Kawika Holbrook - Likes

Affordances. They are important. What does that mean? A door knob "affords" being turned. It almost demands it. Yet FriendFeed is screwing with things like links. Here, click on "hide." That should just hide one item, right? That's the affordance. Yet you'll soon find there's a whole world stuck under that little link. You can hide Tweets. You can hide me. You can hide all sorts of stuff. - Robert Scoble

324 more comments

Is it difficult to use? - Manuel Mas

Hmm.. is it difficult to use?! - Orli Yakuel

It's a peace of cake - Mark

i heard larry wall once say about perl "make simple things simple, and hard things possible"... the simple things are definitely *not* simple in ff, increasing the learning curve right at the start... i rekon if they fix that... they have it made! :) - simran

Ooooo. One does not often see Robert swear. He's really worked up about it. Care to respond Kevin?? - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

#2 Look at the time stamp. Did you know that's also a link? Where's the affordance? Not there. Yet did you know you can click that and that is your permalink? Many people have trouble figuring this out. But here's an ultra affordance killer. Did you know you can click it twice and get a popout menu? Not many people do. Kevin has overloaded links with too many features and he has broken the affordances of what links usually do. - Robert Scoble

Orli: actually, yes, it's difficult to use. - Robert Scoble

Scoble: You may be right now that I read what you had to say. I don't think there is a proper FAQ/guide for all the little details hidden in FF. - Manuel Mas

And noses were designed to support eye glasses. - Todd Hoff

well I just managed to wipe out my entire friend feed account when I was trying to add a new one for a different twitter account - NW Angel

I agree - too many possible results from a given action. Manuel, no one reads FAQs and if you need to, the app is DOA - Sameer

Well, I don't see it as difficult to use. Its more that there are many things in here hidden that would aid users if there were more upfront. - Manuel Mas

Most of us get basic functionality out of the site with how things are at the moment. - Manuel Mas

Sameer: Agree. - Manuel Mas

Look at this complaint too about FriendFeed being difficult to figure out: http://twitter.com/sethgol... Seth Goldstein runs a tech company. He's a geek. Adverse to more pain than a lot of us. Yet he can't figure out how to delete a list. He's not the only one to tell me that FriendFeed is too difficult to figure out. FriendFeed still needs a design rethink to make these issues go away. - Robert Scoble

Valid points, Robert, but a complex interface, once learned, becomes simple, too - although that's not the best design philosophy for a massively public website. - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Its the visual impact of seeing too many options even if you dont use them. V. overwhelming for the try and buy new comer - Sameer

I think it is one of the worst UIs on the web today. Which is why I hardly use it. It violates all the rules of good design. Stuff is not obvious, it is not easy and it is not even quickly learn-able. I've spent years in product management and really, this is one of the worst. - Shripriya

I think the issue here is Discoverability. There are a lot of little hidden secrets to FriendFeed that become obvious only after you've figured them out. They're not very obvious on their own. Personally, it doesn't bother me but that's because I know it. If I were a new user, I'd be at a loss as well. It seems to me that the primary design goal at FriendFeed is a minimal UI (perhaps at all costs). - Akiva Moskovitz

Roberto: I can't think of another web app that messes with link affordances the way that FriendFeed does. Can you think of one? - Robert Scoble

People who figure out how to use a system are often the last ones to recognize how difficult it is to use. It's a self selection thing. - Ken Sheppardson

But affordances are subjective and reliant on the end-user. Take the @ sign or hashtags for instance. Unless you're talking about Apple, it's hard to blame a designer for affordance rule enforcement. - Sam Harrelson

There is a balance with "affordances" though -- if you have a very complex set of features you could have a knob/button/link for every feature but that would not work either - Brian Sullivan

@Robert, do you think FF need More Icon? - abdellah

Sam: we've all clicked on hundreds of thousands of links. We all have an idea of what happens when you click a link. - Robert Scoble

Sam, the @sign in Twitter was emergent - something users created. - Sameer

Sure, but I've seen lots of platforms use the date function as a permalink enabler. - Sam Harrelson

Manuel, agree. Robert, I wouldn't say it's difficult, but confusing (or useless sometimes). I'm not sure it's a design problem though. - Orli Yakuel

abellah: an icon is probably better than a link, yes. I know that Kevin (from an interview I did with him more than a year ago) likes sparse UIs. He is of the school that you just watch where people trip over themselves and then build UI for that. I think that's smart, but I wish that FriendFeed would iterate its UI faster to pave paths where people are having troubles. - Robert Scoble

Robert, sorry, but you're late on this trend too :) First, being not to follow everyone on Twitter. FF ui has always been terrible. Most tech people I know don't understand how to use it. And I think I use less than 10% of the available features. - Shripriya

I like FriendFeed as it is. It's obviously a power users tool as is, but then I wouldn't want it stupid simple reminiscent of installing a Windows OS. There just needs to be a decent screencast on the home page explaining all the features. No one reads FAQs these days. Video Game designers just turn the first level into a tutorial for 99% who won't read the manual and I don't mind. Maybe FF needs a tutorial when you first sign up? - CannonGod

Think about the affordances of FF and compare them with Twitter. Then compare the relative effectiveness of desktop / mobile applications developed for both. There is not a one good app for FriendFeed. This is because of the MANY "extra shite" links and an overly complex API, not because of popularity differences in the services. - Michael Owens from iPhone

Holy shit this item is already in Google: http://www.google.com/search... -- Google is going real time! - Robert Scoble

Great designs shouldn't need tutorials. - Manuel Mas

@Sameer right, but we created the @ sign to do a certain feature. Folks on identi.ca have their own signifiers. That will inevitably happen here as well as folks grow comfortable with this platform. - Sam Harrelson

Shripriya - I think most people who come back dont find it confusion. Its the first timers that run away - and thats FFs biggest problem. - Sameer

Needless to say, we all love Friendfeed, but we also need a Greasemonkey script to learn which service was posting into the time-line, and the entire issue of groups/rooms really needs a rethink because it's so hard to find any, especially If you're a newcomer.. - Nir Ben Yona

Engagement is deep; Adoption is sparce. - Sameer

TV ads (at least in australia) are considered misleading if "a person of slightly less than average intelligence" misinterprets them... i think you will find that it takes "smart techies" a while to figure out the nuances of ff, not saying everything should be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, but the defaults that way would give everyone a great start... especially when introducing innovative stuff (like "the live web") :) - simran

Scoble: That Google real time thing is even more impressive than this discussion! - Manuel Mas

Shripriya: I've been complaining about this stuff both in public and in private for a long time. And I wasn't behind in following everyone on Twitter. Come and study how I use FriendFeed to follow small groups of people closely, especially for Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Manuel - Yes. I like to say that if you need to write a manual for your product, it's too complicated. - Jeff Harbert

Wow, this did get into Google fast. - phil baumann

Robert: Holy shit, that's impressive - http://www.google.com/search... - sod Twitter I say, if you're in marketing then you need to get on FriendFeed for instant Google indexing of a subject! - CannonGod

@Manuel there will be always a need to manual and tutorial, people have to sell or to promote so event if you have to explain a basic evidence, write a document make it in pdf format, sell it or share it, but for the sake of simplicity please never ever do FB style document. - abdellah

UI design is a very difficult thing to do because so many people have different ways they use things. However, I do agree with you Robert that FF does need a redesign to make more of the feature more user-intuitive. - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

Sameer - I've been back many times, I still barely use it. All the stuff Robert mentions, I had no clue. And its not worth my the time investment. - Shripriya

i would expect to see the tweet before this one.. http://www.google.com/search... - Orli Yakuel

Robert - the twitter thing (ie. unsubscribing and not following everyone) was a bit of a joke. But on FF, you are the biggest proponent. If you can't get them to change, no one can. - Shripriya

Phil: THIS THREAD IS NOW ABOUT GOOGLE REAL-TIME INDEXING! XD - CannonGod

Agree Sam, but Twitter nor identi.ca expose a gazillion features in the core app.. Its about managing the "first impression is the lasting impression" thing - Sameer

Here's the interview I did with Kevin last year: http://qik.com/video/73962 Shripriya: yeah, I keep hearing that from other people I try to evangelize FriendFeed to. One guy, who is a tech advisor to celebrities in Hollywood told me they will never use it because it's too hard to figure out and because there aren't good mobile clients for it, like there are for Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Jake - :) - phil baumann

@Sameer That's true for a certain demographic, but I look at sites my 8th graders frequent often and I have no idea how they put up with the features. Or take an xBox 360 controller... lots of buttons that do way too many things for my old 30 year-old mind, but my students find it intuitive. - Sam Harrelson

http://scobleizer.com/2008... - 18 months ago you said their UI was brilliant :) - Mark

Shripriya- thats ok. Plenty of people I personally know that have signed up for Twitter and never come back because they couldn't find a use case. No app is for everyone. Its about appealing to a large number of folks that see relevance. - Sameer

Wow, not only is this indexed in Google, but the Likes are getting indexed as well. Don't see the comments indexed yet, tho. - Sam Harrelson

Maybe FF will always be the power aggregation tool online that only a few use. But is the "few" large enough? I wonder. - Shripriya

47 emails in my gmail inbox already from this thread (as i commented and said follow updates on twitter)... surely they can batch them at least by the minute... after all... email isn't realtime :) - simran

Search results for "I don't get FriendFeed" - http://friendfeed.com/search... - phil baumann

Mark: you took me out of context. I said it both sucks AND is brilliant. That is true. Even today. - Robert Scoble

@Robert, can I add that UI is so clean that functionality are just a part of the design, they need to make more light on them (hey they are all blue link the same sized blue link) :) - abdellah

The missing mobile client certainly is a downer. I love a lot about FriendFeed, but lack of a *good* mobile client, and other minor annoyances may keep me from staying here. Sure I know I will come back from time to time (and I haven't left yet), but not sure I can live here on a daily basis like I can with Twitter because of the great clients for my desktop and phone, like TweetDeck. - Timothy Federwitz

Sam, the feature laden apps you mention that your students use, have intent built in them. The purpose is known before you came. XBox = don't do homework. Hell, Id learn how to use very button too :) - Sameer

I think FF is a different beast altogether and not as easy to create a mobile app for, based solely on service functionality and what we actually do here. - Manuel Mas

Tim: that's why I like the IM integration wtih GTalk. Gets around the site UI and works great on the mobile as well. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Scoble: I think this was a pretty rude way of giving your feedback. Why are you being so provocative lately? - Eric Florenzano from iPhone

difficult for who? the basics are easy....getting the most out of all the tools available is a different story but at least the tools are there. Not so in twitter - Craig Shipp

Sameer: Yep, good point. Similarly, I see FriendFeed having a very useful apparatus in my work/personal flow as a news/twitter/info client. I mostly use it via IM but also find the site pretty intuitive for how I use it and prefer it over Twitter, etc. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Eric: because no one engages unless you make a strong point and I sure wish Kevin would fix this stuff so I can evangelize FriendFeed better. - Robert Scoble

Craig: I have shown FriendFeed to many hundreds of people over the past year and I keep getting this complaint over and over. - Robert Scoble

I disagree with that approach Robert. A strong point is not always necessary. Most times it's a turn off and sets the wrong tone. Sure you get a lively discussion, but half of it is trying to explain you're not reallllly upset about it. - Bwana ☠

It's fine to complain but I don't see any useful suggestions here from Robert or any other commenters. A problem without a proposed solution is essentially a whine. - Brian Sullivan

Bwana: we've been complaining about these issues for more than a year. And I am upset about it. It keeps me from having a good time evangelizing FriendFeed. Just search here for how many people don't get FriendFeed. And those are the ones who'll tell you in public. - Robert Scoble

Just reading this, I have learned 4 things I DID NOT KNOW about friendfeed functionality. - Liza

Back again, to say FF still isn't cool! - K.N. Ajit Narayan

Robert: I couldn't disagree more. Please don't fall into that Arrington/Loren Feldman trap. People engage in a more constructive way when the topic is interesting. Just look at Leo's shows for proof that I'm right. - Eric Florenzano from iPhone

I didn't say this wasn't a case for a strong point, I'm simply stating it's not always necessary per your statement "no one engages unless you make a strong point" - Bwana ☠

Liza: that's another reason I did it in a strong way. I knew it would get engagement. WHen you get engagement your item gets spread to more and more people and that helps out the community overall. - Robert Scoble

Timestamp? Click, double click? Permalink? I wish I knew all of this before. - Liza

Ultimately the best thing to happen to FriendFeed would be the mass proliferation of 3rd party apps that offer a better user experience overall. Let the market sort out best functional IxD. How many highly active Twitter users use Twitter.com regularly? Not many, because there are several Twitter apps that afford a more active Twitter experience. Without them, Twitter would be news from 2006. - Laura Scott (@lauras)

I disagree. I came here because I agree with the point (as I stated in another thread), not because of the strongness. You may attract certain types with that, but not moi. - Bwana ☠

The best level of engagement that I've seen regarding Leo Laporte is when Arrington called him out openly and there was the big fuss of him getting thrown off the show. Just saying. - Michael Owens from iPhone

I also show twitter and friendfeed to a lot of new Internet users and they get confused easily. I think the only solution is to show one simple process and then after they master that for a week or so then show them another feature. - Craig Shipp

Eric: OK, heard and understood. But name another designer who does stuff with links that Kevin does. That needs to be pointed out strongly, I think. But then I get crazy about design, especially when people keep telling me over and over that FriendFeed is too hard to use and figure out. Even Liza, who has been here a lot, didn't know all that stuff was "hidden" under the affordance of the link. - Robert Scoble

Robert - I appreciate your sharing this info, but it feels strange that all of this seems like a secret. Intention is bizarre. - Liza

So Robert, do you really think Kevin and FF are actively ignoring this issue? - Bwana ☠

Bwana: yes. Why? Because it's been like this for 18 months. - Robert Scoble

As a user, I do feel like it is intentionally hidden. - Liza

Interesting - Bwana ☠

It isn't about ignoring. It's about continuance. These affordances have been here since FF started. - Michael Owens from iPhone

Michael: and they f**k with the affordances that everyone has learned on EVERY OTHER WEB SITE. This is why I used strong language. - Robert Scoble

Oh, and the "new ui" upgrade that happened a while back did nothing but add to the hidden complexity - Michael Owens from iPhone

Robert, The UI's difficulty is best expressed in comment threads with a huge number of comments, such as yours - http://friendfeed.com/bitchfe... - Aaman (Clone of FF)

And I am tech savvy, not an idiot, but the argument is, oh, you just aren't enough of a techie to get it. - Liza

I think the beauty of friendfeed is the fact that it can be used as a very basic tool but also has the power to do much more in the right hands - Craig Shipp

Who are the right hands? - Liza

And once these get fixed, the real thing that people can't figure out is what is new. On every other website there's an affordance for that. Even in SimplyTweet new Tweets are green. Quick, figure out what is new here that you haven't seen from the last time you were here. You can't. - Robert Scoble

Robert speaks truth. - Bwana ☠

Craig: That's the biggest copout I've ever heard. Maybe Kevin needs to go bak and read "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. - Michael Owens from iPhone

Liza: people like me who click on everything looking for secret features. :-) - Robert Scoble

Don't Make Me Think ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...) by Steve Krug may be the kind of design you are looking for. - Todd Hoff

@Todd: great minds think alike - Michael Owens from iPhone

Robert: but even Wordpress.com uses the date affordance as a permalink. http://bit.ly/Dwnm6 I understand the concerns about the mass of feature clarity here, but I don't see that particular date/link function as a standard bearer. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Scoble: OK point taken. So let's make this constructive: what should they do to fix it? For the timestamp, my suggestion is to make it bluer and underlined--which everyone associates with links. Do you agree? How can they fix the hide functionality, though? I'm struggling to think of a way. - Eric Florenzano from iPhone

