Hey, this offers me an opportunity to ask a question. What's the deal with dudes spitting in the urinal before starting? I never understood this. - Mark Krynsky
This should be required viewing for all those who use or may use a men's room. - Alan
I tried showing my friend (girl) this movie and she didn't think it was funny at all. I thought women would also find this funny... well??? do you? - Michael Narciso
“How many ways are you planning on following WWDC? I have this and another ff room, endgadget, macrumorslive, summize, & iphone alley audio ready to see which is the most stable. I can't get irc working from work. ”
pretty much all that, plus SMS alerts from Mac Rumors/Twitter. Its crazy really given that we probably know 90% of the content of the keynote in advance - Jamie
Usually I would have a bunch of sites open but this time I'm just going to use the three FF rooms. - Kevin D. White
I'm watching MacRumorsLive, Engadget and FriendFeed Rooms WWDC/VentureBeat WWDC Livestream. There is this also but not sure how reliable it will be for obvious reasons - http://twitter.com/macrumors - Delete Me
cool idea Dave! I was thinking of doing that... love to see it later when you're ready to release it! Thx! - Susan Beebe
Ooops, it was down the second time it checked too. (It checks every 10 minutes.) - Dave Winer
Up/Down isnt the entire issue that should be tracked. Even when it's up, it's seldom working completely. - Christopher Dickens
Is there a friendfeed room where everyone can go to when Twitter is down? Dave maybe you could make your app into a widget that could be posted in that room so everyone would have a place to go to and pseudo twitter until the widget says Twitter is up again. Or maybe we should just create a room called Twitter and just go there to Twitter? - Jon Erickson
Dave: admire your tenacity, but isn't the client making it obvious? :) - Todd Jordan
Jon, that's the key thing to decentralizing -- having an agreed-to place that has enough features to be useful. That's what I've been trying to get the tools-makers to support, with no luck so far. If you want this, send an email to the people who make the clients, and suggest they have a fallback place to route your twits when Twitter is down. The problem is solvable if there is a will to solve it, imho. Here's a list of popular clients assembled by Marhsall Kirkpatrick at RWW. http://www.readwriteweb.com/ar... - Dave Winer
Aaron, come on, where did I say it was innovative. Sighhhh. - Dave Winer
Just figured a groundbreaker like you would spend your energies producing something like you did in the old days when you created RSS. Now you create silly apps that tell us the same things other people have already known. Why don't you work on a spec/white paper for distributed Twitter? Make yourself somewhat useful ;) - Aaron Brazell via twhirl
Okay I'll play along -- go fuck yourself. :-) - Dave Winer
oh right, and forgot, your silly apps are wasting Comcast bandwidth. Come on, dave ;) - Aaron Brazell via twhirl
Dave, but trying to convince a pool of third party developers who are not earning any fees from their work right now to add features is not necessarily going to happen, where is the motivation, they need someone to create the location and to give them the api/web services. I really think that if Twitter is architecturally flawed, then the key should be identify the right place and establish the connectivity. Then you can get the third party tools developers to link to it, first when Twitter is down. - Jon Erickson
This sort of reminds me of http://www.abevigoda.com/ which is a constant check on whether Abe Vigoda is still alive or not. Currently, he's alive. - Joey Gibson
Jon, I understand. I'd be willing to pay part of the expense of hosting the files, I've said this before. I think Twitter could kick in some of the money too, they actually have a business reason to do it. - Dave Winer
I love it when code is used artistically and for social statements like this. Its one of the main reasons why the internet is so rich. - Andrew Baron
if I had the time and obj-c chops, I'd write a little iPhone tray app that kept twitter's status in the top status bar - Brett Kelly
Thanks Andrew. That removes some of the sting of being called an idiot. :-) - Dave Winer
You don't mind. You tell people off all the time. Plus you blocked me. Plus you bandy around the word "racist" in politics like it's play dough. Calling you an idiot is the least of your worries ;) - Aaron Brazell via twhirl
Oy. I'm going to have a drink now. (To everyone else this is why every app should have a block command. It may be Twitter's biggest innovation.) - Dave Winer
adding the inability to block someone on FF to my list of 'unreadable grey text' and 'no DMs' for things which FF needs to fix to make me hooked. - Lucretia Pruitt
Nah. He can unblock me on Twitter and write a public apology for his behavior in politics. Then I might speak to him. But he doesn't give a fuck. He's Dave Winer. He invented RSS. - Aaron Brazell via twhirl
will you leave Jack Burton alone ,.. ? - hisherness
prokofy is working on defending me when I do some child pornography art on friendfeed. that was a joke. really... it was a joke. I swear. no really. I'm... I'm sorry.... augh! - Noah David Simon
I'm pretty sure there's gonna be more scobleizers soon, an possibly see A-Listers for the new generation and A-listers for the people being in the field for some time and there will be Leo Laporte of course - Dobromir Hadzhiev
Colin, thank you for writing such a in-depth response, I really like it. Writing about a possible future isn't about trying to make the right predictions. it's more about presenting thoughts so that a conversation about it can start. Well done!
