I really want high-speed trains in California! SF to Palo Alto in 20 minutes, Stockton in 1.5 hours, and LA in 2.5 hours! - David Recordon
*think* sf to palo alto 20 minutes? that would be a regional train over here. not high speed train. *g* LA though was several hundred kilometers, right? that is several hours even in the land of high speed trains. ;) - Nicole Simon
558.68 km in 3 hours should be doable. and as LAX is my fav airport for entry with my current airline, may I add decent inclusion of the airports into that network as well? ;) - Nicole Simon
Is a high speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco a truly pressing need for our state, or is it the equivalent to another political movement mentioned in a Doonesbury cartoon - "free cheeseburgers for the elderly"? - Ontario Emperor via fftogo
While I can't talk about the full run from SF to LA, I do know that I'd ride it throughout the Bay Area and to Stockton. Traffic is horrible, gas is expensive, and modern trains are quite comfortable. Given how air travel is going I'd expect a slightly longer train ride between LA and SF would be pretty popular since it wouldn't mean stripping in an airport, you'd have internet, and even nice food. - David Recordon
The link above claims SF -> LA is 2.5 hrs. Yes, rail is a pressing need all over the US, not just California. - Andrew Talbot
german trains do 250 km/h tops, so that works out good if you can get the same technology. plus being on a train has the advantage of not having to go to the airport with checkin and everything - and usually trainstations are in the middle of the city. problem: the whole culture is build up on the car, then again you have to start somewhere. I know that I as a tourist traveller appreciate more public transportation, and be it just in CA. - Nicole Simon
Nope, Bitnami is not that interesting -- it solves the "do once" of install, but who cares? You need to figure out the pains with installing this stuff...and those that don't, will get it from a hosting company one click script. - Boris Mann
Adam, it refreshes on its own. Likely an issue with Twitter's reducing API calls. - Louis Gray
its a really lovely peice of work imo. Actually makes twitter feel slick... - Zee from WeDoCreative
There isn't even a preferences pane for some reason so I have no idea how often it fetches my tweets. Other than that, I like the presentation alot. - Adam Helweh
No preferences??? I think I'll stick with Hahlo and Fluid. - Parvez Halim
It's cool but they need to integrate some more features. But still awesome - Timo Heuer
Its a great start. Not even 1.0 yet. Group idea is great. ( Loving the Digg/TRS group :P ) Integrated search is a plus. Also, the multi-line text field for inputting tweets is great. Wish Twitterrific had that. - Gary Bacon II
twitter say thank you to tweetdeck - finally you have become useful! (thanks to summize too! ;)) - Dieter Schwarz
Just installed it....it is twitterrific on steroids....love the summize integration - ....
The application could not be installed because the AIR file is damaged. Try obtaining a new AIR file from the application author. :(( - Javid
:-" who want to send me the .air file ? :ِ - Javid
Javid I get the same error as well. - Mack Collier
Javid I had someone email me the file, and it worked fine. Also noticed that when I DLed the file, it was only 289KB in size, the ver I was emailed (that worked) was 476KB. - Mack Collier
Looking forward to further reviews about this. Looks promising. - Barbara K. Baker
Ok, I'm loving this so far. My #1 requested feature for Twitter is the ability to group/filter by classes of people. Thanks TweetDeck!! - Don MacAskill
I think the group feature is great. But, I'll only use it if it includes friendfeed. - Gerard Barberi via twhirl
Can someone tell me why the same thing wouldn't work in Web app that was Gears-enabled? Just wanting to know. I hate having to have a run-time installed to do this crap. - mrshl
My own (brief) 2 cents on this, from the mozilla/firefox point of view, is that it can be a really good way to start -- to start getting interested & engaged users, to start getting a corpus of interesting data, to rapidly figure out what users want. And that that start could get you into the millions of users -- but over time you'll be led towards other & more comprehensive ways to give great stuff to users. - John Lilly
Agree with John. Extensions seem like a good way to get out there and build a name on a simpler platform, and then if your idea has potential to expand you can build from there. - Bartek Gniado
They think they are providing a public service. What they don't realize is, its going to take a whole lot more than that to make me go get a life. - Russell Holliman
