Jon Lebkowsky - Likes

FriendFeed is the easiest way to share online. Learn more »

Social Networking is the Means to Achieve Workplace Collaboration - O'Reilly Radar - http://radar.oreilly.com/2009...

October 17 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

the purely social aspect helps relationships & therefore collaboration - Adina Levin

This is where we really like to do consulting, vs social media marketing. Collaboration, community, shared relationship and experience are all far more interesting than basic attention. - Jon Lebkowsky

Chris Messina

Contemplating the damage that Google's link-based search algorithm has done to the creation of a more holistic, people-centric web.

September 6 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Thierry R. Andriamirado, Sebastian Wain, Ygor Lemos and 50 other people liked this

An interesting thought... but you've got to elaborate on that :-) - Ankush Narula

48 more comments

People-centric web? I don't trust people. I trust their "interests". People love shiny and trendy things. I love people who love what I love. those people often love trendy things but that's okay, since I love them :) — In other words: an attention-centric web is better, IMHO - directeur

Humm, not sure how you'd go about a people-centric web. You'd have to first get past the integration level (duplicate name spaces, different personas, householding) and then deal with the age/time variable (who you are today isn't who you were a year ago, or 10). How would we determine what a person stood for? You'd be back to on-site analysis of who THEY say they are and what other... more... - AJ Kohn

AJ, what "I" look like, my skin color, my name, my religion, my language... are NOT important unless someone wants to "sell" me something. The online "Me" is the set of "things" I'm interested in and the set of "people" I like to interact with. Google algorithm is based on a simple fact: You have content about a "subject", and this content is linked by content that is already "popular"... more... - directeur

To extend your analogy... shouldn't Einstein's recommendation carry more weight since he's a known authority in physics? I think the Google algorithm might not take this factor into account unless the algorithm looks at the popularity of the linking page/site as well. - Ankush Narula

Ankush, and that's how it works in fact. A link by Dmoz directory is better than a link by well, britney spears' fan geocities page :) — their algorithm iirc looks at the semantic subject of the content + the rank of other content that links to it - directeur

Hadn't realized that... now back to what a holistic, people-centric web is all about... - Ankush Narula

@directeur: I completely agree, which is why a people-centric web seems ... improbable (impossible?) and likely unsatisfactory. @Ankush: directeur's right, Google gives sites more authority based on the number and quality of links it gets - and not just overall but from the same topic/category/niche. It's still not very smart in the scheme of things (hence my blog's title) but it's getting better and better. - AJ Kohn

This is not a positive and in a way quite false assumption. Google's algorithm has not done any damage, if you remember where the state of research were before Google came. Google enhanced in some ways the Web at this time. But if you have an idea for a people centric Web search, then go for it ! ;-) - Thierry Lhôte

And also the approach of Google search IS holistic even i it is not people oriented. it is perhaps the first real try of Web-mapping. - Thierry Lhôte

Agree Thierry. Also, even if google is not perfect (no AI will be perfect) *people* are responsible for its imperfections. People love to game the search engine for fun and more often for profit. Those "gurus" that other people often call "authority" ask their subscribers/readers/"managed community"/horde to "bookmark" (not fave/vote/share) their entries are corrupting the value of "value". This is another kind of spam, it's a taboo, but it's a vicious kind of spam. - directeur

I think the problem is that there's potentially great content in the long tail that won't surface in a Google search because Google focuses on popularity + authority. This is just what makes the Google search useful, so I wouldn't expect a change. However it would be good to have alternatives - search that finds quality in obscurity, the sort of stuff that we now find through curated... more... - Jon Lebkowsky

I saw a paper a while ago (can't find the reference now, sorry) that found that Google's existence increased the popularity of the “tail” pages, because people no longer link to the big popular sites anymore, since they can find them on Google. They link to new, interesting, and hard-to-find things, which over time gives those things more PageRank. - Amit Patel

So long as people, not bots, are the ones making the links I don't see the problem. - Garin Kilpatrick

I think my point was lost. Generally speaking, the focus on links as the atomic unit of the web has done several useful things — but in terms of being able to ask: "Who is this person that wrote this content? And what else have they done? And who do they know? And what is the complete picture of the self-conception?" I think that focusing so much on *document* links has inhibited the development of the social web. - Chris Messina

and 4chan would never have existed :) - Jérôme Flipo

Chris, I see what you mean. Look, one thing I'm humbly sure of is: trends and hype will always win over personal relevancy. That's sad I know, but I'm almost resigned. I've humbly created socialwhois http://socialwhois.com which btw uses google SGN, supports microformats, apml, xfn but most people don't know about it because I'm just directeur, not say... Kevin Rose who afterwards launched wefollow. I'm not sad or bitter about it, not at all. Just more sure about how this world works :) - directeur

Yes Alex, exactly, Web was not designed to be social-media, usenet, IRC and the like were. The future paradigm of the universal social-media tool should evolve around Google Wave concept and XMPP. - Thierry Lhôte

Thierry and Alex, it was not designed for this in fact. But efforts like microformats make this possible. Data about people that is machine-readable using POSH. And Google who Chris is blaming here actually made a big and useful piece: SGN. Questions asked by Chris above "who wrote this, what did he wrote..." are ligitime, but if I had to chose between content and persons, I'd go with... more... - directeur

i use the web from a greedy interest of problem solving. thats why my needs are problem/solution centric. the best solution is the one that fits to my situation and worked for the most people in similar situations. therefore i love a net that i feed with my data (location, situation) and i get socially rated customized solutions. perfect :) and since i have lots of time im interested in... more... - Chris Hofmann

@Alex: that's kind of my point. What if it had started with proper representations of people, like <person> tags, etc? The reason why we rely on centralized services like Twitter and Facebook is because they've added a "people" layer on top of the "document web". And, if I search for someone in Google, I'll get many links to their profiles — but not a complete view of them. Hence my original tweet. - Chris Messina

"I think that focusing so much on *document* links has inhibited the development of the social web." Well now, there's a whole body of work in the semantic web directed at that problem. So rather than complain about Google's statistical model, what will you do get the diso, activity streams (and the html5) crowd to use or learn from it? For example activity streams is still in need of a way to represent actions. - Bill de hÓra

I think sites like BackType and Disqus remedy the "what else has this person said" problem to some extent. Google Friend Connect + Google Profiles tries to solve this problem also by becoming a distributed social network. Over time, I think similar competing protocols will help the social web will integrate to the point where aggregating contributions from and information about a person will be rudimentary. We just have to make sure the protocols stay open and and the technologies proliferate. - Ankush Narula

Let me add that I think OpenID needs more support. - Ankush Narula

@Bill: Hrm, the semantic web is still rather reductionist and mathematical, rather than being expressive or generative. In terms of the effort it takes for my mom to benefit from what I understand as being the "semantic web", I don't think she'll see it in her lifetime. - Chris Messina

OK Chris, so it is 1997, and Altavista is the king of search, with a bunch of others coming up behind. Everyone's search results are getting crapped up with SEO-driven spam, such that meta tags are now being ignored by all major search engines, and various forms of 'invisible text' on the page are state-of-the-art. What would you like to have happened differently from the approach Google took for increasing search relevance? - Michael R. Bernstein

@Ankush: BackType is a great service — Disqus, CoComment, Co.mments and IntenseDebate are all also interesting solutions — but require you to re-establish a profile. Why can't one just pick their definitive profile and federate that? These services hint at what I'm getting at, but still leave much to be desired. - Chris Messina

@Michael: Good question. I guess one possibility for routing spam and whatnot is to become more people oriented — as Facebook is. If you source content to particular profiles, then you can build up what Facebook now calls the "social graph", to help inform reputability. Back in 1997, there wasn't enough connectivity or enough people with online presences to make such a situation really work — but I think that situation has or is changing. - Chris Messina

@Chris: Well, you're just looking for the overlay of the semantic web then, correct? Whether it's self-tagged by the person, or derived through an algorithm, that's how you'd map document to author, and author to author universe. Self-tagging is the only way to ensure this happens correctly - algorithms can be developed to determine if it's the 'same' ... AJ Kohn or not. So, Google... more... - AJ Kohn

AJ, relying on self-tagging has some serious problems. See the aforementioned SEO tactics that rendered HTML meta-tags useless. This is known as the 'metacrap' problem. To use your scenario, what happens if you actually self-tag as AJ Kohn the skateboarder? - Michael R. Bernstein

@Michael: True enough. Self-tagging can be exploited in nefarious ways as well. Which brings us back again to the links caring some sort of semantic meta data - so that it is others who help define the who - and can actually be a safeguard against 'semantic-theft'. But, that too can be abused in a Google Bomb sort of way if everyone agrees to associate someone as the author of some... more... - AJ Kohn

Well, there's a re-balancing that's needed between social knowledge (i.e. who knows who — vis a vis Twitter/Facebook graphs) and the links that are about, related, or created by people. If profiles were first class citizens, and everyone was incentivized to have one or two EACH (rather than many), perhaps the social web would be further along than it is. - Chris Messina

What is a "first class citizen", Chris? - directeur

Documents are currently first class citizens on the web. As are images. Videos are not. A basic test is to consider whether an object class shows up in the source code of the web. We have <img> and <object>, but no <person> tags. It's simple, but it'd be much easier to create social websites if designers could just use something like <person class="viewer"><avatar /></person> to show the active viewer's face in their HTML! - Chris Messina

Chris. Why? I mean.,microformats do this already. why add a new tag? We just can say to the designer use this class name please. - directeur

Sure, I support microformats, but they don't "do" anything right now — not without custom JS. In this case, I'm talking about tags (or microformats — I don't really care) that are supported by browser rendering engines — that could reveal social information based on the viewer and his/her friends. This is similar to OpenSocial's model, so I guess there is *some* progress being made my Google! ;) - Chris Messina

Chris, I think you're about 5 years behind Google on this. Google in 2000 only knew about documents. Google now knows about (and ranks) entities such as businesses, products, and people. Now it has a variety of ways of linking those entities to documents (submitted data feeds, microformats, and algorithmic extraction, among others). Authorship is another question, and you have a good... more... - Daniel Dulitz

Hrm, I wouldn't say I'm railing on Google at all. I'm only contemplating the effects of decisions — which, in hindsight, prove them to be rather wise. Instead I'm asking: what did we not focus on because we chose instead to focus on links? It's great that we have half a loaf — but what about the other half? - Chris Messina

Well, microformats and RDF are being used by Google and others in a number of ways. However, I think we'd all like to develop a way where the user didn't have to do the work and instead the relationships could be discovered and learned by the algorithm. @Chris: I think the one thing you're assuming is that people would want just a few profiles, or that it would be the optimal way to see... more... - AJ Kohn

What about => FluidDB » Blog Archive » Truly social data http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/fluidDB... - Desirade

Damage isn't quite the right word. - Cliff Gerrish from iPhone

@Cliff: "inhibit"? - Chris Messina

@Aj: I support the idea of multiple profiles — and of sharding identity, if you *chose* to. That it's the default baseline means that people who don't want to fragment their digital identity are forced to. Put another way: if BOTH sharding AND holistic identities were the norm today, I wouldn't likely have raised this point! ;) - Chris Messina

@Chris: Got it. If anything, a holistic identify - a primary or default identity *would* be an interesting idea. It could serve the purpose for those who *do* want a holistic identity and can be a sign-post for those who want fragmented identities. [edit] I appreciate and thank you for the dialog. - AJ Kohn

Was this really some sort of decision Google made, or was it just a natural evolution of the "one page = one URL = one object" paradigm we've been living with since day 1 of the web? Blogs, search engines, URL shorteners... everything's perpetuating the idea that you don't link to *stuff* or people per se, you link to pages. - Ken Sheppardson

And of course everyone wants to own that page, or your views of that page, like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Everyone wants you to use their UI. We can't just link to a person or an an article or a comment, we have to link to that object with all sorts of UI overhead, ad banner wrapping, etc. We're stuck in a site/page centric world, vs a user/content centric one. See also http://friendfeed.com/vanelsa... - Ken Sheppardson

I don't think I would be too worried about self-tagging. It's just one piece of the puzzle. There are other forces available, such as all my friends that know I'm an extremely lousy skateboarder. Also, I would like to think that I'm just one person on the web, but that I can choose what aspects of me are visible in a given context. - Alexander van Elsas

Totally agree we should have a whole loaf. I think there are a lot of folks who want to solve the identity-on-the-web problem, including the JS_Kit guys, Facebook, etc. This discussion here is very interesting, thanks. - Daniel Dulitz

"the semantic web is still rather reductionist and mathematical" @Chris I can see why you'd say that, and I don't go for the high formalism much myself. I think it helps to consider something like RDF as a medium, and one that arguably has more degrees of freedom for expression that say relational technology, or the current web2.0 argots. In comic book terms, RDF and Linked Data is for penclilers, XML and JSON is for inkers. The story is another matter ;) - Bill de hÓra

"However, I think we'd all like to develop a way where the user didn't have to do the work and instead the relationships could be discovered and learned by the algorithm." @AjKohn back in the day, this was called a hybrid architecture - lower layers dealt with statistical, telemetry and event data and higher layers dealt with representation, concepts and logic. A good example from robotics is InteRRaP http://www.dfki.uni-sb.de/mas... - Bill de hÓra

Jay Rosen

Hi, @kausmickey. The LA Times "wikitorial" was arrogant because ten minutes of research into best practices would've said: no, don't do it.

