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Thomas Hawk to Thomas's feed, DeleteMe Uncensored

Processing my first batch of images with the new Lightroom 3 beta. So far it feels slower than Lightroom 2.

November 7, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

kinobe, Conor Ogle, Scoble, Alex Scoble and 2 other people liked this

I've seen speed improvements with LR 3B but my catalogue is probably far smaller than yours TH, but develop seems quicker. Liking the new features so far as well especially publish - Russell G

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The new capture One 5 Rocks. Only thing missing is image management... - World Wanderer

hmmmm... that was the fourth time I've had to quit firefox in order to get LR 3 beta to respond. grrrr... - Thomas Hawk

again. grrr. It seems that LR 3 hangs when trying to export a photo and it gets stuck until you close Firefox, then it exports it and you have to relaunch firefox (at least for me on a pretty powerful new MacBook Pro). bummer. - Thomas Hawk

Doesn't happen here on Windows 7 64bit. I also use Firefox heavily. LR3beta is FASTER than LR2, with the same size library. That said, Jeff's exporter is faster than the export-to-flickr capabilities in LR3. - Ryan MacLean

Thomas Hawk

Today marks the 5th anniversary of Google's IPO. The stock originally sold in the offering at $85 per share which was called overpriced at the time. It hit a high of $741 a share in November of 2007 and is at $443.68 per share as I type this.

August 19, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

Amarnath Prabhakar, paniaguai, Katy Barrilleaux and 14 other people liked this

I told my mother to buy Google but she wouldn't listen to me. She regretted it. - Akiva

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It opened at $85, which was a re-pricing due to public mocking at the original target opening price of $135. - Kevin Fox

good point Kevin. Changed that to $85 :) - Thomas Hawk

The NYT on Google's 5 year IPO Anniversary. http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009... "In keeping with the unorthodox corporate image that Google presents — the phrase “Don’t be evil” was written into its I.P.O. prospectus" - Thomas Hawk

Christopher, that might also have something to do with the quality of Starbucks coffee. - Akiva

SHORT - James Michael Mike DuPont

I had put in an order on eTrade for 100 shares at 90 each. I chickened out and withdrew. FAIL. - Louis Gray

Every Computer User on the Planet owes a Huge Thank U to Google for FREEing us All from the Shackles of Greedy Monopolistic Crappy Microsoft CRAP!! ;)) - Billy Warhol

I bought my first one at 555$. Fail :) - Jérôme

Martin Bryant

O2 to support Twitter SMS alerts for @ replies and DMs from next month - not sure if I'll bother - http://dnc.o2.co.uk/home...

July 13, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Conor Ogle, Iphigenie and 5 other people liked this

It certainly could help takeup among young people - I'm just not sure if Twitter fits what they want though. Facebook is much better for the IM, photo and video sharing that most young people enjoy. Most teenagers I know use Twitter just to read what their favourite celebrities are doing. - Martin Bryant

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Yay! I happen to use O2 at the moment, so it's nice to see this make a comeback. - Tyson Key

+1 Josh. I find the whole "You can stalk celebrities!" thing to be pretty annoying, and I'm sure that most of the userbase don't do that. I was amused to see that my HSDPA ISP (who also offer mobile content services within their network) were extolling that as a "big feature". - Tyson Key

Nice to see that they'll indirectly drop the cost of sending Twitter SMSes too, supposedly for some customers (I'm using an "Unlimited" tariff that includes free of charge on-network SMSes, but SMSing Twitter cost 30p if I remember correctly). - Tyson Key

Roberto Bonini to Roberto's feed, Appetite, The Apple Room: TNW Apple

Is there a To-Do iPhone app that will Sync with Google Calender??

June 24, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

Gautam Guliani, Morton Fox, DGentry and 14 other people liked this

Not afaik with the Google To Do list. But you can sync with either RememberTheMilk or ToodleDo, both of which can display a to-do list within Google Calendar. Details on how to do that for RTM is at http://www.rememberthemilk.com/service... - Ian Betteridge

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tried this? http://www.google.com/mobile... - bonino bonino

I'm already using that. But I'm looking specifically for a To-Do list (or one that will sync with Google Tasks) - Roberto Bonini

I saw one pop up the other day: "iTask(Google Calendar Sync)." I haven't tried it because it's US $4.99 - metalerik

but I would be happy if someone else tried it and let us know :) - metalerik

Toodledo iphone app will do that. I think that's free. - Wei-Yen Tan from fftogo

You sure it will?? - Roberto Bonini

I tried Toodledo app and it looks to me that it syncs just with Toodledo.com ... - Citizento

Yeah I could not find any mention of Google Cal sync on the App description. - Roberto Bonini

Going to http://www.gmail.com/tasks with a mobile browser also works very good. - TobiasVerhoog.com

Google has Tasks now - I use it for to do's - you can add them right to your calendar and for a handy grocery list. Find it in LABS. - BEX

Tasks didn't add the item to my calendar, and I'm using my iphone - Toby Graham

Ok will see if it will sync Google Tasks to my iPhone Calender. I assumed that it wouldn't since everything has to go over ActiveSync. - Roberto Bonini

Nope. Does not appear to work. We need a seperate app. - Roberto Bonini

see Tobias' comment above - that is the only solution I am aware of ... no app yet. Google mobile app is great, check it out - Susan Beebe from BuddyFeed

Remember the Milk is the best to do IMO. Decent native iPhone app, and there is a script to somewhat integrate with gmail. Check out Lifehacker for some good articles on RTM. - David Imielski

As Tobia said, the official Google Tasks app is http://www.gmail.com/tasks. Official page here: http://www.google.com/mobile... - Jérôme

With Push Notifications, a web app is no longer good enough :) - Roberto Bonini

@Citenzo, I have mine doing that.. There is a plugin that shows the due dates in Google Calendar, have a look here: http://www.toodledo.com/info... - Wei-Yen Tan

nauiokas | park

@BetfairNews you guys should set up @BetfairVolume channel to live tweet trading volume on active inplay markets. Volume is traders' honey.

June 29, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Conor Ogle liked this

Craig Newmark

RT @cshirky: RT @mpesce "A society built on fear serves its masters. A society built on trust serves its members." #pdf09 (via @amanda)

June 29, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Conor Ogle liked this

Paul Kedrosky

Firefox 3 on Mac must moonlight as weather supercomputer. Only way to explain why it sucks 20% CPU when sitting there.

June 29, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Conor Ogle liked this

Robert Scoble

Mike Arrington is leading the mob. Read his anti-FriendFeed rant here and tell us whether he is wrong or right. Oh, and welcome to the mob:

June 28, 2009 from iPhone - Comment - Like - Share

Mitchell Tsai, Tyson Key, andy brudtkuhl and 114 other people liked this

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - Robert Scoble

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He'll be back...he's just going to milk this for all it's worth first. - Garin Kilpatrick

Do not feed the trolls. - monkeystick

I think he is looking for page views and a way to get the mob to come to his real time event on July 10th. Brilliantly played Mr. Arrington! - Robert Scoble

Maybe it will bring some more people to FF who haven't been on it which is a good thing. - Mike Bracco

"FriendFeed today is like Syphilis in 1495." -Arrington. I'd say that's taking this a bit too far. - Garin Kilpatrick

I understand objectively there's strengths and weaknesses, but I also find that this discussion is teetering of the verge of irrelevance. Can you make it clear to me (in seriousness) the value from this friendfeed versus anti friendfeed arguement? Are we looking forward to the next tool? Or to making improvements to friendfeed? - Malcolm Bastien

Mike: I doubt it. - Robert Scoble

Do you think it was specifically an anti-Friendfeed rant, Robert? Some of the comments that poured in after the "Laporte Incident" were pretty horrible. If I was on the receiving end of that, I'd think I'd be feeling like a mob was after my head. Also, don't you think that his point about people feeling more comfortable to "talk hate" using their own/real names is a good one? - Andrew Terry

I don't understand why Mike is wasting time and effort on those death threat comments from the idiots that posted them. Why is he giving them any real credit? They should be dismissed. They should be ignored. They're the grown up versions of youtube commenters. - Lise

The thread with Aaron last week demonstrates that the FF community is reasonable and self-correcting. FF also provides fine grained controls so that you DON'T see what you don't want. Mobs are simply human nature. Dissapointingly so. Mike may as well call for the abolition of Town Halls, Community Clubs and the like. - Roberto Bonini

As long as Mob leaders like Laporte keep it together no trolls get hurt. - Garin Kilpatrick

Arrington should go crawl back into his cave - Daniel Lazarides

I have a feeling Arrington is developing a relationship with FF analogous to Dvorak's with Apple. ie. piss off the faithful (get traffic), blog about the nasty community members attacking you (more traffic), eventually reverse yourself and please the community (more traffic again). Lather-rinse-repeat. - Michael R. Bernstein

If Mike doesn't like mobs he should open a private room here on friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

I feel the same way about this argument that I do about people who complain about television. Stop whining. If you don't like what's on, change the channel or turn the TV off. FF, like any online community, is based on elective participation. If you don't like what's happening, move on to something else. Also, people take what's written in these forums WAY too seriously. If you can't take the occasional insult, get off the web and go find something else to do with your time. - Kevin (aka ThreadKilla)

And last i checked, Leo is NOT a mob leader. Or a Troll leader. - Roberto Bonini

Andrew: mobs have always formed online. FriendFeed does allow them to form faster but Arrington should go read Digg and YouTube comments for a while. The stuff I have seen here is pretty easy going compared to those. - Robert Scoble

Go to a forum with lots of members and ask a noobish question and watch the mob flame you into the middle of next week. - Mark

Michael: bing! Arrington is the best at whiping up crowds. Anyone remember when he called France lazy? - Robert Scoble

Andrew: I think everyone here generally agrees with Mike that those types of comments are out of line. Can't blame Mike for feeling touchy about them. - Roberto Bonini

Danny that's the irony in all this. Arrington is the King of The Trolls! Leo called him the biggest troll "in the world" a few times. - Mark

I used to read techcrunch and even comment once in a while. Mike Arrington has been consistently losing credibility with me these past few months, and now has forfeited the last bit. I was going to comment over there, but it really has ceased to be worth my time. I'm even sorry I clicked over to his article. Interesting that I wouldn't even have known for it if not for this post on...which service is this again, oh yes, ...friendfeed. - Jim #TeamMonique

It seems to me that Mike wants the attention or he wouldn't have post this. He just doesn't like it if it doesn't go his way. He sort of like the guy who finds a bees nest and pokes a stick in it. They finally calm down and they poke it again and are surprised by the results - Kim Landwehr

Jim: welcome to MobFeed. :-) - Robert Scoble

I'm in my Godfather. - Thomas Chai

Kim: Arrington is smarter than that. He knows there are a lot of people here and he is about to monetize the real time web with a conference. - Robert Scoble

Whats this conference you are refering to Rob ? x - Mark

Yep a online service that accounts for a small percentage of internet users will destroy everything Arrington holds dear. Syphilis? - Andy Foster

Kim: this is all about Arrington setting his conference up well. I will be a part of it from London. - Robert Scoble

[sigh] i guess Arrington just can't stop himself. - MikeAmundsen

"I’m going to pick on" - words say it all - Paul Rawlings

Anyone have a link to this real time conference he is doing? - Mark

Speaking of realtime, why hasn't Arrington or O'Reilly grabbed the title "Realtime Web" for a series of conferences ala Web 2.0?--maybe you should first Robert! - Michael Metz

I guess it's working - ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ

Mike: Arrington is taking advantage of the fact that WE can't stop ourselves. - Robert Scoble

Exactly, Robert. - ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ

Well, that explains a lot Robert - Kim Landwehr

What was that link again? Lol! - ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ

is buddyfeed realtime? - Tyler Gillies from BuddyFeed

Arrington is @replying you on twitter robby - Mark

a) learn to use Block b) like twitter is sooo much better :/ c) waste of a read.. I thought Techcrunch did actual stories on stuff, not rants. Guess I was wrong. - Tim Hoeck

Well, the worst thing we as the FF community could do is prove him right by "attacking" back and name-calling for what he's said. Fanning the flames justifies his opinion. Hey, if it makes people wonder what going on with this "FriendFeed" thing and they come check it and realize it's not at all like what he was saying...all the better. So, let him have his opinion and spotlight. - c.a.j.

here is the link http://www.techcrunch.com/real-ti... - Johni Fisher

@Robert: IMO, Arrington is doing the same thing he always does: setting himself up for some abuse from others. it's so sad to watch. in this case, he'll likely get what we is asking for, too. *again* - MikeAmundsen

Probably should have said fein surprise - Kim Landwehr

thx Johni, - Mark

IMO, He's wrong. And, as mentioned, tossing gasoline on the fire by pretending to be outraged by such supposed mobs while deliberately inciting them. - Bob Morris (polizeros)

@arrington just wrote that I should propose tools to slow down the mob. Yes, we have those in Iran and China. I would rather have the mob. - Robert Scoble

I think Arrington just wants to destroy a medium that he can't control. - Nathan Cooprider

I really thing that this was more about online mobs with FriendFeed as an example rather than specifically about FriendFeed. Yes he uses FriendFeed as the example, but I don't think the points he makes are related solely to FriendFeed. You could easily replace FriendFeed with Digg or Huffingtonpost. Some place where people gather in mass and you can easily see a mob mentality grow. - Michael Koby

Robert!!!!!!! :) - Myrna

Of course he is right. When the wrong people come together than everything can happen. Same is true if good people. Even a revolution (specially Wednesday). People on FF and similar services have lots of power. Can be used to change the world! - bishoph

Yes Chris, he is a sly old dog isn't he? Tickets might be going too slow or something - Mark

The association with Syphilis is kind of weird. I think any public figure gets hate mail, electronically or otherwise. - Ace

@Michael Koby, I'd agree with you (to a certain extent), if the article wasn't...specifically about FriendFeed. And about an event that occurred to Arrington personally, no less. I'd have a lot more respect for his argument if he'd spend the time to find more examples. This just looks like someone who's had a flamewar turn on him that's fighting back with his own bullhorn. - Ken Kennedy

Bishoph: or a mob can break glass and burn buildings and hurt people. What do you want to use your mob for? - Robert Scoble

He probably just read a book on syphilis. When I read a book on something I like to make links to the topic to make me appear well-read and smart. - Mark

He (as usual) has some valid points. FF is a great conversation tool but when it becomes a chat room, it's not up to the task. Just as in public, I tend to avoid these mobs here on FF. 58 comments on this right now is fine but 1000 is useless. I know you don't agree, but IRC is much more useful for that. - John Rubier

It would help if Mike actually understood how he could shape his FriendFeed experience. There are such things as blocking and hiding. It also seems like those who can dish it out but not take it run screaming from FriendFeed - which invites *real* interaction and conversation. Yeah, it's sometimes unruly, but that's reality folks! If you want the *dated* version of arm's length, yell... more... - AJ Kohn

I can't make it to Arrington's event on July 10th (I live in Boston..and the event is in SF), but I hope it gets a lot of coverage online so that the rest of us can learn from what is shared :) - Sam Houston

Look what services like Twitter and FF did for Iran. Just a medium to share and discuss (real time) information. Of course the used words in the blog are misleading and obviously rant (a troll post to start a discussion in real time :-). - bishoph

