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Robert Scoble

I'm going to have my geek credentials pulled because I have not loaded up Snow Leopard yet.

August 31 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Burak "cyrus" Bayburtlu, Johan Bakken, Simon Wicks and 13 other people liked this

If it looks like they're going to cancel your geek credentials and you need a rec, I'll vouch for you. - Bruce Lewis

27 more comments

Look! I caught a Scoble thread before it had 400 comments! - Lindsay

Maybe you did and just haven't noticed yet, like everyone else who has done the upgrade ;-) - Andrew Leyden

Andrew: that's funny! Lindsay: heh, don't worry, engagement is down here. - Robert Scoble

I'm totally diappointed. I thought you're an early adopter! :P - imabonehead

I'm a little disappointed I paid money for it. There's really not much difference. It's a service pack, that's all. - Jesse Stay

I want to be the last person on FriendFeed to do it. - Rob Sterling

Yeah! This is the perfect way to show that you're a rebel! - Akiva Moskovitz

I'm currently recommending people wait to install Snow Leopard. It breaks too many things and there's no apparent benefit (unless you need a specific new feature like Exchange support in Apple Mail). - Leo Laporte

Agree with Leo - Jesse Stay

Longest I have gone without installing a major upgrade.. (after working at Apple for many a year) and unfortunately not very excited about it either.. Over heard people at the coffee shop voice their disappointment as well.. Is this a poor excuse for an upgrade? wheres all the amazing new features for our main desktop platform? Apple pouring focus into mobile and letting the core slip? - Tyson

Oy vey. It just blows my mind that people are complaining about the lack of wow factor in an upgrade that has been, from near the start, touted as an under-the-hood upgrade. - Akiva Moskovitz

All I've been hearing about snow leopard is that it breaks stuff. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

What I've been telling people is this: there's more to a major OS upgrade than just a bunch of desktop eye candy. Things are going to break even if it is an Apple product. Luckily for me, the only things that have broken have been very minor (Glims and Privoxy). Thus, the caveat that should haunt the release of any OS upgrade: unless you like living on the edge, just wait until the... more... - Akiva Moskovitz

so we have to wait another year for the next "major upgrade" ?? Im sure Apple have a load of features they could have released? Apple can dictate tech trends.. Then I wonder are they actually slowing things down.. then I wonder is facebook also guilty of this by buying friendfeed? - Tyson

Back up your Adobe stuff. :) - Louis Gray

Akiva: it sounds like Snow Leopard is Apple's Vista. - Robert Scoble

As they say after a team's disappointing hockey season, It's a rebuilding year. - Micah Wittman

I have all Mac's in my studio and only started with one, it's really fast... - Jade Y. Gunver

Vista took 5 years to produce, it overpromised, underdelivered and is cludgy on computers made 3 years later and costs hundreds of dollars. Snow Leopard took 2 years to produce, promised very little, costs $30, and delivers speed, refinement, and stability and makes 3 year old laptops run faster - El Pub

And yes: I'm a mac user and a red wings fan so... - El Pub

Robert, if you lose your geek cred for not installing Snow Leopard right away, then something is wrong with the geek community. - Eric Geller

oh well....I won't remove the geek credentials for that. In fact Id say they are stronger :-) - Richard Binhammer

Are "geek credentials" really useful in order to be considered as a professional? - Thierry R. Andriamirado from email

I haven't installed it either. From all I've read and heard, it sounds like a maintenance upgrade that you have to pay for. I'll wait for 10.6.1 and give all the apps a chance to update to the latest version. I think I'm more excited about the Windows 7 upgrade. :) - Tom Newman

With all its problems, you're not missing much - Michael Gaines

Gotta say - it improved the color in my Canon inkjet prints from InDesign. - MaryB, BrandingBroadOfFF

Using Epson paper. ;-) - MaryB, BrandingBroadOfFF

(Which sounds just unnatural enough it makes me want to make all the sorts of jokes a liberal shouldn't make about people who are not liberals.) - MaryB, BrandingBroadOfFF

Robert Scoble

New blog post: you are SO unfollowed! http://scobleizer.com/2009... I'll follow on FriendFeed anyone who comments here:

August 5 - Comments disabled - Like - Share

Ozer Wrzl (EN), Jens Christian Freund, Harold Cabezas and 157 other people liked this

Follow me! - TheHenry

427 more comments

TheHenry: I already am! :-) - Robert Scoble

Please don't unfollow me!! :) - Carlo Nasuti

oh yeah! I forgot! lol! #fail - TheHenry

Very interesting approach Robert. If it is working for you that is awesome though. Hope all is well. Give Roc a big hug for me. - C.C. Chapman

Yo... - MVB (Grinch of FF)

Not too much unfollowing please. - Tim

i'm in - Tai Hsia

Can you follow me? - Giorgio

ok I'll allow you - Derry O Donnell

What's going on here? - Andru Edwards

I think you're already following me Robert. - Andrew Leahey

well ok ) - Denverken

Lead, follow, or get out of the way. - Robert Kenney

* - Michael J. Carrasquillo

[comments here] - Nick Humphries

I will comment here! :) - John Ptacek

Great blog appreciate all of your "likes" that I would not have noticed before. Thanks for all the time you spend educating us. - Gary Prechtel

auto-follow always seemed like a bad idea. people can always msg you but your stream will get totally cluttered if you dont do a little bit of housekeeping. - William Kapes

"baby I'm a star" -Prince (off purple rain) - Michael J. Carrasquillo

novel approach, seems sound - Danny Ayers

Consider me available for following. :-) - Eric D. Wilson

Okay, I'll bite.. - Tanya

Bring it Scobleizer. - Todd Pringle

I agree, Twitter is much better this way. - Ryan W

I appreciate your work, and your passion for social media. - Evan Travers

sounds simple... - Mateo Yadarola

Scoble follow me baby - Jadito

Oh you are getting quite a response here!!!! I'm commenting so you'll follow me but the thing is you're going to LIKE following me because you'll learn all about Sedona through tons of videos and you'll love it so much you'll want to pack your camera and head out here! =) - SedonaTV

Thanks for the mentions, Robert (and you know I'm not commenting just for the follow - I just like to follow you, which is what counts!) - Jesse Stay

Guess I might as well delete that overpriced twitter app I bought last week. - Shea from iPhone

Actually Robert, now I've seen you've tidied up your twitter, I'll probably follow you there again too. :-) - Tim

hey follow me scoble - Andy Jenks

joining the crowd - good move Robert. - Adam

Meh, who cares really, not like you read everyone you followed. Plus unfollowed you anyways, not like you have to say that's interestined except friendfeed spam. - Steve

follow me - Tai Hsia

welcome to Boulder - Andrew Hyde

@scobleizer just created the most important tech follow list on Twitter. - Christian Anderson

aww shucks, and here I was thinking it was just me who you unfollowed. - Jess Sloss

I underwent the same situation, Robert - I unfollowed almost everybody on Twitter who duplicated their accounts here on FrF. I got a tempest of fury for this action. web3 is too personal still )) - massagin

Scoble in Boulder = Trouble. - Jim Halligan @jim

I feel fortunate that you're still subbed to me on FF. I haven't even noticed whether you unfollowed me on Twitter. But you following me, still hasn't gotten me the chicks. :P Always fun seeing your posts, long as you don't block me, it doesn't matter if you follow me or not. :) - Arlan Koizumi

I did the same thing some weeks ago after avoiding twitter because it got too noisy. It was instantly better. But in the mean time I started to use FF more and I like it better here so I hardly go near twitter now. - Murray Barton

You already follow me here on ff, which i use more than twitter. - dthree

What's up? - Kevin Whalen from iPhone

Hey Robert, so for following >1,600 is it that right way taken by Philtro and Filttr? - Martin Adamek

I'm glad you mentioned Loic, he caught a lot of flack for doing this earlier. - Steven Cains

Hey Robert - fight the tweetspam ! - Michael Neale

Don't think you are following me on Twitter anymore..please do and best regards - Karma Martell

I'm still trying to figure out the following... so I'm watching how you do it scoble. - Matthew Schrock

Good plan. I'm looking forward to your results. I'm trying to figure out all these social media elements. I would appreciate your Twitter follow. - David Stanley

hope this new approach works for you! - timepilot

Oh, so now you are only easy on FF. - James Watters

Odd internal response, I don't follow everyone who follows me cuz of the very noise you talk about. And, there's no good reason for you to follow me since I'm unlikely to deliver news of interest to you. And yet, here I am, posting on FriendFeed so you have the OPTION of following me, a stranger who is not the same kind of SMART as you. Who'd have thought... - Della Mauler

Interesting statement about original content value of FF independent of twitter. Twitter is where you keep your noise level down... - James Watters

This seems like asking for trouble to me, Scoble. But, it's your time and bandwith to do with what you will. Since only a handful of people (by that I think I mean just one) follow me on Twitter, it's pretty easy for me to weed out the bots. The people I follow are my internet nerds (mostly the Rev 3 crew) so I know their interests are in line with mine. Hit me up for some edifying conversations about Lost and video games, Robert. - Jeremiah Green

Here you go Robert! [also via twitter: @Scobleizer Therefore: only approx. 1.7 million "active" human @Twitter users contribute 50%+ of all activity, right? #engagement] Regards, @AAinslie - Alexander Ainslie

The green avatar is so disturbing mate. :) - Jordan Windebank

I'll lead, you follow. So where are we going? - Tom Sheppard

I was sad to see you unfollowed me, but now you may follow me again, so all will be well in the world. - Jodi

following the leader... - John Munro

You're still following me - does that mean I'm a smart feller? ;) - Brett Kelly

so glad I mail Robert a business card every month :) - Christian Anderson

Della: the thing is here I can follow you and put you into a list and watch you less frequently than some of my other people. So everyone wins. But only here on FriendFeed. :-) - Robert Scoble

Some of us have been doing this from our start. Kind of cool, eh? But our numbers don't grow quickly so we were tagged as "slow." Nice to see you catch up with us! Also, this may shock you, there sre folks who follow and communicate with only 3 folks on twitter and they are HAPPY! Imagine.... - lynda spangler

Yay. Now he will follow a librarian. - joe is...