August 9 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Jon Lebkowsky liked this

Jeff Jarvis

Oh, to be the Economist - http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009...

June 22 from BuzzMachine - Comment - Like - Share

Paola Bonomo, Alessandro Lanni and Jon Lebkowsky liked this

Agree - quality can break all the rules! - Jon Lebkowsky

Howard Rheingold

Loic Le Meur Blog: The coolest way to buy creme brulee in San Fran: the Twitter food cart - http://www.loiclemeur.com/english...

June 5 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Gomez and Jon Lebkowsky liked this

The foodcart movement was started by Korean BBQ @kogibbq and suddenly 100 people can show up where the cart appears. It's the food smartmob. Blake Engel who tweets under @urbanhiker explains what the food cart movement is all about. A few really smart food producers or chefs have gathered a community around themselves and they move around in the city or even in the US and they tweet where they are, the members of their communities just go get food when they are nearby. This is too cool. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Howard Rheingold

Love that - maybe I'll set up a food cart here in Austin? (We knew Vietnamese who came postwar and set up food carts to sell egg rolls.) - Jon Lebkowsky

Craig Newmark

@gwynnek Can you send me more about that? Thanks!

May 25 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Jon Lebkowsky liked this

Robert Scoble

I thought friendfeed would be the biggest threat to Twitter but I now see it's Seesmic Desktop. Come here and we'll discover why:

May 23 - Comment - Like - Share

Chris Baskind, Thierry R. Andriamirado, Curt Mercadante and 152 other people liked this

1. It has list management like friendfeed has. Twitter doesn't. - Robert Scoble

432 more comments

2. It lets you display both Facebook and Twitter messages. - Robert Scoble

3. It lets you search both Facebook and Twitter messages. - Robert Scoble

4. It displays them all better than Twitter does. - Robert Scoble

5. Friendfeed Support in the works. - Jimminy

6. It lets you comment on Facebook postings - Lee Herman

it sucks all the memory out of my machine. performance suffers. I want to like it. I don't. - Karoli

5. Seesmic desktop (and TweetDeck, which really does most of the same stuff that Seesmic Desktop does) does DM's better than Twitter or Facebook do. - Robert Scoble

Are you arguing that a 3rd party twitter application is a threat to twitter? - Frankie Warren

Karoli: I don't care. I run it on its own machine. It can suck all the memory it wants! - Robert Scoble

Frankie: I can see a case for that, yes. - Robert Scoble

It makes it easy to mark spammers. - Jimminy

6. What happens when you add all your data into Seesmic Desktop and Twitter is down? Oh, move over to Seesmic's own service! - Robert Scoble

Robert, I don't have that luxury. Plus, it's still a client. How can it threaten Twitter when it needs twitter.? - Karoli

6B: Twinkle on iPhone already does exactly that. Tweetie has 200,000 plus members who DO NOT NEED TWITTER ANYMORE!!! Update I origionally said Tweetie but it is Twinkle that has its own database. Sorry. - Robert Scoble

Karoli: It isn't exclusive to Twitter. - Jimminy

A twitter client threatens the existence of twitter?! - Joshua Lee

Karoli: look at Twinkle. They show the way. They have 200,000 people who are on their own service now, even though most of them think they are only on Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Only thing that is a threat to Twitter, is Twitter. - Fake Elmo

I use tweetie. They still rely on twitter's firehose. - Karoli

Including myself... haha care to elaborate Robert about tweetie - Frankie Warren

Karoli: wrong. I was just at their headquarters and Tweetie has its own database and can send messages EVEN WHEN TWITTER IS DOWN!!! - Robert Scoble

Karoli: Tweetie has two databases for each member. One for Twitter. One for its own back end. - Robert Scoble

robert, to everyone on my twitter lists, including those NOT using tweetie? - Karoli

Karoli: no, not to everyone. Right. - Robert Scoble

I really *really* wish they would fix it so we can resize the main display panel .. it is really irritating to see it "squished" while the other panels are resizable - Steven Hodson

Karoli: but what happens when all your friends are on Tweetie or Seesmic Desktop? Will you care anymore? - Robert Scoble

I agree with joshua, these are clients, they don't live without the parent service. I don't see how seesmic desktop threatens twitter. - Nitin Gupta

Stop exposing the secrets of us Twitter developers Robert - you're ruining the plan! - Jesse Stay

Jesse: sorry. When you all pay me something I'll shut up. :-) - Robert Scoble

Robert, that's my point. There is interdependence here. All my friends will not be on one or the other. Blackberry users will use Twitterberry. Twittelator is a player here too. I couldn't give a rip about Facebook -- it's one of those necessary evils i have to have but hate. - Karoli

Robert: Does Seesmic do the same thing as Tweetie in terms of redundancy? - Frankie Warren

Nitin: if I got everyone in the world to use Seesmic Desktop why will we need Twitter? Not to mention, why will you pay for "pro" version of Twitter or look at any of its advertising? - Robert Scoble

Interesting. I said the same thing about tweetie desktop and friendfeed - Christian Anderson

AIR apps are a mess, but from an HCI point of view, and from a technical point of view. Native apps please. Tweetie is wonderful. - Jason Wehmhoener

Oooh - I can buy Robert out? ;-) More to my plan for world domination... - Jesse Stay

Jason... yes, native apps, OR web apps. - LogEx

You're not going to make everyone use Seesmic Desktop, you'll pry Nambu from my cold dead fingers. - Joshua Lee

Karoli: I think it's funny you write off Facebook. Looking at the two streams side by side Facebook's is a lot better. There are far better quality people on Facebook in my account than there are on Twitter for the most part. Plus on Facebook there are 225 million. On Twitter? 30 million. - Robert Scoble

You could twitpay Robert a buck to buy his silence. - Louis Gray

Robert, your enthusiasm is infectious, but the hyperbole is still a little on the high side...I think Tweetie is an excellent app. I like Loic and Seesmic desktop but won't use it. I use Tweetie for my desktop app now, and it still needs some tweaking. - Karoli

Robert, I don't write it off. I just hate it. - Karoli

Joshua: what if Nambu, Seesmic Desktop, Tweetie, and TweetDeck made their own database? - Robert Scoble

For me, in terms of signal, FriendFeed trumps Facebook which trumps Twitter. - Louis Gray

Sounds more like someone doesn't like twitter very much. - Mac Sharp

I agree with Jason. AIR apps look so unnatural. Usability is nil - Bogdan Costea

The first thing I would do to Facebook is nuke the frackin' IQ app. - Karoli

Friendfeed is excellent in a browser, but Twitter is awful on the web. Twitter really needs Tweetie. - Jason Wehmhoener

Karoli: hyperbole is what gets people to engage and think differently. - Robert Scoble

I don't suppose Seesmic's secret plan might happen to involve an open alternative to Twitter on the back end, would it? If it's a threat to Twitter in that it allows people to use Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed interchangeably as a back end protocol...sure... yeah... I can see that. If the idea is Seesmic could swap out their own network? Bah. Don't buy it. - Ken Sheppardson

Robert, as long as we're clear on the motive, I'm good. - Karoli

Come on...no. Tweetdeck is so much better... - Ryo / Fuck Facebook

But after all,it is just a client for Twitter and Facebook. - Steve Chou from IM

Tweetie is practically the only reason I even feel bad about leaving Twitter - James Poling

for Windows users bDule is looking to be a serious contender .. still needs work but like Seesmic Desktop it's an alpha - Steven Hodson

Ryo: have you tried the new Seesmic? I like it as much as Tweetdeck at minimum. - Robert Scoble

I have moved from TweetDeck to Seesmic Desktop. I am here on FriendFeed, just b/c you invited me to come discuss :) Also, did anyone using SDT notice that you can set up numerous active search columns and you don't hit API limits. thinking that TD used API count for everything from Profile view to search columns? Don't quote me, I'm drinking. LOL. - Zaneology

Zane: heheh! - Robert Scoble

Louis, done - Robert, $1 your way via Twitpay and Amazon Payments ;-) - Jesse Stay

7. It let's you give up all your system resources in a single bound. - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

James: there's a new version of Tweetie coming. - Robert Scoble

i learn so much from being on friendfeed and reading all these brilliant threads! thank u scoble! - Jason Pollock

I think it's funny how people are writing Seesmic Desktop off as just a Twitter client. It's set up to be so much more all you have to do is look at everything Twhirl had built into it. Freindfeed, Laconi.ca, Seesmic, Twitter, and Identi.ca. It wouldn't be to hard to create a redundant system for it using Laconi.ca. - Jimminy

James: and the real battle will be over search. Imagine what Seesmic Desktop can do with comparative searches between Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

Rahsheen ++++ - Karoli

Has anyone tried PeopleBrowsr ? - Zaneology

YES LOVE SEESMIC DESKTOP! B U T ...... it does take a WHOPPING amount of memory for such a small app... at present, I have a dual core 4gb RAM PC... and Seesmic desktop is taking: 98,456k ... actually more than OUTLOOK and EXPRESSION WEB! so... it is good, but maybe this is an Adobe AIR thing of course rather than Seesmic... hey lets face it, Adobe hardly have compact low memory code do they? like the idea.. but because of the memory, cannot justify using it. - David Sheardown

James: exactly. Zane I like PeopleBrowsr too. - Robert Scoble

i still think that all this talk of the next thing that everyone will move to is a bit premature... twitter will continue to dominate for some time - Jason Pollock

Scoble: are you inferring that it will support friendfeed? - James Poling

But if twitter is down,those clients can do nothing - Steve Chou

James: Loic says that friendfeed support is coming to Seesmic Desktop. I'll keep bugging him until he does it anyway. - Robert Scoble

Robert: I can't agree more. I'm still using Twhirl for it's filter feature. I can filter my stream so nicely with it to extract data I want. - Jimminy

the general public is still getting used to twitter.. us geeks can talk about the next thing until we're blue in the face but its going to be all about twitter for a while and I think we all know it:) - Jason Pollock

Jason: don't be so sure. Remember a few years ago MySpace was on top of the world. Twitter will probably pass MySpace next year. - Robert Scoble

To get back to your thesis, the only thing that can kill Twitter is Twitter. - Christian Anderson

Robert, yes. and it lacks of some features I need, and Tweetdeck is more logical to me in terms of GUI. - Ryo / Fuck Facebook

A client is redundant if the service(s) no longer exist! That is like a "chicken or the egg" discussion. - Allan Besselink

Robert: Told him to make a better user interface by the way,I still don't like Seesmic too much. - Steve Chou

Robert: I can't wait to see how Loic integrates it into SD. It's much more complicated to fit into that platform than Twhirl's. - Jimminy

Robert: i agree that it will be a few years tho.. and by the time twitter is on the decline who knows what will be out by then! - Jason Pollock

Jason: the general public is going to start seeing that search is very important for them to find people talking about things they care about. I can see a world where Seesmic's search will be better than even friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

I tried seesmic desktop for a view minutes but it was so not intuitive that I quit trying it. - rick

Loic ignores serious usability issues. I'm not optimistic for him. - Jason Wehmhoener

Twitter is indeed becoming more popular, I saw a feature on network news about it. If something like twitter is noticed by mainstream media, it's already passed the threshold of being not just for geeks long ago. - Joshua Lee

Jason: Seesmic Desktop is much more usable than it used to be. - Robert Scoble

I just installed the latest version - Jason Wehmhoener

same mess - Jason Wehmhoener

Lets say all the twitter clients work together to build a common database in laconi.ca.. Will we still need twitter? - Varun "Maverick" Pitale

