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Bob Ngu › Comments
In TweetDeck, Seesmic, etc all social networks look the same. If I were an exec at, say, Facebook, I would pay these guys to add features.
Johan Bakken, iTbay, George Hall (Australia) and 24 other people liked this
This is a big problem for these services. How do they convince users to join one over another? Friendfeed has real time on the web page, which is cool for chats, etc. But how can friendfeed differentiate if they all look the same in clients?
- Robert Scoble
A natural need for a middle man is building. It would be good if these companies built some good relationships.
- Eric @ CSTechcast.com
actually now that i have used this new ff a few days, all i see is a commodity - similar to what you are saying
- Allen Stern
Allen: except your comment showed up on my screen without refreshing.
- Robert Scoble
Allen: I think that everything is commodity EXCEPT for the filters, er, sorry, the searches. Those are NOT commodity.
- Robert Scoble
I agree with Scoble, at some point, the similarities are going to kill some of these tools.
- Maria Reyes-McDavis
Other than for commenting, I am unable to understand why I would need a third party app for facebook. And at this point seesmic doesn't even let me comment. API limit or app function? Not sure, but at this point I am sticking with FB website.
- Bob Blunk
won't they all do on screen refresh in the browser within 2 months?
- Jonathan Denison
Allen: and you can't move my searches here that I've saved (already dozens) to other services. You need friendfeed's identity/socialgraph and databases to use those.
- Robert Scoble
I find myself flitting between different services plus the actual web sites. I'm still searching for the right mobile experience for all of them though.
- Dave O'Neill
where can I read about the filters? Not sure I've "got" this feature of friendfeed yet
- Jonathan Denison
I just want tweetie with groups + friendfeed and I can call it a day.
- Daniel Morgan
This is why I've no intention of trying Seesmic's Twitter client or Twhirl or DestroyTwitter. I use Tweetdeck. They all look the same and if any one does anything new then the others will do so soon as well so there's no point in switching and setting everything up again.
- Mark H
Maybe TweetDeck, Seesmic, etc. is not where they expect to get new users from.
- Bruce Lewis
This is the lack of being a purple cow. Everbody looking and acting like each other do something different and creative. The market is flooded with twitter and facebook apps. Make a new concept period.
- John Isaac
John, new concepts are a tough sell. People like to understand new things in terms of what they already know.
- Bruce Lewis
Jonathan: look over at "Saved searches." Those are filters. I need to do a video about them, but I still am playing around at what works well there.
- Robert Scoble
Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Competition among the 3rd party apps will drive them to continually innovate.
- Bob Ngu
I'm still wondering what the mass market version of Friendfeed looks like. Amazingly customizable, but almost too powerful for the avg user. Personally, I'm still trying to figure out how to avoid getting so much crap in my home feed.
- Ryan Miller
Both Tweetdeck and Seesmic need major UX overhauls.
- Dean Clark
Scoble: got it, i have used the saved searches. They are like searches in tweetdeck or seesmic. What I have always wanted in those apps though is shared searches in the cloud, not client specific. I see I get this from friendfeed. A great result
- Jonathan Denison
Ryan: use saved searches. For instance, here's http://friendfeed.com/search... all items that have the word "Obama" used in them that Lous Gray has liked that have the word "inflation" used in the comments and that have at least five comments. Hint: it's only one item. There's a TON of power in saved searches. WAY MORE than in Seesmic or Tweetdeck.
- Robert Scoble
You can NOT do that search on any other system or on Seesmic or Tweetdeck. It's that power in searches that will differentiate friendfeed from now on.
- Robert Scoble
what's the USP of searches on friendfeed? and How does it benefit the average user?
- Jonathan Denison
Robert, the only reason you can't do that search example in Seesmic-Desktop or TweetDeck is that FriendFeed's API is *seriously* behind the curve relative to the UI feature set. Up until recently the same could have been said for Facebook.
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
Mike: no, my point is that you can't do that search on Twitter (no metadata to study) or on Facebook (which doesn't have a search system yet. It's the searches where the money is and it's the searches where the differentiation lies.
- Robert Scoble
I agree that the power of twitter appears to be in the search. Adding metadata will help this, but only if the audience follows. The power of twitter search at the moment is everyone is using twitter, so real time search happens. You can find out about *anything* that is happening in the world
- Jonathan Denison
Robert: ohhh, yes, FriendFeed does have a lot of metadata exposed in the search interface - *but* it's not exposed via an API.
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
Mike: the friendfeed team told me they are rethinking their API. If that's going to be a key differentiator I bet that soon there will be an improved API. They are rebuilding saved searches to be "live" too. There's lots of features missing from saved searches too, can't wait to see how it all evolves.
- Robert Scoble
Mike: Facebook is building its own search engine, too, and its own filtering mechanism. It'll be interesting to see how they both are different. I think Facebook is ahead in terms of mixing in businesses and obviously Facebook has 200-250 million users, so when you get search there it'll be a bigger deal than friendfeed.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: yes, I've been waiting for the FriendFeed API to update - with the quality of the experience that FriendFeed has given to date, their API should be amazing! Facebook is going to run into unique issues with it's Search/Filter just because they have 200-250 million users and an infrastructure that is event-push web oriented. Wiring on a layer that can sniff/store metadata for search is going to be fun :)
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
Scoble: I think facebook serves a different audience. Linked in was for business, friendsreunited was for friends. Facebook brought them together. Twitter and Friendfeed made you realise there was more benefit in meeting new people than contacting those you already new. I can't see FB becoming a meet new people rather than establish relationships with those you know network.
- Jonathan Denison
Friendfeeds needs think think of itself as facilitator of conversation on the web -- where ever you have web presences, ff aggregates discussion.
- Christian Anderson
ff ought to let me respond to @replies from Twitter via ff.
- Christian Anderson
ff also ought to let me see and interact with wall posts on fb.
- Christian Anderson
Open APIs: Good for users, bad for business models. For a while I think this will be like the browser wars with ebb and flow until they all start to resemble eachother. Then there will be a second round of innovation via two trends: exponential growth in "sensors" (people, devices, cameras, etc) and emergence of automation in making connections (your advanced searches only automated, the systems create the searches based on usage patterns). Without that there's no way people will be able to keep up.
- David Ziembicki
David: I think the "win" for the business side will be the amount of metadata that flows thru their systems. That model doesn't care where the metadata originates from, just as long as it enters the system so it can be gathered, scanned, repackaged and sold to outsiders. *That's* where the revenue will come from IMO.
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
Mike: I agree completely, it will just be very tough to hold a sustainable advantage in that environment with this kind of pace of development. There will need to be a sustainable enough advantage to justify the investment.
- David Ziembicki
David: good point - makes me glad i'm on the client side of the fence :)
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
i like how, with Friendfeed, you can comment on tweets- thats Robert
- iTbay
Robert, have you tried the official Facebook AIR app? It has boosted my activity on Facebook 100%. It is a VERY similar experience to FriendFeed, seeing posts and comments in real-time. And it's dead simple to use and totally streamlined, unlike many of these twitter apps w/ a ton of options & menus. FriendFeed needs something like this ASAP.
- Daniel Sims
And there must be a clensing cycle so people that never communicate aren't at the top of the users groups. Imagine FB with 3 walls Family, Friends, and Social-Professional. Contacts that don't have any interaction in latter 2 eventually fall off. I think friendfeed may jump on this weakness since this is closer to what's right than what Twitter and FB are doing.
- Dave
Sure they all look the same in clients, but all require different accounts. This type of media would be better in a single protocal with many clients / suppliers (like email) otherwise we'll end up with a mess of services - a bit like the situation with Instant Messaging
- Robert Davies
have you seen peoplebrowsr.com? it adds a LOT of functionality.
- John Bergoon
Mark Zuckerberg just announced that businesses and brands will have full access to the social graph. Here's what that means:
Kaysha, Daniel Rowley, Anand Sharma and 31 other people liked this
CocaCola will be listed right next to Mike Arrington.
- Robert Scoble
And Mike Arrington will have an entry. So will TechCrunch.
- Robert Scoble
Monetization!
- Robert Scoble
Facebook just became VERY interesting to me.
- Robert Scoble
Everyone who likes Snapple is now two degrees away from everyone else who likes Snapple?
- Kevin Fox
Due to filtering and real time feed?
- Mrinal Desai
Interesting.. Please elaborate
- andy brudtkuhl
Mrinal: no, they have a new "brand" type coming for the social graph. They don't call it that, of course, but that's what it is.
- Robert Scoble
Can you explain what that means?
- Rachel Levy
gotacha - thanks!
- Mrinal Desai
Also want to hear more...Twitter is my public but Facebook is my family & friends app...
- TechMama Beth Blecherman
hmm...do I want brands to have access to my social graph? I would rather sell them my valuable data not give it away for free. Free for friends, costs for business
- David Jacobs
Sounds great, but I will believe it when I see it =)
- Bob Ngu
So... brand (or company/product) will become an entity you can "friend" in Facebook? Am I interpreting this right? Do I get to control their access to my data/friend list?
- Brian Roy
is today the day they get rid of the 5,000 friend limit, since Pages are now Profiles?
- Jesse Stay
Because as we all know, the real value in social networking isn't connecting people with other people, it's connecting people with PRODUCTS.
- Ken Sheppardson
Jesse: sort of. They got very close. We have to see the implementation first.
- Robert Scoble
+100 Ken - Everyone is looking to monetize by tapping into marketing and PR dollars...
- Brian Roy
Will the "likes" feature now be trackable, like it is in FriendFeed? I don't see the purpose of it in FB right now. Why did they add that that feature if you can't see yours and others' likes?
- Jennifer Windrum
It means I've lost even more interest in Facebook. I really have no interest in being bought and sold.
- LogEx
Ken: you have two phone books, right? One is white, for people, the other is yellow, for companies. These can be presented separately in Facebook too. They just added the yellow pages to the social graph. This is the death of the yellow pages.
- Robert Scoble
Yeesh, Robert, Make a room for all this.
- Matthew DeVries
@Robert the yellow pages died years ago
- andy brudtkuhl
Logical Extremes, why do you assume you are being bought and sold? I am guessing Facebook is not going to force you to befriend a "brand/company". If it is done by choice why is that so damning?
- Patrick Boegel
Matthew: why don't you? This is an interactive thing. I'm just typing as fast as I can.
- Robert Scoble
I can't move YOUR threads into my room.
- Matthew DeVries
Matthew, you can reshare Robert's threads (or anyone's) into a room.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
This worked nicely during convention season, there was a room for each talk, thread starters were pointed to the room. Got to follow the talks in real time.
- Matthew DeVries
Tina: Why wasn't that listed among our assets in the first place?!
- Matthew DeVries
How about Dislikes? or even Hate or Evil, Right now your only negative comment is silence...judging by the popularity of Simon on AI, "Hated It" would be a Huge "feature."
- Jamie Ginsberg
LOL! It's right there under 'More', choose reshare and you'll essentially get the FF bookmarklet: choose the room to send it to and BOOM there you go =) Works the other way around too should you want to share something from a room into your feed
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Ok, here's the room http://friendfeed.com/rooms... And I think I aggregated all the scoble threads to it.
- Matthew DeVries
Please never add "hate it" or "dislike it" to a social media service. PLEASE
- Matthew DeVries
Patrick, it's a Beacon nightmare waiting to happen again. One app or one friending of a company, and the floodgates are opened.
- LogEx
So, basically ... Facebook catches up with twitter? I already get updates from Zappos and CNN.
- Jonathan Terleski
And salesforce is there, in the background, collecting all our data - I don't really care since I've never had issues with personal information used maliciously.