Liza: I found a lot of bugs in WIndows 95 by unplugging my mouse and trying to use the entire UI via the keyboard. But then I'm weird. Most people will never try anything. In fact, Google's own research shows that fewer than 1% will click on "advanced search." These weird affordances are even harder than THAT to figure out. - Robert Scoble

So if this doesn't change, FF may not get as wide of an adoption that it deserves. Hide, permalinks, and little things make a huge difference. The technology is too good for this to be its downfall. - Bwana ☠

Not having older items shaded or otherwise marked as old does effectively contribute to noise. - phil baumann

I'm not saying friendfeed can't be made better. I'm just saying it can be used from a basic level with little training. - Craig Shipp

I was accused of working for Friendfeed at an event 2 nights ago, for being an evangelist, and I still know very little about the functionality. AND I do like to think, I do click on a lot, but I also appreciate the intention of inclusion. - Liza

Eric: I would NOT put two hidden features under one link. They need a tab of "customizations and secret features" and put all that stuff there. - Robert Scoble

I'm not sure it's ever going to change at this point... which is sad - Bwana ☠

Liza: everyone knows I'm so excited about FriendFeed that they whine when I don't bring it up. Seriously. It's funny. - Robert Scoble

Whoops sorry Michael, didn't see yours. But it is a good book. Affordances is a bit abstract. He does a good job making the idea concrete. - Todd Hoff

what social site is better? - Craig Shipp

Twitter made a big improvement with contextual menu, such may add a value in FF too. - abdellah

Craig: define better. Twitter is easier. Facebook has more hooks and more users. - Robert Scoble

Which social site has the better UI? - Bwana ☠

Bwana: which is why I used strong language. - Robert Scoble

Until FB and twitter update in real time they aren't even in the game as far as I'm concerned - Craig Shipp

Robert: Twitter has the best UI? - K.N. Ajit Narayan

better UI!! ask myspace ugly by purpose. - abdellah

The problem is w/o knowing the affordances, Newbies create too much noise, feel embarassed and retreat - felt that but did not retreat - Liza

Facebook used to have a great UI imho. It's changed so much, now I can't find anything - Bwana ☠

FF has the better UI would be my guess. But better is such a subjective word. - Brian Sullivan

K.N. define "best." It's certainly easier to understand than FriendFeed is. Especially if you use a great client like SimplyTweet on my iPhone or Seesmic on my desktop. - Robert Scoble

Scoble: I'm not sure about the tab idea. It would add a lot of visual load on ever pageview. Instead, I'm thinking maybe if hide was a hover dropdown. When you hover over it, it says "Hide just this item", and "Hide all items like these" so that you know what you're getting into. This could work just like the top subnavigation items in many websites, which people are familiar with. Thoughts? - Eric Florenzano

Agree Twitter's UI is great - was in a studygroup of power users - most of us use web interface with multiple browsers rather than Tweetdeck, b/c simplicity is preferred. - Liza

Eric: this is why I'm not a UI designer. I like your solution better. - Robert Scoble

Hover is an evil thing in a real-time interface - Bwana ☠

I may repeat it but contextuel menu, yes do it well, that all , FF have to do that , twitter have done it. - abdellah

i hate chasing links - Bwana ☠

Bwana: Ahh yeah, good point. Maybe it would have to pause realtime (considering you are actually doing an action) - Eric Florenzano

Robert: Was talking about Twitter, the site...It's really easy to work with, provided you are not following too many people.. - K.N. Ajit Narayan

On FF you can type in the box and hit enter. How difficult is that? - Craig Shipp

Yeah Eric, it would have to - Bwana ☠

Even this thread is hard to read. No ability to specifically reply etc. Another reason I rarely visit. - Shripriya

FF used to pause real time whenever you your cursor was over a posting or its comments-- somehow that feature got removed. - Brian Sullivan

Basically, Robert, you're saying that FF is too clever for its own good. - Glen, Bespectacled Elder

Shripiya: This conversation will definitely stink unless you find the hidden permalink - Bwana ☠

lisa, that's one thing and four words :) - Craig Shipp

Which supports Robert's argument - Bwana ☠

I don't know if I will be able to handle a better FF - Craig Shipp

I went to grab a glass of water, and have no clue what is going on now - see what I mean? - Liza

@Craig Oh for sure you can remember the alpha version and when beta come. - abdellah

Maybe using IM is best, don't know, but, for now, I find it labor intensive vs. Twitter. I like BOTH, and I will continue to use BOTH, but that does not mean there are not simple fixes to improve the UI. - Liza

@liza no you know for sure what is going on , you know that this thread is about "....", you remmeber what you have said before, you remember the person for whome you talked so for sure you know were you are at the discussion. - abdellah

It would be nice to see some of the FF team on this discussion, Kevin Fox in particular. - phil baumann

I want to reply to indiv comments, it is impossible unless I say @robert or HEY BWANA, that is silly, crappy design. Am I missing something? Plus, everyone calls me LISA not LIZA, so I can hardly answer the questions directed at me without looking for both. - Liza

Robert should have cc'd the FriendFeed feedback room - Bwana ☠

Phil: it is Sunday and they do need some time off of their work. Hopefully Kevin will show up tonight or tomorrow. - Robert Scoble

Liz: yep, I love FF's IM integration. I've got a popout window open on the side of my desktop and can keep up with things (from this thread and everything I monitor on FF) much more easily. - Sam Harrelson from IM

LIZA - not lisa or liz, ha ha - Liza

With that said, I love FriendFeed's comment UI. That's what hooked me to the service - Bwana ☠

After reading about affordances (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...), it appears the problem is that many of them are hidden when they should be perceptible. - Glen, Bespectacled Elder

Robert - I am clicking on everything in site, so if I blow up something, oops, sorry. - Liza

Liza apologies. multi-tasking fail. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Glen, yep, that's where discoverability comes in. Things should be easy to discover based on visual cues. It shouldn't be like playing a game of Myst. - Akiva Moskovitz

UNaffordances - Liza

Robert - yeah, even if they read this tomorrow, there's good stuff here that's important if the service it to grow in use. - phil baumann

Say it with me folks : User-friendly-ability. We HAZ NONE here. - Sean

Robert - now that you are here, I also think it is a mistake to expect users to choose FF or Twitter - recently you have backed off and choose to use both, BUT many of your "followers" are testy with those of us who use both. Until FF is easier to use, I will use both. That is my choice. Positioning FF as Twitter hating is bad move, ppl. - Liza

Who is positioning FF as a Twitter hater? Some people hate Twitter (I personally think Twitter is a waste of mindwidth). How does that have anything to do with FF other than the fact that they post on FF? - Brian Sullivan

Brian, do a search, you will find MANY ppl are positioning FF as anti-twitter, and I don't agree with the approach. I personally get a LOT of grief from both sides of the fence for using both, and I am not going to pick a side just b/c others tell me I should. - Liza

Annoyance: There's no comment, like, etc link at the bottom of the comments. So... I read 160+ comments and have to scroll back to the top to comment? WTF? - Kevin Donahue

Kevin - yes, that is a frustration. - phil baumann

Kevin, totally agreed with that comment, especially when using via the iPhone. It's nice to see comments per OP, but the UI for managing things is horrible and wastes a lot of time, denting my enthusiasm for more participation. - Sally Church

Officially PISSED OFF - using IM FAIL. Opens new page for every feed. Then I respond in Gtalk and get unknown command. F this. Time to breath deep and try not to explode. - Liza

Liza, type in "help" for the list of commands in IM or there's a list on the site. Not sure about the page thing... I don't get that in GTalk. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Liza: consistently when people meet me they ask "what is next after Twitter?" I don't answer FriendFeed, I wish I could. - Robert Scoble

I don't like help menus or reading instructions. I appreciate your efforts, but I am just pissed off in general b/c I like to figure things out on my own. I can't spend yrs clicking on FF for hidden treasures. - Liza

People always ask me why should they use FriendFeed over Twitter.... it gets old after a while - Bwana ☠

Robert - exactly, if we knew what was next, it would be dull. Beauty in playing, mashing, exploring. - Liza

Wow Robert, way throw out an HCI term! Are we going to discuss GOMS or Fitts' Law next? :-) - Bill Welense from iPhone

Bwana - I gave it a shot yesterday with some success in the last day. - http://ff.im/6kbAN - phil baumann

Robert - nice comment. Would love to tweet it to share, but don't know how to isolate it on this f-d up interface. - Liza

Liza - I'd like to be able to tweet comments they way Disqus allows it. - phil baumann

This is Liza frustrated and cranky, sorry for letting my evil twin out, but this feed triggered it. #blamescoble - Liza

I'm wondering if FriendFeed will remain the domain of us geeks. Is that a BIG enough market for their business model though? - Jim Connolly

I secretly hope so, Jim. Twitter was great in 2006 B.K. (Before Kutchner) when it was populated only by geeks :) - Sam Harrelson from IM

Holden: Well, I'm pretty sure someone hopes to make some money from FF. - Jim Connolly

Sam: I have to admit, I would hate to see FF flooded like Twitter is. - Jim Connolly

The fact is Robert that These problems have never crossed my mind. Actually, come to think of it. A unified settings page would be nice. However. Just becuae the UI is unconventional, going against the grain, does not mean it's a bad UI. I'd love to see a mockup of how you would do it better. - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

Holden: I didn't say it wasn't great. I still use and love Twitter. I just miss the good ole days. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Don't even get me started with a wish list of options. - Liza

CONFESSION: I did not know until now about double clicking on the time-link to get a pop-out window. - Jim Connolly

Holden: Twitter's a spam-filled hunk of crap. - Jim Connolly

Holden: You may not automatically see a business model, but they would have had to produce something to get $$$ funding. BTW: Twitter's got the audience, though. It's where the people are. Only reason I use it. - Jim Connolly

Friendfeed is not difficult to use. It is so intuitive. I love that I can easily block certain things, search for items that have a specific number of likes, see a user's likes, etc. It's wayyyyyyy easy. - Ben Hanten

Ben: A lot of new users tell me they can't figure it out. - Jim Connolly

they're not trying then, Jim - Chris Heath

If this was put up to a vote, I would vote to have a better FAQ, but I would definitely keep the design as free of extra buttons as possible. - Ben Hanten

Hmm, wow, lots of comments fast on this post. Too bad it's a Sunday, I imagine Kevin is up to other things right this second... - Jason Wehmhoener

Can someone help me find the link to create imaginary friend? - Krishnamoorthy

Holden, well that's their loss if they can't 'get it' - friendfeed is simple and IMHO if you can't 'get it' then that's your problem, not friendfeed's - Chris Heath

http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Chris Heath

Krishnamoorthy - http://friendfeed.com/setting... - phil baumann

the Imaginary Friend function is now a part of Groups. for example, I created a private "group" with my wife's name and brought in all of her feeds since she's not on FriendFeed. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Ok, the imaginary friend thing is a different story. Awesome concept; but way too much work to add a bunch of users. - Ben Hanten

I think a good start would be to have a totally different "entry point" for setting up hiding rules. Also, defaults might need to be reconsidered. Is it the best to always start off by showing everything from a user? FF already asks you to select your "top five" feeds you want to show off in your profile... Could it make sense to only show stuff from people's top five by default, so one needs to opt-in to get any more of their feeds? - Meryn Stol

Perhaps a big, dedicated "mute Twitter" (though I'd prefer "Kill Twitter" ;)) button would also make sense. After all, Twitter is in itself responsible for most items - and thus most potential "noise" - on FriendFeed. - Meryn Stol

you can still quickly create an imaginary friend (as Sam said it's part of groups now) but if you don't want to choose the private group setting yourself just go here http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Chris Heath

maybe i'm wrong and an imaginary friend is different than a private group, but the functionality seems the same - there was a discussion a few months ago about this: http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Chris Heath

Chris, yep... good point. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Imaginary friends are easy to setup, but... you really should be able to do a whole batch of them. - Ben Hanten

Ben, it's rather janky, but my students have private Twitter accts for labs in my class that I read and interact with using the Imaginary Friends + private Groups feature. Plus, I have a nice archive of all student activity that I can search through. Not a great solution, but a good workaround for my extreme case. - Sam Harrelson from IM

there's a lot on the friendfeed roadmap, and i think that's one of the items... if you participate in the friendfeed feedback room you can get lots of answers to these types of questions http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Chris Heath

You can search for the official FriendFeeders' feedback, as Chris suggested, with this saved search: https://friendfeed.com/ffss... - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Interesting topic. For me personally I use FF for reading rather than contributing or commenting, and via mobile more than the web, but I do agree the UI isn't the best. I would like a google reader or better still, a Feedly style interface. I want to know about what I haven't seen that's in my groups or feeds. And I want that simple and easy with no hidden features or maybe simple and expert interfaces. - Keith Bennett from BuddyFeed

You'r right Robert. - ALPER DURUKAN

It's not the UI that's keeping the mainstream from using the site. This is akin to asking why the mainstream has yet to discover the wonders of traditional message boards. Fact of the matter is most people don't have the desire (not to mention spare time) to continually engage with a stream full of random social media tidbits on a regular basis. But if that's your cup of tea, I think the UI is excellent for sharing, discovering, and keeping up with the real-time chatter. - Aviv

ANNOYANCE: Why is it so difficult to find a list of just my "likes"? I can't find it at all. I can only find my likes through the "My discussions" link. Ugh. - Kevin Donahue

Kevin, it's pretty simple to get to your likes. http://friendfeed.com/samharr... - Sam Harrelson from IM

Has Kevin Fox responded to this thread? - Manuel Mas

Not sure he should -- seems like Robert made vicious and personal attack -- and a lack of response might be appropriate and classy. - Brian Sullivan

I certainly wouldn't join into this pile-on if I were Kevin. "Oh hey, I noticed you all were kicking me while I was trying to have a weekend, here I am now, go ahead for another round!" - Jason Wehmhoener

On the bright side, you know your service is about to hit mainstream when your biggest cheerleader starts to hate it (see Twitter). - Aviv

Aviv: nah, that's not a good predictor. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Have you noticed that the time stamp behavior of acting like a permalink is pretty much the norm across many sites? Check facebook and twitter for example. - Tsega Dinka

One thing I would like to know is, where is the link in friendfeed to the application key? I always have to search it from google. - Ru Viljoen

it's unnecessary to be brutally rude RB but these comments are valuable, we are expecting alot from 12 FF supergeeks, they cannot be perfect but they are incredibly good already. - Thomas Power

I think "hide" was perfectly designed. The user doesn't get smacked in the face immediately upon loading a page in friendfeed that resembles the control panel of an old fashioned telephone switchboard. One simple hide link, that the user will click when they want to hide something, that then asks what you want to hide. It's called not overwhelming the user with too much info at once,... more... - April Russo (app103)

April: they can put a lot of functionality into "settings" that would also do the same thing as hide does today. Most people don't figure out that the hide link has extra functionality. - Robert Scoble

It's better than what facebook does, which is to hide their multi-function hide button, until you hover over the item. I'd rather have it the friendfeed way and at least know it's there by looking and not by having to play "find the invisible features" game by moving my mouse all over the page waiting for all the little facebook easter eggs to make themselves known. You have no idea how... more... - April Russo (app103)