PeopleBrowsr seems quite unintuitive to me. - Chuck Baggett

robert: i agree that real-time search is the the wave of the future and it is the reason that twitter is so dominant right now... too bad the twitter search is always down.. lol.. im definitely going to download the new seesmic right now tho!:) - Jason Pollock

I'm not sure why adobe air twitter apps are so popular, native apps are much more usable and use less resources. - Joshua Lee

Robert: track is the key. - Karoli

Robert, don't all these sources just scream out for common interface pipes? Isn't that the key? Seems like we'll see more and more Tweetdecks, Seesmics, FF, FB Thwirls and Tweeties, all of which will have their pluses, but they all gotta' pass data and interact, like multiple networking protocols going thru a router...right? - Michael Metz

Twitter has a history of killing it's most popular features. How long until they kill real-time search? - Christian Anderson

Karoli: track is coming. - Robert Scoble

If I hear "track" one more time I'm going to scream - Jesse Stay

Christian: they won't kill realtime search. It's the only way they have of monitising twitter. - Joshua Lee

/me passes Jesse some Valium - Steven Hodson

I have track - it's called TweetBeep - Jesse Stay

Christian: I think they already did ;) try searching for something you've said recently. - Frankie Warren

Jesse: track, track TRACK - Karoli

Karoli can I twitpay you a dollar as well? - Jesse Stay

Christian: Frankie is right. Twitter's search is horrid. - Robert Scoble

Seesmic Desktop is getting more friendly on system resources with each build - now it will run for days with the very small increase in memory over time - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Twitter is technically mediocre in general, it proves that if you have a good concept, the technical execution is secondary. Unfortunately. - Joshua Lee

Jesse, sure. :) - Karoli

I seriously doubt that Seesmic Desktop is going to kill Twitter. Besides the people talking on here now, how many people even know what Adobe AIR is? Or what Seesmic is? Look how slow people were to find out about Twitter. I am pulling for FriendFeed:) - Shawn Hickman

I still am a little lost... what do these companies gain by building their own phantom networks behind twitter? It's not like they can just flip the switch off on twitter and expect to keep their users. As it stands, twitter is the only thing that links all these different clients. - Frankie Warren

I love Friendfeed, but i admit...i do not like the name. :) - Karoli

I actually just switched to it today. Though I wish they would do some interface tweaks, but I'm sure they will over time. Able to move the tweetbox around, and be able to take the menu on the right and make it tabs on the top. Just simplify it a bit. - Dean Clark

Joshua: the most important thing about social networks is "are the people I want to follow on it?" Nothing else really matters that much. But once they are, watch the tide move. - Robert Scoble

Shawn: I agree with you, I tried to tell my sister, who just joined twitter, to use a client. She emailed me back like I was some kind of geek! (Well, I am.) - Joshua Lee

our goal isn't to "kill" Twitter with Seesmic Desktop - but rather to allow you to read/use Twitter along side other sources - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Twitter is getting easier and easier by the day to compete with - look at us here on FriendFeed. We're not talking about it on Twitter. - Jesse Stay

Search is pretty broken right now. when they have trouble scaling, they just kill off whatever functionality is holding them up. Twitter may just become email at some point in the near future. - Christian Anderson

Web Apps are the future, downloading will become a thing of the past - Shawn Hickman

Christian, e-mail is more reliable than Twitter - please no - Jesse Stay

The big thing slowing down FriendFeed integration is their own API (note: that's my personal opinion and not my bosses :) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Frankie, I can see some real advantages to building a phantom network behind Twitter. Starting with not having to rely on Twitter and the somewhat arrogant heads of Twitter who do not give a rip about their users. - Karoli

Mike: actually the friendfeed team itself told me that. They know they need to simplify the API. I wonder when we'll see that? - Robert Scoble

Mike, from what I've seen FriendFeed's API is actually more advanced than Twitter's. It's just missing one or two crucial methods. - Jesse Stay

Christian: Yes, Twitter search is dead. Currently hours missing off the top and after 18 days everything disappears. It's a horrible situation for them. - Jimminy

robert: hopefully very soon - there is a lot of movement to happen when that appears - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I can't tell Twitter to only give me certain pieces of data from a user's profile, for instance. I can do that with FriendFeed. They're much more prepared for API scalability than Twitter is, even now. - Jesse Stay

Mike: what do you do at Seesmic? - Robert Scoble

robert: ops, messaging (xmpp), infrastructure - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Mike: awesome. I can't wait until you have friendfeed. That will seal the deal for you guys. Then it's just going to be a race to see who builds the best search display. - Robert Scoble

robert: (again my personal opinion on SD - I'm a user like you all in this regard) I agree, it's the ability to see and manipulate the various streams that is killer, so not having FF is the pink elephant in the room - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

mentions of 'compete'/'kill' in certain contexts in the comments here sounds kind of petty, encouraging some backwards cut-throat sadomasichism. web 2.0's focus on social networks has facets of co-existence and is mutually beneficial in complementing services. everybody is not necessarily out to kill each other, imo. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Karoli... they would still have to rely on twitter right? Things will get crazy confusing if the applications cant talk to each other. Imagine if verizon phones couldnt call cingular phones and you had to worry about who had what handset... thats where theres a problem with having a Seesmic Network, a Tweetie network etc. EDIT: woah i just said cingular haha - Frankie Warren

blackfeathers: whenever you see me use the word "kill" it means to take over the momentum. - Robert Scoble

Yes, Twitter is broken. We were all here a year ago when Twitter's uptime was like 50%. Still, we stayed. Why? Because the people we wanted t follow were there. And people like Jesse were buuling kick ass sticky apps. I don't see that changing. - Christian Anderson

Being able to use the local twitter search to see tweets within however many miles of a location would be nice *hint* *hint* *hint* That seems to be a part of twitter search many air apps still don't support. - Dean Clark

Christian: me neither. Although there's a new usage model that is in play that Twitter has not locked up. Especially around search and zeitgeist display. - Robert Scoble

Christian - thanks for the compliment. Not sure what you mean by sticky though. - Jesse Stay

Jesse: once you start using SocialToo you can't stop. - Robert Scoble

Dean: Local search would be the shit. It really needs to be implemented - Shawn Hickman

Let's make a rule right now. Kill = lose momentum leader status. That is what we mean when we say "kill" - Christian Anderson

Jesse: that's sticky. I call Facebook "velcro" because it has so much sticking power and lots of little hooks that lock you in. - Robert Scoble

@Mike Taylor .. can we *please* be able to resize the main display panel .. PLEASE - Steven Hodson

I thought FriendFeed was kind of meh, I didn't realize it had this realtime comment feature. I'll have to use it more often. - Joshua Lee

Robert: Unless you're me. I cannot abide all those little sticky velcro stupid things. - Karoli

Joshua: there's a lot of things in friendfeed that lots of Twitterers have no clue about. - Robert Scoble

Ah - thanks again then Christian - that's quite a compliment! We won't be supporting just Twitter for long though, although if Twitter keeps breaking it keeps giving us new things to do to fix it. :-( - Jesse Stay

Steven: trust me, I have my own list of UI issues that I remind the SD devs of weekly ;) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Karoli: oh, really? So if someone tags you in a photo on Facebook you don't look? - Robert Scoble

Not that I underestimate FB. I don't. It's why I have a presence there. I just HATE. IT. - Karoli

@Mike Taylor .. well at least I know I'm not alone then :) - Steven Hodson

Robert, no...I'm the chick behind the camera - Karoli

I just don't believe in support applications that are unnecessarily hogs as far as memory goes. Yes AIR apps tend to be on the larger size, but look at DestroyTwitter. John Hallman manages to get his AIR client to consume less than 70MB of memory. - Alex Knight

Karoli: you're a better man than I am then. :-) - Robert Scoble

Steven: also, if you twitter to @seesmic - our customer team tracks all of the suggestions and gets them to the UI Devs - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Mike: you should open a friendfeed room, too. It's even better than Twittering @seesmic. - Robert Scoble

Mike: I have a suggestion, make it look more native on OS X. We Mac users are interface consistency geeks. - Joshua Lee

Alex - one of the things that bit all of the Air devs in the ass recently was the memory leak caused by the xml parser IIRC - now that was a fun one - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

have not try the seesmic desktop... They are the best if they manage to serve local context too.. (Twitter & Friendfeed, not the 3rd party) - Pico Seno

They just did. The Mac buttons are now in their standard place on top of the window left. - Robin Good

Joshua - they are already doing that in small increments - notice the window chrome items changes recently - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I'll have to take another look, especially if you add friendfeed. - Joshua Lee

Robert - If our customer support guy hasn't already I will make sure he does - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I'm a TweetDeck fan, despite the memory suck on my computer. Tweetie is nice on the iPhone, like new Twitterrific better. Seesmic desktop and Tweetie desktop are just OK. - Geoff Peterson

Robert, love your velcro example - thanks for the clarification - Jesse Stay

Mike: cool, I just added you to my secret group for discussing the 2010web. - Robert Scoble

robert: wow - thanks - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Wild 164 comments in 32 minutes. I guess I touched a nerve. - Robert Scoble

You bet, Jesse. You and your app building Ilk have played a huge part in making Twitter what it is today. - Christian Anderson

Robert: either that or you trolled a bit, in a positive way. ;-) - Joshua Lee

Scoble: at the risk of sounding presumptuous can I join in on that 2010web conversation? - James Poling

Joshua: I was mostly trolling Loic who hasn't shown up yet, which makes it even funnier. - Robert Scoble

lol secret group... you know how to work this stuff ;) - Frankie Warren

Robert - that's why i popped in - I know he is doing some family stuff so he's offline right now - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Frankie and Joshua: soon, soon! - Robert Scoble

Frankie: it has to be an elite group in order for 2010web to become a buzzword, from clique to chic. It's the new pardigm. ;-) - Joshua Lee

Mike, I hear a blank AIR app sucks up 20MB. If that's true Adobe has some work to do. - Alex Knight

Joshua: I hated the name "Web 2.0" and am trying to head off the next thing being called "Web 3.0." - Robert Scoble

Alex - yep - your preaching to the choir on that one :) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Yeah, we don't need x.0 - definitely. - Joshua Lee

2010web .. hmmmm - Steven Hodson

Mike: thanks for filling in for Loic. His ears must be burning, or will be soon. - Robert Scoble

i like it (2010 web) just because of the Arthur C Clarke memories it brings up - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Robert 2010web is too soon you should have gone with 2013web, just past the apocalypse. - Jimminy

2010web sounds interesting, but it limits the buzzword for one year. - Joshua Lee

Getting to the topic at hand, how is a Twitter client a threat to Twitter? - Alex Knight

hey lets start a 2011 web secret place:) - Michael Metz

yes thanks Mike and if you open a Friendfeed room add me in please - Steven Hodson

James: I disagree. Most businesses have sites that look like 1994 so 2010 will be very useable for a long time. - Robert Scoble

good point Robert - Steven Hodson

Plus, I always hated the version numbers because the Web doesn't have a version. it's more fashion, like cars. - Robert Scoble

Well im late (in the half hr this has been posted), but i will say that which ever client has the most interesting and frequent updates will prevail, so this debate could go on and on - Chris Nwakalo

And it upgrades constantly. - Robert Scoble

Alex: because these clients secretly piggyback and make their own redundant networks that some think will be able to free the clients of their dependency on twitter. (did i get that right? ;)) - Frankie Warren

Nambu updates fairly frequently. :-) - Joshua Lee

Hey, Robert - it's Yama - I'll be starting a friendfeed room in a bit, but loving the stream here - jyamasaki

I'm trying to get businesses to see that if they are using the 1994 web they'll look pretty lame if their competitors are using the 2010 one. - Robert Scoble

yes. Real-time web might be akin to cold fusion. Guesing vertical and local are the next waves on the web. - Christian Anderson

Anyway, that's all off topic, back to Seesmic and TweetDeck and Tweetie and all the rest. If they all worked together they could totally take away Twitter's air supply. - Robert Scoble

Twitter is definitely on the cusp of something massive. I'm afraid their infrastructure will quickly crumble though. They haven't even figured out a way to make money yet. - Alex Knight

i kind of agree w/ james fuller. there's something too gimmicky w/ all the symmetric number schemes up to 12-12-12 - just for the sake of removing oneself from it, 2013 makes sense to me as a new starting point. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