Follow this dot!!! . - Bwana ☠

I've long thought the entire Twitter "etiquette" of always following who follows you to be a bit of a folly. I'm following 114 at the moment, and the stream still moves too fast for me to keep up with. - Darren Landrum

Comment! - anna sauce

ok - Vasu Srinivasan

Good test, count me in... I don't follow tons of people, I follow a few prolific Scoble-types and the rest are more focused in areas I'm interested in. - David Ziembicki

I'm not following tons of people, just a select few. More to follow on FB when facebook has completely integrated Friendfeed-funcionality. ;-) - Wolfgang G. Wettach

I only follow people I know or have something interesting to say, did you really have 160000 people that said something worthwhile??? - Gerard van Schip

Well I commented via your Blog so instead of repeating myself I'll link to comment http://disq.us/1ms9 - Keith - @tsudo

Gerard: everyone says something worthwhile once in a while. The trick is to see it when it happens. Here on FriendFeed, by the way, you have a better shot because good stuff usually gets liked and commented on, so it pulls up higher into my view. - Robert Scoble

come join us here folks http://ff.im/6dUHN xxx - Mark

Okay. But will you read and comment on my stuff? - Mellissa Claus

Robert, I posted this after Loic's decision and it looks like it will need another update. http://www.knowthenetwork.com/blog... I think there is value in stating your follow policy. - Keith - @tsudo

cool - Zach Cheatham

Hello? - Vicky

following all the discussion of you unfollowing everyone on twitter has made me think about doing the same thing and starting fresh. - (jeff)isageek

not unless we beat you in the Ashes - Mark

Nice post Robert, and no surprise it's an improvement. ;o) I have seen it for me too. - Rob Sellen :o)

1 thing I find Robert still worth following @Scobleizer when I am not on friendfeed & on my Hootsuite or PeopleBrowsr. therefore not much affected, not much 2 bother me, ego not gone at all. luv your post Robert it is a frank posting - polou/indigo_bow

Follow me Robert, I promise I'm not annoying. :) @cluteman - Greg Clute from iPhone

You've piqued my curiosity. - Kathy

Robert, thank you! I follow you and enjoy your "likes" and your energetic takes. I also enjoy your Building43 interviews! I am a constant FriendFeed user now. Thank you! - Tobin Truog

This made me realise I must be more active on FF and comment/post more :-). - Mats Pettersson

I think I'll give FriendFeed a go! Never tried it, but looks easy and I need to understand the interwebs better. @CodeSamurai_Com - CodeSamurai

butt-kissing is not a prerequisite for being followed, he will follow you anyways :D - Mark

Count me in! (Please??) - Ricky Maveety

lol @mark. ;o) - Rob Sellen :o)

You can follow me, but since you follow a lot of people, you probably can't pay attention to the stream of tweets. - Alex Knight

Alex..that's the WHOLE point he did this... ;o) - Rob Sellen :o)

IMHO 1,647 is still way too many people to follow. - Alex Knight

I will NOT get baited into ... ah CRAP. I follow very few people on twitter, mainly only to find info from Android developers (my topic of choice). If you mention anything about the food you are currently eating, etc.. you will probably not be followed. If you post 80,000 times a day, you will not be followed, since Twitters interface sucks (not so for FF). Also, no offense to other social users, but if you resend your FF/FB/<insert other social site here> entries to twitter, I probably won't follow. - Tim Hoeck

http://socialspark.com/blogs... Chris Pirillo is Scum. - Mark

good move IMO - Joanna Nicol

Love the post, love the response. - Chris Rogers from BuddyFeed

nice hanging out at with beach w/ you last week! follow moi!!! - Raina Lee

I always feel like scoble's following me - Rodney J Woodruff from iPhone

Don't forget your Dunbar number, Scoble! There are only so many people you can have meaningfully connect with online. - Steve Lynch from twhirl

Mark is right. No butt kissing. Ew. - Robert Scoble

"I always feel like, somebody's watching me..." - Wizetux

Comment!!!! Ohh wait but you already follow me... - Amit Nangare

Follow me, if you aren't already....please. Thanks, - Steve de Mena

here is my comment ZOL - Shane Gibson

Comment? What kind of coomment, Robert? :-) - Mitch Featherston

Whoop there it is! On Twitter @jimgoldstein - Jim Goldstein from iPhone

Oh..Oh... Mr. Kotter...Mr Kotter..follow me! - Scott Booher

Glad to see you're writing more than 140 characters on that blog. Doesn't that feel liberating? Maybe we should be allowed character# based on your metric for powerful/smart/newsmaker - Noah Bloom

You already follow me here on FF, for which I thank you. So, I'll just say thanks for the phone call the other day. :) - Jeff Harbert

I'll take a follow! - Jeff Weber

@shaunhess - Shaun Hess

Ok, so follow me again and I will follow you back. Thanks! - Audrey

Robert - I fail on most of your criteria so I'm not expecting you to follow me. The thing is I don't care if you follow me back - this is social media and everyone has their own choice. I choose to follow you because you entertain and inform me. The relationship is 100% one way and I am more than happy with that! - Pon

Robert - Last night at GDGT Party the person at the Blackberry booth said: 1) She had 'heard of Twitter, never friend feed' uses neither 2) Is SCOBLE is coming tonight 3) Wow, your Blackberry is really "archaic" and find out when contract lets you upgrade. F-D UP? Booth babes need primers. - Liza

Interesting theory... people who comment more apt to contribute? - Mark Philpot

I know someone else who tried this strategy last year, with similar results. I've been debating it. Once I got over 3K followers on Twitter life just got weird. Started to spend X amount of time every day blocking porn spam. - Patricia F. Anderson

Liza: yeah, sorry for not coming to the party. I went and saw Obama's CTO instead. - Robert Scoble

Steve Lynch: my Dunbar number is higher than yours is. :-) - Robert Scoble

Nice summary Robert on the whole Unfollow thing, but would it be too repetitive if I re-post on my FF? - Keith Rowland

What is the best friend feed aggregation strategy of non-friend streams (eg RSS, twitter, etc)? Imaginary friend per service, then add to lists? Multiple services per imaginary friend or 1 to 1? Or add the services to a group? What are the considerations? - John Brown

Keith: you can repost anywhere you like, thanks! - Robert Scoble

I'm in! - Craig Shipp

still wondering how you are able to handle such a big load of subscribers here and e.g. so many followers with twitter o_0. I am already (sometimes) lost with the few i got till now. Lately with one sweep almost 40 to 50 contacts in twitter disappeard and i have no clue why ... boah, how are you handling the noise? Hell, with so many ppl in, you might have a terrific noise? Or you wear just good headphones ;)? - Ronald

I very much agree that being choosy is the key to Twitter. I'm not nearly on the scale that you are, but in my experience, freely following people (whetther they follow me or not) and then mercilessly cutting back on them over and over again results in a kind of darwinianly better and better signal to noise ratio. - Tim Maly

Touche! - Steve Lynch from twhirl

Count me in - Johnny

Hi Robert - Randy Allen Bishop

Liked the blog post and totally agree. I've been meaning to do something similar. What I do is occasionally prune and then add some "better" replacements, so my total is always 2000 follows. - Bora Zivkovic

I don't see how anyone can manage so many users without groups. Then again, with groups you could just make an "ignore" group. - Oscar M. Cantu from iPhone

Great blog post. I totally agree on the noise level. I figure I have blocked a few hundred accounts on Twitter, and my noise level has dropped dramatically. Thanks for the follow! - Tony "Frosty" Welch

Hello Hello! - Sam Goldfield

Robert - I figured you were in DC from FF, but she had NO IDEA what a CTO is. Point is, she was eager to give you a Blackberry, but not me, and I wish I had a Scoble costume to pretend for 5 minutes. - Liza

@Robert I think you are starting another mass follow again. - Steve Chou from fftogo

Steve: that's not the problem. As long as spam doesn't enter the system I can deal. Keep in mind here I can choose how I follow. I can put you all in a folder that I never look at, if I wanted to. - Robert Scoble

my feelings were hurt that you unsubscribed to me on twitter, but i agree with your methods - Brian Appleby

I'm in! - Chris Rossini

Brian, yeah, but I follow you here. So there. - Robert Scoble

really doesn't matter as long as i can follow you, that's the beauty of these services - Brian Appleby

How did you come to follow so many to begin with? I get annoyed with ppl and unfollowing is easier than sifting through their garbage constantly. - R1CC1

Autofollow was a horrible idea to begin with. - David Chieng

I kind of tired to keep an eye on who follows me now,the ones I'm following is much more important.:-) - Steve Chou from fftogo

Whoa lots of comments I'm following you longtime lol - Edgar Rodríguez from iPhone

Robert: we need more intelligent spam-follower-filtering on Twitter! We need to fix this. - Steve Lynch from twhirl

@David +1 I think auto follow is such a bad idea to begin with,and people like Robert now even need to pay to unfollow these people. - Steve Chou from IM

How much did SocialToo charge for running the unfollow script? - Shane

I'm in! - rich brant from iPhone

I heard its 25 dollars. - Steve Chou from IM

I've always been very picky in who I follow on twitter. I follow 40 people, and I can't guarantee that I see every single tweet. I don't scroll back usually, unless it's my "Real Life" column in Tweetdeck that couldn't fit on my screen. - Tom Ribbens

My birthday is also January 18th, therefore you must follow me Robert! ;) - Chris Luckhardt from BuddyFeed

Thanks Steve! $25 is pretty reasonable. Wonder if anyone else will be jumping on the bandwagon - Shane

Haha....I also threw the devil horns for Scobleizer...that should count for something. ;) http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Chris Luckhardt from BuddyFeed

OK, let's try it! And what about Twitter? - Alexei Zheglov

Thanks for your post. Last time I checked you follow me here on FriendFeed. OK not to follow me on Twitter. - Pilgrim Five

Smart way to clean house. - Jeremy Chone

u have already subscribing me although i am just a-staying-at-home mum =)). thanx scoble. u are really a nice geek. haha! - zʍıɔ

Let's do it. - Kate

this is like an awesome commentfest - Edgar Rodríguez

You can follow me, but I never say anything. Oh.. wait.... - James Macgill

follow me! - Tate DA FF MVP from BuddyFeed

Sometimes the tortoise beats the hare after all... building organically based on getting to know people and interactions tends to avoid the ghastly spammers, seo peeps and bots - Sally Church

