Mitchell - So true!! Toby - I did look and gotta tell ya my fave is the one from space of the Russian plume going into the Pacific - Truly an amazing shot. The sarcasm was just because I haven't even finished my first cup of coffee yet! ;) - Paula Hawk
Mark: I'll have to start looking at Boston's "The Big Picture" Do they archive old ones? My favorite picture of today is not a volcano, but a constructed artwork - "Hug" http://friendfeed.com/e/c71eae... - Mitchell Tsai
Nice one Mitchell - lots of great stuff in there. - Toby Graham
Thank Mahdi Ebrahimi & Mark Douglass for finding this page. I'd only seen the Mt. Etna one at Pixdaus a few hours ago before Mark posted this... - Mitchell Tsai
is that pretty much what happened to you Loic? just wondering....via feedalizr - JohnBfromMemphis
JohnBfromMemphis yes, that is exactly what happened to me each time and straight out of business school, I threw myself in the water, and I am still swiming - Loic Le Meur
If they are truly entreprenuers they already know how to swim. If not well .... - Brian Sullivan
Thats awesome Loic, I really admire your work! I am trying to make some stuff happen.. lots of hard work and I know some good things will happen. Got some press on mashable recently so that helps .. LOL - Emmanuel Pozo
too bad custom PC assembly and repair isn't "Web2.0" that's what I'm trying to get started and that's not going to get me any press on Mashable :(...via feedalizr - JohnBfromMemphis
Hey JohnB interesting concept... trying to think of a 2.0 way of doing that .. what did you have in mind? and what would u do 2 stop them from using freakin geeksquad ... hate those clowns - Emmanuel Pozo
I'm finding that I need the thread of twitter in one place, and all of Friend Feed in another. So it's Twhirl and Feedalizer for me. ...via feedalizr - Andrew Nez
Ok Alert Thingy Makes more sense on FF then twhirl. Alert Thingy it is. I stopped using it cuz I thought it was stupid. - Tim Moore via Alert Thingy
yeah I'm done with Alert Thingy ... i'm really liking Feedalizr .. so far that is...via feedalizr - JohnBfromMemphis
- the only thing I like about it over Twhirl is the video recording and posting, which isn't that great as is. - Jesse Stay via twhirl
Lol I like the replies to this from Alert Thingy and Twhirl. - Eric Florenzano
Installed it and love it, just one thing - is it possible to use a filter to not show someone?...via feedalizr - Simon Gelfand
Very nice look - but no keyboard shortcuts? FAIL...via feedalizr - Boris Gordon
Good looking UI. Problem for me is I do like TWhirl's separate screens for Twitter and FriendFeed - and the fact that I can resize the windows. - ChangeForge via twhirl
Thanks for the tip off Scoble. This seems like a nice alternative to trial :)...via feedalizr - Jake Fudge
Sticking with Twhirl..hate the colors but I think it makes the smartest use of screen real estate. And @Loic mentioned upcoming XMPP support...thats got me excited. - Kamath via twhirl
I've used Alet Thingy and don't like it at all. this morning I am trying feedalizr and am liking it alot...via feedalizr - David Jacobs
Good - nice scroll format, filters. Ick - no resize, no options. Fail - can't select text in comments (couldn't grab cool URL). Uninstalled clean and easy. - Nancy Babyak
Everyone must have younger eyes than me because the font size is just too small and the kerning is atrocious. What's that about? I appreciate the fact the comment text is blue rather than nearly unreadable gray as it is in AlertThingy for most themes but if the font size is too small and can't be adjusted, it's a wash. I can't adjust the window horizontally. Huh. So far there are no friendfeed desktop apps that give me a better user experience than the web site itself. - Rick Powell
better use of screen space, liked the UI overall. good job feedalizr...via feedalizr - Siddharth Mitra
Stickign with Twhirl. I LIKE having FF in a seperate stream most of the time. - Soulhuntre via twhirl
It's strange that it won't let me expand the app window horizontally, only vertically. Not liking that....via feedalizr - Bob
Can't comment because wife has taken possession of lappie and i'm in digital limbo. At least i have fftogo on my N95! - Adrian Scicluna via fftogo
I like this little program, Just installed it. I think this is very useful to keep me updated on what's going on in FF!!...via feedalizr - Paul
Upon installing Alert Thingy, this was the first thing I read. I promply downloaded feedalizer, and no longer use Alert Thingy. that was fast!...via feedalizr - rambn
Afraid that this doesn't work behind corp proxies/firewalls at this point. The developer indicated that they are working on this and should have a revision in a few days. - Greg
This was helpful as I ponder switching from Twitter to FF in light of chronic downtimes. Is there any convenient way to bring those I follow on Twitter (and vice versa, hopefully) here to FF? - Len Edgerly
