I've switched and don't know that I'll be going back. Someone lemme know when beta is live so I can hit the normal site! =) - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
Mona, poster names are still links they're just styled differently so they don't look like the other links. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
beta.friendfeed is my new friend !! lots of new stuff to play with.. 8-10hrs lag with list data ..but a very very powerful feature. !! Way to GO TEAM FF !! - Peter Dawson
Love it. If this does not go mainstream, I don't know what will. - Vinay | विनय
This could be very good... but where 's the Rick Roll? - Bill Sodeman
OK: That's a long enough beta period. Let's do it live! - Chris Baskind
I want to start a pool -- (a) first blog to hit techmeme with an article on the re-design, (b) blog with most articles about the re-design (within 2 days starting now) - Wayne Schulz
Michael: if you're viewing your feed from the main address, there is a 'sharing' box up at the top, and the options (comment, photo, link) appear once you begin typing. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
click on your name Jennifer, above right - Tibor Holoda
@Jennifer "My Feed" in the sidebar replaces the "me" tab. And like Tibor said, your name works too. - Dan Hsiao
you launch this right after takeoff from scoble to berlin - coinkydink? :) - Allen Stern
@Stupid Blogger: Thanks, I'd figured that out, was just pointing out what seems like a bug in the current UI. - Michael Nielsen
Looks nice on first glance, and it seems easier now to reach rooms. The friend lists should be a great way to organize my imaginary friends which are basically topic subscriptions. The "Add/ Remove friends" link is confusing at first because when you don't have any friends in the list yet, clicking it will result in nothing (making you wonder if it's broken). The message sharing post form is also confusing because you don't quite know what to enter into it; a link, or a message, or...? The fact that it says "Share a link, message, or photos" doesn't really help. Also wasn't sure how to remove a friend from the home feed after moving them to a special list feed. Took me some seconds to find the Delete List icon, because I was looking near the "Add/ remove friends" link navigation. Wasn't sure if I like you created so many default friend lists for me (personal, favorites, professional), though I guess it may be useful to get the point across. I think I'm liking how names aren't underlined, though not so sure a - Philipp Lenssen
I love the new info bubble. Super better than the old one :) - AJ Batac (Yoda)
Looks like the logo now clicks to the Friends view, as you'd expect. Same as You + Friends. - Chris Baskind
can't seem to access the beta site: Service Unavailable
We encountered an error on your last request. Our service is new, and we are just working out the kinks. We apologize for the inconvenience. - Thomas Hawk
Awesomeness, very useful, and solves the biggest problem of noise reduction! great! - Aditya Kothadiya
awesome! Working now. Anyone know if there is a pagerization greasemonkey script yet for the beta site? - Thomas Hawk
thanks for the iteration.. it's a great step forward - Travis Parsons
like the new functions, but not the new layout, it just doesn't look like friendfeed and a bit feel like google groups (caused by the side bar maybe). miss the old layout... - Baron Mok
We need a "remove from home feed" button under the friends settings. Or there must be an option that we can choose the list which shows on main page. For example, i want to see only "Professional" friends' feeds on the main page. - Selim Yoruk
So many small details and improvements, make SO much difference. - Martin Añazco
At last, I will be able to add to my feed all the people who subscribe to me, and it won't impact on my main source of infobrainment. It looks nice, too. Looks like you guys have pulled another one out of the bag. +1 - Slippy Lane
Hopefully the Greasemonkey scripts I have installed will work with it. - Steven M. Cohen
I'm truly amazed at how good the UI is. The subtle touches like the use of blue links in just the right places or the contextual help like "How does hiding work?". Really great job. I think mioNews just became a little less useful to me, since FF now natively has friend groups. Oh well :P - Patrick Lightbody
It has a great feature in allowing me to separate different people into different lists - that will be worth the whole interface change in itself. I hope that rooms also have embeddable feeds tho! - Justin Long
FF is in a frenzy. This is 16 hrs old and 3rd on my Best of the Week. Congratulations Bret and team. - Russellreno
@Marcos: you can hover your mouse over the comment bubble in front of a comment to get its timestamp. - Dan Hsiao