Tap, tap... is this thing on? - Yanik Falardeau

This is the best place to follow you. On twitter you only see post headlines, but friendfeed is where the conversation takes place. - Michael Fidler

Ah crap. You're already following me :) - Jason Nunnelley

I'm outside your sphere, but bootstrapping is bootstrapping right? - Travis Bedard

Tuesday night for the first time in 2 months I UNfollowed everyone on Twitter who wasn't following me. Since you had UNfollowed me, yup I unfollowed you. My Twitter account is so /FUBARed! It only goes to page 506 to show who I'm following and after that it is BLANK! I don't even know if they show in my Home stream. So Robert, I value what you say. Know I can tweet profusely - but it's as @replies to others with the occasional micro-blog thrown in. Question, what DID I do to cause you to UNfollow me? - Arleen Anderson

I hope you'll follow me... - Shane Tilton

Follow me, eh? - Joey Gibson

Trying to fill out those dropped Twitter follows? - Jamie Elgie

Scoble: Have you convinced Guy Kawasaki against his "follow everyone that follows you" mentality? - Kevin Pruett

please do what you must to have the most effecient feed mr scoble, the random will still creep through the cracks, ;) - chaz2b

I still haven't really adopted FriendFeed, but I will get interesting here in time if you follow me. - Lance M. Brown

How are your cleanup efforts coming along? - Jennifer Ruggiero

Oops - I also meant to ask, Robert: how are you managing to follow the couple thousand that you are now re-following on Twitter? You must be using groups, I guess...any other methods? I find ~500 people to be a near max in terms of how many folks I can fully read. - Lance M. Brown

Following your inspiration, I unfollowed almost 100 people last night and blocked about 1000 spammers, cam girls, MLM marketers, and the like. Twitter is more like it was a year ago, its almost like I gave my Twitter account an enema and it worked. Thanks for the original idea. - Mark Edwards

Excellent! - Don Strickland

Robert, I started out only following those I know and those I am genuinely interested in. I've only followed back a few of the people who've followed me. I have a second account that I decided to experiment with. I followed about 700 people on there. It has had about double the followers of my main account consistently. I am about to try some new tricks there with an auto-follow script I'm writing but I think I will stay the course with my main account. - Paul The Raven

Robert, I tried the "follow everyone" (almost) method for a short time - then I'd unfollow about once-a-week. Now I try to schedule a "follow new" once a week. TweetDeck's group feature makes following lots of folks bearable. So does FF, but you've been saying that for-ever! - Kathy E Gill

I am just taking it slow. - Rick Cogley from iPhone

Hey. - Kreg Steppe

I will follow you if you follow me (Genesis) - Keith Barrett

I may not be smart, but I'm smart enough to follow you! - John Pfaff

It occurred to me (and surely to someone before me), that different definitions of "following" might be a big factor here. If I'm following someone, it means I'm following along with their updates. But others might see themselves more as becoming part of a person's "following". Not that they are necessarily reading the person's stuff, but they are willing to be considered part of that person's inflated Twitter posse, as part of the influence-trading aspect of Twitter. - Lance M. Brown

Robert, I think that the biggest thing that changed is not that you were "wrong" (to follow everyone) before but that the Twitter population has changed so much. A year ago, pretty much everyone on Twitter was real, and interesting - now there's so much automated gaming the system going on that the signal to noise ratio has gotten unbearable. So I think anyone who cares about more than... more... - Matthew Blaisdell

I can't imagine how it would happen technologically, but it would be great if there was a way to ditch followers who weren't actually reading your tweets. - Lance M. Brown

Enjoyed recent posts and look forward to more from you! Keep it up. - One Degree Connected

I don't want to be left out please!! - Jannifer @wordsforliving

All right, I'll bite :) - although I'll say that I did the mass-unfollow-thing months ago - long before it was cool. - Justin from Nambu

Your most active followers are on FF. No loss.If you really wanted to make a bold statement you ought to have blocked all of your followers and started from scratch. - Benjamin Taylor

Been a while since I put you and Shel On the record...Online - Eric Schwartzman

blah. - imabonehead

Good article Robert. I honestly enjoyed the perspective. I found the same to be true, but on a much lower scale, of course ;-) - Ken Stewart | ChangeForge

i'm in! - Criz

I don't get it - so now you are using Twitter kinda like a normal person, and its some kind of miracle that it works better? - Nick Lothian

I'm impressed you can keep up with 1600 people. I have trouble enough with the little amount I have. I did find that making FriendFeed imaginary friends and putting them in groups for those I'd like to read occasionally (but not on a regular basis) has helped a lot - Tamara

Follow....how about some promotion! - Bob DeMarco

i'm in - Joshua Smith from twhirl

9/11 Was an Inside Job - bill giltner

Stop it, or I will have to get a restraining order. - Sriks7

Hey, Robert! - tomit from iPhone

In my mind I'm important enough to follow ;-) - Jonathan Callahan

Hello Robert....Whatever your favorite genre is...http://listen.grooveshark.com/#... - Michele Lorito-Chase

Looks like you have a lot of work to do following everybody. - Corbett Barr

now i'll have to write something interesting... - Robert Littlejohn

me! i offer nothing but the warm feeling of having accepted a ff reject. - Marco

ok. so how will you filter the noise now - Kfir Pravda

Ooo, I've won the lottery. You'll follow me now. Wheeee! (how do you have the time to go through all of the names by hand? VA assistance?) - Peggy Dolane

Great :) - Baard @ Pixum

Interesting trend on twitter - I always wondered what sense it made to follow tens of thousands of people, too much noise. I'm finding it hard enough to follow 2900 (looking to cull even that down as I mostly tweet about 30 people!) - Tia Singh, Life Coach

211th comment: WTF - Geer

Good :) - ★ Soner Gönül

I like your ability to influence so many people. I'm following you (mostly here - on FriendFeed) because it's one of the ways to learn how you do it (but, please, do not follow me if you do not see anything you could learn from me :-). - Hanna Wiszniewska

I would come up w/ a better vetting process. - Joe

why would you do that? - james

got to get a pic up so i can fit the criteria, I only follow 45 people and some of them are on thin ice ( Im lookin at you Scoble) - James Hunter

"Where in The Net is Robert San Diego?" (cit.) :-) - Luca Perugini from iPhone

I'm not kissing your arse,but i do learn a lot listening to you. - Paul Downing

@scobleizer why would you randomly follow people who comment in this post when you just got done knocking FFollo and having to unfollow a gazillion people on Twitter? - Bryan Zirkel

Bryan: because I'm following people one by one and putting them into lists on my screen. Autofollowing means you aren't doing ANY of that thinking. Also, autofollowing will get you spammers, if they ever show up (and they will). - Robert Scoble

@Robert: Read your blogpost and that's indeed what I look at to follow people too. No autofollow and even close friends have to tell something interesting for me to (keep) following. Friends who are new to Twitter (no tweets yet) get the benefit of doubt. - Patrick Mackaaij

If you follow me, great, but if you don't I'll understand. :) And I ought to do some pruning myself... - Grant Bierman

Let's give it a try. :0) - Toma Kazakov

I still don't understand how you want to follow someone who just writes a comment over here. Well, this is not the first time. I did not understand why and how you followed 100k people. I find it hard to properly follow 100 people. - Sumanth Kolar

Sumanth: obviously there are degrees of "following." When you read the New York Times, do you read the entire paper word for word? I don't. Same when I'm following. I only get random slices of some of my lists. Others, which have 500 people on them, get 100% read. - Robert Scoble

I'm still here . . . although tired after teaching all day. Louis Gray came to my PR class at SFSU and WOWED the 50 students [except for one who thinks we are making too much of social media] We won't be following him. - Shari Weiss

I like cheese! - Paul Puri

really? - clockwise from iPhone

Shari: Louis wows me too. Glad to see the class is getting into it. - Robert Scoble

He he :) - Richard Holas

I still like the "stranger stream" of Twitter vs "friend feed" of other applications. I don't feel the need to read all tweets from everybody - and tools let me check my fave tweeples. I think mass unfollowing destroys some of the social contract - Robert you are lucky because you are well liked and can do some risky things but companies for example (not Brands of One) would be in... more... - Laurel Papworth

As @charleneli predicted back in January, 2009 will be the year of de-friending on social networks. It's here. - Mark Evans

Laurel: yeah, you have to navigate these waters carefully if you are representing a brand, that's for sure! - Robert Scoble

you can put me on your boring list... - Charles Tanton

i will not get followed back: not powerful, don't have a brand, not a news maker... but i kinda understand the reasons - Dani Martínez

I still think it all goes into how you use twitter. If your using it as a communication tool it depends on if you are looking for broadcast or 2 way. Its interesting to watch as some of the bigger names turn back from the broadcast and go back to the 2 way. - Luke Kilpatrick

@Robert so when you're taking in information from FF do you have a feed of several dozen/hundred "key" people and then categorize the rest, or are you mainly searching? Do you utilize groups at all or mainly just rely on what comes across your feeds? I guess I'm curious as to how you're using FF to collect information. - Bryan Zirkel

I have found Twitter becomes noise rather than a conversation once the following/follower thing gets over a certain mark. I think this is the dirty little secret of Twitter - if it just turns into white noise, rather than a filter, then it becomes less than useful. - Michael Liss

I'm interested in how we'll all feel over the next few years as social networks continue to change and more people and organizations get on them. Obviously, many of us are getting fed up with spammers and are unfollowing them on Twitter and Facebook. I am also having a hard time keeping up with new subscribers on FriendFeed because I know less about them from their profiles and have to... more... - Cathryn Hrudicka

BTW, I feel like I'm finding lots of interesting new people to follow from these discussions that Robert and others are holding on FF. Cool! - Cathryn Hrudicka

Am I too late to comment and get followed? - Hichame Assi

I'm definitely around :) - KyNam Doan

Aren't you following me already? If not, you should be! LoL - Thomas Ward

I'm definitely late to be followed. :D - Faraz Mullick

I don't get it but ok :) - Parvez Halim

LOL! I follow those I find interesting and which can give me useful information. And hope someone follows me for the same reasons. - Flavio