I find it interesting that many people are willing to pay or donate to developers making Twitter clients. No one donates to Twitter heh. - Alex Knight

blackfeathers: if you are appealing to early adopters and developers you are probably right. I'm trying to appeal to normal business people. They understand that the 2010 automobiles are just now shipping (my 2010 Prius should be here next week) and so if they want to get a modern web site they will understand that they need 2010web technologies. 2013 is too esoteric and future thinking for normal people. - Robert Scoble

Considering how long from the infamous O'Reilly web 2.0 conference to it becoming a popular buzzword web 2.0 became, maybe 2010 is a bit too soon in the future. I'm not sure why I'm trying to help with this buzzword though, considering how much I hate them. :-) - Joshua Lee

Robert: How would the clients make it clear what networks you're talking to and who actually is able to see your content? For example, If Joe is Twitter+Seesmic and I'm Twitter+Tweetie.... when twitter goes down I can no longer speak to joe... - Frankie Warren

Alex: that's because Twitter treats us like crap and has $30 million in the bank. - Robert Scoble

Loic is well positioned to win because he has an honest to God team working on this. They got in early and they've kept a break-neck innovation pace. - Christian Anderson

Twitter is a platform, Friendfeed and Tweetdeck are apps. Well , Twitter does have a native app, but it sucks big time. I think it's a matter of months that the mainstream twitter users will realize that and there will be a huge explosion in twitter apps usage. - Kirill Bolgarov

Frankie - that's a routing-around-failure problem that is keeping me up at night to be honest - when I think of what will be needed to do that - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Ok, I have to go to bed. One last though before I go, one of the reasons Seesmic Desktop is huge is because it pulls your virtual social life back into one location that can exist on you desktop, and makes it easy to manage from it's interface. - Jimminy

its no threat at all - as twitter knows perfectly well, the Platform is everything! Seesmic isn't the platform and never can be as its desktop based - Anthony Feint

Yeh, that was abit offtopic - Kirill Bolgarov

Frankie: in Seesmic Desktop I can tell which Window is showing me Facebook and which one is showing me Twitter. Why couldn't I be shown that I can have more features with other people who are on Seesmic Desktop? - Robert Scoble

Oh suuure Scoble, get me on Friend Feed and already you've declared it passe? - Brett Schulte

Robert - They should spend the $29 million on their infrastructure and leave the last million to pay salaries :P - Alex Knight

Robert, is there a way to do a date range search in FF? - Gary Gannon

Brett: heheh. There's a method to my madness. When I started getting into friendfeed Twitter took off. So, I figured I better find the next big thing so friendfeed could take off. Seesmic Desktop is it! - Robert Scoble

Alex: I hear the team already took a lot off the table. - Robert Scoble

Alex: that's why the management isn't in a big hurry to sell Twitter. They already have "FU money." - Robert Scoble

Gogii is the next Twitter according to @drew... I like it. - Brett Schulte

I still don't think an app could be the next big thing,after all platform rules. - Steve Chou

Brett: hmmm. Why? - Robert Scoble

Mike: do you see like Robert in that you can make a separate network that acts as a Twitter+ - Frankie Warren

Steve: Seesmic Desktop IS a platform. - Robert Scoble

In all honesty it's easy to bash Twitter's infrastructure when you aren't in their shoes. I know our own company has gone through a ton of growing pains in the past 14 years. - Alex Knight

Alex: Twitter was crashing when I had 1,000 followers. It's always sucked. - Robert Scoble

Blackfeather: I'm glad you like the idea, but now I'm seeing Robert's point. The 2010web is constantly changing just like model years. You want to release next years big thing now. - Jimminy

Gogii is SMS based and more universal, and allows custom groups. - Brett Schulte

Frankie - I can't say to be honest one way or the other - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I remember about 2 months that Twitter wasn't crashing in some form or another, when I first started using it - Jesse Stay

Ff on the iPhone is not handling this string very well. - Christian Anderson

Mike: Tweetie is using its network of 200,000 people to do lots of interesting things and will be doing more when they roll out their new version. - Robert Scoble

This is the problem with FriendFeed... 200+ comments from one post. There needs to be a way to flag comments from different users in different ways. - Jay McCormack

Back in the ole days of twitter when you had to walk 15 miles in the snow, barefoot, in order to tweet... - Dean Clark

Mike: it'd be interesting to see if you guys choose to make your own database to add even more features. Like location and better search and "offline availability" for when Twitter is down. - Robert Scoble

i don't know why exactly -perhaps it was the pager days- that makes me see it as yesterday. i skip sms if i can help it. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

robert - understood - I just can't say or comment on anything we are planning or not planning - loic and marco would personally come stomp me into a furry puddle ;) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

You're right Robert, shit programming is shit programming. It's no excuse to not plan/develop scalable infrastructure. Our company is suffering now because all of our internal systems were writing 14 years ago by a bunch of n00bs. - Alex Knight

Robert: I'm sure you're not at liberty to say.... but it seems counter productive that seesmic and tweetie race to get an install base of twitter clients to have their own network gain a critical mass... shouldnt they work together :) Or am I being naive again - Frankie Warren

Jay: I don't see this as a problem. I see it as a benefit. - Shawn Hickman

Am I the only one that would like to see threaded comments or would that get way too messy? - James Poling

Seesmic was interesting but I just can't stand listening to the French guy. - Brett Schulte

Frankie: I wish they would work together. - Robert Scoble

Brett: heheheh. That's Loic. - Robert Scoble

brett - well, you can listen to the German guy if you want - he's the Seesmic Desktop lead - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

FWIW, I love Tiny Twitter on my Blackberry. So much nicer than Twitter Berry - ursi

Robert: He really should get a spokesman people can understand. - Brett Schulte

@James .. threaded comments FTW! - Steven Hodson

James: threaded comments would be fun here. I'd love to add graphics and video in here too, but it sure would get messy. - Robert Scoble

Just say it, Robert. As a former Microsoft employee, you should be able to explain to everyone in three little words how Seesmic Desktop/Tweetie/insert_thirdparty_app_here can successfully kill Twitter should it gain a critical mass of users: "EMBRACE. AND. EXTEND." I'm 26 and even I remember the browser wars. Seriously. Scoble's right on this one. - Andrew Feinberg

+ for threaded comments, this is hard to follow. Friendfeed should add to their UI and it should highlight comments that mention you. - Alex Knight

"Even I remember the browser wars" - feeling ancient. - Brett Schulte

james fuller: considering the target audience & the purpose then it would make sense currently. perhaps i'm thinking of time in a scalable sense of passage. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Andrew: yes, embrace and extend. Tweetie showed me the light. Seesmic is doing similar things with Facebook and Twitter (I have groups in Seesmic Desktop). - Robert Scoble

I wish there was a button for commenting at the very bottom of this post. I don't like scrolling back up to comment. - Jimminy

Alex: follow? Just click the time stamp and stare at the screen! - Robert Scoble

Nobody remember the losers. - Steve Chou

James: if you click the time stamp it will open a new window up where the comment window will be at the bottom. - Robert Scoble

James: pop out the window via the time stamp? - Frankie Warren

Didn't you use to be big on Twitter Scoble? :) - Brett Schulte

Robert: Thank you this is so much better. - Jimminy

@Brett you should see the crowds he draws in Japan - Andrew Feinberg

@Brett he used to be big on Facebook too :) - Steven Hodson

Brett: a very large PR firm told me I have a more engaged audience than Oprah. So, who said I'm still not big on Twitter? - Robert Scoble

Steven: He's not still big on Facebook? Could've fooled me. - Karoli

Brett: It gave birth to this chaos. - Frankie Warren

Does anyone think Twitter buying out one of the big Twitter client products would be good for them? - Alex Knight

Alex: that would be stupid for a platform company to do. - Robert Scoble

Alex - even better, Facebook buying out one of the big Twitter clients - Jesse Stay

@Alex: No. They can barely keep up with their own internal architecture. - Andrew Feinberg

I think Twitter's plan is to offer premium features like advanced search, tracking, analytics, and bringing back the @ replies everyone complained about recently. They won't give this all away for free. - Geoff Peterson

Alex: Twitter effectively killed all tiny URL innovation by partnering with bit.ly. - Robert Scoble

Alex: I think they need to be bought - Shawn Hickman

Robert I think you said it right there - the only way to truly compete with Twitter as a Twitter developer is to become Twitter - Jesse Stay

Shawn: but the minute Twitter buys one the other companies know it's over and they'll move their code to a different system. - Robert Scoble

Do they have a written partnership with bit.ly or did they just switch due to analytics? - Dean Clark

Robert you coming down for e3? - Brett Schulte

Dean: from what I understand it's a written partnership. Bit.ly is even on the same datacenter as Twitter is now. - Robert Scoble

Jesse: is that like the scene in Highlander where Sean Connery teaches Christopher Lambert to "Feel the stag..."? - Andrew Feinberg

Brett: I doubt it. - Robert Scoble

Sure, someone should buy Twitter but who? I would say what Twitter is doing right now would be a good fit for Google. - Alex Knight

Andrew, something like that, yeah :-) - Jesse Stay

Robert: Agreed, but I meant I think they should be bought by another company - Shawn Hickman

Alex: I talked with Twitter investor Fred Wilson on Thursday. He said that Ev really is adverse to selling. - Robert Scoble

Ok call me a newbie, but why would it be a bad thing for Twitter to purchase atebits (tweetie)? Wouldn't that just be like hiring people to make their own client? Or is that bad because Twitter should only be focusing on Twitter, and not clients for Twitter? - Colin

Robert, to your point about search, I would offer this: Even a powerful search isn't enough. There has to be filters. Tracking my name even gives wonky results without filters. - Karoli

Ok, interesting. Yeah written partnership would certainly kill some people trying to innovate. Few out of work people I think will give you different things a try though, certainly won't be see as widely though since short links are a mainstream feature now. - Dean Clark

So is Twitter's revenue plan to slowly remove the most popular features and then start selling them back to people? - James Poling

I heard Robert is buying Twitter - Jesse Stay

wow, it's been a while since I've been in such a fun tech discussion. I've missed you, FriendFeed! - Andrew Feinberg

No, Twitter bought Robert. ;) - Brett Schulte

Karoli: search is equal to filters in my mind. - Robert Scoble

Robert - EV may not want to sell Twitter, but it may have to happen in the not so distant future. We'll see though. - Alex Knight

The obvious choice would be google to purchase Twitter, but I'm sure others could work well too - Shawn Hickman

it's also possible for another company going down to buy twitter for its upward momentum, but maybe not likely. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Brett, no, I just bought Robert - did you see my Twitpay? - Jesse Stay

I bought his puppet, too - Jesse Stay

@James: there was no plan. that would acknowledge they added features knowing they'd be popular, and therefore would have built them better. - Andrew Feinberg

Alex: Ev doesn't have to sell. What's forcing him to sell? I don't see it. - Robert Scoble

Andrew: friendfeed is fun once in a while when you get a topic that rocks and rolls like this one. - Robert Scoble

Seesmic Desktop is Dead - Bwana ☠

Andrew: but the real power in friendfeed is in the real time search engine here. - Robert Scoble

Robert - Nothing at all... but the future is untold. He may not have to sell now but it may become a good move in the future. - Alex Knight

Haha Bwana! - invariant - farewell FF

LOL @Bwana - Alex Knight

I heard Google is buying Seesmic Desktop - Jesse Stay

Bwana makes me laugh. - Robert Scoble

i do like the search engine. I use it to track current event reactions. I just rarely get engaged. - Andrew Feinberg

Jesse NOW THAT would be interesting! - Robert Scoble

I just heard a rim shot coming from Bwana - Alex Knight

You heard it hear first (might as well claim it) - Jesse Stay

ergo seesmic desktop is the new rss? lol - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

bwana - any more lebron pain for you tonight? - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Robert: Conversation you can see is the real power of FriendFeed. Not the disjointed conversation on Twitter. - Geoff Peterson

Maybe FriendFeed should buy Twitter or the other way around - Shawn Hickman

So how does Seesmic make money... or does it not? - Colin

Tweetie is making money. - Colin

Why don't we all just pitch in and buy them both. How many users between the two? - Jesse Stay

Colin - Seesmic desktop makes money from other services I believe. - Alex Knight

Colin: sell a pro version. I'd pay for a version that had friendfeed integration, for instance. - Robert Scoble