I DON'T KNOW WHY WE'RE YELLING! I LOVE LAMP! - Mark "Mr Bolivious" J

(I'm being facetious. Robert's STRONG points are still pretty tactfully expressed, IMHO.) - Mark "Mr Bolivious" J

http://ff.im/6n4fT - hachure

And I don't understand how any twitter user could possibly not know that the timestamp is a permalink. Timestamps on twitter are permalinks too. Ok, the clicking again thing was a bit of an easter egg, but how else could you add a nifty little feature like that without adding any clutter? Even if you gave a full tutorial FAQ, how on earth could you present all these little extras in a way that doesn't overwhelm a newbie and make them run away without reading the huge FAQ? - April Russo (app103)

Missing the point, not about geeks vs non-geeks, even geeks disagree on UI issues,and it is dismissive and insulting to act as if mainstream is not geeky enough to understand crappy UI. My opinion matters, and it was not until a fellow geek, Scoble, brought it up that anyone acknowledged that there may be some UI issues. - Liza

So go back to using twitter. - jcunwired

I know of a site that has worse issues, for example, clicking the RSS icon on a page takes you to a forum thread with a gazillion posts explaining how to subscribe to the content you want, using all the custom crap they have. You basically have to learn how to build your own RSS url before you can subscribe. And don't click the "Mark" button on a forum thread there unless you want to... more... - April Russo (app103)

FF may be messing with affordances, but I don't see it as f*cling with them. I see it as an attempt to innovate. The 'nonintuitive' behavior is a bit of a PITA, but it adds richness to the app. It is also innovation in action. The most painful upshot of suck innovation ia the fet associated with playing with a UI's functionality - you might end up breaking something really important or... more... - Jason Miller from iPhone

JCUnwired That is not helpful or constructive. Stick to one-sided debates. - Liza

Funny thing is though... I have used Excel and Word without ever reading a manual. Now I'm pretty ninja at both but never had any formal training. Neither has about 95% of the people I know how use it, yet everyone I know has worked it out enough to use it well. See, they have these things up the top like File, Edit etc that hold the functions. Those things are not always required and... more... - Johnny Worthington

Well put johnny - Mark from iPhone

Which social app has the best interface? Easy Facebook. - John Hardy

As far as I can tell "affordance" and "discoverability" are different ways of looking at the same concept. And I've been complaining about the timestamp thing for a long time. - Karl Knechtel

I've been complaining about FF's ease of use since I started using it. I'm glad there's some traction on it. ridiculous that the time stamp is not displayed as a (permanent) link. - jbrotherlove

Never mind that the timestamp isn't displayed as a link. The problem is that it makes no sense for the timestamp to be the thing that is clicked. - Karl Knechtel

I like it, its a nice gate. It keeps FF tech based. It keeps things relevant. Its an Acid Test. There are plenty of alternatives. And those alternatives that cater to everyone, are full of Blither Blather. If you pass the gate, and pass the Acid Test, you learn about the community and the discussion. With a robust Community and Discussion, Self Policing and Spammers are annihilated. Self Healing Robust System. - Robert Higgins

Apostol Apostolov, Ana ( http://friendfeed.com/ana ) has confirmed that they're on the issue of adding recipients and groups after posting an item about a month ago - http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Chris Heath

I totally agree with Robert HIggins & Johnny Worthington's recent comments - Chris Heath

Robert, thanks for your thoughts. Three quick responses: affordances aren't something that someone fucks with, they're something that a designer gives to a design and it's fine to say that you don't think I'm designing a product with proper affordances or strong enough affordances, but the implication that I fucked them up is that I took the gestalt natural affordances of something and... more... - Kevin Fox

The above distinction is important because the argument then becomes one of whether or not FriendFeed has been imbued with proper affordances or not. Now naturally the answer varies from person to person, as it does with any UI for any product. FriendFeed is trying to balance functionality with simplicity and, as is the case for any product with that task, any point on the spectrum could be criticized for either hiding too much of the complexity or showing too much, even at the same by different people. - Kevin Fox

So the strategy then becomes, as has been mentioned here, one of making the simple things easy and the complex things possible. The most common tactic to enable that strategy, and one we rely upon a lot at FriendFeed, is that of progressive disclosure. This works for some people and not for others, but it's usually an excellent way to make a UI that's not intimidating to a new user, and... more... - Kevin Fox

As for the timestamp also acting as the permalink: Well, you're absolutely right. This is a completely improper affordance that only makes sense if you happen to be familiar with blogs that use the same convention. Fixing this (with something less heavy-handed than a link that says 'link' or 'permalink' or (gasp) an icon of two links in a chain) is high on our list and I want to fold it... more... - Kevin Fox

When we get that worked out in a way we're happy with then we'll roll it out. Until then, it's also important to consider user confidence, and that tweaking a UI too often when trying to find the right answer makes users less comfortable with the design and their ability to manipulate it, even if they don't consciously notice any change. For this reason a few things stay rough a little longer until we have what we think is the right answer, not just a stopgap one. - Kevin Fox

As always, thanks for the feedback, and for trying to make FriendFeed a better place. - Kevin Fox

Wow - Bwana ☠

Wow. +500 xp to Kevin. - Sam Harrelson

Kevin I love you because you explain why you are messing with the affordances! :-) - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Doesn't sound like they're ignoring it to me, Robert :) - Bwana ☠

Bwana: me neither! Glad Kevin explained. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I'm liking this article simply because of Kevin's explanation of why things are the way they are here on friendfeed. He knocked that one out of the park. - Alex Scoble

Kevins camp. In Japanese there is one word for beauty. Kirei. Actually, it is the same word for Clean Kirei. 奇麗 FF for me is clean and beautiful. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" Leonardo daVinci - Robert Higgins

So if we're going to change the time stamp from being a permalink, can we use it to sort posts chronologically? That is the one affordance no one can discover. - Andrew Smith

I didn't read the full thread, but reading the top and (what is at this point) the bottom really helps me understand what the UI people do. Thanks Robert and Kevin! - Andrew

Big props to Kevin Fox. - Sameer

Kevin rocks. Even on a Sunday night. They pay me to say stuff like that at work. The thought of having to step up to the plate anytime 24/7 with that level of professionalism is daunting, to say the least. So yah, big props to Kevin Fox. - Jason Wehmhoener

I actually like the current UI. I like the feature set. I agree it DOES need a more intuitive and quicker way to know about and learn the deeper features. - George Hall (Australia)

There is something to be said for having the conversation first - then Kevin calmly explaining his pts. It gives others a chance to respond honestly, and then Kevin gets far more valuable feedback. Selifishly, I also like the fact that I can see others' views - many who did not address UI issues but showed a defensive sense of entitlement (see Louis's chart on new adopters)...Robert,... more... - Liza

Great responses Kevin. For the record, I'm a fan of the "progressive disclosure" approach. - Mike Doeff from iPhone

Really great points, Robert. I've learned some things because of this discussion. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. - Brian Adrian

One answer to Kevin. Blogs, since the beginning of when I started to use them used the "permalink" or "#" convention. I guess the thing is that in FriendFeed the CSS here is hiding the blue underline, so people don't know that the time stamp is a link. It's tough designing for the web, I know. That's why I don't do it. At least very often. :-) - Robert Scoble

Twitter uses a time stamp as a perma-link as well. </fuel to fire> - Bwana ☠

Yeah. I just tweeted about that myself. </more fuel to fire> - Dennis Jernberg

Fascinating. Didn't know about the timestamp as permalink, but I didn't suffer from unnatural affordance issues prior to reading this discussion either. Not an ubergeek, but I don't suffer. So, maybe FF is not "above the heads" of the average, but merely yields enough at any level to meet whatever the particular need might be, wacky affordances or not. And people who avoid it because it is "too hard" need to toughen up a bit. This is 2009 and the Internet, after all. - Martha

Also, the "Share" link exposes the permalink as well which I think was a great addition to alleviate the time stamp confusion. - Bwana ☠

Wow. How did Kevin get those 5 paragraphs contiguously posted? Copy-paste-post. Copy-paste-post? Or is there some other secret weapon not yet released? - Nick in Manila

Nick - I'd bet 1000 gil on Notepad/Textedit :) - Bwana ☠

I'm waiting for the twitter theme for friendfeed, to show people exactly how easy FF is to use considering its features and exactly how braindead twitter's UI is. - Andy Bakun

Nick & Bwana: Textedit and copy/paste/post. As I was c/p/p-ing I thought about how I could make a tool using the API to allow for this kind of thing, then envisioned how that would break FriendFeed and banished the thought. (and then I just commented about it anyhow. Oh what have I wrought? I am become death, destroyer of words.) - Kevin Fox

Bwana: hey, at least FriendFeed's designer listens and answers back. That might get more mud thrown his way, but a whole lot of love too. Personally Twitter's design isn't very good, but everyone thinks it is because it doesn't have many features so they perceive that as simplicity. I perceive it as inferior but that really pisses off the Twitter types and they start arguing with me about stuff like the above. - Robert Scoble

Robert - I was just thinking that. We would NEVER get this kind of interaction with a Twitter dev on a work day. - Bwana ☠

Part of me knew Kevin would address this at some point. It was merely a matter of when. - Bwana ☠

I hope this thread/conversation doesn't end any time soon, either here on this post or elsewhere. I want FF to be the best it can. - phil baumann

I think FF is waaaaaay easier to use than Twitter and recently started using FF to follow my twitter feeds. Images and videos are inline and comments are threaded (no silly @ replies). I only wish more of my friends were on it!! (also, it would be nice if comments were formatted with the commenters name first which seems to be the convention on most sites i.e. "May: blah blah blah"). - May

To go back to the top a little bit: does anyone think it ISN'T weird that not all the links on FF are blue? Not just the time stamp: the service your content was imported from, your name at the top of your profile, and the time stamp are all non-blue links. Is there a logical reason for those inconsistencies? I've never understood that. - Andrew

Awesome explanation by Kevin. I happen to love FF's progressive disclosure. I think the 'hide' feature is a great example of this. You could argue that they might make the second stage a bit more obvious, but it's still a lot better than a huge drop down menu at the start. - Ben Reierson

Even Twitter has a ramp up time. It took me about a month of working it to get comfortable with it. Only slightly longer than it took me with Twitter. And it is light years better in most every way. I agree with Robert's desire to enforce change through public criticism, but I think it important to keep it in perspective: FF is generally a better experience on all fronts. Kudos to Kevin Fox and the rest of the team. I feel confident they are more than capable of seeing issues and resolving them. - Martha

i never really had a problem with that Andrew, and I never had the problem with the permalink either... if your mouse changes from pointer to finger, then it's a link and you can see the destination in the status bar - Chris Heath

Andrew: I actually hate blue underlines. Designers have hated that affordance for years. They look ugly. They make text harder to read. I'm in Kevin Fox's camp on that one. Get rid of underlines! Just make affordances that people can figure out without being told about (like clicking twice on hide or clicking twice on the time stamps). - Robert Scoble

robert, i don't get your clicking twice on hide problem... hide seems fine, and while i don't use it much i don't recall clicking twice, like with the timestamp - Chris Heath

Chris: normal people don't mouse over every word in a UI to discover whether there is a secret link there. Also, explain how hovering over "hide" would tell a user that there's different functionality there if you click twice on that word? - Robert Scoble

Chris: if you click twice on the word "hide" you will get different UI that will give you different choices. If you click twice on the time stamp you will get a popout window. Not intuitive at all. - Robert Scoble

when i click hide i get an undo and hide options links, that seems the correct UI - i agree with you on the timestamp, but the hide thing isn't the same - Chris Heath

++Kevin - Cristo

Chris: Hide does act differently, I agree, but most people, in my experience, don't look at the second page because they don't expect to see more options. Remember 99% of people never click on Google's Advanced Options. Do you REALLY expect people to click twice on Hide? I don't. And even if they did, shouldn't those features be in settings too? Where people expect to find them? - Robert Scoble

i don't buy your beef w/ hide, but i agree on the timestamp - i also agree with you on not having to hover everything to see if it's click-able and also don't like underlining, so there needs to be some other visual cue of the link/feature - Chris Heath

sometimes features do need to be learned/taught and everything can't be intuitive... i think we might be overshooting our ideals for usability. remember the days of three ring binders and books and manuals for using any given system or software package? we've come a long way, but users do have to learn some things. i think friendfeed has done a good job of making the site usable for the... more... - Chris Heath

Given a top complaint about FriendFeed is too much noise, Hide needs to be more intuitive. - Bwana ☠

Since I still get the dumb blonde / not techie treatment from many, I am going to go w/ it and say that even I figured out hide early on. The timestamp stuff was news to me. - Liza

I'd wager at least half of FriendFeed doesn't know about the second page of hide options. I've had to explain it countless times and a ton of people didn't even know you could selectively hide services based on comment/like behavior, etc - Bwana ☠

Kevin, Thanks for listening and major props for taking your time to listen to constructive critisicm. - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

9/10 of the folks that use Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc don't know all the features and functions. Having every single function be completely intuitive and/or labeled is not needed for mainstream acceptance or usage if that's what we're all worried about here. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Every single function, I agree. Hide, needs to be more intuitive. - Bwana ☠

Bwana, I agree as a power-user, but how many folks would actually use "Hide"? It's an edge-case function that will/would never catch on with the mainstream. I just don't get these complaints. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Sam: you're right. But I didn't get this kind of pushback when I evangelized Twitter and Facebook had many more hooks to get people into their system than FriendFeed does (and keep them there) and even Facebook doesn't have a lot of the weird affordances that FriendFeed does even though it's more complex. The complaints I get consistently on FriendFeed (a lot of which have to do with... more... - Robert Scoble

Oh, and the number of comments here tells me a lot of people feel very passionately about FriendFeed and want it to be better, even if they are telling me I'm full of it. - Robert Scoble

The complaint is noise. There's too much. There's too many duplicates. I don't want to see "X". These are complaints I see and answer often. The solution is hide and they don't know about them. It's not a power user function imho. - Bwana ☠

FF lost a lot of users during the initial launch because people didn't know about or want to properly hide unwanted stuff. - Bwana ☠

"FriendFeed is full of baby photos" Classic complaint. Solved by hide. - Bwana ☠

It's always the user's fault. Always. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

Robert, I got on Twitter around Thanksgiving of '06 b/c of your evangelicalism (thank you/curse you btw!). But the concept there was/is much more easy to grok. Of course folks are going to think FF is hard b/c it is hard. But to bastardize JFK, "we choose to go to the moon and do these other things in this decade not b/c they are easy but b/c they are hard!" - Sam Harrelson from IM

friendfeed isn't hard...unless you think a blank piece of paper is hard. - Alex Scoble

Depends on your definition of hard. Some people think complicated or inconvenient is hard. - Bwana ☠

Alex, have you ever written a book for a publisher that loaned you money and expects the money back? A blank piece of paper is incredibly hard! - Sam Harrelson

Look at lists. Very powerful tool of FriendFeed, but for some, it's too much work. Some may call it hard, some may call it.... too much work :) - Bwana ☠

Sam: but this blank piece of paper can write itself thanks to the integration with other sites :) - Andrew

I know in the apps I've tested, if the UI was difficult for the end user, they would avoid using it. - Bwana ☠

Andrew, you are completely right. Good point. I'm thinking from a contributing point of view (b/c I'm a teacher and I always want to influence, etc) but you're right. - Sam Harrelson

Alex: is blank paper sort of like a blank Wordpress entry screen? I get it then. - Robert Scoble

Seeing a real-time stream of the full conversation is highly desirable and one of the best features of the service. I design and use software all the time and didn't know about the time stamp link until someone told me about it. Robert is doing them (another) favor by using controversial language to bring attention to the issue. I bet we see an update in a week or two and the service will be better for it. - Chip Ramsey

