"We've come a long way since Microsoft embedded Internet Explorer in the Windows operating system and was deemed a monopolist, but that won't stop the big players from playing favorites with their own applications and giving you reasons to stick around." Makes you wonder if the EU comission will be happy about this? - Roberto Bonini
With Android only being only a few weeks away, I do not think this is a coincidence. Both Apple and Opera have linked their mobile and desk based browsers - move over Google are on their way. - jon bradford
I think they believed the ancient alchemists could. Too bad we don't have rumors of cave men with iphones. - Ranjit Mathoda
Before people figured out the difference between compounds and atoms, maybe some alchemists really believed they could. I don't remember any concrete discussions of this though. Maybe it was just fund-raising/politics/vaporware? - Mitchell Tsai
common theory at one time was the earth was flat and the center of the universe... I guess part of evolution includes loosing faith in what can and can't be done or true - nick carrasco
It wasn't just lead but base metals - it was part of the theory that everything was linked and it was a question of finding the rights answers to transmute things. The other main goal was to find the elixir of life which would cure all illness and give youth. As Mitchell says, before a better understanding of how things were made it was belived that just about any substance could be altered with the correct process. - Colin Walker via fftogo
Paul, have you read Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, particularly Quicksilver? - DeWitt Clinton
Modern-day alchemy is alive and well (or not so well at the moment) on Wall Street. Wall Street firms have made their money by taking typically under-performing assets and slicing and dicing them in to a dizzying array of products that get rated investment-grade (AAA) meaning sellable and gold. Humans will continue to try to produce gold from lead from now until the end of the species, guaranteed. - Morgan
DeWitt: Quicksilver made my head spin. It was an awesome book. Weird in places, but awesome nonetheless. I plan on picking up the rest of the cycle soon. - Harvey Simmons
Interesting question. Maybe the western alchemists were pragmatic but the eastern neighbors were more interested in immortality. I hope this is correct (from memory) - LPH
Regarding Quicksilver - the descriptions of phosphorous and its uses were worth the price of admission right there, DeWitt. - Phil (scribkin)
I find it amusing that now we really can transmute lead into gold, using a particle accelerator to knock three protons out of the lead nucleus, but the energy required to do so costs more than the resulting gold is worth. So though we can do it, it isn't very interesting. - Denton Gentry
I used to read Stephenson's books, but then they got too intimidatingly long. I guess I'm not a very fast reader. - Paul Buchheit
Both. They believed that they could meet their goal eventually, if they did things right in the lab. Just like all of us. :-) - Daniel Dulitz
They wouldn't have believed in just about anything that happened over the last hundred years either. Alchemy would have seemed as plausible as a cell-phone or nanotech at the time. - Nicholas Molnar
This wasn't really a historical question so much as a reflection on their mindset. I just wonder to what extent they actually expected to create gold vs liked tinkering in the lab (and creating gold was a good way to fund their tinkering). The same personality types probably exist across different times and cultures, so it's interesting to think about what roles they will occupy in those cultures. - Paul Buchheit
don't know if you're going to get to the bottom of this on FF, but people believed some pretty stupid stuff back then. - Mark Schulz
actually it's been proven that if you smash one more atom of lead into a larger chunk of lead you get gold ... so maybe there were simply ahead of their time? - JohnBfromMemphis via twhirl
There were no doubt people who liked to tinker and just called themselves alchemists because it was the word that best described what they did, but I would have to assume that most of them thought their goals were achievable (and it is, just not with their technology). I suppose you could just as easily ask if televangelists really think they're acting on behalf of god, or if they just think it's a good way to raise money to fund their lifestyles? - Gabe Schaffer
I find organic alchemistry more interesting. bring back the dead. we can regrow old tissue? - Noah David Simon
If you are into Alchemist and Anime, you should watch Full Metal Alchemist. That got me started on wiki-ing the history of Alchemists. - Winston Teo
I guess there were at least both types of alchemists: those who expected to create gold and those who expected to monetize the expectations of others. I'm mostly interested in the third type. - Eugene
I have better analogy. Compare turning lead into gold with attempts to create AI - Phil Smirnov
It seems unusual to me that the salesman personality is crossed with the tinkering personality. But maybe it is less unusual that I might think. - Clare Dibble
Clare: salesman + tinkering = Edison? - Gabe Schaffer
Yeah, just like people whose goal is to cure cancer, help people live forever, prove P=NP or whatever, they have to like to tinker for its own sake, because actually achieving their goal is very unlikely. But the people who just like to tinker, with no goal, rarely accomplish big things because big things are too hard. So I think the wacky goal and satisfaction from the process are both required in order to make progress. - Daniel Dulitz
