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Eric › Likes
Re: Email Fail - http://www.avc.com/a_vc...
Mark Essel, Eric and Mike Elliott liked this
"Not going to work on this over the weekend But I am all ears"
- Fred Wilson
Nothing beats Gmail customized with some Google Labs addons and some FireFox addons - try the GTD Inbox addon for FireFox. It's the best thing that ever happened to me in the world of email management.
- Mike Elliott
Love Gmail, haven't tried GTD, thanks Mike will look into it
- Mark Essel
One other thing I forgot to mention is when you add FF addon "Ubiquity" which integrates a natural language command system for all google apps it will blow your mind. I think anyone would be hard pressed to come up with a better email productivity package than the Gmail/FireFox/Ubiquity combo.
- Mike Elliott
Google - Happy Earth Day! - http://www.google.com/webhp...
Anand Sharma, Rodfather, Eric and 14 other people liked this
Happy Earth Day!
- Michael Fidler
like
- Dobromir Hadzhiev
You can also see previous year logos at http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__swuGR...
- Atul Arora
This is actually a great logo
- Eric
SkyGrid -- Real Time News http://m.kyte.tv/ch...
HealingBrush, Ric Johnson, Angus Neil and 52 other people liked this
Are you giving live updates here or just via video?
- coldbrew
Only video, he's recording live so he can't chat. but he does read from time to time the kyte chat
- Alejandro
Looks interesting. How can I get an account for SkyGrid?
- Peter
looks good but only 2 invites for the scoblizer?!?!? fail! ;-)
- Bill Pennington
from twhirl
looks interesting, will be good to give it a closer look
- Peter Efland
only 2?
- americanm
2? wow... *goes to eat dinner*
- Bwana ☠
I'm waiting impatiently to find out how to sign up for an account.
- Russ Jackson
Looks interesting.
- Nicholas James
Console support? PS3 or Wii browsers?
- Bwana ☠
I can't play with it 'cos theres no signup. After all the teasing, that's a little disappointing.
- Steve Lacey
What's even more annoying is there's nothing on their site to indicate it's a private beta. Lots of "why you should join" messages and a sign in, but nowhere to signup.
- Steve Lacey
I agree the site is deceiving. :(
- Russ Jackson
More invites please!
- Steve
Agree, need invites!
- Dominic Jones
Looks like a cool product. Don't know that I'm as psyched as Scoble but it looks worth checking out.
- Brandon Titus
What is SkyGrid's approach to dealing with false/fraudulent information being sucked into the service? We kept asking that on the kyte chat but it never got addressed.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
I am twisting Kevin's arm right now! Who should get an invite? (I have two so far).
- Robert Scoble
Me?
- Michael McKean
Me?
- Amit Nangare
My news-junkie wife needs it.
- Bruce Lewis
Probably not me; I'm interested but I'd probably not be able to put it to as much good use as some other people here.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
I'll trade my top secret alpha invite to SkyNet for your SkyGrid invite.
- Jerry Schuman
So how can I get invited to this? I'm looking forward to trying it out now.
- Dane Deasy
I should get an invite. Media management student in Chicago, moving to Berkeley this summer to continue my education.
- Daniel Zarick
same question as @Chris Charabaruk :3 wondering about false or malicious or misleading information getting on site
- Kim Landwehr
@Steve, he said their new site will be up later today. On the About Us page look for a sign up request dealie.
- Sprague D
Please!
- Dominic Jones
Will the beta invites be available world wide? or US only?
- Roy Herrod
Have him give out like 20 invites and you could invite everyone in this thread! What can twenty more users do?
- Brandon Titus
they could each invite 2 more
- Jonathan
Add me to the invite list please. ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Well if they give each user invites then it probably doesn't matter who you invite, we'll just pass them around. Somehow I doubt they will though.
- Brandon Titus
Techcrunch post is up: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... Looks like you are given invites according to Mike.
- Brandon Titus
What type of ads will be displayed? Text, static, banner, flash?
- Jonathan Callahan
Brandon: Thanks for TechCrunch link. My internet is sucking so much right now I can't check out Scoble's video and I'm intrigued by this service.
- Jalada
Is Kevin on FriendFeed (yet)? If not, you should get him to sign up, Robert, so he can participate in this discussion, too.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Jonathan: Looks like text in the Techcrunch screenshot. The space is big enough for flash or banner styles.
- Brandon Titus
no way to sign up for future invites? but more importantly NO MESSAGE explaining that you have to be invited in on the site. EPIC FAIL. Even if I accept the invite premise, it should STILL be communicated on the front page somewhere.
- Duncan Riley
signup link now live - http://www.skygrid.com/account...
- Roy Herrod
Scoble beat Arrington with video. Score!
- Sprague D
Sweet! Thanks Roy.
- Brandon Titus
The new Skygrid site is up...damn Roy just beat me :)
- Patrick Ainge
Wow. [EDIT: I thought there was going to be a lynching]
- coldbrew
Robert, it would be interesting to know how many requests they got in the first hour following your video and TechCrunch's post. Can you follow up with Kevin and let us know?
- Sprague D
I like that Rackspace shirt he's got in the video.
- Brandon Titus
The team blog is password protected?
- Brian Newman
Saw that too. It appears they weren't 100% ready for the FriendFeed crowd :P
- Brandon Titus
signup is delayed, and blog is password-protected. . . lame
- Peter Ghosh
Ahh the power of Friendfeed :)
- Russ Jackson
They are just launching, give them a few hours to fix problems. So impatient! :-)
- Robert Scoble
Robert: We're impatient because FriendFeed has spoiled us with real-time. ;)
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
I believe that Skygrid is suffering from what is commonly referred to as being Scobelized.
- Russ Jackson
Very intrigued by the looks of this and will anxiously be awaiting it's public availability or an invite if I can happen across one somewhere.
- John Spyers
did the about us sign up thing, got an email back thank me for my interest, hopefully by the time I get the invite I will remember what it is for, you should have warned them before hand Robert that they might get inundated with a lot of request, not sure if they were ready
- Kim Landwehr
Blog password protected?? Whatever. Robert, I'd suggest you check a little more closely before you hype something like this. Weak.
- Ken Kennedy
Would love to get an invite when you have a chance
- Eric
Ken: I'll have them fix that later. They are in startup mode and something got messed up. I mess up all the time too.
- Robert Scoble
I'd be interested in an invite once you have more than 2
- Justin Korn
LOL...ok, Robert. So the big news was to watch some video of yours, see the frontpage of a private invite beta, and a password protected blog? *shrug* That's not too "real-time web" impressive, sorry.
- Ken Kennedy
Really interesting, to me, is the role that the quality of writing plays in the overall quality algorithm.
- Kathy Fitch
Ken: I think many of us like the excitement. Even if all of Robert's hyped announcements don't blow your mind, he still has a pretty good track record. It's fun to get excited about "the next big thing." Now that we have lost Apple keynotes and possibly the showmanship of Steve Jobs, I'll take excitement about tech announcements any way that I can get it.
- Chip Ramsey
Chip: How have we lost Apple's keynotes? They will have plenty more, just not as regularly schedule.
- Brandon Titus
Could someone please help me out with an invite. I just got home, and I missed the announcement. DM me here, or at http://twitter.com/michael...
- Michael Fidler
Brandon: I hope you're right. The media events have seemed focused and less prone to wild speculation, which takes away from the whole experience for me. I was underwhelmed by the iPhone 3 software event. For the next announcement, I would guess they are going to try to make streaming video on the new iPhone a huge deal when they could have approved apps for Qik and others many months ago. In contrast, the Pre UI and functionality seems very exciting.
- Chip Ramsey
Hey everyone. Thanks for your interest in SkyGrid! As SkyGrid's member liaison of sorts, I can tell you we’re really focused right now on trying to connect SkyGrid with people who are passionate about business and financial news and information. If that sounds interesting to you please stop by our site and under the 'About Us' section, and submit your email with a few words on what interests you about SkyGrid...I promise you, your requests are being heard and aren't heading into some dark abyss!
- Alex (SkyGrid)
Thanks for the response, Alex. Good to know that are requests aren't going unheard!
- Brandon Titus
I started using SkyGrid yesterday and it has been great so far. I love the content, the features, and the ease of use to this point. Looking forward to continuing to try it out.
- John Spyers
I just got my invite. It only took 3 days after I submitted an account request here: http://www.skygrid.com/account...
- Alexander Grundner
Sound off here if you are using friendfeed. Let's show Michael Arrington what's what and what nobody looks like.
Rick Cogley, Jesse Newhart, James Michael Mike DuPont and 279 other people liked this
No I'm not.
- Mike Nayyar
HAI!
- Eric @ CSTechcast.com
Ding.
- adf
um... wait, lemme check.
- Kamilah Gill
Here, but I gotta go get some body work done...
- Helen Sventitsky
I think so...
- Juan Pablo González
here I be
- paisano
*bing*
- Glenn Slaven
I'm only here now because it broke Twitter
- Sally: gift wrapper
I refuse.
- ♥patricia♥
*lets off a sneaky one*
- Johnny Worthington
Present.
- WiseYoda (aka Patrick)
Cheers!
- Scott Jarkoff
Who me?
- Deepak Singh
not as actively of late.
- Alan Le
Ok, watching this thread real time is cool!
- Juan Pablo González
tl;dr (Please buy my book!)
- Daniel J. Pritchett
FF rules, twitter drools
- LPH™ and his dog P™
...
- Kevin Johnson
Here!
- Rebecca
Nope
- Michelle Martinez
I use it on and off. The new beta interface with live updates is amazing enough that I might use it nearly as much as Twitter.
- Dion Hinchcliffe
Yep.
- Rochelle
Who me?
- Micah Wittman
I only seem to use it when twitter is down. A better iPhone app might bring me around more often more "reader" like features (ie, let me add feeds and info that only I see like my google reader subscriptions and all of the tweets from my account on twitter)
- Scott Watermasysk
Were we to use a horn or just a loud cow bell?
- LPH™ and his dog P™
More cow bell.
- Alex Scoble
Definitely needs more cow bell LPH.
- Dion Hinchcliffe
Oy!
- Steve Lowe
sounding off
- Mattb4rd
Hi all. I'm pretty much always on FriendFeed =)
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
What's FriendFeed?
- Andrew Trinh
I am using it. Still on the regular UI though, as that's what's bookmarked in my browser
- Ian May
Same as Tina. FF is by far my favorite
- Mattb4rd
Present and accounted for.
- Rui Pereira
Friendfeed's the new brain feed.
- jcunwired
on both in tabs.. ;o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
Me!
- Karoli
Saying "Hi!". It's 3:14 here in Paris, but there's no night for Friendfeed.
- Jérôme Flipo
Using FF.
- Ghennipher
Sound off. One, two.
- iluvgimp
Random Moment number 2: Awwww, my Yankees.
- Terence
Beep beep
- Steve J
using FriendFeed, but not as much as tweetdeck
- Ken Gibbs Jr
!
- lautaro
FF stand up! Right here. Would use more if there was a TweetDeck-like tool for it. (FriendDeck isn't it)
- Ms_Krista
59:65:73:1f:20:49:27:6d:20:75:73:69:6e:67:20:46:72:69:65:6e:64:46:65:65:64:21
- Jason Nelson
Always and Forever
- JSNFLMNG
FF works.
- WorldofHiglet
aloha
- BCK
I think the sound was muted. Lemme change that.
- Beau Liening
Hee
- Rodfather
Holla?
- Andrew
Weeee!
- AJ Batac
Hoooty Hoooo!
- Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah
W00t!
- Laura Lou Who
Rasheen - Did you just see a cop? :)
- Andrew
Does this message construe usage of FriendFeed?
- rob friedman
yup
- Hutch Carpenter
Present and accounted for
- Devlin Dunsmore
from twhirl
Here !!!
- Eric Logan
Present!
- Larry Hawes
*bum dance*
- Bec Rowe @d0tski
Keeps me coming back.
- Tom Landini
Blue leader, standing by.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Check.
- Warren Butler
Yep
- John Collis
!?!...
- Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)
Hells to the yeah.
- AJ Kohn
Wanted to smack Mike Arrington tonight.
- Mol, Santa Claws
I'm a noone!
- MiniMage TKDteacher of FF
wow it's empty in here!
- BEX
Somebody in the house. Love the redesign.
- Steve Isaacs
Techcrunch reported 637K unique users for the month. Michael doesn't read his own publication apparently.
- Paul W. Swansen
w00t! FF rocks!
- ~C4Chaos
Duh
- Louis Gray
Yo Yo Domino!
- Spirit 2.0
I am here.
- Paul L. McCord Jr.
Testing...testing...is this mic working?
- Jack (a.k.a. Jeber)
Ciao baby :)
- enza (aka iVenus)
Reporting in from The Netherlands. P.S. Michael, you're an asshole! Oh no, I didn't really mean that. Love you Mike! ;)
- Meryn Stol
here and thoroughly enjoying the Arrington roast
- Daltonsbriefs
Arrington is a twat. That is all.
- nouhad
Oui.
- LogEx
using FF everyday.
- MikeAmundsen
maybe (Arrington's personality) is a persona---like Andrew 'Dice' Clay (remember that guy?)
- Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)
Everybody is a somebody, unless they are a nobody?
- Joe Pierce
Sweet...keep it going y'all!
- Alex Scoble
count me in!
- Jay
O HAI. I IZ NOBUDDY
- Josh Haley
What's Friendfeed? Is it cool?
- Walt Ruppar
Sound off 1 2 3 4.
- Russellreno
Here
- Bluesun 2600
Present
- Herb Hernandez
One more. BTW, who's this Arrington fellow?
- ha3rvey (chee-la-key-les)
BUELLER? BUELLER? FRY? FRY?
- Josh Haley
What's friendfeed?
- Glen Mistletoe
Aaaaaaah!
- Jeff P. Henderson
I need to catch up, because I don't know what he did now. I didn't bother to read his embargo-breaking story.
- John E. Bredehoft
from fftogo
here, here.
- Thomas Hawk
better yet, go to his post on FF today and post your thoughts on why you like it more than twitter. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
- Thomas Hawk
If it's not on friendfeed, I'm not interested, Thomas. :)
- Alex Scoble
Best ignore those that think they know what is going on and preach about it.
- CW™
Uhh oh, don't I act like that sometimes, CW? *goes and cries in a corner*
- Alex Scoble
Your a scoble.. I don't think you can help it. ;) But you back up your statements, allow others the chance to change your mind and not go off to a Ashram and sulk when people complain about you. ;)
- CW™
People are complaining about me? *goes and cries in a corner*
- Alex Scoble
PEANUT SAUCE
- Larry Hudson
What be this friendfeed you speak of?
- ronin
Whats Friendfeed?
- johnpiercy
I just signed up and searched my FB friends for FF users. 1 out of 215+
- Joel Watson
You say that as if it's a bad thing, Joel.
- Alex Scoble
I thought only scoble fans use FF? :) or Andorid App Devlopers..
- Fred Grott
Tell that to the librarians who have no idea who Robert is and don't care.
- Alex Scoble
I use.
- Vijayendra (V-Mo) Mohanty
I AM!!
- Internet's Tad
w00t!
- Adam Lasnik
You mean yesterday's news Arrington ??? Or today's embargo Arrington?
- David HC Soul
I just read Arrington's post and commented via FriendFeed (not to make any philosophical point, but because I'm on an older mobile phone right now using fftogo). While I had some quibbles, the fact remains that there are far fewer FriendFeed users than there are Facebook users. Then again, there are far fewer Twitter users than Facebook users, so simplicity isn't everything...
- John E. Bredehoft
from fftogo
The word I heard him use was "nobody", not "fewer", "nobody"...Perhaps I'm wrong though...either way, I don't care. I find friendfeed to be eminently more entertaining and useful than Twitter or Facebook.
- Alex Scoble
That's what schema-less SQL said.
- Mitch
If Twitter closed tomorrow, my life would be the same, If FriendFeed closed I'd lose all of you...
- Jamie Ginsberg
huzzah!
- Nathan Chase
And far fewer Mahalo users than any of them *rimshot*
- Michael W. May
bbq
- AJ Batac
I would just give him this link to see what "nobody" looks like: http://beta.friendfeed.com/scoblei...
- April Russo (app103)
I'm a nobody.
- Jeremy Brooks
nothing to see here for nobody...move on people. ;o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
Here's one more nobody for the roll call.
- Lindsay
I don't exist.
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
There's a blank line above this comment. Strange
- nouhad
"Liked" FriendFeed...(have love hate relationship with twitter and its whale mascot!)
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Who is this Michael Arrogant, anyway?
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
what's a twitter?
- Steve C
What is a Michael Arrington?
- Fred Grott
We are here, we are here, we are here.
- Larry Kless
Here too
- Carl Pruitt
*raises hand*
- Justin Korn
Present *raises hand*
- Drew
I am nobody and I love friendfeed.
- Robert Scoble
What's a Friendfeed?
- KyleHase
are we going for a million comments?
- Robin Barooah
It's a bit like I'm a PC. Unfortunately not that cool. FF is actually pretty cool though.
- Joe Bland
the battle for the real time web has really just begun. magic happens. here.
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Oh it's luke that now.
- Tsega Dinka
Oh, looks like I missed somethign good. Oh, well.
- Mona Nomura
Woot!
- Aaron Tinling
Hello, Switzerland friendfeeding on the beta.
- Richard A.
What a shame, there's nobody here.
- Admiral Anika
I love friendfeed.
- netvista
Go Friendfeed!
- Edwin Khodabakchian
me too netvista3987
- Majento
and me
- Richard Jones
I'm going with Scoble, and betting on this horse. This new UI is just a thing of beauty. This is how it should be. They're the ones who've found the Grail Castle. This is it right here. I'm just loving it.
- Web Nex
Here. But off to bed soon. Back later. G'nite, FF.
- Lisa L. Seifert
Love the new beta. Really nice job to Team FF!
- Marc Chung
Who is this Arrington fellow?