- Mona Nomura
Brands are just catching up on artists and sports guys. They've been branding themselves and using the social graph for a while.
- Marc Verstaen
It means they're vying to become more evil than Google?
- Richard Akerman
I have a new plan for surviving this recession/depression: standing outside with a sign reading "will sell my social graph for food".
- Richard Akerman
Did facebook just become a huge version of GetSatisfaction?
- Anton Mannering
"Today, I stood victorious with the American people and voted no to defeat the Wall Street 'Fat Cat' bailout," said Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble
Jeff P. Henderson, jjprojects, Soulhuntre and 2 other people liked this
He wasn't standing with me. I was on the other side.
- Mathew™ one of a kind
Lots of folks didn't like this bill, apparently. 40% of the house dems voted to kill it as well even though under Pelosi they usually move in lockstep. Interesting times.
- Soulhuntre
More Republicans rejected it than Democrats. What does that tell you about the Dem's?
- Cameron Reilly
from twhirl
Soulhuntre: yeah, they wanted to get reelected.
- Robert Scoble
If you want to be cynical, you can follow the money: Those voting Yes received more banking money contributions than those voting No by about 50% or so. http://www.maplight.org/map...
- Andrew Leyden
MobileMe Goes Down Again...
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Erhan, Soulhuntre, mjc and Gordon Swaby liked this
Now it's getting to the point where I lose messages I've written, as they're not showing up in the "Sent" box, and people are saying they're not getting e-mails. Screenshots from 5 p.m. Pacific. (And yes, I used Mail2FF from my work account to get this to go.)
- Louis Gray
from email
hmmm, interesting
- Franklin Bishop
It sucks!
- George Smith
It'll start drafting the incendiary "MobileMe Must Die" post.
- Chris Baskind
Sooooo glad I didn't waste my money on this service.
- Bob Blunk
Damn Vista! Why cant they be more like Apple.... oh, wait.
- Soulhuntre
from twhirl
I can see it now "I'm MobileMe, and I'm live Mesh... never mind, he's dead."
- Soulhuntre
from twhirl
So, is it time for me to start using them for my mail yet???
- Jesse Stay
Welcome to Mobile Fail. http://tinyurl.com/5hvgy4 (image via Engadget)
- Michael Forian
URLs that are case sensitive suck.
- Mohamed J
I'm glad I didn't sign up for this.
- Al Stevens
@joelhousman is right that the Dept. of Energy says that offshore drilling will have little to no impact on gas prices.
Tyson Key, Inksim, Warner Crocker and 16 other people liked this
There is something to be said for long-term planning, however. Sure, drilling won't affect prices over the next few years, but there's the possibility that it could affect prices after that. In the U.S., business is so driven to make quarterly numbers that it's a struggle to devote resources to long-term planning.
- Ontario Emperor
I saw a lobbyist (I think) for big oil two nights ago on CNN who stated that if Exxon broke even instead of $11 billion in profits, the price at the pump would be almost negligible. Yeah, right.
- jcunwired
We need to apply long term planning resources to alternative energy initiatives rather than short term stuff
- Francine Hardaway
from twhirl
... and even if it were so, time to market is 7 to 14 years. But based on known reserves, consumers will enjoy no price benefit as all from new drilling. Our best bet -- while waiting for the maturity of other energy technologies -- is conservation. In fact, it's the only play at all.
- Chris Baskind
The profit made at the pump is federally regulated - in other words the whole idea of "windfall profits" as if they are gouging us is not only incorrect but impossible. The federal government makes about double in taxes at the pump as the oil company does in profit. Who is robbing us again? Stirring up class envy against "big oil" isn't anything but politics.
- Soulhuntre
And the concept that we should just move in (thanks Nancy Pelosi) and jsut decide to confiscate legally earned profits is about the scariest thing I have heard in a long time.
- Soulhuntre
@Chris: What, you expect Americans to quit driving their Tahoes and Escelades? People enjoy that feeling of driving a large tank down the road looking down on everyone else. (Yes, I'm generalizing. No, I don't drive one, I drive a Neon. Yes, I hate large SUVs.)
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
The core concept in the US is freedom. If I can afford to drive a SUV, and I want to drive one... then I damn well will. Obviously people will call that selfish or whatever - but the freedom to enjoy our lives is an important one. The additional burden on the energy system is incorporated into my higher feul prices... so there is no issue of fair.
- Soulhuntre
Of course drilling tomorrow wont have an affect on the prices you pay the day after. What drilling will do is produce more SUPPLY which will drive down the FUTURE price of a barrel of oil. Oil is a commodities market just like pork, corn, wheat, etc. The price per barrel is a speculated price. As for Exxon's "obscene profits", hey it's their profits. I'm guessing their shareholders are very very grateful. What, exactly, is the maximum amount of money any one person or company is allowed to make anyway?
- Dave Madison
While Exxon may have earned $11B in profits, They paid $32B ww in total taxes. So, sounds like the public was benefiting greatly from Exxon's obscene profits. That works out to $3 in taxes to every $1 they made in profit. I don't know about you, but I would be very pissed if every paycheck I got $3 went to the government for every $1 I got to keep. I know there are some that think that's more than fair, though. We usually call those Socialists.
- Dave Madison
Finally, once the Capitol Bldg is fitted with Solar Panels and Windmills for power, I'll start taking all this "alternative energy source" talk seriously. Walk the talk. Until then, shut the hell up.
- Dave Madison
Dave: there's a lot of hot air in Washington, but not enough wind. As to Solar, there's not enough surface area on the Capitol to generate enough electricity to drive everything. Not to mention that covering one of our national treasures in solar panels just ain't gonna happen.
- Robert Scoble
@Dave: Don't forget the White House, Blair House( for visiting dignitaries) and the Old Executive Office Building across the street from the White House.
- Roberto Bonini
Oh and the Pentagon - gotta be plenty of roof space there, huh?
- Roberto Bonini
Dave, as you said, Exxon paid "32B ww" in taxes, where ww = *worldwide*. Most of that $32B was not U.S. income tax. We can't help it if some foreign countries charge 90% of oil revenues in taxes. It's *their* oil. Also, the difference between my paycheck and Exxon's is that my paycheck doesn't come from the consumption of a finite *public* resource.
- Karim
And as for *which* public was "benefiting greatly from Exxon's obscene profits," I point you in the direction of Kuwait, which has free health care, free college education, and 0% income tax for its citizens. And, if you order now, you get free American military support should you ever be invaded by a neighboring dictator. NOW how much would you pay? But wait, there's more...!
- Karim
and now barak obama supports drilling... as part of a comprehensive energy package. which is after he was against drilling and now he is for it. will it change more times before the november election?
- Jonathan Jesse
The economy is based on the consumer driven "credit economy". Our country's loans from other countries are in the billions. The rich third world countries have bought our debt. The price of our gas pays the interest on these loans. If we started drilling for oil and produced our own gas the economy would fall. One day when the country goes into a depression will they remember the pundit's warnings about the"law of diminishing returns?"-EarlWAllace
- earl wallace
Covering the Capitol in solar panels would be an abomination and not effective. Replacing the Capitol power plant with a Nuclear reactor, however, would be cleaner and more efficient. We just need to wait for Robert Byrd to retire
- Andrew Feinberg
why do we have to wait? Is that because it can't be named after him until he retires? ;-)
- Dave Madison
@Karim, nice exercise in making straw man arguments. But you didn't address the point. The fact that Kuwait has 0% income tax for individuals is irrelevant. I was talking about corporate taxes. And you are right, we can't help it if other countries have more oppressive tax rates than the U.S. Again, that's irrelevant to my point. The fact is, Exxon paid $3 in taxes for every $1 in profit. So, if I were Barry, I'd be careful what I wish for. The federal govt benefits quite nicely..
- Dave Madison
..from Exxon's "obscene profits". The ones that are getting filthy rich off of oil are not the oil companies; direct your ire to the oil traders at investment banks.
- Dave Madison
Robert, of course it would be an eyesore. I was being ridiculous to make a point. The Dems seem all too happy to tell people how they should live their lives (just last week Barry's solution to the gas price issue was to tell people to keep their tires properly inflated. If only he'd had on a sweater and was sitting by a fireplace, he could have been the second coming of Jimmy Carter--telling us all what to set our thermosats at). As soon as Stretch Pelosi, outfits her house with solar panels,....
- Dave Madison
@Dave, Its a matter of personal preference. I prefer a planet that can last into the next century, a life for my son that is at the least as good as mine was from the perspective of breathing. While I certainly would like every bit of my government to "walk the walk", I don't allow the decisions of government to influence whether I will do the right thing or not. By the way, Jimmy Carter was right and proper air pressure can do a lot to save $ and the planet.
- Brad Nickel
Of course it won't affect gas prices. Big Oil has gotten things where they want them and while we may see small drop backs in price, with leases or other gimmicks, these prices are here to stay.
- Warner Crocker
If we start taking our own resources like off-shore drilling, nuclear power, etc., it will send a strong message to the market that we are determined not to rely on foreign sources, then it will have an impact on prices. There is no reason we should not be doing everything to get our own resources, while at the same time looking at alternative means.
- Spencer
@ScottBourne We can go back even further, what did the White House do in the 90's to "fix" this problem? What have democrats done to "fix" this problem aside from whining? Gas prices have doubled since the democrats took power, they refuse to do anything but appease the far-left environmentalists which are a big source of this problem. But now we see the Obamessiah is even favoring off-shore drilling, maybe now you guys will see that he will say anything to anybody to get elected.
- Spencer
@Dave Madison my point, which was apparently so subtle you missed it, was that you are erroneously conflating $32 billion in taxes Exxon paid *WORLDWIDE* (i.e. including to other governments) with arguments about how "the public" (i.e. the AMERICAN public) and "the government" (i.e. the AMERICAN government) are benefiting from these taxes. You said, quote, "the federal government...
more...
- Karim
Spencer, you said, "If we start taking our own resources like off-shore drilling, nuclear power, etc., it will send a strong message to the market that we are determined not to rely on foreign sources, then it will have an impact on prices." Just to clarify, I don't think anyone is saying that off-shore drilling will eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, just *maybe* put a dent in...
more...
- Karim
@Brad. Whether Jimmy Carter was right, or Barry is right about tire pressure is not the point. The point is, we don't need our President, or the govt telling us what temperature to keep our homes at, or how to maintain our cars. As the Leader of the Free World, Carter looked utterly foolish and was a huge embarrassment when he did that. But then, Carter will go down as Worst-President-Ever
- Dave Madison
@Karim. And you missed my point. Governments benefit far more from Exxon's "obscene profits", that Exxon's shareholders do. So, it's really quite laughable when people get all up in arms about how much profit Exxon turns. For Barry to want to tack an additional windfall profits tax on "big oil" is ridiculous.
- Dave Madison
Earth to ScottBourne. uh...this dependency on foreign oil thing has been around for more than 6 years. That question could just as easily been asked of Clinton's administration, and so on and so on and so on. So your point is really a non-starter.
- Dave Madison
ScottBourne, of course oil companies will sell any new oil discovered the highest bidder. You sound like you view that as a bad thing. You do understand the basics of supply and demand though, right? With more oil on the market to be purchased, the lower the ppb will go. So, it's not necessarily about reducing our dependency on foreign oil. It's about driving down the price of a barrel of oil. Once OPEC sees there are other places from which countries can buy oil more cheaply....
- Dave Madison
they will be forced to reduce their prices. It's more about the price being paid, not the source of the oil. Here. this link might help you with the basics http://www.netmba.com/econ...
