@Mike - Louis is a class act and truly respects the small independent blogger. - Franklin Pettit

@Charlie - I will definitely make the most of the bump. - Franklin Pettit

Very cool Franklin. You very much deserve to be "put on the map". - Hutch Carpenter

@Hutch - Thanks so much. - Franklin Pettit

congrats. it was his post that brought me by. - Rob Williams

Congratulations! I was Louis Grayed, too! We should all start a club. Or at the very least, a FriendFeed room. :) - Nathaniel Payne

@Nathaniel - Thanks I like Nerdflood. Your blog is great. Yes we should start a friendfeed room for those who have been LouisGrayed - Franklin Pettit

Sorta off-topic, but I created http://friendfeed.com/rooms/lo... - possible248

Oohhh... I am enjoying the comments here. Who's volunteering for August? - Louis Gray

Maybe I need to start a new blog... - Cyndy

You will never be obscure, Cyndy, only notorious. - Louis Gray

Duran Duran style or Biggie Smalls style? - Mark Trapp

I poppa phreakz all the honeyz... - Shey

I'm fine with the icons as they are. I think a picture at that size would be pretty much unrecognizable and I'd hate for them to make it larger. - Akiva Moskovitz

no real preference between the two, but something unique is best. - felix

Person. As a matter of fact, i don't tend to believe people with cute icons. - Parth Awasthi

picture of a cute person - nathan

yeah, but michelle might not want to use her picture everywhere - RAPatton

person - dan

I'd rather see a photo, or barring that, a caricature. A random icon is kinda useless. - Roger Benningfield

I'm fine with what most people choose as long as they don't change it all the time. Cute Icons are a little easier to distinguish over personal photos. - Lindsey Smith

Cute person ... (duck) - Charlie Anzman

This is a greasemonkey script or something, right? because the less graphics I see, the happier I am. - Cyndy

cute person but if they are ugly the FF icon. I believe that is the logic used now. Jk :) - Michael Narciso

Created by our very own central Iowa friend, Richard Drake - http://friendfeed.com/richdrak... & http://twitter.com/richdrake (I'm very happy to have one of the originals). :) - Nathaniel Payne

ditto, they really do help in #tweetups, EXCEPT when ppl forget them in their car!!!!!!!! :-) http://www.flickr.com/photos/c... - Chris Harris

Here's a blurry shot of mine: http://fileflood.googlepages.c... - Nathaniel Payne

More information will be available soon at http://tweetupbadges.com - Mike Templeton

they almost lost me there... i am enjoying FF more and more - andy brudtkuhl

i like FF i think more too, i am just so loyal to twitter. wish FF came out first actually. - Chris Harris

I agree, it's silly - Ryan

-100 karma for Nathaniel! :-) - Chris Harris

Its Twitter with the ability to have threaded conversations. The horizontal timeline is hard to get used to, but the mobile app is vertical. - Mike Templeton

Like everyone said it's like Twitter with an Ajax on crack interface that is not impressive and something that I can't see lasting beyond the initial buzz it got because of Twitter's instability. - Chris Rodgers

twitter for kids or painkiller for heavily depressed tweeple - Dobromir Hadzhiev

move moves the wrong way - Marc Canter

have you ever played defender? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...) its twitter with a defender interface :) - Scott Cropper

-1000 karma for Chris Harris! (which will be rendered as a severe beating at the next dmtweetup) ;-) - Nathaniel Payne

@clarke, http://www.plurk.com/m <- mobile version ;-) - AJ Batac

its like an unnecessarily complicated version of twitter that nobody really uses - so maybe it's more like pownce :) - Jennifer Van Grove via twhirl

it's a chat-room where you can post with ping.fm ;) - Dieter Schwarz

It is a more complicated Twitter - Jared Radosevich

It's a dog without a head. i.e. a website without usability - directeur

http://www.geekfridge.com/?p=1... - Starman

As long as Twitter remains unstable, Plurk is the most Twitter-like option out there that also happens to be new kid on the block. - Scott Kitchen