I can see it now: if entry["from"]["id"] == "scobelizer": theme = "lots-o-links" - DGentry

either that, or entry["body"] = pigLatinize(entry["body"]) - DGentry

Wow ... Great dialog. Kudos to Kevin for his comments! I have demo'd Friendfeed for more people than I can count. Most of the issue has to do with people's time vs value (or just fun). Is it harder than Facebook? NO! Nobody says you have to use it all and 9 out of 10 people I've demo'd Facebook for have NO IDEA what a permission is (Think about that ... and the defaults?!). Twitter has... more... - Charlie Anzman

Then ... The Friendfeed Browser and OS! - Charlie Anzman

Robert, given Kevin's responses, you might want to edit/tweak the Original Post/headline. I wish there was a way to promote the comments so they were 'pinned' to the OP - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Aaman: what's an OP? The headline? - Robert Scoble

Oh, thank goodness. I was wondering what an OP was, and feeling dumb that I didn't know. I didn't want to have to read 328 comments to find out. - Glen, Bespectacled Elder

Yes, the Original Post - I wasn't familiar with the term myself, and saw it first on this very thread, then googled it. (It can also mean Original Poster) - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Glen: I'm not scared of feeling dumb. I feel dumb every day given the quality of the people I hang out with. - Robert Scoble

@Kevin: wondering if there could be a link that would take you to a page that would show what features have been added, disabled, or removed. - Harold

Robert, you should lock comments, so it's immortalized properly at Kevin's reply - Matthew DeVries

Matthew: you make sense. I've locked the comments here so you can see Kevin Fox's reply without digging back too far. - Robert Scoble

The first five bit.ly items I Tweeted today would rank 2, 2, 3, 3 and 3 on http://jay.40twits.com/ Now either they all took off like a shot, consecutively, one Wednesday morning, or there is something I am not getting, or....or what? - Jay Rosen

96 more comments

And now that http://jay.40twits.com is back up again, I just Tweeted a typical @jayrosen_nyu link and the normal numbers for tr.im are seen, about 3 x lower than the bit.ly rate for number who clicked on it. - Jay Rosen

Okay, some numbers, this latest link http://twitter.com/jayrose... is at no. 30 on the top 40 chart, with 137 clicks on the tr.im system. This is normal for an item like that on http://jay.40twits.com/. A comparable item like http://twitter.com/jayrose... is now at 587 clicks on bit.ly, which would rank no. 2 on the chart. See what I'm saying? - Jay Rosen

I would suggest you put Google analytics on the target page and find out the REAL metrics - Ric Johnson

Bit.ly also counts other shortlink versions of the same URL. Perhaps people are re-tweeting you link, but only after they visit the page, and using another url shortener? Google analyticsmay help sort this all out, but you're still not going to know the origin of the traffic since most twitter traffic comes from third party clients. - Mr. Gunn

Bit.ly separates the clicks off my link from the total clicks off that url from bit.ly users. At least it says it does. - Jay Rosen

I'm with Ric. Real metrics answers your question authoritatively, and that's good info to have. But, I'm not sure I see the whole picture clearly. It doesn't sound like apples and apples. Doing a blind test is difficult if you're relying on a single source. Doing multisourced links is only meaningful if you can provide impression stats. I'm pretty sure you can't do that with Twitter (unless you know someone or something I don't). - Jason Nunnelley

Have you checked the referrer stats via bit.ly to see what it looks like? Maybe some site is picking up your bit.ly tweets. - Jeremy Felt

I don't get how Google analytics helps me. I must be missing what you are saying. I am not trying to find out how many people came to a given page, I am trying to track how many people USED (clicked) the link that I selected an sent out to them. Because of Re-Tweeting and switched url shorteners, this is not exact, but both tr.im and bit.ly claim to measure the number who clicked the unique URL created for me and my Twitter feed, and if that url was Re-tweeted, those clicks are counted too. - Jay Rosen

I'd agree with the other folks on here...it's probably somehow not an apples to apples comparison. The other option (oh, I see Jeremy just mentioned a form of this) is that bit.ly links are being "watched" more closely by some site/service/tool. - Ken Kennedy

In this example http://twitter.com/jayrose... the unique url is http://tr.im/o2in which is currently no. 24 at http://jay.40twits.com/. I guarantee you, if I used bit.ky it would tell me that three times as many clicked on MY link. And what I am asking you is: why? You're answer seems to be: apples to oranges. I say: it's apples to apples for the user. Both services claim to do the same thing. I think... - Jay Rosen

I'd say that their claims, while sounding identical, are probably somehow not, Jay. One could be stripping out multiple clicks per IP address w/in a short timeframe or something, for example. (intended to prevent double click counts, but would also hide multiple users behind a NAT, for example). - Ken Kennedy

Ken is almost certainly right. tr.im isn't counting some traffic that bit.ly is counting. I'd bet on tr.im's number being the better reflection of actual interest in the link, based on other data I'm seeing, like hit counts on blog posts linked to from my twitter feed, or flickr pics. their counters usually pretty closely track tr.im's. - Dave Winer

BTW, this is great stuff. I wanted Jay to lead a technical investigation to give him an idea how we do it in developer land. I expect this will be discussed on a future Rebooting The News podcast. - Dave Winer

Hmmmm. Okay, so when you say apples to oranges the referent for that statement is the counting mechanism several layers underneath what the site says to users? As a user, "apples to oranges" means: "Jay, you're reading the claims of the two services wrong....." But I say I'm not. It's only apples to oranges for the coders, right? - Jay Rosen

Good data, Dave. That'd be a decent way to check...choose two links that you can see the backend data on (ie, flickr photos where you can see how many times it was viewed, or two blogposts at PressThink, where you can see the server logs.) Then tweet one w/ a tr.im link, and the other with a bit.ly link. Then compare what your server logs say, hit-wise, to what tr.im and bit.ly say. The difference in magnitude of these numbers (3x-ish) should make the "correct" data fall out pretty easily. - Ken Kennedy

Yes, Jay...the "apples to oranges" comparison was in reference to the claim that the claims are identical, if you see what I'm saying. I'm saying I bet they aren't. They're counting different things, but the difference is subtle enough (technically) that when they reword their claims into "non-techie", they say statements that sound identical. Did that make more sense, or was it still unclear? - Ken Kennedy

Funny observation. I (with barely any followers) posted one Trim link and one Bitly link seconds apart to the same URL with the same description. Trim climbed to 12 hits immediately, bitly stayed at 4. I think Ken/Dave are right. Jay needs to post a url through both services to something where the real data can be watched. Either lots of Jay's followers dislike Trim and refuse to click links, or something is being piped out or counted multiple times somewhere. - Jeremy Felt

IN-teresting, Jeremy. Interesting. - Ken Kennedy

Aha, so I do have a mystery of my hands, eh? Ken: I get the oranges now. Thanks. - Jay Rosen

I'm just a "dumber" user; I don't know how any of these things work inside. But I can't post a link to the same Joe Klein post at Swampland, through two different urls; the first one uses up many of the people who would click on the second! A second pass through the same people isn't a valid measure. Followers don't want the same thing twice. So I don't get why that would help. - Jay Rosen

Two different posts, not one. What you're comparing isn't tr.im to bit.ly, you're comparing tr.im to a known value (the server logs) and bit.ly to another known value (the server logs for a different post). One is probably very close to the log values, and one isn't. - Ken Kennedy

There do appear to be differences in bit.ly and tr.im if "a user is not logged in" (which I take to mean if a shortened url is generated by an non-logged in user, not if it's clicked on by one). tr.im says they generate unique tr.im urls for EVERY person who creates one; two different non-logged in users generating a tr.im of the same url get different tr.ims. Bit.ly apparently generates the same bit.ly url for all non-logged in users. Let me try something... - Ken Kennedy

I am accessing tr.im through Dave's app. http://jay.40twits.com/ in m toolbar. But I am logged into bit.ly. So I am supposed to be logged in all the time to tr.im? It's generating a unique url for me, Jay Rosen, it says, and Dave turns that into http://jay.40twits.com/ Maybe I have to stay logged in to tr-im all the time... - Jay Rosen

OK...I take your bit.ly example url from the tweet you mention above (tweet: http://twitter.com/jayrose... - bit.ly url: http://bit.ly/vYfRX ). Clicking on that link takes me to the Friendman article http://www.marketwatch.com/story... So far, so good... - Ken Kennedy

When you use my bookmarklet you are logged into tr.im. My app is logged in on your behalf. You do not have to be logged into tr.im. - Dave Winer

I open Chrome (separate browser, separate cookies, etc.) and go to bit.ly; not logged in (I don't even think I have an account). It gives me an url: http://bit.ly/DjpLP That's good, it's different than yours. It DOES give me a way non-zero click number, though...730 at time I created it (2 minutes ago). What number do you see in bit.ly for that Friedman link right now? - Ken Kennedy

OK, fascinating. If I read the bit.ly site right (http://bit.ly/info/DjpLP), there are (currently) 743 "aggregate clicks" to the destination URL (at marketwatch) that have gone through bit.ly in total. Your specific version of that link accounts for 643 of them (http://bit.ly/info/vYfRX). So there does appear to be a difference between the "not logged in" and "logged in" accounting. - Ken Kennedy

back to apples to apples then because I WAS logged in at bit.ly and Dave says I AM logged in on tr.im What I said earlier was: since I am using Dave's app in the toolbar I didn't know for sure whether I was logged in at tr.im, but I know I was logged at the bit.ly site. - Jay Rosen

But it only shows 10 clicks in the past hour-ish (there's a couple of time errors, but I think they're just typos; it says 12:51am, and means 12:51pm, and it's EDT, not EST. I don't think either of them are any problem.) You posted that link around 4 hours ago, right, Jay? That indicates something HUGE happened very early on. I wish we could see detail click info further back than the "Now" tab shows in the info screen...I wonder if there's an API way to go back further. - Ken Kennedy

re: apples to apples. Not necessarily. *grin* There are lots of apples to apples going on here. We just got rid of one; the logged in issue. That's good! But if tr.im is not counting individually counting multiple clicks from same IP address w/in a short time, for example, then you've got an issue. Welcome to bug squashing, tech style. *grin* - Ken Kennedy

Funny you say that: because I notice that the "immediate" rush from bit.ly was much huger. But it takes 5 mins or so for the first readings to show at http://jay.40twits.com/ so I don't know....I have not been using bit.ly since 40twits came back online, so it would not show much now. Besides: which count is right? what I really want to know is: is this a quality bug or some garden variety thing? - Jay Rosen

Ok, I poked the bit.ly API (which is kind of cool) with a stick. According to it, your current data is as follows (I'm cleaning up a a bit, but I'll be happy to send you how I got this: userClicks: 646, userHash: "vYfRX", userReferrers: { direct: 591, friendfeed.com: {"/": 1}, partners.bit.ly: { /sd: 3, /td: 15}, powertwitter.me: {"/": 2}, twitter.com: {"/": 24, "/home": 3, "jayrosen_nyu": 4, /jayrosen_nyu/status/2103086825": 1}, "www.google.ca": {"/reader/view/": 1}, "www.netvibes.com": {"/": 1} } - Ken Kennedy

The important point there is that of 646 clicks, 591 of them are "direct". What is direct, I'm wondering? That link isn't on http://jay.40twits.com/ , correct? - Ken Kennedy

From the FAQ: What does the "Direct" traffic in Traffic Sources mean? Direct Traffic includes people clicking a bit.ly link from: * Desktop email clients like Microsoft Outlook or Apple mail * AIR applications like Tweetdeck or Twirhl * Mobile apps like Twitterific or Blackberry Mail * Chat apps like AIM * SMS/MMS messages * It also includes people who typed a bit.ly link directly into their browser - Ken Kennedy

Yeah, that one was a bit.ly only link I sent out to my Twitter feed from Marketwatch. bit.ly tells me 632 out of 722 people total were mine. - Jay Rosen

That's what I thought. - Ken Kennedy

I don't know what that means, in the larger sense; the assertion appears to be that they're all real clicks, though. With the number being so much higher than tr.im, the next thing I'd think to look at is whether or not tr.im is not counting links somehow, or aggregating things up in some subtle way. - Ken Kennedy

On second thought, I wonder if it's possible that some mobile/AIR apps (like Twirl) try to do some sort of resolution against the URL that is incorrectly "counted" as a click. You have 21,000ish followers...it doesn't seem unlikely that a certain number in the low hundreds could be online at any particular time, using Twirl or other AIR clients. That might explain a bunch of fast "clicks" as the link flowed through. (Note: this is a complete hypothetical, though I'd think it's possible to test.) - Ken Kennedy

OK, I think we're onto something. I just pushed a non-shortened url from my blog (about 10 hits/day normally. LOL) into my FF stream (which pushes to Twitter) while watching my logs...a FF hit, and a GoogleBot hit right away, but that's pretty much it. Then I bit.ly'd another url, and pushed it in, and an immediate stream of hits to my server log; already 30 in about 5 minutes.... more... - Ken Kennedy

It was the "immediate rush" that surprised me, Ken. But then maybe it's really a delayed rush from tr.im that should not be there. - Jay Rosen

bit.ly appears to be lagging a bit, but it's numbers for that shortened url (bit.ly/MXEMo) currently show 6, all "direct". Still rising. Will watch. Setting up tr.im url now. - Ken Kennedy

There was something recently about bit.ly admitting that their stats are whacked. think they're working on a fix. - Andy Bold

Zoom! tr.im going strong as well. Very interesting. I note that trim stats do try to guess what's a bot, but that's pretty iffy. They count 30 visits in last couple of minutes (hm...very similar to bit.ly number), but then break that into 17 humans and 13 bots. That being said, I'd be VERY surprised if 17 people have already looked at that. - Ken Kennedy

Oops...the 30 I mentioned is NOT similar to bit.ly number, but is close to actual server log hits. - Ken Kennedy

Jay (or Dave...whomever tr.im account it is)...login to tr.im and check the stats directly for one of the top40 tr.ims (this link will work if you're logged in... http://tr.im/statistics/nK3P). How does the number at top40 site compare to the stats #s. Is it the "human" number, or the "total visits" number? - Ken Kennedy

One question, one note: 1) Has anyone asked bit.ly about this? http://twitter.com/bitly would be one easy way. 2) Twitter switched to bit.ly for default URL shortening recently -- I imagine that caused in increase in bot traffic to index bit.ly links, although I don't have a better explanation than that. - Ryan Sholin

Asking bit.ly is good, certainly...but nothing wrong w/ having raw data to inform discussion. I don't think there's any sense that they're doing anything "wrong"...it's just the metrics seem to be different. - Ken Kennedy

I'm out for a bit, but I'll bundle up the data I've gotten for a bit later. - Ken Kennedy

Ken - the tr.im api that dave is using returns total visits. I haven't found a way to split out the bot numbers in the response. - Jeremy Felt

Interesting! I wouldn't have guessed that. - Ken Kennedy

Okay, someone is going to summarise and blog this for us, right? Bit.ly went kapluey (a tech term) y'day for a while but I always find that the numbers are about 3 to 5x higher than visitor numbers measured through google analytics or elsewhere. - WorldofHiglet

Ken: I'm logged into tr.im but the only data I can access at the web portal is old urls I created by hand through the web interface. And the link you gave me above gives me an error message when I click it. - Jay Rosen

Jay: I'm guessing this means that Dave is having you use a separate login for Tr.im through his application than the one you used to use. - Jeremy Felt

I'm guessing the URLs are being generated by a different account then, Jay. - Ken Kennedy

Gotcha, Eric...thanks! This is interesting stuff. Yep, wrt bit.ly we're looking (at least right now) at userClicks for a specific hash. - Ken Kennedy

Okay I have an account Dave created for me with a different log-in and I guess I have been logged into that. Clicking on the link Ken gave me, I find 885 total. Humans: 402. Bots: 283. - Jay Rosen

