The article is from 2003, but the 120,000 hearts counted at that time couldn't all have been awarded in the last four and a half years...right? - Chris Wetherell
omg. congratulations. that's huge - and very few people are going to know how difficult that must have been to schedule/achieve. switching to draft full-time for sure now. - Chris Wetherell
Many of the results of this trend are pretty disturbing. For example, the idea that our primary physicians are avoiding seeing us when we're hospitalized because it's too time-consuming to deal with the bureaucracy and commuting is maddening to me. - Chris Wetherell
Kind of wanting Autodesk software these days. This article's about Combustion, a compositing app, and its use in various music videos, particularly "Weapon of Choice" featuring your favorite Walken doing more than walking. - Chris Wetherell
There's interesting stuff to know about Nassim Taleb, who is the author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, and I found this long article and interview to be a fun introduction to knowing more about him. - Chris Wetherell
Movie money is SICK money. Hollywood spending is crazed, but Sahara is especially awesome in its burn rate. Its ten writers cost a total of $3.8 million. McConaughey got $8 million. $10 million was paid for the story from Cussler. (Ouch.) A scene of an airplane crash cost over $2 million and was deleted. Meals cost $1.4 million. Bribes in Morocco cost them $237,386. There's more details in the article - I love when Hollywood goes all "Pets.com" on occasion. - Chris Wetherell
Huge "O" article. And I like that Scientific American links relatively unimportant words to past articles throughout the entire thing. e.g. patch, cousin, "in men" - Chris Wetherell
the jetblue terminal at JFK is awful :( - Neha Narula
They're working on a new beautiful terminal. Not sure when it'll be done. - Kevin Fox
Hmm. I meant "Leopold and Loeb." Mistyped? Auto-corrected? I'll never know... - Chris Wetherell
Wait, *United* and *American Airlines* and the rest of the lame carriers didn't do it, but it's *JetBlue* that's killing your childlike wonder? At least with JetBlue, you get the sense that somebody, somewhere, far off and powerless as they may be, gives a damn. - ⓞnor
not in that terminal. in that terminal you feel like you're caught in spring break hell. - Neha Narula
When people look for a new job, they can expect to be Googled. Most prospective employers find it unappealing when they see a candidate bash their previous employer. Of course, it might also be that they had one of the best experiences of their lives and are eager to strike out on their own. This is actually the case for a lot of people leaving Google (especially those who tend to have high-traffic personal blogs). - Kevin Fox
Bindu, I'm curious if you're including my recent post as an example of an ex-Googler's goodbye that is "garden-variety" and "scared of speaking out?" I agree with Kevin that it seems that many people who both a) leave voluntarily and b) want to talk about their change in employment are also likely to be people whose experiences were mostly positive. This includes me. - Chris Wetherell
It might just be that people don't see the need to comment on the bad as their lives have now moved past that. - Edward Ho
For some, leaving is like graduating from college. After 4 years, you do something else. - amar
The question is not why googlers don't (necessarily) have an ax to grind when they leave... it's why so many people stay so long in places where they do have bitter terrible experiences. - Clare Dibble
Firstly Chris, no this was not directed at you or anyone in particular. This was just a random discussion we were having yesterday :) I am also not suggesting anyone at Google has had a terrible experience. In fact, I do believe most people have good experiences.... However, I do believe every experience has both pros and cons. In Google's case - many more pros than cons... All we were wondering is how could it be that we never hear a con... - Bindu Reddy
Like with any venture, there were often frustrating times, bad decisions, and lame people. But, the company and the leadership were so head and shoulders above anything I have experienced elsewhere in terms of their dedication to users, ethical compass, and empowerment of young, inexperienced employees, that I feel a deep loyalty and gratitude for working there. Did they get everything right? No way. Is it getting worse? Yes. But I will always feel lucky to have worked there. - Sacca
I also have to say, I agree with Kevin's comment that high-traffic bloggers are likely to have had good experiences. Since these people tend to be more influential than others, constructive criticism from them can sometimes make Google better... There is always room for improvement ;) - Bindu Reddy
Less so now, but it seems that those that were there near the beginning-ish were part of something that is being immortalized in American pop culture. Kind of like happening into Jack Keroak as a drinking buddy. You had a sense you were part of something exciting and important. Except instead of being stranded in Denver without your clothes or your girl or whatever, you made money out of the experience as well. - Clare Dibble
