My guess is the guys at FriendFeed are already thinking about this and are preparing (hopefully) to fight the problem of spam. - Nick Dominguez
"With the steady growth that Friendfeed is experiencing," - whats your sources ? do you have data to prove this statement , in terms of new users signing up and using FF ?? - Peter Dawson
Peter: FF is seeing sizable growth according to my follower stats. - Robert Scoble
i've received so many useless followers on twitter trying to peddle their goods. i'm not sure how friendfeed can prevent spam considering the format. hopefully it doesn't go the way of craigslist - Cee Bee
No, "FF is seeing sizable growth according to my follower stats."... thats according to "Scobles" !! What I am seeking is true new users signup and usage stats, Not just Scobles Screech. I don't mean to be impertinent to your comment , however, thats exactly the type of statement which I would like to call in . Your thoughts are important, but give me data/graph ..till then, to me , its just screech !! - Peter Dawson
I would have to say that, while this post does a good job of building suspense, it just isn't that serious. Rooms can be made private. Captcha could stymie these massive spammer attempts at different points of entry. This only works for rooms. Nobody is going to keep following a spammer. I know, I tried...everyone unsubscribed (j/k...don't unsub...srsly). - Rahsheen Porter
The same can be said about identi.ca. I agree spam might be coming to FriendFeed but, can they really do anything about it other than the "report for spam/abuse" feature? - Outsanity
I haven't seen any spam yet... Isn't the block feature already a solution? We do communicate here and if someone spams, we say it and we block him/her. Don't you think? - directeur via NoiseRiver
I had to post this for it almost seems douchebagary to me "callingbull 4 hours ago
How is this problem different from blog spam or any other type of spam on public systems? You write this as it is a unique phenomenon.
FAIL.
" - Outsanity
I think the miscreants are already working Twitter and Friendfeed and your measures are worth thinking about. My gut tells me that FriendFeed will be more resilient. - Dennis E. Hamilton via twhirl
I actually find it more smart the way FriendFeed is built. You have your own vision of the river. You consider someone spaming? hide it, block it... It's your choice! - directeur via NoiseRiver
The major point I was driving home is room spam. Spammers at this stage of the game,have yet to realize the true potential of rooms on Friendfeed.The ingenious part is how the spam-vertsied rooms would and could be used. - Mike Fruchter
I've had a bunch of spammers follow me on Twitter lately. I block them when I remember to, but usually I just don't bother following them back. From the perspective of a non-tech-savvy end user here, I guess I haven't quite seen this as a problem yet -- they can spam all they want, but I'll never see their posts. - nathan
no spam so far, once they do, get your block button ready - Dobromir Hadzhiev
I will throw this out there, what would happen if the phishers caught onto rooms? I could picture rooms themed out with various corporations media, all aimed at easily duping a person who is not too net savvy. - Mike Fruchter
I used to subscribe to everyone who subscribed to me... but it became too many people :( Then I don't get to see what my real friends are saying because it's buried between the hundreds of others. - Alana Taylor
I hear ya Alana. That's one of the big drawbacks of following a lot of people, if one of your friends updates something and they don't have many people following *them*, their update disappears unless you visit their profile page. I wonder if there is a greasemonkey script to make 'tabs' of the people you want to keep an eye on. - J. Phil
Rooms as a source of spam. Yup - I can see it. It'd have to be done via an already existing room that people subscribe to. You set up accounts, join rooms, post spam links. Ugh... - Hutch Carpenter
yes I saw this from the beginning. good idea the flag post thingy - Noah David Simon
Spammers at this stage of the game,have yet to realize the true potential of rooms on Friendfeed.The ingenious part is how the spam-vertsied rooms would and could be used. - Mike Fruchter
Hutch, which brings me to another good point. Anyone can see a public room on FF, no password authentication is needed. - Mike Fruchter
If it got bad enough, rooms would have to go to invite only. A burden, but it would stop the spam. - Hutch Carpenter
Good point Hutch, but it would be a matter of time, before the spammers circumvented that process as well. - Mike Fruchter
Maybe - I'd expect the room moderators to have better control. Bots requesting access to rooms seems like something humans can manage. And I don't believe invite-only rooms show up in search results. - Hutch Carpenter
Dewald, touches on another point, seo manipulation using rooms.
