Facebook dev wiki is horrible! I tried to correct these where possible with FBML Essentials. Hopefully developers can take content from FBML Essentials and fix the wiki when this is done. - Jesse Stay
I would like to see them succeed. While I find the FF deluge very nice and useful, twitter is just so danged easy, and it's a bit easier to keep up with the people you really want to. Now, if FF implements something to accomodate that....hmmmm... - Joel Gray via twhirl
In the meantime, @replies that don't start at the beginning of a line and @replies via SMS are also down - Jesse Stay
No one who is on friendfeed tonight should be driving :) - Gavin
I wish someone thought of this when I still had a babysitter! - Michelle Martinez
You hide a Flickr entry because it's NSFW, take a drink. You see an entry from more than two weeks ago come up again, take a drink. The entry from more than two weeks ago is Eddie Murphy's huge head, chug it! - Mike Doeff
Now that's a drinking game that everyone can "win". :-D - David Cook
Let the game end! Please, I feel sick already. (should have replaced the beer by applejuice). - Ton Zijp
Louis, don't give in! You and I will be the only sober ones here. ;-) - Jesse Stay
That's really good stuff Jeremy. (takes drink for making comment #12 on this post) - Hutch Carpenter
Jesse, I was planning on consuming a lot of Diet Coke. :-) - Louis Gray
Added you. Also new to FF. I think it might be information overload, though... - John Storer II via twhirl
I added you two weeks ago. Guys and Gals - use the hide button to reduce the info overload. - Russellreno
yea I am trying to figure out how to make my friend feed posts go out to twitter - Jason Stephens
Jason: why? post to twitter and bring them in. - klecu
klecu: because then I have to leave friendfeed, I want to do everything in here...when I share I want it to go out to all my services too.... - Jason Stephens
I think you've got it backwards. FriendFeed is drawing in everything, not sending out. - John Storer II via twhirl
exactly my point...I think it could be a twitter replacement though...i like posting to hear better then posting on twitter. I'd like the messages I share on here to go out to my twitter followers to help grow my subscriber list - Jason Stephens
So is it Ping.fm that does that (posts to Twitter) then, not FriendFeed? - Jeff Kopp
That is, of course, a very valid example. Unfortunately, It's sort of like the AIM/ICQ Fiasco. All your friends are on AIM... why should they switch, even when AIM now sucks? I just got into FF, so I am not sure it could handle the excess traffic like twitter is dealing with. - John Storer II via twhirl
The method to comment and reply is much better on friendfeed, I think this definitly should either be bought by twitter or find a way to cross integrate them better. I see the option to "also send this comment as an @reply twitter from jpstephens" but thats not EXACTLY what I mean - Jason Stephens
Jason: I totally agree, if you can post out to all your socials then someone tell me how. If not, then FF should have the option or I smell yet another social network for social networks. ;) - Mark
You could try Mahalo share to post to a lot of your socials at once, but wouldn't this create a bit of a spam effect to FF if all of those socials are showing up here? Interested to hear comments from anyone with that experience, because of course you don't want to spam your FF friends, but not everyone is using FF... conundrum - Dave Earley
Glad you got it Kevin. Friendfeed lends it self to more engaging conversation and sharing. - Larry Kless
Problem is, you have to Friend back. :) - l0ckergn0me
Did Scoble block you for begging for followers? - Ryan Kuder
yeah there's real potential. but it's so damn hard to manage your friend list! same as with twitter - this is a huge barrier to the usability of the site. there should be a subscribe/unsubscribe button next to every post from anybody. - Mickipedia
Friendfeed is awesome Kev. Everything at your fingertips. - Vipin Chamakkala
This is a common refrain - people admitting that it takes them months to get FriendFeed. And for those of us who aren't honest enough to publicly admit this, it takes us months to use FriendFeed effectively. Is there a way to reduce this learning curve, so people can productively use FriendFeed from day 1? - Ontario Emperor via fftogo
There are all sorts of things they could do to improve FriendFeed. I guess we have to remember it is version 1.0 - Jonathan Beckett
You don't get it Kevin unless you're willing to friend us back. I believe same goes for Twitter. Why add you to our community if you're not willing to listen to us? - Jesse Stay
So the question now is: Will Kevin friend us back? All of us? Or selective friending? - Winston Teo
"Representative Culberson, very great explanation - I agree, this is