"Among the policy experts and economists who make up the Democratic government-in-waiting, there is now something of a consensus. They agree that deficit reduction did an enormous amount of good. It helped usher in the 1990s boom and the only period of strong, broad-based income growth in a generation. But that boom also depended on a technology bubble and historically low oil prices. In the current decade, the economy has continued to grow at a decent pace, yet most families have seen little benefit. Instead, the benefits have flowed mostly to a small slice of workers at the very top of the income distribution. As Rubin told me, comparing the current moment with 1993, “The distributional issues are obviously more serious now.” From today’s vantage point, inequality looks likes a bigger problem than economic growth; fiscal discipline seems necessary but not sufficient." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet
"In practical terms, the new consensus means that the policies of an Obama administration would differ from those of the Clinton administration, but not primarily because of differences between the two men. “The economy has changed in the last 15 years, and our understanding of economic policy has changed as well,” Furman says. “And that means that what was appropriate in 1993 is no longer appropriate.” Obama’s agenda starts not with raising taxes to reduce the deficit, as Clinton’s ended up doing, but with changing the tax code so that families making more than $250,000 a year pay more taxes and nearly everyone else pays less. That would begin to address inequality. Then there would be Reich-like investments in alternative energy, physical infrastructure and such, meant both to create middle-class jobs and to address long-term problems like global warming. - Bret Taylor
"So his policies often involve setting up a government program to address a market failure but then trying to harness the power of the market within that program." - - Free markets and small government are fine ideals, but market failures lie in the externalities... tragedies of the commons, infrastructure, undue influence (lobbyist money, regulatory capture, etc.) and long-term strategies (e.g., alternative energy). - Logical Extremes
"Men's singles has traditionally been an upset-filled event at the Olympics, and Nadal is the first player ranked in the top five to win the gold." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet
"The problem is, the comedy stylings of most church pastors is kind of like a combination of Yakov Smirnoff and Rush Limbaugh. You either get the world’s crappiest puns or some sort of evil, hate filled message that’s supposed to scare you into attending, or a totally awesome unintentional double entrendre." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
"When something you own is necessary to the success of a venture, even if its contribution is small, you’ll tend to ask for an amount close to the full value of the venture. And since everyone in your position also thinks he deserves a huge sum, the venture quickly becomes unviable. So the next time we start handing out new ownership rights—whether via patents or copyright or privatization schemes—we’d better try to weigh all the good things that won’t happen as a result." - Paul Haahr via Bookmarklet
Discharging a volume of air takes a few 100 milliseconds sometimes. - John Lam
Extremely awesome. Stuff like this is what should be forwarded in those chain letters full of jokes. - Here's... possible248!
I so miss lightning! I was surprised that the electricity went both down the bolt as well as up it. I thought it only did one or the other. - Rachel L Fisher
Interesting. How often does lightning strike there? possible248, the is the 2008 equivalent of a chain letter, I've seen it 3x on ff so far and I'm less than half way down the first page. - j1m
"McCain aides said that the senator's journey to the Internet will span five days and will take him to such far-flung sites as Amazon.com, eBay and Facebook." - Kevin Fox via Bookmarklet
Yeah, but I wanted to talk about it with *my* friends. Is it a social faux-pas to try and enforce comment consolidation of someone else's entry? - Kevin Fox
I just noticed how useful it was for Scoble to post that crosslink here -- I wish Friendfeed would find and display these crosslinks automatically. One often misses interesting discussions for lack of crosslinks. - Sean McBride
Kevin: I don't know. I figured your friends might like to know about an interesting conversation going on with my friends. :-) I wish FriendFeed would show where other places a conversation is being discussed. - Robert Scoble
Whoops - hope I didn't step on Kevin's toes by endorsing the interesting crosslink. - Sean McBride
Sean: yeah, I guess Kevin wanted to open a private room here for him to discuss this ONLY with his friends. I think FriendFeed needs to have a construct to make that possible. Maybe my taking items like this into a room where only the friends of that person can get into it? - Robert Scoble
Robert - Kevin raises a valid point when you think about it -- no doubt a software solution is available upon reflection. In any case, I am enjoying the crosslink. - Sean McBride