I just snorted with laughter, Russell. Look how fast we throw our heroin over here instead. : ) - Chris Brogan
Alright, Chris just made me do a spit take...thumping my arm, lookin' for a vein, LOL - Cheryl Allin
Maybe while you and the rest of the team are looking for Ahab, Chris... others will recognize FriendFeed has played the part of the Wright Brothers. It's a new age. - Louis Gray
As evidenced by this conversation, eh Louis? I used to disagree with you on this. Now I feel like you've been on to this since forever, and I'm just now catching up to it. - Chris Brogan
The truth is, Chris, is that this isn't an either/or, although "battles" are more fun. The answer is simply, both. That Twitter has made themselves a laughingstock is frustrating, because when it does what it is supposed to, it can be very useful. - Louis Gray
Different kind of conversation. Need to be careful with follow. Smaller voices get drowned out. Unlike @ (and I do mean @) Twitter. @ reply feature is *powerful.* - Barbara K. Baker
I wonder, though, how this whole scatter of media makes it all work? Feels like too many rabbit holes here, or maybe that's the beauty? Feels like we can go all over the place, never really catching up to all the conversations. Non? - Chris Brogan
Chris, there's no one right answer. The power of aggregation is to have multiple conversations come in one place. The power of diversification is to have many separate conversations tailored for a specific crowd in more vertical places. The best bloggers and social media users will participate and engage where the best conversations are, and leverage search or other tools to be aware. Given the # of hours in a day is limited, how you use your time is up to you. - Louis Gray
Begging the question, when will Summize dig into FriendFeed? - Chris Brogan
I am seriously sick of the "what will kill X" conversations... - Jennifer Leggio
Me too. I wasn't saying it like that. I really meant the whale graphic, not the app. I'm a Twitter nerd. What can I say? - Chris Brogan
fwiw, twitter's back up again. shortest twitter outage ever. - Russell Holliman
Chris - That comment wasn't directed toward you. :) - Jennifer Leggio
Me think Robert Scoble is scared of the Great White Whale! Remember what happened last time? The Whale got his foot, and now he limps with a wooden stump. Oh Scoble where is thy Whale who swims the great vast internetz. - Igor The Troll
In my living room - I like television... in my car - I prefer radio. Just because I have a TV doesn't mean I don't want my radio to work in my car. Friend Feed is my TV - it's deeper, richer, requires more attention and time. Twitter is my radio - I'll sing along, drum on the wheel, but the static is getting annoying. It's time for them to up the signal. But meanwhile, FriendFeed/TV is rockin' it. - Lucretia Pruitt
I speak whale. Aeeeeeeeeewaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhooooooooooo. - Ryan Kuder
Ryan, well that was rude. There are women here, watch your language. :( - Bwana McCall
Didn't Moby Dick kill Ahab and the rest of the crew (except for ol' call me Ishmael)? It's been a long time since I read it, I could be wrong. - Kirk Kittell
@scobleizer, and what about all the people that don't subscribe to you and yet a friend "likes" or comments? Add another 10k sheep-readers to your ff tally... - Czar Derek Peterman
Jes: funny you should say that when you have a private feed - klecu
FriendFeed, IMO, is much more viral than Twitter - the way posts go back to the top of your friend feed every time there is activity is powerful. - Jesse Stay
My FriendFeed audience is 2x my Twitter audience. That's due to being early on FF and late on Twitter, and being more engaged here. But it took Robert, Rubel, etc. just about no time to pass me up. - Louis Gray
More viral but can be distracting. Any way to stop that for a post that I don't want to follow any more? - Dennis E. Hamilton via twhirl
It's nice to see good architecture at work, FF loads so much more information of different types with more complex relationships and yet do it so much faster than Twitter. - Amit Morson
Because people listen to you and follow your lead. I definitely have. I'm a PR academic. But will FF last before the next big thing comes around? My thesis depends on sustainability of both Twitter and FF...or the next lifestreaming aggregator that does it RIGHT. So far, FF has the lead. But do my friends, colleagues, or fellow students know or understand it? No. They get AllTop (or similar, whatever can can appeal to the masses) because it's easy... - Philip Ryan Johnson
Philip: I think FF will survive because of the search engine here. That's the magic, but it's hard to access the magic so far. - Robert Scoble
I have just 34 people are subscribed to myself but more than several people add me to their follow list during every week. - Daniel Schildt