I totally agree with you that the public conversation will not stop. I focused a bit more on my initial thought that once everyone can interact in a public manner, we might see a move back (or forward if you will) to smaller communities. I should have balanced this a bit more with the observation you just made. An interesting side point to this is that I believe that the mainstream web 2.0 business models (freemium and free ads based)are build for large communities. You need to scale big, to the size of Facebook and beyond to remotely become successful with it, or you need to have a targetted niche community. Once the web becomes more social, destinations such as Facebook become obsolete (not the service, just the portal). From that point on, business models need to de - Alexander van Elsas
Oops, hit the FF comment length boundary. I wanted to end with: From that point on, business models need to deal with much smaller and targeted communities. That will enhance the user experience and provide the user and his friends even more value. Well written response! - Alexander van Elsas
Thanks, and thanks for writing yours. This is why I love the social web and the connections we make which get us thinking. Also, I added a second comment to your post, don't know if it's in spam... - Colin Walker
Just started reading the article and the link to vanelsas, and a thought just popped into my head. What about the personal privacy issues? I'm not talking about the "big brother" stuff. I'm talking about some nut-job deciding that since I said something bad about Vista, he has to track me down and confront me in the parking lot at work. - Harvey Simmons
@ha3rvey - privacy has always been an issue in one form or another. When I used to work at a helpdesk for an ISP it was widely known where we were based so we were told not to wear any branded items (t-shirts etc.) when we left in case any disgruntled customers were hanging about. The social web is just another way of having info out there, the problem has been around a lot longer. You just have to be sensible and careful with what you do. - Colin Walker
@Colin, when I used to work at an ISP, I had a disgruntled customer tell me he was going to come down to the office and kick my butt. I'm sure we all have stories like that. You're right, this is not a new problem at all. I try to be careful, but it's *so* easy to look up a person's name on any of a hundred "background check" search engines these days. - Harvey Simmons
Great points in both articles. i had just thrown some related thoughts up about the GenX debate that was bouncing around a little yesterday. As Alexander pointed out the web2.0 innovations are second nature to GenYers and has shaped the way they approach the world. GenXers are used to the monolithic web as it has existed which is precisely why a number of my friends are comfortable with certain types of tech but can't fathom the importance of the new innovations. Colin is right - some of these technologies will be scaled down so the masses can grasp them - at the same time this will enable the rise of more global "web stars" - expansion and contraction at the same time - gonna be interesting to watch! - Marco
“Do a search in your inbox for FriendFeed. Who was the first person that you got a FriendFeed invitation from? Mine was Trevor Carpenter, Feb 26, 2008”
wow, that's early Steve. Who invited you? - Thomas Hawk
This is how I know I'm on the wrong side of Scoble's "friend divide." No invite in my inbox. No colleagues on FF. No college friends. Just an interest in emerging social technologies (and photography). - James Vasak
I received my Beta invite on October 19, 2007 from Bret and Jim. I used it on FB for a long time. My first post here was Christmas Eve at 8:33 PM. - Russellreno
I did it after reading Scoble's twitter or shared google reader - Denis
october 21st, the friendfeed bot was kind enough to authorize my registration :-) - Dobromir Hadzhiev
3/1/08 - first day on FriendFeed (per FF "confirmation email"). Received my first subscriber notification email on 3/18/08 - Eric Rice (@Spin) - wow, soo coool! - Susan Beebe
February 27,2008 from Chris Brogan. Man, that guy is everywhere ;) - Andy Kaufman
Absolutely 100% agree, so happy they posted this! - Veronica Giggey
I've been sticking in there through 1.5 years of their downtime. By the way, thanks for bringing some noise into Friendfeed. - Robert Scoble
Shey that's the exact comment I left there, they need to be explaining that on Twitter as WELL as their blog. How many people check that blog to see wha the deal is? - Mack Collier