In last couple of weeks I have been oscillating between only using Twitter, or only using FF. But now I'm thinking I'm going into the FF camp full time. But only after creating imaginary friends for all the twitter people I follow who are sadly not on FF. - Daniel Robitaille
Does anyone know of a way to auto publish ff notes to twitter for mac? It seems like this is the last thing FF needs to keep me over here full time. - Andrew Baron
Nice. I'm the Johnny Appleseed of FriendFeed. ;) - Jason Shellen
Prediction: in one year from now the majority of FriendFeeders will be getting their FF fix (AKA consuming their FriendFeed flow) using alternative interfaces built upon the raw-by-design FF platform. - Aviv
From the article: "Friendfeed essentially renders Twitter obsolete. Steve Gillmor is wrong. The only need for Twitter is for legacy purposes. The same audience that made Twitter is slowly migrating over to Friendfeed because Friendfeed has what Twitter has, but its better and there is a lot more." - Mike Reynolds
One of the better articles I've seen written on FF lately. - Thomas Hawk
"The only need for Twitter is for legacy purposes." extremely well argued - Duncan Riley via twhirl
Thanks for the great comments yall, makes me wish I had more time to write more! - Andrew Baron
Great argument. I linked this on my twitter. - Sarah Austin
very well done andrew & agree would be nice to have the auto publish to twitter while on mac, when on windows its useful - i can't see abandoning twitter just yet but the usability of friendfeed it much richer rivaled by the diversity of input methods (when working) and the simplicity of twitter - be really nice to have both working well frankly :) - mike "glemak" dunn
I think you're wrong Andrew. Twitter itself is hard for people to grok, but they get there eventually. FriendFeed is an order of magnitude harder to understand. This technologically superior service will not compete with twitter once Twitter gets it's act together. It's VHS versus Betamax all over again. - AJCann
AjCann, I can understand your feeling about this and it may be that you only have a desire to use Twitter to broadcast tweets in a one way fashion or only go one level deep with people. Thats fine. I think a small subset of people will continue to want that. But the reason why FF is picking up steam as a Twitter replacement is not because we all don't like Twitter, or just want to have fun. Its happening because its a natural evolution. - Andrew Baron
What I don't get about FriendFeed is… it seems to mostly aggregate stuff from other sites, right? And right now, Twitter is the one most people are using for their "microblogging." But it doesn't show all your tweets. If you tweet a lot, it shows a small fraction of your tweets. How do my messages get out? - Jesse Baer
Sorry, I don't agree with that either Andrew. FF is basically an aggregator, although the recent addition of commenting complicates the picture. The reason FF has had the big boost lately is due to the chronic instability of Twitter rather than the inherent qualities of FF. I'm not knocking FF - it's good, stable and improving. But it's not a replacement for Twitter, it's a different beast. - AJCann
Can someone help me - how do I link to this thread on FriendFeed? Thanks. - AJCann
yes, use the "More" feature. Select "link to this entry" and then copy the URL from your address bar. - Robert Scoble
Another n00bie here. I loved the article and am trying to get my friendfeed onto my blog to join the revolution. How do I embed the friendfeed widget into my wordpress template. Do I need a javascript plug-in? - ViralReality
Many of the bloggers I read have yet to sign-on to Friendfeed and I agree with Gillmor that Twitter is driving this bus. - paul mooney
Paul, if they have yet to sign-on, then they are simply late to transfer to the next bus. Its okay, there will be another bus behind this one. - Andrew Baron
Why does it have to be a "chap"? Why not a "gal" or a "lady" or some other reference to the under-represented majority? - Out Wrong
I tried to use this and it said the setup files are corrupted. Downloaded it again -- same thing. - Trish R
I really like what FF is doing, but what many people forget is the advantage of SMS texting to and mass mailing from Twitter. Twitter as some form of IM client seems silly in my eyes. I see it more as an SMS2.0 rather than IM2.0. FF is completely different from Twitter. - Jake Fudge
FF seems aimed more towards some form of Blogging2.0 (yes, I'll stop using '2.0' from this point - I promise!). What FF needs to work on now is making it's commenting system integrate with the blogs that they link to. So then all my Flickr, YouTube, Twitter comments matter on the grand scheme of things - and reduces redundancy. Also better levering of the 'liking' system that can possibly relate to the blog's Page Rank? - Jake Fudge