(Robert Scoble) -- "this is all about Arrington setting his conference up well. I will be a part of it from London. " -- next time, put this at the beginning of your post, Robert. I'm NOT interested in being a part of this childish crap. If you have actually have a problem with the post, you shouldn't either. If this thread is to help TC drum up word-of-mouth about a conference, that's... more... - Ken Kennedy

Could argue that MobFeed was more useful because it had private rooms and things. - Mark

@AJ: Arrington knows how to use FF. this thread is evidence of that. his willingness to pimp himself out - to invite this kind of negative talk - just to promote his own interests is what is so disappointing. - MikeAmundsen

Lazily, i'll c&p my post from TC..Yeah, this is Arrington taking a personal incident and trying REALLY hard to universalize it. And the syphilis analogy only makes this look needier and less applicable. FriendFeed aggregates conversations and connects sub-streams of the cloud more efficiently than any other current service. Once you try it, you like it. I works. It's efficient. The... more... - Thom Kennon

@Mike: Perhaps he understands that he can drum up talk, but I don't think he's been here enough to actually understand it's true power. So, yes, Arrington essentially is a FriendFeed spammer or Social Media Lout. - AJ Kohn

Ken: it isn't my strategy and I am not profiting from it. - Robert Scoble

"Mobs" have collapsed police states, authoritarian regimes, and given rise to countries like are's that even allow us to have this conversation today. To suppress them is like revoking the right to assemble and petition, removing the peoples voice, and is not a sign of a free and open society. Turn on the news and remember 99% of the world haven't a clue who Mike Arrington is. - Shaun Hess

@Robert: do you think Arrington is using you to promote is own agenda? - MikeAmundsen

Mr. Arrington is just too young. This online behavior will not subside soon. AOL Chatrooms, Usenet discussions, Compuserve bulletin boards, listserv flame wars.... The more things change, the more they stay the same. 15 years of Law and Order and broadcasting reruns on other Channels. For a Technology News guy it's pretty pathetic. What's the news? Where is the new idea? - Birgit Pauli-Haack

Mike: he is using our mob behaviors, yes. Do I feel used? No more so than when Aaron and Steven did the same thing. - Robert Scoble

@Robert: yep. - MikeAmundsen

I think there are many factors working here: 1)rapidly changing community norms 2) expansion of these services from small homogeneous groups who create them 3)poor communications skills 4)poor social skills 5) a lack of inhibition due to the virtual environment. - Francine Hardaway from BuddyFeed

If there was ever any doubt that Arrington seeds the controversies that surround him, let this post put that doubt to rest. His goal is to incite passions because he knows that anger drives engagement more than agreement does. He's merely the Ann Coulter of the nerd world -- nothing more, nothing less. - Sprague D

Mike knows that we cannot help ourselves, we simply must talk about his post and send him lots of hits and maybe sell a ticket or two for him. - Mark

@Sprague: "He's merely the Anne Coulter of the nerd world..." LOL +1 - MikeAmundsen

Well put Francine! - Bluejeanslady from twhirl

@Robert: your response is far too similar to what you used AGAINST Tim O'Reilly and other members of the SUL, IMO. If you know/suspect that Arrington is using this to promote a conference that you're going to attend; a conference focused on a technology realm that you make your living off of...then of course this helps you, just like being on the SUL helps Tim O'Reilly, even if he's "not changing what he says based on it". You didn't find that answer from Tim satifying, and I feel the same way about yours. - Ken Kennedy

It is difficult to take Michael Arrington seriously as a tech analyst -- he's inflated his self-created brouhaha into a mentally disorganized blast at Friendfeed. A very emotional guy. Friendfeed is a self-organizing platform. One shouldn't complain about getting mired down in nasty exchanges that are easily avoided with unsubscriptions and blocks. Arrington's mess was self-inflicted. - Sean McBride

Chris: I am an unpaid speaker at the TechCrunch Real Time event. - Robert Scoble

Tim O'Reilly doesn't pay to be on the SUL, Robert. - Ken Kennedy

Ken: WTF? - Robert Scoble

As a matter of fact, I think Twitter is much more suited to mob creation than FriendFeed. - Miguel Caetano

I work on my mob behavior. I engage, but try to be civil, helpful, or educational:-) this is a learned behavior after I got my butt handed to me a few times. - Francine Hardaway from BuddyFeed

Yes Matthew, alot of people (myself included) read a book on something and feel we must reference it to make us appear smart. I did the same thing with a book on the black death. its all nonsense of course - Mark

@Sean: from my POV, not only was Arrington's mess self-inflicted, it was a purposeful act on his part. as is this one. - MikeAmundsen

Miguel: yeah, over on Twitter I saw hundreds of people saying Jeff Goldbloom was dead when he wasn't. - Robert Scoble

arrington: @Scobleizer perhaps someday when you are sitting in your house with a police car parked out front to protect you you'll think differently. - Mark

C'mon Robert...do you seriously not grok the similarities between this argument and your complaint about O'Reilly/SUL? This is free publicity for a conference that you're speaking at that will help make your name more notable in your area of expertise. - Ken Kennedy

Mark: perhaps I will. - Robert Scoble

I need to read up a little more on the other parties involved. The only person I follow of this group with any real regularity is Leo LaPorte. However, from a listeners point of view, Leo grossly over-reacted to a legitimate question ( and I love Leo's work ). Would Larry King shut down the show just because he was asked something he was apparently sensitive about? ( I realize this... more... - Sean E Brown

Must have been a serious thread if the police give you personal protection - Mark

No robert, what I pasted was Arringtons reply to you on twitter - Mark

Mark: I know. - Robert Scoble

Robert, please don't pay attention to M.A. He does not deserve it - Luca Conti

Arrington is just ticked off at the response he was getting after he attacked Leo .. yeah I really think he attacked him personally. Attacking a man's credibility and integrity is a personal attack in my opinion. Then he removed the techcrunch feed from friendfeed ..so what let him .. I agree with the other commenters..He is an attention whore plain and simple then compares Friendfeed... more... - John Blanton from twhirl

I really think Arrington has a skewed view of FriendFeed. Most of the venom against him on FriendFeed has happened during Gillmor Gang podcasts, which were most recently running on Leo Laporte's TWiT network. For whatever reason, a large percentage of Leo's TWiT fan base hates Arrington. Not just disagree. Hate. They've also said pretty awful things about Steve Gillmor, Dave Winer, etc.... more... - Mike Doeff

Notice how Mike is totally absent on this thread. He should be here defending his article, defending his analogy to syphilis and letting us all know how dumb we are for not seeing things is way. Mike obiously sees no point to having this discussion. I count 2 tweets from him on this subject. - Roberto Bonini

@Mike Doeff If he did see the civility of FriendFeed he wouldn't have compared it to syphilis. - John Blanton

Please note, Robert...I don't think you're being all devious or anything. I'm just pointing this out to give you another angle on the O'Reilly thing. I actually think Tim probably thought "WTF" as well. And while I DO think that both of you are being a teeny bit naive thinking that the attention doesn't affect what you say or do...that's the case with pretty much all attention. I don't... more... - Ken Kennedy

Scoble: I see what you did here. :-) - Mark Davidson from BuddyFeed

I'd put a witty comment here, but Arrington isn't worth the requisite brain power that would consume. - Steven Perez

Arrington is a douch. - Peter Kruit

Can Mike read this thread without a FF account? - Mark

Ken: Arrington is on the Suggested User List and he did not disclose that. Jason Calacanis says that is worth $250,000. I guarantee you that speaking at a conference won't get you $250,000 worth of followers. - Robert Scoble

Anybody remember Usenet newsgroups? They still exist, and lots o' tech people still use them (i still answer questions there). There have been some remarkable flame wars there, and they are all threaded. I don't see how different that is from FF except FF has a prettier interface. - RobinDotNet

Mark: yes - Robert Scoble

Peter: so are you. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Thank you ;) Don't get me wrong. We also need people like that. They make for interesting discussions. - Peter Kruit

Hah! Arrington removed my comment about him not disclosing that he is on Twitter's Suggested User list. - Robert Scoble

Lets give 1 sec to the Arrington point at his last tweets ,cant we have some kind of control on the stream ?cant FF add better moderation tools ? - Johni Fisher

Robert: You're stirring the pot yourself and why? Because Arrington comapred FF to Syphilis? I have nothing against a discussion about the issue at hand but you're lead-in to this was a bit on the point of the article.. It's just a session of Arrignton bashing, replace the keyboards with pitchforks and you're all on your was the TC headquarters to string up the guy. - Sean E Brown

"on your way" rather - Sean E Brown

And again I am comment on a Scoble thread, but to misquote Cassius " The fault, dear Friends, is not in Scoble or Arrington But in ourselves, that we are underlings." - Kim Landwehr

oh I forgot IMHO - Sean E Brown

Sean: you are right. - Robert Scoble

Sean: the thing is I have seen mob suppression and I don't like it one bit. - Robert Scoble

And I have had my car damaged and life threatened by a mob after the 49ers won the Super Bowl one year. - Robert Scoble

@Robert: gotcha. I think I understand where you're coming from. I disagree, but it's no big deal. - Ken Kennedy

Robert: but who is suppressing it? An article isn't going to to stop mobs, not all mobs are good mobs (lol). I suppose we all have our quirks that get us up in arms, I am in no way innocent of that. - Sean E Brown

I declare the Dead Horse to be Beaten sufficiently. - Sean E Brown

@Johni Fisher: FriendFeed is a social network, not a community or a forum with administrators and the like. But I reckon that nested conversations could be useful ;-) - Miguel Caetano

This inspired me to listen to the Mob Rules album by Black Sabbath :D - Per

It's interesting to me that the very thing Arrington talks about happens here. Where did good taste and treating other people with respect get off the track? I mean seriously...have you looked at how many people are on this thread making nasty comments about Arrington? He isn't the only one that gets that treatment, we all do if we state our opinions publicly. Now, I'm not against... more... - Sheryl

Sheryl: yes, this is bloodsport. Same thing happens at baseball stadiums every day. - Robert Scoble

Sheryl: The nasty talk against Arrington is earned. Arrington frequently slams FriendFeed (which get under Robert Scoble's skin and compels him to do these sorts of posts, but that's another topic) and then cries whenever (a) no one pays him any attention or (b) people talk nasty about him. - Steven Perez

Robert: I can't take things that seriously. Life is to be lived not destroyed. Why don't we talk about the value of the mob? Why don't we talk about how amazing social networks can be? - Sheryl

Steven: I disagree with you :) That Arrington has an opinion and states it no more gives you or I a right to tear his person apart than my simply waking up every day. Argue against his opinion but name calling has no benefits. - Sheryl

Sheryl: You're entitled to your viewpoint, but I've been here long enough to see how Arrington operates. And nothing I've seen from him lately has changed that opinion. He deserves every bit of scorn he gets, because he delights in these sort of poop fights. - Steven Perez

Here are some features that might slow down mob-like participation: 1) move the comment link to after the last comment, rather than right under the item, to encourage reading the previous comments before commenting. 2) once a threshold has been reached, remove the comment link entirely, so you have to go to the item page (which displays all comments) before commenting, to discourage formation of instant pile-ons from within the live stream. - Michael R. Bernstein

Steven: You don't have to change your opinion of Arrington. At no time have I suggested you aren't entitled to your opinion. But what benefit for you is there in calling him names? We all have opinions others disagree with. You didn't call me names and yet for all you know I'm a horrible person (I'm not) I think the world is better for opinions and different thoughts. It stretches us to... more... - Sheryl

Mike comparing FF to syphilis is pure, shameless analogy abuse. But say what you will about Mike, his arguments are interesting, and I do read them. And if anyone on this thread wants to organize a torch and pitchfork mob against him, let me be the first to say I've got a billion more interesting and important things to occupy my time. - James Hernandez

Sheryl: I said it Zee's thread and I'll say it here - it's another Arrington poop fight. He throws enough of it on the wall to see what sticks, gets Robert Scoble riled up, and a mess of blog posts and forum fights ensue. SOP for Arrington. Meanwhile, he reaps the benefits of notoriety and links back to his site, all without ever setting foot in here, because we're all going over there to see what he wrote. - Steven Perez

Neither of these are particularly innovative, BTW. I can suggest reading Derek Powazek's excellent book 'Design for Community':http://www.amazon.com/exec... - Michael R. Bernstein

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it go something like this: 1. Arrington dislikes Scoble. 2. Scoble likes FriendFeed. 3. Therefore, Arrington dislikes FriendFeed. - Stephen Mack #TeamMomo

Steven: I would only ask this, who is inciting who if Arrington squawks and people fluff their feathers? I don't know Mike Arrington, I know who he is and I have read enough to know he frequently says things that are inflammatory, but I don't call him names publicly. Where is the value in that? Can someone show me why that is useful because if you can, I may change my tune, though it's highly unlikely! ;-) - Sheryl

Stephen: I don't think Arrington dislikes me. - Robert Scoble

it's all entertainment in the end :D - Iphigenie

Ken: ;-) Dork! LOL (I can call Ken names cause he's my SO) hehe - Sheryl

Ken: even filtering can't help some threads! :-) - Robert Scoble

Robert: shall I bop him on the head? hehe - Sheryl

Ken: only if you search for it will it matter for long. - Robert Scoble

Sheryl -- what kind of response do you think Arrington anticipated when he compared Friendfeed to syphillis -- *at length* (in case we missed the point)? Describing him as a jackass strikes me as a measured and rational response. But he is best ignored, to be sure. - Sean McBride

Sheryl: there's a small bit of problem with your logic. By your logic, everything that Ann Coulter (thanks, Sprague D) says is not deserving of scorn, either. - Steven Perez

Steven I don't say it's wrong to be scornful. I do still think it's wrong to call names. It feels wrong to me to validate that in any way. Defending position is a whole other thing. To enter the fray and retaliate has no good consequence. - Sheryl

Sean: I don't think it matters what Arrington's goal was. In the end, even if Arrington calls FF names, to do so in return accomplishes what? - Sheryl

Sheryl -- sometimes it is healthy to call out a jackass as a jackass, and then move on to more productive topics. It puts a period on the nonsense. In general I agree with you: the more civil the conversation, the better. - Sean McBride

This whole thing reminds me of the "How to tell someone they sounded racist video" http://www.youtube.com/watch... I think we can all learn something from that video. Keep to the subject, instead of calling names and generalizing from what a person did. If you want a good discussion on this subject don't call people names. Instead of wasting time in here where M.A says he... more... - Rasmus Lauridsen

Because, at the end of the day, Arrington is against mob mentality ... unless he can direct the mob's direction. - Steven Perez

The real problem with herd mentality is that once understood, it can be effectively deployed to link bait, generate PR in the form of online discussions, and to promote social media sites and/or events, without people even being aware of it. - Mark Davidson

I'm particularly baffled - better yet - amused by how the media gurus quickly turn into poor, weeping poopflinging angry things once they find themselves prodded by the pointy end of a mass of people (which they then call "a mob" elegantly skipping the "lynch" part). Groupthink - yes, sometimes - even herd mentality - but this has all to do with how people are, and nothing with technology, so I really don't get the hate on FF (Syphilis? gimme a f-in' break!). - dario

also: the guy is obviously oblivious of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and has no clue about what goes on in "the mainstream", say on Reddit, /. or that cesspool that are youtube comments. FF is pretty much a small, happy place with tea, pastries and fancy embroidered cushions compared to those. - dario

