“Flickr videos has a maximum time of 90 seconds. This seems absolutely brilliant to me because with one single parameter they're defining the entire spirit and purpose of the feature. It's not YouTube. It's different.”
I have to say I'm also happy about that limit. It's enough for short "family videos" and such, and enables the videos to dovetail nicely amongst the photos. - Adam Lasnik
Not sure, why 12+ peeps - flaged as "liked" ?? 2nd'ly- creative fashion w/food stuffs when half the world is in near starvation mode, jus shows the metal state of the person who did it. GROSS is an understateme - Peter Dawson
Number 5 for me: function to explode the link. - Carlo Maglinao
@Tony, when you have a small number, they are countable. I assume for Fred and others, the number is much more difficult to ascertain, unless you're good at scanning multiples of three for hundreds of rows. - Louis Gray
@Louis, ahh, now I see. Thanks for the info Louis. Well if we're lucky by the time if ever I get to that point, we'll have a count number there as well. - Tony Miller
Good suggestions. I especially like the term "explode the link" :) - Paul Buchheit
Looks like they are still listening. I now see the number of people subbed to me now as well as all the pictures. - Tony Miller
Yep. I use it to create a private site for parents at our school to share pictures, plan events, etc.. It is super easy and does the job. - Edwin Khodabakchian
I've heard of two Ning success stories. From my anecdotal and unscientific surveys, most people join and forget. I'll see if we can't get a Mash poll on it or something. It'll still be unscientific, but at least less anecdotal. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
It is super easy but way back when I first tried it, I wasn't impressed with the features. A bit too easy, in my opinion. And philosophically, I don't know about the wisdom of creating 10 kajillion niche social networks. Not sure it can hold user interest after a piece. - Carla Thompson
It's not how many connections you have, it's the quality and relevance of the conversation. - Mike Reynolds
Wow... I can't believe he just blew up like that. It doesn't look like you were attacking him at all and all of a sudden he just comes after you. - Brandon Titus
One of the best bits of advice I ever read was 'Imagine your mother is reading your blog'. Does Riley always swear so much ? I think the article is way over the top. - Andy C
New catchphrases for the week: "awesomesauce" and "tits on a bull" - Jason Kaneshiro
The most amusing part is being mentioned as if I positioned as an A-Lister. Anybody who has talked to me or traded e-mails knows I know my place. But... seriously... I'm not engaging here. - Louis Gray
LOL. Someone needs a hug. If that's what he calls someone "coming after him", I'd hate to see someone really give him some nasty criticism. I hope he lightens up and realizes his overreaction. - Bwana McCall
Calling you Louise as an insult was a throwback to Jim Rome-Jim Everett. What year is it again? Resorting to LCD insults, nice. Remember this guy called Doris Lessing's comments "the ditherings of an ignorant old woman". - Jake Kuramoto
Holy cow. Talk about temper tantrum. Personally, I'd say *his* article is about as "useful as tits on a bull" - Michelle W
lol: "That’s right, I forgot, I’m a complete retard." Ironically, I think his post has just welcomed you permanently to the A-list. - j1m
Also there are amusing comments, like "Grow up, you immature, ill tempered idiot. You sound like an 5 year old stamping his feet, throwing a tantrum who has just discovered swearing." - j1m
Not the kind of insight you'll expect from a person who claim to blog for a "bloody long time". - Carlo Maglinao
Well, it still generates press for FriendFeed. :) - Chris White
So do you think Duncan will log into FriendFeed and read this comment thread :| - Jason Kaneshiro
Louis, just wondering, are you doing PR for Friendfeed? - Erick Schonfeld
heh I don't agree with you there Louis... the techcrunch I've read is wrong most of the time, specially this Duncan fellow. - Mario Romero
If he's not doing PR, he should be. I dismissed FriendFeed just as fast as Duncan until I read his blog post about it. - Bwana McCall
He responded to my comment on his blog: "his whole tone was Duncan is an idiot and it does these things and its wonderful because I say so. If you can see that you're either up his arse so far the sun isn't shining, or you need some remedial reading lessons." I think he means "can't" in that second sentence. - Brandon Titus
"Grow up, you immature, ill tempered idiot. You sound like an 5 year old stamping his feet, throwing a tantrum who has just discovered swearing." That was me. It got under Riley's skin so much he chose to delete it, which is very satisfying. Plus I got a very amusing email with more profanity. - Andy C
I wish Duncan would make all his TechCrunch posts this colorful. - Jess Lee
@Jess, sure... just keep me out of it! :-) - Louis Gray
