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James Ketchell › Comments
It’s not about Friendfeed, It’s about Friends – A Requiem (via feedly) - http://thenextweb.com/2009...
Andrew Terry liked this
Quote of the day about what made Friendfeed great comes from this article, "These people and hundreds of others have enriched my life in a more ways than I can count. These are my people. I’ve learned from them, argued with them, laughed with them, and shared my life with them. Heck, I’m watching Louis’ twins grow up on Friendfeed. When Friendfeed closes we will lose the only place that we’ve all come to congregate."
- Andrew Terry
Well put Andrew!
- James Ketchell
Go ahead and delete your feed. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete....
Anne Bouey, TiTi, guruvan (Rob Nelson) and 37 other people liked this
All it will do is make you look idiotic. Really? You have content that you don't want Mark Zuckerberg to put his hands on? Really? Come now.
- Robert Scoble
Interesting coming from a guy who, until yesterday, was trying to get more people to come here.
- LogEx
And it'll ruin all your Google Juice.
- Robert Scoble
And it will make us mad at you for deleting our pithy quotes.
- Robert Scoble
Not.
- Robert Scoble
Uh oh. Robert's been at the pub. ;-)
- Christopher A Carr
A little bit extreme.....the time in half moon bay is........last orders at the bar..... :)
- James Ketchell
Christopher actually I haven't. I never went to the pub. Took a little nap and haven't been able to go back to sleep but some of the stuff I've been reading here about Facebook is laughable. Luckily not too many people are deleting. I've gained a bunch of followers in just the past hour.
- Robert Scoble
lol.... shame, I had big plans for ffollo and frienddeck, its a shame that the facebook api doesn't allow us to do the same stuff, infact I really hope that facebook take a leaf out of FF api because it is super easy to use, and I can hit a far larger audience.
- Paul Kinlan
How's the new ToS coming along?
- Johnny Worthington
Johnny, I wonder the same thing. Hopefully there will be time to export before making any changes that you may wish to before the TOS change.
- LogEx
I won't delete until I export. And I'm not sure I'm going to delete at that point, either. But I'm not ruling it out.
- Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
I don't care about FB having my content. I care about specific posts that, when taken out of context, could lead to trouble. Will I delete my entire feed because of it, no. But I have gone through my feeds and deleted posts that I don't want certain FB contacts to see. I make it a rule to not post anything I haven't or wouldn't say to someone in person but just because I've hashed...
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- pea
Never been to the pub? No way! :D Too bad I was offline yesterday and couldn't catch all the screams of pain and regret of frf users :) But WHY F#$KING DELETE? What's the point?
- Sasha Kovaliov(.com)
Rizzn: you're just weird enough that I expect you to delete. When I leave I'm not going to delete. I'll leave that chore to one of Zuckerberg's minions. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Is that the new definition of DDoS attack--distributed deletion-of-service attack? :))
- K.D.
Ah. Shame you didn't make it to the pub. :) I don't want FF to disappear, and I'm not a fan of FB. So I'm a bit irritated. I don't see the point in deleting, though.
- Christopher A Carr
@Robert: haha - well, knowing your history with FB, it might just happen to you anyway. :-p
- Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
Mark: I don't think Zuckerberg will be trying THAT again anytime soon! :-)
- Robert Scoble
I've read its good for FF, it's bad for FF. It's better than being sold to google, it's better than being sold to twitter. Myriad variations on a theme, which leads me to conclude we haven't got a clue what the future will bring.
- Mark
Good point mark.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
Robert, how are you going to get the same people who follow you here to follow you on FB? I know that I want to follow you on FB, but aren't you at your friend limit? The thing that sucks for me as that I will never be able to follow the same people I do here on FF... on FB.
- Travis Koger
I don't think there is any content I put on friendfeed that is not also available on the open web or other services I use, and the facebook terms and conditions are not that much different from the friendfeed ones (i dont like the ff ones much either, too much left unsaid). I also assume for now that FB bought FF for the technology and the vision (heard them both at fowa last autumn and...
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- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
I think personally it was nice to get away from Facebook, and come to a pure geek zone like Friendfeed.
- Mark
Travis there are no limits on the numbers here :) http://www.facebook.com/scoblei...
- Peter du Toit (S.Africa)
I suspect they wont merge the two in a hurry - not until facebook has asymmetric follow, ways to have different "types" of friends, way to control the overlap of friend circles so the school mates (fb) dont pollute the current interest network (ff) (my facebook is full of people from school and old jobs, many I have very little in common with, and probably nobody here would choose to...
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- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Why would I want to do that? lol
- Kevin J Hatton
I think I'll simply HIDE this post
- Opensource Obscure
@Joelle, it seems like Facebook is at least headed in the asymmetric direction, turns out people you add to your friends list end up on your home feed before they even respond to your request.
- Hugh Isaacs II
I get the feeling that using Facebook in the future will start to feel like managing 2 different social networks at the same time.
- Hugh Isaacs II
yok devenin nalı :P
- Sinan D
Don't you people know by now that Scoble follows the white rabbit down whatever hole it plunges? Yesterday Friendfeed was the greatest, today its dead. Yes, FB's TOS and narrow minded view of the world are absolutely to be avoided.
- jcunwired
If you read FF's ToS closely, you'll find it not much better in the who-owns-the-content department than the we-own-you FB's. What attracted me to FF in April in the first place was in fact that it didn't say anything about the content, as I recall. And then, approx. 2 months later, I discovered that that clause has "miracuously" appeared in this ToS as well. And not only that: it...
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- ianf ⌘
Bing is live. I already know I’ll be sticking with Google. - http://thenextweb.com/2009...
I've had chance to play with Bing for around 30 mins this morning, and if this is what MS think will bring them back into the search game they need to rethink their strategy. Compare any two searches between google and bing, and you will see what i mean. Its simply embarrassing!
- James Ketchell
New Comparison Photo of Matte iPhone Enclosure? - Mac Rumors - http://www.macrumors.com/2009...
"In February, the first images depicting the back casing of an unreleased iPhone began circulating around the Internet. The images showed a matte finish to the casing, but looked otherwise identical to the current iPhone enclosure. Recently-posted rumors now suggest that we could indeed see a matte casing for the next generation iPhone."
- James Ketchell
from Bookmarklet
Smub Lets You Do All Your Social Bookmarking On The Go - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
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"When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. Smub aims to change all that by debuting a web-based tool that you can access from anywhere and lets you easily bookmark and share stuff from your mobile browser without necessarily having to register for the service."
- James Ketchell
from Bookmarklet
I'm struggling to really see a difference in using snub or simply emailing your friendfeed account. Whenever I want to bookmark something i simply email it to myself from my phone and get my gmail account to automatically label items sent from that account.
- James Ketchell
Google won't run all the Wave servers - http://news.cnet.com/webware/
"Google has said it will "federate" Wave. That means it will make it possible for anyone to operate their own Wave server and have it communicate with other Wave servers. This is just how e-mail works today: Anyone can run an e-mail server that can send messages to and receive messages from any other e-mail system. The Internet routes messages from server to server."
- James Ketchell
from Bookmarklet
Should YouTube Charge to Host User Generated Video? - http://blogs.barrons.com/techtra...
"In an eye-opening essay, Bernstien Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay proposes a radical idea on how Google (GOOG) might address the business model problem that now afflicts YouTube: charge people listing fees for uploading video to the site."
- James Ketchell
from Bookmarklet
Livermore Laboratory shows off world's biggest laser gun - http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technol...
"Today, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory dedicated the world's largest laser system. The National Ignition Facility, with its 192 giant laser beams, fills up an entire 10-story building in Livermore, Calif., about 45 miles east of San Francisco."
- James Ketchell
from Bookmarklet
Omniture Launches Facebook Analytics Solution - http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/090529-...
"Omniture has created a new tool designed to measure the success of Facebook applications. Dubbed App Measurement for Facebook, it utilizes the reporting capabilities of the company's online analytics solution SiteCatalyst. With App Measurement for Facebook, marketers can view users by how many members they have, see which parts of the app are most popular, monitor video sharing, and observe which users invited their friends to the app."
- James Ketchell
from Bookmarklet
Five Reasons to Be Terrified of Google Wave | TechWatch | Fast Company - http://www.fastcompany.com/blog...
via @palafo. Cute article, some good points. Total traffic bait post but I didn't feel gross after reading it - I shared it!
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
from Bookmarklet
I'm not so sure about the "google is rarely wrong about these things" comment. I'm sure BP or Shell could produce free software by the bucket load and a destroy whole hosts of business markets in the process. Commercialising those markets is a whole different ball game. I love the concept of what they are building with wave, its the google is rarely wrong comments that annoy me.
- James Ketchell
Google Wave Video Demo
- James Ketchell
SAP Braces For Change - http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-c...
Leo Apotheker's appointment as SAP's sole CEO is more significant than many in the IT industry realize, says SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner. How so? The 37-year-old software company needs a change agent, and Apotheker is it.
- James Ketchell
from Bookmarklet
80% Google Ad revenue comes from the top 1.35% of advertisers - http://www.seobook.com/google-...
Alex Schleber, Cem ARGUN, Ho John Lee and 11 other people liked this
"Google has hundreds of thousands of advertisers, but over 80% of their United States ad revenue comes from the top 1.35% of advertisers, according to a recent study of keyword data by SEM Rush."
- James Ketchell
from Bookmarklet
That's the opposite of what I expected. How accurate can this be?
- Todd Hoff
There goes the 80-20 rule. There goes the Long Tail. Can this be true?
- Michael Markman
Actually this proves the long tail is very much alive and kicking... and continues to be the most efficient place to play for your advertising keyword dollars.
- Thom Kennon
Further to this, I've worked with many of the top SEM brands over the past 8 years and many of the smaller players. Those top brands - the 1.35% of GOOG advertisers - are spending HUGE dollars on generic head terms to capture dominant but very inefficient awareness and clicks. The little guys - the other 20% of their revenue - are playing on the long tail and the edges of the generics, with no brands to defend, only those to attack.
- Thom Kennon
I can believe these numbers to some extent. I've seen exactly what Thom is describing as his own experience, for myself. I'm more suprised if these numbers are accurate, why googles revenue in the first quarter didnt have more impact from large ad budget cuts
- James Ketchell
XMind - Social Brainstorming and Mind Mapping - http://www.xmind.net/
Kathleen Capps, Sasha Kovaliov(.com), Andy Bold and 37 other people liked this
XMind, is an open source brainstorming and mind mapping software tool developed by XMind Ltd. It helps people to capture ideas, organize to various charts, and share them for collaboration. Supporting mind maps, fishbone diagrams, tree diagrams, org-charts, logic charts, and even spreadsheets. Often used for knowledge management, meeting minutes, task management, and GTD. XMind is compatible with FreeMind. The latest version is XMind 3. - Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
- Christopher Harley
from Bookmarklet
Watch the Demos: http://www.xmind.net/demos/
- Christopher Harley
Nice! I just downloaded this and started playing with it. Liking it so far!
- Hasitha
Very nice, just downloaded and installed.
- James Ketchell
Why should I sign up for an open source software download?