- Quasar
Wow, a whole ~120 people ... over 5 hours. I used to play on MUDs 10+ years ago with more simultaneous users. FF is 98% Scoble-hype noise, 2% RSS crawling.
- Dossy Shiobara
@Dossy- your naivete is showing!
- Bec Rowe @d0tski
@bec rowe - fine, I'll be generous, suppose there's a whole ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more users, 10x or 1,200 ... this is a big deal? Most major IRC networks each have 60k+ concurrent users and that's tech that's 15+ years old now.
- Dossy Shiobara
???
- vijay
for such a "new and improved" UI, why do I have to scroll ALL the way back up to click the "comment" link? what, did none of the UX people think "gee, putting it at the bottom of the list of comments would be a good idea"?
- Dossy Shiobara
seriously, people, stop being sheep. FF is cute but it's a pet rock.
- Dossy Shiobara
uh, no Dossy.
- Josh Haley
Dossy - I'm not sure if that was a joke or sarcastic comment or not, but just in case it wasn't...I strongly disagree.
- Justin Korn
Well to be fair, I know my real life friends would never understand FF -- especially the filters. It's too much effort to set up.
- Mona Nomura
Mona - I agree with that statement, but still disagree with Dossy.
- Justin Korn
@Mona Ditto. But I don't come here for RL friends. I come here to connect with people like me.
- Bec Rowe @d0tski
Arrington is a stupid.
- Wo
Exactly -- I come here to escape from Facebook and when I want more conversation than Twitter :) Sheep we are not. ;)
- Mona Nomura
I have 3 tabs locked into the first three positions of my always-open Firefox window: Google Reader, Gmail and you guessed it... FriendFeed.
- Brooks Bishop
I am using FF because it's awesome.
- Aaron Hood
from BuddyFeed
Obviously using FF Beta right now
- Arnold Zafra
All the time! FF Beta at the moment.
- Anton
From out the Blu, I am.
- Benjamin
What's a Michael Arrington?
- Pete Delucchi
Nothing much, something Europe doesn't care for ;-)
- Richard A.
*beep*
- Lorenzo Strambi
from twhirl
yes yes yes
- Davide D'Incau
Sure, but as a casual user I don't see that much usefulness. Fun, yes.
- Johan Mellberg
from twhirl
I'm loving the new version. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Beta? Yes. Standard? Never used it. Barely got the hang of Twitter!
- CAJ, somewhere else
Bring - It - Onnnnnnnnn!
- Vicky
is arrogant arrington squirming yet???
- Rob Sellen :o)
yo yo
- Kelly W.
Here is to both platforms. Twitter for ease of use and Friendfeed for search and aggregation
- Karen L Thompson
from BuddyFeed
I'm on it!
- Tracy Mendham
Nope, I'm not using friendfeed. Sorry to disappoint.
- Aaron the Librarian
(like Horshack) "ooooh ooooh ooooh"
- Bryan R. Adams
Absolutley! Great aggregator, but have to use Twirl or other app at work
- Jonathan Decker
from twhirl
Who the hell is Michael Arrington, and why should I give two tugs of a dead dog's cock what he thinks?
- Steven Perez
damn you steven perez... speak ya mind for a change!!! ;o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
Perez: Some meatbag with an overblown sense of self importance
- Mo Kargas
Arrington is a Web 1.0 dinosaur trying to make himself relevant still by being Jerry Springer without the entertainment value.
- Bob M. Montgomery
from twhirl
love it
- Brian Frank
Just to note: I know damn well who Arrington is. He's that meatsack whose website couldn't hold its load for a few hours. But I'm serious about not caring what he thinks.
- Steven Perez
that's r scoble too mo... ooops I'll get bashed! :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
I am loving FF.
- Nation Hahn
what's FF nation? where you hear about that? arringtons blog by any chance?
- Rob Sellen :o)
I'm using it and loving it!
- Samuel Driessen
i'm using....friendfeed beta
- Alejandro
Conspiracy Theory: Alex just wants to have a post with more comments than Robert. Discuss :D
- Bob M. Montgomery
from twhirl
I'm in.
- Aravind Jose
Here ;)
- Nicholas James
hello
- Alfredo
ff ftw!
- minus-one
go, go ff!
- graywolf
Michael who?
- Anthony Citrano
Nobody goes to friendfeed anymore, it's too busy
- Christopher Galtenberg
that techcrunch guy is pure noise - ignore at all cost :-p
- mike "glemak" dunn
O Hai! :-)
- Mathew A. Koeneker
I use FriendFeed all the time. Rarely if ever read TechCrunch anymore.
- Andy Roth
I use Friendfeed. Love it. Wish it was integrated into gwibber... but I think it will be soon. :)
- Amy H.
What's TechCrunch?
- Great Scott!
Jelly beans!
- Bwana ☠
Nobody here but us chickens.
- ɐ ɯıʞ sıɹɥɔ
huh!? What?!
- Nurse Katie
Arrington knows I use FF - I too need "intervention" :)
- Susan Beebe
I'm not sure 219 people prove him wrong...
- Carter Rabasa
Arrington who ??
- Peter Dawson
Bump :)
- Stephan Miller
from Friend Deck
I'm a friendfeed - its offers better value for the investment
- Chris Rogers
from Nambu
Using ff more every day
- Gordon Corte
still going
- Josh Haley
yep
- Elena
new to friendfeed and liking it very much
- brainno722 (Peter)
bumpity bump....
- Rob Sellen :o)
um....... :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
Huh? What?!?
- Nurse Katie
I never use friendfeed and I'm never ever on it. I can't believe you'd accuse me of such a thing!
- Jim Hearts FF
hey
- Stanislas Jourdan
Something tells me he's not impressed yet.
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
something tells me THIS proves how little he uses this place ;o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
That's OK, I get the sense that most people here couldn't care less. :) We use friendfeed because we like it, not because some A-Lister that doesn't even participate here thinks we should or shouldn't.
- Alex Scoble
*comment deleted to keep up appearances that I'm a nice guy*
- Michael W. May
I agree.... :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
Loves me some FriendFeed
- Marco(aureliusmaximus)
Shouldn't this be on a TC post since all those comments will be sucked into the blog itself?
- coldbrew
agreed alex, if you watch your brother's video of the pre-beta walk through from last weekend, mike was there, engaged and asked good questions of bret and paul, but then he goes off and belittles ff & those using it - immature or trollish not sure which it is...
- mike "glemak" dunn
But Alex.. your bro is a supposed A-lister...
- Rob Sellen :o)
dunn: Arrington is providing feedback. I'm sure team-FF can handle it.
- coldbrew
yeah the feedback he provides is..."the worse way to use friendfeed" :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
My brother also participates here a lot, so when he says something is great or sucks here he has some authority...certainly a lot more authority on the subject than you know who.
- Alex Scoble
drive by - I'm in
- Rick Bucich
You'll notice TC's FF integration is one-way (i.e. FF>TC), not synch.
- coldbrew
FF is the FFuture
- Alan Cheslow
Who's Michael Arrington? ;-)
- Kenton
I'm soaking in it.
- Mark Dorgan
FriendFeed is the best social service; just too much for many people to handle...yet!
- Neal Jansons
I do like FF - but it can be a lot to handle.
- Bill Sodeman
yeah.....
- Rob Sellen :o)
It doesn't get much better. Still here after a year.
- David Cook
from fftogo
yeah...great eh :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
i am and its soo much better. Tell mike the tech rumors are better here, too.
- Roberto Bonini
my head hurts. || button is my friend
- Todd Randolph
Right on Alex! To enhance what I said yesterday, FriendFeed is the "coolest app" to consume information on the Internet and interact with smart people.
- Eric Berlin
I use FF!
- Damond Nollan
:o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
ding dong.
- Tobias W.
AOL!
- Alex Scrivener
from twhirl
Who the F is Michael Arrington?
- Mattb4rd
He's some dude who unwisely said that nobody uses friendfeed.
- Alex Scoble
So much better than twitter!
- Bo Stern
Nah, I never use FriendFeed. FriendFeed uses me! Don't ask.
- Brad Butner
from twhirl
*rolls eyes* Outlandish statements are how Arrington moves the space. It doesn't matter how the space moves, as long as it moves, then Arrington can remora off it. He doesn't care who wins or how his little bombs affect anyone, just as long as it moves somewhere. He's like a weapons dealer who foments the extension of wars so he can sell the weapons to both sides.
- Matthew DeVries
It's Michael Arrington. His ego is the size of the Sun and is infinitely expanding like the universe. All I hear is "blah blah blah blah blah blah blah."
- Zach Flauaus
Love the new FF
- LeighaB
Go FF!
- atanas
Trying it again and liking it
- Todd Dewell
Ho ho ho Happy FF-estivus!!!!
- George The Writer
How about some comment pagination, I love scrolling and everything...
- Alex C. Williams
Hear, hear, Alex W. Something needs to happen with comments.
- Kamilah Gill
so.... arrinwho?
- Rob Sellen :o)
I luuurve friendfeed!
- Rob Sellen :o)
;o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
:o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
ho
- Laura Norvig
Aloha! Been here for over a year now.
- Bill Sodeman
blurp
- Johannan Edelman
linky to another similar thread ... http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Peter Dawson
My thread was first and my brother was just being a copycat. First!
- Alex Scoble
Put both threads in a room, and similpost in both. The power of the exponent!
- Matthew DeVries
yep, that Scoble is a copycat !! :)-
- Peter Dawson
I think the only way to settle this is with a good old fashioned slap fight. Or a drinking contest... Either way we need video of it.
- Joe Pierce
But I said "First!" That's the internet beat down right there.
- Alex Scoble
more comments than likes? how can that be... you commenter's who have yet to like...like.. and those who have yet comment...comment..and like ;o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
I'm down with FreindFeed. My usage has skyrocketed since the beta launch.
- Tim
A new "live web" experiment. We are brainstorming about Building43. What would you like to see there?
Carlos Duarte, news2me, AJ Kohn and 35 other people liked this
Less noise and more interaction.
- Amit Nangare
A way to filter relevant info based on my previous likes and comments.
- Jeff P. Henderson
Stuff I don't know exists yet.
- Andrew Smith
Behind the scenes videos about how big scalable sites are architected.
- Henning
What is Building43? A community of people who are fanatical about the Internet.
- Robert Scoble
Collaborative projects like layertennis.com
- Andrew Smith
I would like to see lesser known, successful start ups. Companies that flew under the radar, yet continue to bring in revenue.
- Bwana ☠
Image/video/music integration section. Throw a Flickr link in, vimeo, etc. Music links: Blip.fm, Last,fm, iLike, etc.
- mtlb
i'd like to see more about what makes great companies function. more on web companies culture. office tours, sit downs with regular employees...etc
- patrick
Metadata.
- Matti Leppänen
A Special area where user groups and events could be advertised for people fanatical about then net could meet off line. ie. a space to collect meetups, tweetups and barcamps.
- Luke Kilpatrick
Cutting edge technology, which is not available anywhere else. Current trends in web industry.
- Pavel Senko
Free parking, clean restrooms and windows where the grunt employees can see outside (well, that was what my favorite building had).
- The Web's Wendell Wittler
Community - a place for coders, sysadmins, and others to share ideas, gather, and change the web. Something Web 2.0 that does this.
- Jesse Stay
But seriously, how about some new ways to use existing tools/resources/stuff?
- The Web's Wendell Wittler
a better way to read the content not live
- Gerd saurer
Ability to publish podcasts & vodcasts via social networks (i.e. FriendFeed, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.).
- Paul Maez
But it'd be good if you can match the user experience of Area 51... sorry, can't resist joking about the Building43 name.
- The Web's Wendell Wittler
Focus on open source - release tools they are using internally as open source, build community around that.
- Jesse Stay
Jesse: open source is a big deal, agreed.
- Robert Scoble
Wendell: heheh, I'd love to do a building43 episode from area51. :-)
- Robert Scoble
A large nude statue of you out front in full hulk mode. :-)
- Todd Hoff
Robert, is Building43 gonna be a site? How can you beat FriendFeed in terms of usability? We're quite fanatical about internet here I think. I like the idea of community (certainly with you involved), but I don't believe in dedicated sites for them.
- Meryn Stol
Jesse: a place for coders and sys admins makes a lot of sense. How about http://www.stackoverflow.com ? That's a place to discuss code. I'd like something like that in building43.
- Robert Scoble
Meryn: we already have a friendfeed room. Building43 is a distributed community, not a web site. http://friendfeed.com/rooms... is our room.
- Robert Scoble
I like to see you and other prominent community members start discussions... Exchange expertise with each other. Maybe involve guys from http://highscalability.com/ . But I like to see it all on my main feed. :)
- Meryn Stol
Meryn: highscalability is a great site, thanks.
- Robert Scoble
What I hope you can pull off is convince big brains to talk openly, in a casual manner, here on FriendFeed. Open to questions from people without this expertise. A bit like Digg is doing with its crowdsourced interviews. The more interactive the better. And the more "established" people, the better. Also if they are people we normally don't hear of, but play a big role behind the scenes. Rackspace is hosting quite some big sites I think. I wouldn't have a clue which ones though!
- Meryn Stol
Thought leadership around new IT organizational and operations models for emerging hyper scale, *2.0, and cloud computing companies...with focus on how legacy IT must evolve.
- dmcclure
Thanks for the plug Meryn.
- Todd Hoff
I think a "skunk works" mentality in projects and a "camp" like environment where the conversation is both the leveraging of technologies and the development of new ideas would be fantastic.
- Tony
Nice toilets - so many buildings have crappy bathrooms - maybe a covered entrance in case it rains.
- Allen Stern
I think a geographically diverse orientation (less california centric) might be a goal
- Brian Sullivan
A good reputation platform
- aaron
I would like to see a site without walls, a place that consumes mobility through text and video that is always learning that integrates your social networks with what you are discussing.
- Kevin Tunis
reduce the noise
- Francesco Marconi
Scientist sharing their projects and promoting science to students
- T J Petta
I'd like to know more about the steps that companies take when they go from small/startup to a bigger small company. Not a true "medium" sized business, but a firmly established small company that isn't bootstrapping anymore. I find this to be a grossly overlooked area. Not enough resources for the mature startup, we're too focused on the new new thing. How about the successful "old" new thing?
- Chris Stevenson
MORE FEMALES!
- Dawn
more females. lololololWHEEZElolololol
- alexia tsotsis
Lifestreaming Larry and Sergey's product reviews?
- Daniel Dulitz
photos.
- Thomas Hawk
Community of awesomeness dedicated to exploring this real time web thing to help drive new innovation and solve really hard problems.
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
A place where people can be fanatical ABOUT the internet sure beats the old business model of simply being fanatical ON the internet. alt.binary.hamster.richardgere.ducktape springs immediately to mind.. :)
- Philip Tomlinson
I'm in Building 42. Different shop, tho.
- Clemens Vasters
An open source, multi-language, creative commons licensed, wiki where social media experts can contribute their thoughts by submitting page edits via friendfeed, twitter, identi.ca, adocu, and facebook updates. Oh, oh, ho: it must have live streaming video comments from seesmic, kyte, and ustream and a streaming ticker of pictures from flickr, zoooomr, and tiny. Host it on a cloud server and display the usage and compute metrics in the sidebar in real-time. It would be awesome!!!!!!!!!!!
- Steve Wilhelm
More on evolving data center tech like virtualization, cloud-computing... what are other companies doing successfully to cut costs using new tech.
- Jericho
58 wildebeeste, 22 guinea fowls with wellington boots on and a triceratops. :-)
- Richard A.
cup cakes
- Ian Tindale
Smart people who don't get exposure from leading blogs - and smart bloggers who don't get read.
- Louis Gray
Thx Louis! :o) My suggestion for 43: more LOLcats
- sofarsoShawn
Magic.
- Dani Radu
SocialWebTV! Do you need me to be more specific? I'm in a meeting , but I can elaborate on it later. It's right up your alley Robert!
- Michael Fidler
from twhirl
if every person on earth could add a message every second to the stream,what would that do? What if each of those messages was a vote on something. Is that a universal conscience?
- Tweet Feeds
Cutting edge stuff, not just web. Stuff that will bring the information in 'ambient' fashion to us when we want it. Tonchidot (remember them). IPTV, ambient information devices, mobile predictive information technologies. I want to see what is out there that is bringing us closer to the tech I saw in science fiction films a few decades ago.
- Andrew Leyden
Me, I want real rich desktop: iptv /many filtered search widgets, think netvibes on wheels / laptop cameras as live icons/ broadcast windows: post on twitter/fb and ff simultaneously/ - best
- pena schmidt
A new design for FriendFeed at http://beta.friendfeed.com/ - http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009...
Sharon McPherson, cshirk, Anthony K. Valley © and 325 other people liked this
Great job!
- Robert Scoble
Nice job friendfeed!
- Kevin Mohr
Awesome work!
- Aaron Draczynski
Indeed, very good job. Gives me some ideas on Nambu integration.
- Gersham Meharg
realtime by default now eh? nice
- Karl Rosaen
I hate it. I love it! I haven't even scrolled down to the bottom yet. Hold on.......ok, it's good. :-)
- Jeff Eddings
Cheers Bret & team - it's feeling pretty good so far (which includes initial gut reaction)
- Christopher Galtenberg
Nice job. I can at the very least say it is a big improvement aesthetically. I haven't finished checking everything out yet, but so far so good.
- Rolf Schewe
why there is no Re-share function?
- Tony
I miss the ability to have a Firefox sidebar setup that just had my list of items scrolling past and nothing else along the side like this view: http://friendfeed.com/realtim...
- Justin Yost
Reshare will be back. Just an artifact of beta-testing, didn't make it in for this morning
- Bret Taylor
Definitely not looking for attention here, but I just don't like it.
- Nick
This real time integrated updates is pretty kick butt. Especially for comments.
- Gersham Meharg
don't like the grey background
- Moses
Any new comment can not move up this item?
- Tony
Our settings vary to prevent things shuffling around excessively. We bubble up when someone you are subscribed to comments.
