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Demonstration why hash tags are not needed anymore:

Svartling, Meryn Stol, Mike Fruchter and 34 other people liked this

http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... - Robert Scoble

That page aggregates all posts/tweets etc together that have anything to do with the Dream Machines show yesterday. How was that page built? Friendfeed's search engine and adding the term "dreammachines09" into the comments somewhere. - Robert Scoble

Now that we have this really killer live search engine we don't need hash tags anymore. At least not here on friendfeed. Over on systems that have no metadata you've gotta do lame things like take some of your 140 characters to post #dreammachines09 or something like that. - Robert Scoble

Inclusion of cryptic information in band though seems like a lame solution(both in FF and Twitter)-- some sort of meta data solution would be better. - Brian Sullivan

Brian: the neat thing is that as a friendfeed item gets more comments it gets more searchable. For instance, you can search for the words "cryptic information" and find this item now. - Robert Scoble

I heartily disagree: http://re-searchr.blogspot.com/2009... - James Ostheimer

Agreed Robert. I am actually building twitter apps and experimenting using Friendfeed to power the more advanced content pulls. - David Bisset

Wait, your argument is that we don't need hashtags because you can add hashtags via comments? (Sure, without hash marks, we'll have to call them wikitags, or just WordsStuckTogether) - Joel Bennett

James: I did just that with the dreammachines09 word inclusion. The thing is I didn't need to include that in the top-level item and I didn't need to steal any of my precious 140 characters to do it. - Robert Scoble

are you talking simply about the actual hash mark? (#) - Kenley Neufeld

Hashtags are still the best way to participate in a Twitter chat convo like #journchat or #blogchat. Probably why you're better off on Friendfeed, Robert... ;-) - Danny Brown

Joel: I call it metadata. Kenley: no. For Twitter to find your Tweet you need to actually include that word INSIDE your Tweet. I don't need to do that. For instance, if I want to find this item under "foobartweets" I just include that word OUTSIDE my original item as a comment. - Robert Scoble

Danny: that is really lame. Over here we get live chat that you can only dream about in Twitter. Here, join the live chat on this item here: http://beta.friendfeed.com/scoblei... new comments will flow into your screen as they are posted. - Robert Scoble

I've said this since day one. Hash tags are almost 99% useless. no need for the hash! - Jamie

Danny so they are used like a communally defined room on Twitter? This agrees with the simple wins meme. - Todd Hoff

maybe I'm confused. If you run a search on Twitter, you get the results whether you hashtag or not. You have to use a distinct term so people have something to search (as you did with dreammachines09), but it still shows the results. Is this somehow different? - shaun mclane

Here's the search for foobartweets: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... this item was indexed in a few seconds, really amazing technology here. - Robert Scoble

hashtags work well as a way to FLAG or bring attention to a particular topic but searchwise, I never understood why adding a # made any difference. - Andy Sternberg

Dont think this is legit argument to eliminate any need for hastags. They are still great user generated filters. - Cody Heitschmidt

but wouldn't a "standard" mark be helpful for being able to find specific information that's referenced by common words. For example a common search I use on twitter is for #jobs so that I don't get all kind of tweets unrelated to job postings. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Hashtags are metadata, and are useful, a tweet with a link and a hashtag is a delicious entry, so is delicious not useful anymore? - James Ostheimer

Shaun: right, but what if your original tweet doesn't have a good way to include that word in it? Or, what if you are out of characters? - Robert Scoble

Computers are fast enough that they don't need hashtags but for humans it's different. When I'm scanning Tweets I find the hashtags useful as they draw my eye to the keyword. For human readability the hash character is the equivalent of bolding or underlining a word. - Troy Forster

I also like that you don't *actually* have to conform to a 140 character limit on Friendfeed. Certain conversations, like this one, lend themselves to having longer messages. I don't buy the argument that Twitter makes people better writers... - Tim McDougall

and unfortunately it appears that FF filters out the # mark - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Robert: got it. Term can appear anywhere in the comments (and one time is enough). - Kenley Neufeld

Demonstration why they're still needed: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... Sadly, it doesn't work because keywords are only as good as the posts they are in. FriendFeed could still benefit from community generated tagging of content (by author or by readers) - Kevin Kuphal

Troy: so you can still use hashtags here too if you like them for visual purposes. #stupidhashtags - Robert Scoble

Troy: but here note that now you can search on stupidhashtags, but I didn't need to include that item in the original Tweet. - Robert Scoble

I think it is still needed. - Alp

Robert...I think we're saying the same thing here. Except now I think this is more a Twitter VS FF argument. If you run out of characters, you can't add a hashtag OR the togetherwords. The actual # symbol only accounts for one character. Maybe I need to re-read this. - shaun mclane

I've posed my above question a few times, and still it's not really been addressed - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Seems more of a side-effect of the commenting engine on FF rather than anything to do with hashtags themselves. Twitters lack of context makes this an impossibility for them - Kevin Kuphal

the lack of need for hash tags is truly only as good as the posted data. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Of course, wouldn't it be nice if we could markup tweets, FF, etc posts to use bold and underline. I'd prefer that over YAMS (Yet Another Markup Syntax) - Troy Forster from twhirl

Rob: which question, the one about needing a standard mark? I disagree. Everyone who saw my dreammachines09 knows what I was doing. Does including a hash like #dreammachines09 make it better? OK, up to you. - Robert Scoble

tell me how to search on "jobs" and not come up with steve jobs then - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Troy: I wish I could import photos and videos into comments too. Flickr, for instance, lets you do that and I really like it. - Robert Scoble

I tend to agree with guruvan, in the value of elevating benign words above their typical use in conversation. I wish twitter search didn't ignore hashtags. - Derek Shanahan

Rob: learn to use the friendfeed search engine. You can remove all items that mention "steve" for instance. Here is how you do that: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... - Robert Scoble

it's not an arguement against intelligent posteds like yourself robert, just an observation that a standard mark is a simple way to distinguish common words...."dreammachines09" is not exactly a "common word" - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Or, Rob, pick a set of words that indicate employment too. You can do "AND" searches on friendfeed, for instance, so here's a search that includes all items that include the words "jobs" AND "employment." http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... - Robert Scoble

wouldn't things like hashtags still be of some use as a low-load search mechanism? I mean full text search is far more expensive to run - whereas hashtags would be something the system can pre-index, hence making a search that is far lighter. And once you multiply by millions of users, it can matter - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

but there's a zillion things I don't want to come up with on common terms -startup is another prime example...I don't want to have to list a ton of "- word" to get just what I want. the # makes it simple to get just what I was looking for - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

sean mcbride in 5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1.... ;) - alphaxion

A hashtag without a hashmark, in the comments ... is still a hashtag. Yes, it WOULD BE FAR BETTER hashtag because other people can add it, and it doesn't take up space ... except that your search is VERY NON-INTUITIVE. You're really just proposing a new way of marking things (which NOBODY ELSE is using yet), Maybe instead, you should ask FriendFeed to just natively support keyword TAGS as additional metadata. THAT would actually be way better, instead of just different. - Joel Bennett

Joelle: we get full text search here automatically and it's quite well done. See my first comment for a demonstration. - Robert Scoble

And I do know how to use the search here at friendfeed....this is how I know what some of the limits are - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Joel: no, it's not a hashtag. - Robert Scoble

Because they don't work everywhere - Outsanity

robert, posters are lazy, and "jobs AND employment" took too many characters on twitter, and so it wasn't posted like that - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Well, a hashtag is not required because you can just create a room for that #topic and cross-post to it. - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

while the hashtag might not be necessary, it is useful in some circumstances. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I can tell it's well done, i was just wondering about the impact of thousands of people having multiple live search and filters - but clearly if it can cope all the better. That leaves hashtags as a mechanism to create special labels for memes - not for the machine anymore, but for people to know what to use should they play along a meme - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

That's two extra steps Ahsan. - Todd Hoff

find out how many terms you have to exclude on the search term "startup" to just get posts about startup businesses (and not starting up your computer) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Robert: Don't you think that your search could easily get cluttered? What if a user started adding 'dreammachine09' to random unrelated posts? I agree that Friendfeed's search is much better than other sites, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. - Tim McDougall

Rob: well, then, just remove anything to do with Steve and Apple, but I agree that it'd be nice for friendfeed to search on the hashcharacter as well. Funny, it seems that friendfeed turns a Tweet with #jobs in it to a hotlink to the Twitter search engine. Almost like admitting that doing hashtags is better over on Twitter's search. - Robert Scoble

If I'm not wrong, hashtags were introduced on twitter because it was difficult to organize posts around a certain topic. - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Ironic because @twleung just declared that he likes #hashtags. Key point w're often missing is the end-user experience: it's easier for many to use #ht in their simple desktop client rather than having to setup a search engine query. In (related) news: https://shane.curcuru.name/blog... - Shane Curcuru

and then on the same startup search, find me a term that is ALWASYS posted along with it to indicate startup businesses - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Tim: if someone started doing that they would break the social contract here and would earn blocks from people and, if they were doing it on my items, would get their comments deleted. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Maybe I don't have the right picture of how this works. Are you saying that if you block someone, then I won't see their comments under this post? - Tim McDougall

@Todd, ok I admit only people creating a topic would want to do that. (like on tinker.com) - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Seems that this "social contract" could also be used by incorporating tags into FF so that users could tag posts with various categories, etc making the search more valuable by searching on those tags rather than taking a whack at full text. I'm sure some nifty ajax could even suggest categories/tags like eBay does when posting an item for sale to jumpstart it for each post. - Kevin Kuphal

In most cases, you're absolutely correct Robert. If the poster is smart enought to make up a common search term that can be used to find the data then you're correct. But how is that really any different than having a standard mechanism like the hashtag to find the data? how is "dreammachines09" really any different than "#startup" to find specific data? - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

guruvan: I already demonstrated how it's different. For one, it isn't needed inside the originating item. For instance, I can put #stupidhashtags or stupidhashtags inside the comments here so that this item shows up on a search for stuidhashtags. No need to waste my 140 characters above to make sure my item is searchable or included in some weird conference hash tag. - Robert Scoble

2.. 1.. we have lift-off! :) James Ostheimer+ semantic metadata are more needed now than ever. I get the impression that linguistics, semantics, pragmatics and natural language processing are not fields that have captured Robert's attention with much force. :) - Sean McBride

Also, a lot of times people can't figure out what the hash tag is before they start to post. When I was posting/tweeting from the Under the Radar conference last Friday I had no idea what the hash tag was. But by the end of the day I figured it out. So, it sure would be nice to be able to go back and add the #utr tag to everything. But on Twitter that's impossible. Here? Just add it like I just did. Of course that introduces noise to under the radar searches, but oh well, just remove Scoble. :-) - Robert Scoble

hashtags are probably used for things that could be better done on FF, and this scrolling comment feed is a good example of a way to 'find' a conversation, which is one of the uses hashtags has served users (#journchat). i still believe that hashtags can elevate mundane words into a highlighted conversation that you can go grab, and in many cases a hashtag will enlighten you to that conversation, which you otherwise wouldn't have known to look for. - Derek Shanahan

Sean: no. Because normal human beings will never learn any of that. We did learn how to use Google. :-) - Robert Scoble

you didn't demonstrate that it's really different. You simply substituted one extra long term for the hashtag. On specifically made up searchable terms like "stupidhashtag" it's obviously not necessary, but on more common terms where I might wish to include or exclude all the possibles like "startup vs. #startup" it's still a useful mechanism. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob: I agree there. - Robert Scoble

agree it's different:You can add it outside the content, and *I* can add it to *your* posts. But better? Not really. #hashtags advertise their presence for a reason: because only by doing so will others follow along and tag their posts the same way so you can follow a thread of commonality. - Joel Bennett

I wish the friendfeed search engine would let me also include the hash. Then we'd both win. - Robert Scoble

Agreed :) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I wish they'd support tags as separate metadata and allow the crowd to add to it. Then we'd have something to dance about ;) - Joel Bennett

There is nothing really different here -- only that the tags can be added after the fact. - Brian Sullivan