- Hiro Asari
Good question, Hiro.
- Christopher Harley
It's a good desktop app for mindmapping which I use even though I try and keep to web apps -- web alternative http://mindmeister,com
- Dan Perlman
FYI http://www.mindmeister.com (you put a "," by mistake.
- James Ketchell
How is it for collaboration?
- Tardid
It allows you to upload your maps up to your web profile Hiro
- Hasitha
Hashita: Thanks for the info. But what if I don't want that feature? They should allow download, and then optionally have users register if the users want additional features.
- Hiro Asari
I agree... But I think they have this sort of tied into their pricing model. Basically, if you want your uploaded maps to be private, you would have to subscribe to a plan. In any case... I agree that they could have still offered the download without forcing you to sign up.
- Hasitha
Is your favorite success quote in this list? http://perrybelchersuccess.com/28...
I always like "the early bird may catch the first worm, but its the second mouse who gets the cheese"
- James Ketchell
from fftogo
blog owners. as i never seem to check RSS anymore, if you don't offer a twitter feed for your blog, i can't keep up. this is all.
Kol Tregaskes, Wayne Sutton, Steve Rubel and 16 other people liked this
So if I manually post blog updates to Twitter, you will find them there? Okay.
- Louis Gray
Dear publishers. As i never seem to check my twitter stream anymore, if nobody engages with your content, hence it's not on friendfeed, i can't keep up. this is all
- Kirill Bolgarov
GReader is the center of my online life. Everything else is a way of feeding content into it or commenting on things that come out of it.
- Alex Scrivener
I agree, this new "movement" away from RSS is ridiculous. Striking a balance between RSS & Twitter is more important. There's too much noise in between links to post on Twitter (either from that account or just from all the other people you follow).
- Tyler Hayes
Maybe we could get 20% or so of the people building yet another URL shortening service to help build out a webhook/pubsub notification network instead.
- Ken Sheppardson
+1 Kirill - I'd say content has to be noticed to get noticed. Twitter RT is one way. FriendFeed likes/comments is better. Digg/Slashdot/yourfavoritesite is another.
- Eric Johnson
content has to be noticed to get noticed - absolutely!
- Kirill Bolgarov
I don't want them to go away from RSS. I just want the Twitter option, as well.
- dannysullivan
Dear twitterers. If all you publish in your tweetstream is the RSS stream of your blog, I won't follow you. That's what my G Reader is for.
- TobiasVerhoog.com
Why does posting a blog to twitter make it more digestible than using an RSS?
- James Ketchell
So how do I balance getting posts into twitter -- where danny can find them -- but also not into twitter, so they won't turn Tobias off? One twitter account for RSS, and second one for me? Mix up the RSS and other sharing posts? Only send the best RSS stories to Twitter?
- Eric Johnson
Eric it sounds to me like your describing what friendfeed does already....
- James Ketchell
from fftogo
Bring everything into FriendFeed and have it drop links into the Twitterstream when appropriate
- Ken Sheppardson
Ken that's exactly what I was thinking. Its what I do already. Everything into friendfeed and then just select which items to go onto twitter.
- James Ketchell
from fftogo
Do you want a Twitter feed or just that the blog posts show up in my Tweet stream? I certainly do the latter manually.
- AJ Kohn
See mates, FF is way, way more valuable than Twitter. Scoble, where are you? Say your word =)
- Kirill Bolgarov
Eric, yes, you run two accounts. Look at my personal blog, http://daggle.com. Want to keep updated on the content? You can (1) visit via web (2) get email alerts (3) take the RSS feed (4) subscribe to http://twitter.com/daggle and get a ping anytime I put up a post. Offering a Twitter feed of blog posts is just another option. It's more choice for the reader. I'm not saying dump any of...
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- dannysullivan
To thin that twitter replaces anything other than RSS "Headlines" is ludicrous. I get the best news via RSS. I see the Hottest news via FriendFeed and twitter (more so friendfeed). I may even see the links first in friendfeed and twitter, but I like having my rss reader keeping track of the days news that's important to me. Oh - and yeah publishing your entire blog via twitter is just lame, headlines are fine thanks. (pics and excerpts on FF though!)
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I can't say this enough, so I won't keep going on about it. Offering a feed on Twitter is not a replacement for an RSS feed. I didn't say that. That won't work for everyone. But yes, some people are relying on Twitter more and more for news. It's a huge source of news IN ADDITION TO other ways that people find news. Offering a Twitter feed for a blog is easy to do, secures your blog's...
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- dannysullivan
I send my blog posts to twitter/identi.ca via twitterfeed. I always take feedback via twitter/identi.ca. I do prefer RSS to a pure twitter feed of a blog though. I will miss something from twitter/identi.ca. RSS allows me to read it on my terms in my own time, not as the twitter firehose streams by.
- Amy H.
danny - Thanks for sparking the great discussion. I can see how the two-Twitter stream does make sense for Twitter-centric folk. But I've gotta say I wish everybody was on Friendfeed, in which case the multi-channel problem would go away. We're not there yet.
- Eric Johnson
Google builds extensions for Chrome - #google http://viigo.im/ADa
Rutger Blom and Svartling liked this
Works great
- Svartling
I wish I could try it for myself, but stuck waiting for chrome on the mac.
- James Ketchell
from fftogo
Google Chrome is my main browser now and I really like it. Especially the "Create Desktop App" feature.
- Svartling
Yeah, where's the Mac version?
- Rutger Blom
You can create desktop apps using the firefox add on Prism http://bit.ly/Dc3qS I'm also a big fan of greasemonkey, and use quite a few add ons that as yet aren't available on chrome (although I'm sure its only a matter of time)
- James Ketchell
Mac version isnt likely to be released until the fall (apparently). I think that was a PR mistake on their part. Ignoring the mac community really means ignoring the blogging community. So they severely restricted their press covereage as a result. (being google they still get coverage of course, but not they could have done better)
- James Ketchell
Many GreaseMonkey scripts works in Chrome too. Prism is great but not as fast as Chrome apps. Chrome apps starts instantly.
- Svartling
Isn't there an early alpha version of Chrome for Mac out already? I think I tweeted it somewhere.. Can't find it though.
- Svartling
There is an alpha version available, but from what I'm told its not really worth the download. I'm happy enough the firefox for the time being.
- James Ketchell
from fftogo
Evernote for BlackBerry Is Here - http://blog.evernote.com/2009...
Goktug Gedik, Philip Tomlinson, embee and 10 other people liked this
The, much (read: MUCH) requested, native Evernote for BlackBerry is now available. Yes, it’s true. BlackBerry® owners, you now get a slick app to create new notes and search through all of your existing Evernote content.
- (jeff)isageek
from Bookmarklet
at last!
- Burak "cyrus" Bayburtlu
Excellent. Now I may re-install it onto my laptop and pick it up again. The web-based mobile site was quite adequate, so I can't wait to see what this brings!
- Craig Eddy
is there any way to download it without appworld?!
- Burak Bardakçı
Brilliant!
- Reed Porter
I've tried getting it from app world and its not showing up in the UK. Cant find a way of downloading it from the site either. Any ideas?
- James Ketchell
Anyone who had similar problems finding evernote on app world, they have now put a direct link on the website here http://www.evernote.com/about... (bottom right of the page.)
- James Ketchell
James Ketchell: glad you mention it! Thanks a lot! :)
- Burak "cyrus" Bayburtlu
do not forget to enable javascript on browser or evernote won't open recent & pending notes.
- Burak Bardakçı
I think I'm in love!! sobees – your social desktop aggregator. http://link.brightcove.com/service...
Francois Bochatay, Malevi4, Nicholas James and 15 other people liked this
Sharon, looks interesting, will try it later.
- Kol Tregaskes
Sharon, have you received your confirmation email yet? I'm still waiting. :-(
- Kol Tregaskes
Unfortunately Kol, I'm unable to use this because of my archaic Windows 2000 OS.
- Sharon McPherson
I'm just downloading and trying it. Looks interesting although it requires .NET 3.5 so it will likely be as much of a memory hog as most AIR apps.
- Kenton
tried this today, and my biggest complaint is that it seemed to insist on using IE to open items.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
second complaint was the response time...very slow. - I Did like the RSS feeds in it. but that's not enough to give up my PeopleBrowsr.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Installing now. On the face of it, this looks like exactly what I'm looking for.
- Todd Brunner
from twhirl
Ah, shame, Sharon. Rob, really? That's pants! :-(
- Kol Tregaskes
Kol: yes I played with it for a while, and didn't see the means to change it (and IE is certainly not my default browser!) Though this app looks like it could be cool, the .NET and Microsoft reliance are not for me. I thought on first run that the interface needed work. I liked the design layout and the multi-network connectivity, but it seemed to have been missing a lot of the features...
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- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
wow that demo is really impressive but from what rob has to say i have to agree that id stick to peoplebrowsr for now. need to read up more on this, looks exciting
- Freddie Benjamin
I retried this app, and it did not use my IE. Very weird. I haven't figured out what makes it use the one browser instead of the other. It was a pretty nice app, but I still think that it needs some work to be ready for the big time. Basicall there's nothing in sobees that's not in PeopleBrowsr BUT it's considerably less complicated than PB's advanced mode. The sobees response time was still not very good on my second run.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
IMO, For more casual users this application may be a nice solution. If you aren't a power-tweeter, and want an integrated "social desktop" application, give this a try. If you're more of a power user I would recommend PeopleBrowsr.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Finally gave PeopleBrowsr a whirl on the strength of Rob's endorsements. Wow. It's TweetDeck done better!
- Kathy Fitch
Kathy: In Lite mode it is exactly that. In Advanced mode, it's a complete "Social Desktop" (And Thanks! )
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Kol - Switched from Sobees to BDule ... Much more stable under Win 7 here
- Charlie Anzman
bdule is only a small part of the sobees application. useful, but not the full experience by any stretch.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Hmm. Guess I am too old to figure out how to make it all work...Seems a bit overwhelming!
- John Apps
No linux no party
- Giulio Ardoino
The light version is faster, more stable and no log-in necessary
- Charlie Anzman
Tried it for a while, but stopped. I found it way too slow to be useful.
- Kenton
Charlie: When you say light version you mean the bDule version?
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
i install this but is giving me an error because it won't start (application say that there is one process that needs to be made...) how can i solve.
- Laurentiu
my suspicion is that you don't have .NET 3.5 properly installed. I've also noticed that exiting the application once running will not necessarily clear all of its processes out of active memory. A false start may leave the partial set running. You may need to use the task manager to end any associated processes (or reboot if that is easier)
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Shame its not available for the mac :(
- James Ketchell
Charlie, is BDule just for Twitter and FB?
- Kol Tregaskes
Twitter Spam Invades Trending Topics - http://mashable.com/2009...
Nicholas James, Daniel Rowley, Cesar XKR and 16 other people liked this
It will be interesting to see how, or indeed if, Twitter can put a lid on this. As one who has never visited a trending topic I've not been affected. I'm sure I'm not the only one, and it's almost certain a good percentage of Twitter users are not even aware of trends. Can someone explain just how effective this spam is though?
