Dyre42 › Likes

Can it be a useful ego boost? - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Ego boost and echo chamber apparently. - Soulhuntre from twhirl

Useful. I learn something new and 'meet' new people everyday! :) - Mona Nomura

Stupid: of course. I learned what you all thought about Hillary's speech tonight. - Robert Scoble

A mix, sometimes I learn, sometimes I stroke my immense ego. Sometimes the latter blocks the former. - Mo Kargas

Both. Social Media is just a medium, in the same way that blogging or RSS is a medium. It's how we communicate and engage to find new information and people. It's not the medium, it's the message. - Louis Gray

Mona: you WOULD say that. After all, we all met you here. And fell in love with your "Likes." Proves it's an ego boost. :-) - Robert Scoble

I don't think you're really going to see people who use it as an ego-boost admit that it's an ego boost. - Mark Trapp

Those who pooh-pooh "social media" today remind me of those who dissed the early Web in 1994. And believe me, I fought lots of non-believers at that time. "The Web is just a frivolous distraction," was the main point of those who did not see the tsunami coming. The Social Web is as big a wave. - John McCrea

Well I think it's what you make of it. It can be both useful and an ego-boost. Linkedin has been very useful for me too, in terms of getting work, without too much effort on my part either. - jjprojects

John, she doesn't pooh-pooh social media in the article, but the culture surrounding it. It's a demented social hierarchy that props up things that feed people's egos over really useful social media tools. - Mark Trapp

Mark. Sorry, my comment was not specifically directed at her, but rather at the provocative question in the title. - John McCrea

RTFA. :D - Cyndy

This reminded me of Alexander Van Elsa's post.. how do you monetize off of all that data: http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2008... - but the fact of the matter is, businesses are just looking for whatever service will get them the most views. In the end, it's all about the traffic. The difference is social sites can later (hopefully) be targeted for core audiences of a product and/or service. - Tim Hoeck

Robert: I share things I like and am excited about and FriendFeed is one of the rare places I interact with those that have the same broad interests as me. I love the conversations and exchange of information. It has nothing to do with 'ego', Robert. If I wanted my ego boosted, I would be barhopping and clubbing. :) - Mona Nomura

ego boost for now, but I've got a plan to make it very valuable, and I can't be the only one. - Jason Carreira

Mona: I thought this WAS the adult equivilent of barhopping and clubbing! More fun, less rejection and no hangover! :-) - Robert Scoble

Brian: I just subscribed to you. How's your ego now? - Robert Scoble

Oh come on Brian. - Kyle Lacy

Ego boost until the buzz-words vanish. First to drop should be the "social" precursor to media. - Andy Angelos

Robert: I'm female, single, and live in San Francisco, where - mind you - the ratio of males to females is almost unfair... Rejection almost never happens, if you fit in any of those categories ;) - Mona Nomura

Think of it like high school. Let's see who's successful in 10 years :) - Charlie Anzman

I'm aging, married, male, live near San Francisco, so you can see my different worldview. :-) - Robert Scoble

both. useful and ego-boost. bottomline: just like most things in life, it's how you intend to use it. - ~C4Chaos

@Robert I don't know about you, but there has been a number of times I wake up in the morning with a FF hangover. - Tim Hoeck

Hah, Charlie: I like that. Who's going to marry the Facebook cheerleader? - Mark Trapp

HA! Hence, the ego-boost factor. To each their own, but don't make judgments or assumptions about me, please ;) - Mona Nomura

If I was Mona's age again ... I'd WOULD be barhoppin' and clubbing (not dukin' it out with Robert :) - Charlie Anzman

Charlie, I am secure with myself and who I am. I haven't required an ego boost since I was in middle school. :) - Mona Nomura

ego-help - adolfo foronda

Useful AND Ego-Boost? - Igor Poltavskiy

Jason, we're not regarded as thebible of web2.0 + that stuff we cover - Duncan Riley

I don't get how that makes it ok for you to do that which you ridicule others for doing... - Jason Carreira

agreed, nice primer - i tend not to use hide that much i just move on by since ff flows pretty quickly - i do tend to block more often lately though, mainly for those w/ high irritation tendencies - mike "glemak" dunn

Thx Aaron. Particularly with microblogging platforms, definitely, but as I noted, I don't do it for blog posts (well foreign language sutff aside) because the good stuff is usually in something someone had taken effort in writing, as opposed to say a Pownce/ Jaiku/ Twitter update - Duncan Riley

Great stuff! I do take a different opinion about duplication in syndicated streams, but otherwise very solid tips! Thanks! - Phil G

J. Phil, one thing to keep in mind, if you start duplicating too much, people start hiding you. It's why I pulled things like Plurk out of my blog feed, and didn't add Identi.ca. The irony of course is that this is suppose to be a lifestreaming service, but I think we're starting to move past that very basic premise. - Duncan Riley

Duncan - I will agree, people start hiding some of the duplicate content. Hopefully just enough so that they are no longer seeing the duplication, and they have chosen the services they prefer (like diigo over del.icio.us in my case, or mixx over digg). And if a conversation springs up, if they did the hide right, they will still see it. - Phil G

I need to start hiding things more. Also, when did you start integrating TradeVibes into posts? - Ben Parr

Here is my argument FOR duplication when necessary, and I guess I could make this into a blog post: I like an article, so I bookmark it and digg it. In theory, this generates FOUR entries in friendfeed: Diigo and del.icio.us, Digg and Tumblr. Looks like spam if you aren't filtering it, but some people will want to find me on digg, and others will want to see my tumblr. Why should I deny them? - Phil G