@Jesse. Nice bring me in as an investor - Christian Anderson

bear - no, I'm somewhat over it...until I turn the TV on - Bwana ☠

Christian, might still be expensive at what it seems Twitter's asking for - Jesse Stay

well, I'm off to bed. This was fun, see ya in the morning! - Robert Scoble

I heard the LDS church is buying the LHC from CERN and using it to go back in time so they can buy Twitter, add everyone's tweets to their genealogical databases and use that to target ads better than google, AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD AHAHAHAHAHA. Right, Jesse? :-) - Andrew Feinberg

Seesmic desktop runs on AIR. I refuse to use it for that reason. - nick

Robert I thought you were going to kill Gilmore - you got pretty hot. - Brett Schulte

Robert: the average person does not equate search/track/filters . Look at Google usage for examples - Karoli

Colin - I paid for my Tweetie licence but also donated $18 to DestroyTwitter. Love supporting great developers. - Alex Knight

Andrew, I think my head just exploded - Jesse Stay

Brett: he can't kill Gillmor. Two would pop up to take his place. - Andrew Feinberg

hahahaha - Brett Schulte

Good night. 330 comments. Wild. - Robert Scoble

Way to be Alex, this stuff isn't free to make. - Colin

@Jesse: so you don't deny it? :-) - Andrew Feinberg

fun discussion. The pug insists I leave it. Good night all. - Karoli

Good night - happy weekend! - Brett Schulte

Andrew, that one I'll let you make your own conclusions on :-) - Jesse Stay

(I somehow forgot to work Louis Gray into the conspiracy. But we all know he's there. The question is who will play him in the movie starring Tom Hanks as Ev and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Scoble) - Andrew Feinberg

/me wanders off to dream of wiring IRC to FriendFeed - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I think Microsoft should buy Twitter and make their own Twitter client and implement Microsoft Bob to help you tweet! - Alex Knight

and don't forget the CGI "Clippy" voiced by Chris Rock - Andrew Feinberg

Microsoft kills almost every business they bought. - Steve Chou from IM

@Steve Chou - Google's record isn't much better really - Steven Hodson

(too bad Don LaFontaine isn't alive to record a trailer voiceover for Ron Howard's "Twitter/Friendfeed" techno-thriller) - Andrew Feinberg

So I need a who special box to run seesmic? *rollseyes* So it's like on of those Bloomberg boxes that investment firms have clicking away? And where in my already oversized backpack am I supposed to carry this Seemic machine? - Matthew DeVries

Matthew: the bloomberg software can run on any laptop now. but you need a special smartcard with a fingerprint reader that reads a barcode off the screen at the same time. - Andrew Feinberg

I'm going to look so cool taking up 4 tables in the coffee shop to run all the shit I'm supposed to be running to be truely plugged in.... - Matthew DeVries

@Matthew ROFLMAO .. just like the rest of the cool kids at Starbucks :) - Steven Hodson

That? That's the PS3 and HDTV just so i can watch Qor. - Matthew DeVries

I'm going to sit down and deal 5 notebooks out of my back pack like a Baccarat shoe. - Matthew DeVries

Wow 350 comments. What a massive comment stream. The comment feature makes a huge diff. It facilitates conversation, which twitter doesn't really provide. - Lawrence Di Stefano from Nambu

What Twitter's at threat!? It has the momentum of an unstoppable train, as to Seesmic being a threat - maybe, unfortunately it's irrelevant. - sofarsoShawn

I dumped Tweetdeck after the last Seesmic release. They have such an insane release schedule I don't think people can grasp how difficult it is to roll out the kind of releases they have done back to back.Their version stream just tells me they have bank behind them. When you work from different boxes I don't love the tethered feel of Seesmic however. - Chad Harris

there is potential for all these services (twitter, Friendfeed, facebook etc) to become secondary to the apps. The more services there are, the greater the need to bring them back together again. - Alistair (alpinefolk)

Chad: agree, there is something about SD that I'm not a fan of, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Seems to have lost something from Twhirl somehow - Alistair (alpinefolk)

@Scoble: Can you disclose publicly here that you are not on a pay roll by Seesmic or Loic LeMeur? Don't you have a PR-advisory deal? Please disclose.... - nikolas

Mike Taylor: "dream of wiring IRC to FriendFeed" <- that would be SO great ^__^ (with xdcc support included and stuff...) - minus-one

Robert is high - Alejandro

amazing 355 comments - learned a lot about Seesmic in rellation to twitter; thanks for sharing! - Jeroen De Miranda

Nikolas I have no such deal with Seesmic. I never have been paid by them. I have no investment in them. I don't know where you got that idea but it is totally false. - Robert Scoble

I just cannot bring myself to install one more thing on my computer to take up needed RAM. Plus, I do not want to install anything on my work computer either...and like to just user browser things that I can use on any computer. - Hummie

Scobleizer, Wait, Do I hence assume that your assertion is that friendfeed is no more (or, never was) a threat to twitter? - Lakshman Prasad

Lakshman: Friendfeed I'd not a threat to Twitter, correct. That said it is a threat to http://search.twitter.com - Robert Scoble

Robert: I like it but --- 1. it is a tool not a place, so i'll stick with FriendFeed as my means to "kill Twitter" and 2. it is a total whorish memory hog and i hate it when that happens. - Thom Kennon

Yeah it's a memory hog - Svartling

Robert: Seesmic definitely has potential, but I think that PeopleBrowsr has far more potential and far more power than Seesmic will ever have. As a power user, I'm quite surprised that you haven't taken that tool up, and replaced your Tweetdeck. And I would be surprised if you chose Seesmic to replace Tweetdeck. The search capabilities alone in PeopleBrowsr make me wonder this. Add to... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I would honestly say Seesmic Desktop is more of a threat to Friendfeed than Twitter - Zee.

Rob: I need to try Peoplebrowsr again. When I first tried it it was too slow and complex. - Robert Scoble

Zee: one major reason I also haven't gotten in Peoplebrowsr or Seesmic desktop is because, well, it is Adobe AIR and my iPhone doesn't run that (in Seesmic Desktop's case). In Peoplebrowser's case? It didn't do mobile last time I tried it. Friendfeed's search and realtime is keeping me going. - Robert Scoble

I think we can all agree that twitter was just the first in a line of ever evolving systems in real time news, twitter is the oldest, and will probably be replaced eventually, but surely it doesn't help to keep jumping ship every few months, nothing seems to be gathering as much steam as friendfeed, and it offers huge improvements over twitter, I really think people do need to persist with one service... rather than constantly jumping - Chris Lloyd

Robert the lack of mobile in PeopleBrowsr is valid, and it is complex, but the light mode makes it much more manageable to start using. The speed has considerably improved since you last used it. We'd love for you to try it again. The AIR version will import your groups from Tweetdeck. Please feel free to ask any questions you have. Jodee is on his way to California now for the conference this week. I hope that you'll have a chance sit down with him and see the improvements. - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from f2p

augh, too many comments to absorb. just wanted to throw in my two cents, though. i started with twhirl, then tried out Seesmic Desktop, and then went back to twhirl because i was able to customize the font size for reading the tweets. maybe i didn't dig deep enough, but Seesmic doesn't have that option, and i find the print a wee bit too small for my liking. - Starshadow Rivaulx

Wow Rob, you are an internet phenomenon. Someone tweeted me the link of this thread followed by "look at the moron, lol". Anyway: If twitter gets shut down, Seesmic will die. If Seesmic dies (gets shut down, w/e), it won't make a dent to twitter. Hence, you are wrong. - H M Elius

I'm with @guruvan on this, PeopleBrowsr is way better than Seesmic Desktop as a power tool. - Svartling

Svartling: Thanks! And, you can see by the via on this post, we already have FriendFeed support, and it will improve as well. And, with all the networks that we support, PeopleBrowsr isn't dependent on Twitter. Twitter access is surely the big slice, but we offer the ability to search Facebook, FriendFeed, Digg, Youtube, flickr, and even custom URLs. And, we provide access to Seesmic's network - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

Loic is gonna love this - David Lloyd

so I go offline for a few hours playing with the kids and Robert launches this conversation when I am quiet and away! Ah! that's fun. If you had written a blog post instead of a friendfeed entry it would definitely be the week-end techmeme headline! Competing with Twitter? Nah I would have to be seriously sick to even think about it. We are just delivering as fast as we can and growing... more... - Loic Le Meur

WOW, what a conversation that was!! - Micky

Seriously. Robert...I think you just proved the value of (at least) FriendFeed forever more...(And Seesmic too of course!:-)...This is what I get for sleeping, eh? - Alan Edgett

I still rather prefer Twhirl to Seesmic Desktop. (Twitter + Friendfeed) better than (Twitter + Facebook). - Adrian Scicluna

The newest SD is much nicer than previous from a functional standpoint. I agree that FF support is a must (as well as Seesmic support). I still do not really like the UI, especially on my EEE PC, but even on the 24" monitor it is not as nice as TD. The functionality is better though so I have switched to SD. Really hoping to have the ability to rename saved searches, it is the searching which is so awesome after all. - Sean Brady

Robert how about a video showing the features or another interview with Loic? Depraved for Content!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Stephen Pickering

Its PeopleBrowsr not Seesmic - Webferret

So, what is this stuff from the top of the thread about Tweetie using their own servers? Little Snitch tells me that Tweetie for the Mac is communicating with twitter.com and s3.amazonaws.com. Robert? - Jason Wehmhoener

Jason: sorry it was Twinkle. I messed up. - Robert Scoble

It would sure be ironic if the 'openness' of Twitter's API killed them. As far as Seesmic goes, I wouldn't count on it emerging as the winner. I'm not impressed with it at all, most of the reasons being cited or commonly known. It has a lot of work to do before even attempting FriendFeed integration. I think Nambu has a lot of promise actually - Angus Burton

Starshadow - I know that better font handling is on our short list - i'll go poke the devs to see if I can move it up a couple notches :) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Loic: who cares about getting on Techmeme anymore? Not me. I'd rather just have an interesting conversation. Seems like a few people found it here. - Robert Scoble

Looks to be the ase doesn't it. I was moving to TweetDeck/Twit but now thininking about exiting ofdf to Seesmic - James Hemby

Robert, you've got me trying both FriendFeed and Seesmic now from this post. Soon enough I'll be on flttr , even. - Raj Rikhy

Robert, I love TechMeme, I read it multiple times a day. I agree Friendfeed has very active users. Both are small groups on the web, if these groups are enough for you as a conversation, then yeah it's cool. Friendfeed definitely did not make me stop reading techmeme. - Loic Le Meur

having said that, yes, Friendfeed is coming to Seesmic Desktop - Loic Le Meur

Loic: I am inviting a bunch of Web innovators to a private room on friendfeed this weekend. It's amazing how many are already here and signed in. They might not be active, but they are active enough to accept my invitations! Watch for yours soon. - Robert Scoble

Wow all these comments about seesmic! Well this got me really curious, until now I only used Tweetdeck,tried Peoplebrowser, didn't like it, will give Seesmic a chance now. Want to find out for my self, and once again thanks to friendfeed for these discussions! - Jacob

I view Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck as almost next generation web browsers customized for the social web. Will be interesting to see how that dynamic evolves and how the traditional browsers like firefox will fit into the picture going forward. - Mike Bracco

Loic: I would love to hear what you feel about my above statement and where you see SD fitting in long term/big picture perspective. If you have a link where you have already discussed this, can you send - thanks! - Mike Bracco

Mike: agreed Loic "Bloomberg for Social media" sums it up perfectly. Also I am not a fan of peoplebrowser think Steamy is cleaner if you want to go untethered. Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T - Chad Harris from email

Chad: Thanks and makes total sense. - Mike Bracco

Thanks also ment to type "Streamy" not steamy, thumbs need a diet :) Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T - Chad Harris from email

Seesmic Desktop is too buggy for my liking... and I've tried to like it. Userlists are often completely incorrect... and randomly at that. I don't much care for any of the AIR apps. They just don't "feel" good. - John

Robert: I'm curious - If Twitter decides to use advertising as part of their business model, how will apps like seesmic etc impact Twitter - if they block advertisements, which are displayed on the Twitter web page? If so many users won't see the ads, how will that hurt Twitter's model? - Jim Connolly

