Ben Hedrington - Comments

Nice. I'm home this afternoon and get to see it live for the first time. - Amyloo

355 more comments

ditto. no sound either. - Christopher Harris

We're getting there - Brett Slatkin

The test pattern looks good so far. - Matt Mastracci

We are starting shortly. - Robert Scoble

whoooo! shortly! - Christopher Harris

Please stand by... - Robert Scoble

It's on - Matt Mastracci

Cool - Ken Sheppardson

Rackspace is wasting their money, they could reach 175000 geeks by advertising on TWiT - Mark

first time i'm seeing the new video :) - Christopher Harris

Mark: who said we won't do that too? - Robert Scoble

Alright... need to pull up Dave's Twitter stream in another window... - Ken Sheppardson

look at that chizzled jaw, lucky guy - Mark

dave winer? - Christopher Harris

Considering we're watching video sucked over Skype and rebroadcast over ustream, the quality is pretty good. - Matt Mastracci

"Fast RSS." I liek that generic term. Harkens to fast zombies. - Amyloo

Fast feeds - like fast food? Will there be a Slow Feeds movement? - Kevin Marks

Polling sucks. - Bob Wyman

Bob: can you explain why you think that? - Robert Scoble

And how that fits into this conversation? - Robert Scoble

Knowing "what's new" is pretty important - as important as "something is new". - Matt Mastracci

Scoble: It's inefficient. - Eric Florenzano

Aha I'm awake in time for the gillmor gang. - Hilary Talbot

polling wastes resources on both sides of the connection for the majority of the time when there are no new items - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Hey Hil. - Amyloo

hey Amy :) - Hilary Talbot

Scoble: Think of the browser. V1 of friendfeed was polling. You had to ask (by refreshing) whether there was new content. This version of friendfeed is push, where FriendFeed tells you when there's new stuff. - Eric Florenzano

bear: right, so is Pubsubhubbub doing it right or wrong? And, is there a better way? - Robert Scoble

the key part is that it's sending the content along with the item - this dramatically reduces client complexity - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

By "server", he means "hub", re: doing more work. The blogs do as much work as they do today (ie: ping the hub). - Matt Mastracci

Hubbub is doing it right IMO - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Scoble: Just remember everything I said to you 5 or 6 years ago when explaining why PubSub was useful and why "one-day" people would realize that real-time would be good. Nothing has changed. - Bob Wyman

Bob: yup, I'm slow. :-) - Robert Scoble

Robert: You need to get more "real-time"! - Bob Wyman

Right - this is the HTTP/HTML version of what PubSub has been doing for XMPP - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Absolutely. No question. Yes. - Bob Wyman

Yeah. It could do twitter. - Matt Mastracci

correction - I'm not the CTO - I don't think Johann would like me taking his job :) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Is it possible Bill Gates had it right, Business at the speed of Thought? We want content and information as we think it. - Owen Greaves

Oh, sorry. - Robert Scoble

I get confused. :-) - Robert Scoble

Someone ask Recordon if they've figured out how all this can relate to activitystrea.ms, the streams protocol Facebook, MySpace, and others support - Jesse Stay

no worries :) I like the promotion - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

which is Atom based - Jesse Stay

You'd have a hard time doing twitter over rssCloud - you'd have to be pulling the last 30 twitter messages after each tweet. That's 30x the traffic. - Matt Mastracci

If you were designing this sort of system from scratch today, I can't imagine that you'd take a polling approach. It's legacy left over from page-based web browsing. - Ken Sheppardson

This is a great fit for activitystrea.ms - Kevin Marks

Kevin, that's what I was thinking - both being Atom, they ought to fit together well. I'd love to see a use-case in action. - Jesse Stay

Yeah, activitystrea.ms works easily with Atom which can then be made real time using PSHB. - David Recordon

robert - easily - Seesmic ran in the cloud until we finally needed more memory for the Java side - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

polling is useful as a fallback and to pull history when subscribing for the first time. - Kevin Marks

Can we all just agree on "Hubbub" vs "PuSH" or saying "pubsubhubbub" every time... once and for all? :-) - Ken Sheppardson

I'd love to see Brett's opinion on why Twitter won't implement PSHB - Jesse Stay

It requires a big player just to have the operations staff to maintain a high volume site - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Jesse: I was just about to ask that. - Robert Scoble

Tornado uses epoll and it's been used by Twisted Python - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

but if it's distributed - it would scale out anyway - Ankush Narula

Kqueue too :) (Well, Twisted does support that, Tornado doesn't yet) - Eric Florenzano

Twitter won't implement it because they want to be the hub, and they want everybody to use their own, proprietary APIS - Ken Sheppardson

Ankush - correct - until you get "scobled" (i.e. when you have one user with a huge number of followers) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Mike: and wait until you get onto Oprah! :-) - Robert Scoble

Sounds like DNS - Rob La Gesse

Ken, I understand the Hub part, but I can't help wonder if they just don't understand how it could help their API. They could use their own hub if they wanted. - Jesse Stay

Are Hubbub and rssCloud the same thing? (...he asks, feigning innocence) - Ken Sheppardson

The PSHB protocol is "simple" and fairly trivial implementations are possible. But, *any* single hub that monitors millions of feeds is going to need care and feeding. There will be *very large* hubs and their will be tiny hubs and they can all work together happily. - Bob Wyman

I'd love to know if Brett or Brad have reached out to Twitter in any way - Jesse Stay

Ken: no. Similar efforts but come from different histories. RSSCloud comes from Dave Winer's side of the house. - Robert Scoble

robert - oh hell no - that's what Loic is good at - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

the distinction is that PubSubHubbub sends the fat pings with content in; rssCloud sends an update notification and still needs a poll - Kevin Marks

Mike: actually Loic has someone speaking at LeWeb that has a bigger global brand than Oprah. - Robert Scoble

robert - yea, I haven't found out who yet - i'm curioius about that - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

It's Dr. Laura isn't it Robert? - Jesse Stay

what happens if a hub dies? - Ankush Narula

Jesse: way bigger than that. - Robert Scoble

Yeah, Twitter wants other people to adopt their streaming API, if anything... they don't want to be yet another hub in some network - Ken Sheppardson

rssCloud causes "thundering herd" problem on source blogs. The result can be a complete swamping of smaller publishers. This was the core "mistake" in rssCloud when it was first done 7 years ago and it remains the core error in that protocol. - Bob Wyman

How about working with the OMB guys? Why PSHB vs. OMB protocol? - Jesse Stay

yea, Twitter got burned with XMPP early in their engineering life so have a bad taste for it - they got burned not because of XMPP but because of other non-tech reasons - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Jesse - IMO OMB should allow for atom payloads - then it could become part of PSHB by default - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

OMB could generate activitystrea.ms + PSHB too - Kevin Marks

Thundering herd would be a *huge* problem if Twitter were to get decentralized. Oprah has 1MM+ followers - that's 20 tweets * 1k * 1MM subscribers on each tweet. - Matt Mastracci

Celine Dion probably has a bigger brand than Opera, and she speaks French (ADD kicking in here) - Jesse Stay

Bear, interesting - Jesse Stay

Bear: The issue wasn't XMPP the protocol, it was the software they used to implement it, the systems they built to feed it, the way they configured it, etc... XMPP isn't, a priori, any worse than the alternatives. - Bob Wyman

OMB made a big mistake when they created their own protocol instead of just extending ATOM, IMO - Eric Florenzano

Bob, yes - you said it much better than I did - I was trying to say just that - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

There was also the on again/off again relationship Twitter had with Gnip that confused the whole XMPP situation - Ken Sheppardson

Yeah, I don't really see what OMB gets you these days given activitystrea.ms, Hubbub, etc. Seems redundant. - Ken Sheppardson

We have an interesting interview with Gnip's founder on Building43 right now, by the way. - Robert Scoble

@Matt: Right. with rssCloud, publishing becomes massively expensive if you get popular. rssCloud will, on the other hand, work well for people who aren't very popular and don't have many people interested in what they publish. For those folk, rssCloud is a potential solution... :-) - Bob Wyman

Gnip link: http://www.building43.com/videos... - Rob La Gesse

oh cool - Gnip has some very cool tech behind the scenes - i'll have to queue that video - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Ken - now that identi.ca/status.net has plugins - nothing prevents someone from wiring up a PHSB hook to the internal message queue for identi.ca/status.net - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

bear: You know if anybody's pushing activitystrea.ms out of a Laconica instance yet? - Ken Sheppardson

I imagine that hooking up the twitter firehose to PSHB would be really easy and cheap, but it would likely violate the twitter firehose license. - Matt Mastracci

kevin - yea, one of the most fun projects I did was to hook a sms/xmpp bot to a phone switch - it allowed you to control your vm/phone from xmpp and gave a lot of benefit - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

EVERYTHING cool violates the Twitter firehose rules :) - Rob La Gesse

ken - there is some private branch work being done on that - but they are working on getting 0.9 out the door first - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

@bear great - we should get you hooked up to the Ribbit APIs for telephony stuff and Seesmic - Kevin Marks

Rob: FriendFeed figured out a way around the stupid Twitter rules. - Robert Scoble

I think just knowing that Twitter offers a firehose violates it's terms of use. - Ken Sheppardson

@kevin i would love to review them and make a pitch to the team about them - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Robert - FF didn't try to share the firehose. - Rob La Gesse

$50M for FF engineering and architecture team? - Ankush Narula

@bear great, email me kevinmarks@gmail.com - Kevin Marks

..and FF was able to position themselves as a Twitter client, in a sense, by pushing traffic to Twitter. They weren't just extracting value from the system. Plus, they probably asked nicely and sent cupcakes. - Ken Sheppardson

Rob: sure it did, but it only shares it for people who have logged into FriendFeed. - Robert Scoble

Rob: Twitter's rules are "don't create a shadow Twitter." As long as you don't try to do that they probably will let you play. - Robert Scoble

Rob: of course every geek in the world wants to create a shadow Twitter. :-) - Robert Scoble

Rob - once they produced the v2 api - then they started sharing the full stream. Until that point it was a partial stream - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Robert - my point is - at the same time Twitter couldn't support more use of the firehose, they demanded the firehose NOT be re-broadcast. They don;t allow one to become a "node" of the stream. Which seems silly. - Rob La Gesse

That's not entirely correct, Robert. Their other rule is "don't try to monetize something firehose based that we may at some point in the indefinite future think about monetizing ourselves" - Ken Sheppardson

On PubSubHubbub and rssCloud ... (http://brad.livejournal.com/2405147...) - David Recordon

Ken: we're saying the same thing. :-) - Robert Scoble

decentralization!!! - Ankush Narula

Rob: FriendFeed rebroadcasts the Twitter firehose, but only for the people who have signed onto FriendFeed. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Ah... right... "shadow Twitter". Gotcha :-) - Ken Sheppardson

Robert/Ken - I can understand why Twitter doesn't want downstream nodes passing on the stream - they lose access control - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Robert - they are not. They are broadcasting back a VERY small portion of that stream, at best. - Rob La Gesse

I think technically rebroadcasting is illegal according to the Twitter developer terms for the firehose - Jesse Stay

Mike me too! Rob: it is a small portion because only a few hundred thousand people have signed onto FriendFeed, but if you could get everyone on Twitter to sign up here you'd see the entire firehose. - Robert Scoble

See: http://code.google.com/p... - Bob Wyman

In so far as fire-walled end-user applications can't receive pings, PSHB protocol mainly helps publishers and server-side aggregators like Google reader. Since this "last mile problem" is out-of-scope for PSHB, we can't yet expect any client explosion the likes that Twitter has seen. Any thoughts from the panel on the last mile problem? What would have to be done so that Tweetie, Seesmic, etc, might benefit from PSHB? - Mason Lee

Robert - I disagree. I think if that happened the hose would be shut off. - Rob La Gesse

The protocol comparison document is at: http://code.google.com/p... - Bob Wyman

Well, I don't think it's just rebroadcasting... there's also an issue around derivative/aggregations based on the firehose, firehose-based analytics, etc - Ken Sheppardson

Why isn't Twitter ever a part of these conversations? I'd love to hear their viewpoint. You should get Ryan Sarver on one of these episodes. - Jesse Stay

real time chat across different media and internet access levels - you pick what size/speed your want your conversation to happen at - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I believe they have an open invite :) - Rob La Gesse

The last time I saw Twitter participate in this sort of conversation was at BearHugCamp last fall.... and I suspect that left a bad taste in their mouth :-) - Ken Sheppardson

I'm curious if anyone invited them - Jesse Stay

But you can't do global Track across a federated system - Ken Sheppardson

*somebody* needs to aggregate everything if you want to search across everything - Ken Sheppardson

But Kevin, what about tracking the firehose? - Cliff Gerrish

*drink* someone mentioned Track - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