Dude, TC deleted my (constructively thoughtful albeit critical) comment in the article thread --- and it keeps eating my attempts to repost. wtf?!... - Thom Kennon

Thom: Arrington did the same thing to me. Welcome to the mob. - Robert Scoble

Ken Camp - I agree completely with your post - this whole thread went from a discussion on Mobfeed and into something similar to a 1990 BBS rant - Kathleen Forden

This is really getting to be ridiculous. Arrington admits that people can be nasty at Twitter and other places, but says FriendFeed is worse, basically because all comments can be seen in one place. Blame FF? Why don't we start with blaming TechCrunch, because a lot of people started out disliking him due to what he writes there. I suspect that if Arrington didn't delete so much of what was posted there, we'd see a REAL mob. - MiniMage

Dario: If Arrington's blog post heightened your emotional state, then his mission was accomplished. If you clicked the link to Arrington's blog, then his mission was accomplished. If you commented on Arrington's blog, then his mission was accomplished. If Robert Scoble started a thread on FriendFeed about Arrington's blog post, then his mission was accomplished. If we are still... more... - Mark Davidson

Mark: that was my point, actually (sorry it didn't come through too well) - basically if you go prodding a hive with a stick sometimes you get stung - it doesn't reflect too well on you if you get all uppity afterwards. So, I agree with you 100% on the manipulative part. - dario

The same thing happens on Digg, and it's been around for years. It's not a problem with the service(s), it's a cultural problem. We've all been desensitized to some level or another, some extremely. - Blake

Dario: Don't feel bad. I got caught up in it too. It's human behavior. As human beings, we respond to stimuli. When executed properly, we just can't help ourselves. Our emotions get stirred, we take action in the form of a response, we become engaged because we've invested emotional energy, we talk amongst ourselves, etc. Politicians, public speakers, bloggers, television and radio... more... - Mark Davidson

What a bunch of echo chamber nonsense. - Jason Nunnelley

Matthew, I just expanded my opinion on Mike's post (linked by Scoble). I think it's calculated drama. Either that or really, really silly. I'm giving everyone the benefit of doubt here and assigning more intelligence than the latter opinion would allow. - Jason Nunnelley

Why would anyone take anything that Arrington writes seriously after his complete bullshit stories about Last.fm - which had real, economic consequences for the company, and which are still being repeated as if they were true by people around the web? He's perfectly happy to whip up the mob when it suits him, but when it bites him back he suddenly becomes Mr Socially Concerned. - Ian Betteridge

How many times was Arrington's name mentioned in this post, thus reinforcing his brand through repetition? How many people reading his name were in an emotionally heightened state? Hmmm. lol. - Mark Davidson

When someone comes into your house and poops on your coffee table, it's a bit difficult to look at it rationally and ask what the merits of such an act was. - Steven Perez

He actually removed my comment. No kidding. I didn't wish him ill, suggest he should died or anything of that nature. I just made a coherent and short comment about his tactic with as bland a set of language as possible. Wimp. - Jason Nunnelley

THIS is why i fucking hate FF. "Read his anti-FriendFeed rant here" WHERE? damn it, friend feed always makes a monkey out of me. where's arrington's rant? i dunno. i'll seach for arrington's account and see if i can find it. i'll prolly be back in five minutes to say "oh, i'm so stupid... i found it at [INSERT FUCKING URL HERE]" thanks for exposing my FF ineptitude, Scoble. - Mark Hartwell

Mark: it's the first comment on this thread. It's a link. Then come back here to read the 200 comments. - Robert Scoble

Mark: I've used this device hundreds of times. Most people figure it out pretty quickly. - Robert Scoble

He hasn't deleted mine yet - Rasmus Lauridsen

Comment removal is standard practice at TechCrunch, and it really doesn't matter if the comments are polite. He'll leave a few counter-comments in (enough so it's not obvious he's blocking counter-opinions) and delete the rest. Perhaps his lack of control of the conversation is why he doesn't like FriendFeed much. - Ian Betteridge

All I said was that he should thank Scoble for the link, but he shouldn't be surprised if these tactics result in trollish drama queens following his work only to bring a teen girl styled smack down to his next slumber party. It wasn't even that caustic, definitely not "mob" language. - Jason Nunnelley

Matthew: he's probably deleting all comments he perceives as being from the "MobFeed." I think it's funny. Mike once told me he's an entertainer, and this is evidence of that. - Robert Scoble

aha http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... got it ... second comment actually. i agree with jason calicanis ... you need a freaking masters degree to work friend feed. thanks, Robert, BTW .. the url gets shortened, so even though the title of the article is in that URL, one doesn't see it when scanning the comments. - Mark Hartwell

Mark: no, it's the first comment. The first line are people who clicked "like" on this item. - Robert Scoble

The problem, though, is that Arrington is an "entertainer" with the power to seriously hurt companies and careers in the web industry. And he does it, too. - Ian Betteridge

So, he deletes my comment about participating in adult conversation and leaves the guy's comment that calls him a douche? Mature. I'm starting to withdraw my prior benefit of doubt. - Jason Nunnelley

Ian: he only can hurt you if you let him. If your marketing campaign relies on TechCrunch then your marketing campaign is bad and needs a major rethink. I've had Valleywag and Techcrunch aimed at me before and it never hurts. - Robert Scoble

To be totally fair, i dont think it is that bad. We have had quite a few articles on Techcrunch and on on a whole they seem to be a nice bunch, very accomodating and understanding. - Paul Rawlings

Although it is unpleasant to go through. - Robert Scoble

I thought it was quite a funny read, I don't think I can take it seriously... it is almost as if someone spat in his face or something. - Paul Kinlan

Robert, he can't hurt me - but think of Last.fm, whose reputation was hurt and which lost subscribers because of a completely false series of articles that Arrington posted. And he's never really acknowledged that he got it totally wrong, preferring to hint that "there's no smoke without fire". That's what I mean about serious damage. He has the power of mainstream media, without the vaguest notion of a conscience. - Ian Betteridge

FF interface: simple? perhaps. Intuitive? not so much. The FF fail is strong in me. (and scoble was right, the url IS in the first comment) what looked to me like the first comment was just a list of "likes" that's a Digg concept, right? - Mark Hartwell

Ian: if Last.fm has value it will cruise right through a wrongful attack. I'm not saying it's right, or pleasant. - Robert Scoble

Yeah, Last.fm will survive - think of the man-hours it took dealing with the mess that Arrington created. A lot of time and effort went into cleaning up a mess that Arrington gleefully made. And again, no acknowledgement from him that he was in the wrong. - Ian Betteridge

Matthew: stay nice. It's not that easy sometimes for newbies. - Robert Scoble

Matt, your comment on Arrington's post is funny dude. I give it ten minutes :) - Jason Nunnelley

I just read this entire post. I'm so sorry I wasted my time. Maybe we should ban the use of cell phones and IM just in case. Like FriendFeed, they also make it too easy to talk to people. - Rahsheen?

on such a beautiful sunday, how on earth could anybody be paying attention to arrington's opinion - he is a self serving dolt... - mike "glemak" dunn

ok, i've read arrington's post. and most of this thread. the syphilis analogy was probably just something that mike has been wanting to paste and share since he read that book. the laporte / arrington "war" lasted all of 10 minutes. what that exchange DID expose was a lot of pent up anti-arrington hate. why do so many people think arrington is an asshole? simple, he IS an asshole. if i... more... - Mark Hartwell

ok Robert If you are going to remove mike's comment couldn't you at least remove my reply to him also? Now it stands out like a sore thumb of dumbness in a sea of irrelevance. :-P - Rasmus Lauridsen

Rasmus I haven't removed any replies on this thread! - Robert Scoble

yay then he removed it himself. Mission accomplished :-) - Rasmus Lauridsen

who cares. - Stalyn☂

Glad to know you know me so well @Zudfunck, So I'm a "spoiled intellectual" from California... Not a 29 year old college dropout living in Randers, Denmark? Wow you know me so well almost better than I know myself. Thanks for the generalization, it totally helped my mood :-P - Rasmus Lauridsen

What an odd post - I like Arrington, but it's posts like this that make him come off as a bully. The mob boss? - Jesse Stay

Robert: "Nice mob you got here" ~ Kevin Costner in Wyatt Earp - Sean E Brown

I think Mike is paranoid one of those startups he loves to put in the deadpool want HIM in the deadpool :p - Mark

A salad? You see this is the Kevin Rose effect. All the young kids up and coming in tech are all skinny, and they rock climb, and drink fashionable teas from around the world. No more fat techies with these guys in charge. Crap. - Mark

@mark dammit I need to work out then, thanks for not sending me that memo before now! :-P - Rasmus Lauridsen

Lost me when he got to the pustules part. - Oldengrey (Jay) from fftogo

Mike Arrington's is not on the global radar, so his rant is useless. There are major social media shifts in developing countries, violent regime crack-downs, and tech developments leading human dignity campaigns. - E-Advocate Network

Yawn, change a few words and it could be used by any class with power, religious, political. IE. Admin blog power, Green Dam, RIAA, Tehran, Bush. Read/Write culture is showing tremendous growth. There is no one person, power, group or nation that can change any of it. Call it Mob call it anything you want, but for 99.99999999999% of the population. His rant is a YAWN. It will change nothing and have no effect not now or ever. There is nothing to fear here move on. - Robert Higgins

The biggest problem with Mike Arrington and MG Siegler's arguments is they only seeing this problem because of their position. I've said some pretty fierce, opinionated things on FriendFeed, Twitter, and elsewhere, but I'm not fearing for my life. Nor would I in the near future. Even though we're not anonymous on FriendFeed or Twitter, it doesn't matter for most because we're anonymous enough to where enough people are going to care enough to do something to us. - Jared Mehle

+1 SpragueD, the difference being Ann Coulter has a pair of *cojones.* she wouldn't need months of seclusion and grief counseling after someone spat on her. - Karim

Karim: I am no longer speaking at any TechCrunch event, according to an email I just received. Just so we can clear that part up of the conversation above. - Robert Scoble

What a bone head move by TC. - Mark

Sorry, I don't join mobs. - xero

Matthew: I don't know, but he clearly was not happy with something I said above. - Robert Scoble

Matthew: Mike considers Robert the leader of the FF movement for some odd reason. Cult leader. He evangelises the service so he must be the one getting people to threaten Mike, right. - Mark

Matthew: it might have been a comment he deleted over on TechCrunch too. I don't know. I'll talk with him when he's calmer and see what got him to use that stick on my legs. - Robert Scoble

Don't think so. We have work to do to get alot of the big twitter users over here. - Mark

Friendfeed is ours. We own it, not the celebs who own twitter more and more :/ FF is for the geeks. - Mark

@Jason: http://friendfeed.com/wilw - MikeAmundsen

Robert... he *disinvited* you to London? lol. petty. perhaps not unexpected though, given his penchant for drama. http://dramabutton.com in the movies they call it a "plot point." - Karim

Send him one of these, Robert: http://saydrah.files.wordpress.com/2008... - Daniel J. Pritchett

Karim: I'm going to London, just not going to speak at any TechCrunch event I guess. I'm going as part of http://www.travelinggeeks.com - Robert Scoble

©Scoble, you said, "...he only can hurt you if you let him. If your marketing campaign relies on TechCrunch then your marketing campaign is bad and needs a major rethink." According to a rep from a huge tech corporation, even an unknown blogger can damage a company's ability to sell a product. When I asked for permission to review a new device, the response I received conveyed this warning. I never wrote the review. I'm not sure I ever wrote any others. - MiniMage

MiniMage: yes, any random person can hurt you, but only if that pain resonates with others. If you have a great product or service, it will go on. Look at Apple. - Robert Scoble

Matthew: where did you read that? - Robert Scoble

Matthew: Arrington isn't in charge of http://www.travelinggeeks.com so he can't pull my ticket from London. He can, however, keep me out of TechCrunch events. - Robert Scoble

I'll read this thread, but why is Mike angry with you, Robert? - Stephen Pickering

Stephen: I don't know. I guess he feels I turned the mob against him. Or something I did over on his blog bugged him (he deleted a comment where I wondered whether his attacks on FriendFeed were driven by his inclusion on the Twitter Suggested User List, which delivered to him $250,000 of value and that he never discloses when he talks about social networking). Funny if it's that because it's pretty much the same thing that he did to Leo Laporte that pissed off Leo so much. - Robert Scoble

Yeah, I was just thinking that's what Leo should have shot back with, and I was just thinking the same thing about the SUL and how dramatically that's a bigger deal to affect their coverage of Twitter than Leo's getting a pre for a week. I'll try to start being just positive like you suggested earlier, but it makes me wonder if TechCrunch got as many @replies attacking them as Mike... more... - Stephen Pickering

I thought friendfeed was the "coolest app nobody uses"... now we're the mob ;) guess we're moving up in the world guys. - Frankie Warren

lol Matthew -- no, the "Burn Notice" intro goes like this: http://www.hulu.com/watch... My name is Robert Scoble. I used to be a social media expert. Until... [VOICE ON PHONE: "Arrington put out a burn notice on you. You're blacklisted."] - Karim

LEAVE MIKE ARRINGTON ALONE!!! *cries* - Alejandro

If this has already been posted, I apologize, but the bad side of a mob can be seen here: http://hashtags.org/tag... When a twitter / ff user says he's going to commit suicide and a bunch of people encourage him to do so.... Not a good example of the "mob." - Ben Hanten

Ben: so, a bunch of Twitter users flash a stupid hashtag, it shows up here on FF as being ported from Twitter (http://friendfeed.com/search... - note the point of origin and how many users here actually used that tag), and somehow that's the mob that Arrington is talking about? - Steven Perez

I agree with Mike too, except for the syphilis comparison (could have used a better analogy).. Emotions + Real-Time communication with the rest of the world can blow matters out of proportions very quickly, and especially so when not everyone reads all 286++ comments.. - Winston Teo

Winston: the problem I have with is with the equating "social media" with "FriendFeed", Seriously, this place is worse than, say, 4chan? Or Digg? Or Stormfront? Really? - Steven Perez

Because Arrington didn't note this as a general problem. He specifically targeted FriendFeed over some of the worst social media sites out there. For that reason alone, his article is laughable. - Steven Perez

@steven Yup, I would say it's not only about FF. But his "theory" makes sense in a general way, IMO. - Winston Teo

Well, welcome to 1997, Winston. Because "mob mentality" has manifested itself since comic book nerds were flaming each other on USENET over whether Hal Jordan or Kyle Rainer was the better Green Lantern. If general assholery was the issue, then not only did Arrington's point hit wildly off the mark, it didn't even land on the same planet. I've been here for a year, and while people do... more... - Steven Perez

Not enough page hits, or not enough fans to drown out the dissenting voices. Arrington et al can hide in their imaginary utopian internet hangouts (as if they exist) and shut out everyone who dares to suggest they're wrong, but they need to stop attacking FriendFeed. It's not the cesspool they pretend it is. - MiniMage

My take is that Arrington doesn't like FF because he can't control what goes on here or what is said about him here. He can't delete the comments on threads (unless they are his own), like he can on his own web site. - Jeff P. Henderson