- Dave Madison
Dave, your argument was misleading because you talked about $3 going to "the government" (as if it was one government) and "the federal government" (as if it were OUR Federal government). Now you are finally saying "governments," plural. Once you start to think about how Elbonia deserves to tax you for the profits you made on pumping *their* oil out of *their* country, maybe that $32B tax *worldwide* won't seem like anything to get upset about.
- Karim
And the reason that oil and gas prices have been coming down over the past few weeks is.....what? Anybody know?
- Michael Markman
twello.com is so awesome - categorized twitter directory, such a good idea!
Brian Daniel Eisenberg, accesine, Charlie Anzman and 10 other people liked this
try this instead: http://www.twellow.com/
- Dave Winer
i don't get why it fails a search for 'toeman'... needs fixing!
- Jeremy Toeman
@Bob Ngu I thought the same thing when I was the homepage too, but it is a very useful site
- Richard Kannegieser
from twhirl
Awesome! Twitterpacks, with actual navigatiion and architecture. (I sure hope it doesn't become another tool for spam followers.)
- Ian Wilker
from twhirl
yes and Ian, there is a nonprofit section in particular, though you probably know all those folks already.
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
Caught Twellow back in June on EverythingTwitter http://everythingtwitter.com/2008...
- Chris Miller
Very cool, found lots of new people
- Kol Tregaskes
Yes twellow is really cool. Also, Twitter makes for a far more interesting cut from the population than Linkedin. Great for recruiting self-actualizing people!
- Meryn Stol
What we need next is a Plurk directory.
- Meryn Stol
great concept - their design needs some serious help though!
- Morgan
Is anyone actually claiming their profiles on Twellow?
- MiniMage TKDteacher of FF
i did... haven't been back since though.. not sure why i need it as a service
- Jeremy Toeman
I'm testing out Identic.ca, leave your handle below - http://identi.ca/jowyang
Fa La La La Lindsay, Michael Hocter, Susan Beebe and 2 other people liked this
cgranier
- Carlos Granier-Phelps
from twhirl
tigertwo :)
- Nancy Williams
from twhirl
chrismoritz
- Chris Moritz
infinitelymeta
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
richardk138
- Richard Kannegieser
from twhirl
Leave your URL if possible...easier to just click and add. Thanks all
- Jeremiah Owyang
/glemak - not using it much though
- mike "glemak" dunn
http://identi.ca/steve but given how many messages I get for Steve Gillmor and Steve Jobs, I may get a new one :)
- Steve Lowe
rogerkondrat
- Roger Kondrat
ross
- Ross Mayfield
from twhirl
steverubel
- Steve Rubel
http://identi.ca/robrecord - Rob Record
- Rob Record
Is it my imagination or does it seem like TC's posts have slowed to a trickle recently
Seems like reality to me... They seem to have picked up the pace lately.
- David Damore
Has it? It still seems slower than usual
- Bob Ngu
Perhaps slower than 'usual' but it seemed like it picked up IMHO.
- David Damore
Too many iPhone apps are crashing or being forced to quit way too often
Hao Chen, Topsurf and Glenn Batuyong liked this
Can you name a few apps?
- Dru Kelly
I've had AIM crash on launch, causing the iPhone to fully reboot
- Glenn Batuyong
i also am having a ton of apps crash on me. twitteriffic, pandora, loopt, and twittelator for me
- Kyle A Koch
Pownce I can't sign into. Plurk's UI turns me off. Identi.ca has no replies or track. Jaiku? too slow. Shall I go on?
Brandon Wood, Joshua Oehler, Franklin Pettit and 26 other people liked this
For me, Twitter is perfect for what it's supposed to be. Save for the server issues, of course.
- Bradley McSpinn
its July 4th...grab a couple beers and your family and go outside...enjoy your life, everybody is out now.
- Pokai
I don't need Pownce, I don't like Plurk, Identi.ca doesn't offer me anything I need. I'm more than content with Friendfeed.
- Keith - @tsudo
My issues: Pownce has no conversation, Plurk has no one I know, Idecti.ca = useless and what is Jaiku? :) - FF or Twitter plz
- Tony
Pownce's best feature is the conversation... which makes the fact that it just doesn't load so much sadder. Aside from FriendFeed, it's my favorite service and it is just broken.
- Andrew
Twiter is what it is and does what it does and we like it that way. Why so hard for people to understand?
- Andrew Feinberg
bright kite! what about bright kite?
- Mona Nomura
FriendFeed rules
- Fred Grott
Twitter's SMS is absolutely vital feature. There's no real replacement for Twitter at this time..
- Jiri Fencl
again...I agree, Robert...Twitter is what emergency management professionals will use to spread the word quickly about natural and man-made disasters. You're China earthquake post was the cat's meow!
- Bruce Curley
are people getting spam after joining identi.ca? i just got 3 spam emails direct to my email account....i just sent an email to the admin
- Pokai
Ping.FM Robert all the kids are doing it :)
- Fred Grott
I love Friendfeed, but want SMS texts. Please. Maybe I could write something to pull FriendFeed posts into a twitter account.
- David Sim
I use Ping.FM whenever I post. It's really very nice. So far I haven't experienced any negative issues.
- Niall Connellan
Twitter...regularly down
- Duncan Riley
@Duncan, +1 LOL
- AJ Batac
Duncan: what's funny is even though Twitter is regularly down I'm still getting 100x more messages on Twitter than any of the other services.
- Robert Scoble
friendfeed, for the win!
- Randal Schwartz
Scoble, I know. The magic ingredient still remains community. It is changing though, I don't have hard proof but I know Twitter is quieter now than it was 3 months ago, for me at least
- Duncan Riley
Duncan: it's not quieter for me. I'm still seeing a new tweet almost every second.
- Robert Scoble
Twitter, even with all it's downtime will still be the microblog service of choice. As we say in Mexico: "El que pega primero, pega dos veces." The rest are just copies.
- Michel Bechelani
from twhirl
Scoble, but you're also following more people than just about anyone as well. Maybe it's just in particular groups, but where as I might have seen 20 tweets a minute, today I see 2-5.
- Duncan Riley
Twitter is still the best, even when taking stability into the equation. The UI is the key, plus the featureset
- Cait
Duncan: I'm noticing that lots of people have changed their behavior over past three-five weeks. But in aggregate the users are still on Twitter. The people I like to talk with most (like you) are here on FriendFeed.
- Robert Scoble
@duncanriley really? I'm surprised, I've seen more Twitter action since it's been really unstable. Are you taking your timezone change into account?
- Cait
yup... plurk's ui is too noisy and slow
- ming yeow
I'm really getting into Utterz. Not as a new social network but as a way to post a variety of content quickly and easily and redistribute it to other sites. Just realized when I saw this item that one Utterz post can contain multiple content types, like picture and audio. FF takes in the RSS and displays them very nicely http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Kevin Shannon
It's all about the quick and easy communication from literally anywhere. Device updates on Twitter is what got me hooked.
- Matthew Horton
Ok guys, aren't you fed up? over 50% of your gibberish (excuse my lame english) is around twitter, friendfeed, etc... You use the same tools to talk about them. You aren't really creating anything new. Are you?
- Guillaume
Robert have you looked at Kwippy yet?
- Steven Hodson
For me it's mostly Twitter + FF, also checking out ping.fm + swurl but i have a strong feeling i'll be on FF for very long. Compared to portals, start pages, readers and newer stuff like Feedly, FF is actually becoming a fun useful and addictive zone.
- Majento
I use a combination of SocialThing! and FriendFeed. FriendFeed has more of a breadth, but SocialThing! shows me a load of Facebook activity such as photo uploads that FriendFeed doesn't, and also keeps track of everybody, not just the people on FriendFeed or ones I have manually set up as imaginary friends. Neither gives me exactly what I want currently.
- Richard Peat
Why I am not leaving Twitter - http://qik.com/video/120512
mhmazidi, Mitchell Tsai, Rex Hammock and 27 other people liked this
The quality of the post from the people... BINGO!
- Rom Feria
Good vid / reasoning Robert, but one question. You put a high value on the "real time" nature of Twitter (for good reason), but are you really highlighting the real time nature of Twitter via Google Talk? i.e.: is the "client" adding some of that value? If so, could FF in GT be of equal value?
- Kevin C. Tofel
The client is certainly adding some of the value and, yes, I'd LOVE to see XMPP in FriendFeed so I could do the same thing here.
- Robert Scoble
cheers to that! Need a client for FF, Ping.FM, etc. - just ONE client please. :D
- Rom Feria
Agreed. At the end of the day, I don't care about the network or the protocol used. I just want a real-time conversation aggregator.
- Kevin C. Tofel
"FriendFeed...Twitter...they go to-ge-ther". Damn you Robert I can't get that jingle out of my head now.
- Mark Krynsky
thank you... easier just to point people to this qik :)
- Lucretia Pruitt
Funny that I was listening to Gillmor Gang when I started this video.
- Robert Scoble
no, Twitter is leaving you, that's the problem. Even if you want to stay, they don't let us play :-)
- Duncan Riley
Now I have Scoble singing in my head.
- Bec Rowe @d0tski
I agree Twitter is leaving Scoble
- Fred Grott
Hmmm... interesting timing for this. But, I agree!
- Barbara K. Baker
Here's my response to you Scoble - http://qik.com/video/120649
- Corvida
Won't TWEET just become a protocol and google create a clearing house or collection place fro tweets? Is Twitter the Right answer?
- John McElhenney 2.0
my guess is that you already have a lot of followers on twitter and will stay there to the bitter end because it is the path of least resistance. Eventually the features that make twitter so great will be available on other platforms, plurk for example, and while it's easy to stop a spammer on Plurk (as soon as the first person exposes the spammer/bot no one will follow them unlike twitter where scrape bots have the same juice as anyone else.
- Darren Daz Cox
FriendFeed, Twitter, Seesmic et al, are pointing in the direction of something. They aren't the destination.
Rishabh Mishra (p248), Nikpay, Michael Connick and 59 other people liked this
Totally agree with this.
- Dave Winer
I'm sure it will keep evolving. The Web in a few years will look very different.
- Cathryn Hrudicka
it takes a real smart brain to attain such a simple, yet true, conclusion. Hats off, sincerly!
- directeur
from NoiseRiver
We're crossing the swamp, hopping from platform to platform as they're built one hop ahead of us.
- Ken Sheppardson
I said "look very different"...the Web will sound and be experienced as very different in the future, involving all the senses and lots of interactivity.
- Cathryn Hrudicka
BTW, I'd add TechCrunch and TechMeme to that list as well.
- Dave Winer
Something needs to be the destination. That destination may change. Today it's FF for me. Tomorrow it could be something else.
- Steve Rubel
Are these Web 2.0 services instead pointing to the need for some future database, searchable, filterable, where we'll all go for info?
- Mark Dykeman
Well put. I'm wondering if FriendFeed will one day crawl the sites we share and flip a twist on search.
- Dan Kaplan
I think where our ideas live and co-mingle will get much richer. The shared space will wander in and out of different worlds much more easily. We've got Level 1 integration, made possible by first generation APIs. It's nice the way FF and Pownce handle Flickr for example. Nice the way FF understands YouTube. Just knowing that you can do more if you know more about the data is a big step. Twitter is unwilling to take that step. These other guys are willing to tiptoe up to and over the line. Lots more to do.
- Dave Winer
Ok I like Rubel's comment here a lot!!! Something needs to be the destination. How do we stop continuing to be dissatified with one app.. and at the same time continue to attack innovation??? Thats a bitch but damn I cant keep up with which kickass social app I am suppossed to using.
- Cody Heitschmidt
FF et al + us == awakening the internet.
- Tad
BTW, I doubt seriously whether Rex Hammock is even aware of this discussion. This is not a minor flaw.
- Dave Winer
Are these the beginnings of the Semantic Web?