Robert- tis true, tis true. But I walk around the hallways at Newhouse (Syr U) and nobody has even caught onto Twitter yet. It's frightening. Mass comm schools are graduating students who haven't a clue. So how do we get students to pay attention so they'll be better job candidates? It's scary, but even blogging is foreign to students. Huge disconnect. Anyway, prob a discussion for elsewhere. See Edelman's recent summit for proof of concept that the kids are more clueless than we think. Much more... - Philip Ryan Johnson
I've just started using FriendFeed and integrating it with my blog. Very nice way to pull several things together into one... - Richard Miles
Funny people still seem to be posting primarily through Twitter instead of the Share Something in FF... - simonpure
@simonpure the reason why FF users even uber-geek Scoble - still post to Twitter could be that they dont want to lose or affront their early followers. here's one way how to omit the problem: http://consiliera.tumblr.com/p... - Gaby Benkwitz
@Robert: As you know, survival is not only about user adaption or appealing to the masses, it's about monetizing that crowd, and I don't see FF don't any better job at it than Twitter. - Amit Morson
@Robert, but are they the same people as on Twitter? - aggregators have a 2nd or 3rd mover advantage. They can follow in the slipstream rather than have to create the bow wave. - Craig Thomler
Can you imaging 15K followers commenting on each of your posts? - Alex Sauceda via fftogo
Thats partly because, friendfeed is more reliable then twitter - and because, twitter created the market people are becoming aware of it and joining other alternatives too =] - Nicholas James
Photos are the biggest thing. Facebook is to a large extent a photo sharing site, but their TOS prohibit you from doing anything interesting with the photos -- they're trapped inside FB. - Paul Buchheit
Yes, Mr. Morin. Tear. Down. This. Wall. - MG Siegler
I also want photos to flow into Facebook from other repositories. Display my Flickr photos in Facebook and let people tag them please. - Benjamin Golub
Man with all the hypocrisy, it really stinks in here. - Gavin
does not gov have the same exact motivation for not opening up as facebook? - Fred Grott
@sacca's point is fun, but it's a fact that the gov's data is ours, and debatable that FB's is. Both would be great, but the Gov's should happen yesterday. - Nate Koechley
First, government data is created through taxpayer dollars and since we all kinda have an ownership stake in the gov, we should have access to its data. FB data is FB's, per their TOS. Second, FB has data that is more valuable than other services -- it's a big business decision for them to be more open or not, and imho it's not clear if being more open is worth it to them at this point. Update: I see Nate already said basically the same thing. Anyway..... - Eric Eldon
Unfortunately most government organizations get the lowest-bidding contractors to build their content which usually means lock-in to proprietary data and clunky 'net applications. Just check out some of their intranets. IE6-only VBscript running on 10-year old proprietary multimillion dollar software - Glenn Batuyong via twhirl
I've seen a lot of agencies just mirror "what works at other government offices" which tends to perpetuate this cycle of technical stagnation. Some orgs do get the message and it's usually because of some introduction of Web 2.0 technology into certain facets. However, it needs to be internally evangelized and pushed up the ladder to the decision-making personnel (who usually don't understand the need). - Glenn Batuyong via twhirl
Bumping my follow up Twitter comment to FriendFeed comments: Back to my comment on the government. Wouldn't it be awesome to get updates on new laws and programs through the various social feeds? My thoughts on this come from the new cellular phone law in California. I think many people are probably finding out about this for the first time by seeing the blinking signs above the highway. It would be amazing if a notification for a new law came in through twitter, or friendfeed, or facebook (or all of them). - Dave Morin
Yes but Dave you missed everyone's point the value proposition is not in opening up as you would hoped but holding back. Politicians hide info to keep power, corps hide information to keep customers locked in..when users finally have away to route around than that info-lock in has NO POWER..that day is coming Dave very soon - Fred Grott
My comment was intended as a prod between pals. I make it a habit to tease Dave and other friends at FB about the relatively closed nature of some of their platform. I was by no means attempting to jump into the fray regarding OpenSocial/FriendConnect.