It's an odd discussion. One party is saying others who don't like Friendfeed should like it. The other party replies that those who do like Friendfeed shouldn't. Why not just let those who like it use it and let those who don't like it, well, not use it. E.g. I never used Twitter or a (traditional) feed reader and even when others love it, if it's not for me why should anyone worry. Might be better to just leave friendly tips on how to improve browsing but not try evangelize about the right or wrong things to do. I suppose this whole debate is partly caused by the fact Friendfeed is a bit like a rorschach ink test... you can project anything into it based on your suscriptions, which complicates reviews as there's not "one" Friendfeed. - Philipp Lenssen
Wow, is there nothing Duncan likes, or do I just keep seeing is negative posts? :( - Paula Hawk
I agree with one of his points though: conversation at the source isn't enhanced by friendfeed. Certainly it's a different use case, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be a part of the aggregator. By using APIs, SocialThing is actually able to push comments/replies/likes back to the sources. Then you can have both conversations with friends and with the public. What's yet to be seen though is a service which merges both conversations in a meaningful way. - taj
Sorry to "get off topic," as it were, but this discussion has revealed a drawback in FriendFeed. When Louis shared this item, a ton of discussion took place, yet (last I checked) there was hardly any discussion at the FriendFeed link to the post in Duncan Riley's own feed. http://friendfeed.com/e/8fe997... Louis had to go to that entry and manually link to this entry, since FriendFeed didn't automatically relate the two. - Ontario Emperor
@Ontario_Emperor I don't know if that's a drawback, I don't think FriendFeed would have any problem associating the posts, this is just the way the comment communities work on FriendFeed (I think it's pretty cool). We're discussing with Louis his shared item, which happens to be Duncan's post which also has its own comment thread for his friend circle. - Mario Romero
With FriendFeed's introduction of search capability, this issue is effectively solved. Try a search for the words more hyped yawn. - Ontario Emperor
Wow, have to say I'm surprised at all the negativity....how could someone *not* like friendfeed? - Benjamin Golub
Don't sweat Duncan Riley. He's like Mikey from the old life cereal commercial. He hates everything. In any case, I don't utilize services just cause the cool kids are there. I utilize them because they are useful. And FriendFeed is a useful tool for keeping track of 'people' as opposed to just subscribing to a blog. More at http://blog.awakenedvoice.com/.... - Rob Safuto
"As the chart I pulled from FriendFeed demonstrates, nearly half of all entries from my friends come from Twitter." Truth be told if half the entries I'd see here were from Twitter I wouldn't like Friendfeed either. So I guess it depends on your subscriptions (though of course it will be improved once the global-mutings-of-a-type-of-feed are implemented on the user settings page). - Philipp Lenssen
I like FriendFeed for the fact that it is introducing me to more people with the "friend of" feature. It's extending the conversation to a wider group of people. - Steven Melfi
I voted Yes, Friendfeed wins hands down on coverage of services, UI, and performance and most of all the private commenting community is rich, you are really on to something here, all the inane YouTube style comments are gone from here because you actually know the people or have few degrees of separation - this is a great product - Aneto
Duncan Riley signed up for one day. It takes more than a few minutes to get FriendFeed. But he's TC's resident grump. - Louis Gray
Can we impose a rule that you can't review services like FriendFeed unless you've been using the service for at least a week? Duncan brings up a few decent points but it reminds me of all of those MSM journalists who reviewed Twitter based on a quick glance at the Twitter home page. - Mike Doeff
I have a truly marvelous point-by-point debunking of this post which this margin is too narrow to contain. - j1m
"Can we impose a rule that you can't review services like FriendFeed unless you've been using the service for at least a week?" I think that's hardly feasible for a blog with multiple posts per day... imagine the blogger having to use dozens of crappy services throughout the week (we know FF isn't crappy, but some other services may be)! Of course, even if you use something just for a day you should follow your instinct if you think the tool needs longer evaluation, and disclose that in the post. Otherwise, I think what's more feasible is to write a follow-up once you used a service longer, and/ or integrate comments into the post from people who used it for longer already. (Some blogs don't update their post with comment feedback though, which I think is unfortunate.) - Philipp Lenssen
PS: On the other hand, there may well be a blogging niche for someone only actually doing a couple of used-for-a-week reviews per week. It would not be a news blog but a review blog. Hmm. It's easier if you are a niche blog focusing only on one company, I guess, because then you can take the time to use the company's tool for much longer stretches of time. - Philipp Lenssen