essential and will affect not only our government, but we as bloggers. I'm
proud to have people like you represent Texas." - Jesse Stay
What exactly is "unofficial" content? If Culberson wants to say that his honorable colleague from the state of Indiana is a jerk, couldn't that be designated as unofficial communications, and thus posted wherever he wants to post it? - Ontario Emperor
I believe he says only family business and personal outings can be deemed "unofficial" content, if I read his Tweets right. - Jesse Stay via twhirl
@Louis, what was the tipping point for you where you went from 1k to 4-6k/mo out of curiosity? - Jesse Stay
Jesse, a few tipping points... the most obvious was when I wrote "10 suggestions to improve Google Reader" in March of 2007. http://tinyurl.com/6rro59 Scoble and others linked to it, and it was my first Techmeme headline ever. - Louis Gray
Other things contributing were when I switched from RapidWeaver to Blogger, and could post more frequently, with flexibility, getting indexed by Techmeme, and of course, Friendfeed! - Louis Gray
I think the key goal for any up-and-coming blogger, based on what you're showing, is to get some big A-listers to link to you and that will get you recognized by Techmeme. As soon as that happens, more people begin to recognize you. Thanks for sharing that, Louis! - Jesse Stay via twhirl
Turning serious for a moment, Louis has been sharing his monthly statistics for...months... - Ontario Emperor via fftogo
I think being transparent is a good idea, especially for anybody who feels real "small" and is looking up to where I'm at, or, even better, to realize how small I am and how I would have to look up to others. - Louis Gray
I put titles on every new video now, and I've found that I'm getting MUCH more traffic. Look at this page and see how my videos stand out vs. most of the other top Qik users: http://qik.com/browse/people?t... You can put titles on every video (the Qik software has an option for you to enter a title). I take the time to do this before starting a video and it's always worth it. - Robert Scoble
do you mean you can put on titles from the phone app - I've always wanted to do this and add comments, but don't seem to be able to till afterwards - Ivan Pope via twhirl
so I go to Qik and it tells me I need to do an auto update (to .70) so I download it but it won't install, is telling me the certificate is not in date .... gaaaagh ... did you update for this functionality? - Ivan Pope via twhirl
Agreed - it will be a huge mistake for Twitter to close the XMPP stream. While only a few people use it now, developers will flock to new ideas for their product if they can keep it open. - Jesse Stay
With the uniqueness of Plurk, I think it is quickly becoming one of the "Apple's" of the microblogging space. It's interesting to see this community bloom. They have done a great job building niche community out of this platform. - Jesse Stay
Agree with Susan - no surpise. When you read peices by Corvida, it's as though she speaking to you. Her personality really comes through and that's what makes her writing so great! - Elliott via Alert Thingy
Sasha - thanks for the reminder of the grand effect master feed! I'm going to go sign up for that right away. - J. Phil
J. Phil - much better way to track them all from one place. The only ptob is that you can't see the authors and original blog in the master feed. Sarah passed this bug to somebody to fix, but it's still not. Maybe you have more influence :) - Sasha Kovaliov via twhirl
Congrats to Corvida. I stopped reading RSS feeds a long time ago though. I prefer my news filtered through the social filter that is FriendFeed. - Thomas Hawk
Hey FriendFeed, 99% of your users don't know where the store is because there's no link to it anywhere on your site. Help your happy users be your walking advertisements and make it more visible. - Louis Gray via Bookmarklet
I am sure if I walked in wearing one of these my partner would assault me. She hates my obsession with the site and doesn't understand why I frequent it so regularly! - Joe Dawson
Anybody like to send some free schwag halfway 'round the world? (I can't buy from cafepress 'coz the shipping costs are usually greater than the item costs. sigh) - Yuvi
i need one in black perhaps with a heavy metal devil's horn thrown in - Cee Bee
heck, allow users to design their own. - Kyle Lacy
Ok, I need to buy a FF shirt el pronto! - Susan Beebe
Anyone can create a CafePress store with anyone's logo, and it's hard to tell who's reaping the profits. So I wouldn't use this as a way to "give back" to the service. - Paul Whitaker
Paul, this is the official store, not a fan site. - Louis Gray
Thanks for sharing Louis - now my baby can be a true Swag magnet ;) - Jesse Stay
The issue isn't necessarily traffic though - the issue is they had to take the entire site down to make a change. Hopefully they're working on that, too. - Jesse Stay