That said, as a FB user, while I was thrilled to see them start passing full text emails to me, it does bum me out that I can't reply back to the thread from my regular email inbox. It is an annoyance, and Dave has heard this from me before. This seemed like a fun opportunity to remind him of my #1 feature request.
More importantly, for the record, I am particularly impressed by Dave Morin when I see him participate candidly in public discussions regarding issues like these despite his high profile. Having been in a big company and knowing the effort that it takes to manage internal PR in parallel with community expectations, my hat goes off to him. It is very clear that Dave cares deeply about users and works hard to make them happy. - Sacca
@fred gott. i'm sure dave would like to know how soon that day is, since you seem to have such a clear idea. - Eric Eldon
WRT the lowest bidding contractor theory, hows about some of the more financially comfortable devs offer up their services in the form of govt contracts with outrageously low bids. Put your money where your mouth is so to speak. - Erica Baker
@eric listen to Gillmor Gang its closer than u think - Fred Grott
@Fred we agree on a lot of this. i was put off, however, by your antagonistic language towards dave, who has been at the forefront of opening up social network data to third parties for quite some time now. - Eric Eldon
@eric users wanting their data as free as possible has none of the tone you subscribe to me - Fred Grott
@Fred how many Facebook users want their data free right now? - Eric Eldon
Better if govs give access to the raw data. In my experience, trying to get a decent api from a gov department is kind of tricky. If you get the raw data there are plenty of companies & non-profits who are willing & able to build decent APIs around it. - Nick Lothian
@eric its not free part as u imply we want useful data that can only come about by full data-portability no user will ask for free or data portability because they do not know it as that. - Fred Grott
@fred i fundamentally agree with you. i just think facebook gets too much shit for "not going far enough" even though it has been the (social networking) industry leader in data-sharing. just look at how myspace was treating third party developers in previous years. this is a process. - Eric Eldon
This is what will happen more often with FriendFeed - items that appear and are discussed here will become news more and more. Expect this to happen more often. - Ben Parr
agree with Eric Eldon's take on Dave's comment. facebook maybe deserves a little bit of shit for not always being transparent on the PR, but seriously they get waaaaaaay too much crap for being "proprietary" about their innovation & leadership. folks that really want new & cool stuff should also realize that there is a cost to risk-taking & research, and that is often recouped via proprietary measures. and if it ISN'T uniquely innovative, other competitors will take down their walls with better shit. - dave mcclure
I really don't want to make another switch. I'll go to friendfeed fully before another twitter app. - Leif Hansen
IMHO identi.ca's nowhere near ready for mass adoption, nor do I get the impression the folks operating it are suggesting that. Open source is great... particularly if the community's able to check changes in and doesn't have to create a fork immediately. identi.ca strikes me as pretty much what Twitter must have been like when it was at the same point in it's development two years ago. - Ken Sheppardson
Yep, it's up and down and bumpy - but what's reallly nice is the guy running the show tells you what's going on. - Susanne "Renee" Bullo
Isn't the big deal that identi.ca is doing the openmicroblogging.org OMB protocol? The point is that this is a reference implementation of what *could be* a more decentralized microblogging infrastructure/protocol... - Gabe Wachob via twhirl
@corvida's post about Identi.ca seems the most informative I've seen http://shegeeks.net/ - she's got a list of strengths and weaknesses and planned features. Definitely worth the look. They're not doing too badly for day 2. :) - Lucretia Pruitt
I'm finding FriendFeed more and more useful... it's kind of scary. AFAIC, I'm interested to see how this "CC" integration will work moving forward.
It seems that a better approach, however, would be to enable me to create an account on ReadWriteWeb with my OpenID and then use OAuth to authorize my comments to be sent to my FriendFeed account, rather than having to type in my key everytime. - Chris Messina via FriendFeed MT Plugin
Sweet integration! I almost want to have an MT blog now, but I know Disqus is gonna come through for me in the end. Right, Daniel? Daniel?