Twitter is only for legacy purposes? Call me crazy, but I can think of two or three features Twitter has that FriendFeed still lacks. That's why people aren't coming over here in droves. I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that FriendFeed is overtaking Twitter when it's the same people saying it over and over. Twitter is alive and well, problems or not. - Shawn Farner
Len:
Take the plunge! I've made the switch & I'm loving FF! - Thomas Ho via fftogo
i think it's actually this interface that people tend to disconsider that is a big part of FF success. i'm not seeing it go away. and i wouldn't want to see it go away. - Tudor
however, akimbo was biz model flawed from day 1 & not a web 2.0 company - when model #1 (stb legacy one) failed they tried to play business model darts in a hopeless attempt to find something worth funding thus prolonging their demise - not a normal story, except the part where flawed models, mgmt teams and the investors that get enamored w/ them collide - those never work... - mike "glemak" dunn
Facebook is the ultimate data roach motel: your data goes in, but it will not come back out. - Robert Scoble
That argument doesn't really hold up. You can export any RSS feed you import to the mini feed. Events are available as iCal files. Status updates of you and your friends available as RSS, and so on. - Jamie
A nice post from a nice blog. I wish more of the web were like this. - Kevin Fox
"I have to agree with many others that the Apple Extended Keyboard II is the finest keyboard I have used in terms of key feel. I used it for a couple of years in the late 90s, and it was the first to even make me aware of how good a keyboard could feel. I have not found a match since." - Sanjeev Singh
My favorite keyboard is still the IBM AT keyboard. For years, my brother and I would hunt through fry's looking for those exact keyboards and refused to use any other. - Piaw Na
For those of you looking for Model M's -- http://pckeyboard.com has the patent and makes NEW USB ones. They are super-nice. I am typing this on a black Model M keyboard from pckeyboards right now! - Erica Douglass
I use a DVORAK keyboard and it sure as hell beats QWERTY! - Siddharth Deb
If I could get the Microsoft ergo keyboard form factor with buckling spring feedback, that would be One Badass QWERTY Rig. - matt shobe
Kevin: I was thinking a concept similar to this would be great just today. (Yeah, that's the ticket) Great work! Another thought is a tab where you can see only the comments and likes made by your friendfeed subscriptions. Not their posts, just their likes and comments. (I'm sure this may already exist, and I expect Lewis Gray at any time to bring me down to size and enlighten me :-) ) - Chris Reed
Kevin, will there be a directory of public rooms? - Mike Doeff
This is awesome! How do I change the icon for the room? I can't seem to find that under "Edit room settings." - Jason Chen
I was just thinking this AM that friendfeed needed something analogous to Flickr Groups and pools. cool. - bernie
Woohoo! I'd love to be able to specify where my imported items show up ... like my personal photos and Gmail status updates to these particular rooms, and my blog to my public feed, etc. - Ocean
<?php echo "Jason Chen's question about the icon and Mike Doeff's query about a directory..."; ?> - Voyagerfan5761
Darick, that's on our wishlist too :) - Paul Buchheit
I wish items in rooms were shared as usual unless specifically hidden (unless the room is private). The rooms mostly correspond to topics, and that's great for active content discovery, but without the usual sharing my friends don't get to discuss the content with me. Passive content discovery is one of FF's big strengths, but the current opt-in model of rooms doesn't help. And, you know, while discussing Obama with the enthusiasts in Obamamania is nice, I want to discuss stuff with my friends. - j1m
+1 for that, pretty please. (Super-Hide should have a "everything in this room" option, naturally.) I think that's a much bigger deal than a room browser. A room browser will have trouble scaling, but "which rooms are my friends active in" would be a very friendfeedy way to navigate the space. - ⓞnor
SEW offered other details this afternoon: http://blog.searchenginewatch.... . See also Danny's post last year about other search engines that have offered prizes or incentives to search: http://searchengineland.com/07... . Other companies that have tried this in the past include iWon, Blingo, Zotspot, and A9. Ask also tried search incentives with a site called ChallengeAsk. I think this has also been tried by Winzy, Kazook, and SlashMySearch, which offers to pay searchers $0.25 per hour. - Matt Cutts
As Matt notes, this is a tactic that has crashed and burned time and again. Why not just pay users to surf the Web? Wait? That's been tried too? - Louis Gray
