I would say blogging, because I count micro-blogging as just a subset of blogging. Meaning...I have really made no choice at all. I still get to do both :) - Rahsheen Porter
Does FF participation count as micro-blogging? I participate in FF a lot more than my blog now. More convenient, easier to start a conversation and keep it going. No self-imposed timetable or post quota to keep up with to make sure enough people are interested in being part of my "audience" (it's built in with FF). Easier to interact with people and get more interaction back. Easier to find the answers to my questions. FF does all I really wanted out of blogging anyway. - Lindsay Donaghe
depends on my mood and what I want to say. it obv takes a lot less cognitive ability to microblog, but many more mainstream people read my blog. - Philip Ryan Johnson
@Lindsay Yeah I definitely agree. FF takes away a lot of my time that I would spend doing other things, that's why I've significantly cut my usage over the past couple weeks. - Shey
definitely would stay with blogging. I can live without things like Twitter. - Rob Diana
If had known micro-blogging / lifestreaming would reach this level, I probably wouldn't blog at all - Charlie Anzman
I can always find time to micro-blog... - Rachel Beer
Micro blogging == FF? If FF posts supported more length, formatting and inclusion of media then blogging would disappear for most people - Brian Sullivan
I don't think we have to or need to choose. Both are great for different things. - Tris Hussey via twhirl
more and more I am falling towards the micro blogging side. I sometimes think I should just get rid of my traditional blog. - (jeff)isageek
Since you did not mention IM, blogging, even though I do little of it, there are times a long public rant is needed for the psyche - Michael W. May via twhirl
Mini-blogging. Creating content while wearing a mini-skirt. - Andy C
98% of my blog's readers do not know what twitter is and they don't care. When I used twitter tools to publish an daily digest of my tweets, they hated it. So: The answer is Blogging. - Rick Powell
I agree with Lindsay. Post directly to FF. - Russellreno
hey there I say go for the guest posts - (jeff)isageek
Why not Phil? You've got a good content base and guest posters can open that up to a new audience as well as expose those posters to yours. Go for it. - Colin Walker via fftogo
Hm. Thanks for weighing in.. now of course, the problem is finding people who are actually interested in guest-posting. - J. Phil
Why? Twitter updates reach two audiences: here and Twitter, and still can spark discussions in the same way any other service can. - Mark Trapp
I did it because Ive started to use my Twitter account for a single purpose and felt as though it was just adding noise to my Friendfeed acct. - Andrew Baron
The great thing about diversifying your services, I've found, is that it gives people who are following you finer grain control on what noise they want to hear. I may want to see everything you're doing and sharing except for your status updates: but if you combine everything into just using the Friendfeed share something link, I can't filter out the different types of items in your feed anymore. - Mark Trapp
I'm thinking about doing the same as I only use Twitter as a broadcast service now. - Colin Walker via fftogo
@Colin Same here. If I want a conversation, I post the message to FriendFeed - Shey
@Colin I think you nailed it. Twitter is more for broadcasting. FF is a lot more like a blog with comments. Most people dont include their tweets as blog posts. Anyway, once I turned off the Twitter noise, I started to think of FF much more like a link blog, which Im liking (but also not wanting to muddy up with my Tweets). - Andrew Baron
I want to do the same, but I'm wondering if ppl try and MSG me thru twitter after discovering in FF. Also, I'm now twitterfeeding my FF internal RSS. - Hao Chen
yes i have made that shift- using twitter to answer the question "What are you doing?" and discussing it over here on FF. - Nathan Eckenrode
I did the same a few months back and I don't regret it. The audience that I cater to on Twitter is different and I'm not about to go back and forth checking FF for Twitter replies. - Corvida via feedalizr
Twitter inside of friendfeed is pretty irritating. Not everything decontextualizes well. - Dave Coustan
boy I've been thinking about it for long long time, never had the guts @colin I'm twitterfeeding lots of my friendfeed on twitter just to keep my network over there in the loop, some people are just not happy with leaving twitter behind an dmoving on - Dobromir Hadzhiev
Congrats Franklin. It's always nice to see the little guys getting some exposure. Louis Gray is truly a class act, but we already knew that. :-) - Mike Fruchter
*snort* As long as it's not Tori Spelling style. - Cyndy