Anyway, good job, looks great and it really raises FriendFeed's profile here on RWW. - J. Phil via FriendFeed MT Plugin
w00t! just want to make sure that this shows up in the FF comment stream too. thanks for the info! - ~C4Chaos
@factoryjoe, I have thought about that approach as well. I may very well update the plugin in future such that your FF account can be linked to your MT login (whether native or OpenID). That would certainly make things smoother, as all your would need to enter is your openID. - Mark Carey via FriendFeed MT Plugin
I was just watching a presentation by Tapscott (wikinomics dude), with a panel of "next generation" Gen y'ers in front of big name NY execs. I was thinking it was unfair to mislead all these senior executives that they are representative of most people their age - the panel are just early tech adopters like everyone else here (rather than typical 22 year olds). But I've just come back to reality, realising how early adopters influence the masses - this is a perfect example of how a early adopter crowd influence an early adopter blog which in turns influences the mainstream media which in turn influence the mass market. News like this mark turning points for these products I think. - Elias Bizannes via twhirl
I think this is a cool feature and had to try it.
I notice that some people have a blog-entry item that does inverse linking -- reporting pages that link to the blog entry.
It looks like this is automated. I think that would be very useful and I am out to find out more.
Wouldn't this (perhaps) solve the track-back problem. There would have to be some sort of white-list/black-list system to deal with link bait, though, wouldn't there? - Dennis E. Hamilton via FriendFeed MT Plugin
I changed the title, to remove Twitter. It's not technically correct that we're integrating Twitter -- although of course the link that attracts FriendFeed comments could come from Twitter. In this case it came from the RWW rss feed, but it also went to Twitter via Tweetfeed. The trouble with these things is they make one's head hurt :-) - Richard
Ah, now I am in FriendFeed and can see how this works from this side. Have to find the opportunity to comment in Twhirl too and I will be very happy. - Dennis E. Hamilton
@Richard: Interesting. The title doesn't change in FriendFeed, of course, but your comment about it does, which I guess is close enough for computer work. - Dennis E. Hamilton
the other cool thing is that the FF comments actually get saved to our RWW publishing software. So if FF ever went down or stopped working, the comments will still be on RWW. - Richard
I love this feature! I wish the WordPress plugin worked in a similar fashion. - Mack D. Male
When I try to post trough Feedly, I get -error: 404 -- undefined'. Hmm... but it seems this is only true for some posts and not for others. - Kris Haamer
Wow! Looks great. An elegant solution. - Chris Baskind
Good enough reason to take a second look at Movable Type - Andy Roberts
Nice work with the CC to FriendFeed, I really like the direction that this is going and FriendFeed integration with sites is definitely the way forward! - Joe Dawson via FriendFeed MT Plugin
cool .... i swear a blog is coming that is ONLY comments, and a prize will be offered to determine what the article was about
dang, startup anybody? - gregory lent via FriendFeed MT Plugin
Why doesnt FriendFeed share with other services? Instead of just gathering from other sources? - donclark
I'm currently using Wordpress for my blog system. I'm going to try to install this: http://blog.slaven.net.au/word... , At least that's the only one I found for Wordpress. I may be wrong. But this is a great idea! - Dennis Jackson
Not sure if I'm cool with "twuser". Lends itself far too easily to "twluser" :P - Brad McCrorey
That's crazy, Twitter has not let me follow new people for a while now but never shows this error (only something strange happened, please refresh the page and try again). Interesting to know what exactly the limit is as mine is definitely a strange number. - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl
why would you ever want to follow that many people? -just curious - Jason Fleming
@Jason: That's a usual question :) I added tons of people first on Twitter to get a grip of what to do and continued when new people followed me that I found interesting. Now I really want to stop following some to make place for new people and can't as no application that shows mutual followers seems to be unable to cope with API limitations - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl
This is definitely a temporary limit that gets triggered when you follow a lot of people in a short amount of time. There are more details this and other new limits on Get Satisfaction:http://getsatisfaction.com/twi... - Mike Doeff
@Mike: This definitely is not my case, I only follow 3 or 4 new people per day now so I don't think it's a lot in a short time. So it is probably about the actual countable (not time-based) limit we are looking at. - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl
"FriendFeed has always seemed to me to be a weird concept for a stand alone application. Why would I want to go to whole new site and create yet another friend list just to share what I'm doing on the Web with my friends? Isn't that what social networking sites are for? It just sounds so inconvenient, like carrying around a pager instead of a mobile phone.