Joel: and that system totally sucks. How many people figure out what the hash tag is for a conference by the beginning of the conference, for instance. Not many. Even yesterday we had to figure out what the official tag was for dream machines. We talked with the head of PR for the event. He didn't know. So we had to agree on our own. Are we catching everything? Probably, because friendfeed's search engine is so good (and so is Twitter's, by the way). Humans are good at figuring this stuff out. - Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble: what would be the easiest way to say that a post is PRO Barack Obama or ANTI Barack Obama? Or that someone LIKES Britney Spears or DISLIKES Britney Spears? How can one perform sentiment mining on Friendfeed posts? Think, Robert, think.... The truth is, most of the basic semantic data locked in Friendfeed posts is still unminable and unusable. - Sean McBride

And it doesn't have to be a hashtag (but people are used to it) ....It could be any agreed upon mechanism....we could all agree right here that from her on out on FriendFeed a ^TAG would be a searchable meachanism (and then the hashtag would still go to twitter search) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Brian: and I can add a lot more tags to this item than you can to any Tweet so this will be much more searchable. - Robert Scoble

Sean: for negative sentiment you search for words like "hate" "sucks" etc. For positive search for "love" "great" "awesome." Etc. I can remove posts with either sentiment pretty easily here. - Robert Scoble

That point is very true Robert - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

interesting read - polou/indigo_bow

Well since the tweet is only 140 characters, is stand alone and the tag is in band that falls out naturally. - Brian Sullivan

It's much easier to find data on FriendFeed, but that's primarily because of grouped conversations and the availability of more characters per message - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

What we need is the ability to embed widgets into the stream so there can be some form of custom structure. All these methods are informal ways of adding structure to free form text. - Todd Hoff

they are totally not needed, but they are FUN #givescoblemoretequilla - Erin @queenofspain

#agreewitherin #takeanothershot - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Robert -- I think you are missing the point: most people don't know how to use HTML, but HTML is still enormously valuable. Semantic markup will provide much more leverage over documents than HTML. Only a small percentage of the human population needs to use semantic markup to elevate it into a powerful tool that benefits everyone. - Sean McBride

while we're at it, let's ask for #underscores_in_hashtags ;) - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Robert: that method of sentiment mining is crude, imprecise and weak, and misses or misinterprets the majority of sentiment expressions. - Sean McBride

#ok_ahsan_you're_on_I'll_ask_Paul_and_Bret_myself_lol - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

#hey_my_hashtag_is_longer_than_yours_longer_than_yours - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Sean: that depends on how thorough the searcher is - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Ahsan: you win...i concede ;) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Seriously though, instead of hashtags, FF can just provide simple comma-separated tags with a post - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

@Robert RE: @Joel. Community tagging would solve the "conference tag" problem quickly. Sure, at first tags may be misapplied as people settle on what it should be but rather quickly they will converge and the community can fix itself and all those mis-tagged items become properly tagged. - Kevin Kuphal

Sean: I can make up a few examples of where that type of minig is imprecise, and misinterprets data, but those case are probably extremely rare in real world situations - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

@Robert - thanks for noticing that lame is my middle name, many people don't. - Danny Brown

Ahsan: yes if the tags are metadata not part of the actual post, then that works...but if we want to use terms in the post as tags, then a marker character can sometimes be necessary or useful - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I would prefer the "out-of-band" tags method myself - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Nah, #we@really//need.namespace.support:in-hashtags?right But a key difference is if (any) system intelligently supports some real metadata, or simply gives you text. Raw searching is improving, but real metadata will add a ton of extra meaning - and someday, it'll be easy to unlock. - Shane Curcuru

If FF really wants to take meta-data to the next level, give us proper tags (external to the post). Otherwise, people will just start using hashtags, like they did on Twitter. - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

A sentiment mining challenge: show me a program that will parse this conversation and accurately label each comment as pro-hashtags or anti-hashtags. Robert: any pointers? #hashtags+ (I just stated that this comment is pro-hashtags in a way that is machine-readable.) - Sean McBride

I agree with Robert, half of the power comes from the direction the coversation takes in the comments which is frequently much more broad than the author originally intended so would never have had the hash. - David Ziembicki

Agreed, but unless the search engine here changes they're going to have to be some other character than # - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Friendfeed should develop its own semantic markup conventions that go well beyond Twitter's hashtags. This would not be a difficult project. - Sean McBride

David: Conversations are probably much easier to locate than simple posts - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

By the way, I think that slashtags offer a more promising route for semantic markup than hashtags. - Sean McBride

Have not tried...are they working in the FF search engine? - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

P.S. Robert: Thanks for the "stupidhashtag" it made this conversation really easy to remember and find ;-) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Great discussion here...I'm chiming in a but late but wanted to capture a couple other drawbacks I've noticed about twitter hashtags: 1) you can't necessarily depend on everyone knowing about a particular hashtag and using it, even with a topic that is well-known and especially considering the influx of non-geeks to twitter... - Steve just Steve

2) depending on the hashtag, you can encounter 'hash clash' with a hash that may be in use for an unrelated topic (a good sports-related example is #rangers...are you tagging the NY hockey Rangers or the Texas baseball Rangers?) - Steve just Steve

As always, there is a someecard for the occasion: http://www.someecards.com/usercar... - Gregg Le Blanc

I think that posting to a specific feed/room is the FriendFeed alternative to in-post hash-tags. On top of that, reader-tagging of posts would be nice. That's the model followed by Delicious, but then applied to FF conversations instead of the whole web. It would also help you to find your favorite conversations. FriendFeed should just implement social bookmarking. - Meryn Stol

Quite sensible Meryn. Both this idea, and Robert's very successful idea of making up asillytag to find the conversation work quite well. Reader tagging effectively as simple as posting a comment with anothersillytag. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

How do you set the topic for the backchannel? seems like you are simply removing the # - andrew

Matt Mullenweg

WordPress CodeSniffer - http://ma.tt/2009...

April 23 from Matt Mullenweg - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Nicholas James, Edmund Tay and 6 other people liked this

The Apple Room: Steve Sill

Apple, Your Mighty Mouse Sucks. Please Fix It. - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...

April 17 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

David Bisset, Joey Gibson and dthree liked this

I know that many people do not like the Mighty Mouse, but I have never had any issues with it. Does anyone else like their Mighty Mouse? - Steve Sill from Bookmarklet

3 more comments

I love my Mighty Mouse. I had to use a different mouse once, and I was told that my dip in productivity was noticed. The next day, I got a new Mighty Mouse. - Joshua

I loved my Mighty Mouse until I realized it was no good for WoW and some FPS games. Now, it is a Mighty Dust Bunny. - Arlan Koizumi

Actually I use my mouse when playing WoW and have not had any issues. My mouse ball has gotten stuck a few time, but it was nothing that some basic screen cleaner and a paper clip (to force the ball to move) have not taken care of. - Steve Sill

I used a mighty mouse for about two hours and was ready to chuck it out the window. It sucks out loud. - Joey Gibson

Robert Scoble

I just realized hash tags are dead, er, less relevant than they were last week. #hashtagsaredead I gotta write up a blog post about why. Or you could speculate here:

April 9 - Comment - Like - Share

Donovan Watts, Jamie, Haim Schlesinger and 92 other people liked this

Hashtags are used to group things of common interest. Like all items from a conference. But, do we really need them now in an age of great grouping and filtering like we have here on friendfeed? - Robert Scoble

253 more comments

They've been dead for some time. Track makes them unnecessary - Ken Sheppardson

Dead? I think they're around on Twitter not as often, but they're still alive! - Shane Adams

Shane: first thing you gotta realize when a pundit says something is "dead" is that it doesn't mean they go away, just that thing become less relevant than they are today. - Robert Scoble

They are generally not needed. Just search on the same term and save a character. - xero

Yes, because more people are on Twitter and Facebook - for now - Steve Rubel

I know for me personally after I post an update I am like crap I should have #hashed xyz. It is not an involuntary action yet. It may never. - Michael woodard

were they ever really alive to begin with? Nobody can decide on which tag to use for a concept half the time, so you end up with multiple tags for the same thing, which sort of defeats it ... - Michele Neylon

Yeah, they are useful for comedic effect, but not much else. At least not on friendfeed. - Alex Scoble

#hashtagsaredead - Ryan Kuder

If Yahoo would get off it's duff and imbue Delicious with some statusness and conversationalizingness, we wouldn't need to hack Twitter with hastags. Then again, if Twitter would separate out tags and links from 140 characters, we wouldn't need Delicious. - Kawika Holbrook

Steve: right, but I bet that Twitter gets conversation threading eventually and Facebook already has better ways to tag content. - Robert Scoble

And, anyway, since friendfeed is an addon to Twitter, in this respect (this post went to Twitter) we get grouping of common items here. No hashtag needed. Oh, and you can search on any word in any of these comments and find this thread. - Robert Scoble

what is the percentage of 100% accuracy with hash tags? how many people who do know the hash actually use it? for me 'concept' filter, zeroing in on the sweet spot is best (for me) take #swf09 - how many people who were twittering about the Skoll World Forum 09 actually got it, used it most of the time? some of the time? only once? Skoll seems pretty right on to me, so i just filter Skoll - unique enough to pluck it out of the stream. Gets much more difficult with wider targets but can be done with + or - - michael sean wright

Don't count Twitter hashtags out yet...they came in handy in our local situation here in Australia. We did have one slight problem with some teenage bright spark hijacking the #bushfires stuff to a @bushfires group. Otherwise it was still very active for us back in February. Hashtags highly relevant in emergency situations. How they work on FriendFeed, someone else will have to tell me about. - George Hall (Australia)

"user tagging" will keep being relevant until machines can infer these tags themselves. They really can't at this moment. Normal search engines are still doing keyword-matching. - Meryn Stol

#bitchtlips will live forever - sofarsoShawn

So you're at a conference where you've never met half of the folks there. Sure you know your friends at table and have access to their feeds, but what about the table two over? If they don't use the name of the conference, your name, the name of the speaker or something that orients the feed toward the common experience, how will you know what's being said? The hashtag still seems relevant in that context. - Michael Sommermeyer

Did they ever have value? Twitter Search is certainly set up not to need them so long as you just use a common identifier term. - Pete Mortensen

# not dead until I can click on any word in a post and get the search results. only hash'd words are clickable. - John Treadway

They are dead because they were always stupid and because people make them up and other people can never find them I HOPE they are dead. - Francine Hardaway

Pete: yeah, they did, especially for events. That way everyone would see you are explicitly wanting to join the tag for that event. - Robert Scoble

Used to be a good way of 'tagging' keywords for easy search. But if the common subject is mentioned clearly in a conversation (eg. 'social media' vs #socialmedia) then agree, its days are numbered. Particularly the trend as online conversationalists move beyond Twitter. - schmediachick

I just lost a fight with Twitter search and http://tr.im today, trying in vain to locate an old link I forgot to ALSO save on Delicious. Even FriendFeed is fallow when it comes to historical organization. I miss Swurl's calendar-based timelines. This is so "in the moment" that there doesn't seem to be as much attention paid to "where's that link from that thing that happened last month that I now need for something coming up this very moment." - Kawika Holbrook

Kawika how do you use delicious in junction with Twitter? - Bryan Lee

Michael: conferences in the future will embed a friendfeed thread in their sites. Look at how many comments are here. Watch this live. It's amazing. - Robert Scoble

There's still some use of hashtags on Twitter and a few other services. Others have something similar to hashtags, which you might consider the same. But for the most part, I have to agree: hashtags are dying, and the reason for that is because we're getting much better with searching and filtering content. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

http://beta.friendfeed.com/scoblei... Here's the permalink for this item. Once you have that you can watch all the comments flow in live and you do NOT need hashtags anymore. - Robert Scoble

Hash tags enable intelligent indexing of Twitter. And (not so) subtle humor. #ScobleIsWrongAgain :-) - Brent Logan

Brent: Twitter is dead. Because if you want REAL indexing in live time of a conversation about a social object this is WAY BETTER than Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Keyword matching on the message is really not up to par with what's possible with tagging. - Meryn Stol

Meryn: you are absolutely wrong. Here, search on this in the next minute or so: foopoo - Robert Scoble

foopoo is already indexed in search. Wow. http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... - Robert Scoble

Hashtags dead because no clearinghouse on what they mean. They get co-opted and perverted to generate follows and reads. And Twitter search tools have improved massively in short time. Readable tags take up too much of my 140. Short ones are not obvious. - Wilford

Hashtags are now most likely used just to get more followers in same interest if that even!. I have seen people misuse hashtags , for example "I Love my dog #iphone" wtf has dog to do with an iphone or how much you love your dog.... you know what I mean? Anyways i use tweetgrid.com for clearing things out and don't pay attention to tweetdeck or so to say twitscoop anymore. - Live Crunch Blog

