Yeah, sorry I couldn't respond to that one before. :-)
- Kevin Fox
well i be darned .... we now can rejoice, since fast paced additions to already good product are surely fastly coming about off the feedpipe ... it'l be a hectic season of finest upgrades ... I'm sure they'l start with keyboard shortcutze. ... I mean Google Reader rules on that. Intelligent to the extreme. ..Google.com, on the other hand - are we sleeping? .. not even "/" ??.. and that...
more...
- pb:
Congrats Ben! Totally agree with Jason. Our latest project wouldn't have become feasible without Ben -- I'm just so glad we managed to get a fraction of his time before he left! :)
- Simon
Congratulations, Ben! You're joining an awesome team.
- Anne Bouey
Congrats, you are now a "big company"! ;))))
- K.D.
That's not my picture! They got the picture wrong! In fact, I didn't get the letter of hire either. :( Oh, Hi there, Ben...if that's your real name. ;)
- Josh Haley
Good luck Ben! With you our preferred service will go more interesting
- Roberto
from fftogo
I think there were a bunch of spam comments made to some 2009-era posts by FF employees. For some reason even after the spam is nuked, the post stays bumped.
- Stephen Mack
Yes, I blocked a spammer that was bumping old posts about FF themes and what not.
- Zulema ⋅ spicy cocoa tart
Well, let's see this as an opportunity to raise a virtual glass to Ben and FriendFeed-that-was!
- Kevin Fox
It probably had something to do with the Tornado 2.2 release. I noticed Ben was the one who posted about the release on HN earlier. Edit: Or it could have just been a spammer. *shrugs*
- Jimminy, CoG of FF
I don't think it had anything to do with the tornado release - a spammer bumped a bunch of Bret's old posts today.
- Ben Darnell
Ross and Dan made this video to illustrate the advanced technology we use behind the scenes at FriendFeed. (Ross and Dan, you are amazing - I can't believe how awesome this thing turned out)
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
How very creative. This is very fluid and cool.
- Louis Gray
OK, not exactly what I was expecting, but very cool.
- Kevin Arth
Anyone have the video somewhere other than Youtube? it's banned here in Turkey and I can't wait until we get home (next month) to watch it!!
- Chris Myles
Bret, this video should be titled: A Love Song for FriendFeed ! Great vid (and music) !
- Ahsan Ali
This is superb. I just showed it to my 5 year old son who enjoys Lego and has already taken some great photos, including one or two of his toys. So now he has the seed of the idea that, in time, he could take multiple stills and put them together to make moving pictures. Thank you very much for posting it and giving me and him that opportunity. Maybe, he might use FriendFeed one day too!
- John W Lewis
I think they need to make a full stop-motion version of the Matrix in legos. Now THAT would be awesome. I wonder what bullet-time looks like in LEGO?
- Bret Taylor
i'd pay to see the stop animation lego matrix, but not the sequels
- patrick
"Equipment Generously Provided By Casey Muller" - hahaha!! THIS IS AWESOMESAUCE!!! I love the creative energy and vibe in this video... LOTS of work went into that one! Thanks guys!! :)
- Susan Beebe
Genius, how much time did that all take?
- Wayne Hornsey
Chris Myles: if you want ot - DM me an address and I'll mail you a copy.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
FriendFeed is now available in Persian! Thanks again to all of our Persian users — it has been extremely exciting for us to see FriendFeed so widely used around the world. You can set your language preference here: http://friendfeed.com/...
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
Any way we could auto-translate (or even have a link with the option to?)? It'd be great to really be able to collaborate with the non-English speaking world...
- Chris Reichow
wow, another language... I can't read it, but that is cool! :)
- Susan Beebe
Now if we could only filter out languages other then our own and have the lang:en search filter.
- DarknessFalls
You're welcome! We are excited to better support our Persian users.