As I said in my original post on the topic, all FriendFeed has going for it is the community that has built around the site. Especially since the functionality it provides can be easily duplicated and actually fits better as a feature of an existing social networking site." Yup. And I'm agreeing with this as both a big fan of FF and as an active member of that community. - DeWitt Clinton
A social networking site can surely duplicate FF functionality, however the beauty of FF is that it does not have all the baggage associated with MySpace or Facebook. It is neat, clean, and provides an excellent filtering mechanism. I guess the magic lies in the great team of developers working on FF. - Shakeel Mahate
Interesting to think about for sure. My circle of friends on facebook never participate. It's like pulling teeth to get people to comment. And I haven't met many people on facebook. But I've met a ton of people on friendfeed. And it's the first social app I've really gotten into, after trying a bunch and abandoning. Don't know why that is. Maybe it's the smiley faces -- they hypnotize me. Or maybe it's that friendfeed isn't about your profile; your participation is your profile. - Ginger Makela
I think FF serves a segment of people that the "traditional" social media giants miss - people who are active online, want to interact with people, but don't want to trade quizzes back and forth all day. I love my friends on Facebook, but not for what they do on the site - most of that stuff isn't all that interesting. On FF, there's so much more substantive information, commentary and interaction. - Jennifer Dittrich
I agree with Ginger wholeheartedly. I think that sharing what you read, write, listen to and take pictures of all in one place really says a lot about you. I too feel like I have gotten to know people, and I feel more compelled to comment on something that a friend of a friend shared than commenting on a friend of a friend's facebook page, because I am commenting on the content, not on the person. And, I am looking forward to meeting Ginger in person. Clare says she is really cool. - Robert Felty
I agree very much with Jennifer. I am also pessimistic about how many people would actually be full adopters of FF. I would argue that Mini-Feed in Facebook (which they've now change to be permanently open) is meant to be like FriendFeed.. except they implemented "Pages" and "Notes" somewhat awkwardly and have no outer-facing way of getting more substantive things into your MiniFeed. FF is about openness - pull in whatever you want from wherever you can share - where as Facebook is not. - Jennie Lin
I use FF and never use Facebook. My Facebook account could be deleted tomorrow and I wouldn't realize it for a few weeks. But then, I'm among the proverbial "first 300,000" that we all joke about. Most people (by simple subtraction) are not. The future of FF is to bring FF to the people, not expect the people to come to FF. - DeWitt Clinton
"One of the most common complaints about Blogger’s comment form is that it’s on a separate page from the post, styled in a way that doesn’t match the blog. Our new embedded comment form addresses that by putting the comment form where your readers expect it: at the bottom of the post" Inline comments! - DeWitt Clinton via Bookmarklet
I wish I could "Like" this 100 times. Finally Blogger, finally. - Erica Baker
"Today we're releasing an updated version of our JavaScript client library, including new support for working with the Google Contacts Data API. This API lets users securely share their GMail contact lists with third-party sites, and now that it's available in JavaScript form, this access can be integrated directly into the rich environment of your AJAX-driven applications. All without writing a single line of complicated server-side code." - DeWitt Clinton via Bookmarklet
Big thank you to John Musser at Programmable Web for explaining Gnip so clearly. I admit to first dismissing Gnip news as a bit of noise, but now I see that they are creating a highly valuable service. Expect Gnip-alikes to sprout up all over the place, and more power to them. Data providers and data aggregators alike should (if they're wise) be quick to embrace these mediation services as enhancements to their ecosystem. - DeWitt Clinton via Bookmarklet
Interestingly, this is what I expected FF to turn into, it makes so much sense. And then... nothing. - Steve Ivy
Not too late. And FF is in an even better position to serve as mediator -- they'll create additional value along the way in the form of discussion and comments. - DeWitt Clinton
"Of course, we like OCaml here, so we are pleased to announce the release of an OCaml binding to the API. You can find it on our developer downloads page." Cool. - DeWitt Clinton via Bookmarklet
