I was looking at the "Everyone" page here on friendfeed and realized what I wanted was the "everyone" page, but filtered to show items that were already on Techmeme.
- Robert Scoble
As I said on Twitter, you're looking to solve a problem VERY few people have + are going to have in the future.
- Robin Wauters
But none of those satisfy. None have done a good job for me alone.
- Robert Scoble
I want the same thing. All my RSS feeds in one client, with the ability to tweet them, and have a conversation thread that you can actually follow (which for one reason or another Twitter doesn't enable very well). Add to that search capabilities that span several social networks and then you'd have a winner.
- Josue Fontanez
Robert, seems like it's already a pretty doable idea using Yahoo pipes and dupe removal...
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Robin: I really don't give a shit. Why does everything have to be for billions of people?
- Robert Scoble
Your wacky idea should have an algorithm to combine similar posts (links to articles, mainly). FF doesn't seem to do this very well.
- You.
Robin: a great meal happens four people at a time. No one complains that no one else can experience it.
- Robert Scoble
Everyone: There's millions to be made here. Pay attention!
- Meryn Stol
Tina: I need to learn Yahoo Pipes. Has anyone created a Pipe that does something close to this?
- Robert Scoble
@RobinWauters maybe it's a problem that people just aren't aware that they have.
- Landon
I have no capital to invest in your plan Robert, but I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, and support this idea in a non-money sort of way.
- Matthew DeVries
Robin: great technologies get built to scratch an itch all the time. Even Twitter. When they built it they had no clue that it would be popular.
- Robert Scoble
I'm not sure they should join such a site even if it were cool. Twitter search is destined for greatness. Imagine Live.com was the only search engine to display real-time results from Twitter.com together with their normal results? People would search for something, and not only get the usual results, but what people are saying about that right now. It would be a killer combo, something...
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- Odi Kosmatos
Scoble, why don't you quickly break down what specific value each service brings to the table? ie why do you bother going there in the first place?
- Landon
I've played around with Pipes and it's a very powerful (and not surprisingly user-unfriendly) technology.
- You.
Landon: sure. Techmeme shows me the biggest stories in Tech in a way that's unique and shows me lots of blogs that are talking about each story. Friendfeed has the best community and best "live web" search engine. Google News shows me all the news from around the world. Sports. Finance. Big city stuff. Etc. Just like your newspaper.Twitter search shows me what people are talking about right now.
- Robert Scoble
Pipes seem too complicated for my musician mind. I should have digged it more, but I don't have much time to find a perfect solution for myself. I wish I could just login to one account and everyone I'm interested in would be there.
- ilter
I'd like to be able to subscribe to notifications on a post's comments. Like FB, I guess.
- You.
Take a look at Streamy. I'm finding it to be very useful for this type of thing. Saved FF and Twitter searches like TweetDeck. Across the board service seraches. The service itself is similar to FF (with discussions, etc) but a much better RSS reader than FF. Development is ongoing with new features very few days right now it seems. http://www.streamy.com
- Kevin Kuphal
This morning I started out on friendfeed and noticed it was very slow. Then I went over to TechMeme and found lots of interesting stories and wondered if I was missing people talking about those stories over on friendfeed. So I went to the Everyone page here and started doing some searches. But was very frustrated with what came back (mostly non-English sites).
- Robert Scoble
Robert: I've made a couple of pipes. The main ones grab info from 7-15 different feeds, remove dupes based on a couple of criteria and filters out keywords I don't want (which is a HUGE plus IMO). It's not perfect, and some dupes still get through because different sites put information in different places in their markup, but that's because I use so many sources. If you're using Google...
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- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
I wanted a friendfeed search that showed me news that was being discussed on Techmeme. That's what got me thinking about all this.
- Robert Scoble
Tina: I'd like to smoke your pipe! :-) I have a Yahoo account. You can email me at scobleizer@gmail.com
- Robert Scoble
I would want just one more element: authority. i'd like to know who submitted it and if they know their shit.
- Landon
They are integrated in my eyes, and for me.
- Richard A.