- Gilbert Harding
Datasmog - Thats like saying as someone whose never clicked on a viagra email, I've never been affected by spam.....
- James Ketchell
James it's not really. Spam email for most people ends up in their inbox on their PC if they don't have an ISP that operates effective filters. Twitter spam rarely reaches the desktop. It's easy to avoid, you just don't look. Email spam is still a far bigger problem that needs solving than the relatively minor irritation of Twitter trend spam. I'm still interested to know if anyone has any ideas as to how Twitter can stop it. Stopping email spam is easy, but no-one seems to want to do that.
- Gilbert Harding
I've just decided that I hate Twitter.
- Big K
Gilbert true if your purely a reader. If on the other hand you think that real-time search has potential to change the industry, then spamming results is an issue that will effect a lot of people.
- James Ketchell
Gillmor said that the "swarming" behavior around tags makes them vulnerable to spam
- Brian Hendrickson
James many people are just readers and don't see the spam in Twitter. Real time search anywhere will always be susceptable to spam unless the spammers are stopped. Too much time, money and resources are being spent fighting spam instead of looking at ways to kill it.
- Gilbert Harding
Found it interesting that Mark Zuckerberg was under major fire today on Twitter and his name or facebook didn't get on the trending list once...now we know why.
- Steffan Antonas
I think trending topics on Twitter should be human monitored for protection against spammers, otherwise they will be abused as they are currently.
- Garin Kilpatrick
Just like Gmail has "Report Spam" button, Twitter should have one for search results.
- Atul Arora
Gilbert, how would one kill spam?
- Laura Norvig
Gilbert that's an admirable goal. However being that the causes of spam are greed and laziness, I think you and I will be both be long gone, before anything changes. I think treatment is still necessary in conjunction with prevention. Treatment is more likely to bear fruit in our lifetime.
- James Ketchell
Garin I'm not sure human moderation is really practical for a site which is growing at its current pace. I dont think the spamming algorithm is that hard to create. First off they might want to try validating sign up email addresses. The next logical step would be to create an influencer hierarchy based on peoples re-tweets etc. Then simply apply more weighting to trends that contained references from more reliable sources. Its basically a realtime version of page rank and inbound links.
- James Ketchell
James you are probably right in the timeline. But you needn't be. The best form of defence is offence. With all spam there is financial gain. Somewhere down the line someone is peddling something for money. There is a money trail that can be followed back to the source. It's not necessarily the spammer though, but the person or persons buying the spammers services. Shut down a spammer...
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- Gilbert Harding
Gilbert i know were on the same side on this one, its just I'm less optimistic about what can be done in even the medium term. Equate it to another market, such as the "war on drugs". Again massive resources and massive funding has been thrown into it. I know its demand driven to a larger extent that spam, but at the end of the day spam wouldnt be sent if people didnt respond to the...
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- James Ketchell
James I agree. But the drugs trade is largely cash based at the end user point. With spam the peddlers are hiding behind an on-line payments system. Credit cards, PayPal or similar. That money ends up in the banking system somewhere. That's the money trail that leads to the real culprits. Where they are is largely irrelevant, the banking system is worldwide, always talking and at this...
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- Gilbert Harding
Gilbert, I get what your saying about the money trail. I think following the money will work to an extent on the large corporates which are using this method of marketing by creating armies of unaccountable affiliates. Unfortunately there are thousands of knock off versions to take their place. The result is a pretty well un manageable pipeline of prosecution. I dont think there is any...
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- James Ketchell
Tweetmeme Shows Off the Future of Twitter Search - http://mashable.com/2009...
Things are really starting to get interesting now. Amazing to consider just how long it took for twitter to add search to the main site, let alone be this creative.
- James Ketchell
Interview: Rob Grimshaw, Publisher Of FT.com: Newspapers Must Add Paid Content - http://www.paidcontent.org/entry...
Apparently "It's impossible to fund an online content business through ads alone" the FT says. Well i know of lots of pure play web sites which produce content and make a profit. I'd be surprised if the one thing that's effecting their numbers, isn't the legacy of their old business infrastructure. As long as they pursue the on-line paid subscription model, they are screaming to the world, they still don't understand the web.
- James Ketchell
Do You Want to Discuss Products in Social Media? - ReadWriteWeb - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...
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dean and James Ketchell liked this
Great discussion, do people really want to talk about brands, products, and advertising in social media as a means for sales. Not sure I'm convinced on this one.
- Maria Reyes-McDavis
Another occasion where pressing "like" doesnt feel right....
- James Ketchell
Twitscoop launched a new site today. - http://venturebeat.com/2009...
Big improvement on the old design, but I think http://www.tweetmeme.com/ has the greater potential.
- James Ketchell
Microsoft Revamps MSN City Guides With Live Search and Live Maps - http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/090511-...
Nothing really to write home about here. Yelp has more functionality and greater mobile intergration.
- James Ketchell
Just installed the firefox extension "Feedly". They say newspapers are dead, well you should try this out and see creativity in action.
Edwin Khodabakchian liked this
Thanks James!
- Edwin Khodabakchian
Edwin all i can say is wow! Is this a commercial project? You have created something very special.
- James Ketchell
[GMAIL] How to Make Gmail Your Ultimate Productivity Center | Zen Habits - http://zenhabits.net/2009...
Laura Norvig, Mario, Patrik Johansson and 11 other people liked this
"These days there are a proliferation of digital tools we use for productivity, for time management, for communication, for social networking, for keeping track of our lives, online and off."
- Kol Tregaskes
from Bookmarklet
"you add it to the task list in Gmail. Then you archive the email, instead of leaving it in your inbox. " -- I'm too lazy to re-type a to-do item that already exists in email form. Sounds like making work just to be overzealous with the archive button. Leave it in the inbox as motivation for getting the task done!
- Chuck Kahn
I use labels for organising tasks in gmail. If its related to an inbound email, I simply reply to myself and change the subject line to a task title. That keeps the email thread but with a new relevant topic.
- James Ketchell
from fftogo
lol
- Zafarali
Arrington and I disagree on future http://m.kyte.tv/ch...
Cedric Chee, John Downey, Dadah and 78 other people liked this
word up.
- john erik metcalf
I'm writing a post about this. Arrington believes that Twitter has won and that this is a winner take all market (the microblogging world, that is). I explain why this game has only just started.
- Robert Scoble
Gillmor Gang:http://gillmorgang.techcrunch.com/2009... Arrington's points here have me disagreeing with him.
- Robert Scoble
Re: Arrington et al http://www.zefrank.com/theshow...
- Matthew DeVries
Agree a lot...want will be needed is to have the babble of all real-time web information being filtered by a core set of people that I trust...I need a service that says..."from all the noise that is out there right now..the people that you trust think the following is important...the following is funny...the following is bunk etc...
- Mike Aikins
if you can't dominate the market, redefine it.
- MikeAmundsen
The majority of the "big bloggers" that I've read over the past week (esp re: FF beta) I think that most of these guy have got the whole thing wrong. The tech market is never a "winner take all" thing. It a winner takes the current level, but then we bring it all up to the next level There was IBM, then Mircosoft, then Google, now (Twitter, FB, FF?) -But what's after that? And like Microsoft grew from the relationship w/IBM who grows from this market?
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Mike, can't you do that now: e.g. friends:justinlong likes:20 or some such?
- Justin Long
I agree Robert. The argument Arrington is proposing is similar to the search engine wars of the mid-90s, with prognosticators stating that Altavista was the search engine.
- LPH™ and his dog P™
I honestly can't remember the last time I heard anybody agree with anything Michael Arrington said. He seems to be quite out of touch with the "community" and his credibility / level of influence are on a steady decline.
- Nicholas Kreidberg
Nicholas, I wouldn't count him out yet. For me personally his credibility / level of influence is rebounding. And it doesn't matter so much if his opinion is wrong. A-listers don't need to be right from the start. They just need to start conversations.
- Bruce Lewis
Bruce: Arrington once told me he's an entertainer. As long as everyone is paying attention to him he's going to do just fine.
- Robert Scoble
While I started out in micro-blogging on Twitter and also found it a great service during Australia's recent bushfires for volunteering, I wouldn't call it the be-all-and-end-all. After all, one period of unexpected downtime on twitter had me looking at the new beta here on FF. And this morning, I'm even looking at jaiku and identi.ca. Who says Twitter's won?
- George Hall (Australia)
I stopped paying attention to Arrington last year, but I'm starting to pay attention again now. Something good happened in Hawaii.
- Bruce Lewis
we all here?
- Nick
Nick, I'm here.
- Robert Scoble
Ah. Peace and quiet.
- Andrew Fowler
That picture is priceless.
- Pat Hawks
well hi, then. I don't think ppl will move to ff the same way they didn't pick up on pownce, which (a year ago) was (already) better than twitter in terms of feature-set — it had photos, content, an air app, etc.
- Nick
the key for the survival of sites like Friendfeed is not try to compete with Twitter, but to do things that Twitter doesn't. This is not a winner take all situation.
- Kim Landwehr
sorry, i missed that (on kyte). how do you use office w/ google docs?
- Nick
Nick: if someone sends a Word Doc to my Gmail address I can open it up in Google Docs.
- Robert Scoble
John: sounds a lot like Twitter/friendfeed, huh?
- Robert Scoble
Robert: Unless its a .docx format....?
- Justin Long
I'm sure the issue for FF isn't search. Search isn't the first reason for users to get their friends in a specific service. People go to Twitter because Twitter is the place to go. People went to Hotmail because others were on Hotmail. Now, and only now, people realize that Gmail is better. Unfortunately, it took years for Gmail to emerge. I guess people will learn how to use the real time web on Twitter and 5 years later, they try to optimize their usage with FF. Years.
- Jérôme Flipo
Justin: probably not, but those should be even easier for Google to read.
- Robert Scoble
Wouldn't you think people would go where the majority of their friends are? I'm kind of divided between FB and Twitter. I wish more of my friends used FF but...
- Justin Long
Robert: 1) I agree totally w/ twitter being an entirely useless way of finding ppl of value — ie it's good for following existing celebrities, and may even be O.K. for finding local randomers, but no good for finding services of value (those most likely to advertise in a highly targeted online setting!) 2) I take ALL my school notes on gdocs and i wish i could mass export just to be safe
- Nick
Jerome: right. But now friendfeed will be the place to go. Why? Because I can send you a link to something of great value.
- Robert Scoble
If I look at my geeky friends, they all try to "manage" Twitter, and still refuse to get lost on FF (the Twitter for "advanced" users).
- Jérôme Flipo
Jerome: two years ago all my friends told me that Twitter was the lamest thing they'd ever seen.
- Robert Scoble
Then they all shifted when more of their friends got onto it.
- Robert Scoble
See, that's what I think: the center of gravity isn't features, but friends. You have to have people in order to have substantive conversations. You go where you have a preexisting pool of sharers.
- Justin Long
Unless you have enough "pull" to be able to go into a new service and bring a bunch of people with you... like Scoble...?