Congrats Franklin, can't say you didn't deserve it - Dobromir Hadzhiev
I'd recommend you post an entry trying to measure the "Louis Gray Effect" in terms of RSS subscribers, or another metric you feel appropriate, in a couple weeks. - Denton Gentry
A lot of speculation -- based on pseudo reverse engineering -- it would be interesting if FF commented on this. This goes to the core of what is the essence/power of FF I think. - Brian Sullivan
Brian - you're right. Call it empirically-based speculation. Interesting to hypothesize the "why" of the bounce-to-the-top algorithm. - Hutch Carpenter
As a relative newcomer to FF and all the associated stuff, I found this to be a very interesting read. Thanks, Hutch :) - Bob Kingsley
I love following you guys - I never, ever, ever in a million years would have thought of or taken the time to figure out how the beach ball mechanism works on FF. great stuff - Marco
Just to add more speculation to the mix -- I am guessing that clicking on a link (or playing a video/mp3 inline) also counts as a "touch" maybe with more weight than either a comment or a like - Brian Sullivan
Thanks Bob - I've been here for 4 months or so, and I really hadn't take the time to understand how this works. - Hutch Carpenter
Great post Hutch. I'm very interested in the algorithmic stuff behind FF. On twitter, I never used the Favorites feature because they have no meaning behind. Here I 'like' all the time. I also like seeing the stuff that my network liked and commented on. - Alan Le
Excellent post Hutch, I know Darwin would agree. Thanks for the mention :-) - Mike Fruchter
Two small addenda to what I've seen with Likes. (1) It seems that you can "resurrect" an old item with no Likes by Liking it. The first Like puts it back to the top. (2) I actually did put an old item back to the top of FriendFeed by Liking it. Happened with one of Frederic's Last Podcast posts. Steven Hodson even commented on this happening (http://friendfeed.com/e/4e549e...) - Hutch Carpenter
Louis, thanks again for including me in the list. I am honored. - Franklin Pettit
I'd like to follow you folks here, if you're on the list speak up and make it easy me and the others who are as lazy as I am! - David Knight
Wow, thanks Louis! It's great to be recognized for nothing more than my own random incessant blathering. ;) - Nathaniel Payne
I saw this post yesterday and just got around to read it, only to discover that I'm on it! Thanks for including me Louis - I too am honored. Your blog is one of those gems on my list as well. - Jesse Stay
Awesome. I would suggest more books by Frank Herbert, he was an absolute genious. Especially – since it is almost no longer sci-fi – I would suggest "The white plague". And also the last books in the Dune saga (by Brain Herbert and Kevin J Anderson) are nice, but not necessary. - dekay
I'd recommend Samuel R. Delany - "Dhalgren", "Babel 17", or "Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand" are three of my favourites. - Bob Kingsley
One I'd recommend is "The Mote in Gods Eye" by Niven and Pournelle - about the best book on first contact I've ever read. - Colin Walker
Colin - but stay away from "Footfall" that book stank. - J. Phil
I would recommend "Blood Music" by Greg Bear, and "The 5th Column" by Robert Heinlein. And how about some Larry Niven love.. ah you have ringworld. Yes, good choice. - J. Phil
Agree with Colin on "The Mote In God's Eye" - I'd forgotten about that one! I recall now that it was, indeed, a terrific read. - Bob Kingsley via twhirl
Most of the books on the list cant find it on my mother tongue - George The Writer
Yea I put in Ringworld. Thanks for all the suggestions folks. You've given me a ton of new books to read. - Steve Spalding
It's amazing the way that most probably know the majority of these stories by watching the films but NOT by reading the book. Occasionally a film will do the book justice (Animal Farm was a great adaptation and had a huge effect on me as a kid watching it at school) but not often. - Colin Walker via fftogo
One other book that I've always liked: "Wave without a shore" by C.J. Cherryh - an interesting look at perception and willpower and how they shape our "reality". - Colin Walker via fftogo
Yeah, you should really check out Jeff Noon, he's buzzing :) - HollowMarkeD
I came, I saw, I was heartily unimpressed but at least _I_ hold my name there - just in case ;) - Colin Walker via fftogo
The one part that is intriguing is the possibility of connections with other services. However, that's not implemented yet. I was on vacation with no computer access during Plurkmania, so I guess I should leave town again during our July 4 weekend and see if sanity has returned by Monday. - Ontario Emperor via fftogo
I can't even get on the site....it's shaping up to be just like the other services! - Mike Lewis