@Mason If PSHB handles the backbone problem of providing fan-in and then fan-out for millions of feeds, it makes it massively easier for people to focus on building innovative front ends. There isn't much opportunity for creativity in solving the backend problem -- that's why it is reasonable to build something like PSHB today. The really fun problems are the things that should be relying on PSHB as a source of feeds. Let PSHB do the boring backend problem -- you should focus on innovative clients. - Bob Wyman

drink - Rob La Gesse

Ken: that's a good point. - Robert Scoble

or you need to delegate/distribute searches out to the hubs - Ken Sheppardson

I need a drink! - Robert Scoble

Robert - grab some formula! - Rob La Gesse

But, "follow" isn't enough. We also need TRACK! - Bob Wyman

Or that other kind of milk. - Amyloo

There are certainly benefits to distribution and redundancy, but there *are* benefits to centralization. - Ken Sheppardson

Kevin has the key point, getting what you want... Discovery of what you want would be next... these hubs will be learning patterns of what is wanted. - Ben Hedrington

Or will it be too decentralized? - Ben Hedrington

Discovery on a federated/partitioned system is problematic. - Ken Sheppardson

but PSHB isn't for track, as you have said eloquently on the mailing list, Bob - Kevin Marks

live filtering? - Ankush Narula

So discovery is the next frontier? - Ben Hedrington

track remains a problem even with PSHB *but* using PSHB allows you to do a track across more than just one source - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Robert: chat room other than here? - David Stratton

discovery happens the same way you discover new blogs IMO - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Discovery has always been the new frontier - Francine Hardaway

@Kevin: But, if I've got PSHB aggregating the feeds, it makes it really, really easy for me to build a server that *does* do track on the stuff that PSHB feeds to me. - Bob Wyman

David: this is the chat room. - Robert Scoble

Hubbub allows some central search provider subscribe to everything, then people can subscribe to the search provider... but there just has to be some way to discover/broadcast which feeds are out there... this is an issue with SUP, btw... discovery. You have to know a feed's SUP ID first. - Ken Sheppardson

okay, thought so - David Stratton

I guess I wasn't being 2010 enough. This is the chat feed. :-) - Robert Scoble

So you mean if you want to do research or market research you will pay - Francine Hardaway

@bobwyman sure, but that isn't the usecase Robert says he wants; he needs a mass crawl for that - Kevin Marks

Francine: and restaurants will pay $10 a month to have their own Twitter. - Robert Scoble

I remember the Microsoft guy at BearHugCamp last fall was wondering why anybody would ever want to build a Track system, rather than just leave it to Google... - Ken Sheppardson

I'm a set of keywords, I'm looking for a set of keywords - Arnie Klaus

Of course, Twitter will probably offer http://www.sushirestaurant.com/twitter at some point too. - Robert Scoble

Live regexp for big pipes sounds like a $1Billion dollar business. - Cliff Gerrish

@kevin, I dont' see the distinction. I can do track based on all that flows through the PSHB hubs. That's semantically equivelant to doing a "mass crawl" - Bob Wyman

we've been doing this stuff with MOM in financial market feeds - topic subscriptions, channels, etc. - Ankush Narula

And what will they really do with it? That they don't do now - Francine Hardaway

You can have one aggregator that controls the entire feed, or you can set the feed loose and let several companies aggregate from those. Same data, no single point of control. - Rob La Gesse

Francine: I can see a lot you would do if you had your own branded Twitter clone. - Robert Scoble

Every Hubbub hub could/should provide a local firehose to anyone who wants it. - Ken Sheppardson

distributed track is possible. Centralization only makes it easier. - Bob Wyman

Complex events processing... - Cliff Gerrish

@bobwyman only if all the hubs do collation for you, surely? Content-based filtering inot feeds on the hubs too - Kevin Marks

Bob: and even centralization isn't THAT easy. Twitter only shows you the last few days on http://search.twitter.com - Robert Scoble

How similar to JustSignal? - Francine Hardaway

This is similar to tracking multiple market centers (pools of liquidity) to get the right trade. - Cliff Gerrish

John Kalucki, a SQLstream co-founder, has been at Twitter for about 18 month now working on... wait for it... their firehose API. - Ken Sheppardson

Cliff: Now I understand - Francine Hardaway

the fun happens when PSHB allows for disparate streams to have firehoses - then all the search/filter geeks can do their thing - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

@Scoble: "history" is irrelevant to any system doing a real-time track. All you care about is the future -- not the past. Past is for "retrospective search," "track" is about "prospective search". - Bob Wyman

The future: filter, search, discover, curate - Francine Hardaway

So Twitter is trying to become FriendFeed? - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Sure we do. It's called TwitterSpy. Dustin Sallings built it two years ago - Ken Sheppardson

others have built the same thing... - Ken Sheppardson

Mike - so is Facebook :) - Rob La Gesse

Bob: I want both. - Robert Scoble

@bobwyman disagree - you need both flow and past; they complement one another - Kevin Marks

bear: I think if you look at some of the newer Twitter web clients, they're basically a FriendFeed-like UI on top of the Twitter message bus. - Ken Sheppardson

twitter retweet is going to make a lot of folks angry - not that I have any inside info or anything - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

bear: hah! - Robert Scoble

@Scoble: Of course you want both. I would never question that. The two halves of search compliment each other. Only retrospective or only prospective is only half the solution. Most of the systems you've ever used have only solved half the problem . - Bob Wyman

bear: Justine Bateman's already mad about it. :-) - Ken Sheppardson

Bob: agreed. FriendFeed came close to solving both. - Robert Scoble

London here :) - Bastian

New York here... - Bob Wyman

hawaii here - Arnie Klaus

Texas - Rob La Gesse

Philadelphia - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

NYC - Ankush Narula

Just got a 503 on Twitter... we breaking it real time? - Ben Hedrington

Washington State - Steve Hammer

San Francisco (not Silcon Valley ;-) - Ken Sheppardson

canberra, Aust - Hilary Talbot

Dana Point, CA here - michael sean wright

nice thing we started here - Bastian

Wow - what a nice distribution! - Rob La Gesse

Ben - no - Twitter's auth API is having trouble right now - my monitoring alerts are going berserk about it - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Minneapolis, MN - Ben Hedrington

RSS!! - michael sean wright

Arizona - Francine Hardaway

awww...RSS :-) - Jodi Church

RSS, welcome to the world. - Bob Wyman

RSS lives! - Mason Lee

Don;t know how Scoble had a cute baby :) I mean, Maryam is cute, but Robert? Hee - Rob La Gesse

LOL @RSS... - Karoli

That gives new meaning to RSS stream. - Steve Hammer

when he farts - do you call it an rssCloud? ;-) - Ankush Narula

welcome to the intertubes RSS! - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

@ankush LOL! - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Rocky looks so cute petting him - Francine Hardaway

Ankush, FTW! - Karoli

Careful - Rocky looks hungry! - Rob La Gesse

loved the mp3 of the sounds of RSS greeting the world - michael sean wright

Your saving it all for his great, great grandkids! - Arnie Klaus

I need to run! :) - David Recordon

Thanks man ttyl - Brett Slatkin

lots of spamming yesterday - Karoli

it was a classic phishing scam - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

2 different things - Karoli

Good to hear about http://superfeedr.com! - Julien

If you were using SocialToo you wouldn't have gotten those messages :-) - Jesse Stay

they're able to insert messages into your stream when you don't follow via the Twitter API - Karoli

PSHB is not really decentralized from the client's perspective-- there will be one front end: google. - Mason Lee

Diversity is important in *any* ecosystem... - Bob Wyman

It's funny that I'm getting a fail whale on the Gillmor Gang. - Robert Scoble

it's the same with your computer network - all the same server means you are pwned by a single attack - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Steve Gillmor needs his Twitter anti-virus (SocialToo) :-) - Jesse Stay

DNS - Eric Florenzano

Gmail - Ken Sheppardson

Commonality in protocols -- diversity in servers. - Bob Wyman

oh, wait... - Ken Sheppardson

Twitter is down hard now. - Robert Scoble

Ok, really need to go now! Thanks and talk to everyone later. - David Recordon

I'm gettting 503 server error. - Robert Scoble

everyone gets nervous when we add a layer on top of the web stack... - Ankush Narula

yea, i'm getting hard errors from Twitter in my server alerts - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Ahh, it's back. - Robert Scoble

One day Twitter just won't come back. - Ken Sheppardson

i was, but it's working again for me - Jodi Church

Yeah - API's having issues too - Jesse Stay

Still 503 here - Ken Sheppardson

@ken - then, we will all sleep. - Rob La Gesse

Ken: Not after it has raise $100m - Francine Hardaway

Its google wave getting ready to go live. - Arnie Klaus

it's both - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Annie: Hah! - Ben Hedrington

The problem comes in ownership of the resource. In the decentralized web, we share the pipes in neutral fashion. But, "commercial" people tend to violate net neutrality rules. Like Twitter deciding who can and cannot read their data. That is a net neutrality failure... - Bob Wyman

Only portrayed that way by the FSF/GPL extremists - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Love the sound of Skype in the morning - Bastian

@bear: We should profit by competing on the service we provide users -- not on how much of user's data we have captured. - Bob Wyman

Bob: and what about Facebook's front door being completely locked? - Ankush Narula

@bob agree 100% - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Is he saying Dave Winer's naive? :-) - Jesse Stay

Bob: agree. Jesse: I think so. - Robert Scoble

He's saying light pinging won't work. - Cliff Gerrish

*smack* - Rob La Gesse

@Ankush I'm seriously hoping that the new hires at Facebook help steer them away from the dark side :) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

So to argue in Twitter and Facebook's defense, they're not just a neutral pass through. They're adding value to the system, and they'd argue that they shouldn't be "forced" to just let that walk out the back door. - Ken Sheppardson

I'd like to see Dave Winer's response to that - Jesse Stay

@ankush , Folk don't always agree with me. But, I believe that users should control access to their data and they should make decisions based on what is in their interest -- the people who run the services that people use should *not* be the ones deciding what access controls will be enforced. - Bob Wyman

so do you see there being an APi to Google's crawl for use in this, Bob? - Kevin Marks

Because of stampeding herds? - Mason Lee

I'm a big +1 on the fat ping - Eric Florenzano

Jesse: I'm sure you will (see the response) - Ken Sheppardson

Mike: if Facebook doesn't get its public service act together they will see themselves becoming the next MySpace. In the early adopter audience it already is. - Robert Scoble

Bob/Mike - i'm in full agreement - but when you're building a service that has zero monetization (twitter) - what else can your valuation be based on other than your core data assets? - Ankush Narula

I think Facebook is getting it together. Connect is their answer, but they're also slowly opening up search as well. - Jesse Stay

Of course they have FriendFeed now to keep the early adopters inside the Facebook tent, but there's a lot more early adopters on Twitter than here. - Robert Scoble

@robert agree completely - I had already zero'd out my profile and moved to FF - but the FF folks moving to FB made me give them more time - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Bob/Mike - as for FB - I hope so too - Ankush Narula

Of course, you are better off doing it on Rackspace :) - Rob La Gesse

Jesse: I agree with you. - Robert Scoble

Don't build services that have no legitimate path to profit. In that case, you should be building protocols whose costs can be shared by the community and then build your business by creating the best tools for using the protocol. - Bob Wyman

popping in to listen to RL Gilmor Gang stream #gillmorgang - Del_

Bob - Sounds ideal - but knowing the history of Twitter - I suspect they were much more concerned about uptime rather than the public good - Ankush Narula

robert and rob: speaking of using Rackspace, Cartus put my contract on hold while they figure out their needs - David Stratton

"Has *2* Bs"?? Doesn't it have, like 12? - Ken Sheppardson

pub sub hub bub (five bs) - Robert Scoble

activitystrea.ms is yet another endpoint that can be connected to PSHB - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

@Ankush I don't know who was thinking what. But, I do know that those who focus on "public good" typically write protocols, not walled garden closed sites. - Bob Wyman

Sidewiki is so not a wiki - Ken Sheppardson

I think it's actually "pub/sub hubbub" - I'm usually wrong though - Jesse Stay

I want Sidewiki to have Wave support - Jesse Stay

Bob - fair enough :-) - Ankush Narula

Locking a new "feature" into relying on me installing a toolbar is a GREAT way to make sure I don;t play with it. - Rob La Gesse

ooh - I hear tension in the realms of Google :-) - Jesse Stay

you would have to gather a set of wave changesets and then push that out via PSHB - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Rob: I'm sure they'll support it in Chrome too, eventually - Ken Sheppardson

It's PSHB vs. Wave - who will win? :-) - Jesse Stay

you guys are nuts :-) - Loic Le Meur

Wave *IS* XMPP - Ken Sheppardson

Loic is in the building :) - Rob La Gesse

Loic it's Celine Dion isn't it? :-) (how's it going?) - Jesse Stay

nope - Loic Le Meur

Where's my Wave invitation? - Francine Hardaway

The Wave protocol is just an extension of XMPP - Ken Sheppardson

good try though - Loic Le Meur

PSHB and Wave don't compete. They do different things. Othogonal. PSHB does *nothing* in the last-mile user interface space. - Bob Wyman

