It depends on so many factors. Your mood going in, the music, the lighting, the environment around you. Tons of factors. Its only a 2-5 minute "acid trip" really. I dont see what the problem is, or why someone would want to ban it. - Colby Olson
agreed, paul and colby. no further comment ;) - Eric Eldon
"Thanks for the input. I'd noted Sonal was at Google.org when I mentioned her position in a previous article, by the way -- which isn't necessarily less of a plus. Maybe her breadth of experience would be good for the CTO job?" - Eric Eldon
"PrivatePete, the point is that they'd be pre-populating the site, which can be good for jump-starting interaction. But I see your point, too." - Eric Eldon
"Niels, given that your business is focused on MMS, I can understand your reaction. That said, data plans are expanding in most countries around the world -- and getting better all the time. You may be right that it will be years before the average user has a data plan, but the train is only going in one direction, and it's going fast. Example:
http://business.asiaone.com/Bu......" - Eric Eldon
Dems will continue to blame Bush as long as they can. Why not? It worked for the election. It's tough to go from bashing to boosting. - Jay Tannenbaum
Jay, I'm sure some will, but I think most realize that ball is in their court now (fyi, i'm registered independent). - Eric Eldon
*open* commenting on change.gov?!? yikes. i can see where that would be good, but i can also see it being flypaper for every wacko on the planet with a dialup connection. they may need a Federal-level Department of Deleting Inappropriate Comments. I just hope they learn from others before rolling this out... or find some way to make it open but not anonymous. - Karim
Karim, I think one way is to force people to use their real names and profiles. In an earlier post I'd recommended FB Connect integration to help with that. Note that FB cofounder chris hughes has been helping lead obama's digital efforts. Wouldn't be surprised to see him involved with this. - Eric Eldon
I could also see this as an effective way for someone like PE Obama, who spares no wrath for political opponents or civilians who speak out against him, to draw out and locate said opponents. - Charles LePage
Charles, what do you mean? Don't a lot of people publicly voice their disagreement with Obama already? - Eric Eldon
Yes, but this would be a fine way to harvest email and IP addresses, and likely use the anti terrorism laws and agencies GWB helped create to find/arrest/prosecute. - Charles LePage
I would like to think that is not something they're thinking about -- why are you concerned? - Eric Eldon
i am always looking for better ways to promote, manage and sync my events. will check it out. (also, i'm commenting via IM thanks to you. have a feeling this will change my life) - Baratunde Thurston
hell yeah! what a crazy day for innovation in web stuff!!! (also sent by IM woo hoo!) - Marshall Kirkpatrick
i'm seeing events. makes sense now why there was no third party event app available on their platform. - Eric Eldon
Eric, u r seeing events? apparently it's recommended that I stay home! - Marshall Kirkpatrick
marshall, i'm amazed by this IM interface. it occurs to me that FF could straight steal traffic from twitter by migrating the conversation around imported twitter statuses into FF. - Baratunde Thurston
baratunde, yeah, FF IM is how i saw marshall's tweet about this. its sick! - Eric Eldon
"Could be. I was certainly guessing. It's just that Genachowski has executive experience -- and he's been in charge of tech policy for Obama up to this point, including the idea of having a CTO! Remember what happened when Dick Cheney was in charge of finding a vice president for Bush ;)" - Eric Eldon
"Interesting point about fine-tuning an automated way to pick out qualified people. That'd certainly be representative technocracy in action -- not a pure democracy.