LOL. - Mona Nomura

damn! this thread is still going! scoble's threads are epic! - Jason Pollock

Jim: the advertising money is in search. So, what happens if Seesmic Desktop does a metasearch that uses Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed to present to you the best possible display? Wouldn't that hurt Twitter's ability to sell advertising? I think it would. The one who is in charge of the display controls where the ads go. The one who has the relationship with the user controls the... more... - Robert Scoble

I like Seesmic's functionality but really dislike the interface. It's all a little clunky and a little ugly. Plus the left panel takes up way too much space. Air apps aren't may fav. Seesmic should look at Tweetie on the mac for design ideas. - Wo

How do you search Facebook on Seesmic? - Wo

Didn't read all 400+ comments. Seesmic desktop is poopy compared to Nambu. Try Nambu. - Jason Mayoff from Nambu

Robert: I'm waiting on my invite :) - James Poling from email

does anyone know how many users are registered on friendfeed ? :) - Pretty Monkey Studio

It has 103.33 million accounts - David Lloyd

cool thx mark - Pretty Monkey Studio

can't believe this thread is still active - Loic Le Meur

Wow this is still going on?? LOL - Alex Knight

Jason - Nambu is crash happy, at least Seesmic Desktop doesn't crash. - Alex Knight

This entire thread is silly and nonsensical. It's one thing to argue the merits of an interface's appearance, but the way this reads is like comparing an orange to orange juice. Seesmic Desktop is the orange juice to Twitter's orange; without the source, you can't have the juice. Or, is Loic planning to create a competing SNS? - Ari Herzog

Ari... I think the point is you can now drink orange, apple, tomato and grape juice and it all tastes like the same juice. Things like this make 'where' less important than 'what' - Johnny Worthington

Not the point, Johnny. If Twitter has one of its legendary fail whale attacks, it matters not what juice you're drinking since it ain't there. - Ari Herzog

Hey Robert, you're attracting again heh!!! Had to take 2 days off after all the fun we had. I LOVE SD, btw. - Myrna

Twine Is Taking Off, Now Bigger Than FriendFeed http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... (pretty hard 2 believe) - Ron Hagenhoff

+1 on hyperboles make you think. Just did a twitter search to measure the buzz around twitter clients: tweetie ~70 tweet per hour, tweetdeck ~150 tweet per hour and seesmic ~30 tweet per hour. But seesmic has $12M in the bank and a charismatic leader - It is going to be an interesting fight! - Edwin Khodabakchian

Edwin: TweetDeck also had a multi month lead over Seesmic. That's going to be tough to beat. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Yes. The challenge for Loic I think is going to be to carve out a market segment: 1) companies managing their brands and communities, 2) social media power users or 3) normal users. 1) is where the short term revenue is, 2) is where the vocal/buzz people are and 3) is where the mass and long term search revenue. I am not sure that you can design one product which will fit the... more... - Edwin Khodabakchian

The future is in a desktop app? Everything else is going web-based, into the cloud, and yet for this alone users will flock to some resource-hog? No way, no how. Be web-based or be content to live with only early adopters. - Maxwell Kennerly

I'm loving Seesmic desktop - i look forward to what adaptations it will make - I want that friend feed pull-in. - Robert Freeze

The one thing that I have only seen in Nambu is the unread count. Might be missing something but it is just amazing for having searches in there, for mentions and direct messages. It's just wonderful. And is it not Air which security people will tell you is a major danger spot for hacking. - Oliver Thylmann

Robert: Thanks for the feedback re Twitter's revenue model. Just a thought, but with this thread having (at this point) 425 comments - is there a chance that FRIENDFEED could be the real competition to Twitter? The quality is already here, just a 'little' light on numbers. Thoughts? - Jim Connolly

Jim: I think there's something interesting happening here in search and in groups. Those are both places there's potential money, but a lot has to happen before that can happen. - Robert Scoble

Only if we all get more expensive computers, webcams, etc. - Prokofy Neva

Robert: Are you referring to FriendFeed needing more active users or for the actual FriendFeed platform to change? - Jim Connolly

I dont know if Seesmic is a threat for Twitter, but I know Robert Scoble knows well how to create a hot thread. - Jacque

Jacque: That's what I was thinking. :-) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Can someone please explain to me how you can search your facebook stream in Seesmic - Wo

Ari: Not all of these clients are particularly susceptible to Twitter's failwhales. Many features still continue to work, often including search. Some of these clients have backends that cache/queue tweets so even more gets through. So it's not always like having no juice. Furthermore, if you're paying attention to multiple social networks, you're not as concerned or slowed down by one of them becoming inaccessible - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

I've been using Seesmic Desktop for about a week now. I absolutely love it. I have no use for Tweetdeck now. I sometimes use Hootsuite - mostly for their "Hootlet". But Seesmic Desktop is absolutely wonderful in managing my feeds. - Curt Mercadante

*bumps* - sofarsoShawn

Tim Walker

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." ~ Shunryu Suzuki

May 22 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Jon Lebkowsky and Owen liked this

Cool to see that quote - have you read Suzuki-Roshi's works? - Jon Lebkowsky

Robert Scoble

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:

April 9 - Comment - Like - Share

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

253 more comments

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

#hashtagsaredead - Ryan Kuder

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

Ha! #ScobleizerIsFunny - Brent Logan

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

Meh. #scoblesayingitdoesntmakeittrue - Suburban Oblivion

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

Robert, your "foopoo" example IS a tag without a designator as tag. The purpose of a #tag isn't to FIND, but to TELL others where something is to be found. It's an ad hoc channel, not a query. - Shoq

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)

Tags define a community. Those #Tcot and #teaparty and #idol people cannot be served by an arbitrary "track" query. They are both tools with very different uses. - Shoq

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

Matt: we need you in the #hashtagmafia #natualhashman #jointhefun - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

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... more... - 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... more... - 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

http://hashtags.org are not dead. Far from it. Happy #followfriday!! - Garin Kilpatrick

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

Nancy White

Definition for this tweet flow: Communities=bounded, shared interest, Soc Networks=fuzzy boundaries, overlapping interests 4 #smgps

April 10 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Jon Lebkowsky liked this

Howard Rheingold

Google's Love For Newspapers - http://daggle.com/090406-...

April 7 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

Jon Lebkowsky liked this

And now I'm hearing the same old crap again, and I'm feeling the same way I did back then. Some samples in the past few days. First from Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal: Meantime Thomson said it was "amusing" to read media blogs and comment sites, all of which traded on other people's information. "They are basically editorial echo chambers rather than centres of creation, and the cynicism they have about so-called traditional media is only matched by their opportunism in exploiting the quality of traditional media," he said. Robert, I've been creating original content on the internet for about 12 years longer than you've been editor of the WSJ. Shut up. Seriously, shut up. To say something like that simply indicates you really do not understand that all blogs are not echo chambers. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Howard Rheingold

Steve Gillmor

Gillmor Gang will record Monday 4PM Pacific w/ FriendFeed founders

April 4 from IM - Comment - Like - Share

Mike Cooke, Daniel Chow, John Flinchbaugh and 107 other people liked this

Great timing. Big day for FriendFeed Monday. I'll definitely be tuned in. - Rolf Schewe

773 more comments

Awesome! - Susan Beebe

Great! I may actually be able to catch that one due to the time! Thanks! - ursi

I will be in the air, unfortunately. Bummer. - Robert Scoble

Good to hear. A good time for that. - Thomas Hawk

Gillmor, is anyone from the FF team on your show this afternoon? - Thomas Hawk

My guess would be he's probably been tired since Friday or so, Chris. :-) - Ken Sheppardson

yes Paul Buchheit will be on Gilmor Gang at 4PM Pacific streamed on Twit.TV live - Steve Gillmor

I can barely hear what Leo is saying. - Dave Winer

Leo's spent the last few days trying to recover from a tricaster failure and has been tweaking levels on different services, getting resolutions reset on feeds, etc. The ustream feed seems to have the best audio at the moment: http://www.ustream.tv/channel... - Ken Sheppardson

50min till Gillmor Gang right? - Wo

Cris: yes - Ken Sheppardson

Thanks Ken. This real time thing is pretty neat! - Wo

Live now at http://live.twit.tv - Ken Sheppardson

Paul Buchheit, Mike Arrington, Scoble, Dan Farber, Andrew Keen, and Kevin Marks. - Ken Sheppardson

Mike says he's writing an article right now: "FriendFeed is in danger of becoming the coolest app no one uses" - Ken Sheppardson

Mike sorta declares FF missed the boat and won't be able to overcome Twitter's lead/network effects. Paul's trying to defend the fact that they can/should be more than one company in the space. - Ken Sheppardson

I disagree with Arrington - Bwana ☠

Yeah, I don't think it's going to be a short term shift en masse to FriendFeed - Ken Sheppardson

Has Andrew used the beta? - Ken Sheppardson

Andrew seems like he doesn't understand the beta. - Thomas Hawk

Talking heads are mentioning Twitter because it is a fad - Bwana ☠

the idea of twitter storing my images and video on their site gives me the willies. - Karoli

Half of them don't even know what they're saying - Bwana ☠

I wish they'd stop talking about twitter... - Adnan

yeah it seems like some of the people on the call really don't understand how the new FriendFeed even really works. - Thomas Hawk

I just brought my friends timeline into Friendfeed as a custom RSS feed. - Karoli

Bwana: Yeah, this is a whole lot more about how the standard market dynamics stuff than what FriendFeed's done - Ken Sheppardson

I thought this was going to be a "Twitter free" edition...I guess I was wrong. - Ahmed

I can't understand some of these guys because they are talking over each other. - Mol, Time Warping

Ahmed: You can't really talk about FriendFeed after today without also talking about Twitter and Facebook. - Ken Sheppardson

Hey, yeah... let's talk to Paul about this... - Ken Sheppardson

Chris: They have to go through the usual suspects before they can settle in and talk about FriendFeed :-) - Ken Sheppardson

Chris, don't take it personally. - Kevin Fox

live updating on the new beta really works well for this type of back channel. - Thomas Hawk

Ken : True... - Ahmed

This realtime discussion is amazing... instant realtime chat room! - Adnan

Mike is missing the standards conversation - Kevin Marks

Thomas, it's great. I did turn off the replies to Twitter feature though... - Karoli

Live blogging events pretty much changed overnight. - Ken Sheppardson

I'd love to ask Paul, will there be any chance to give people the choice for run-Time instead of forcing it onto people. That's what I didn't like. Leave it an option. - Mol, Time Warping

That's actually a really good point: "Celebrities aren't coming to Twitter for conversation." - Kevin Fox

Thomas: opening up an entry page (this one for instance: http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegi...) works really well in the beta. It's like a chat room :) - Benjamin Golub

I agree with Paul, personally I'm not interested in celebrities and Twitter has very little appeal for me. I'm far more interested in interesting tech and photography and for that FF is far more interesting a place. - Thomas Hawk

Molly, just hit pause and manually refresh - Karoli

Neither is Steve Gillmor, for that matter. - Kent

Benjamin: Only little kink is the page doesn't scroll to keep up. The convo keeps walking off the bottom of the screen. - Ken Sheppardson

If I post a comment, does it leave the post input open and focused? No. :( - Michael Leggett

Are the comments to this post from Steve just an analog to an IRC chat? Looks darned familiar! - Calgary Guru

I love FF over Twitter. - Mol, Time Warping

Michael: It does if you're on a single-item page. - Kevin Fox

Calgary: Absolutly, but it's persistent, searchable, linkable... - Ken Sheppardson

RT is great for these fast-moving conversations, but if only the comment button was down at the bottom. - j1m

Michael: when on an entry page (http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegi...) if you post a comment it immediately refocuses the comment box. Edit: Kevin beat me! - Benjamin Golub

It makes it pretty much a group IM chat. - Kevin Fox

yeah this is nice. - MG Siegler

...and when I see somebody say something interesting here, I can jump off an link to everything they've ever written. - Ken Sheppardson

J1m if you click the link and come into this post only, the comment button is at the bottom. - Simon Wicks

Facebook. ugh. - Karoli

Can I go slap Mike Arrington? - Mol, Time Warping

Molly, get in line behind me. - Karoli

Molly: Ask Kevin to. - Ken Sheppardson

FriendFeed pro tip: once on an entry page (http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegi...) click on the entry timestamp again :) - Benjamin Golub

Mike was pretty hilarious at the FF demo on Friday. He was wandering around the office looking at whiteboards and stuff... - Ken Sheppardson

Why should I use FriendFeed when I'm happy on Twitter? <-- Use Twitter. Duh. - Bwana ☠

Facebook's UGI is crap now, but I still use it. :) - Mol, Time Warping

Benjamin: That's sweet! - Sam Grover

Thanks Benjamin - Phil Maxwell

oops UI not UGI - Mol, Time Warping

I like the way these comments are turning into an irc room - Kevin Marks

Twitter is a broadcasting channel now. The real exchange of ideas is going to be here. - Ken Sheppardson

FriendFeed has photos, Twitter does not, I think that's huge right there and very disruptive. - Thomas Hawk

oh, that's very cool Benjamin - Karoli

FF is good for the conversation. - Mol, Time Warping

I think with the feedback FF is getting, they will improve their UI. - Mol, Time Warping

Friendfeed is pretty cool with the update. - Paul L. McCord Jr.