- Prolific Programmer
Flaw with Rex Hammock or FriendFeed?
- Tad
@Cody, I'm just an everyday joeuser, but it's all good to me. I'm continually amazed at all of this. This from a guy who remembers B&W TV!
- Larry Huffman
Im sticking with the decentralization argument. I want to host my own Twitter/friend-feed, just like I do with Wordpress, MoveType. I want my own MYSQL database to control my own data, my own security, just like everything. This is where its all evolving, I think. Currently, the transmission is backwards. And no one gets any linkcred for anything.
- Andrew Baron
@Andrew, agreed. I want enterprise Twitter in lieu of pagers. On a team of 15 production engineers, that would be a big help towards endless reply-all emails.
- Larry Huffman
@Andrew you're on to something here. Web 2.0 2001-2006 we all built equity exclusively on our personal sites (mostly blogs). However around 06 something switched - we built equity on YouTube, Facebook, then Twitter and now Friendfeed. It might go full circle as people get fed up doing so.
- Steve Rubel
We're redefining (1) communities (2) friends-acquaintances (3) in-group out-group. In the wake of all the loneliness in the US nuclear-family-model, this is probably something people are crying out for... In the early days of public Internet 1991-1995, one very active group I followed was parents raising gifted kids. It was so hard for them to find a support-community.
- Mitchell Tsai
That's probably quite true, but then again, half the fun is the journey, right? :)
- Sawyer
Is there a destination? I hope not. Our tools change us even as we change them.
- Craig Thomler
Not a flaw with either Rex or FF.
- Dave Winer
Decentralization fixes #1: who owns the data (we own our own data), #2 scale issues Twitter is having - balanced load - P2P, #3 it protects the web from not being neutral - e.g. makes it more difficult for Verizon to allow ltd. access - #4 distributes server costs so its cheaper, #5 give developers and services more control over all.
- Andrew Baron
Verner Vinge's Rainbow's End provided a good description of where things might be heading. http://tinyurl.com/67nzgm
- Brad Collins
My feeling is it's not (just) the content, the real value is in your social graph - plus obviously the possibility to expand it; we're getting to a point where the specific service you're publishing on is becoming of secondary importance, while the real benefits lie in this cross-pollination of services. Facebook tried that by being - in a sense - a social OS with its apps, but in fact a 2.0 app can never be the OS. Internet can.
- dario
totally with Andrew. Someone talked about "information siloses" referring to 2.0 services - open APIs are taps to those siloses, but you don't own them, you can't control them, yet you host your lifestream on them. What if you *were* the owner of the silo?
- dario
@andrewbaron Personal portable version of what Tom Watson has done with http://tincorporated.com would be great, its an integrated lifestream with control over his assets, but still open to the web through those services APIs
- Roger Penguino
from fftogo
Andrew and Steve have good points. The initial Web 2.0 enabled self-publishing/ user generated content, but community was largely manual (via RSS readers, cross-linking, etc). The soc net revolution enabled mainstream community, but does not give us ownership. If we do go full circle -- and WordPress would be awesome for this btw -- we can self-publish, with community... and I think that's where Google Connect is going.
- Allen Fuller
@davewiner - I'm aware of the discussion. I think it's amazing and even love the part where people are suggesting I'm clueless.
- Rex Hammock
[Telegraph]: Bill Clinton says Barack Obama must 'kiss my ass' for his support - http://x.newsjunk.com/0H0
.LAG liked that, Helen Sventitsky, Oldengrey (Jay) and 2 other people liked this
Somehow I don't see that happening Bill.
- Dave Winer
What if he leaves stains?
- Craig Thomler
Why does Bill Clinton matter?
- Seth Garrison
that's gross
- Mark Schulz
Does he want Monica for president then? Does SHE have his support?!?
- Prolific Programmer
Exactly Bill will never support Obama! Bill is being sarcastic! Bill has balls to speak out!
- Igor The Troll יִצְחָק
Big Bad Bill may not like Obama but he could not conceive of McCain continuing the total dismantlement of the liberal manifesto (whatever that is)
- Herb Myers
Pres. Bill Clinton is the party's past and Sen. Obama has the chance to be its future. Maybe Bill should try kissing Obama's ass if he wants to continue to be relevant figure in the Democratic party.
- Joseph Ferris
Thank you all for making this #1 on NewsJunk. http://newsjunk.com/counts...
- Dave Winer
Bill, can you define the word 'a-s-s'? "I categorically deny ever referring to a human butt-ock in my comments about Senator Obama."
- .LAG liked that
Has the former Bill Clinton gone? http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc...
- Stuart Woodward
Loren Feldman takes the hex of Shel. In this comment I ask if he would mind getting off my back too. - http://www.1938media.com/open-le...
Helen Sventitsky, Bob Ngu, Oldengrey (Jay) and sean percival liked this
BTW, what a relief that they stopped hounding Shel. TechCrunch can go back to being a blog about technology, and Calacanis can go back to whatever.
- Dave Winer
Glad to hear, oddly enough none of this made it onto Techmeme, conspiracy or coincidence?
- Bob Ngu
How unreliable does Twitter have to get before people like me give up on it totally?
Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Craig Thomler, Adam and 48 other people liked this
Really, really, really unreliable.
- Mack D. Male
I have already left for Plurk. I use Feedtweeter to send all my Plurks to twitter.
- Jon
it isn't going to be a unreliable issue, it'll be a 'reliable other thing' (like friendfeed) issue. when you are certain that enough of 'the conversation' has moved away, and we can get away without twitter, we'll leave. i'm willing to wager it's already happening. the question i ponder is: can twitter regain its footing, or have they permanently lost it? i hope the money/team can make enough impact fast enough...
- Jeremy Toeman
Plurk will have problems soon, too. They're already showing.
- Hao Chen
The thing that bugs me is that it took some time to build an audience on Twitter. I don't want to give that up by hopping to another service. Although if everyone I Twittered with came over to FriendFeed, I'd jump. Right now it's about 33%
- Rafe Needleman
I hear you, Rafe. As it is right now, I'm using both FF and Twitter, but if they have another major outage, I think a bunch more people will switch. Still, because FF is promiscuous (it reads my Twitter feed) there's no loss to continue to use Twitter while it remains useful.
- David Sifry
from twhirl
In your case, I'm quite sure your audience will follow you wherever you go
- Bwana ☠
Rafe - same for me. I don't want to move to another app and rebuild my community. So, I guess i'll have to suffer through the Twitter growing pains.
- Jim Turner
FF is a much better place for conversations Rafe. I suspect that someone like you, a prominent tech journalist, would build up an audience here just as large as your audience at Twitter. For what it's worth I haven't been on FF all that long and I've got almost as many people following me here (2,797) as I've got following me at Twitter now (3,177). The audience is growing faster over here than there as well.
- Thomas Hawk
but you are thomas hawk. people follow you,
- excalipoor
Bwana & Thomas are right, it won't be a problem to get audience here, You might like it even more here
- Dobromir Hadzhiev
Twitter is no where near dead yet. My personal theory is they didn't expect loads of people choosing to massive amounts of others. In the past week, I've had several people with absurd numbers of follows (one with 60k, one with 90k) - that's insane. Twitter has hired some top talent to address these issues and got new rounds of funding to assist. Personally I still love twitter and find it a different and useful complement to Friendfeed.
- Doug Brooks
I'm on it less than before, but use Twitter as a gateway to more reliable socnets like FriendFeed, where we can have longer discussions. The community on Twitter still merits having an account there. Can we be hopeful that now that they got another round of funding, they'll FINALLY find ways to make it more reliable?
- Cathryn Hrudicka
FriendFeed is certainly a very reliable Twitter client, I'm finding. It's nice to get everything that everybody's doing -- not just what they tweet -- inside a feed as well.
- Jared Smith
Twitter peaked during the early primaries, it was an incredible learning and connecting tool. It's not doing anything for me anymore. So have I moved on? Not exactly, because nothing has come along to replace it. FF is very different, and most of the people I connected with on Twitter aren't here. I've always said it's about the people. Nothing else.
- Dave Winer
Compared to mobile carriers and cable companies, Twitter does quite well. It's free and works most of the time. I'm sure things will get better given all the $$$ they've raised recently.
- Mike Reynolds
As long as it takes for FriendFeed to handle SMS posting.
- Rubin Sfadj
I am getting there.
- Steve Rubel
unreliable? I would say unpopular ;) I would leave twitter If I could follow ALL my friends and MORE interesting people in other place :)
- Lora Lufark
still on twitter. Not sure when I will move out.
- Thejesh GN
Excellent, a Twhinge (Twitter + whinge) thread! In all seriousness... I posted about this situation at Broadcasting Brain today. I am feeling fed up and having the Reply function on the Twitter Web app disabled doesn't help at all.
- Mark Dykeman
I prefer Plurk's timeline and threaded comments, but the community doesn't seem to be present quite yet. Once the community exists, I'd be happy to switch. But something like FF will keep me happy in the meantime.
- Jason Ziglar
Until Plurk gets more users I'm sticking with Twitter.
- Oli from the-iBlog
from fftogo
excalipoor, but he is Rafe Needleman, an influential and popular online tech journalist. People will follow him wherever he goes as well.
- Thomas Hawk
Have you given it up? Me neither. That's 'cause we forget how much it sux when its working right.
- shelisrael1
There have been plenty of opportunities for people to move off Twitter to clones. Since it hasn't happened yet, primarily because it is hard to bring your community with you, I don't expect it to happen ever.
- Bob Ngu
Give up? I only just started
- Phil Whelan
How expensive does gas have to get before people like me give up driving cars totally? :-)
- Bassam Islam
from twhirl
Twitter indeed has its limitations. It is NOT a replacement for the fluidity of IRC, it is not viable as a live conference tool, at so many junctures it introduces latency, this is all before we touch upon its infrastructure, reliability, and ability to scale. Perhaps Bezos' infusion of cash will see to thoee last points
- David Blumenstein
from twhirl
For me the thing the twitter offers is the ability to sms info quickly to a bunch of people. Events like Siggraph twitting about the next events or the results of events as they happen to people at the shows. Imagine if the SF Giants twittered player info at their games or things like that. I do agree that it's horrible for conversation, but one-way info is a perfect use for it.
- Doug Brooks
i will never give up on you rafe
- Allen Stern
Fortunately it's not too hard for me to move over here. Most of my (and yours, I'd argue) followers on Twitter are ghosts (long gone) or following for reasons other than shear interest. Twitter is still useful for ephemeral exchanges and generally telling the world how undercaffeinated I am. But for interesting links/thoughts and level of conversation this is where I'm now planting my flag.
- Jim Stanger
totally agree with Jim Stanger
- Giovanni De Stefano
I like FriendFeed more every day. But I miss Twitter.
- Rafe Needleman
I don't rely on it for communication. To me it's like graffiti on a wall. I'll keep reading it, but if they repaint the wall, c'est la vie.
- Patrick Beard
As long as there is a backup, like FriendFeed, I think Twitter can go out regularly... for me, this works. For all the good Twitter-based projects or business models, Twitter is running out of charm....
- shanebe
5 days continuous ... maybe. People have built huge followings. They're not abandoning them.
- Charlie Anzman
New money and new people coming in to Twitter. Users have been through all of this and stayed so far...they will wait it out. Twitter will and must fix the architecture once and for all and conclude on a viable business model and be off to the races. I'm as sick of the flying whale as anyone else but inexplicably I haven't left...and I don't think I will.
- Paul Marshall
Once the A-listers leave Twitter, it's over.