My "like" here actually means I liked this. The one that really rang true with me is reciprocal follows. If you don't follow me, that's cool. But it's not likely I'll follow you long. FF really is a sharing kinda thing. If I wanted broadcast, I'd still be on Twitter. - Chris Baskind

I hide everything I've read. In fact, at one point I was hitting the daily limit on hides and when I'd hit the link the little loading icon would sit there and spin. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken - that's one of the more extreme uses of Hide I've heard. But then, I guess you won't see this comment... - Hutch Carpenter

I REALLY want to see the URL treated as the top level object. Six people each bookmarking and sharing and twittering a link shouldn't result in 18 new items in my feed...at least not by default. By default I'd like to see each of those actions appear as a "comment", and pop the item onto my list the same way a comment/like would. Here's my UI mockup :-) http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Ken Sheppardson

Agreed a great article!! I am new here and need all the help I can get. - Mel Buckpitt

No, saw your comment, Hutch. Because I regularly go back and look at the items I've commented on or have hidden. I switch back and forth from "discovery" mode where I'm hiding stuff that's in my "inbox" to "converation" mode where I go back and follow-up on stuff I've seen/liked/commented on. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, but then who owns the thread? Right now, the moderator of a thread (and owner) is the person who published the item on which the discussion resides. But if there are multiple people publishing the same story, and they're all now part of one single feed, who gets top billing? And how would you handle reshares, or bookmarklet shares? - Mark Trapp

If we take the time to 'clean up our own' stuff occasionally and throw a pointer to the primary thread (like this one already has) it will help for now. i have a lot of faith in the FF gang but right now, it's all in how you use it. First timers need to learn BEFORE they drop out. - Charlie Anzman

As a strawman I'd say the first person to post the URL "owns" it (does posting an item really give you any form of "moderation" functionality??) Any subsequent twits, shares, likes, comments... whatever... show up attached to the original post. There's be no point to "reshares". Commenting or liking an item would serve the same purpose. A bookmarklet share would appear the same way (as shown in my mockup) - Ken Sheppardson

Ken - I can see link aggregation for a particular user's stuff, but link aggregation between users would cause a lot of confusion. - Phil G

Ken, the other thing with consolidation is a lot of times, merging conversations wouldn't be interesting to people. One group of people might have an entirely different discussion about the content that a different group of people may have. Merge all the items together, we all have to have the same conversation. It's been brought up a few times tonight, but every time Friendfeed takes away the control from the individual experience, you run into problems. It's what makes Friendfeed Friendfeed. - Mark Trapp

The forced merge of conversation doesn't seem to be the answer. - Mark Trapp

Perhaps there's some compromise where FF could add a drop down list of all the conversations associated with a particular URL, next to the "More" link, for example. Could list the action, number of comments, and number of likes. Or somebody could just come along and write a full blown desktop client that would let us slice/dice the feed the way we want to see it (ala email) - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, re the overall duplication: absolutely yes. I'd love nothing more than for FF to say list the primary link, the offer a supplemental list underneath of people who have Dugg, bookmarked, whatever under that. J.Phil, that goes to your point as well, although what I'd say is that although you can't avoid some duplication, but that doesn't mean you cant reduce it. If you're ping.fming Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku etc with the same message, do you need all three or more feeding into FF? - Duncan Riley

Ken - There is a point to re-shares. If we start re-sharing to FF rooms, that concept will gain more wide-spread acceptance, and possible help all of this. - Charlie Anzman

Duncan, I especially appreciated the unsubscribe without return follow tip. - Michael C. Harris

Duncan, I think the user bears a HUGE responsibility not to pollute the stream by feeding three or four copies of everything into their account (e.g. blog RSS, tweet of their post URL, FF note of their post URL, etc) and to just perhaps designate one bookmark services as feeding FF (I don't need to know somebody bookmarked AND greader shared AND dug etc an article) - Ken Sheppardson

Charlie, Good point RE rooms. Seems like it might be nice to just be able to tag an item and have it appear in the room as-is, with comment stream intact. - Ken Sheppardson

What about merging feeds just on a user's account? It wouldn't do anything for multiple people sharing the same stories, but it'd mitigate the problem of people sharing their stories to multiple services on their feed. It would still allow for water-cooler fragmented conversation, as well. - Mark Trapp

+1 Ken - Cyndy

I have to agree with a lot of what you said here, especially the bit about unfollowing people. I cleaned out a lot recently for the very same reason. - Ross Maguire

This just happened to me. There was a post with a tinyurl redirect. When tinyurl goes down, then link gets lost. Thus, duplication of the article occurs or the link gets reposted somewhere in the comments. I see this often on Slashdot when servers get slashdotted. - Franklin Naval

Great article! Agree on the duplication of content. Sometimes it's just damn hard to think of all the possible ways, that the services will interact with each other. Will do it later on this week. - Sasha Kovaliov(.com)

Very good points, especially about the duplicates - there's nothing more annoying than to see the same links from the same person repeated 5 times from different services. The one point I don't get is the reciprocal following - I do have some "friendship" subscriptions & subscribers, but when I subscribe to someone who shares good links on a subject I'm interested in, I don't expect them to follow me in return. And when someone subscribes to me, I look at their content before deciding if I return-subscribe. - Andrea Sturm

Thanks for the tips. Don't know if I could unsubscribe from those that don't follow me. I've only got 8 now and I want to keep each and everyone! That being said, thanks for the encouraging words towards the "hide" feature. I'm just figuring out the benefits of that. - James Hull

The way to do it is to click on the "Digg" button above, which takes you to the submitter's profile. You can see it there in "Recent Activity". Not perfect, but that's how I do it. - Louis Gray

weird. the story was not there when I clicked on the digg link before but now it is. oh well. dugg. - Thomas Hawk