So my comment about consolidation was intended mostly to initiate a conversation on the subject. Success! To my mind a lot of the value of FriendFeed is the ability to have conversations scoped by friend connections. I actually saw Michael Markman's twitter first, and decided I liked the story, and would like to share and talk about it with my friends, rather than the strangers who were talking about it on that thread. Personally, I wouldn't want someone siphoning off my conversation to the stranger conversation, because the point of my sharing the item is to talk about it with people I know. Also, in this particular case, the phrasing "We're already talking about this over here -->" felt more like an accusation rather than an invitation. Thoughts? - Kevin Fox
Kevin: get over it. I'm going to keep joining these things because I want MY friends to see all conversations on a topic. :-) Of course, if you take it into a room, then I'll probably leave them there. I don't get why you didn't just "Like" the original item, which would have shown your friends the item and gotten them involved in the conversation. What, you don't want your friends to hang out with my friends? I don't get the value of having just your friends see something... - Robert Scoble
Kevin: my thought: Friendfeed should be infinitely flexible. Users should be able to organize conversations every which way, with any level of inclusivity or exclusivity. You've got a valid point and raised an important issue about social protocols here. - Sean McBride
By the way, I'd love to debate this face-to-face on video. I bet it would get something very interesting going. It also explains some of the design behind FriendFeed and why many people I show it to say "it's too noisy." - Robert Scoble
uh oh - I'm not going to be asked to choose sides here am I? ; ) - Marco
Scoble is operating in the Walt Whitmanesque universal embrace of the cosmos. :) - Sean McBride
Marco: no. But it would be interesting to know your thoughts. - Robert Scoble
"I wouldn't want someone siphoning off my conversation " , Kevin I agree. There are topic and threads which are 'yours' , regardless of whereelse the conversation maybe happening. I would not want (a) somebody to inject themselves into my thread and hijak the conversation (b) to redirect my friend to another thread. We kinda forget our common good sense manners when we get into convos on FF. Both items(a and b) , would be considered rude inturruptions in RL life . Just my way of thinking and I maybe wrong ! - Peter Dawson
I admit, I liked this thread for the FF comments, not the article. - Hao Chen
Robert: It didn't sound like your purpose in commenting was to make sure your followers saw this conversation, but to consolidate the conversation into a single thread. Please don't twist this into a 'what, my friends aren't good enough for you?' I believe that conversational diaspora is a good thing, and that artificial comment consolidation is not. If I had something to say in the other thread I would have not had any qualms about contributing to that conversation but, as I said earlier, your comment read as if you were trying to create a single conversation and cut my own conversation with my own social circle short. If that was not your intention, then I apologize. - Kevin Fox
Actually, the only thing that frustrates me in this thread is that by the time I finish writing a comment, 5 other people have written new comments, making it look like my comment was written with the awareness of those comments. Ugh! Definitely a user experience issue. :-P - Kevin Fox
You know, I'm sure Michael Markman didn't appreciate the siphoning off of comments from his thread when Kevin Fox, authoritative Friendfeed person tons of people are following, reposted the same link. Or maybe it's good to just not worry about where conversations are going? Isn't that the value of Friendfeed? Who cares who's siphoning from whom? Who cares where links are re-shared? Oh, and hey, one more for the road: maybe it's better to assume good faith before having a public, highly visible, comments brawl. - Mark Trapp
Kevin: I wanted to do both. Your friends should know about an interesting conversation happening about that topic somewhere else, and should be able to discuss it amongst themselves too, here. Personally, you should have loaded a comment that made it clear what your intent was. If I want to talk about something with just my friends, I would have loaded a comment with a link to the original, but with a comment saying "I want to talk about it just with my friends, to see what you think." - Robert Scoble
Re a F2F conversation on video: that would be cool. I've been meaning to write a blog post on 'who owns the conversation'. I've got some concrete ideas on the subject, especially how it pertains to conversations about blog posts that happen off-blog, but I also don't feel any one person has the right to speak for others in a 'this is how things should be' kind of way. Definitely one of those social issues that is still contested because it's so new. - Kevin Fox