I pretty much agree w/Shey Keep us in the loop & we'll cut you some slack. - Andy Kaufman
The communication issue is key. I've been saying that here and on the site itself. Show your users some love, let me know what's up other than "Something is technically wrong" and I'll keep on using the service. Twitter is great when it works. I don't know if I "owe" them anything but I am very appreciative of the information and contacts I've made through the service. I'll stay loyal for those reasons. - James
oh, I'm too co-dependent to leave now. what if twitter needs me? - rambn
I don't think we "owe" it to them, but I have no problem in giving them more time. Although I still am having a hard time understanding how Twitter receives millions of dollars in funding yet is experiencing epic failures in terms of downtime. Shouldn't that kind of dough give you the leverage to hire the right talent to get these problems fixed once and for all? - Michael Beck
I'm new to twitter, so I have to say I'd feel no great emotional angst switching to something equivalent but more reliable. - Bruce Williams
Are you kidding me? We don't owe Twitter a thing. Yes, it's great to have insight, but c'mon, but the simple fact of the matter is that after this much time having problems, if they don't get it together, people will start to leave, no matter how much transparency they provide. I can't tell you how often I hear "I hate twitter" from twitter users. As a side note, I hope they do fix it and I have no plans to leave, but would not fault anyone if they did. - Ryan W
It just occured to me that if I hadn't joined twitter (after hearing about it on TWIT and other podcasts and blogs) I probably wouldn't be on FF right now. My first twitter outage, there were a lot of posts like "Twitter keeps going down. I'm moving to FriendFeed." I just wanted to see what was the big deal. This is all your fault, Scoble. :) - Harvey Simmons
And, yes, I think they deserve a little patience, yeah, yeah. - Harvey Simmons
Yes we owe it to them, as community, we all know twitter is still beta, everyone needs grace. - Wayne Sutton
Jordan, thanks for the info about the twitter status account. I did not know about it until I read your comment. - Marcel Janus
We definitely owe it to them. Twitter is still a fun service so I see no reason to completely give up on them yet. - Scott Jarkoff
We don't *owe* them patience, but they don't *owe* us a service with 100% uptime. Or 98%. Or even 50%. None of us are paying for any of this. The simple fact is that the only value in Twitter is the community. The people using it who are providing information that any of us want to see. It's not as if Pownce or Jaiku or FF don't exist. If the community moves, then this'll get interesting. Until then, we're all on Twitter and all the bitching is noise (and I don't mean the Noise® that Scoble is so fond of). - Ryan MF
Yes... for the same reason I've stuck with Dreamhost through their rough times - they may have problems here and there, but they communicate communicate communicate... I'm willing to cut Twitter plenty of slack if they will do the same. However, the twitter_status account is kind of worthless if Twitter itself is down... - Lee Goolsbee
it's not about patience for me, Twitter is still the most effective professional networking tool available online, it would be bad for business not to wait out the kinks at this point - Jennifer Van Grove via Alert Thingy
Jeremiah, I would be much more willing to show Twitter more patience if they would show us more of the kind of thing we saw tonight, a mea culpa. Not knowing what's going on exacerbates the frustration I feel over Twitter's stability issues. Eventually, though, they're going to have to get it right and Twitter's going to have to become much more stable if they expect longterm loyalty. - Gregory Pittman
I think we owe it to ourselves to make allowances for Twitter's growing pains. - RandaL Hicks
Very much yes. They are working hard to provide a truly great thing. If they were to call me, I'd help too. I don't know exactly what I'd do...but I'd find some way ....go get sodas and pizza, whatever. Yes.. - Dave Evans
Yep we owe it to them. Twitter is still genius. - Drew Lucas
Sure, why not. There are limits tho. And it's too bad that Google snapped up Jaiku and made it a beta only deal. - robb enger
We owe them nothing. But I'll stick around, because I find value in Twitter. And I appreciate their transparency as they wrestle with whatever gremlins afflict them. - Chris Baskind
I'm happy to give them some, maybe they should go completely down for amount of time, just to make it working as it should be when they come back - Dobromir Hadzhiev