Microsoft search is so bad that they would have to pay me to use it... Oh, wait... - Paul Buchheit
After last comment, I 'Like'd it : ) Suggest MSFT - they may use Adsense for this :D - Erhan Erdogan
Why doesn't this item in FF get any comments but the twits and google reader shared items do? Is it because otherwise the conversation gets away from the blog or is fragmented to much ;) ? - Mark Jenniskens
Answering Mark, it's because when Robert wrote this, he sent a tweet, and there is a delay between the tweet hitting FriendFeed and the blog post. Therefore, the conversation is already happening on the tweet before the blog post arrives. Happens to me as well. - Louis Gray
Mr. Scoble... Let me turn the dime on you... Google Scholar has a proprietary crawl on nearly 1 Million documents in the peer-reviewed energy exploration vertical search platform I operate by day. They've indexed something like 40,000 of them so far. Yahoo has NO CLUE those exist. They won't and can't. Google's already perfecting "closed" search deals (in enterprise and behind paywalls like mine). - Gerald Buckley
And, to Lousi and Mark, he also did a Reader shared item for it which also has comments. It's almost like he's trying to show how scattered things can get on friendfeed. I had to try to find this entry to comment here. I could have just done a Reader-share-with-comments, but I didn't. It would have been easier, though. - lilbyrdie
Personally I'm very bored of Facebook and I think a lot of people will get bored of it over the coming months and years. We've been through all this before. Five years ago in the UK friendsreunited was huge; it was all anyone talked about. They tried to maintain their monopoly by keeping it incredibly closed. Now it's virtually dead. Great services always beat big walls. - Charlie
Here's my first ever comment on FriendFeed, just for you Scoble. I can't see MS keeping Facebook closed if they do in fact acquire it. I don't agree that it is in their own best interest to do so. - Mack D. Male
Nice. If you don't see the new UI on your iPhone, scroll to the bottom and click on 'Mobile'. The old UI is now oddly referred to as 'Classic' (not-mobile?) - Kevin Fox
funny that its 'new' but doesn't have the new share with notes feature. Looks great though. Just slightly slower, but I'm on edge right now, not wifi. - Vince DeGeorge
vince I am seeing the notes feature on the main screen -- also running quite a bit faster for me (but on WiFi) - MG Siegler
I can go to the things I've shared and see the notes, I just can't add new items. Ha, between the new reader and FF, I've used 75% of my battery at the airport. - Vince DeGeorge
I'd use it as my desktop browser version if it had j and k built in. - Jordan Hofker
Cool but it should be possible to bookmark a particular folder for direct access - Nico Steegmann
@Nico ; actually you can from a full browser but not from mobilesafari - Jonathan Belgourari
@Nico and @Jonathan The current version of Mobile Safari is not great about URLs and history handling (which gets you bookmarking). Things seem to be better with the iPhone SDK simulator, so hopefully with the 2.0 firmware release this summer things will be better everywhere. - Mihai Parparita
The best thing about FriendFeed, besides that it's so much fun, is that it forces Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. to make their services better. Twitter should have added hide a long time ago. Flickr should have shown you more than the last 5 contacts photos. Competition is a beautiful thing. - Thomas Hawk
@Scoble So true. @Thomas Twitter needs to figure out how to scale before they add any new features. - jon
Yes competition - but more so: open communication - is truly a wonderful thing. Developments here at FF and twitter with respective apps like twhirl, AlertThingy etc. just go to show how quickly last years fad can become extinct (facebook?). Of course it would be even better to find fb add something truly novel. - Alex von Halem
Early adopters may have moved on but the herd continues to graze like cattle on the hillside at Facebook, MySpace, etc. Eventually, they will learn about other forms of social media and move there, but by then there will be something new that the fleet-footed have mooooved onto while the slow stampede contiues ruminating. - Phil Boiarski
I think it's quite possible that friendfeed has totally superior DNA. If I were to bet on facebook vs friendfeed now, I'd bet on friendfeed, even with facebook's huge headstart. Because, if Altavista would have done it's job right, Google would have never happened... - Meryn Stol
It's like a great brainstorming session where people build on each other's ideas to get to the best solution. So I think it's less about FB doing a better job, then fresh blood building upon the ideas to make the better solution. - Jane Quigley via Alert Thingy
