So I figured I'd take advantage of Plurk's Twitter import feature; worked great, found a bunch of people I already follow on Twitter (61 to be exact). Except I'm not allowed to import them all, only 50 of them. Because the timeline would be too crowded. Sacrificing user experience to preserve a design aesthetic is "worst mistake you can ever make as a web developer" #1. - Mark Trapp
Had the same issue Mark. Just ran it twice. Got them all in. - Robert Sanzalone
So Scoble would have to run that import, um... 400 times or so if all his contacts were to switch to Plurk? Yes, fail. - Cyndy
plus you have to select them one by one, a bit too much clicking - Dobromir Hadzhiev
They've said it many times Plurk is not designed to be like Twitter. They've designed it to communicate with your close friends, everyone else you should become their fan. They constanly discourage adding hundreds and hundreds of friends and your "karma" is not rewarded for it. I got clarification on this the other day. It's part of the system design to use it this way. Right? Wrong? Who knows, but that's how it is. - Bwana McCall
Sure Bwana, but providing tools like this only serve to confuse that message. Providing an importer from Twitter says "We want you to use us instead of Twitter, look how easy it is to migrate over!" only to tell the user "whoa, not so fast, only 50 people! We know best for you!" and, to top it all off, it's not even enforced; as Robert points out, if I go back do the import over, I can add another 50 from my list, which seems to fly in the face of why they're saying there's a 50 person limit. - Mark Trapp
Good software solves a need. Great software solves a need and backs the hell off. Let me use Plurk the way I want, don't tell me what's best for me. I know what's best for me. You gave me a tool to import my Twitter contacts? Awesome, let me import all of them. Not 50. Not 50 at a time. All of them. - Mark Trapp
If it were enforced, then I'd see your point, but it's not. It's a way of saying, you'll be sorry if you do this. Look at the flip side, what if they allowed you to do it and your timeline becomes severely cluttered? I'm 80% sure some would complain that "you should have warned us about this". I seriously doubt they are taking the attitude "we know what's best for you", it's more of a "if you do this action, here are the consequences..here's a slight hinderance to bring the point home". - Bwana McCall
Bottom line is, this feature was put there because of Twitter's problems, but now this limitation is there to preserve the intended experience. Some would say they are stupid for not capitalizing on Twitter's woes, which is what they're doing. Some would say, don't put the feature there if you don't want it used like Twitter, which is what you're saying. It's a compromise on their part which I don't think will make or break the service. - Bwana McCall
Except there's no option to say "I got it, now let me do it anyway." You just get the error message. The only way to add more people is to more or less randomly try to import again, where it happily lets you import another 50. No warning there saying "Hey, you already have more than 50 people on your list, you shouldn't enter any more." No, the way this is handled only serves to confuse and infuriate people. - Mark Trapp
Twitter wasn't designed to be used like it's being used either. I don't like Plurk, personally, but find it hilarious to say "You don't WANT more than 50 users imported. It will TOTALLY wreck our design!" Is it an app or is it performance art? - Cyndy
People don't have time to figure out what the developer's intentions are. If they can't use a website in an expected manner, they leave. Providing this feature in the way in which it was provided tells people "we don't want you here." Sure, they are never going to be Twitter, but doing things like this (and the big disclaimer telling everyone to only add your very closest friends) means they will never catch on, even by themselves. - Mark Trapp
Twitter's simplicity allows for flexibility. Plurk's timeline does not. It's a warning, nothing more, nothing less. If it bothers you that much, there's plenty more in there that I'm sure will deter you from using it. - Bwana McCall
Bwana, it's not a warning. If there was a banner at the top of the import saying "We strongly discourage adding more than 50 people" before adding people, that'd be a warning. It outright refuses to add more than 50 people, and provides no recourse. Only people who thought "what the hey, let me try it again" were able to do it again, again with no warning. This is stupid how they implemented this. - Mark Trapp