It's essentially Twitter, but the conversations stay self-contained and don't send out a lot of noise to the timeline. There are toys like karma, but most people ignore them. - Starman

Oh, yeah, and it works :D - Starman

http://banannie.com/blog/2008/... - Starman

@Nathaniel nooo, -1000 makes all my plurk smilies disappear. you bastard!! - Chris Harris

Twitter is to statements as Plurk is to conversations. Even more than twitter, Plurk requires adding friends and interacting with them. This interaction is the reason so many people are falling in love with it. If you want to know more, feel free to send me a plurk: http://www.plurk.com/user/Teeg - Teeg

tried to use it for a few weeks, but the big problem is that they simply don't have the user base. you end up talking to the same 2 people and after a while, everybody is bored and goes back to twitter (if it's up). - Mark Schulz

Pluk is really twitter with consolidated replies and tweets on a timeline instead of in a stream. - Greg Hollingsworth via twhirl

Right now I have over 300 friends on there, only 1 or 2 of them are teenagers, many are computer geeks of one kind of another, a lot are experts in their fields. In the 3 weeks or so that I've been on Plurk, I've already learned more and received more answers to my questions than I ever did on Twitter, even though I actually have more friends listed on Twitter. - Teeg

Plurk is like wurk. - OpenAllNight

Plurk is like Twitter but with participation and interesting conversation. To generalize all Plurk users as "high school kids" is very misleading. If you get on, conversate and make friends you'll see what the buzz is all about. - Patrick Britton

it's Twitter with conversation that you can actually follow. It's got good search functions and none of my Plurk friends are teenagers - Sharon Hurley Hall

It's like Twitter with more conversations, more community, more responsiveness from founders, and less egos and snarkiness. - Mack Collier

"its like an unnecessarily complicated version of twitter that nobody really uses - so maybe it's more like pownce :)" Has 155 friends on Plurk, been there maybe a week. Twitter, 127 followers and I've been there for several months. Not to mention Plurkers actually talk to you, Twitterers just blab on about their own self indulged lives. - Patrick Britton

Plurk is amazing. Many of the comments here are naive and misleading, not to mention ignorant. If you like community interaction Plurk is an awesome choice. - Konstantino

It's a faster, horizontal pownce with a rating system that's very stable. - Nexeus Fatale

No "fail whale." :D - Patrick Britton

It's more fun at times. I tend to get more responses. but it's only cause people are trying to build karma. timeline is an interesting interface that allows a little better view of when in time everything is happening. - Josh

Josh, they're helping you build karma when they respond. They build karma by getting responses on their posts. A neat idea that drives conversation levels up. :) - Teeg

Twitter on crack. or meth. or your mind enhancing chemical of choice. - jane

I agree with Konstantino "Many of the comments here are naive and misleading, not to mention ignorant" For one, my teenage years are long forgotten and my plurk friends are adults with adult conversations... I LOVE Twitter for the sharing of great business information & links but you cannot have nor follow a conversation there. On Plurk you can create or follow conversations from beginning to end if you want, & some conversations are long we discuss all sorts of topics personal and or business, politics.. - Linda Zimmer

silly chat room with emoticons & reaching for a level of *karma* gets ya better emoticons. that being said, there have been good discussions there :) - Barbara K. Baker

Not to get angry, Brian, but did you read the article? Please God, let's not turn FriendFeed into Digg. - J. Phil

First! - l0ckergn0me

LOL @ the certificate - Bwana McCall

remember when all those people came out initially and called Twitter a "fad?" Lots of folks hated it. Didn't matter though it still represented innovation and to that end eventually even the haters were brought on board. Same thing will happen with FF. Gillmor is a hater right now. But he'll eventually come around. They always do. Same thing happened with the conversion from film cameras to digital cameras. It just takes some more time than others. - Thomas Hawk

your article was boring linkbait. How's that much different from Digg? :-) People should be allowed to use services any way they see fit. You get out what you put in, so what difference does it make? Perhaps Gillmor wants to use FriendFeed merely as a way for Scoble to have an easy way to see his tweets on FriendFeed, so be it! - Robert Seidman

already on my block list for his dipshit commentary on gillmor gang. - Scott Cropper