Sounds like a sort of info/comms nirvana...maybe it's an Air app, adding windows for these other services into something like what Yahoo just released which is a modest gas - Sideline.
- Thom Kennon
Robert: Would tapping into RSS be fast enough for what you want though or are you thinking more of a real time thing?
- Landon
friendfeed combines techmem, googlenew, yahoo , twitter and a lot more other sites, including itself , that is, if you sub to a room into another pvt room: !! This is a self ecusive space much like a Mandelbrot set , if you can handle it !!
- Peter Dawson
Landon: RSS isn't enough. It's not fast enough, for one, and it won't include friendfeed items for two. I'm not sure if you can even do what I want. Peter: I'm an advanced private room user here on friendfeed and it doesn't do what I want.
- Robert Scoble
Peter: I want the ranking to come along with Techmeme too. What's at the top of the page is more important than what's at the bottom. That's why RSS isn't very satisfying since that forces everything into reverse chronilogical order unless you do some wacky tricks with RSS.
- Robert Scoble
Well, I don´t know the details, but the people want to talk about popular things... other sites like Friendfeed offer this, your site must be different... what would be the difference (exactly)? I suposse the site offer the popular themes on Techmeme or Google News as topics for conversation
- HECTOR ARTURO
Robert, wouldn't it be a good idea to take the feedback and your thoughts to your blog, so you can elaborate a bit on what it is you want? You can explain in more detail and the feedback will be even more valuable.
- Robin Wauters
Hector: yup. I wish I could see conversations on friendfeed that match up to what's on Google News or on Techmeme or on Twitter search. That would be cool.
- Robert Scoble
Robert -- what is the problem you are trying to solve? It seems to me you posted a solution and people are madly discussing other solutions. I don't see any clear statement of the problem.
- Brian Sullivan
Robin: yup, after I think about it some more. This was mostly a brain fart I had and I like being interactive when I'm brainstorming ideas like this. Seems to have at least a few other people interested too.
- Robert Scoble
Brian: the problem is that on friendfeed it's hard to find the really good tech conversations. If you are over on Google News, it's hard to find the blogs and tweets and friendfeed conversations that are happening around the news. If you are over on Techmeme it's hard to find the stuff that's happening on Twitter or friendfeed. That tells me there's opportunity for something new to glue all of these together to make all of them more useful.
- Robert Scoble
It's an interesting train of thought, but I'm still left wondering what you want
- Robin Wauters
Robert: I think this is a great idea...I'm swimming in all the details of trying to sift the news and see whats really happening and what people really think about it. I also don't have as much time to go through each and every site to discover the gems-This idea certainly has the potential of being VERY useful to a good number of people. Meryn points out there are millions to be made w/ this - Correct. Directly possibly, and Indirectly FOR SURE.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Robert: I can dm or email you something I'm working on that you might like. Private - trying to launch at TC50.
- Landon
Robin: let's just take it from friendfeed for a second, to answer what I want. I want to have a site that uses the "Everyone" feed and shows me everyone who is discussing an item that's currently on Techmeme. I'd love it if it were displayed like Techmeme too. Is that understandable as to what I want? Now, that we got that, let's add Twitter search's trending topics. Cool? Now let's add Google News.
- Robert Scoble
the question is does FF support any RSS feed? if so then integrate what you want, integrating service is interesting, filtering by interest even more interesting.
- abdellah
Landon: please do. I'll keep to embargoes. scobleizer@gmail.com or you can call me at +1-425-205-1921
- Robert Scoble
Here is a search that shows all of the most engaged items on friendfeed right now. (This search shows all items on the Everyone feed that have 5 comments AND five "likes."). http://friendfeed.com/search... Note how noisy it is and how unfocused it is. I'd love it if I could say "filter by Techmeme." Or "filter by what's currently on Google News."
- Robert Scoble
abdellah: Friendfeed can pull in any RSS feed (or most of them, anyway) but that's not what I want. I want it to display items that are already on Techmeme. RSS might play a role in that, but it isn't enough. I'd need an engine to go through the Everyone feed looking for discussions already taking place and then I'd need to display those. Techmeme's value is in its display, which isn't easy to communicate via RSS. It's a tough problem.