Loic: thanks for filling infor me. - Robert Scoble

dang - I'm going to figure it out one of these days - Jesse Stay

Francine: don't worry, I don't have one either. - Robert Scoble

oh robert, no thank YOU - Loic Le Meur

XMPP is also nice in that completes the last mile. - Mason Lee

I had a blast being you for 24 hours - Loic Le Meur

Seemed like a good conference watching it on my iPhone. - Robert Scoble

XMPP is great for "last mile" as well as for reasonable number of persistent connections on teh backend. - Bob Wyman

Great conversation guys! - Ben Hedrington

I LOVED Tony Robbins, I was expecting to hate him so that was a pleasant surprise, best speaker I have ever seen. Such a stage presence. amazing/ - Loic Le Meur

Great show, everyone - Rob La Gesse

great show! - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Enjoyed listening/watching - Ankush Narula

Great discussion here. Thanks Brett, et al. - Mason Lee

That was very good - thanks Steve - Jesse Stay

thank you - Hilary Talbot

/me is wondering why everyone thanks everyone - Loic Le Meur

@Loic It's because we americans are so polite! - Bob Wyman

Thanks, Loic, I was wondering that myself. - Mason Lee

Errr... That was a joke. - Bob Wyman

LOL - Loic Le Meur

social networking - Arnie Klaus

don't get me started - Loic Le Meur

Good show Steve, thank you all for making the time. - David Stratton

You rang? - John Kalucki

Hey John! When are you going to be on the Gillmor Gang? - Jesse Stay

quick - get Steve back on video - Twitter is here! - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

John is in charge of Twitter's Streaming API, FYI - Jesse Stay

I totally didn't realize John had a FriendFeed account - awesome - Jesse Stay

I skimmed most of the conversation. I didn't see any explicit questions to respond to, or that haven't been addressed on the twitter-dev list about pubhub... - John Kalucki

have you looked at PubSubHubbub John? - Kevin Marks

As far as the Streaming API rules, we'll work on them. The user TOS and API rules just went out last week. - John Kalucki

John - except that a lot of the folks who were asking don't regularly read the twitter dev list :) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Let me find the link... - John Kalucki

Heh :-) - Jesse Stay

http://groups.google.com/group... - John Kalucki

I'd just like to be able to standardize my code and not have to re-write for every new social network out there. - Jesse Stay

But we've had this conversation. :-) - Jesse Stay

how about activitystrea.ms support, John? You going to write the shim or do we have to? - Kevin Marks

Activitystrea.ms support seems unlikely. A shim would probably be seen as syndication. - John Kalucki

Overall, the direction is towards exposing more data types, more predicate types, and supporting more use cases. Format and protocol support, while making developer's lives easier, isn't as high priority as some of the proposed features we're considering. - John Kalucki

That's too bad John - hard to be the "pulse of the internet" if you're not supporting open standards - Jesse Stay

Hey JK! Welcome! How goes? - Ken Sheppardson

Hey Ken. It goes. It goes. - John Kalucki

Looks like we still have 27 viewers for a test pattern... - Cliff Gerrish

I missed this shooooooot! need regular calendared events so i can add you guys to my schedule! :) - Susan Beebe

That's nice. Just random, or in response to something. :) - τorƍue

71 more comments

Does that mean you got a little sleep? - Anne Bouey

Good news? People like Paul don't usually get in the office so early especially after a lack of sleep, on a Monday morning, if there wasn't a great reason. - Louis Gray

this could be big. - vijay

Aww Man, see now I am not going to get any sleep tonight! DAMN YOU PAUL and your teasing little smiley face. OK, must go and get some coffee! - Travis Koger

O.k., I'll smile too :) (and open my ears and eyes) - Martha

10 bucks says that they add emoticons soon. :) - Joe Beda ()

This emoticon makes a little more sense now... - Stephen Foskett

Guessing this was about the Facebook announcement? - Ben Hedrington

Cheshire cat? - Hutch Carpenter

Good for you, Paul. I can't help but feel a little let down, though. - Matthew Gifford

well done! - michael sean wright

Congrats! Let us (well, our chef) cook you lunch before you're no longer walking distance! :) - Don MacAskill

I have the same feeling as Matthew Gifford... Congrats to you, Paul, but I'm not sure this bodes well for the rest of us. - Fa La La La Lindsay

Congrats, Paul. :-) - Jordan Hofker

Congratulations! - Ethan Herdrick

Congratulations to the whole team, Paul! - Ryan Kuder

yeah they signed away the community :(- - Peter Dawson

Congrats Paul if they're truely in order :) - Jason Cronkhite from iPhone

No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - andy brudtkuhl

congrats to the team, but to be honest i'm not liking it at all - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Good news or bad news? :) - Arda Çetin

Congrats Paul! I was really hoping this would happen. Friendfeed and Facebook need each other. Cheers! - Akshay Dodeja

Now I get it. Congrats on the $$. - Yolanda

Now I know...and knowing is half the battle - Bwana ☠

:( - TiTi

Congratulations!!!! A 'worthy' smiley ... ;-) - Bo Stern

I think Paul's emoticon was charming and that Louis Gray is either super discerning or super informed. - Michael Muller

Congrats to the FF team you guys are awesome (keep this place awesome) - Ryan

WHAT'VE YOU DONE!!!! THAT'S TOTALLY SH*T! - Ahmet Alp Balkan

http://bit.ly/jC1DE - Bo Stern

congratulations, may your road ahead be smooth... - Nathan Chase

That can imho only mean good things for the FB UI ... - Bo Stern

Congratulations, definitely. - DGentry

congrats! - Peter Warnock

Congrats to you and the entire FF team. I hope you guys are in it for the long haul. - Mike Doeff

hey congrats to the FF team! I look forward to seeing what the future holds - (jeff)isageek

Congratulations Paul & FF team! - Charles Ying

congrats dude - Jason Pollock

:( - Alex Scrivener

Congratulations. - 321

congratulations.. but liked the whole UI & funtionality of ff than fb!! it'll b gone!! - Gtp19

You're totally ::stpd:: - Ahmet Alp Balkan

its business after all, sell it but get back to make a better product for your old users. dont 4get the users !! - Peter Dawson

http://friendfeed.com/sunipey... - sunipeyk

:( - acedanger

the results of good work - Juan Pablo Ruiz

congratulations! - Hareesh Nagarajan

Congrats! - DS

GZ! - Sarp

:) we will learn from the process - abdellah

Paul, will you respond to this? This is *bad* for FF users. Best case: it continues on, but distracted by Facebook and with stagnated feature development. Worst case: it's gone. Middle of the road: Facebook forces its ads into the timeline and friendfeed starts acting like Facebook by ignoring its users. - tollie williams

@tollie, I imagine Paul's ability to respond is now constrained, which is just one of the changes we'll see coming. There's new management in town, folks. - Ken Kennedy

scared!!! - abdellah

Good luck Paul... it's gonna be a great partnership. - Andrew

Congrat's Paul. Great news, and I'm really happy for all of you! - Michael Fidler

Congrats to the whole FriendFeed team! - John McCrea

Way to go Paul - bet you sleep like a baby tonight whilst Biz and Ev scratch their heads once more! - Jan Simmonds

Sure congrats to you!!! - susan mernit

http://friendfeed.com/markzuk...... Hold on! markzukerberg?!?! - Lora Lufark

Congrats! - fbrunel

congratulations! - Loic Le Meur

Congratulations Paul - I am very proud of you... no wonder you couldn't sleep! :) Now we know why! As you know, I am a huge fan of your FriendFeed product. I am very happy for you guys and hope you keep your fabulous culture of innovation going strong. This is really amazing.... nice exit! :) - Susan Beebe

I have been wishing facebook could get more like Friendfeed :) awesome. - Christian Burns from iPhone

Nice job, Paul and team. Congrats! - Rob Shillingsburg

many congrat. from UK. ;) @GarethWong - Gareth

I bet you never forget your anniversary EVER ever now. - Pete Delucchi

boo-urns - Raphael, Raphael

:D - paniaguai

:-( - Jannifer @wordsforliving

Congratulations, great for you and the team. - Rocky

i like the way the deal was done! - Siddharth Parmar

G.Z.s - Ugur Akdmr

The retweet is better. Why? - Robert Scoble

82 more comments

1. The retweet shows up as a top level item here in FriendFeed. Which gets you more branding. - Robert Scoble

Yes, but your tweet got me to FriendFeed for the first time in months. So now I'm totally confused. - Jennifer Leggio

Facebooks like system is pointless. - Simon Wicks

2. A retweet usually gets retweeted, a lot. I retweeted a guy this morning saying that Eric Schmidt had resigned from Apple's board. That got retweeted a lot. - Robert Scoble

Likes, just "bump" content, while a retweet duplicates the content and potentially gets shared several times. - Rob Diana

I like retweet better. But if facebook had a dislike button, I would be equally happy! - Dakota O'Neill

like is only promoting to shared friends where are retweet is promoting to everyone. No? - Edwin Khodabakchian

3. A retweet gets you credit, while "likes" just get you buried and no one is sure why they got lots of engagement. - Robert Scoble

Facebook is a joke. Like on friendfeed is pretty simple too. A retweet say a lot about your content but I think generating an actual discussion in friendfeed is the most powerful - Johnny

The retweet also directly acknowledges the original author, building relationship. FF Likes on Twitter have no such attribution. - Peter Kelley

Johnny: A retweet will get more conversation going and get you branded more than clicking like will. - Robert Scoble

That said, I love likes. You can check my likes out at http://www.friendfeed.com/scoblei... -- that's something that's hard to do with a retweet. I've done 21,000 likes so far. I don't know of a way to count how many retweets I've done. - Robert Scoble

Robert: I agree. I was saying that generating a conversation (like this one) is more powerful than likes and retweets. - Johnny

Retweet overall but both have benefits - Travis Tasset from iPhone

I think that you're right, Robert. The Twitter retweet is better because there's some action behind it. In my opinion, the Facebook "like" feature really doesn't do much. It's more of a placebo than anything. Facebook's like is just a "slap on the wrist" letting the author know that it's "approved" by other people who come to the site. There's no reward for getting the most "likes" - it's like Digg but more retarded and something you wish you could euthanize already. - Kenneth

A like is just FB's way of trying to copy twitter and facebook, but I guess google reader has the same thing now - Billy Fung

Also, here, likes can be used to search. You can tell FriendFeed's search engine "show me all items about Google that Scoble has liked." - Robert Scoble

I think likes are great, but FriendFeed should also work on its presentation of reshares. I'd extend the datamodel to support an optional "originating item" for each item. The text (via: [url]) looks a bit messy. - Meryn Stol

your #1 reason for why RT is better than something is because it ends up in friendfeed??? not much of an incentive for the ~44 million twitter users really, is it? - Jeremy Toeman

With a retweet, it can be shared with multiple friends across MULTIPLE networks - my tweets can be posted onto Twitter, FriendFeed and even Facebook. Where does the Facebook "like" come into play? No where! Tweet away! - Kenneth

Exactly my thoughts too Meryn. Twitter should implement that as well. The original source gets lost after a couple of RTs. - Sumanth Kolar

Kenneth: you can send your likes on FF to Twitter, I do - Peter Kelley

Too much noise on Facebook, I still keep RTs in high regard. - Amy Chorew

Jeremy: a large percentage of my Facebook friends are sending their Tweets over there. Facebook has a similar liking system. I guarantee you that there's more than 44 million on Facebook (last number I heard was 250 million). And I'm getting WAY MORE engagement here on FriendFeed than I am on Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Twitter's reach is the key -- added to FriendFeed's real-time conversation, it's a powerful combo. Facebook is still too much of a walled garden. - Don Tamihere

Peter: good point. I think I was dragging on Facebook's "like" and not FF. Now if you want to compare FriendFeed's likes with Facebook's...that's another can of worms I don't wanna go into. - Kenneth

The database guy in me (my left elbow) is screaming that re-tweets duplicate data in a way that isn't easy to track. The social effects are nice, but can't this be replicated in a way that's a lot cleaner and more useful? - Ryan Massie

but ya said friendfeed, not facebook. :) - Jeremy Toeman

Jeremy: read the headline again. I specifically mentioned Facebook. And, anyway, we're all here on FriendFeed. How did THAT happen? - Robert Scoble

well i came here because i wanted to see what you were up to and since you don't blog anymore... ;) - Jeremy Toeman

Jeremy: heh, why blog when I can have engagement with you here? - Robert Scoble

RT as it feels like more of a commitment to the content rather than a passive vote - Daniel W. Rasmus

because you need to keep up your overall internet presence. doing it here is not in your best interests. IMHO that is. :) - Jeremy Toeman

