This will be a photograph in the top 10 of many future lists. - Andrew Baron
Explanation: "In January 2007, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught has now returned to the outer Solar System and is now only visible with a large telescope. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework." - Andrew Baron
Wow, 153 people 'liked this" so far and almost 30 comments. - Andrew Baron
Absolutely incredible shot! Then again some of the best shots on the web come from NASA, National Geographic, Discovery and, of course, Hawk :) - Charlie Anzman
Not to be too cynical but that shot seems to good to be true -- I wonder if there is more processing going on than the text seems to admit. - Brian Sullivan
I'm going to side with Brian here. What is right: Comet McNaught was that bright in WA (I use to live there), but I checked my attempted pics, they predate this by over a week. I'm sure the comet was only that bright for less than a week. Second, the main Australia Day fireworks occur in Perth City...which isn't near a beach . Maybe it's Leighton Beach with Fremantle to the left...but it doesn't seem right. I did check the weather records though, there was a storm that night, and it's in the right direction - Duncan Riley
I do hope it is real though...and I forgot how wonderful the environment there is - Duncan Riley
Duncan, last year both Fremantle and I believe Hillarys held their own fireworks for Australia Day. I myself was trying to guess the location this morning. Being a regular on Leighton beach though it doesn't look familiar so I was thinking it may have been taken to the north of Hillarys. It also made me very nostalgic for Perth :) - Penny
At 257 likes, the #1 most liked post of all time on FriendFeed (at least #1 of the past 30 days of my friends, and more than any other I can remember...). Antti Kemppainen Photography - Here's Antti's original picture http://jkemppainen.com/antti/i... Antti's e-mail is kemppaisantti@gmail.com, and you can scroll through Antti's other photos. - Mitchell Tsai
read phonetically and think like a 2nd grader - Michael W. May
A school teacher asks little Johnny to make sentences with the words detail, deduct, defeat and defense. He responds that he can do it in one sentence. "Defeat of deduct went over defense before detail." - Scott Cropper
Using it right now on my iPod Touch. :) - Raoul Pop
@Scoble: let me know what you think. I know you use FF a lot on your phone, and you are quite a power user, so I have a feeling you will have a strong opinion and/or notice things we left out. - Bret Taylor
I know you guys aren't out to compete with twitter directly, but putting that post text box at the top of the interface removes my last reason for twittering. - Robin Barooah
looks great but interested to know why you chose to remove the hide function. It would seem well suited to mobile browsing and removing the noise a little more on the small screen - Jon Dillon
Awesome job; renders well on my phone (a Moto Q9c) too - Benjamin Golub
@Jon: You're right, we should add that back in. - Bret Taylor
renders perfect. clicking youtube videos just work as intended... Here's a quick request. Search is at the bottom and scrolling endlessly to reach is a bit boring. Can you guys insert an anchor for a quick access to page bottom? And another anchor there for teleporting back to top. - Berk D. Demir via twhirl
again, enjoy the pic :) and the interface even more! - MG Siegler
Very nice. I'm also posting from my iPhone. FF lends itself well to mobile use. - Chris Baskind
The anchor to jump to the bottom would be nice. Tip: On any web page you can tap the 'status bar' at the top of the screen to jump up to the top of the page. - Kevin Fox
I don't want to take credit for this or anything, but I just did ask about this today. I'm kidding by the way. - Johnny Baker
This works REALLY WELL in a sidebar or Fluid App site specific browser. WAY better than the googlegadget URL we've been using. This interface in Fluid is my new favorite way to interact with FriendFeed. It's teh Awesome! Thanks! :-) - Josh Bancroft
this is AWESOME - posting from my touch! - Charles Hudson
A much needed improvement. This will be awesome on a 3G iPhone as well. - Chris Rodgers
i'd still like to see the Comment/Like buttons made a little bit easier to hit. They have close proximity to the article link and using a finger isn't as accurate as a cursor. - Jamie
Yeah, I just started using friendfeed today and can't see how you guys/gals did without this spiffy interface. Rocks! - Christopher Medina
It looks fantastic, thanks guys it's a great job. FriendFeed is now even more useful. - fbrunel
I would love the option to run links through the Google transcoder. FFtoGo has that and it's invaluable. - Steve Rubel
