Brendan Cosgrove - Likes

FriendFeed is the easiest way to share online. Learn more »

How Microsoft Office 2010 will be locked out of my toolbag - http://www.facebook.com/note...

September 30 from Facebook - Comment - Like - Share

Sebastian and Brendan Cosgrove liked this

When Microsoft rolled out their new "free" virus software I actually stopped long enough to read the legal disclaimer.. It includes this tidbit in its license agreement - it will validate your software and disable anything it doesn't approve of.. http://www.microsoft.com/securit... I wonder if this is akin to the Quicken model of forced obsolescence? So you will be forced to upgrade. First your operating system then your software.. - Sherry Reynolds

You like the same locking of iPhone apps because it isn't Microsoft. This is partial. - Nitin Nanivadekar

Bret Taylor to Bret's feed, FriendFeed News

FriendFeed now 6x more awesomer with themes - FriendFeed Blog - http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009...

June 30 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

roamin, HealingBrush, Francesco OC and 339 other people liked this

Choose your theme at http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Bret Taylor from Bookmarklet

87 more comments

I'm a Blue Wave man myself. - Bret Taylor

Nice, but I think I like the Classic style the best. :) When can designers submit more themes, or users upload their own? - Pistos

That wouldn't have anything to do with Google Wave, now would it? - Daniel Sims

Who would believe that *I* would be using the "Flowers" theme? :) - Ana

Helvetica - Christopher Chung

Pistos: user submitted themes are coming soon. - Bret Taylor

Pistos: It's in the blog post. ;-) - Kevin Fox

I prefer to keep things Fresh - Dan Hsiao

oooooh boy!! - Micah Wittman

Nice! how much control over theming when user submitted comes out? Twitter-like? more? Sharable? - Justin Hart

Helvetica for now. - Jimminy

Whoops, didn't even see that there's a blog post. Sorry. :) - Pistos

Justin: most of that (user submitted, shareable, etc) is coming, this is just a first step. - Bret Taylor

Awesome. - Justin Hart

thank you jesus - Sarah Perez

This is awesommeee!! - Burcu Dogan

Thanks :) - Tracy Benham

Nice - Kreg Steppe

*awesome* I <3 Helvetica! - Sparky

Helvetica for sure! - Burcu Dogan

This was all due to Kevin's (http://friendfeed.com/kfury) hard work in case it wasn't obvious. Great job, Kevin! - Bret Taylor

Looks like I signed on just in time today. - Yolanda

Thanks guys. Rockin Helvetica for now. Needs the FF logo though. - Andrew Smith

Helvetica for now. - Darryl

This post came when I was thinking how FF logo is a Twitter look-like. Dont change the Helvetica version! - Burcu Dogan

Thanks.. but I'm not a big "theme" guy... I'd rather see updates to the API... I guess I should be hammering Ben for that :) - Tim Hoeck

ohhhhh snap! - Nathan Chase

Niiiiceeeee. - Simon Wicks

I chose Fresh! - David Schmidt

It became clear as soon as the FriendFeed Themes room was taken over. - Andrew Trinh

Awesome! - Frankie Warren

thank you! - Alfredo

Do any of the feeds have the highlight options of AJ's theme? Or the Service Favicons from Micah? - Matthew DeVries

Very nice. Like the Helvetica myself for the moment, but that will probably change in a week or two. - Alex Hellstrom

Helvetica! awesome. BTW, pause button is clipped by a couple of pixels on WebKit browsers. - Kelly Norton

Nice one, though we need more themes... - Kaan Ertürk

+1 to Helvetica! - Joel Webber

Helvetica is loveable but I wish it was white, black and red instead of being just 1-bit. - Berk D. Demir

sorry guys. my helvetica edition more beauty :) http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Burak Dönertaş

haha :) thanx for that. - Ahmet Alp Balkan

helvetica ;) - Faruk Kaymak

@Burak, yup, more beauty ♥ - Zulema ◕ ◡ ◕

Yeah, great job bro. i like the Helvetica edition - Simto Alev

"Bamboo" suggests there's a picture, but all I see is brownish colours, at that don't match the friendfeed logo. - Peter

I like "fresh" - Peter

I like Blue Wave. Fresh should be the default theme and the Classic should be dumped. ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

MIcah says his scripts still work with the themes btw: http://ff.im/4DlX9 - Kol Tregaskes

OMG LOVE!!! - BEX

Perhaps post your favourite theme and whether you like or dislike the themes in the new *official* FF-Themes group here: http://ff.im/4DluG :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Peter, there should be an image inthe lower right corner. What browser/OS are you using? Thanks! - Kevin Fox

this is great! - Joe Pestro

Be Gone Grey! - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

Blue Wave for me :) - Great work FF! - Roy Herrod

You guys flippin ROCK - BEX

Why are they all so girly? - Gabe

@Kevin Fox: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6 - Peter

I'm with Gabe: after considering BlueWave, I went with Helvetica, everything else is just girly. I might just stick with my 'stylish' hacks. - Joel Bennett

Yea, flowers and stuff are annoying. Helvetica version should be improved for better spacing. - Burcu Dogan

Thanks, Kol, that's what I was going to ask - if themes conflict with scripts. Sounds like it's cool - heading off to choose one now. I have one stylish userrstyle script and two greasemonkey scripts applied to friendfeed. We'll see if they can all play nice. - Laura Norvig

Laura, how'd it go? - Rochelle

works great - I'm trying helvetica now. It's super clean because I have avatars removed. Me likey. - Laura Norvig

cool... when is that nasty orange "ParisLemon" theme comin? :P - Susan Beebe

This'll make it prettier when I'm using Chrome anyway. :) I think I'll stick with the Stylish scripts and hacks on Firefox, though - I like the typography modifications they provide. When user-generated themes come in, will they be able to modify the typography/spacing, or just the background and colors? Thanks for the options, guys! - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

Thanks Bret. Hel-vet a lot better. - E-Advocate Network

Thanks Bret, I love the Helvetica theme, btw, your new avatar is awesome:))) - K.D.

Helvetica. WIN - Jamie

Tres cool. - Jason Toney

It's good that ugliness is no more reason #1 to stop connecting. Next I would like to have is d&d to sort out friends in categories - Michele Costabile

Helvetica... Minimalism. Thank you! :D - Brandon

Thanks, FF team! - Anne Bouey

Good stuff! Thanks! - Rick Cogley

Great! - Shun Fukuzawa from twhirl

Helvetica! Clean:) - Dave

Try this Helvetica - http://userstyles.org/styles... - ThenWang

Bret, BIG MAHALO for the themes! I'm going Hawaiian! Check me out! http://friendfeed.com/AlohaAr... - Arleen Anderson

Helvetica definitely :) - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Flowers & Butterfly Corner are good,but a little bit girl stuff.Any good theme for a guy? - Steve Chou

YAY! - Alli Worthington

Coolness! - Ron Bailey

I like the Helvetica, who created it? - Juvenn Woo

Sorry, but were there no "real" designers to push out some mindblowing themes? It´s just a change of color and background? - Hans Kainz

Like those themes. Would be nice though, if they also show up if someone visits my page. Or does it? - Sven

When I click your name, Sven, I get the bamboo theme, which is what I chose. If you have chosen a different theme from that, we know it just remembers yours. It seems to work differently from twitter. - Rick Cogley

It's Helvetica for me! - Rui Pires

I think i'm going bamboo... - diego morelli

Helvetica all the way! I feel like the nytimes.com - Liviu Barbat

@Rick: Thanks. I get the idea. The twitter concept would be nice though. Like personalized version of the FF page. Now, if there were archive links now..... - Sven

Finally! I'll go with freeeeesh!:) - Patrik Johansson

Jeremiah Owyang

Friendfeed Management Team: Noticed their slow yet steady pace of product enhancements. Only once did they do a large revamp, this tool is slowly being evolved. What are they doing? Agile development? Rapid deployment? I like to suggest they are "slowly changing the water in the fishbowl so the fish rarely notice" gulp gulp.

June 30 - Comment - Like - Share

Benjamin Golub, Marko Saric, dereference and 69 other people liked this

Feels a bit like scrum. Something new every few weeks to a month. I wonder how they keep track of tasks internally? - Daniel J. Pritchett

31 more comments

what is a "scrum" - Jeremiah Owyang

aha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Jeremiah Owyang

I love the incremental changes - Mike Doeff from iPhone

Um... Daniel, we use friendfeed to keep track of tasks internally :) - Ross Miller

No calendaring or deadlines of any sort? - Daniel J. Pritchett

It's odd how slow they are compared to how fast other, similar products evolve (like Posterous). - Brandon Mendelson

the mind boggles - Daniel J. Pritchett

Also wow @ Posterous as a similar product. Posterous is similar in that it allows you to post multimedia stuff to a lifestream, but show me their realtime commenting and content discovery engine and granular search features... - Daniel J. Pritchett

As long as they haven't put the fishbowl over a stove top and are slowly turning up the heat. - John E. Bredehoft

I have started using Friendfeed as a research clip board via bookmarklet to a Private Group and an outliner for writing tasks. Getting close to 101 uses for FF. - Deano @ Byron New Media

You lifestreaming? Like it! - Steve Rubel from iPhone

John: LOL. That thought came to me as well. - Joe Bonner

I would *love* to interview the FF team on their Product & Project Management methodologies, etc. - Susan Beebe

Have you noticed they've also stopped blogging about these changes? Fewer people talk about the "little things" when you don't make it obvious. - Jesse Stay

Great observation, Jeremiah! Google has been accused of following an "under the radar" product enhancement as well. It seems to be very effective in both cases. - Larry Hawes

Smells like agile, scrum or other extreme programming type of situation. I, personally, enjoy those environments. You get things out faster and can iterate or destroy with intelligence. - AJ Kohn

I live near Ben Golub, a FF developer, here in Rochester NY - OK Ben can we have an Dev process interview? I'll by lunch!! :) - Susan Beebe

We use the obscure "just get it done" methodology. Unfortunately, I don't think that there are any books written about it :) - Paul Buchheit

@Paul: Well, I think you just found the title of a new productivity book. "Just Get it Done" You know, for all that free time you have to write. :) - AJ Kohn

...where i work it's: "...just get it done...NOW!!!" - .LAG liked that

Paul - I know that one!! LOL :) - Susan Beebe

Jesse: We don't blog? - Kevin Fox

Doing things and talking about them, or worse, talking about the process used to talk about them, are (surprisingly to some) not in the same order of magnitude of productivity. Big companies like to make the assumption that talking is the ONLY way to do things. Excellent small teams operate like "expert brains" that just get stuff done. Bravo to "just get it done"! - Michael Herf

Kevin, you blog, but my point was you don't blog every new feature. Often you just launch features and let people gradually discover them. Maybe I just missed a few blog posts or something, but that's been my observation. - Jesse Stay

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, either - I think it's smart. - Jesse Stay

My only concern when I hear the Agile, Rapid, SCRUM or the "Just get it done" methodology mentioned is the fact that some developers who use those methods don't use them correctly. Without proper testing and documentation, developmental work is just looking to fail. I hear plenty of developers use the words but not understand the correct method. Beta testing is NOT the work of the demographic you are marketing to, and upgrades are no laughing matter if you don't know what you could be breaking or changing. - Kathleen Forden

I just checked and you can still monitor updates by viewing their changelog which is still live at http://changelog.friendfeed.com/ although it may not be updating. - Mark Krynsky

This I mentioned during our video at Plaxo. It's like being a frog in boiling water. - Louis Gray

Louis, you act like we're all dying here ;-) - Jesse Stay

good observation! combined with the rockbottom stability; very fast solving of bugs I conclude that the development process must be top-notch. Otherwise this incremental releasing of new features would be much more difficult. No suprise if you know that Paul and some other Friendfeeders previously have developed Google mail and Google maps; Google mail now having more than 100' mailboxes (must be very solid architecture and very scalable as well) - Jeroen De Miranda

Releasing things frequently increases quality independent of any testing simply because things get *really* tested (by real users) and fixed at a much faster rate. Weekly code pushes sound more stable, but they require an order of magnitude more testing inherently, because when you find a bug, you can't push out a fix for seven days. - Bret Taylor

Thanks Bret... - Jeremiah Owyang

Dave Winer

"I predict a return to blogging as people discover the power of being able to finish a thought" http://www.scripting.com/stories...

June 30 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Annarella G., david beckwith, Tac Anderson and 154 other people liked this

I had thought blogging has been growing steadily, globally. Admittedly I don't have a good chart/stats for it. - Mark Essel

67 more comments

I really like this statement - but will people return to blogging as we've known it? - Tony

Are you perhaps over estimating the allure of thinking? - Todd Hoff

Micro-blogging is good for idealets and infotainment, but it really is turning the web into a mindless medium like TV. Of course, there will always be the equivalent of PBS trying valiantly to raise the bar somewhat. Blogs will always have the possibility of transmitting real knowledge. - Paul W. Homer

The interesting thing for me is I think we have lost the definition of what a blog is. Everybody jumped up and down about what Steve Rubel did, but really I see his change as a shift of platform. If he posted that same content on wordpress, nobody would have said a word. Just because he did it on posterous and called it a lifestream, people took issue with it. So, what is our definition then? - Robert

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/whatmak... - Dave Winer

Dave - I read through the link you sent, thanks for the information. So, in what ways do you think posterous goes against this definition? - Robert from email

I think Steve still has a weblog, he's just submitting posts to it in a "different" way. Like Dave's link says a weblog is "... a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser." Pretty much sums it up, I think. Steve's post is going to generate attention, and debate, but in the end it's a weblog. - Rob Fahrni

Robert, I know you're asking Dave a question, but I don't think the Posterious way goes against the definition. If I'm not mistaken Radio could post via e-mail, and I know Blogger supports this feature. Maybe I need to dig into Posterious a bit more but isn't that what it does? - Rob Fahrni

Rob - That is my point. This in my mind is one of the major problems with looking for a "new name" for these social products. We see it as something different because it is called something different. Posterous, from what I can see so far, allows for the writer to interact with their "weblog" in a different way, just as you said... - Robert from email

Huh? - Dave Winer

Dave - I think your "huh?" was towards me... We call Posterous a "life stream", I say it is a blog, that we have given a different name to. That is what I am saying.Rob - I agree with you 100%, and that is my point exactly. I keep reading these post about blogging being dead, or blogging being alive... but those that say they are not "blogging" are still "blogging" Maybe I am not making sense, but I hope I am... - Robert from email

Robert - Precisely! I think Posterious is trying to find a why to differentiate their product, so they've coined a new phrase. It's still a weblog, how the data arrives may be different, but it's just a weblog all the same. When I read Steve's story last night, from his new site, I thought I was going to find a link on it to something "new and innovative", then I realized I was AT the actualy site, his "life stream." - Rob Fahrni

Rob - YES... That is what I am saying... Same with Tumblr in my view, it is a weblog... Blogging is not dead at all in my view... - Robert from email

Robert - Right on! - Rob Fahrni

Blogology is a still too young science, and definitio usually comes when plays are over. What I feel sad for is the lack of opportunity future literature and social behaviour experts will suffer not using post's content ( and graphics ) as sources for studying today's world zeitgeist. Borges prophecy is at work, few understands - too many doesn't even know what they're writing about: a... more... - valerio fiandra from iPhone

Robert, the photo sharing site you've used recently is structurally a blog too. It differs from normal blog software mainly in that the chronology is by date of occurrence, not date of posting. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

It's funny that this sentence and a few lines from Anthony Trollope's autobiography should have crossed paths in my consciousness on the same day, since it's almost the same idea, thrown back two temporal orders of magnitude. Trollope tells of a correspondent, a vicar, who had enjoyed his clerical novels but was upset by Lady Glencors'a contemplation of adultery in the Pallisers series.... more... - Amyloo

Bruce - Very true! I'm glad that you are not working hard to call it something different. I'm loving it so far, even though I have not had a lot of time to put a bunch of pics up... - Robert from email

This is silly. Blogging isn't defined by the tool, it's defined by who's doing it. Read the piece I pointed to. I don't mean click on the link and hit the Back buttton, click the link and READ. - Dave Winer

Agreed, Dave. Heck, we blogged back in the day via FTP uploads; that's what moved you towards developing "Edit This Page", in fact (IIRC). - Ken Kennedy

Dave - I did read through it, and I agree that a blog is NOT defined by a tool, I think that is what we have been saying. I do not see where we are at odds on our viewpoints, please expound. - Robert from email

This subject keeps coming back - blogging will never die. - Jesse Stay

Before Web 1.0 we listened, conversed, collaborated and then we wrote. Writing was the synthesis of all the thinking that occurred in the first steps. In the new medium, the thinking process is the streams, both personal and community. Blogging is the synthesis of this new kind of community thought process. - Joolio

Dave - haha! - that is awesome :D - Susan Beebe

Pity there's no "Really, Really Like" button. - Chris Baskind

Of course bloggin won't die, but you better have compelling content, because people have little tolerance for long articles. - Todd Dewell

I think a large percentage of bloggers were really microbloggers, they just didn't have the correct apps to do that. The people that actually have something to say will keep blogging and those that just like to say something small or share something interesting will continue microblogging, or lifestreaming, or whatever variant you want to name it. Blogging is akin to publishing articles... more... - xero