The poll's a little disappointing. The choices equate to 'I haven't heard of FriendFeed' 'I like FriendFeed' and 'I might try FriendFeed' but the results are framed as 'FriendFeed is not good, good, or undecided'. Sigh. - Kevin Fox
Still, it's an honest comment. Taking the devil's advocate stance can force people to view their choices in a different light. However, putting the survey at the end of such a blatantly negative article is definitely going to bias the outcome... if you could ever consider the survey "valid" in the first place. - Steve Lynch
Eh, you win some you lose some. You guys are lucky we covered you twice. I'm sure nobody here would be complaining if I had put that poll at the end of my post:http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... - Erick Schonfeld
In other words, take both posts together, and there's your balance. Anyway, blogs are not about balance. they are about strongly held convictions. And Duncan keeps us honest at TC with his. - Erick Schonfeld
"You guys are lucky we covered you twice" What stones you have! Are you so deluded that you think TechCrunch can make or break a company with a blog post? - Rob Safuto
I'm not complaining; I just care deeply about quantitative research methodologies. Anyway, one post was "FriendFeed News, here's an analysis" and the other was "FriendFeed sucks, I'm trying to stir up controversy." - Steve Lynch
Duncan's post actually reminded me of a Paul Saffo Long Now lecture on predictions: it's always a safe bet to take the other side when people are proclaiming the Next Big Thing. Look how it's driving traffic to his article. - Steve Lynch
I know I'm probably in the minority, but I actually like using FriendFeed by itself. I just like posting things from the web and discussing it with comments. - Chris White
When people start complaining about you, think you have arrived - Varun Mahajan
I think friendfeed is great for sharing, but it's also a good way of reliving your web history. I like going back and seeing the links I have posted, especially where they have images. - David Tapper
my tiny little gift for FF - bookmarklet in Java, put into your browser bookmarks and use for sharing, tetsed on FireFox, it works! javascript:location.href='http://friendfeed.com/share?ur...) - silpol
“Friendfeedfolk: How important is comment styling? Being able to linkify text? make things bold or italic? What's your favorite means: HTML, markdown, *IM* _client_ /style/?”
IMO having no special syntax but potentially just adjusting the output to stuff people already use -- like *this* and _this_ and http: //bla stuff -- can make sense. But in a way just leaving as is also seems to be cool because *this* style already looks exactly like what it's supposed to mean, right... and turning e.g. :) into a full-blown yellow icon can be overkill, I personally don't like that. - Philipp Lenssen
PS: A YouTube link could turn into the YouTube video as expandable embedding, an HTML link could take the linked-to page title as link text (plus showing the domain, it might contain valuable info), a link to an SWF could turn into an expandable embedded SWF, an image could... etc. - Philipp Lenssen
Nah, I agree with Phillip. I don't think that a rich, special syntax would help much. It would end up like a Steven Hodson wiki experience. I was thinking that you guys are parsing the @toddmck text to make a twitter link out of it, but maybe that's only for inbound links from twitter. Something like that, in moderation would possibly be useful. One of the things I found myself wanting to do a few times today was follow one of those twitter links to the person's FriendFeed profile so I could subscribe. You should have the data to correlate it, if they've added their twitter account to FriendFeed. Something like the popup on "Options" perhaps that would go to twitter or FF profile? - Todd McKinney
My m.o. is to type something like <a href="http://foo.com">bar</a> and expect that to render as the word "bar" but as a link. But then, that's just how I roll.<br>As it is now, that gives me the worst of all worlds - the brackets and the href don't get hidden and Firefox randomly chooses a large chunk of text to turn into an incorrect link. - Brian Johns
The only thing I have felt I wanted was the ability to create a line break. Other than that I'm happy with the current functionality. Keeps it clean and simple to read. - Rachel L Fisher
I agree with Rachel. The current comment functionality is clean, and at most, the ability to have a line break could be added. - Jatin
and please a lil' more characters per comment allowed if possible - Philipp Lenssen
line breaks yes, otherwise, plain text with URLs linkified. - Adam Lasnik
*bold* and _italic_ would be nice, keep urlifying urls please, no need for [url] or <a href> - Benjamin Golub
I really like how it is now. Comments are and should be just a big, delimiting block of gray text my eyes can skim over if I don't find the article itself interesting. - Wayne
I don't like how the comments are gray. Hard to read. I do not need any particular formatting, although I wouldn't mind anchor tags, line breaks, bold, and italic (in that order of preference). - Stephen Mack