- Dossy Shiobara
We're all getting tired of the hit/miss feature set and repeated, unplanned downtimes. Twitter management of their app is beyond weak, it's moved over to an untenable business and is completely unreliable at this point. I do think they are taking active steps to rectify the instability of their current app / db environments, but it may be too little, too late.
- Susan Beebe
you lot have very short memories - ebay, amazon, google, world of Warcraft all had issues when they hit viral explosive growth - icq,hotmail - I could go on and on. The fact that there is this much heat about it shows that it will get through the hurdles and move on.
- Ed Dale
a full week downtime 24/7
- Chris Harris
It's unreliable? Seems to break down often enough to be broken down reliably.
- Jim Turner
how unreliable is unreliable is the real question
- Loic Le Meur
Having been around the internet block a number of times...crap happens to the best of them at the worst of times
- Renee Hendricks
Dear World, Please Stop Saying Linux Is Hard to Install. - http://codingexperiments.com/archive...
Tyler, Jake (aka Jawee), Joanmarie and 7 other people liked this
Thank you!
- directeur
Bob: The people of the world once thought the Earth was flat. Then came the Greeks and we now know it's a sphere, sorta.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
Haha, point taken but hardly a fair comparison. I agree there is an advantage with Mac and Windows coming pre-installed on computers. It is still a dreadful experience whenever I have to reinstall Windows from scratch, however, the experience is more painful for Linux IMHO.
- Bob Ngu
Well, I find reinstalling Linux to be easy, but perhaps difficulty also depends on hardware.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
In Linux, there are sometimes the complicated steps of ./configure, make, make install to compile and install a driver or app, YIKES! That's pretty a no-go for mainstream users.
- Bob Ngu
Bob, that's only if you want to install bleeding-edge updates and/or software which is not only not in your distro, but which also is not available as a downloadable package. I set up my friend with a Linux (Ubuntu Hardy) box and he has yet found a need to build anything.
- Joanmarie
@Bob: it's just an additional way to install software which I never needed to use. I never advice people to compile software from source, because they almost never need that. Just use a mainstream distribution like ubunu or fedora.. etc, and you'll get everything precompiled in a convenient package :)
- Hassan Ibraheem
@Bob Ngu: Compling software is only needed for software that is brand new and not yet ready for use by most people generally. Complete software generally has binaries available.
- Jake (aka Jawee)
Compiling is necessary in two places. The first is where you're running a Linux distro that doesn't have a lot of packages. To solve that, run Ubuntu or Debian. The second is when you want the absolute latest of something.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
Mob attack, run and hide LOL kidding. On a serious note, I get all that though I seem to recall having to compile a driver from source for a rather common Intel wireless chipset which wasn't supported in the FC distro I used. Also it is intimidating for mainstream users to even have to understand how to pick one distro over another.
- Bob Ngu
http://contentconsumer.com/2008... - a real life girlfriend and Ubuntu experiment
- Bob Ngu
To the naysayers, the average person is simply not used to installing an operating system. Linux is easier than the rest (most distros), but I don't think a lot of users could install Windows XP.
- Jake (aka Jawee)
from twhirl
Well, it can be difficult to get wireless set up. I'm one of the few that randomly chose a computer and got one with nearly everything, including wi-fi, supported out of the box. Ironically, I don't need the wi-fi support because I run Linux on a desktop. I believe hardware support is going to become dramatically better as more and more companies begin to take Linux seriously.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
Ask your Marketing team to describe what they do in one sentence. Here's my definition in 9 words http://www.web-strategist.com/blog...
Get people to believe in the hype? Kidding, well maybe half kidding.
- Bob Ngu
Avynn (my 11-year old) is in the other room learning to code ruby. "Dad! I made a program that tells you how many characters are in your name!"
Alex Williams, Shey, Jamaican of FF, directeur and AJ Kohn liked this
A Conference Organizer put my name on the public agenda, although I've not agreed to come. This is unethical, I may blog it.
acedanger, Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah, Susan Beebe and 9 other people liked this
Almost as bad is when an organizer includes your name as "invited speaker" on draft programme that circulates to others, before you even see it. In my experience, too common esp here in Europe.
- Neville Hobson
How do you know it wasn't a simple mistake made by a junior person and which wasn't checked?
- Dennis Howlett
from twhirl
Dude, you just did!
- Steve Rubel
from fftogo
Dennis, are you serious? No conference material gets published and distributed unless it has final approval from the head people. This was intentional.
- Gregory Pittman
from twhirl
This happened with Blogworld last year and @techcrunch
- Andy Beard
Business wise it just does not make sense and will be busted even before registration has ended. :(
- Nicole Simon
it's a true sign of fame... why don't you send them a bill?
- mark ivey
I'm just curious if you'll reveal the name the conference or the organizer
- Jennifer Van Grove
from twhirl
ballsy
- anna sauce
While I can understand the problem if the organization has not indicated that you have not confirmed participation on their agenda, why would this be a problem if organizers have in fact indicated that you've been *invited*. That is a mere statement of fact (assuming they have invited you and you have not already declined said invitation.) I understand the possibilities of abuse, but given how slow some people are to agree to or decline a speaking commitment, the organizers may have equally valid concerns
- Jill O'Neill
That is total crap... i can't believe someone would do that to you... I'd make some calls to that group asap.
- Susan Beebe
Bob has a good point in his reply...maybe Blogging about it is a bad idea afterall? hmmm
- Susan Beebe
What Friendfeed Needs to Do to Reach the Average Person - http://codingexperiments.com/archive...
Aditya Banerjee, Sarah Perez, Dobromir Hadzhiev and 19 other people liked this
I disagree on turning off FOAF by default. I've found it to be one of the best features for discovering content.
- Mark Krynsky
I disagree about the friend-of-friend entries, but the others are good sugestions.
- Alejandro
+1 FOAF is impt feature for me.
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
He's not saying remove it, just disable it for new users. It would have no effect on your experience. I think it's reasonable, especially with his other suggestion about having prominent "pro tips." Turning on discovery could be one of those.
- Mark Trapp
@Mark (K) -- I'm with you on the FOAF.
- Roger Chen
Mark: I totally disagree. One of the problems with social media is that if you don't have any friends your experience totally sucks. FOAF brings new people into your view. If you get tired of it you can ask how to turn it off and then you have graduated to a real user of FF.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, like an example feed, more or less, I didn't think of that. It should be obvious how to turn it off and focus on the content in the way you want though: for a lot of people, once they grok what Friendfeed does (with the FOAF feature injecting a bunch of feeds into their stream) they don't want to continue down that path. Something like "Want to hide this? Click here" or something less cheesy.
- Mark Trapp
Agreeing with ya'll: I think FOAF is really important for users with low #s of friends. It gets past the mini-social-grid malaise that causes people with few connex to think services are low value.
- Clay Newton
FOAF is what kept me around. I'm here to learn, and not being an insider I'd be sitting around forever waiting for friends. Because of this feature, I can read content applicable to my profession, follow conversations to learn more, and find other interesting people to follow. It simply would not have been possible without FOAF, and I would quickly have moved on.
- jcunwired
Mark: that sounds sane, but I know Kevin Fox is being very conservative with adding things to the UI. It's not that hard to figure out and the real key is to get people addicted to FF fast. FOAF really helps there so they can see the potential and see that there's a big world here. It's pretty clear if they only add me that something weird is going on, though.
- Robert Scoble
I agree with Robert Scoble 100%. The problem is there is work to get the value (add 10 friends, spend a week subscribing, editing "hide" preferences etc). But if you do the work (and assuming continued growth of FriendFeed). you have a spectacular "serendipity engine". Unfortunately it's not possible to get perfectly automated "serendipity" without the people using it doing any work. FriendFeed needs to strive to provide the serendipity in as few steps as possible though.
- Robert Seidman
FOAF is how FF became useful to me. I'm still discovering people. Rocks.
- Chris Baskind
i personally love the foaf feature & don't think having it off as default is the right way to go - i see foaf as a way to "trial subscribe" to folks before fully subscribing and for new users this should allow them to broaden their network via the 6 degree approach of foaf
- mike "glemak" dunn
I like it too -- in the morning (Eastern time) whan all you west coasters are still in sleeping I see lots of F of F posts so I prospect for interesting people to follow
- Brian Sullivan
I'm not convinced that the content discovery portion of Friendfeed is its only value, though. Without a lot of people in Friendfeed (compared to Facebook or MySpace), and yeah, if your friends aren't already in Friendfeed, FOAF is a huge boon to be able to start using the service right away. But let's fast forward to if/when Friendfeed is a mainstream product, and when you join, a few dozen of your friends are already there. Are you going to be focusing on all the other people, or just your friends?
- Mark Trapp
It need to be implemented in the Facebook mini-feed. One of the things I loath, now that I have seen FF in action is the fact that on fBook, you can't comment on someone's status updates. makes no sense to me.
- Laurent Courtines
from twhirl
+2 For FOAF
- Varun Mahajan
Mark Trapp, but what would it take to convince you that content discovery is the particularly UNIQUE value of FriendFeed? There are a lot of paths for handling content aggregation. Like Facebook and Myspace people will use it in a variety of ways. If you want no serendipity other than you would get from your circle of friends -- you'll focus on your circle of friends. If you want something broader you'll focus more broadly. FF will provide the tools to fine-tune the in-between.
- Robert Seidman
Content discovery is great...but I'm probably enjoying comment discovery and engaging dialog with a whole new set of people even more. With FOAF a friend will reel me into a discussion I may not have known or participated in otherwise. For me, this has been the biggest draw to FF.
- Mark Krynsky
Robert, I think Friendfeed's top value is what you described second: the ability to shape your social experience in the way you want, through the use of hiding, subscribing, likes, and comments. Most other social networks don't give you the amount of flexibility to shape your personal conversation that Friendfeed does. I think it could be more obvious to change your experience, though. For most people, finding out about a feature that saves a bunch of time long after you started using it is frustrating.
- Mark Trapp
I am not sure the average person that everyone is referring to is that same as the average person I would imagine. Most of my friends/acquaintances do not have blogs nor are they signed up to the plethora of social services most here are and furthermore most of their friends are in the same boat. For FF to reach the average person everybody would have to start a blog and join a host of...
more...
- Brian Sullivan
Another interesting stat would be to see how many of my subscriptions & subscribers were generated by FOAF content. I'm guessing upwards of 40%
- Mark Krynsky
I like FF especially so because: 1. I am new to the scene and 2. The more ideas or thoughts that I see keep my ole noggin humming away. I like seeing as much as I can. FOAF entries have allowed me to get more data or "noise" without having to actually subscribe. Then when I find that I have liked or commented on a set amount of FOAF entries, I subscribe to that person.
- Mathew A. Koeneker
Brian, good point. I don't think it's as dire as that though: yeah, Facebook is the 800 pound gorilla, but a lot of these services are "almost there" with the broader mainstream audience. Twitter, Flickr, Linkedin: I wonder how much of these aren't getting huge like Facebook because of the problem that Friendfeed can solve: who has time to go to all these websites?
- Mark Trapp
@Brian - complete agreement. What FF needs to do right now is just continue what they are doing: build a good service that gets more and more useful to a wider and wider audience. The reality check is - most people still won't need it, but *that's okay* - they just need to dominate the market that *will* use it.
- Jeremy Toeman
Mark -- I wasn't intending to indicate any direness in FF position. I agree with Jeremy I think FF should just carry on doing what it is already doing well and can probably be successful financially without going "mainstream"
- Brian Sullivan
also a FOAF fan
- timepilot
I see how everybody is saying that FOAF is one of the best features. While you could argue that, I'm sure that there are those people that just want to use FriendFeed so they can find out what relatives are doing across the country. Right now, FOAF is disabled via the "Hide" link. The average user might not realize that the "See options for hiding other items like this" gives different options based on different items.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
(Continued from above) FOAF is a great tool if you want to discover new people. But many people are more interested in maintaining communication with existing contacts. I think that FriendFeed can do that brilliantly.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
I would love to see a slider that you can use to set the noise level on your account. The more you slide it to the right, more options get enabled (ie. FOAF, etc). This could happen on the main page or the account settings level.