Mark, I don't think this UI defect is enough to make or break the system. There are way too many other factors to consider. Many other services don't even offer a Twitter import, let alone hooks into Twitter's service. If I were writing this defect as a tester, I would mark as a medium priority only because it's a barrier to entry. It's a low priority since it' a generally a one time function. - Bwana McCall
Bwana, I realize now that my screenshot is a bit misleading. The banner at the top of it only shows up AFTER you try to import more than 50 people. It's not there before. - Mark Trapp
Ok Mark, you've made your point that it's stupid to implement it this way. So are you going to submit it as feedback to Plurk? :) - Bwana McCall
Bwana, the apparent impetus for a feature like this, based on the available information, is to preserve the design aesthetic of the site. "It'd be too crowded!" There are a few things you can sacrifice usability for: technical limitations and functional requirements are two of them. But to sacrifice it for your design is insane. They either need to figure out how to handle more than 50 people, or make a cogent case for why more than 50 people is unnecessary. - Mark Trapp
Bwana, that brings up a whole other issue I have with Plurk. Where are the developers? - Mark Trapp
I used the faceless contact form pointing to the discussion, as well. I guess there's no @reply notification or direct messaging feature in Plurk, too? - Mark Trapp
yes there is a direct message feature, (called a private plurk) however, you must be friends with the individual from what I recall. - Bwana McCall
Nice, if I click on your link, then click "My Profile," it brings me to your profile. - Mark Trapp
I can only add so many new things to my "brain feed-stream". Unfortunately, I deem Plurk a FAIL. Just too juvenile a feel. I need no more MySpace clones. - Mathew A. Koeneker
Hi guys. I am a developer of Plurk and I want to share some input on this. The major factor for this limit is performance - fetching and inserting timelines from hundreds/thousands of users isn't cheap and would be very costly. The second major factor is that following a lot of people on Plurk will have penalties as we don't have all the timeline filters developed. But we do listen to user feedback and we have raised the limit to 100.
This limit may be removed in the near future, depends on performance and the power of filtering. - Amir Salihefendic
Sigh. Now you know why I love FriendFeed so much. No limits. Always fast. I reload the page hundreds of times a day. - Robert Scoble
Oh, and I already have more than 800 friends on Plurk (compared to more than 12,000 followers on FriendFeed and 26,000+ on Twitter) and I only manually added a handful. - Robert Scoble
Robert, FriendFeed does have limits. Both you and I ran into one of them. There was a comment limit which caused commenting to fail after a certain point. FriendFeed raised the limit once we brought it to their attention. Come on now, FriendFeed isn't THAT perfect. - Bwana McCall
Bwana: that limit didn't hurt and was, like you said, instantly raised. I haven't hit it since despite thousands of comments. - Robert Scoble
plurk needs an api stat, i doubt people want to use it as there sole twitter like interface - Chris Jones
Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter all these services have SIMILAR goals. Again this reinforces to me that microblogging is becoming the "new email" (aka killer app). Email, IM, microblogging three great ways to communicate. Perhaps FriendFeed will be the savior for all of them. But FF would have to also be able to post freely to them as well. So, FF becomes something like a service and you use apps like Twhirl, etc to interact with your stream. - Tris Hussey
The best way to use Plurk is head over to the mobile interface at http://www.plurk.com/m - Personally, I hate the regular UI...its like playing Defender. - Scott Cropper
Leave it up to Robert to jinx FriendFeed :) It's been pretty slow today and I'm getting sporadic Service Unavailable errors. No system is perfect :) - Bwana McCall
Or maybe because the UI is annoying as hell... - Eric Florenzano
My guess why it wont catch on....Because we don't need it. - Gadiel Rivera
I submit Plurk's not disruptive enough. Twitter's *different*. FriendFeed, too. Plurk...not so much. - Brent Newhall
That limitation can be fixed, fixing Twitter's downtime problem is another story as we all know. - Bob Ngu
a fitting list for your blog to be a part of .. congrats - Steven Hodson
Thanks Steven! And Sprague... this was a B-to-Z list so I'm thinking I may be sniffing the rarified air of the K or L List these days. Life is good! ;-) - Eric Berlin
Congrats as well, keep up the great writing! - Mike Fruchter