- Robert Scoble
Robert. Here's a quick screenshot I did from Streamy. Took seconds to create a search widget added to my FF page that shows techmeme conversations. http://img504.imageshack.us/img504.... Works the same for searching twitter as well as your RSS feeds.
- Kevin Kuphal
Robert: i'll buzz you now if that's cool.
- Landon
Fallon's Skimmer - http://www.fallon.com/skimmer - does a good job of the more media-centric social networks (FB, YT, etc) - maybe an AIR app is the way to tackle this as opposed to burying it in a tab that can easily lose its session/context/settings etc...
- Ben Watson
from twhirl
Tina: you have the right idea here with your pipe setup & de-duping- It would be great if something could then point out where all the dupes are at the end of each entry, rate/rank by # reads (of article and originating sites), and have "authority" rating via tags perhaps imported from the likes of peoplebrowsr.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Kevin: but that shows all items that discuss Techmeme. I don't want that. Too noisy. I only want to see items that actually are ON Techmeme.
- Robert Scoble
Heavens me, Robert. I would love to have 'problems' like this. For someone whose on the interent non-stop, what would you do with all the free time you'd have If you just had one "single stop" for meta-everything? (conversations, feeds etc, etc) /tounge-slightly-in-cheek, of course ;)
- Chris Duffy
I think Pipes are probably the way to go then. You really need some logic behind the filtering. More than a typical search will give.
- Kevin Kuphal
Robert - how would you relate or tag the conversations as being on "Techmeme" or "Google News". I don't think it works if it is a mechanical connection (url referenced for instance). That kind of connection misses so much is an generally unsatisfying. It seems the connecting requires intelligence, personal involvement -- difficult to do in real time -- maybe you could pay people to do it (like Mahalo?).
- Brian Sullivan
robert, I understand yes, it is a kind a a big puzzle where all the "related" "related by what" items a cross diverse services.
- abdellah
Chris: if I had this, I'd find something else to complain about. :-) Kevin: I must learn to use Pipes. Marshall Kirkpatrick showed me that last year and it looked useful, but I never had a big enough need. This is it.
- Robert Scoble
Daniel: that is very close to what I want, but not there. Backtype is mostly about federating comments, I thought. At least that's how I use it, although the link you gave me shows that it can be used in other ways. Interesting.
- Robert Scoble
brian, you are brilliant, there are 2 sort of connection "words" and "social graph", without going in AI level algorithm this may be done by investigating those 2 direction : "related words" , "related peoples"
- abdellah
as brian says it is hard if we try to make it real time , pipes are useless if we have to make it real time :)
- abdellah
Brian: you might be right that it needs to have some human involvement. Even Techmeme is learning that it's better to have atul working for them (for free, I might add!) than to have just algorithms doing the work.
- Robert Scoble
I think the issue is that the controls necessary to fine tune the conversation would look like you are flying a plane. If you want to just see everything based on a keyword at a point in time there are really easy tools but if you want to archive everything, like I do in Google Reader, have curation like Techmeme, and let friends play like friendfeed it would be a very complex interface. That's why we are talking pipes, tweetdeck, http://tradeshowmetrics.com/Default... or maybe tinker.com
- Tom
I've been advocating for integration between TechMeme and FF in terms of comments and links. Twitter threads also need to be preserved in FF. I don't use GoogleReader. Lora and I have been talking about the opposite though and things getting too connected. Hotmail, for instance, shows "what's new in your network" (Twitter, Live status, etc) by default and to me this just doesn't seem...
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- Loren Heiny
I can almost guarantee you there are at least 10 people reading this who are part of teams trying to build such a service/app. I'd guess 50% are building a web site, expecting people will add yet another site to their daily workflow or just drop some other combination of sites to use theirs. 40% are probably building Air apps, and 10% are building Mac apps. And I'd guess none of them are talking to each other, because everybody wants to be the next big thing. I wonder...
- Ken Sheppardson
...what would it take to get them all in the same room, and convince them to pool resources?