- Bret Taylor
I like the updating comments, but when it shifts what I'm reading out of the frame it's a little distracting. Overall, great work!
- Derek Coatney
also wish i can add links/pics/embed in the "comments"...for example, i'd like to include an image of my email from http://www.emailcover.com, but it only shows up as a link
- brainno722 (Peter)
thanks, it looks awesome!
- Dani Martínez
Congratulations guys on a job well done!
- Thomas Hawk
Love it, but needs a floating Pause button.
- Barak B
+1 Barak
- Kenton
Barak, very good idea
- Kol Tregaskes
The filter is great! But any filter can not output to friends.
- Tony
+1 Barak
- Tony
what filter?
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
adding a filter sucks, things like has comments from should ajax populate :(
- Stuart Evans
from twhirl
you can create filters when you click "filter"
- Tony
The anticipation was high, but so was delivery! Great job FF team.
- Micah Wittman
Awesome!
- Iván Abrego
Like it! Facebook import (notes & link, not status) seems broken though...
- Alex Lomas
A keyboard shortcut for Pause, maybe?
- Micah Wittman
Thanks, Alex, we will look into it,
- Bret Taylor
Can you open an existing conversation in a new window?
- Barak B
1st look is good, like the real time...didn't make it to the bottom the first few minutes. Also the comment box drops down as I am commenting now...message got off screen ;)
- Sanne Buurma
please add keyboard shortcut for play/pause feed
- Ouriel Ohayon
Please, remove the gray background. Any color, but not gray.
- bnoise
Agree with Andy, dislike the fugly grey
- Sally Church
Barak: click on the timestamp to open a conversation in a new window.
- Kevin Mohr
Barack B : you can click the time and select open in new window.
- Simon Wicks
Just bring back the filters to the main feed. Other than that, it looks awesome :D
- Gerardo Curiel
Agreed, the grey isn't that great.
- Gersham Meharg
refresh the page would move up the item which have newest comment?
- Tony
sad grey: why don't you let everyone choose the colour of the background?
- Davide Leonelli
looks awful for me - http://www.flickr.com/photos... - do not like the gray or the wasted space
- Nick
Grey or not, rather think about what the beta has to offer in functionality
- Sanne Buurma
Please, bring back service icons near each post — it's very hard to scan information flow without them. Also hope you'll do something with new subscription module — it's unuseful while managing a lot of imaginary friends.
- Juras Vetrau
Nice. Good job guys.
- Peter Kruit
The colouring needs looking at for sure. Unless, of course, you are going to redesign the logo? ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
dislike the grey, sorry
- Manuela
Agree on colouring - but hey its a beta. Thanks Bret.
- Roberto Bonini
But Bret, picking a nice background colour is basically free (although I guess you should really be testing 41 variations :-))
- Alex Gawley
perhaps highlighting your own comments in the flood of comments (easier to scan/find)?
- brainno722 (Peter)
agree, gray background is bothersome.
- AJ Kohn
Wait, is the frequent shifting up and down of items I'm reading (i.e. the items in view) really supposed to work out well? I suppose you guys tried it for a while and you just got used to it?
- j1m
Peter, yep but thankfully the Cleaner FriendFeed GM script still works in Chrome and FFox, which does this for you.
- Kol Tregaskes
Don't like: broke my Blocks list, Block not available from Hover Menu
- Will Higgins™
Why Will Higgins have a superscript of "TM"? how typed in?
- Tony
it keeps the bad low-contrast grey on white text for comments that deters me from reading it. You made the main text bigger, now make the comment text black.
- Kevin Marks
Fantastic job guys !
- David Berrebi
can't see source of posts and comments
- Moses
Will: block will be back, just missing today, but it is not something we are removing (just something we didn't get in for this morning)
- Bret Taylor
I think you guys should really embrace the idea of hashtags. Let us add them to other people's posts, having various services auto-tag imported items, let us search on them using filters. Tagging is one great way for us to get a handle on the volume of information here.
- Kevin Kuphal
What's with the orange and the green on the side? Its a bit ugly if you ask me. Also, is there a way to change this, as well as make the beta permanent? (I like living on the cutting edge).
- darnell
I too like the orange and green. It's the blue I'm not sure about. :-)
- Daniel Dulitz
I like the FF blue
- nouhad
Yeah, but it clashes with the logo. Either Friendfeed needs to change their logo, or get rid of the colors. Or (even better) allow users to change the colors. :-)
- darnell
Looks horrible to me, I think we should have a customizable interface more like iGoogle, I like the idea though, just more customization, like sidebar customization, friend lists, realtime widget, chat widget, all movable and arrangeable, there sure is enough space etc...
- Kyle Weller
I'm with Kyle and Darnell - I like being able to customize my GMail colours, and having that feature on FF would be cool
- nouhad
Sorry, I don't like it. Real-time makes me nauseous still and the design is terrible.
- Lindsey is Fierce!
Yes, bring back service icons, somewhere. Also, the bigger font in entries doesn't look good.
- bnoise
Ignoring 71 previous comments... I really like the new design! One request: allow the pause button to follow my cursor as a scroll down the page!
- Chris Messina
+1 Chris Messina. That would be an awesome feature.
- Beau Liening
Add a floating "COMMENT" feature at the bottom of each thread, so I don't have to scroll up to click "comment"... this is a weird experience in new beta UI
- Susan Beebe
@Ari: This is why I really think tagging is what they need to focus on. If we could each add #ffbeta or something to our own posts as well as others, you get the trending and other features that twitter already has. Combine this with filters and you really get some killer information management features.
- Kevin Kuphal
I really like having one UI instead of different modes (normal, realtime, miniwindow), but to support the old "mini window" experience, perhaps allow the right hand side bar with filters and subscriptions to be collapsible?
- Karl Rosaen
@Karl: API is key here. Twitter isn't massively popular because their website rocks. Twitter is massively popular because there's a massive layer of applications built on top of it. Build that for FF and you have the same potential growth
- Kevin Kuphal
I wish it could use more of the screen real estate of my monitor, given my normal window size, it has large amounts of unused space on either size of the content due to the fixed layout. Maybe a multi-column mode?
- Ray Cromwell
Nice job! but, where are my rooms??
- Krishnamoorthy
@Krishnamoorthy rooms I believe have changed to feeds beta.friendfeed.com/[room_name]
- Lou Paglia
the new design works better for me. I am sure there will be glitches, but so far so good.
- Sharon Hurley Hall
Is there a way to change my prefs over to to the beta so I don't have to keep entering beta.friendfeed...?
- Ryan Stanley
UI suggestion: there's a link to expand all comments, there should be one to collapse them as wel.
- Ryan Stanley
UI suggestion: after expanding comments you scroll all the way to the bottom reading the thread, then you have scroll all the way back up to click the Comment link. Why not have it at the bottom of the thread too.
- Ryan Stanley
Feature suggestion: FF needs a built-in way of referring to people publicly, just like Twitter's @. Perhaps use the same convention. But there needs to be a way people to address each other in public threads, so a user can make sure to be informed when people are talking or referring to them.
- Ryan Stanley
going to read through faq - roadmap of what made beta & what's going away would be nice - big concern for me is the lose of ability to expand lists to see individual participants - i find that one of ff's strongest features - that and block but i see from earlier in this thread that its will make it in later in beta (whew)...
- mike "glemak" dunn
Um, Twitter much?
- Christiana
A Pause button that follows you on page scroll could be more distracting than it's worth. But how about something like it appears upon a white space mousedown/mouseup event.
- Micah Wittman
You guys should use this userstyle: http://beta.friendfeed.com/ajbatac...
- Kyle Weller
Curious about how the new design will affect the iPhone version of the site...?
- Chris Messina
welcome qwerty. :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
Hmm, I tried to read this thread, but I never got to the bottom, because the unexpected shifts of the text just became too much after a while. Fundamentally, if the page keeps shifting up and down unexpectedly, it's hard to see how anyone's ever going to read it -- hence the many requests for a floating pause button, which would help. You could also imagine pause on hover. Being able to read down the page without having the text disappear seems to me like the #1 use case of ff.
- j1m
I like it.
- Willem (@wim66) ☠
Of course, it's not really like you want Pause -- the real-time updates are great when they're below wherever the eyes are :-)
- j1m
I love the new UI! I'm a big fan. It feels a lot cleaner and more organized. The real-timeness doesn't bother me. It seems pretty clever about when and when not to refresh. Great job, guys!!! : )
- Jess Lee
Bret - Great job! There are certainly things to clean up before this interface goes to the main page. Rooms should REALLY be on the subscribed list on the right hand column. I would LOVE to be able to put Blank Lines in comments. I don't care if they count for a whole lines worth of characters (as opposed to a more common one character for the cr/lf) Blank lines make comments more legible and clear than just a runtogether paragraph.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I don't like how the interface STILL loses my place if I subscribe to someone while posting a comment (or even reading it!) I should be able to subscribe to YOU while I read YOU and not lose my page place. The Page should need to be refreshed to reset everyone because of the new subscription.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I don't know about the queued items, I like the real time feed, having selectable speeds instead of "over-caffination required mode" would be good. Most discussions this is irrelevant, but the discussion on tis new beta this morning (i.e. on scoble's feed) showed how insane that can be.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
The real-time-only feed in the beta is causing Safari 4b on my MacBook use up a lot of CPU cycles, hence depleting the battery faster. I'm sure FF3 will too. Please consider an "ECO Mode" similar to the current standard mode, which only refreshes once every few minutes, for those running their machines on battery power. Without such an eco-mode, and with the rapid-fire pace of live updates, I fear that I won't be using FFeed much at all. Certainly not leaving that tab open for hours on end like I used to.
- Siddharth Deb
I don't know if I've done something, or you guys did, but when I look here, I only have a few services setup in the account, when I go to the old interface I have a LOT more -I'm not certain that everything is feeding through? (i.e. I have Digg and Disqus set up, I see the correct list of icons on the old interface, but on the beta "settings" popup, No Dice. Even if this is irrelevant to the actual data flow, please fix this to make me sleep well at night. ;)
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
One more thing - Could we have a character counter in the comments? It would be REALLY nice, if my account is setup to post this comment to my twitter account, and it's going to post the link to this discussion, please Add the number of characters in the link (plus a space) to the total character count. That way I won't be truncating the comment and/or the URL when it gets to twitter.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Another thing: I used to be able to click the "More" next to a single discussion, and "Link to this discussion" Where is that? If this is an outmoded way of thinking please let me know. Otherwise, um...can we have that feature back?
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Rob: the timestamp ("9 hours ago") is the permalink
- Benjamin Golub
Benjamin: You rock! Thanks!
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
do you need a techno dunce to help the average joe make sense of this?? haha...i love it...
- Lauren Shanahan
Very twitter like. But better due to nice conversational.
- xiawinter
I actually kinda like the grey... though it does look like it's an opportunity to let companies brand the background in some way.
- Frankie Warren
For cc to Twitter functionality, can the number of characters be a count-down instead of a count-up?
- Winston Teo
I'd like to second the notion that there should be a way to address an individual within a thread...the agreed upon "Rob:" works great, but maybe could be clickable so that there's no confusion as to which Rob or which Scoble you're talking to ;) (i.e. maybe a CTRL-Click or something on the person's name after their comment to start a new comment with their name at the beginning? )
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
The grey background looks kinda dullish, and it looks like someone ran out of ideas for colours..
- Winston Teo
IMO avatars occupy way too much real estate now, I liked the smaller ones better.
- ǝuǝƃnǝ
thsi is nothing on the new design, but after being on here all night with no attention to a down twitter, I am reminded of this: It would be nice if I could set the post to twitter for comments and likes a) permanent b) off or C) on a per comment/like basis -twitter users say this "yeah, when ppl I follow flood me with FF spam ... I usually unfollow ... even block if it irritates me enough." And I would like to be able to be easily selective of what gets put through, and it would get more GOOD attn for FF
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
please, for the love of god, move the "comment" link to the BOTTOM of the list of comments. seriously, am I the only one who can't believe this hasn't been fixed for so long?
- Dossy Shiobara
I like it
- Cristian
Great stuff! :-) FriendFeed does it better than Facebook. Please go real-time all the way for subscription requests and confirmatoions too.
- Nenad Nikolic
from twhirl
++ Nenad Nikolic
- Darren Heydon
I dont like nofollows on friendfeed and links are moved to urls very bad :(
- Turkey banned Bloggum :(
I like quick stats on user feed on top right of screen.
- Turkey banned Bloggum :(
Love the new friendfeed!
- Chris Martin
from Nambu
It's not bad, but I prefer the smoothness of the old one to the lines and edges in this new one.
- scott willeke
I love the new letter-counting post widget in the beta though.
- scott willeke
at first glance, find it much more readable than the old one. Pity there still isn't "my items that were liked or commented by others"
- Stephanie Booth
from twhirl
Bret: all the videos are now up at http://scobleizer.blip.tv -- thanks for inviting me and for all you do.
- Robert Scoble
I like this beta
- Goofy2
Stephanie: comments:1 likes:1 from:sbooth
- Justin Long
stephanie & justin - that is in the catch all http://beta.friendfeed.com/filter... - i went and liked/commented on something from each of you that had no other activity - you should both see that bubble up in /discussions...
- mike "glemak" dunn
LOVE THE NEW BETA ! the new filter is so powerful, more powerful if you could add "language parameter"!!
- foxmachia {山石}
still waiting for direct-to-room links on the right column, is it planned? (with lastupdated timestamps if possible)
- Kemal Hadimli
Nice.
- Thomas Chai
People, People, People, it doesn't matter if FriendFeed has the masses. What matters is that they can monetize and profit from the group they target. Remember Apple?
atanas, Andy Bakun, Eric and 17 other people liked this
I think what matters more is that we all enjoy being here.
- Mitch
++mitch. :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
Mitch, exactly - that's why Apple was successful. They didn't target the masses.
- Jesse Stay
But it sounds like they already listen much better than Apple did, and are open enough to make improvements based on that. Bad response and bad tech will kill any business in this world. And Twitter doesn't 'own' a platform as Microsoft did, so they can't strong arm themselves into market share.
- Jeff Bruning
Such a good point, jesse. We forget these.Apps are supposed to be businesses
- Francine Hardaway
from BuddyFeed
Francine, Exactly - it's about securing a percentage of the market that you can effectively profit from. Bigger is not always better.
- Jesse Stay
I'm not going to pay $2000 to use FriendFeed.
- Shawn Farner
FriendFeed has a staff of eleven people. Eleven. Anybody recall how much funding they've received?
- Ken Sheppardson
Looks like they've raised $5M total in a series A with Paul, Sanjeev and Benchmark participating. http://www.crunchbase.com/company...
- Ken Sheppardson
How big do they need to be?
- Ken Sheppardson
@Ken: Not very. And remember, this is from the team that built Gmail ... which took a long time to reach primetime. I think they're thinking long term.
- AJ Kohn
It's funny how I keep having the same arguments about Twitter as I do Facebook, and now we're having the same argument about FriendFeed. They'll all succeed, and they'll all profit from different segments of the market.
- Jesse Stay
AJ: Yep. I'm happy to settle in with them for the long haul, particularly after hearing Paul and Bret talk about FriendFeed in different forums and meeting them at the beta preview last Friday. On some level, I honestly hope they don't try to go head-to-head with Twitter and/or Facebook.
- Ken Sheppardson
@Ken: I hope I'm lucky enough to get an invite to FF HQ soon. I'm not sure how quickly FF will try to be a direct competitor or work at a revenue model. I think both Twitter and Facebook may force the issue though ... the speed in which FF is iterating and the ability to execute ... to near perfection has to be worrisome.
- AJ Kohn
Who *are* the people that FriendFeed is trying to target? Facebook is definitely for the masses. Twitter benefits from having more people joining (surely they won't regret having Obama and Shaq). Is FriendFeed targeting the "tech elite" and won't care for having mass appeal? Is that their business model?
- Andre P. Siregar
dregar I don't think we know that, but my bet would be currently they're targeting the early adopters, similar to what Apple did.
- Jesse Stay
from IM
Jason, I don't think they're targeting Twitter. I think it's rather "Twitter or Facebook, for the rest of us". They just need a percentage of the market to succeed. It's a huge market now.
- Jesse Stay
I really don't see how a company like FriendFeed can only target early adopters. Early adopters will "move on" to the the next new and shiny thing, whatever that is at the moment. I compare FF to FB and Twitter because I think these 3 companies all need the large audience. Apple is different. Even before their current mass appeal they can create niche products with high margins. And even now, Apple is also not complaining about having iPod and iPhone kind of market share
- Andre P. Siregar
Jesse, I disagree. Friendfeed is subject to network effect just like any other social network. It needs the masses. I don't think Apple, which sold hardware with a specific business model, is comparable to a web app that has no proven business model. However, FriendFeed rocks. I'm sure they'll get the masses.
- Jordan Willms
For me the Apple comparison is simply an example of how a niche product can survive alongside what some would call a monopoly.
- Ken Sheppardson
Ken, that's exactly what I mean.
- Jesse Stay
Trivia question answer: Lucia Willow @Pandora is the most followed Community Manager on Twitter, according to a Twellow bio field search
Víctor Hugo Hernández and Eric liked this
Techcrunch just posted about new friendfeed: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
Iván Abrego, Mykl Roventine, Sanne Buurma and 20 other people liked this
Blatant traffic whoring =/
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
yes
- directeur
HAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. sigh. so much for that
- Erin @queenofspain
Wow, when they said a total redesign they weren't kidding.
- Mathew™ one of a kind
So its all just real time view by default now? Not so sure i like that already without even seeing it. I like to have the slower option, and have real time open seperate.
- Simon Wicks
now we have to make a thread about how FF UI is inspired from Twitter too, FF deserve the same effort as Facebook.
- abdellah
Simon: yes, it's all real time. Everything you do now moves the page.
- Robert Scoble
Realtime thing is REALLY cool. DMs are pretty sweet too.
- Brandon Titus
I actually like the new flow, but its overloading for sure
- Eric
I'm amazed.
