blog because of people seeing the FF discussion and clicking through to the blog. The more discussions that happen around the web, the more popular the blog's going to be. Surely it's better to have lots of different discussions happening all around the web about your blog, right? - Brent Newhall
Personally, if it were discussion about something I wrote, I'd like to at least be able to take part in the discussion and that's the problem I see with FF. The fragmented conversation. If the conversation takes place in the blog comments, it's much easier for me to follow. If people spin off into their own conversation and you aren't following them, you'd have no idea. If there was a way to keep everything under the umbrella of the original discussion, FF would be even more powerful. - Shawn Farner
I think their needs to be some type of cooperation between content creators and friendfeed. If you know your convo may move to ff, move it there yourself, plug ff directly into your blog with a plugin or something. Embrace it. It could only help. - Rahsheen Porter
I just realized I wish FF had a save or tag-like function Sometimes I see conversations that I'd love to come back and re-read later. I've been saving a link to some of them, but since moving to del.icio.us, I barely bookmark anything. Web 2.0 stuff is making me lazy. :) - Harvey Simmons
But, what is it that FeedFriend do that can't be done by anyone else? Where is the sustainable advantage to this system? - Bob Wyman
There lots of reason it won't go, but the IU issues will get resolved and the watch out. - Russellreno
bob, you're here. That was such a Microsoft response. Sigh. - Robert Scoble
All I know is, ff did something that I was looking for and no one else had done. That by itself makes it sustainable unless someone attempts to do it better. - Rahsheen Porter via twhirl
But the discussion is ALREADY fragmented? Why is this new? If you write an article and I blog about it, the discussion among my blog's readers will occur on my blog? Sure, I might send your blog a trackback, but I find that so many of my trackbacks are spam that I don't even bother looking at them anymore. - Mitch Wagner
Posting a comment here does not allow me to also post to my Twitter account unless the original post was generated by Twitter (the checkbox doesn't appear below this textbox). Even when I can simultaneously post, my twittering is associated with FF, but not the URI. Any gratuitous @ symbols I throw in are associated with the username's comments which may have nothing to do with the context of the message. - RandaL Hicks
IMHO FF should always allow an option to cross-post and enable linking back to the conversation. FF would send a tinyURL (generated from the URI) along with the message to Twitter. Twitter would display the message, and at the bottom list FF as the client, but the 'in reply to:Username' field would be In Reply to: http://tinyurl.com/4yjmce ...In the meantime we'll have to clue our friends in manually, all concerns about fragmented conversations aside. - RandaL Hicks
I'm surprised you didn't write a full post about this. I'd like to know more about it. Why the change? Why is Windows better in this situation? - David Klein
And my comment was about ten seconds early....... Damn. - David Klein
Apparently Windows costs $3 in the developing world. - Ranjit Mathoda
David, most countries who were approached asked "Where's the windows?" Intel's classmate PC has had much better luck in developing countries, even though it has a higher price tag, because it runs Windows (among other things). - Mark Trapp
Windows is not better. It's about corporate power, and the fight to defeat Linux. - Rod Bauer via twhirl
Rod, maybe so, but it was up to OLPC to either provide what their customers wanted or convince their customers why the alternative is better. For a long time, they did neither and it was devastating to them. Now they chose the former. - Mark Trapp
@david if you haven't seen it already, this post ( http://is.gd/ggY ) from a ex-employee is very interesting. Agree with him or not, he states a lot of issues from his perspective unambiguously. Worth a gander. - felix
How are all the viruses supposed to get to these kids if we don't equip them with Windows? - Chuck Lawson
Oh I know how this will work. I just figured it out!! They'll ship FREEBIE copies of ultra-craptastic VISTA O/S - no one wants to buy it! - Susan Beebe
"Google AdSense does have a policy which says that partners may not advocate 'against any individual, group, or organization.' " I didn't realize Google was that stupid. - Kevin D. White
I'm no Quantum Physicist, but I do know speaking in terms of absolutes is absolutely crazy. This maybe crazy too, but do we even want something completely unbreakable? Mr. Bush's missing emails are already hard to find do we really want them Quantum Encrypted too? - Geoff Schultz
Simple, in security and crypto never say "never", "unbreakable", "100% bullet proof", "no body will" - Arturo Servin
Quantum crypto is a method for transferring private keys not for encrypting data. The basic quantum crypto key exchange cannot be intercepted without a new area of quantum mechanics being discovered (ie that you cannot copy a quantum mechanical state without changing the original state). That's not to say that the more mundane areas of the communication could be subverted. (Ie just breaking in and stealing the private key :) ) - David Peake
I really like the new social features of google reader. I always wanted to add notes to my shared items. Also, adding notes and urls that are not in your feed is a very good improvement - Arturo Servin
I like the functionality - I often find myself emailing/sharing things with people who don't friend feed and sometimes get the response - why did you send this too me, half the time people are most interested in your take on it , so they don't have to read the thing themselves! - ben rogers via twhirl
I like the Google Reader items popping up on FF (and FFM ;) - it allows me to keep up with what the people I follow are reading without having to jump around - via FriendFeedMachine - Scott Goldie
So this is where the traffic came from, I'm glad you all took the time to read it. As far as I can tell, it's not a bug really, just an oversight on the Google Reader team's part. They must have meant for you to edit the original article (otherwise why would it be there at all). The problem stems from the fact that anyone who reads your shared items can't tell what you have changed from the original. - Ryan Svoboda