An 18-yr-old high school girl, Kristen Heath, presented about a company, Passive Devices, she started while 14 yrs old! Kristen sells Snoop Tunes, devices which allow 15-22-yr-olds and 18-30-yr-olds to share music with nearby friends on iPods & other devices using FM (rather than sharing earbuds or illegally copying music). Describing her experience at starting a company at age 14, she shared "I wasn't thinking I would actually have to be there & go through all the steps." :-) - Mitchell Tsai
Amra Tareen (allvoices - helping 3rd world voices get heard, Geolocating), Erica Estrada (d.light, sub-$25 lights), Leila Chirayath (Market for Change - supporting outsourcing to Kenya & other developing countries) presented about the challenges of international business - Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan. NOTE: Leila shared that biggest challenge for Kenyan programmers is NOT infrastructure, but lack of marketing ability to US/Europe. - Mitchell Tsai
Business Plan Competition - Finalist #1: WebVet - "WebMD for pets" http://webvet.com, Hope Schultz, William Zaccheo, Target: Most pet owners don't trust internet info for pets, and are very picky about vets. Q: How sticky will the site be? Are they spending too much on content? - Mitchell Tsai
Business Plan Competition - Finalist #2: Koollage - 1-step pod-maker for social "mini" blogging and "micro"media. http://koollage.com. Mythili Sankaran. Target: Right now blogs look terrible on iPhones. No easy 1-step method to make pods. - Mitchell Tsai
Business Plan Competition - Finalist #3: Gaiagy - 1-stop-shop for finding the best eco-efficiency products. http://HomeEnergySaver.com. Margot Eiran. Kanika Singal. Rucker Alex. Target: It's a pain-in-neck to find & evaluate eco-efficient stuff for the home (even for experts)! Existing government sites can NOT recommend actual products. - Mitchell Tsai
Business Plan Competition - Finalist #4: Skill Shop - Help IT shops put the right people on the right projects. Idea stage. Solution: Use a taxonomy rather than a keyword match on "C#, HTML, Javascript, CSS" - Mitchell Tsai
Business Plan Competition - Finalist #5: Passive Devices (mentioned above). Sold 2,000 units. $20 each. Have order for 50,000 units. Redesigning units based on feedback from 1st 2,000. Two Markets: 18-30-yr-olds want better earphone quality, and share less. 15-22-yr-olds share more. - Mitchell Tsai
Google.org's (Hybrid Philanthropic-Profit arm of Google) Rachel Paynes discussed their 3 areas of interest (1) Climate Change (2) Global Public Health (3) Global Development. One project, Planet Read, teaches people in India to read by showing the words to popular Bollywood songs. "Same-Language Subtitling" In 1 year, 200 million people have been learning to read. Watching 1 day/wk, they estimate it will take 3 years to learn to read. - Mitchell Tsai
Great story. I can relate.. but I've been "a long time... back" in my one-horse town. Just love the Dixie Chicks, especially for speaking out the way they did. - Alex von Halem
I tried to comment on this earlier... ff didn't like it. ANYWAY. What I wanted to say: that was an awesome video. Full of past and present hope in technology. - Alex von Halem
Robert - Late adopters are not some small set of people. They're basically the rest of the internet. Generalizing across them is..not quite right - Sriram Krishnan via Alert Thingy
Sriram when people call me names for being an early adopter, will you stick up for me? Why is it OK for late adopters to make fun of early adopters, but it's not OK for early adopters to make fun of late adopters? - Robert Scoble
I dont think it is correct to generalize from the few to many. Calling literally hundreds of millions of internet users 'late adopters' and then generalizing across them is incorrect. In fact, the term 'late adopters' is in itself incorrect - the right term is 'normal people'. - Sriram Krishnan via Alert Thingy
I see late adopters as the rest of the world that doesn't know what they're missing. Getting my family on flickr is a struggle. They don't have the internet understanding to know why it's a good tool for them. They fear security breaches. Perhaps we early adopters could do a better job of showing them the way. It's hard work, and they may not want to listen, but I bet some of them would thank us. - Roadgoer
Not sure if it's totally deserved to mock the late adopters. I've waited a darned long time to buy a next gen HD disc format and I'm glad I waited - didn't spring for HD-DVD and waste money with that. Now I'm just waiting for prices to come down on stand alone Blu-Ray players. I know what the tech is capable of, I know what I'm willing to pay for, and I know it all gets cheaper. That's smart instead of just jumping on whatever new comes along. - Jason Kaneshiro
But web services are almost all free. That's the beauty: no financial barrier to involvement. - Roadgoer