How on earth would Robert have time to create a fictitious person and all of the user accounts and posts that go with that person, making them look real, AND have time to participate on all of his own social accounts? - Jeff P. Henderson
@Jeff: He can! He is, afterall, Loubert Groble! :) - Yuvi
Jeff: not to mention being on the Gillmor Gang and raising one boy with one woman and twins with another. What a life! - Robert Scoble
Yuvi, that was the classic comment I made that connected Scoble to me in the first place. Good detective work. - Louis Gray
I totally assume Scoble doesn't remember that comment? - Yuvi
Yuvi: I remember that, yes. The Engadget piece is when Valleywag really started digging into me. That was a major mistake of mine to write that piece. Never beg for links! Or followers! :-) - Robert Scoble
@Scoble: Heh :) I should redo a statbot on Scobleizer - it's been a coupla years since I did it first :) - Yuvi
Louis, so where is this proclaimed, "store" where I can get the FriendFeed onesies? I want!!! - Jesse Stay
Nooo nooo sillies! Those two guys are really unique! Yep, they both make my FF really fun, techie and interesting to say the least! But yeah...they're NOT twins! hehehe! - Susan Beebe
@Susan Beebe: I assume you haven't been to the Louis Gray Facts room? :P - Yuvi
Yuvi LOL! you're fuelin' the funny flames! - Susan Beebe
I watched the video and I'm still uncertain. I mean, Robert COULD be a ventriloquist.... did you actually see him on that video? Couldn't it be an actor? Ha ha ha! - Mark Dykeman
Robert is showing some guy that claims to be called Louis Gray in a QIK video and calling that proof? Hah. Robert its smart for you to create a new persona so that you can inhabit that persona once you get tired of the old Scobleizer gig. Louis Gray is a perfect name for that. Congratulations on your vision, I love the new persona Robert. It is thoughtful, critical, fresh, and a bit edgier in an intellectual way than the old more sensationalistic persona (which I also like for other reasons)! - Elliott Ng
I left a comment agreeing with you on this post. - Robert Scoble
Linking may be less important but as I've said elsewhere the alternatives do not always provide quality traffic to go with the quantity. - Colin Walker via fftogo
'Like' * 3!!! You said what we've all wanted to say, Louis - thanks for this great post. - Jesse Stay via twhirl
Interesting... and I wonder what this is going to do to Google's rankjuice flow model... if linking to others as part of a mutual info/attention ecomony starts to decline in importance and value. - Tom Beardshaw
@tombeardshaw, you can see how old-school google is .. - gregory lent
There's now a pretty good dialog in the Disqus comments on Louis' blog as well. Good reading - Charlie Anzman
@louisgray this is totally wrong. Linking is one of the most powerful signals you can send to Google about your importance and authority in your topical area. I will leave a bigger comment on your post but basically just read @DannySullivan comment carefully because he said it well. And he should know. Especially brand new bloggers NEED high quality links to even be found in Google. What % of your traffic is through Google? 60%? 75%? Enuf said. - Elliott Ng
@gregorylent maybe... searching people and what they've found here vs searching pages and their content on google? I find FF more useful for finding the latest content. Google still rules as an archive though. - Tom Beardshaw
@Elliott - I think the point of the post was that Louis is getting traffic from FF, google etc rather than from blogs linking to his posts. - John
I guess this could be seen as a Tipping Point for your blog, Louis. When you started out you relied on other people linking to you but now you generated enough content, authority and page rank that the referral traffic from blogs is minimal compared to what you get from Google searches. - John
John, that could be one way of looking at it. Also, year over year, a link from Scoble is about the same. I didn't get linked to from the big guys, aside from him, in 2007. I would get about 200 visits from his stories last year, and the FriendFeed one drove about 350 this year, with other mentions being in the 70 range. Also, this post wasn't supposed to be about me, per se, but about how the biggest blogs drove such a small amount of traffic, relative to social media, in general. - Louis Gray
IMHO, it was always the case that you got more comments the more you commented on other people's blogs. Sort of symbiotic relationship. FF seems to just be the next incarnation of the same rule. FF really is just a single portal to view a member's complete content stream and comment inline. - Shawn Smith