On a side note: currently Google Reader "likes" are worthless as you can´t even subscribe to someone else´s like-stream. It´s even hard to find a way to see your own like-stream in Google Reader (although there /are/ at least 4 ways...) - peter huesken

Yeah, duh, likes aren't viral! - James Watters

Re-Tweets have this very natural word-of-mouth feel, but I'm concerned that you loose metadata by doing it the way twitter does. Instead of taking the firehose data to re-assemble this metadata after the fact, shouldn't the platform build the metadata as part of the process? I'm not saying that the word-of-mouth feel should go away by any means, but how accurate are the re-tweet counts that I have been seeing on sites recently? - Ryan Massie

James: They're more viral on FriendFeed due to the friend-of-a-friend views than they are on Facebook. But you're right, it's nothing like twitter. - Ryan Massie

Also Re-Tweeting has another problem: How do you retweet a tweet of more than 133 chars without paraphrasing at least part of it? - peter huesken

FriendFeed Likes are much more elegant than a retweet - the Grey Poupon of SM. :) - Nick in Manila

Why does one have to be "better" than the other? They are two different apps for sharing thoughts about content. The RT works well on Twitter, you just RT anything you like (and feel other might find interesting). When you like someone's content on FB, you give it a vote and everyone who is a friend can see it. If you want to add a comment you comment. If you want to share it, you use the share function. Now you can share tweets RTs on Facebook anyway, I'm not sure why it even matters which is better. - nicky jameson

A retweet takes more time to do and shows more interest. - Randy Allen Bishop

This is wrong. A retweet is copying someone's work and trying to drive traffic towards yourself using it. A like and/or a comment is much better as you are acknowledging the work of the author. Retweeting is parasitic. Liking is symbiotic. - Alex Scoble

Alex: that's interesting. As a content owner I'd rather you retweet, though. Why? Gets my ideas greater distribution. - Robert Scoble

What Randy said. A "like" means different things to different people. To me it might mean, "the title of this sounds good, the topic interests me, but I don't have time to read it." I would "Like" something like that, but I would *never* retweet something without visiting the link first and at least scanning it, preferably reading the whole thing. Also, Alex, I don't think a retweet is an attempt to drive traffic towards yourself. How do you figure? - Laura Norvig

Because when people see the retweet they are seeing what you wrote. It's the same as if I copied a blog post from Robert and put it on my blog with attribution to him. I'm doing this to get people to read my blog, I'm not doing it to help him. If I really wanted to help him, I would link to his blog post and write something about why I agree or disagree with that. A retweet is parasitic... more... - Alex Scoble

Alex: first of all, nothing you write in 140 characters is going to have much value, and certainly won't be enough value to charge for it. Second of all, if you RT: properly you also link to the source person or URL. Third of all, it's nothing even close to copying an entire blog post, but that really is sweet that you think Tweeting is blogging. They both have the same attributes, I... more... - Robert Scoble

RT's on Twitter are more manual and take a little more engagement then Like unless you are using SW to manage your tweets - RT duplicates... - Robert Freeze

Alex, your logic is twisted, no? RT is intended to share with your followers something someone else said or found, who they might not already be following. If traffic is driving anywhere it's to them; those reading your RT are already following you. Your point also assumes everyone's playing the numbers game. - Jim Barry

@Scobleizer It looks like you RT % is 1.85, of total tweets. Data from: http://tweetstats.com/graphs... - David Damore

First off, I don't write in 140 characters, because I do all my posting from friendfeed. 140 character limit is whack, but that's another argument. Second, nothing about Twitter really builds participation. It's all about islands versus on friendfeed, which is why reposting (I hate the "tweet" non-word) is even necessary. The fact that it's necessary is a symptom of the problems of the... more... - Alex Scoble

They serve different purposes. FB/FF like is just a quick shared bookmark. Twitter has a Favorite option that's similar, but it's geared toward recall more so than sharing/recommending. Retweet is not even a built-in Twitter feature, but many Twitter apps have the feature and people use it to share/recommend other people's tweets. - Lawrence Liu from twhirl

Alex: if you visit my blog you'll notice that my like feed isn't showing up in the FriendFeed widget there, while my retweets are. That's a huge problem and one I don't know how to solve. - Robert Scoble

How about the share option in FF, then change the FWD: to RT? - Lee

I will like things here when I don't want to comment, but I hadn't thought of it as a proxy for RT. Now you have me thinking about forwarding my likes here twitter. - dthree

You could combine the feeds using Yahoo Pipes. It's a bit messy, but here's my combined posts, comments, and likes: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes... - Ryan Massie

Isn't this just like a Scobelizer chat room? - Peter Mullen

I think I'm going to take the core of your question Robert and post it to my Facebook non-social media friends and see if they can even parse the question. I'd expect some funny "uh...what?" responses. - Elliott Ng

the like SHOULD be much better. this is a voting system. FF needs to help you filter content this way however. retweets just confuse things even more and create even more noise. FF should have default searches that are all your friends with 2+ likes...this is your personal best of the day. if FF does not make use of these advantages, then it will continue to muddle about. - lew

Here's why Robert and I disagree. He sees these spaces as primarily a marketing tool for building a brand and getting his media out to eyeballs. Reposts work great for that because it's like a ball thrown in to a room of mousetraps. I mostly want to have conversations and am here for fun. Reposts suck for that because they fragment conversations. I don't like that...AT all. :) That's why both services can coexist. - Alex Scoble

++ Alex... services like this don't succeed because they are good marketing platforms, they succeed because regular people like to use them. - LogEx

as soon as we have threaded conversations on twitter, i suspect you will hate conversation being distributed on duplicates (retweets). My vote is for likes on ff. - Sajida H Khan

when i like something it gets tweeted... so it's like a retweet for friendfeed content... it doesn't come back over here as my own, but that's okay with me - Chris Heath

The ReTweet is -sometimes- better as it keeps track of the last RTers. - Thierry R. Andriamirado

Once again, FriendFeed and Twitter are complementary: it's better when a FF 'like' is ReTweeted again and again. Facebook's like.. huh.. it's.. different (?) - Thierry R. Andriamirado

Retweeting on twitter is equlivent to "share" on friendfeed. Retweet and like are uncomparable, in the same way that twitter's favorite and ff's like are uncomparable. - Andy Bakun from Android

the spammers are here - how do we report the guy above? - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Taken care of - boom! Like That! - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Robert, I think you're completely wrong. FriendFeed ranking is poo. A retweet is mostly poo --- depends on the context of your Twitter experience, and your POV. Is your POV "Is it better to BE retweeted? Or liked as a status update on FaceBook" ? or "Is it better to retweet someone ELSE'S Tweet or to Like someone else's FaceBook update?" I'd argue in both cases, the retweet sucks.... more... - Gib

Gib: where do you get the poo from? Sigh. - Robert Scoble

Robert: OMG! you're like the fasted gun in the west! By poo I mean, as a person without your scaling issues, if someone Retweets any random Tweet of mine, I'm like, "huh? THAT'S what you want to repeat to your following?" For mortals, viral stuff isn't everyday occurrence. On the other hand, as a mortal, on FaceBook, when a few people like a photo or update or comment, my other friends... more... - Gib

I agree with Andy that a Twitter retweet is more like a FF share than a like. "Retweet", in my opinion, is simply Twitter-speak for "share". - Dennis Jernberg

On the moment itself an RT is better, but a 'like' has a longer life, since it can be used in FF search queries. - nooble

RT was a community generated method, and can easily be done in friendfeed or facebook - Mark Essel from iPhone

I think we can expect Google Reader and Facebook, among others, to emulate FriendFeed's useful "Like" system in more ways, including likes in feeds, as a search filter, etc. SOON. - Ryan Sholin

+Alex. I agree much more with his sentiments than Robert's; likes are a much better way of showing appreciation for a post. 1. I don't care about building my brand. 2. Why wouldn't likes propagate just as well as RTs? They both show up in my FF stream. 3. See 1. Don't worry, Robert will come around eventually, just like he did with following people on Twitter. - Niklas Morberg

I guess I'm against the grain on the RT versus Like feature. I don't hate RT but I think they can become Spam noise in some ways. If you follow several people who follow the same people, you get an endless flow of the same tweet for a while with no extra value. Whereas a "Like" (in FriendFeed) bumps the conversation back into many peoples focus. In both FF and FB, the "like" also tags it to your attention when future comments are made. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

If you use Feedly in Conjunction with Retweets and Tweets you can kind of follow your Karma and get feedback on how they are dynamic and changing - Robert Higgins

RTs are better so I can continue to play with extracting valuable trends from them on my little experiment http://www.retweetradar.com! - Ben Hedrington

We all know Twitter is the front-end & FriendFeed is the back-end ;) Hype builds quicker on Twitter, FriendFeed hosts the discussion. - CannonGod

You can add ur own opinion on a RT if space permits. with ff its commenting and liking which are 2 different things. U can comment and not 'like' the post. - Freddie Benjamin

Very good point Freddie but that usually gives you no room when you include the "RT @username" or the new person alters the original tweet (I hate this). RT is to Like as @ reply is to commenting. Both serve close to the same purpose but work very different. FF's direction keeps everything tighter coupled while Twitter is very loosely coupled in the approach. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

This one is worth a retweet in itself: That said, I love likes. You can check my likes out at http://www.friendfeed.com/scoblei... -- that's something that's hard to do with a retweet. I've done 21,000 likes so far. I don't know of a way to count how many retweets I've done. - Robert Scoble - Riaz Kanani

Facebook is closed, essentially, as I will always only ever see a "like" from either someone who is already my friend or a friend of a friend. Twitter is open, in that when someone I'm following retweets (from either someone they're following --- a 1st gen RT --- or a 2nd/3rd gen RT of someone they're following is also following or exposed to...whew!...) well, then I am exposed to a... more... - Thom Kennon

along the lines of Louis Gray's under the radar series http://www.louisgray.com/live... - Zee.

40 more comments

Zee, do you know http://www.gravity7.com/blog...? Not sure how well know Adrian's blog is. I particularly enjoy the Social Interaction Design posts - Matt Hooper

no i don't, thanks Matt - Zee.

Wink WInk. Nudge Nudge. :) - But seriously, I have stumbled across a few by randomly clicking stuff here in FF, so hopefully those people see this thread. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

long, analytic articles: http://blog.agoeldi.com/ (english blog from a swiss entrepreneur living now in Boston. Disclosure: He's also one of the authors of the german techblog I'm the editor of.) - Marcel Weiß

Here are a few that I enjoy -- under the radar? I'm not sure: http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/, http://digitalroam.typepad.com/digital..., http://www.hinutech.com (mine...definitely under the radar). - Josh Asbury

keep em coming folks! - Zee.

http://www.scumbagmillionaire.com? Not strictly tech, but... - drbeanbagmd

"Great" is a stretch for certain but I am trying here... http://buildcontext.com/blog - Ben Hedrington

I'd love some more exposure for Shared Creation - http://www.sharedcreation.com. Its starting to turn into a useful resource so any shout out to help it along would be great - Robert Davies

Copy cat. :) - Louis Gray

@Louis, Zee said 'along the lines', not exactly the same! LOL - Jorge Escobar

Mine's is not a tech blog, but I would love to have your comment on my latest post on social-media http://adkaal.blogspot.com/ - अभिषेक(Abhishek) Das

I'm not great, but I am technical -- http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/ - Paul W. Homer

My favorite NUI blog -- http://theclevermonkey.blogspot.com/ - Paul W. Homer

Mine of course! :) http://www.dailypatricia.com -- i wouldn't say it's a social media blog, but i write alot about the internet platform and business around it. - Patricia

Snap. http://garin.me - Garin Kilpatrick

@Louis, dont worry - i promise i'm not stating a series of posts...just want more blogs faster than your 5 a month! :P - Zee.