This was known since the times of IRC: you can only have idle chatter or quick focused questions at that speed. - Michele Costabile

Michele, if that premise is true, then kids only absorb important life-long lessons from their parent(s) when they're sat down for a full length lecture. No? :) - Micah Wittman

The best food for thought always come in easily digestible chunks, however, sometimes you need to digest some larger/harder stuff to give you the ability to digest that chunk. - xero

Xero - That is an interesting thought... - Robert from email

Agreed, well said, Xero. - Micah Wittman

I thought completing a thought was the beauty of FriendFeed. - Alan Eggleston

Microblogging is very much a product of the times, very ADD, very video-game-ish; so I agree strongly with the idea of longer. - Rick Cogley

Just FYI, when I started Scripting News in 1997, it was entirely "microblogging" -- look in the archive. http://www.scripting.com/1997... - Dave Winer

Dave - I very much appreciate you keeping up this fight. When I heard this past weekend the term "Lifestreaming", and seeing it picking up momentum. No, this has to stop. Twittering is an aside to your thoughts, or a highlight to pull people to your thoughts, if it's you only thoughts, you need put your head below the surface of your lifestream while carrying a big pile of rocks and... more... - Matthew DeVries

LOL, unfortunately, I don't think this problem exists just for blogging :) - Armando & Cindee Edrosa from iPhone

This isn't a fight. I love all this stuff. I was just saying what I think. - Dave Winer

Even calling it a "Lifestream"? That's the creepiest sounding thing in tech, since Steve Balmer was threatening to "Squirt" his music onto my Zune. - Matthew DeVries

Who really quit blogging? Even the most active lifestream addicts never really quit. For me, the blog is and has always been home. Everything else is somewhat ancillary, even when it's the first place I go. Critical thinking sometimes requires the depth of a written post. - Ken Camp

Question: Of those of you out there who use posterous, do you use it as a replacement of your blog, a mirror of your blog or something different? - Curt Mercadante

Ken - Rubel quit blogging. - Matthew DeVries

One of the things I like about blogging is the ability to not finish a thought, not to try so hard to say all I have to say or say come to any definite conclusion in a single post. The unfinished thought is what encourages conversation. Let someone else add to your thought. Let others challenge your incomplete premise. I don't know everything, why pretend I do? My thoughts are never finished. - Jack (a.k.a. Jeber)

Wow, you're right Dave, scripting news was indeed VERY much a microblog. Interesting & thanks for pointing that out! - Rick Cogley

Just last night, my sister sent out a vague tweet that made no sense to me out of context: http://twitter.com/awarnoc... So I suggested she blog about the topic so that readers like me would understand the context. http://twitter.com/awarnoc... http://zelzega.blogspot.com/2009... - Peter Warnock

Just because you can finish a thought, doesn't mean people will read it. - Will Higgins™

Tell me about it. That happened earlier in this very thread. But at least you ca read it yourself. - Dave Winer

Just as your diary became your journal and then your log, your log has become your stream. The web has become your life..... AND SO IT WAS, that in the year naught-nine, the web-log was renamed to life-stream, dissected, and it's pieces scattered about the hundreds of "cloud" services, from which it could fall as raindrops of thought, pinging here and there in an attempt to spread ideas to where they were needed the most. - Joel Bennett

No time to read it. Can you give us the gist of it in 140 characters or less? Thanks. - Diego Barros 

Here's a picture, even easier than 140 chars. http://tr.im/qrBb - Dave Winer

Haha, love it! - Rick Cogley

Love the idea! - Sampad Swain

Come on, Dave. Where's your sense of humor? - Diego Barros 

Where's yours? - Dave Winer

If you were joking, that's cool. I can take it. :) (I was joking, honest) - Diego Barros 

Me too. :-) - Dave Winer

Blogging is still the platform of choice for sharing a clear/uninterrupted flow of thoughts from a single perspective. Then comments rapidly add value to the original post's material (most of the time). We're witnessing the link power of blogging decline because that functionality (which is monetizable) is moving to social media. We are left with the question, how best should bloggers monetize if they're losing link passing strength? I'm working that issue now by frankensteining several parts together - Mark Essel

Personalized/Customized ads based on public user status. Semantic tools (via API), memory (local user profile database), and the passing of information to an ad aggregator will help produce custom (dynamic web matched) advertisements. It should serve all parties involved (social media, bloggers/front ends, semantic processing houses, and advertising aggregators). - Mark Essel

What do you mean, I have always been able to finish a ... ooh a nice shiny object... - Marcel de Jong

Isn't it ironic that this post contained a clear and concise thesis, in under 140 characters? - Mike Chelen

Good point Mike... - Mark Harai

There's NOTHING wrong with brevity. There is a time and a place for discussion and lengthy discourse. - Will Higgins™

Mike Chelen - "a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning ... the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning." - Nope, not ironic - Matthew DeVries

Matthew DeVries: that covers definitions 1 and 2, yet the 3rd is an "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result," where in this case the expected result was to explain how new platforms prevent thoughts from being finished, and the actual result was to the contrary :D - Mike Chelen

If you say so. I never saw that definition, but I have no reason to doubt you, or motivation to find the source myself, so, I'll allow it. - Matthew DeVries

aren't we all copying from the same online dictionary? http://www.merriam-webster.com/diction... - Mike Chelen

No, I rattled mine out of something I memorized years ago. - Matthew DeVries

wow, you got it perfectly word-for-word, remind me to pick you for my crossword puzzle team :) - Mike Chelen

Robert Scoble

Blogging is back? ORLY - http://scobleizer.com/2009...

June 30 from Scobleizer - Comment - Like - Share

Marko Saric, Roland Hörmann, Stuart Miniman and 22 other people liked this

I guess this answers my question from the previous thread. Blogging is back as a way to feed content to realtime networks - Mark

14 more comments

Real-time networks don't have much value without content generated externally. - Matt Mastracci

I disagree matt, most days Robert will write a one line statement or rhetorical question on friendfeed and stimulate a 10-500 comment thread on here. - Mark

I'm back in style! Let's hope this happens to flannel shirts because I'm not giving those up either. - LA Snark

@Mark - discussions around 140 character snippets can only go so far. Without tl;dr articles, it's nothing more than a cocktail party discussion. - Matt Mastracci

O-R-L-Y... haha... I used to respond with that to annoy my old roommates. Hmmm... I don't live with them anymore. Maybe it worked too well? - Bryan Zirkel

well I enjoy them anyways. - Mark

"That hub has now moved for me to FriendFeed and for most other people to Twitter or Facebook." Be careful in generalizing, Robert. Perhaps the alpha-geeks that make up your particular audience have moved to these services (I include myself in that group) but remember that that doesn't translate across the whole population. For example, a recent survey indicated that 74% of Canadians were still unaware of Twitter (http://bit.ly/iiWOg). - Dave Fleet

Fleet: Your comments is a bit weak. Because we know that only a small percentage of Americans are aware of (or actively use) Twitter/FF/etc, perhaps Scoble should have said, 'most other [microblogging] people'. Or 'most other people who are engaged on online discussions.' That 26% of Canadians surveyed are aware of Twitter is probably meaningless, from a statistical standpoint, of what Robert is trying to say. - Jason Miller

One of my frequent contacts in Israel is named Orly. But I can't imagine how you'd know her. - Lo is a Quitter

Blogging will always be around. And I really enjoy things like Twitter as a way of finding interesting articles by other like minded individuals. Honestly, to me, the concept that bogs were 'done' made little sense to me. - Katie Metzelaar

I'm with you on the Friendfeed Helvetica theme. Is blogging back for me? No. It was never in for me, as it's not my primary job function - however Twitter, Friendfeed, and less so Facebook - increasingly have relevance (to both professional and personal life) - Nick Wade

Long ago (circa 2005-2006) a link from Scobleizer.com or Techcrunch would send thousands of people to my site. I was linked to by both sites in the last month and barely saw a blip - although many came under "direct" and Google which could have been your RSS feed. Nowadays, though, a link from twitter.com/mashable or twitter.com/garyvee can send thousands of readers. That's part of the... more... - Steve Rubel

❝Off topic: it's weird to comment a Scoble's post now: it's like partying in his house while he's away❞ - Jérôme Flipo

Yep! :) - Susan Beebe

Agree. Twitter has re-ignited my desire to blog (although I used to blog racing, but that's here nor there). 140 characters is enough to make the occasional statement, but not enough to share logical, well-conceived thoughts. - AllisonWagda

Robert Scoble

Atlassian's "stimulus" plan - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

April 20 from YouTube - Comment - Like - Share

John-Paul Gallo, Susan Beebe, sean andersen and 15 other people liked this

Atlassian is an ultra-cool company and they make good products our company uses. - imabonehead

6 more comments

I like how Jay refers to the Atlassian products as 'lustful' (I totally agree) - Craig Bailey

I love Altassian, especially JIRA. Best trouble ticketing system out there, IMO. - Kevin Kuphal

and their web site is down on Monday? Hmmmm - Moushumi Kabir

We used some products too, really good impression of modularity and customizability. - CantorJF

It's cool to see Atlassian following Axosoft's lead: http://bit.ly/Ttrx and http://bit.ly/mUFvV - We wish them success to raise money for a great cause. - Hamid Shojaee

I sent this info out to my office today... very cool. We use both JIRA & Confluence -- LOVE both apps!!!!!! - Susan Beebe

today during the Dutch Naf seminar (Dutch IT Architects) on Web2.0 vhttp://www.lacinsight.nl/insight..., Jay Simons http://www.lacinsight.nl/insight... of Atlassian mentioned the great viral effect they had in`communicating this "stimulus plan" when Robert 'retweeted' this campaign video. Interesting stuff; btw great presentation of Jay! - Jeroen De Miranda

Robert Scoble to Robert's feed, building43

What five tools do you use to build 2010 websites (or would you recommend to businesses)? Answer here:

June 11 - Comment - Like - Share

Colin Pickard, Enrique De La Torre, Darren Crawford and 68 other people liked this

Google Wave - Sid Burgess

65 more comments

1. W3C Web Standards Compliant Code -- 2. Social Networking APIs / Social Media Integration (i.e. Twitter / FriendFeed / Facebook / etc) -- 3. Git / GitHub for Version Control -- 4. Open Source CMS Solutions (i.e. WordPress / Drupal / etc) -- 5. Open and Accessible Analytics systems (i.e. Google Analytics, Mint, or similar) - Michael Owens

err, often its not the tool but how you use the tool... I'm looking at you Flash! - Matt Searles

It would depend on each individual business - Patricia

WordPress, Analytics, Mint (haveamint.com), Facebook Connect, BLIP.TV OR Vimeo - Adam Jackson

Wordpress, Thesis Theme, Disqus Plugin, Friendfeed, Feedmingle... - Arne Krueger

WordPress & Thesis theme, Twitter, FriendFeed, Disqus, some OpenId provider(s) - Jeroen De Miranda

A knife. It's the most versatile tool there is. Allows you to cut right through the BS and cut chunks off of spit roasted meat. - Todd Hoff

I like Todd's answer. - Happy

Web 3.0 & cloud computing + my Leatherman multi-tool :D :D - Ronald

Again, it does depend on the customer's needs, but I think #1 Michael Owens gave a pretty accurate answer. - Happy

i like michael owens answer - this is it! - Arne Krueger

Wordpress, Apture, Zemanta, FriendFeed, Woopra - Eric Logan

Depending on the business' needs, the best recommendation is to go with a platform that gives you all the features you need and none of those that will simply distract from your strategy. Suggest folks check out social collaboration via Groupsites @ www.collectivex.com. - Carissa Caramanis O'Brien

Add some visual computing to the mix for more engaging content like real-time avatars and animation with CrazyTalk: http://www.reallusion.com/crazyta... - John Martin

I just got some PR email about Rackspace Cloud. Could that be it? :-) - Todd Hoff

I would go with Wave - Julian Hoffbauer

Maybe we should wait until 2010 to find out, and while we're waiting, build 2009 web sites. - Andy Bakun

I use wordpress on a purchased/ hosted domain, friendfeed, google friend connect, disqus. That's just my simple blog example, unfortunately the template could use some sprucing up. I'd like all the functionality, but to look less Scoble clonish - Mark Essel

It's still in private release, but Notable (www.notableapp.com) is becoming a real life saver for giving feedback on web sites/applications. - hunter

Specific tools should be dependent on the tech team (e.g., size, existing skills). More important are the business's attitude to engage and delight their stakeholders. - Bill L

Idk, I don't think its about the tools, I think its about what you want to do with your site, and then what tools you use depends on that and like.. your skill sets, and all that good stuff.. for my personal sorta business e I'm looking at C4D, After Effects, Photoshop, Flash, and final cut studio.. seems like a code editor probably goes without saying? - Matt Searles

Depends on the business. Depends on their customers. It's all relative. - Andy McIlwain

Drupal 7, textmate, cssedit, mamp and git - Michael Harp

Andy: it's not... it's about a different, new way to communicate/work/live - for all the businesses! for me, it feels like we are in the middle of a revolution! - Arne Krueger

I never felt like this before! i was running my own software company with 30 people in 2000 and was just wondering!) i have now the same feeling, like i had maybe ;-) starting doing business with computers in 1988 at the cowfarm of my father in east germany! - Arne Krueger

Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP & Wordpress - am I answering the question correctly Robert? or is this type of setup assumed? - Chris Heath

Robert: can't make your event tonight - Son's 8th grade graduation.. have a great event - John Furrier

the <marquee> tag - Jeremy Toeman

YouTube... have you seen how this agency used YouTUbe to build their site? Very Creative. http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Chip McComb

Wordpress, Flip Mino, Vimeo, Friendfeed, RSS (it's not dead) - Chris Pugh

1. Google Analytics/Woopra. 2. Google's Social Gadgets (or Wave integration when it's out). 3. Version control (my choice is Git w/github) 4. Pushing the browser envelope, use HTML 5 & CSS 3 whenever possible, use standards compliant code. Do cool stuff that sets you apart. 5. Open up your data (if applicable) with some kind of data feeds or apis. - Brandon Titus

Definitely XML libraries to read/write feeds and APIs - Raj Advani

I do both: ASP.NET with Expression and some Flash, but we also use PHP, Drupal, Wordpress, mySql, and even some Coldfusion (yuck!) - Ric Johnson

Of course depends on the customers of the individual business. What industry are we talking about? Are their customers even on the net? I can name more businesses than not, where if I start talking about a new flashy web-site I will get thrown out of the office asap. - Peter Efland

For #web2010 1. Social Identity (Connect) 2. PaaS design (Cloud) 3. Activity Streams (Realtime) 4. Git 5. Open Analytics - Alberto Saavedra

I'm planning to use Windows Azure, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, and Visual Studio 2010. - Jeff Weber

Pen, Paper, Photoshop, Text Editor, and a browser. - Andrew Smith

business rules, pen, paper, brain, computer - pk

Drupal, Wordpress, Twitter, Blip.tv, RSS - Chris Wills

I use Wordpress, Friend Feed, Disqus, YouTube, and Google Friend Connect on the web pages and then to supplement the pages and features - I use FaceBook, Twitter, Linked-In, Digg, and Delicious. The first 5 are key to connecting the web page/blog socially; the supplements are to enhance those features. - Robert Freeze

If your budget doesn't include an accomplished developer (send more work to those guys!), to get started effectively on the cheap: Squarespace, Twitter, Friendfeed, the Google suite (analytics, apps for your domain, connect, adwords, et al.), and probably Facebook (which seems to be working a lot better for business). - Brian Hill

If you have a developer, or are a developer, what David Cann has done with almost.at using the cappuccino framework looks very interesting... - Brian Hill

The mention of cappuccino reminded me: GWT (google web toolkit) for building scalable AJAX applications without cross-browser worries - Raj Advani

I use everything Eric Logan listed plus seesmic desktop to see your brands progress in realtime. Throw in disqus plus any smart phone to provide instant feedback to comments, questions/concerns - Anthony Farrior

Whatever tools a small company would use, it should be funded in this economy leveraging Kiva.org - Eran Even-Kesef

A great tool everyone has is the ability to tell a story. I would suggest that rather than build just a marketing site, or online community, or social network, that you take the tool of storytelling and use it to build a 2010 website. - Brendan Cosgrove

In no particular order: CMS: drupal (for industrial strength) or joomla (for ease of use)... sorry, but wordpress is brain-dead... round it out with some groovy core technologies: Wave/XMPP, RSS/Atom, and Ajax. - Fred Davis

Same as Jeff Weber looking at a .NET blogging platform instead of WordPress - been using GraffitiCMS. - Kevin Tunis

WP self-hosted, DIY Thesis Theme, FriendFeed (widget and embedded for real-time convo), Disqus w/ Facebook Connect and twitter connect, - my new blog has some of these elements now http://susanbeebe.com (so is yours Robert!) :) - Susan Beebe

I honestly don't care what the tools are, but whatever you build, make sure you have a mobile version of it and I don't mean iPhone only. Build the site and ensure it works well on the main 4 mobile browsers iPhone, android, S60, Palm and maybe Win mobile. - Keith Bennett

Adobe Dreamweaver, The Drupal Dream Theme Utility Suite Dreamweaver Extension, MyXoopsExtensions, Adobe Photoshop, and Flash - Chelsea Belle Goodell

Lots of good tech suggestions. I'll add HTML Canvas. But the key to success is understanding the value you are adding for your customers. Of course social networks are the latest example of this, but remind yourself again and again WHY you are here - to understand what value you add now, and how you can improve that over time. You need to find tools and design patterns that allow you to collect as much feedback, as quickly and easily as possible. - David Sky

less is more - Tyler Gillies from email

WordPress, Thesis Theme, Twitter, Youtube, Google FriendConnect - Marko Saric

Second Life, Metaplace, Typepad, Twitter - Prokofy Neva

Video!!! - Morgan

Only one mention of Silverlight. Too much bing-bing? - Nick Wade

I like Alberto Saavedra's answer. It's about the building block elements rather than the branded tool. He nailed it. - Neill Adamson

Imagination and then what ever tool gets the job done. Drupal and Wordpress allow businesses to get online quickly without the need for technical knowledge. - Darren Rollett

Darren - that may be a little exaggeration regarding Drupal's ease. - LPH™ and his dog P™

Agree w/ Michael Owens list. - Jason Cronkhite

Google wave - Amir

LPH - Agreed. Joomla is probably better for the none technical and a little easier to use. Although as Building43 shows you can acheive most things in Wordpress. - Darren Rollett

http://www.vooices.us for using your mobile phone to seamlessly talk to to a webpage. - Paul Kinlan

I am surprised nobody mentioned SMF (I have seen some amazing things done with it) - April Russo (app103)

I would also bet on Google Wave. - Martin Seibert

Robert Scoble to Robert's feed, building43

We’re shipping today: the road to Building43. Please come and join us during launch party today. - http://scobleizer.com/2009...

