FriendFeed for Beginners

where is ODF? - ovigia

yeah the closest thing is RTF which is rather old. guess HTML makes a decent intermediate format - Mike Chelen

Nice list for file sharing on friendfeed. - ashish

PDF is right there :) - Alex Scoble

sure PDF is fine if the document doesn't need to be edited much later on ;) - Mike Chelen

Yeah, I was being snarky :) And to be honest, DOC is about the closest thing we'll ever see to a real document standard, open or otherwise. - Alex Scoble

even if the widely used formats aren't ideal, there's an advantage from rapid sharing & discussion, that can hopefully determine what additional files might be useful ;) - Mike Chelen

@alex: i guess you're wrong! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - ovigia

.doc is only useful for sharing within a closed ecosystem. Proprietary formats cannot rightfully be considered standards. I insist on receiving open formats, and I refuse to send anything but open formats. People over-format anyway, plain text works for 80% of the use cases where people attach Word or other files. Aside from that, Word sucks. - LogEx

ovigia: it is odd that some word processors like abiword still do not seem to use ODT as the default file type - Mike Chelen

LogEx: since open office is capable of reading and writing .doc it's still possible avoid word :) - Mike Chelen

True, other apps will r/w it, but that doesn't make it any better as an interchange format. - LogEx

@mike: i really don't know why, but at least you could save documents using odf format.http://arstechnica.com/open-so... - ovigia

LogEx: yeah it's mostly useful for backwards-compatibility, sort similar to other fallback options like .txt or .csv - they are better than nothing, but a modern format presents more robust information storage features - Mike Chelen

ovigia: that is true, probably they are in the process of improving and integrating OpenDocument formats. wonder how far along other office suites have come? - Mike Chelen

I'm sorry, but when 95% of the world uses a format, it's a "de facto" standard, regardless of whether it's open or not. - Alex Scoble

how do people measure usage statistics? they are more difficult to collect than tracking website visitor browsers. since windows market share is only 90% that would mean some non-windows users would have to be running word :D - Mike Chelen

@alex i really don't know where you get those numbers since here in the EU, and several other countries like Brasil, ODF is the default standard; and NATO uses ODF as a mandatory standard for all members - ovigia

Certainly Word is ubiquitous, but it's hardly standard. We used to use Word in med school and residency in order to pass on information at the end of the day to the on-call team, but ever since HIPAA passed, we ended up having to switch to proprietary encrypted web based solutions. And most of the on-line documents we received from the residency program, medical organizations, and the boards that aren't in plain text are in PDF format. - Victor Ganata

ovigia: in the US at the moment, majority of documents on government websites are PDF, XLS, or DOC. it depends what is considered a document though, and fortunately there is a growing amount of XML - Mike Chelen