Very interesting post - I've always thought that you guys who follow loads of people must get completely swamped by noise! Like you, I've found it useful to follow companies I use that have interesting products like Zoho and Evernote as a way of keeping up to date with their latest innovations. Excellent idea spelling out your "follow criteria" - it needs to become standard etiquette for social networks so that people don't get offended when they aren't followed back :) . - David Meredith

aren't you doing the same thing here, that you did in Twitter? Choose carefully who you follow, filling your brain with pollution doesn't make you smarter - Allison

Just finished reading the Mashable post on your unfollow exercise. It's attracting attention from all the other big names now. - George Hall (Australia)

Very interesting indeed, I only to unfollow a few, cause I just never had auto follow on.. So now I just unfollow the ones I'm bored of.. - Jaap Willem

Seems like a good idea. Although Louis Gray also has a few valid points on his latest blog post why it might be a mistake http://bit.ly/19UKxk - Silver Hage

I've never understood the auto-follow procedure on any social network. Even on Facebook, where it is obligatory, one can still lower the noise by simply hiding the updates of those who want to follow you, but perhaps also have little personal connection and therefore can be hidden. - Noah Gray

It seems like the unfollowing was the easy part. Choosing who to follow again must have been a chore. I think it is crucial in twitter (and FriendFeed for that matter) to have a clear out every six months or so otherwise you get bogged down in an information feed you don't really care about. - Chris Nixon

I can totally understand why you had to do this. I'm following 2700-ish folks on Twitter and I need 3 groups to manage it (using TweetDeck). I feel I am keeping up with most of my local community and the general tech community at large though I'm sure I'm still missing quite a bit of stuff from people who are not in the 3 groups. I also wonder how much more I can actually handle. - Ken Seto

Um... well, I made something of myself, but then I didn't like what I made, so now I'm doing it all over again. Not sure how that fits with your criteria! Plus, I really don't have a brand or any influence to speak of. I do look great in boxers, however. - Mark "DerBingle" J

OK, OK, changed my picture. Instead of a green clock (a clock is my personal brand) I put a picture of myself. A lot of people told me to do that.... - Bora Zivkovic

I am still looking for info on holographic technology being used for news delivery. Perhaps it's a technology that hasn't even been invented yet or is sitting on a shelf somewhere. What say you? http://specialdee.wordpress.com/2009... - Denise

Hoping your new look account has had the desired effect. No need to follow me, I'm not the interesting type, I'll just be glad if your insights, links & content continues. Congrats & good luck - JanLawrence

Here's what's interesting, Robert, I've noticed an uptick in followers even if you reply or RT or like someone's tweet, not just if you follow that person. Then again, perhaps that's the intent - if you like or RT someone's idea, that's a kind of stamp of approval. - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Hej hej! - Peter

The Scoble Pendulum.. How long till we go back to FOLLOW!! FOLLOW!!! FOLLOW!!!! ? :) - Adrian Scicluna

I did a purge on Facebook for the same reasons a few months ago. It's under 300 and it's people I actually care about. I've come "this close" to running a purge on Twitter but haven't yet. Maybe this will spark me to do it. I've kept FF tight from the beginning. - Rob Williams

moving from FB to FF ... fewer, longer, more meaningful threads. welcoming your follow. cheers - marc calamia

ok, you´re following me already :-) - Torsten Eckert

alright - follow me... - thx in advance Robert Scoble... - Nilesh

All that commenting in the past counts for nothing? - Kevin Gamble

Hey Robert... Great post... On FriendFeed, I increasingly put people without meaningful and valuable content on a separate feed that I rarely check... Its a more "sensible" way to unfollow, i think... I only unsubscribe if I get pissed at someone etc. I wish, FF gave users the option to only unsubscribe from comments and likes (but keep the main feed). This would be a good tool to control the noise... - Onur Kabadayi

I agree with Robert (duh!). I very briefly made the effort of checking out the new follows and deciding whether to follow back. I think once I hit a thousand I shifted to a model of occasionally saying, "If you want me to follow you, talk to me." Hit two thousand and quit saying anything or checking followers. I don't care if they follow me as long as they either say useful things like real people or don't talk at all. I've never autofollowed back. This strategy works for me. - Patricia F. Anderson

I have a large difference between people I follow (around 2000) and people who follow me (around 1800) - I choose people who are important sources of information. People choose me if they think I am an important source of information to them. I never thought it would have to be a one-to-one relationship as to who is useful to whom: some are informative, others are good listeners and learners. I learn from people I follow and I hope my followers learn from me. - Bora Zivkovic

I also think that those of us who follow larger numbers of people don't use the stream in the same way. It is more dipping in and out of the stream, trusting that the important stuff will be repeated enough to float to the top, engaging with conversations of the moment. I wrote a blogpost on this earlier this year: http://etechlib.wordpress.com/2009... - Patricia F. Anderson

Someone told me twitter can be separated into two types. (id say at least two) - Kay Proskin

Scoble, I am beginning to think you are a cult leader :). Look at all these comments! I am using FF more and more these days... Useful for eGuiders.com that's for sure. - Marc Ostrick

I'm not sure your following me. - Amit Morson

Hey Scobie :D Follow me ! - paniaguai

I like Robert. He was one of the first people I followed on Twitter and brought me to FF. But I don't understand why people are desperate to have him follow them. Status? Some kind of virtual autograph? - Tech Introvert

What the heck. Follow me if you like. I'll be as entertaining & informative as I can. - Aaron Schaub from iPod

Been considering doing the same. Your post just might be the flame that lights a fire you-know-where to get it done. - Kate

I only follow a few people and keep losing track so lord only knows how you managed to even begin to keep track of a conversation before friendfeed came along - Iain from BuddyFeed

Well done! Who need followers that aren't reading your tweets anyway. - Sean Rasmussen

I just want a toaster! - ZuDfunck

I'm considering doing same once I'm more confident in my use of FriendFeed. I RT'd this and it resonated with at least one of my followers. - Tony Hollingsworth

'Hand-crafted personal network' is the meme of the moment, and whilst I can see the workmanship, where's the value going to be for you, Robert, in following this rag-tag (no offence people :) ) of folks from a gazillion different verticals. (OK, so they're mostly life scientists). - Andrew Spong

I use to want to be Bob Dylan. Now I am not so sure. - ZuDfunck

um..... - Spencer

My take: you can't be an authentic, credible voice to your community if you let 'sex & dollars' spammers hang on to your coattails. Spam followers matter.... in a bad way. Allowing them to be associated with you diminishes your potential value to genuine followers. It's a pain. It takes time. It's worth doing. More on this, if interested: http://tr.im/vJwb - Andrew Spong

I'll have mine to go. - ZuDfunck

Hope to see more "old fashioned blogging", like it better than tweets. Tweets are bound to disappear into oblivion the moment they're posted. - Willem (@wim66) ☠

"Spam followers matter.... in a bad way." - I certainly agree with this. I block pornbots just as quickly as they follow me. I'm less vigilant about the commercial follows, but usually they go away by themselves after a while. - John Craft

You're already following me here (don't care about twitter tough), so i just hope you don't un-follow, even though you probably don't understand what i'm talking about most of the time, since it's in portuguese. - Diego Sana

So what happened to the advantages to following so many people you always talked about? - Bas

Thanks for connecting here, still learning all the advantages of FF - carece

@Andrew Regarding spam followers and the idea that allowing them to follow you somehow dilutes your credibility, I just have to disagree. To me that places the burden on the wrong person. I don't have time to waste pruning those who follow me, unless they are overtly annoying.My stream is public, they can follow me anyway. What matters to me is that the spammers leave me alone. If they don't, I block them. If they keep quiet, I don't care. - Patricia F. Anderson

What is important is not who follows me, but who *I* follow. - Patricia F. Anderson

Follow me if you want, but I gotta warn ya, it's scintillating stuff! - Pierce Presley

Funny my twitter feed is much noisier but I have been very selective on who I follow. I have tried to make the feed relevant and actionable. At times I post things that seem out of the norm on my twitter feed but that is mainly for the few people who follow me that don't get it but I am trying to keep up their interest level. I also control who follows me, yes this breaks the model but I think the follow everyone model was broken and reckless - Richard Gallo

Am I interesting? Dunno. I'm often controversial, tho. ;) BTW, we met in person at a Pittsburgh Blogfest, but I really don't expect you to remember that. - Eric Williams

Enjoyed the post. I just started Twitter a few days ago to get away from Facebook. I like friendfeed the best - can't wait until it becomes more mainstream. - Robby Parker

Awesome move. Consider that my comment please :) - Charlotte Barker

friendfeed is definitively more evolved that Twitter. Conversely, user bases of Twitter is still its real (and unique) point of strenght... - Marco Castellani

Don't want you to follow me (unless you find my stream of interest) but it's quite interesting the number of people that comment to get you to follow! - Ben Drury

Hey Robert! So, I would like to talk to you about a social media company I'm working with right now. They launched a few months ago and their trajectory and momentum is pretty amazing. Oh, and I started unfollowing the noise in my Twitter after I commented on your blog post. - Gregg Le Blanc

Great ideas. I've been selective (though it fluctuates) about following people/accounts on Twitter since I joined about 2 years ago. I can't take too much noise. - Joe Lance from twhirl

I'm asking the same thing Bas asked... what about your video on the benefits of following so many people? I took a stab at that method of madness by starting to follow all kinds of people, and following anyone that followed me... but I always felt like I was missing good content from good people because of all the "spam". I started to use TweetDeck to create groups/columns for... more... - Timothy Federwitz

@Patricia - reminds me that I should probably review all my twitter followers and thin things down. :) - JA Castillo

thanks - Keith

I like conversing with interesting people. Sometimes that means commenting to get followed, @cogiva. ;) - Eric Williams

Hi Scoble! - Pete Gilbert

I did almost the same thing - unfollowed about 1000 from my 1500, no attention is way better - Maarten den Braber

Couldn't agree more. It's about time we all grew up. BTW Don't follow me. :-) - Gee Ranasinha

Robert what's the deal with Twitter? - stockmanmarc

Your post makes good sense. I didn't auto-follow & still find folks to unfollow because their noise gets too loud. - Debra Ellis

Very clever. I imagine the signal to noise is sooooo much better. - Chris Brogan

I've been thinking about unfollowing a bunch twitter folks as well. I'll look at SocialToo again. My initial experience with SocialToo wasn't good. However, it was during their infancy. - Ron Hudson