- Justin Long
Robert: so they should have left Hotmail for Gmail once they knew Gmail had big storage, good search, threads, etc. My friends and family all know that Gmail is better, but making the change is psychologically hard. Now, the problem in social networks is that leaving Twitter or adopting FF means you've to move your friends with you. That's not the case for webmail and that's why I'm concerned about FF's future. People may admit that FF is better, but it will take years before they move.
- Jérôme Flipo
Scoble: do you think it is meaningful to compare the live feed on YOUR account to that of the average user? I dont think ANYONE else has numbers similar to yours in terms of updates/minute (or even /second)
- Nick
Wish there was a way to better integrate Twitter's stream into Friendfeed... so that you could see both streams and update them... that would make it easier to migrate to FF! Maybe so you could see your twitter stream but no one else could unless you happened to comment on something or like it??
- Justin Long
Jerome: right. This is why Twitter has won. The first inning of this game.
- Robert Scoble
Nick: I used to be the only one following 1,000 people on Twitter and everyone made fun of me. Now that is a common thing to see.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: but Twitter is your friends' first Twitter-like service. People are still learning how to use it. I'm sure FF may be the next winner, but in years. And in months, Twitter will probably have launch likes and comments. Then, what would be FF's raison d'être? Why do you think you'll want to stay on FF? You've already said that you go where your audience is...
- Jérôme Flipo
I didn't realize how bad Twitter was at searching until recently. That's why I've migrated to FriendFeed as well. The 140-character message is similar to the traditional Unix bias toward flat files. It works for simple uses, but if you need metadata, you have to use more elaborate methods. FriendFeed is analogous to a relational database.
- David Delony
Jerome it took Twitter three years to get to 20 million and be considered a "mainstream success."
- Robert Scoble
FriendFeed has a character limit, too. It's just more than 140 is all. I would have predicted the "Disqus" and "Intense Debate" type service would be dominating the borader conversation by now... I would have been wrong.
- Matt Shaulis
Matt: metadata on friendfeed does NOT take away from friendfeed's size, though. On Twitter typing "RT: " takes away four characters and typing tags takes away even more.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: It's good for everyone though. It prevents rambling, hyperbole, and bloat. It has not prevented text messaging from becoming a global craze...
- Matt Shaulis
Why is Twitter a mainstream success? Because of how it was used in certain cases and what sort of publicity it got by those cases. Mumbai, the Hudson River plane, Australian bushfires. FriendFeed can get the same sort of thing, all it needs is imaginitive use of FriendFeed capabilities in a crunch. The added bonuse of aggregation greatly enhances its use in such cases, too. Do it properly, Friendfeed will hold its own.
- George Hall (Australia)
What takes more time and resource: implement FF's features in Twitter or gain Twitter's number of users? I love FF, but without a big promotion push from its community, I fear that FF will never go mainstream.
- Jérôme Flipo
George: But FriendFeed lacks a cute name meaning the "bubble headed bleach blondes" will not like saying in on the air. ;) hehehe
- Matt Shaulis
Jerome: I guarantee that in two years (Twitter is two years older than friendfeed) we'll be talking about friendfeed and not Twitter.
- Robert Scoble
I agree something like Friendfeed will be more interesting, certainly.
- Dominick Brady
what makes twitter a mainstream succes is the cases that goerge mentions PLUS the mobile aspect FF weill never get there until I can have it on EVERY mobile devices
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
How boring is it to say "I posted a FriendFeed message" versus "I Tweeted" .... Come on... it might sound silly, but it's marketing 101. The media and the glitterati will not adopt FriendFeed because it's not "fun" to talk about. (Not to mention, it is confusing to average people and will only get moreso.)
- Matt Shaulis
It's like no one watched the film in my link. You'd all understand Arrington if you did, and we wouldn't have to have a giant ass thread to explore it.
- Matthew DeVries
guruvan: what if every mobile device becomes a clone of the iPhone? That's where it's headed.
- Robert Scoble
I tend to agree. I am already really into this new version- even being in beta.
- Chris Parton
Matt, all its missing is a cute little mascot. The name's good enough...and cute enough...but it needs something visual. Mascot, visually identifiable immediately. Something that stands out in the minds of a bubble-headed bleach blond. Hmm, do bleach-blonds HAVE minds?
- George Hall (Australia)
Matt: fair enough. Twitter has a fun attitude.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: don't you think there's going to be legacy TXT for a while though?
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
WOW, scoble. that's a bold statement. i have a hard time believing that. they just dont have the brand equity
- john erik metcalf
but yes the clone of the iphone is for real
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
George: yes yes yes.. the mascot too.. all the way. Great point as well.
- Matt Shaulis
John: so did MySpace two years ago.
- Robert Scoble
twitter is becoming a household name.
- john erik metcalf
@Matt and George. Marketing is FF problem right now. Media coverage, for sure, name maybe.
- Jérôme Flipo
John: so was MySpace two years ago. Twitter is only used by 10 to 20 million. Facebook is 200 million. If Twitter's success means anything then it shouldn't even exist.
- Robert Scoble
Medai coverage + Name + Mascot + Etc. == Marketing
- Matt Shaulis
Matt: Financial Times is writing about friendfeed on Monday. And so it starts.
- Robert Scoble
friendfeed could easily become a household name too if there were 50 different clients to meet everyone's different wants and needs for friendfeed
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Even google figured out android needed a visual mascot. It's worked, too, for linux, having Tux the penguin. Twitter has the bird and the fail whale. At the moment, we have the incredible Scoble, but due to similarities with the Hulk, we have copyright and trademark issues there. Other suggestions?
- George Hall (Australia)
Rob: friendfeed is simplifying its API to get more people to be able to write for it. Twitter's API is so simple even I could write an app for it. Friendfeed's API is far more complex.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: LOL @ Financial times.... hehehe... I suppose it is a start... but it's no Tonight Show with Jay Leno. :-D
- Matt Shaulis
Ellen and Jay talked about Twitter for a good 2.5 minutes
- Matt Shaulis
Matt: In a year Ellen and Jay will need to talk about something else.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: my gut tells me that if that is true, it won't be FF. It will be something newer. But yes... Google will soon buy Twitter which means it is getting shelved and we will all have to move on.
- Matt Shaulis
The clip, look at the clip, all will be answered in the clip all will be answered in the clip. When you hear "Yellow swim trunks" think "Arrington" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
- Matthew DeVries
Matthew broke FF.
- Rochelle
Speaking of third-party stuff and API's, the iphone clients for Friendfeed need some work. Too much crashing in motherfeed and and Nambu
- George Hall (Australia)
Robert: agreed re: twitter api simplicity...I think I could do it too. Eager to see easier ff api and more clients esp mobile ones....then I can get tons of people to take it everywhere they go....then people will really be engrossed in their phones walking thru traffic ;)
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Matt: there will probably be something new that +I+ will be onto, but I usually look for the newest and best way to do something.
- Robert Scoble
Well, Jive.ly's certainly not it!
- Chris Parton
Chris: when I see it I'll probably talk about it here all day long and get everyone pissed at me. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Facebook seems to be doing alright without a cute name or mascot.
- Bruce Lewis
Bruce: so does Microsoft and Google and Amazon.
- Robert Scoble
And Seesmic seems to fail with a good name AND a cute ratoon :)
- Jérôme Flipo
You sure Microsoft's success isn't because of Clippy? :-)
- Bruce Lewis
And remember Microsoft's Windows emblem? That's practically a mascot/trademark instantly identifying it
- George Hall (Australia)
Google has also its Clippy, it was for Google Docs, to make it mainstream :D http://blogoscoped.com/archive...
- Jérôme Flipo
I try to jump out on Seesmic every now and then; I want to get into the video interaction but it always seems like the same 15 people are out there. Like a big video conference on odd topics
- Lou Paglia
seesmic is certainly trying to branch out and make more interaction happen
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
winners be damned this is good discussion, but while I really like FF twitter has a considerable league up on general cache and public sphere already. General adoption is going to be that much more challenging for every platform just from social app fatigue
- Patrick Boegel
Hey, i started on Seesmic this week...it's actually quite good. I like it more than Tweetdeck. It's only let down in one area, the userlists. As groupings, they're too static. Tweetdeck lets grouped friends be a column that's actively updated. Other than that, it's superior to Tweetdeck.
- George Hall (Australia)
Patrick: thats actually why I like FF so much...as I get better and better at it it relieves the fatigue by aggregating my content and republishing it for me
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
George: I am a huge fan of peoplebrowsr ....way more powerful than anything I've used ....better than tweetdeck for sure
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Rob: I agree, for me I like the aggregation. But the less voracious social app users? We will see
- Patrick Boegel
I think the aggregation makes people more voracious -especially when they see how it reposts to where THEIR friends are. If friendfeed were to be able to repost stuff to Facebook as well as twitter it would be a SMASH hit
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I think that, as I grow more and more into social apps, FF grows at a comfortable pace with me. But that's just me +shrug+
- Chris Parton
Chris: good point...I think people are generally comfortable with the pace on facebook (and myspace and similar) and they're just becoming comfortable with the pace on twitter - the pace on friendfeed is a little more hectic even still (omg with the realtime feed even more so) and will take some getting used to for people, but they will.. Especially if FF develops the outbound feeds...out to twitter is good, but it needs to go to where the people have their friends ....whereever that is
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I don't know my history too well, but in my limited time following you, you guys don't totally agree too often :)
- Bwana ☠
Very good points. I feel as though I have outgrown many of the other services and am ready for a fluid and fast-paced real-time entity. Also, my FF doesn't seem to be posting to Twitter haha!
- Chris Parton
100% agree - if everything feeds into everything else, in the end it may just be a question of interface / controls. Friend Feed is well on its way to being a streamlined interface for both Twitter and Facebook at the same time with all the relevant meta data. An interface, that I personally prefer. But, ultimately, agreed we are in the stone age and this is barely started much less over! P.S. Love the edit feature : )
- JP Maxwell
Chris: I bet if you tried to hit their website youd get you a failwhale...doubt its on FF's end ;) -----and I agree about out growing the others...but my friends have not, so I still use them...but more and more, as a way to get stuff into FF
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Robert's goin' Green! Ahhhhh!
- Charlie Anzman
Bwana: lol! probably not, but which guys are you referring to?
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
And how fun would the discussion be if everyone agreed on it all....little mutual lovefest and that's it heh.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I was referring to Arrington and Scoble
- Bwana ☠
My extended family is set up to get a weekly FriendFeed summary by email. It doesn't get more comfortably paced than that.
- Bruce Lewis
Again, just so right on w/ Twitter being just the beginning. When you introduce something new to a group of people previously not exposed to it, often the simplest thing wins at first. It is only once the adoption has occurred that people start wanting more. The simplicity becomes limiting and people demand this or that, but you never could have started out with it all.
- JP Maxwell
And the internet itself is founded upon the idea of using the simplest thing as the base layer and then building onto that base....FF build well onto the simplest layers like twitter - being able to like and comment on tweets over here is a great addition...but still leaves twitter as an important piece
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Laying down the gauntlet. The drama!!!
- sofarsoShawn
Robert, true, the game has just started and we do need better filters, but there is nothing stopping Twitter from implementing some of the same features we see on Friendfeed, Facebook and more. Threaded conversations and a like button do not constitute barriers to entry.