Great idea Zee. Always good to highlight great writing. :) - Sheryl

English only? Else, http://www.ovelho.com/ and http://meiobit.com/ - Marcos

www.futurity.org showcases original research from universities regarding tech, the web, society, etc. It's actually run by the universities themselves - LANjackal

One side benefit is that I might subscribe to any here I haven't seen before, which makes them candidates for next months' lists. - Louis Gray

http://oldmedianewtricks.com (it's mine) and http://thelostjacket.com - Daniel B. Honigman

well http://minZuD.com may qualify as a Tech blog. Its a tumblr tumblelog I maintain. Has a lot of your stuff in it Zee. It's easy on the eye and is something I am proud to maintain. - ZuDfunck

Web/tech/social media - check.... Nobody has heard of - check... Once a month - check.... Interesting - I'll let you be the judge. http://www.jimyiapanis.com - Jim

I'm working on a podcast & blog called Moms Gone Geek. We'd love to see what you think of it :) http://www.momsgonegeek.net Thanks!! - TheMacMommy

You can visit mine at http://softwarecritics.info and tell me what you think.Thanks! - Mathdelane

http://www.politechan.com/ is one I started to focus on the politics of technology and government tech efforts. - Andrew Leyden

http://www.socialfeds.com | Blog with a gov2.0 "roundup" front page, topic is social media/new media in the government. - Sara

http://www.communityorganizer20.com/ - this focuses on social media/web uses by nonprofits. Some of it is very basic, but there isn't any other blog like this that's not just basically self-promotion for some consultant. - Amy℠

Since you asked, my blog focuses on collaboration practice and technology, including social software. http://lehawes.wordpress.com - Larry Hawes

Hi Zee- one of the ones that I enjoy is Paul Bradshaw's Online Journalism Blog at http://onlinejournalismblog.com. He focuses on worldwide online journalism but integrates tech, tech analysis and the analysis of the ever-changing state of the web. - submitted by Debra Askanase - Debra Askanase

since you asked my own www.the-techshop.com - Rob Cairns

Everyone has heard of this one, by Valeria Maltoni, but I HAVE JUST GOT TO SHAMELESSLY PROMOTE this blog: Conversation Agent!!! I love that blog!!! http://www.conversationagent.com/ - J. D. Ebberly

I am gonna plug myself: http://yagglo.org I teach people the Internet - Shawn Hickman

Well, unless you're a rabid fan of Lifestreaming chances are you've never head of mine :) http://lifestreamblog.com - Mark Krynsky

Mind Streams of Information Security Knowledge http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/ - Polly Potter

I write http://www.bagofspanners.com - I'm a software developer / web designer - it's filled with stuff I have discovered, found interesting, or want to remember :) - Jonathan Beckett

Dutch 'Ambtenaar 2.0' ('Civil Servant 2.0') aka gov20 http://www.ambtenaar20.nl - and the translation by Google Translate: http://translate.google.com/transla... - Jeroen De Miranda

awesome stuff, keep em coming! - Zee.

I focus more on the less-than-tech audience, but there may be some content you'll like http://www.dennisoneil.com - Dennis O'Neil

I recently launched Social Photo Talk, focusing on the intersection of social media with the photography industry (specifically aimed at photographers): http://www.socialphototalk.com - Aaron B. Hockley

It's like SUP but with a longer title ;) - Jorge Escobar

12 more comments

Did you watch the demo? http://www.ustream.tv/recorde... (56 Minutes) - Ben Hedrington

Effectively gives a subscriber to subscribe to updates rather than poll. Less waste on both sides. - Ben Hedrington

e.g. Google Reader won't check RWW every minute, rather be pinged whena new post is published. - Ben Hedrington

It adds a hub to the ping architecture. Hub aggregates for distribution. Sorta like what Twitter already does. - Cliff Gerrish

If I knew what it was, I'd try. Guess I'm out of touch? :) - Charlie Anzman

'Hubbub turns all Atom and RSS feeds on the web into real-time streams. That's all ya need to know! - Brett Slatkin

http://vodpod.com/watch... - Richard pancakhaus Walker

Correction... if Brett is here just ask him! -> http://ff.im/5aDT5 Hah! - Ben Hedrington

I still think it would be better to make feeds more efficient at the end point. - Shawn McCollum

Be sure to check out this wiki page on the efficiency of feeds: http://code.google.com/p... -- we can make this very efficient. - Brett Slatkin

I looked at that but not sure why you went with If-None-Match over If-Modified-Since. Also is there any thought to having hubs communicate like a neo-nntp for feeds. - Shawn McCollum

You should follow up on our mailing list with any questions! http://groups.google.com/group... In short, if-none-match and ETag headers are better because they allow publishers to encode whatever context information they need into the client's state. if-modified-since just gives you a date header, which is not enough information to do this correctly. - Brett Slatkin

Although it serves the same purpose as SUP, it works differently. SUP pulls data. PubSubHubbub pushes. The publisher pings the hub, which pushes updates to subscribers. - Bruce Lewis

As you can see, we have a video player on the page using <embed>. But Facebook Connect's code is rendered before it and we can't change the order (or set z-levels for the FB popup). Anything else you can think of? - Jorge Escobar

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Now that's an idea, Roberto... - Jorge Escobar

Let me know :) - Roberto Bonini

try something like: .flash { position: relative; z-index: 0 }. z-index only works on positioned elements so this might do the trick. also, on the overlay, might need z-index: 1 or something like that - chrisofspades

There is a concept called an iFrame shim that you can place over the video player (using javascript) when you know something else is going to interfere with it... http://bit.ly/2xUMl it's a pretty dirty hack but sometimes needed. - Ben Hedrington

Awesome, let me try some of these. You guys rock! - Jorge Escobar

http://twitter.com/bjdsr http://twitter.com/bestbuycmo ... Barry Judge has a blog (CMO). Brian Dunn (current CEO as of Wednesday) is working on a blog I assume will be available externally when it's done. - Ben Hedrington

I knew about Barry's..thanks for the info on the others Ben. - George Dearing

When Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, showed me Flickr in the hallway at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference it immediately captivated me. Hunch? I filled out my first 20 questions and then looked over the questions. None grabbed me. I don't get why we are seeing so many sites that are trying to answer people's questions. And, anyway, Aardvark is getting me more excited. - Robert Scoble

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What is Hunch? - Fee501st

What is Aardvark? - Jennifer Ruggiero

Fee501st: Hunch is http://www.hunch.com/ -- a site that asks you a ton of questions and then presents what it feels are interesting questions for you. Or you can ask your own. - Robert Scoble

Jennifer: http://vark.com/ Aardvark is similar to Hunch, but uses IM to route questions to you, or you can ask the system questions. I've found it to be very cool and much neater because it has that IM feel. When I do have a question that I need a real person's answer to, Aardvark is going to be where I go. - Robert Scoble

Worked for me. It totally helped me choose a case for my iphone. Perhaps what excites you isn't really relevant. Not being snarky, just saying. - Jim Oxenford

Jim: that might be true, but I'm pretty good at picking "hits." Flickr immediately had me excited. Hunch? Nope. Hunch already has well entrenched competitors and I don't see what makes this so much better than any other question service. - Robert Scoble

I have never been into these type of answering engines/services. The only thing in this domain I have used is ChaCha - For simple questions, like "did the lakers win last night"? I am a big fan http://www.chacha.com/ - Mike Bracco

Flickr immediately answered something I needed (a way to share photos with others) and did so in a way that was clearly way ahead of the competitors. - Robert Scoble

@Robert Cool, i just did the questions, then ask which care should i buy, It said Mini Cooper! lol that's not me! - Fee501st

Fee501st: it bored me before I even got the answer. - Robert Scoble

Well, it helped me decide what was important in a case. It's something I've been trying to decide for about a week. Not a life changing decision but important to me. I've not tried Aardvark but certainly will. We all have track records of picking hits and misses so we'll see what shakes out. I just think it's to early to declare it a miss. - Jim Oxenford

Robert: the 'questions' that disappointed you are the user contributed content. Certainly this is not hunch's fault. And how much can you get excited about what 'shoes to buy' anyway? - Nikos Anagnostou

What's really bad is that it asked me what kind of car I'd want to buy, yet it didn't even know that I can't drive. - James

I quit before I answered the question too but then asked "what netbook should I buy" asked the right questions and gave decent recommendations. Better than many mainstream sites can state they do online today... - Ben Hedrington

Do we really need a tool to help us make a 'better' decision? (not totally convinced by the 'better' word though) - Constantine

A smart hunch site would ask for access to my twitter/flickr/friendfeed/facebook feeds and data mine those sites with a smart algorithm and make recommendations based upon the wealth of available data. - Jim Posner

@Constantine I think such a tool is valuable to boil choices down to what's most meaningful for you. It can help clarify your options a bit. - Jim Oxenford

But wouldn't that make humans act more like robots? Malcom Gladwell said something very interesting the other day: it is very hard for people to make a decision out of many options, but the process becomes a lot easier and "more controlled" when people have fewer options to chose from. - Constantine

I have a Hunch thread too! http://friendfeed.com/dariusm... - Matthew DeVries

@Constantine Well, I'm not sure I would go as far as to say that. It was a useful tool for me to use when making a relatively minor consumer purchase. Yes, Malcom Gladwell is 100% correct stating the obvious. That's one reason Apple found success again when Steve Jobs returned. - Jim Oxenford

Robert I agree on the state of the current questions, kinda boring. BUT, I think if they get the user base, the questions will grow and become way more interesting. Where I really think they stand out however, is how quickly and easily they got me to answer 20-30 questions. FAST. I haven't found a site in a long while that has successfully extracted that much information from me without boring me to tears. - Matt Sims

Matt: that's true. It too got me to fill out those questions. - Robert Scoble

There was another site, pretty much identical to this about 6 months ago, asking questions to try to profile you, then bring you content according to your questions, this is no different. What was that other site called? - Matthew DeVries

Plinky! That's it. - Matthew DeVries

I liked the questions about the lounge and kitchen styles. Too bad the pics are small. Would love to answer preferred office furniture and computer specs. - Constantine

it doesn't HAVE to be another flickr either. flickr was/is HUGE. That being said, I prefer smugmug. - Jim Oxenford

Is Hunch even a picture hosting service at all? Cause if it is, it is certainly downplaying it. - Matthew DeVries

I don't get these question services. Are they for people with lots of free time or just those who don't know what questions to ask themselves? - Sal DiStefano

Nikos hit it on the money without realizing it: "the 'questions' that disappointed you are the user contributed content." --- No, this is not Hunch's fault, but it is exactly why every general-topic anything-goes answer site eventually goes to the dogs. Stranger's random questions just aren't interesting. Sites like StackOverflow thrive because they target a specific demographic that... more... - Joel Bennett

Sal: Decision making by humans is generally flawed. We succumb to the pitfalls of our own psychology too easily. We drive with either too much intuition, or too much data, and both of those methods have major traps. What we really need is a tool or service that manages both of those elements better. Haven't seen it yet. (I'll get working on it... ;) - Matt Sims

Robert: You should try playing with http://www.fluther.com. You can ask and get questions over IM like Aardvark, but we also have a rich and active community, with a focus on real-time group discussions. - Ben

Ben - Friendfeed already exists, but without the pesky questions. - Matthew DeVries

Matthew: Touche. Though Fluther's real-time is more like Google Wave than FF. And you'll find the feel of the community is quite different (in part because of the question focus). But we're happy to be in such good company. :) - Ben

ideas like vark.com have been tried before. Most died for lack of community. Same for IM based services. I dont recall any service getting significant traction just cause they had IM connectivity. - Vivek Puri

I'm going to be contrarian here and like both Hunch, Vark and Y! Answers but don't think any of them are really independent businesses appropriate for venture capital, but could be all fine small businesses. - Sam Pullara

I absolutely hated hunch. I had to sit through a tirade of questions that had little or no application to my actual life. They progressively made me feel like an outsider - on my own computer! My own computer in my own house - I live here! Those questions really grated and as the experience wore on became increasingly discomforting. They mostly assumed that I must live in some foreign country, and that that was the only country that could possibly apply to the entire world-wide-web. How utterly infuriating. - Ian Tindale

@Robert, Aardvark is slick. - Jim Oxenford

Just looking at their general information page is quite interesting. That's a clever idea - a completely different angle than machine indexing and processing. - Justin Long

twithive works for me - mike "glemak" dunn

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I'm a big fan of Tweetie for the desktop and for the iPhone. Many people seem to like Tweetdeck, but I have no experience with that app. - Donald Forth

Hootsuite if you're trying to manage multiple accounts. - Elizabeth Parmeter

Seesmic FTW - andy brudtkuhl

wow, thanks! trying twithive first! @donald - tweetdeck is pretty solid, but only allows for one account - Jeremy Toeman

I think the new version of tweetdeck has multiple accounts. - Frankie Warren

What you are doing? Are you contributing to one stream from another? I built a simple tool for this. http://www.connecttweet.com - Ben Hedrington

e.g. Jeremy as part of this company's stream or that company's stream but always via Jeremy. Examples: @sprint @bestbuy @googlers - Ben Hedrington

cool - not what i need for now, but looks cool!! - Jeremy Toeman

Funny you should say that. My wife and I discussed Southwest's lack of presence on iPhone just this morning. The weather in much of the country right now is perfect for a "Want to Get Away?" iPhone Campaign. - David J. Hinson

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it looks like someone made an iphone app for Southwest, but they had to take it down :( - Sarah Perez

Friendfeed - but theirs is in the queue apparently :) - Patrick Jordan

heh, spelled southwest wrong - Sarah Perez

@Patrick fftogo.com is pretty hot...but I hear a native app is coming, too....can't freakin' wait for that! - Sarah Perez

How about every fast food restaurant. Order your food before hand and get notified when ready. - Robert Chute

I tried fftogo a while back and ended up going back to the main FF site - I've also tried the Nambu native app - but I also can't wait to see the genuine FF native app :) - Patrick Jordan