Why are high-traffic bloggers likely to have had a good experience? - Gary Burd
@Gary: This was my reasoning, may or may not be the same as Kevin's. If you have a high-traffic blog, it is most probably because you are well-known in the blogosphere for having launched/designed/run a fairly successful/well-known product(s). All said and done and in-spite of all the frustrations, launching/running a successful product can be a very rewarding experience at Google. So that leads to the conclusion, that most high-traffic bloggers have had a pretty good experience :) - Bindu Reddy
@Chris White: No doubt there are a lot of people from Google who are influential that are not bloggers. In fact the vast majority of influential people at Google don't blog.. That said, Googlers with high traffic blogs tend to be more influential than your average Googler. - Bindu Reddy
I would also add item #6: "Everyone I worked with is a super duper genius, and the person replacing me is super duper genius-er".....again, not to say it isn't true, just seems to be included in all the goodbye posts. - Adam Kazwell
@bindu "constructive criticism can sometimes make Google better ..." sure - but the place for that is a mail to LSE, or maybe an internal blog post. You post anything public, even 'constructive', and that becomes the story: Another Superstar leaves Google with Parting Shot etc. - Steve Crossan
@steve: you are prob. right what with the tendency for the press/media/blogosphere to sensationalize every thing - Bindu Reddy
Many of these mails include people who follow me here at FriendFeed. Please accept my apology for not seeing them. Getting through them will take some time...yikes...but I will respond to each. - Chris Wetherell
Did you just think you instantly got unpopular? Like High School when you were the geek on the drums? ;-) - Brandon Werner
Heh. Actually, I was the geek with the saxophone. I've had significant changes in my life recently and the noise associated with that masked the absence of a lot of other mail. Particularly since most people are mailing a different account that I have. I'm mortified by the missed connections. - Chris Wetherell
Google had a very hard decision to make here but I can't feel good about its conclusion. I'm a user. I'm disappointed. I'd love if Google could find a way to be more transparent about why the decision occurred. - Chris Wetherell
I used Google Browser Sync for a long time, and it was really useful. Due to personal privacy concerns, I scaled down to just using it for bookmarks sync; and once I was in that mode it became more practical (and more flexible) to use del.icio.us for that purpose. I always felt that this extension was something that Google could have promoted and worked more on. They had the start of great little Google product. - Daniel Robitaille
wow I used Google Browser Sync a lot but sucks to know they are dropping the product. - Jerome Gotangco
Yeah, it's always bad to drop support for a product. I do wish I knew more details than "we're busy building something else". On the other hand, part of Google's philosophy is to try a lot of projects expecting that some won't be wildly successful. I like that Google is brave enough to move on to other projects they think will have wider public appeal. - Braden Kowitz
Sprague, I'm really bummed about the demise of Browser Sync, too, but I gotta tackle your comment about resources. No company, not even Google, has unlimited resources. Even if we had theoretically unlimited money, that doesn't mean unlimited people... and even if we had unlimited people, we wouldn't have unlimited resources to train, integrate, test, document, etc. In every company -- even thriving ones -- there are limitations, including frustrating ones. - Adam Lasnik
The problem here is transparency: we don't know why that decision was made, and if it is simply because of a transition of these features into other Google products. The hint from the original email from Google is that it is not, since they point people to non-Google products as replacement. And the real reason is probably that Google cannot really make money out of this extension since I son't see how ads could be inserted anywhere in the user experience of that extension. - Daniel Robitaille
Understood, Daniel. But though I'm not / was not on that team at Google, I can tell you this: we don't decide to staff up or kill projects primarily based upon direct revenues. And, alas, the reason why some projects survive and others don't can tend to be pretty complicated, far from lending itself to an easy answer. - Adam Lasnik
It's a shame that Mozilla Weave will be shipping their update on Friday the 20th. Three whole days without open tabs synchronization... - Panagiotis Astithas
Presumably, Nelson has just recently purchased a flame-retardant body suit and is testing it out by calling for a non-equitable view of feed formats. I like (and agree with) the bit about Atom representing "the industry maturity of the syndication vision." - Chris Wetherell