i guess they fixed it, coz i don't see it the ability to alter the text of an article - Huy Zing
I still see it on my end. You click on "Share with note" then click inside the box above the text entry box(it shows a preview of the post), and you can still edit it there. - Ryan Svoboda
More alternatives? Um, no. The world's attention is on Yahoo now, it wasn't before. So that added value. Also, investors are lazy. Probably wanted to see if anything else would happen. - Robert Scoble
don't forget there is still the google search ad deal and yes, the very real possibility of a comeback of the MSFT proposal in time - MG Siegler
May be because Yahoo is really a valuable company. Some investors sold, but other foresaw the potential of Yahoo as a big player and saw the opportunity to buy under-valued stock. Then the market went to equilibrium. - Arturo Servin
I think people are hoping for MS to come back to the table. Yahoo will be crushed under the weight of lawsuits in the very near future. - Chris Patterson
Chris: what's funny is that Microsoft saw value destroyed after trying to buy Yahoo, while Yahoo saw its value go up. So, not sure the shareholders have too much of a leg to stand on. It will destract them, but I doubt it will crush Yahoo. - Robert Scoble
Yahoo was undervalued. If you look at Yahoo Japan and the Alibaba shares (Yahoo China), they were seriously undervalued. - sebmos
@Robert it's not funny at all. Microsoft lost value because the buyout was an admission of weakness. The street repriced Microsoft based on that admission. The residual increase in Yahoo's stock price is due to the street once again adjusting value based on new information. There is nothing new here. This is a *very* common result of a failed merger. The stock price of the involved parties rarely retreats to price prior the merger. - Kevin D. White
so useless in fact that I'm not even using facebook anymore ... facebook is all about the apps so would that mean hat facebook is useless? it's starting to look that way to me - JohnBfromMemphis via twhirl
Isn't a social network meant to be a mesh, not a platform. Score one for FF - Cains
Insert gone-beyond sensinble cliche here. Facebook is not a framework or dev environment. Want to find friends. It may have killed Classmates.com but what the hell is it anymore? Just a clutter feed and spam engine. - Jay Gilmore via twhirl
Yeah. Facebook got me into social networking but I got quickly tired of being poked, challenged to fight zombies, or rate cute kittens. - Akiva Moskovitz via Alert Thingy
I ditched Facebook as soon as I realized it didn't have nearly the practical utility that LinkedIn has. I've been contacted by *known* Silicon Valley names about real jobs on LinkedIn. I've only been contacted about buying virtual flowers for charity on Facebook. You do the math. - James Urquhart via Alert Thingy
Also deleted my FaceBook account. No regrets whatsoever. Got very little out of it. - Jason Kaneshiro
Friend Feed has been the Facebook killer for me since it integrated with Twhirl - Morgan via twhirl
@Akiva. so, wait. what level is your zombie? - HokieGeek via twhirl
Good post Robert. I wrote a story today on why people should be Lifestreaming. you cover one of the reasons in your post, but there are many others. You can read it here: http://lifestreamblog.com/why-... - Mark Krynsky
Ok, this is seriously cool. I'm starting to like Friend Feed more and more. - Don MacAskill
I use my "Comments and Likes" page as a newspaper, to see what's happened on these articles/posts/Twitters since I last saw them. Without the Comments/Likes, stuff would get totally buried (even only following 50-80 people. How do people follow 10,000? Ouch.). 2 weeks ago, I barely used "comments" and "likes" and stuff moved so fast on FriendFeed, that in a few hours, everything was so far down the pages...lost. Good post. - Mitchell Tsai
I may put a "like" on something interesting, so I can (1) come back in a few hours (2) see if any cool discussion is going on (3) remove the "like" if it's boring (4) gives me time to Del.icio.us the article if I was too lazy/busy when I first saw the article. (5) Remove the "like" if I make a "comment" so I don't hit that FriendFeed "like" limit .... uhhh speed bump. :-) - Mitchell Tsai
Robert: I think a perfect place for a discussion link would be in the hover-bubble that appears over each name in friendfeed. http://friendfeed.com/e/94d317... - J. Phil
What Robert Scoble and Louis Gray really nailed in their two posts. - If I like person X, I can easily see what person X also likes. Waaaay better than reading one blog. Better than a set of RSS feeds. Combines (1) the power of "light-weight communication" - interaction without e-mail/phone (2) the ability to make "50 million personal newspapers" (3) the building of a community with multiple layers for everyone (e.g. asymmetric links, you don't have to follow your fans) (4) imaginary friends - Mitchell Tsai
@Mitchell Shaulis: I am clearly not in the big league on FriendFeed as I didn't realise there was a limit to how many posts I could Like. I need to up my involvement clearly! Great post Scoble, I enjoy reading both yourself and Louis Gray! - Joe Dawson
This is great thnx for the heads up - John Spencer
We should ALWAYS remember that blogo-something is a two-way road. Commenting helps keep stuff healthy. Not commenting is unhealthy to the network. - Cesar Cardoso
It is apparent that FriendFeed is one of those services that you should know very, very well. - Alex Williams
I'll try to comment on the original blog post rather than FriendFeed. If they're not using Disqus my comments won't show. - Andy Murdoch
Andy: what you doing commenting here then? - Robert Scoble
The power of blogs over traditional publishing is the two-way communication channel. Many times the post is just the jumping-off point for the good stuff. Those that forget that intrinsic fact usually are suffering from a fit of an inflated sense of self-importance. - Morgan via twhirl
I didn't realize this page existed - wow! cool! and it has its own feed. circle of life. nice - Sarah Perez
Excellent tip!! I did not know you could do that. I am checking my subscriptions and really, very few "famous" people take the time to discuss. Sad but true, it seems that the communication is only one way. - Arturo Servin
This is why FF keeps me coming back, is all about the great conversation and the discovery of interesting articles that keeps me interested. - Gadiel Rivera