I don't think it's anything special. Just another site for social media "experts" to play both sides on. "Ohh, this could be the next Twitter. Or it may NOT be the next Twitter so I'll keep my Twitter account just in case.." - Shawn Farner via twhirl
Lessee...June's hot thing was Plurk, July's was identi.ca...what bizarre name will everyone be typing in August? - Ontario Emperor via fftogo
Yes, it's not anything special, but it's also not just a twitter clone. It's an open source, distributed twitter clone. That's what people like Dave Winer and Duncan Riley are excited about. I think to gloss over that and suggest that all the interest is simply about another microblogging service is disingenuous. - Michael C. Harris
Right now, it is just another microblogging service. When someone takes the source and uses it themselves, it will be just another microblogging service. - Shawn Farner via twhirl
Ontario, I haven't looked at the code in any depth (and haven't managed to get it running) but my understanding is that users can follow across installations. Shawn, your comment seems to dismiss the open source and distributed aspects completely. Is that what you mean ? - Michael C. Harris
"After all this is Dave Winer’s wet dream come true and that alone should be enough to prompt another peyote induced post by Steve Gillmor - that is as soon as we can get him to come out of his corner." - very funny :) - mike "glemak" dunn
I think it may prove to be an interesting study in how a service like this could (or should not) work as a federated service. Twitter replacement? Nah, there's not going to be a twitter replacement. - felix
yes the important part of this new service is not that it currently is a featureless clone of twitter, but that it has a capacity to be distributed and developed to in clude all those features we want (ie, SMS, track, IM) and to have scalability that does not rely upon one set of central servers to give us the fail whale. when twitter started out- there was not the same amount of energy directed towards it as there is at indenti.ca - Nathan Eckenrode
Whether it really has the capacity to scale and whether the distributed system architecture upon which it's based can address the shortcomings of Twitter has yet to be seen. Track, in particular, is pretty much a non-starter in this 0.x release and in the OpenMicrobloggingProtocol spec. - Ken Sheppardson
From the page "On the radio: a look at the year ahead, Office 97 is here and so are the bugs, why Command & Conquer has conquered my heart, and why you shouldn't download Netscape Communicator..." http://web.archive.org/web/199... - Mark Krynsky
Wow Kevin...that site really takes me back in time. Very cool, I especially like "This page is intended for use with Netscape 1.1 Use it for full effect". - Mark Krynsky
It just didn't look right in Netscape 1.0. I don't think it supported gif transparency or the 'align' image attribute or something. Don't even get me started on NCSA Mosaic. - Kevin Fox
Not in Web Archive. First web site was 2/2005. - Cyndy
My first client site: thomas-york.com / 1996-08-08 / http://tinyurl.com/5g6uoh (Want to know how much things have changed? Molly Holzschlag contacted me in late '96 or early '97 to say how much she liked that monstrosity.) - Roger Benningfield
It was 3 years old when the first shot was taken, and please don't hold the content against me, I'm a reformed conservative :-) http://web.archive.org/web/199... (and it was christmas when the shot was taken, hence the logo) There was another site older than this but I cant remember the exact URL. - Duncan Riley
Mark, sorry, I decided pulling up random sites in wayback machine was better in a different thread... so I pulled my comment about cnet. - J. Phil
Wow Duncan, fan of the animated gif back then? Me too, actually.. - J. Phil
J. Phil, geocities address as well :-) Back in the days where a .com cost $200 and hosting was prohibitively expensive for most...well for me anyway at the time :-) - Duncan Riley
Duncan - I was lucky that one of my good friends got a portable class C domain back in 1990 before network solutions decided to start reserving them for bigger customers. That became (and still is) talisman.org, 255 fixed IPs of real estate. - J. Phil
I'd participate, but archive.org is borking for my domain right now. I know it was 1995 for my first blog like thing, 1997 for my first domain (rizzn.com). Thankfully, since I used Tripod, my first teen angsty blog posts are forever gone. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
The oldest Randomelements link on wayback is Feb 2004 but anyhting from there to June 06 just gives a SharePoint script error (obviously couldn't be archived properly). My first site on geocities (a long time ago) is lost in the ether - can't remember the url and there is no longer any record of it but that went back to about 96/97. - Colin Walker via fftogo