That's probably it, Jay. - Ken Kennedy

Eric - Does tr.im group clicks by IP in a certain time frame at all or does it report only raw click numbers? - Jeremy Felt

To confirm, I did create a separate account for the bookmarklet. Jay was the second user after me, so I did it by hand. Later in the process the tr.im folk gave me access to an internal API for creating accounts so it's automated. I sent Jay the credentials for his account via email. - Dave Winer

Eric/tr.im folk (I like that)...so the way I'm reading the statistics page, I should "expect" (I realize these numbers aren't perfect) the "total visits" metric for a given link to be potentially higher than the actual hits in my server log. Your guess for the "bots" number are those services you know only want to unpack the url, etc. The "human" number should be closer to the "correct" value. Is that a fair (albeit jumbled *grin*) statement? - Ken Kennedy

Ah, HEAD requests...good point! Anyone know if bit.ly counts HEAD requests? (that's the very definition of an apple/orange technical comparison, Jay. I would hope they wouldn't, but if they did, there's no comparison). - Ken Kennedy

Correct, Bit.ly says they stopped reporting HEAD requests back in March. http://blog.bit.ly/post... - Jeremy Felt

Gotcha. - Ken Kennedy

I have a real jayrosen_nyu post ready to Tweet, should I do a bit.ly url? - Jay Rosen

Just update on my tr.im hits (which have died off, unsurprisingly): 37 total visits, 21 marked human, 16 marked bot. I have 25 actual hits in my server logs on that page since I posted the link. - Ken Kennedy

Sure! - Ken Kennedy

Okay its.... Coral Reef journalism: to a "sunken" structure tiny facts attach. The wikipedia stub: got an equivalent in news? Listen: http://bit.ly/sJiBz Tweeted: http://twitter.com/jayrose... - Jay Rosen

Okay the bit.ly "initial surge" count is 168 clicks, that's about three times more than an item would debut at at 40twits (tr.im) Typical debut count is 60 to 70. Initial count of 100 indicates an exceptionally fast link at http://jay.40twits.com/. - Jay Rosen

You can see the "surge" at the info page. http://bit.ly/info/sJiBz - Ken Kennedy

Good link for example, too...b/c according to the API, you currently have all the clicks for it ("clicks": 341, "userClicks": 341, "userHash": "sJiBz"). So the "total" clicks equal your userClicks...there's no other bit.ly url for this that's been clicked on. (yet). Of 341, direct is 331, FF 1, partners.bit.ly 4, powertwitter.me 1, twitter.com 4. - Ken Kennedy

Minute by minute hits, first few minutes (this'll fall off the graph at bit.ly eventually): 1, 62, 81, 65 55, 35, 24, 18, 3, 4, 5, 7, 2. I don't think that's people, you know? - Ken Kennedy

Oh, I hear what you're saying, Eric. And really, that ratio doesn't even matter for purposes of what Jay's trying to determine...why the bit.ly numbers and the tr.im ones are so different. But your comment about people processing urls is a good point: it may be that some tools looking at twitter are only processing some shortener namespaces, but not others. That would explain a lot. - Ken Kennedy

Okay, so what do we know as a result of these investigations? - Jay Rosen

For click data, unless you have your own service and can see the whole picture, use 1 tool to gauge the popularity of clicks on a pure trends basis alone, not by numbers. - Jeremy Felt

Gotcha, anything else? - Jay Rosen

I'd say that it's interesting to note that the "initial surge" should probably be completely discounted in terms of interest...I assert that in the vast majority of cases, it's basically all automated stuff. That being said, good stories still "rise to the top"...the clicks over time add up. Having two services with different "initial surges" makes comparison difficult (impossible, really), as Jeremy noted. - Ken Kennedy

My gut also tells me that we've learned that there are tiers of shorteners...I think some get more attention paid to them by the automated tools than others. bit.ly's initial surge is larger because it (like Twitter in the "what are you doing" space) gets more attention from the people making tools to analyze the data. Not a super surprising piece of info, but worth thinking about. - Ken Kennedy

And also, those numbers have only a tenuous relationship to actual web hits to the page. At this point, my story I pushed through bit.ly has 9 bit.ly hits (though I know I did a couple of those myself accidentally), and 18 page hits (since I pushed out the link). My tr.im url has 37 total visits, 21 of which are deemed to be "human" by tr.im. The page has 25 hits (since I pushed out the link). - Ken Kennedy

And of the 25 page hits on the story linked to by tr.im, I can tell several of them are bots by the user agent (Googlebot, TweetmeBot, etc.) Has ANYONE actually read that story? I'll try to determine that (based on other GETs in logs around the hits), but I'd honestly be surprised. - Ken Kennedy

Okay, so... it seems the little url shortener mystery was isolated to some kind of auto-counting by services that have targeted some url shorteners but not others, and that the critical piece of evidence is the "rush" in the first few moments, and so the "number clicked" meter is only good for trends over time. This is all based on what we can know without further digging or information from the firms. Best practice: adopt one shortener; stick with it, watch for updates on the issue. Does that capture? - Jay Rosen

Sounds right to me. Trends, not numbers. :) - Jeremy Felt

Exit question: why did 12 people tag this as one of their likes on FF? - Jay Rosen

1) contains useful information, 2) a fascinating example of the worth of social networking - Bora Zivkovic

Does Bit.ly subtract bots automagically? - Kathy E Gill

Yep, sounds right to me, Jay. As for liking it, my interest is obvious, but I totally agree w/ Bora; in general, it has useful info ("liking" is often like bookmarking for me...I can search and easily find it again with that hint), and it was also a great discussion/example of why FF is so interesting. - Ken Kennedy

continuing Bora and Ken's answers to exit question: 3) to make it easier to find in future (search by likes) 4) to publish it to likes page (like retweeting except by reference instead of by value/copying) 5) to send Jay some love/goodwill - carl morris

Well, I should definitely add: thanks, everyone, particularly Ken and Jeremy and Eric for stopping in. Thanks for your kind assistance. - Jay Rosen

I read the whole thread and "liked" it because 1) it was started by someone with a sound reputation and a history of investigation, 2) the interaction of journalist and geek was interesting, and 3) the issue of what data can we trust in Twitter-land is important (especially with the growth of URL shorteners). Thanks to all who contributed. - Chip Roberson

I read the whole thread and "liked" it because I have clients who are starting to ask for some ROI with their Twitter usage. The see numbers and want them bigger. I want to be able to give them perspective. - Kawika Holbrook

Some of my clients like the tr.im stats page because it's easy, fast, and separates humans from bots. Others like bit.ly stats page because it includes comments from the page itself as well as Twitter and Friendfeed comments. What they really want is one tool to see at a glance what's popular, where the conversations are happening, and who/what carries the most Google juice. - Kawika Holbrook

My clients wouldn't care about this discussion, but I do because it helps me make a recommendation based on facts, not guesses. I would hope Twitter's use of bit.ly as the default shortener doesn't ultimately swamp all others, if only to ensure continued innovation. - Kawika Holbrook

I actually noticed this problem a few months back when rolling up aggregate statistics for the @nytimes account. I contacted Bitly to ask them (kinda surprised nobody else has, pretty easy to do). Upshot is bitly counts expansions of the URL, not clickthroughs. So, my twitter client autoexpands bitly links and that counts for a hit, even if I don't click it. They filter out bots and such, but plugins like that are still hits. - Jacob Harris

Of course, any redirection service that counted only hits could still encounter situations where the redirect is not followed (and they don't really have any way to know that), so there will always be some overcounting. And of course, most web analytics is based on Javascript on the page which might not be executed, so there might also be some undercounting. But bitly was giving me spikes of 4-5x my web analytics totals from WebTrends. - Jacob Harris

Here is the last message I received from Bitly asking when I noticed a decline in the numbers: - Jacob Harris

Bit.ly is still counting decodes and not necessarily only actual human clickthroughs. We are not counting: - decodes that we identify as bots based on their user-agent strings, and we are working on more advanced techniques for bot identification. - HTTP HEAD requests, which some third-party tools use to get meta-information (such as the destination link) without fetching the entire... more... - Jacob Harris

It seems like the general problem is there are 2 ways you can expand a link via bitly. One of which is to do a GET request and get the redirect (that is what a user would do and should be counted for them, but it's a problem when bots do it). Apps should be using the separate expansion API that doesn't count that as a hit, but the problem seems to be that many programs and plugins are still doing a GET on the short URL to expand (and being counted). - Jacob Harris

Essentially, ALL URL shorteners have this problem, but Bitly is probably exaggerated because it is so prominent in usage compared to the rest. I apologize for not blogging about this (I did tweet about it at a few points), but bitly support (that contact link on the bottom) has been very helpful in explaining the issue. - Jacob Harris

Yep, totally agree! - Susan Beebe

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I like that they have expanded the notifications to other lists - but I would *kill* for the ability to pick different IM's for each list - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I finally found a use for the FF desktop app: instead of producing a constant stream (like just another twitter client) I program it for groups, friends I need to follow on the fly. It's very quick to add another alert, or pair it down if the stream gets too dense (ie: unreadable) or annoying. But, the most important missing element is to be able to create alerts for saved searches. - Brad Kligerman

(and for realtime Saved searches :) - LogEx

it would be helpful to have a small number to the right of each group or user/list to see total new since last time to that page. - Tom Parish

"What the research also goes on to state is that 50 percent of those that set out and establish or become involved in these communities will fail in their efforts. That's about 300 Fortune 1000 companies that will fail at social media: a striking number, especially in light of recent economic pitfalls." - dougpollei

I agree. Most corporations don't value small things. I know the value of having only a couple of followers. Most corporations don't. - Robert Scoble

I'm not shocked... This is looking like a CRM replay in the Enterprise. Massively over-hyped expectations, vague but large return, vague measures of success, and a completely vague definition of success. - Brian Roy

The pull vs push marketing - good one "social media requires .... some fundamental shifts in marketers' attitudes toward online marketing" - Yann Ropars

Our firm's high-tech and cleantech customers are eager to engage the communities they serve, but they (and most small and midsize companies) still struggle with *how* to keep up with disjointed conversations. They're realistic. They know they're not going to control the conversation. They know they're not going to shove marketing messages down people's gullets. They know they need to be authentic and responsive. They just can't afford to waste time beta testing services that don't deliver actionable info. - Kawika Holbrook

From what my friends are telling me Vimeo's new TOS says they have the right to do whatever they want with your videos. That's horrible for people who are trying to build content businesses. - Robert Scoble

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*sigh* And yet another service to delete my account on. - Jon, the Beartato of '10

BTW: I'm using TubeMogul, but never posted to Vimeo because I like using HD and Vimeo has too restrictive a cap on HD videos. If you're doing video and not using TubeMogul to distribute your stuff you really are missing out. - Robert Scoble

Sheesh. And here I was, enjoying what they were doing. - Mike Nayyar

I agree, you really have to be everywhere. Gives different communities the chance to see your work. - deakaz

I have no idea what their TOS is like, but their new video is hilarious http://vimeo.com/3718294 - Richard Lawler

http://seanlockedigitalimagery... has some details on Vimeo. Yup, it is indeed as bad as Scott says. That's a horrid TOS. Compare, for instance, to SmugMug's TOS which says exactly the opposite. - Robert Scoble

Maybe that's what it takes to accomidate for creative commons licensing. Vimeo has been great for those of us not trying to build a business on content. - Christian Burns

Seems every site has to go through this "learning-curve" before they get it right. Vimeo's response has been excessively poor. Look's like self-hosting one's content is the only long-term solution. - Robert Kenney

The bottom line of anything is host it yourself or deal with TOS issues. Pretty sure most online video sites have the save clause in their TOSes. - El Freak

You'd think companies like this would learn from each others mistakes. Look at the flap Facebook got over changing their terms. Same with Google a while back. I'm sure that Vimeo will/should be pressured to do the same - Kevin Kuphal

El: SmugMug doesn't. - Robert Scoble

Scott Bourne runs the very influential "This Week in Photography" by the way. Has hundreds of thousands of listeners and is very popular. Pissing off someone like him is not a smart business plan, seems to me. - Robert Scoble

Like Robert Kenney said, the self-hosting looks better all the time. That said, you can use a service like Amazon S3 for the heavy storage lifting (granted, may not scale bandwidth cost-wise depending on consumption factors). SmugMug is great for (presently on pro account) 10 minute and under clips. - Micah Wittman

What I don't understand is, why does vimeo need to own the content uploaded to them? - Jon, the Beartato of '10

El: why would you make an uninformed assertion that slows discourse when you can just quickly do the research, where you'd have seen that you're wrong and then not made that point at all? - Matthew DeVries

I like Blip, too. Nicest player I've seen out there. I'm also using Kyte a lot. Gotta go and compare the TOS's of those. SmugMug really rocks and uses Amazon S3 a lot anyway. - Robert Scoble

Flickr does video too now. - Matthew DeVries

Jonathan: at Microsoft when stuff like this happened it usually was just a lawyer trying to protect the company from all lawsuits. I doubt that Vimeo really wants to sell my videos to some other site, but the lawyers usually are in CYA mode, not thinking about what's appropriate for the business. I like SmugMug for that reason: they are a family run business and think about the impacts of this stuff first before setting lawyers loose. - Robert Scoble

You're gonna need to talk really fast to host video on Flickr and get a point across - Kevin Kuphal

Kevin: the industry is really settling on 10 minute videos for the free sites. I've found that lately I'm really trying to keep my interviews and such under the 10 minute mark so that they'll go everywhere. Plus, with HD, the file sizes get so nutty big that 10 minutes is about the limit anyway. - Robert Scoble

SmugMug allows 20 minutes, though. YouTube: 10. Facebook: 20. Blip: longer, not sure how long. Kyte: longer, if you have a pro account. - Robert Scoble

Robert: That's awesome that SmugMug does that. I suppose it will be a matter of time then before these companies notice that no one is hosting content through them because of their TOSs. Although, that may just be a naive assertion on my part. - Jon, the Beartato of '10

Vimeos response has been horrific. They posted a pretty pathetic response on their own forums, then locked the thread... wonder how long until they delete the thread... I love the Vimeo service, but this response really is making me re-think vimeo. Check out the thread: http://www.vimeo.com/forums... - Juan Pons

Never used Vimeo - Patrick from twhirl

smugmug is my choice for posting videos - planetMitch

While I understand the message it sends to its users, these types of license agreements are of dubious enforceability. I'd love to see what would happen should someone sue Vimeo over it: my money is on the plaintiff. - Mark Trapp

Thanks Robert for bringing this to a broader audience! Vimeos response to the issue so far has been ridiculous. I'm hoping that - at some point in the future - companies will realise that these kind of TOS are bad for them. Looking into Smugmug for an upcoming project now... - Holger Eilhard

The companies response is ridiculous, reposting a boilerplate message and then closing the thread is hardly appropriate. Here's hoping the outcry is loud enough that they listen. I don't even use them at this point, but that kind of legal bs, pisses me off! - James Dasher

It's this kind of thing that proves to me that most companies are going to stay away from cloud services for a while longer. - Kenton

I have posted the Vimeo issue to GetSatisfaction in hopes of generating an actual response from their management. http://bit.ly/rmamf - Malevolent Robot

I find it interesting that companies in the user generated contant space keep rolling out these overally broad TOS clauses, smacks of a lazy legal team - Bill Pennington from twhirl

That's a disappointing change in position. I originally signed up for Vimeo years ago *specifically* because they did not claim ownership of my content. Now they're claiming "legal reasons and technical realities". Another company grows too complacent to serve its users... - Dan Byler