What a cool way to get help writing your blog post... where were you earlier today when I was having brainfreeze? - Kathy Colaiacovo

Well I think the foopoo example sorta ended this argument - Matsis

Yes, that's keyword matching. So what's the big deal? Hashtags are merely a way to add keywords to a piece of content the "#" denotes that it should not be read as part of a sentence, but that they are just some extra keywords. - Meryn Stol

So using Friendfeed with twitter eliminates the need for hashtags, essentially? - Derek Schauland

Kathy: everything changes now that we have live display. - Robert Scoble

God, does it ever! - Kathy Colaiacovo

Kathy: everything changes now that we have live indexing. - Robert Scoble

Derek: yes. - Robert Scoble

Matsis: foopoo was indexed in less than five seconds. It used to take a minute for the indexer to work. Freaking amazing. - Robert Scoble

but this requires a single source? hashtags come from lots of places. - Jonathan Hopkins

Live / non-live is a separate issue. Hash-tags might not be real-time also... - Meryn Stol

and you get so used to it! I was on a live chat (supposedly) last week - but they were moderating the comments... and the delay was so annoying to most of the participants. It's an on-demand world now - Kathy Colaiacovo

Hashtags are pretty much just tags for your tweets - Chris Martin

Meryn: you aren't getting it. If you want to create a tag, you can do it here. I just created foopoo and now search works on that. No need to create an ugly tag. - Robert Scoble

Sweet sweet the live view works on the iPhone! - Bryan Lee

Wrong: I like making up really fun & zany ones: #robertscobleshotshit!WHoo!!!!!YEAH!!!!!!WootWOOT!!!!!!!! - sofarsoShawn

There's only one reason for hashtags now: To mark something as being related to something else not explicitly mentioned in a post, and point out that marking. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

And, because our conversation here is grouped all together you don't need a hashtag to create a thread. - Robert Scoble

I hate this "this is dead, that is dead" crap. They work for some things, for others they don't. Move along people there's nothing to see here. - Jeremy Armer

Twitter does real-time search just fine. Anything you type in a tweet, including "foopoo" can be searched on. - Meryn Stol

I do agree though - searches have changed and the # seems irrelevant now. - Kathy Colaiacovo

If you can work in what you'd tag as context into your actual post, you don't need hashtags. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Robert, "Twitter is dead" is a different argument than hash tags are dead. FriendFeed is a different animal with it's own advantages and disadvantages, but as long as Twitter is alive, so will be hash tags. - Brent Logan

By the way I still am wondering why Gabe Rivera didn't add LC for aggregation on techmeme, even tho atul and other ppl are sending tips to #techmeme - Live Crunch Blog

Brent: Not true. Twitter's real-time search means hash tags aren't needed for Twitter either. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

hashtags are a hack. I've been saying this forever: http://staynalive.com/article... - Jesse Stay

Brent: Twitter will copy friendfeed. Mark my words. If they don't, Twitter is dead. - Robert Scoble

The concept is good (esp. for event listings) - but there needs to be ONE place to go to register them so you don't end up with 10 other ppl using yours. But it is out of control on Twitter - some people have 3 in every post - where is the content? - Robyn Hawk

jeremy: saying something is "dead" causes you to pay attention. Sorry, but this is provable and is why this technique is used so often. - Robert Scoble

Here in the Portland Oregon areas we use #pdxtst (Portland Twitter Storm Team) to tweet about weather conditions. No form of search can replace it. - Brent Logan

Hashtags served their purpose early on and were the tool of Twitterati in the know. It's like anything that trends... It's cool until the grown-ups arrive. And now with Twitter's growth, the grown-ups have indeed arrived. Once the grown-ups arrive and start using something to forward an agenda it dies. - matt

Brent: you could just include pdxtst in a message. you can find it by doing a search for it. - Robert Scoble

Robert, I hope Twitter does adopt FriendFeed style conversations. I still see value in hash tags. - Brent Logan

http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... Here's all items with pdxtst included in them. - Robert Scoble

http://beta.friendfeed.com/filter... pdxtst filter - Christian Burns

Hashtags are machine language which is unnecessary. I talked about it last week. http://www.louisgray.com/live... - Louis Gray

Robert, in other words, you'd prefer I embedded gibberish in my messages for search purposes, just don't prepend them with a hash? - Brent Logan

now you tell me... - Ecosaveology

Excellent point John - it is convenient to be able to click on the hashtag words! - Robyn Hawk

Hashtags can be useful if everyone in the group that uses them agrees on a single tag. Poeplebrowsr makes interesting use of them by making groups ot of the people that use them. But, as said above #mosthastagsaresilly just ask the #hashtagmafia ;) #jesseisrighttheyareahack - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Brent: tell me how this would be improved if everyone had to post #hashtagdiscussion to join in this comment thread? Note that you don't need to do that anymore to have your comment grouped with other people's on a common topic. - Robert Scoble

I think hashtags must be ironic #butyouknewthat - Alan Thornton

Scoble but the search results doesn't have a live view or doesn't poll like Twitter search. - Bryan Lee

Bryan: yeah, I know. That's getting fixed by the friendfeed team. We asked about that last week at the press conference. - Robert Scoble

Also once someone has entered the tag into a discussion, and then I comment or like it, It's part of my discussions page - Christian Burns

Bryan Lee, I attempt to tag articles I like for posterity in Delicious and then -- if they may be of interest to others -- share them in Twitter. The former is indexed storage and the latter is quick conversation. I stills struggle with Twitter and FriendFeed as a repository of knowledge and sentiment. Hashtags were meant to give some structure to Twitter. Ultimately, however, it still feels like the Wild West. - Kawika Holbrook

Imagine if every post on here had to include #hashtagsRdead - Christian Burns

Robert, you're missing my point. Tags are very useful for searching topics, even in the absence of a continuing conversation. It's author-intended indexing. Blog posts use tags. They just have a special field for doing it. If FriendFeed or Twitter allowed for a special tag field, I'd love it. It would be prettier than hash tags. But it hasn't happened yet, so calling hash tags dead is premature. - Brent Logan

Brent: yes, but see I would only have to put a hashtag at the top node, and everyone does NOT need to include the hashtag individually anymore to join in. - Robert Scoble

Robert, I agree. Hash tags are ugly for enabling conversations. That's not their only purpose, though. - Brent Logan

Brent: I just changed the headline that started this to include a hashtag. - Robert Scoble

Robert: or someone could insert the hashtag into just one of the comments - Christian Burns

Sorry, I'm a little confused. This is like a chat room. A hashtag on Twitter is aggregating independent thoughts, no? Apples and oranges? - Catherine Ventura

Ha! #ScobleizerIsFunny - Brent Logan

The one purpose they really do server at this point, Robert is to make a searchable term out of a more commonly used word so that search does NOT pull up unintended tweets. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

kawika never thought to share my delicious links on Twitter. I just have friendfeed handle that. - Bryan Lee

Here's the search that pulls up all items with the tag #hashtagsaredead http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... See, now no body needs to include that hashtag in their comment to be grouped in here. On Twitter they'd still need to use the hashtag. Oh, and notice how I can add a tag AFTER the fact to make something more searchable here! - Robert Scoble

Wait... hashtags are dead? What about !groups and @#tagfamilies?? - Ken Sheppardson

Never used them or liked them. Get more results searching for normal words because no one actually remembers to add the hashtag - BCK

Hashtags are very useful in lots of different contexts (local, relevance, mimicking behavior), but they are not the sole method and definitely not intuitive enough for mass adoption - Tiffany Winman

Meh. #scoblesayingitdoesntmakeittrue - Suburban Oblivion

Robert, imagine a TV channel wants to start a live discussion on twitter. It says: "guys, use the hashtag #xxx". Now, it can watch only updates with this hashtag; making just a live search for "xxx" would be false - there would be so much noise. - Konstantin

Ken LOL - Jesse Stay

They're not dead. Yea, you could save a character by not using the # sign, but that could lead to confusion depending on what the tag is. Same with not using @ before someone's username... fine if you're @Scobleizer, not so fine if you're @John. On Laconi.ca, you can subscribe to hashtags (different from subscribing to a keyword), which is convenient for event attendees. - Marina Martin

Catherine: Twitter is a chat room too. Just because it doesn't look like one doesn't mean it isn't. It's been a chat room for me for years. - Robert Scoble

Marina, you can use ! to exclude items I believe - Jesse Stay

Marina: OK, they are dead for a lot of things that they are being used for today, but not totally dead. :-) - Robert Scoble

Dead or dying? I'm usually late to most trends so if I haven't started yet it's probably not dead. Maybe. - CAJ, somewhere else

Marina: notice how i changed the headline here to be more accurate. That's something you can't do on Twitter, either. (refresh this page). - Robert Scoble

Robert: Touche! But its a very big room... and this is a dedicated closet - Catherine Ventura

Robert I don't understand this. maybe it's late and I'm being silly but hashtags are to bring together lots of people in one place. this is a single thread, started by you. - Jonathan Hopkins

Catherine: Oh, we can start lots of offshoots. - Robert Scoble

Jonathan: this is lots of people "in one place." No difference. This is like me saying "here's a hashtag" let's talk. - Robert Scoble

Posted my thoughts on this: http://coldacid.net/blog... (Did I beat you to it, Robert?) - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

It's machine language. Don't understand why people use it -- Twitter's trend algorithm catches keywords with or without hashtags. I just do it because it's funny. #WhoCares. :) - Mona Nomura

but it's a place created by one person. hashtags help create a single place, created by lots of people no? - Jonathan Hopkins

I'm digging this live view can't wait till it's out of beta! - Bryan Lee

Jonathan: OK, I get that. So, go start another thread on friendfeed and post the URL here. Now we'll have two places all tied together. No hashtag needed. - Robert Scoble

I agree w/ Brent that Twitter should just include a field for 2 or 3 tags and not count it toward the 140 char limit. I guess this would break the SMS functionality though. Then again, they're not clickable in text messages so they're just taking up space in most SMS messages anyway. - Jeremy Armer

Chris: you beat me. I might not even do a blog post. :-) Maybe blogs are dead too! :-) - Robert Scoble

Since we ARE talking hashtags, one thing I WOULD like to see is something in the Twitter system NOT reading anything hashtagged as part of the 140-character limit. Again, where that helps is in emergency uses of Twitter and other micro-blogging apps. More room for the real information, and meaning you could use more than one hashtag. Anyone thought of that before today? - George Hall (Australia)

Jeremy: Twitter will never do THAT. Why? Because it makes Twitter far more complex. - Robert Scoble

George: that would be a cool way to handle hashtags. Too bad that Twitter is still chasing scaling problems and not able to use its developers for building new features. They will fix that eventually, though. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Agreed, simplicity is Twitter's "killer app". - Jeremy Armer

Robert: Blogs aren't dead, yet. Wait for FriendFeed to uncap the length of a post and add inline links and images. :D - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

;-) For sure - but then I have to post the URL back in here - a hashtag does that automatically. with or without the # - having one word to unify distributed content is useful right? focus should be on search and the language we are creating together on here. friendfeed, twitter, whatever - this is all the groundwork for the language of the live web, no? PS good chat, loving this view on FF - Jonathan Hopkins

ROBERT! LOL!! - Mona Nomura

Robert: And I'd suggest write up a post anyway. You do a much better job at blogging than I do, and probably have a different viewpoint. Even if it's only a little different, it helps expand everyone's view of the matter. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Robert, you hit the nail on the head. Anytime Twitter is used for anything other than sending and replying to messages, it complicates the intended simplicity. I've only seen hashtags work great in intimate settings, but on bigger scales, it loses it's desired effects. - Mike Lewis

Jonathan: You have a point there. The "@user" convention has spread far beyond Twitter. - Jeremy Armer

Hash tags are still useful on Twitter because not all posts concerning a particular subject contain the subject in question. Not everybody follows everybody on Twitter so using hash tags is a good way to find those subjects. Smaller groups use hash tags to coordinate their conversations and make search easier. - Aulia Masna

Hash tags aren't dead. If anything I think they are growing. I've seen more people using them since the election that before. - ChiliMac