Your post was surely not a serious question, but there were really many different groups of people which we have labeled "alchemists" after the fact; the quest for transmutation is a stereotype of ours and by no means a universal pursuit of alchemy. As far as I can tell, in those times and places where alchemists were funded, it was usually not for transmutation work but for more immediately useful contributions (explosives, medicines, paints, etc). - ⓞnor
agree have always bn amzd by federer's ability to stay focussed whn so dominant - look frwrd to cing what nadal brings out in him - Marco (aureliusmaximus)
Unfortunately, I could only read updates from the bbc service and couldn't actually watch the match as I am in the Alps on holidays. I did manage to rent a holiday cabin with wifi to my wife's dismay ;-) - David Heffernan
no... David.... you are so geek that even in the mountain you get a wifi connection LOL. - Xavier Donat
Xav, any problem with wifi on the mountains? ;-) - Carol Linden
Awesome match! I thought Nadal would close him out early but Federer hung strong and now looks good. Not a tennis fan but this is AMAZING! - JMaultasch
no breaks of serve since the 2nd set - this could go on a long time - jon bradford
The quality of the hitting between Rafa and Roger is amazing, this is a classic match!! - Joe Dawson
Is there any service out there that lists other types of "you should hurry up and check this out before it's over"? Would think this would be a fun use for Twitter - Adam Kazwell
@scobleizer loses his IPhone in DC, you lose N95 in Paris?? - Mark Forman
If you can hold off and buy an new iphone (on pay as you go) in the UK on O2 - $600 and 6 months free data ... take back to the US and jail break - jon bradford via Alert Thingy
My company are partners with QuickBooks, if you run into any problems let me know and I should be able to provide assistance - Joe Dawson
Hope they don't use the argument, "well it's because 75% of our customers use IE!" (note the dropping number) - Glenn Batuyong
IE Team to world: We don't need to follow standards because we are the Internet. And we have a blue icon. and it has an e. That yellow thing orbiting us? that's the world. deal with it. ;) - Sam Levine
Oh, damn, I won't hear about Smugmug anymore. Heheh. Speaking of which, how did we meet? Was it your PR firm? Nope. It was a chance encounter at the Ritz by my house. We must do more Ritz lunches!!! They are the key to great PR, I'm convinced! - Robert Scoble
completely agree with DeWitt, all I eed is a weekend free and I'm gonna start using SmugMug properly - keep you're eyes on http://phillprice.smugmug.com everyone! - Phill Price
We live in a competitive environment. Think about your competition proactively engaging the key journalists in your market everyday, creating PR events, etc. Put their products with all the PR support against your product standing on its own. So even if you don't engage a 'PR firm', I suppose you should continue doing the 'PR' yourself and keep all communication channels open. - Palin Ningthoujam
And one more point is that everybody thinks his/her product is the best. The key is in the positioning. - Palin Ningthoujam
Palin, I think you make a good point, but I have to wonder if our time isn't better served making a better product than making PR waves. We have a very strong recurring revenue business (subscriptions and prints/gifts), and most of our new sales come from word-of-mouth, so making the product better and the customer happier sound like the best way to win in our niche. - Don MacAskill
There is that worry that we might get sidelined, but we're seeing more and more journalists reaching out to us. And when they do, I think they're thrilled that they get to speak to the two founders rather than some PR rep who's not an expert about the product or the field. I guess only time will tell. - Don MacAskill
@Palin: Don is right, especially for a company like SmugMug. The work he's done on his blog, and networking with key influencers is more relevant than any effort from a PR firm. - Louis Gray
@Robert: good point. And our biggest story ever, front page on the LA Times, wasn't due to our PR firm. It was friends of mine networking me to Jessica Guynn (and then Jessica being persistent enough about the story that I finally called her back :) And btw, I'm always up for more Ritz lunches. :) - Don MacAskill
If SmugMug made it easier to organize your photos I'd be on it much more. Right now I find it very hard and time consuming to add a photo to multiple galleries. I think this is the one thing that Zooomr has nailed with SmartSets - Dave Cohen
@Dave: Stay tuned. I think you'll see something about this fairly soon. - Don MacAskill
Fantastic! Just goes to show why you don't need a PR firm - Dave Cohen
Fire them. I just moved all my photos off Flickr to you.:-) - Francine Hardaway
I love this: "Tamagotchi effect: If you take care of your users, the right investors will rally around you and talented hackers will line up to work for you." Graham +1 ;-) - Erhan Erdogan
I like that :). And I appreciated this paragraph in particular: "The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. Anyone can adopt 'Don't be evil.' The catch is that people will hold you to it." Friendfeed, clearly, has opened up with clear expectations to "be good." People will hold it (and them, the employees) to that standard, and I think that's awesome :) - Adam Lasnik