Summary: My friend Jason Shellen (the first product manager of Google Reader) is starting a new company. Exciting! I wish him and his team the best. - Chris Wetherell
Ugh. Please, please, please stop calling it a "bump." It is a pound or some dap but not a bump. - Erica Baker
They're all good as terms - known it as a bump since the 70s so I'm ok with it. 'Course it's all really just dignity and pride by any name, no? - Chris Wetherell
I cannot BELIEVE the amount of attn this simple gesture has received...LOL. And Chris come to the new millenium [even if I can't spell it] it is DAP! - Ruth Ferguson
as the token Australian, can someone explain to me what it is they are doing? - Duncan Riley
@Duncan Riley: ha! that's the problem. no one can decide. - edythe
@duncan, its american blackeze for "whats up my N!@^ER?" - Tyler
That's a fist bump. I'm sure we could get the worlds foremost expert on fistbumping and lolcats to weigh in on the subject. Paging Anil Dash, paging Anil Dash. - Jason Shellen
And according to urbandictionary it looks like dap is also an acronym for "double anal penetration." Damn, uncool. Makes it WAY more confusing given the term I'd prefer as an appellation for a gesture. I guess "bump" it is. :) - Chris Wetherell
"Fist Bump" is ok. Not just "Bump" though. - David Cook
Ha. Can't say I didn't attempt to educate the masses. :) - Erica Baker
Though I should have a different impression of Pixar and Disney's future after reading this article, I can really only see the words "Cars 2" and "four direct-to-DVD movies built around Tinker Bell." - Chris Wetherell
Bloglines is dead to me. Thanks to Scoble I switch to GR a long time ago and will not look back - The Dude Abides
The Hitwise post made me smile when I saw it. Their conclusion would be very, very difficult to back up given what we know. Odd bit: the incorrectness of comScore and Hitwise data for some services can be an advantage e.g. I think bolder features can be released if you're not perceived as a market leader whose power should be checked. Back in the day they inspired me to get excited about stuff that (only under the perceived condition of leadership) would be prohibitively controversial. - Chris Wetherell
Not. I'm with John on this one. I haven't seen any use of reader.google.com for a long time. - Voyagerfan5761
It amazes me this space hasn't been solved yet. Particularly when you consider how much money trades as a result of numbers like these. - Sacca
Just to be the odd one out, I use Bloglines because I don't like the GR interface, and I don't like relying on Google for every damn thing. - Bill Hooker
I'm kind of hoping "W." turns out to be this era's Zardoz. Stone is so batshit insane it might work-fail brilliantly. And the casting is gold. (Rob Corddry as Ari Fleischer? Wow.) - Chris Wetherell
Rough week for Twitter. I've watched dozens of new, popular, and free web services experience scaling difficulties. I'm always saddened by knee-jerk responses of technologists who blithely assert "I guess they don't test their software" during outages. Testing is only a part of prevention and is always a moving target. Diagnosis and response can sometimes take hours/days/weeks/months depending on the problem or the system. Money or funding doesn't automatically translate into an ideal production, staging, and analytic environment overnight (especially if growing by millions) and NO service or platform is immune. None! Not One. Happens within Google all the time. (You might not know that the Reader team has been sleepless this week in attempts to keep the service running.) I figure those of us who can help out with coding or sysadmin work to services we love probably should offer our efforts pro bono. Might not be able to help - but might as well offer. That is, if we care about them... - Chris Wetherell
Great comments, Chris. People should know about how understaffed the Reader team is versus what we expect from it. - Louis Gray
@chris as for "noBODY IS PERFECT" - i want to point you to telco services, they are might be ugly but _reliable_. - silpol
@silpol It is much easier to be reliable when you don't innovate :) - Sacca
@sacca to me, innovation without reliabilty coming-second-but-coming looks cheaper than reliabilty without innovation ;) - silpol
Well, bless the Reader team, then. I'm hopelessly addicted. - Chris Baskind
@silpol - I think the Faustian bargain for using these services *must* be that you accept a little down time or lag once in a while, they are on the bleeding edge after all. Don't get me wrong I love a piece of software or hardware that feels solid state but it's not the number one concern for any start-up. Any company worth a damn is concerned however, that if they don't keep their users happy that there might not be a tomorrow, which is more than one can say for telcos. - Jason Shellen
Chris, thank you for adding some much needed perspective to this. I'm so sick of the Twitter bashing. - Mike Doeff