Chris: you tease you. I can't wait for the day I can put a 4,000-word blob up into friendfeed. Jonathan: you really don't need to even put the URL back in here. You just need to use the same word or set of words in the top level to join them together. For instance, why write #w2e when you really just mean "I'm attending the Web 2.0 Expo." Here, search on Web 2.0 Expo now and see what happens. - Robert Scoble

Here's a search for "Web 2.0 Expo." http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... Notice that I didn't need to use a lame ass hashtag to join together lots of conversations. - Robert Scoble

fundamentally a hashtag eliminates more than it adds. using #wine eliminates confusing a convo about wines with "love the new wine colored lipstick" - Catherine Ventura

Hashtags were always a kluge. Threading + fabulous search makes them unnecessary. - Eric Johnson

uhhh... what's a kluge? - Catherine Ventura

While I'm in a talkative mood today...giving the Australian bushfires back in February as an example, we utilized hashtags thusly: #bushfires for main general information. #vicfires and #nswfires for the information relevant to the two states which had bushfires at that time, Victoria and New South Wales. #fireupdates for more specific types of info. #firecomments for condolence messages, keeeping them off the main hashtags. We tended to treat the hashtags more like channels back then. - George Hall (Australia)

Catherine: that's a good point. But if you are talking about wine, you probably have some modifiers that make sense. So if I search for "wine and merlot" I bet I will only get back discussions about wine, not about lipstick. Also, friendfeed lets you search for "wine" and then subtract out anything that mentions lipstick. - Robert Scoble

OK thanks! - bit clearer now. Twitter does the same thing without #tags but crucial difference is the presentation of results as individual tweets versus conversation threads you can jump into. - Jonathan Hopkins

Catherine: here's a search for all items that include the word "wine" but that do NOT include the word "lipstick." http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... - Robert Scoble

Robert, your "foopoo" example IS a tag without a designator as tag. The purpose of a #tag isn't to FIND, but to TELL others where something is to be found. It's an ad hoc channel, not a query. - Shoq

Kluge = a clunky work-around. A hack. But there's still so much blurt going on on Twitter that hashtags will be with us for some time yet, I'll bet. - Eric Johnson

In fact, this item is NOT included in that search because it includes the word "lipstick." Friendfeed filtering really rocks and we haven't even started using it yet. - Robert Scoble

BUT - using a #tag is a way of someone labeling their content because they want it to be found, rather than letting someone just find it. Plus - it helps fuel pre-filtered (to some extent, minus the spam/opportunists) feeds to be mashed up with other stuff - Jonathan Hopkins

Shoq: I sort of got that. Which is why I included an official hashtag in my headline above. That way you can see that we're specifically going to tag things here. Also, it will let Twitterers use that tag and join in the conversation. - Robert Scoble

By the way, Robert, I claim first dibs the idea on having hashtags outside the 140-character limit. - George Hall (Australia)

Robert: nice, but identical to google, fundamentally, and we have to anticipate that wine is a fashion forward lipstick color. But what if it's your street name? Or your last name? Or you are mispelling the sound your children make when they want to watch TV? I wouldn't write off the power of the "secret decoder ring" magic of a hashtag just yet... - Catherine Ventura

Jonathan: if I want you to find a conversation about wine I bet it will be found if I just discuss wine. Here, let's see if this works. Damn, it does work: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... - Robert Scoble

so wine is the hashtag (just without the #) ;) . . . . . - Jonathan Hopkins

Catherine: well, if I do a search for wine and find lipstick I know something is wrong and Google has already trained me to try a different search. :-) How many people know how Google works? Billions. How many people know about hashtags? Maybe 20 million. - Robert Scoble

And thanks for saying "doesn't mean it's dead." But anyway, so if the tag does dual duty, it's not dead, but merely being reassigned to a more useful and formalized role. - Shoq

Jonathan: now you're getting why I realized that hashtags are dead, or at least, a whole lot less relevant from now on. I still might use them here and there, but I am not forced to, like I am on Twitter, to join a conversation together. - Robert Scoble

Robert: pretty good. only anomaly was an appliance list by stephanie with a "wine cooler" - Catherine Ventura

Catherine: here, let's get rid of the cooler: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... - Robert Scoble

Robert: pretty good but there were some crystal wine glasses. Still, impressive... - Catherine Ventura

Um, sort of . . . i think though there will always be a 'word' that people agree to use to lump content together and help each other identify it without question from other content that *might* be relevant. But, yep -=reckon we agree that there's no real need for the # anymore. so, it comes down to tags then - which is all over the web and that comes back to my thoughts re the fact we are just creating a live web language together here. And well done you for getting conversations like this going . . . ! - Jonathan Hopkins

I think #hashtags, like Tweets, are amorphous and will be used by people how they need/want to use them. - Jeremy Armer

Maybe it's not death but evolution? Hashtags were useful in the way they were used in Twitter (and well before that). Technology and knowhow have improved to practically make a tagless hash. I could search for the word "the" if I wanted to. Or perhaps "teh" but who would ever think to hashtag that? - CAJ, somewhere else

Jeremy: That's exactly what I think - Chris Martin

Chris: you can edit comments (or delete them) if you make a mistake. I can delete them too, under items that I started. So, I'll delete your extra one in a few seconds if you don't. - Robert Scoble

Okay, now what about getting a specific date range in FF searches? Specific format? - George Hall (Australia)

Tags define a community. Those #Tcot and #teaparty and #idol people cannot be served by an arbitrary "track" query. They are both tools with very different uses. - Shoq

Oh, THAT is another reason why hashtags are dead: they will be used by spammers. But HERE we can delete and block spammers. - Robert Scoble

Wait. Robert are you saying you can censor the comments you don't like? Interesting! - CAJ, somewhere else

Shoq: good point. Alan: yes, I can. But I won't. Can you guess why I won't censor your comments? - Robert Scoble

Cuz you like people's opinions, even if they're different? Because you're not China? I give. - CAJ, somewhere else

Robert: Because he would start a "Scoble censors FF comments!" thread? - Jeremy Armer

At least we've lost the old IRC commands, like /join #Scoble - Catherine Ventura

hashtags are often misused or abused - Kim Landwehr

Hashtags are great when you are having a conversation on Twitter on a topic. Dead? Hardly. Lots of people are just figuring them out. And while plenty of techies know how to filter and use friend feed for conversations, face it, it's the minority of users. - Peggy Dolane

You can also "censor" out/block spammers in Twitter, too. It's only on your particular computer, so everyone else still sees the annoyances. - George Hall (Australia)

Jeremy is right: http://beta.friendfeed.com/scoblei... - Robert Scoble

i never know what are the right hashtags to use - Nicholas

The spam issue is probably the best argument against them. I can block spammers on Twitter but I can't stop them from littering all over tags I watch. Nick: I never know the right ones either. - Jeremy Armer

I can see Robert's point, though. One of the things that killed off Yahoo Groups was the fact they eventually filled with spambots, etc. Now that's all you ever find in a Yahoo chat room - George Hall (Australia)

Another advantage of the known tag signifier is that people can decide on the fly what attentions they want to route an item to without an interface. - Shoq

right. the yahoo groups were fixed. less flexible. We can still, in effect, say, "quick, go to channel 3"... - Catherine Ventura

the point about spammers spoiling hash tags is valid -- however they only seem to be a real problem for trending topics, smaller group conversations appear to be immune thus far in my experience. - Peggy Dolane

George, that is true about chat, but the follow concept alters that paradigm significantly. You can determine who is in the flow, to some extent, and even enough extent for many people (as some like the noise seepage that gets in.) - Shoq

so what about 'invisible #tags' that don't form part of your 140? much like tags in blog posts only even less visible without clicking through. Other stuff could be added . . . location, mood, timezone, authority, etc etc - all improving search results using the meta data manually/automatically assigned to your tweets/comments/threads whatever - Jonathan Hopkins

Jonathan: I think the main issue w/ that is the 140 character simplicity is what makes it so customizable. I can make a Twitter app that works any way I want. When features get added, it complicates the process and narrows the possibilities. - Jeremy Armer

Jonathan, all true, but not while anyone is pretending to live within the 160 SMS limitation (twitter reserves 20 for name). That's the problem there. - Shoq

Jeremy: for sure. Simplicity is key - it's what it doesn't do etc . . . but I reckon there's a few things that will need to be done to deal with the scale and maintain value for everyone. - Jonathan Hopkins

That proves the power of a thread. It's getting interestingly long. In my view, hashtags are cool, but they're represented here as the post's thread itself (that could've been with some tagging-system prior to filtering). The hashtag could've been treated as a shortener, as "This post went to FF #ff51x32" but FriendFeed went for that by linking to the discussion itself so. Hashtags are nice to explore the twitter world as you can find, I'm sure, any of those used words for any case. - ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,

Jonathan: it's like back in the day when you called someone collect and they refused to pay. It was a free call to signal something. With an 'invisible' hashtag, I could technically write a very long tweet. #sothisishowtogetaroundthelimitof140characterstakethattwitter. :) - CAJ, somewhere else

Shoq: definitely Alan: ;-) - Jonathan Hopkins

Alan, I'd really love to see that long a hashtag actually work in a Twitter client... - George Hall (Australia)

Everyone wants the 140 do more. I think they're great. They force concision, point to payload, and all but crush feature-creep. We shouldn't call them "updates." They're "headers." - Shoq

Well, I tried #testtoseehowlongahashtagcanbeandificanactuallyuseupallthecharactersthatareallowedwillnotusepunctuationtobreakanythingupjustincaseicannot and it allowed it. Of course...I used up my character limit. - CAJ, somewhere else

twirl, btw. Jus' sayin'. - CAJ, somewhere else

Doesn't really matter if things are hashtagged or not in the grand scheme of searching capabilities. - Elizabeth Parmeter

I liked how you got that #hashtagfromhellandback to go outside the lines Alan. #nicework #deservesprize - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Shoq: I agree, w/o the 140 character limit most Tweets would be as boring as most blogs are. - Jeremy Armer

Rob: That was surprisingly hard to type. I'm WAY too used to proper punctuation, spacing, etc. No wonder I'm enjoying FF! - CAJ, somewhere else

I'm still noticing one thing with the FriendFeed searches...if I want a set of feeds from a specific date, I'm still scratching my head on how to do that. Merely inputing one single time like "Feb. 7 only brings up anything with that date in the title or text, not what I specifically want, which is all feeds in that search ON or between certain dates. - George Hall (Australia)

George: that's a good feature request. - Robert Scoble

Egad, my second bright idea of the day... - George Hall (Australia)

But it's a clear need. Can't find anything in the FriendFeed search that helps pin down specific periods. If I want to look back over feeds from all the first week of February, at present it's go through heaps of back pages or hit and miss. That's a much-need feature. - George Hall (Australia)

George: It is indeed. Suggest it in friendfeed-feedback and friendfeed-beta, hopefully Paul & co. will add it (and sooner rather than later). - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Alan: I totally understand. I have a hard time with just tweets, because I like to be clear, and as well "spoken" as possible, and like to use punctuation to provide emphasis that would be the if I spoke what I wrote. But I do appreciate how character limits get me to think in shorter, more powerful phrases. (LinkedIn profile was WAY hard to do!) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

To Chris...suggested it in Feedback. Done. - George Hall (Australia)

#hashtags are inanimate objects. how can they be dead... or alive? ;-P - .LAG liked that

George: Awesome! LAG: Oh, you... :D - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Hash Tags will continue to be useful for groups of people - paul mooney

Adequate search capabilities make any form of tagging irrelevant. - rob friedman

keyword is "adequate." I find that unless a search facility can take into account synonyms (as Google's can) it's probably not going to be adequate. My biggest problem: searching for "mission" and coming up with diplomatic missions, or searching for "missionary" and NOT coming up with religious work, but something vastly different! - Justin Long

Well only the smart people it seems know to quantify their search by using the primary search term, and then 2-4 or more words which help narrow things down. Let's not search for root latin words in google. - rob friedman from twhirl

A generic search will yield a generic result. A more thought out search query is likely to yield something specific or nothing at all. - rob friedman from twhirl

Are there any hard numbers on the use of hashtags on Twitter over the last twelve months? A simple trendline graph? - Sean McBride