I think, in life, you have to go with what drives you. If your identity / fulfillment comes from being on the edge ... then do it well. In the process, a little bit of trash talking (i.e. calling out late adopters for being ... late) is fair game ... as long as they get to make fun of you for when your style bites you in the @#$ (may that day come only rarely). - Tim Bauer
Late adopters are, basically, your family. But without them, none of us would be adopters, early or otherwise. - Tom Landini
Sounds like a new form of class warfare to me. Betaheads vs RTMites - Lindsay Donaghe
For me it's always like having to expect and explain the willingness to a complete paradigm shift when I explain these things. You have to hand it to Bill: the name "windows" was a good term to explain to older generations (thos 10 or more years older than us) what happens with a shifting view on things. I use that model often. Usually to no avail. I guess it has to "click" - a complete paradigm shift, or it won't work. - Alex von Halem
"Late adopters" (as used by the "Crossing the Chasm" writer Geoffrey Moore) is not quite the same as the "masses". "Late adopters" describes the REALLY slow group, which refuses to use even after 90% of the public uses (e.g. no cell phone even now). (1) Early Adopter -> (2) Early Mainstream -> (3) Bulk of Mainstream (4) Late Adopter ... There are interesting marketing & design considerations when marketing to the "safe" "late adopter" - Mitchell Tsai
Mitchell: yes, and I just joined all thosee other groups together and call them all "late adopters." It all depends on your point of view anyway. Remember, only 1/6th the world has had their hands on a computer at all. So, we're all early adopters if you look at it that way. - Robert Scoble
I guess it doesn't matter what we call people, "early", "late". Are there different communications, usage, safety, and money-spending characteristics which we ought to know about? - Mitchell Tsai
Only 1/6? Puts things in Perspective. Makes me happy to See Ubuntu grow and hopefully explode with the low cost computers so everyone can benefit from Tech. But there will still be divisions and divisions within those divisions. Being first or last doesn't matter as long as you are in the race...imho... - Anthony Farrior
Funny: I have some business friends who called me an "early adopter" for finally doing Facebook/LinkedIn in mid-late-2007. I found blogs again 2 months ago via some paper book written when you worked for Microsoft. What the h*ll would I be? The "early adopter" and "late adopter" terms are maybe too 1-D. Like the good book 3-D Negotiation http://tinyurl.com/6gmh7c (on sale $8) which suggests that 1-D win-win or win-lose negotiations leave a lot of money on the table. - Mitchell Tsai
Perhaps frustation towards late adopters reflects an underlying anxiety that what we've chosen to "early-adopt" will turn out to be irrelevant. - Rick Powell
Rick: that might be it. But, it's the same frustration that Douglas Engelbart tells me about when it took the industry 20 years to put his concepts into use (he's the guy who invented the mouse -- he showed us that in the 1960s and it took until the 1980s to see it used in a consumer product). - Robert Scoble
I think this is true. I found myself doing it with Flickr video. Now I use it (though only for "Family"), because the quality is better than YouTube. - TranceMist
The only thing anyone can do is commit to what you believe in or what one believes works, and hope that someone will follow after, and not worry too much if they don't. At least we're having fun. :-) - Rick Powell
Hehehe. Do you switch between Macs and PCs and try doing Alt+T on PCs in Firefox because of the positioning of the Alt and Cmd/Apple keys? That one always gets me. - Cyvros/fyc
Actually I'm surprised at how well my brain intuitively adapts to each scenario. But, yes, the alt/cmd mistake does occur - on the pc. At the mac I don't seem to have any hesitation, even though I haven't been using it that long. - Alex von Halem
Macs must have special powers indirectly imbued by Steve Jobs' RTD. - Cyvros/fyc
Will you be taking pictures or video of the gallery? I'm sure it's impressive - Bob
One time at Yosemite, I hiked with a friend up the left side of the main falls, and we heard some music. My female artist friend was so upset that someone had brought a boombox into nature. Then we rounded the corner, and a musician had brought his electric guitar and amp halfway up the falls. Cool! - Mitchell Tsai
post a shot of the tunnel view - beautiful this time of year - Dave Hodson
Scoble and TH - Can' wait to see this.. Ansel is one of my (and America's) favorite classics.. Way to go guys! - Randy Carranza
Hope to see you in HMB this weekend. You're not camping out up there, are you? - Francine Hardaway
i'd use it if I had some more parameters like only show _my_ stuff I am sharing without any of the other stuff plus have at least some control over the layout of the box.. - Nicole Simon