June 11 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

HealingBrush, Fashion Picture, deakaz and 156 other people liked this

We'll be launching Building43 from TechCrunch's headquarters today. We can't fit more people in, but we'll have live video streaming starting at about 4 p.m. Pacific Time today at http://www.kyte.tv/scobleizer -- lots of special guests. - Robert Scoble from Bookmarklet

58 more comments

Site goes like at 4pm PT? - Jason Miller

Friendfeed plays a huge part in the site, by the way (thanks to Paul Buchheit for all of his help over the weekend). Jason: I think we are actually launching it at 5 p.m. - Robert Scoble

very cool! can't wait - andy brudtkuhl

^^ yo very (!) interested in how 'things work' for you today - wish you all the best!! :) - Ronald

Good luck today, I hope everything goes well. Sorry I couldn't make the party! - Buzz Bruggeman

Buzz and others, thanks! Make sure you join the Building43 room here. http://www.friendfeed.com/buildin... -- you'll get on the home page if you post there. - Robert Scoble

we'll always support you and love ya rob x - David Lloyd

Congrats. Just commented on the blog post. I think it's a great movement and I'm looking forward to contributing to it if I can! - Alexander van Elsas

Can't wait! Here's a good intro video on all this from a local news station who got to interview Robert this week in Blacksburg, VA -- http://www.wdbj7.com/Global... - Cameron

^^ yeppers, pretty nice intro video, already seen :) :) - I WANT MORE, please :)))) - Ronald

good luck today, can't wait to read (and see video) of more from B43 - erik yuzwa

Well done Robert & Rob L!!! Very excited for all that you guys are doing. Sooooo much potential and ground breaking & practical stuff that is being offered. - Lyn Graft

Scoble on my question how does Building43 make money: @vedi: we're a cost center right now. I have been on Twitter for more than 900 days and they haven't figured out how to monetize so you gotta give me 900 days to figure it out too. :-) - Vedran Rudelj

The Scobleizer.com feed to Google Reader is very slow these days. I always find your posts here first. - Louis Gray

Congrats Robert, looking forward... - Nir Ben Yona

Louis: that's on purpose. I manually refresh my feed here on friendfeed manually as soon as I post. Why? Because the real time web is important. Google Reader seems old, I find I don't like visiting it anymore. - Robert Scoble

I consume GReader via Feedly now - if I dont see it on FF first - andy brudtkuhl

andy: yeah, feedly is doing weird things, though. It keeps posting stuff to Twitter and I can't figure out why or how. Plus I just am addicted to friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

eeewww. Just noticed 4 p.m. Pacific Time, is actually 2 a.m my time. Can't we make it 2 hours earlier, LOL. - Nir Ben Yona

That's true, but getting your post in Google Reader helps me share it. - Louis Gray

Can't wait! You guys are doing some great things---look forward to seeing it! Want to share what we're doing with http://www.jailbreakomaha.com - Jeff Slobotski

Congratulation Robert, already have a reminder for 7 PM EST tonight to watching the streaming, wish I could be there. - Kim Landwehr

1st off Thank You Robert Scoble you helped me stay ahead of the curve over the years in what's in the technology pipeline. I am really interested in you latest project because I am that small business that would like to have the 2010 website but have yet to get it past say around 1999 level website. looking forward to the future... - Jim Beall

Excited! I think this idea is really cool and I'm ready to see some more great interviews and demos similar to what you've been doing in the past. I'll be watching the launch. Good luck! - Brandon Titus

I know I for one will be *extremely* excited to see this puppy launch :) - Michelle McGinnis

Congratulation to all the Rackers involved and especially to you, Robert!!! I am sooo looking forward and i am already a big fan! - Arne Krueger

Robert - YAY, CONGRATS!! woo hoooooo! - Susan Beebe

Susan, save your applause for when we ship it. You might not like it! - Robert Scoble

Robert: psyched to finally see and hear about the rest of your Fred Wilson breakfast! Although my lucid moments have been shattered by two recent puppies, I'll support the 43 movement with my best blogging thoughts/links - Mark Essel

Good luck Robert - Charlie Anzman

Congradulations Robert. Keep doing the great work. I'll be watching.... - Alex Marrow

rockmanusa needs a new website - David Lloyd

Sounds cool and fun. Looking forward to your launch. - Michael Williams

Getting closer... very excited for you guys! :) I love Go Live Launchs !!!! - Susan Beebe

Congrats Robert to you and Rocky! So if i come by the TechCrunch offices without an RSVP can't I just say I'm heard about it on FriendFeed? :) - Elliott Ng

Isn't it 4pm now? - Matthew DeVries

WTF, where's my building? - Matthew DeVries

Ditto what Matthew said... WTF, where's my building? - Arleen Anderson

Website is Live :) - Nir Ben Yona

Where is the friendfeed account? - Matthew DeVries

http://www.friendfeed.com/buildin... - Robert Scoble

thank you sir - Matthew DeVries

So is Chrome your default browser? - Mats

Nice Job Robert ! Looking forward to hooking up with you in the near future to pursue some paradigm-shifting applications for B23 and RS... - Mike Schmidt

Hey Robert, fantastic video interview with Fred Wilson. Worth the wait! - Mark Essel

Congrats, Robert! - Bret Taylor

Congratulations on the launch, looks great! - Raj Advani

Congratulations! Looking forward to learning from this site! - Entreprini

Congratulations! (Now you can sleep!) - Kay Designer

Congratulations! Even though the sites new, it still looks great. I can’t wait to see where you go from here. BTW. I loved the way Loic took over the show at the TechCrunch party. lol - Michael Fidler

Reading and commenting on this from the Building43 site. Cool. - Hutch Carpenter

Got a bunch of stuff to do for a huge Friday ahead, but am very excited about guiding our startup alongside the Bldg43 community - starting out with no bad habits and no pre-conceived notions except embracing the new and the best frees us. Looking forward to learning, teaching and sharing. Keep up the great work! - Matt Weeks

congrats!! - Patricia

Congratulations, Robert! Can't imagine amount of work you did for site launch. Interview with Zuckerberg was really great. - denis

Congrats on the launch, Robert. - George Hall (Australia)

Congrats Robert, the site is looking good. I'm gonna spent the next two hours watching those video interviews. - Diego Sana

Just took the the feed with Google reader. Interesting Concept. - Brent Smorgen Bleg

"All building43 content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial " ~ nice touch. - Peter Renshaw

I spotted a Rackspace logo and put together some other impressions here: http://www.sampletheweb.com/2009... still trying to wrap my head around it all though. Good luck with it! - C. K. Sample III

Robert Scoble

We're heading fast to a June 11 launch of http://www.building43.com -- today I drive my new Prius over to Facebook. Topic? Business. More:

June 2 - Comment - Like - Share

lew, Susan Beebe, Ross and 24 other people liked this

I might be interviewing Zuckerberg but might only get to ask him one or two questions. I want to hear how he'll guide Facebook into business interaction land. Twitter is already there, as Shel Israel's new book, Twitterville, spells out quite accurately (I have a very early copy here and it's quite good). - Robert Scoble

29 more comments

Robert, did you read the other book on Twitter "Twitter Means Business", by Julio Ojeda Zapata? http://yourtech.typepad.com/twitinb... - Ivan Stegic

I wish we had another two months to build Building43, but one thing I've learned is you gotta ship and ship often (the Internet rewards iteration). It sure does apply the pressure to get tons of interesting things and interesting people involved. No sleep for Scoble for a while. - Robert Scoble

Ivan: not yet, I have a pile of books to catch up on. - Robert Scoble

@Robert - what tech are you developing Building43.com on? WordPress I presume? Perhaps BuddyPress? - andy brudtkuhl

It's nice, by the way, to be working with Rocky Barbanica again. We're kicking ass and taking no prisoners. - Robert Scoble

Andy: Wordpress and friendfeed. :-) - Robert Scoble

Yet that "get it out there" principle is something I've just learned from watching Jason's show. It's something he hits on constantly. Makes sense and you can apply it to so many areas - Stephen Pickering

Andy: and a few other things. I want to do more on the technology side, but three months isn't enough time to do a whole lot (it's only been three months since this idea was hatched). - Robert Scoble

Stephen: the human impulse is to "wait until it's perfect." Wrong impulse for Internet stuff. Gotta shoot first, then aim, then shoot again. The problem is that expectations are too high. Which means Scoble gets no sleep. Along with a bunch of other people at Rackspace who are rushing to get the site built. ;-) - Robert Scoble

Yeah, after watching his first 3 shows I wrote a blog post "Perfection is the Enemy of Progress" which actually is Jason's line. But it really struck a chord with me. We don't expect too much from you, Robert, just give us the Moon! hehehehehehehehe Joke. No, don't stress, you'll do great. Can't wait - Stephen Pickering

Robert, did you consider drupal at all? Zappos runs it (http://drupal.org/node/473648), so does the Whitehouse (http://drupal.org/node/376313) - Ivan Stegic

Robert, why do you feel that facebook has to go into "business interaction land" most of the people I talk to like having facebook for there personal relationships... (real friends and family) Personally I think facebook would be better off focusing on this aspect than trying to continue to try to move the focus on getting to know people that you don't know. Twitter and friendfeed are... more... - Nathan McClain

Ivan, what's this Joomla, have you heard of it? It looks pretty interesting - Stephen Pickering

Nathan: we use facebooks public profile offering for our business and it's working very well for us. - Peter du Toit (S.Africa)

ask if they will support the wave federation protocol. :) - coffee

@Robert yea that's a short timeline but WordPress helps a TON with the plumbing.. .Can't wait to see it! - andy brudtkuhl

:) Well, if it is not ready yet then you could call it Building42, or ~41 depending on your sense of how far there is to go. Much better than endless "beta"s. :) (Sorry, it is the end of the day here!) - John W Lewis

Robert: ask if the communication with fans on public profiles will be streamlined more. There is some stuff you can't do unless you friend the person on your personal profile eg tagging in notes, invitations to events, tagging in photos etc. - Peter du Toit (S.Africa)

You could ask them how asymmetric they are happy to let relationships become. (Asymmetry seems to be the strength of Twitter). - John W Lewis

Ivan: I used Drupal at Fast Company and we did consider it, but since we want to build most of the community inside friendfeed/facebook/twitter, we didn't need the power of Drupal. Plus I feel more comfortable with Wordpress as a content generation engine. Over time there might be pieces we build in other things. One of my goals is to have a sandbox where you can try things out, but that will take longer to build. - Robert Scoble

Nathan: because that's where the money is. The future of Facebook (or things like Facebook, aka friendfeed) is not in banner advertising, but in giving businesses interfaces to send offers to its customers, or potential customers. Facebook could be an AWESOME place to do that. More later tonight, I need to do a blog post about this to explain more what I'm thinking. - Robert Scoble

Nathan: Look at it this way. Facebook has built out the metaphorical equivilent of the old White Pages. Now they are building out the Yellow Pages. It'll be interesting to see what happens when they have both built and what kind of interactions they can have between both. - Robert Scoble

I'm just not personally on Facebook much anymore. All Twitter and here, but maybe I'm an Outlier - Stephen Pickering

There are clearly a variety of business use cases for social media, but how many more do we need? By building Building43, are you indicating that you think each company is going to have its own application silo? The issue is beyond federation, it is about communication protocols (rather than services) within layers ... which email already provides and Wave seems to be doing too. - John W Lewis

Robert: okay I may have been thinking about it in the wrong way. Just to make sure that I am getting it right your talking about the way that Facebook can leverage the information within its pages to create revenue and in turn offer relevant ads similar to the way google's adsense does? - Nathan McClain

John: excellent point! I think businesses have already taken to Twitter in a pretty sizeable way (over at Four Seasons, yesterday, I saw that first hand). I think businesses will go wherever their customer base goes. - Robert Scoble

If you get a chance, you might ask what Facebooks plans happen to be means the games are causing so much havoc with the reliability and performance of Facebook as a whole. - Cary D. Conover

Robert, you're right on here. Businesses need to view the web as myriad set of possibilities to communicate with their customers and the companies that step in & help out with that are going to make a TON of money. I think it's important that the companies that step in here realize that it's not about them, though. Rather, it's about the communications that go on and whether or not they're desired, positive or productive. Facebook seems to me to be a bit deaf on this issue, don't you think? - Robi

@Nathan: Google adsense is algorithmic. I think Robert has a different idea. Real people ( read customers ) are there on facebook and doing a lot of things within it. Businesses would eagerly want to take a peek into all that people are saying. Why? Because that way they could find customers interested in the products that a business has to offer. This would hugely increase their chances of making a sale... - Arvind

...If facebook can figure out a model for allowing businesses to do this then imagine the kind of money that facebook could mint!!! - Arvind

Robert Scoble

I'm getting a look at http://www.peoplebrowsr.com OH MY GAWD. Friendfeed support. And they fixed the "Scoble bug" that kept my long list of rooms and lists.