Fascinating that something "dead" can inspire such a discussion! ;) Srsly though, when I came up with hashtags (http://tr.im/fj_hashtags) they were proposed as a way to provide on-the-go context with zero overhead. If your tag got picked up and used, great! If not, welcome to the longtail! I find hashtags useful in heterogeneous/cross-network situations --or via SMS when conference wifi sucks. They were never intended as a final solution, but as a convenient, transparent stop-gap, still find them useful. - Chris Messina

Also, consider how #pman was used to stage protests in Maldova: http://tr.im/maldova. They didn't use FriendFeed groups for that. - Chris Messina

I'm quite happy to do a search w/o hash tags. Sometimes, I have to OR several possible terms, but it doesn't particularly bother me. - Seth Greenblatt

Hashtags can be useful for including descriptive metadata about text which is not evident in the text itself. There are many valuable uses that should be evident if one gives the matter a moment's thought. - Sean McBride

By the way, where's that guy who thought nobody uses FriendFeed? He's proven wrong again. Do we have a hashtag for him? - George Hall (Australia)

George: #arringtonyoufool :D - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

The best reason to use hashtags are for sarcastic remarks #Icantfindmysockssoitmustbemonday - Matthew Sauer

Matt: we need you in the #hashtagmafia #natualhashman #jointhefun - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Chris Messina--thanks for jumping in with some sanity. ;-). Trying to make a call on what's dead is dead, so lets stop. As long as 140-character text messages continue to dominate and grow, hashtags will always be around. Folks like to annotate (that is, add metadata) things and hashtags are a lightweight, simple way to do that. If anything, Maldova should be a wake-up call regarding this. Hey--what about best practices about how, when and when not to use hashtags? - Albert Willis

Whoa! Slow down the # hate train! While I acknowledge that its a lazy way of finding and grouping content for human search and consumption, I use them extensively within the enterprise to aggregate content for knowledge management purposes. Lets not start the "just say no" campaign just yet. - jcunwired

It's not about #hashtags, it's about structured metadata for the Semantic Web, of which hashtags are just a small subset and primitive type. Why Robert Scoble is probably wrong about this: let him name a search engine which can identify and separate the pro-hashtag from the anti-hashtag comments in this discussion. #hashtags+ - Sean McBride

Ok so if they're dead then why are people still using them? And is there really a replacement that can work just as well? (No, friendfreed groups don't count since it's outside of Twitter). Twitter Search does to some degree, but hashtags are great to group content that may not have mentioned a searchable term otherwise. - R. Alexander Spoerer

I think short and useful hashtags will be great for taxonomy of microblogging. - Alp

I think hashtags are what FF needs to incorporate to make the filters truly useful. Allow community tagging (with approval) and you get more useful organizing of data. Search for Roku vs. #Roku to get an idea. - Kevin Kuphal

"Rooms" can be used for tagging. Any message can be addressed to one or more rooms as well as your public feed. FriendFeed is different from Twitter in the sense that you can post messages to rooms without posting it your own feed. On Twitter, everything appears in your own feed. It's a must. - Meryn Stol

sms compatible public micromessages are the tightest, most basic communications platform we have. it is only going to become more ubiquitous. in-line tags indicate relevance, and allow for permission-less participation in something while you are typing. they are human-prefiltering and they can be used anywhere you type. this is only going to become more important overtime. this is standards level not service level issue. search and in-line tags will co-exist and integrate together. - Michael Lewkowitz

Excellent analysis by Michael Lewkowitz. Robert needs to reexamine this subject. - Sean McBride

oh I thought hashtags were being celebrated in growing semantic web - is that not the case any more? #hashtagsaredead - Julian Edward

Julian -- Robert had a sudden gust of "inspiration." :) - Sean McBride

I didn't know people were using hashtags for conversations. What I like tags for is so you can browse a pre-existing taxonomy of what people find important at a concept level. Tag clouds. You can't do a general word cloud because there's too many and it takes too much semantic knowledge to map to equivalence classes. By a community using RoR, for example, as a tag then you can browse and easily find all Ruby on Rails posts without already having to know all possible forms of RoR. - Todd Hoff

I think its on the way but we're not there yet. If you search for a term on twitter and dont use a hash, then you will get thousands of minor relevant terms. Using hash tags at least lets the educated user let you know the central theme of the tweet. (i really do hate that term, so i must be getting old). Sites like friendfeed are setting the standard for true real time search... more... - James Ketchell

Hashtags cut through a massive amount of irrelevant clutter. - Sean McBride

In an extremely inefficient way that also looses a lot of relevant items. - JP Maxwell

It doesn't lose any relevant items -- one is free to search on the full text of documents in tandem with metadata. - Sean McBride

Hashtags aren't necessary in a world of full-text indexing, but they impose a small amount of keyword discipline. And they make it a lot easier to track a multi-part conversation. I think as Twitter grows they become much more useful. - Jeff Newfeld

So I guess what we're agreeing here is that hashtags are de-hashed, we use tags or keywords. Just like we did before Twitter appeared. - Jon Lebkowsky

I agree with jeff. It differentiates text search from what the actual content is about. I don't wanna search all text, justbyhose conversations that are relvant to this subject. And follow Friday is an excellent example of this. - Roberto Bonini

To many people are looking at hashtags in the context of a a FriendFeed user. But hashtags are only relevant in the Twitter world. A # tag give a 1 charecter symbol letting whom ever is reading the tweet that the following charracters represent a search/subject term. This prevents confusion. Look at it this way if I ending a tweet with "Robert Scoble" people might thing I'm directing my... more... - ChiliMac

Wow so much to sort through however I have to completely disagree in the context of Twitter usage. IMO, hashtags are not dead. Their use and purpose has just evolved. They are no longer relevant for search however are a mechanism for grouping. Pitch a topic and a hashtag will naturally form to focus the topic and keep conversation on point. - Rob Jensen

I think they just help people search. Click on the hashtag and see the search. Otherwise keywords are searchable in any event with the hashtag. - Bill Romanos

tags won't die. hashtags might, tho. - MikeAmundsen

I keep forgetting to use hashtags. People should just search for keywords of interest to them. - Morton Fox

A recent hashtag, #iagaymarriage, is being used effectively for information exchange, meetings, etc. Here, it's very efficient to agree on a single term for this purpose. - Stan Scott

I never really used them. - Ernie Oporto

If everyone comes to a spontaneous consensus about a hashtag (e.g. #followfriday), it works. Hashtags start out used by a few and get adopted by more...if it's useful and makes sense. - CAJ, somewhere else

Hash tags are speaking machine language - Jeremiah Owyang

germans still love them - kosmar

Tagging tweets has for a long time been something I thought would add value to Twitter. Hashtags may be a convenient solution for some to organize conversations, but they're 1) ugly and 2) take up space. Being able to tag tweets would empower Search.Twitter. Many users may think hashtags are the same as tags, but tags offer true metadata. It would be in Twitter's interest to roll out tagging sooner rather than later imo. - phil baumann

http://hashtags.org are not dead. Far from it. Happy #followfriday!! - Garin Kilpatrick

hashtags should be dead. they're space-consuming and redundant. - Karoli

Not to mention the work that goes into making them uniform for a particular event. Small I know, but still an issue. - Angela

yeah, I've never really been able to get into 'em... the #followfriday one is the only one I've been able to ever type... - Krikit Media

I still think people are too lazy to remember to work their keyword into a post on Twitter and while this feed stream is cool, I don't see how every event will remember to create a FF stream on their website. Plus, how do I pick up on that if I'm sitting in room with only my BlackBerry or iPhone? It's kind of essential to be able to use these tools in the form their were intended at the moment. Twitter is SMS. FF is a web stream. #BlackBerry #iPhone #FF #Twitter #socialmedia #haveipissedyouoffyet? - Michael Sommermeyer

Robert, PLEASE write up a post on this and deflect some of this criticism that keeps getting heaped on me. I don't think I explained it well enough and my misinterpretations seems to have gotten a lot of peoples' knives out. :( - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Chris If you get people to take their knives out then you got a reaction. That's the most any writer can hope for. - MarkCarras

a) Threaded convos like this can be too much. This is what I expect to see when I visit a hashtag page, blog, or forum. The rest of the time, I'm content to see thoughts of people I sub to. b) These judgments seem to be based on twitter implementation. hashes ~link~ in identica. if one is used, you can click it, skim what others are saying, then return to your stream. They also build clouds: Public Clouds, Profile Clouds, & Group Clouds. One glance gives an instant feel for what's on peoples' minds. - exador23

c) I believe hashtags are just a step toward semantic linking. The !bangtag (for identica groups) takes another small step: as used, it's essentially a ~subscribeable~ hashtag, delivered real-time to your personal stream when used. Eventually I hope the # & ! will be hidden. It's the ~link~ that's important, the char is for SW. Hopefully the final step will be the SW links for you. My 2c. peace. - exador23

sorry. figured I should give an example. Imagine the ! and #'s are gone & you just have the links: http://identi.ca/notice... And how useful is it to have metadata like this when considering if you want to follow someone: http://pikchur.com/iso Note these clouds evolve continually & each tag is a link. - exador23

Curious. Considering Jeremiah's point about writing machine language and Robert's suggestion that hashtags are dead (in the context of search), should @replies also be killed off? I mean, the @username convention is useful, but super nerdy. Shouldn't we just move to full/real names? - Chris Messina

but both # and @ tags both show intention, which natural language doesn't. - ryan

Shey, Jamaican of FF

Always check your children's homework

November 28, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Jemm, Roney Smith, Nia and 123 other people liked this

(Mommy works at Home Depot, she was selling a shovel) - Shey, Jamaican of FF

31 more comments

i busted out laughing when I first saw this - Shey, Jamaican of FF

Holy crap, man. 101% LOL - Akiva Moskovitz

ROTFL - Parth Awasthi

too funny. - Jasmin Smith

Oh...my... - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

NOW why was Shey google-image searching strippers? hmmm - Caroline

lol umm... - Shey, Jamaican of FF

OMG!!!!!!!! that's tooo funny - Susan Beebe

OMG this is horrible! LOL - Adriana

))) - Mehdi saberioon

Hahaha :D - Joe Dawson

That is hysterical! - Aaron Schaub

bling bling! - Jeremy Campbell from twhirl

submit it to the Failblog... ;-) - Bora Zivkovic

Wow. That's wrong on many levels. And hilarious. Very hilarious. - Give 'Em DBizness

holy crap. farking hilarious. - DO ANYBODY NO MONIQUE

Looks more like a hammer... - Tyson Key

OMG.. I'm putting it on my Facebook. - Cyndy

i havent laughed like this in a long time - took me a minute to get it haha thanks - Allen Stern

Shey, if you put it on Flickr or your blog or something, we can link back to it and spread the word.... - Bora Zivkovic

I don't get .......ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! LOL! - Mike Lewis

you guys are retard i have seen this image 50 times on the internet somewhere....TIRED OF U PEOPLE GOING NUTS OVER SHIT THAT IS SOO BLATANTLY OLD it makes u look inexperienced - Caroline

Holy crap, who pissed in Caroline's corn flakes this morning? - Peter Ghosh

Caroline, on behalf of all of FriendFeed, I humbly offer our sincerest apologies for not consulting with you first to get permission to post something that you may have seen but others may have not. - Akiva Moskovitz

I’m deliberately un-liking this and then re-liking it just to bring it to the top and spite Caroline. - Guillermo Esteves

submitted to reddit! http://www.reddit.com/r... - Joshua Hatfield

lol least i got that out off my chest..akiva but 89 people? 89 smart and intelligent bloggers? content managers etc. - Caroline from twhirl

Makes sense to me :) - Charlie Anzman

LOL@Guillermo ! - Shey, Jamaican of FF

I've seen it before. Ive even posted it before ( to stumbleupon ), But that's ok. It's still funny as shit. I'd much rather look inexperienced than come off like I have that "shovel" she's selling shoved up my ass.....sideways. - Tony, Paradox of FF

Apparently, this is the note from the mom to the teacher: Dear Mrs. Jones, I wish to clarify that I am not now, nor have I ever been, an exotic dancer. I work at Home Depot and I told my daughter how hectic it was last week before the blizzard hit. I told her we sold out every single shovel we had, and then I found one more in the back room, and that several people were fighting over... more... - Shey, Jamaican of FF

I have never seen this and it's funny! There used to be a strip club in my town and the cafeteria workers at the school say a student used to pay for lunch with a lot of wrinkly $1 bills. - mandyvan

Appetite: Cee Bee

USERNAMECHECK -- Where is Your Username registered - http://usernamecheck.com/

November 25, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Chris Loft, TheHenry, David Bisset and 3 other people liked this

has this been posted before? (am on phone) - Zee.