- Alp
where are the reply notices and auto-mobile device access detection?? more of the same - you still need to focus on it for it to be engaging
- Jonathan Greene
reading TC article now
- Susan Beebe
Great for real-time. I'll be on Streamy though. Combines real-time with the offline features of RSS/Google Reader plus lets me see a TweetDeck-like view of the real-time information, not just an endless stream
- Kevin Kuphal
The evolution of the 37signals home page - http://www.37signals.com/svn...
Daniel Rowley, Anthony Feint, Jim Bergman and 4 other people liked this
@ericfriedman , @timjahn , @kclennon , @cspenn , @mattcraine follow all these great people ! #followfriday
Eric liked this
reminder. last day today for pre-agenda price on our smx advanced event june 2-3 http://searchmarketingexpo.com/advance... you&a with @mattcutts returns again!
Eric liked this
Let the FriendFeed Data Mining Begin In Earnest - http://www.louisgray.com/live...
Nicholas James, Bill Romanos, Meryn Stol and 65 other people liked this
so folks on ff would rather talk about bacon instead of sex? geeks. :-)
- Rob Williams
mmm bacon
- (jeff)isageek
it's bacooooonn!
- Sarah Perez
Great examples!
- Paul Buchheit
I agree with Paul very interesting snapshot of the FF community while showcasing the power of the new search app.
- Keith - @tsudo
I especially liked that you did links to originals. Makes it easy to share as explained
- MaryAnn Chick Whiteside
Thanks mcw, tsudohnimh and Paul. I didn't pretty up the post with screen captures. I felt the original links themselves could tell the story.
- Louis Gray
'So yes, FriendFeed loves Scoble, tolerates me, and loves babies' - Classic :)
- Charlie Anzman
This is so funny - the very time I ever commented on an LG item was on July 9th, 2008!
- Mona Nomura
Just so you know, that conversation in Italian was NOT about a cat. It was a mother's story about the abusive treatment her 4 yr old autistic child received from a professional photographer.
- April Russo (app103)
Liked for multiple mentions of Akiva's baby. :P
- Rochelle
This is significant: Facebook to embrace OpenID http://venturebeat.com/2009...
Neill Adamson and Eric liked this
Last December, YouTube once again gained the most new online video traffic - http://venturebeat.com/2009...
Eric and Mihalcea Razvan liked this
Davos09: A crisis and failure of leadership - http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009...
Eric, Daniel Rowley, Andrew Terry and 5 other people liked this
Report from the Edelman Trust Barometer breakfast this morning at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
- Robert Scoble
My photos from this breakfast are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos...
- Robert Scoble
Scoble can I find detailed program of forum? I want to know when Anatoly Chubais will speak.
- Ahmet Yükseltürk
1- Davos is shooting itself. 2- All information should be public. 3- Davos retaining any credibility? Doubtful.
- Marc Brandsma
repeating myself.the ones who made us sick are disqualified to cure us
- Jean-Charles VERDIE
from twhirl
Marc: I don't disagree. But it doesn't matter. I can report anything anyone says in any session here, albeit in many sessions you can't directly quote or attribute things to people without their prior permission.
- Robert Scoble
Close of the first session, moderator wrapped up with, "Despite all that, go out and have a great Davos, folks!" Yukkin' it up all the way and pretending poor by not ordering dom perignon in public; fiddling while Rome burns. Intermission videos clearly say, "markets create wealth, but how do we equitably distribute this wealth?" But policy makers seem to be twiddling thumbs and hoping they don't have to say anything meaningful toward those ends. ASC experiment clearing up a wee bit at http://tr.im/wef09
- michael silverton
Ahmet: I don't know. Participants have a much better program guide available to them than you do.
- Robert Scoble
Thanks Robert.
- Ahmet Yükseltürk
Trust in magazines has dropped so then why do you think FastCompany is growing?
- Mrinal Desai
Mrinal: the Economist is still growing too. FastCompany is one of the only magazines that grew last year because we invested more in doing great content. That's expensive and it's nice that our owner, Joe Mansueto (founder of Morningstar) believes in investing in great content. Not many media company owners are in his position right now.
- Robert Scoble
@robert I don't get this blogging restriction. You can quote ppl but not attribute the quote? Are they ashamed of what they're saying? That just doesn't make sense to me
- Jean-Charles VERDIE
from twhirl
Jean-Charles: it's "chattermouse rules." That means that stuff said in sessions can't be quoted. Conferences do that to try to get speakers to actually say something more than what their PR teams approve them to say.
- Robert Scoble
Was watching that feed from Geneva :-)
- Richard A.
@Robert, ooops I missed the point that they're not talking as themselves but on behalf of their company. Changes a lot obviously wrt privacy
- Jean-Charles VERDIE
Maybe we should blame PR companies for the mess we're in
- paul mooney
Did anyone's Google pagerank get reset to zero over the weekend? This has just happened to a friend. I'm trying to see if this is isolated or widespread.
Gavin, Igor Poltavskiy, Eric and 5 other people liked this
There seem to be problems with GReader counts and FeedBurner as well...
- Valeria Maltoni
Does anyone evern look at the pagerank anymore????
- Roberto Bonini
No problem with page rank but FeedBurner numbers have been oddly volatile.
- AJ Kohn
No idea, haven't been following any pageranks.
- Daniel Schildt
Agree with AJ Kohn. My Feedburner numbers shifted by 150 over the weekend. How on earth does that happen?
- V Mary Abraham
Mike is talking about me -- Google has wiped out my PageRank...my blog is NOT webspam. I've been trying to contact them, we'll see what the response is.
- Adam Singer
I got Adam's note as well - worth looking into.
- Louis Gray
I think mine is always at zero:-)
- Michael Fidler
from twhirl
How can I check mine without the toolbar?
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
I noticed my feed subscriptions dropped by half, but I thought it was because I switched my feeds from feedburner to google.
- Mike Hussein Cohen
Adam, I'm in DC and don't have my normal tools on this iPhone. I checked it earlier and didn't see any penalties. I'd guess it's just a canonicalization issue and that your site has PR just fine.
- Matt Cutts
@Matt Cutts - wow, thanks!! Made me feel a lot better. It is just scary to see things like that when you put so much time/effort into something. Really appreciate your response.
- Adam Singer
I totally understand, Adam. I checked it earlier but didn't get a chance to comment until recently--sorry about that.
- Matt Cutts
Matt, I double checked and made SURE everything is pointing purely to http://TheFutureBuzz.com and not http://www.TheFutureBuzz.com - I don't know what I did to trip up Google but it appears to be OK now, all pages are directing away from the www version
- Adam Singer
Why Windows 7 should be a free upgrade - http://www.techradar.com/news...
Debi Jones, "Joey", Nia and 84 other people liked this
It absolutely should be - especially Vista fanboys and social media evangelists like myself :-)
- andy brudtkuhl
Hey Andy, did you get a Beta license for Win7?
- Chris
Do you need a Beta license?
- Mona Nomura
from IM
@Chris - yes I do have a beta license for Win7.. Will be installing it as a virtual machine tonite to play with
- andy brudtkuhl
Windows 7 is a marketing trick. Don't buy it people.
- Rutger Blom
a marketing trick? how do you figure?
- andy brudtkuhl
Is anyone still using Windows? ;)
- Meryn Stol
I am going to go get it now (legally of course) and install it under VMWare. Now you have me curious.
- Chris
Windows? Aren't they those things with glass panes in them? ;)
- Tyson Key
Andy: it brings nothing new to the table. Windows has been the same since Windows 2000. What you're buying is eyecandy.
- Rutger Blom
Rutger, curious. Are you a Windows user? What do you use? XP, Vista?
- Kamath (नमः)
@Rutger - first off I am not buying it (I'm MSDN). Secondly there is no way you can say it's been the same since Win2k.. that's absurd. What about MediaCenter? The thing is an entertainment juggernaut. you sound like a linux fanboy :)
- andy brudtkuhl
Wow, more infantile whining about Vista. And now a petulant little temper tantrum demanding Windows 7 for free? I can almost hear them snorting and stomping their little feet. People, even adults, are still spoiled little brats, aren't they?
- Akiva Moskovitz
Rutger, prove it.
- Akiva Moskovitz
Those that whine the most about Vista and demand free Win7 have probably never even tried or paid for it, anyway...
- Jemm
Uh and inded huh. That's a crazy notion. The reason it's crazy is that if they did do that then they would never be able to charge for subsequent versions of Windows again. So in the long run they'd lose. They should, however, ditch all of this nonsense with various versions and strains of the OS. It just makes a big ol' mess.
- Tadhg Kelly
from twhirl
I can't agree with this. It's a pay product, everyone knows it. Vista is fully functional as well, even if the general impression is bad.
- Eric @ CSTechcast.com
I use vista at work and it is just so poorly built. The 2003 AD tools don't install without having to run a script to finish off the installer, and even then many of them still don't work (DHCP admin for example). The explorer shell is a travesty (I lay a big dose of blame on indexing services), the interface for common things like share and NTFS permissions is a mountain of windows when one should do and the networking performance is piss poor for basic file management!
- alphaxion
don't you understand, everything *must* be free. Business model? <mumble> <mumble> something about advertising <mumble> <mumble> Profit!
- mikepk
win7 is looking like a point release. Should be free to those with the applicable license (where upgrades are free, such as enterprise VLA). However, it should be a massively reduced price for those with a full copy of windows and a legit license.
- alphaxion
hahahah mikepk just leveled up
- Bwana ☠
@milepk taking business lessons from the underpants gnomes again? ;)
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
I upgraded a Vista machine here yesterday. It went without a hitch (took three hours or so). Everything seems to work ok so far. However, I am quite underwhelmed. It seems, perhaps, slightly faster but except for the visual changes to the task bar, I can quite forget I'm using it, instead of Vista.
- Ian May
I'm using XP at work. I've tried Vista and in a corporate network environment it's a disaster. Microsoft more or less admits Vista was a flop and now is in a hurry to hype Windows 7 and make everybody forget about Vista. Windows 7 is at its best what Vista should have been. I think it stinks. By the way, I whine as much as I want to. It's called freedom of speech. Amen.
- Rutger Blom
Rutger, it'd be better if your whining was actually based in facts and logic
- Akiva Moskovitz
+1 DSaad69
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
It is consumer unfriendly. An OS should not take more than an hour to figure out and should not have to be set up or customized.
- Mona Nomura
Akiva, it is in my world. Facts and logic you won't find much of here. Opinions and experience plenty.
- Rutger Blom
oh hell, this conversation again. can't we drop this. nobody is going to change their mind and you can't convince people the error of their ways no matter how hard you try. people can't listen to reason and refuse to believe anything other then what they believe. it's a exercise in futility to keep rehashing this over and over.
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
Then why do you keep participating and reading, Jason? You posted a comment earlier. Bizarre. @DSaad - that said, shouldn't Win 7 be free?
- Mona Nomura
@Mona - did i mention i'm a little crazy? :P
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
Hey - aren't we all, Jason? Aren't we all. ;)
- Mona Nomura
from IM
Interesting thread. @Rutger. Do you have any idea of the underlying changes that were made in Vista? It is a vastly superior operating system to previous versions. Unfortunately the UI lets it down. And @Mona, one of my favorite things about a new install of any OS (Mac OS included) is spending time customizing it and installing my favorite apps. Maybe I'm just a geek that way. I'd stop buying/using it if I couldn't endlessly customize it.
- Kenton
I find it interesting that the interface for manipulating the NTFS metadata streams for things like Keywords, Author and Comments that's been in since Windows 2000 or so has actually been removed from Windows Vista. So much for supposedly having "enhanced metadata support".
- Tyson Key
@akiva thing is, rutger is right when he's saying it's a flop in a corporate domain, the fact that their own AD management tools are borked in their latest OS is inexcusable! And as I said, something simple such as changing share and NTFS permissions is an act of annoyance as you have to traverse edit windows instead of being able to modify them from that one window!
- alphaxion
@Mona ++
- Enrique Gutierrez
from twhirl
Aside from the technicalities, like I said above: It is consumer unfriendly. An OS should not take more than an hour to figure out and should not have to be set up or customized. - You (edit | delete). Thus, Windows 7 upgrade should be free.
- Mona Nomura
from IM
I agree with everybody who says Vista wasn't all that it could have been. But it was far from botched. If it was measure from the perspective of getting converts from Mac/Linux, it failed. But it worked well enough for current windows users. An enormous amount of work went into the innards with very little and poorly directed focus on the usability. Win7 goes the other way - usability and performance is a focus. Try Win7, give it a fair chance. It's excellent as an OS.
- Kamath (नमः)
And THAT is why it should be free, Kamath LOL
- Mona Nomura
from IM
Mona, I totally agree. Wasn't arguing about that part :). It is to Windows Vista what Snow Leopard is to Leopard - though the degree is different.
- Kamath (नमः)
But in the process of re-engineering the NT kernal for things such as network presentation etc they buggered up the network stack. Set off a file transfer from one machine to another across a network comprising of 2000 small files and I'll bet you that the XP one will complete it quicker than vista. They screwed up the explorer shell, why does it take a minute to contemplate displaying its contents? Basic requirements that are borked.
- alphaxion
I'm all for it being free to current Vista users. It would be a good reward for Beta testing. However I also think OS X updates should be free until 11 comes out.
- Kenton
alphaxion, that bugs me too especially over wifi connections. If I remember correctly, I believe Microsoft's explanation was that it increases the fail-safety of network transfers if there were network failures during the transfers. It would still fail (time out) during longer network failures but large transfers would not be aborted due to momentary network failures.
- Kamath (नमः)
it's also partly because of the packet size since it was incorrectly determining jumbo settings and a little bit of the peering protocol (network discovery, attempt at replacing WINS for CIFS, tho they still had to copp out by altering DNS for wins-like static entries and of course they still haven't fixed the issue of needing WINS for trust relationships in 2008 *rolls eyes*)
- alphaxion
alphaxion, I believe they did work on network transfer performance in Windows 7. I don't know if anybody has done any benchmarks with real numbers. An unscientific benchmark was done by zdnet which seems to show dramatic improvements in performance. http://is.gd/eqTP. There are issues with other OSes too. I understand this bothers you as it does me but there are so many other usability+perf improvements that i don't let this bother me too much.
- Kamath (नमः)
I've said it before, they should price it like Apple does Mac OS X upgrades. Full retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate should be no more than $120.
- Bwana ☠
Won't be a problem. I'll just order a ticket to the launch event, as usual :)
- Mirco
I don´t know about "free", but I must agree a bit with some of you in that I have lost most of my confidence in MS after the Vista disaster (mostly for MS themselves), the Mojave "experiment", and now the fixer-upper approach on 7. It may all just be a feeling I sit back with, but whether it´s true or not that´s a very real problem for MS´s marketing and UX departments.
- Thomas Bøhm
The biggest problem (or the reason for problems) about Longhorn/Vista was project management and processes. They were forced to do the "Longhorn reset", start over from scratch after 2.5 years. That's one reason it lost many promised features and lot of development/fine tuning time. Instead of the Longhorn, they did Vista as a basis for future OSs, like the Windows 7. Fortunately processes were changed a lot, too.
- Jemm
bwhahahahahaahah give it away? keep dreaming, people.
- Terry O'Fee
we sadly do not live in a world where the big companies think. "you know, i feel really really bad. let's give the next one away". Microsoft does not equal Trent Reznor.
- Terry O'Fee
Then why was Steven Sinofsky (Win 7 dev chief) quoted to say: "Technically if you have a Vista machine you can install this and it will install an upgrade. That's part of what we're letting people test. But that's not a product offering. This is an offer to test the product. I would remind readers that this is a beta product. This is not a done product. That means there are bugs in it...
more...
- Mona Nomura
from IM
They could have done a free upgrade to make up for the fact they lost some trust etc..look at the IE haters lol.. and maybe had a deal where they got feedback...say a form that users filled in once a week... if not filled in, then they could probably disable it or somthing untill form sent. ;o) Imagine how much they could improve that as they went with the amount of feedback.
- Rob Sellen :o)
microsoft do not owe us anything. they fucked up, granted, and vista was a mistake. they are seeing that with their "vista ready" shitfight. but let's be honest. this isn't some simple upgrade to vista, or a newer version of XP. this is a brand new operating system, of course they're going to pay. if they said "we've fixed vista and we're going to charge you 100 dollars for the privilage", i'd be pissed off.
- Terry O'Fee
because "this is a test". it's not the full program. it's hardly completed. but really, if you're into that whole "everything should be free" ideal, look at ubuntu. i still have hope they can get their act together and get a decent OS running that will make MS pee themselves a little. :P
- Terry O'Fee
I'm going to "like" this cause it's so funny..
- Terry O'Fee
??? We're not saying everythign should be free (at least I'm not). Look, if a consumer targeted OS takes more than an hour to learn PLUS people have to customize in order to efficiently function? No, that is a defunct product and it is NOT ok. Why do you think MSFT was giving out XP FREE to users that bought new computers and didn't want Vista? Fact: Vista is a mess. And Microsoft owes the paying customers a functional product - Windows 7.
- Mona Nomura
If you want free upgrades, Linux distros such as Ubuntu or Mandriva might be good.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
WHY did they do Vista then? what was the aim over xp? I haven't used vista so dont have a VALID opnion on it.. I mentioned the free comment above in realtion to the vista users mainly.. :o) I wouldn't expect it free, though I wouldn't complain if it was... :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
@Mona .. they obviously didn't read my post on that idea did they LOL :)
- Steven Hodson
why did they do vista? cause they're money grabbing bastards, thats why. im still using XP myself. i'd be making a post more on "vista - i want my money back!"
- Terry O'Fee
$120. I'd buy it for that.
- Bwana ☠
they should offer cheaper upgrades for vista, if possible. i grant you that.
- Terry O'Fee
If a consumer purchased a new computer within the last year or so, they also purchased a MSFT license for a crappy unintuitive RAM hog. WHY should they pay? Makes no sense.
- Mona Nomura
from IM
++++++mona! :o) I agree!