@Clark heck, "threads" on Twitter are so disorganized that you can barely call them that. *grin* (I realize some of the desktop apps make them easier to review, but still.) - Ken Kennedy

Mr. Arrington has a good point there: aggregating opinions and discussion indeed create online mob. We just saw it in many real examples. - darwin|1q84

it is always easier to lead a mob than a person. - darwin|1q84

I concur, darwin|1q84, especially when no one moment can be the whole truth. Mobs form quickly and often without the *whole* story. real-time, while useful in many contexts as Louis pointed out, can lead to a quick-time mob mentality that gets out of control fast. Great discussion. Brings up a lot of things. - thinfilms

Surprise surprise, Arrington deleted my comment on his thread. As I said above, he really doesn't like it if people disagree with him in "his own territory", does he? - Ian Betteridge

I'm not sure where Mike Arrington was back in the late 90's, but I was smack dab in the middle of a vibrant CNN online community where discussions happened in real time with real names and yeah, there were mobs around certain issues. Anything to do with the Middle East, or Bill Clinton was guaranteed to be a 24/7 shift for the elves who scrubbed the spam and the flames. This isn't new. It's been around since the cave man days. It's only a question of how it's manifest. - Karoli

LOL of my comments over there he removed the one where I argued against Sean MacDhai for calling Michael a Douche. Guess he just wants to continue being the victim. I actually liked MA's stuff and enjoyed the turds he threw out sometimes. But deleting comments supporting him so he can just look more like a victim is low... Guess I'm gone from there.. His comment moderation makes it impossible to carry on a conversation, self serving as it is... - Rasmus Lauridsen

the bully pulpit worked. against the bully. - Rick Cogley

Having stepped back and thought about it, I think that there's a serious point struggling to get out of Arrington's post. He's choosing to blame tools like FriendFeed for people being vitriolic, but real-time tools - like any tool - don't make people do anything. People *choose* to be vitriolic: it's part of their make up, their culture, their approach to life. The problem that I have... more... - Ian Betteridge

The fact that Mike is deleting comments that don't suit his needs and banned Robert S from Tech crunch events tends to prove my suspicion, and this is about control. He doesn't control the Ff conversation and that's what bothers him. - Kim Landwehr from BuddyFeed

It strikes me that Friendfeed tends to fuel invective out of partisanship or loyalty because threads like this one and the TWIT episode thread attract groupies. The bile comes from what the spewers must see as the most noble of motives -- sticking up for their Friend. - Amyloo

the best analogy for friendfeed he could come up with was syphilis? Yeah that's not link bait. I'm sure the guys at friendfeed are just thrilled with Mike today. - timepilot

I think Mike got used to shouting fire in a theater and he is now upset that the theater goers are organized and calling him on it. give me a break - timepilot

Discussion of these questions is welcome with the understanding that the dialogue is invigorating. - Mike Chelen

Kevin: the praise for twitter is that it is less effective for communication, friendfeed should be thankful for the nice compliment ;) - Mike Chelen

Andrew Terry: the post actually is much more insightful if taken to apply more generally, however it does single out friendfeed as somehow qualitatively worse than blogs or twitter :D - Mike Chelen

It is rather silly that FF's supposed Achilles heel is that it's too effective at bringing crowds together. Mike's unspoken counterpoint benefit to Twitter is that megaphone-style broadcasting is still possible without too much interruption from the public. - Daniel J. Pritchett

I prefer twitter because individuals are individuals on twitter and there is nothing meaningful to say in thirty seconds in a flame war or a thread with 322 replies - Michele Costabile

We could certainly use some threading options in the comments UI, maybe even some upvoting and other dynamic resorting. These big threads tend to buckle under their own weight. - Daniel J. Pritchett from IM

Daniel, I like time sequencing on big threads. I'd like to see simpler respond identifiers so when someone says "Jason," I know which of us billion or so Jasons he's talking to. I much prefer this to seeing comments floating around based on up and down votes. - Jason Nunnelley

I did throw in the qualifier "optional" to my feature suggestion. I guess y'all's vote cancels out mine :P (http://www.theonion.com/content...) - Daniel J. Pritchett from IM

Daniel, welcome to the democratic process. Facts and logic need not participate ;) - Jason Nunnelley

Michele: individuals can be seen clearly in friendfeed once familiar with the interface, and followed or unfollowed similar to twitter - Mike Chelen

Guys, Mike should remove the post from Techcrunch or else we will start a group to protest against him - Michael_techie

Guys, please join this group http://friendfeed.com/hate-mi... to protest against Michael Arrington - Michael_techie

You created a group called "Hate Mike Arrington?" Wow. - Mark

Yep, we should show how big is Friendfeed - Michael_techie

Um, no. - Steven Perez from IM

Sorry @Michael_techie that's a fail. I think its time to move on and think about more positive stuff. It's 22 hours since @scobleizer started this thread, its like years in realtime web. Seas have already flowed under the proverbial bridge on this one. - Rasmus Lauridsen

Yes, you won't see threads like this any more. Scoble wants more positive threads and is trying to make up with Mike Arrington who has denounced their friendship after several years. - Mark

@Matthew hey we should pile up this conversation in separate room - Michael_techie

@matthew Are you promoting Michael arrington - Michael_techie

As a FF user, It really hurts when some one call us as mob - Michael_techie

@matthew, He shouldn't call the whole FF users as mob, coz he got some hatred messages - Michael_techie

Black Sabbath said it best: When you listen to fools, the mob rules. - Andy Dustman

Sean McBride

The best news distribution platforms on the planet in order of value (according to me): 1. Feedly 2. Peoplebrowsr 3. Google Reader 4. Friendfeed.

June 28, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

Kathleen Capps, Thierry R. Andriamirado, Kol Tregaskes and 20 other people liked this

I would say: 1) Google Reader 2) FriendFeed 3) There is no #3. - Louis Gray

39 more comments

Louis, what about Posterous? - frank barry

No Twitter? - Brandon Mendelson

Posterous and Twitter are included into the ff stream. - Jim Braux-Zin

Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo! News. :) - Dare Obasanjo

The line above is a test. Twitter Search is somewhere in there. But if we are talking about distribution, one should really start with e-mail. - Louis Gray

Feedly makes GReader more useful...too bad it's locked into Firefox though - .LAG liked that

Louis -- I think of Feedly as Google Reader PLUS -- and that is a very big plus. Do you perceive any advantages of Google Reader over Feedly? I can cover much more ground more nimbly with Feedly compared to GR for the same unit of time. (I subscribe to over 1,000 feeds). You may well use these tools in ways that I haven't imagined. - Sean McBride

Sean, it depends on your use case. I like Feedly a lot and was the first to write about it. But I use Safari instead of Firefox, and am not going to switch browsers for one service. - Louis Gray

Brandon - Peoplebrowsr is Twitter PLUS -- and that is a very big plus. - Sean McBride

My main beef with Friendfeed: no list view, no mark as read (and therefore too much noise). Two issues that would be extremely easy to fix. But it is still a great news distribution platform, truly revolutionary. - Sean McBride

Ah -- the browser issue; got it. - Sean McBride

How's PB doing these days? I'd gotten tired of waiting for it to get out of alpha and switched to Tweetie for Mac. I'm also not crazy about running it in a browser window and both the Air and Fluid.app options for PB are less than ideal. I did like a lot of the functions PB offers, but wish I could find a comparable native Mac app. Maybe Nambu, but that still needed some maturing last time I checked, too. This is all a little off-topic, but other than this, I'd pretty much agree with your ranking. - Grey Drane

Grey -- I just took another look at Peoplebrowsr yesterday, and it finally clicked for me. It's operating on all cylinders. The design is elegant and slick, despite the wealth of functionality. (There IS a learning curve on customizing it to one's tastes.) - Sean McBride

Sean -- Cool. I'll have to give it another look, then. - Grey Drane

Five or six years ago I used email heavily for news gathering, using various subscriptions and news alert services. Now my use of email for that purpose has dropped to near zero -- much too clunky and inefficient. - Sean McBride

Friendfeed, memeorandum, Google News, Skygrid, and Feedly are my faves. - Robert Scoble

The deeper powers and virtues of Feedly only become apparent after heavy use with a large feedbase -- one can easily navigate across one's entire collection of feeds in complex and swift ways that Google Reader can't begin to match. The conceptual design of the Feedly interface is really stunning. - Sean McBride

Feedly rocks no doubt. I never go into GR now. I love that Feedly keeps adding features that make it even more useful. - frank barry

PB does have a more mature feel now, but seriously, STILL alphaware??!!! What's up with that? Pull the trigger already, devs! - Grey Drane

Robert -- I didn't mention Google News because I feed Google News searches into Feedly and Google Reader; for me, Feedly and Google Reader subsume Google News. Have to take a look at Skygrid -- hadn't heard of it. (You may have meant to type Google Reader there instead of Google News.) - Sean McBride

What I like about the current Peoplebrowsr: 1. no desktop app required (except my browser) 2. tons of valuable functionality 3. many of the function buttons are hidden until one hovers over them; not too cluttered 4. feels fast and zippy 5. easy lateral navigation through stacks with left/right cursor keys 6. pause button, mark all posts as read, wipe read posts, resume flow 7. various... more... - Sean McBride

Sean -- Do you use PeopleBrowsr for FriendFeed, too? Or just Twitter? It seems buggy and generally not great for anything but pure Twitter statstream. My FriendFeed "Home" feed gets all sorts of excess junk in it, just for one example. - Grey Drane

Grey -- I am only using Peoplebrowsr for Twitter -- looks like you've bumped into some alpha-style problems around the Twitter edges.( I would love to see Feedly take on the challenge of fully and optimally integrating Twitter into its interface model.) - Sean McBride

Sean -- Yep. That'd be the way I'd like to go, too, for news anyway. - Grey Drane

Sean -- BTW, what are some of those high-quality Twitter feeds you follow? I'm following a few, but I'm not sure how many I'd call "high-quality". - Grey Drane

Grey: We'd love to know more about issues that you have with PeopleBrowsr's FriendFeed support. We are improving all the time, and need (and love) the feedback. Thanks! - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

That said, the reason i started using (and subsequently joined) PeopleBrowsr, is because of the ability to watch large numbers of streams simultaneously. When used in conjunction with FriendFeed's website, I think it's an incredible way to absorb large amounts of news very rapidly. It's been invaluable (for me) in determining the veracity of sources for news from Iran. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Grey: a few Twitter feeds that I've found to be valuable: Antiwarcom, alleyinsider, amnesty, atul, bbcpolitics, bbcscitech, BreakingNews, CBSNews, CFR_org, cnnbrk, cqpolitics, dailydish, DavidCornDC, DemocracyNow, dorait, EFF, foxnew_pol, FP_Passport, Gizmodo, glenngreenwald, guardiannews, guardiantech, haaretzonline, harpers, huffingtonpost, HuffPolitics, infowarsstories,... more... - Sean McBride

Sean: I wonder if you have all those added to a group in PB, and if so is it public? - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob -- I will look into doing that. I take it that you work for Peoplebrowsr? - Sean McBride

That would be awesome :) (and you can also pass out a link to the group stack - non PB users can just use the link to get the stack w/o logging into PB - just use the export at the bottom of the stack) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Yet another great Peoplebrowsr feature! - Sean McBride

Tiny Peoplebrowsr features that make a big difference: for instance: the count of new tweets at the top left corner of stacks, and the countdown as they enter the stack. I now feel like I have some control over the deluge (particular in combination with Pause, Mark all posts as read and Wipe read posts). - Sean McBride

Rob -- OK. I've just joined the PeopleBrowsr group here and will be posting some of my experiences there. - Grey Drane

Sean -- Thanks. I'll check some of those out, but if you do get them all into a public PB group, let us know! - Grey Drane

Grey -- do you have any Twitter feeds that you especially value? - Sean McBride

Thanks Sean and Grey for the great comments! Love reading you guys. Here are some PeopleBrowsr videos: Lite http://is.gd/IMI7 Adv. http://is.gd/JfGU Business http://is.gd/JfIa - SHHHE

SHHHE -- these links demonstrate that videos are often more effective than manuals and books for getting a quick handle on new programs. - Sean McBride

Sean -- I've only just started following news feeds on Twitter, so there aren't any that I "especially" value yet. I still get most of my news there from the actual people I follow, which is a valuable resource in itself, of course. That said, the Telegraph's feeds are the one's I seem to notice the most in my statstream, but I don't actually click through to (or retweet) much of their content. - Grey Drane

TweetTabs. It is rather auckward that you need to click on the favorites. But a good real time news as people type. - ThinkEzy

Robert Scoble

The coolest use of the Twitter API I've seen today: http://BillieTweets.com/ a Twitter tribute to Michael Jackson's Billie Jean.

June 28, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

Laurie DesAutels, Vedrana Janković, Lola Bean (Penguin) and 32 other people liked this

it doesn't seem to be loading properly for me. Did you break it Robert? - Mike White

16 more comments

pretty cool - Shiva

Mike: possibly. - Robert Scoble

I was fortunate to see it before Robert talked about, so it was not yet broken :) - Jean-Charles VERDIE

That's pretty cool. Does it search for the words live or is it "playback" ? - Klaus @ TechPatio

I'll check in with Mike Demers @mikedemers - it might be buggy in some browsers....:) - drew olanoff

it's so nice :) - Matteo

@drew - you're right. works in safari, not firefox! - Mike White

And thanks for the tweet/FF love Robert! Mike has done http://www.BlameDrewsCancer.com and a slew of other mashups - http://www.9astronauts.com (And is 1 year out of Hodgkins as of Friday!@#!@#!) - drew olanoff

linkbait... from beyond! - Dustin Hoffmann

Brilliant, just brilliant. - Nir Ben Yona

Very impressive. Shame it picks up so many spam tweets. - Conor Ogle

Conor: Twitter is full of spam and the search engine sucks in removing them. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Can you stop using Twitter? - Jason Hansen

Jason: no. Why would I want to? - Robert Scoble

love it superb - Thomas Power

Thanks for the post! Sorry about the bugs, I'm moving house this weekend and whipped this up during a break. It didn't get the usual testing and debugging effort. - Mike Demers

klaus: It's semi-live... The server periodically fetches new tweets from Twitter. There were too many words in the song to run the searches right from the browser. - Mike Demers

Zee. to Zee.'s feed, TheNextWeb Forum

The Twitter Time Traveler - Best pair of tweets i've ever seen! Genius! - http://thenextweb.com/2009...

June 27, 2009 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

mikepk, Jerry Chacon, Darren Stuart and 35 other people liked this

seriously genius. - Zee.

4 more comments

i rarely do this, but i'm bumping this one - its just the best online thing i've seen this weekend - Zee.

Inventive. Good fun end to the weekend. - Conor Ogle

Seriously funny, thank you Zee - Rasmus Lauridsen

oh i'm glad everyone appreciates this just as much as i did :) Bloody fantastic stuff...hope he's got a heap of new followers - Zee.