Definitely Southwest. - Kevin Bondelli

Starbucks...the iTunes thing doesn't count because it's not available for most of us - Bwana ☠

my stealth startup - Pascal Bouvier

the iphone interface for FF seems great to me, what more could an app offer? - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall: subscribe/unsubscribe, block, reshare, realtime - Mark Trapp

ok, makes sense. and maybe easier media sharing? - Marshall Kirkpatrick from IM

I often wonder... When people say "iPhone app" do they really mean "something that works well on my iPhone" or do they really _always_ want to go to the app store and download something? - Ben Hedrington

Marshall: that, too. I'd like to see more usability improvements, as well. To access specific rooms and lists requires a lot of refreshes of pages. It'd be nice if I could access my rooms and lists using an App tab rather than a link on a web page. - Mark Trapp

the upcoming app will make use of the camera for faster sharing - Sarah Perez

can we get back to the question about companies (beside friendfeed!) in need of an iPhone app? I really want to hear your suggestions. =) - Sarah Perez

I wonder if FF is developing a bookmarklet for mobile safari. Added: Sorry, Sarah. :( Because of the phone's limitations my app space is filled with utility tools. The iPhone interface for mobile safari is sufficient for me... For example, I would never purchase or install the Chipotle app (that disappeared) - Mona Nomura

LOL, leave it to friendfeeders to turn every discussion into one about friendfeed...ha ha - Sarah Perez

Sorry Sarah - my bad on FF mention. How 'bout Geico - the iPhone is easy enough for a caveman and all that ... - Patrick Jordan

Target, Gamestop, Best Buy, Nike, XM Radio/Sirrus, Coca Cola, Soccer.com, Marriott, Expedia.com (and all foreign partner companies), Amazon, Amtrak, Virgin America/Atlantic, Jiffy Lube, Kodak - Amani

@Patrick no worries! :) Geico, hmmm...yeah... - Sarah Perez

@Amani Whoa. big list! Except Nike and Amazon have apps already...have to check those other ones though... - Sarah Perez

@Sarah - you asked! :) Yes, I wasn't sure about all of them, but some of those would be easy IMO. Are you working on a special project? My mind is racing with ideas. - Amani

The car companies maybe? I remember Jaguar doing something in early iPhone days. They could possibly do something cool with multimedia, letting you try out different colors / add-ons etc. via an iPhone app before having to go in person ... - Patrick Jordan

A "New Apple Products" app? ;) - Tyson Key

@Amani No, it's a great list :) thank you! Yes, I'm writing this up. - Sarah Perez

ING - Devon Campbell from NoiseRiver

Newspaper Deathwatch app? - Tyson Key

@Tysen I love the NYT and AP news apps - Sarah Perez

Like Jason, I'd vote for some more good newspapers / print publications ... - Patrick Jordan

thx all, writing it up! - Sarah Perez

Ben, I wonder the same thing because Southwest has a mobile presence which has served me well the past 4 years. And no, I don't have an iPhone. - Admiral Anika

Sarah - bit late now obviously, but one more ripe category I think = more fast food chains (Chipotle borught out an app that lets you order on the iPhone last week) - also, I linked to your post, at: http://tinyurl.com/9jlhkz - Patrick Jordan

more companies don't have iphone apps because apple has made the process onerous and expensive. Even after you jump through all the hoops to make one, you are not able to distribute it because it is "waiting in line" for them to review it. These companies don't have them because they are being fiscally responsible in a down economy. A mobile web interface is a much cheaper and more flexible choice. But since the iphone browser is pretty good with regular websites, there's not so much pressure to do that. - jacob robbins

I don't see all this 'approval' crap with my Blackberry. I can run pretty much anything that is JRE based. I don't need to ask my provider's permission either. - Ian May

This approval stuff (or lack of it) is why I like Symbian OS, for what it's worth. At least I know there isn't a Big Gatekeeper(TM) preventing me from installing what I want, where I want and how I want... - Tyson Key

I would like to know, whiche companies actually have apps already. Can you help me here? - http://ff.im/3746S - Martin Seibert

As mentioned earlier today, Twitter seems to have capped your ability to follow at 2,000 people, which just so happens to be exactly where I am. The goal, in theory, is to stop marketing-oriented spammers, but it could be another way to reduce stress on the system. So what should I do now, delete "less favored" people, or wait for Twitter to figure this out? - Louis Gray from email

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Maybe it's the legacy talking, but I'm really not bothered by this. :P - l0ckergn0me

I can see why they do it, but it does suck for the people who do it legitimately and are not using stupid mass follow scripts. - David Risley

I'm not super-concerned either, but it does answer why all of a sudden, I started getting these errors last week. It could be part of their "Making Progress On Spam" initiative via the blog, but it hasn't been spelled out all that clearly. - Louis Gray

let blame this one on Scobles... :)- - Peter Dawson

Louis, I think cap is more of the architecture the system. Making it into a more robust platform. Now watermarks have been set, it becomes easier to build consistency of experience and application behavior. <Edit > wait for Twitter to figure it out.. Marketing spammers are targeting the 'stupid' one that have the auto follow !! - Peter Dawson

gotta like it, if I'm the one you are trying to follow! - Ben Hedrington

I don't think there should be limits like this, but I guess everything can't be infinite - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

I honestly am indifferent about it; Twitter is going to hell and i tried my best to convert it; oh well, Hell has cookies - Gordon Swaby

I"m only following 49... with 106 followers.. - Ian May

so what do you think, Louis, is benhedrington worth going to the mat for? - Nathan Rein

I'm sure I can find someone to unfollow in exchange for Ben. - Louis Gray

Twitter needs to build in groups functionality a la tweetdeck for following 2K+ to even be practical. - Nicholas Molnar

Louis: You need to convince the new people to head over here :) - Justin Korn

I'm just curious what the rationale is for following that many people. - Paul Rodriguez

Well, maybe that's why Louis always seems to know what's going on before anybody else. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

I've noticed that most of the time I get followed by somebody with a big number, it tends to be marketing play. It triggers the email to you and then you go look and click on their bio link which takes you to the pitch. Very irritating. I always block em. - Mark Schulz

@Paul Rodriguez, I was wondering that too. I wouldn't have even guessed there are 2000 interesting people in the world </cynicism>, but what fascinate me is that i'm following like 83 people and only about 14 of them tweet regularly. I can assume most of those 2000 do not tweet regularly. Add in the fact that I'm a WAHM to two toddlers, and do other stuff, there'd be a lot of stuff I'd miss. - Admiral Anika

New profit center? Sorry, but now you'll have to join Twitter Pro .... - Charlie Anzman

Info restrictions suck:( - Igor Poltavskiy

Very interesting. System limits is going to be a topic that we all work through in this early phase of the Social Web. It seems to me that it's reasonable to cap the number one follows to 1,000 or 2,000. On the flipside, one would clearly like to enable a very high number of followers. With respect to bi-directional connections, the real number should max at 1,000 to 2,000... - John McCrea

This is awesome! Incidentally, Scoble (@Scobleizer) is still following over 30K. - Vincent van Wylick

So where is the point following 30k people? You might as well hit the main timeline. The only thing that is bad about this limit is that it was not there from the beginning. - Alexander Kohlhofer

@kevinrose: 56K+. Losing 54K+? - Igor Poltavskiy

so what's going to happen to those who follow over 2000? - Wayne Sutton

you follow two. thousand. people.??? never mind twitter; there may be a law against that. - jeneane sessum

I like the new limit. I cannot see how anyone would be able to legitimately follow (and pay attention to) more than 2,000 people. Frankly, even that limit seems higher than it needs to be. If it helps keep Twitter a little more stable, go for it. - Dennis Metzcher

Couple thoughts: the limit impacts the ability to use the service as a direct message router -- for some people. It also reinforces the need for dectralized microblogging -- so if you want exceed the limits you can do so on your own infrastructure. Lastly, nothing prevents you from following everyone or a subset of people through RSS/feeds. - Chris Messina

Are we sure that Twitter has set a 2,000 limit are or we cranking up the rumor mill? I've seen image before with respect to my own account - an account which just reached 1,000 followers today. According the Twitter rep who contacted me, I got - ahem - put in "Twitter Prison" for "Aggressive Following" My ratio of Followers to Following was kinda out of whack - at that time I had only ~800 people following me while I was following ~2,800 - They suspended my ability to follow more people. I removed 2K. - Vincent Wright

I don't understand the motivation for following 2K people if you're not a spammer... someone explain? - Jason Carreira

Jason: For a entrepreneur/VC/angel networker, it would be very easy to hit 2,000 contacts (assuming you used Twitter like a rolodex). From one networking meeting, I might pick up 0-100+ business cards (more at conferences), and during a heavy season I could be doing 7-10 meetings/week. As a angel, I might want to follow 5,000-10,000+ projects/people. Anyone might have a really good project 2-10+ years down the pipe... I've got cartons/boxes of 3-ring binders of business cards in plastic sheets. - Mitchell Tsai

@Mitchell @Charlie - Rumors aside, do you think the cap is a gesture towards monetization? Going after the power networkers? Seems you would have good cause to pay for a Twitter Pro, or would it just not be worth it? - joneilortiz

I use Twitter as both a professional development tool (following people who say useful and interesting things abt health / edtech / social media / libraries ...), a personal tool (friends and folk who are amusing), and a reference tool (following a lot of news streams and information resources). You can hit 2000 fast. A friend says that people are imagining new ways in which Twitter could be used, but Twitter seems bound and determined to force them back into some small box of how it "ought" to be. - Patricia F. Anderson

I would happily follow more than 2000 people, heck I am almost there. And I don't need to see every message. With Tweetdeck it's manageable. I see some Friendfeed users here have thousands to tens of thousands of subscriptions, should we also say it's good to have a cap here? No, please no. I understand that perhaps it has to do with monetization or stressing the system less, these are alas viable reasons. - Jacob

I love the idea for MyKmart / MySears. Wish more brands encouraged community and feedback on their own turf. Will be fun to watch. - Mike Templeton

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Nah, I'm just not going to go to each brand's "my" site. And I'm certainly not going to go there and expect that most people are "real" as opposed to plants placed/paid by the brand. - Craig Eddy

A smarter move for Kmart & Sears is to use existing socials, benefiting from cross-pollination. - Jason Nunnelley

I dont like it.. YASN = yet another social network.. why not use the tools everyone is using already - instead of trying to pull people in. that's why the news industry is flailing now - refusal to adapt and insistence on pulling people in when they didnt want to be - andy brudtkuhl

We added reviews to our sites and in very short order have over 7000 responses. It's been very useful for everyone. But, it all remains under our primary domains so it does not take the shape of a separate social media site. - Rick Bucich

Rick - that is exactly how it should happen - andy brudtkuhl

@i140 Jason: perhaps it's particular to our product but for us, existing review platforms haven't gotten traction. I suspect it is because many (like Yelp) are localized and our customers are nationwide and international. - Rick Bucich

Interesting conglomeration at mykmart, mysears, etc. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - Jason Nunnelley

Look at non-traditional social networks that sprout up around e-commerce... Amazon comments, lists, recommendations, etc... Netflix has friends features, recommendations, ratings - andy brudtkuhl

In an article about the launch the founder talks about using things like Facebook Connect, etc. to pull in additional user data. Doesn't want it to be a chore to set up "another profile." Also, this is an opportunity for them to build partnerships with places like Amazon, Netflix, etc. to bring in their content. Either way, they'll build up a community of uber-focused brand loyalists. - Mike Templeton

I don't think there's a solid argument yet over which is better: custom-building social features or leveraging existing platforms? Corporations like Sears will want to collect (and own) customer data and behaviors, so custom-building makes sense out of the gate for them. Building off Facebook Connect assumes that Facebook is *the* ubiquitous social networking utility, which may be true, but does require a leap of faith from the big corp standpoint. - Nathan T. Wright

@mike true but those brand loyalists are already buying from them and are following them on Twitter, Facebook, etc... Why create another bridge? Why create more dispersion? - andy brudtkuhl

@webtwopointeight I concede your point, and see a social deep-linking future. Aren't we wishing we had threading now? - Jason Nunnelley

@Nathan - you are exactly right - they want the data. This why newspapers are in the state they are today. They wanted to own eyeballs and data (classifieds, jobs, etc). Rather than using the tools available they tried to create their own and they became irrelevant - andy brudtkuhl

@abrudtkuhl The idea is to keep you on the site. It makes sense. They link into existing socials also. <3 existing platforms. - Jason Nunnelley

@abrudtkuhl Though we don't like to admit it, not everyone is on Twitter/Facebook. This is a way for Sears to mine the data they collect from fans, just like Facebook is doing as a third-party aggregator. Also, how much are you really going to be posting about Sears on other websites? To me this is like signing up for the email newsletter. I joined their community because I am interested. I'll go there to see reviews, discussions, etc. related to Sears. It's not only a filter for them, but a filter for me. - Mike Templeton