I wish more nonprofits operated using the Tamagotchi effect as a basic operating principle. - Allan Benamer via twhirl
Be good! Reminds me of E.T, good post I also like their transparency it gives me confidence in their vision and objectives! - Joe Dawson
Take care of this user please and make it so when I jump from the normal search to the advanced search, my search query won't be lost :) [also, please give me the link "Search all of FriendFeed »" even when the other search found some results] - Philipp Lenssen
do you guys need a marketer? Or does that not fall into 'be good" ar ar - anna
@Philipp The Friendfeed Feedback room is your friend :) - Erica Baker
@Paul: Invent a new slogan for FF. You 'll be needing that in future. - Varun Mahajan
"Be Good" produces "make really Good" software applications! woo hoo! Neat article. Very inspiring to see someone take a stand on "Do No Evil" and then go one step further and commit to "Be Good"! - love it! excellent example and role model for aspiring Web App Devs!! Keep up the "good" work!! :-) - Susan Beebe
I don't know why, but when they described PB as "cherubic" I just had to laugh. It was so cute! - April Buchheit
@April - same here! when they described PB as "cherubic" - awesome! angel face!! ha, ha!! - Susan Beebe
I find it fascinating that there are no comments on the actual Times Blog post but plenty o' comments here and acknowledgement by well over 100 people. Friendfeed power right there. - Jason Toney
Jason, good point, one of the things I value most about FF is this interactivity. - susan mernit
I finally read this. Nice article, Paul. Good luck. - Robert Konigsberg
That Paul Graham's article is one of his best - so true and succinct. I guess, the more social the online world becomes, the better (as in "less evil") will companies need to be. - Nenad Nikolic
Simply awesome. SmugMug are at the forefront of all this cloud business, and Don is a guru at explaining it. Great post. - Mike Cannon-Brookes
"Thanks to Amazon, the software and hardware that processes all of your high-resolution photos and high-definition video is totally scalable without any human intervention." - I think the employees at Amazon would disagree. Just because you can't see behind the curtain doesn't mean we live in an age without one... yet.. - Brandon Werner
@Brandon. Thank you for striking a blow for all of us oppressed workers in the cloud - Adewale Oshineye
"Hrrm...interesting. Well I know exactly what you're thinking, and you're right, they forgot to make a "Jesus and little boy playing Halo online" model. Hopefully that's one they're working on. Now you know how much I hate to get all religious, so I'll just say this -- Jesus was on my swim team in grade school and I think he may have cheated. For one, all he ever did was run on water -- which is not technically swimming. And secondly, it was the 10-12 age bracket and he was like 30 and had a beard." - Bret Taylor
I can't figure if this is serious or a joke. The latter I hope. - Brian Sullivan
Unfortunately, there is a huge "Christian" branding effort out there. It's disgusting to me, and I'm a Christian. Look hard enough, and you'll probably find Jesus underwear. Might even find Jesus condoms. It's the same as green-washing to me. Unethical businesspeople found marketing buzzwords and gimmicks that sell, and they're exploiting them. - Raoul Pop
Jesus is just all right with me (but he's got as much a hand in helping you swing anything as I do) - Michael W. May
On further reflection: Jesus needs to choke up more on that bat. And is that girl seriously trying to tackle Jesus? Doesn't she know He went all-conference last year? - Mark Trapp
Incredibly strange but also rather entertaining! How many yards does Jesus usually rush for? - Nicholas Kreidberg
That robe would get in the way, but he would be awsome on a flooded field. - Russellreno
omg, I've had the hockey one for years at work. Lauren got it as a gag gift for ray, who hates gag gifts, so I ended up with it. - Misha
Believe it or not, I actually have one of these on my mantle right now. It is of Jesus tearing up the slopes on skis: http://flickr.com/photos/sacca... - Sacca
Wait! Twitter was back up? I keep missing it. - Harvey Simmons
Yes, Twitter was up for a bit, but I couldn't use it because it was too slow. - Morton Fox
This is getting past ridiculous; we wouldn't have sat still for such an appalling record of availability by another service. So, Dave, how about that distributed Twitter architecture you proposed, was there any interest to help set it up? - Asteris Masouras
Asteris -- yes there was interest, but generally the people with the products are scared of pissing Twitter off. This I don't understand -- I think the Twitter folk would welcome a bit of redundancy. Everything they've said publicly and done with the Twitter API indicates that they believe federation is in their future, but mostly the tech industry is scared. Where are the swashbucklers? Where's the adventure in venture capital? :-) - Dave Winer
I'll believe that Twitter Inc. hearts federation when I see them take definite steps in that direction. If Microsoft & Yahoo are anything to go by, corps that live & die by the mass adoption of their services are anything but cool with federating & open standards. Only their users can keep them on the straight & narrow, or provide scaffolding for alternatives. As to your quasi-rhetorical questions about the guts of the industry, I wonder too :-) - Asteris Masouras