- Tsega Dinka
That slider thing sounds interesting. It could be first presented when the account is created, and if the person feels like there is not enough discussion or too much noise, it can be changed in a settings panel.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
like: tsega's slider concept
- mike "glemak" dunn
I agree with an above comment - the average/mainstream person barely uses social web services at all, let alone uses so many as to make FF useful. That said, I think there's a schism between people who might use FF to discover content vs merely follow the activity of existing contacts. FF would do well to keep that in mind as they develop it.
- Eric P
1. FOAF absolutely should NOT be disabled by default! Too many newbies miss the value of these tools because they feel like they're talking into the void. Maybe adding a visual indicator for FOAF entries (with an explanation) could help. 2. Reducing duplicate content would be helpful, but some of this burden has to be on the publishers as well. If you're duplicating content across 20 sites, maybe you don't need to feed all of those into FF.
- Jennifer Breazeale
Slider is OK, but is kind of simplistic. Don't rule out the ability to micromanage.
- Tanath
I would think that generally any form of noise control setting that is visible both when you register your account AND in the settings panel should be good.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
Just being clear here, references to FOAF on the comments are meant in a social sense and not the RDF/FOAF technical sense.
- Bob Ngu
Average person here. I joined FF looking for people who share my interests (art, 3D, gaming, graphic design, science) I think rooms are the way to get the average person interested. Most of what your core group posts is of little interest to me, so it's from rooms that i find people to subscribe to. Rooms need love and promotion. Cheers.
- sergiooo
Yes, it's rooms that I think are a big feature that could lure many new people to FriendFeed. FriendFeed rooms can be made for local groups like book clubs, sports teams, etc.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
Definitely agree on rooms. It's too difficult to find useful rooms on a topic when you're looking inside FriendFeed. (I know people have external lists)
- Jordan Hofker
Update 10:51 a.m. PDT: Mozilla said in a blog posting that the site should be available "shortly." "The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!). Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly. Download day will officially commence once the site goes live," Mozilla... - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10...
Firefox 3 Direct download links
James Mayer, Alex, ehsan11m and 87 other people liked this
Mac OS X http://download.mozilla.org/...
- Bwana ☠
Windows http://download.mozilla.org/...
- Bwana ☠
This worked for me. Thanks. (I wonder if this counts towards the record).
- Ben
That's how I managed to get it. Working great!
- Jake (aka Jawee)
from twhirl
Works for me too, thanks. I am all for setting the record but if those dorks make it hard for me, then I won't bother
- Bob Ngu
w00t!
- Voyagerfan5761
Thanks a lot!
- Wictor Wilén
You da man, Bwana
- Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah
Well done!
- Rich
Careful with the overseas mirrors. They will not enable auto-update!
- Charlie Anzman
Release candidate 3? I thought this was a final version?
- Brian Sullivan
Great
- Palin Ningthoujam
@Brian Sullivan: RC3 and Final are identical.
- Jake (aka Jawee)
from twhirl
Thanks Bwana! I'm downloading right now :) oh it's finished. see you then.
- Kenichi Matsumoto
I went directly to the source -> ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/
- Mike Marusin
Shit it forces FF as the default browser -- no option to modify during install it seems.
- Brian Sullivan
I guess no one in the tread is participating in the record :-)
- Dobromir Hadzhiev
Well done
- Jican
ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/win32/en-US/
- Will M
Hmmm..custom installation wants Fx in ..Mozilla Firefox Beta 5 folder, is the link really the final release?
- Wictor Wilén
Do we know that the FTP links count?
- Voyagerfan5761
I would hope so: FTP and direct HTTP downloads are trivial to track.
- Mark Trapp
shit - no firebug for rtm yet...B-(. scrambling to remember how to set "ignore compat" switch...
- Shawn L. Morrissey
@Voyagerfan5761: Mozilla said they don't earlier. If you do get it from FTP, download it from the main site later.
- Jake (aka Jawee)
from twhirl
It just installs on top of the existing version.
- Rich
What's the md5? My file (windows) has MD5 = c971bb2273d24d62dd15dcdbd6030ea3
- Rich
Dynamite! thanks bwana!!!
- Noah Carter
Is really the final version identical to the RC3 and so the version we are downloading is just a set up for the firefox down(load) day
- Stéphane Guérin
Thanks Bwana, struggling with server down for minutes :)
- Dan H. Racek
I've only downloaded the Mac version, but the md5 matches on both FTP and the link I provided above. Mac OS X md5: 27ff7989db6a206cdfc8989aca9f9283
- Bwana ☠
I cant spot much differences between RC3 and the final version
- Palin Ningthoujam
There shouldn't be many differences. But so far so good on my system. Seems a little snappier and uses less RAM than earlier betas.
- Robert Scoble
excelent
- Ruben Llibre
Updated. Thank you, Firefox team. A vast improvement over FF2.
- Chris Baskind
Did it. Can I go home now? :)
- Naor Mark
is there somewhere (or some tool) to check compatibility with your addons? I don't want to have to go to each individual addons page and read the fine print.
- Tim Hoeck
Palin, the final release of FF3 is identical to RC3. No code changes whatsoever; it's the same package.
- Gregory Pittman
from twhirl
Linked to this from RWW - awesome! :)
- Sarah Perez
The welcome page says "Release Candidate 3" after I install from the Mac OS X dmg with an MD5 of 27ff7989db6a206cdfc8989aca9f9283. However, the about page says just "version 3.0".
- Fred Yankowski
from twhirl
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox... not working
- Varun Mahajan
The "about" page has said just "Version 3.0" for a while (or at least it does previous in RCs). I can haz actual release and not RC?
- Karim
Shawn, go to http://getfirebug.com. Under releases you can download beta 12. It works with 3. I'm not sure how stable it is, so, as with all betas, installer beware! They claim it to be stable.
- Joel Gray
...getting off topic here, but I've been using Firebug on FF3 for weeks and it's very stable.
- Daniel Shaw
Watch them live on Mogulus...they just said downloading from mozilla.org counts. http://www.mogulus.com/air_moz...
- Bwana ☠
thank you, I can finally download FF3
- Rajiv Doshi
yeah, i've been having a hard time getting the updated firebug for ff3. anyone have an alternative download link?
- Ivan Stegic
never mind, i just answered my own question. firebug for ff3 is available on the ftp servers too, in a different directory. go herE: ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/addons/1843/
- Ivan Stegic
Thank you very much.
- Kevin Porter
thanks for providing the link
- Moksh Juneja
Wow, that link made it much todo about nothing.
- Russellreno
My Mac OS version also has MD5 27ff7989db6a206cdfc8989aca9f9283 - can someone confirm whether it's really final or RC3 (or provide an official confirmation that final == RC3)?
- Chester
For those wondering, the md5 of the Mac OS X download from getfirefox.com and the one I provided above match. Both are 27ff7989db6a206cdfc8989aca9f9283 Those are the official versions
- Bwana ☠
Dude. You're awesome! :)
- Flora
So much for FireFox 3, huh? Page won't load. FAIL
Igor Poltavskiy, Ricardo Vidal, Dobromir Hadzhiev and 9 other people liked this
*sigh*
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
Yeah, I just saw Shey's new post, figured I'd go ahead and download...no dice. I don't think this plan was thought out very well...
- Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah
http://www.mozilla.org/mirrors... but they still have the "not yet" message up on some of the mirrors.
- cmiper
I've gotten it to load and it still says FF2
- Stefan Hayden
Host not available - FAIL.
- Shawn L. Morrissey
Predictable, it seems. You set a goal for massive volumes of downloads, your servers will be hugely taxed.
- Hutch Carpenter
Fail for me as well!!
- Joe Dawson
Has anyone actually downloaded it yet? It's 17mins in.
- Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah
@Rahsheen Porter: A friend of mine just managed to get it, but I haven't.
- Jake (aka Jawee)
from twhirl
Think there's some ISP intervention (Caching the older pages). Can't say it wasn't predictable. Reminds me of the old Microsoft dial-up days
- Charlie Anzman
my kids think this guy looks like me. i don’t see it, but... - http://fredwilson.vc/post...
RAPatton, Robert Seidman and edythe liked this
maybe its the pink crocs ;)
- mike "glemak" dunn
I agree with your kids the center of his face bears a strong resemblance to yours for me,, but not the hairstyle, body type or hopefully, the pink crocs!
- Robert Seidman
Now I'm ashamed. My four-year-old wanted pink crocs tonight and I made him pick a new color because I figured one crack from his brother and he wouldn't wear them and I'd have a useless pair of $25.00 foam shoes until the baby grew into them. *sigh* I did let him get the teal that were his second choice.
- Cyndy
i should fess up that i own multiple pairs of crocs, they are way to comfortable not to - but all are black, tempted by the flashy colored ones but never took the plunge - for me the teasing would come from my teenagers ;)
- mike "glemak" dunn
thinking we need a colored crocs support group room on friendfeed...
- Mark Forman
@Mark Forman: :D
- edythe
i posted a side by side that alex lines did for me http://fredwilson.vc/post...
- Fred Wilson
Why Plurk will not catch on. - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
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siavash, John Duff, Clay Newton and 38 other people liked this
So I figured I'd take advantage of Plurk's Twitter import feature; worked great, found a bunch of people I already follow on Twitter (61 to be exact). Except I'm not allowed to import them all, only 50 of them. Because the timeline would be too crowded. Sacrificing user experience to preserve a design aesthetic is "worst mistake you can ever make as a web developer" #1.
- Mark Trapp
Had the same issue Mark. Just ran it twice. Got them all in.
- Robert Sanzalone
So Scoble would have to run that import, um... 400 times or so if all his contacts were to switch to Plurk? Yes, fail.
- Cyndy
plus you have to select them one by one, a bit too much clicking
- Dobromir Hadzhiev
They've said it many times Plurk is not designed to be like Twitter. They've designed it to communicate with your close friends, everyone else you should become their fan. They constanly discourage adding hundreds and hundreds of friends and your "karma" is not rewarded for it. I got clarification on this the other day. It's part of the system design to use it this way. Right? Wrong? Who knows, but that's how it is.
- Bwana ☠
Sure Bwana, but providing tools like this only serve to confuse that message. Providing an importer from Twitter says "We want you to use us instead of Twitter, look how easy it is to migrate over!" only to tell the user "whoa, not so fast, only 50 people! We know best for you!" and, to top it all off, it's not even enforced; as Robert points out, if I go back do the import over, I can add another 50 from my list, which seems to fly in the face of why they're saying there's a 50 person limit.
- Mark Trapp
Good software solves a need. Great software solves a need and backs the hell off. Let me use Plurk the way I want, don't tell me what's best for me. I know what's best for me. You gave me a tool to import my Twitter contacts? Awesome, let me import all of them. Not 50. Not 50 at a time. All of them.
- Mark Trapp
If it were enforced, then I'd see your point, but it's not. It's a way of saying, you'll be sorry if you do this. Look at the flip side, what if they allowed you to do it and your timeline becomes severely cluttered? I'm 80% sure some would complain that "you should have warned us about this". I seriously doubt they are taking the attitude "we know what's best for you", it's more of a "if you do this action, here are the consequences..here's a slight hinderance to bring the point home".