"Not only can spammers very easily push their content in the faces of FriendFeed members, they can also abuse the service for getting additional "followed" backlinks to their sites and pages." - Mike Fruchter
I think FriendFeed will be just as useful to spammers as blogs, yahoo chat, and twitter. @MIke, good point about SEO. I wonder if Google will step in and do something about that. - Rahsheen Porter
ok Dugg, commented, dugg comments and made it a favorite, hope that helps. The recommendation engine looks cool I'm gonna have to spend a little time on Digg again - David Knight
Stories can still make it after 24 hours. The chances are very low though but it can happen. - Corvida
Dugg that this morning cuz it was so dang cool!! :-) - Susan Beebe
Oh man, I've managed to go all this time without having a digg account. Done. I guess it's for a good cause :) - Todd McKinney
Dugg, and I sent a shout to all the folks on Digg as well. - J. Phil
I was number 262. TweetDeck is getting rave reviews. - James
all i know is this, if we get him on digg, his server better handle it - otherwise im sending him the largest fail whale ever - Allen Stern
A lot of speculation -- based on pseudo reverse engineering -- it would be interesting if FF commented on this. This goes to the core of what is the essence/power of FF I think. - Brian Sullivan
Brian - you're right. Call it empirically-based speculation. Interesting to hypothesize the "why" of the bounce-to-the-top algorithm. - Hutch Carpenter
As a relative newcomer to FF and all the associated stuff, I found this to be a very interesting read. Thanks, Hutch :) - Bob Kingsley
I love following you guys - I never, ever, ever in a million years would have thought of or taken the time to figure out how the beach ball mechanism works on FF. great stuff - Marco
Just to add more speculation to the mix -- I am guessing that clicking on a link (or playing a video/mp3 inline) also counts as a "touch" maybe with more weight than either a comment or a like - Brian Sullivan
Thanks Bob - I've been here for 4 months or so, and I really hadn't take the time to understand how this works. - Hutch Carpenter
Great post Hutch. I'm very interested in the algorithmic stuff behind FF. On twitter, I never used the Favorites feature because they have no meaning behind. Here I 'like' all the time. I also like seeing the stuff that my network liked and commented on. - Alan Le
Excellent post Hutch, I know Darwin would agree. Thanks for the mention :-) - Mike Fruchter
Two small addenda to what I've seen with Likes. (1) It seems that you can "resurrect" an old item with no Likes by Liking it. The first Like puts it back to the top. (2) I actually did put an old item back to the top of FriendFeed by Liking it. Happened with one of Frederic's Last Podcast posts. Steven Hodson even commented on this happening (http://friendfeed.com/e/4e549e...) - Hutch Carpenter
I will buy a 3G iPhone. Most definitely. The #1 thing I do on my iPhone is participate in the Web, and having a faster one will be worth the expense. - Mike Fruchter
No, I won't. I have a Nokia N82. What would I want with an iPhone? - Cecily Walker
"FriendFeed has also recently added the ability to stream enclosures on the site in a flash player. Yesterday I started coming across some feed items from user edythe labeled “Last Loved MP3’s” that included the inline player. I was curious and wanted to know how she was doing this. It turns out she was using this yahoo pipe which converts the Last.fm recently loved tracks XML feed to a RSS feed including links to MP3’s from Seeqpod." - Mike Fruchter
The only disappointing thing about these is that they're not available for delivery. If I want some, I should be able to call a number and have them delivered directly to my couch. - Louis Gray
That seems to hover somewhere between incredibly wonderful and incredibly nasty. - Trish Robinson
I just came up with a name for these: the Devil's Breakfast - Rubin
Louis, i'm not sure how well the donut buns will hold up after sitting in a bag for 30 minutes and saturating with hamburger grease. But like you, I wish I could find out! - Robert Seidman
I can eat whatever I want on fridays since I eat healthy the other 6 days. I'll eat these! - Bjorn Tipling
Does it come in a veggie burger alternative? - Tom Landini
I'm not going to defend McCain on every front but the fact is that most of these are not flip-flops but rather McCain being true to his core principles.
There was no attempt to shade his change in immigration positions - he came right out and said "My side in the debate lost - this is an important issue so I am going to support a solution the American people are willing to get behind." That is a long way from a flop flop.
I'll give Obama the same kind of leeway in similar situations (I think, for instance, his FISA stance might be one of them) but expect the same in return. - Mike Fruchter
The power of accountability the internet brings to bear is highlighted again - when are we going to learn that there are now millions of fact-checkers out here who not only posses the desire to double check claims but the communication channels to broadcast their findings? - Mike Fruchter
*Sigh* having lived through all of these I don't have the strength to read through them right now but am sure it is a great aggregation of decimation. - Mike Fruchter
Great post. It should be pointed out, though, that there isn't much difference between having one's liberty questioned (which I am against) and constantly being lumped into some ridiculous "neocon" category and having your humanity questioned. - Mike Fruchter
The third sentence should read "truths" instead of "rights" I think but other than that this is a very cool view of our Declaration of Independence. Yet another great find thanks to FriendFeed (props to Kevin Donahue!) - Mike Fruchter