My friend Aaron Hockley did a talk at Ignite Portland 5 on the varying levels of egregious licence agreements among online services, like Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Though the norm is pretty biased against the user, he said that Vimeo was a little better than usual. Too bad to see them change. You can watch Aaron's talk at http://www.igniteportland.com/watch or http://linuxaid.blip.tv. - Josh Bancroft

ha ha, they keep repeating the same message, over and over to each complaint on their forum. like drones. - TranceMist

Trance: Pretty sure that is people just requoting there response, it looks like repeating but if you look at it you will see it is quoted from the original - Bill Pennington from twhirl

censorship sucks. It's too bad that vimeo locked the thread where people were complaining about this. - Thomas Hawk

Threadlocking should be considered the legal equivalent of a signed confession that the company is wrong. - Matthew DeVries

how incredibly lame - Susan Beebe

hope vimeo is changing their tos as I recently heard. Smugsmug is great but completely different and takes a pricy pro-account to upload hd video.. and since I got all my pictures on photoshelter anyway, I don't need the picture-features of smugsmug.. so Vimeo used to be the perfect place for creative videos by now.. - Dan van Moll

Vimeo has locked their forum where this was being discussed. http://vimeo.com/forums... OTOH, they have stated that they're reviewing their ToS. The essence of Vimeo's response is "you can leave any time you like," which seems a really bad message to send. My commentary: http://www.techbreakfast.net/2009... - Glen, Bespectacled Elder

Say what you will about this being a legalese for them, but locking the thread is a huge mistake. I can understand why Vimeo doesn't want other customers to see the thread, but preventing them from commenting seems heavy handed and makes me doubt how willing they'll be to listen to consumers on this one. - Davis Freeberg

Would be a great way to filter out noise. - Kevin Pedraja

Digg-like voting would be a great way to promote smart comments, bury poorly reasoned ones, and raise the level of discourse. Or, perhaps, start flame wars. - Kawika Holbrook

Facebook now has "hide" features and filtering. Nice. - Robert Scoble

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New home page comes starting next Wednesday. - Robert Scoble

So it is pretty much FF? - andy brudtkuhl

I bet they missed te oportunity to integrate real attention profiling... - directeur

Yeah - Facebook is completing its transformation into FriendFeed - Chris Saad

Good God let the bitch begin. Last summer that amount of complaining about the re-design was ridiculous. People complained like there was not UX and planning involved. I think the site re-design was a huge improvement. I look forward to the new design as well. - JP Holecka - Jaypiddy

Interesting - does that look like less external app and advert space? It does to me. - Ian D. Nock

Where do the ads go? - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

@Chris That's a good thing, sort of. I would rather see FF incorporate more robust profiles and other FB like features, but without the closed model. And you know, more like FF :) - Neal Jansons

I am sure the focus is more on the content now. Videos and pictures adn other media will be grabbing more space in there - Hardeep Singh Dang

looks like FF.... - anna sauce

looks like the nav has been streamlined -- as chris suggests, more like FF -- and the sidebar on right is ? groups, pages? guess we'll see soon enough - Adrian Chan

Facebook had "hide" features in the News Feed around 18 months ago. Remember the thumbs up/thumbs down? - Jamie

Well, they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... - Jemm

Yeah - "hide" has been there - show more of, show less of is very useful, and kicks FriendFeed's butt in terms of intelligence - Jesse Stay

So if FriendFeed is Apple, Facebook is turning into Taiwanese MSI.. ? http://bit.ly/mogsR - Thomas Bøhm

Thomas, LOL. - Onur Gündüz

I may reactivate activity on this new FB. But in that case I would do a pure reset of my friend list... Just like "some" did on twitter ;) Not that I have a huge list there, but not _the_ appropriate list - Jean-Charles VERDIE from twhirl

I hope they don't sacrifice the amount of information you can view above the fold for larger user pics. - James Simmons

You have to give facebook credit for iterating fast. I think that twitter and facebook should join forces and create a compelling alternative. - Edwin Khodabakchian

no it is getting provocative, really the future will prove it. but FB is playing a loose game - abdellah

it cost time money and resource to re-educated an audience, the large the audience the large the expenses, and FB audience is large how much it will cost to re-educate such audience to act like FF people do. - abdellah

Can't believe this - no originality. Complete rip. - James Hull

The complaints of "I don't understand Friendfeed" will have not weight if people use the new Facebook interface. - Andy Bakun

Yep, it's FriendFeed. Would be funny if app developers protested this obvious ripoff by NOT developing updates to their apps (Twhirl) to support Facebook. - KyleHase from twhirl

is this the silicon valley equivalent of waking up next to the severed head of your favorite horse? "we can steal your UI at any time, friendfeed. remember that." - Karim

That will work much better, although I'm getting used to ignoring the right hand column, I'll need to get used to ignoring the left hand column again. ;) - Daniel W. Crompton

Why so much hype around new FB page? Like you use it more than FRF ;) - SK is in fucking love.

Sasha: this is a huge change. Not because of what you see, but because businesses and brands now are full members of the social graph. That will be an impact you'll feel over next two years. - Robert Scoble

well, full members if you fan or friend them. But you don't have to. And then they invade you less than they would on Twitter. - Prokofy Neva

Robert, agree. However, FB has to work hard these 2 years to make itself destination #1 on the web. I hardly go there - all important things just hit RSS or email. I wish RSS had more 2-way interaction. - SK is in fucking love.

the FB move, is just an other move toward a more social service, some have to confess that in FB there is an equivalent of bull, even it is a social website, it is a set of million bull and those (family friend reduced set restraint) suffer from inter-bull interaction, this FB is to bring more interaction between people from different bull and this will be provided but the concept of fellower. and feed commenting like etc. is it risky!! yes - abdellah

how to argue that such feature can be a bad move for FB, just see the "group" evolution in FB. in FB people want one thing "be in a closed relation with their known relations", would people be open mind in FB and open their own bull to others bull!! this is all what future will tell. - abdellah

Sasha: That's why FriendFeed is so much better than Facebook. the ability for RSS to be embeded in your feed and be able to carry on a conversation about a storry in that RSS feed on FriendFeed is what makes FF so amazing. BUT, i don't know if i'd want everyone on FF to have the same access that friends on FB have access to about me. That's the problem. We need two sites for this unless someone can come up with way to make a profile partially private and available to only those you trust. That's key. - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

@Slayerboy, do you think that's why we don't have this extensive profiles (read "no profiles") on FRF? - SK is in fucking love.

I think the new facebook homepage looks awesome. Some interesting changes are definitely taking place. The new input bar which you can just see will completely transform the service by placing an even greater focus on sharing media. No longer will it simply be a status update but an all in one sharing feature - Benno

@Sashe, yeah I think that's one of the reasons. I believe in openness and all that, but am not blind to the fact that a majority of people even have problems putting stuff on their facebook profile when they CAN set privacy settings. I think Facebook has a good idea with the whole Network thing, but there's no real communication there. If FF applied the network idea and let me specify who I want in my "Friends" and in my "Network", friends can access my profile, network can't, but we can all converse. - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

.....it would make it much easier and we wouldn't need two sites for this. I think that's what FF does with Rooms, but again, privacy vs non-privacy is an issue for profiles. - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

@Slayerboy I like the way Flickr does it - on adding a friend you mark them as a contact, friend or family. Cool idea that should be easy to implement and would save us from rooms and other stuff. - SK is in fucking love.

@Sasha interesting, I use Picasa and just share the feed on FF. Never got into Flickr. Can't imagine it'd be hard to implement that on FF then. - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

Facebook now has Friendfeed! YATTAAA! :-) - Burak "cyrus" Bayburtlu

It seems to me like only the social media experts would compare Friendfeed/Twitter with Facebook. The rest look at them as apples and oranges. They are used differently - Andre P. Siregar

Andre, what do you mean by social media experts? - abdellah

I think the term 'social media experts' is used in this context to indicate 'stupid dumb-ass charlatans'. Hope that clarifies. ;-) - David Petherick from twhirl

so, may be I am one of them :) David - abdellah

Thanks, David :-). Although I would put it less harshly. - Andre P. Siregar

are you sure?!! I am still waiting for your definition Andre. what is a social media expert? - abdellah

I thought the smaller companies were supposed to be the most agile? Here we have the battleship turning inside the destroyer. FriendFeed is still mostly what it was a year ago. Facebook has redesigned twice. Impressive. - Chris Baskind

Abdellah, here's all I'm saying. There's been tons of serious discussions on Friendfeed/Twitter and Facebook, allegations and accusations that one copies the other, etc. etc. I don't understand why spend the energy. The majority of the 175mill Facebook users are there simply to connect with actual friends. Simple example: I respect Robert Scoble's opinion on new technology, but I don't care what he is doing at home tonight. But I do want to know what my sister is doing, 1000 miles away - Andre P. Siregar

Andre, I respect your opinion and how you use social service, now I was about the label of "social media expert" , I hope that you aren't about self claimed guru, that all. we are all expert and none is :) peace. - abdellah

The new Facebook Page layout makes it more difficult to highlight video content. Video is now relegated to tabs or below the immovable Fans box on the Wall page. Not great if video is a key part of your content strategy and you want to make it prominent. - Simon Taylor

I like the new setup as I updated my company's page yesterday. I approve FB! - Jeremy Campbell from twhirl

I'm not going back to Facebook - my mom's on it now:) - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Facebook is the Microsoft of 2009, mimicking FF, Twitter, slowly taking shape as THE communications platform for the masses. Big mistake turning FB Pages into a profile page, though, businesses lose any branding. Looks like a college kid designed it. - mark ivey

看上去结构更清晰 - 阿石

CeCe Salomon-Lee of PR Meets Marketing calls out PR agencies that aren't active on social media platforms and asks, "Would you trust them to run your social media campaign?" Unfortunately, her research is pretty thin. In the case of my agency, she couldn't see the link to our blog that's right on our homepage. Or find our LinkedIn profile. I'm guessing there were similar mistakes for other agencies. So the question is: Would you trust someone to run your social media campaign who can't do basic research about who's using social media? - Kevin Pedraja

It's pretty easy to search "Sterling" on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever other service you prefer, and find Sterling Communications. - Kawika Holbrook

Good article. I guess you've got to work smart to get noticed on Flickr. - Adam Christie

42 more comments

Very good advice, Thomas. A comment on no. 6 ("Groups"): I remember Flickr staff mentioning that not only photos that are in too many groups (more than 10-15, as a rule of thumb) get penalties for their Explore rating. Allegedly, this is also true for photos that are in the *wrong* groups, specifically the ubiquitous "post 1, comment x" groups. So not all photo critique groups might be good when you want to get your pictures into Explore. - Ole Begemann

Ole, I hadn't heard that certain groups penalized photos but have seen Flickr staff in the past mention that posting your photo to too many groups will reduce it's visibility with their algorithm. - Thomas Hawk

Re: no. 5 ("Explore"): more criteria that seem to influence whether a photo makes it to Explore: the presence of EXIF data, geotags, title, description has a positive influence; faves and comments from people who are not among your contacts seem to count more than from contacts; faves and comments from popular photographers count more than those from nobodys; a photo that gets 2 or 3 faves within minutes after uploading is more likely to make Explore than one that gets faved 15 times within 24 hours. - Ole Begemann

Thomas, I'll try to find a reference for this. - Ole Begemann

Good point on EXIF data Ole, yes, photos in Explore are required to have EXIF data. My own guess as to why this is is that if a photo has EXIF data it is more likely to be your own photo vs. something you simply ripped from the web. Not foolproof of course but I'd guess that this policy is in part due to a desire to increase the authenticity of the photos promoted on Explore. - Thomas Hawk

If you look at the photos in Explore, the only "Leave a comment" groups that I see with any regularity are TWTME and 1-2-3 groups... what makes them special I'm not sure, other than they're amongst the largest groups in general. But you see very few of those award groups or "leave x comments" groups in the photos in Explore, so I suspect that Flickr must be penalizing them. - Eric P

Thomas, that's a great refresher on the original article. Some great tips. - Tom Quinn

And Thomas, throwing reciprocation in as a "bonus"? It should have been #1 or #2. The vast, vast, vast majority of comments and faves that I receive are from people whose stream I previously visited. The only real exception to that is when a photo is high in Explore, which results in a torrent of views/comments/faves from strangers. - Eric P

Yep Eric. Reciprocation is very high. Bonus tip might not be the best place for it. It's very important. Faving back when people fave your work, commenting back. Adding people back as mutual contacts, etc. All encourage activity on your photostream. - Thomas Hawk

Eric, participation groups don't penalize your photo from Explore best I can tell. This photo http://www.flickr.com/photos... from a few weeks ago was in the Deleteme Uncensored critique group and was #3 on Explore as well. - Thomas Hawk

In fact just searching flickr for the save10 tag from the DMU critique group along with "explore" brings up a number of photos: http://www.flickr.com/search... - Thomas Hawk

Good post, *IF* getting attention is important to you, as opposed to using it as a vehicle to just share photos with people - Eric Rice

After I read your original article on Flickr popularity a while back, I began reciprocating every comment received. That worked very well. - Tom Harrison

Eric, true. Some people have no interest in their photos receiving attention. I do think that the majority of people posting on Flickr though do appreciate when their photos receive some attention. Lots of people do not though. I have friends that only publish private photos that their friends can see and opt out of every public aspect of Flickr. I think these people though are the exception rather than the norm and think that Caterina's quote is pretty typical of the most active users on the site. - Thomas Hawk

Thanks for digging my article Aaron! :) http://digg.com/arts_cu... - Thomas Hawk

Alright, I found something. Flickr staff member acknowledged almost 2 years ago that "groups that force people to comment/fave on certain photos with no choice" do in fact hurt your Explore chances. Also, "weight of comments and favorites from contacts is quite low in interestingness calculation." (http://www.flickr.com/groups...). A very old post and the algorithm has changed since then but we can probably say that the gist of it is still true. - Ole Begemann

interesting Ole. I hadn't seen that. I think it would be difficult for Flickr to manually track every group that encourages tags and comments as participation. Per the links above though, photos in DMU have definitely made it into Explore anyways. - Thomas Hawk

Yeah, I have no idea how they maintain a list of the "bad" groups. Further below, SilentObserver mentions his business is writing algorithms to filter them out automatically, though. - Ole Begemann

Here's another good summary of nearly everything the community knows about the Explore algorithm: http://www.flickr.com/groups... - Ole Begemann

Here is an example of tagging. I did not know this woman was a celebrity until after got this shot. It appears on the first page of the image search engines and it has received over 12,000 views. http://flickr.com/photos... - Russellreno

So far I got 3 (!) photos into explore. Their common factor? They all were faved by you (TH) soon after I posted theim. - Guillaume Lemoine

Flickr used to say "who" faves your shots was a part of the Explore algorithm. It wouldn't surprise me if the algorithm weights faves by different people from the Flickr community differently. For instance, Pro accounts where people actually have paid for the service might be weighted higher than non-Pro accounts. More active users might carry more weight with their faves then less active users. Just speculating on this part. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas - I don't think that participation in all groups gets a penalty, just that there are some groups that are penalized as far as Explore is concerned. I simply don't see Explore photos in "Post 1, Comment X" groups - so either there's no explore-worthy photos in those groups (not likely IMHO), or Flickr is penalizing the photos in those groups. - Eric P

such a great post Thomas, thanks for writing it - Dobromir Hadzhiev

As a note to certain groups penalizing your photos...I had a photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos...) that went to explore spot 150 or so. After, I added it to a few groups to see if I could bump it higher. It had the opposite affect and immediately dropped off. I can't say which group exactly did it or if it was the number of groups I submitted to, but adding to groups definitely does come with some sort of penalty. - Justin Korn