- Rob Sellen :o)
I know it's not fair Mona, but lets be honest - when have MS ever given anything away? If you don't like it, you can always go to Apple, which products are twice the price or a linux install and hope there's not too much of a headache to set it up....
- Terry O'Fee
I don't agree. If a consumer bought a new computer within the last year or so, they should be able to run Vista just fine. The early performance complaints of Vista were from older computers.
- Alan Le
So that's how you treat consumers? Especially in an unstable market where Apples are becoming more widely used? Don't like us? F*ck off? I don't know about you, but as a long time Windows user now Mac convert, I'd like to see Windows succeed.
- Mona Nomura
from IM
Maybe this is the difference between Apple and Microsoft, Mona. Apple released OS X 10.1 as a free upgrade from 10.0 (which was arguably worse than Vista). We're in a different situation though. Everybody is cutting costs left and right (including Microsoft) and no matter what they did last year, THIS year is different. I expect very little "free" anything this year. It'd be a stretch for Microsoft to do this in a good year, but it's even more a stretch to even think about it this year.
- Bwana ☠
If MSFT has the $$$ to throw away resources on applications that have been hybernating (play ready ring a bell? what's going on with "pink"?) They sure as heck should have the funds to service their clients. I played with a Vista machine for the first time a few weeks ago and was utterly appalled. That said, I am excited for Windows 7 CTP
- Mona Nomura
from IM
that's what im trying to say. i'm no big fan of the MS either (despite me using it) but didn't MS just lay people off as well? Good intentions aren't going to pay the bills.
- Terry O'Fee
Those are 2008 funds... 2009 has different budgets
- Bwana ☠
Oh and you will see those "throw away" resources dwindle
- Bwana ☠
If you want free, go Linux or use them trendy torrent sites. Microsoft doesn't owe anybody a new product just because customers had a gripe about their old product.
- Jon, the Beartato of FF
Bwana - also Apple sell the OS and the computer to go with it. MS don't sell the PCs (yet - actually no. I don't want the red ring of death on a PC too :P)
- Terry O'Fee
Look, I see where you're coming from Bwana but I highly disagre. MSFT is going more and more downhill and is this a smart business move for them? You have to spend money to make money and we've been under the MSFT reign for so long, they were free to do whatever the EF they wanted. Average consumers don't have the time nor the resources to install free open source OSs nor do they want...
more...
- Mona Nomura
from IM
all a free upgrade will do is get reports in the tech blogs. you really think word of mouth is going to spread to the average user who is looking for a new computer?
- Terry O'Fee
What are you talking about?
- Mona Nomura
from IM
It'll be cheap anyway if they are going on Netbooks. Or vendors will make it cheap by installing crapware.
- Rodfather
So if consumers get free upgrades, what about businesses? That's a huge piece of the pie. I agree with your reasoning Mona, but I simply don't think it's going to happen.
- Bwana ☠
I don't know about free upgrade, but it needs to be cheaper for Vista users as there aren't many features in Windows 7 compared to Vista. Performance is better but that's what it should have been with Vista.
- Vaibhav
What about existing customers who are stuck with a crap OS? I am not around techies all day and there are a lot of people that can't even hook up their computer to WiFi - or have major issues when troubleshooting. I mean look at that frickin' UX! On top of that, it's slow! Hey for all you people that know and love Vista? I commend you all but usability is number one and Vista is a nightmare.
- Mona Nomura
from IM
@Mona Who said Microsoft is going downhill? I'm not sure what you use to gauge company health, but 60B in revenue and a 30% profit margin seem like they'd contradict the thought that we're a struggling company. http://finance.yahoo.com/q...
- Paul Whitaker
You said it at the beginning, it's about principle, and principle ain't gonna sway the accountants. Reality :/
- Bwana ☠
Proof right there they should give Vista away for free TO EXISTING CUSTOMERS FOR AN UPGRADE.
- Mona Nomura
from IM
For those who bought Vista Business, they already have XP disks to use. Vista isn't a failure so there shouldn't be compensation. Windows 7 is not a Vista upgrade anyway. At least not marketed that way.
- Rodfather
Mona, you might as well buy a car and then expect a free upgrade when the new model comes out the following year because you didn't like the one you have or couldn't figure out how to drive it properly.
- Akiva Moskovitz
Seriously? You expect the people who made this to not get paid? No revenue? You've gotta weird picture of how the world works.
- Ernie Oporto
It's not unheard of, like I said, Apple did it with OS X 10.0 -> 10.1. I just think there's outside factors that are going to prevent MS from taking this leap.
- Bwana ☠
But for cars and I can customize the way I want to. I can't afford a paddle shift all leather bimmer wiht a sun roof, so I'll settle with a cheaper manual w/ a sunroof option that might be thrown or perhaps go with an automatic with no sun roof. They all drive properly but there are choices. Terrible example, Akiva.
- Mona Nomura
from IM
Service packs like Vista SP1 were free. Windows 7 is not a service pack.
- Alan Le
Bwana - it's called customer service LOL
- Mona Nomura
from IM
It might as well be a SP because it's basically the same thing, re-packaged with a few UI tweaks (from what I'm reading)
- Mona Nomura
from IM
Mona, your response to me makes no sense.
- Akiva Moskovitz
Why you would equate Microsoft to a car in the first place makes no sense.
- Mona Nomura
from IM
Especially Vista.
- Mona Nomura
from IM
Its a good thought, however its not going to happen. It should however be reasonably priced like an Apple upgrade, and there should not be so many different versions perhaps 2 home user and business user.
- Dean Blithe
See, Vista is not a failed product. I've shared articles on my feed listing reasons (consumers can understand) why it is not. However, an OS should not take over an hour to learn and certainly shouldn't require tweaking in order for it to run smooth. Tech savvy people LOVE it. Consumers hate it. So who is Vista really for?
- Mona Nomura
from IM
Mona, basically it appears that you want a free upgrade because you didn't like the Vista experience. That is the same as buying a car and then not liking it and expecting the next generation of the model for free (and I chose a car as an example because it follows a pattern similar to OS releases). You might as well whine to Apple and say that you bought a Mac but you hate the Dock so you expect the next version of OS X for free.
- Akiva Moskovitz
I don't have a MSFT machine anymore and stayed away from Vista - as far away as possible. It is NOT the same as buying a car, since there are HUNDREDS of cars to choose from. How many platforms do we have to choose from? What about the peopel who can't afford Apples? I know many people that have purchased cheap(er) computers with Vista and have nothing but issues because they don't know how to use it. Is it really their fault they purchased a new computer and forced to use Vista?
- Mona Nomura
from IM
So your complaint now isn't with Vista but it's with the fact that OEMs bundle with Vista? Take it up with the OEMs. I mean, last I checked, if you bought an Apple, you only had one choice of OS, too. At least most PC OEMs gave you the option of XP.
- Akiva Moskovitz
LOL!! Ok, Akiva. You win. But that still doesn't change the fact Windows 7 is a pre-packeged Vista with UI tweaks.
- Mona Nomura
from IM
Hiding this before I say something mean.
- Paul Whitaker
Yeah and that's no different than Snow Leopard being pre-packaged Leopard with under-the-hood tweaks.
- Akiva Moskovitz
I haven't said anything about Mac or people should get a Mac, omg LOL. All I am saying is, as a general business practice if you sell a flawed product they (MSFT) as a company should take steps to rectify it. They did something that threw everyone off by offering XP down? upgrades? for existing Vista consumers. That right there shows how unhappy people were with the experience. Why NOT offer Windows 7 free to users that already have Vista on their machines newly purchased?
- Mona Nomura
from IM
Paul Whitaker's a turdhead!
- Akiva Moskovitz
It is not. Microsoft didn't spend 3 years doing UI tweaks.
- Alan Le
The UX is flawed, Alan... All devs I know LOVE Vista, consumer hate it. :(
- Mona Nomura
Dude, they're still using... Tahoma in the shell. It's painful.
- l0ckergn0me
Mona, I use both OSX and Vista and now Windows 7. For me Windows is more practical for gaming and work. I don't think it's flawed. I however love to use OSX while browsing and to do creative work. I'm not a typical consumer though as you pointed out.
- Alan Le
l0ckergn0me, I thought it as all Segui UI these days.
- Akiva Moskovitz
Definitely should be free (or at least slightly under 20$). This would propel Microsoft ahead immensely.
- Brandon Titus
Microsoft is not ahead and have a monopoly with its OS? tell that the the EU.
- Alan Le
LOL @Matt.
- Alan Le
Oh, dang, I KNEW I should be doing *something*...
- MiniMage TKDteacher of FF
Yes. Next question?
- Martha
I agree, it should be free or possibly $50 tops. But that wouldn't be the Microsoft way of doing things.
- Sloan Bowman
Vista has worked very well for me in a corporate domain setting. We've only used Vista with new computers though. XP was fine for what we do. Every average user that I have setup with Vista was resistant and hesitant at first because of the bad publicity they heard. Every single one of them have thoroughly enjoyed using Vista and would never go back to XP. Windows 7 thus far for me seems like many modest improvements to Vista which add up to a very good OS. However, it must be a free or under $50 upgrade.
- Jim Bednarz
I can't believe no one has a made a counterpoint thread "Why Windows 7 should cost 3 paychecks"
- Matthew DeVries
@Jim - Agreed, almost everyone who actually USED Vista for more than a week with a bad attitude loves it once they get used to the changes. It is stable, secure, fast and does things that you really really miss when you go back to XP.
- Soulhuntre
Win7's real value is in giving all the pundits and a-listers who are so emotionally invested in Vista floppign a chance to admit they were wrong without having to say they were wrong. They cna go on and on about how good Win7 is and never amdit that the core tech is all Vista baby.
- Soulhuntre
That being said, Win7 does do things nicer than vista and runs equally well on my primary quad core and my Dell Mini9 - which is flat out awesome.
- Soulhuntre
I swear a fighter jet just flew under the Golden Gate bridge. Did I wake up on the set of The Rock this morning?
David Cook, Mo Kargas, Kol Tregaskes and 14 other people liked this
I never saw you throw that gentleman off the balcony. All I care about is: are you happy with your haircut?
- Joe Dawson
Is Nicholas Cage doing slow-motion glamor walks with guitar riffs playing the background? If so, you may be.
- Mark Trapp
Does Nick Cage have flares?
- Roberto Bonini
GREEN SMOKE! I HAVE GREEN SMOKE!
- Steven Perez
Yeah, there's some sort of very loud air travel that feels like it's on my roof.
- B. Hatin
hahaha! awesome
- Marco(aureliusmaximus)
Jason and MG, where are you? I'm in the Tenderloin and annoyed.
- B. Hatin
That's right kids. Prell shampoo is the preferred carrier medium for naughty neurotransmitter blockers and/or off the charts fissile materials depending on your preferred method of mayhem.
- Jay Cuthrell
yeah very annoying when i'm on the phone cannot hear a thing!
- MG Siegler
I'm no North Beach and hating that my quiet sanctum has turned into an airline carrier
- anna sauce
@kaia - i'm in Russian Hill
- MG Siegler
All you Blue Angels haters should contact Chris Daly. Trying to kibosh the Blue Angels shows during Fleet Week has been one of his pet projects.
- Chester
Blue Angels and Thunderbirds = teh awesomesauce. They can be my wingmen anytime.
- Alex Scoble
@jason are you at that gaming co. the old movie theater? i'm 2 blocks from you
- anna sauce
They've been buzzing our office for a half hour, now.
- Steve Lynch
from twhirl
Living next to Moffett Field gives us a great opportunity to mute our TVs and wait out the airplanes about 1-2 times a day.
- Louis Gray
FriendFeed celebrates its first birthday on Thursday. What a first year! Thank you to FF for being such a huge part of my life this year!
Amir, Aaron Krug, Apostolos Papadopoulos and 173 other people liked this
I predict a birthday cake meme!
- David Young
FF FTW *FIREWORKS AND CRACKLES* chick chak, what is to do then?
- ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,
Not if you got to do the private beta. I signed up on September 3, cuz I'm cool like that ;)
- Shannon Jiménez
I joined a while ago but have only recently got the addiction. It's a great service, look forward to many years to come.
- Kol Tregaskes
Hey, same as my birthday! Very cool! I suggest a "Party Hat" meme is in order.
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
Ohh, Happy Early Birthday FF!
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Well done FF and users, it's been a great year!
- Mo Kargas
Does anyone have a printable party hat template... hmmmmmm
- Johnny Worthington
lol +1 John
- Kyle Lacy
@robert scoble Is this 1 year birthday since launch of product or of the company overall?
- Jason Goldberg
That went fast!
- Charlie Anzman
FriendFeed helped me achieve my first Google PR5 ranking
- Glenn Batuyong
YEAH!!! Congratulations FriendFeed!! What an amazing and productive first year...very impressive!! So happy for you guys!! Thank you Robert for reminding us of their birthday and to appreciate their product!!
- Susan Beebe
Thank you FriendFeed, Robert Scoble and everyone else that has made FF the useful and entertaining tool that it is!
- David Ward
I must thank the Twitter outages for pushing me here.
- Eric @ CSTechcast.com
I look forward to seeing how FF moves forward, very good service, thanks to Paul and the team for their hard work creating a very useful utility.
- Jeremy Campbell
from twhirl
FriendFeed is so useful that I don't even know what I'd do without it. Congrats on completing your 1st year FF!!
- J. D. Ebberly
Wow, its hard to believe that FF is already a year old.
- Josh Smith
It took you almost a year to get me onto friendfeed? Dude, WTF?
- Alex Scoble
I predict that I will be unemployed by this time next year if my first month's activity on FF is any indciation of what the next year will bring. :D I joke. I think.
- ♥patricia♥
Shannon: that wasn't even the private beta. That was the "are you a sibling of Bret beta," of which you were the only participant :)
- Bret Taylor
Cake in the Logo time ??
- Charlie Anzman
Alex - LOL that was snarky!!! Ok Robert, what took you so long to get Alex on FF?!! ha, ha!!
- Susan Beebe
Truly a great year for and on FF -- what an awesome service, a BIG thank you to the developers and to all the COOL PEOPLE on FF.
- Nicholas Kreidberg
glad this is still the BEST item on "Best of the Day"! Bump!!!
- Susan Beebe
Actually the birthday party is on Wednesday evening. Yikes. Well, it'll be Thursday in Australia! :-)
- Robert Scoble
Congrats to Friendfeed - i predict BIG things :)
- Zee.
At first I didn't 'get' the point of FriendFeed, but after a while, its become my favorite internet hangout.
- Nick Humphries
Happy Birthday Friend Feed--in a very short period of time, you have made yourself a critical part of my day. Kudos!
- Amie Gillingham
Happy Birthday FriendFeed! Congrats to every FriendFeeder!
- Cesar Cardoso
happy happy!
- Jason Calacanis
I'm looking forward to seeing what they do in year two.
- Chris Luckhardt
Boom shacka-lacka-lacka Happy Birthday! (in three more days)
- Pete Delucchi
Wow only one year for FriendFeed, and it's already quite a hit, I only joined it last month
- Alvin
Happy birthday FF,can't believe it was about a year,I joined it about two months ago,and now I can't live without it,kinda addictive.
- Steve Chou
Happy Birthday FF btw
- Kol Tregaskes
is there a party somewhere?
- Loic Le Meur
Happy Birthday, FF. I like it, a lot.
- Leon Ho
First of many successful
- Alex Hammer
Gorillas.bas - http://www.rickyroad.com/games
Wayne, Jérôme Flipo, Brian and 11 other people liked this
I used to love this game
- Eric
this takes me back to my freshman year in HS (1993), screwing around in the computer lab
- Carter Rabasa
Takes me back, this and Nibbles
- Mo Kargas
Ah, those DOS days relived.
- Jonathon
I so remember this, but I never really thought they looked like gorillas, just naked fat men.
- Chris Rivait
I learned to program by viewing the source on this and nibbles.
- Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
@mark Me too !
- Mo Kargas
w00t!!! The good ol' days... remember those two other apps? like the source for a budgeting app and some database?
- ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,
I remember REMLINE.BAS - but I could never get it to work - had to convert my GW Basic programs by hand.
- Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
I still have the QBasic source : )
- LouCypher
Life after Techmeme - http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r...
Mark Interrante, Will DeLuca, Benedikt Koehler and 41 other people liked this
I'm popping the popcorn now. Let me know when the show starts.
- Cyndy
I don't know what to say, that post resonates on many levels with me. Especially on lists being irrelevant. Damn right!
- Mo Kargas
"thiefdom" LOL
- Jason Carreira
Don't miss it one bit.
- David Cohn
We don't need Digg or Reddit to survive, either.
- Chris Baskind
Chris, true, although I never say no to the occasional Digg headline either :-)
- Duncan Riley
I have to say, Duncan. I've greatly enjoyed your content much more post-TechCrunch. And I believe this is part of the reason why. You do indeed write to the audience, and not to the TechMeme potential. Good stuff.
- Nathaniel Payne
Never say never. ;-)
- Chris Baskind
Thx Nathaniel
- Duncan Riley
What Nathaniel said. And that's kind of what I was digging at, pardon the pun. I'm thinking if we write for readers, the traffic will follow.
- Chris Baskind
I noticed the same for Polymeme...it's a strange thing but I'm learning to use it in ways I do find useful.
- Hrag
For what it's worth, The Inquisitr is becoming a must read for me. Enjoyed this piece, pretty illuminating stuff on a few different levels
- Eric Berlin
Duncan, The Inquisitr is #3 on my Leaderboard. http://www.louisgray.com/live... (does that help?)
- Louis Gray
Thx Eric. Louis, yes + thx
- Duncan Riley
Went cold turkey about 4 months ago. Still visit once a week or to see a story thread I need to see easily.
- Jim Kukral
from twhirl
I definitely agree with Eric
- Steven Hodson
-high five!- ....let's go have some pork chops, of course!
- Mona Nomura
Duncan, nice, that post came out even better than we planned. Now how about starting a whole blog dedicated to how much Techmeme doesn't matter?
