As a Briton one thing confuses me about America. A lot of times you hear things stated such as "the troops are defending America" Or "they gave their life to defend America" but if a soldier in a foreign country dies, how are they "defending America"? I mean, America has not been invaded in the last hundred years, so it has not had to be "defended". Btw, In Britain we say "they died SERVING their country".
- Mark
Mark, that's cause the people who say that are idiots.
- Dave Winer
@Mark: Because the people who say that usually classify things like 9/11 or Pancho Villa's trek to the US as full-scale invasions, comparable to the Germans in France in WW2. I've always used SERVING, as well.
- Sean Quinn
Mark, I think it's a Cold War throwback. During Vietnam, "keeping us free" tied into the domino theory. But hawks never gave it up; saying you're for freedom is so nice and all-purpose. You'll regularly hear Palin and Fox news types claiming that fighting in Iraq protects everything from our right to free speech to our right to vote.
- Amyloo
That would be a heck of an event if some terrorists in Iraq managed to overthrow the US government and repeal the Constitution of the USA. Hehe.
- Mark
I'm finding scheduled chats to be the most interesting usage of it. You can have an actual conversation. Otherwise, you're just finding new people and getting what they find to be news or interesting links.
- Jeremy Schultz
Like people who say the press acts as their filter. I hope they pay you to say that. The press is ridiculously boring *and* dishonest.
"I believe that there must be a consensus for something to become news. And I think news organizations have a chance of working as long as they understand that they're just mirrors. Once they lose that perspective, they become the agenda-setters, they become Jay's Church of the Savvy, the insiders who have become "players" -- who end up being used as poorly paid mouthpieces for the truly powerful people, the ones with all the money. Mark, I would consider myself the equal of Mitch Kapor when it comes to software design, and I would compare my achievements with RSS and blogging to his achievements with spreadsheets, but the press treats him with infinitely more respect and credence because he's made many times the money I've made. I'm not complaining, about the money -- I'm comfortable, and making tons of money was never really an issue for me. But the press can't get its mind off money, even though they, as individuals, don't make very much. They end up, over and over, being used as..."
- Dave Winer
Thanks Dave, now I have a word for my favorite software projects. What could be more open and exciting than starting from scratch (with a few of my favorite tools).
- Mark Essel
Yeah the psychology of developers is they want to see green-fields everywhere, but are shocked to find out it's really more complex than they thought.
- Dave Winer
Dave misses that FriendFeed search can be constrained by groups of people YOU pick. This is the real "track" that Steve Gillmor keeps talking about. Oh, and by the way, my blog items (via RSS) get into FriendFeed within 60 seconds. Anyone figure out how I do that?
- Robert Scoble
I agree with Dave, though. Real Time search raises more questions than it answers and FriendFeed's UI has too much duplication and not enough tools to help you manage it. Until that happens it's going to be as geeky as a command line interface. Lots of people will use it, yes, but there's something better out there and the minute a company figures it out we'll go "of course" just like we did when we saw the Mac UI.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, using the WP-SUP plugin that implements the SUP protocol developed by the FriendFeed team; I use this also, nice feature! See http://www.jeroendemiranda.com/about... for details ('WP SUP is a plugin for WordPress that implements FriendFeed’s Simple Update Protocol.')
- Jeroen De Miranda
Jeronen - you're awesome - thanks for the tip on the plugin.
- Robert Freeze
It definitely is a great idea with the real time track but in real-life in practical usage it is not very useful yet. You do not get much information other than a bunch of mentions of couple of the most prominent links on the topic.
- Marko Saric