Oh no, now he's going to start getting Time Travel Spam: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/timetra... - Michael R. Bernstein

Robert Scoble

I haven't looked at Netbooks lately. Is the Asus 1000HE still the best for under $400? Which is the best to run OSX on? Answer on FriendFeed

June 27, 2009 from iPhone - Comment - Like - Share

Derryl Beukes, Jack Nork, Daniel Schildt and 21 other people liked this

Yeah, the Asus 1000HE still gives best bang for your buck. That, and it can run games decently. - Sam Goldfield

38 more comments

Robert, you should wait for next lineups which include Nvidia Tegra and ION chipsets that run 1080P videos smoothly. Otherwise, Asus 1000HE is definitely one of the best nowadays, specially in terms of battery life. - Nir Ben Yona

I love OS X on my MSI Wind, plus the battery options are very nice to have in a netbook. - Aaron Dyer

1000HE works fine for me---thrilled about battery life, but haven't moved to OS X on it. You *know* if you buy something, something better is announced the next day... - elspmdi

Nir: when are those coming? - Robert Scoble

I have the MSI Wind and am very happy with it. - Gunnyman™

I'm waiting for the Asus 1005HA (out this week) - the fully loaded version. I believe the Dell Mini is still the easiest for running OSX tho - Andy Sternberg from fftogo

I was personally looking at the HP Mini (fully loaded, bluetooth, the works), and Newegg is having a sale for $329.00? - Sam Ferry

depends. some people hate the msi wind. i got it because at the time it was one of the *only* ones that you could overclock. some people get other kinds for the keyboard size but does not have the overclock feature. my msi wind runs the default xp, windows 7, and os x. i have unbuntu on usb and backtrack 4 on sdhc. it's a great little machine for the price with great battery life. it... more... - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

one of the better compatibility charts floating around regarding OSX and Netbooks. http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008... - Jerry Schuman

been using the Acer Aspire One 531 for a while now, the inbuilt 3G module makes it very interesting but today switched to the Samsung N110,what a machine, running windows 7 ultimate is the only way to go - Patphelan

Robert, the new Lenovo IdeaPad S12 with ION chipset is already up for pre-order and scheduled for shipment on July http://bit.ly/kXgMw. Other netbooks with Tegra chipsets are expected to make a debut on Q4. - Nir Ben Yona

What is the benefit of a Netbook over, say a 13-inch MacBook or an iphone? - Curt Mercadante

the boing boing link jerry gave shows the msi wind works well with it. however, there's a hack for the audio i/o -albeit not very elegant but they are working on it and it's getting there. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Curt: price over Macbook. Screen resolution and flexibility over iPhone. - Robert Scoble

You can put OSX on the 1000HE? I'm posting this with a 1000HE, and I must say I really love the device. - Robert James Massey

Curt, I was considering the MacBook Air and asked Robert for alternatives. Have iPhone. Want keyboard, practical screen and multi-tasking. - Conor Ogle

curt, a netbook isn't for everybody. i have an iphone, netbook, and macbook pro. you take your netbook when you need to travel on the go but don't want to lug around your primary 3+ grand laptop, risking theft or damage. it has a bigger screen and capabilities than the iphone. they are supposed to complement your existing computing experience -not necessarily replace anything. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

The Dell Mini 9 is supposed to be the most Hackintoshable netbook. - nick

tbh I've never been a fan of the atom processor. It made no sense in buying the equivalent of a 5yr old centrino. A beefed up battery on a centrino benchmarks the same as a netbook. However as others have suggested the ION chipset is the way to go if you want to offload DXVA videos on to it. - Shaf

Ive had the HP Mini 1000, The Acer Aspire one, and the 1000HE. The 1000HE is hands down the leader. - Kyle Nas

shaf, it would be interesting to see what happens when the dual core atoms come out in q4 and how they will stand in regards to the ion. will they integrate the ion some how, or will they compete? the tech is getting better. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Use my 1000HE now as I write this and I love it. It's great as an extra especially when travelling, but I would not choose it as my main computer. The screen & keyboard is too small for bigger tasks and more hours of work. That said, I do use it a lot! Great when in the kitchen and you need a recipe from Google, or just need to check your email in the living room & don't want to go upstairs to the mainframe station :-) - Morten Blaabjerg

sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq indeed - I'll just wait in the meantime ;) - Shaf

Morten, I actually replaced my touch screen HP with my 1000HE and just hook it up to a 22" monitor when I'm at the house. The ability of the computer to quickly change resolutions makes it even better. Although I am preparing to buy a Mac soon. So... Where can I find details on OSXing my 1000HE? Maybe I should google it. - Robert James Massey

robert scoble, (i just saw your question up there), the ions are supposed to come out near the end of summer. the dual cores by intel released at october at the earliest -meaning netbooks a month after that. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

I run OS X on my Acer Aspire One, works wonderfully and software update works too! - James

We've had excellent results with the $200 Acer Aspire One's. They make an awesome PBX platform. - Ward Mundy

PIAF on an Aspire One is just hilarious. Ward gets bored easily. - Jerry Schuman

Does anyone have heat issues on netbook(running macos x) particularly when running flash? - Ashish

Curt: Ever since I bought my iPhone, I rarely use my Asus netbook anymore. The iPhone effectively replaced it for me. However, when away from home, there times when my netbook is needed. I just wish the video was faster. That is my biggest netbook complaint. - Mark Davidson from BuddyFeed

Ward, off topic... PIAF in VirtualBox on Mac mini. Along with a few other virt machines. - Jerry Schuman

sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq ION is just the platform there are already Atoms using the platform albeit mini-ITX and smaller(see the Zotec boards). Mixed reviews so far, think it can handle 720p but struggles at 1080p and you can forget blu-ray - Shaf

good question, I've been wondering the same thing or considering the Ipod touch - freedom fighter mom from twhirl

shaf, the zotac is a mini itx motherboard i've being drooling over for some time. in regards to ion netbooks, the ideapad is the first *netbook* to have ion and plans to be released in a month or two... hence my safe estimate of august for the netbook: http://www.liliputing.com/2009... :) - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

ah, i see the ion netbook (from my previous link) has been now set back to october. this is around a month or two when the atom dual cores plan to be released. both attempt to trackle the prob of smooth hidef playback 720p, not quite 1080p or i yet. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

i hear that Dell mini 9 is the best netbook to run OSX on. I just bought one and going to attempt it. - drinktale

Why not use Ubuntu instead :) - Manuel Mas

Netbooks still Taboo in my opinion, until Neo platform from nVidia shows up. Without decent 3D, I don't call it a computer...Even iPhone has better 3D capabilities than current netbooks... - Adi Rabinovich

I have always been a fan of the Samsung range, check out more here: http://www.sammynetbook.com - Winston

David Chartier

Remember The Milk 1.1 is out for iPhone with Push Notificaions. Fantastic.

June 27, 2009 from iPhone - Comment - Like - Share

Nik Fletcher, Rick Turoczy and Conor Ogle liked this

Chase Jarvis

Is it just me or do all y'all stumble on weird stuff like this (if u do, pls @ me )... http://twitpic.com/8n906

June 27, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Isaac Hepworth and Conor Ogle liked this

Leo Laporte

My Way News - Yahoo CEO promises shareholders to get 'mojo back' - http://apnews.myway.com/article...

June 27, 2009 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

Conor Ogle liked this

Bartz didn't mince words when two shareholders wondered why Yahoo isn't doing more to protect human rights and free speech in China, where the company has previously faced harsh criticism for turning over e-mails that help convict government critics. "Yahoo was not incorporated to fix China," Bartz said. Most of the time, though, Bartz spiced her remarks with predictions of better times at Yahoo. Yahoo will "get our mojo back in the marketplace," Bartz pledged. "We are working really hard on that." - Leo Laporte

Thomas Hawk

June 27, 2009 from Flickr favorites - Comment - Like - Share

Jeff P. Henderson, darthdallas, Conor Ogle and 2 other people liked this

Hugh MacLeod

Re. Careers. The "Network" has started replacing the "Ladder". I don't need another rung, I need another node etc etc.

June 27, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Jared Smith and Conor Ogle liked this

Dave Winer

"the majority of people who believe the SUL is good and/or harmless are those who are fortunate enough to be included" http://twittercism.com/suggest...

June 26, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Conor Ogle, Robert Scoble and Derek Coward liked this

Robert Scoble

Keeping kids online safe - http://scobleizer.com/2009...

February 10, 2009 from Scobleizer -- Tech geek... - Comment - Like - Share

Ryan Gerritsen, Patrick Jordan, Rob Michael (Atmos Trio) and 30 other people liked this

I am glad that the movement is swinging away from just only trying to prevent our children from experiencing the dark side of the internet. We need to place reasonable safeguards as well as opening the lines of communication between parents and children. I work in a school and see every day how hard many parents find it to have uncomfortable discussions with their teenagers. I would love to see a resource that helps encourage and facilitate a positive and open communication between parents and their kids. - Phillip Miller

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this is where Glubble will help you. We provide parents the tools to support their children discover the web and social networking. Instead of locking children or the computer down, or trying to be the experts for parents, we let parents take the responsibility and build a safe and fun web for their children. This way parents can teach their children to be good citizens in the online... more... - Alexander van Elsas

Kids are part of the problem themselves. At my school lots of trouble begins online at social media sites and can even end in fighting. Othertimes it's the other way round. A child is bullied at school and then bullied online too. - Donald Townsend from twhirl

Our kids are only allowed to use the computer in the public areas of our house (ie. not their rooms). I am not so naive to think this is the only solution, so I have had discussions with my older kids (11 & 8) about appropriate use, sites, etc. As far as them posting information online, I told them to think about this: If you wouldn't stand up in the middle of your school lunch room and share the same information with everyone, it's probably not a good idea to put it online. - Dave Gambrill

Dave, that's a good criteria. I'd extend it to say... If you wouldn't stand up in the middle of your school lunch room and share the same information with everyone and allow it to be posted on the school wall forever, it's probably not a good idea to put it online. - Tinfoil 2.0

Avynn's computer is in a common room, right where I can see him from my office. We have no censorship of any kind on his computer. So far the worst thing he watches is machinima based around Half Life 2 and sometimes Monty Python. He's 12 now, so we'll probably need to have a talk about porn sometime before too long. He doesn't have any friends yet who even know what email or IM is. That'll change in Middle School. - iTad

Alexander, I'll have to test that out in anticipation. I haven't given up waiting on my little miracles. :) Nice to be prepared though. Thanks for sharing! - Melanie Reed

@Tad - Watching Monty Python already, eh? Sounds like your kid'll be okay. :) - Steve Lynch from twhirl

I agree that education is the best form of prevention -- kids are smart, make sure they know how you feel (and why). - Steve Lynch from twhirl

Locking computers and the web down too much gives kids a reason to want to break free. It is so much better to give them a cool experience and teach them about their behavior on the web at the same time. My ultimate goal is for a child to be able to say that his Internet is way more cooler than mom's or dad's Internet. And parents need to be educated and get involved as well. They can't just rely on tools but should be actively involved. They want to, but often do not know how - Alexander van Elsas

As much as you try, you cannot "protect" your kids online, except by educating them. The weakest links are their friends. I've seen first hand how friends will introduce new people into a network that no one in the existing network knows. Kids don't realize that these new people are "strangers" because they assume "a friend of a friend" is safe. That's one thing I've had to teach my kids -- that friends of friends are strangers unless you know them in the "real world." - Dominic Jones

And the cc: line in emails is the most common way strangers get into your kids' networks. - Dominic Jones

Sorry to hog this, but if I can help one person it's worth it. Teach your kids never to share their passwords with their friends. They often do this for things like neopets and webkinz when they're going to be offline for a while and want a friend to take care of their "pets" or keep in good standing on Club Penguin or something. Their passwords often are the same for a variety of sites, including web mail. - Dominic Jones

I grew up before the age of social media and there was lots of bullying, malicious gossip and harassment, not to mention the creepy guy who stood on the corner in a raincoat. (of course, bringing guns to school wasn't unusual then, you just had to keep them on the gun rack) The Web is just the latest tool for bullies and pervs. - Robert Hafer

@ Robert Hafer Today, the creepy guy in a raincoat is a sweet-looking 10-year-old girl who is popular with everyone and has all the latest gadgets but absent parents. - Dominic Jones

Jacob to Jacob's feed, Twitter

I just killed my tweet feed, it was cluttering my friendfeed... Do you guys know how I could stop some tweets from being published in my friendfeed? I use Tweetdeck and if possible I would like to keep using that.

May 28, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

Chieze Okoye and Conor Ogle liked this

If you find out how to do this, please let me know - it bugs me too. I would particularly like to keep all my @ replies out of my FF stream. - Conor Ogle

Ditto Conor. - Chieze Okoye

I just had the same problem, flooding Facebook, too. Best I can tell, it's an all or nothing with TweetDeck - kooder

Iphigenie

Bad Collateral - Followed by: future currencies discussion - http://jameshowardkunstler.typ...

May 18, 2009 from open thinking on NewsGator... - Comment - Like - Share

Conor Ogle, joneilortiz, David HC Soul and 2 other people liked this

"The choice we face really comes down to this: do we put our dwindling resources and "hopes" into resuscitating those dying systems, or do we move forward to the next chapter of American life, cut our losses, and make new arrangements more consistent with the realities on offer from the universe? To take it a step further, can we remain one nation, a common culture, without such a conscious re-purposing of our collective spirit?" - Iphigenie

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"There are plenty of things you can state about the economy past and future with some confidence right now: -- Cheap energy is over and our wishes for alt.energy are currently inconsistent with reality, meaning we have to live differently. -- We have to downscale and re-localize our major economic activities: food production, commerce and manufacturing, banking, schooling, etc." - Iphigenie

I file under "open thinking" people who write and think about things that go outside the current "mainstream" thinking in a way that makes me think that they have a point worth listening to and thinking about (i.e. no crazies) - Iphigenie

For a while, the "old money" (i.e., the kind created by the fed) will be going into life support for the failing systems, while the "new money" (i.e., our time and attention) will be going where we (as individuals) choose to spend it... until the masses realize that the financial system itself is also dying. Until then, choose wisely how you spend your time and attention, and invest your dollars in ways that will be meaningful when dollars lose their perceived value. - Nathaniel Thurston

I'm not so sure about that - I think there will always be a need for a currency with a consistent and consensual value which can be 1)paid ahead 2)paid back 3)moved 4)stored for a while - at the moment neither energy nor information or attention fulfill the conditions. But it might change. - Iphigenie

I've often thought that the most natural unit of currency that is still storable/fungible and so on would be 1 hr. of unskilled adult manual labor. Interestingly, it is still subject to inflation, since it is always losing out to newer forms of skilled work, slightly balanced by deflation, as new tools become available to the unskilled. - Michael R. Bernstein

My speculation (and it is just that) is that it's possible to make currencies out of individual labor -- the financial technology has advanced a long way already, and I don't think it's an impossible leap to go from the tens of thousands of instruments (mostly stocks and bonds, but also FX) that the systems can handle now to the billions of currencies it would need to handle. - Nathaniel Thurston

Nathaniel, what do you mean by 'individual labor'? Do you mean individualized labor currencies, with each person their own sovereign bank? - Michael R. Bernstein

Michael, I do mean individualized labor currencies, but probably the bank would be your community of choice (it could be an online community). I've started a new thread -- this seems like a digression. - Nathaniel Thurston

Not sure what the substantive difference is between having billions of currencies (and an explosion of exchange rates) and a standardized work-hour currency, except the additional computational load. Having local currencies is another good idea, but it is an orthogonal concept. - Michael R. Bernstein

Of course, if manufacturing ever gets very cheap (say we get science-fiction style nanotechnology that can build stuff on demand) then the currency would have to move to a more information/creativity basis - attention, reputation, originality - Iphigenie

Joelle, I fear that even in that scenario, various rare earths / minerals / elements will still form the basis for an economy of scarcity, at least for a while. There is also an issue of energy scarcity, and (in the rosy scenario that externalities are actually accounted for) scarce resources used up for proper disposal or recycling. - Michael R. Bernstein

It's probably the case, although the freedom from manufacturing would change society in ways we probably cannot predict - since a lot of the basis of our industrial age society is/was organised around mass manufacturing. I find it strange that information-focused organisations have grown as large as they have, as they do not have the kind of economies of scale and mass that manufacturing had, and it seems like such an inefficient way to organise innovation (sorry, disgressing). - Iphigenie

Louis Gray

A quick difference between Twitter's architecture and that of FriendFeed pointed out by @biz's post from today...