Agree with you Stephen, especially on this laptop this gray is harder to read (which might be a problem of my own hardware but on the other hand, other sites look good). - Philipp Lenssen
I want the ability to make all vowels in words blink alternately blue, red, yellow, blue, green, then red. Seriously, I like very few choices, I just want to be able to 1) edit my comments just my clicking on them rather than having to hit the (edit) button and 2) the ability to like comments, so the best comments rise to the top. - Ginger Makela
Rising comments could be confusing, since many of them make more sense in chronological order... (like this one) =) - Dan Hsiao
i like the comments the way they are now. i think line breaks will encourage comments that are too long. - Jess Lee
I like it without HTML. That way I can feel special using Unicode® to highlight my text… - Rob Schonberger
I like links, but don't need anything else. That the URLs are automatic makes this very unimportant. - Louis Gray
links are nice. i don't care about the rest. - Lilly Irani
I see no need for formatting. Links might be good, but auto-linking urls does 90% of what I want. If you do add links, don't make me learn a new syntax. The only truly portable link syntax is HTML. - Neil Kandalgaonkar
I agree with Benjamin and Don - nice and simple IM-style formatting, nothing too elaborate. For me, HTML takes up too much time and allows access to a whole heap of crap formatting that is ultimately distracting and sucky. I like them how they are, though. Auto-linked URLs would be cool. - Cyvros/fyc
"i think line breaks will encourage comments that are too long." Though some people would prefer longer comments (and already use multi-comment-style continuations to write them) so it's really a question of "What's Friendfeed anyway?" (Perhaps it wasn't intended this way, but half the fun here are the interesting comments from interesting people, and the most interesting comments aren't necessarily always the short quips.) - Philipp Lenssen
Eh. Not really necessary. I haven't once thought, "If only I could make this text purple..." - Carla Thompson
Don't want no stylin - don't want to see no stylin - line breaks nifty - Nida
Resist. If you don't you will soon be implementing a menu of smilies. - Bay Chang
No HTML, please. Basic formatting (bold text, underlining and putting a link behind a text) would be cool. - sebmos
I agree with just about everyone: all we need is plain text and automagically-linkified URLs - although I believe a maximum of 1 consecutive carriage return would be useful too! - Tony Ruscoe
Maybe the styling could be changed for repeated comments by the same person (removing redundant icons and attribution) so they render as a multi-paragraph comment. - ⓞnor
not interested in styling beyond links. What would be more interesting is to automatically guess how to comment using the same service if we share the service in comment. IE: "reply on twitter", "reply on facebook", "reply on blog" - engtech
I'd really love to be able to linkify text, but I think other formatting, smileys, images, etc could really ugly up the site - Jeremy Raines
Not interested. Might slow down commenting. keep it twitterlike. - Jason Kaneshiro
How about threading? Dis/like on comments too. These would save quoting previous comments and improve readability. On your original question, except for dangerous elements such as <script>, pass xHTML inside <div> and <iframe> for those who know and prefer to type it; otherwise except for urlify, text remains text. For readers i prefer comprehensive ease to expressive ease. Let those who crap up their comments get modded down or even censored by the thread owner. - John Lam
ff now is easy to read because of minimal styling. keep it minimal. - Jing Lim
I'm not keen on adding a bunch of extra style to the comments. Linkification might be useful, but I think it would be okay to only automagically linkify stuff that starts with the http:// header. All that said, I would like there to be some kind of style on new comments that bump an older item back to the top of my pile, so my eye can go straight to the new jazz. I don't have a specific request for what that would look like, just as long as I could tell new stuff from old stuff along for the ride. - Keith Pelczarski
Duncan name-drops but doesn't link. Grr. - Louis Gray
I left this comment on TC... My theory on this is that people (myself included) have oversubscribed on Twitter. FriendFeed is a fresh start where you can start over, bringing over a handful of “high signal” friends from Twitter. You can also cherry pick the top 5 or 10 daily reads from your RSS reader, etc. What you end up with is a river of news that combines all of the things that you are keeping track of in one place. Just like Twitter, what you get out of FriendFeed is going to vary from one person to another. If you add 500 Twitter friends to this you’re going to get overwhelmed but keep it limited to the stuff you are really paying attention to and it turns into a great stream of information and discussion.