- Gabe Rivera
wrapped in bacon.
- Bren, Not Grinchy
Maybe for the 3 month anniversary Gabe ;-)
- Duncan Riley
I agree with the other Eric, The Inquisitr is becoming a great site. However, I think you should buy up all of the similar domain names because every time I tell someone about it, they mistype the URL and get to some dumb site :)
- Eric Florenzano
Eric, true, my wife found one last night based on a real basic typo
- Duncan Riley
http://jeneane.net/?p=83 my two cents
- jeneane sessum
Gregory, I forgot to mention in the post that my last headline on Techmeme was a post discussing the problems with Techmeme.....total coincidence :-)
- Duncan Riley
Duncan is a talented, sometimes provacative, always intriguiging (thought-provoking) writer. And great headline writer and promoter as well.
- Alex Hammer
Duncan I think if people send email to questionsorcomments@techmeme.com with subject line $$$ you will get respond back otherwise your email goes to deleted folder :) I build techmeme for my self I would be glad to add every f*** tech blogger ... Anyways as I commented on your blog, awesome post I love it!
- Live Crunch Blog
I think there's far too much emphasis on whether or not one "makes it" on TechMeme. And zealots who follow TM with every breath and then show up in the comments area to say stupid crap like "why did this make it to TechMeme" need to get a life. Read and subscribe to what's interesting, don't be so focused on "where" it comes from. There is no single golden source on the web.
- TDavid
Traffic alone is a tough measurement. We've also had a huge rise in the adoption of syndication. People going to sites is in decline (or slowing) almost everywhere.
- Kevin Gamble
Barack Obama meets troops in Kuwait, makes 3-pt jumper on first try - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
  |
nouhad, Seth, Crystal English and 40 other people liked this
Swish!
- Mike Doeff
Daaaamn ...
- Chris Baskind
the coolest
- Ňicķ
jesus, i mean it is not like he's a freakin superstar so stop admiring him like one. hope he makes it better than bush, that is all i want from him
- Nils Hitze
from twhirl
Nils, if you can hit that shot, I'll say the same about you. :-)
- Chris Baskind
if he's not superstar, i don't know who is.....
- Ňicķ
Shooting hoops may become a crucial part of his campaign
- Charlie
presidential shot
- Jamie
Fluke.
- Mohamed J
I wouldn't vote for a Bulls fan
- Noah David Simon
Wonder if he can throw a baseball.
- Larry Huffman
This really shows the one thing that sets Obama apart from most other public figures: how incredibly, almost preternaturally relaxed he is in front of a crowd. Coolness incarnate.
- Dave Bonta
Impressive guy all the way around...neat!
- Susan Beebe
All star
- Jeremiah Owyang
Yes but he can't bowl which shows he is not in touch with "regular" people. After all... regular people don;t play basketball.
- Jeff Jones
Quality!!!
- Joe Dawson
"I may not make this first one" - yeah, right
- Tom Quinn
he is "on target"
- orionstarr
Now I want to see him box.(What a president we could have!)
- Lisa Creech Bledsoe
from twhirl
forget foreign policy! I want a prez that can shoot hoops.
- SolidSmack
from twhirl
that's it. i'm voting for him. twice
- Cee Bee
he is left-handed....4 of the last 6 presidents were southpaws
- Derek Coatney
Awesome!
- Mitchell Tsai
Wouldn't it be neat to have a cool president?
- Anthony Citrano
Wow.
- Dave Winer
The Lakers sure could have used him back in the NBA finals, but I think the US needs him more.
- Jon Erickson
Would have they shown it if he hasn't scored? :) Anyway I hope he'll be your next President.
- Markingegno - Donato
Too bad the presidential race can't be decided by a game of 'around the world'.
- Dave Earley
Interesting sidenote: When John McCain visited the base last year he was handed the same basketball. It spontaneously self-deflated in his hand.
- Bill Barol
If Obama agrees to do a town-hall meeting with McCain I think McCain should agree to play Around the World or Horse with Obama.
- Brandon Titus
When I saw this on Fox News, they deliberately included 10 seconds of Obama "prepping" for the shot, but somehow were too short on time to include the part where he makes the basket.
- Sanjay
2 points.. toes were over the line!
- Aaron Baer
Has/How/Why tech blogging has failed you - http://scobleizer.com/2008...
Yaroslav Nikolaev, Adam, Dimitar Vesselinov and 174 other people liked this
Long rant, sorry, had to clear the air so I can start blogging again. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Wow...I'm very interested and excited to see/hear/read what is to come from Scobleizer land next.
- Justin Korn
I hope I make your list and if not, please let me know why so I can potentially improve.
- Allen Stern
Glad to see that you are starting to realize, despite Techmeme that the world doesn't revolve around just the bay area.
- Harold Gilchrist
from twhirl
Gotta say you're bang on the mark there. Tech blogging should be about the tech, not the biz.
- Luke Robinson
Allen: I like your blog. It's just that I love hanging out with all of you and talking geeky stuff a lot more than talking about this deal and that deal and all that.
- Robert Scoble
Harold: I've always realized that. I feel I got unfairly tagged with believing the world only was about the Bay Area. I guess I deserved that to some extent, but this area is quite dominant in the world of tech (including the tool you're typing on right now) so some of my boosterism is to be expected. Funny that the top Israeli company has offices here too.
- Robert Scoble
Kudos to you Mr. Scoble, what a very bright post you delivered today! Thank you for bringing some fresh perspective, that's always refreshing and welcome. I'm also happy you cite Lifehacker as an example. They focus on the smartest digital experience possible and help us improve ourselves. That's the biggest deal of all. Techbloggers should never forget it.
- c0wb0yz
I love the tech first and foremost but the business is important too, especially in respect to the sustainability of said tech.
- Jamie
Jamie: I agree. But the business needs to serve the customers and the customers/participants/users or whatever you want to call you and me aren't coming first in this industry anymore and that's worrying.
- Robert Scoble
Wow funny enough thats the way i have been feeling for a while now I am looking forward to seeing what is next from the Scobelizer...
- John Spencer
from twhirl
I agree overall - CN has only a small percentage of biz - most is trends, analysis, and reviews. I had an interesting discussion about this with someone last week - if i had a computer that could handle video, i'd make a quick video to explain - there's an important part you are missing
- Allen Stern
Next is to get some sleep. Gotta be up at 7:30 to be at Fortune Conference at 8 a.m. for breakfast. It's an incredible conference, hope to see some of you at the Tweetup at 5:45 p.m.
- Robert Scoble
This is often relevant from major blogs/ celeb bloggers. The smaller and more personal blogs are still focusing just on tech ;) Perhaps you need to update your feeds :-)
- Dennis Bjørn Petersen
from twhirl
Allen: will be watching in the morning for what I was missing. I'm sure I'm missing a lot. I had to stop ranting at some point, it was getting too long! :-)
- Robert Scoble
Dennis: I know. It's why I spend a lot more time here lately than on blogging. The smaller stuff shows up here a lot more regularly and I see a lot less "Yahoo business news."
- Robert Scoble
Excellent post Robert. It's why I don't read Techmeme as much as I used to. The life and joy in exploring, playing with and dissecting tech, the geeky exuberance in 'new stuff' has been lessened across almost all tech sites in general, leaving a bland veneer that is just business talk. Things a geek like me doesn't care about, as I'm not an investor.
- Mo Kargas
Techmeme has suffered because most of the tech blogs they follow have become nothing more then PR outlets like you said.
- Harold Gilchrist
from twhirl
As I posted in your comments, that's a really good post. It's great to see the old Scoble back - the one who I started reading back when your "latest thing" was Tablet PC! Welcome back, mate.
- Ian Betteridge
Robert, blogging is becoming commercialized, as it becomes popular. I do not see it as a problem. It just might mean that you and a bunch of other likely minded people have to move on to a greener, more fascinating and less populated pastures. Like friendfeed, etc. Luckily, there are lots of them around and tons in the pipeline. Enjoy!
- Павел Романовский
I don't know, Robert. On the one hand I agree 100%. And can I say that as editor of WebWorkerDaily I am the one who gets those 15 press releases a day and I *constantly* have the "is this useful?" filter on. I hope that's clear in our postings. Anyway...Your post is kind of like the person who is used to picking their own corn complaining about the supermarket because it's not the same garden. It's not. The grocer has to pay its bills, as does the paid tech blogger.
- Judi Sohn
I know I am a newie to all this but I have been reading blogs for a while. I've bee thinking up a response and I'll post later. Long comments on the iPhone make for one queasy bus ride.
- Derick Valadao
Finally. Thank you. I follow 357 feeds. Everyday. Granted I have many pop-sites (lifehacker, engadget, etc) on the list. But not one is of these "new breed" of tech bloggers out there. Even though I am in the industry, they do not speak to me. They are just another form of CNN to me. Linking to each other and regurgitating the same gibberish, no matter how relevant or important, it does not speak to me. Anyway, welcome back! This is very refreshing news to me. I will be following it with much interest. TY!
- Carlos Ayala
We should all just organize a "Tech Blog Strike", unsubscribing to those blogs that only push press releases. Let's see how they sweat when they see their subscriber count falling...
- Jorge Escobar
Obviously my previous comment was "tldr". I just wanted to say how great it is that a person in your position is able to repurpose his content to better fit the goal you are trying to reach with your content. It's a great direction to take in a time where most blogs are just trying to echo up to the top.
- Derick Valadao
Excellent post on the state of the blogging nation.
- Sheila Thomson
My only real problem with tech bloggins is how easily ideas take hold and spread to get page hits. This is very easily seen in the Vista hatred - there was never any objective reasonf or it... but it was so useful for traffic generation and looking cool that it was rampant.
- Soulhuntre
from twhirl
It's probably less about the business/tech divide, and more about me-too echo blogging
- Dave Pelland
I think so... tech bloggers are jsut as easily victims of peer pressure and memes as anyone. Once an Idea ("love google") defines someone as "getting it" then few will look at it objectively.
- Soulhuntre
from twhirl
This is a welcome breath of fresh air. Fantastic.
- Pete Gilbert
Scoble. Great post. Agree completely.
- Tom Quinn
Super excellent post and, ironically, exactly what blogging is all about. One good thing about an economic downturn, it will weed a lot of fluff out of the infosphere -- with less incentive to act as promotional platforms for startups, blogs may get more informative about using established tech.
- Sprague D
Great article Robert. It is your authenticity even more than your tech blogging that has made you the great writer that you are. Anyone can report Apple's earnings yesterday. You have always had an honest voice though that makes your writing stand out.
- Thomas Hawk
The take away is 'sensational headlines'. Add to the "Rumor:" and we don't need this stuff unless it's coming from a tabloid format site
- Charlie Anzman
Blogging is about saying what I want to say, and sharing things that I like with anybody who cares to listen. I'm not interested in driving traffic (thank goodness) or repeating what others have said, but contributing to a discussion.
- Chris Nixon
Great post Robert. Very good read and right on the mark. I religiously read feeds in Reader, but only a few that help me. I love Lifehacker. Almost everyday I find something new and useful to my job.
- Gary Schmidt
The Techie audience thirsty for knowledge is much smaller then the Get-rich-quick audience, but the largest demographic are the Free-lunch boys. The blogs with the most revenue have tricked their advertisers into believing teenage boys are business decision makers.
- paul mooney
I love tech bloggers and the things they write about. The good ones will always come at a common topic from a different angle and I just LOVE that because it makes me think outside the box and start connecting dots all over the place. Robert you are definitely one of those bloggers that I love to read and I don't think any of the ones I read have failed me.
- Devlin Dunsmore
from twhirl
Awesome reading! THX a bunch!!
- Ronald
I have to agree about the comments system though. One thing that we started to see a while ago was data portability and being able to communicate accross services. I think Disqus does that quite well and it's a great first step to making sure that the comments system becomes a little more useful on blogs.
- Derick Valadao
Well said Robert, left a comment, said my piece, cheers!
- Steve Spalding
Wow, an impressive and honest assessment of some major issues in the techblogosphere.
- Richard Akerman
Robert - I'm not in the tech industry. But I love what lots of tech stuff has done for learning stuff in my life and for others. And I want to keep on learning. You've certainly helped me here - I wouldn't know a fraction as much about using Friendfeed productively, for example. Glad we're going to see more of this kind of stuff. Welcome back.
- Tom Landini
Knocked it out of the park. If we can just get back to being geeks again, a lot of this drama will calm itself...
- Jared Smith
Great read, but kind of depressing the way things have gone. I just like being a bit geeky and all things will work out in the end.
- Alan Ashley
from twhirl
Shripriay, you hit it on the head. It is a shame that all the tech bloggers just wants to be Engadet or Gizmodo these days.
- Harold Gilchrist
from twhirl
Nice writeup Robert. I enjoyed your detailed analysis & history of the situation. Perhaps you can lead us in a new direction?
- Mitchell Tsai
i read the tech bloggers then try to actually use the gadget. would like to hear more results from the usage angle.
- Lee Kent
Shripriya, I agree with you wholeheartedly. My original comment was much longer but got cut due to length. I wish more blogs were like Louis Gray and Lifehacker which take a step back and then hit us with posts that are useful/interesting almost 100% of the time. Zero Punctuation is a great example for the gaming crowd--one post a week, internet fame.
- Derick Valadao
Hmm... A Scoble article I like.... Is this the Seventh Seal? Seriously, you're right on in that the echo chamber of groupthink has made tech blogging boring and predictable. I think there's a few people out there fighting it, and FF makes it easier to find them. I think you're off on the business side, though... I think it SHOULD be about the technology, but the entrepreneurs coming out of the Valley have made it necessary for us to discuss the business side by not having solid business plans.
- Jason Carreira
Anyway, hope this is a sign of things to come from you.
- Jason Carreira
Thanks Robert. Great read, and perspectives. Love to see more on productivity, like Lifehacker. Just became a GTD convert BTW and loved the David Allen piece.
- Jericho
Thanks for that Robert -- perspective is key.
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
I'm sorry but those that don't scale are toast, from a commericial and traffic standpoint. I know that is part of the point (varying aims and objectives of blogging etc.)
- Alex Hammer
Slap your self and get back on that horse Robert. You have NOT failed us. Human nature makes us want what we do not have. For some it's page views/revenue, for trolls it's attention, and others it's n-list status. The rest of us are looking to quench our thirst for knowledge. And please give our group a little credit. We have become ever-so-skillful at weeding out those sources that do not provide this knowledge. I repeat...You have NOT failed us.
- Andrew Smith
I appreciate what you are saying, and am glad that others share the same opinion as myself. What happened to being the guys who always had some tech trick that seemed like magic to the uninitiated? The joy of tech for me is showing that magic to others and getting them interested in what's out there too, and lately we have all become business whores a little bit. I look forward to the future content coming from you, and getting back to what made tech cool in the first place, the tech itself.
- Aaron Krug
One of the things I value most about Robert is his inner homing mechanism. He's very prone to get lost, but something always shakes him loose and he re-calibrates. Or is that re-boots? (Kind of like iPhone 2.0 now that I think about it.)
- Michael Markman
I agree w/ your article, Robert. The wonder that makes so many of us interested in tech does get lost at times- I never saw tech blogs as the place for that stuff, but appreciated it when I found it there.
- anna sauce
Alex: While scaling is necessary if you want more people to view your content, why should that come at the cost of the content itself? Too many startups are trying to replace a solid marketing plan with social media and end up trying to use big blogs as a means to advertise their product and ride the traffic tail to customers. From what I gather, this tends to make jaded bloggers who...
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- Derick Valadao
I kinda find this funny.. the comments are so distributed between FF channel and Scobles blog channel ? which one am I too follow ? I mean yesterday we had this big huge augments about cluster and fragmentation of conversations. So Robert, here's a suggestion. Turn off comments on your blog and let your readers comment on FF only. Else dont post your blog entry to FF and break your own...
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- Peter Dawson
I just approved a bunch of comments that were held in moderation. Now there's 88 comments over there. Whew.
- Robert Scoble
melmcbride: good point. It's easy to just stay on FriendFeed all day. It's hard to come up with something new to say that takes more than a short paragraph. Damn, I'm sounding so old school. The neat thing is when I do a longer blog is comes in here and improves everything.
- Robert Scoble
i think this is part of the echo chamber that is the silicon valley. people who live there use the "new" thing for so long they soon get sick of doing it. they are same people who think everyone elses use technology the same way they do and feels the same way they do.
- Jonathan Jesse
Scoble steps out of the bubble and takes a breath of fresh air... hopefully more follow or we're going nowhere fast.
- Harish V
I thought this was great! Robert, I think what I hear is your desire to just do whatever the hell you want to without regard to "The Man". Go for it. You of all people can do that!
- Elliott Ng
Robert the real issues is that everything really only needs to exist once. Conversations don't neeed to exist in many different places. Your blog comments and the conversation here are all the same conversation. I'd love to explain the solution as i see it but it'd take too long.
- Anton Mannering
Robert I am still lost- How can you profess to be be a convo aggregator , yet approve 88 comments on your blog ? @Anton, no Blog comments and these comments on FF, are two different sets of conversation happening on the same topic. Lets not confuse this fact !! There is a fork in the convosphere.
- Peter Dawson
@ Anton: I sort of agree with you, but i don't think comment fragmentation is all bad. Sometimes well-written comments appearing somewhere else can draw attention to good ideas. If I don't subscribe to a particular blog but see the feed posted here on FF, I'll pick it up and then maybe I'll go straight to the blog. There's value in fragmentation along with the frustration.
- phil baumann
I think a service like disqus should be used so that friendfeed comments on links to blog posts (with comments therein) will all show up no matter which medium you use to discuss them. Does this exist yet? I thought disqus would have this covered by now.
- Derick Valadao
Great points as always Robert. We're with you on this.
- Missionary Broadcasting
Peter: I approved about 40 that were being held in a moderation queue. I don't let newbies post a comment on my blog because then it'd be overrun with spam. FriendFeed has a much better system to protect against spam than my blog's comments. I think that it'd very cool if I could replace my blog's comments with FriendFeed, but that'd require an API that would make a URL, return it to my blog, and get it linked in, all really quickly.