May 27 from PeopleBrowsr - Comment - Like - Share

RetiredTeacherD, Jannifer @wordsforliving, John and 38 other people liked this

I need to do a post on the various Enterprise clients here some time. PeopleBrowsr has them all topped I think. - Jesse Stay

26 more comments

I like that Jodee really listens to those that use these apps and he and his team have put countless hours behind the scenes trying to implement the feedback. - Jesse Stay

Wow! When did they push all of this out! I tried Streamy, but you can not filter the news right. Will try Pbrowsr again. - Chad Harris

Thanks for the love guys. We spent a lot of time listening and pushing new code; sometimes every night. Download the Air client once you launch the web page if you want "popup" updates, and a bit more real-estate on-screen! - Gadget Guy Dave Mathews

It keeps telling me that my password is wrong. Both with Twitter and Facebook logins. - Andrés David Aparicio

Started playing with it an hour or so ago... this may just become my weapon of choice! - Peter Liu

The problem in Safari repeats in Firefox with the Facebook login... [edited in FF] and it cut this comment (it finished with "Adding stacks now!") :( - Andrés David Aparicio from PeopleBrowsr

Love it. Now this is what you call steroids! - Jennifer Windrum

Having a look at PeopleBrowser now, like the breadth of services it supports. - Clifford Kennedy

I sent ya a link there last week ;) - Leif Hansen

Does it support more than one Twitter account? Doesn't look like it unless I'm missing something...could very well be after staring at my computer all day......Just got my answer via Twitter!!! - Jennifer Windrum

Hey Dave Mathews: The 'Expand" and the "Campaigns" have a lot of work into them. what is your personal favorite feature? - Chad Harris

Yes Jennifer, it does. Look for it in the Accounts page (the link is at the bottom of the page). - Andrés David Aparicio from email

@chad My favorite feature on Campaigns is "auto reply" where it builds a reply based upon keywords you insert. You can do many different replies for different keywords within a campaign. You can then edit them to customize before sending (look in your scheduled stack to see them waiting) Other feature I like is Air client (full screen + pop-ups) and Helicopter view to track all stacks in a single column! - Gadget Guy Dave Mathews

@Mathew Thanks I see them all lined up like 757 on JFK on a rainy day! Love the Campaigns. I opened Chrome then set up 15 columns and drug it across two screens and they are all resized and saved fast. I must say after seeing this, if they told me I had switch to Twitter only as it exists today, I would rather have David Beckham kick me in the groin wearing a frozen dutch clog! Seeing is believing! Thanks for a sleepless night ahead as I play with the features. - Chad Harris

(Unless there is some super double secret beta version that is not available from visiting the linked URL) I have to say I'm entirely underwhelmed by this service. - BryanSchuetz

The Campaign features would either be a turn on or turn off. For me, they delivered something I did not get from Seesmic I desperately needed in my business. It all comes down to what you are using it for. - Chad Harris

And, By all means everyone, If you have questions or troubles with anything. We are here to help. You can send me a message or @PeopleBrowsr on Twitter, or post a question in the PeopleBrowsr Room here. We're always listening. :-) - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

Andres: We've notice an occasional truncation posting into FriendFeed. We're tracking that error down asap! (It has happened to me as well) - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

When PeopleBrwsr first came out in its alpha, I liked the *idea* but I found the user experience wanting. The beta version is so much better. There's a bit of a learning curve with all the features available, but I think it's worth the effort. So far I've only used it as a Twitter client, but I'll test FF. This could top the other clients (desktop version is nice too). - phil baumann

Rob: Great! Because the app looks good, congrats! - Andrés David Aparicio from email

Jennifer: Multiple Twitter accounts are supported. Once you enter in your credentials for the second account there will be two avatars in the top right corner, as well as on top of the Twitter stacks. Just select the avatar you want to "Be" and the tweets for that account will load. If you select both avatars, both sets of tweets will load, and replies will be sent from the Primary account - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

Andrés: Thanks! We all really appreciate it :-) - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

trouble with firefox.... - Tim Robb

Tim: What kind of trouble? You're welcome to DM me if you'd like - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

Impressive, really really impressive. Actually it just became the weapon of choice. - Amiroo ™

Congrats Rob to you and people browser team for this lovely product though you should know that it doesn't have that much a good first impression as I saw it before but didn't understand how big it is. May be a introduction video in the homepage may help. - Amiroo ™

FF UI kicks PeopleBrowsr's butt so I won't be using it to replace this site, however, this is the most powerful twitter/ FB/ etc client I have seen yet. - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

Robert Scoble

I visited Kevin Marks at Google today. Here's the video of what he showed me: http://www.blip.tv/file... -- how to make your blog more social by adding FriendConnect to it. More details shortly here:

March 26 - Comment - Like - Share

Nicholas James, Dimitar Vesselinov, Shay West and 73 other people liked this

His blog is at http://www.kevinmarks.com Google FriendConnect is at http://www.google.com/friendc... - Robert Scoble

27 more comments

I shot this with my Canon 5D MKII. Unfortunately I have to manually focus and everytime I do that the noise from me manipulating the camera gets transfered to the video. Sorry about that. Still learning how to use this new equipment. This is the kind of video we'll be doing more of for Building43.com. - Robert Scoble

I shot this in 1080p on my Canon, brought the file into iMovie, saved it out at a lower bit rate, uploaded it via TubeMogul.com which pushed it over to Blip.tv. Pretty good quality for on camera microphone. I was using a fixed 24mm F2.8 lens. - Robert Scoble

Kevin is on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kevinma... and here on friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/kevinma... - Robert Scoble

I look forward to this integration as well.. maybe over the weekend - Sardar Mohkim Khan

I hope to make a lot more "how to" videos for http://www.building43.com -- what do you think? Do you like these? If so, we'll do more from other companies too. - Robert Scoble

more more more! - Nitin Gupta

Hi Robert - also note that we published details of the Portable Contacts +OAuth API for Google contacts today: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009... - Kevin Marks

Considering the room we were in was just fluorescent lights, the colour came out pretty well. Nice camerawork. - Kevin Marks

really cool video. I tried friendconnect on my blog, but because of my small blog community, it didn't show much friends, so I uninstalled it. But watching this video makes me want to install it again :) - xavier vespa

Kevin: this camera (the Canon 5D Mark II) rocks. The more I use it the more I fall in love with it. Only problem is it's a bit tough to manually focus and that also causes audio "clicks" to be generated. I'll work on that, we're getting external microphones for these. Both Rocky and I have a 5D MKII now. - Robert Scoble

interesting, Blip was displaying the MP4 file up to now. In the background it was transcoding to Flash. Now it's playing the Flash and the quality isn't nearly as nice. The full MP4 is here: http://blip.tv/file... -- much better quality, if your computer can display it. - Robert Scoble

I've had friendconnect on my blog for a while, it's been great. Google chatback is great for interacting with visitors to the blog, too. - Iain Baker

It's nice to watch an interview where the image is so sharp. - Richard A.

Can everyone play the MP4? If so, this quality freaking rocks!!!! Check this out if you can play it: http://a1.video3.blip.tv/0020000... Richard, you ain't kidding! It's amazing that I can shoot and deliver this quality now from an SLR that isn't even optimized for video! - Robert Scoble

The quality is really good but the shallow DOF is a bit of a problem when viewing Kevin's laptop screen. - Yuval Atzmon

Yuval: yup, and that's with a 24mm F2.8 lens. Makes it hard to focus, too, because the screen is too small to see properly (you can't focus through the lens, because the mirror is up to allow light to go to the sensor). I'll get the hang of it, though, and I'll also play around with fstops to get more depth of field. - Robert Scoble

In the flash video version I can see jumps when the camera is moved fast. Will try mp4 version. Edit: The download took serious time, server had a low bandwidth... quality of the video is great, but I still have horizontal and angular cuts when camera moves back and forth between his face and the laptop screen. Might be because of my refresh rate and/or DirectX-graphic card version though. - ilter

Watching the mp4 feed via Silverlight 3 beta 1 which now supports mp4 video, playback, quality very good, but agree about shallow DOF issue. - Martin Duffy

I like the idea of more "How-To" video's. However, I would consider taking the time to do more editing. Like how about having the interview cut between you and him talking, to a screencast that is nice and clean/visible. Basically, keep the great dialog but improve the video of the screen you are both talking about. - Kevin Keeney

Kevin: we will try to do more, especially as we construct building43.com since we have two camera and Rocky does editing but I have tried to do this several times and it is pretty tough to justify/do. Why? One reason I get the access I do is because I don't take much time. Doing this would require a lot more time and access to the interviewee's computer. Not to mention editing time, which costs money. Keep in mind I am mostly playing around right now until we get building43 up and running in May. - Robert Scoble

I'm still wondering, what can FriendConnect do for new blogs, not the static ones? - Toni @ NavinoT

Robert & everyone, I'm trying to listen in on these conversations for Building43. Regarding the comment about doing screencasts (time and cost), what if you could do both simultaneously? Robert, you could do your video for the live interaction effect while the demo/interviewee is processing the screencast and edited/voiced over later. Using something like Jing could achieve this but its just a thought. - Jason Cronkhite

Just enabled this on my site interested to see if it draws people into the conversation. Feel free to stop by KnowtheNetwork.com - Keith - @tsudo

Pardon the hijack, but I'd love to get people's recommendations for screenscasting software ... looking at SlideShare and Evernote.... - Richard ¿digame? Walker

Love the How To video, more please. Would be interesting to see Facebook Connect as a comparison, although guess its slightly different? ;-) - Steven Horner

@Richard - neither of those are screencasting software - andy brudtkuhl

nice, been using friend connect for a while, glad you got it working - Wayne Sutton

Glad you finally got it up on your blog Robert, now add some gadgets. - Kevin Marks

Dave Winer

Matt has been quietly building a twitter-clone in WordPress called P2 cause they need it. It's how all good sw is made. http://ma.tt/2009...

May 6 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Mark Essel, Daniel Rowley, Zack and 14 other people liked this

Hopefully it is not a clone but an improvement -- - LPH™ and his dog P™

3 more comments

Looks great, but it's still a blog at heart, not a network. Micro-blogs are going to spread like wildfire now though. - Daniel Sims

Wordpress P2 looks awesome... I wonder if you can intermingle normal posts with micro? "No draft posts!" "No fail whales!" - Ben Hedrington

I mentioned this the last time I was on TWiT - pretty cool upgrade of Prologue - Bwana ☠

P2 is just a theme. You can still use the OpenMicroBlog WP plugin so each blog isn't its own island. - coldbrew

Kevin Rose

RT: Jeff Bezos is the new Steve Jobs. New Amazon Kindle pics: http://www.engadget.com/2009... (via @mager)

May 6 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Randy Pollock, Alex Williams, Brendan Cosgrove and CesareBeHuman liked this

I love my Kindle, but I do wish they'd work out some of the niggling, ongoing issues. - Lynn Loschin

Dave Winer

"I got put on Twitter's official suggested users list last night. I asked them to take me off it today and they did." http://twitter.com/jayrose...

April 30 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

akio0911, Rob Diana, Richard Carter, FCD and 49 other people liked this

i wonder why they don't ask people before they put them on the list? maybe they just assume that everyone wants to be on the list - Chris Heath

35 more comments

I will do the same, if I get put on the Twitter list. - Robert Scoble

I think I asked the last time there was a similar conversation - so please excuse the question if it was already asked - but why would you want to be removed? Am I missing something? Since I don't really use Twitter maybe there is something I do not understand. - LPH™ and his dog P™

LPH: I will refuse to be on this list for three reasons: 1. it's not a meritocracy. That means that my inclusion on it will raise questions about whether I did something behind the scenes to get on the list. 2. It is a gift from a company I would like to cover journalistically in the future. If I got the "gift" of being on the list I could no longer do that and keep my own integrity. 3. Being on the list gets you huge amounts of unenaged followers. I really am not in this game just for numbers. - Robert Scoble

...you're a man of principle, Dave Winer. - .LAG liked that

LPH: Go to TechCrunch's followers. Look at the engagement level. Most of his followers don't even put a picture on their avatars. Now go to mine and compare. The engagement level is HUGELY different. I'm paid to get an engaged audience, not an audience of bots or an audience of people who don't participate in the Internet. - Robert Scoble

LPH: TechCrunch's followers: http://twitter.com/TechCru... My followers: http://twitter.com/Scoblei... -- what differences do you notice? Look for signs of engagement. What are those? 1. Have the members put a photo on the avatar? 2. Have the members actually done a tweet or two? 3. Have the members actually followed anyone on their own (organic following?) - Robert Scoble

Robert - now that makes sense. I just don't use Twitter enough and am used to FF engagement. Guess I'm spoiled ! - LPH™ and his dog P™

LPH: now do you see the problem Twitter is facing here? http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsen... -- lots of hype, not enough engagement. It's engagement that advertisers will pay for, not the hype. - Robert Scoble

Or, visit this article about non engagement: http://features.csmonitor.com/innovat... - Robert Scoble

Hint: this list is actually making things worse for Twitter's returns and engagement. Here's why: 1. If you get onto Twitter because of a celebrity, that's great, but I've found people get very fickle about celebrities. Go to @oprah, for instance. Is there anything really that interesting there to read day after day after day? I don't see it. But what if your best friend is on Twitter? Yes, I find following my close friends on Twitter day after day IS interesting and DOES get me back to the service. - Robert Scoble

2. Twitter seems to only endorse "celebrities" on its recommended follower list. Well, that tells normal users that they don't matter to the system as much as celebrities. So they feel less engaged/empowered. Compare this to Facebook where celebrities only can have 5,000 friends. Now everyone is on the same level and the system "feels" more intimate and engaging because of that. - Robert Scoble

Great point Robert, and that's another reason why sites like Facebook (and in the past MySpace, Friendster, etc) are 'sticky' ... people you actually know are there. Most people will be more engaged with people they actually know - i for one don't engage with celebs on twitter because i know they're not going to engage with me - Chris Heath

bet that if twitter had a "best-of-the-day" feed like, no celebrity will on it. twitter is becoming less conversational. pity :( - Shivanand Velmurugan

Chris: right! Plus, this list really penalizes the real users of the service (this is why Allen Stern's points about friendfeed's list being bad are starting to win me over). Those who put the most time into the service should be rewarded by that service. I've been on Twitter 890 days. The fact that someone else is on the recommended list that's only been on for 15 days really pisses me off and makes me more likely to go elsewhere. - Robert Scoble

Shivanand: right, and it would be a lot better for engagement to have something like http://alltop.com/ which recommends people based on your content interests. If I want to hook into people who are into quilting, why would such a system recommend Mike Arrington to me? - Robert Scoble

i'm texting scoble from my iphone and it's mangling every goddam word - Dave Winer

The other thing about 'recommended' is For What? I might like Robert, but not if I'm looking for hollywood dish. same w/ jay, obviously. - reed price

Dave: the iPhone keyboard does that. (I'm on the phone with him now). - Robert Scoble

I've never found the suggested users list to be useful, on Twitter or FriendFeed. Frankly, I don't care if you're "just some guy/girl" or if you're God...if you don't say anything that interests me or teaches me something new, I'm not going to look for what you have to say. If you put all the numbers aside and make connections on a one-to-one basis, even though it's accessible one-to-many, that's worth finding. - Sally: gift wrapper

The celebrity suggested user lists completely miss the point of Twitter, implying it's a broadcast system - which is a minority use case. Services like Mr Tweet are far more apposite. Even random selections might get you started better! - Tom de Grunwald

A friend of mine joined Twitter and had list of "friends" and she didn't know who they were. It's like moving to a new address and getting a bunch of junk the first time you open the mail box. - Tom Newman

Tom, they're not really "friends", you're following a person, they may be friends, they may not. I know, picky, picky, picky. - Rob Fahrni

Reed, i totally agree... suggested lists are a nice thing to have, but only when you know why the suggestion is being made. - Chris Heath

Maybe a better model for a suggested list would be to look at more than number of subscriptions/follows - look at how many posts/comments - on FF they could also look at how many services or what services - if i post a lot from a service then the suggested list should maybe show me more people from that service ... one thing i will agree is that a suggested list is a hard thing to do because you can't please everyone with your suggestions ... just look where we are now... - Chris Heath

Even though I respect your reasons, I still can't believe you did it. It's such a huge opportunity. Yes but I do see what Scoble is saying. it would be impossible to criticize them. - Stephen Pickering

Oh my bad, It was Jay Rosen. I thought it was Dave Winer. Oh well, same difference. I can totally understand him. He's a journalist. What would be interesting to see though is if he remained on the list but remained totally objective and criticized them when it was appropriate and see if they then took him off. - Stephen Pickering

NICE: @anonymoustom: "celebrity suggested user lists miss the point of Twitter, implies broadcast system, a minority use case" - .LAG liked that

Dave, why do you think they put you on the list? - Thomas Hawk

Thomas: Dave wasn't put on the list, Jay Rosen was. I bet he was put on the list because he's one of the best Twitterers around and because he doesn't do anything "negative" in their eyes, like talk about friendfeed or overload users with too many tweets. - Robert Scoble

Don't forget the fact that there will be no way your followers can all DM you if you're on that list. - Jesse Stay

Jesse: that's a good point and since I care more about having engaged followers than just a broadcast mechanism, that matters to me too. - Robert Scoble

When a 'cat who tweets' makes the list, while many worthwhile charitable/educational organizations are ignored, something doesn't smell right. And it isn't just @sockington's litter box. - Sharon McPherson

How many more requests did you get while 'recommended' versus say a normal day? - Andrew Leyden

ah got it. It was Jay not Dave. - Thomas Hawk

Probably not the same league as Twitter, but Tweetree.com shows you (Dave) and Scobleizer on their front page sometimes. - Hiro Asari

Jay's decision clearly struck a nerve: Look at all these comments! ... Re: Robert Scoble saying he'd refuse to be listed because (a) it would raise questions about quid pro quo (b) gift would compromise his journalism, and (c) unengaged followers -- I get a & b, and applaud him for it. But I'm not sure I grasp the downside of having 100,000 "unengaged" followers. How do you know how... more... - Alan Mairson

Robert Scoble

Decentralized moderation is the chat room savior - http://scobleizer.com/2009...