Chris, thanks for reminding me what it's like to work on these services. It is a pressure cooker and I can't imagine what that's like. Of course my own site is having its own issues, so I have a little taste trying to keep everything working. Thanks for Google Reader and thanks to the Twitter team for everything it's done. I'm freaking addicted to both, so both teams are doing something right. - Robert Scoble
There's a real catch 22. If you spend tons of time at the beginning of development on making a super-scalable product in a fast-paced market, you may miss the boat. However, if you don't, later you'll run into scalability issues and it's much harder to rearchitect on the fly. Not really sure what the answer is here...maybe quantum computing :) - Eric Florenzano
Great stuff, Chris, I was beginning to think I was the only one who felt deeply uneasy about the Twit-out. - Iain Baker
I used Twitter during the Twit-out, and I used the Hide function every time Twit-out came up from the participants. It's one thing to use a service for what it was intended, and another to pour salt in another's wounds to show how you don't think you need it as much as you might have before. Also, such wide discussion of the activity seemed overly self-congratulatory to me. - Louis Gray
@shellen i understand your logic but don't buy it. in my opinion, twitter _is_ too long in kindergaten and _too_ repetitive in fails. they could open door for paid service for those looking reliabilty at low price, leaving masochists with all-time-failing-but-free level... - silpol
@Chris - They had already received $5.4M in venture capital. Why should we offer services for free? And they just received $15M more tonight according to GigaOM. if anything, we should volunteer our time to make something else better that's being bootstrapped instead of something that has received millions in venture capital. $20M buys a LOT of hardware and pays a lot of salaries. - Erica Douglass
So in other words, you build a Rube Goldberg machine, and then complain it's hard to figure out why it doesn't work? It's been a year. They first ran into scaling problems at SXSW 2007. They aren't working on the next NYSE in terms of data processing and scaling. I've been one of their biggest defenders. But I'm no longer convinced they really want to listen about solutions. - Cyndy
The graph in that blog post looks more like a fundamental flaw than soemthing that can be fixed easily. Maybe this is proof that RoR isn't a good choice for a platform... - Alexander Falk via twhirl
Hmm..could news of the 3rd round funding have reversed the feelings of generosity and forgiveness we were feeling towards Twitter? Still against the twit-out. - Kamath via twhirl
The key fact is that Jack *talked* about them. That's all I ask. - Ontario Emperor
@silpol - Your assertion about telcos requires more nuance. AT&T, Vonage, and Skype (first off the top of my head) have had major outages in their data services. And phone services (including a massive transition from analog to digital in the PSTN) have had roughly 80 years to work on scaling issues during which there has been significant downtime. Also, I'm not sure what you mean about telcos being "ugly." Are you talking about Bell Labs' DS0 digital signal? Marketing? Pulse dialing? SS7? - Chris Wetherell
@Cyndy - Your opinion about Twitter's system ("Rube Goldberg") sounds definitive. Have you seen their code? Their network topology? Their database schema? Do you know their message volume? What's your opinion about their message queue solution? Do you know more technical information about Twitter than the platform they've (reportedly) chosen for their web service? I'm suspicious, hopefully understandably. Also, Gmail and Google Reader have had big outages...do you also think they are Rube Goldberg machines? - Chris Wetherell
@Erica - Because (as I mentioned above) funding doesn't automatically translate into an ideal production, staging, or analytic environment overnight (esp. if growing by millions). Also, hiring and getting people up to speed are potentially high-latency tasks as new companies don't usually have built-out HR depts. So, in the meantime, I like the idea of offering help to stuff we love and use. Not for everyone and potentially inappropriate but there's a chance it'd be more effective than redundant outage notification. - Chris Wetherell
Too bad Louis. You missed the entire point of the Twit-Out as did most of the web. That's ok though, we all love Twitter the same. - Bwana McCall
Never underestimate the value of hiring someone who does solely community outreach and customer/client relations. Twitter would benefit immensely with a person in that position, even if they aren't doing a line of code. - Mark Trapp
Ruby on Rails is only part of the infrastructure, as Ev has mentioned before. It's not as simple as just rewriting that part. But still, they've been working on this for what a year or so now? - Ryan W