I actually just made a private room last night just for my real friends (in case any actually decide to join). I think a private place to have conversations is probably a good place to start for people who don't want want to fully expose themselves online. Also, time can be a limiting factor some times and when it is they're the ones I'd most like to engage with. That being said, it would be cool to view all the public conversations on a particular link, so I can jump into the best one. - Raymond
There should be an easier way to view all the conversations on a particular piece of content. FF should connect all the threads in the background through some unique identifier for the content (like the URL that this link points to), then let people decide whether they want to view just their friends' comments or those from extended community (including imported Disqus / Intense Debate comments for the same URL). - Joe Lazarus
Now we know why McCain has not visited The Internet - Shakeel Mahate
@scobleizer on the original McCain/internet piece or the discussion over comment fragmentation it has morphed into? lol - Marco
In Geoff's best McCain Voice "I need The Googles installed please" - Geoff Schultz
don't have to read the article... the title is priceless - Rob Reed
I'm not quite sure what is "historic" about a septuagenarian visiting the internet. Are we meant to be impressed? My mother is 72 and does quite a number of tasks online, as do many people of her age and considerably older. - Ian May
Apparently Kevin because Robert stumbled on your thread, he was already your friend or perhaps in some other way in your Friendfeed vicinity -- and you say you wanted to discuss this with friends -- so from his point of view your entry may have looked like a dupe. And dupes among segments of friends are indeed a problem on Friendfeed. Nobody minds the dupes we don't notice, but we may mind having the conversation on the same thing split up among segments of our friends. - Philipp Lenssen
@Kevin - allow sub-comments which are comments to comments to make it easier to allow people to talk the person who's talking. Again making this a simple UI is of a challenge as it may soon turn out to be ugly... Also, please allow to scope your post/comment to only your friend/family/colleagues etc So that you dont want every one to see them... I sort of agree with your point of the need for having private/protected/public conversations on FF. I even posted this in the ff-feedback room a few weeks ago. Looking forward to some progress in this direction :) - Krishna Gade
@Mark Trapp... thank for looking out for my feelings. But I don't feel any ownership in discussions about something that Andy Borowitz wrote. Now, if I had written the original piece, I might feel differently. - Michael Markman
@Ian May It's a comedy bit that combines a) McCain's having disparaged Obama for not visiting Iraq and b) McCain's boast to the NY Times that he's learning to get online. - Michael Markman
Andy's piece is well-written. Thanks for sharing, Kevin, wouldn't have seen otherwise. - Stephen Mack
Why is this thread being highjacked to discuss FF features?! I thought it was about McCain visitng the "Internet" :) - Shivanand Velmurugan
This thread keeps growing and still going nowhere. It is really simple: if you want to discuss things only with your friends, make a private room just for you and your friends, and post "friends only" stuff there. No one else needs to find you've created a separate thread of "their" topic somewhere else. - Dread Pirate PJ
I have a very simple model of ff, which is perhaps a lot like Kevin's. I come here to discuss things with my ff friends. Many of them are people I don't know at all in rl, but it's important to me that these conversations are mostly with the same 100-200 people, over and over again. As a result, rooms are not very useful to me, since when I comment on something in a room, it is not automatically placed in the feed of all my friends. Rooms are at least useful for finding content and resharing it..... - j1m
The feeds of people with very many friends, like Robert, are not very useful either. With so many people commonly commenting on his thread, I mostly don't remember who any one person is from one encounter to another, and for me that makes conversation a lot less fun. So Robert's feed, also, is mostly useful for resharing. - j1m
I do really wish that ff would organize feed items that share a url, by presenting them all (that is, all the ones I can see) right next to one another, or joining them into a single nested feed item, that has the different conversations hanging off of it. - j1m
I made a private room with just myself in it so I could discuss this. - Chris White
According to the article, our photoreceptors respond to four different wavelengths, but our lenses block the lower wavelengths (the shaded portions in the picture). Surgical replacement of biological lenses with more transparent ones might allow us to see into the UV A range. - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet
FriendFeed is slowly discovering all the links that I've been collecting for my future blog post, “We are all color blind.” - Amit Patel