It would be interesting to take a look at a relatively new blogger who is active in social media to see what kind of numbers they are getting. - John
I agree with John above. I went through this with my niche blog. Now, my biggest worry is to keep advancing my game so I stay on the other side of the tipping point. Social Media is a part of that game, adding other services, networks, etc are an important part as well. But they're just tools. - John Frost
I'm inclined to think that there is something much bigger going on here. - Kevin
I think what's really going on is web browsing behavior is changing. People are less inclined to click on blog links. I think louis is right - folks are relying on aggregators and search engines to find content, or they're in their reader subscribed to so many blogs following the links within articles is less appealing. - Jason Kaneshiro
I think there is a point at which what Louis says is true, but it's after his blog "arrived" in a sense. After all, a link from Mashable that only give him 77 readers isn't much when he's getting 3,000 visitors from Google that same day. But it's a ton when no one knows who he is (including Google). I agree with John above about the "Tipping Point." - Bob Caswell
Great piece describing the changing landscape for how blogs are discovered and read. Interesting that the #1 and #3 blogs that drove your referrals were posts that themselves were powered by Techmeme and Digg. You indirectly got the benefit through those services. - Hutch Carpenter
i think i have to agree here. i used to find all kinds of new sites through post links but rarely click out of google reader unless i want to comment these days. ff and twitter drive me to more new sites now. - Steve Long
This applies to those people in the thick of the blogosphere and social media, NOT to the rest of the people on the Web who don't know what all this newfangled Web 2.0 stuff is. And quite frankly, that's a good 99% of the people getting online. - Wendy
I believe I agree with the change of discovery of content, but in the end it's still a link whether it's from a blog or from an aggregator such as FriendFeed - I still click on a link. We are simply adding multiple layers (shared thru Google Reader -> FriendFeed -> actual content). - simonpure
There's no irony of it being on Techmeme. I said that's where many people find their news... so it shows the system works. - Louis Gray
Links are still *extremely* important. Your 'Google/Organic' results wouldn't have happened unless you'd established yourself as a hub and authority in your 'neighborhood'. The only way Google understands this is by looking at links: quality and quantity. In addition, you don't get full credit for links right away. It takes time for Google to fully weight the links you have, thus avoiding ephemeral link gaming strategies. - AJ Kohn
Louis, great article on the sliding landscape of traffic aggregration, but I didn't see you make mention of the quality of your visits - only volume. SU for instance offers some great volume, but I'm not seeing a lot of stickiness from that source. However, I do see the smaller referers seem to build longer lasting communities - and yes FriendFeed has offered some great interaction. - ChangeForge via twhirl
"Loic, excellent points - it really doesn't matter any more if other bloggers link to you (well, it is one more way to spread your brand, but not quite as effective). I really think the need for blogging has significantly diminished since the forthcoming of these services. Paying attention to how you can participate in these services can be far more effective than having a big blogger promote your blog (although it does get you recognized by Techmeme!)." - Jesse Stay
"Louis, I'm so glad you posted this - I've been fortunate to be linked by TechCrunch, Guy Kawasaki, you, and others, and was very surprised to see how little traffic I got from some of them (well, relatively speaking). I had almost as much traffic from a "like" on one of my articles from Scoble on FriendFeed than I did from TechCrunch. Being a headline article on Techmeme has been my all-time high (never been on Digg or Slashdot, unfortunately - that's my next goal!), at near 10 times the traffic of TechCrunch's. To give credit where it's due, while traffic wasn't *huge*, both yours and Guy Kawasaki's posts converted to a large number of RSS subscriptions, which is one of the things I care most about. I have only recently seen the likes of these types of links so I don't know how things used to be, but I was quite surprised to not see the "effect" that I've heard so many sysadmins cringe at. It also makes me wonder if the "TechCrunch" effect is a myth. This is one more reason these..." - Jesse Stay
I'm not so sure the new API elements are ready yet. The documentation is slim and there are major bugs that I'm seeing so far. We'll see if they get this fixed in time. - Jesse Stay