I don't blame you at all. Leo was all over that yesterday. - Daniel B. Honigman

why would simply leaving a comment prompt you to follow me? - David Wescott

You're not going to change your mind and mass unfollow us are you? - walidmREALTOR

Sup! :-) - Jon Winters

I suspect it identifies you as a real person interested in dialog, David. - Eric Williams

Followers are currency and you have plenty to spend - Lee Odden

Bob, did you do anything on Twitter recently ? Did you massively refollow people ? Seems like you screwed up Twitter : down for a while... ;-) - Enikao

Follow me! @carloscomputers - carloscomputers

very cool timing with just before twitter goes down hard! well done Robert! @crbrowning - Colin

@davidorban - David Orban

I've followed you and have really enjoyed your posts. I think I would miss that - Tom

Good to hear that your experiment has stopped the spam @lindsaydavies - Lindsay Davies

ciao Robert! - alex

Your ego is amazing. You make it seem like it is a special deal to be followed by you. I'm glad there are many very bright, talented people here who follow others, regardless of class, education, social status and not based on some snobbish criteria. - RuthNH

DON'T follow me! I write in Italian :-) - Lorenzo Strambi

Here I be - Robert

Wow, this is a lot of comments. And kudos for following Followable people who have something interesting to contribute to your day. I'm glad you did it, because that means you'll find AND share more interesting things. This, in turn, makes you more followable too. Thanks for seeing the light, so to speak. - ax0n

You killed twitter. - Melissa Pierce

and now with twitter down, many will flock to here! - Mark V. Fusco

I love rob - Mark from iPhone

Did this take down Twitter this morning Robert? - frank barry

That must of taken a long time :-) I've always been a fan of twitter, but I must say they have struggled in the last few weeks. We are working with their API on a project and their seems to be an issue every other day that causes problems. Do they have what it takes? - Chris Nadeau

I follow under 200 people and it's great. I can't imagine 1k+ . I add about three or four a month. - Mike Janicke

I unfollow people when I find I ignore their tweets/updates. After reading your blog, I think we ALL need to be more judicious. - Janet Barker-Evans

Is this why Twitter is down? LOL! Can't check to see if you unfollowed me. Hope not. You, Shel Israel, and Jeremiah Owyang were some of the very first people I followed way back before Twitter even had 100,000 people on the service. -- It's been a fun ride but, of course, the spammers always show up to make things difficult. - Brenda Young

How do you really know if you should be following someone until you follow them for a while? Sometimes I don't start talking to someone until I see a common interest, then I tweet back and we start talking, but that could be months later. I don't follow everyone back, but I follow back those that interact. I will unfollow once I see that won't happen, or I don't like their tweets. - Nadine Gilden

Twitter is victime of it own success, they have to re learn how to scal better, but more important they have to learn to share better. - abdellah

looks like you'll need to follow at least 343 people LOL - Shari Weiss

Friendfeed takes over for twitter finally? - Thomas Resing

@Patricia I don't want potential followers to be put off by who is following me. I wouldn't want them to think I care more about have n+1 followers than I do about what they're going to see if they review who I've allowed to follow me. Not to cull spammers suggests I care more about my experience than theirs. To a great extent, the quality of their experience will determine the quality... more... - Andrew Spong

1600 ... isn't that a big number too? It could be you'll think again before you follow every one here :) - Mario Gastaldi

Hi... do I get a follow? - Jason Mayoff

If you are already following me. Will you double follow me? :) - Brady

Hi Robert!! :) - Zaneology from Nambu

Still waiting for my Building 43 t-shirt. Not that I'm bitter or anything. ;-) - Donna Tuttle

Be sure to come by Dallas when you swing through Texas! - Zaneology from Nambu

Respect your opinion Robert but we'll have to agree to disagree. Yes I despise all the FakePornSpamBots who follow me. I block as many as I can, but can't keep up. Our views differ regarding what is important to SEE! I treasure home Home stream! I read it, refresh, read, refresh and in minutes I have the pulse of the world... at least MY world! EVERYONE has something of value to share at some point. If I UNfollow tens of thousands, I will miss so much worthy of consideration. - Arleen Anderson

Just another reason why it's good to diversify, I can still read your posts here. :) - Luis Sandoval

Cheers! - Jeff Wiant

Funny. I was catching up on news on Friendfeed for some odd reason. Great post; plenty for new and long-time users alike to consider there. - Alex Howard

I'm still waiting for the ultimate tool to manage my followings - I can only manage to keep up with about 1/3 of those following me. I'd love to see something that can tell me what friends of mine also follow those that I am or those that are following me. Maybe it's out there and I missed it? - TheDiva Rockin

Anyone interested in assessing the quality of their followers should check http://tweetblocker.com. It's pretty chastening. I aim to improve on my C rating. http://www.buzzom.com is a fun, fast way of decoupling yourself from non-reciprocal followers. You can select individuals to purge, or flush 50 random non-reciprocal followers at a time. - Andrew Spong

Robert, your timing could not be better. ;-) - Dave Martin

Great post, with perfect timing! Dang it, Dave Martin just took it off my lips. - Vadim Lavrusik

/me waves - Kevin Johnson from iPhone

I hereby rename this comment thread neoTwitter <waves at followers> - Andrew Spong

Awww, you gotta admit, saturation, the level of influence that you have, because of your high follower, count, is a tool of mass destruction. Seriously, did you think if you recommend an online service that people would not try it out? Was this an asassination attempt - Peter Murphy

I'm glad i'm not the only one who misses /me actions from IRC, Kevin. ;) - Eric Williams

With today's Twitter outage your timing is pretty stinking good, Robert. :) - Chris Cree

Now to get the rest of the world to follow that same logic when it comes to follow/unfollow! I only started being more selective as Twitter (and everyone else) started getting aggressive with spammers or anyone that even remotely did a single spammy tweet. Now if only there were the same contact management tools available for the other social networks as with Twitter. No matter what though, I'll continue updating my status when I eat a peanut butter sandwich! (With Fluff of course!). - Paul Monaco

Twitter couldn't handle the mass unfollow load, blew up... - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

I've been followed by Robert Scoble :-) - David Finch

Follow iPolitics - Jacob Kobi Gamliel

Now I think that it is time to think about a way to make money using Twitter. - abdellah

@Mark, +1. When in doubt, the default delegation of blame goes to Robert. - Dave Martin

what is critical mass for twitter? Too few and nobody interacts, Too many and spam bots overwhelm, Is it 1K or 2K needed to get a real experience? - WarLord

Hmm can you unsubscribe from "comment notification via e-mail" in FF on a *specific* topic? This one :-) - Patrick Mackaaij

Of course I thonk it is a different experience if you hand follow reading each bio from the beginning then these mass purges are unnecessary - WarLord

I thought you already followed me. lol - Duane-PreppyDude

Not sure if you do, but here I am... - Aron Michalski

I am intrigued how RT addict will RT now?!! (ps: FF please don't post this to my twitter) - abdellah

I have been keeping my twitter account private a majority of the time lately b/c I am going through a divorce, but I really kinda like it. Have been reducing followers as well as the number I follow. - Jackson Miller

You should follow me here in FF and on Twitter too! - Karthi

hopefully most of us have proven our worth beyond commenting on this single thread - andy brudtkuhl

I like the way you operate, Scoble. Thanks in advance for the follow! - Dr. Frank Ramblings, Ph.D

Nice way of doing it... - Charles

No need to follow me unless you are actually going to engage in conversation with me. - Jeff Hurt

If you're already following and we comment, will you unfollow? *wink Hoping all is well your way! - Dayngr

4&5 are my favorite! Those are big reasons I decide to follow someone too. - Kelly Mitton

I'm lucky. Have never had Twitter spam. But then again I'm no Scoble either :) - Lori Reed

I am the peanut butter eating bot - Benjamin Spector

If you are already following me on ff does that mean I get a cookie or something? ;-) - Tomy Thomson

I'll add my name to the list. I came back to FF after the Twitter DoS outage. Maybe Scoble broke Twitter by all his unfollowing. He was the "glue" holding Twitter together. :-) - Tom Newman

Robert: Here's the bit you missed off the end of your title here: .... and put them in that group I don't read :-) - Jim Connolly

Hi Robert, greetings from germany. - Flynn (Michael A. Volz)

add me for your social media and the practice of law news! - Rex Gradeless

Great post. I'm sure that some people might say that this kind of mass unfollowing will hurt Twitter, but I think it's just the opposite. Users who are following people they have no interest in just to pad their own numbers are diminishing the meaning of "following." - Mark Denton

@Ulrichmargarita - Ulrichmargarita

To stave off being unfollowed we need to comment here ya say? - Jason

you are already following me here... perhaps you'll consider re-following me on twitter too - tinym dot com

I don't know how you ever did it the other way. I am not in the tech world near as much as I used to be, which wasn't a whole lot. I just followed some random people I saw on SMugMug-related people on here when I started. You were one of them. I had no idea who you were (and still don't :-), but you talked about Twitter a lot too, which got me on there as well. Both services have really... more... - James Schipper

Follow away! - Ferdinand Perez

ok 400 jackpot - abdellah

Quality over quantity in all things, including (perhaps especially) Twitter. Loved your friending methodology -- those are the same rules I've applied since being on Twitter. Posted them onto Posterous to share the love with credit to you: http://lorilaurentsmith.posterous.com/ - Lori Laurent Smith

it's not about unfollowing, it's about filtering... - Barak Hachamov

I started out following everyone on Twitter.Then I got wise. When someone's stream becomes more noise than signal, that's when I consider unfollowing. I realize that threshhold is different for everyone, but I'll take "what I had for lunch" over a dozen bogus "marketing tips" any day. - Julie Barrett from twhirl

Well, I am trying to use FriendFeed more after watching Scoble's video on all those monitors he had up. I'm not a big consumer of information and don't own a TV but this online social stuff has been a perfect fit into my life because I can connect with people who are fountains of knowledge on a specific subject or are "human mashups". I like both! - Adria Richards

Why !? - Bertrand Soulier from iPhone

I've been reading al of this unfollow bits, and this point of yours: - Donna

Hey, I think that today you might make your point about FriendFeed being more interesting than Twitter. Hope you are well. Talked with @fransteps this morning and she is excited to work with you at Rackspace. - Kami Huyse

hi - George Desmyter

I would appreciate the follow, thanks! - Jeff Reisdorfer

I've been reading all of this un-follow posts lately, and this point of yours in WHY you unfollowed: "#2 Because I personally care about everyone I am following their noise level is a LOT lower. ." Is exactly what I do. And now I am starting to understand Friendfeed more. and using posterous to do aggregate posts. So is this overload making more people sit up and think first? I think so. At least the intelligent ones. - Donna