This appeals to be in a bizarre fashion. - Jerry Welch
"Note that the above optical density is for a human lens of about 5 mm thickness. The optical density is proportional to the thickness of the lens. As will become apparent below, smaller animals have better ultraviolet visibility than humans because of their thinner lens. Larger animals have even less sensitivity in the ultraviolet and even blue regions for the same reason." - bob
And the fourth color look like pea soup? ;-) - Jim Norris
Yeah but I'm guessing the lens blocks UV A for a reason, which has something to do with keeping your retinas from being fried. Just a guess though ;-) - Karim
How would we process the data, though? (For that matter, how do X-chromosome heterozygous tetrachomats process the data?) Our retina and visual pipeline is pretty set up for trichromacy. - ⓞnor
nor, that's interesting, where could I learn more about "our retina and visual pipeline is pretty set up for trichromacy"? - Jason Wehmhoener
j1m probably has some more technical references, but I very highly recommend reading http://www.handprint.com/HP/WC... if you are at all into geeking out about the fundamentals of color. From http://www.handprint.com/HP/WC...: "Evolution could arrive at a more complex visual system, but it would require modifying a visual cortex specialized to receive and interpret the three cone outputs; adding a fourth cone would mean reengineering the brain as well." - ⓞnor
So has anyone had these new lenses installed? I thought that was a relatively common procedure. Maybe they use uv blocking replacements? - Paul Buchheit
I've heard of experiments where people (probably Army "volunteers") had their vision extended into near-UV, but with the predicted retina-burning results. - Gabe Schaffer
Cataract surgery and the use of replacement intraocular lenses has been around for a while. I am not sure, but I am under the impression that originally people were encouraged to wear sunglasses or UV-blocking lenses to block UV, though lately the replacement lenses seem to block UV (see http://archopht.ama-assn.org/c...). This is to prevent retinal damage. - Karim
There is a fascinating article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie... that confirms my suspicions that UV looks like the color white under a black light: whiter than white, tinged with blue or violet. If you have ever seen someone's clothes or teeth glowing under a blacklight, you might have an idea what being able to see into the near UV is like. - Karim
I am not of the opinion that a fourth cone would require re-engineering the brain, so much as it might involve co-opting the existing channels. UV might be perceived as a change in brightness (luminance) rather than a new color (chroma). - Karim
paul, egnor: the studies that this article refers to involved people who had their lense in one eye replaced. One of the investigators is himself akaphic and can see UV: http://starklab.slu.edu/humanU... Karim's link is good too. - Sanjeev Singh
@Karim, the problem is that the perception of brightness will continue to be needed for (a drum roll) actual brightness. - j1m
:-D good point, j1m. i guess i am thinking of UV looking "unnaturally" bright, glowing, the way the color white does under a blacklight. so the perception of UV would be of things being radioactive ;-) just a guess, mind you... - Karim
I think you might actually need to have one normal eye to see uv light: you'd need to compare the differences between the eyes and if your UV eye sees a whitish blue that the normal eye doesn't, then it's UV. - Sanjeev Singh
Well, think about how you see violet -- you don't need a violet-sensitive and a non-violet-sensitive eye, just a violet-sensitive cone, whose signal can be compared to a few non-violet-sensitive cones a few microns away from it. - j1m
From the sound of it, there is no UV cone, it's just that the regular cones are uv sensitive (though the blue more so), which is why it looks like a bluish white. - Paul Buchheit
The reason you can't "see" UV directly might be due to the processing circuitry, not the cones themselves. - Sanjeev Singh
"It has come to this: Zimbabwe is about to run out of the paper to print money on." - Anne Bouey via Bookmarklet
"As hyperinflation spiraled last year, Fidelity printed million-dollar notes, then 5-million, 10-million, 25-million, 50-million. This year, it has been forced to print 100-million, 250-million and 500-million notes in rapid succession, all now practically worthless. The highest denomination is now 50 billion Zimbabwean dollars (worth a U.S. dollar on the street). " - Anne Bouey
I' was born there and I tell you its no joke. when a whole generation of kids grows up never using coins. Its really a shame. Some of us living else where don't realize how good we have it. - Tatenda Mbavarira
@Tatenda I visited there last fall. It was sad to see the empty shelves in the grocery stores. Even if a person had multi-million Zimbabwean dollar notes, there was no food to buy. Such a tragic state of affairs. - Anne Bouey