April 20 from Scobleizer: Technology,... - Comment - Like - Share

metalerik, Robin Good, Shivanand Velmurugan and 81 other people liked this

I wrote this for my friendfeed buddies to explain why friendfeed sees a lot less "a%%hole" and spamming behavior than other places on the Internet. - Robert Scoble

100 more comments

All hail FriendFeed! - Martin Bryant

Martin: the system they built here is pretty darn interesting to study. - Robert Scoble

Hmm, interesting , and yes I think decentralized moderation is a pretty good control (maybe like Churchill said democracy is a pretty good form of government) - but I think the PRIMARY reason Friendfeed doesn't have a ton of jerks and spam is because it doesn't have the masses here yet, just as you said about the early days of the NetMeeting forum. By the way I just used NetMeeting for work yesterday - it was a viable lowest-common-denominator when the fancier options weren't. - Dan Becker

Dan: I totally disagree. When the masses do arrive (who said they haven't arrived yet, by the way? Heheh) this system is far more resistant to problems that have popped up on other forums and chat rooms. - Robert Scoble

Dan: for instance: go ahead, try to spam me. Or, try to be an asshole. I'll show you how we deal with that here and keep the signal to noise level high. - Robert Scoble

The general tone here is conducive to good conversation. Thought-provoking topics, interesting news, and plenty of lively, sensible debate/discussion. Wouldn't be that many people wanting to go against that sort of thing. - George Hall (Australia)

Robert: I know - it's so simple and yet so complex. I tried to do a Screencast about it on Saturday (to encourage people to try FF) and there was so much to cover that it ended up 20 minutes long and I scrapped it. But yes, this model of moderation is very effective and probably the future, if it can be integrated in a wider way across multiple sites. - Martin Bryant

George: see, though, the system here itself makes sure we both behave. This is VERY DIFFERENT than other moderation systems that have been tried. - Robert Scoble

I'm not sure how the system does that, technically... - George Hall (Australia)

One thing I didn't cover on the positive side, is that if you both behave and participate with interesting content your stuff will get "liked" and "commented on" which increases its distribution dramatically. - Robert Scoble

It's true that the masses aren't here yet, but I suspect Robert is right: that even when they arrive the simple concept of having each person moderate their own threads is powerful enough that it will keep bad forum behaviours to a minimum. The question is whether new kinds of bad behaviour, unique to distributed moderation, will arise. - Edward Coffey

George: in short, if you troll here, I'll delete your comment from this thread. Strike one. - Robert Scoble

I think this idea of "decentralized moderation" is also seen in the blogosphere. Here on FriendFeed, every post is like a post on your own blog. You moderate your own comments. FriendFeed is like a centrally hosted blogosphere, on steroids. :) - Meryn Stol

George: if you troll me again, strike two. If you troll me a third time, I'll just block you. - Robert Scoble

Blocking keeps you from seeing my items at all, so you can't attack me anymore. - Robert Scoble

I said it before: The "blog" model has proven to scale. There are millions of blogs, each with its own conversations. - Meryn Stol

Okay, I know I can delete my own comment...and I think, if I remember correctly, the thread-starter might have some control...anything I've missed there? - George Hall (Australia)

Meryn: true, but with one HUGE difference. You have identity here and can be blocked. On my blog? You have NO identity in my comments and can not be blocked and you suffer no ill consequences from me trying, either. - Robert Scoble

George: right, I can delete you on this item because I started it. You can delete me on items you start. - Robert Scoble

Robert, yes. That's a major added benefit of FriendFeed. Something like Disqus, IntenseDebate, Facebook Connect or OpenID could solve that for blogs though. - Meryn Stol

That's good to know, because I've seen the problem with spam/trolling on my blog...so it's good to know I've got some control over the total troll commentors. - George Hall (Australia)

Meryn: it could. If I troll a Disqus blog, and get deleted, do I suffer negative consequences? And, does that blog get removed from my view totally? Nope, right? Well, then, it isn't as resistant as friendfeed is. - Robert Scoble

I can see the actual consequence of getting blocked on friendfeed, as that would affect your overall friendfeed reputation. - George Hall (Australia)

George: it doesn't just change your reputation. If I block you you can no longer see any of my items, comments, or likes. The attack surface you have has been reduced. That's HUGE. - Robert Scoble

The more people blocking you, the harder to really misbehave in the long run. - George Hall (Australia)

All in all, that's quite effective compared to a lot of other sites. - George Hall (Australia)

Robert, you've got a good point there. In the case of blocking (as opposed to regular moderation) the consequences are far more dire than could be done with blogs: You can exclude people from seeing your own posts. That goes further than excluding people to comment. (I do think we might two types of "blocking", one all-out, one only for blocking comments) - Meryn Stol

So that also affects even interacting with other people in your posts, too? - George Hall (Australia)

George: yes. If I block you you can no longer interact with other people in my posts because you can no longer even SEE my posts! You also can't see my comments in other people's posts and my likes are now invisible to you, as well. - Robert Scoble

So what's the exact mechanism for blocking? Haven't exactly paid attention to a block button yet... - George Hall (Australia)

"You also can't see my comments in other people's posts" I don't think that's true. One person has blocked me. I can still see his comments in other people's threads. - Meryn Stol

Robert: The biggest concern I have is possible abuse by moderators. You mention moderator reputation being a factor in preventing unreasonable behaviour on the part of moderators, but is it enough? The idea that I can have a fascinating debate with someone, then tomorrow find the whole thing deleted at the whim of the person I was debating with, or the third party whose thread we were debating on, seems like a disincentive to put a lot of time and though into such a conversation in the first place. - Edward Coffey

Edward: you betcha it's enough. You just wait to see the blowback that happens if someone like me starts deleting comments without cause. - Robert Scoble

I'd venture a guess abusive moderators would, themselves, eventually be blocked by a significant amount of people. - George Hall (Australia)

Meryn: really? Hmmm. Must test that out. I could have sworn that it blocks everything from view. - Robert Scoble

George: if someone deleted my comment and I didn't think they had cause I'd stop liking and commenting their stuff. - Robert Scoble

George: and I might block them just for being a jerk. - Robert Scoble

George: I expect the same would be done to me, too, if I did that. - Robert Scoble

Sounds fair... - George Hall (Australia)

Robert, yes, I thought that at first too, but apparently not. I hope we can get different blocking levels. Then we could make our own "sanctions" against people. BTW I studied some international law in college. There are some similarities. :) - Meryn Stol

Meryn: a graduated scale of blocking?? - George Hall (Australia)

It's fine to block bad people after the fact, but I'd still like to see some mechanism whereby if someone blocked me or deleted my comments, I could still access an archived copy of how the conversation looked before that action occurred. - Edward Coffey

George, yes. I think that if someone is trolling in my threads, I wouldn't want to totally exclude them from my content. I would want them to keep them from commenting again. - Meryn Stol

Edward: I don't mind that it's a death penalty. It's like a nuclear bomb. If you use it too often you end up killing yourself. - Robert Scoble

Robert, funny that you are talking about a nuclear bomb, and I'm talking about international law. I hope we can work towards peaceful sanctions. :D - Meryn Stol

As blocks can also been seen as a form of negative endorsement it would be interesting to see in someone's profile if _my_ friends have blocked him/her. - Jan Ignatius

Meryn: wish it were that easy...you do get some really nasty trolls, especially on Twitter. One springs to mind who pops up during major situations around the world trying to preach hate stuff. On Twitter, blocking them from just one reader's view isn't that effective a solution. - George Hall (Australia)

Jan, agree. That would be some interesting data to see. In general, it would be nice if you could make your block-list public, so that everyone sees who you've blocked. Maybe together with an (optional) reason for blocking. - Meryn Stol

There's the FF Spam Report Channel: http://beta.friendfeed.com/friendf... - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

It's also a way to combat against fake accounts blocking a user just to hurt his reputation. - Jan Ignatius

On twitter, a really aggravating, hate-preaching troll can be banned by Twitter, although the example I've cited keeps finding a way to get past that. Ahsan just answered what would have been the next question I was going to ask about friendfeed's method of dealing with that same case. - George Hall (Australia)

George: plus the friendfeed team can see who is earning blocks and I'm sure that can also provide a warning system to check in and see if someone is needing a global block. - Robert Scoble

Presumably a blog using Facebook Connect exclusively for comment posting should move the onus to the real user and hence their reputation and it would solve most of the same issues without the complexity. What do people think? - James Harnedy

Does this lead to users having to join a service like Facebook, before they're allowed to sign on to regular blogs, and social media networks? Does it effectively end up with the 'walled garden' of Facebook (or similar service) enveloping almost the whole public internet - i.e practically all web sites that require a log-in? - Ian May

Good idea James, that centralizes reputations. But what if someone wants to use Google Connect or OpenId ? Here on FF at least its all under a single umbrella ... and data from other sites is 'Fed' in - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

In fact, isn't FF, thanks to its architecture a mini-internet in itself ? - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Does a facebook connect -only approach mean that one always has to comment with his true identity revealed? Surely there is need for pseudonyms in the future too.. - Jan Ignatius

@Meryn That is not a bad idea...scales of blocking. Like see their links but not their comments, etc. Interesting. - Neal Jansons

Indeed it restricts your audience but like everything there is a balance and I see a trade-off between ease-of-use and content quality. - James Harnedy

@Robert: how is friendfeed's block different from twitter's block ? - Antoine Bertier

Antoine: if I remember right, they are very similar. - Robert Scoble

One approach could be an openID provider that verifies your real identity but enables you to create pseudonyms tied to this account for every service you want to use. Now, if your pseudonym at service x is blocked you cannot create another one as the openID provider limits your pseudonyms to 1 per domain/service (and you can only have one verified account with that openID provider). - Jan Ignatius

Why doesn't FF provide a comment widget that can be embedded in blog entries? The comment widget can then act as a mini UI tied to the permalink discussion over at FF. To minimize the effect of FF being a walled garden, FF should expand their authentication system to support things like Facebook Connect and OpenID - Edmund Tay

Edmund: there are some Wordpress Plugins that do just what you're talking about. - Robert Scoble

Excellent points. I too have been noticing the gradual degradation of the conversation in chat and forums. I do hope that the system here works to keep FF interesting. - Leo Laporte

Leo: if not, we're coming over your house for conversation and beer! :-) - Robert Scoble

Robert: Wine, surely? :) - Martin Bryant

But I can just create another account and continue attacking. I would love a system that let you say your account has to be X days old and you must have X amount of reputation (waiving magic wand) to comment. - Chris Bartow

Robert: An official Javascript based widget provided by FF would be better because then it will be platform agnostic. Ok, I'll even settle for a 3rd party widget but it shouldn't be tied to a specific platform. With the existing Wordpress Plugin (http://blog.slaven.net.au/wordpre...), you get people like Louis Gray offering to pay for a Blogger version :) - Edmund Tay

Chris: how would you gain reputation if people block you from their threads? - Martin Bryant

yup you nailed it robert, the full control to the end-user of controlling their own experience here in friendfeed is what i've always liked & after only really looking for a presence aggregation service originally - i block w/out remorse so haven't had to delete or moderate comments yet but i like that the functionality is there - mike "glemak" dunn

Martin: That's why I wrote waiving magic wand. It could be by # of friends or stats on a system wide level. Similar to identifying spammers on Twitter by looking at Following vs Followed. - Chris Bartow

Hmm, interesting contrast between being blocked on Friend Feed (so can't follow) and not being able to be blocked from reading a blog. Still, even for a pubic blog, so long as there is some sort of identity scheme, one should be able to restrict commenters, not just delete their particular comments. Is this all just about anonymity, where FriendFeed even controls visibility through it... more... - Dennis E. Hamilton

So it seems that to extend the FF model for moderation well into more of the online conversation, ie blogs, twitter, fb, that several different identity systems may have to be able to leverage the FF model so that 1. users have choice 2. more people can be included in the conversations. - Brendan Cosgrove

+1 Dennis, you said exactly what I was thinking while reading this thread. FriendFeed's comment lockdown is only possible because there are no anonymous comments allowed. There's a reason Robert hasn't disallowed anonymous comments on his blog, and it's because he wants to encourage as many comments as possible. FriendFeed still presents the registration barrier and that's going to drive away some would-be commenters even as it fosters increased participation by the ones who do register. - Daniel J. Pritchett

daniel, i like to remember that ff started as a presence aggregation service and blossomed into a conversational experience, i'm sure you've been followed by what i call "null" friendfeeders: no profile info, avatar, service integration or activity (likes/comments) these are attempts at anonymity that the system easily allows us to recognize - of course once someone starts engaging they have entered the community, even if they started as a "null" user - from there they are judged by their actions in ff - mike "glemak" dunn

I disagree. If 4chan decided to spam your FriendFeed, you'd be blocking for hours. I stand by my claim irc still has the best moderation tools. - Bwana ☠

I think I'll blog reasons why - Bwana ☠

I agree 100% - Scott H

I could use color coded conversations or indent level matching-> fun trying to follow all the great ideas/responses but challenging making sense of the outcome. - Mark Essel

ok finally made sense of the conversation: there's a need for protection against faceless spammers, and also a need for anonymous users to freely add value to posts. Some type of sliding bar per post security that is customized to each user to optimize their experience/expectations? - Mark Essel

Agree 100% .. after all, here we are a "personal forum/topics administrators"... however diffusion of platform make the difference ... will see if we are right! - CantorJF

bwana - yes, that example is scary and would waste lots of time, pls link to your blog post back in this thread - i'd read it :) - mike "glemak" dunn

Great post, Robert. It came in handy for a discussion I've been having with investor relations officers who are looking at shareholder forums and shaking in their shoes at the idea that anyone can say anything they want on a forum. - Dominic Jones

Ironic - My sites are down :) Hopefully I didn't tick the chans off - Bwana ☠

I have already observed a new kind of trolling that results from the FriendFeed moderation system - I call it microtrolling. If you apply game theory to the decision to block someone, there's a cost-benefit analysis. Contribution vs Rudeness are orthogonal and are determined over time. If someone is rude but never contributes, they'll get blocked quickly, whereas someone who has contributed a lot over time can get away with more rudeness because people will hesitate to lose the expected future... - Robin Barooah

...contribution. The same is true of people who host a lot of interesting discussions. If they themselves are rude, the threshold for blocking them is higher than for someone who doesn't, because you are not only excluding them, you are excluding yourself from discussions they start which involve other people. - Robin Barooah

So someone who is very popular can enter a discussion moderated by a less popular person and there'll be a higher threshold for blocking them if they are rude or disruptive. My name for trolling above the mean threshold but below your own personal threshold (because you're popular) is 'microtrolling'. - Robin Barooah

Robin: That sounds a lot like life. I won't spend time with someone who is rude all the time, but if someone is generally a pretty good person but occasionally a bit of an ass, I'll make allowances. - Edward Coffey

Robert - Thanks for the fabulous post… Hooray! for this uber geeky post! I am super happy to see you continuing to champion FriendFeed.com - my all time favorite social site; clearly yours as well! :) ... While I was reading your post about the FriendFeed “block” feature, Paul Buchheit’s words immediately came to mind … “Do No Evil.” - If that doesn’t say it all, I don’t know what does! That is the basis of the FriendFeed culture. If one can’t live in that reality, they have no business in FF. - Susan Beebe

Edward: It's similar but qualitatively different. I'm saying that their popularity on FriendFeed systematically enables someone to be ruder on other people's threads and face a lower threat of moderation. The fact that the thread is associated more with the with the thread owner increases the effect. If they were consistently rude on their own threads, then they'd lose popularity more rapidly. - Robin Barooah

I like the FF option of having each individual deal with rude or uncalled for behavior themselves, different people are sensitive about different subjects and at different levels with FF I don't have to depend on anyone else to block someone, its my decision alone - Kim Landwehr

Kim: you can only block people from your own threads though. You will still see them in other people's threads. - Robin Barooah

Just to clarify - I personally like the way the friendfeed system works, but although it's intuitive to use, I think it's not entirely obvious what the consequences of each action is and this reduces the deterrent effect. - Robin Barooah

robin - when you block someone they are gone from all your experiences on friendfeed and you are gone from all theirs... - mike "glemak" dunn

Mike - you're right about that. Kim - I was wrong. - Robin Barooah

That actually increases the strength of the 'microtrolling' effect I described. I.e. the loss in terms of a bad experience through seeing threads in a disjointed way is even greater if you block a very prolific user. - Robin Barooah

robin, i've been on friendfeed for awhile and blocked the obvious trolls/haters from day 1, some of which are as you've stated prolific, so yes you do notice reactions to them in others comments, sort of a ghosting effect but it doesn't create a negative experience for me - i'm glad to have the trolls out of my experience and love friendfeed for providing that functionality... - mike "glemak" dunn

Mike, I'm not talking about people who are consistently trolls and do little else, and I am not criticizing FriendFeed's functionality which I think is state of the art. I am pointing out that being prolific in general, and posting good stuff gives such people more of a license to get away with rudeness in other people's threads when madness strikes, and that there is no mechanism to control this other than their own self-control. i.e. the threat of blocking isn't much of a deterrent. - Robin Barooah

ah got it robin - good point - the prolific folks I follow tend to not be rude at least in my experience - mike "glemak" dunn

wait, so what's keeping spammers and trolls from just opening new friendfeed accounts as they get blocked? - Ned Baugh

Robert Scoble

Chasing the magical experience - http://scobleizer.com/2009...