I love you Scoble! ;) - Carol Levesque

with all due sycophantism :) - jeff hammond

This is a great move, Robert. It's also a lot more human...I was almost convinced that you were the only person who could actually drink from the fire hose without choking. - Steffan Antonas

That sounds fair. After this morning, I've renewed my love for FriendFeed and Tweetworks. Until the next DDos attacks, of course. I will miss the fake porn stars, but I did when I moved from L.A. - Scott Pierce

Steffan; I agree...there is no way anyone else could do what Robert S. does. It's good to see him become human. - Robert Jones

This has been my problem for about the past six months. I routinely go in and unfollow, get the noise level down to where I want it, and then end up following back a bunch of new people, some of whom I'm incredibly grateful to get to know. When I had track, it was a whole lot easier to manage the stream, but I suspect even that tool would now be out of hand. I have a set of rules for... more... - Karoli

hee hee. i am commenting not so much to beg your follow but what a clever pitch:) - Tresha Thorsen

Robert - I have not read all 416 comments so if this was asked and you answered forgive me. What was the all of a sudden revelation that caused you to reverse stance on Twitter Followers? - Jeff Vreeland

It's difficult to maintain and filter a list on all the social networking sites. I cannot even imagine maintaining the kinds of lists you must deal with, Robert. - Jeremy Brooks

Dude, you broke Twitter! When you unfollowed all of your 100,000 the other day you pulled the rug right out from under it, so it fell down and now it can't reach its beer. :-) - Robert Morrison

Actually I felt rather sad being fav'ed by you on FriendFeed then dumped.. But again. I get more from you from FriendFeed, so oh well, stop talking about Following and Get on more with Tech! :P - Du Senyao Peter

Me Me! lol! - Bill McGehee

i like the idea of importing favorite tweets into friendfeed. i haven't used that favorite feature much because i haven't seen any real use in it. thanks! - Jonathan Blundell

When twitter is down I always wish I could tweet: checkout friendfeed. Nevertheless, how will following folk that leave a message here really improve the quality of your input? While I don't want to judge many of the fine folk on this thread, are they all that interesting? In other words, isn't this the start of the same problem you had on Twitter... - Jon Mountjoy

what like here? this is a comment :) - michelle harris

Barak - isn't filtering just unfollowing while pretending you're still following? ;) - Matthew Blaisdell

Well to bounce back on your Twitter is down comment I think it is time to watch this video again http://www.youtube.com/watch... Hilarious! - 77Agency

Robert, I'm glad you decided to stop auto-follow (finally). :) - Veronica Sopher

I'm in - Jeroen Sangers from Nambu

works for mw - Brendan Jackson from twhirl

Robert, but why clutter your FriendFeed stream? This comment is not to get you to courtesy follow me on FriendFeed, think you've established you've changed your thinking. :) - L.P. NEENZ FALEAFINE

OK, I have enough people to follow so I will close the comments on this thread. Thank you everyone, I will try to get to everyone today. - Robert Scoble

Thomas Hawk

Flickr Refreshes Search Page: Looks Good! - http://thomashawk.com/2009...

August 4 from Thomas Hawk Digital Connection - Comment - Like - Share

Anthony Farrior, Joe Dawson, mridul and 48 other people liked this

Today Flickr announced a refresh and redesign of their main search page and I have to say I’m liking what I’m seeing so far. The new page layout flows a lot better than the old one. You can now choose between small, medium, detail and slideshow in terms of views and they have a cool little letter i that is on thumbnails that you can click on to get additional photo details without having to leave a search results page. (You can see an example of this on the image above searching for graffiti by “most interesting”). In addition to offering you more choices for viewing, flickr’s also made use of a right sidebar space to provide you possible related interesting content by highlighting “groups” that feature what your searching for, “photographers” who shoot what you’re looking for (based on number of tags I believe), “tag clusters” showing similar sort of search terms or related criteria and finally “places” tying geotag information in with your search terms. All of this content in the right column is done in typical flickrish ajaxyish style and flows easy and well. - Thomas Hawk

9 more comments

I really like the update. Makes searches so much faster with more information on a page. - Tom Newman

Meh - I still miss the days when Flickr used to actually innovate. There's nothing *new* here, just a UI refresh of the site feature that that I'm least interested in anyway. I guess it's good for me if it makes it easier for people to find my photos, but for the most part this is yet another update that gets a great big yawn from me. - Eric P

Shame they still keep loosing photos ;) - Nicholas James

I suppose this refresh was due to the new Microsoft-Yahoo partnership? Delicious got a search refresh as well. I wonder how much of the new search is based off of Bing code. - Steven (optionshiftk)

Steven, I doubt that this has much to do with Bing at all. I think properties like Flickr and Delicious are not part of that deal (but I could be wrong). The search results themselves largely seem to be the same as before the refresh. I think it's just a design implementation and basically offers the same former results just with more choices for sizes, easier access to basic photo... more... - Thomas Hawk

Well, Flickr was integrated into Yahoo Image search some time ago. There's no reason to think that Bing won't have access to Flickr data as well and include it in its image search. Which sucks for Google, which is now the only big player that doesn't have access to Flickr data to incorporate into the search algorithm. - Eric P

it is interesting that even without official corporate access to Flickr data that Google Image Search still sends a lot more traffic to my images than Yahoo's Image Search. - Thomas Hawk

I assume that's just because Google Image Search has such a large market share. Yahoo's is better, at least when it comes to finding Flickr photos. I believe all Google is doing is analyzing the image metadata for photos on Flickr. It would also know about inbound links to the photo pages. What would be absent would be any of the social activity around the photos - views and traffic sources and comments/faves and whatnot. - Eric P

Eric, agreed. Google gets a larger share simply because more people use Google for image search than Yahoo. Yahoo potentially should be able to do Image search far better than Google though and beyond some very basic integration of Flickr images, they never really realized this potential. Had Yahoo been smarter they would have much more aggressively integrated Flickr images and the social metadata around the images into their image search strategy. - Thomas Hawk

This is beautiful... now I just search and search to see what is there. - Evan Travers

Dave Winer

"I got put on Twitter's official suggested users list last night. I asked them to take me off it today and they did." http://twitter.com/jayrose...

April 30 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

akio0911, Rob Diana, Richard Carter, FCD and 49 other people liked this

i wonder why they don't ask people before they put them on the list? maybe they just assume that everyone wants to be on the list - Chris Heath

35 more comments

I will do the same, if I get put on the Twitter list. - Robert Scoble

I think I asked the last time there was a similar conversation - so please excuse the question if it was already asked - but why would you want to be removed? Am I missing something? Since I don't really use Twitter maybe there is something I do not understand. - LPH™ and his dog P™

LPH: I will refuse to be on this list for three reasons: 1. it's not a meritocracy. That means that my inclusion on it will raise questions about whether I did something behind the scenes to get on the list. 2. It is a gift from a company I would like to cover journalistically in the future. If I got the "gift" of being on the list I could no longer do that and keep my own integrity. 3. Being on the list gets you huge amounts of unenaged followers. I really am not in this game just for numbers. - Robert Scoble

...you're a man of principle, Dave Winer. - .LAG liked that

LPH: Go to TechCrunch's followers. Look at the engagement level. Most of his followers don't even put a picture on their avatars. Now go to mine and compare. The engagement level is HUGELY different. I'm paid to get an engaged audience, not an audience of bots or an audience of people who don't participate in the Internet. - Robert Scoble

LPH: TechCrunch's followers: http://twitter.com/TechCru... My followers: http://twitter.com/Scoblei... -- what differences do you notice? Look for signs of engagement. What are those? 1. Have the members put a photo on the avatar? 2. Have the members actually done a tweet or two? 3. Have the members actually followed anyone on their own (organic following?) - Robert Scoble

Robert - now that makes sense. I just don't use Twitter enough and am used to FF engagement. Guess I'm spoiled ! - LPH™ and his dog P™

LPH: now do you see the problem Twitter is facing here? http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsen... -- lots of hype, not enough engagement. It's engagement that advertisers will pay for, not the hype. - Robert Scoble

Or, visit this article about non engagement: http://features.csmonitor.com/innovat... - Robert Scoble

Hint: this list is actually making things worse for Twitter's returns and engagement. Here's why: 1. If you get onto Twitter because of a celebrity, that's great, but I've found people get very fickle about celebrities. Go to @oprah, for instance. Is there anything really that interesting there to read day after day after day? I don't see it. But what if your best friend is on Twitter? Yes, I find following my close friends on Twitter day after day IS interesting and DOES get me back to the service. - Robert Scoble

2. Twitter seems to only endorse "celebrities" on its recommended follower list. Well, that tells normal users that they don't matter to the system as much as celebrities. So they feel less engaged/empowered. Compare this to Facebook where celebrities only can have 5,000 friends. Now everyone is on the same level and the system "feels" more intimate and engaging because of that. - Robert Scoble

Great point Robert, and that's another reason why sites like Facebook (and in the past MySpace, Friendster, etc) are 'sticky' ... people you actually know are there. Most people will be more engaged with people they actually know - i for one don't engage with celebs on twitter because i know they're not going to engage with me - Chris Heath

bet that if twitter had a "best-of-the-day" feed like, no celebrity will on it. twitter is becoming less conversational. pity :( - Shivanand Velmurugan

Chris: right! Plus, this list really penalizes the real users of the service (this is why Allen Stern's points about friendfeed's list being bad are starting to win me over). Those who put the most time into the service should be rewarded by that service. I've been on Twitter 890 days. The fact that someone else is on the recommended list that's only been on for 15 days really pisses me off and makes me more likely to go elsewhere. - Robert Scoble

Shivanand: right, and it would be a lot better for engagement to have something like http://alltop.com/ which recommends people based on your content interests. If I want to hook into people who are into quilting, why would such a system recommend Mike Arrington to me? - Robert Scoble

i'm texting scoble from my iphone and it's mangling every goddam word - Dave Winer