- Erick Schonfeld
Can someone please tell me how either of these startups are going to make money? Please?
- Bwana ☠
which startups?
- Spotcher
Erick - twitter has only just got its service engineered to handle it's existing features, whereas FriendFeed has been built as a well maintained scalable infrastructure right from the start. I wouldn't underestimate FriendFeed's technical lead - it may be larger than Twitter's user-base lead. Not to mention the fact they'd have to lead their user-base perhaps unwillingly.
- Robin Barooah
google wasn't first, but they had a great idea and incredible execution. FF might have the same effect on soc-net.
- MikeAmundsen
Robert I agree with you 100% on the value of the "meta data" aspect of FF. I'm not so sure that advertising isnt already viable on twitter. Google adwords functionality integrated into the side bar of twitter would be much more targeted than the google content network. So even on a basic level it is viable. I agree that it could be much more. Google can just sit back and integrate into any or all existing social networks. The myspace deal paid of in much the same way.
- James Ketchell
Ewww, Cheyenne yo you do know he's married.
- sofarsoShawn
That is true.
- sofarsoShawn
correct...current state of information is chaos, jumbled mess...need organization...ff is a start
- Michael
Why the concentration on selling adverts? I mean, advertising is dead. I don't want to be bombarded with adverts any more. I'd pay a subscription to Google so I no longer have to see Google Adsense, either on their home page or anywhere else on the web. I'd pay a subscription to Twitter to continue to use the platform and not be bombarded with Ads. Can we go back to selling people things, services, instead of using adverts for things to support things and services? Pretty please...?
- Alasdair Allan
Alasdair: advertising is a $300 billion a year business. THAT is why I concentrate on it.
- Robert Scoble
nice - the difference between *THE* answer and many solutions. It's just what solutions dominate, what ends up being a robust niches and what dies (and it's an ever shifting playing field in this case).
- Stuart Miniman
FF FTW!! :)
- Susan Beebe
Advertising might be a $300 billion a year business, but it's not really very interesting, is it?
- Alasdair Allan
the metadata angle to the discussion on twitter versus FF/FB is an interesting one. for first time users harder to grasp; on the other hand richer metadata structures make it indeed much easier to really filter the information; not only for directly using FF, but also for third party engines building on top of FF API's
- Jeroen De Miranda
Alasdair: Advertising is far from dead. Just because you're not a fan doesn't mean the rest of us are not. The truth is advertising is prevalent in our society because we need it. You need to know where those people, things, services and such are. The best of anything goes to waste if no one knows about it. The key to advertising, though, is to deliver it to you in such a way that you like it, and is relevant to you. Most current media doesn't allow for that. Social medial advertising does offer potential.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Who cares what Arringtoin says? Last week he said Google was buying Twitter
- paul mooney
I think twitter has much more metadata capability than we see on the surface. A good search correlation algorithm could take temporal and spatial metadata as weighting vectors; more weighting vectors: indexing + analyzing link targets (and their metadata), retweets, replies, follows, tweets sources, and the kicker indexed RSS feeds from the top N news/info/media web sites, etc. Correlate a search term against these vectors and self-tune using user rating. $.02
- Ankush Narula
I disagree with you on so many things, Robert, but I watched this video, and you make excellent points. I do believe you're right.
- Stan Scott
Get arrington to set up a realtime private room for techcrunch staff
- Christian Burns
This is the future speaking: you are both wrong.
- Todd Hoff
The meta data and "likes" you are describing that is the advantage of friend feed is reminding me of what Plurk is trying to do. I don't like it over there, and I'm trying to figure it out over here on Friendfeed. Maybe when you have 19,000 subscriptions FF makes sense, but for the little guys, it's not so transparent.
- Peggy Dolane
Twitter's victory will be short-lived and potentially Pyrrhic. It's a cool toy everybody can play with but not a great tool for serious users. I still can't see it paying for itself over the long run unless as a data collecting device for Google. And the best point: all the metadata is currently within the 140 characters. And apps not limited to 140 characters are so obviously more useful.
- The Web's Wendell Wittler
Definitely love Robert's calling out of Mike at the end. They're both nice, smart guys, and I'm glad we have a system (the Internet) where they can discuss this for all of us to see, and discuss with them/each other as well.
- Tyler Hayes
hint you on the next challenge: Servers will distributed into multi-region server farms management that somehow will focus on local activities but still synchronized with primary server farm.... That would be how megatons of meta data will be delivered seamlessly without causing too much traffic collision and bandwidth waste... I think..
- Pico Seno
I finally understand the value Robert gets out of FF, and it's because he can easily pool lots of useful metadata (likes, links, comments) to each of his own posts out of the vast trove of friends. For the rest of us, there's the live feed, which works better on Twitter than FF. I still think that in the future, we will all be Scoble though and have gadzillion more friends.
- Prokofy Neva
I just realized hash tags are dead, er, less relevant than they were last week. #hashtagsaredead I gotta write up a blog post about why. Or you could speculate here:
Donovan Watts, Jamie, Haim Schlesinger and 92 other people liked this
Hashtags are used to group things of common interest. Like all items from a conference. But, do we really need them now in an age of great grouping and filtering like we have here on friendfeed?
- Robert Scoble
They've been dead for some time. Track makes them unnecessary
- Ken Sheppardson
Dead? I think they're around on Twitter not as often, but they're still alive!
- Shane Adams
Shane: first thing you gotta realize when a pundit says something is "dead" is that it doesn't mean they go away, just that thing become less relevant than they are today.
- Robert Scoble
They are generally not needed. Just search on the same term and save a character.
- xero
Yes, because more people are on Twitter and Facebook - for now
- Steve Rubel
I know for me personally after I post an update I am like crap I should have #hashed xyz. It is not an involuntary action yet. It may never.
- Michael woodard
were they ever really alive to begin with? Nobody can decide on which tag to use for a concept half the time, so you end up with multiple tags for the same thing, which sort of defeats it ...
- Michele Neylon
Yeah, they are useful for comedic effect, but not much else. At least not on friendfeed.
- Alex Scoble
If Yahoo would get off it's duff and imbue Delicious with some statusness and conversationalizingness, we wouldn't need to hack Twitter with hastags. Then again, if Twitter would separate out tags and links from 140 characters, we wouldn't need Delicious.
- Kawika Holbrook
Steve: right, but I bet that Twitter gets conversation threading eventually and Facebook already has better ways to tag content.
- Robert Scoble
And, anyway, since friendfeed is an addon to Twitter, in this respect (this post went to Twitter) we get grouping of common items here. No hashtag needed. Oh, and you can search on any word in any of these comments and find this thread.
- Robert Scoble
what is the percentage of 100% accuracy with hash tags? how many people who do know the hash actually use it? for me 'concept' filter, zeroing in on the sweet spot is best (for me) take #swf09 - how many people who were twittering about the Skoll World Forum 09 actually got it, used it most of the time? some of the time? only once? Skoll seems pretty right on to me, so i just filter Skoll - unique enough to pluck it out of the stream. Gets much more difficult with wider targets but can be done with + or -
- michael sean wright
Don't count Twitter hashtags out yet...they came in handy in our local situation here in Australia. We did have one slight problem with some teenage bright spark hijacking the #bushfires stuff to a @bushfires group. Otherwise it was still very active for us back in February. Hashtags highly relevant in emergency situations. How they work on FriendFeed, someone else will have to tell me about.
- George Hall (Australia)
"user tagging" will keep being relevant until machines can infer these tags themselves. They really can't at this moment. Normal search engines are still doing keyword-matching.
- Meryn Stol
#bitchtlips will live forever
- sofarsoShawn
So you're at a conference where you've never met half of the folks there. Sure you know your friends at table and have access to their feeds, but what about the table two over? If they don't use the name of the conference, your name, the name of the speaker or something that orients the feed toward the common experience, how will you know what's being said? The hashtag still seems relevant in that context.
- Michael Sommermeyer
Did they ever have value? Twitter Search is certainly set up not to need them so long as you just use a common identifier term.
- Pete Mortensen
# not dead until I can click on any word in a post and get the search results. only hash'd words are clickable.
- John Treadway
They are dead because they were always stupid and because people make them up and other people can never find them I HOPE they are dead.
- Francine Hardaway
Pete: yeah, they did, especially for events. That way everyone would see you are explicitly wanting to join the tag for that event.
- Robert Scoble
Used to be a good way of 'tagging' keywords for easy search. But if the common subject is mentioned clearly in a conversation (eg. 'social media' vs #socialmedia) then agree, its days are numbered. Particularly the trend as online conversationalists move beyond Twitter.
- schmediachick
I just lost a fight with Twitter search and http://tr.im today, trying in vain to locate an old link I forgot to ALSO save on Delicious. Even FriendFeed is fallow when it comes to historical organization. I miss Swurl's calendar-based timelines. This is so "in the moment" that there doesn't seem to be as much attention paid to "where's that link from that thing that happened last month that I now need for something coming up this very moment."
- Kawika Holbrook
Kawika how do you use delicious in junction with Twitter?
- Bryan Lee
Michael: conferences in the future will embed a friendfeed thread in their sites. Look at how many comments are here. Watch this live. It's amazing.
- Robert Scoble
There's still some use of hashtags on Twitter and a few other services. Others have something similar to hashtags, which you might consider the same. But for the most part, I have to agree: hashtags are dying, and the reason for that is because we're getting much better with searching and filtering content.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
http://beta.friendfeed.com/scoblei... Here's the permalink for this item. Once you have that you can watch all the comments flow in live and you do NOT need hashtags anymore.
- Robert Scoble
Hash tags enable intelligent indexing of Twitter. And (not so) subtle humor. #ScobleIsWrongAgain :-)
- Brent Logan
Brent: Twitter is dead. Because if you want REAL indexing in live time of a conversation about a social object this is WAY BETTER than Twitter.
- Robert Scoble
Keyword matching on the message is really not up to par with what's possible with tagging.
- Meryn Stol
Meryn: you are absolutely wrong. Here, search on this in the next minute or so: foopoo
- Robert Scoble
foopoo is already indexed in search. Wow. http://beta.friendfeed.com/search...
- Robert Scoble
Hashtags dead because no clearinghouse on what they mean. They get co-opted and perverted to generate follows and reads. And Twitter search tools have improved massively in short time. Readable tags take up too much of my 140. Short ones are not obvious.
- Wilford
Hashtags are now most likely used just to get more followers in same interest if that even!. I have seen people misuse hashtags , for example "I Love my dog #iphone" wtf has dog to do with an iphone or how much you love your dog.... you know what I mean? Anyways i use tweetgrid.com for clearing things out and don't pay attention to tweetdeck or so to say twitscoop anymore.
- Live Crunch Blog
What a cool way to get help writing your blog post... where were you earlier today when I was having brainfreeze?
- Kathy Colaiacovo
Well I think the foopoo example sorta ended this argument
- Matsis
Yes, that's keyword matching. So what's the big deal? Hashtags are merely a way to add keywords to a piece of content the "#" denotes that it should not be read as part of a sentence, but that they are just some extra keywords.