April 17 from Scobleizer: Technology,... - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Andrew Terry, Ron R. and 43 other people liked this

I wonder who Scoble will put me with when he's seperated his followers into groups of four. - Nicholas James

17 more comments

Nicholas: now THAT is an interesting question and one that I'd need to do some homework on. I think that's a more interesting definition of friendship, by the way: can I create a magical experience for you? Not have I met you, etc. - Robert Scoble

Wow. This is great. Very good analysis of what makes for magic moments. I will DM you some info re: a magic moment opportunity. Also, your analysis in your prior post about "regular" businesses is spot on. It is great to hear this because that concept is central to our strategy at my company! Thanks for the great thoughts... - Troy Malone

This is why Francisco Dao created "Francisco's Fun Club - No Business Cards Allowed." Robert the best time I ever spent with you was around a fire pit at the Ritz. I don't think we spoke business once. I remember that I was hoping to get an interview with you for The Business Maker's Radio Show...but the moment wasn't right. It was in a word - Magical. - Erica OGrady from Friend Deck

Erica: I agree, we should do a fire pit meetup again soon. - Robert Scoble

I've known my best friend for over 40 years (since Grade 1). We see each other's families about once a week. We agree far more than we disagree, and we bounce ideas off each other. Our wives laugh at our similarities (including quirks we share in common). Happy is the man or woman who has at least one such friend, because then the magical experience happens more often. - Victor Panlilio

That is a great post. Those moments are something special when they happen. - Jeremy Brooks

So was our interview with Ev and Biz last year a "Magical Experience?" ;-) - Jesse Stay

I realize it's not really the point of the post and that you're going for the number four as a theme, but my experience is that a birth with a midwife instead of doctor an a nurse is definitely more magical. - Tim Trentham

Looking forward to the magic at Building 43! - Brendan Cosgrove

Wow Robert, I love the bit at the end about bringing three guests. You could try and bring three locals to *every* tour you land, regardless of the venue. It would really add to the perspective! - Daniel J. Pritchett

This is going to have a profound effect on my thinking. I have a Twitter account that built a failry large following, but I ended up creating another (closed) account where I only invite and accept close friends for noise-free conversation. Find I'm spending much more time there; my old account mostly just gets stuff I "like" on FriendFeed now. - Mark Traphagen

Does anyone else feel like Robert Scoble is getting boring? Or is it that there is nothing interesting going on in the tech world. Techcrunch/Techmeme all feel the same, mashable and readwriteweb are wordy and not too original, Huffpost is an ok read for someone desperate like me, but i can't believe that there is no revolution going on somewhere...maybe we need a new breed of bloggers that can identify the revolutions ..... am talking about it at http://beta.friendfeed.com/tweetfe... - Tweet Feeds

Tweet Feeds: Robert Scoble has ALWAYS been boring. Hope this helps. - Robert Scoble

Isn't your family about to increase to more than 4. Could be trouble there. ;-) - Brian Sullivan

Nice, especially from someone who is known for his many connections. - Meryn Stol

Robert, maybe we are all stuck in web 2.0 land, is the internet still interesting? I understand that most enterprises still behave like the web just happened, but it didn't, its old and infrastructural, like highways, someone somewhere is inspiring and empowering someone, magical experiences can be able about changing people's lives not feeling the buzz from the brandy or the bong ;) - Tweet Feeds

Magical experiences can occur in mundane, everyday circumstances. When my wife and I get together with another couple (whom we are seeing this very evening), we can sometimes talk for hours, listen to music together, etc. Eric Schmidt in an interview last year said that four things are at the core of human happiness, regardless of political ideology, culture, or religion: (1) freedom from war (2) a healthy family life (3) good education for the kids (4) happy times with friends. That's it. I agree. - Victor Panlilio

When Scoble can write articles like this, that remind us that what we do on the web must never be divorced form our "real life" experience, he will never be boring. - Mark Traphagen

Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Perhaps it's time to abandon Twitter - http://coldacid.net/blog...

April 9 - Comment - Like - Share

Peter Efland, David Berrebi, Ho John Lee and 33 other people liked this

"We all know that Twitter has jumped the shark. The recent additions of the suggested users list, the influx of celebrity and brand accounts (and all the silent, creepy stalker accounts that follow them), and the incredible gaming of the friend/follower system demonstrates that quite clearly. But that's not why I say it's time to take our tweets and go elsewhere." - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

33 more comments

Hats off to Jesse Stay, whose recent blog post on Twitter gave me the idea to suggest it's time for us to move on to greener pastures. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

I think with the huge recent popularity of Twitter that more people will understand what social networks are and perhaps understand why FriendFeed is so awesome. But right now, Twitter wins on the mobile interaction game. Tweetie (and other apps as well) on the iPhone is much better than Buddyfeed or Motherfeed. - Aaron Hood

Aaron: It may be winning in mobile, but that's because there really isn't any competition to it there right now. If there were competition in the mobile feed, perhaps Twitter would do something to un-fuck SMS for Canadians like me. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy from IM

Not only is this line of thinking narrow minded, but it's very short sighted. I think as a technologist, we should all want services to prosper and be something even our moms would use. Otherwise, what's the point right? - drew olanoff

Perhaps it's time to dump FriendFeed? Personally I like one tool to do one job. Multi-tools, like FriendFeed, may do lots of jobs, but they generally do them all badly. There is a reason I don't post videos to Flickr. Twitter still does the job it was intended for better that anything else I've seen. Facebook isn't Twitter, and FriendFeed isn't Twitter. Use Twitter for what it's intended to be used for and - Alasdair Allan

Drew: That's why I'm suggesting a move to another service, not the complete abandonment of microblogging itself. Services will prosper if they take care of their users. If they don't, they won't keep users, and they sure as hell won't prosper. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Honestly, right now Twitter is just more fun. Follow five of your favorite comedians and it is a good read. It also seemed to be that FF died down quite a bit in the time that Twitter really exploded. - Keenan

Alasdair: LOLWUT? FriendFeed is no multi-tool. It has one well-defined purpose (to unite a person's feeds all in one place) and it does a damn fine job of it. Besides, Twitter is the issue here. And it doesn't do its job very well. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Link not working http://coldacid.net/blog... - RetiredTeacherD

Chris: The "gaming" you speak of is so ridiculously small, percentage wise. The value of the company, the medium, the people using it far far far outweigh the fictional "shark jumping" you describe. - drew olanoff

@DBlack: Try refreshing shortly; Drupal 5 is resource-heavy and there's really only one way for my host to deal with that. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

I say abandon FriendFeed. Good example. I clicked on the link above and it took me to an error page on your blog. This was actually the third click to get to the error page. FriendFeed doesn't actually send you to the link referenced by Twitter or any other spot, especially FriendFeed. It just propagates links to broken URLs. Twitter may be adding features that won't pan out, but when you click on a shortened URL, it does take you somewhere. - Michael Sommermeyer

Michael: FriendFeed is supplying the correct link. My site is just deranged. Hopefully it'll improve when I can get rid of my Drupal 5 dependencies and upgrade to 6, but for the meantime just refresh. I get that problem a lot myself. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Drew: Going at it by percentage is bullshit. There's enough gaming to be visible for a lot of users. When you're seeing gamers follow and de-follow you every day, you get pissed. It detracts from the quality of the service. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Chris: And FriendFeed is bulletproof to any type of "gaming"? How about we do a poll of people who are not in the 2%, ie: people who don't work in this space for a living...and see how they feel about it? - drew olanoff

Drew: What purpose would there be to gaming FriendFeed? These people aren't gaming the system because there aren't any controls against it. They're gaming it because they see some twisted value in it for themselves. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Chris: How are people gaming Twitter? My mom uses it to keep track of what I'm up to. I use it to keep track of what friends are doing and ROFL at what Shaq says once in a while. I follow who I want to follow, and if someone wants to follow what I have to say, rad. If not, I don't worry. I don't get your point here. - drew olanoff

Drew: Just as an example, ever seen someone with interesting looking tweets, who you then followed just to get a bunch of spammy DMs from them? - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Chris: Yes. I unfollow them. And it's happened like 3 times. - drew olanoff

Chris: Have you ever been out on a date and they seemed cool so you give them your #? And then they say something that bothers you and you don't want to talk to them anymore? And when you tell them that they still contact you? Are you going to remain single for life? - drew olanoff

I'm reading Chris Charabaruk's post on friendfeed, need I say more? :-) - tom

Drew: I unfollow the gamers too when I find them. But it's not just the gamers. It's the fact that Twitter can't keep their service running properly, they don't communicate well with their users (the company blog is every bit as helpful as DreamHost's service blog, i.e. barely useful), and the fact that the top folk there just seem to radiate unhelpfulness now. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

On other services, like here and on Blellow, I know that if I have a complaint about something, I can quickly make sure it gets seen by someone working at that service, and even get a response. Here users get value as much as they provide it, from the people in charge. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

With all the crap and poor service on Twitter, it's only a matter of time before it's simply an outflow of my activities elsewhere. (I'm just waiting for an app ecosystem for Blellow, and then *bam* I'll move.) - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

@Chris Charabaruk: If you want free Twitter SMS updates I'd suggest signing up to http://twe2.com :¬) - CannonGod

CannonGod: I don't care about getting SMS messages from Twitter (I'd switch to Bell if it were that important to me). I'd rather that incoming messages worked as advertised, though, with them appearing once and only once in my tweet stream. Not multiple times over the course of weeks. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

UPDATE: Twitter, after a couple of months of complaining by users, is finally looking at the SMS reposting issue that Canadians (such as myself) are suffering. MONTHS. TO SIMPLY RESPOND. If that doesn't scream shitty service, nothing will. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Why is everyone so concerned with Twitter? Who cares. It's supplementary to the services we use and clearly not going anywhere for a while. I don't care if celebs are there or not. As a technology enthusiast, I am HAPPY people are understanding Social Media more. - Mona Nomura

Mona: It's because Twitter is one of the best known social media services and the (currently) primary one for all us social media wonks. So of course, every little thing with it gets the attention of an electron microscope, and every time something about it is disliked, we all enjoy screaming about it. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy from IM

Chris: Clearly this is sparked from something personal in nature, and this isn't a discussion about usefulness or technology at all. I have found no problems with getting answers from the folks at Twitter, and their Status blog at http://status.twitter.com is always updated. I think people who understand what goes into a service that has to scale, realize that there will be hiccups. - drew olanoff

Drew: I'll not deny that I have issues with Twitter. But I started off enjoying it and making great use and great connections. As time's gone on, though, the great things about it started disappearing, to be replaced with crap. I came in back when it was going through its early growing pains. It was understandable then. But since those days, the use of the service has expanded while the management acumen of its leaders hasn't. And that's caused a drop in the quality of service for me. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Any one of Twitter's problems, on its own, isn't that big a deal. A mosquito or two. But brought together, all at once and at one time, and the problem becomes more than the sum of its parts. And it's gotten to the point where I just can't stand it any longer. And I doubt that I'm the only one who feels this way. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

its easy to say you will abandon but if you have friends there you might not, for example I abandoned facebook but all my tweets get posted there as status and get messages in sms. I joined friendfeed cuz scoble's tweets kept taking me here I dont use much find it hrd to follow lol but it actually works on cell, twitter mobile is a little better. - David Gross

David: few of my friends actually are on Twitter, and several of them long ago moved on to greener pastures and only update Twitter via other services like Ping.fm. Those who I want to keep track of, and aren't yet on FriendFeed, I can still create imaginary users for, and reply to them via FriendFeed sending those replies to Twitter. I'm abandoning the service itself, not the users. The users I can find again elsewhere, or cheat by pulling in here. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Allen Stern

Should Early Adopters Reap The Rewards for a Startup's Growth? http://www.centernetworks.com/early-a...

March 30 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Internet Strategist, Dave Martin, David Berrebi and 28 other people liked this

Though I am not a twitter early adopter, I tend to be one for most apps & services I use. I am currently doing kind of work with a couple companies as describe in this article: testing, reporting, feedback and so on. Sometimes in great detail, requiring hours of labor on my part. In at least one case, the company is sending me some promo items. Not much compared to the hourly rates that... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

64 more comments

I remember how I was treated by investors and employees. Will no one involved in Twitter start another company? Fred Wilson? Really? I will be far less willing to pour thousands of hours into their next venture cause they treated early adopters like shlubs. Even Ev and Biz will probably make a crapload and then want to invest in new companies. Leo Laporte is the one who got me onto Twitter and he was treated like crap by Twitter. - Robert Scoble

But the real question is how does the early adopter community as a whole change this dynamic? How do you deal with the fact that there's always someone who's going to do that work gratis? If you don't participate you miss out on the opportunities that the early adoption brings you that are beyond the scope of the company -i.e. Revenues derived directly & indirectly from blog & vlog coverage. How do you (we) get the companies to sign up for some clear form of reciprocation/recompense? - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob: that's not really true. There are a few super connectors who can really help get a much larger audience onto new services by getting excited by them. My brother, for instance, no matter how excited he is by friendfeed, has only dragged a few hundred people on here. If Leo Laporte talks about friendfeed, though, thousands sign up (I've seen this happen over and over). So, if a company then turns around and treats the super connectors like crap (like Twitter has) and they remember (they do) ... - Robert Scoble

... then next time they come pitching they'll just stay quiet, which will retard their ability to get an audience. It's very possible they'll get that audience anyway due to other connectors, but it's a lot tougher. This is why PR people gripe about Techcrunch in private but usually treat Mike nice when it comes time to do a press tour. - Robert Scoble

Leo is really the one who got Twitter hot at SXSW two years ago. Most people don't know that. But he talked about Twitter on TWiT two weeks before SXSW and got all the early adopters onto it before SXSW. Then when we got there it was the talk of the conference. - Robert Scoble

So the question really remains, for the next big thing (forgetting the investors of Twitter for a moment) How do you ensure that you can change the dynamic? This story is all too often repeated. And the end result is damaged relationships, and a damaged community - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

How did Twitter repay Leo? By putting far less popular people onto their suggested follower list, which, in TechCrunch's case, got him 250,000 followers already (TechCrunch had far fewer followers than Leo did before Techcrunch got put onto Twitter's list). - Robert Scoble

Rob: make anything you do algorithmic and a meritocracy. Why is Techcrunch on the list (or Veronica, who had far fewer followers than Techcrunch did) on the suggested follower's list and not Leo? The fact that there's not an equal way to get onto this list is what screws things up. It penalizes people like Leo who brought huge numbers of people onto Twitter. - Robert Scoble

In the case of Twitter (and the example of supporting the celebrities on the recommended users list) I think that twitter is not only screwing the early adopters (and super connectors), but in the process they're screwing the community as a whole. What value are these celebrities actually bringing to the _conversation_ ?? How many people do @iamdiddy or @The_Real_Shaq talk to? How many people do they follow? Just seems wrong all the way around. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Look at Facebook or friendfeed. Facebook is growing far faster than Twitter is and they didn't need to do a "suggested" list that was made up of Zuckerberg's friends. Neither did friendfeed. Friendfeed's list is algorithmic and is based off of people you've already added. - Robert Scoble

Rob: bing. The thing is Twitter is arrogant. They see all the hype and let it get to their heads and forgot the people who got them there. But, worse, now "little people" like my brother know they have absolutely no chance at getting onto the top tier because they didn't bring Biz Stone cupcakes and aren't already celebrities. So, even if you don't care about A listers or early adopter/super connectors it hurts everyone (and messes with stats that could be used to suggest followers to you, like wefollow). - Robert Scoble

The signal that sends to everyone is quite caustic. - Robert Scoble

Leo and Kevin Rose are the reason I joined Twitter. I respect their recommendations - if they suggest elsewhere I check it out. I was on Pownce before Twitter because of that. I hope Twitter appreciates that. I know I've been treated like crap by Twitter, but I know they don't really care. - Jesse Stay

Jesse: yeah, I forgot that they even treat you like crap and you're a developer. Sigh. What's worse is they probably will go onto make billions. I'll be laughing, though, if the wheels come off the train because of their arrogance. I notice that more and more people are going to Facebook, especially developer and early adopter types and friendfeed is seeing a nice pickup lately. - Robert Scoble

well said Robert - Jeff (the メガマクダジ of FF)

Agreed. Now it seems that your job, and that of others in positions like yours, is to prevent that same arrogance from infecting the other services that you want to see succeed. Like FriendFeed. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I feel much more welcomed by Facebook. Dave Morin notices me by name in the halls, and goes out of his way to say hi. I get regular announcements via press channels from Facebook. Josh Elman has been wonderful to work with - he talks and listens when you approach him. Their PR department has been through a learning curve, but I think even they are improving and have been much easier to work with. - Jesse Stay

Robert! I haven't seen you this worked up in quite some time, but I agree with your sentiments. I gave up on twitter a while ago because I stopped having meaningful interactions there. Friendfeed on the other hand, and more recently Facebook (as much as it pains me) , have got my attention. Your take on Facebook's potential to take on Google in next gen advertising/marketing is where the next battle will be waged. Consider me among your early adopter crew. Where to next? - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

I'm on the verge of ditching twitter and sticking with FB and FF. The only thing is FF doesn't have a private message feature. If FB/FF were to do a public/private sort of thing where I can have IRL people I know see private info and just people in general who I "friend" online that I don't know see all my public stuff but not my private stuff they will win my eyes. - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

Jesse: yeah, isn't that a turnaround? Facebook is much nicer lately. Zuckerberg is a lot more confident, too. He keeps playing the shy kid, but I see him really growing his personal skills. He's definitely THE one to watch in Silicon Valley. Everyone seems to want to work there, the recruiting they are doing now is pretty extreme. - Robert Scoble

FF needs to add more features to lists and allow private info to be shown to certain lists I add people too. That would make me completely switch. FB is so mainstream right now, but I can't import everything I do in the social web like I can with FF. And twitter...well they're like Myspace. Look at what a wasteland Myspace is right now. - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

Brian: this is the single worst thing I've seen a startup do to its early supporters. It has pissed off a whole community. Most of whom aren't willing to stand up and say they are pissed, because it looks bad. But they sure changed the dynamic when they did this. - Robert Scoble