The other thing about 'recommended' is For What? I might like Robert, but not if I'm looking for hollywood dish. same w/ jay, obviously. - reed price

Dave: the iPhone keyboard does that. (I'm on the phone with him now). - Robert Scoble

I've never found the suggested users list to be useful, on Twitter or FriendFeed. Frankly, I don't care if you're "just some guy/girl" or if you're God...if you don't say anything that interests me or teaches me something new, I'm not going to look for what you have to say. If you put all the numbers aside and make connections on a one-to-one basis, even though it's accessible one-to-many, that's worth finding. - Sally: gift wrapper

The celebrity suggested user lists completely miss the point of Twitter, implying it's a broadcast system - which is a minority use case. Services like Mr Tweet are far more apposite. Even random selections might get you started better! - Tom de Grunwald

A friend of mine joined Twitter and had list of "friends" and she didn't know who they were. It's like moving to a new address and getting a bunch of junk the first time you open the mail box. - Tom Newman

Tom, they're not really "friends", you're following a person, they may be friends, they may not. I know, picky, picky, picky. - Rob Fahrni

Reed, i totally agree... suggested lists are a nice thing to have, but only when you know why the suggestion is being made. - Chris Heath

Maybe a better model for a suggested list would be to look at more than number of subscriptions/follows - look at how many posts/comments - on FF they could also look at how many services or what services - if i post a lot from a service then the suggested list should maybe show me more people from that service ... one thing i will agree is that a suggested list is a hard thing to do because you can't please everyone with your suggestions ... just look where we are now... - Chris Heath

Even though I respect your reasons, I still can't believe you did it. It's such a huge opportunity. Yes but I do see what Scoble is saying. it would be impossible to criticize them. - Stephen Pickering

Oh my bad, It was Jay Rosen. I thought it was Dave Winer. Oh well, same difference. I can totally understand him. He's a journalist. What would be interesting to see though is if he remained on the list but remained totally objective and criticized them when it was appropriate and see if they then took him off. - Stephen Pickering

NICE: @anonymoustom: "celebrity suggested user lists miss the point of Twitter, implies broadcast system, a minority use case" - .LAG liked that

Dave, why do you think they put you on the list? - Thomas Hawk

Thomas: Dave wasn't put on the list, Jay Rosen was. I bet he was put on the list because he's one of the best Twitterers around and because he doesn't do anything "negative" in their eyes, like talk about friendfeed or overload users with too many tweets. - Robert Scoble

Don't forget the fact that there will be no way your followers can all DM you if you're on that list. - Jesse Stay

Jesse: that's a good point and since I care more about having engaged followers than just a broadcast mechanism, that matters to me too. - Robert Scoble

When a 'cat who tweets' makes the list, while many worthwhile charitable/educational organizations are ignored, something doesn't smell right. And it isn't just @sockington's litter box. - Sharon McPherson

How many more requests did you get while 'recommended' versus say a normal day? - Andrew Leyden

ah got it. It was Jay not Dave. - Thomas Hawk

Probably not the same league as Twitter, but Tweetree.com shows you (Dave) and Scobleizer on their front page sometimes. - Hiro Asari

Jay's decision clearly struck a nerve: Look at all these comments! ... Re: Robert Scoble saying he'd refuse to be listed because (a) it would raise questions about quid pro quo (b) gift would compromise his journalism, and (c) unengaged followers -- I get a & b, and applaud him for it. But I'm not sure I grasp the downside of having 100,000 "unengaged" followers. How do you know how... more... - Alan Mairson

Thomas Hawk

Simon Blint, Director of Visitor Relations at the SF MOMA, Yeah You Asshole, Photography is Not a Crime - http://thomashawk.com/2008...

August 8, 2008 from Thomas Hawk's Digital... - Comment - Like - Share

William Spaetzel, Ole Begemann, Ihar Mahaniok and 96 other people liked this

still reading...but my jaw is dropped right now! - Justin Korn

43 more comments

Wow, that's unbelievable. - Chris Rivait

Blint and the SFMOMA can kiss my...time to get a group of photogs to all go in together? Let me know when the beg to apologize. - Justin Korn

It is pretty crappy. To accuse someone of using a telephoto to spy on his employees is a crappy charge and not something that one ought to get kicked out of a museum for. If the SF MOMA doesn't want their employees that sit in the atrium appearing in photos then they should not have a "photography is allowed policy" per their website in their atrium. Simon Blint is like plenty of other assholes I've run into over the years. A power trippy person who gets upset when someone challenges their word. - Thomas Hawk

Digg it up...http://digg.com/travel_... - Justin Korn

thanks Justin, appreciate the digg and support. - Thomas Hawk

TH: This is absolutely ridiculous! I don't have that much (any?) power, but I'm going to do everything I can do get this story out (not that you don't have enough followers/supporters) - Justin Korn

"Blint obviously knows nothing of photography because the 14mm ultra wide angle lens on my camera body was about the furthest thing possible from a telephoto lens." Ultra-LOL - Johnny Worthington

Sigh. Amazing that they are still being jerks about photography. - Robert Scoble

It appears that they have (just?) changed their policy on the website. "Photography is not permitted in the galleries. Flash photography is permitted only with a handheld camera in the Atrium." http://bit.ly/4sm86V - Jauder Ho

Jauder: But TH was in the Atrium, and he wasn't using a tripod, so his camera was handheld. Do you interpret the policy as 'only flash cameras are okay. Cameras without flashes are not'? - Kevin Fox

So 'handheld' must only be point and shoot... - Johnny Worthington

Kevin: Upon initial reading of the policy, for some reason I fixated/associated it to mean only P&S. My bad. I do not like what happened to TH and would definitely like to see a reponse from MOMA addressing this. - Jauder Ho from twhirl

sounds like the Curator of the SF MOMA needs a slew of emails , in protest . Perhaps a large photography meetup at the SFMOMA . Press Office commassistant@sfmoma.org - johnpiercy

A photowalk with video camera would be lots of fun! Then we could have a segment about "what to do if you are accosted by an asshole." :-) - Robert Scoble

I'm in for a photowalk over there. I just sent an email to the curator as well. - Justin Korn

http://www.google.com/search... I hope this is just a wake up call for him and that he doesn't lose his job over his poor behavior. - EricaJoy

Sounds like a good human interest 'new story' for a local TV station or Newspaper. Works every time - Charlie Anzman

@Erica incompetence at a high-level position like that where interfacing with the public is priority #1 is exactly the sort of reason he should be severely reprimanded or terminated. That's the last thing a museum needs is bad press. - Pete Delucchi

Thomas - want to come visit DC's Union Station with me? - Andrew Feinberg

Nice shot from the Atrium BTW - Johnny Worthington

Reprimanded yes. Fired? Only if he has an established pattern of this sort of behavior. - EricaJoy

I dugg the post, and sent an e-mail to relay my astonishment. Looking at the other staff members' e-mail addresses on the PR contact page, it was pretty easy to guess at Simon's. - Tom Harrison

like, dugg, shared and whatever else you need to help :) - Tim Hoeck

I'm sorry you got kicked out, Thomas! What I really don't understand about his accusation of your spying (and it seems to be a common excuse to try to stop photography these days) is that newer P&S cameras are capable of crazy zoom. If someone were spying, do they not think they would want to be the LEAST conspicuous? It makes no sense. - carlotta fancypants

I can't believe this happened. I hope everyone talks up this issue and something changes. I noticed that people react differently when you use a DSLR instead of a small point-n-shoot. - Tom Newman

Ppl freak out when I pull out my DSLR..... - John Staton

But more and more people have DSLRs these days -- I think they will just have to get used to it - Brian Sullivan

facebook profile -Simon Blint http://www.facebook.com/home... - johnpiercy

Wow, what a muppet. - Andrew Garrett

I just delicious tagged and anonymous tipped your story for SFist... we'll see if they pick it up... - Richard ¿digame? Walker

Tomorrow night I'm going to see two friends who work in the SF MOMA dungeon. I'll ask them about this miscreant. - Richard ¿digame? Walker

I left an hour before this happened but not before I had to body check the over zealous security girl who literally got within 6 inches of my personal space because I refused to acknowledge her 2nd request to turn my off camera. - Mrsth

Simon Blintz is a douche nozzle. He needs a good kick in the nuts. - noeltykay

Something tells me he's going to have come to his senses by Monday. - Pete Delucchi

If you haven't dugg it yet (only 200 or so have!) do it...http://digg.com/travel_... - Justin Korn

Holy sh**. I took tons of photos at the Louvre and no one cared. - sergiooo from NoiseRiver

Ridiculous. This type of stuff really annoys me and makes me wonder about the future of public photography in general. I'm amazed at how quickly our photographic freedoms are being torn away by unbased bias and fear. GRRRRRRR. - Sam Dodge

Interestingly, Simon seems to shoot with a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi. http://flickr.com/search... His behavior seems more douchey to me now. - EricaJoy

This man needs to loose his job over this incident. Not even a public apology should save him from getting canned. I've had a similar incident regarding my camera at a NY Islanders game in the Nassau Coliseum and have been following Thomas Hawk's series of posts about the museum with interest. David Pogue wrote about this as well after a motocross event incident a few months back. - Tony Vota

Wow! 12 pages of ff entries on "Simon Blint" in just 19 hours. http://friendfeed.com/search... - Jesper Kjær Hansen

What a nippy arse. Hope he gets read the riot act. - Chris Nixon

There are some comments over on SFist from people with first-hand opinions: http://sfist.com/2008... - Richard ¿digame? Walker

Oh, and one more thing to all of you that are trying to make this an issue of Hawk's or Blint's character, I think the real issue stems from trumped up "security" meant to keep us "safe." All sorts of power-tripping security guards and police have become accustomed to people immediately accepting restricted rights with the magic words "post 9/11." The reason it is such a hot-button... more... - Richard ¿digame? Walker

Sorry this happened to you Thomas, it's strange to see how close minded and arrogant are some of the people in art institution. What happened to you and to me last week is a sign of the times: photography is increasingly seen as a danger as it cannot be controlled. http://digg.com/arts_cu... - Davide Bedin

l0ckergn0me

Oh Crap. Palm software developers are also developing apps for the iPhone. Who the fuck uses *cyan* as a background color?! Get the HELL out of this platform. - http://stevenscreek.com/