If you use FeedBurner, you can splice your Flickr photos into your blog feed. I have it splice my last two photos and I find those have at least 5x the number of views as the ones that aren't in my spliced feed. - Mike Hussein Cohen

Awesome post Thomas. I signed up for Flickr a couple of years ago, but only started using it more regularly after the purchase of a digital SLR camera - so this post is particularly relevant to me. I am still patiently waiting for that first comment/favourite on one of my photos to truly experience the emotions as described by Caterina Fake. - Jeff Smith

Thanks for this post, Thomas. Great tips! - Eric Johnson

Great article Thomas... I was also wondering about what my friend calls 'Shooting for the 75'. That is, a great majority of people only ever see a 75 x 75px thumbnail of your photo. When he processes, he always does a square crop to test how it looks in the frame. Would you like to see proportional thumbnails as an option? - Johnny Worthington

I actually really like the square thumbnails. Heck I really like the square crop period. I think I'm cropping more and more of my photos 4x4 these days. Maybe it's just that I've always loved medium format photography so much, not sure why I'm so drawn to the square crop right now though. I much prefer Flickr's square thumbnails actually. Still would love to see larger sizes on FF like SmugMug's thumbnails. - Thomas Hawk

you're right though. Frequently it's the thumbnail that draws people into a photo. A good looking thumbnail is more likely to be selected by viewers for clicking through to full size viewing, commenting, faving, etc. - Thomas Hawk

One of my very first Flickr experiences was someone in a critique group cutting me down for a square crop. It was a rose in a perfect spiral petal pattern, could only be cropped square as far as I was concerned. LOL...I didn't change it either. - Karoli

Haha, that's funny Karoli. so much of the criticism in critique groups on Flickr is so lame. You should have seen the deleteme critique group ravage a Henry Cartier Bresson photograph who is probably considered by most photo historians as the greatest photographer who ever lived. Read some of these comments on this photo for a laugh: http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Thomas Hawk

I used to work to get photos into explore. I think I probably take better pictures now, but I don't have the time at the moment to put in the work. Lots of community building and commenting went into the mix. I confess, there's a real rush to hitting the front page. I had three in the top 10, and it was a lot of fun. - Karoli

I have been doing a lot of panoramic shots over the past year and I have started to play around with vertical cropping. Taking a portrait photo and cropping a really tight vertical crop: http://www.flickr.com/photos... It's all about how the picture looks to you in the end. Square, circle or hexagon, it's about the sensory reaction :) (and now I'm going to square crop for this week just to try it out, thanks guys) - Johnny Worthington

Thomas, those comments are a hoot! I met some nice people in some of the critique groups, but it didn't take me long to know the critiques weren't helping. I do love Flickr's community...even if I haven't spent a lot of time in it lately. - Karoli

yeah, the attention from Explore can be fun. But I'm pretty unimpressed with a lot of the photos there. I think Flickr could do a much better job with that algorithm. I do find filtering explore just by my contacts though produces more consistently interesting photographs for me. I use this script to do just that: http://www.drewmyersphoto.net/flickr_... - Thomas Hawk

Agree on the photo quality on Explore. Seems like a lot of the same sort of gimmicky stuff lands there. Looking forward to trying the script. - Karoli

Thanks for the article, that opened my eyes up a lot - Alex Carpenter

Hey Karoli, here's you and your daughter by the way. I uploaded this to Zooomr a while back when I was taking a break from Flickr but uploaded it tonight on Flickr. Great fun on that photowalk. http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Thomas Hawk

Hey, cool! Thanks for the pointer. It was a great photowalk, would love to do another sometime soon! - Karoli

Here is one more way to get attention: Comment on this post with a link to one of your photos. I received a hit today from the comment about. http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Russellreno

Good stuff. Worked for me: http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Demetri Mouratis

Apple is contributing $100,000 to fight Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that would define marriage as only between a man and a woman. The company's announcement today came as the fight over Prop. 8 grows hotly contested, with recent polls showing the race tightening. - Leo Laporte

Go Apple!! - Mr. Enn

You won't see any new Apple products in my house. That is low. A private company supporting a political cause, that a majority of Americans disagree with. That was a dumb move. You've lost mine, and many others' business, Apple. - Kevin Porter from twhirl

I will keep my iPod nano, thank you, and likely buy another. However, I think it would make more sense is Steve put the money up himself and not directly involve the company. - Shawn Poulson

Kevin, you sound like a homophobic person. -1 Way to go Apple. +1 for you. :) - Molly, New Ears :P

Molly, I'm not homophobic. I am a supporter of the sacredness of marriage. Marriage was ment to be for a man and a woman only, not a man and man or a woman and woman. It is not right, nor is it naturally given to us. - Kevin Porter from twhirl

As Apple states, it's not just political, it's about civil rights. Are you going to stop using Google for searching as well? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008... - Rick Powell

@Kevin, you're confusing different types/meanings of "marriage." Religious marriage is not the same as legal or social/cultural marriage. Religious marriage is (and should continue to remain) separate from legal marriage. (Though they're usually held simultaneously). Forcing others to adhere to your opinion is what's not right. - Tanath

Hey Kevin - I am so thankful of Apple. My civil rights are being stripped away by people like you who use nonsensical talking points. It is disgusting that people who live in another state are pouring millions of dollars into Prop 8. The love between a man and a man and a woman and a woman, is not second class. We will not sit in the back of the bus anymore! - PC Easy from twhirl

Since I just got marrried recently to my partner of 16.5 years (straight), I think my gay and lesbian friends and a gay relative deserve the same right. We had a civil ceremony, and the day we got married, we were very touched by the gay and lesbian couples marrying at the same time. I hope and pray these people's marriages will not be voided on Nov. 4th. They deserve the same rights that my husband and I have enjoyed. - Cathryn Hrudicka

civil rights are what laws give you! or am I wrong? - directeur

Now I have more reason to dislike Apple. - Jake (aka Jawee)

Why shouldn't Apple contribute...we talk about corporations acting ecologically friendly why shouldn't they act morally as well. Apple is saying they have a valued segment of employees that will be negatively affected by others who are trying to take the current rights they hold away. Standing up for your the civil rights of your employees is admirable and Apple will continue to be a company I support. - Sidney

"morally" ? you must be kidding. This "morally" adjective is also used by the ones against it. Business is one thing, social life-style is another. All this is marketing, and a cheap one ; 100.000 for such advertising, now this is "marketing" - directeur from NoiseRiver

Kevin: your bigotry and old ideas are not well thought out. Personally I wish our society would separate the legal rights of marriage from the religious/cultural implications of same. I don't really care what you want to do in your own church, but when it comes to legal rights everyone should be treated equally. Kevin: you sound like those who argued against civil rights in the 50s/60s. Amazing that such ideas still exist in modern society. - Robert Scoble

I see it as Apple supporting the civil rights of its gay and lesbian employees. If you don't like gay marriage, don't enter into one. - Michael Markman

Markman: So since I do support gay marriage then I should enter into one? :-) Someone had to say it! - Stephen Foskett

Kevin: Your feed has some old status updates where you support the Presidential candidate who dumped his sick wife to marry a younger, richer woman that he had an affair with. Now that you've decided to vigorously support the sanctity of marriage, shouldn't you be advocating the candidate who has stuck with one wife his entire life? - Bruce Lewis

But if gays get civil rights, soon everyone will want them... - Indio Apache from twhirl

Bruce: awesome point!!!! - Robert Scoble

100k? that's like 1k to a company like apple.... - Patricia

Bad move, Bruce, now the McPalin campaign will spend millions trying to accuse Obama of multiple secret infidelities that began before he entered kindergarten! (I had to edit that; it could take a really sick turn) - MiniMage TKDteacher of FF

While I personally support "No on 8," and I appreciate Apple's donation, I have to admit I get a bit queasy when corporations can donate such huge amounts to political causes. It has the capability of putting their interests so far ahead of everyone else's, and that could easily be abused (and has, I might add). - Glen, Bespectacled Elder

Ain't that McCain's October Surprise? Some woman that'll claim she's Obama's babymomma? - Victor Ganata

Victor: if they had something like that they would have already pulled it. The early voting is locking in the vote every day (you should see the lines all over the country). McCain's campaign is in dire trouble and they needed to pull something like that a week ago, not next week. - Robert Scoble

If the LDS as a Church (aka religious corporation) can donate why can't Apple? - Sidney

aka Taylor: not to mention that LDS isn't even located inside California. Apple is and its employees are totally affected when they lose their rights due to a church trying to take away legal rights. - Robert Scoble

If the prop passes it only puts off the inevitable. Freedom always wins out in the long run. - Tad

Tad, this is very true. - PC Easy from twhirl

I wonder if Chis Pirillo read this... - Amir

Most homosexual people i know own at least one apple product (a macbook in most cases). that's because apple's are not asw ugly as the rest of the "techie things". I am not gay, and i personally like the old IBM thinkpad design. so fo Apple such a move is quite logical, and, it will generate a tremendous ROI! as for Kevin - mate, don't show too much of your (nothing personal) ignorant views. it's actually a fact that homosexuality is normal for most animals. agree or disagree, but we are animals as well - Kirill Bolgarov

what a sad f'in country America is that this is even necessary. Just pathetic. - Maverick

what a world - Stowe Boyd

Robert and aka, to clarify: The LDS church is not donating for Yes on 8. They are encouraging their members to support the multi-faith group "Protect Marriage" that supports Prop 8. I would be more careful in terms of how that is portrayed, though the misunderstanding is easy. - Louis Gray

Louis: ABC news radio was reporting today that 30 to 40% of the Yes on 8 ad money came from the LDS church. In any case, that's hardly any different. This is an issue that in 50 to 100 years your organization will end up apologizing for, just like churches have had to apologize for being on the wrong line of justice and decency before. - Robert Scoble

Louis: http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2008... - Robert Scoble

Robert, yes, the link shows 30-40% of the ad money has come from church members. The church has itself not donated. - Louis Gray

I'm sorry to say this, but this ignorance makes me really sad. It's the 21st century and people hate homosexuals. It's sad that homosexuals can't get the same rights as hetro married couples. I'm sick of people going, "Oh It's immoral." People don't choose to be gay, yeah, people LOVE getting discriminated and attacked. Oh yeah, I'd so love that. - Molly, New Ears :P

Louis: interesting that you make a distinction between an organization and its members. I do not. They are one and the same, particularly when leaders of that organization are encouraging the members to do something specific. - Robert Scoble

Robert, also, this pro-8 campaign was actually instigated by the Catholic church, and the LDS church jumped on after being approached by the Catholic church if I read right. http://www.sltrib.com/ci_1079... It's not to be ignored though that a large percentage of the LDS Church members are in support of it regardless. - Jesse Stay

Several churches (including my own, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod) have voiced long-standing opposition to gay marriage. While these churches may not themselves be directly donating, they are certainly contributing in kind (see the LCMS page I stumbled upon earlier). - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

That having been said, I do differentiate between an organization and its members. Not every person who walks into an LDS or whatever church agrees with its teachings (most notably pro-choice Catholics, and Quakers such as Nixon who fought in World War II). There are probably many Apple and Google employees who support Proposition 8. McCain has voted against Republicans, and Obama has probably voted against Democrats. Few organizations if any reflect their members 100%. - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

My tangent on individuals vs. organizations was pursued further in this blog post http://mrontemp.blogspot.com/2008... - Ontario Emperor

Several churches (including my own, the United Church of Canada) have voiced support for same-gender marriage. My husband and I first applied for a marriage license about 20 years ago, and we had to wait a while to get it. ;) As for Kevin's comments, they remind me of a cartoon I saw in the paper, which depicts two couples, drinks in hand, chatting at a party, with one of them saying: "Gay marriage makes a mockery of all three of my marriages." - Jerome

Tonight is an opportunity for her to tell the ticket's story, but the real picture of who she is will come out when she is unscripted. If she is worth her salt at all, tonight she will hit a home run with the Republican crowd. In this case, the home team should win. If they don't, they have real trouble... - Rob McNair-Huff

Of course thats all we have ever had to judge Obama by. THe man is a great orator but his voting record is basically non-existent. BY all means, let folks tell the public to rely on the record not the speeches - it hurts Obama more than Palin. - Soulhuntre from twhirl

@robmcnairhuff what makes you think McCain's handlers will allow Palin to ever be unscripted? - Kawika Holbrook

Obama Voting Record: http://www.votesmart.org/voting_... - AJ Kohn

And yet we STILL haven't seen a real debate between McCain and Obama. McCain even won the Saddleback forum which is about as close to a real debate the dems would ever allow with their lame duck candidate. They know that they don't have any rational arguments against McCain so the dems are sticking with scripted speeches with very little Q&A. - pitlord from twhirl

@pitlord, so Obama's Law degree, 12 years as a constitutional law professor, 6 years an attorney in a firm focusing on civil rights, 6 years as a state senator and 4 years as a US senator do not count for anything? - Jeff P. Henderson

Jeff: Don't forget "community organizer". - Oldengrey (Jay)

Jeff: no. He should have been mayor of a small town. That is the only experience that matters to be President. Didn't ya get the memo? - Robert Scoble

Not only does Sarah Palin have far better and more relevant experience for the job of Commander in Chief, she also has a record of working to respond to and resolve the problems and needs of the people working to build a home in Alaska, instead of whining and crying to the government to fix everything. - pitlord from twhirl

Vincent, your link contradicts your comment. What part of "Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors" is unclear? Pitlord, which part of being a small-town mayor and a governor of a state with half the population of San Diego for two years is "far better and more relevant experience" for a national position than Obama and Biden's? Where are you guys coming from and how are you so coordinated in your repetition of the absurd? - ⓞnor

@ Robert, Oh, my mistake ;P - Jeff P. Henderson

just being realistic here how is 21 months "FAR BETTER" I do not see the logic in this line of thinking. I think you continue to prove that little experience in ANY position qualifies one to run AMERICA! The only qualification you need is my confidence and my vote. - John (ColderICE) from twhirl

Who said: "Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems" - AJ Kohn

21 > 0. That clear enough for ya? - Ernie Oporto

OK, I stand corrected, he lectured/taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years. - Jeff P. Henderson

From Timothy Noah: Palin may or may not be ready, but her speech won't tell you anything about that, and the commentary will tell you less than nothing. http://www.slate.com/id... - Kawika Holbrook

Soulhuntre and Vincent: You're aware that both Obama and Biden wrote their own convention speeches, right? Even when people use speechwriters those writers get conceptual input from the orator. Palin's speech, as has been portrayed by McCain aides, was originally written without any input from Palin (though this may have changed). - Kevin Fox

Because that state has more National Security relevance than California in the global scheme of things. She has first hand experience dealing with foreign attacks against our borders from Russia, China and the Pacific Rim in general. Not to mention the experience she has dealing with the movers and shakers of the big energy and the American Military which are two of the most active... more... - pitlord from twhirl

And remember, 'This election is not about issues.' It's about the 'composite view of what people take away from these candidates.' So here's to looking at what the 'composite view' is via her speech. - AJ Kohn

Seems to me that a clear understanding of the Constitution and the Law is a significant benefit and even a requirement of someone who is running to be President or Vice President. But then again we elected our current administration and they have shown a clear lack of understanding of (or disregard for) the Constitution on many occasions. - Jeff P. Henderson

Republican-favoring comment trolls often call the opposition "dead", a "lame duck", say they "just lost the election", and so on - chest-thumping which doesn't seem like it should convince anyone. Liberal speakers, no matter how abrasive, don't seem to take that particular tack nearly as much. I think it's related to the right wing viewpoint that strength and power is itself a key virtue, and maybe the general psychology of wanting to side with a winner. - ⓞnor