You can also use http://tiltview.com to view the iPhone version of the site from your computer or other mobile phones . You need to select iPhone as a mobile type. - seman
Love it! As soon as I open up the MBP I'm going to fire up Fluid.app and make a menu app with the iPhone interface. - Ryan Cates
Seesmic videos could theorically been played on an iPhone. The Seesmic API also provides a link to the video in MP4, that's would be awesome to do that in the FriendFeed iPhone interface. - fbrunel
Why do the "comment" and "like" links the load after the rest of the page? I almost missed them with EDGE's slow data. - Frankie Warren
awesome! Anyone else want a bit more space around the "comment" and "like" links? I mis-poked on my first attempt. - Kelly Norton
So awesome, great work! I love it. I'm sure you're aware but longer (horizontally) posts, such as those with multiple photos, do funky things to the layout. - Jake
@Jake, et al: we will do some work for posts with a lot of media to make it work better. Thanks for the feedback. - Bret Taylor
It looks like the UAT testing with Scoble and team worked marvelously well - nice job Bret!! :*) - Susan Beebe
I am back to the old version too. I miss Everyone tab, Search, and Hide features - Robert Scoble
i agree with one of the comments. why a separate blog to capture comments - get them all using FF. easier to follow discussion. iphone interface looks great - i think i'm going to find myself using it a lot on my phone - naveen
Awsome! It just needs search and it would be perfect!
As far as the old interface went, it was pretty good for the iPhone as well. - darnell
@Scoble: thanks for the feedback. They were known problems, but I think we can find the space to fit them in. Search is at the botto of every page, FYI. - Bret Taylor
Very nice. Much prefer it to FFtogo ... - Patrick Jordan
Very nice. However, on the iPhone it's very easy to jump to the top of the page (just tap the top bar) and very hard to get to the bottom of a long page (lots of scrolling). Can search be moved to the top? - Stephen Mack
Very nice. Makes it much more useful on my iPhone. Like the picture option... - simonpure
I agree with Stephen about "search". It's been quite the workout on the thumbs. - m.0
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
WOW... a BABY Buchheit entered the world while I wasn't looking...amazing! great secret there Paul!! Congratulations on your new addition to your family!! :-) - Susan Beebe
Wow, UPS tracking has gotten much better. Where is the baby now? Make sure you're home during the delivery, though. Whenever I'm not, they just leave it at the front door. (Congrats, by the way ;) ) - Vince DeGeorge
What is this? Baby on Friendfeed week :) Between you and Louis...hehe. So does this make Friendfeed an aunt or an uncle? or maybe a cousin? Congrats Paul! - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
@Erhan, actually I would like to see the true babies pic and then the a render pic from http://makemebabies.com/. It would be awsome to see how closely the two would match up :)- - Peter Dawson
My Facebook usage has weened so much. Basically its just a photo sharing site. - Neil Dunn
I'm using FB less and less now - Prefer normal email to FB email too, in fact I have nine million notifications awaiting my attention but all of them are probably pointless likeness, vampires etc etc.... - Nick Lewis
facebook is a closed platform, I prefer open web2.0 platforms where I can do what I want ...via twhirl - ryan
lowest common denominator stuff lasts a long time, facebook should not get too smart - ana ma roopa
No kidding! I don't have FB at work (a good move, really) so trying to schedule with people is impossible that way. - Jennifer Dittrich
Were it not for the lack of this feature, FB would get zero pageviews from me these days. - Richard Chen
Chris, I couldn't agree with you more, in fact last year a wrote a blog post outlining the need for a Social Network Message Autoresponder http://laughingsquid.com/socia... - Scott Beale
Where's Facebook's feature wishlist page again? - AJ Batac
I was thinking about something like this for Twitter. Redirect them to friendfeed... - Rahsheen Porter
Facebook mail would be awesome as IMAP. As it is, the lock-in is maddening. - Dan Byler
Arjun: Yahoo isn't an acronym. It's referring to a type of hominid-creature-thingy in "Gulliver's Travels" - possible248
The O's left for Google a long time ago - hunter walk
you can spot them occassionally down at the bottom of the search results goooo*oo*oooogle - Alex Gawley
Where'd Y and A go? Scoble told me one of those O's is worth about 5billion each! go grab it quick and cash it in (me thinks it is a lottery ticket!) - Susan Beebe
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