Well written article! I also have a problem with these "posers" showing up as recommended users and I also feel FriendFeed is not an application you can look at on paper and dismiss. This happens more often than not. - Bwana McCall

Sweet! My first linkbait! As for the boring part.. we will see how popular it is... - J. Phil

Boring linkbait can be quite effective, J. Phil, I suspect it will be among your more popular articles! - Robert Seidman

I agree with Robert. Back when Scoble posted numerous tweets on Twitter, people started arguing with him that he was using Twitter "wrong". His response was great: essentially, there is no "wrong" way to use Twitter. Use it how you like to. FriendFeed is the same way. What if all I want is a lifestreaming service that I can post to my blog sidebar? Does it make me a poser just because I don't particularly want to join and interact with the community that is on the service? I don't think so. - Nathaniel Payne

Bwana, so the issue is more a product development issue w/FriendFeed continuing to recommend the same people. Do you really have an issue with Gillmor or anyone else not really using the service? - Robert Seidman

Nathanial, if it was anyone but Steve Gillmor, I'd agree with you. He's not doing that though. He's hedging his bets. - J. Phil

I will preface what I said with an agreement that someone who doesn't necessarily interact with FriendFeed shouldn't appear as a "recommended" user. ;) - Nathaniel Payne

Yup. I read it. Phil. I gave up trying to pay any attention to Steve after his rude interview with Bret Taylor, who was more than courteous in his replies to Steve's leading questions. Gillmor's snobish and elitist line of questioning with Bret and others who work at Friendfeed is testament to his child like behavior when it comes to FF & Twitter. His is noise I can do without, so I have one simple answer: Block on Twitter, Block on Friendfeed. Problem more or less solved. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

So if he signed up for the service, tried it out, then discontinued using it, that makes him a poser? Does not compute. - Kirk Kittell

Brian, about the same conclusion I came to, but I thought I'd set off some fireworks first. - J. Phil

Whether he tried it or not is irrelevant... he's not using it, so why is he a recommended user? - Bwana McCall

don't look at the recommendations, the way they're are generated is questionable maybe even random, besides that the post was LOL, it felt right - Dobromir Hadzhiev

@Bwana - That doesn't make him a poser. A poser is trying to get in front of the crowd to be seen by that crowd. Gillmor isn't inserting himself in front of this crowd, his account is being placed there by the service. - Kirk Kittell

I noticed these folks too, I think "using it wrong" is a bit harsh, but all the same, I've begun weeding them out of my subscribe list. I have GReader to pull in feeds, I come to FF for the conversation. But if there's conversation on FF around something posted on an inactive users list, I'm happy to partake of it if it's interesting. Just because one doesn't like the source, doesn't mean the resulting bits around it aren't worthwhile! - felix

There's nothing wrong with just setting your feeds up and walking away. That's just one way to use this service. There are other, more social, ways to use it, and that's ok, too. Agree that what's raw is if he still lands in the Recommended list. Plurk does this, also, I believe. Who do they "recommend?" The usual suspects...which can be rather boring. It may give the creators brownie points and blog links, but little ense. I would hope the FF gurus would mix it up more often. - Jim Stanger

Kirk, then why won't he delete the account? Or stop feeding? - Bwana McCall

why should he, Bwana? Not that this is the case w/Gillmor, but let's say he just wanted to aggregate his Internet presence on FriendFeed and give that feed to his friends and family and not participate all. What's wrong with that? That will likely be a fairly common use case if FriendFeed is to scale. - Robert Seidman