- Robert Scoble
I haven't read the comments here, but feel I can comment. Robert, as someone who as known you for five years now - just before the mania began - I am pleased to hear this. What got me into your blog in the first place was your ENTHUSIASM for technology, particularly GTD. Never let that go. You be you. I will be me. And everyone else will be everyone else. In the end, you gotta follow what you love. It works for everyone from Steve Jobs to the Pope. Your friend online and off - SR
- Steve Rubel
@ phil bauman Ok 2 things. First of all I didn't say it shouldn't appear in many places. I'm saying that if you're in Roberts comments and I'm on Friendfeed then we should be able to see ALL the conversation from both. But it need not exist in a whole bunch of places only be visible from there. Second I think the argument that there is value in fragmentation is similar to saying there is value in using a ploughshare pulled by an ox. Ther is but not to most people.
- Anton Mannering
@ Robert Scoble: Interesting you should mention your blog comments being friendfeed. I know a startup or two working on those problems. In reality though the issues become way bigger when such a service is subject to really large numbers (non-tech crowd). Solving those problems is where the fun and games are and I only know one startup with a real solution for that.
- Anton Mannering
Ironic, isn't it--the influences (PR, marketing, big media) the original bloggers were trying to break away from are--surprise-- still here and the game hasn't changed as much as we thought. PR people still push their stories, tech and news blogs focus on a few big name co's and start looking like traditional media, etc. What's needed is more of the energy, enthusiasm and original thought that Scoble and others brought to the game earlier on--otherwise, we've only duplicated the old media on a new platform.
- mark ivey
I send you a tweet also but I believe that I must also write here how spot-on was your post... I can't wait to see more real Tech news coming from you and I hope that this will force other bloggers to remember how they started back then...
- Manos Matsakis
This is clearly your best post ever. Thank you for all of your hard work. I read your blog because it entertains me. I would love more posts "sharing geeky things." On the other hand, if you blog about news, technology, and a few pro-company biases, that's nothing to be ashamed of. Just because you (or any other blogger) do not provide a perfect balanced news experience does not mean that you have failed. People are responsible for finding their own news this day in age.
- Brian Wilson
Great post and I totally agree. "What's needed is more of the energy, enthusiasm..."
- Eric_T
Great stuff Robert. As blogging and social media continues to spread outside of tech and into other niche industries and verticals, those of us facilitating and evangelizing that spread should continue to look back at this post so history isn't repeated. See you at the Ritz tonight.
- J.J. Toothman
"I think that it'd very cool if I could replace my blog's comments with FriendFeed, but that'd require an API that would make a URL" - yeah I second that motion. If I had a widget that could do that but with bi- directional flow , that would really be a convo aggregator. This will certainly be an interesting challenge to some of the geeks out here !
- Peter Dawson
You can, if you're willing to give up the content. Glenn developed a great plugin that allows for bi-directional flow. It works for Wordpress and (I think) Blogger http://blog.slaven.net.au/wordpre...
- Steve Spalding
Great timing :) I got strange looks this weekend when I said that I don't review anything that has been 'pitched' to me - but rather things I discover that I think are cool. I discovered something this weekend at BlogHer that I will review. But no one sent me a press release. :) It's just a really neat gadget!
- Lucretia Pruitt
I think you should watch the movie 'Resurrecting the Champ' - its about a Writer. Drew the analogy to your post and the movie (that I just happened to see yesterday) http://mrinal.vox.com/library...
- Mrinal Desai
Enjoyed that rant, Robert. I'm not a tech geek, I don't read techmeme or techcrunch as the gist and trends can be followed here on FF, but I do read blogs like yours, Louis, Jeremiah and Hutch's, mainly to learn new things. Before FF I had never heard of Rescue Time, Jott, Evernote or TSheets for example, but hearing about new ideas and then experimenting with them myself, well that gets me interested and excited. The corporate enterprise stuff leaves me cold, it isn't nifty or flexible enough for users.
- Sally Church
Nice post. The PR influence bit reminded me of this article by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/submari.... Agree to the fact that Tech blogging has been less 'tech' than it was a couple of years ago.
- Nikhil Dandekar
I loved the rant earlier yesterday, and even more impressed by the ff reaction. My take on your blogging, having followed you since MS days. Stay on what you think, not what others think. Avoid the whole Gillmor Gang bs, and associated groupthink.
- Bankwatch
I think that every new medium matures as it becomes possible to make real money at it - this is inevitable. I don;t think it will be the death of blogging certainly but we are in a new phase. Older blogs will mature and still keep that flavor or they will stagnate and die. The personalities will decide that. One of the things I like about your work Robert is the enthusiasm. Sometimes it makes you a bit naive, others it makes you a little to fast to declare something game changing but it is always good input
- Soulhuntre
Robert, just read your wonderful post now, and I'm still fascinated by it. I'm commenting here because I know you'll read here first. You know, this competition that you were taking about, almost cause me to stop blogging, but then I realized that I'm writing because I like it, so as far as I'm concern, I'm not trying to compete anyone, this is why I'm taking things easy and on my own...
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- Orli Yakuel
Orli: you know me too well! :-) Yup, agreed. Just do it because it's fun. The problem is that posts that make us all smarter don't stick around very long because of the flow.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, maybe it's because 'blogs' are not so unique anymore. Lets take Friednfeed for example: everyone can get noticed here just because they favorite picture on Flickr or dugg story on digg (regardless if they writing a blog, or giving any other opinion in the subject) this and other massive content mixed up together on a daily basis is flowing so fast, it almost seem that if you'll...
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- Orli Yakuel
PodTech Sells For Less Than $500k - http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r...
Sampad Swain, Edward Vielmetti, Alex Williams and 72 other people liked this
The most interesting thing here is that Scoble "liked" this ;-)
- Brian Sullivan
Scoble "likes" items to bring them to the attention of those who follow his feed. It's not an emotional response. It also is his only option if he wants to highlight it... and not comment.
- Louis Gray
Lighten up Louis - I'm sure Robert can speak for himself
- Brian Sullivan
Louis, that type of social behaviour is not alone a scoble thing :)-
- Peter Dawson
interesting, scoble "liked" my post but then removed the like. i also think like should be renamed to share to avoid these issues in the future.
- Allen Stern
I thought changing it to "mark" would work as well.
- Brian Sullivan
I don't Like that PodTech failed, $7.5 million in VC cash and today they were sold for for less than half a million dollars. I know Robert, Jeremiah, John and Vallery, but no one is ready to tell the story
- paul mooney
I'm cool with telling the story. I just need a couple of glasses and wine and a lot of time to tell it first. Podtech was screwed up by a number of decisions. Everyone played a part, but I sure learned a lot about how a company can screw up big time. Major learnings for me? 1. Have a story. 2. Have everyone on board with that story. 3. If anyone goes off of that story, make sure they get on board immediately or fire them. PodTech did none of the three and I'm sorry for my part in not making the three happen
- Robert Scoble
Not all ventures succeed though. How many 'fail' for those that succeed? It pays to take a pragmatic view. I think it's a hot market, and the impetus to succeed is high, eventually some will break
- Mo Kargas
Other things I learned: 1. Make sure people are judged by the revenues they bring in. Those that bring in revenues should get to run the place. People who don't bring in revenues should get fewer and fewer responsibilities, not more and more. 2. Work ONLY for a leader who will make the tough decisions (see above). 3. Build a place where excellence is expected, allowed, and is enabled. 4. Fire idiots quickly (didn't happen at PodTech -- even if you count me as one of the idiots).
- Robert Scoble
We get so much coverage of companies when they launch, when they're growing, etc. I'm hoping that someone writes an in-depth piece on what went wrong at PodTech so that entrepreneurs can learn from this. There is so much that you can learn from failures.
- Mike Doeff
Other things I learned: 1. if your engineering team can't give a media team good measurements, the entire company is in trouble. Only things that are measured ever get improved. 2. When your stars aren't listened to the company is in trouble. 3. When your stars start leaving (Gillmor and Owyang left before I did) the company is in trouble. 4. Getting rid of the CEO, even if it's all his fault, won't help unless you replace him/her with someone who is visionary and who can fix #1,2,3.
- Robert Scoble
My only thought is, how much longer does PodShow have?
- Christian Burns
Robert: Thanks for all the insights from the "front". It's no fun being in a business failure. :-( But the lessons there are immense. I learn a hell of a lot from my failures...
- Mitchell Tsai
Mike: I'm not going to be the one who writes that. Much of the worst stuff is too personal. Failures of companies often happen around failures at the leadership level. Telling why things failed means telling off investors, executives, and others (and even me). Not likely to happen because that'd mean burning bridges and I'm just not willing to do that. These people have too many friends. :-)
- Robert Scoble
My vote is for assimilation into something bigger. They bought it to "right the wrongs" and flip it to someone else. Heck, at 500k, it's a bargain right now...IF things are cleaned up.
- Bradley McSpinn
Brad: almost all of the talent left. What's left now is not much that's worth much. The revenues came because of our social media leadership. That's what Furrier really had in his hands. Owyang. Me. Cunningham. Jones. Gillmor. The rest of the stuff was a pipe dream that didn't lead anywhere, which is really why the company burned through $7 million (plus several million in revenues).
- Robert Scoble
@louisgray I've often wondered if there was a better option than "like" and "unlike" would be nice to see "interesting" there are many times when I see something that is interesting but I don't "like" it.
- michael sean wright
Although I'm sorry to hear this happened, Robert, I'm really appreciating the lessons you're passing on. Valuable stuff, thanks. :-)
- Brian Carter
Louis is correct. I didn't "like" this. I just thought it was interesting for you to read.
- Robert Scoble
I'll second Brian. Thanks for sharing, Robert.
- Chris Baskind
"burned through $7 million (plus several million in revenues)" ?? wow thats a lot of mulla to burn thru .. net net at least 10-12M ! For what a 10 member team and within like 2yrs ?? you all must have had rock star status... did you have a chauffeur driven car Scobles ?
- Peter Dawson
I have Podtech stories, too.
- Eric Rice
Well dish them up, Eric. The aspect of full disclosure is part of what I love so much about FriendFeed.
- Bradley McSpinn
tell tell Eric.. the topic is hot :)_
- Peter Dawson
I honestly hate to hear of the downfall of any credible social media, especially in the means by which this story unfolded. Glad to see you're in better company these days, Robert.
- Bradley McSpinn
Peter: there were more than 30 people and dozens of contractors working at Podtech. Only a couple brought in any sizeable revenues.
- Robert Scoble
Misteps aside, did PodTech have a viable opportunity, or was it ultimately doomed from the start? Clearly any company that's not run as a meritocracy has little chance for success.
- Brian Edwards
Although Robert's response to Mike Doeff is probably true (that the backstory to companies that fail are too personal), I agree with Mike that a post mortem of entrepreneurial endeavors would be very useful. Case studies can change the names to protect the not-so-innocent too.
- David Muir
grrrrrrrr.. I wish FF has button at bottom of thread 4 ease of commenting..anyhoot @Sean even at 40heads - it still does not make sense. Unless you tell me that all 30 members were getting $100K and dont 4get startups pay less and give more in share holdings !!
- Peter Dawson
Do I dare bring up the how did they expect to pay back 7.5 million in V.C. through such extremely niche content question?
- Paul Colligan
Sean: engineers in Silicon Valley cost more than $100,000 per year. Podtech had a chance in the Social Media World but spent too much to build its own platform and never delivered on that. We also didn't work together and that is another failure in a startup.
- Robert Scoble
I am going to write an in depth post on this story. It's huge. There are many lessons. Scoble's view is from his perspective but there is a big picture that goes way beyond Scoble's view and that has to do with building a company from a zero stage. I've moved on from a year ago after I was forced out by the board. We made some mistakes but directionally correct. Sure if I had a mulligan things might be different but a business strategy, financing strategy, and team strategy are part of the story..
- John Furrier
john: I am looking forward to your post.
- Robert Scoble
There are many lessons to learn that I'll post about. PodTech had a great chance and pioneered some of the best practices in social media. One thing that I'll talk about is the difference between self financed growth strategies and venture backed growth strategies.
- John Furrier
Looking forward to your posts John.
- Thomas Hawk
I'm looking at this from way on the outside. The value of my perspective is that I know nothing about internal management, visions, discussions, factions, or what have you. All I can say is that from afar, I never got any brand coherence from PodTech. Was it news? paid corporate marketing videos? analysis? community? There were some powerful personal brands--I still follow them in the PodTech diaspora--but it felt they never cohered into a PodTech identity. (That doesn't mean losing personal identity.)
- Michael Markman
Michael: exactly. We never played together as a team. It is why entrepreneurs need different skills after they start their companies. It is not enough to sell people on a dream. You must coach your way to it too.
- Robert Scoble
Great to work with John, Robert, Valarie, Kevin E, Jennifer J, Michael K, Jeremiah. Like many Web 1.0 / 2.0 companies, those in social media face the challenge of business model. There are lots of bigger train wrecks. But unlike PodTech, no one created enough of a brand (good or bad) to even be remembered in this conversation. There are more to come.
- Brad Baldwin
Brad, so does this mean you're looking for something new now, or are you still with PodTech's new owners?
- Jesse Stay
from twhirl
When exactly are people supposed to use PodTech? At work... but too time consuming... people hate slow voicemail and want email. In the car, maybe. At home, may not want to address work topics. At least they had the cojones to cut bait.
- Indio Apache
from twhirl
John Furrier, I'm also very interested to hear your stories.
- imabonehead
I think this is one of the best conversations I've ever seen on Friendfeed or in a blog. The perspectives are great. From my outside point of view, and from the vantage oint of having worked with literally hundreds of entrepreneurs, I think Podtech didn't exactly know what it was doing from a brand standpoint, other than being "cool." It was VERY cool, but so was pets.com,There also has to be a viable business model, and I don't believe revenue from sponsorship is enoough.
- Francine Hardaway
With all due respect to their "failure", half a million dollars ain't that bad! What puzzled me from the beginning, is what permission do they have to record and publish many of the talks. Did all respectful speakers surrender full "replay/distribute/resell" rights to their sessions? This doesn't apply to interviews, but a lot of recordings are from professional talks and seminars...
- Adi Rabinovich
I have been thinking about what Furrier said about me not having a full picture of what went wrong. First of all I don't think he is right, but if he is I will add one last learning: never work in a VP position when those above you don't share a complete picture of the business with you. Especially when that business is a social media one that was pushing transparency and community values.
- Robert Scoble
PodTech introduced me to Thomas Hawk. Robert Scoble took a risk and left Microsoft for PodTech for more money and to make his mark ouside of MS. The back story would be interesting to hear. I agree with Francine Hardaway in this this is one of the best conversations I too have seen on FriendFeed. Honestly, I'm an audio listener. I never could support PodTech as a viewer unless you count Photowalking. I did not know that John Furrier was forced out. So who bought PodTech?
- Maury Estabrooks
Pathetic that people cheer at someones failure. Regardless, I know - don't go there- just freakin sad.
- Rocky Barbanica
What will happen to your videos? You guys did good work there.
- Andrew Feinberg
Andrew: our old videos belong to Podtech. I hope they donate the tapes and archives to the Computer History Museum.
- Robert Scoble
I'm looking forward to hearing an open discussion of what went wrong. I think startup entrepreneurs like me ca learn a lot from this.
- Andrew Warner
Hope the 2-3 hours of video Scoble recorded of CrossLoop way back doesn't go away
- Mrinal Desai
One thing, Andrew, you could learn - don't alienate those about you. Be strong enough and have the courage to bring everyone on the team together and make them all feel that their contributions are appreciated.
- Rocky Barbanica
...and be smart enough to put the company on Chemotherapy when cancer is detected.
- Rocky Barbanica
Robert was kind enough to take me to Podtech and introduce me to John when I was in town last May. I think it's very sad that it didn't work out. People put their hopes and dreams and very soul into startups. But then, "failure" does have a lot of value, as we can all see from this thread. Hopefully, for everybody involved Podtech was a good stepping stone to something else that's...
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- Dawn
@ Scoble. I am copy pasting a comment from Mathew Ingram's post on this topic. I liked the comment and hope you would shed some insight into its questions. The comment follows: "Is anyone at Fastcompany Inc. reading this? What has Scoble really learned? What is Fastcompany.tv's story? How do Fastcompany.com, scobleizer.com, scobleizerTV, Fast Company Live, WorkFastTV, PhotoCycle, Qik,...
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- Bilal Hameed
Bilal, perhaps you and anonymous commenters at Mathew Ingram's blog should mind your own business. Demanding revenue and profit numbers, etc., is outrageous.
- Dawn
As much as anyone who is 'in it for the tech' hates to admit it, revenues are simply essential for any business. I can't even count the number of times in y old company business development came down and said 'do this and this please' and I was like 'it will take 3 employees 2 weeks of time to do this, how much money will we get for it?' and the answer was 'oh, no revenues, we just think it would look better.' Revenues matter.
- Andrew Leyden
Did the rights to the Vloggies go with the sale? I know Irina would love to have her idea back.:) A lot of the talk here is how Podtech was a "social media" company, where it always looked like a "video production/distribution" company to me. Is there a difference in Podtech that I was missing? There is definitely a great case study in how companies interact with creative professionals and communities somewhere in here.
- Schlomo Rabinowitz
Bilal: the changes to WorkFastTV actually were made due to community feedback. If it weren't for the community feedback, those changes would never have been made. What is FastCompanyTV's story? We are having conversations with business and tech innovators to understand how the "fastest companies" are building value for their customers and we'll use the most interactive methods around to...
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- Robert Scoble
FastCompanyTV is making our bosses happy (we're bringing in more revenue than is being spent) but we're a private company so we don't discuss our finances in public. About our audience. I'd argue that I know more about our audience than any TV show does and we're soon going to require loging into FastCompanyTV to comment. Who is making tough decisions? I have a boss and he has a boss but the community is really our ultimate boss.