- Ken Sheppardson
Isn't it far easier to just ignore it all and serendipitously skim the occasional bit or piece of it, rather than bulk it all up and eat it whole? Use the lack of integration to your advantage. Blimey, you're probably reading every single comment on here, too!
- Ian Tindale
Robert (or anyone else for that matter): here's an example pipe http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes... This takes a Google Blogs search for Techmeme, a FF search for Techmeme (items with > 5 likes & 5 comments), and a news.Google.com search for Techmeme. Filters out any from Scoble's site, and then permits any that are a link to Techmeme, Google News, or have...
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- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Tina: that's cool, but it's not satisfying. For one, it doesn't look like either Techmeme or Friendfeed. I think I need to do a video of what I want to explain it better, but I'm off to attend the Web 2.0 expo so will noodle on that this weekend. Thanks everyone, interesting times we live in!
- Robert Scoble
Robert: this kind of pipe creates a feed that you can bring directly into FF, say into a room that you create. Just a thought.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Let's combine the whole internet into one site.... ooh wait, Google already done that.
- Amit Morson
Robert: We (BackType) certainly federate comments, but around more than their authors -- we federate around keywords (search) and content (connect) like the example Daniel showed you, which connects the conversational graph for a particular blog post. I e-mailed you about what we're doing w/ the latter. But more generally, I think FriendFeed for news is a basis for what you're...
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- Christopher Golda
@Scoble: i agree with your initial assertion that Feedly is pretty close...they've done an AMAZING job with it so far...
- .LAG liked that
I hate to pimp my own service (not really) but with our last update at justSignal.com we now have support for Twitter, Google Blog Search and Backtype - you get each as a widget that can be fully customized via CSS and incorporated into your site. You also get the DATA... which is great if you want to learn something from what you collect. FriendFeed is next on our list... Link: http://briantroy.com/blog...
- Brian Roy
@BrianRoy... everyone knows: pimpin' aint easy! i'm heading over for a look at justSignal. thx.
- .LAG liked that
LAG - love to hear your feedback/thoughts brian dot roy at cosinity dot com
- Brian Roy
Feedly is the service which is best on track to pull all this together.
- Sean McBride
I thought the whole point of FriendFeed was to aggregate other sources. Wouldn't it just make sense to lobby FF to add those additional things?
- Kevin Elliott
@Kevin Ah, but here's the question. Should FriendFeed be used as a 'Friend' aggregator or a 'Web Feed' aggregator ? I would prefer to use Feedly/GReader for the latter.
- Ahsan Ali aka. Slick
In a very general sense I see things headed in that direction, aggregation of news/blog/social media sources with tools for users to interact with the content. FF already does an amazing job with much of that, of course :-)
- Eric Berlin
I am working on a site like this. Will send you invite in few days
- Niraj
"We just launched a new set of customizable FriendFeed widgets for spicing up your blog or web site. There are several ways to embed FriendFeed, and you can pick as many of them as you want."
- Paul Buchheit
Thanks for more options but still JS only. :( The likelihood of any site I don't maintain allowing me to use JS is slim to non. Please add 1 flash widget? Pretty please? With sugar on top?
- EricaJoy
FWIW, in http://pastebin.ca/1186734 I've put my FriendFeed badge setup. Stolen elsewhere, I forgot where, thanks to the original author. Hope it helps.
- Cesar Cardoso
For those that are using the feed widget, note that you can change num=x in case the defaults of 1,5, or 10 aren't what you want.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Mark, the white is div class = friendfeed widget and needs to have the background overridden, it's set to white (obviously). The classes in the nested divs below it should inherit the new BG color.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
nice improvements Paul & Co. - feedback seems positive so far
- Zee.
It all looks very well thought out, i like it a lot
- sergiooo
looks good. I like the different classifications of "friends"... and the imaginary friend is pretty sweet in a kinda stalkerish kind of way
- Scott Lockhart
Steve, it should auto-refresh the same as the old interface.
- Paul Buchheit
my first thought was "holy FaceBook convergence!" Other than that, I like it a lot, much cleaner & easier to navigate. Particularly like the friend classifications, easy link sharing, and access to rooms.