Rob: the friendfeed guys are very good at dealing with community. You can see that in how they participate here. Ev and Biz never really participated with Twitter's community. I'm not worried about arrogance here. Over at Facebook they know they are very close to finding a serious gold mine and are staying humble so that they don't miss it. If they get arrogant, it'll be after they figure it out (sort of how Google got arrogant after they did AdSense). - Robert Scoble

I've always been confident about Facebook's development staff and knowledge. I'm not so confident about Twitter's. (Twitter also needs some better Project Management) Facebook's PR and Executive leadership has definitely turned around over the years. I really love what I'm seeing, and right now have a lot of faith in them again. I hope they continue that way. - Jesse Stay

slayerboy: friendfeed has some new stuff coming soon. I haven't seen it yet, but have heard the rumblings. Can't wait to see what they do. - Robert Scoble

I do agree, early adopters mostly are not getting the reward they deserve. The trivia celebrity hype e.g. on Twitter may be the reason for the disappointment early adopters feel and why this debate http://friendfeed.com/e... popped up. - Mark Jacobs

Mark: I don't want a reward, I just want to be treated fairly and equally with everyone else. In other words, if someone who has brought fewer people into the system gets a goodie, I should too. Not saying that there shouldn't be rewards for everyone who participates. - Robert Scoble

i think Jason over @ Social Median did a good job with us early folks. he treated us well and took what we said to heart...ended up making some good changes - Jeff (the メガマクダジ of FF)

Robert, you know what's interesting is that since you're saying it on Twitter or FriendFeed, Ev and Biz will never call you out on it. They seem to only pay attention to blogs. The minute you complain on your blog they notice and demand an apology. I find that interesting considering they run the service they're not even paying attention to. - Jesse Stay

and he also placed us early birds in the "Featured Newsmakers" section on the home page. a nice touch - Jeff (the メガマクダジ of FF)

Jesse: that's cool. Zuckerberg has a Twitter account so he can see what other people are saying about Facebook and respond there. Companies who don't track what's being said about them on all services are not doing a very good job. - Robert Scoble

I think it would be a very interesting experiment if Scobleizer deletes his twitter account. What would the twitter founders react? What about Scobleizer's followers do? etc... - imabonehead

Jeff Social Median is a well-run company. I've been impressed with how they treat people. Makes me want to use their service more. - Robert Scoble

imabonehead: they wouldn't care. That was the point of "would a kitten die?" (Kitten is a metaphor for would Twitter care?) No. Most of my fans have already followed me here on friendfeed anyway (I have 31,000 followers here, which is far more than I had on Twitter a year ago). - Robert Scoble

I think that's one reason Social Median sold in under a year. They are extremely well run, and I still wear their shirt proudly that they sent to me for free, at their own expense. - Jesse Stay

Robert it's funny (and sad) that all of Twitter's competitors are using Twitter to track the conversation about them, but Twitter is not. I think that says something. - Jesse Stay

Robert: I have noticed certainly that Ev & Biz haven't and do not partiipate in their community (in fact that was one of the first things I noticed on Twitter...and thought it strange). I'm glad you feel that way about FriendFeed. I got on here not long after I got onto Twitter, and at your suggestion I might add. I've not been a huge Facebook fan, but like the overall direction of upgrades and changes I use it more and more. I think I see correct decisions being made, despite massive outcries. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Yo, Jesse: Can you go do a manual refresh of your Twitter feed here so we can talk about your whitelist Q? Sorry to borrow the thread ;-) - Ken Sheppardson

Jesse: Exceptional point. One of the big uses for Twitter is brand protection and customer service. It truly is mind boggling that Twitter itself doesn't jump on that bandwagon. (Especially considering their Direct competitors use it!) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

It's a hard question. On the one hand, early adopters provide free beta testing, free design ideas and free brutally honest evaluations of your project. On the other hand, it's kinda like the users of Open Source projects demanding a new feature for a product the haven't paid for and then complaining when it doesn't happen! - John Rubier

John: I'm not demanding new features. I'm just asking startups to treat all users fairly (one user who does less on a system should not be treated better than another user who does more). Systems built should be meritocracies, not rewards for bringing the founder cupcakes (or worse). - Robert Scoble

But see part of the problem, Robert, is that life's just not fair. No matter how much longer you or I or been using a service, we're just not as popular as Britney Spears or Ashton Kutcher. It's a pretty classic big fish small pond issue I'd say. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken: if you're more popular than me, that's fair, but the system should treat everyone fairly. If you are less popular than me, the system shouldn't make you more popular just because you brought Biz some cupcakes. The system as it is now is NOT fair because people who had far fewer followers than, say, Leo Laporte, now have far more followers than him because Twitter's founder "picked" them to be popular. - Robert Scoble

If startups were smart they would reward users for engagement, too. But in a fair way that everyone can have access to. The world should move toward meritocracies and away from systems where merit is thrown out the window. - Robert Scoble

Dave: the list is 97.99% of it, yes. The fact that getting on the list is arbitrary has built a system where other services like http://www.wefollow.com are now suggesting people who were picked by Twitter to be popular, not who earned that. For instance, Leo Laporte and Guy Kawasaki and Jason Calacanis had far more followers than other people on the list and now have been passed by. Those three earned their spots on the list, and were snubbed. Not to mention that people like my brother have no chance. - Robert Scoble

Speaking of the article, I helped Beta-test the original Qik iPhone app and even submitted several bugs. They're picking Kevin Rose over me to give the final version to. Should I get Qik for the iPhone more than Kevin Rose since I contributed more to the original product? (Note I'm just posing the question for discussion - I recognize Kevin Rose brings much more to Qik than I ever could) - Jesse Stay

Jesse: I think so. Companies that only go for A listers are blowing it big time (and I give that advice to lots of companies behind the scenes). Go read my corporate blog manifesto. Here, let me go find that for you... - Robert Scoble

http://scoble.weblogs.com/2003... -- note #7 (talk to the grassroots first). - Robert Scoble

Isn't your corporate blog manifesto Naked Conversations? - Jesse Stay

Jesse: I wrote the corporate blog manifesto before I worked at Microsoft and long before Shel and I wrote Naked Conversations. - Robert Scoble

Wow - that's good, sharing it with my Twitter and FriendFeed audience. I never saw that. - Jesse Stay

Companies that bypass their most loyal people over "celebrity" stars are just trying to get the most exposure instead of using the tried and true method of word of mouth. This is how Twitter ORIGINALLY started, by word of mouth. Instead of letting that continue, they shoot themselves in the foot and move "stars" to the forefront. Treat everyone equally and you'll retain and actually gain more people. Show that you have no respect for those that built you, and you'll wonder why you were just a fad. - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

That could have been written yesterday and still be applicable. - Jesse Stay

Rewards are typically related to risk. Early adopter risk what? Wasting some of their time? Entrepreneurs put a lot more at risk. Simply grabbing on to someone's passing coattails doesn't qualify you for a reward. - Nathan Wenzel

Nathan: bullshit. I've spent 5,000 hours on Twitter so far and I've pulled my audience from my blog over to Twitter (I have hundreds of thousands of readers per month). That was a HUGE risk to my reputation. In fact, go back and read some of the hate mail I got when I kept talking about Twitter to my blog's audience back two years ago. Many kept asking me to shut up about Twitter. Maybe they had a point. - Robert Scoble

Show that you have no respect for those that built you, and you'll wonder why you were just a fad. - Ben Watson from twhirl

RScoble: easy... Companies are rewarded for their value proposition. You say you have hundreds of thousands of readers per month. That would appear to be your value proposition. If you want to make the argument that companies should reward those who bring them value, I'd agree. If you make the argument that companies should identify their high value customers and make sure those people are happy, I'd agree. But simply being among the first 100 people to sign up doesn't seem to merit much. - Nathan Wenzel

Nathan: It's not just about being the first 100 or 1000 users. It's about putting in the time to make the service viable for a mainstream audience, and it's about using your clout (as in the case with Robert and Leo) to bring additional users to the service. How successful would Twitter be today without some of those "super-connectors" writing about it and adding to the hype? That seems to merit a great deal. Some of the tech-pundits can make or break a site with how & how much they write/speak of it. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob: I agree. The post and my comment was about early adopters. If the post was about "super-connectors" or "evangelists" (a new title I've been seeing a lot lately) then I would have agreed. Do I think Twitter/FF owe people like Robert something? Absolutely. But not because they're an early adopter. Because as you said, they're super-connectors. - Nathan Wenzel

Nathan: people who are early adopters are often also evangelists and super-connectors. That's sort of the same personality type. After all, who would be stupid enough to use Twitter before all their friends were on it? Early adopters. Anyway, I don't want startups to give me anything, I just want them to build features that treat everyone fairly. The world needs more meritocracies. - Robert Scoble

I find it hard to be an early adopter without being the evangelist. If I try an app or a service out, and it's terrible, I don't continue, and don't evangelize. If I like it, especially enough to spend the time to report, diagnose bugs, and provide feedback, I want to see it succeed, & I push the product to all my friends. I may be "little" but it's basically no different than what someone like Robert does (just less press). I want the companies I support to show they value my efforts. Pay it forward & back - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

This conversation gets to the heart of social media and what is meant by community. Once a brand's early adopters build a community, the brand has an obligation to keep the brand promise. When it doesn't, like the automakers didn't by building crappy cars, the community deserts the brand. And then the brand goes bankrupt. So we have to ask "what is Twitter's brand promise and are they keeping it" before talking about early adopters and how they are treated. This is a big, important discussion. - Francine Hardaway from BuddyFeed

My expectation is almost always as an early adopter I will eventually be alienated by the service I helped. I use, I promote, I provide feedback (and being in the tech profession my feedback is not unuseful). Like most people; I do this to improve the service I am using, or eliminate the headaches I'm living in it. The most heartless version of being alienated is when a service decides they will now become a pay service and not grandfather their early customer base into the service, even for a year or two. - Keith Barrett

So why does this seem wrong? Because the reality is that the company could NOT have gotten where it was without the early adopters. There's no way they would ever have had the resources or staff to perform the debugging, promotion, customer growth, or eventual press without that FREE public participation. - Keith Barrett

Robert is absolutely right expecting brands to respect the contributions of those who got them off the ground. They make a cardinal error in snubbing those people because they ARE still bringing in new users and keeping existing users there. Those users are more likely to keep using the system unlike the fad group that creates an account because Oprah mentioned Twitter and never uses it. If they were really wise they would seek out and support their evangelists - even those much smaller than Leo and Robert! - Internet Strategist

Robert Scoble

Help Loic Le Meur (Seesmic) and John Furrier (Silicon Angle) find new hosting - http://scobleizer.com/2009...

March 28 from Scobleizer: Technology,... - Comment - Like - Share

Ian Wright, Brendan Cosgrove, Philip J Beyer and 22 other people liked this

These two guys aren't happy with their current hosting partner. Help them pick a new one. - Robert Scoble

37 more comments

Help guys who unfollowed me for no good reason? I don't think so! - Matthew DeVries

Matthew: heh. Well, you aren't just helping them by suggesting a good host. - Robert Scoble

Don't they have people on payroll to figure this stuff out for them? - Ken Sheppardson

I think Peer 1 [ http://www.peer1.com/ ] would suit John's blogging company. JoelOnSoftware uses Peer 1 and here [ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/article... ] Joel has good things to say about it. - Arvind

Matthew and Ken, dont be so negative ;) they ask for help.. its up to you to help or not ;) - Qbat

Ken: this post isn't just for them. - Robert Scoble

Hmm, what about Rackspace? ;) - Meryn Stol

A friend has been trying to get me onto Slicehost, or at least that's what I think it's called. Basically you get your own server. Anypoo, that could be something to look into. - Jon, the Beartato of FF

I use ixwebhosting.com; love their service and have never had an outage - Sandra

Slicehost, MediaTemple, Rackspace. All good choices, depending on what you're looking for. If they can develop what they need on AppEngine, it would also be a good choice for a medium sized project. AWS seems good for hosting static files (I use it quite a bit) via S3, but I don't think it's a great environment for running servers (the EC2 prices seem a bit high). - Brandon Titus

Rackspace, absolutely. The fact that the most popular forum for discussing this subject (webhostingtalk.com) is hosted there might be a clue :-). [edit]: probably should have read the full blog entry before posting...but that doesn't change the fact that RS is a fantastic option, and might still be the best for them. - Sam

Watching your tweets, Robert... "I’m not going to pitch them on Rackspace (my new employer)" sure didn't last long. Not as if you *shouldn't*, since you're part of the company... just not sure why you'd say you're not going to. - Ken Sheppardson

"not sure why you'd say you're not going to" - Ken, my guess: having other people confirm Rackspace as a good (or possibly the best) choice is much better PR than saying himself it while being on their payroll. If Robert can pull "Rackspace" out of *our* mouths, he's golden. I think that in this kind of business, customer testimonials work far better than advertising. - Meryn Stol

I doubt Rackspace would be low enough cost for Seesmic. - Todd Hoff

As a CEO, I just want Rackspace to tell me how you compare with Amazon - what do I get, as a startup that Amazon doesn't provide? I admit I know little about Rackspace - what I have investigated is that it *seems* more expensive. However I'm probably wrong. Side-by-side, how do you compare? - Jesse Stay

BTW, our database now has tables with 20 million rows of data and we are experiencing bandwidth near 20-40,000 requests per hour. I'm looking for the lowest cost and most scalable solution that can handle that. - Jesse Stay

Jesse: it is very possible that Amazon would be better for you but if you want to talk to a human being in the middle of the night, or if you will need a hybrid approach Rackspace will be better for you. I will get @mosso to help you out. - Robert Scoble

There you go Robert.... embrace it. Pitch it. Be it. :-) - Ken Sheppardson

Meryn: a big part of my post today is for my own education: to see what hosting companies I should learn about. - Robert Scoble

OK, my own experience on the low end: avoid Bluehost. Arbitrary policy changes (like dropping domain wildcards) pushed me off to MediaTemple gridserver. Happy enough, except for latency issues on a low traffic site, as it it took a while to "spin up" the idle site. Looked at Linode and Slicehost, Linode won that battle pretty much solely for their DNS management tools. - Ken Sheppardson

...but that's if we're talking about budget, low traffic, root access, ability to configure everything yourself, and don't want to pay for Amazon, which is my cloud provider of choice at the moment otherwise. But then I haven't looked at Rackspace lately. Might be time. ;-) - Ken Sheppardson

For the record, Rackspace owns Slicehost. http://www.slicehost.com/article... - Ken Sheppardson

Hey Robert, we have human beings on duty 24x7x365 at Amazon, accessible via the AWS Premium Support system. Also, our reserved instance pricing should make EC2 a very good value for applications running in steady state while allowing you to seamlessly add capacity on demand. - Jeff Barr

Jeff: cool. Amazon is doing amazing. Many of my favorite companies are hosted on Amazon (Jeff is Amazon's web services evangelist). - Robert Scoble

.. and another FriendFeed convert. ;) - Meryn Stol

Jeff beat me to it :) - Deepak Singh

So does this make Jeff Barr the "Robert Scoble" of Amazon now? ;-) - Jesse Stay

Or it makes me the "Jeff Barr" of Rackspace. - Robert Scoble

I've heard good things about Mosso. Think Ryan Block is using them now for gdgt, and his last Apple (iPhone OS 3.0 Preview) event live blogging went very well - servers handled load and all that jazz. Think they are not cheap though, could be wrong ... - Patrick Jordan

Patrick: yup Ryan's gdgt is on Rackspace's Mosso. Thanks for the compliment! - Robert Scoble

Here's my other dilemma: Jeff Barr's a friend and so is Robert Scoble. Both of them are doing their jobs very well. :-) - Jesse Stay

There's an informative article with comments on slicehost vs linode here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item... I've had too many problem-free years at linode by now to think about switching. I actually just shut down a dedicated server to move back to linode. - Bruce Lewis

Wow - didn't realize Mosso was part of Rackspace. Cool - any special mega-discounts for Friendfeeders? :) - Patrick Jordan from BuddyFeed

I recommend http://Hostmysite.com - ask for Art Zeile the CEO - I have his cell # - these guys mean business and they deliver. We also use CFX hosting.com and I do *not* recommend them. - Susan Beebe

slicehost would be my vote - been using for 5 or 6 months and happy as can be with uptime and service. Media Temple was the other I looked at - they may be fine on the higher tarrifs (I have no data) but seem to have much more downtime on their lower ones (Have been monitoring for over 6 months). - Riaz Kanani

Given the nature of Seesmic's business, Loic needs something scalable and reliable, so the average hosting service is just not tenable in the long , especially given the amount of bandwidth that Seesmic probably drives. For the kind of video that Seesmic is (non-streaming), S3 + Cloudfront is a killer combo and of course EC2 to drive scale. (Disclosure: I work at AWS) - Deepak Singh

It would be interesting to see the numbers. Seesmic strikes me as a low margin high resource use application. Will it be able to make money using these services? - Todd Hoff

oTodd, that's a more general question. The cost savings for anyone with variable use via a utility provider is usually pretty attractive. Once you optimize provisioning, then your savings can get very very attractive. - Deepak Singh

Robert Scoble

When we got home Milan (our 16-month old son) did a dance. He's so happy! Now he's helping me install Windows 7. Geek in the making!