- Meryn Stol
So using Friendfeed with twitter eliminates the need for hashtags, essentially?
- Derek Schauland
Kathy: everything changes now that we have live display.
- Robert Scoble
God, does it ever!
- Kathy Colaiacovo
Kathy: everything changes now that we have live indexing.
- Robert Scoble
Derek: yes.
- Robert Scoble
Matsis: foopoo was indexed in less than five seconds. It used to take a minute for the indexer to work. Freaking amazing.
- Robert Scoble
but this requires a single source? hashtags come from lots of places.
- Jonathan Hopkins
Live / non-live is a separate issue. Hash-tags might not be real-time also...
- Meryn Stol
and you get so used to it! I was on a live chat (supposedly) last week - but they were moderating the comments... and the delay was so annoying to most of the participants. It's an on-demand world now
- Kathy Colaiacovo
Meryn: you aren't getting it. If you want to create a tag, you can do it here. I just created foopoo and now search works on that. No need to create an ugly tag.
- Robert Scoble
Hashtags are pretty much just tags for your tweets
- Chris Martin
Sweet sweet the live view works on the iPhone!
- Bryan Lee
Wrong: I like making up really fun & zany ones: #robertscobleshotshit!WHoo!!!!!YEAH!!!!!!WootWOOT!!!!!!!!
- sofarsoShawn
There's only one reason for hashtags now: To mark something as being related to something else not explicitly mentioned in a post, and point out that marking.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
And, because our conversation here is grouped all together you don't need a hashtag to create a thread.
- Robert Scoble
I hate this "this is dead, that is dead" crap. They work for some things, for others they don't. Move along people there's nothing to see here.
- Jeremy Armer
Twitter does real-time search just fine. Anything you type in a tweet, including "foopoo" can be searched on.
- Meryn Stol
I do agree though - searches have changed and the # seems irrelevant now.
- Kathy Colaiacovo
If you can work in what you'd tag as context into your actual post, you don't need hashtags.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Robert, "Twitter is dead" is a different argument than hash tags are dead. FriendFeed is a different animal with it's own advantages and disadvantages, but as long as Twitter is alive, so will be hash tags.
- Brent Logan
By the way I still am wondering why Gabe Rivera didn't add LC for aggregation on techmeme, even tho atul and other ppl are sending tips to #techmeme
- Live Crunch Blog
Brent: Not true. Twitter's real-time search means hash tags aren't needed for Twitter either.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
hashtags are a hack. I've been saying this forever: http://staynalive.com/article...
- Jesse Stay
Brent: Twitter will copy friendfeed. Mark my words. If they don't, Twitter is dead.
- Robert Scoble
The concept is good (esp. for event listings) - but there needs to be ONE place to go to register them so you don't end up with 10 other ppl using yours. But it is out of control on Twitter - some people have 3 in every post - where is the content?
- Robyn Hawk
jeremy: saying something is "dead" causes you to pay attention. Sorry, but this is provable and is why this technique is used so often.
- Robert Scoble
Here in the Portland Oregon areas we use #pdxtst (Portland Twitter Storm Team) to tweet about weather conditions. No form of search can replace it.
- Brent Logan
Hashtags served their purpose early on and were the tool of Twitterati in the know. It's like anything that trends... It's cool until the grown-ups arrive. And now with Twitter's growth, the grown-ups have indeed arrived. Once the grown-ups arrive and start using something to forward an agenda it dies.
- matt
Brent: you could just include pdxtst in a message. you can find it by doing a search for it.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, I hope Twitter does adopt FriendFeed style conversations. I still see value in hash tags.
- Brent Logan
http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... Here's all items with pdxtst included in them.
- Robert Scoble
http://beta.friendfeed.com/filter... pdxtst filter
- Christian Burns
Hashtags are machine language which is unnecessary. I talked about it last week. http://www.louisgray.com/live...
- Louis Gray
Robert, in other words, you'd prefer I embedded gibberish in my messages for search purposes, just don't prepend them with a hash?
- Brent Logan
now you tell me...
- Ecosaveology
Excellent point John - it is convenient to be able to click on the hashtag words!
- Robyn Hawk
Hashtags can be useful if everyone in the group that uses them agrees on a single tag. Poeplebrowsr makes interesting use of them by making groups ot of the people that use them. But, as said above #mosthastagsaresilly just ask the #hashtagmafia ;) #jesseisrighttheyareahack
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Brent: tell me how this would be improved if everyone had to post #hashtagdiscussion to join in this comment thread? Note that you don't need to do that anymore to have your comment grouped with other people's on a common topic.
- Robert Scoble
I think hashtags must be ironic #butyouknewthat
- Alan Thornton
Scoble but the search results doesn't have a live view or doesn't poll like Twitter search.
- Bryan Lee
Bryan: yeah, I know. That's getting fixed by the friendfeed team. We asked about that last week at the press conference.
- Robert Scoble
Also once someone has entered the tag into a discussion, and then I comment or like it, It's part of my discussions page
- Christian Burns
Bryan Lee, I attempt to tag articles I like for posterity in Delicious and then -- if they may be of interest to others -- share them in Twitter. The former is indexed storage and the latter is quick conversation. I stills struggle with Twitter and FriendFeed as a repository of knowledge and sentiment. Hashtags were meant to give some structure to Twitter. Ultimately, however, it still feels like the Wild West.
- Kawika Holbrook
Imagine if every post on here had to include #hashtagsRdead
- Christian Burns
Robert, you're missing my point. Tags are very useful for searching topics, even in the absence of a continuing conversation. It's author-intended indexing. Blog posts use tags. They just have a special field for doing it. If FriendFeed or Twitter allowed for a special tag field, I'd love it. It would be prettier than hash tags. But it hasn't happened yet, so calling hash tags dead is premature.
- Brent Logan
Brent: yes, but see I would only have to put a hashtag at the top node, and everyone does NOT need to include the hashtag individually anymore to join in.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, I agree. Hash tags are ugly for enabling conversations. That's not their only purpose, though.
- Brent Logan
Brent: I just changed the headline that started this to include a hashtag.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: or someone could insert the hashtag into just one of the comments
- Christian Burns
Sorry, I'm a little confused. This is like a chat room. A hashtag on Twitter is aggregating independent thoughts, no? Apples and oranges?
- Catherine Ventura
The one purpose they really do server at this point, Robert is to make a searchable term out of a more commonly used word so that search does NOT pull up unintended tweets.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
kawika never thought to share my delicious links on Twitter. I just have friendfeed handle that.
- Bryan Lee
Here's the search that pulls up all items with the tag #hashtagsaredead http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... See, now no body needs to include that hashtag in their comment to be grouped in here. On Twitter they'd still need to use the hashtag. Oh, and notice how I can add a tag AFTER the fact to make something more searchable here!
- Robert Scoble
Wait... hashtags are dead? What about !groups and @#tagfamilies??
- Ken Sheppardson
Never used them or liked them. Get more results searching for normal words because no one actually remembers to add the hashtag
- BCK
Hashtags are very useful in lots of different contexts (local, relevance, mimicking behavior), but they are not the sole method and definitely not intuitive enough for mass adoption
- Tiffany Winman
Robert, imagine a TV channel wants to start a live discussion on twitter. It says: "guys, use the hashtag #xxx". Now, it can watch only updates with this hashtag; making just a live search for "xxx" would be false - there would be so much noise.
- Konstantin
Ken LOL
- Jesse Stay
They're not dead. Yea, you could save a character by not using the # sign, but that could lead to confusion depending on what the tag is. Same with not using @ before someone's username... fine if you're @Scobleizer, not so fine if you're @John. On Laconi.ca, you can subscribe to hashtags (different from subscribing to a keyword), which is convenient for event attendees.
- Marina Martin
Catherine: Twitter is a chat room too. Just because it doesn't look like one doesn't mean it isn't. It's been a chat room for me for years.
- Robert Scoble
Marina, you can use ! to exclude items I believe
- Jesse Stay
Marina: OK, they are dead for a lot of things that they are being used for today, but not totally dead. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Dead or dying? I'm usually late to most trends so if I haven't started yet it's probably not dead. Maybe.
- CAJ, somewhere else
Marina: notice how i changed the headline here to be more accurate. That's something you can't do on Twitter, either. (refresh this page).
- Robert Scoble
Robert: Touche! But its a very big room... and this is a dedicated closet
- Catherine Ventura
Robert I don't understand this. maybe it's late and I'm being silly but hashtags are to bring together lots of people in one place. this is a single thread, started by you.
- Jonathan Hopkins
Catherine: Oh, we can start lots of offshoots.
- Robert Scoble
Jonathan: this is lots of people "in one place." No difference. This is like me saying "here's a hashtag" let's talk.
- Robert Scoble
Posted my thoughts on this: http://coldacid.net/blog... (Did I beat you to it, Robert?)
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
It's machine language. Don't understand why people use it -- Twitter's trend algorithm catches keywords with or without hashtags. I just do it because it's funny. #WhoCares. :)
- Mona Nomura
but it's a place created by one person. hashtags help create a single place, created by lots of people no?
- Jonathan Hopkins
I'm digging this live view can't wait till it's out of beta!
- Bryan Lee
Jonathan: OK, I get that. So, go start another thread on friendfeed and post the URL here. Now we'll have two places all tied together. No hashtag needed.
- Robert Scoble
I agree w/ Brent that Twitter should just include a field for 2 or 3 tags and not count it toward the 140 char limit. I guess this would break the SMS functionality though. Then again, they're not clickable in text messages so they're just taking up space in most SMS messages anyway.
- Jeremy Armer
Chris: you beat me. I might not even do a blog post. :-) Maybe blogs are dead too! :-)
- Robert Scoble
Since we ARE talking hashtags, one thing I WOULD like to see is something in the Twitter system NOT reading anything hashtagged as part of the 140-character limit. Again, where that helps is in emergency uses of Twitter and other micro-blogging apps. More room for the real information, and meaning you could use more than one hashtag. Anyone thought of that before today?
- George Hall (Australia)
Jeremy: Twitter will never do THAT. Why? Because it makes Twitter far more complex.
- Robert Scoble
George: that would be a cool way to handle hashtags. Too bad that Twitter is still chasing scaling problems and not able to use its developers for building new features. They will fix that eventually, though.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: Agreed, simplicity is Twitter's "killer app".
- Jeremy Armer
Robert: Blogs aren't dead, yet. Wait for FriendFeed to uncap the length of a post and add inline links and images. :D
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
;-) For sure - but then I have to post the URL back in here - a hashtag does that automatically. with or without the # - having one word to unify distributed content is useful right? focus should be on search and the language we are creating together on here. friendfeed, twitter, whatever - this is all the groundwork for the language of the live web, no? PS good chat, loving this view on FF
- Jonathan Hopkins
ROBERT! LOL!!
- Mona Nomura
Robert: And I'd suggest write up a post anyway. You do a much better job at blogging than I do, and probably have a different viewpoint. Even if it's only a little different, it helps expand everyone's view of the matter.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Robert, you hit the nail on the head. Anytime Twitter is used for anything other than sending and replying to messages, it complicates the intended simplicity. I've only seen hashtags work great in intimate settings, but on bigger scales, it loses it's desired effects.