I think it's all an evolutionary process, the good thing is anyway that the idea spreads. Facebook could save some money though and implement open standards right now. They have to in the end anyway. FB won't be a working Passport or anything like that. - Christian Scholz via twhirl
I think the "secret" force behind friendfeed's succes will be the discussion of the tech bloggers here. It looks like unintended crowdsourcing. There are so many feature (and strategy) suggestions flying by. I think some people *want* friendfeed to win, and friendfeed provides a way to let those people help them. It's gonna be a powerful combination. The only question is if they can hire good programmers fast enough to keep up. - Meryn Stol
Still get to the bottom of FriendFeed, but liking it more and more every time - David Orban
Same here @David, @Meryn I like your perspective and also your terminology 'crowdsourcing' more like crowd surfing! - Joe Dawson
For all who don't know, crowdsourcing is quite common jargon. It's what Starbucks (MyStarbucksIdea) and Dell (Ideastorm) are doing. This will beat the crap out of companies who don't. - Meryn Stol
If IBM had done its job right Microsoft would never have happened. etc - Stuart Woodward
great observation about crowdsourcing meryn, friendfeed seems very interested in hearing what people have to say - Chris Jones via twhirl
I don't use facebook anymore, I just pipe my friendfeed stream back into facebook - Mark Ramsey via twhirl
Im going to go on record here with a prediction for the future: Facebook is the greatest hyperbole the web has ever seen. I know it's worth a lot because so many investors put so much money into it, but Im expecting it to earn the title for "Most Inflated Value Ever". - Andrew Baron
BTW, if George Bush had done his job right, everything would be worth at least twice as much. - Andrew Baron
tut tut ...forgive n forget was what my mum always told me. - viki saigal
I think Facebook and Friendfeed cater to different purposes. FF is great for sharing ideas while Facebook is good for maintaining profiles and contacts. - Vishal M
FriendFeed brings the "NewsFeed/Mini-Feed" out of Facebook. Most of my friends are not on Facebook, so this is great! I can give people links to interesting articles/photos/discussions on FriendFeed. Signing up for Facebook overwhelms many of my friends. It's too complicated to set up an account. - Mitchell Tsai
Facebook was never useful for this. Way too heavy. - Soulhuntre via twhirl
this is exactly right. A while ago I had an idea similar to FriendFeed and Pete Cashmore told me, nah, Facebook is already doing it. As it turned out, Facebook had the chance but didn't capitalize on it. - Stan Schroeder via twhirl
i could be wrong, but I don't think Facebook is (a) losing users to FF, or (b) incapable of making this a reality for the masses - Jeremy Toeman
FriendFeed is much more about content. Content and insight defines the "friends" I pick, whereas Facebook has a greater social context. I would not follow by nieces tweets in FriendFeed, but she would be on my list of "friends" in facebook. - Ralph Poole via twhirl
If FF added better mobile access and posting a nice real client, i'd have less and less reason to use Twitter. None at all actually - Michael Gartenberg
Ralph, I agree wholehearted facebook is a different beast all together. A different beast that thankfully doesn't have a zombie game or super wall :) - Doug Brooks
Not sure I agree about Facebook. It was built for college kids, not for people looking for useful information. - Mike Reynolds
Of course Facebook and FriendFeed both serve different purposes. It's also entirely possible to use both. I think we'll have to observe what services suffer due to FriendFeed in order to see what competes with FriendFeed. - possible248
not everyone is capable of flyfishing in the river of posts that is friendfeed. some folks just want to go out and get sushi with their friends, and then get back to their lives. facebook is for them. - Chris Hollander
But that would break facebook's business model - collect the data we input and sell it back to us.... - Robert O'Callaghan
friendfeed is way better and way simpler than facebook. Andit's app, poke and zombie free. Damn brilliant if you ask me. - DC Crowley
@Mike R "It was built for college kids, not for people looking for useful information." Funny! - Jack Baty
Don't think so. FF is a different site built on a different premise. Its lighter and more agile while being very powerful. Facebook is way more profile centred while FF is more like Google Reader on Steroids. - Roberto Bonini
![Recent Volcanic Activity [Boston - 7/16/08]](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/589818aa14089d1b2e75abdd04f2f30e64b3bafd "Recent Volcanic Activity [Boston - 7/16/08]")
![Recent Volcanic Activity [Boston - 7/16/08]](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/6325f5bbb29a926bccc8f0408a7ff9c4e983cb4e "Recent Volcanic Activity [Boston - 7/16/08]")