3 more comments

i don't believe it has, i tried to check it using the search function and nothing came up - Cee Bee

I'm pretty sure this has been posted on Friendfeed more than once before - I've even tried it. I don't think it came up under Apps. My impression is that it is SLOW, but thorough. - Chris Rogers

right chris, i only checked to see if this was posted in the apps room previously - Cee Bee

bump due to duplicate - Zee.

Charlie Anzman

Is it me ... or do we have a whole bunch of new people here ??!! (Hint: When you have time ... comment and engage ... The Friendfeed 'experience' can be awesome!)

December 10, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Internet Strategist, Anne Bouey, Mike Reynolds and 19 other people liked this

"sorry" ;) I'm fairly new - at least on the active part. - Uwe Schwarz

23 more comments

No need to be sorry Uwe. Take your time and explore. Honestly, this time of year don't have as much time as I'd like to join in myself - Charlie Anzman

i dont see many, but then again i stick to some feeds and comments of few people ! - Hayk H.

I was just thinking that a few days ago. - shaun mclane from StumbleRead

My subscription rate has been getting faster and faster over the past two months. Several of those new subscribers appear to have joined very recently, so Charlie I would have to agree with you. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Mine has been too, Tina. It's been a lot of fun! - Ladybug Heather

Lots of new people, but they're not really participating it seems. Just subbing, no? - Admiral Anika

I think this may be one cause, at least from what I can tell: https://twitter2ff.appspot.com/ - Stephan Miller

Lurkers? :) - Mark Krynsky

yep, i'm a noob. - ernie yacub

Nice to have you join us, ernie =D Mind if I ask: how'd you find us? - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

noobs make me happy. Welcome to the collective - Bwana ☠

I just never commented regularly before :P - BCK

I've been here for quite a while, but I've been discovering the wonders of the real-time mini-window lately. Definitely pulls me in to the site more. - Nathan Howell

I've been seeing a lot of new people lately. Many are geeks and seem to interact with Leo Laporte, so I assumed that when he talked about FriendFeed recently with Steve Gillmor that he brought a lot of new people in. Plus, Twitter is exploding. - Robert Scoble

Like me. - Bob Maltais

+1 for Bwana's Collective comment. - Franklin Pettit

Hi new peeps. How are you? Happy Holidays! :-) - Mathew A. Koeneker

I didn't "get" twitter until I finally caved in to checking out FF ("lifestreams, schmystreams"). Now I tweet as well, although I can only bare to do it through FF, which I am hooked on now for the last week. Love the aggregation of everything, so yeah, hi!:) - Thomas Bøhm

I have a bunch of new followers too! - Drew Lucas

Welcome one, welcome all! - Micah Wittman

I'm gonna stalk you all when I get off the iphone FF to normal:) - Thomas Bøhm

Cool to see this thread take on a life. All I have to say is ... WELCOME NOOBS! - Charlie Anzman

thanks for the welcome - tina, got here via fb first stop a few months ago, didn't "get" twittter, found ff does it all and i'm running flat out following leads to much interesting stuff. - ernie yacub

It's only been a week or two for me. I've been interacting and would like to see more. FF is full of amusements. - BEX

Thomas Hawk

GM Asks U.S. FAA to Bar Public Tracking of Leased Corporate Jet - http://www.bloomberg.com/apps...

November 27, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Bob Sonin, Brian, MikeAmundsen and 12 other people liked this

"Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- General Motors Corp., criticized by U.S. lawmakers for its use of corporate jets, asked aviation regulators to block the public’s ability to track a plane it uses. “We availed ourselves of the option as others do to have the aircraft removed” from a Federal Aviation Administration tracking service, a GM spokesman, Greg Martin, said yesterday in an interview. He declined to discuss why GM made the request." - Thomas Hawk from Bookmarklet

17 more comments

Dear GM: How about instead of hiding the flights of your private jets from the public, just do the right thing and sell them off. Nothing wrong with good old commercial air flights. Seriously, in first class they give you great food, really good wine, it's a blast. You even get your own bathrooms to use. - Thomas Hawk

Seriously, who does PR for these bozos... someone needs to smack some sense into them that regardless of the (maybe) cost/benefit of a private jet it *looks bad* and sends the wrong message. - mikepk

What was it Obama said about being "tone deaf"? - Brian Sullivan

Agree with Thomas Hawk. GM is making a horribly wrong move here in trying to hide use of their private jets. - Mike Reynolds

Another alternative: Get rid of the CEO + the other nutjobs at GM and keep the jets... - Holger Eilhard

I like Holger's idea. The buffoons running these running GM and the like are completely clueless. They need to go if there is any hope of saving these once great auto companies. - Jeff P. Henderson

So... if Apple has a bad quarter (or year)... should Steve Jobs give up his jet? - Louis Gray

If apple was going bankrupt in 60 days and was begging the US government for a hand out, then yes, Steve Jobs should give up his jet also. - Jeff P. Henderson

If Jobs is looking for a gov't handout to help him -- he should give up his jet(does he have one?), his Mercedes and maybe his first born. - Brian Sullivan

Personally, I disagree with Thomas Hawk. If an executive is very highly paid I don't want him standing in line at the airport. But for PR reasons I do agree with him in GM's case. - Robert Scoble

If Rick Wagoner owned his own jet it would be a different story. It's GM's jet, they're asking for a handout, they should get rid of the jets. It is just emblematic of their problems. What other perks to these executives get that are costing the company a fortune? - Kenton

"If an executive is very highly paid".. maybe that is the root of the problem. If anybody else performed as poorly as these guys they would be out on their ass in a second. - Brian Sullivan

Getting rid of the jet would save them money and put money into the pockets of the hurting airline industry. Nothing bad in this particular case. - April Russo (app103)

Clemson's Athletic Director did the same thing recently after people tracked the athletic dept. plane going to interview coaching candidates for the football team. - Jeff Quinton

They are only sour cos they got caught out using such excess at a bad time. No one gives a 3 monkeys when companies are doing well, but going cap in hand for moolah in a private jet was sheer madness. Perception is reality. They need to start making competitive cars instead of frittering $ on executive benefits. - Sally Church

It's the board and the shareholders that strikes these deals. It's just like it's them that struck the deals with the unions. They let it happen, now they should pay the price. - John Rubier

Being broke ain't no fun is it? - Albert Maruggi

reduced transparency results in increased distrust. stoopid. - MikeAmundsen

WordPress: Rodrigo P. Ghedin

Anybody know what happened with WordPress 2.7 final release? It was schedule to around November 24th, but there's nothing until now...

November 27, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

David Bisset liked this

No idea. I'm downloading the latest beta now to try it out. - David Bisset

4 more comments

I just read in somewhere that 2.7 final will arrive late this week - probably on Thursday. - Rodrigo P. Ghedin

It's released. - EricaJoy

I know it is on my Wordpress.com blog, but not putting it near any of my self hosted ones until post new year - see what gets broken - Ian D. Nock

Just posted RC 2 this week, so I'm not expecting it until next week. - Fleagle

It's out now, no? - Shey, Jamaican of FF

Steven Hodson

Don’t you get it yet? Partial feeds kill readership - http://www.winextra.com/index...

December 9, 2008 from WinExtra - Comment - Like - Share

Jarred Taylor, (jeff)isageek, Igor Poltavskiy and 71 other people liked this

Agreed. Any partials in my feeds are liable to get skipped. - Steven Perez

23 more comments

I don't mind as much but then again if the content is brief then I am less likely to click through anyway whereas a full text feed will more likely get read. Ads in full text feeds are the way to go as long as the ads aren't too obtrusive. - Peter Kelley

Unfortunately I don't think this is possible in Joomla if one uses "Read More" breaks in articles for appearance purposes in a template. It goes into the RSS feed excerpted. - Glenn Batuyong

I also prefer reading full RSS feeds instead of partial ones. The worst? As you point out: title-only feeds. I usually unsubscribe to these. I also hate when a post is really way too long on the feed. Complicated am I? :-) Now, I must admit that, as one that needs his blog for income, I see the reason behind the partial feeds. - Paul Papadimitriou

100% agree. I won't click through or share. Steven wins. - Louis Gray

I agree & applaud the Guardian newspaper here in UK for changing to full feeds. Can't believe BBC still stuck on partial. - Richard McKay

I only subscribe to one partial feed blog (that of a friend) for exactly this reason. Hope those partial feeders out there can tell me why they think that I would use their RSS link to import in my Reader, and then have to continue clicking though someplace outside of it? *sigh* - Victoria Plautia

I usually skip through the partial feeds myself. - Adriana

I prefer partial feeds for newspapers and magazines, full feeds for blogs. - Mitch Wagner

So if nobody goes to a site because they can view all the content in a feed, how does one make money? - Mark Trapp

@Mark: Good posts makes me click on full feeds when I want to see possible comments or join discussion (which shows how important they are, too) - Jemm

You make money by not being lame and relying on adverts.. it's not a real revenue stream and we're fucking ourselves by using them. Try a donate button at the bottom of every post or offer some form of subscription. You will always have a certain percentage that won't pay no matter what you do, but some will. Try to come up with exclusive content for subscribers only. I think the next big change for the net will be the implosion of the ad market. - alphaxion

agreed 110%. It shows respect to your readers first and foremost. If your content is good they'll click on to your site - Duncan Riley

Isn't FriendFeed one giant aggregation of partial feeds? I don't see any full articles here, just titles, image grabs and commentary by my friends, yet it's the only feed I am glued to for hours a day. - Bill Strathearn

Agree: No Click Through for partial feeds for blogs. However, most newspapers are still only partial feeds - so its kinda har with them. Agree with alphaxion on the "donate" button - for blogs.... but again I'll find that unlikely for newspapers. - Peter Efland

@bill I'd call FF "filtered aggregation and commentary" ;) - alphaxion

Doesn't it all depend on how well written the first paragraph is? I can't say that I don't read 100% of my parcial feeds. Some of them are interesting enough to make me click it. - Nuno Curado from twhirl

Yes partial feeds are silly when you can advertise directly in the feed - sean

I don't understand the hostility towards partial feeds. If it looks interesting, I'll click through. Why wouldn't I? Why am I supposed to be so vehemently opposed to the idea of the author wanting me to go to their website? - DGentry

@Bill Strathem - the difference with FriendFeed is that it is just an aggregator of post headlines and that is the expectation. FriendFeed being an aggregator does promote click through to the story. That doesn't mean I don't have a problem with it - as the conversations here I as a blogger would prefer on the blog but I'm just happy to have people clicking through to read. With headline or partial feeds there isn't that same click through. Too many thoughts to try and fit in here so maybe [...] - Steven Hodson

[..] I'll write my thoughts up on the difference later - Steven Hodson

@Nuno I have yet to see a compelling enough first paragraph on a partial feed yet that makes me click through. - Steven Hodson

@Denton I guess it boils down to available time. If I have feeds that are full text they are saving me time. with partial feeds I have to first read the partial text - gauge whether it is interesting enough - then click through .. wait for the page to load .. either re-read what I have already read to find where to pick up or skim over until I find that spot. With full text in a way I guess it is like the author is appreciative of your time. It may not seem that important but maybe more of an unconscious... - Steven Hodson

@Gregory .. that is a very fair point and one I think that a lot of bloggers wrestle with - I now I do with every long post. *I think* it boils down to a couple of things - aesthetics - a page of long posts get's unwieldy and lopsided. the other thing is that given the amount of traffic that comes into blogs from either direct links and/or search the front page is in someways secondary. So rather than deal with page load times with full text post on the main page make sure long posts don't add to the prob. - Steven Hodson

Mark, you could include nonobtrusive ads at the end of your full feed posts. - Philipp Lenssen

Appetite: LouCypher

Twitter-to-FriendFeed - https://twitter2ff.appspot.com/

December 9, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Jennifer Lindsay, Jonathan Belgourari, Enrique Gutierrez and 82 other people liked this

Twitter-to-FriendFeed Contact Sync is a simple, but useful tool to find Twitter buddies who are on FriendFeed. If you're considering FriendFeed, this is a great way to automatically populate your subscriptions list with people you may already be following elsewhere. [via Webware http://news.cnet.com/8301-17...] - LouCypher