- Robert Scoble
Schlomo: no, there's no real difference in the end. That's why PodTech failed. It squandered (didn't listen to, or make use of) its social media stars. I don't know what'll happen to the Vloggies trademark and domain. I assume the new owners will keep those, I'd assume Irina can negotiate with them. Andrew is right. Dawn, thank you, appreciate the support.
- Robert Scoble
PodTech and John's earlier work (circa 2005) was why I got into podcasting. It's why I co-founded PodCamp. It's why I thought there was a great opportunity to make interesting media in the tech space. Between PodTech and IT Conversations, I learned tons of larger picture information that saved my company millions of dollars. When all the "cool kids" showed up, I had high hopes like everyone else. But that's also when things diffused in a weird way.
- Chris Brogan
What a wonderful discussion. I am waiting for John's post. It will surely clear a lot. I know John personally and I like him. Let's see his opinion and see what the next steps for everybody are.
- George Athannassov
some of Those videos that Scoble did for podtech have had huge impact on me
- Christian Burns
Posted a longer essay on this, and podcasting as a business. My question: How does the $500k sale price relate to missteps by the company, as opposed to fundamental problems with podcasting as a business? -- http://www.thestandard.com/news...
- Ian Lamont
I pointed this thread to a friend of mine, not a geek , but a "thinker" and who dabbbles in M&A, Hedging and all that nice fund style mngt. His comments were. "listen there are lesson to be learned everywhere, the founders should be thankful that this is only a 10-12M cost of learning curve. All startups face a risk, all investments have risk. Its only throgh failure that people learn to mature and grow. All good things that flourishs are by-products of many failures" . Oh well, I digress.
- Peter Dawson
It was certainly an interesting ride for the almost year I was there. One thing I could never understand is why PodTech felt it needed to build its own media player and distribution platform when there were several potential partners that were already years ahead of PodTech's development. Blip.tv or Castfire could have easily saved PodTech a shit ton of cash while delivering better features and stats reporting. I suspect with an engineering team in place, they needed something to do.
- Eddie Codel
Eddie - Can't agree more, but this is just one of the many missteps that appears to have happened. Roberts level of transparency on the topic gives us a great opportunity into what can go wrong in a start-up. The core issue appears to be a lack of leadership at many levels. If an honest post-mortem can be written it will surely benefit anyone looking to build their own startup.
- Jim McCusker
Twitter versus Friendfeed - http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r...
Howard Saavedra, Charlie Anzman, Eric and 8 other people liked this
It's not a "versus" relationship.
- Mohamed J
I agree with Mo. Without twitter, friendfeed loses a source of data AND a source of potential users. Without friendfeed, twitter also loses a source of data and potential users. As with all the services which feed to friendfeed, there are gains and losses in both directions.
- Slippy "WildBeard" Lane
You may want to read the linked article, in case you hadn't.
- Jack Baty
It's and "AND' not an "OR'
- Jeremiah Owyang
+1 Jeremiah
- Susan Beebe
The idea of FriendFeed replacing Google is kind of exhilarating. It's about as likely to happen as seeing a live dragon flying over Terra Haute but it's a thrilling idea nonetheless.
- Akiva Moskovitz
I prefer an XOR relationship - find the elements of FriendFeed that Twitter can't replace and use FF for that. Find the elements of Twitter that FF can't replace and use Twitter for that. :)
- Jesse Stay
This argument does not hold up for me. Remember when you had to have your phone in one pocket and your camera in another pocket? But now you can have them both together? Friendfeed has all of the functionality of Twitter so you can do your broadcasting bursts, and people can see them in their streams just the same. However, there is a lot of additional functionality that is valuable and after sometime, you can finally see how Twitter is only needed for legacy purposes.
- Andrew Baron
@Jack - I did. I still think I make a valid point. I haven't joined in with any previous twitter v friendfeed discussions, so i figured it was time to stick my beak in and see what comes out. ;-)
- Slippy "WildBeard" Lane
Andrew, FriendFeed still doesn't have very good messaging capabilities, like direct messaging and/or (xor) public messages (that aren't replies). Also, FriendFeed does not have the friends I have on Twitter yet as well.
- Jesse Stay
from twhirl
@akiva I don't think Google will die, but what you already see is that people use Twitter to ask their friends a question and often get an answer for stuff like "In paris, know a restaurant?" When I search now for "Demand Media" I find out what my "friends" think about the current news. Just as one example.
- Oliver Thylmann
@andrewbaron the problem is that people cannot see them. I am following 150 people in twitter and I still have a pretty good overview of stuff when I check it a few times a day. Checking friendfeed a few times a day does not work, a for the volume and b for it not being scannable... that's the thing with have 50 different services with different formats to aggregate from. You can't have one simple view of things. That's what twitter brings. Simplicity.
- Oliver Thylmann
EA Goes Live With Scrabble on Facebook for U.S. and Canada; Get Your Q's and Z's Ready! - http://www.centernetworks.com/scrabbl...
Mack D. Male, Svetlana Gladkova, Nathaniel Payne and Eric liked this
check the post to see which blog wins at scrabble!
- Allen Stern
CN does not let me post a comment for some reason so I'll do it here. "Can't stop to wonder where you get the ideas for such paradoxical comparisons and post ideas, that's really amazing! Glad to see Profy not the last in the list even with the shortest name of all :)"
- Svetlana Gladkova
sorry svetlana - maybe you can skype msg me and let me know what happened - we always like comments on cn :) yea - i thought inquisitr would win with their usage of Q but the other letters didn't support the Q. The key I think is less vowels :)
- Allen Stern
No need to be sorry, will skype you now with the details of what happened
- Svetlana Gladkova
from twhirl
User 21 » FriendFeed Has ~75,000 Active Users (Personal Research) - http://user21.com/2008...
sophy, David Erickson, Nikpay and 44 other people liked this
Interesting analysis that also breaks down "the top 20 'heaviest' (most subscribed to) FF users." What's notable is that many of these same influencers put Twitter on the map.
- Steve Rubel
from Bookmarklet
Must read now.
- Russellreno
Interesting table!
- Louis Gray
I would like to see 21-50.
- Russellreno
This data is lame. Notice # 20 - he barely even uses FriendFeed at ALL! He only has 2 organic posts. His entire FF is just a cross-post of his twitter and upcoming feeds - that’s it… ok ooooh 14 comments since last year - wow! let me go follow that guy! gees. I guess this list strikes a nerve, 'cuz I keep seeing lists of "cool" people - yet they are NOT the really *contributing* to FF; now granted MANY of them are, and you know who they are - i do! and I am GLAD they are here.. trim list!
- Susan Beebe
I too am impressed that the folks who built the twitter empire are re-building their empire over in FF- which I applaud as FF is a worthy service and gives us more conversation!! My rant is due to folks listed as key players in FF that don't really even use the service
- Susan Beebe
they are key players in the analysis Susan because of the number of people who subscribe/follow them. is it lame that ~20% subscribe to someone who doesn't participate much? I don't think so, at least not if people wish to see Arrington's blog/twitter/flickr etc feeds via FriendFeed.
- Robert Seidman
Cool job... Love the stats!
- Mitchell Tsai
Note the correlation between the top 10 and those who make up the "default recommendation" list for new users. Re: Allen Stern's post, it's how FF targets the influencers.
- Sprague D
Susan and Robert. I agree with each of you. Arrington does not participate here, but FF is a great place to find all of these people in one place.
- Russellreno
completely agree @Sprague D, you are right. The top list are all the people on the default list. I notice my recommended list never ever changes and I refuse to follow folks just because everyone else is.
- Lou Paglia
What is "contribution"? How many people actively comment/like/post? I don't think I've ever seen a post with more than ~300 likes or ~200 comments. For a userbase of 75,000 people, that's much less than 1%.
- Mitchell Tsai
Funny. This guy's stars show only 10,000 subscribe to me. FriendFeed says more than 15,000 do now. So, either FF has really grown a lot since he took his stats or he missed more than he thought.
- Robert Scoble
Er, stats. Can you tell I am FF'ing from an iPhone?
- Robert Scoble
Compared to how many on Twitter? People like to compare Twitter & FriendFeed, but they are very different beasts. Sure you could use FF as a microblogger, but what a waste, it's the aggregation and conversations that make it what it is. I too wonder why some of the folks in the top 20+ are so widely followed... it's not that they aren't interesting, I just think there are many others who are contributing more unique and insightful perspectives.
- LogEx
Somehow I can't convince the 30 or so people that follow me on Twitter to friend me here. :( sadness.
- Zach Underwood
Maybe the data is a little stale Robert. Looking at his older blog posts it seems he started his experiment back in mid-june but only posted his analysis over the weekend. Although its not presented very clearly
- Jon Dillon
Your information is interesting. I personally like FF better than Twitter
- Theresa Geyer
Think Seidman's piece addresses this nicely http://www.youhavetobekiddingme.com/2008...
- Charlie Anzman
"This guy's stars show only 10,000 subscribe to me. FriendFeed says more than 15,000 do now." ok Robert, we belive what you say, you got 15K followers - so what ?
- Peter Dawson
He says that he may be missing 10-15%, but based on Robert Scoble's data (and considering all the private feeds), maybe that should be 25-50%. Perhaps also a lot of people with private feeds subscribe to Robert (a "discriminating" crowd).
- Mitchell Tsai
Peter: why the bile? We're talking about stats and I'm giving mine. Since I'm mentioned in the article above, I think it's relevant to the conversation.
- Robert Scoble
Wow, I had no idea friendfeed was so big (not matter the exact figures). Still feels like a small town (in a good way).
- Sutee Dee
@susanbeebe - just to clarify - in this context “active” simply means discoverable, and it doesn’t matter if a person actually does anything on FF as long as his feed keep flowing in. If he is active on twitter and doesn’t even set foot in FF, he will still be picked up by my crawler because his twitter activity contributes to his FF feed. Also not that no matter if he spends time on FF, the data I collected suggests that many people follow his FF feed, which is what I wanted to find out.
- Yuval Atzmon
@Robert and others - The data was indeed collected during the second half of June. Please look at this FF thread http://tinyurl.com/6h7zc6, check smernit and jowyang numbers, and compare to a longer list I will publish tonight. I'd say they fit well within the 15-20% margin. Also, as far as the big guys go, I'm sure I'm missing more than that. There are probably a lot of dormant/inactive users who simplly follow Scoble and Arrington without contributing to the feed (which makes them non-discoverable).
- Yuval Atzmon
Twitter's milkshake meet FriendFeed's straw - http://www.calacanis.com/2008...
Niclas Strandh, excalipoor, Robert Banghart and 65 other people liked this
thoughts?
- Jason Calacanis
from Bookmarklet
yep jason - here's most likely how you got so many so quickly - http://www.centernetworks.com/friendf...
- Allen Stern
the one thing Twitter has it is that it was first before FF in that space. And that brings name recognition to the "masses" and a large inertia that you have to overcome before you can become a true replacement, no matter what technical advantages you bring to the table. I have 5 times more followers in Twitter than FF, and sadly a mass migration doesn't seem to be happening for these folks.
- Daniel Robitaille
Your post to a given site takes on more life when it hits the pages of friendfeed. It's almost like you weigh where you want to "release" a post first knowing that it will get "picked up" by friendfeed.
- todddoubleu
I do not think Twitter will survive as CMS systems that run into message bus systems are the hardest to scale on ruby on rails nd they do not have the money to fight two fronts ruby on rails scalability and new features to stave off competition.
- Fred Grott
good link, allen. some additional default choices would be fantastic. read: better discovery mechanisms. having only members of the echo chamber as default choices makes for a duller feed. no offense to present company. ;)
- Brooks Bayne
I think all this FF > Twitter discourse is seriously, seriously underestimating the power of Twitter's unparalleled portability. It's 100% usable through SMS and has an iPod-esque ecosystem of third party tools and add-ons that hook into it. These things brought Twitter to its throne, and now you guys aren't even factoring them into the equation because of a little downtime.
- David Chartier
i'll post some thoughts on my blog, but one thing that is still annoying is represented in this post... where your friendfeed shows all aggregated iterations of this post here on ff and it just feels silly as i can choose which iteration to leave a comment on. that's an issue. maybe you should turn comments off on the other instances. except that you cannot because its not a feature. also, check out http://friendfeed.com/frendfe... to see some aggregation bugs.
- sull
Jason, that's a brilliant "There Will Be Blood" reference. And so true. I'm afraid that Twitter is just a couple of weeks from being bludgeoned with a bowling pin by FF.
- Frank Roche
I think the removal of a character limit would hurt twitter more than help it. Twitter was never meant as a conversation platform. I think keeping it small and simple makes it much easier for people to use. One of it's biggest strengths is that it's a short form messaging service, and to take that away would make it something that isn't twitter.
- Austin Brown
Jason, I fully agree with what you say here.
- Steve Rubel
I love the fact that there is no premium linked with the number of connections you have. In twitter the greater the number of connections, the higher you appear in the "following" list of your follower. That has become a reason of spam, lowering the quality of the twitter network. Plus, FF works.
- Marcello Del Bono
I can see how Twitter is useful for people who post via SMS, but while Im at the computer FF is far more useful and also more fun to use
- Jeff Hoard
from twhirl
I could offer my agreement here on your entry's content, but I'd rather tell you how much I dug the entry's title.
- Donna Mugavero
I'll put it this way, i never used twitter because I'm not part of the technorati community, but I do use Friendfeed because it allows me to bring together all my online content and then share it with the people I want. That alone is enough for FF to beat out Twitter for me.
- Alfredo Padilla
I think one of the things we have missed carries forward or plays forward a Robert Scoble post, see : http://scobleizer.com/2008... ..let me put it in non tech terms as it pertains to start-ups. FOUNDERS MUST PARTICIPATE IN THE COMMUNITIES THAT FROM AROUND THEIR PRODUCTS! When I state founders I mean also the ones building the product.
- Fred Grott
What it comes down to me is *noise*. FriendFeed is just noisy, what with content from all my social media friends all being dumped into one stream with no organization whatsoever. I look at my FF friends page and I can't make any rhyme or reason to what I'm seeing, even with little favicons to identify which service I'm reading from. Twitter, is clean and organized.
- Stephen Lopez
School of ALL CAPS is a little loud... ;-)
- Mitchell Tsai
I think Center Networks (Allen) has an interesting analysis. I'll be curious to see if the high profile FF users are as interested in commenting on other people's feeds as having their own words commented upon. Twitter just seems like a more democratic forum to me. Personally, I don't care if it is down a couple hours a week. FF only supplements it, it is not an adequate replacement. And I like to write more than 140 characters! Still Twitter is my first choice.
- Liz
PS... Because I use the Flock browser, I get all my social media updates right from the Media Bar and People Sidebar, without ever having to open Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Pownce, Digg, etc... Everything I want is right there at the click of an icon. Flock > FF.
- Stephen Lopez
I wouldn't underestimate twitter's connection through sms. It makes it the first legit mobile social network, and that is significant for mass adoption and use. Most people don't have internet on their phone to use a web app (iPhone Facebook, Tumblr, etc.) or internet (twitpic, friendfeed, etc.) to send email to update or submit to services. But they are very likely to have sms service, and are used to using it.
- Tony
Liz I comment on tons of feeds.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, but you seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
- Robert Seidman
Jason, good post. I made some comments regarding your five questions here http://seriousaboutcamo.typepad.com/posts...
- Clay Newton
my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
- Tyler Gillies
I agree to what you say but besides Twitter reliability, its major flaw is really the reply (or conversation) system which is close to be useless. I guess FriendFeed gained a lot of people (at least myself) because of its efficient conversation system.
- fbrunel
Jason, I agree with you a lot of the time but not in this case. I think it would be suicide for Twitter to get into a features arms race with FriendFeed. They would lose that battle. Twitter needs to focus on keeping it simple, getting stable, and becoming a short messaging infrastructure - not a destination.
- Mike Doeff
Mike, I think you're right on. Twitter would do better to solidify its differentiation.
- Clay Newton
Agreed. I have flip flopped a couple of times on which service I prefer, but FriendFeed is clearly in the lead. If they launch a great iPhone app next Friday it could be thing that pushes them over the hump.
- Scott Watermasysk
Scott: FriendFeed already has a great iPhone app. http://www.friendfeed.com/iphone
- Robert Scoble
FF's iPhone web app is fun and all, but a native app could offer a lot more functionality without having to wait for page loads and other clunkiness. I'm hoping for a native app too.
- David Chartier
Twitter has become a victim of the success it created for itself. As Twitter gained popularity it naturally creates a market for competition. Its poor performance allowed FF to grow. Many of Twitters power users have begun to migrate communication, and followers to FF wanted to see what it is all about. Twitter has lost its first movers advantage. I would not have been able to even make this post on Twitter. FF invites conversation and dialogue. Sorry Bezos, you may have made the wrong investment.
- Fred Neil
Agree. Twitter just isn't built for the type of robust sharing and conversations that make FF really interesting. Twitter is like shouting into a canyon, FF is like being at a noisy bar. Sorry, but too many Tweets are just status updates: You're going to Subway for lunch, whoopee! FF gets a lot better when you hide non-commented on Tweets. As for FF enhancements, I'd like a merge function so the same content from various people/feeds are collapsed into one master. That way I can see all comment streams.
- AJ Kohn
I agree. Great post.
- jonn
Keep in mind that twitter was not initially made for replies, the whole @ sign reply came from users wanting a way to reply and Twitter then started to support the method
- Ray Slakinski
from twhirl
Nice way to put it!
- ChaCha Fance
Looks like Twitter has lost the first mover advantage, and now FF has the first mover advantage with its features. Though since Twitter was the first mover in the beginning it still has a bunch of people who are on it and not on other sites and also has a familiar interface and more third party applications that are compatible with it than Twitter does. Favorite thing so far about FF is the new Seesmic feature to reply to a seesmic post from within FF, really killer.
- Andrew Fielding
I'm still one of the few that want's Jaiku to get back in the game! Google is dropping the ball there!!!
- tomit
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