- Bret Taylor
This feels so good to be able to view the pages in a way are eyes used to see Persian writings. Thank you so much! We really appreciate your effort! Thanks again ! :)
- انجل
Great Bret! I remember that in the past some persian people wrote here that whould be nice to have FF interface also in persian, probabilly because their language is very different and english isn't so diffused such in Europe. A welcome to persian friends! :)
- Roberto
from fftogo
bretçim herkes google plus'a gidiyor ama ben seni bırakmam ^^
- aynebilim
Aynebilim'e katılıyorum Bret. Bir sürü idiotla paylaşsam da burayı, vazgeçemiyorum işte. - Ben bu yüzden hiç kimseden gidemem gitmemmmm.. la la laaa
- pippi haşmet
bretçim sana dm atamıyorum..bana abone olur musun ^^
- aynebilim
This is clearly not my cat. If this was my cat he's have one arm shoved down into the printer trying to tear up all the internal whirling bits with his bare claws.
- Soup in a TARDIS
Too Funny! Reminds me of the San Mateo Cat Shelter where one of the cats loves to sleep on top of the laster printer where the paper comes out...
- Greg Lato
1600+ to beat the FFundercats live chat thread. I think with this real time now on all threads we're going to see some truly epic comment numbers.
- Simon Wicks
Ivan, no the picture speaks for itself. ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Petr, I have no idea what you mean, but thank you. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
@Kol .. :] that, partially, might have been the purpose.... I don't know it exactly either. :] .. was I reflecting on a cat under the fax, and that it is hard to fax that way ... /?:] ... "underfaxing at its worst" ..
- pb:
there ya have me ! :] .... see, to be honest with you, i saw this pic couple days ago, but i let it go, without posting it ..... what does that make me? :]
- pb:
even a flat cat... faxes just can't handle the hair. You'd have to shave the cat first, else the hair will burn and stick to the drum... a mess! (I am extrapolating from transparencies, mind, i don't have access to a cat to test)
- Iphigenie
Hehe, Joelle. This is now tied for the 'likes' top stop. One more then, hehe. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Hehe, Greg. Blimey! Erm, is that not far from 500 likes now? ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Bloody marvelous, Kol. Wish I could like it again... too cute (and help u to 500 likes).
- Roberto Bonini
I couldn't believe it when I logged on from the morning over posting it and saw it was at something 200 likes! You all have a strange fetish with cats and fax machines, hehe. ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Am I the only one who saw this and their first thought was - My goodness did someone break that cats neck? It still freaks me out a little
- SteVe C
Steve, it does look a little out of place, but cats are pretty bendy. ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
They fax much better if you flatten them first. What?
- The original Kevin
So we can put this post to rest now. :-) 505 likes final count, wow! :-D Good night all!
- Kol Tregaskes
did 3 people really un-like this? now at 506. wtf (edit: uh, oh, yeah, me and 2 + 506 others makes 509. dammit, jim, i'm an artist, not a mathematician)
- ɐ ɯıʞ sıɹɥɔ
One of the best funny cat pictures I've seen! :-)
- John Collis
Kristian, it appears to be. Hehe, John.
- Kol Tregaskes
ای بابا این پیشول بی خیال نمی شود، بابا پاشو برو دنبال یه بازی دیگه ، از هفته پیش تا حالا تو فکس ولو شدی حوصله ات سر نرفته، پاشو اقلا بپر رو کیبوردی چیزی
- Maryaminaa
It's really only social convention which regards it as inappropriate, same with Xeroxing it, like one does with their b__tocks. Wait are we still talking about cats cats here or...
- The Real sofarsoShawn
OMGosh 700+ likes now!! LOL. Thank you all 702 of you. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Indeed ! that's was very nice! Have you done anything special about this Bret? (Like twitter's folks)
- directeur
very nice. anyone could guess Friendfeed would make it.
- SolidSmack
from twhirl
We did move a few things around, but nothing temporary - the event inspired us to optimize a few things we had been meaning to optimize anyway.
- Bret Taylor
Congratulations, Tudor and Jeanette! You are both certainly invited to use my just-for-fun http://bebepool.com site if you were planning on having friends/family prognosticate about babby's arrival :) Cheers!
- Micah
Well, it's a joint project, but she's doing most of the work :)
- Tudor Bosman
Good stuff! The baby looks just like its daddy! :)
- Louis Gray
Yay! They say the best way is to start with a sketch and add definition.