23 more comments

Awesome tool! Great job! - Glenn Batuyong

awesome, i'll check this out. Thanks for the link :) - Michael

The tool I always been looking for,,, but is it secure? - Farhad Jafari

wow ... Im trying it ... - johnpiercy

Awesome! - Iván Abrego

I'd used this some months ago but I'm really glad I re ran it. Found lots of people that Twitter had unfollowed. Thanks for the reminder. - Keith - @tsudo

@farhad well, I don't store any credentials and all communication is over SSL. But I'm sure I could do more. - Carter Rabasa

I dig it. Thanks! - Josh Haley

Synced, - Christian Burns

Nice improvements the last day or so. :) Many people listed I'm already subbed to on both, with an active Subscribe button for 'em, tho...? - abacab

@abacab that is strange :( what happens when you click to subscribe/follow? i'll have to look into this... - Carter Rabasa

After I subscribe to tweeple through Friendfeed, I'm more likely to continue following them on Twitter. - Bernie Goldbach

tweeple, what is that, Bernie? - Kol Tregaskes

Cool tool, Carter, thank you. - Kol Tregaskes

very very cool, I'd never find some of the people I followed today, love keeping things in sync - Dobromir Hadzhiev

same here, I see many people I already follow on both services and next to them the 'follow' button. I tried to click it and it just turns into 'following' and is no more clickable, but nothing happens as I already followed them. - Flavio

I found Chris Coyier's FF profile! And I was think that he doesn't have FF account... Thanks to this tool! - Kristian Salonen

Excellent stuff!! - Sarah Perez

I tried this and got a long list of people I'm following on Twitter *and* subscribed to on FF, yet it shows a "follow" button next to their name. - Carlos Granier-Phelps

Mine had no links to people im already following on both. Few people came up that i dont follow on FF though which was good. - Simon Wicks

I used this yesterday and added about 100 people that I follow on FF but not previously on Twitter. Thanks, Carter! - Anthony K. Valley ©

@flapic @Carlos Ok, it seems I need to look into this. Thanks for the feedback. - Carter Rabasa

synced, really good tools - Andrea Romoli

@Carter: FF remote key should be opened in a new window. See http://friendfeed.com/api... - LouCypher

Appetite: SnakeDoc

TweetDeck - http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

November 20, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Neal Jansons, Paul Papadimitriou, Adarsh and 51 other people liked this

Awesome !! Twhirl on steroids. TweetDeck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. The default columns can contain All Tweets from your timeline, @replies directed to you and direct messages. The GROUP, SEARCH and REPLIES buttons then allow the user to make up additional columns populated from the live tweet information. Once created these additional columns will automatically update allowing the user to keep track of a twitter threads far easier. - SnakeDoc

26 more comments

Welcome to the greatness of Tweetdeck. The last 3 version have been great improvements so it keeps getting better. - Keith - @tsudo

Good App - ♥ D E V I L S ♥

at last categorization comes to twitter, too!!! - Ozkan Altuner

Strongly recommending - Ozkan Altuner

Ozkan - really? I need to get the latest upgrade...that rocks! - Susan Beebe

@Susan, yes, indeed :) - Ozkan Altuner

I had heard people having problems with columns. I'll have to update mine. - Mike Lewis

@Mike maybe you need to update it to its latest version? - Ozkan Altuner

this App is Not Support Farsi Language - ♥ D E V I L S ♥

Twetdeck does not support to tradional Chinese, 繁體中文,too. But it has good link of twitpic and other service, including "search" of twitter. - borghrose from Alert Thingy

Except--unless I'm missing something--the groups don't persist. If you close that column, or Tweetdeck entirely, that group is, *poof*, gone. I really like groups, but I got burned creating one over the course of several hours off and on, went to a meeting (shutting down my laptop, and Tweetdeck with it of course), and late found my group was nowhere to be found. Sucky. Persistence is surely on a to-do list, tho... can't wait. - abacab

I'd still like a Friendfeed version of Tweetdeck, too, of course... - abacab

@abacab it is called Twhirl - Ian Cleasby from twhirl

I like Twhirl, but it's no Tweetdeck. Twhirl isn't a very good FFeed client for me...and I prefer Tweetdeck for Twitter over Twhirl anymore anyway, too. I prefer Tweetdeck's breakout of columns, allowing me to organize queries, watch replies, and...track groups, all in one large dashboard-style view. Just want it for Friendfeed now, to watch lists and rooms and all that, in that same large at-a-glance dashboard view. - abacab

Was buggy at first but just came back to the latest version a few days ago and it is awesome! - Andy Lewandowski

One feature I'd recommend to developers, sync option of the groups with different computers. So I don't have to create my groups on every computer I use. - Ozkan Altuner

Yep love it, too! - Gerd Leonhard

I'm a convert. They also fixed that bug that kept moving people into the wrong groups - anna sauce

i've used twwetdeck for a while - it's the best twitter client period. performance has greatly improved as well - Sean Scott

Ok I am twhirl user and I use Twhirl for Twitter and FF. Can you provide me an aggregator for the Friendfeed conponent to replace FF? - Ian Cleasby from twhirl

to replace twhirl I mean - Ian Cleasby from twhirl

Been using TweetDeck for a couple weeks now and I'm loving it so far. - Karl Gookey

Yep for twitter alone no client I have tried can beat it. How ever it will soon need new features again to stay in front of browser based options being released. Perhaps multiple accounts like is available with twhirl would be a step forward. I would also commend @iaindodsworth for the great support he provides users on twitter with tweetdeck issues. - Twittergator

Do u include peoplebrowsr in your comparison? - Tokyo Dan

Great application that has been tested. - Tim FitzGerald

Being using it all day. More user friendly than Twhirl - just need a Friendfeed equal (even Twhirl did Friendfeed). - David Bisset (sn)

@gregory, minimize? - Ozkan Altuner

The Apple Room: Amani

Hooking my Apple up to all my video/audio sources in my house - http://store.apple.com/us...

November 29, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

michael sean wright, David Bisset, spin and 3 other people liked this

So here is my question. What is the best way to hook my stereo up to my Macbook Pro so that I can play my itunes from the MB onto my stereo? I also have intentions of hooking my MB Pro up to my HD TV on the wall. Is there a wireless way to do this? I bought this cord to start off with although I still need to do the audio. What would you do in my shoes? Apple TV a worthwhile option? - Amani from Bookmarklet

2 more comments

You could buy a cheapo Airport Express and put it next to your stereo and wireless stream. You can also just buy a long headphone -> RCA jack. As for the TV, I bought a Mac Mini for each of my tvs. I would prefer to use Apple TVs (to save money) but there are some features that I 'need' a full mini on the tv to use (like livestation and other streaming programs) - Andrew Leyden

@ Andrew - So, tell me more about the Mac Mini's. I don't know much about them. How do you use your TV like a livestation? Sounds interesting. - Amani

The Mac Mini is a fully functioning Mac. It's about the size of a hardback book (smaller actually) and quite a few folks have turned them into Home Theater PCs (check this blog--http://www.machtpc.com/). Basically with an HDTV / DVI input you hook up the mini, enable screen sharing and install whatever--Joost, Livestation, etc. You can also play VIDEO_TS files (i.e. ripped DVDs) which is something you can't do on an Apple TV (you have to export it and resave). Anyway, basically turns each TV into a Mac. - Andrew Leyden

Sarah Perez

Plurk-Inspired WordPress Theme Found - http://microblink.com/2008...

November 29, 2008 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

David Bisset liked this

Tim O'Reilly

New blog post: Why I love Twitter: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008...

November 29, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

James Holcomb, Derek Coatney, Ed Dale and 20 other people liked this

I saw your interesting Tweet about why you love Twitter article http://tinyurl.com/66buku first on FriendFeed, which is funny. - Robert Scoble

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Yes, same here, saw it on FriendFeed first. Also, interesting that O'Reilly went from like (in the URL) to love (in the title). Guess he fell in love while writing it up ;) - AJ Kohn

"I don't have time to wade through the comments" - That's kind of boring. - Todd Hoff

todd: I knew someone over on FriendFeed would see that. But I understand what he's saying. - Robert Scoble

I guess @timoreilly is only interested in letting people know what he thinks and does, instead of interacting with them. it makes sense why he likes Twitter and not Friendfeed then. - Alejandro

he's a ceo of a big powerful co. he likes to tell people what to do and then disengage. maybe not right, but generally the only way to be a ceo of a big powerful co! - Brendten Eickstaedt

well said, well said - Jason Calacanis

Sarah Perez

Google Knows Where I Am and Everything Else I Do - http://www.centernetworks.com/google-...

November 30, 2008 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

David Bisset and Allen Stern liked this

Dave Winer

RSS is more popular than Twitter, but Twitter is about to catch up - http://www.google.com/trends...

November 22, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

susan mernit, Dave Martin, Mike Elliott and 47 other people liked this

One could make the argument that searching for RSS is as useful as searching for HTML or word processing. It just quietly does its job. - Louis Gray

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One could also make the argument that they're kind of related. - Amyloo

what louis said - mike "glemak" dunn

The problem is marketing - no one in the early/late majority even knows the term RSS to look up. - AJ Kohn

It's not a problem. As Louis says, you don't need to know what HTML means to use the web. Technology has its place, but it doesn't have to be in your face. :-) - Dave Winer

@Dave: I'm not saying it has to be in your face, but RSS isn't an easy concept IMO, particularly since you have multiple readers from which to choose. Digest. Delivery. On-demand. I think all would be more accessible to early/late majority folks. I love RSS so I'd like to see it gain greater usage. - AJ Kohn

What's even more interesting for me: it shows how far behind Germany is, even behind Netherlands, Sweden etc. - Frank S.

Anybody know what the latest RSS adoption stats are? I'm looking at a new survey of the audience I serve in my day job (safety managers), and I'll be curious to compare what they said about RSS to a more general audience. Figures for my study (still preliminary) show about 60% never heard of it. Interestingly, it's not the youngest managers who are more aware; 41-50 year olds are most up on it. (BTW I never think these end-user figures mean much; more of the power of RSS happens behind the scenes, IMO.) - Amyloo

@Amyloo: Do you have a link to your study? I'd be interested to see the numbers. - AJ Kohn

No link yet. Responses still coming in so no report. - Amyloo

Here is one item I don't get. I have met almost no teenagers who have heard of twitter, much less use it. I don't get it - these kids send 1000+ messages a month and twitter is foreign. - tim

tim - im, sms & facebook are their tools of choice - twitter is seen as lame, my two teen kids are on twitter but could care less about it, one of my son's though is on friendfeed & actively uses it but he's a comp-sci geek ;) - mike "glemak" dunn

oh yeah - i could care less about twitter too :-p - mike "glemak" dunn

glemak, I've noticed that about kids, too. Those who do know about it associate it exclusively with the original "What are you doing?" purpose and roll their eyes at me for using it. - Amyloo

tried to get both the 22 & 19 to use Twitter. they like it, but in the end their social graphs are in Facebook & Myspace, so the big question is "what's the point, there's nobody on Twitter". The constant discovery of new people online does not really have a corollary in FB, so they don't see that value (yet). - Mark Schulz

yeah mine are 19 & 16 - facebook is their preferred "friend" & "status" environment & they tend to know most in meatspace too, which is different than the percentages of twitter & friendfeed users i'd imagine, it is for me at least... - mike "glemak" dunn

There could be false positives here since RSS is a political party in India. This is more accurate. http://www.google.com/trends... - Steve Rubel

Twitter is a funny word; RSS is an acronym for a protocol. Funny wins. - Cliff Gerrish

Louis Gray

One Year Later, Too Many People Are Still Using TinyURL - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...