Can you shoot me an email? eric (at) venturebeat (dot) com" - Eric Eldon
"The rumor had hit Bloomberg and many hedge funds. This was causing Yahoo's stock price to go up -- that's news. We skeptically published what we knew, and have since updated." - Eric Eldon
"We heard rumors last week that 34-year old Joaquin Phoenix might be retiring from film but the fact that E!’s reporter didn’t take him seriously caused him to walk off and prevented him from elaborating further (check out this vid for the entire interaction). Phoenix was understandably peeved, but now the AP reports that this past Saturday night, at the premiere of his latest film,Two Lovers (directed by James Gray), Joaquin Phoenix officially announced the end of his movie career in order to pursue music. Phoenix showed up with the words “Good” and “Bye!” etched into his hands" - Bret Taylor
via Bookmarklet
He was pretty dang good as Johnny Cash, so...right on. - Josh Haley
Wow! I would definitely buy that album! Btw, in that vid, he looked a little doped up .. or .. very pissed (maybe a little of both :) ) - Shivanand Velmurugan
@Josh: he played so well against Robert Patrick, in the "family lunch" scene (Walk the Line). I (almost) cried... - Jérôme Flipo
I wish River was still around too, though. :( - Josh Haley
To see River and Joaquin together as adults would have been awesome, Josh. - Yolanda ♥s Nuttycakes
The Sandy Koufax career model is much preferred to the Johnny Unitas model. I look forward to hearing his music. - grant
He's the one celebrity I would actually go bananas to meet. - Patricia
Rebecca, I think he was getting tired of being cast as the petulant villain - Eric Eldon
Many other actors have been able to do both a music career and act, I don't see why he can't. I bet he'll come back to acting in a few years but still keep the music career going. - Colide81 (James)
As Elmer-DeWitt notes, this analyst has been wrong in the past, quite wrong when it comes to Apple -- which he doesn't even cover on a regular basis. All that 40% iPhone production cut news today should be highly suspect. - MG Siegler
“New feature: The "publish to Twitter" feature now has an option to link directly to the source site instead of linking to the conversation on FriendFeed.”
Also, it's easy to convert the ff.im links by adding or removing a '-' from the path. For example, http://ff.im/5eY links to the conversation on FriendFeed, while http://ff.im/-5eY links to the article on VentureBeat. - Paul Buchheit
aww man, you guys have been on it! Fantastic - thank you for listening to us. - Zee from WeDoCreative
Would love an option to opt out of posting a particular conversation to twitter. Some posts I would rather stay on FF and not go to twitter (where co-workers linger) - Kamath ॐ
this is a great ff feature it let's me post everything from ff - Kelly Johns
Excellent, ta. Can we have an option to post to a separate Twitter account other than the one we use for replies? I know you can change the Twitter account on this page but it also changes the account that is used for replying to tweets on FF. :-( - Kol Tregaskes
Would it be too much to ask for a Ping.fm or HelloTxt option? Posting to Twitter is all very nice, but there are other microblogging services... ;-) - Voyagerfan5761
via fftogo
Your Ping.fm option is... to use Ping.fm - Outsanity
I'm still linking to FriendFeed. This helps to promote it. - Ryo
It seems the publish to twitter does not respect the selection of feeds. I do not want to twitter my delicious feed, so I deselected it but I still have it in my twitter.... Am I missing something ? - Antoine Bertier
"Did you see this line? "I’m having a hard time parsing speculation from sources here, but everything so far sounds plausible." I agree that it doesn't quite add up, which is why I explained my 0wn reservations.
I disagree with you labeling this "rumor-mongering."" - Eric Eldon
This is a freaking nightmare. Voting is a constitutional right, and this garbage is interfering with that right. Demand a paper ballot! - Stephen Foskett
After voting people off left and right during spring sweeps they've really been milking the final round. I can't believe the old guy made it this far. - Kevin Fox
It seems like it has been dragging on forever at this point though. I'm looking forward to it being over. I just hope that they don't end up extending the season the way they did in the 2000 series. - Paul Buchheit
@Brian Did you miss these DVDs from The History Channel? http://tinyurl.com/5sgajf They are heavy on the serious stuff but don't seem to include a lot of the drunken orgies that the contestants usually end up in. - Ryan Kaisoglus
"anon, you bring up a point i should have addressed. my understanding is that facebook is looking at something interactive ("a la the myspace model") based on what sources have told me and based on what facebook's mission is -- a place for people to share things that matter to them. sharing an internet radio stream is far less interesting than sharing a playlist of your favorite songs, for example. however, you're right that they could theoretically do an internet radio service of some sort -- just harder for me to imagine." - Eric Eldon