The widget would be better if it has one parameter to control the number of messages. - terababy
I didn't expect it to resize to my blog but it did which is good! Great widget, although I agree with the above comment about parameters...via AlertThingy - Joe Dawson
Tried to add the widget to my Blogger blog, but got "a server error occurred" message. Will try again later. Has anyone successfully added the widget to a Blogger blog? - Ontario Emperor
Yeah, can I get it in black? (w/o fiddling with the code) - Alex von Halem
It actually does support a num= parameter (add to the script tag src url) and it can be styled with css. Unfortunately none of this is very well documented... - Paul Buchheit
Too bad, my non-hosted version of WP doesn't format right Java script based widgets! :( - Mario Sundar
well, for starters, why not give us the main parameter, like name of the classes etc, we can add the rest. ;) - Nicole Simon
Neat but agree with Nicole's first comment - more useful if can restrict to my stuff. - Vasudev Ram
@Nicole: I think you can use Firebug to figure out how to style the widget - Turker Keskinpala
It is only your stuff, or am I misunderstanding what you are asking for? - Paul Buchheit
yes my stuff. while I do share 'all' on my facebook page, I would consider putting the widget on an 'about what does nicole do on the net' page but not with the rest of the stuff in it - because that is about what happens on friend feed. f.e. on my german blog I do display - quite clumsy - one of my two twitter accounts (the english one), my stumble upon and my english blog. I' could replace that with one ff widget. - Nicole Simon
I understand that by the way your design is you would have a problem with showing my comments to something as that would not make sense to show mine with it, so it would be w/o any comments or likes. in a version 5.0 of that you should allow me to choose: which of your feeds shall be displayed in this edition of the widget. reason: i'd put my german + english content on my german ff widget and the english content on my english pages. - Nicole Simon
i saw this awhile back but didn't bother with it because I thought there was no way to resize it to your blog...but it automatically does so? wow!! i'll have to try it - Sarah Perez
OK nope, it practically prevented my page from loading and took a minute to appear - Sarah Perez
yes! excellent. you guys rock...btw i know your cousin in our hmschl group....i heard and joined ff through her. i saw this on your site and looked all over for it. thanks for posting it on your feed. i added the widget. would like to change the color of the widget box. i am assuming that it can easily be done, perhaps? http://heatherwarren.blogspot.... - Heather
Still no flash version. The JS prevents lots of people from using the widget. You should really offer both. - Erica Baker
This broke my blog in IE6 as it didn't respect the size of the enclosing div. It would be great to specific a max width. - Dominic Preuss
anyone tested it against classical L10N/I18N issues? right-to-left alphabets/languages? same in mix with left-to-right one's? - silpol
@EricaBaker would you mind to consider that Flash is more P.I.T.A. than value? JS is certainly LESS evil than Flash... - silpol
@silpol PITA yes, but no site owner in their right mind lets people drop JS widgets on their pages. Think about the people who aren't savvy enough to control their own webspace, not just us nerds who have 35 sites and are working on 5 more. ;) - Erica Baker
@EricaBaker I think about layman behavior for several last years - and that's exactly the reason why I think that Flash is more evil than JS. While JS is hole for certain amount of cross-scripting, Flash is hole of another kind (closed-source black box) and hence is true Pandora box. So, yes, Flash is more dangerous (not to mention an army of other issues with) than JS. Naturally, this is only my opinion, not a "truth in last instance". - silpol
Was in the same camp as Sarah ... giving it a spin. Keep it up Paul! - Charlie Anzman
It works fine in Blogger - Paul - colors???? - Charlie Anzman
Hurm.... when I added it to my blog (see http://www.pelczarski.com/gonu...), it blew out the table cell it's in, even though I have a width set for it. Anyone have ideas on what I'm doing wrong? Thanks! - Keith Pelczarski
To fix the frozen page problem if the JS is stalling I'd suggest adding the ability to specify the DIV to draw into. That way I can load the JS at the bottom of the page after everything else is visible. - Dylan Parker
Solved Keith's blowout prob. For others: wrap the script tag in a <div> that specifies the intended width. This is only needed if you're trying to embed in a td, and fixes a condition that only arises in Safari. - Kevin Fox