May 14, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

Gimminy, minitoka, Mohammad Abdurraafay and 98 other people liked this

Biz writes, "Every time someone wrote a reply Twitter had to check and see what each of their followers' reply setting was and then manifest that tweet accordingly in their timeline—this was the most expensive work the database was doing and it was causing other features to degrade." - Louis Gray

65 more comments

But on FriendFeed, every time you see an update, FriendFeed checks if you subscribe to someone, and if you have hidden any service, or even any specific blog from any service. - Louis Gray

FriendFeed knows when you post an update who can see it and who can't see it, based on who is following, and what services they have opted into or out of. And when you think of how many different ways the database has to be set, the unlimited power is very impressive. - Louis Gray

FriendFeed checks by list, by service, by name of service, and can even check by if something is liked or not, how many times, has comments, and how many, and who from, if you use the search. There is a ton of data behind the data. - Louis Gray

Math is hard </barbie>. Sorry, but this seems like a serious cop out to me. If FF can design the DB to function as quickly as it does with as many selection parameters, surely Twitter could do the same (if, that is, they have the proper backend platform to do so, and it doesn't look like they do). - FFing Enigma

And yet, FriendFeed continues to add features and have near-flawless uptime without slowness. - Louis Gray

I agree...it is a major copout. We have been using that technique in online chat systems since the early 1980's. It is not difficult and does not take as much power as @biz seems to be implying. - Semipro

I am serious. They had downtime last week, and that was a blip. And what slowness, Glen? (Referring to FriendFeed) - Louis Gray

Twitter's was. Not FriendFeed's. - Louis Gray

My comments should have run together. Tina helpfully interrupted. :) - Louis Gray

Yeah, the "And yet, they continue..." sorta started down the road to Ambiguity. - Ken Sheppardson

(Edited for clarity) and Glen, look forward to that happening. - Louis Gray

@ in the middle must be a lot less frequent than @ at the beginning thus saving processing power - Matsis

But a beginning @ is index 0, there's no seek time compared to an any position @. - Micah

also I believe a fair comparison would be twitter removing the @ replies to all (lame) with FF removing FoaF entries from lists other than the home feed. And twitter search is real time - that's probably eating up processing power - Matsis

Good point re: Friend of a Friend, Matsis. FriendFeed already has to check if you have it enabled or not, and then if you have it enabled for a specific friend or not, and then, execute. I neglected to mention that. - Louis Gray

Leather: When the "see all @ replies" was an option, Twitter had to decide how to handle @ replies (whether to propagate the tweet to you or to hide it, depending on your setting), which is expensive to the database. So, either they make everybody see all @ replies (which changes the setting of 98% of the users), or they sacrifice the 2% - Andre P. Siregar

Micah I think twitter's point was that they didn't want to go check the setting (too much work for them) so they removed it. We b*itched and moaned so they gave back something less than what was. Or in other words, if the feature is available, and Oprah has a back and forth with aplusk (say replies 10-15 times), twitter dies. Also what Andre said :) - Matsis

This is a good lesson for all comp sci students. The @-reply was not a feature Twitter had when they first launched. It's sort of a hack from the community that later got incorporated. But the architecture didn't anticipate this feature. And now it's hard to change the foundation when the house has been built - Andre P. Siregar

Andre, I also think it's fair to say (many have stated this many times) that the whole of twitter's original architecture wasn't built with the anticipation of its current use. - Micah

I think it all has to do with the schema-less design on top of MySQL FriendFeed is using. They're simply making smarter choices ahead of time, rather than reactive choices. - Jesse Stay

So, by the presumed logic, no one's going to a see any new features that involves a follower dependent setting regarding anything tweet in stream. Well, ok then. - Micah

Jesse, I have no doubt Friendfeed made smarter design decisions. When Twitter started the whole micro-blogging thing nobody really knew back then how it was going to grow and be used (now Twitter is much more than just about "I'm having lunch"). So when Friendfeed started, I'm sure they took some lessons learned from Twitter and others - Andre P. Siregar

Micah, yes regarding Twitter's original architecture. IIRC, Digg went through the same re-architecting exercise a few years back when their users started to skyrocket. - Andre P. Siregar

It's typical to have to re-architect a system once you realize how much the userbase is skyrocketing. Ideally you've constructed it in such a way so that you can rip out modular pieces and replace them as necessary. It seems to me that the whole of Twitter's backend is a much more serially constructed system, which is why they have to have complete system outages still now at three... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Leather, here is what Bret talked about for their MySQL implementation: http://bret.appspot.com/entry... - Louis Gray

This thread is fascinating. I'm learning. - joey

And though I wasn't on Twitter to see it, Robert suggests that they've been seeing these problems since he had about 1500 followers. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob: that's absolutely true. Twitter was crashing even back in 2006. The architecture they chose was always horrid. It's getting better, actually, but still is having sizeable problems. Friendfeed has been down twice, once for an hour, and once for more than an hour because of a power failure that took down the entire data center. (At least that I remember). Twitter seems like it was down every day in 2008 and even this week has been down more than friendfeed has ever been down. - Robert Scoble

It's hard to compare the two systems DB functionality because of the lower traffic FriendFeed has compared to Twitter. - Rick Cogley

Rick, you can compare them based on the time of their lifespan though, and FriendFeed is doing much, much better. See the interview Scoble and I did with them last year when they had a very similar user-base to FriendFeed's. - Jesse Stay

Rick: absolutely NOT true. Friendfeed today has MUCH higher traffic than Twitter did two years ago. - Robert Scoble

It is easy to look at the total user base and make excuses for Twitter, but what I'm talking about is the fact that FriendFeed is accomplishing much more complex tasks, and not missing a beat. Even when they are 10 times bigger than they are today, I expect they will scale smoothly, because of their talent and their track record. - Louis Gray

Leather: I'm assuming the difference is with the amount of WRITE operation in the database (which is much more expensive than parsing) - Andre P. Siregar

I would love to read how friendfeed has architected itself to avoid the problems twitter is having. - ian kennedy

Traffic may be one thing, but I would venture to guess the activity in the database is higher in FF than in Twitter for the same number of users - Andre P. Siregar

ian: on friendfeed there is more metadata to study and filter with. I can say "show me all items that mention Obama" on both services, but only on friendfeed can I also say "and display only those items that have a like or more." That is how friendfeed can remove a major amount of spam (and I use it all the time). Spam doesn't get likes. Another way? - Robert Scoble

On friendfeed I can delete any comment underneath one of my items. So I can help keep my corner of friendfeed clean. And if I see any underneath, say, your items, I can let you know about it. But what about on Twitter? We can't do shit about spam except report it and hope that @biz or someone gets to it. - Robert Scoble

Leather: Twitter is more than three years old. Friendfeed is just about 1.5 years old. You aren't factoring that in. Go and compare the two services all along at the same age. I don't compare my 1.5 year old to a three year old, and neither should you. That's a HUGE mistake you are making. - Robert Scoble

When Twitter was 1.5 years old it had fewer users than friendfeed and was FAR LESS COMPLEX yet it was going down about 100 times more often than friendfeed is today. Twitter's architecture was NEVER thought out very well and we're still seeing the artifacts of that. - Robert Scoble

Leather: I'm comparing friendfeed today to where Twitter was 1.5 years ago. - Robert Scoble

Leather: true, but friendfeed is a LOT more complex than Twitter ever was and it also has more users than Twitter did when Twitter was 1.5 years old. - Robert Scoble

Leather: then what are you arguing with me about? Heheh. - Robert Scoble

Scoble, yes the filtering on advanced searches is impressive (it even supports simple exclusions). I am impressed that they can keep it all running with every page updating in*real*time. Is each page an open session? - ian kennedy

ian: I believe it is. Leather: go to compete.com or any traffic site and compare. But adjust the dates. - Robert Scoble

Leather: keep in mind I've been on Twitter 907 days and I'm not going to do your homework for you. :-) - Robert Scoble

Louis, you're absolutely correct about FF accomplishing much more complex tasks much more effortlessly. Overall the leaders of this team are more effective. We had a saying back when I was consulting ISP startups "The network IS the business plan" In an online business that depends entirely on its systems for potential revenues, the architecture of the network becomes a model for the... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Leather: believe me, Twitter didn't grow that fast until the last year. The first two years Twitter grew slower than friendfeed did and had a TON more problems (and was even less complex). - Robert Scoble

Leather: 900 != 700. Heheh. That's a huge number of days in this world. And, anyway, both traffic and complexity are higher on friendfeed and amount of time down is MUCH lower here. So, by either metric friendfeed is winning HUGE. - Robert Scoble

Robert, here's the screen capture from Compete.com: http://twitpic.com/57bgl Y'all seem to be forgetting about non-Twitter-account web traffic. FF is flat; Twitter skyrockets. And yes, FF is "younger" but is built on top of Twitter so it did not start from the same "zero" point -- nor does it have as many API calls -- nor is it as accessible off-the-laptop (iPhones excepted). - Kathy E Gill

Kathy: you have NOT shifted the graph to show equivilent times. At 4/2009 Friendfeed is STILL far younger than Twitter was at 4/2008. Shift the graphs and come back. Also, at 1.5 years into its life Twitter didn't have that many apps either and Twitter's API is far more simplistic than friendfeed's is. Twitter didn't take off until after it was two years old. Friendfeed is already growing faster. And who cares what it is built on top of? Twitter was built on top of blogs and we don't hold that against it. - Robert Scoble

Kathy: Benjamin Golub of FF wrote fftogo.com. FriendFeed on any phone. - Johnny

Twitter started March 21, 2006. Friendfeed started October 1, 2007. You must shift the charts to compare apples to apples. - Robert Scoble

I just don't understand why it's so hard to compare apples to apples. If you want to compare the two companies, you have to compare them at similar stages in their lifecycles. it's really simple. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob: because our tools make it hard to do the comparison. But I was there and saw how Twitter grew. Twitter was crashing before it even got to the famous SXSW and I only had something like 1000 followers then (and that was in March of 2007). - Robert Scoble

I use fftogo almost every day. and I use the IM on the other days (twitter isn't really even sophisticated enough to keep their IM service running) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Not to mention email - Johnny

I don't know about that Robert. We can grok how to compare money from today to money in 1920. We should be able to adjust stats about companies in our brains. We don't compare the revenues of a 3yo company to the revenues of a 30yo company, right (unless the 3yo is performing Outrageously). I haven't heard a single person disagree with what you've said about "the old days" of twitter either. So I can only assume that it must be true. These problems don't sneak up on a company. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob: Twitter's management will admit they've always had technical problems. Remember, their architect was fired (Blair) and @ev admitted that it was a test project that they never expected to get so big. - Robert Scoble

Ok, well the first step to getting well is admitting you have a problem, right? Never expecting a thing to get so big is a lack of vision, and not a very good quality for a management team IMO. Since they never expected it, and now that it is, they should be stepping aside as they are certainly no longer qualified to lead it. And THAT is the true sign of success of management teams.... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Choose Success, not failure. But, it's interesting to note that "fail whale" and twitter are synonymous. Fail is practically in the name. And that needs to be corrected. It affects team spirit and morale, and causes it to become a vicious cycle. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob: you have to go back in @ev's history, though. Remember when he started Pyra? They made Blogger. Remember how often it was down? A lot, just like Twitter. How slow it was? Very. How much spam it had? A lot, just like Twitter. Yet it made Ev a lot of money, just like Twitter will. So, since he's been down this path before, why not repeat? It actually doesn't make sense to over... more... - Robert Scoble

And that's where I come back to the lack of vision. If you "aren't sure" then you don't have the vision. You're right that it doesn't make sense to over engineer something if you have doubts, but if you have doubts, why jack with it? But in some sense it does make sense to over engineer things, because in a pinch you can often sell the company for the technology that's running it to someone who has a different vision for it, someone who knows what to do with what you've built. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Robert, I was talking about now, but I see your point about comparing two years ago. However, it's still hard to compare two different systems, different db's, different programming languages, different ways of indexing data, etc, in my opinion. It's pretty apparent that FF has been very stable, comparatively, however. - Rick Cogley

lots of testosterone on this thread, did we at least all agree that twitter's "organic architecture" sucks now just like it did from inception & friendfeeds "designed architecture" should scale nicely just like it has from inception? - mike "glemak" dunn

Mike, yes, agreed on that. ;-) - Rick Cogley

FriendFeed enthusiasts in Scoble's network agree that it's better than Twitter! Film at 11. - Christian Crumlish

Evan Williams

Reading people's thoughts on the replies issue. We're considering alternatives. Thanks for your feedback.