I started Safuto.com back in 2000. Here's the front page from late 2001. Notice the reference to Austin weather on the front page. I lived there from 1999 til Sept. 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/200... - Rob Safuto
Your permalink for this story (the link on Friend Feed) is 404'ing for some reason, even though the story is clearly visible if you go directly to Scripting News. - Ed Ryan
And as it's starting to get traffic guess what -- it's getting slow. :-( - Dave Winer
I propose we cut identi.ca some slack. It just barely launched. my experince so far is positive. I assuem they'll lclea up the RSS issues. - ron k jeffries
wow, identi.ca has "gone twitter" pretty damn fast - sloooooow. - Dossy Shiobara
Not sure if it's an IE thing but can't open the email address confirmation URL. Yes, it was IE - ok in FF3 - Colin Walker
Wow. It's getting pounded now. I'm looking at the PHP source now. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Okay - I'm impressed, OpenID registration flow worked pretty smoothly. XMPP confirmation process worked. - Dossy Shiobara
Interesting, free software is one thing and well and good, but who's paying for the infrastructure and the manpower to watch said infrastructure? Still, it's funny that the software is called laconica, I appreciate that. :) - felix
Blah. "Open source" for a Twitter-like service doesn't mean squat unless there's a server-to-server protocol, like IRC, so one can start up their own server and participate in the "cloud" ... otherwise, you're just standing up lots of islands of attention. Who needs more of _that_? ugh. - Dossy Shiobara
Interesting. The license is a version of the GPL that compels the release of modified source even if its just used to deliver a service. - Erik S
@Dossy, there is a server-to-server protocol. The docs are sparse, but it's there. - Dave Winer
Feels very familiar... with the slow page loading and everything! :) - Yolanda
sbisson there (as everywhere!)... so now we'll see how it goes - Simon Bisson via twhirl
Dave, I just posted a question (waiting for moderation) in the Control Yourself blog http://controlezvous.ca/?p=5 regarding the underlying architecture. I must admit, however, that their interoperability plans sound impressive. - Ontario Emperor
Well, using HTTP POST and OAuth piggibacking doesn't seem like the optimal solution for the server-to-server substrate to me. Why are we constantly reinventing new protocols? We have XMPP with Pub/Sub extensions, we have JXTA... - Vlado Handziski
i just change mine to keep all reboot interviews entries on the fp as it determines how much is available through the feed, but usually I think 5-10 is fine. - Nicole Simon
I was asking myself that question the other day .. still haven't figured out the answer :) - Steven Hodson
The average I see is 10 but as my posts are quite long I have 5. - Colin Walker
I have 5 for my blog, I think that's my personal preference for the amount of info I'd want on any one page. - Shey
I'll chime in with "it depends", but on a 'straight' non-magazine-variety themed setup, 5-10, but probably closer to 5 than 10, for my tastes as a reader. More than 10--unless they're incredibly short entries--is too many, imo. - abacab
I find that return visitors (regular readers) tend to come to the front page to check for new stuff, so I keep to 10 or fewer. More than half my traffic is from Google and those people come into a particular page and leave. The trick is to find a way to "tease" them to view more pages. - Sprague D
I think two things worth considering are how quickly you want your page to load and how easily readers can find other recent posts (links on the sidebar etc.) - Julian Baldwin
I just counted 7 on mine and I'm glad there wasn't more than that. A mixture of videos and short updates. - Larry Kless via twhirl
I agree with Julian Baldwin and abacab. It really depends on your blog, what you are posting, how often and how easy it is to find something that was written in the past. Typically, I think the rule of thumb should be 10 or less, but that's just me. - Justin Korn
"I agree that services shouldn't try to be all things to all people but, by the same token, I think there is a convincing argument for some form of basic functionality to avoid the need to go elsewhere." - Colin Walker
i won't do the spreadsheet thing for hides, but i would like to see who i've blocked listed somewhere "privately" - i haven't done that to many yet but as ff grows it will be a useful poison pill for trollish folk :-p - mike "glemak" dunn
Guess I'm just tolerant as I've only hidden maybe one or two things (aside from filtering all non-commented/non-liked tweets). - Akiva Moskovitz