- Mike Lewis
Jonathan: You have a point there. The "@user" convention has spread far beyond Twitter.
- Jeremy Armer
Hash tags are still useful on Twitter because not all posts concerning a particular subject contain the subject in question. Not everybody follows everybody on Twitter so using hash tags is a good way to find those subjects. Smaller groups use hash tags to coordinate their conversations and make search easier.
- Aulia Masna
Hash tags aren't dead. If anything I think they are growing. I've seen more people using them since the election that before.
- ChiliMac
Chris: you tease you. I can't wait for the day I can put a 4,000-word blob up into friendfeed. Jonathan: you really don't need to even put the URL back in here. You just need to use the same word or set of words in the top level to join them together. For instance, why write #w2e when you really just mean "I'm attending the Web 2.0 Expo." Here, search on Web 2.0 Expo now and see what happens.
- Robert Scoble
Here's a search for "Web 2.0 Expo." http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... Notice that I didn't need to use a lame ass hashtag to join together lots of conversations.
- Robert Scoble
fundamentally a hashtag eliminates more than it adds. using #wine eliminates confusing a convo about wines with "love the new wine colored lipstick"
- Catherine Ventura
Hashtags were always a kluge. Threading + fabulous search makes them unnecessary.
- Eric Johnson
uhhh... what's a kluge?
- Catherine Ventura
While I'm in a talkative mood today...giving the Australian bushfires back in February as an example, we utilized hashtags thusly: #bushfires for main general information. #vicfires and #nswfires for the information relevant to the two states which had bushfires at that time, Victoria and New South Wales. #fireupdates for more specific types of info. #firecomments for condolence messages, keeeping them off the main hashtags. We tended to treat the hashtags more like channels back then.
- George Hall (Australia)
Catherine: that's a good point. But if you are talking about wine, you probably have some modifiers that make sense. So if I search for "wine and merlot" I bet I will only get back discussions about wine, not about lipstick. Also, friendfeed lets you search for "wine" and then subtract out anything that mentions lipstick.
- Robert Scoble
OK thanks! - bit clearer now. Twitter does the same thing without #tags but crucial difference is the presentation of results as individual tweets versus conversation threads you can jump into.
- Jonathan Hopkins
Catherine: here's a search for all items that include the word "wine" but that do NOT include the word "lipstick." http://beta.friendfeed.com/search...
- Robert Scoble
Kluge = a clunky work-around. A hack. But there's still so much blurt going on on Twitter that hashtags will be with us for some time yet, I'll bet.
- Eric Johnson
In fact, this item is NOT included in that search because it includes the word "lipstick." Friendfeed filtering really rocks and we haven't even started using it yet.
- Robert Scoble
BUT - using a #tag is a way of someone labeling their content because they want it to be found, rather than letting someone just find it. Plus - it helps fuel pre-filtered (to some extent, minus the spam/opportunists) feeds to be mashed up with other stuff
- Jonathan Hopkins
Shoq: I sort of got that. Which is why I included an official hashtag in my headline above. That way you can see that we're specifically going to tag things here. Also, it will let Twitterers use that tag and join in the conversation.
- Robert Scoble
By the way, Robert, I claim first dibs the idea on having hashtags outside the 140-character limit.
- George Hall (Australia)
Robert: nice, but identical to google, fundamentally, and we have to anticipate that wine is a fashion forward lipstick color. But what if it's your street name? Or your last name? Or you are mispelling the sound your children make when they want to watch TV? I wouldn't write off the power of the "secret decoder ring" magic of a hashtag just yet...
- Catherine Ventura
Jonathan: if I want you to find a conversation about wine I bet it will be found if I just discuss wine. Here, let's see if this works. Damn, it does work: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search...
- Robert Scoble
so wine is the hashtag (just without the #) ;) . . . . .
- Jonathan Hopkins
Catherine: well, if I do a search for wine and find lipstick I know something is wrong and Google has already trained me to try a different search. :-) How many people know how Google works? Billions. How many people know about hashtags? Maybe 20 million.
- Robert Scoble
And thanks for saying "doesn't mean it's dead." But anyway, so if the tag does dual duty, it's not dead, but merely being reassigned to a more useful and formalized role.
- Shoq
Jonathan: now you're getting why I realized that hashtags are dead, or at least, a whole lot less relevant from now on. I still might use them here and there, but I am not forced to, like I am on Twitter, to join a conversation together.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: pretty good. only anomaly was an appliance list by stephanie with a "wine cooler"
- Catherine Ventura
Catherine: here, let's get rid of the cooler: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search...
- Robert Scoble
Robert: pretty good but there were some crystal wine glasses. Still, impressive...
- Catherine Ventura
Um, sort of . . . i think though there will always be a 'word' that people agree to use to lump content together and help each other identify it without question from other content that *might* be relevant. But, yep -=reckon we agree that there's no real need for the # anymore. so, it comes down to tags then - which is all over the web and that comes back to my thoughts re the fact we are just creating a live web language together here. And well done you for getting conversations like this going . . . !
- Jonathan Hopkins
I think #hashtags, like Tweets, are amorphous and will be used by people how they need/want to use them.
- Jeremy Armer
Maybe it's not death but evolution? Hashtags were useful in the way they were used in Twitter (and well before that). Technology and knowhow have improved to practically make a tagless hash. I could search for the word "the" if I wanted to. Or perhaps "teh" but who would ever think to hashtag that?
- CAJ, somewhere else
Jeremy: That's exactly what I think
- Chris Martin
Chris: you can edit comments (or delete them) if you make a mistake. I can delete them too, under items that I started. So, I'll delete your extra one in a few seconds if you don't.
- Robert Scoble
Okay, now what about getting a specific date range in FF searches? Specific format?
- George Hall (Australia)
Oh, THAT is another reason why hashtags are dead: they will be used by spammers. But HERE we can delete and block spammers.
- Robert Scoble
Wait. Robert are you saying you can censor the comments you don't like? Interesting!
- CAJ, somewhere else
Shoq: good point. Alan: yes, I can. But I won't. Can you guess why I won't censor your comments?
- Robert Scoble
Cuz you like people's opinions, even if they're different? Because you're not China? I give.
- CAJ, somewhere else
Robert: Because he would start a "Scoble censors FF comments!" thread?
- Jeremy Armer
At least we've lost the old IRC commands, like /join #Scoble
- Catherine Ventura
hashtags are often misused or abused
- Kim Landwehr
Hashtags are great when you are having a conversation on Twitter on a topic. Dead? Hardly. Lots of people are just figuring them out. And while plenty of techies know how to filter and use friend feed for conversations, face it, it's the minority of users.
- Peggy Dolane
You can also "censor" out/block spammers in Twitter, too. It's only on your particular computer, so everyone else still sees the annoyances.
- George Hall (Australia)
Jeremy is right: http://beta.friendfeed.com/scoblei...
- Robert Scoble
i never know what are the right hashtags to use
- Nicholas
The spam issue is probably the best argument against them. I can block spammers on Twitter but I can't stop them from littering all over tags I watch. Nick: I never know the right ones either.
- Jeremy Armer
I can see Robert's point, though. One of the things that killed off Yahoo Groups was the fact they eventually filled with spambots, etc. Now that's all you ever find in a Yahoo chat room
- George Hall (Australia)
Another advantage of the known tag signifier is that people can decide on the fly what attentions they want to route an item to without an interface.
- Shoq
right. the yahoo groups were fixed. less flexible. We can still, in effect, say, "quick, go to channel 3"...
- Catherine Ventura
the point about spammers spoiling hash tags is valid -- however they only seem to be a real problem for trending topics, smaller group conversations appear to be immune thus far in my experience.
- Peggy Dolane
George, that is true about chat, but the follow concept alters that paradigm significantly. You can determine who is in the flow, to some extent, and even enough extent for many people (as some like the noise seepage that gets in.)
- Shoq
so what about 'invisible #tags' that don't form part of your 140? much like tags in blog posts only even less visible without clicking through. Other stuff could be added . . . location, mood, timezone, authority, etc etc - all improving search results using the meta data manually/automatically assigned to your tweets/comments/threads whatever
- Jonathan Hopkins
Jonathan: I think the main issue w/ that is the 140 character simplicity is what makes it so customizable. I can make a Twitter app that works any way I want. When features get added, it complicates the process and narrows the possibilities.
- Jeremy Armer
Jonathan, all true, but not while anyone is pretending to live within the 160 SMS limitation (twitter reserves 20 for name). That's the problem there.
- Shoq
Jeremy: for sure. Simplicity is key - it's what it doesn't do etc . . . but I reckon there's a few things that will need to be done to deal with the scale and maintain value for everyone.
- Jonathan Hopkins
That proves the power of a thread. It's getting interestingly long. In my view, hashtags are cool, but they're represented here as the post's thread itself (that could've been with some tagging-system prior to filtering). The hashtag could've been treated as a shortener, as "This post went to FF #ff51x32" but FriendFeed went for that by linking to the discussion itself so. Hashtags are nice to explore the twitter world as you can find, I'm sure, any of those used words for any case.
- ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,
Jonathan: it's like back in the day when you called someone collect and they refused to pay. It was a free call to signal something. With an 'invisible' hashtag, I could technically write a very long tweet. #sothisishowtogetaroundthelimitof140characterstakethattwitter. :)
- CAJ, somewhere else
Shoq: definitely Alan: ;-)
- Jonathan Hopkins
Alan, I'd really love to see that long a hashtag actually work in a Twitter client...
- George Hall (Australia)
Everyone wants the 140 do more. I think they're great. They force concision, point to payload, and all but crush feature-creep. We shouldn't call them "updates." They're "headers."
- Shoq
Well, I tried #testtoseehowlongahashtagcanbeandificanactuallyuseupallthecharactersthatareallowedwillnotusepunctuationtobreakanythingupjustincaseicannot and it allowed it. Of course...I used up my character limit.
- CAJ, somewhere else
twirl, btw. Jus' sayin'.
- CAJ, somewhere else
Doesn't really matter if things are hashtagged or not in the grand scheme of searching capabilities.
- Elizabeth Parmeter
I liked how you got that #hashtagfromhellandback to go outside the lines Alan. #nicework #deservesprize
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Shoq: I agree, w/o the 140 character limit most Tweets would be as boring as most blogs are.
- Jeremy Armer
Rob: That was surprisingly hard to type. I'm WAY too used to proper punctuation, spacing, etc. No wonder I'm enjoying FF!
- CAJ, somewhere else
I'm still noticing one thing with the FriendFeed searches...if I want a set of feeds from a specific date, I'm still scratching my head on how to do that. Merely inputing one single time like "Feb. 7 only brings up anything with that date in the title or text, not what I specifically want, which is all feeds in that search ON or between certain dates.
- George Hall (Australia)
George: that's a good feature request.
- Robert Scoble
Egad, my second bright idea of the day...
- George Hall (Australia)
But it's a clear need. Can't find anything in the FriendFeed search that helps pin down specific periods. If I want to look back over feeds from all the first week of February, at present it's go through heaps of back pages or hit and miss. That's a much-need feature.