Jim.. good point. That's essentially what I was thinking in the article, but I deliberately went for a more rant attitude. I just love how emotionally charged the word 'poser' is.. I didn't realize people had such different interpretations of it, though. - J. Phil

@Bwana - probably the same reason I don't delete my Hi5 or Friendster accounts: it's less work to not delete them. As long as they aren't bothering me with mail, they don't exist to me, and I don't even consider deleting them. I suppose that's the difference I would mention between a poser and non-poser: intent. - Kirk Kittell

I think your assessment may be a bit harsh. There are many who don't use FF to chat and they are not posers. We are all figuring out how to implement the various social meda tools in our arsenal and Twitter was an easy medium for chatting. I admit I initally thought of FF as an aggregator not a chat vehicle. - Karen Swim via Alert Thingy

Just because people are getting used to a service - or find new or personally convenient ways to use a service doesn't mean they are "posing." but I didn't read the blog post - so maybe Im missing the point... - Tony

Also, I'm not as closely involved in the same industry as the rest of you -- I don't have any back story to the why/why not for Gillmor. He's just a name I recognize from Gillmor Gang, which is something I don't follow... - Kirk Kittell

kirk nailed it - there is a backstory here when it comes to steve and ff... - mike "glemak" dunn

Karen - Agreed, actually I tried to say several times in my post that I have no problems with most friendfeed 'tourists'. - J. Phil

Ah. Well. I see. In that case: back to work... - Kirk Kittell

J. Phil, noted and thanks for saying it again! I :-) - Karen Swim

you could say the same thing about folks feeding their shit to Jaiku. A great deal of people set up their feeds and never came back. Are some of you feeding your tweets to Jaiku? HA! Posers. Anyway, most folks are still pulling for twitter but they want to start setting up shop over here to prepare for the inevitable. - Richard

I often come to FriendFeed to see what's going on with friends on other sites. It gives me a nice rundown of what they're saying other places and what they find interesting. I don't often come chat or vote up sites, probably because commenting here doesn't show up on blogs, so doesn't make sense to post twice and because Plurk isn't included, so the main place I want to talk isn't available. It doesn't mean I don't use it, I do and often, but I'm pretty sure I don't use it like it's "supposed" to be used. - Teeg

If you read the post, J. Phil's just saying that it's kind of rude to feed your blog and Twitter to FriendFeed and then never participate in the ensuing conversations. I think "poser" may be a bit harsh, seeing as most people haven't really thought this behavior through to this extent, but he it's an interesting point to make. - Lon Harris via twhirl

Richard, FriendFeed can be viewed as a simple lifestream aggregator, and using it as such as fine. Or whatever, actually I don't really care how anyone uses FriendFeed or NOT using it or whatever. There are three (well, four) reasons I wrote this article, to be honest: 1) I wanted to say 'for shame' to those who depend on services such as twitter and friendfeed to promote their personal brand, and they bash FF and *are using it for advertising anyway*, 2) I wanted to write my first "rant" article (contd') - J. Phil

3) I wanted to highlight that friendfeed's suggested people to follow mechanism is sort of busted, and 4) I wanted people to realize that FriendFeed has an amazing amount of potential for community building and opinion and input, and those people who just visit and vanish are basically ignoring all that. - J. Phil

@Lon Its not being rude because nobody is forcing you to care about those people. POSTING a picture of somebody on your blog and calling them a poser is RUDE. - Richard

All I'm saying is if you're going on record to dismiss a service, why bother feeding it your data or even using it. Case in point, I hate/dismiss Myspace all the time, and I have an account. There's absolutely nothing there. It's solely for squatting. I agree that the "recommended user" part is mostly a FriendFeed issue, but I don't see Gillmor complaining about it either. My $0.02. - Bwana McCall