July 8, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Alan Cheslow, Jake (aka Jawee), Tom Harrison and 16 other people liked this

Their iPhone apps look disgusting :( - Graeme Shaw

22 more comments

Can't comprehend the use of cyan there. Just.. No. - Mo Kargas

Is this a joke? (serious question) - Mona Nomura

No, Mona - it's not a joke. There are people who actually BELIEVE they can release an app that looks like this on the iPhone and people will buy it. No way this company will EVER make it on the iPhone. No way in hell. You could have functionality out the wazoo in any application, there's no way I'm going to use it or recommend it to others - web-based, OS X, Windows, Linux... no way. - l0ckergn0me

There is a company that is developing a product that will allow you to run your old Palm OS programs on an iPhone. http://www.styletap.com/product... - Tom Newman

wow.... i mean.. they have a gif of what is that, Palm V? Palm III? on their home page... and i bet their site is made from tables lol.. i'm embarrassed for them. maybe i'll write them an email - Mona Nomura

What I want to know is, how is a random number generator "Personal Productivity Software"? - invariant - farewell FF from twhirl

edit: this entire page = PURE hilarity http://stevenscreek.com/iPhone... - Mona Nomura

EPIC FAIL'age... combined with invariant's question i can't. stop. laughing. - Mona Nomura

eyes are hurting now. - Tsega Dinka

"A leading provider of software solutions for the iPhone ..." - Chris Baskind

Yeah, Chris - if they're leading, who's falling behind?! - l0ckergn0me

Palm apps always look 10 years out of date ... - Patrick Jordan

@Invariant: it automates coin flippage, of course, and thus saves you a heck of a lot of time (especially for the uncoordinated who keep dropping their coin and have to pick it up). Sheesh. *Everyone* knows that.... ;-) ;-) @Everyone: So Palm still exists, eh? Go figure.... - Joanmarie

Chris this post = classic. Thank you SO much for this. I still can't get off the site - Mona Nomura

http://summize.com/search... - l0ckergn0me

We shouldn't be so hard on them: cyan was, at one time, a very trendy programming color. Back in the Eighties or so. - Chris Baskind

I remember seeing their apps last week, linked by Gruber. Talk about horrible interface design. I guess folks go with what they know before learning what they should. - Scott Jarkoff

The summize results are hilarious. :-) - Joanmarie

My word. Haven't seen UI like since my highschool computing class- even then we were competeong for the ugliest UI. - Roberto Bonini

Interesting post on this on 37signals: http://www.37signals.com/svn... - Alex Haar

I don't think they're coming from Palm OS. This stuff is uglier. (I still have a working Sony Clie that I used up until I got my N800 regullary) - Jake (aka Jawee) from twhirl

I'm ready for PalmPrint on the iPhone. Woohoo. Let's point our IR ports at each other. - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

cyan > uselessblogger - Hayes Haugen

Thomas Hawk

The number one way I find people to add on FF? Nope, not FFs recommendations, finding little white bubbles next to people making interseting comments in conversations. These are the people that I want more of. Folks that participate intelligently are far more valuable than A listers who don't.

July 7, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Peter Reavy, Joe, Mitchell Tsai and 141 other people liked this

Agreed, when I find a thread I really like, I tend to add a bunch of commentors from it. - Phil G

54 more comments

I'm only just now starting to use FF, even though I signed up months ago...and I agree, this tool is far more useful than even twitter. - Jeremy Botter

I agree 100% Tom. That is how I have been finding a lot of people. I am relatively new to FF so that and friend of a friend posts are the only ways I am finding people. - Matt Donders

Personally - that's why FriendFeed is differentiating itself from a lot of other sites. It caters to those active people that want to discuss, learn, inform - which makes it a resource that I come back to over and over again... - George Smith

I'm in absolute agreement but have to admit that I've added some of the A listers just to see who's talking to them intelligently. Granted, the ROI's a little low, but sometimes watching the fawning is reward in and of itself. <insert sarcasticon here> - Linda Mills

You get what you give - Dave Martin

Good point, this is one of the reasons why I'm spending more time on FF now - great way to discover and interact with new people that have relevant information/comments to share - Gabriel Biguria

So very true. My page of "recommended" friends is nothing but a bunch of A-listers that would fill my FF pages with mostly junk, and not a lot of substance. - Brandon Wood

ditto ditto and ditto - just added Gabriel and Jeremy in fact - Marco(aureliusmaximus)

When I am looking for people that share my interests, I search for a headline I really liked on the everyone tab and check out others who shared it and see what they are all about. It is kind of time consuming but fun. - Geoff Schultz

we use the same technique - Fred Grott

I'd also add that you don't have to add a whole lot of people to get quality content thrown into your FF stream. I'm slowly adding people and the value of FF went up 10 fold. - Otto R. Radke

The goal of adding friends here is to have intersting stuff in your Friendfeed. And you do that by carefully watching the dicussion not just in terms of comments and likes ( as mentioned above multiple times), but what items are posted by people. Thats whats I look for. - Roberto Bonini

I've been getting annoyed at the amount of junk, repetition, and endless Twitter vs. FriendFeed talk from the so-called "A-listers". It's high time to start unsubscribing and find some new "friends". - Matt

the ancient toad style of social networking - Anthony

Actually if you do that you soon realize that there's more content by interesting people here than time you have to read that. Then, the question stops being how to find interesting people (that you'll keep finding and following) but how to reduce the noise... - Marcos Marado from fftogo

So Marcos the task at hand is to become Jedi of the Hide button and learn how to fine tune everything. - Mark Forman

Hide is awsome, but I'm feeling it is not enough. I hope noiseriver ends up being the solution, but... it still hasn't the hide feature implemented :-) - Marcos Marado from fftogo

Hah! I just added everyone in this post who I wasn't already subscribed to. - Thomas Hawk

Ha! Prepare to be inundated with my brand of minutia! - Geoff Schultz

If the same friend of X comes up often, and I find them interesting, I will subscribe to them. - Hao Chen

No white bubbles here for me. - Robert Scoble

Thomas: I do the same thing too - Sally Church

I get zero comments on FF to my posts. I'm not A-list of course. I'm more like a lesser known Baldwin brother. - Jason Shultz from twhirl

LOL @ Scoble's comment!! ha, ha! - Susan Beebe

@Jason Participation is a two way street. - Hao Chen

amen brutha! - Scott Jarkoff

I, too, am just getting more involved in this social networking thing ... - Robert Couture

This taps into what for me is the stand-out experience FF. 'Common Interest' is _one_ facet, but there's more going on in deciding to Subscribe or not. It's like a first impression in person - the brain takes a bunch of behavioral cues builds a profile in seconds upon which decisions (sometimes lasting) are made. To balance the split decision weakness of not enough information, just cruise through the person's feed for 'background check'. All common sense I suppose. - Micah Wittman

Yeah but I frikin HATE the moment I add 1 person from a thread i like, I get bumped out of the thread & have to go back & search for it again to see if I want to add anyone else. - Mrsth

@mrsth, I agree 110% w/ that. It's easier to open a new tab then scroll down and locate the topic again... - Czar

Nah...I add completely based on superficiality and looks. :-P - Live4Emma (L4S)

@Czar- ah I didn't realize you could do that. I'll give it a whirl. Thx!!! - Mrsth

@Carlos Perez- Ahh. that explains alot. You can only see my legs:-) - Mrsth

i guess just a 'me too' here would be totally wrong. - MLx

I think the only way to find those interesting people you don't know is to subscribe to the popular people. I've been finding some interesting folks that way. Otherwise, no one posts comments to your own stuff. Oh, to be unpopular. Sigh. - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

That's exactly correct. I don't auto-follow. I add people who comment and like and share things I'm interested in. - Louis Gray

wow, that's a super-excellent observation. i'm taking the hint with a few 'white-bubble' folks here too. altho i wonder if the FF folks shouldn't cue that behavior up with mouse-over info on the bubble icons... i had no clue why the color was showing up at first. (then again, i'm often an idiot) - dave mcclure

awesome. this reaffirms why i like ff better than twitter. the failwhale is kind of endearing, though. - Marissa "malouie"

Couldn't agree more! The Fancy Pants people are too fancy, I just want interesting conversation(s)! - Cheryl

Totally agree!! Wish I could get some of those people as my friends too!! - ChaCha Fance

I can't stand FF posts with more than 10 comments. I want to filter them out but there is no option for that. - Sam Pullara

What client are you using? twirhl makes comments on FF OK, but just OK. It's a shame that we're all this way and still don't have clients that support threaded conversations as good as tin or slrn on usenet... - David Molnar from twhirl

Good tip:) - Igor Poltavskiy

david let's agree on 'as good as on usenet' - i never could stand neither tin nor slrn *g* but yes. it is now 10 years ago that most decent usenet clients had a feature set still not rediscovered for everything feedish ... - Nicole Simon

Agreed as well I look out for the white speech bubbles as well to see what value they add to the FriendFeed community! - Joe Dawson

and little like icons ;) - Tyler Gillies

Occasionally I'll wander over to everyone and 'browse'. it's really eye opening as FF grows - Charlie Anzman

Charlie, I like doing that too, but we need a language filter badly! - Hao Chen

The number one trick A-listers use and I never liked? " hey I'm here now on friendfeed, comment on this if you want me to follow you". I don't want them to follow me because they are important. I want them to follow me because they feel I'm important to them! - Alexander van Elsas

Agreed- when I see opinions I like from someone several times, I check to see if I've subscribed to them yet. - Brian Carter

My first time on FF and I like the interaction I'm seeing. The "white bubbles" are a great way to find new and interesting people. - Tom Newman

That's a great way to find friends with whom you can actually talk and count as friends. And the comments are a great feature of FF. I'm just getting to know how to make FF useful for me... - Dan V

I haven't found FF list of recommendations terribly useful either. Although this is a bad example, because it brought me to this entry. - TDavid

The criteria of "participate intelligently" is a relative word. What is "intelligent" to you may sound "stupid" to others? I guess the more appropriate term would be "value-adding to the conversation".. But I agree 100% on how "comments" can really uncover hidden gems! - Winston Teo

I do this too. I consider the comments a kind of signaling (a concept I learned from economics). Too bad there are so little interesting people in FF (to me at least, my interests are a little "off" from the median). - Meryn Stol

Tom Newman › Comments