- Jonathan Tang
Great design. Sidebar is awesome.It is definitely going to increase the usability of groups.It is a great idea to present feeds of someone’s subscriptions as a part of the profile page. This will help to discover new people.
- Kerem Ozkan
well I was only off by about two weeks LOL
- Steven Hodson
Looks great! I'm a big fan of the new friends categories - huge value-add for me. I'm disappointed, however, that there is no easy way to discover rooms. Any chance the FF team is working to surface rooms better?
- Andrei M. Marinescu
Mona, poster names are still links they're just styled differently so they don't look like the other links.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
beta.friendfeed is my new friend !! lots of new stuff to play with.. 8-10hrs lag with list data ..but a very very powerful feature. !! Way to GO TEAM FF !!
- Peter Dawson
Love it. If this does not go mainstream, I don't know what will.
- Vinay | विनय
OK: That's a long enough beta period. Let's do it live!
- Chris Baskind
I want to start a pool -- (a) first blog to hit techmeme with an article on the re-design, (b) blog with most articles about the re-design (within 2 days starting now)
- Wayne Schulz
Michael: if you're viewing your feed from the main address, there is a 'sharing' box up at the top, and the options (comment, photo, link) appear once you begin typing.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
click on your name Jennifer, above right
- Tibor Holoda
@Jennifer "My Feed" in the sidebar replaces the "me" tab. And like Tibor said, your name works too.
- Dan Hsiao
you launch this right after takeoff from scoble to berlin - coinkydink? :)
- Allen Stern
@Stupid Blogger: Thanks, I'd figured that out, was just pointing out what seems like a bug in the current UI.
- Michael Nielsen
Looks nice on first glance, and it seems easier now to reach rooms. The friend lists should be a great way to organize my imaginary friends which are basically topic subscriptions. The "Add/ Remove friends" link is confusing at first because when you don't have any friends in the list yet, clicking it will result in nothing (making you wonder if it's broken). The message sharing post...
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- Philipp Lenssen
I love the new info bubble. Super better than the old one :)
- AJ Batac
Looks like the logo now clicks to the Friends view, as you'd expect. Same as You + Friends.
- Chris Baskind
can't seem to access the beta site: Service Unavailable We encountered an error on your last request. Our service is new, and we are just working out the kinks. We apologize for the inconvenience.
- Thomas Hawk
Awesomeness, very useful, and solves the biggest problem of noise reduction! great!
- Aditya Kothadiya
awesome! Working now. Anyone know if there is a pagerization greasemonkey script yet for the beta site?
- Thomas Hawk
thanks for the iteration.. it's a great step forward
- Travis Parsons
like the new functions, but not the new layout, it just doesn't look like friendfeed and a bit feel like google groups (caused by the side bar maybe). miss the old layout...
- Baron M.
We need a "remove from home feed" button under the friends settings. Or there must be an option that we can choose the list which shows on main page. For example, i want to see only "Professional" friends' feeds on the main page.
- Selim Yoruk
So many small details and improvements, make SO much difference.
- Martin Añazco
At last, I will be able to add to my feed all the people who subscribe to me, and it won't impact on my main source of infobrainment. It looks nice, too. Looks like you guys have pulled another one out of the bag. +1
- Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane
I'm truly amazed at how good the UI is. The subtle touches like the use of blue links in just the right places or the contextual help like "How does hiding work?". Really great job. I think mioNews just became a little less useful to me, since FF now natively has friend groups. Oh well :P
- Patrick Lightbody
It has a great feature in allowing me to separate different people into different lists - that will be worth the whole interface change in itself. I hope that rooms also have embeddable feeds tho!
- Justin Long
FF is in a frenzy. This is 16 hrs old and 3rd on my Best of the Week. Congratulations Bret and team.
- Russellreno
@Marcos: you can hover your mouse over the comment bubble in front of a comment to get its timestamp.
- Dan Hsiao
i was getting that too for a few days last week - we need a reliability revival!
- Morgan
from twhirl
at least their downtime is measured by minutes on the contrary to pop start-ups. Many of them are using "days" as downtime unit where Twitter prefers "weeks" for decreased functionality.
- Berk D. Demir