@Robert Seidman: "Not that this is the case w/Gillmor, but let's say he just wanted to aggregate his Internet presence on FriendFeed and give that feed to his friends and family and not participate all." *Spot on!* If someone just wants a link for people to see what they're up to/have to say, they are not at all a "poser" they are just taking advantage of what the service has to offer. @J. Phil: If this blog was just a way to single out Gillmor, then this would not be a problem at all. However, if you are talking about the gen pop of FF users, I think you're off base with this one. - David Cook

David,I'm quite sure Gillmor has went on record to point people to Twitter for everything. That scenario doesn't apply here. My assumption here is that even though the title is general, it's a poke at Gillmor specifically. - Bwana McCall

Bwana, my point is simply that if he wants to bash someone he doesn't necessarily like, then by all means do it and I'll probably get a laugh out of it. But I just don't feel that all people who don't "use" FF are wrong. If you want a service aggregator and don't actually visit the site to check up on it, doesn't make you a poser. - David Cook

David, as I said in my article (and here to Karen) my intent is not to say that most people who use friendfeed (even as a tourist) are posers. - J. Phil

@David If FriendFeed were a pure aggregator (like Profilactic), I'd agree with that, but it's really not if you ask me. There's much more to it. But I digress. I have other concerns about Gillmor that are outside the scope of this article. I'll agree to disagree simply because inserting Gillmor into this situation brings along a lot of baggage. - Bwana McCall

Bwana, I see your point and I agree with you in the sense that FF *should* be more than just an aggregator. I, myself don't use it that way at all. I love getting involved, reading posts, comments, and making comments myself. It's just that when J. Phil said: "So, my advice to you internet pundits, either crap or get off the pot. Why not pull yourself off FriendFeed completely until you want to interact? I’m close to just blocking FriendFeed posers as matter of policy." - David Cook

Bwana - I agree with you here, but as I stated in the article, I picked on Gillmor (though I deliberately did not use his name in the title) because he was the first person in the suggested people to be a clear non-user of the service. I admit that using his name would heat up the discussion a bit, which is good for an opinion piece. - J. Phil

This is the limit. I need a way to filter posts that have the word "FriendFeed" in them. - Sprague D

J. Phil, "David, as I said in my article (and here to Karen) my intent is not to say that most people who use friendfeed (even as a tourist) are posers." I read what you said to Karen *after* my post went through. But the quote I posted to Bwana is what made me say all that. - David Cook

Sprague - LOL sorry for have annoyed you with my post. Feel free to hide or block as needed. ;) - J. Phil

You're on to something Phil, but I'm not with you 100%. - Shey

J. Phil: Stir it up! - Hutch Carpenter

Thanks, David. No offense taken, or meant. - J. Phil

Shey - That's OK. Remember my about page. My goal is to increase my writing portfolio. This was an opinion piece, a 'rant'. While I of course will take personal responsibility, I wrote it mostly to see if I could write it, as much of a tautology as that sounds. - J. Phil

It's social (media) Darwinism to a certain extent. Those who use, explore and excel using FriendFeed will benefit the most. Should Gillmor or anyone else decide to not do so is only really harming themselves - if you believe FF is here to stay (which I think it is.) So others will be late to the party, some too late, but others will have enough social capital to join when the tipping point becomes obvious. - AJ Kohn

more to the point, and given your own realisations on writing that article, does posing that question place you further into the realms of poser? lol, j/k obviously - Slippy Lane

Slippy - I wouldn't consider myself a poser on FriendFeed by my own definition. Now, you look at me on Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.. HELL YES. - J. Phil

I like a point you made in your post. Gillmor is not at all active inside FriendFeed (his activity comes from Twitter). Yet he shows up as a recommendation. Perhaps there is a better way to do recommendations. - Hutch Carpenter

@Hutch, yup, I agree. A lot of people don't like how the recommendations currently work. - Shey

It's a great service, it truly is, but it has a bad habit of going down right when you absolutely need it. :P - Nathaniel Payne

Why not move to FriendFeed, then? It's more "inner community" friendly, seemingly. - l0ckergn0me