January 10 - Comment - Like - Share

Randy, Morton Fox, AJ Batac and 24 other people liked this

He also is a netbook fan. I think that'll be his first computer. Just his size! :-) - Robert Scoble

16 more comments

No, he'd be a geek in the making if he did the dance when you started installing Windows 7 ;-) - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

My 2.5 year old helped me today with Windows 7 too! HA! So easy, a toddler can do it. :) - Brendan Cosgrove

That's cute. I think Windows 7 has convinced me to buy a new PC for the first time in 5 years. - Michael Yurechko

I wish I could install Windows 7, but the install fails. Look at me, 12 years older than your son and I can't even do it! Makes me want to rethink my priorities. - Melik Yuksel

Isn't Milan the MS Codename for Surface? :-) - The Comic Project

Kids pick up tech so quick don't they. My 3 1/2 year old daughter is a master off all the remotes etc already - Michael McGimpsey from twhirl

Easy enough a caveman could do it. Been very pleased with Windows 7 so far today. Haven't had a single crash. Just had to install some 3rd party drivers over the default ones. That and Chrome didn't work well, but no big deal. - Dean Clark

Simple enough - 25 min install + 15 more for MS Office. Faster, and smoother than Vista. Big step forward for MS. - Bankwatch

Why are you exposing him to Windows? So many studies have shown that happy computers make happy kids and happy computers need Mac! - Louis Gray

Do not listen to Louis. *Hissss* The Steve-Side has pulled him in. LOL Just teasing Louis. :) - Robert Miller

What's great is that Windows 7 runs on older PCs too, and quite well. You don't need loads of disk or memory for it to run. - Paul Shadwell

Louis: Milan will be brought up as an OS agnostic, just like his older brother Patrick. When he's old enough he will decide which one is better. Patrick is the world's #1 Apple fan because he was exposed to both. :-) - Robert Scoble

My 30 month old son says "Apple" whenever he wants to play on a computer, regardless of the OS. I think the big Apple logo is something he now associates with the computer (along with Youtube 'Fire Truck House' videos. "Fire Truck-Doors Open" is his new favorite saying) - Andrew Leyden

Robert: Ask Patrick to give us his opinion on 7 then, please? - Roberto Bonini

Patrick is very solidly in Apple's camp. He's a little religious about his OS choice at the moment so getting him to see any value in something Microsoft does is going to be very difficult. - Robert Scoble

Patrick should be using GNU/Linux. When you're young is when ideals like freedom should rule. Robert, you need to sit him down and have him watch 5 hours of Stallman videos until he screams "proprietary is evil". - Gregg H.

Greggish: sorry, Patrick is one of those "Steve Jobs is king" types. Not much I can do about it. I just hope it passes soon. - Robert Scoble

Chris Brogan

Social Media Events Are Fragmenting - http://www.chrisbrogan.com/social-...

August 21, 2008 from chrisbrogan.com - Comment - Like - Share

Brendan Cosgrove, andy brudtkuhl, Christian Anderson and 6 other people liked this

My event calendar is noted here. I tell ya, there's too many events. And Vegas isn't a good place to hold a smaller event. It's too impersonal and there's too many distractions. - Robert Scoble

Robert - your event calendar is a service at this point, like your Shared Items. In my estimation, and I want to talk with you about this at Gnomedex, if you'd spare a moment, you've moved from being the prototypical ambassador to being the web's first super-curator. - Chris Brogan

Chris, I would venture to say you're approaching that point yourself. :) - Daniel Johnson, Jr.

Chris Brogan

My Best Advice About Social Networking - http://www.chrisbrogan.com/my-best...

August 13, 2008 from chrisbrogan.com - Comment - Like - Share

Jeroen De Miranda, Brendan Cosgrove, Mike Fruchter and 3 other people liked this

Chris Brogan

Be Sexier in Person - http://www.chrisbrogan.com/be-sexi...

June 11, 2008 from chrisbrogan.com - Comment - Like - Share

jswi_jim, Brendan Cosgrove, Dimitar Denev and 4 other people liked this

Thomas Hawk

How to Better Manage FriendFeed for Relevance - http://thomashawk.com/2008...

June 11, 2008 from Thomas Hawk's Digital... - Comment - Like - Share

Edd McArdle, Dan Byler, RyanEs and 64 other people liked this

really like the idea of being able to rank friends so that you don't miss out on stuff from less 'popular' users - Frederic

58 more comments

Interesting thought Thomas. So maybe the ranking you apply to a user could be a multiplier against the FriendFeed algorithm that determines the "best of" sequence. Higher rankings will drive these users higher on your "best of" pages. - Hutch Carpenter

that's it exactly Hutch. It would be pretty simple to do (I think) and I'd be surprised if the FF folks haven't already thought of this. Ranking users on a scale from 1 to 100 would be your own subjective filter into their "best of" system that would result in a far more engaging and engrossing "best of" discovery page. - Thomas Hawk

similar attention profiles? http://friendfeed.com/e... - Erhan Erdogan

When you apply it to search it becomes the most powerful of all. It's going to take FF a few years to really index the web through their social filter in a meaningful way, but in the end FF could be far more powerful as a search engine than a social network or social media aggregator. - Thomas Hawk

Erhan, APML focuses on topics, not people. What Thomas is suggesting is that a person, regardless of their content, could be ranked higher than another person. It's up to you, as a subscriber, to determine how interesting that person is. - Mark Trapp

I read a comment on a previous post here on FriendFeed mentioning that more than a third of discussions on FriendFeed probrably are _about_ FriendFeed... Most of the items where there are a lot of replies have something to do with FF. I wonder if this service is going to become way less interesting when people finally get bored of talking about the service. What happens when you run out of "nothings" to say? - Jonathan Sterling

Yes, right! IMHO APML is by far more interesting than "ranking" people with notions like karma or such. I'm on the Internet because I want/like/hate/need stuff and it's about these stuff, it's about me first. Then may come other things like friendship and sociability. I'm not against teh "Social" word, of course. I'm for the "me" word that tends to disapear a little bit... :) - directeur

Jonathan, you're following the wrong people (as curt as that sounds). If you expand who you follow to people outside the social media echochamber, you find a lot of posts about a wide range of topics. - Mark Trapp

directeur, we all have relationships with people, not topics. Dehumanizing social media doesn't solve the issue. - Mark Trapp

@Thomas: Interesting. Sounds a bit like a souped up StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us. Different ways at attacking the question of how to bubble up the best of a topic. The time element is the bit that always makes it difficult IMO. - AJ Kohn

Mark: I'm with you, I really do. But what defines "friendship" is our common interests, don't you think? I'm not about dehumanizing the web :) - directeur

Jonathan that's the thing though. Those are the most popular discussions based on likes comments etc. but not the most relevant. Allowing people to rank users would filter more of the most popular out and bring more of the most relevant in. I might not care what 99% of my contacts had for lunch today. But I might care about what my wife did even though it's not popular or more broadly generally interesting. - Thomas Hawk

Directeur, Interests are what might lead to a friendship, but friendship is not completely defined by one's interests. I might meet a friend at a great italian deli, and we hit it off. A few years down the road, he tells me, "Man, I'm tired of italian food." He doesn't suddenly stop being my friend. There's a link between us, after the friendship has been established, that transcends any list of interests. - Mark Trapp

Do you propose this simply for the "best of" or for your actual feed as well? - Frankie Warren

@Mark,@Thomas I don't think like you. I said similar content followers/like'rs/commenters are owners of your best points in Thomas's idea. This will be possible with creating real attention profiles with all your interests in FF. - Erhan Erdogan

Frankie, it would be the algorithm's job to sort out ranking and relevance. But your subjective rank for a person would be a very significant component that went into the algorithm. Think about it this way. Your brother twits, "I just bought a new car." Most people are not interested in this but you probably are. Even more than the 18 popular posts about twitter, google, apple and FF. By letting you rank your brother 100, you ensure that you see that ahead of the other stuff. - Thomas Hawk

Mark, yes that's true, but it's only because you have other "interests" that keep your friendship alive. The day where you don't have no, and I mean NO interest that connects you, that day will be the end of your friendship. Moreover, online friendship and real-life one are a little bit different. We may define those interests, maybe we just can't express them, but they still are here - directeur

Erhan, APML does not solve a very real problem people have: they have a bunch of friends and people they find interesting they want to follow, and are inundated by an inability to say "I like this person more" or "this person is more important to me." If you look at MySpace or Facebook: who are most people following? Their friends. That's what people care about. I think Thomas's suggestion happens to be a good one to help solve that problem on Friendfeed. - Mark Trapp

I have a kind of "manual" friend ranking system. I subscribe to the ones whose posts I most often click through, like or comment. Other users I find interesting but who I don't want in my main feed get their feeds subscribed to with Google Reader. On top of that, I have a few folders on my bookmarks toolbar, each containing a list of links to friendfeeders' feeds pertaining to a field of interest or set of relationships. I call it efficient stream absorbtion - Slippy "WildBeard" Lane

directeur, I don't know what to tell you. A friendship on that superficial level isn't a real friendship. I'm not interested in dehumanizing people into a list of interests: people are ends in and of themselves, not means for me to extract information. - Mark Trapp

Some good ideas in there. It would be nice to have a hand in "what is relevant to me". - Joel Gray

Mark: Maybe ULML (http://userlabor.org) may do this, but for interests -the things that mostly gather us- nothing equals APML I think. - directeur

APML does not solve the filtering problem: people don't reduce everything into a list of interests. It's a square peg trying to fit in a round hole. - Mark Trapp

Mark: i'm speaking about the programs, the software we use... I think you got me wrong. In real life I don't rank my friends, I even have friends that don't share any interests with me. I'm talking about programs, about apps like FF or other social web apps. these apps need a formal way to know who you are, and who I am, because, for that app, I should be what I like/hate - directeur

@Mark : ) I really don't care about contents are my friends' or not. And don't want to share with my all other followers. For this focus should be content. I think you need a niche FriendFeed like BestFriendFeed.com ;-) - Erhan Erdogan

Mark: me I do, If my best friend *here* talks about Britney Spears, I won't like to comment, click, or "Like" it. I just don't care. Period. But if an unknown person talks about Coltrane, or Dizzy, I'm here to say loudly that I LOVE them :) - directeur

When you are online or offline, you're dealing with human beings. That fact doesn't simply just become irrelevant when you use software. When I hang out with my friends at a bar or whatever, they are the same people there as they are when they message me on Facebook or Twitter or Friendfeed. I want to know what they are up to, moreso than what you're doing or what Robert Scoble's doing or anyone else, even if they are talking about the same thing your'e talking about. What they say has more value to me. - Mark Trapp

Mark: we're a little bit different. That's not to say that I don't have friends or that I don't care about them... No, but I'm a coder (just like you I guess) and whatever we say, we always need formal ways to (re)define things that we borrow to the real life. - directeur

directeur, you could still rank non friend people of interest highly. It would be entirely customizeable. If a stranger consistently blogged about things of interest, you could always rank them 100 too. It would be up to you to apply ratings as your relevance filter. I'd be very interested, for instance, in a pro photographer if they posted lots about photography even though they were not my best friend. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas think this is a great idea although "technically: I can't contribute to the conversation. Blindly hoping algorithms are my friend :D - Mark Forman

Thomas: Exactly, that's a big advantage of attention profiling. I'm a jazz lover, So I'm very likely to be a friend for other jazz lovers, and filters like these will help me find such "interesting" people. Not that others are not worth my consideration, but we may exchange a lot more when we have the same interests - directeur

APML is like discovery for interesting information: like Thomas, he's got an APML profile which weighs pro photography very high. Feeds it into a service and it tells him a bunch of people who he might match (like Toluu, for people). He says "man, John Doe is really cool. I'm going to subscribe to him." That's where APML leaves off. John Doe isn't merely defined by pro photography, but that's what got Thomas interested in him. But now that he's interested in him, he wants to know more about John Doe. - Mark Trapp

This is a brilliant idea -- personally weighted "best of" summaries. - Dewald Pretorius

So APML's solution is to say "forget everything about all my friends other than my interests:" It's not that simple. I hate car talk, so I'd rate the keyword car really low. My friend just got a new car: I want to know about that, but I won't because my interest in cars is low. It doesn't solve my original filtering problem. - Mark Trapp

Yes Mark, we agree on this, and that's what I just said too... BUT we discover future online-friends through the _content_ they share/publish or are interested in. - directeur

If you agree with me, I don't understand why you and your feedego team try to push APML every time filtering comes up. It doesn't help filtering subscriptions _I already have._ - Mark Trapp

Wouldn't it be possible to get around all this and create a personalized list of items that are personalized according to a ranking system. But at the same time keep a river of news view. That way we keep our subscriptions while allowing a second view of the same information through the prisim of our ranks. FF already does some of this through their best of sections and their rooms. So... more... - Roberto Bonini

My interest in new cars are very low as well. In fact I could care less if someone got a new car. But if my *brother* bought a new car I'd be interested, even if mildly. But in general we are more interested in some people than others for a myriad of reasons, family, friend, common photography passion, romantic involvement, whatever. The point is by ranking them you could better assist an algorithm in discovering and searching that content. - Thomas Hawk

Fun! I will create a new google docs file :p We must go on there - because we want to draw something and write a little longer :-) - Erhan Erdogan

Mark: Feedego is NOT a social thing. It's really about ego. There's no friendship in feedego. I agree with you on the fact that APML helps you *discover* interesting future friends. I advocate APML in general because I do belive in it, and filtering IMO is a concrete example on what APML may serve. Don't you think? - directeur

Roberto, exactly, "best of" by relevance would not *replace* the current "best of" river by sheer popularity. It would just be another optional view. Same goes with search. But i think it would likely be more interesting and relevant than the current best of. - Thomas Hawk

Directeur: No, it's not! You yourself agreed: APML solves filtering in the discovery phase, it does NOTHING for the content I'm already getting. Take the car example: how does APML not fail, spectacularly, when handling that? - Mark Trapp

P.S. I'm the only feedego guy on Friendfeed btw :) People talking about APML aren't members of feedego, they just like APML, like I do :) - directeur

I'm in directeur :( So bad - hearing such a thng like this from you :-) - Erhan Erdogan

Mark: I've never said " it does NOTHING for the content I'm already getting" ! I told you That ME "directeur" am not like you "Mark" and I won't care about anything about "Britney Spears" be it a content submitted, loved or whatever by my best friend. We're different on this Mark - directeur

At this point, I'd love to have an APML profile just to block every time someone mentions APML. - Mark Trapp

Erhan: I meant you aren't in the feedego staff :) - directeur

Mark: Ah! see? - directeur

@All :-)) Thanks for discussion. But this is end of our comment limits ;-) @Mark all of the things would be together ;-) - Erhan Erdogan

Mark: sorry to annoy you, I really didn't meant that. But a last example for the road: See? Me and you have had many misunderstandings in others discussions... That's it... wer'e human... But the next time I'll see you talking about APML I'll be interested, because you have an objective point of view, maybe different than mine, but I'll be interested in what you'll have to say. - directeur

You could achieve the same by collecting and analyzing a person's clickstream data without asking that persons's personal ratings for his/her topics of interest. My guess is that that is what Google is trying to do with the clickstream data of its users who opt for the option of complete Google "personal history" record. It is a scary thought to let Google know about every click one... more... - Javed Alam

Big point Javed and yes APML supports this already, that's called "implicit concepts", the others are "explicit" ones. And yes, an application may smartly create a profile from your behavior, but implicit concepts can't be really reliable without something explicitely given by the user. - directeur

@Javed That's all good for conjunction between APML and Thomas's point alg. ;-) But as you said we should see datas after researches ;-) - Erhan Erdogan

I like this notion of relevance. I imagine the "best of" stream could also be re-ranked based on your personal stats of who you find interesting, negating the work of manually ranking your relationships. - Andrew Smith

Mark: take it easy man! I didn't started the thing with APML, Erhan did :) And I'm not shoving APML down everyone's throats. You still say "we", "everyone". You're free to do this of course, but I personally never use "we" online. That's maybe the main difference between us, and that's indeed what separates our points of views, but still, I never see you as a woe... You're a guy who has his own opinions, I have mine and it's okay. (Even when you delete the comment to which this one is a reply) - directeur

@directeur Okayyy. I'm boomer ;-) Heheh! You're funny ; ) I subscribed to Mark - see you in his new comments - we will always punish you ;-) - Erhan Erdogan

Great idea Thomas. It reminds me a bit of how I started to organize my RSS feeds into categories based on levels of interest rather than topics. That way, I could do a better job of keeping up on the blogs that were important to me. - Jeff Smith

Great idea. I study within artificial intelligence and I can definitely say scoring and quantifying this data is the way to a more effective and efficient network. Another question though, do you find it depressing that you're blog has no comments - but FF has over 53? - CannonGod

Great post. Also see an earlier thread I started discussing more or less the same concept - http://friendfeed.com/e... - Aviv

Brendan Cosgrove › Likes