- George Hall (Australia)
George: It is indeed. Suggest it in friendfeed-feedback and friendfeed-beta, hopefully Paul & co. will add it (and sooner rather than later).
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Alan: I totally understand. I have a hard time with just tweets, because I like to be clear, and as well "spoken" as possible, and like to use punctuation to provide emphasis that would be the if I spoke what I wrote. But I do appreciate how character limits get me to think in shorter, more powerful phrases. (LinkedIn profile was WAY hard to do!)
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
To Chris...suggested it in Feedback. Done.
- George Hall (Australia)
#hashtags are inanimate objects. how can they be dead... or alive? ;-P
- .LAG liked that
George: Awesome! LAG: Oh, you... :D
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Hash Tags will continue to be useful for groups of people
- paul mooney
Adequate search capabilities make any form of tagging irrelevant.
- rob friedman
keyword is "adequate." I find that unless a search facility can take into account synonyms (as Google's can) it's probably not going to be adequate. My biggest problem: searching for "mission" and coming up with diplomatic missions, or searching for "missionary" and NOT coming up with religious work, but something vastly different!
- Justin Long
Well only the smart people it seems know to quantify their search by using the primary search term, and then 2-4 or more words which help narrow things down. Let's not search for root latin words in google.
- rob friedman
from twhirl
A generic search will yield a generic result. A more thought out search query is likely to yield something specific or nothing at all.
- rob friedman
from twhirl
Are there any hard numbers on the use of hashtags on Twitter over the last twelve months? A simple trendline graph?
- Sean McBride
Fascinating that something "dead" can inspire such a discussion! ;) Srsly though, when I came up with hashtags (http://tr.im/fj_hashtags) they were proposed as a way to provide on-the-go context with zero overhead. If your tag got picked up and used, great! If not, welcome to the longtail! I find hashtags useful in heterogeneous/cross-network situations --or via SMS when conference wifi sucks. They were never intended as a final solution, but as a convenient, transparent stop-gap, still find them useful.
- Chris Messina
Also, consider how #pman was used to stage protests in Maldova: http://tr.im/maldova. They didn't use FriendFeed groups for that.
- Chris Messina
I'm quite happy to do a search w/o hash tags. Sometimes, I have to OR several possible terms, but it doesn't particularly bother me.
- Seth Greenblatt
Hashtags can be useful for including descriptive metadata about text which is not evident in the text itself. There are many valuable uses that should be evident if one gives the matter a moment's thought.
- Sean McBride
By the way, where's that guy who thought nobody uses FriendFeed? He's proven wrong again. Do we have a hashtag for him?
- George Hall (Australia)
George: #arringtonyoufool :D
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
The best reason to use hashtags are for sarcastic remarks #Icantfindmysockssoitmustbemonday
- Matthew Sauer
Chris Messina--thanks for jumping in with some sanity. ;-). Trying to make a call on what's dead is dead, so lets stop. As long as 140-character text messages continue to dominate and grow, hashtags will always be around. Folks like to annotate (that is, add metadata) things and hashtags are a lightweight, simple way to do that. If anything, Maldova should be a wake-up call regarding this. Hey--what about best practices about how, when and when not to use hashtags?
- Albert Willis
Whoa! Slow down the # hate train! While I acknowledge that its a lazy way of finding and grouping content for human search and consumption, I use them extensively within the enterprise to aggregate content for knowledge management purposes. Lets not start the "just say no" campaign just yet.
- jcunwired
It's not about #hashtags, it's about structured metadata for the Semantic Web, of which hashtags are just a small subset and primitive type. Why Robert Scoble is probably wrong about this: let him name a search engine which can identify and separate the pro-hashtag from the anti-hashtag comments in this discussion. #hashtags+
- Sean McBride
Ok so if they're dead then why are people still using them? And is there really a replacement that can work just as well? (No, friendfreed groups don't count since it's outside of Twitter). Twitter Search does to some degree, but hashtags are great to group content that may not have mentioned a searchable term otherwise.
- R. Alexander Spoerer
I think short and useful hashtags will be great for taxonomy of microblogging.
- Alp
I think hashtags are what FF needs to incorporate to make the filters truly useful. Allow community tagging (with approval) and you get more useful organizing of data. Search for Roku vs. #Roku to get an idea.
- Kevin Kuphal
"Rooms" can be used for tagging. Any message can be addressed to one or more rooms as well as your public feed. FriendFeed is different from Twitter in the sense that you can post messages to rooms without posting it your own feed. On Twitter, everything appears in your own feed. It's a must.
- Meryn Stol
sms compatible public micromessages are the tightest, most basic communications platform we have. it is only going to become more ubiquitous. in-line tags indicate relevance, and allow for permission-less participation in something while you are typing. they are human-prefiltering and they can be used anywhere you type. this is only going to become more important overtime. this is standards level not service level issue. search and in-line tags will co-exist and integrate together.
- Michael Lewkowitz
Excellent analysis by Michael Lewkowitz. Robert needs to reexamine this subject.
- Sean McBride
oh I thought hashtags were being celebrated in growing semantic web - is that not the case any more? #hashtagsaredead
- Julian Edward
Julian -- Robert had a sudden gust of "inspiration." :)
- Sean McBride
I didn't know people were using hashtags for conversations. What I like tags for is so you can browse a pre-existing taxonomy of what people find important at a concept level. Tag clouds. You can't do a general word cloud because there's too many and it takes too much semantic knowledge to map to equivalence classes. By a community using RoR, for example, as a tag then you can browse and easily find all Ruby on Rails posts without already having to know all possible forms of RoR.
- Todd Hoff
I think its on the way but we're not there yet. If you search for a term on twitter and dont use a hash, then you will get thousands of minor relevant terms. Using hash tags at least lets the educated user let you know the central theme of the tweet. (i really do hate that term, so i must be getting old). Sites like friendfeed are setting the standard for true real time search...
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- James Ketchell
Hashtags cut through a massive amount of irrelevant clutter.
- Sean McBride
In an extremely inefficient way that also looses a lot of relevant items.
- JP Maxwell
It doesn't lose any relevant items -- one is free to search on the full text of documents in tandem with metadata.
- Sean McBride
Hashtags aren't necessary in a world of full-text indexing, but they impose a small amount of keyword discipline. And they make it a lot easier to track a multi-part conversation. I think as Twitter grows they become much more useful.
- Jeff Newfeld
So I guess what we're agreeing here is that hashtags are de-hashed, we use tags or keywords. Just like we did before Twitter appeared.
- Jon Lebkowsky
I agree with jeff. It differentiates text search from what the actual content is about. I don't wanna search all text, justbyhose conversations that are relvant to this subject. And follow Friday is an excellent example of this.
- Roberto Bonini
To many people are looking at hashtags in the context of a a FriendFeed user. But hashtags are only relevant in the Twitter world. A # tag give a 1 charecter symbol letting whom ever is reading the tweet that the following charracters represent a search/subject term. This prevents confusion. Look at it this way if I ending a tweet with "Robert Scoble" people might thing I'm directing my...
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- ChiliMac
Wow so much to sort through however I have to completely disagree in the context of Twitter usage. IMO, hashtags are not dead. Their use and purpose has just evolved. They are no longer relevant for search however are a mechanism for grouping. Pitch a topic and a hashtag will naturally form to focus the topic and keep conversation on point.
- Rob Jensen
I think they just help people search. Click on the hashtag and see the search. Otherwise keywords are searchable in any event with the hashtag.
- Bill Romanos
tags won't die. hashtags might, tho.
- MikeAmundsen
I keep forgetting to use hashtags. People should just search for keywords of interest to them.
- Morton Fox
A recent hashtag, #iagaymarriage, is being used effectively for information exchange, meetings, etc. Here, it's very efficient to agree on a single term for this purpose.
- Stan Scott
I never really used them.
- Ernie Oporto
If everyone comes to a spontaneous consensus about a hashtag (e.g. #followfriday), it works. Hashtags start out used by a few and get adopted by more...if it's useful and makes sense.
- CAJ, somewhere else
Hash tags are speaking machine language
- Jeremiah Owyang
germans still love them
- kosmar
Tagging tweets has for a long time been something I thought would add value to Twitter. Hashtags may be a convenient solution for some to organize conversations, but they're 1) ugly and 2) take up space. Being able to tag tweets would empower Search.Twitter. Many users may think hashtags are the same as tags, but tags offer true metadata. It would be in Twitter's interest to roll out tagging sooner rather than later imo.
- phil baumann
hashtags should be dead. they're space-consuming and redundant.
- Karoli
Not to mention the work that goes into making them uniform for a particular event. Small I know, but still an issue.
- Angela
yeah, I've never really been able to get into 'em... the #followfriday one is the only one I've been able to ever type...
- Krikit Media
I still think people are too lazy to remember to work their keyword into a post on Twitter and while this feed stream is cool, I don't see how every event will remember to create a FF stream on their website. Plus, how do I pick up on that if I'm sitting in room with only my BlackBerry or iPhone? It's kind of essential to be able to use these tools in the form their were intended at the moment. Twitter is SMS. FF is a web stream. #BlackBerry #iPhone #FF #Twitter #socialmedia #haveipissedyouoffyet?
- Michael Sommermeyer
Robert, PLEASE write up a post on this and deflect some of this criticism that keeps getting heaped on me. I don't think I explained it well enough and my misinterpretations seems to have gotten a lot of peoples' knives out. :(
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Chris If you get people to take their knives out then you got a reaction. That's the most any writer can hope for.
- MarkCarras
a) Threaded convos like this can be too much. This is what I expect to see when I visit a hashtag page, blog, or forum. The rest of the time, I'm content to see thoughts of people I sub to. b) These judgments seem to be based on twitter implementation. hashes ~link~ in identica. if one is used, you can click it, skim what others are saying, then return to your stream. They also build clouds: Public Clouds, Profile Clouds, & Group Clouds. One glance gives an instant feel for what's on peoples' minds.
- exador23
c) I believe hashtags are just a step toward semantic linking. The !bangtag (for identica groups) takes another small step: as used, it's essentially a ~subscribeable~ hashtag, delivered real-time to your personal stream when used. Eventually I hope the # & ! will be hidden. It's the ~link~ that's important, the char is for SW. Hopefully the final step will be the SW links for you. My 2c. peace.
- exador23
sorry. figured I should give an example. Imagine the ! and #'s are gone & you just have the links: http://identi.ca/notice... And how useful is it to have metadata like this when considering if you want to follow someone: http://pikchur.com/iso Note these clouds evolve continually & each tag is a link.
- exador23
Curious. Considering Jeremiah's point about writing machine language and Robert's suggestion that hashtags are dead (in the context of search), should @replies also be killed off? I mean, the @username convention is useful, but super nerdy. Shouldn't we just move to full/real names?
- Chris Messina
but both # and @ tags both show intention, which natural language doesn't.
- ryan
I'm at Pete's Coffee & Tea (370 Fourth Street, Harrison, SF) .
Man i so miss Peets. One of the highlights of living in the bay area.
- James Ketchell
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