I don't choose to use Twitter, Twitter chooses to use me. And apparently FriendFeed chose me to make this comment too. - Jason Honingford
Adds *maniacal laughter* to previous comment. - Morton Fox
Friendfeed just gets the right drive, though its already noisy ... lessons learned: rethink following quote according to capabiity off info processing ability regarding signal/noise ratio ;-) - michael h
There's only one person who could bring FriendFeed down, and dare I say his name or am I starting a nightmare thread... Chuck Norris. - Andrew Dobrow
The concern is not only that of noise/signal, but also the possibility of averaging-out and overall decline in interesting/new/relevant shared stuff that ends up in your home feed. - Aviv
@Aviv - Probably even more so than Twitter, you should think about the folks to whom you subscribe. Because it will be more than tweets that stream from your network. The nice thing about noise/signal here is the amount of control you have (subscribe decisions, hide functions). - Hutch Carpenter
Hutch - right. At the same time, I think FriendFeed should eventually introduce mechanisms to explicitly rank importance of our own friends/subscriptions, in addition to implicit learning of each user's interaction with the FriendFeed flow. Not all FF friends are created equal, and such steps are necessary in order to keep our home feeds filled with interesting and relevant items. - Aviv
I said this in another thread as well, but there are already a plethora of filters to set up for FriendFeed that many haven't started utilizing yet. - Andrew Dobrow
Andrew - tell me about it - I haven't even used my OWN filtering scripts in a while, but I'm quite surprised at how many people do use Filters: Friends & Groups. The problem is that such scripts can only go so far - there is so much more to be done. I'm combining them, and many new ones, into http://ffreader.com - which is essentially a light web interface where FF users should feel right at home, and still have access to all the goodies without needing to install or maintain third-party hacks. - Aviv
I've tried both Google and Zoho, and have to agree that overall I like Zoho better. That being said, how does this help Zoho expand their market presence? Are they tying this with some marketing program to let Yahoo and Google users know this is available? - James Urquhart
@James - It's probably a marketing thing - I hate building a collection of accounts I have to manage - it's one of the reasons I use Google Docs - it's just there. Avoiding a signup avoids a barrier to adoption. Additionally, they presumably have decided that the user authentication / account management space isn't where they want to be. As an aside, could I add Google Accounts authentication to my web services? - David Sim
The best thing about FriendFeed, besides that it's so much fun, is that it forces Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. to make their services better. Twitter should have added hide a long time ago. Flickr should have shown you more than the last 5 contacts photos. Competition is a beautiful thing. - Thomas Hawk
@Scoble So true. @Thomas Twitter needs to figure out how to scale before they add any new features. - jon
Yes competition - but more so: open communication - is truly a wonderful thing. Developments here at FF and twitter with respective apps like twhirl, AlertThingy etc. just go to show how quickly last years fad can become extinct (facebook?). Of course it would be even better to find fb add something truly novel. - Alex von Halem
Early adopters may have moved on but the herd continues to graze like cattle on the hillside at Facebook, MySpace, etc. Eventually, they will learn about other forms of social media and move there, but by then there will be something new that the fleet-footed have mooooved onto while the slow stampede contiues ruminating. - Phil Boiarski
I think it's quite possible that friendfeed has totally superior DNA. If I were to bet on facebook vs friendfeed now, I'd bet on friendfeed, even with facebook's huge headstart. Because, if Altavista would have done it's job right, Google would have never happened... - Meryn Stol
It's like a great brainstorming session where people build on each other's ideas to get to the best solution. So I think it's less about FB doing a better job, then fresh blood building upon the ideas to make the better solution. - Jane Quigley via Alert Thingy
I think it's all an evolutionary process, the good thing is anyway that the idea spreads. Facebook could save some money though and implement open standards right now. They have to in the end anyway. FB won't be a working Passport or anything like that. - Christian Scholz via twhirl