I think Trapp has a great point as do Bwana, Scoble, Gray, and Wetherell. Scaling will always be an issue whenever a "widget" takes off whatever it is. Support for said "widget" is then necesssary, as well as prompt communication of c/s issues. Many times having a "non-techie" be the c/s person helps provide a different insight as to where the current user as well as the potential user are coming from. This all said. I am increasingly addicted to both Twitter and Friend Feed! :) I am glad that both are around. - Mathew A. Koeneker
Alex Payne is such a good guy. I think if people knew how hard those guys work at Twitter this wouldn't even be a discussion. Perhaps they should be more open in communication, but that would mean vindication to those whom seek to be disruptive. I think if they just added the "Beta" tag to their Twitter logo this conversation wouldn't even happen. It would set expectations that appear to have gotten out of hand. - Brandon Werner
Studies where participants self-report about happiness don't seem particularly solid to me. And I wish they'd asked a follow-up question in the Harvard study that crossed poverty lines. (Would you choose to only earn $18K while everyone else earned $10K in real dollars? Or would you prefer $100K while everyone else earned $200K?) Nevertheless, I like the effort in figuring out how relative affluence is affecting well-being. - Chris Wetherell
This one's for the Reader team who already deeply know about this anxiety. Those of us making feed-aware software continue to have this particular (and fun) problem on our hands to solve. - Chris Wetherell
Yay. I went to school with Dorothy. I'm so happy Cat and Girl took off. - DeWitt Clinton
Somehow I overcame wanting to 'catch up' with my 300+ feeds a long time ago and just enjoy snacking on the river of Reads. My new horror, catching up with 150 people I follow on Twitter. :( - Jason Shellen
Possibly awesome? Being made by the same team that created and produced 'The Riches' which I'm enjoying due to Hulu. (And I'm braced for my tiny film of the same name to get bumped farther down the result pages by this. Should've named my effort: You Know, That Time Someone Got Hung.) - Chris Wetherell
Wow, neat! Group created. So Ben (don't know him? he created the feed platform for Reader) is raising the bar of what to do while sabbaticizing. Awesome, but I'm sure I just read somewhere that the root of sabbatical is [slack {slak} n.] ... right? - Chris Wetherell
!!! Nice work Ben. I'll give it a try. - Jason Shellen
very nice....testing it out right now - Adam Kazwell
Can someone post screens? I don't want to waste a registration if I don't like how the interface plays... - Bwana McCall
there is no interface....just group your friends in a text box and the app generates an RSS feed for GReader for that group - Adam Kazwell
It just uses your existing GReader and FF credentials. It's nice but it just makes me realise that the grouping of 'friends' is a feature that belongs in FF itself. - Adewale Oshineye
Projectiles aren't compelling video to me normally, but I'm fascinated by the camera work here. I'm amazed by how fast that pan must be in order to follow the bullet. - Chris Wetherell
@Allen That'd be great, but it's currently used for going to the next subscription. - Cyvros/fyc
D'oh, I always use Shift-J/K for moving in subscriptions. Forgot about Shift-N. BTW, Chris, the ? help screen seems to be broken in FF 2.0.0.14 on Mac. - Allen Hutchison
I would say Shift-N unless you could free up n from it's current role. I don't think it's necessary to have the shift before since you can always simply close the resulting window. --Edit-- But since Shift-N is already taken I guess you could go with w or Shift-w for "write". Probably too much of a stretch though. Sorry Scoble, I think that Shift-S-N is too many keys. I like to be able to use one hand on these kind of things. - Brandon Titus
We were thinking of Alt-Shift-S to build on the existing share shortcut. Too many keys? - Mihai Parparita
What about detaching notes from sharing a post? You could replace "Share with notes" with "Comment" or "Add note" and expand a small box the same way you do for "Email". This way you could also delete the comment or edit it later. The shortcut could be "c". - Ionut
Before realizing there was no shortcut, I tried Shift-N this morning. I guess that would be my vote. kthxbye - Thomas Han
Looks like it's going to be Shift-D (which is next to Shift-S), since Shift-N is taken, and Alt-Shift-S doesn't work in IE. - Mihai Parparita
I find it depressing that you can "share with note" a post that has all already been shared and you can do it multiple times, creating new copies. - Ionut
Slightly off topic but ditto what Ionut says, although "depressing" is a bit strong... It's a bit odd that the original feed item also doesn't appear as being shared, which I'm guessing is because it created a copy to share with the note. And if I then search Google Reader for that post, I get multiples - i.e. the original post and a copy (or copies) with my note(s). Couldn't you do a sneaky link / replace of the original post with the newly created noted copy? - Tony Ruscoe
Shift-D now works in Reader. You can select an item and use the shortcut to launch the note form. - Chris Wetherell