- Kevin Fox
As my husband would say... I did my job, now you get to do yours! Haha... luckily I thought this was very funny :)
- Georgia
I think it's amazing that at 18 weeks you can see all the ribs, organs etc. We even got a great view of the baby's foot and watched as the toes wiggled around. Totally cool.
- Jeanette Bosman
Can I get one for the body as well as the face?
- Dion Almaer
Very interesting. Hope they post the download link soon so that we can all play with it.
- Brady Brim-DeForest
It seems as if the main problem with most people in the examples shown is their forehead is too short or too narrow. Wonder if there's a subtle clue that big brains are beautiful there! :)
- Lindsay
@Jason - that's an interesting concept. Would you be more likely to trust the girl on the left or right? Would you be more likely to talk to either one of them at a party (or more intimidated by either one?).
- Lindsay
Notice that for all the women they soften the jaw, while squaring it for men. Everyone also gets a slightly thinner face and upturned almost smiling lips.
- FFing Enigma
@SB yeah and the forehead adjustment... almost like there is a triangle with the forehead at the point and they flip it so the chin is the bottom of the triangle... weird.
- Lindsay
They are different women! Blame Paul! : )
- Erhan Erdoğan
Lindsay: whenever sketching generic faces, the face starts as an inverted triangle and the eyes appear a third of the way down from the top of the forehead; lips and nose appear below and above (respectively) a line 1/3 up from the chin. Looks like these pictures are rearranged to meet that particular school of drawing.
- FFing Enigma
That is interesting yet odd. Seems that the faces are slendered with the software.
- Jim Goldstein
from twhirl
I wonder what would come out of applying their algorithms to face of black or asian person? Different countries have different concepts of beauty.
- arty
This technology should be made available in eye glasses, just imagine how much better your work day can be!
- Claude Betancourt
Paul - Think you should definitely add the option. "Click here to be beautiful without the expense of plastic surgery! .... and you may even get more 'Likey's" :)"
- Charlie Anzman
Some of the stuff coming out of Siggraph this year is really freaky. How about combining this with the automatic video editing stuff? ;)
- Joe Beda
without a doubt amazing. It's incredible how subtle the changes are yet massive difference.
- Zee.
Huh, that's pretty crazy. Creepy, but cool. :)
- felix
I haven't read the paper, but I wonder if it adapts to different notions of "attractive" (that changes from culture to culture ...)
- Rui Pires
+1 @Claude I was thinking the same thing! Incorporate this software in wearable monitor glasses, and the whole world would be beautiful! I'll bet we can look for these on the shelves in the U.S. just before November. Social media and reality enhancement software have put Winston Smith out of a job.
- ɐ ɯıʞ sıɹɥɔ
do i sense another manga-style meme starting?
- anna sauce
So, if it turns me into Gilbert Godfried... what does that mean?
- Ⓒⓗⓡⓘⓢ Ⓟⓘⓡⓘⓛⓛⓞ
You know, if these guys had gotten together with the realtime video+photo enhancement folks and approached the Beijing Olympic Comittee then that singing girl in the opening ceremonies might not have had to been replaced with a body double. (Yeah, I just brought three of this week's biggest memes together. I'll be here all week.)
- Kevin Fox
The artist proportions were laid out by the Greeks as the perfect human, that's not being used here. This beautification engine, I think, builds on top of a previous study where some students tried to mathematically identify attractiveness. They had participants rate the attractiveness of head shots from yearbooks. What they found was there was a high correlation b/w the geometrically "average" face and high attraction. That "average" is based on the proportions of the di
- xero
stances between the individual elements of the face and their relative sizes. IIRC the software adjusts elements so they statistically/geometrically complement each other. It's not actually working toward a golden set of proportions, but a set of proportions appropriate for the individual as defined by the masses. I wouldn't think of it as "facial discrimination" so much as "deviation from ones potential".
- xero
I'm waiting for the first Facebook application that automatically enhances your profile picture like this. Every social network should run this on the avatars. Beautiful people!
- Benedikt Koehler
Can you imagine the controversy if dating sites got a hold of this?
- xero
@paul automatically apply it to all profile photos, huh? are you sure you ready for results? check my picture - try to see wonderful cossacks writing infamous letter to Turkish Sultan :)
- A. T.