I have a gut feeling I'm following a good chunk people for the sake of following people, but I'm not too sure, which is why I want to systematize it. One thing that's making Friendfeed frustrating for me is the feedback loop effect: someone popular likes, comments, or shares something, within an hour you get it reshared in all the services, reblogged, etc. at least 20 or 30 times. This might be a dud in trying to alleviate that problem, but I want to explore it for a couple days and see where it goes. - Mark Trapp
One thing I've noticed in the last few minutes of implementing this experiment is that I'm getting more and more hesitant to hide stories now: don't want to hit my "hide" quota. My mind is a silly place. - Mark Trapp
but thanks for sharing w/ us mark - watching troubled minds work via ff is fascinating ;) - mike "glemak" dunn
After about 5 hours of this, I've found nobody really hitting my arbitrary number of 5 hides. I currently have 26 people of which I've hidden at least one of their entries, and only one person where I've hidden 3 (no 4 or 5s). It might be a slow news day, but the stories I'm finding myself hiding are actually political ones, not social media ones. Every McCain gaffe gets at least 4 or 5 mentions. I'll see how it is tomorrow. - Mark Trapp
Murray had one hell of a comeback...I didn't think it was in him... - Snay Trivedi
Was an amazing match, he will have to play even better to beat Nadal though!! - Joe Dawson
cool. Let's be fair though -- Rafa will probably crush Murray. But Murray's a fighter, so you never know. - john conroy
I reckon that will be the outcome as well, just leaving work now so I should be home for the start!! - Joe Dawson
Yep, looking forward to this. Just on my way home as well. Can't see Murray doing it though, to be honest. Let's face it, he only beat Gasquet because the guy fell apart. - Colin Walker via fftogo
Disappointed that Murray wasn't the same player as the other day, still Nadal plays with such intensity that there was only going to be one outcome!! - Joe Dawson
Well written. In my opinion standards are the problem here. Will there be any company break out and really innovate on e-mail? The risk is, that some new features may not work in every context. This would make things more complicated for "normal" users... - Matthias Schwenk
Google is definitely making the moves. They have taken a lot of steps already, integrated Google talk for example, presence, reduced spam (I never get spam in my inbox). But there is so much more to do as I pointed out ;-) - Alexander van Elsas
Matthias, I just realised I didn't react to your point of things becoming more complicated. You are right about that. For that reason I never got around using those add ons that make Outlook "social", xobni for example. Outlook itself isn't "simple". Gmail is a very nice platform though. I like it best, even though they still would have along way to got to implement my wish list ;-) - Alexander van Elsas
What I wish is that someone would come up with a way of telling me when I haven't heard from someone in a long time, or the ability to tag an email to a project (or a label) and tell me how many messages I've gotten on that tag, and what the last one was... So that I could better use gmail for contact management and project management. I have a number of smaller projects that tend to fall through the cracks and while I have tried to come up with a number of ways to handle that, it'd be nice to be built in. - Justin Long
Justin nice list of features. If a few creative people would sit down for it, there are so many possible improvements thinkable. Google seems to be at it, but I seem to hear often the team working on it isn't very big (I don't know). But there is a lot to win still. - Alexander van Elsas
Pity that someone can't come up with a Greasemonkey script that could do it... I don't know anything about programming something like that. It ought to be possible because you can access Gmail through IMAP... wonder if an open source webmail project could be created to "extend" gmail? - Justin Long
Some users have come up with their own strategies of handling email which are pretty good. I've covered this in my Blog post "How to handle Email overload" sachendra.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/how-to-handle-email-overload/ - Sachendra
To me its not so much a matter of managing email - for which there are any number of good suggestions, I use Zero Inbox - but rather better tools for understanding the social connections and the convergence between projects and specific email addressses; the ability to treat email as data for analysis; the ability to better thread conversations; the ability to better expose email threads to more people while keeping some emails private etc. and more - Justin Long