May 12, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Marko Saric, Guillaume Foutry, Oliver Bouchard and 149 other people liked this

We would be happy to provide feedback in advance next time. - Louis Gray

90 more comments

Thank goodness you responded when you did - the frothy mob outside was about finished building the gallows! - Brett Kelly

at the rate that #fixreplies tweets are coming down the pipe they'd be nuts to not re-think their decision and/or explanation - Chris Heath

Nice to know you're listening! - Michael Fidler

You should ask for people's thoughts first. - Michael McKean

I reckon removing the feature was a good things. Has left holes though, that probably shoulda been filled first. - Tim

Louis: sorry, until Twitter fixes how it treats early adopters I'm not giving Twitter free consulting. Only suckers would do that. We helped build Twitter and then it stabs us in the back. That's not making me willing to provide free consulting. Don't know why you'd do that. - Robert Scoble

I volunteer to be your community manager for a month free. If I'm effective at communicating ahead of swarms like this, you can hire me and pay me retroactively. Because seriously? You really need someone to communicate with your users in real time. - Karoli

I hope "considering alternatives" is a euphemism for "we'll have it back right stat, sorry!" - Jandy

@scobleizer; "stabs us in the back" A bit over the top perhaps? - Jordan Brock

Jordon: it absolutely is NOT over the top. When they recommend someone who has only been on Twitter a week or two as a recommended follower they are stabbing users who put a lot more time into the service directly in the back. I have about 1,000 days on Twitter and have put thousands of hours into the service. The way Twitter treats its users is deplorable. - Robert Scoble

Jordan, Mr. Scoble has a propensity for the dramatic. :) - Brett Kelly

Well since it was just a "small setting update" the simplest alternative should be to just undo the change, right? - Ken Sheppardson

Brett: when you put thousands of hours into something and you get stabbed in the back by the owners of that thing you see how it feels. - Robert Scoble

In the meantime, Twitter can get the celebrities to help out with its community problems. I'm not working for free and anyone who does for a company that stabs its users in the back is a sucker. - Robert Scoble

Robert, I can offer my services for free all day to Twitter. I know they won't take me up on it as they aren't interested in what I have to say and their track record proves that. - Louis Gray

I'm really curious to know what kind of stats that were tracked to make this decision. Both @al3x and @dougw are hinting that there wasn't a significant number of people "using this feature", which I am extremely skeptical of. Would tracking the number of times I click out to a profile that I'm not following be enough? It is impossible for them to track whether I personally received value from a tweet even if I didn't click through, right? - Lee Adkins

"The way Twitter treats its users is deplorable" What other instances justify this statement? - Angus Burton

@ev Don't you have more important things to focus on? ie., affiliate marketers who don't disclose what they're doing, follow bots, and all of the spam and manipulation that's ruining twitter?. - Michael Fidler

Louis, I think @ev is listening to you and other Internet celebs, but not nobodies like me. - Vinko

Vinko, I'm no Internet celebrity, and I don't believe I've been addressed by him ever, so he has an odd way of "listening". - Louis Gray

You can't go asking your customers about every checkbox and option. Knowing which is what makes a good decision maker. - Ryan Stanley

Sure you can, when it's a feature change that enough users expect to have. It's not disabling a checkbox, it's disabling community discovery. - Karoli

Karoli, here here!! - Vinko

Twitter is clearly listening, and responding quickly and in public. Now, they need to roll back the change - Bob Morris (polizeros)

Twitter knows all the geeks moved to FF. I doubt Oprah considers it a feature change. - Ryan Stanley

wow what a conversation. - Dustin

+1 to dedlam :) - Jordan Brock

Twitter will "consider alternatives" until #fixreplies starts trending back down, which will happen over the next 24 hrs or so. Then they'll look to see if there's any dip in the user number or sign-up rates. There won't be, as nobody's actually willing to leave Twitter over this and new users who've accepted the default setting don't know this option was there, so this will be the last word on the subject you'll see from ev. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, that's true today and not true in the future. Twitter's continued decision to ignore user feedback and input and make arbitrary decisions will ultimately result in someone creating the next shiny thing. It happened with other services/sites and it will again. - Karoli

Karoli: That'll happen either way. - Ken Sheppardson

There must be a strategy around this, right? They wouldn't just arbitrarily do this. What would be the next feature they implement to make this redundant? - Gregg Scott

Hmm. So, Ev is "Reading people's thoughts." wouldn't it be better if he talked and listened. - Michael Markman

Michael: Thought reading must be something they're testing internally. Probably part of Twitter Pro. - Ken Sheppardson

Could be the move that pushes more people over the FF wall. I've not considered this move until now, but now..... - Debi Jones

@scobleizer, i thought the point of using twitter was because you want to not because you want fame and a pat on the back from evan for "helping". shame on you, that's the biggest douchery i've heard in quite some time. - Snipergirl

Leather is an astute reader! :-) - Robert Scoble

Snipergirl: that's BS. If you are in the media business the size of your audience allows you to build a business. Before the recommended follower list Mashable, GigaOm, and TechCrunch had smaller audiences than I did on Twitter. Now they have far bigger ones and people who don't do many tweets at all are rewarded while the rest of us suckers are left in the back of the bus. If I just... more... - Robert Scoble

The simple alternative is to make is a user preference. Even better would be groups, and then to apply said preference to groups. - Barney Craggs

@scobleizer if it's a business to you then vote with your feet and go to a different service and stop whining about evan not paying you enough attention! - Snipergirl

Snipergirl: that's exactly what I've done. But, sorry, I've put thousands of hours in and 904 days into Twitter. When a service treats someone who has put far less work into it better than me, I deserve to whine a little bit and anyone who says I don't isn't worth listening to. Let's put it this way. I see on LinkedIn that you are a hospital worker. What if you put in the time, do a... more... - Robert Scoble

Not entirely sure I agree with Robert, but I'll say this: it is incredibly frustrating when sites you use as intensely as Facebook and Twitter ignore the intelligent users. I won't say intelligent = early adopters, and I won't even say that it precludes the celebrities, but it is extremely tiring offering "feedback" when you're treated as just one voice. Clearly, CEO's are out of touch and don't understand us; yet, running a [sufficiently large] site by total democracy trends towards the stupid. #fixreplies - tollie williams

Matt: I get what you're trying to say, but, here's another way to look at it. Twitter has signaled to the world that there's no way you'll ever been seen as a "top tier" person. Take me out of it. No matter how many hours you spend, no matter how popular you'll get, you won't be treated the same way as one of their personal friends and/or celebrities that they want to feature. To me that sucks. It is not a meritocracy. It's a closed society and that's everything I work against. - Robert Scoble

The real problem is like this: Twitter was made for broadcasting and was never meant to be a convesational platform. Even friendfeed does the comments half baked. There are no comments for comments. - ThinkEzy

The only feedback users contribute (that matters) is what they buy or use. If you don't like Twitter, leave. - Jason Nunnelley

@Gattoo seriously, wouldn't this conversation be a LOT easier with threading and a respond feature? - Jason Nunnelley

I don't know about meritocracies or closed societies, but i do know that the main way I find new people to follow on twitter is by seeing who the people I already follow are talking to...and if they say something of interest to me in a reply to them, I want to check that person out. If all I see are replies to people I already follow, I won't find anyone knew unless I pay much closer... more... - Shawna Benson

Gattoo: I disagree with that at least in part. The thing that always excited me about this media is that it's two way. You talk, I respond. But Twitter has biased its business toward the serving of celebrities who mostly use Twitter to broadcast and less to those who try to use it to have conversations with people. That's their right. It's my right to whine about it, though. :-) - Robert Scoble

Shawna: yup. I think Twitter wants to push people like you to use search instead of the "@ replies" tab. - Robert Scoble

Robert: that's a problem -- why would I search on something I don't even know to search for unless someone mentions it? Let's say person A tells person B something about daffodils and I find that interesting enough to go check out person B and start following them based on who they are, who they talk to, etc. Now, 'daffodils' aren't normally something I go randomly searching for info... more... - Shawna Benson

@scobleizer It's possible you give them far too much credit. I doubt they've any plan beyond limiting feed size. - Jason Nunnelley

Shawna: I mean you can search for someone who uses your name. I do that on Seesmic Desktop and here on friendfeed and it regularly catches people who both use @scobleizer as well as people who just say "scoble" etc. Then I can go off and check them out, just the same as if I used the @mentions page. - Robert Scoble

Jason: you're right. Twitter's team sure seems like they don't think things out and take the easy road most times. The recommended follower list is just one example of that. They could have done something really magical, but instead they did something half assed. They should have just hired Guy Kawasaki to do an AllTop page for it. That would have been better than what we got. - Robert Scoble

"we've learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow [...] [h]owever, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable" so despite what we apparently learned that people want we've decided to scrap it anyway. Interesting use of the word "learned" there. - Mark H

Twitter made a mistake by removing this option whatsoever and they have to revert back. We have brains to decide what we do when we have an option! - Jacque from twhirl

The simple way of looking at it for me seems to be- when they say it's what most people are telling them to do, it's actually them telling most people what to do. - Iain Baker

Scoble: You deserve a couple hundred thousand followers, for sure. I joined Twitter bc I read a post you wrote in '07. I hadn't looked at your follower count in a while; figured for sure you had at least been rotated in Suggest Users by now. That just makes me dislike the Suggested Users crap even more. ... The question here, I guess, is: did you do something so bad that Twitter/Ev/Jack/Biz can not forgive you? - john erik metcalf

Scoble: Actually, even if you did, it would still be bullshit. What is this, Texas politics? Good ol' boy system. They need to figure out a better way, obviously things are getting very unequal. - john erik metcalf

I don't know, Scoble, I'm going to take a different angle. Did Ev ever ask you to spend "thousands of hours" and 900+ days on Twitter? If so, then I'd say you've got a gripe. Otherwise, you did it voluntarily for your benefit, and frankly, Ev doesn't owe you anything; he provided a service for free, you used the hell out of it (profiting along the way, I don't doubt). It sounds like... more... - Bob M. Montgomery

I already miss what my followees are saying to other people. I've been using Tweetree for awhile now, because it would display the tweet to which my followee is replying (unless it was a protected tweet). With the new change, that aspect doesn't work, and Tweetree's entire platform is practically destroyed... - Qrystal MqKenzie

If there's one good thing about this, it's that I can probably follow more people: I used to not follow someone if all they do is reply to people without giving context of what they're talking about. Maybe they'll make it so the visibility of @replies to people I'm not following is set on a per-user basis... which would be great, because some of my followees were SO GOOD at giving context, it's a major loss to no longer be able to see their @replies to people I don't follow! - Qrystal MqKenzie

Qrystal: I feel the same way, except now it's a huge hassle for me to actually find all the people I should be following. - Guan Yang

Bryan, this is about a setting being removed that was not the default setting. If you had changed the default setting to this setting you would see every tweet by the people you were following (the default was and still is to hide the @'s to people you're not following). The change is now there is no choice that setting has been removed and anyone who set that setting is now back to the default (which it seems you've always been on). - Chris Heath

I don't want to have to follow a bunch of people just so I can follow a topic to it's close. Am hoping this was more about saving downtime. This is how Plurk etc will find it's market. Maybe this will clear the chaff and all the real people can take the reins again! - Elia Penn from Nambu

@scobleizer please clarify: are you saying that "stab in the back" = "not being on the recommended list"? - Michael Markman

I'm still trying to figure out why Scoble is so upset. While it's noble for him to have helped pioneer the service and offer input on making it better, I don't see how that equates to Twitter somehow owing him any type of allegiance. Also, people seem to have forgotten that Twitter is an independent entity, responsible only to its investors (ultimately) and, as such, they are free to... more... - Brett Kelly

@Brett your suggestion that people go elsewhere to find a similar Twitter service is what makes the free market so interesting and exciting. While Twitter cannot be everything to everyone, every decision Twitter makes affects their future success. Look at what happened to MySpace and the rise of Facebook or Ford compared to Honda. If Twitter leaves enough room, someone else will come... more... - Damond Nollan from email

Michael: no. He's said in the past that he would asked to be removed if he was placed on the list. Thought I can see Scoble's frustration, I agree with Brett on this one. - Angus Burton

I haven't read this thread in its entirety, so I apologize in advance if I repeat anyone else's position. Two thoughts: 1) If the powers that be at Twitter were simply concerned with reducing the noise in our streams, why not simply change the default setting of the @ replies to not show all, while keeping the option available? Instead, they change the default behavior and remove the... more... - Phil Essing

I wonder if Ev has made it over to friendfeed to read this. I can see Robert's points. It would have been cool if more 'meritorious' tweeps were added to the recommendeds. But when the average non-techie person signs up to Twitter they probably find it more attractive to follow P-Diddy and Ellen than to follow someone they've never heard of, regardless of how much valuable content they've added to the service. That being said, Twitter needs to adjust they're listening ears. - Jesse Newhart

Phil: that was the setting. It used to be an option to turn on all replies from friends, now there are not at reply options at all. If you had made the settings change, you're back to the default. - Chris Heath

Jesse: I have to suggest that the average person would probably prefer to follow someone that actually shares their interests, and beliefs, likes and dislikes. Thus the whole recommended users list on any site is bullshit, and completely worthless. In the absence of a personally worthwhile recommendation, the average non-tech would probably prefer to follow typical pop stars (Brittney,... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Phil: The network I've built since 2007 was largely built exactly with the optional feature that they just removed. I don't mean to sound hysterical or overly dramatic, but the change eliminated something that was fundamental to how I used twitter. It is a free service, they can do as they see fit, it's just a less useful free service to me than it once was. - motownmutt

All the discussion here on FF is neat... but should it be over here too/instead? http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter... (personally, I won't be asking for the 'replies' to come back but... to each their own) - Jay Cuthrell

Jay: I find that Getsatisfaction.com never lives up to its name. I can't think of an issue I've posted or looked into where the company in question posted something. I've found several companies who reirect all their support questions to there, apparently as a convenient black hole. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Brett: Twitter being a free service and held by private investors do not make it immune to the desires of its user base which are the source of its (theoretical) future earnings potential. The less it chooses to work with its user base, and the more it makes decisions that alienate them, the more likely it it that they bail (as HUGE numbers already do withing 30,60,90days of account... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob: There are 11 members of Twitter on GetSatisfaction and < 60,000 customers in the system. So, not perfect but it is a trending area and support does read things there. As a side note, that area has over 10,000 support topics... imagine the insanity of a phone support IVR menu that would take 12 hours to delineate all those "issues" :-) - Jay Cuthrell

Jay: No one from twitter support supports a damn thing, unless you're oprah, or brittney or aplusk. Not on getsatisfaction and not anywhere. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Jay: I have never seen anyone from any company answer any question about anything on getsatisfaction.com. This includes WAY more companies that I've looked into than twitter. I never expected anyone from twitter to answer, but I've sure as hell expected someone from ping.fm to answer when that's where their support link took me, - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Update from Twitter - "...we're making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon" And they've started designing a new feature which will "give folks far more control over what they... more... - Sharon McPherson

Rob: I'm not trying to change your mind... just to give you an idea of the scope of what "support" would entail. Of the 11 Twitter employees on GetSatisfaction they have collectively produced 1045 responses as of the count today on their staff page. - Jay Cuthrell

When I last looked their last response had been over three months prior to the date i was looking. I would welcome my mind being changed, but you're trying to change it on two subjects I don't have much faith in a) twitter support in general, and b) getsatisfaction's overall effectiveness. Links may change my mind. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Chris Heath: It seems I wrongly assumed that the @ replies were set to all by default, likely because I chose that setting a long time ago. Thanks. However, that truly begs the question as to why the folks at Twitter decided to remove the option. - Phil Essing

motownmutt: Like I said, I do understand the frustration caused by this feature removal, a frustration which I share. That being said, I'm not going to lose any sleep as a result. - Phil Essing

i'm going to say this fully knowing the fan boy charges i will open myself up to - u can see how concerned i am about that possibility (yawn) - from my perspective scoble has a valid point (Louis is also welcome to offer help to a service he values btw) - about this time last year a myriad of similar conversations were taking place here as twitter crashed MULTIPLE times a day - i cant... more... - Marco(aureliusmaximus)

I am actually fine with the change because one can always go the persons page to find who he/she has replied to and it makes your page less cluttered. There is always some trade off but i am fine. I am waiting for more options from twitter in the future. - Ashish

Funny take on this - http://cli.gs/dumb - Brian Kelley

I love the twitter product, but am growing more disgusted by the twitter management team. There is zero user input solicitation and this latest event #fixreplies is a classic mistake of product mgrs who fail to engage their customer base to get valuable feedback on the design prior to go live; instead, twitter mgmt is releasing features that are not vetting by their user base - huge... more... - Susan Beebe

waves at Evan Williams. Hey Ev! - Thomas Hawk

Evan, perhaps with the next major functional change you might consider inviting ideas of your users; a good example of how this can work is presented by SalesForce.com: 'Idea Exchange' http://ideas.salesforce.com/ (no suprise SalesForce.com is good in gathering and using feedback from their customers; being a CRM company ;-) ) - Jeroen De Miranda

Scoble, you are a follow-blocker, and as such, you laid the groundwork for the devs putting in this nerf. There are quite a few thin-skinned A-listers who hate seeing back-talk in the @ tabs. this accommodated their wailing. It's wrong and should be put back. People who are vain enough to want to broadcast to followers have to accept that they will hear from the public, and often critically. Otherwise, go on a private AIM or FB chat. - Prokofy Neva

Prokofy: bullshit. If you are a jerk you don't deserve to mess up my experience. You can keep commenting on your own place and I'll still see it anyway. Everyone I know searches on their last name. But I absolutely won't back down from your bullying and change my opinions. I will keep blocking people who are jerks and who are spammers. That's the only way we can keep our community from destroying itself over time. You are NOT entitled to get in my face, sorry. - Robert Scoble

Veronica

RT @ryanblock: I CANNOT believe that Google is offering free Exchange for iPhone users. Sooo awesome. http://www.google.com/mobile...