I wonder if they'll turn Mickey Mouse into Mighty Mouse
- Dave Q
this will have a lot of practical applications to create a (virtual) world of beautiful (or more acceptable facially) people.
- Apostolos Tsompanopoulos
Just a complicated high tech implementation of beer goggles.
- Hayes Haugen
This is what came up as the top Google hit for paul buchheit friendfeed.
- Spidra Webster
I just read the first comment and may I ask why we should apply it automatically to all profile pictures??? Who are we gonna kid that way?!
- ambidextrous
I'm craving a Taco Bell chili cheese burrito. I don't know why; I haven't eaten at Taco Bell for at least 8 years, and I don't even know if they still make said chili cheese burritos. Perhaps my memory of them isn't even accurate. Nonetheless, I must have one.
Your memory serves you correct -- they're called chilitos and were particularly delicious with sour cream Sadly, they were discontinued. A tragic day for chilito fans.
- Mona Nomura
Just had a cheesy bean and rice burrito the other day and it was pretty good. Apparently, the result of an enthusiastic line chef and the taco sauce bottle. ;)
- Melanie Reed
Had Taco Bell last night. It was good.
- Josh Haley
The history of burning tree started with our curiosity on how flamable Christmas trees really are. So shortly after New Year's 2006, we took our Christmas tree out to the backyard and just lit it up. We were delightfully surprised at how quickly and furiously our tree burned. Paul was so impressed with the results that he decided that this was something we should do with all of our subsequent Christmas trees.
- April Buchheit
oooh look at how young and cute Paul is! :) very cool that you saved this! What was your job title then (intern for ______)? What location did you work at? Does that # mean you were the 39,325 employee hired by M$?
- Susan Beebe
I worked on Win NT, debugging OLE. It was pretty bad because the NT OLE code was fine; all the bugs were in 16-bit OLE apps. There are few things worse than debugging interactions between two 16-bit apps you don't have the source to!
- Gabe
Wow, 16 bit OLE. Why didn't you force everyone to use 32bit Word and Excel? It would've been very Apple of you.
- Eric
Yup, Redmond. I think I worked in building 4, which may not exist anymore, and lived across the street at "Timberlawn". I worked on the installer for "Plus Pack for Windows 95".
- Paul Buchheit
Eric, it gets worse: one of the first apps I had to look at was Ichitaro, Japan's #1 word processor at the time. It sure would have made things easier if I could have forced everybody to only use 32-bit English apps!
- Gabe
I wonder if it was some kind of foresight to hang on to your old Microsoft badges, but not your diplomas.
- Clare Dibble
Nice, a blue badge. I consult for Microsoft and have an Orange badge.
- Alan Le
Wow! I was there that same summer interning for "Office Team Manager" I must have started a week or 2 before you as my employee number was 39207.
- Joe Beda
I think I returned my badge, so I can't remember what my employee number was. I worked on porting the standard ms installer from windows to the mac.
- Private Sanjeev
Sanjeev - a worthy cause for sure! :P
- Susan Beebe
It was a piece of code that Ben Slivka wrote to produce cab files :)
- Private Sanjeev
"For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different. The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth."
- Jim Norris
from Bookmarklet
Hmm, but I see that I'm far from the first to make that observation about today. Oh well. It occurred to me in the shower but if I'd been keeping up with FF I would have seen a dozen other people point it out. Happy Palindrome Day anyway!
- Stephen Mack
well why didn't you have a device in the shower with you so you could have posted as you thought of it and maybe been the first?
- Rachel Lea Fox
Your angle is new for me. Most folks, including me, saw 01-02-2010 as the palindrome. I am going to start using the YYYY-MM-DD format for files. BTW, I decreed today International Tacocat Day. :->
- Kurt Starnes
Kurt: Go hang a lasagna hog! Racecar! Step on no pets! Draw, o coward! Lisa Bonet ate no basil! No sir, away -- a papaya war is on!
- Stephen Mack
Stephen, Lisa got a DryCase for her iPhone for sailboat racing - it worked OK for awhile, but eventually developed a leak and wouldn't hold the vacuum seal. http://www.drycase.com/
- Ken Gidley
Thanks Ken but the world does not actually want me posting to FF from the shower, believe me. :)
- Stephen Mack