- Bwana ☠
Bottom line is, this feature was put there because of Twitter's problems, but now this limitation is there to preserve the intended experience. Some would say they are stupid for not capitalizing on Twitter's woes, which is what they're doing. Some would say, don't put the feature there if you don't want it used like Twitter, which is what you're saying. It's a compromise on their part which I don't think will make or break the service.
- Bwana ☠
Except there's no option to say "I got it, now let me do it anyway." You just get the error message. The only way to add more people is to more or less randomly try to import again, where it happily lets you import another 50. No warning there saying "Hey, you already have more than 50 people on your list, you shouldn't enter any more." No, the way this is handled only serves to confuse and infuriate people.
- Mark Trapp
Twitter wasn't designed to be used like it's being used either. I don't like Plurk, personally, but find it hilarious to say "You don't WANT more than 50 users imported. It will TOTALLY wreck our design!" Is it an app or is it performance art?
- Cyndy
People don't have time to figure out what the developer's intentions are. If they can't use a website in an expected manner, they leave. Providing this feature in the way in which it was provided tells people "we don't want you here." Sure, they are never going to be Twitter, but doing things like this (and the big disclaimer telling everyone to only add your very closest friends) means they will never catch on, even by themselves.
- Mark Trapp
Twitter's simplicity allows for flexibility. Plurk's timeline does not. It's a warning, nothing more, nothing less. If it bothers you that much, there's plenty more in there that I'm sure will deter you from using it.
- Bwana ☠
Bwana, it's not a warning. If there was a banner at the top of the import saying "We strongly discourage adding more than 50 people" before adding people, that'd be a warning. It outright refuses to add more than 50 people, and provides no recourse. Only people who thought "what the hey, let me try it again" were able to do it again, again with no warning. This is stupid how they implemented this.
- Mark Trapp
Mark, I don't think this UI defect is enough to make or break the system. There are way too many other factors to consider. Many other services don't even offer a Twitter import, let alone hooks into Twitter's service. If I were writing this defect as a tester, I would mark as a medium priority only because it's a barrier to entry. It's a low priority since it' a generally a one time function.
- Bwana ☠
Bwana, I realize now that my screenshot is a bit misleading. The banner at the top of it only shows up AFTER you try to import more than 50 people. It's not there before.
- Mark Trapp
Ok Mark, you've made your point that it's stupid to implement it this way. So are you going to submit it as feedback to Plurk? :)
- Bwana ☠
Bwana, the apparent impetus for a feature like this, based on the available information, is to preserve the design aesthetic of the site. "It'd be too crowded!" There are a few things you can sacrifice usability for: technical limitations and functional requirements are two of them. But to sacrifice it for your design is insane. They either need to figure out how to handle more than 50 people, or make a cogent case for why more than 50 people is unnecessary.
- Mark Trapp
Bwana, that brings up a whole other issue I have with Plurk. Where are the developers?
- Mark Trapp
Blog: http://blog.plurk.com Contact Form: http://www.plurk.com/contact My favorite is contact them directly on Plurk. I've submitted much feedback to amix (http://www.plurk.com/user/amix) as he's the lead developer. Here's a useless page listing the team members..nothing's linked there http://www.plurk.com/plurkteam . They generally listen.
- Bwana ☠
I asked him to join our discussion: http://www.plurk.com/p/86au
- Bwana ☠
I used the faceless contact form pointing to the discussion, as well. I guess there's no @reply notification or direct messaging feature in Plurk, too?
- Mark Trapp
yes there is a direct message feature, (called a private plurk) however, you must be friends with the individual from what I recall.
- Bwana ☠
Nice, if I click on your link, then click "My Profile," it brings me to your profile.
- Mark Trapp
LOL
- Bwana ☠
I can only add so many new things to my "brain feed-stream". Unfortunately, I deem Plurk a FAIL. Just too juvenile a feel. I need no more MySpace clones.
- Mathew A. Koeneker
Hi guys. I am a developer of Plurk and I want to share some input on this. The major factor for this limit is performance - fetching and inserting timelines from hundreds/thousands of users isn't cheap and would be very costly. The second major factor is that following a lot of people on Plurk will have penalties as we don't have all the timeline filters developed. But we do listen to...
more...
- Amir Salihefendic
Sigh. Now you know why I love FriendFeed so much. No limits. Always fast. I reload the page hundreds of times a day.
- Robert Scoble
Oh, and I already have more than 800 friends on Plurk (compared to more than 12,000 followers on FriendFeed and 26,000+ on Twitter) and I only manually added a handful.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, FriendFeed does have limits. Both you and I ran into one of them. There was a comment limit which caused commenting to fail after a certain point. FriendFeed raised the limit once we brought it to their attention. Come on now, FriendFeed isn't THAT perfect.
- Bwana ☠
Bwana: that limit didn't hurt and was, like you said, instantly raised. I haven't hit it since despite thousands of comments.
- Robert Scoble
plurk needs an api stat, i doubt people want to use it as there sole twitter like interface
- Chris Jones
Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter all these services have SIMILAR goals. Again this reinforces to me that microblogging is becoming the "new email" (aka killer app). Email, IM, microblogging three great ways to communicate. Perhaps FriendFeed will be the savior for all of them. But FF would have to also be able to post freely to them as well. So, FF becomes something like a service and you use apps like Twhirl, etc to interact with your stream.
- Tris Hussey
Plurk isn't made for us: http://friendfeed.com/e... Think outside the box perhaps?
- Bwana ☠
Leave it up to Robert to jinx FriendFeed :) It's been pretty slow today and I'm getting sporadic Service Unavailable errors. No system is perfect :)
- Bwana ☠
Or maybe because the UI is annoying as hell...
- Eric Florenzano
My guess why it wont catch on....Because we don't need it.
- Gadiel Rivera
I submit Plurk's not disruptive enough. Twitter's *different*. FriendFeed, too. Plurk...not so much.
- Brent Newhall
That limitation can be fixed, fixing Twitter's downtime problem is another story as we all know.
- Bob Ngu
Is Plurk the Twitter killer? http://www.neowin.net/news...
Jack Collins, Charlie Hope, Shawn L. Morrissey and 4 other people liked this
If it is, that means that there's something wrong with the world.
- Robert Scoble
Never.
- Daniel Backhaus
You have only just realised there is something wrong with today's society!
- Joe Dawson
Not sure anyone needs to kill Twitter.
- AJ Kohn
Not from what I've seen of it. Plurk just doesn't do it for me.
- William Beem
Never going to understand the "-killer" mentality. If companies like Novell are still around, then almost any company can survive on the merits of their technology. It's running out of cash that kills them - not other products.
- Ray Grieselhuber
well Ray, Sony is not running out of cash, although the iPod killed the Walkman...:)
- Benoit Octave
from Alert Thingy
Plurk is cute -- Teens will love it.
- Stephen Pierzchala
Only Twitter can kill Twitter, and damn it, they're trying!
- William Beem
Plurk interface is harder to use.
- Mike Reynolds
Stephen is totally right. Plurk is conversation, chat. Twitter is broadcast (with conversation tacked on to it). Very different beasts, and Plurk will be much more popular in the long run with a younger crowd.
- Ian Betteridge
How many more of such message will we see, comparing Plurk with Twitter?
- Winston Teo
@Winston as many as there were Twitter-FriendFeed comparisons no doubt
- Chinkerfly
from twhirl
Bah! Plurk Sucks IMHO. Its Too Teeny Boppy. Agree with @Stephen; Teens will love it.
- Parth Awasthi
Argh, stupid Twhirl screwed up my first attempt. Anyway, I disagree with the "it's too teeny boppy" argument. The reason why Facebook and esp MySpace is so popular is that the majority of their users are teeny boppers and mainstream users. So the fact Plurk is seeing more mainstream users right off the bat is a GOOD sign IMO.
- Bob Ngu
from twhirl
Stupid me looking for the "Like" button on Twitter. FAIL
Graham Garland, Mitchell Tsai, David Cook and 25 other people liked this
You can star Twitter entries to put them in your favorites.
- Morton Fox
good one Shey! LOL
- Susan Beebe
ditto to Morton: Gold Star Favorite feature on Twitter very underused. I love it :)
- Barbara K. Baker
haha, you can't find the hide button there either.
- Thomas Hawk
You don't need to hide anything on Twitter - just hit "refresh", it'll be gone soon enough :)
- Nathaniel Payne
Give twitter a break guys, they should make a website filled up of "Twitter Jokes"
- Gordon Swaby
<quiet whisper> BTDT</quiet whisper>
- Steven Hodson
It's actually a "No Shit" moment@ Bob
- Gordon Swaby
FF has me conditioned too!
- Anthony Farrior
instead of a hide button to remove 1 convo thread, twitter hides all of them - that's the cool "something is technically wrong" feature!
- Susan Beebe
lol@Susan
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
Hahahah. Plurk is already down. Fail. And no Fail Whale, either. Double fail! Hint: if you want to be the next Twitter: stay up. Always.
karl dotter, Robbie van der Blom, Loic Le Meur and 24 other people liked this
it was down this morning too, rebounded pretty nicely though for a big push tonight.
- MG Siegler
that's why Twitter may just succeed - I doubt many services are ready to compete with Twitter on an architectural level. By the time they are, so will Twitter.
- Jesse Stay
if you want to be the next twitter, just wait for SXSW next year, but still probly wont happen for you lol, the fail whale is hungry
- Anthony
Yeah, I fill cheated. Where's the picture of headless birds lifting a whale torso out of the water? :-) In all seriousness, twisted images aside, I don't see what unique offerings Plurk brings to the table.
- Joanmarie
tough crowd.
- Eric Schlissel
from twhirl
I'm sure the plunk engineers were thrilled when leo sent out a mass invite and 9:30 am on sunday morning. They were probably doubly thrilled when scoble showed up. I bet their job sucked today.
- Doug Brooks
so far so lame
- adolfo foronda
Doug, what do you mean? All new startup engineers should be ready for a mass invite by Leo, shouldn't they? ;-)
- Jesse Stay
they fell to the scoble and leo effect
- Charles Rice
from twhirl
I tried it just now and deleted my account soon afterward due to the name restrictions (had to be at least two words, it appeared). But it wasn't down.
- Voyagerfan5761
they weren't expecting all the attention, it's your fault... again... : http://blog.plurk.com/
- David Petar Novakovic
from twhirl
There's two million people on Twitter. Only about 90 have added me as friends on Plurk so far. Fail.
- Robert Scoble
down for me also from their blog: "You can rest easy knowing that every facet of Plurk is built with scaling in mind from day one"
- fbrunel
i just looked at plurk, and it scares me. what's going on in there?!
- Craig Childs
Why have I ALWAYS to be right when everyone believes at first the other thing? :) Am I a genius?
- directeur
Try FAIL fish ... blowing hard but can't blow enough bubbles!! LOL
- Susan Beebe
Humor is another :)
- directeur
jesse, easier said than done.. just saying I'm glad that wasn't my sunday :) imagine waking up to that ehhe. I find the whole thing quite hilarious.
- Doug Brooks
it won't stay up long enough for me to add you robert
- marty nickel
from twhirl
yep...it's borked up and that fish is blowing so hard it's head's gonna pop off like that bone-head dog! LOL ...lameO
- Susan Beebe
if you want to be the next twitter all you have to do is stay up. that's pretty much it. someone famous once said 90% of anything is showing up - well maybe 90% of web app success is staying up.
- Morgan
Doug, oh yeah, I understand, and I feel for them. I remember waking up to hear our site was on the front page of MSN at one startup I was at several years ago. Those days were horrible days! And I was the only guy that could fix it!
- Jesse Stay
as a side note i put that poor logo's head back on :) http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Doug Brooks
It was only a matter of time, seriously.