I wonder if you can create a happy medium here. Build some proprietary social functionality but still allow for the portability of identity and social graphs? - Nathan T. Wright

Completely retarded. It shows a complete lack of understanding for the long-term as we move away from proprietary networks, owning customers, etc. - coldbrew

But after the initial "flash in the pan" from the site being new, what compels me to keep coming back to mysears.com? Honestly, I can't think of anything... - Craig Eddy

@mike oh yes i agree they want to broaden their social reach .. but they should do it on their main domain, wrapped around their store - directly linking the online buying experience with the social experience. Not YASN - andy brudtkuhl

@Craig - exactly that's why it needs tied into the buying experience. Any B&M store like this should look to Amazon for how to approach implementing proprietary social systems into the buying experience - cuz that's where it matters. - andy brudtkuhl

Example: Whenever I am looking to buy something, I go to Amazon or Newegg first to check out the ratings and recommendations - which are tightly coupled to the product - not on a completely different site - andy brudtkuhl

http://www.viewpoints.com/ is an existing social, just not one of the ones we typically use. I agree that controlling your space is paramount in commerce. Amazon comments are dead on. - Jason Nunnelley

@Andy I think you will see them incorporating things like reviews and discussions from the MySears site back into their main online experience. Just give them time. - Mike Templeton

@Mike undoubtedly... so that begs the question - why not just implement that in the main site? ...Where all your customers are already visiting ... right where they can click "BUY" - andy brudtkuhl

Another component I love about this: "2,338 members in IA" Already that's more people than I follow on Twitter, and I follow people from everywhere. This is a great way for me to find targeted information from a targeted audience. - Mike Templeton

The benefit to the stores are cross-linking / deep-linking between their web presences. I don't see a benefit to the customer - like Craig said "why would i go back?" - andy brudtkuhl

Amazon has only one physical product of their own (not counting SKUs), and it also represents lots of different retailers. It is not quite appropriate for an analogy. - coldbrew

@coldbrew yea it is - sears sells products that arent their own - andy brudtkuhl

@Andy I'm saying they will add that into the main site. It's just a difference of a domain. It also creates some separation for those who may not care. "To join in discussions about this product, visit MySears.com and see what other consumers are saying." - Mike Templeton

Brudtkuhl: The majority of Sears products are their own (Kenmore, Craftsmen, etc.). I wouldn't go to Sears for anything else. Sears doesn't have other vendors for whom their domain is an ecommerce site. Amazon has less conflict of interest in controlling the consumer contributions (moderating poor reviews). - coldbrew

It's still a digital natives issue if you ask me. Traditional retailers too often have very little knowledge, interest, or ability in using social computing to engage customers, despite these encouraging signs. Of course, the survivors 10 years from now will have figured it out, one way or another. - Dion Hinchcliffe

@Dion: Do you feel that Sears is not "getting it" with this community? They have a blog, offer consumer reviews, discussion sections, a "submit your idea" ala Dell's Ideastorm, plus outposts on the top social media websites. They've even got tools to enable users to share information via email or other channels. Seems to me they are ticking all the social media boxes. - Mike Templeton

I think Dion is drawing a distinction between "ticking the boxes" and making it part of the fabric of the retailer... I work at Best Buy and we are spending a lot of time thinking about the latter. - Ben Hedrington

@benhedrington But first Best Buy had to step into the conversation, right? I think this is a good step for Sears, but is also only the first step. With what they've launched for now, I'd be surprised if we don't see this stuff integrated into their main experience in the near future. - Mike Templeton

Mike, I'm with Ben, social retailing is something that goes far beyond social media; it's about transforming the very way customers are engaged by the company. The models for doing this effectively (both in terms of cost and the desired outcomes on both sides of the conversation) are still evolving. Social media is a good medium, but it's far from sufficient when it comes to engaging customers over the network as a primary channel. Great first steps from Sears IMHO. - Dion Hinchcliffe

@Mike I don't disagree start somewhere start small and grow it based on feedback organically... but when you see these vendor platforms launch it seems more about "installing a product to make you social" in this case Viewpoints.com rather than efforts to become a social retailer. All that said kudos to Sears for trying and getting out there with something. - Ben Hedrington

Jeremiah thanks for your post. Rob Harles here - I am the VP of Community at Sears. The comments from your followers are very helpful and many of them dead on. This is a first step for us and we are committed to seeing this through to fully integrate community into everything that we do. We are very keen on using this initiative to learn and evolve. So, we are glad to hear from you. - Robert Harles

Robert - thanks for chiming in! Great to know you are listening! - andy brudtkuhl

@Mike- Great discussion! This is Julie-Community Liason on MySears. Sears.com and MySears are linked. When you check out a product, there are reviews and discussion links from the MySears site on the product page. Just wanted to let you know-Sears is trying to make the social interaction work with the retail side. - Julie Kayaian

a little late - that's already happening :-) - andy brudtkuhl

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...now it will become industry wide norms if twitter is able to categorically index and rank it accordingly. - Sampad Swain

Hopefully a reputation based ranking system will help create content filters - andy brudtkuhl

Yup. - Michael R. Bernstein

Also means some URL shortener fallout... their methodologies (301, meta, etc.) will come into play for transferring link cred. - Ben Hedrington

We're already seeing the move by brands to create their own shortened urls. That will really heat up - Christian Anderson

Hopefully it is not a clone but an improvement -- - LPH™ and his dog P™

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Looks great, but it's still a blog at heart, not a network. Micro-blogs are going to spread like wildfire now though. - Daniel Sims

Wordpress P2 looks awesome... I wonder if you can intermingle normal posts with micro? "No draft posts!" "No fail whales!" - Ben Hedrington

I mentioned this the last time I was on TWiT - pretty cool upgrade of Prologue - Bwana ☠

P2 is just a theme. You can still use the OpenMicroBlog WP plugin so each blog isn't its own island. - coldbrew

Looks nice, might use it as a sub page somewhere. I want to try this: http://wordpress.org/extend... Twitter LiveBlog WP plugin. Sounds pretty useful. - Kol Tregaskes

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Very Cool - I'm tempted myself - Charanjit

My Friend, Joseph Scott wrote that (a local Salt Lake resident) - Jesse Stay

Interesting. But why? I mean you already have at least two places to do the whole real-time conversation thing. I would assume that you want something that works well with longer posts. - Vishwas Narendra

Scoble, did you see P2 (Prologue 2) http://p2demo.wordpress.com/ - Ben Hedrington

That said, it is a very cool theme! - Vishwas Narendra

looks interesting - (jeff)isageek

Matt's post - http://ma.tt/2009... Winer is talking about this too: http://friendfeed.com/davew... - Ben Hedrington

You gotta check out P2 from them. - Abhimanyu Chirimar

Vishwas: that's the thing that keeps me from doing this. - Robert Scoble

My power management issues are cleaned up on my laptop and it is a much slicker experience than 8.10... Installing on a new desktop tonight, hoping for better experience than with the beta [video drivers]. - Ben Hedrington

Your mileage may vary. I'd like to see a non-techie use Ubuntu for a month, it is a very nice Linux distro, I use it, I like it, but it's not for mom and pop. It's still light years out for the casual user. Test #1 for the non-techie user.. Install it on your laptop, and connect to your wireless network. Try that with a MacBook, or Windows laptop. It's the little things that matter. - Rob Fahrni

Its as slick as either until mom and pop try to install a program like you would windows then at's all over red rover, but I love it! - Andy

i like simpler/lighter distros, but linux and bsd certainly have come of age on the desktop - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

great, great news! and I see positive signs that VMware is going to work, too :-) http://tinyurl.com/cs3pd2 - Julie Bovee Hill

I think it could become a serious contender but the Linux folks don't really seem to care about that. They're interested in the server, which isn't a bad thing. Apple has proven you can make a serious OS friendly to the average user, and you can get to the horse power under the hood. - Rob Fahrni

Pete, From what I can see (if you are publishing your FF posts to Twitter) Twitter will get the @ and add it to @Bret's mentions (via that free text showing up in the tweet) but FF is not technically creating a proper @ via the API... - Ben Hedrington

It's lunchtime for me :) - Tim McDougall

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I am fanatical about the internet but i am not close to Silicon Valley:( What can i do? - Tweet Feeds

Tweet Feeds: videoconference! - Robert Scoble

right on! - skype or? - michael sean wright

Skype works but since I am at Cisco WebEx is more appropriate. Later though. - Robert Scoble

how long are you there? i'm at your old workplace (winnov) nearby...and i'm hungry - Rob Hyodo

Indeed a fanatic, from a different continent :-) Enjoy your breakfast - Majento

Rob: I am free between now and noon. Could meet anywhere. - Robert Scoble

Hah! Virtual lunch? You may be able to schedule a TelePresence conference! - Jody Carbone

Is that the one in MIlpitas? I would be happy to treat you to lunch in that area if your game? - Adam Helweh

Robert: A bit off topic on the immediacy angle but are you going to be going to Google I/O? A few of us "internet fanatics" who also happen to work for Best Buy will be there and would love to meet. - Ben Hedrington

Jody: I could for sure! Of course not many people have access to a $300,000 telepresence system. They are cool to use, though. - Robert Scoble

I spend most of my time at Cisco Building 12...but alas I'm in SF today...maybe next time. - Greg Lato

Wish I could make it, have a bunch of tasks to complete this morning. - Rick Bucich

Hi, Robert! I am in Lisbon but i am following you. I am also a Friendfeed fan. I got it in my 2 blogs: - ramiromarques

Ben: I am planning on being at Google IO right now. - Robert Scoble

Oops, I missed the word "breakfast" in your original message Robert. Guess your on to another adventure by lunchtime. :) - Adam Helweh

Robert, your avatar is all green. Scary in a Hulk kind of way. - Erick Schonfeld

I was at Cisco to drop off some videos I did for it - Robert Scoble

Erick: you don't want to see me when I am angry! :-) - Robert Scoble

Erick, The Hulk comes out on the Gillmor Gang. :) - jcunwired

Gosh if I knew...I could have brought out a squad! - Susan

As you likely saw, my 1998 Mercury Tracer, which I've had since 2000, is finally on its last legs. The transmission is toast, and would cost around $4k to replace. The car is maybe worth $1k. I bought it for less than $10k just out of college. - Louis Gray

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My wife has the family car for the twins (Toyota Rav-4). In theory, I just need a car for me, and most of what I do is commuting to work, errands, and occasionally driving to San Francisco and the East Bay. - Louis Gray

Peer pressure (from work and the Valley itself) is to finally break out of the Ford/Mercury niche and move upscale to a BMW/Audi type of car... but we're not exactly flush with cash. My wife's not working, and while we have no debt, it's not like the stock market has been good. - Louis Gray

you could get two of those tato nanos for the repair cost! http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investi... - sean percival

Budget? - MVB (Grinch of FF)

I've been tempted to go the route of a used BMW, but they tend to run above $20k. There's a 2003 model with 70k miles for $16k at a nearby dealer, but that's a little old and a few too many miles. What should I do? - Louis Gray

If I put my nose high enough in the air, I don't want to end up with a Camry/Prius type, or a basic Honda. They say to dress the way you should for the job you want not the one you have, and cars should be the same way. But I am not interested in anything over $25k... - Louis Gray

bmw with 50K+ miles on it is probably asking for trouble. walk into the dealership, ask how much, tell them you'll pay $200 less per month. make them give you twice the value on the broken car if needed. we just did that, its a good time to haggle with these guys. :) - sean percival

If I were you, I would probably check CarZen :) http://is.gd/prlx it's time to get something new, cheap and hip lol - Ahmed

Nowadays, if it's a decent brand, 70k miles really isn't that much. How long do you intend to keep it? - Jesse Stay

I own 2 BMW's. If you buy one, buy one in warranty. You'll thank me. And even then, that's all I drive. - MVB (Grinch of FF)

@Sean, I see your comment. Thanks. And @Jesse, I expect to run it into the ground, just like my current one. If I have it for 5 years, that'd be great. - Louis Gray

I am a Vehicle Wholesaler with owner contacts all over the Valley. If you are going to buy a slightly used car. Which do you really prefer ? - Eric Logan

Eric, what I really "prefer" is a BMW/Audi type, but being realistic, I might settle out of that. Your LinkedIn says you represent the big 3 automakers. How much access do you have outside of the USA dealerships? - Louis Gray

It's a buyer's market.If you buy used, be patient. The perfect one will pop up. Look at a bunch of them & ask questions. By the time the right one presents itself, you'll know exactly what your looking for. I suggest buying used. Let someone else own the depreciation! If you don't rush into it too fast,you'll find one with low miles and at the right price.I'm on my 3rd one, and they're great cars.If you have money to throw away,buy a new one! I still wouldn't do it. It can go 300,000M if you take care of it - Michael Fidler