It's lots of things. It's adaptable. It's sorta infinitely extensible. The trick is making it simple at the same time. - Ken Sheppardson

Paul seems like a really understanding person. - Mol, Time Warping

The comment box needs to be above the comment stream so it doesn't get pushed of the bottom of the window if a couple of people post comments while you're typing. - Phil Maxwell

Kevin: Ask what FF's runway looks like, will ya? - Ken Sheppardson

Can't wait to hear it. When will it post to the web. - Tom Parish

I am not giving Twitter or Facebook my content. They keep it - Karoli

It would be interesting to pick any two: FriendFeed, Facebook, or Twitter, and assign those two arbitrary user counts where one had 10x the other, and then try to make the argument of how the underdog was doomed, or would eclipse the larger site. - Kevin Fox

I can't understand why it's always a choice between FriendFeed or Twitter and not a choice between Facebook or Twitter. Boggles my mind - Bwana ☠

When FriendFeed will tip: When people get sick of duplicating themselves across FB, Twitter, Flickr, Disqus, BackType, etc. - Karoli

There are tautological arguments. Twitter is superior to Friendfeed because it's simple, but Facebook is superior to Twitter because it has more functionality. - Kevin Fox

I don't think a direct 1-to-1 comparison of users is fair. Does a twitter user have the same value as a FF user under all the possible monitization schemes you can imagine? - Ken Sheppardson

*sarcastic tone* Yeah get Paul off the line so we can trash FF. *rolls eyes* - Mol, Time Warping

FF is far superior to either for two simple reasons. 1. It's far better for conversations. 2. Visual representation is significant and in many ways can be more relevant than text alone. - Thomas Hawk

I prefer friendfeed over twitter because it allows a conversation to beuch less fragmented. I can see the whole conversation rather than having to jump all over the place to pick up what is being said. Twitter is one on one im and not the group chat I prefer - Iain

Scoble speaks truth. - Bwana ☠

The most telling argument is probably that this dicussion we're having here simply couldn't happen on Twitter as it currently exists. - Kevin Fox

@Kevin @Bravada Agreed! Discussion here is much easier to follow than on Twitter - Pat Hawks

Scoble rocks - Mol, Time Warping

I'm on the call and reading this - Kevin Marks

nice. hi Kevin. - Thomas Hawk

Hi Kevin :) - Mol, Time Warping

Kevin: Hi! Are you reading via the entry page (http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegi...)? - Benjamin Golub

Much better than the 'real chat rooms' - Amyloo

Mike has a very typical biz/VC approach to this it seems. Sorta limits the scope of what one sees it seems. - Ken Sheppardson

We have real-time web around a real-time video show... - Bwana ☠

When Paul says multiple services converging... does that mean he sees friendfeed, facebook and twitter eventually having the same functionality? - Adnan

Adnon: No, it means he sees interoperability and a free flow of data between them. - Ken Sheppardson

Adnan, since Facebook seems to copy everything FriendFeed does anyway... :) - Karoli

Back in my day, we called this IRC... kinda cool it's on the web now - Bwana ☠

"Why would you want a private room?" Because some people have friends in real life that they want to share with and not worry about random people on the internets messing it up - Pat Hawks

Bwana: And we can search it, link to it, hop off form it into peoples' other stuff, etc. - Ken Sheppardson

Well, I'm off. Bye :) - Mol, Time Warping

Bwana, on the web and going out to anyone who follows you if you want it to. - Karoli

Someone should get Scoble in this thread. - Thomas Hawk

Scoble speaks for the drunken folk. yay! - Bwana ☠

Kevin: Suggest Andrew actually try it, will ya? - Ken Sheppardson

yes Kevin it would be great to let the others on the call know that this is going on. - Thomas Hawk

Beta tweak: Put a comment link a the bottom of an active thread. I keep having to scroll up to get the comment box to come back up :) - Bwana ☠

Bwana: go directly to the item. It expands automatically, and you always have a comment box open: http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegi... - Ken Sheppardson

Bwana, are you on the permalinked (and beta) page of this thread? If so, I think the box should always show. - Philipp Lenssen

Oh ok, I was on Steve's page - Bwana ☠

IM should be a component of Twitter, except that they don't give a shit about their users. - Karoli

Is friendfeed doing anything with opensocial? - Adnan

I think FriendFeed might kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia - MG Siegler

Chris: Some folks on this call (e.g. Steve) think email's dying, yes. - Ken Sheppardson

I hate email. I like FF direct messaging. - Thomas Hawk

Compare this: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... to this: http://search.twitter.com/search... Which is actually more meaningful? - Kevin Fox

Chris White: maybe that's why Twitter removed their IM functionality? - Phil Maxwell

Friend feed is all about the databasing and the search!! - Ed Dale

@Kevin Yes! FriendFeed search ftw - Pat Hawks

Because you're using it Leo LOL - Bwana ☠

Adnan: Matt Cutts and Paul were talking about OpenSocial last Friday night... keep your eyes open. - Ken Sheppardson

On Twitter, I know 50 people are telling other people to listen to Gillmore Gang. On Friendfeed there are several active conversations in realtime *about* the things that are being discussed on the show right now. - Kevin Fox

Kevin: perfect example - Bwana ☠

The search is the most powerful I've seen, particularly when it starts updating in real time - Karoli

Which is why I'm so excited about Filters - Bwana ☠

My company uses friendfeed as a group repository for niches we are researching - fully searchable - people can comment and it's permanent - Ed Dale

ken: I was in the middle of watching scobles video of the event when the gillmorgang started... :) - Adnan

Kevin Fox: Would be nice if there were someway to know/see what other convos are going. - Ken Sheppardson

bwana: I can't wait till when they make filters realtime! - Adnan

twitter is broadcast - friendfeed is a destination - Ed Dale

Not *everybody* uses Google, but they're doing all right - Pat Hawks

Adnan: It was after the demo, over a beer. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken Sheppardson: That's what I linked to: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search... - Kevin Fox

Google at one point was far smaller than Yahoo. And then Google came along with better tech. Sometimes you actually can build a better mousetrap. - Thomas Hawk

Adnan: seriously - Bwana ☠

It's a search for "Gillmor Gang' entries with more than 5 comments. - Kevin Fox

Leo speaks for the common man - Bwana ☠

Aha... cool. I've been trying to funnel everybody here. :-) - Ken Sheppardson

Mike is wrong about network effects and disruption. - Kevin Marks

friendfeed needs an api period - not what they are currently calling an api - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Some superset of the Twitter API, yes - Ken Sheppardson

the trouble with twitter is the follow you follow me problem - by making it to "rude" not to follow people - they create a mess - Ed Dale

I agree with those who say the API for FF needs to be more robust. Developers won't build if they don't get an API they can work with. - Karoli

yes, follow too many people on twitter it's a total mess. FriendFeed is far more manageable. - Thomas Hawk

let him finish a sentence, mike - Ken Sheppardson

not true @chris White - anyone can send you an @ message - Ed Dale

Scoble and Mike, like a married couple :) - Simon Wicks

FF is vastly superior for realtime search. - Thomas Hawk

it isn't real time search, Mike. it's TRACK - Karoli

The metadata's much, much richer on FF than Twitter. - Ken Sheppardson

with the real time push, it becomes track - Karoli

I gree with that - - Ed Dale

impossible - Ed Dale

Thomas: Agreed! Robert really has a point... even Arrington agrees! realtime search is important. - Adnan

This real-time chat is one of the reasons why FF new UI is so much relevant - Martin Añazco

Martin - But it's tooo faaaaaaaast </whine> :P - Bwana ☠

Likes are much richer than Favorites - Ken Sheppardson

Bwana, you crack me up. - Kevin Fox

this chat is excellent. - Ed Dale

see how this realtime is limited to this thread....Guess what else can do that... LISTS!! - Bwana ☠

friendfeed has metadata because they don't strip it from the incoming sources - twitter strips all of it but the source and the 140 characters - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Lists of comments provide much more semantic connectivity than @ signs on Twitter - Ken Sheppardson

@Bwana we will get use to it or find better ways to use it. It's just day 1 on this. - Martin Añazco

someone in the chat room just said short statement metadata is useless. LOL. - Karoli

Martin - yup you're right - Bwana ☠

hang with the hashtags, then - Karoli

Likes are the new retweets - Karoli

Scoble is a FFholic!! best ever.. - Ahmed

He said Plurk!! hahah - Bwana ☠

oh dear the meta data of likes and comments alone is immense for the search engine - Ed Dale

If this permalinked thread is IRC, then I would want the comment box to always be scrolled into sight/ be at the bottom, tho. - Philipp Lenssen

Twitter and FF can and will coexist. - Pat Hawks

Yeah, Laconica/Jaiku are the biggest losers here. - Ken Sheppardson

Philipp, agree. frustrating to keep having to retrieve the comment box. - Karoli

Philip it is here: http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegi... - Bwana ☠

Robert just nailed it. - Thomas Hawk

Yes. Needles out of the haystack ftw - Pat Hawks

Ken, why isn't there a bridge into Laconica like there is to Twitter? - Karoli

That's why they're shutting him up Thomas - Bwana ☠

Right on Scoble!! - Ed Dale

You have all the same friends you had yesterday, you just see them now. You're just seeing everything you used to miss. - Ken Sheppardson

Robert is on top of it tonight - Bwana ☠

Mike Arrington is an asshole today. - Karoli

Mike! See this forum! THIS IS WHY! - Pat Hawks

@Karoli only today? - Ahmed

Karoli: You mean a little checkbox to post to Identica? Because nobody uses Identica. - Ken Sheppardson

I just realized..my FriendFeed stats are going to be weird this month... Steve Gillmor will be my #1 guy - Bwana ☠

Bwana: He has to be to deal with Mike. - Ken Sheppardson

@Ahmed I was hoping someone would say that. - Karoli

Scoble's really on today. Making very good points. - Thomas Hawk

Bwana, that is where I am, but old comments perhaps should be pushed away by new comments... right now, new comments push away the comment box instead. - Philipp Lenssen

Here it is again...Explain again Robert lol - Bwana ☠

if you have comments and likes!! you can filter!!!!! - Ed Dale

Scoble knows how FF works far more than Arrington does. - Thomas Hawk

meta data is sadly not a celebrity word :-) - Ed Dale

Ken...but still, what if we want to communicate from FF. I have to leave to reply, can't send likes there. Even if it's not huge, it would center everything on FF - Karoli

SOMEBODY get this link in front of Mike! - Pat Hawks

Scobles been put on the spot so many times, he's improved all his arguments over time! :) - Adnan

Ed - Let's make a cute name for it.. "Meta Meta" or "MoMeta" - Bwana ☠

I like how the company founder just sits back and let's Scoble explain stuff. Robert is FriendFeed's "Goose", re the Top Gun analogy earlier today. - Ken Sheppardson

@Karoli I think he is just on the show to make people angry... - Ahmed

Fluffy kitten meta - Ed Dale

also group messaging, Filters... - Ken Sheppardson

how do I make a filter of only this comment stream? (sorry if it's a stupid question) - Michael Breslin

FF = the dream of social search realized. Twitter = one big search mess. - Thomas Hawk

DITTO SCOBLE!!! - Ed Dale

awkward silence of "I'm right you're wrong" - Bwana ☠

Fuck you, Mike Arrington. Just sayin'. - Karoli

sorry about the ditto! - Ed Dale

:) - Thomas Hawk

but its searchable!!!! - Ed Dale

This could never happen on Twitter. - Thomas Hawk

its permanent!!! - Ed Dale

And you can search it later, link to other stuff, etc. - Ken Sheppardson

Michael, as a workaround, perhaps you can search for this guid and add the search as filter 579630c9-3f6c-4e9e-a8ec-4e91a52d9f91 - Philipp Lenssen