I agree with the points made about discussion happening on FriendFeed and not on the blog where the blog author probably wants it to happen. I’d like to see someone like Disqus come up with a way to suck in comments from lifestreaming services like FriendFeed so that all of the comments that have be - Mike Doeff
The star is the feed, the subject. All comments or "like" follow, which simplify users' discussion tracking. - Carlo Maglinao
At first I thought this conversation here is stealing the comments away from the post at TechCrunch, but my second thoughts are it's a good place to have a conversation about this blog post with your network. But then you could leave a comment on this post from the public page. - John Tropea
Wow. I wonder who are in the 1-3 positions. Btw, where do you get that data? I also wish FriendFeed will have a reporting button to show most-commented feeds/items. - Carlo Maglinao
I think you get it by running SQL queries on the FriendFeed database while on their VPN. BTW, are you counting multiple comments on the same post? - Chris White
@Paul nice one :) considering opening a Rochester office? :P - Benjamin Golub
Need.....stats.....now.....! Read access to the content database will do, I can compile my own stats (and ff search routines) that way. ;-) - Slippy Lane
I do regularly, I'm more consistent than Rose. :-) - Frances Haugen
I do, but I never comment, because not commenting builds character - j1m
I do, more often than not... Where else would I get my filtered feed of lolcats? - Scotty Allen
lol good to know. This post was inspired by the fact that yesterday Rose and I were comparing friend feed stats and under the "People who find you interesting" section mine read "Share some content so people can find you interesting (i.e. you are boring and despite the 3 full pages of content you have shared I here by officially bestow upon you the title of 'angry bridge troll',)". - jack
yes, I think stats should measure clicks (if they even track clicks, which they should). - ⓞnor
Funny, I was just thinking I should start deleting my Friendster account info. - Chris White
I did a while back, after using Spokeo to grab my Friendster data, I questioned why I had an account there. So I pulled it, as well as my Friendster contacts in Spokeo. - Louis Gray
Friendster is still where I see most of my Asian friends. Slowly however they are using Facebook. - Carlo Maglinao
Carlo, you can see Facebook as a service I have listed in my FriendFeed. (http://friendfeed.com/louisgra...) If that option has gone away, it's due to Facebook's news feed being closed. I've seen other services grab your "status updates", but little else from FB. - Louis Gray
Oh, thanks @louisgray. Not cool for FB to close that feed. - Carlo Maglinao
You get the little FB icon by adding the FB app: http://friendfeed.com/connect We don't yet import any content from FB though. Unfortunately, the best stuff (photos) is off-limits. - Paul Buchheit
Wishing Facebook would be more open to sharing its data... - Voyagerfan5761
Surprised it took you this long to join FriendFeed. ;-) - Scott Jarkoff
Glad to see you there: it's quite addictive:-) - Patrick Chanezon
did you write a crawler to setup your subscriptions? - Karl Rosaen
After signing up with friendfeed, I initially used twitter solely to post to friendfeed. Then that functionality was replicated within friendfeed, and my twitter has lain dormant since. It won't be long before yours succumbs to the same fate. - Slippy Lane