On your third what, Michael? - Louis Gray

Find a nice MB E or BMW 5 and go for it. Just keep in mind the maintenance on them is quite a lot more and more money than a Ford or a Honda. - MVB (Grinch of FF)

My wife's 1992 Acura Integra with 123K miles is still going strong. Japanese baby! - Hutch Carpenter

If you are buying a used car they are all sourced the same way. I wholesale to car dealers I can not sell directly to the public but, I can help you by utilizing my network of owner operators who have been buying from me for 15 years. Sean is right BTW not sure about his formula but, the premise is correct. - Eric Logan

Hutch, I can in theory keep driving my car... but not for much longer. It's at 140k miles. American, baby! - Louis Gray

Louis: we are selling our 2006 BMW 325i with 56,000 miles. Make me an offer. Well maintained and fun to drive. - Robert Scoble

Louis make him an offer he can't refuse... - MVB (Grinch of FF)

Robert, if I bought your car, people would start talking. :) (And how does the Bank of Scoble accept payments?) - Louis Gray

That's a great offer from Robert and it's coming from your friend! I agree with Mark. - Michael Fidler

Louis - from what I understand, Scoble's car comes with LCD's in the ceiling that show Friendfeed and Twitter in real-time - Allen Stern

Allen, I heard that too. But I may have to change the license plate: "IMSCOBLE" - Louis Gray

Louis, in case you're not familiar with it: http://autotrader.com - John Craft

Yeah I'm guessing Robert and Maryam are pretty good about maintenance/repairs, Louis. At least go look at it. You'd be remiss if you didn't. - MVB (Grinch of FF)

LOL @ "Bank of Scoble" - Haggis (Sean Loyless)

He wants something new shinny and cool. Don't torture him. - Todd Hoff

I talked to Scoble. It's actually a real possibility. Blue Book on their car is in the right range. And Todd, it's not torture. The first car I ever bought was very cheap ($3k - all I had). The second I bought by dropping off the old car at a Ford dealer and saying I was leaving with something else. This would be the first time I could look around a bit, so I admit to being somewhat clueless. - Louis Gray

buy japanese if u plan to run into the ground. as much as I like my german cars, they don't get the same lifeline as the japanese - clarke thomas

I love my 09 Civic but if I were in the market right now for a new car I'd be getting the new Insight: http://automobiles.honda.com/insight... - Benjamin Golub

Are you going to use Hunch to make this decision? - Head Ov Metal

I can't argue except having been an undergrad in LA in the early 90s everyone had to have a BMW so I had to resist the urge. When we lived in New England and the Mid West, my wife and I opted to go the Audi route due to the all wheel drive. We haven't been sorry although there's clearly less need now. I guess I'm partial to German, I've owned 4 pre-1969 VWs, a 70 BMW 2002, and 3 Audis. Sounds like the Scoble offer is a good one, but I'm clearly biased. - Rick Bucich

Mazda RX 8 one of the more fun cars I have owned, if you want a sporty car that does not cost an arm and a leg, and performs as good as the BMW in handling (and racing not that I know this right?), might want to test drive one. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

The "buy used" argument is generally a good one, but in today's economy isn't as good an idea as it used to be. The demand for used cars is actually up, while new cars pile up on the docks. You might actually get a better deal on a new car. - DGentry

A friend of mine had been considering selling his 2006 E46 M3 with really low mileage. Under 20000 miles I believe. If you really want a fantastic covertible, it'd be hard to beat. I can ask him for $ if you'd like but I suspect it's going to be close to $30K if not a little more. - Abbas Haider Ali

Excellent point Denton, but even though demand is up, unfortunately so is the supply as more people are forced to unload their expensive vehicles in favor of more practical transportation in order to make payment's on the roof over their head etc. - Michael Fidler

Mark is right. We changed oil twice as often as factory recommended. BMW says to change oil every 15,000 miles. I always thought I would keep the car awhile. But family plans change. :-) - Robert Scoble

Robert's offer is as good as anything else we are considering. I picked up my car from the shop today, so it's not dead yet, but it could "just stop" at any time, I was told. - Louis Gray

LOL Robert. $2K for brakes a little bit ago, too. - MVB (Grinch of FF)

Louis, I missed your question earlier. I’m on my third BMW right now. One piece of advice; get any used car checked out by your mechanic, without exception! - Michael Fidler

We just bought a new Highlander. Got it for under invoice. Louis: the BMW has new tires, too. - Robert Scoble

I just walked by a brand new BMW M3 coupe on my way back from dinner. Silver with the black carbon fiber roof. Tres nice, the flared fenders and hood bulges are nice accents without looking over the top. Way rich for my, and probably most people's blood. - Derrick

I'd wait for the Tesla Model S http://is.gd/p6TF - KyleHase from twhirl

Kyle, the Tesla is a tad expensive, and my car isn't going to wait. Could die any day. Like the idea though. Hope they don't be unsuccessful and not crash out before getting momentum. - Louis Gray

I have a BMW 330xi (x stands for 4WD) http://www.flickr.com/photos... - great four door sedan even in Rochester NY winters! Love BMWs!! I picked it up after a 2 year lease - 18K miles, now 36K, great car ... fabulous drive!!! - Susan Beebe

how does a 2006 325cic sound? - Lazworld.com

@Scott, I like your last name. :) And @Laz, it sounds good, of course, but the above conversation shows we're price constrained. Do you think a 2006 325cic would come in at equal or less the price of Scoble's car? - Louis Gray

I wouldn't forget to look at cars like the Acura TSX or TL - If I were buying a car right now it would be a Subaru Legacy GT (GT only!) but to me the AWD and turbo are top wants... Just chiming in from the midwest... gotta diversify that point of view out of the valley ;) - Ben Hedrington

Ben? I don't follow. You're saying there are people in the midwest now? - Louis Gray

Hey I want this, too :)I) - Alp

Do NOT buy a used BMW - they are expensive to maintain and fix. (parts / labor) The beauty of Bimmers are only when they're brand new. The warranty is what people shell out the $$$ for. Oil changes, even wiper blades are covered. If you're looking used, go Japanese. They're the most reliable. :) - Mona Nomura

You might try Enterprise leasing to buy used. Their cars have been driven hard but also maintained; should have most of the bugs worked out. - Robert Hafer

the BWM cabrios jujst dont look tight to me go for a A4 personaly i think the Audi A3 Black is a nice looking car - Maurice Walshe

This post is making me wish I was a German car mechanic. - Alex Scoble

This post is making me wish I had money. - Rishabh Mishra (p248)

Did that station wagon make a trip to Wally World? - Peter Ghosh

This post makes me happy that I'm a civic hybrid owner. - imabonehead

Keep it, do not get rid of it. I still have my 204,000 miles Honda Civic 1993. Soon to be collection. - Jeremy Chone

Louis! I'm here by myself, one guy + internet connection... ;) Oh and Mona++ - Ben Hedrington

I saw Scoble's car tonight. WANT. :) - Louis Gray

Louis, did you make him an offer he couldn't refuse? - Anne Bouey

Anne, when he and I talked Saturday, he gave me guidance. I reported back on what that guidance said would be a good price. We'll see. :) - Louis Gray

I can just hear Robert: I said I would see you, Louis, because I heard you had a serious offer. But I must say no to you, and I will give you my reason... - MVB (Grinch of FF)

Hope it works out for you! - Anne Bouey

This post has reawakend my deep craving for a Bimmer. sigh. - Leslie Poston

You want to croudsource an M3 convertible? Well, at least it's the old model... - Mirco

Louis - do it, buy Scoble's BMW. I love mine. And that car probably still has 1 more year of factory warranty, plus the new tires seal the deal dude! Go for it! - Susan Beebe

What car did you end up getting? - Phil G

So far, I have not gotten a new car yet, Phil. I've been driving around my wife's old Honda Civic. The best option thus far is to take the ScobleMobile off his hands at the end of May. I've already seen it. - Louis Gray

I'm sure you could do worse.. much worse :) - Phil G

Louis after the Highlander incident Robert and Maryam may not be selling. Perhaps youshould inquire about lease options on the 330 or the C350. - MVB (Grinch of FF)

Mark, I saw Robert on Friday. Things are a go. The issue with the Highlander was a bad battery. :) - Louis Gray

See if you can get a new Accord, which is what I just got after a lot of research. The technology on it is great, and Hondas run forever. I'm a firm believer in new cars with warranties if you can. I've had BMWs, Audis, Mercedes, etc and they are very expensive to fix. And if you have kids, you don't want a car that's always in the shop. - Francine Hardaway

Louis, with 10 years as a new car sales manager, I would happy to help with (friendly) negotiations. - MVB (Grinch of FF)

Louis, without going through each message - BMW will easily go 250k miles with proper upkeep, and a heck of a fun drive. The only thing I have ever enjoyed driving more than my BMW is my Alfa Romeo (NOT recommended as a family car!) - jcunwired

get new Fiat 500 :] ... http://images.google.com/images... - Petr Buben

I have the exact same car in the "I Want This" pic, but a different color. GET IT! - Roshan Vyas

I have a 92 318convertible, bought it with 175K miles on it...didn't have a lick of trouble with it while I was driving it (I left it on the west coast when I moved to NY) It's got at least 225K on it now. Expensive to repair if something does go wrong, but ifyou get the right one, they're Awesome cars. I would buy another well used beamer in a heartbeat. If you can get on under 100K miles, you'll be such a happy camper. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

He's such a great guy and very brave. One of my heroes. - Robert Scoble

He's President of Atlassian. - Robert Scoble

Guys like this, who are facing their own mortality head on cause us to remember what is important in life. He told me stories of all the support he's gotten around the world. Social media +is+ important and it +is+ changing lives. - Robert Scoble

He writes about his cancer here: http://radiowalker.wordpress.com/ He called me from Stanford University to talk about something while he was getting chemo. I love that he isn't going to let cancer slow him down (he's working on something cool, more on that later). - Robert Scoble

My family kept a blog while my dad was battling Pancreatic cancer, help to get information out to family and helped with support and expressing feelings a lot. - Ben Hedrington

After his battle ended I reversed the blog starting at day one so other could benefit by reading the ups and downs. http://hedrington.com/scott/ - Ben Hedrington

This is probably one of, if not the most useful Twitter updates. - Nicholas James

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A much needed Twitter update, many didn't understand how poorly it worked as it was. - Ben Hedrington

Sweet, now I can stop tracking that externally - I had a summize search fed into a FriendFeed virtual friend on a specific list just to pick up stray @dpritchetts: (http://search.twitter.com/search...). How were you tracking it? - Daniel J. Pritchett

Hmmm replies are now @username in Opera and in FireFox with PowerTwitter I have @username (old replies) as well as mentions. My Opera still doesn't have some of the new twitter features though . . . - Chris Loft

that is seriously wacky. it's not like your blog hasn't been linked to shitloads of times. wtf? - Marshall Kirkpatrick

My "rel=me" links seem keep themselves above the Twitter result http://www.google.com/search...... Try linking to your stuff using "rel=me" from your blog, etc. http://microformats.org/wiki... - Ben Hedrington

so this is interesting, twitter put rel=me at href="/marshallk/friends" id="following_count_link" rel="me" is that not an odd place to put it? - Marshall Kirkpatrick

not cool. if its not you then don't twitter. The Real Shaq said it best. - Monique

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Depends. If it's a "person" that I am following, it's not cool. If it's a company/project, it's all good. - Jeremy Brooks

If it is open and well know, then no problem. Think of Obama's account. - MVB (Grinch of FF)

I agree with Mark on that. Depends on how it's done. - Chris Baskind

"How do you think I feel? Betrayed, bewildered... ". Seriously? Guy Kawasaki's "influence" just dropped by 2/3rd. - jacek

@jacek walicki Excellent "Birdcage" referrence! - MVB (Grinch of FF)

Milli Vanilli. - Rebecca

It's not news that BritneySpears has been doing this. Barack Obama obviously does it. For public figures, something beats nothing. - Louis Gray

Not good. If it's someone and their "ghosts" it should be claimed with a distinguishable name or tag. - John Spyers

I thought part of the point of the whole 2.0 thing is for increased transparency, openness and interactivity. A paradigm shift. The ghost folks are just more of the same old same old. - Pete Delucchi

yes prefer transparency ... http://blog.iampaddy.com/2009... - Raymon Montalbetti

I've got an extra $100 grand. Anbydoy want to tweet for me. But, you've got to get me at least 80,000 followers. - Andrew Pass

Not a fan. Trying to help companies/orgs on Twitter show the real people inside with attribution. http://www.connecttweet.com - Ben Hedrington

Its not exactly hard to write 140 characters (or less), I don't see the point in Ghost Twittering although, cases are except for Britney Spears who actually reveal who posts the Tweet i.e. Member of her team etc. - Nicholas James

I have mix feelings about it, if they are clear that its not them, but their representatives,then that's cool. However if they pretend like they are doing it themselves then that is not cool at all. - Kim Landwehr

Who gives a shit? - John Zipp

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