February 9, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Tom Small, Matt Cutts, Karim and 22 other people liked this

Very cool! - Fee501st

11 more comments

Good sign that they are getting desperate. - Adrian Bashford

Desperate? Explain. - Veronica

It's not Exchange until it pushes email. - Bryan Bartow from twhirl

Wait... I actually went to your link... I totally misunderstood your headline... replace 'Exchange' with 'exchange', sorry... - Adrian Bashford

Adrian, your argument still doesn't make any sense. I'm not sure how offering a feature that people want is desperate. And who are they desperate in comparison to? - Veronica

Veronica, I think Adrian interpreted your title as 'Google will give you an Android phone in exchange for your iPhone.' - Kevin Fox

Ah, he changed his post now, ok! Makes sense now. - Veronica

Sorry V, reading things too fast... agree this looks really cool! No scoop here, look elsewhere. ;) - Adrian Bashford

I was thinking the same thing. Trade in my old phone for a G1 - walterh

Now I have to figure out how I can sync my Stuff to Google because I don't use the Google Services at the moment. ;) - Johannes W.

Mentos? http://www.backtype.com/RicMaye... - Ric Mayer

Why no email??? And i already have an Exchange account on my iPhone. The iPhone is limited to one exchange account. Grrr. - Roberto Bonini

Thomas Hawk

FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...

April 6, 2009 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

James Myatt, Alexander Arsky, Victor Panlilio and 51 other people liked this

"FriendFeed is a *vastly* superior platform to Twitter. Both in terms of lifestreaming as well as the bigger piece of the pie, search. Try this. do a search for photography on Twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search... Now do a search for photography on FriendFeed with 5 likes are more: http://beta.friendfeed.com/filter... Do you really need any more of a comparison between the two? Twitter will be an interesting place to follow the mundane lives of celebrities, sort of like myspace, but the more interesting community, content and discovery will take place at FriendFeed. It’s only a matter of time. The fact that Twitter was earlier and is larger today is about as relevant as the fact that Yahoo was earlier and larger than Google once upon a time long, long, ago." - Thomas Hawk from Bookmarklet

25 more comments

just posted this comment at TechCrunch. - Thomas Hawk

add backtype here :P - sean percival

I hope that is not true! But, I'm still not sure the new UI will do much to attract new users. I'm stil trying to get use to it! - Jeff P. Henderson

Thomas, FF mangled your second URL (the FF search on photography). Could you repair it to help prove your point here? I think this is the URL http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... - Daniel J. Pritchett

The funny thing, like Louis Gray just pointed out, is the fact that Twitter didn't even build it's own search and wouldn't be comparable to FriendFeed if it hadn't bought Summize. - Mitch

This is a great opportunity for a side-by-side mashup, Thomas. User enters a search string, sees the Twitter results on one side, sees the FF beta results (with likes:5) on the other... - Daniel J. Pritchett

gee, arrington. no surprise there. he's as sensationalistic as any other tired blowhad news medium out there. i don't get the appeal of people like him, but i sense it being similar as when people claim the sky is falling there's people who are quick to fall for it - Cee Bee

thanks Daniel, fixed it. - Thomas Hawk

Daniel someone should build a page that does side by side search results for terms on both FF and Twitter. I remember some old Google vs. Yahoo side by side search pages from way back when. Search on Twitter is a wreck compared to FF. - Thomas Hawk

dumb question, how do I get my twitter subscriptions to post on FF? - nrlaskey

It's great for tech savvy folks but everyone that I show pretty much says "Um thanks but no thanks" I feel that there are only a small percentage of people that want to streamline all of their social media. The average joe moves at a much slower pace and does not require the super aggregation. It's lost on them as to why the need it. The other thing is that it strips out the unique user experience of each social networking app that most people, including myself, appreciate. - JP Holecka - Jaypiddy

Yet another TechCrunch headline designed for one thing ... and one thing only - Charlie Anzman

Nathan, go here: http://beta.friendfeed.com/natel... and add twitter. You might want to consider making your feed public instead of private as well. - Thomas Hawk

thanks!! - nrlaskey

@JP - why do we need to worry about FF being everything to everyone? It's amazing at what it does now for its current audience, and it's backed by successful millionaires with other world-class web apps to their credit. When people tell me they don't get FF I don't bend over backwards trying to force it on them. - Daniel J. Pritchett

One thing that helps Twitter adoption is that there are a LOT of iPhone apps for Twitter, but only a handful of (good,free) iPhone apps for FriendFeed - David McDonald

I will add that the new FF design is much more appealing! - JP Holecka - Jaypiddy

hmmm...I can get 'my' posts but not other I follow...is that because I am not public? - nrlaskey

@jp, although unfortunately still not as appealing as twitter. At least ff works a lot better, though, and for a functional perspective the new set-out is quite good. - Joe Bland

@Joe Bland I don't use the Twitter web app as the 3rd party apps are much better from a UI and features perspective. Not sure what that mean for their biz model though. Charge for the use of the API? - JP Holecka - Jaypiddy

The suggestion to search FF for the term photography with likes more than 5... I've never done that before, but it looks really slick in the new UI -- this suggestion may turn me around on the new UI. - Andy Bakun

@JP Agreed the 3rd party apps are far better, but you need to install them on something, and cannot take them with you. One way I use ff is as an online twitter client. - Joe Bland

I think more people will use FriendFeed eventually. This latest beta will probably help that along, since we can read all the discussions in realtime. There are a few limits to Twitter that FriendFeed overcomes, and it's good there's not the same 140-character limit. It just needs a few decent client programs and a chance to prove in a crunch like Twitter has. Give it time, it'll prove its worth. - George Hall (Australia)

Actually, back in February, if I'd known as much as I know now, I'd have used FriendFeed more for piping out information on the Victorian Bushfires. FriendFeed's aggregation abilities would have helped keep all the information I had to work with in the one place, plus one wouldn't have had to contract everything into the space of that twitter limit. Twitter was good at the time, but now I'd have been using it to pipe things through to a more detailed Friendfeed. - George Hall (Australia)

Just had a bit of a think about why Twitter is more used, even though FriendFeed is superior. At the moment, there's no equivalent as far as I can see of Twitter's public timeline, which is where most Twitter users start to see who's good to follow or subscribe to. One may actually get a clue from the discussions as to who to follow, but it's not quite as intuitive. Perhaps this is something FriendFeed can rectify soon. I'd venture a guess a public timeline would get more people using FF. - George Hall (Australia)

An excellent suggestion from Thomas Hawk. Really; try it. "Try this. do a search for photography on Twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search... Now do a search for photography on FriendFeed with 5 likes are more: http://beta.friendfeed.com/filter... Do you really need any more of a comparison between the two?" - Alex Williams

Robert Scoble

Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google | Twine (computational knowledge engine) - http://www.twine.com/item...

March 8, 2009 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Mike Bruder, Leisa Fearing, Wildcat and 63 other people liked this

I want to see this. - Robert Scoble from Bookmarklet

26 more comments

This should be exciting. Remember, Wolfram discovered cellular automata, too. - Akiva

So long as the beta isn't called Wolfram Hart, it'll all be good. - WoH: Professor MOTHRA

Akiva, I believe it was actually John von Neumann (in '40s...working on self replicating systems he followed suggestion by Stanislaw Ulam to use mathematical abstraction rather than having one robot physically build another robot). For those of us in school in the early 70's our first exposure to CA was via an article in Scientific American (Martin Gardner's Column) on John Conway's "Game of Life." Wolframs' work was considerably later....(I think first published around mid 80's) but oh what work it was! - David HC Soul

Sorry, Akiva but Wolfram didn't discover cellular automata von Neumann did and the NYT article from several years ago was talking about Wolfram playing with the Game of Life created by John Conway in the 70's. - Gimminy

I was being sarcastic. His whole pompous 'new science' deal and all that. - Akiva

Sorry Akiva - right over my head; it must be too late at night for an old guy like me. - David HC Soul

Looks like it will be a giant, general-purpose expert system. - Pavlo Zahozhenko

S'all right. I'm barely keeping it together myself. - Akiva

Robert, I too want to see this... the potential for this is really amazing. Einstein would go nuts for this, huh?! This is a great milestone in mathematics and computing science - Susan Beebe

Hi folks -- it is indeed very cool -- I was blown away by what I saw. It is really something new and impressive. Only Wolfram would take on something so ambitious, and actually pull it off. - Nova Spivack

Hmm... what's stopping Google from creating something similar? I guess because of what the article highlighted: hidden in the article is a big red flag for me, " ... there are potential biases in the answers one might come up with, depending on the data sources and paradigms used to compute them." - Pandu ● IT Optimizer

I have to add a note: Ever tried searching for "who is the mother of britney spears" in Google? Try it.Or, for a more acceptable kind of question, try "what is the capital of bolivia" - Pandu ● IT Optimizer

http://www.trueknowledge.com seems to do the same thing..impressive service. - Mahesh CR

I've noticed a pattern over quite a few years: Internet services that are pre-announced with a great deal of hype often fail. Services that simply and quietly open up shop, like Google, and which rely on word-of-mouth to communicate an exciting experience, are more likely to succeed. NEVER pre-hype your Internet service. Let the service speak for itself. That being said, from its... more... - Sean McBride

If it takes that many words to describe it I'm thinking it's not going to pan-out. - Kevin Gamble

I dunno, I remember google having a good amount of hype long before I ever used it, I don't think it did "pre-launch" but certainly long before it was well known and at a time when other search engines results were still competitive. - Richard Lawler

Have any pointers to the Google pre-hype? I don't recall it. - Sean McBride

This all seems to rest upon some interesting advances in Knowledge Representation, which might be of use even if the service doesn't pan out. - Seth Greenblatt

Where are the research papers underlying the knowledge representation approach here? Wolfram's team worked entirely in stealth mode? - Sean McBride

I have a friend working on this and he is raving about it. - Mark Krynsky

Mark -- where is the headquarters for this project? - Sean McBride

reminds me that we still have no clear picture of how mind works.. and i don't think we could ever possibly have.. - Hayk

Hayk -- we know quite a bit about how the mind works, and will learn much more. Cognitive science is a viable endeavor. - Sean McBride

Sean, that is true. But compare the amount of money, resources, time and effort put into finding out how the mind works, combine it with all previous endeavors of humanity and contrast it with results we have - IMO not much. Processing info in as organic and natural a manner as human mind is the objective of this project. I am going to be cautiously skeptical in my expectations about it, although I already see the hype that gathers around it - reminiscent of Turing's machine some 70+ years ago. - Hayk

Sean, my friend is based in LA but I don't have details on where the rest of the team / offices are located. - Mark Krynsky

Where Sergey Brin once said "If it doesn't exist, you cant find it" Wolfram is saying the answer can be constructed from the question. Notions of what 'does' and 'does not' exist are going to be pulled in for questioning. - zeroinfluencer

Wolfram and his team are smart. I look forward to seeing what impact this has on the community. I wish that he would do more work in "productionalizing" his research in emergent behaviors. - Will Hawkins

Dave Morin

davidhoffman:The iTouch ad on the new pitchfork site just blew my mind. Go watch it now. - http://davemorin.tumblr.com/post...

March 9, 2009 from Tumblr - Comment - Like - Share

Aaron Berman, Peter, Sumit Chachra and 21 other people liked this

Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! - SurajLuke

9 more comments

Wow, not sure I like that kind of advertising. First one is unique, but if every ad did that I'd try to get away fast. - Robert Scoble

The ad is here: http://pitchfork.com/ - Robert Scoble

@Scobleizer @davemorin If you liked the one on pitchfork, you will love these: http://www.pointroll.com/showcas... - Alexander Ainslie

Um... am I missing something? Is the whole website one big ad for the iTouch? Or does the iTouch ad not happen for Linux users? Huh??? - Lisha Sterling from twhirl

Lisha: the ad takes over the website while it plays for 15 seconds or so. Yes. It might not work on Linux, not sure. I think it's a Flash thing. - Robert Scoble

Turn AdBlock off to see it - Tim Ostler

The AdBlock is the main thing, have to turn that off to see it. - Andrew Trinh

Very wicked! - Kevin Elliott

OMG... just saw the ad. "The FUNNEST iPod ever?" What is it with Apple advertising and bad English?! (Yeah, the flash was cool.) - Lisha Sterling from twhirl

Super-cool flash! - Sumit Chachra

Lisa Bettany

Robots! http://www.boston.com/bigpict...

March 7, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Conor Ogle liked this

Julia Allison

You’re welcome. - http://juliaallison.tumblr.com/post...

March 8, 2009 from Tumblr - Comment - Like - Share

Conor Ogle liked this

mjc

Data tethering is a go on Palm Pre - http://www.engadget.com/2009...

February 11, 2009 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Parth Awasthi, Conor Ogle, Carlos Ayala and 7 other people liked this

"There are many things the Pre can do. Tragically, swallow a microSD card whole (or otherwise) is not one of them, which is kind of unfortunate considering that only 7.4GB of the integrated 8GB will be available to the user -- but it turns out that tethering, thankfully, is. Newly-published tech specs on Sprint's site reveal that you'll be able to use your little EV-DO Rev. A monster as a modem both over Bluetooth and USB cable -- something the Pre's arch nemesis cannot so far (at least, not in any official capacity). Whether this helps push AT&T and Apple over the edge remains to be seen, but in the meantime, we'll be pushing close to a megabit per second upstream, thank you very much." - mjc from Bookmarklet

6 more comments

this phone is just so freaking sweet. - Jack Lhasa

A big one-up on the iPhone. This could have an effect particularly on the business-user demographic, which I believe the iPhone still struggles with. - Jalada

Yep. Its attactive enough to tip me in favour of a Pre. - Roberto Bonini

@ Jalada Love it all you want, but stuff your Apple hate. - Phil Boiarski

I don't see that as hate at all, the iphone is not exactly taking over in corporate markets as fast as apple would like - mjc

Socoolsocoolsocool(hyperventilating) - Martha

@Phil Actually, I have an iPhone and love it. - Jalada

Conor Ogle › Likes