- Mack D. Male
pretty clone, but running into scalability issue way too early
- MojiPage
it's still up for me .. maybe I missed it
- John Blanton
from twhirl
You and Leo Laporte should sell your service as a "scalability audit" :)
- Katherine Druckman
How do Python and the other technologies today scale? I've heard many Ruby on Rails complaints. How about others?
- Mitchell Tsai
Shame! Python not scaling? You sure are kidding Bob? :)
- directeur
directeur, I am being facetious LOL. I know that Google is largely written in Python, so yeah it scales but even that is a silly thing to say because a language is but one small piece of the overall architecture. Likewise, people need to stop blaming Ruby on Rails for Twitter's downtime, even Twitter has came out and said as much recently.
- Bob Ngu
Bob, you're very right, but I won't compare Python to Ruby ;-)
- directeur
Disqus new office - http://qik.com/video/90609
Colby Olson, Zulu, Mitchell Tsai and Tyler Gillies liked this
so Robert, do you have disqus on your site yet?
- Nathan Eckenrode
Hey man, looks like you still need to add disqus ;)
- Phil Harnish
Twitter blames its users - http://scobleizer.com/2008...
Brian Bufalo, Jed White, Stanton Champion and 33 other people liked this
I think you played it cool. Cool post and you didn't pull an Arrington. In other words, you did a good job toning down the ego and seeing it's a community issue rather than a Scoble issue :-) Even if that IS what Twitter meant.
- Andrew Dobrow
"pull an arrington" - love that!
- marty nickel
from twhirl
"I’ve sent 3,598 tweets (Twitter messages) — Scoble has sent 12,318. This is clearly putting a strain on the service." That's the equivilent of over THREE heavy users then. Scoble is clearly abusing Twitter's stable system.
- Chris Nixon
scoble dude. calm down.
- Alex Gawley
I'm wondering will Google also say sometimes that You got our servers down because you send 2000 emails everyday.. where our system is built to hold load of just 30 emails everyday!!
- Jigar Mehta
from bTT
Alex: I'll calm down when Twitter stops blaming its users and fixes its service. Thanks.
- Robert Scoble
FriendFeed is just built better. It has to do the same thing as Twitter, send out messages/information (longer than 140 chars I might add) from one users to 12,000+ followers, etc. FriendFeed isn't having issues. Yes, FF isn't as big as Twitter yet, but I have the feeling the Ex-Google engineers here at FF know what the hell they're doing more.
- Ben Parr
Robert, this time you couldn't be more wrong. Read the post carefully once again . Twitter is simply explaining how things can go wrong from time to time - certainly not blaming you.
- Ron Emrick
We just have to face the fact, Twitter has hit the limit of scalability now.. They need an intelligent consultant to help them resolve their issues! Anybody, help!!
- Jigar Mehta
from bTT
Ron, here's what Alex Payne said: "The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular” users - that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following - perform a number of actions in rapid succession." THAT IS BLAMING. And, since I'm the only one who has 20,000+ followers and behaves like that, they are being very specific in their blame.
- Robert Scoble
Twitter just leveled down... bad form Twitter, bad form.
- Bwana ☠
They're not blaming you. They are blaming themselves for being unable to cope with you and other superusers.
- Jamie
@Ron The point is that the system was designed incorrectly. Either you build it to scale for someone to have 20,000 mutual contacts or you limit the number of contacts. Or you limit the eleventy billion "graph a pretty picture of your Tweets" apps that have access to your API. It is NEVER the fault of any action done by your users unless they are running a DDOS against you, and at that point, they cease being users anyway. And OMG, did I just write a rant defending Robert Scoble? I do believe I did.
- Cyndy
That's about as plain as you get. They're saying they can lighten the load by limiting power users in a nutshell. Sigh.
- Bwana ☠
Jamie: well, then they can come here and say that and apologize for causing my name to be at the top of TechMeme right now.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, I'll end by saying its unfortunate you see it as BLAMING when I really believe its EXPLAINING! :-) I think you may be taking this a little too personally. Twitter is finally doing a good job acknowledging the problems they have and communicating them to us all as much as they possibly can. I'm sure they never intended for this sort of discussion to occur when they published their post. All in good fun Robert...
- Ron Emrick
and they just got $15 mil in funding?
- MikeAmundsen
@jowyang showed us the 'real' Twitter problem - it's the few birds that are flying the wrong way ;)
- Kate
Ron: when your name is used in headlines at http://www.techmeme.com, then you can not take it personally. This stuff IS personal. It's called social software for a reason. :-)
- Robert Scoble
To me, instead of playing the blame game I would think that twitter would take advantage of its power users learn their patterns and build out to scale.
- Kevin Tunis
robert - no offence intended when i suggested you 'calm down' just trying to lighten the tone :) I think that the original post was not very well written and quotes have been wrenched out of context and now it seems much worse than it was. When I read the post I read it as: Our architecture does not scale well and so we can't serve the most prolific users of the service well. I thought it was quite mea culpa...
- Alex Gawley
@Cyndy - Agreed 100% that the problems lie at the feet of Twitter and not Scoble or any other high profile Tweeters out there. I just believe that the context and intent of the post was *never* to blame but rather to explain. I can understand why some may see it as "blame" but I simply disagree... hope that helps explain my position a little better.
- Ron Emrick
Ron: explaining? OK. It's still down. They made it sound like the biggest load is noisy popular users (there's only really one of those in the world) doing rapid tweets. Only I behave that way. So, why is the system still down? I stopped Tweeting, yet IM is still down, track is still down, and the site itself is slow. Does this go to their credibility? Let's say they are right. Why penalize everyone then? WHy not just throttle the popular accounts? Wouldn't that fix the problem? No? Why bring it up then?
- Robert Scoble
Robert - shouldn't your ire then be directed at VentureBeat? They're one of the first (if not the first) to identify you as someone to "blame".
- Ron Emrick
Why would Robert infer that he is being blamed? He loves to be the victim. Al3x didn't blame anyone, and Robert is twisting this whole conversation around to be about himself. Al3x gave a very frank answer about what specific actions their current architecture has issues with. That's not blaming anyone it's telling the truth, something that people like Robert have encouraged them to do over and over. Now that Twitter is finally communicating with their users, Robert finds something else to attack
- Clint Ecker
Lets not forget hat they went down on the day of the Tweet Out as well
- Marco(aureliusmaximus)
Ron, Scoble is widely known as the top Twitter user. We didn't need VentureBeat's help to figure out who Twitter was talking about.
- Bwana ☠
"WHy not just throttle the popular accounts? Wouldn't that fix the problem? No? Why bring it up then?" Maybe because they aren't blaming the users, and think that people like you SHOULD be able to use the service in the way that you do.
- Ian Betteridge
And why doesn't Friendfeed have the same issues? Because it's no where near as big as Twitter. I don't even know why you would bring FF into this whole matter. It's not even close to the same scale.
- Clint Ecker
Ron, that isn't an explanation. An explanation is "Gee, we didn't realize that our architecture wouldn't be able to handle the load when we have several users with over 5000 mutual contacts, and we need to figure out how to fix that or set limits on the number of contacts. This is why marketing folks wisely keep the programmers away from the public in most instances.
- Cyndy
Gah. FF doesn't allow enough characters. I'm just going to hop on the bitchmeme train and blog it.
- Cyndy
Clint: >>Why would Robert infer that he is being blamed? << There is only one person who has more than 20,000 followers that behaves in a noisy, bursty way. No one else behaves that way. There is only one possible person they could have been talking about. Me.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, again, your 'beef' here should be with Venturebeat who, if you are going to take the line that it "is personal", were the ones who mention you by name - and let's face it, by naming you they are guaranteed to get some traffic. Twitter have not named you personally, and have not, in fact, blamed anyone but themselves for their problems.
- Scott O'Raw
i'm going to have to agree that this smacks of blaming users. maybe that wasn't intentional. i hope it wasn't. when you use phrasing that implies, however mildly or unintentionally, that your own users are involved in DoS (even if it's not implied as a malicious attack), that's blaming. if i'm patching a hole and don't have enough drywall, i don't tell my customer the hole she knocked in the wall is too big; i tell her i didn't bring enough drywall, and then i go buy more.
- hisherness
i realize twitter isn't a paid service, and i realize some allowances must be made for that, but with the venture funding and all i assume they'll eventually turn a profit. one must start as one means to go on, and this just isn't the way to start.
- hisherness
I don't agree Robert. There are several people who follow and are followed by a lot of people. No one set any limits on what they meant by "popular". You only know of people who have a lot of followers but there are TONS of people who follow more people than you. There are people who follow 40k+ 60k+ and I'm sure more. Those people hit the system hard too. Again, they didn't "blame" anyone, if anything they blamed their own architecture for not being able to handle those kinds of actions.
- Clint Ecker
@Robert Actually, Calacanis is pretty noisy. I can't follow him anymore either, but I still know the dog names. ;)
- Cyndy
Robert, we know you've been singing the Friendfeed song for the past few weeks, so it's not the Scoblizer who broke Twitter. Most of the readers of my blog subscribe via a thing called RSS, but too many bloggers Tweet a link to a new blog and then reTweet it an hour later. So I guess most people are not using Feed Readers or Friendfeeders.
- paul mooney
I think what Alex really meant is "It's because 'popular' user dragged our 'bad design' service down."
- Panu Tangchalermkul
I agree with Scott. This was mentioned as a transaction processing issue, not a Robert Scoble issue. Not a user issue. Alex was asked what the problem was and gave an honest answer: throughput is challenged under certain conditions - and they're working on it! Thanks to VB, everyone's on the warpath. For what?
- Eric Weaver
Are people really looking this hard for something to make drama about? Sheesh. Is this what happens on a "slow news day" in tech pundit land?
- Soulhuntre
from twhirl
I see in the Venture Beat article that Twitter said "Not running scripts which follow thousands of users at a time would be a help" - ermmm. I'm sure I read that Twitter actually enabled/created this FOR Scoble, to 'follow back' all his followers in one go?
- kosso
Everything is made with certain assumptions in mind. Ikea probably makes chairs assuming they will inhabited by one person at a time, and that the person weighs less than 500 pounds. If reports of broken chairs surface and Ikea says most of the broken chairs are owned by people who weigh over 500 pounds, you can either read that as "blaming" fat people, or as an admission that they didn't design the chair to fit the 0.02% of the population weighing over 500 pounds.
- Karim
If you write an app with a field that's designed to hold 15 characters, and someone enters 16 characters in the field and the app crashes, is that the user's fault? You can either read that as "blaming" the user, or as an admission that the app wasn't designed to hold more than 15 characters in that field.
- Karim
Twitter said, "Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that’s behavior we have to limit on our side." i.e. we didn't realize people would use the service this way, but we need to fix this service to prevent this behavor, NOT ASK THE USER TO CHANGE.
- Karim
Contrast this to what Facebook did to you when you, as a user, exhibited "unexpected behavior" and used Plaxo to download your contacts. Instead of limiting the service on their side so you *couldn't* eat up excessive resources with Plaxo, they banned your account. They expected YOU to change. They blamed YOU.
- Karim
Twitter is losing me.. I am starting to get hooked on this FriendFeed thing now.
- Winston Teo
i am finding twitter as redundant tooo ... since i just follow and dont send too many updates ....ff is better
- Raza
from Alert Thingy
Is there any why to sign up for a Jaiku account? The whole twitter thing is getting bad.
- Brian Bufalo
I am using Jaiku. Done. Finished with Twitter. This is beyond the pale.
- Andrew Ruess
Hey, Scoble - stop breaking Technorati! They're down :-(
- Lars G. Sehested
http://xrl.us/bmazc tweets totally f#(%ed twitter
- Noah David Simon
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