I think the "secret" force behind friendfeed's succes will be the discussion of the tech bloggers here. It looks like unintended crowdsourcing. There are so many feature (and strategy) suggestions flying by. I think some people *want* friendfeed to win, and friendfeed provides a way to let those people help them. It's gonna be a powerful combination. The only question is if they can hire good programmers fast enough to keep up. - Meryn Stol
Still get to the bottom of FriendFeed, but liking it more and more every time - David Orban
Same here @David, @Meryn I like your perspective and also your terminology 'crowdsourcing' more like crowd surfing! - Joe Dawson
For all who don't know, crowdsourcing is quite common jargon. It's what Starbucks (MyStarbucksIdea) and Dell (Ideastorm) are doing. This will beat the crap out of companies who don't. - Meryn Stol
If IBM had done its job right Microsoft would never have happened. etc - Stuart Woodward
great observation about crowdsourcing meryn, friendfeed seems very interested in hearing what people have to say - Chris Jones via twhirl
I don't use facebook anymore, I just pipe my friendfeed stream back into facebook - Mark Ramsey via twhirl
Im going to go on record here with a prediction for the future: Facebook is the greatest hyperbole the web has ever seen. I know it's worth a lot because so many investors put so much money into it, but Im expecting it to earn the title for "Most Inflated Value Ever". - Andrew Baron
BTW, if George Bush had done his job right, everything would be worth at least twice as much. - Andrew Baron
tut tut ...forgive n forget was what my mum always told me. - viki saigal
I think Facebook and Friendfeed cater to different purposes. FF is great for sharing ideas while Facebook is good for maintaining profiles and contacts. - Vishal M
FriendFeed brings the "NewsFeed/Mini-Feed" out of Facebook. Most of my friends are not on Facebook, so this is great! I can give people links to interesting articles/photos/discussions on FriendFeed. Signing up for Facebook overwhelms many of my friends. It's too complicated to set up an account. - Mitchell Tsai
Facebook was never useful for this. Way too heavy. - Soulhuntre via twhirl
this is exactly right. A while ago I had an idea similar to FriendFeed and Pete Cashmore told me, nah, Facebook is already doing it. As it turned out, Facebook had the chance but didn't capitalize on it. - Stan Schroeder via twhirl
i could be wrong, but I don't think Facebook is (a) losing users to FF, or (b) incapable of making this a reality for the masses - Jeremy Toeman
FriendFeed is much more about content. Content and insight defines the "friends" I pick, whereas Facebook has a greater social context. I would not follow by nieces tweets in FriendFeed, but she would be on my list of "friends" in facebook. - Ralph Poole via twhirl
If FF added better mobile access and posting a nice real client, i'd have less and less reason to use Twitter. None at all actually - Michael Gartenberg
Ralph, I agree wholehearted facebook is a different beast all together. A different beast that thankfully doesn't have a zombie game or super wall :) - Doug Brooks
Not sure I agree about Facebook. It was built for college kids, not for people looking for useful information. - Mike Reynolds
Of course Facebook and FriendFeed both serve different purposes. It's also entirely possible to use both. I think we'll have to observe what services suffer due to FriendFeed in order to see what competes with FriendFeed. - possible248
not everyone is capable of flyfishing in the river of posts that is friendfeed. some folks just want to go out and get sushi with their friends, and then get back to their lives. facebook is for them. - Chris Hollander
But that would break facebook's business model - collect the data we input and sell it back to us.... - Robert O'Callaghan
friendfeed is way better and way simpler than facebook. Andit's app, poke and zombie free. Damn brilliant if you ask me. - DC Crowley
@Mike R "It was built for college kids, not for people looking for useful information." Funny! - Jack Baty
Don't think so. FF is a different site built on a different premise. Its lighter and more agile while being very powerful. Facebook is way more profile centred while FF is more like Google Reader on Steroids. - Roberto Bonini
The geek code of ethics appears to be: Don't steal from people you know. But hack the system to get freebies all you want. It's very personal with geeks. - Ranjit Mathoda