"What if this "number inflation" suddenly sweeps through all Google apps? Will I seem more popular on GMail even though nobody e-mails me there? Will miles be added on to every trip when I get directions from Google Maps?" - Louis Gray
I've been experiencing that a lot tonight, Louis. The sidebar will say I have 200 items, but the main area gives me what you pictured. I was able to clear it up by signing out of Google and signing back in. Annoying to say the least. - Mark Trapp
Phew. Not just me. I like the Google Reader app and the team, which is why it's in part fun to show this. They do a great job, but that's an amusing bug. - Louis Gray
GReader must not like you guys, I haven't had even the slightest hint of trouble at all today. - Shawn Kirsch
and here I am with FeedDemon working flawlessly as usual :) - Steven Hodson
Steven, whatever it takes to make you happy and cranky-free. We are at your service. - Louis Gray
Shawn, have you let GReader get recklessly high in unread items? At one point, I was well over a thousand unread entries, and was chalking up the weirdness to GReader's (not so) silent protest. - Mark Trapp
Scratch that, now it's going goofy on me. And yes Mark, I've had well over 3000 unread items before, and as they kept on coming (really busy news day), it took me about 6 hours to get through them. - Shawn Kirsch
I want more options instead of just like. Such as "dream of seeing this." I considered it a success to have my reader under 100 once this month. - Cyndy
So Cyndy, how does that happen? I check in multiple times throughout the day and bring it to zero. - Louis Gray
Dunno, Louis... more feeds? Gah. 300 more in the time I was making a child lunch for school. It's WEDNESDAY people! Stop writing! Wednesday is supposed to be a SLOW catch-up day! - Cyndy
Google Reader has been acting weird all morning. Only now has it's stop giving me error messages. - Paul Grav
I've got the same problem >1000 new items and no unread items? Meh. - Sally Church
yeah, GR has been doing the odd on me today too. Not catching up with the read items properly. - laurence timms via twhirl
You've been secretly cut-off dude. Did you buy someone at the reader team a caff instead of a decaf when you were there? - Charlie Anzman
Sounds like something you late nighters faced! :-) Maybe Google did some maintenance overnight thinking you night owls would be in bed. - Hutch Carpenter
I gave up on Google Reader - and all readers - a while ago. Much better to actually go to blog pages than to see a denatured version in a meta-browser. - Edward Vielmetti
I agree with Edward, but then again I don't check 1,000 feeds like Scoble does. Techmeme, reddit, digg and tweets are all the recommends I need. - Justin Gardner via twhirl
I live in the land of the feed reader. I'm right there with Scoble 1000+ feeds to read every day. And I have the scattered across several online feed readers (I like to play around), doesn't stop me from adding more feeds, I don't even flinch. - Shawn Kirsch
As an information junkie, I regularly check out close to 500 feeds: saying just go to the blogs is like telling a heroin addict to just chew gum. - Mark Trapp
Even I was confused with my GReader for sometime. But it got fixed soon - Varun Mahajan
Google Readers been screwy alot reacently- at the moment I can watch new shared items come in from friends, it flashes yellow, and then when I click there's nothing new. Very irritating, but when it works, it's awesome so I don't mind too much, - Fearghas
This just happened to me - I hope "screwiness" means a new feature coming. - Vince DeGeorge
This was one of the main reasons I switched to a desktop reader. I was sick of being beholden to when Google decided to check for updates. - Tris Hussey via twhirl
I get messages like that occasionally. Usually combined with the old "j key doesn't work anymore" trick. I take it to mean that I need a break. If I log out and walk away, it seems okay later. Strange. - Harvey Simmons
@Tris +1 Well, that and the fact that they couldn't seem to count higher than 1000, which seemed ironic for a company named Google. - Cyndy
Finally! Some coverage on another FF guy. I'm so tired of seeing that Paul guy all over the place. :) - April Buchheit
Yeah, it's too bad they didn't do best young entrepreneurs under 2^5. - Paul Buchheit
And matching shirts, also? Does FriendFeed buy clothes for its staff? :) - Ontario Emperor
great quote that gives the reason behind release early, release often: "Getting things done is often more important than getting things right. When you are creating an entirely new product, getting things right without direct feedback from users is virtually impossible." - Adam Kazwell
It's not quite that convenient yet, but the FriendFeed bookmarklet gets you closer: http://friendfeed.com/share/bo.... I usually copy a section of text then click the "Share on FriendFeed" and paste it into the comment box. - Paul Buchheit
I do the same copy and paste routine, it would be extremely convenient to be able to highlight text on a site, click on the "Share on FriendFeed" bookmarklet, and have my highlighted text automatically pasted in the comments area with quotation marks around it. - Jatin
Something like that would only save me a single shifted keypress to be honest. Using Autocopy addon for firefox results in having selected text automatically copied to the clipboard, so I select text, click "Share on FF" and press CTRL-V in the comment box and there you have it. Job done. - Slippy Lane