The problem is that Outlook has too many features and is too big, but Gmail is designed to only have the features that most people use, right? I seem to recall reading that Gmail was mainly features used by, like, the regular users of email (not so much powerusers). I do wish that Gmail was "extendable" - like Firefox's plugins! That would be great - because then you could plugin the functionality that you need while resisting feature creep. - Justin Long
If Gmail was extendable like Firefox that would be great. - Matthias Schwenk
Not at all, but I know some people won't read long posts or only skim through them at best. Personally I really enjoy long posts that dive deep in to an issue but short and to the point does just as well. - Colin Walker via fftogo
No, but readability and scanability is. If you're writing a 3000 word treatise in the form of 4 paragraphs, I'm taking a pass. But if you're using the same word count and breaking it up into lists, more paragraphs, using visual aides, I'll read it. - Mark Trapp
Not really. I find that the blog post's title is what makes me read it. - possible248
Sometimes yes. When you're merely browsing through your feeds and/or don't have time to do otherwise, a long/complex blog post can be rebutting. But what I do then is star it in GReader and save it for later. - Rubin
No, but I have been known to run away from a wall of text. It mostly depends on the subject and the source (does this person usually write good stuff?). Word count doesn't matter to me if the content is broken up and scannable. - Rahsheen Porter
Mark, spot on. I have read some bloggers who say great things I want to read but they're too dense, so I end up skipping more posts than I would if they were more easily scanned. What works in an academic paper doesn't work so well online. - Michael C. Harris
Joel Spolsky's posts are usually long, but they are never unreadable. On the other hand, I won't talk about a certain Amazon turned Google Engineer... - Yuvi
usually it's a combination of the headline and the first two or three sentences. the same factors that determine whether i read a newspaper or magazine article. but i agree with @Mark Trapp. Those things definitely make me more willing to read a post that is only so-so on the interesting scale - mike
Yuvi, I often read Mr Yegge's work when I have some spare time. They're long, but I think he's slightly mad, which I like. - Michael C. Harris
Sometimes - I like reading short and to the point - though I don't walk this talk always in my own blog (http://egov.blogspot.com) - comes from writing books/articles to a word limit - wrong habits :) - Craig Thomler
no, but could leave the post for later if I can't focus - Dobromir Hadzhiev
Usually shorter is better than longer, less is more. - Sean McBride
It really depends on the author - I love Stephen Fry's blog essays, which are several pages long. Something that long on another, more dynamic blog would likely get a pass from me. - Jennifer Dittrich
Positively (and whether or not to share it) - Charlie Anzman
One thing for certain: a long post must state its main point clearly in a single sentence or brief paragraph at the head, or I won't read it. Life is too short. - Sean McBride
"To me it seems that having instant access to information makes the information itself less important. We don’t need to remember things, we can simply query it. The information itself becomes less valuable because the transaction costs to obtain it have dropped to zero." Disagree. The value of information isn't the cost to get it. It's what you can do with it. - Hutch Carpenter
@hutch - agree! the easier the more valuable, the more flexible, the more you can expose yourself to...all of which equal greater learning - Julian Baldwin
Ha Ha Hutch, but there you are falling into my little trap. Although there isn't a single good definition of knowledge I would say that doing something with information adds to knowledge. Information sitting somewhere isn't valuable. Acting on it provides us knowledge. A simple example would be that I could easily Google 10 (or maybe a 1000) tips to start up a business. But that information in itself does not make me a great entrepreneur. Instant access to information is ok, but not that important! - Alexander van Elsas
It is what we can do with that information, having been there before, having earlier experiences or deep knowledge on the matter what separates the great entrepreneur from the one that can Google the right answers.I bet a great investor doesn''t look for the right answers, he looks for an entrepreneur that has been there before. That is way more valuable. And you can't Google that - Alexander van Elsas
Hutch - You should copyright the last sentence! - Charlie Anzman
Steven Hodson has produced yet another cliffhanger based upon this post, wondering what is going on in that cranky brain of his ;-) : http://tinyurl.com/69veqc -