November 27, 2008 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Nicholas James, Andy Davies, Jon McCoubrey and 28 other people liked this

What is the preferred alternative to TinyURL that you use? - Amani

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Fine, I'll use bit.ly, though I don't really see the big deal. - Pete Delucchi

Done. - Lisa L. Seifert

I really don't see the issue -- unless you are providing your own service -- each of these is about as likely as the other of failing. Stopping using one and using another doesn't really solve any problem. - Brian Sullivan

I had never run into the problem and I always use tinyurl. - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

I use TinyURL as much as I can. is.gd fills in during times of slowness. - Louis Gray

slow news day? - Allen Stern

Tr.im - Sweyn Venderbush from twhirl

every1 try http://urlborg.com it's a friends project with more than bit.ly's features and a very rich API! just visit and see :) - Apostolos Papadopoulos

I only use it for stuff on Twitter and FF. If the link gets broken it's not the end of the world. If it is critical then I wouldn't use any of these services. - Kenton

Cli.gs rules. - Svartling

I use is.gd because it's so short. - Martin Bryant

http://MooUrl.com - Susan Beebe

+1 for tr.im. Best name by far. But I am biased. - Gersham Meharg

When anyone else comes out with a Firefox plug-in, I'll change. Until then... - Robert Worstell

UrlBorg - Morton Fox

Didn't one of those services die? I'm going to use what's popular, in the hopes that it will be more likely to survive than its upstart competitors. - MiniMage TKDteacher of FF

I'm a tr.im guy - Abbas Haider Ali

I love Bit.ly analytics are the best part about it, using the bookmarklet and support and TweetDeck are also great. - Mark Krynsky

I was using is.gd for a while until I heard about bit.ly. It has many more features. The best I can tell of all URL shortening services. tr.im looks cool but it does not have enough features to make me want to switch from bit.ly. Yet. - Rolf Schewe

Oh and tr.im is a great name. - Rolf Schewe

Build your own: http://thesidepath.com/ Also, agreeing with the comments on the article - switching services does nothing to solve the problem (in fact, if you use an alternative and they disappear, it makes it much worse). - flammable

I hate the URL shortening sites that do /not/ offer a "preview" feature like TinyUrl.com does. - Dylan Bennett

Startup Success: Zee.

Just switched all our projects over to Redmine.org from basecamp. Will let you know how it goes...

November 20, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Andrew Badera, Bill Sodeman, Kenton and 5 other people liked this

I really like redmine more simple than trac - Sebastian Wain

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I use Jira also. - imabonehead

how much time it takes to have jira running and setted up? - Sebastian Wain

Sebastian, I use the Jira Enterprise where I had to set it up in my own instance of Tomcat. It took several hours to install and configure it. So it varies on your skills and how you want to deploy Jira as it has many options. - imabonehead

I'm definitely a fan of RedMine, but my problem with it (and Trac) is that it tries to be too many things. At least with Basecamp and JIRA they are really good at one or two things. - Ryan Twomey

I like (and work for) nokahuna.com - that does defenitely not try to be too many things and is way simpler than TRAC and co.. - Alexander Kohlhofer

We're just in the process of implementing JIRA. It will take us months to implement it completely. - Kenton

Twitter: Kathleen Anderson

Twitter is not a chat: desktop wallpaper - http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecl...

November 27, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

bemyax, Tyson Key, black_hat and 7 other people liked this

it's not? - Valley

6 more comments

It's not. - teh Dork Knight aka Kenny

of course not ... - johnpiercy

LOL...I'm still trying to get the @reply ratio down. - Valley

Twitter is not a chat - it is a tweet! :) - Laurie DesAutels

It's a tweet :) - Laurie DesAutels

how tweet xD - Goktug Okan Oguz

Love it! - k00pa

Robert Scoble

Social Network Advertising, Part II http://m.kyte.tv/ch...

Social Network Advertising, Part II http://www.kyte.tv/ch/6118/279600

November 26, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Nicholas James, Susan Beebe, Wayne Sutton and 5 other people liked this

again, not anything that ppl in the FF/Twitter world don't already know but def worth the watch - stanleyyork

facebook needs to integrate their instant chat into some type of application/fan page. i know theres a program for this, but anybody who belongs to the LOST fan page or downloads a LOST app, they can chat during the show. they should build smaller communities w/in facebook around multiple tactics such as instant chat, fan pages, applications, photos, etc....there's obvious benefit for... more... - stanleyyork

slashdot

At Atlantic Records, Digital Sales Surpass CDs - http://slashdot.org/article...

November 25, 2008 from Slashdot - Comment - Like - Share

David Bisset and Robert Scoble liked this

Robert Scoble

WordPress top developer Donncha O Caoimh is now on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/donncha I can smell new WordPress features already! :-)

November 25, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Nicholas James, Donncha O Caoimh, Langley Zhu and 22 other people liked this

He lives in Cork, Ireland, and is one of the top developers in the world. Little known fact, I kissed the Blarney Stone with him. True story. - Robert Scoble

15 more comments

Coool! You're bringing lots of great folks to FF, thanks!! :) - Susan Beebe

Pics or it didn't happen :) - Susan Beebe

You believe pics? :) - Robin Monks from IM

Susan: I gotta find some. http://scobleizer.com/2005... is the blog post I did. Here's a photo after we kissed the Blarney Stone: http://inphotos.org/donncha... - Robert Scoble

Wow...his last name is a tongue twister ! - Dana Fosburgh

Is that "top developers in the world" rating on the scobscale? Just curious. - ·[▪_▪]·

Another little known fact, Donncha had worked for Mullenweg for a few months when I met him in Cork, Ireland. At one point while we were walking around the Castle he turned to me and asked "so, what's Matt really like?" Turns out he had never met him. I thought to myself that the Internet had brought us a wild world where we could work for people we had never met, even in a startup. - Robert Scoble

You kissed his Blarney Stone? On the first date? - Mitch Wagner

*_*: it's peer reviewed. Lots of people tell me that Donncha is one of the best. I can't argue with the value the Automattic team has delivered, either. When I walked into the Speaker of the House's office, what did I see being used there? Wordpress. That's pretty damn cool. - Robert Scoble

wow, that is pretty wild, i.e. not every meeting your management folks in person. - Susan Beebe

Mitch: I guess you could say that! :-) - Robert Scoble

Susan: he met Matt a few weeks after I met Donncha. - Robert Scoble

Nice. Subscribed! :-) - Josh Bancroft

So this is why I got so much attention today, thank Robert! - Donncha O Caoimh

Donncha - Yup Blame Scoble!! you learn fast! :) - Susan Beebe

Surely such an accomplished and talented photographer should have a profile picture - hint :-) - Andy C

Appetite: Carlos Granier-Phelps

Parallels Desktop 4.0 or VMWare Fusion? Which is it?

Mac Virtual Machines and Virtual PC. Automation and Virtualization Software for Desktops, Servers, Hosting, SaaS - Parallels - Mozilla Firefox.jpg

November 24, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Philip J Beyer, Lindsey is Fierce!, Tim Hoeck and 16 other people liked this

Fusion for me. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

22 more comments

I've got an upgrade option to Parallels 4.0 for $39.99. Not sure how much Fusion is. Which do you like best? Looking for something that runs 3D games and World Wide Telescope, etc. - Carlos Granier-Phelps

i prefer vmware fusion. once i started using it, it was all over for parallels. just seems quicker and more responsive - Cee Bee

Why does it say "Win a MacBook!" when they're showing an iMac? :? - Michael Forian

@Michael, good question.... ;-) - Carlos Granier-Phelps

Fusion has a competitive upgrade mail-in rebate worth $30 off. So VM would cost me $49.99. - Carlos Granier-Phelps

$40 seems like a lot for an upgrade of a product I use to essentially test websites in a browser and do Windows updates. - Andrew Smith

@Andrew, yeah those upgrades are ridiculous. It's becoming more expensive than what I paid for XP in the first place. - Carlos Granier-Phelps

VMWare Fusion - Chris Luckhardt

Fusion. By a landslide. - abacab

Yeah, I'm just like Matt :) - Zio Bonino

Fusion. I heard not good things about Parallels - Outsanity

Fusion has very stable for me. VirtualBox works nicely, but the port is incomplete. - Kevin Johnson

Fusion for me. - Jauder Ho

Parallels. I've used it since the beginning. Super development times. - Brandon Titus

Fusion. I had Parallels trash my bootcamp partition and had it kernel panic. Never had any similar issues with Fusion. - Paul Grav

@Michael Forian, good catch :))) - Ozkan Altuner

Fusion. Faster and more reliable, but certainly has some areas for improvement. haven't tried Paeallels 4.0 yet. - Jon Price

Fusion for sure. It's rock solid. - Nathan Chase

Installing the demo right now... - Carlos Granier-Phelps from IM

I've been using Parallels but the latest version has been horrible for me. Not sure if it's the program or the fact that I'm running out of HD space. Thinking of switching to Fusion. - ronin

I'm on my 3rd attempt at installing Windows XP under Parallels. FYI, it installed cleanly the first time on Fusion. Parallels has had device errors, memory pointer issues, etc. Not sure what's going on there.... - Glen Mistletoe

I get errors when trying to boot into XP with Parallels. Couple errors and no boots, then it works. irritating, but i hardly ever use Windows on it, so im not overly bothered. Not tried Fusion. - Simon Wicks

So this Ad is telling you to buy a Mac to run windows on it? - CW™

Tudor Bosman

Threadless T-Shirts - The Food Chain by Olly Moss - http://www.threadless.com/product...

November 25, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

David Bisset liked this

Louis Gray

Sharing, Self Promotion Always a Two-Way Street - http://www.louisgray.com/live...

November 24, 2008 from louisgray.com - Comment - Like - Share

Anne Yurasek, Tyson Key, Will King and 18 other people liked this

Post by Michael Fruchter: http://friendfeed.com/fruchter - Louis Gray

Excellent, I appreciated the post - Aad 't Hart

Librarians /really/ need to learn how to market themselves a little better. - joe is...

Dave Winer

Why does everything suck?: Are Newspapers Reaching The End Of Days? - http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008...

November 25, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Melanie McBride, Jeff Larche, David Bisset and 3 other people liked this

"The New York Times does not have a problem, *we* have a problem. The Times is just the canary in the coalmine for this much larger and more important issue of fixing our tools. This is a problem for the technology industry to solve, and fast. Expecting The New York Times, or any newspaper to solve it is about as reasonable as expecting them to create the next great operating system. They just don’t have that kind of DNA, and we shouldn’t wait around expecting them to develop it." - Dave Winer from Bookmarklet

Andy Baio

John Gruber on the iPhone's deprecation of "http://" - http://daringfireball.net/2008...

November 24, 2008 from Waxy.org Links - Comment - Like - Share

David Bisset, Philipp Lenssen and Tony Ruscoe liked this

Appetite: Stéphane Guérin

FoxGLove is Firefox for Google addicts - http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008...

November 25, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Cibeles, cch, David Bisset and 2 other people liked this

Rob Diana

What is The Right Price For Twitter? - http://regulargeek.com/2008...

November 24, 2008 from Regular Geek - Comment - Like - Share

Hutch Carpenter, Kol Tregaskes, Morton Fox and 18 other people liked this

Chris, everything is relative. For most of the social media and social network sites, people are looking at potential revenue. The potential of harnessing the "network effect" is huge for the number of users these sites have. Granted, I think the valuations are totally best case anyway. - Rob Diana

11 more comments

Twitter is microblogging #1,so it's a billionaire. - Igor Poltavskiy

Do any of those companies mentioned turn a profit? - AJ Kohn

AJ, that is a good question. I know that some of them have revenue mainly based on ad sales, but I am not sure about profit. - Rob Diana

@Rob: To *my* knowledge (not unlimited) none of them turn a profit though a few do have revenue. It just feels like web 1.0 all over again. Grab share and monetize later was the adage. It only worked for a slim few. I know many VCs are advising to extend runways because valuations are down in this climate, more so with companies without a real revenue model. Boom, potential looks good. Bust, potential looks like risk. - AJ Kohn

Profit? - we don't need no stinking profit. Not even a source of a revenue is required apparently. 100's of millions, billions -- insane. Large, real companies barely have those evalutions. - Brian Sullivan

I retweeted this to my friends - great post! - Laura Briere

Brian and Chris, the key here is to remember that stock price and company valuations are not related :) Valuations are typically considering current revenue, recurring and project revenue as well as potential. The stock market is something completely different and price fluctuations are not entirely explainable. - Rob Diana

Thanks for the kind words Laura. - Rob Diana

Stock price and company valuations are not related? - Brian Sullivan

Brian, I was talking about the non-public companies. Typically, they are given a different set of standards than public companies. - Rob Diana

Chris, that is a good point on the Microsoft investment. We have no idea what was investment or what was "bought". I kept the valuation the same as I did from a previous post in order to provide a stable comparison. - Rob Diana

BTW - this is a great benchmark to have as we figure out what exactly will happen with these companies. It's nice to see someone put this out there like this. - AJ Kohn

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