Let that become Arrington metadata. I've been saying that to myself forever - Karoli

Just today :) - Kent

If other companies start pumping their activities into twitter and if they get to critical mass, does that nuke FriendFeed? - Angus Logan

you cant save IRS ...easily - Ed Dale

We have this thread as proof when Arrington says he was behind FF all along when it becomes big - Bwana ☠

YES! - Pat Hawks

Yes, Michael - Ken Sheppardson

Ahmed, he's succeeding. - Karoli

:) - Bwana ☠

haha. yes. - Thomas Hawk

pretty much - Ed Dale

Yes, you broke the embargo... Jerk. - Bwana ☠

I love you! - Bwana ☠

I HATE you too. - Bwana ☠

wow..who likes Arrington...really? - Ahmed

Arrington should join this chat. - Thomas Hawk

Gmail has all your email. Next argument. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken wins again - Bwana ☠

and google has all its data on their site!! - Ed Dale

Angus, how is Friendfeed nuked? Given that Twitter's feed can come to FF, I'd think the superior search would hose Twitter - Karoli

uhhh... now we are worried about silos... but we aren't worried about it when we talk about twitter? - Adnan

Ken, I have all my email. GMail holds it in the cloud, but it's all stored here, too. - Karoli

Twitter is limited...FF is the future! - Ahmed

I'd rather have the guy who came up with "don't be evil" managing the conversation on his site than trusting it to Twitter. just sayin'. - Thomas Hawk

I think of the Big Three, FriendFeed is the most likely to build embeddable services that let publishers brand their conversations. - Ken Sheppardson

its certainly not either/or - Ed Dale

It's here! - Chris Baskind

It's RIGHT HERE. - Trevor Childs

WE ARE HERE :) - Ahmed

*Waves to Mike* - Ken Sheppardson

Too bad Mike doesn't listen to women. he'd have the link to the chat room now. - Karoli

too much scrolling - Maxine Appleby

and you can search for it - Ed Dale

Philipp, thanks, seems to work. - Michael Breslin

Somebody tell mike to search for "arrington comments: 200" - Ken Sheppardson

You're not good at all sir - Bwana ☠

com'on now, it's right here..my 14 year old bro can find it! - Ahmed

LOL - Bwana ☠

I found it! - Randy Archer

"It's right there at the top" :-) - Ken Sheppardson

Hi. Welcome to your doom - Bwana ☠

Hi, Mike - Ken Sheppardson

he's found it. - Thomas Hawk

Hi Mike. - Thomas Hawk

Click on the timestamp - Ken Sheppardson

What has science done?! - iluvgimp

Listening (and viewing) the discussion in real time is amazing. - Henry Burger

Here it is again!! - Jeff

found it, finally, eh? - Karoli

Does this thing auto scroll for us as well? (my entry box has just scrolled off the screen!) I guess not. - Viran

GamersCircle Comics was here - Andy Wood

Somebody tell mike to search for "arrington comments: 200" - great point - Ed Dale

this could never happen on Twitter. - Thomas Hawk

LOL blais - Bwana ☠

it isn't a chat room... it is a conversation - Brian Roy

the scroll issue needs to be fixed. hate my comment box rolling out of sight - Karoli

Auto scroll would be sweet. - Pat Hawks

how about an autoscroll? Is that possible? - Phil Maxwell

why to turn it into a room? just click on the time stamp, it has its own page - Jérôme Flipo

And we stay on topic here. (mostly) - Bwana ☠

If you go to the item directly, http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegi... it'll scroll automatically for you, with a comment box that sticks on the bottom - Ken Sheppardson

a searchable and PERMANENT conversation - Ed Dale

go here and the box stays at teh bottom - Amyloo

muahahah - Bwana ☠

I agree with Pat...we need auto scroll - Ahmed

he found it thank the lord - Zach Scott

http://beta.friendfeed.com/stevegi... - Amyloo

Real-time comment is awesome - Jérôme Flipo

Autoscrolling would be nice - Jeff

nice, thanks Ken - Viran

no need to get my 14 year old bro lol - Ahmed

the nice thing about FF is that there hasn't really been any censorship that i've seen. - Thomas Hawk

No. The permalink does not autoscroll... - Pat Hawks

I am not a troll. I am reacting in real time. - Karoli

It's not trolling if people would say it to your face, Mike ;-) - Ken Sheppardson

Trolls are usually wrong...I'm just right :) - Bwana ☠

Oh, no, we bash Robert. - Ken Sheppardson

it's constructive criticism Mike :) - Ahmed

<3 Leo. - iluvgimp

Mike, I promise I don't spit - Karoli

Scoble made the most sense on the call. And probably knows FF better than anyone else on the call except Paul. - Thomas Hawk

block block block - Ken Sheppardson

Oohh also, use the scroll function in the browser, activated using the mousewheel/mousebutton3 and just set it to scroll to the bottom of the page, once it hits the last item, it won't scroll until a new item is added by friendfeed. - Viran

you're wrong! BLOCK! - Bwana ☠

Mike is just one of those persons that some people just love to hate :) - Phil Maxwell

LOL - Bwana ☠

Scoble has used the service a heap and gets the power of it - Ed Dale

+1 for Shel - Pat Hawks

Oh, please. stop it. you sat there and said FF would fail and a room full of people reacted . that's not trolling. - Karoli

Click on Saturday, which is a permalink and yes it does autoscroll. You need to go all the way down to the bottom - Rolf Schewe

OH Leo, don't say that please... - Trevor Childs

This is one of th few times where I completely agree with Scobel - Keith Barrett

Amyloo: How do you get to the link? - Nick in Manila

Thanks Leo :) - Andrew Smith

Scoble understands FF... mostly - Bwana ☠

@Rolf @Ken not in Firefox it doesn't - Pat Hawks

I've disagreed with him too :) - Bwana ☠

Rolf, the browser does not autoscroll here (Firefox 2.0.8). The comments do auto-push the box away instead. - Philipp Lenssen

Leo speaks sense. - Thomas Hawk

"mini-forums" will sping up where they are required - Ed Dale

+1 Karoli - Tony, Paradox of FF

Reminds me I need to cancel my Well membership. - Shawn Thompson

Yeah, in firefox the confo flows off the end of the screen - Ken Sheppardson

Good of leo to make nice with paul, so he'll want to come back... - Amyloo

idem for Chrome, Philipp - Jérôme Flipo

+1 Philipp - Pat Hawks

Yes. I thought you meant it was not real-time. Misunderstood. - Rolf Schewe

Barbarians being ... well ... actual people. - Chris Baskind

The ShamWow salesmen - Bwana ☠

I put my screen bottom up, so that the last comment is always at the top :D - Jérôme Flipo

But if we are commenting publicly how can we be trolls? - Brian Allen

Talent is not universal - Ken Sheppardson

Chris Baskind +1 - Karoli

I gotta say, the FF UI is not very intuitive. - iluvgimp

I am using Firefox 3.1 beta. Same thing happens here - Rolf Schewe

twitter will be fine if they get rid of auto follow - Ed Dale

It helps Hammer - Bwana ☠

Unwashed masses: The people that do not use leading edge tech - Keith Barrett

:) - Bwana ☠

who cares about following celebrities. I don't. I'm much more interesting in following great photographers. - Thomas Hawk

Doesn't auto-keep box at bottom of browser window in Chrome either here. - Philipp Lenssen

Well Leo..she did stop a suicide, so she is pretty smart.. - Ahmed

Wow, real time increase a lot the comment flooding, look at this thread! - Jérôme Flipo

Oh, the permalink is on the date, kind of like Wordpress. - Nick in Manila

Trolls .. Blocking give trolls more power - Michael Holzinger

Ed, I disagree. The Twitterati lists combined with lack of track mean it will be elitist. that's how they want it. Like Google weighting toward corporate sites in their results - Karoli

Nick: and Twitter :) - Bwana ☠

Jerome: We're discussing the live streaming Gillmor Gang at http://live.twit.tv - Ken Sheppardson

awkward silence of "wut" - Bwana ☠

Sometiemes trolls are nice to have around. - Thomas Hawk

I'm on Twitter because my site's readers are there, too. - Chris Baskind

Chrome seems to handle the ajax in a little smoother way on the thread page - Amyloo

wow, this is long. I like the trend with FF. They just need to give me some numbers that will boost my ego and I'll switch over. - Nick Gonzalez

Chris: I thought a troll was somebody who tried to incite you into responding. - Ken Sheppardson

@Philipp Lenssen Same issue here. I need to scroll down constantly to play catch up with the ever growing conversation. Hopefully there will be a fix for that. - Rolf Schewe

Mike, this could never happen on Twitter. - Thomas Hawk

As opposed to Twitter. - Ken Sheppardson

MAINSTREAM users pay for servers and keeping a service up. - Angus Logan

you are Mike - Andrew Smith

And now Mike is the Troll - Pat Hawks

Mike's trolling :-) - Ken Sheppardson

Twitter would get a reaction..we're too smart for that kind of bait - Bwana ☠

@Ken, I know, I'm listening too :S - Jérôme Flipo

Chris, exactly. so if you could bring your Twitter stream into Friendfeed, and reply from there, it's an invitation to conversation - Karoli

Mike is so much fun. ;-) - Chris Baskind

Leo nailed it. - Thomas Hawk

better than the junior high kids in the chat on the video pages! - Amyloo

Oh no..you didn't! - Ahmed

Leo, FTW. - Karoli

"I said that just to get a reaction." the definition of trolling. - Tony, Paradox of FF

Twitter = the AOL of Micromessaging. - Thomas Hawk

Agree with thomas - twitter is about individuals - friend feed will work for groups - Ed Dale

Mike would be a good agent provocateur. - Rolf Schewe

@Rolf Schewe I'm using the autoscroll using the mousewheel button to permanently scroll to the bottom of the page, give that a try :) - Viran

how many comments can a post hold before it starts messing up the browser? are their any posts with 1000+ comments? - Phil Maxwell

It's not Twitter vs FriendFeed.... - Bwana ☠

scoble's giving away money post had over a thousand I think. - Thomas Hawk

Twitter is a brilliant success that has not made a cent yet - Ed Dale

We could care less if Twitter succeeds - Bwana ☠

There's a difference between lots of people and quality content - Pat Hawks

MySpace grew at a staggering rate for awhile too - Karoli

and twitter is avery different service to friendfeed - Ed Dale

Phil, Robert had a 1000+ comment string - Karoli

Viran, I tried that, but how do you combine it with typing? :) - Philipp Lenssen

@Karoli ROFL - Pat Hawks

friendfeed will never be able to compete with Twitter's simplicity. - Phil Maxwell

That's like saying Facebook will fail because Twitter succeeds - Bwana ☠

Why can't Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook all succeed? Apple seems to be doing just fine right along side Microsoft? - Ken Sheppardson

Twitter is only a small part of FF. FF supplements other services - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

Anybody who compares FriendFeed directly with Twitter doesn't understand Twitter - Pat Hawks

@Viran Thanks. Works great, until I have to type. ;) - Rolf Schewe

build in Friendfeed comments to your blog, Mike - Karoli

I will, however, refrain from repeating my FF/My Space comparison. ;-) - Chris Baskind

JaikuEngine: -) - Ken Sheppardson

I think in the future, people are going to hate simple stuff, they will need more features... - Ahmed

XMPP - Phil G

So how does the plugging of networks happen? Open Social? Why won't they talk about that? - Adnan

Yeah a comment button on the BOTTOM of the feed!!!!!!!!!!!!1 yeah! thanks for listening to my request for this earlier today!!!!1 woooo hooo! - Susan Beebe

twitter and friendfeed work well together - Ed Dale

REALTIME BLOG -- Try real time comments when people aren't on your blog using IM for the hundreds of millions of people on their desktop - Angus Logan

So we've went from it'll fail, to "I want this" - Bwana ☠

Ok must go... hubby wants BEEEEEEEER :) sorry to hit and run - Susan Beebe

Susan: Yes, when you're viewing an individual post. - Ken Sheppardson

I will crush the enemy social media and drive them before me and hear the lament of their users. - Moved to Facebook

smart hubby. - Thomas Hawk

i want transcript of the Gillmor Gang show to

Jon Lebkowsky › Likes