"She has first hand experience dealing with foreign attacks against our borders from Russia, China and the Pacific Rim in general." I wasn't aware we were attacked by any of these countries in the past two years. - Jeff P. Henderson

Wow, Pitlord is really trotting out how Palin apparently had to defend Alaska against "attacks" from Russia and China. What, did she lead the National Guard to repel submarines from the coast or something? Surely even conservatives are embarrassed by the Pitlord line of reasoning? - ⓞnor

Did I miss the battle of Alaska? And please explain basketball courty please? What does that mean? Which candidates sit on the Foreign Relations Committee, or Homeland Security? - AJ Kohn

I don't think you're following the right (?) people, or you're oblivious to your bias. There were plenty of leftie trolls snarking play by play of the RNC. - Ernie Oporto

Oh, there are leftie trolls for sure. I just haven't seen them loudly trumpeting victory the way rightie trolls seem to, but you could be totally right that I'm missing them. - ⓞnor

How many meetings has Obama held of his foreign relations subcommittee? Zero. - Brian Newman

@Brian: Which subcommittee? The one on Afghanistan? http://blogs.abcnews.com/politic... Seems Obama attended one. McCain zero. - AJ Kohn

the same happens with all political campaigns... remember mr. obama's 57 states, his several comments about how he is going to keep promises he's made as presidents and of course the whole we keep our tires inflated properly we won't need to drill for oil comment. all of these have come when the teleprompter has been turned off. - Jonathan Jesse

Obama chairs the Senate's Subcommittee on European Affairs. He has held zero meetings. http://www.salon.com/opinion... - Brian Newman

AJ: He's referring to the subcommittee on Europe, which Obama got dinged for not convening something like a year ago, though really it's not actually important. Biden is actually the chair of the *committee* and he is there all the time. Jonathan Jesse's references are pretty much all bogus (the tire pressure comment was serious, and drilling is dumb), though of course politicians are as susceptible to stumbles as anyone else, and their stumbles get extracted and magnified. - ⓞnor

@Brian: And McCain missed all of his own Armed Services meetings on Afghanistan in the last 2 years. - AJ Kohn

Should Obama wonder whether he ought to have bothered with his subcommittee, he could ask his friendly rival Joe Biden, D-Del., who chaired the Europe subcommittee for many years during the Cold War. Biden effectively exploited the chairmanship to transform himself from a junior member into one of the Senate's most knowledgeable experts on arms control, nuclear weapons, European... more... - Brian Newman

It sounds like a true leader could have really used the position gain a lot of foreign relations experience. Where Obama is seriously lacking. Too bad he was busy campaigning. - Brian Newman

@Brian: I'd happily have Biden as President and glad you agree as well! - AJ Kohn

Not exactly, but better Biden than someone who is too busy campaigning to hold meetings of his own committee. - Brian Newman

@AJ don't know if @Brian is arguing for Biden as president. he was unsuccessful twice getting his party's nomination for president as is. i think what @Brian is stating that if Mr. Obama was actually involved in his subcomittiee it would have helped his expereince story a lot better - Jonathan Jesse

Experience sitting in commitees exercising your vocal apparatus does not equal Presidential experience. Especially when your candidate didn't even complete a single term and spent over half of it campaigning for the office of President. - pitlord from twhirl

@pitlord i agree totally with everything you said - Jonathan Jesse

Thanks Jonathan ^^ - pitlord from twhirl

@pitford: Okay, so all of McCain's Senate Committee experience doesn't qualify him for President either. Correct? - AJ Kohn

I recall a commentary I heard on NPR a couple months ago, which basically said: Why do we always get duped into thinking that candidates will actually do what they say they will do. History proves this wrong again and again. - Robert Felty

Michael, I wish you the best of luck. I have no doubt success will continue to follow you wherever you land. - Kevin C. Tofel

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Best luck in whatever you decide to do. - Loren Heiny

good luck Michael - Jamie

Best of luck with your new ventures. I hope we'll be seeing more of you soon! - Sally: reading a book

Same here. What ever you do, I'm sure it'll be interesting. Looking foward to seeing it. - Roberto Bonini

Good luck! - Yung-Hui Lim

Buon giorni!! - Dave Winer

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." - Lindsay is in 20-ten

Enjoy the break - MaryAnn Chick Whiteside

um, unless you have T-mo at home :) then its a series of hellos and hellos :) kidding aside. Very best of luck! I am excited to see what you do next. Maybe you and Charlene team up? - Christian Anderson

hey, congrats! good luck on whatever's next! - Chuq Von Rospach

Lots of luck to you! - Steve Rubel

good luck Michael and have fun. You know, it's funny - there are zero comments on your blog post right now but this link is one of the most discussed in my network on FriendFeed. Either you haven't moderated comments or discussion has truly shifted. - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Good luck Michael! Whatever you do next, I know it'll be worth reading about. - Ian Betteridge

Love the Billy Joel reference. Good luck with your new career! - Tony Vota

Looking forward to what you come up with next. - Thomas Hawk

good luck with your next adventure, now enjoy the peacefulness - Dobromir Hadzhiev

Good for him...just as long as he doesn't go all New England Patriots on us. - Steve just Steve

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The press seems now almost anti-Obama, even MSNBC. There is no way the trip was not a fantastic plus for Obama, yet press was all "will it backfire". Now, why is that? Because they think its more of a story to "sell" than the straight ahead story of what is most obvious, that Obama is "presidential" to the nth degree, and that is a good thing, not somehow a bad thing. Where is the... more... - Richard Hood

Politics aside, I just want a president who can speak clearly and remember what he said 10 minutes ago... Really, is that asking too much? - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

"Now, why is that?" Saturation. - Kirk Kittell

To me, Obama is too "rock-star" like to make a good president. He hasn't even served one term as Senator. How is he planning to run the country? - Gavin

Richard Hood: I know Reagan is untouchable in the USA - but how was he a "great leader" when he supplied Iran with weapons, at a time it was clearly an enemy?! - sebmos

Gavin: Nobody can train to run a country, not even McCain. You can show management and leadership skills, though, and Obama showed both with his campaign: He had an uphill battle to fight against HRC, who was expected (by her, the party and the media) to be the nominee since the day she announced she would run for office. His campaign is the reason why I think he can make a great president. - sebmos

A report on POTUS 08 yesterday said 3 major networks were over 70% negative comments toward Obama. Gavin: why do members of congress have the lowest ratings and yet you want to use that as a measure of success in the office of the Presidency? - LPH™ and his dog P™

sebmos: he's a great leader because he won the cold war and made the USA the sole superpower (or was anyway). it could have easily gone either way between USSR and USA and it could have led to the destruction of many, many people and it didn't. whether he gave arms to the wrong guys pales in comparison to that accomplishment. it's a given that the american foreign policy in the middle east is pretty much terrible across the board - so i'll give him an iran mulligan in the scheme of things... - Morgan

Look at it this way -- if Obama wants to start acting like President, then we're going to start acting as if he were President. Which means thank god Bush is gone, now you're the guy in the hot seat and we're going to be criticizing you. He's a student of history, and he's really smart, so he knows that and is probably prepared for it (as he seems to be prepared for everything else). Milbank is giving him shit because that's what you do with the President! - Dave Winer

From Milbank: "Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," adding: "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."" From an aide's notes sent to Karen Tumulty: "Wld like to take credit for the crowds, the 200,000 in berlin, but can't, represented a symbol of america... more... - Kawika Holbrook

Large CMS vendors are similar to message board vendors (Propsero, Web Crossing) who have run out of customers and find their market vaporizing. They have no CHOICE but to retool and add "social" to their offerings. This is all part of "bringing social to software" the repercussions will reverberate throughout the software world. In the beg of Aug we'll be able to put the Facebook F8... more... - Marc Canter

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Good points Marc, I agree that it software should be socialized. This statement is not true however: "who have run out of customers and find their market vaporizing." - Jeremiah Owyang

Large CMS vendors are actually doing very well. New CMS projects are being driven by companies looking to better use content to improve the customer experience. This includes adding targeting/personalization capabilities, website optimization, RIA, etc. - Tom Wentworth

Good post (http://is.gd/J7x) - couldn't agree more! :-) I recently theorized "ECM+SocialComputing=KM 2.0" but now I see it as SICA (Seamlessly Integrated Contextual Awareness) - http://friendfeed.com/rooms.... - Lawrence Liu

for goodness sakew - what makes Jeremiah think he' that important? - Dennis Howlett from twhirl

Oh Dennis, you always make me smile, you were the first to anoint me on Zdnet (and prob not the last), an excellent rebuttal by the way. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett... - Jeremiah Owyang

The only way I am likely to anoint you is...OK - let - Dennis Howlett from twhirl

You didn't complete your thought Dennis, eh? In either case, welcome back from your long deserved vacation. I found the best way to come back to work was to ease back into it. - Jeremiah Owyang

Sarbanes Oxley is preventing many companes from going social - paul mooney

you forgot the wealth of open source cms solutions out there, much easier to extend social features within those - as for desire for enterprise to add social to the toolkit offered to employees, desire yes but resisting due to ignorance, fear and risk tolerance - needed though to provide better collaboration - think of something as simple as ff for those you work closely with - mike "glemak" dunn

Good point Mike, thanks - Jeremiah Owyang

your welcome jeremiah - good post btw - i think this is a critical need for enterprise it relevance on a go forward basis especially as gen y enters workforce - they work differently, expect toolkits similar to what they get personally - to many it practitioners are blind to this requirement - if you're on ff reading this i assume you're not btw ;) - mike "glemak" dunn

We all know that there are values embedded in software. The values in a traditional CMS are straight out of the industrial era. These are in direct conflict with the embedded values of social software. I see a huge disconnect, and think that attempts to blend such "different" types of solutions is like trying to combine oil and water. - Kevin Gamble

Clickability, a CMS SaaS vendor, has a bunch of media and enterprise clients. They offer social media tools: http://www.clickability.com/product... . Also, their "Print This, Save This, Share This" tool you see on most news media sites may have been the first example of "social media." (disclosure: I work for their PR firm). - Kawika Holbrook

social MEDIA relationships have no limit :) - Luigi Centenaro

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Nice idea. Though when you hit the limit, you would end up having to chose who to kick from your list. Unless that kicking were automated. Which brings us back to the original problem that defining such relationships in the first place often adds more worry than an auto-triggered-by-your-everyday-actions kind of approach (which does have its own world of problems, admittedly...). - Philipp Lenssen

Did they meet Scoble? - Steve Rubel

Tag+Rate>set strike out limit/Filter/reduce/visible tags+but hopefully soon lists fold/collapse>file view../ Tag/Rinse repeat. This will come in handy also for Stephen Colbert when he joins his Thetruthiness room;-D, and I bet for you too Paul/FF Co, for the wood for the trees it may need a nice hot air balloon/or summat like a hand held mini helicopter which runs on its own propulsion! filter etc, Anyways a bit of Friendfood for the road, speaking of which its tummytime!:-P - Jason

The number of relationships one can maintain is clearly limited but the number of information sources one can process is far greater. I suspect most of the Twitter/FF/other social media friends are much more like RSS feeds than relationships. - timepilot

I seem to remember reading some research that theorised that the maximum size community/relationship we can maintain is limited at around 200 people. I'm trying to find where I read it now... *edit*: hah-nevermind, clicking on your link showed me exactly the research i was citing. - David Adam

Social media apps need multiple friend "TYPES", i.e. family, real-life friends, colleagues, online friends / acquaintances, and business contacts. This way you could have multiple groups of friends. I can dream... oh, wait Facebook already has this - they have groups with permission controls - and yes I really use that set of features!! I love that! - Susan Beebe

Dunbar's number is usually taken to be the maximal size of a cohesive group, not the maximal number of relationships one person can maintain. Some sources (including the Wikipedia article) confuse the two. It's an interesting question how the social sites would change with a friend limit. A room size limit on FriendFeed would also be an interesting experiment. - Michael Nielsen

Limiting Twitter friend count to 140 would drive slackers to other micro-blogging platforms. ;-) No really, we have (an growing number of) tools to filter relevant content from much greater number of users. - Nenad Nikolic from twhirl

Let us also not lose sight of the fact that, all other things being equal, the human organism is an engine of adaptation. I don't have a background in neurobiology or in developmental psychology, to say nothing of anthropology, but it's hardly dizzying leap to imagine that the emergence and subsequent evolution of the human mind was (and is) an exercise in testing and overreaching boundaries...[to be continued] - Derrick Burns

[continued]...which is to say: humbug. The internet with its shiny social media toys is nothing more or less than a novel environment, with its attendant resource distributions, evolutionary pressures, and selection mechanisms. What I think we'll find is that those pressures and mechanisms will affect us not only intellectually, but, over time, physiologically as well. Have 140 friends, or 1400. Whether for the better there's no way to say, but we will adapt. It's what we're best at. - Derrick Burns

150 relationships to maintain, sure: but isn't the old mantra of if you aren't building your network, you're doing it wrong also true? You may only really interact on a regular basis with 150 people, but if you only choose to subscribe to or friend 150 people, you'll never find out about new people or new ideas. Maybe subscriber 151 and higher are people trying out for slots 1 through 150: oh dear, did MySpace have it right with their top friends list? - Mark Trapp

I wonder how much that limit may be changing, though. It seems like we interact with more and more people all the time. - Christopher Granade

If you assume that the sole purpose of Twitter ought to be to the maintenance of social relationships then this might make sense. If on the other hand you look at Twitter as partially being about maintaining social relationships but also partially about getting fast breaking news early, meeting new friends, forming new social relationships, being informed about interesting subjects by fringe connections, broadcasting your own social media, etc. then the 140 limit becomes a significant barrier to use. - Thomas Hawk

depends on the degree of reciprocity. I can be a follower to many (with the right tools), maintain a sense of their identities (sometimes aided by good UI), and have only rare interactions with them that, while ephemeral, can be rich, useful, and/or meaningful. I think the new forms of asymmetric friending/following and the tools for interfacing among these folks change the rules. What is a "social relationship" in 2008? What is the cognitive overhead to "maintain" it? - tonx

LiveJournal did this for a while. People just got multiple journals and X-posted between them. An online friend isn't always the same thing as a real friend. - Jonathan Tang

What is better needed is an actual way to filter the significance of a large pool of social relationships from strangers to closest friend. The answer here is relatively simple and straightforward. Allow users to use a 10 point rating system for every contact with 5 being a default. By incorporating this rating data into future systems of rank, relevancy and eventually search it would be more powerful than anything that exists in social media today. - Thomas Hawk

There was an argument a while back that Free Twitter should be limited to say 150 followed, more should be paid for as that is increasingly the realm of pro-sumerdom. That would also allow us to discover the marginal value of online friendship. - Broadstuff

I don't think we have much in common with the villages, tribes, and other organizations that Dunbar was studying. All of the groups he studied had a common interest in cohesion as a unit as a means for survival. I'm not convinced that many of us view our social network interactions as "necessary" (at least, I don't see it that way). - Jason Wehmhoener

Dunbar's number is the reason I prefer to work for companies with fewer than 150 people. - Ginger Makela Riker

If you can and want to keep up with 150 people then you will. Some of them will fade in and out of your social circle, effectively giving you many times that number if needed, but only around 150 at a time. (In your head that is.) - xero

The Dunbar number was arrived at by studying primates picking fleas off each other, not tribal humans ;) - Broadstuff

=Derrick, =timepilot. Also, note that even though we know about Dunbar's number, no one imposes an actual limit of 140 real-life friends. - j1m

I'm not sure that the people I have on my FriendFeed are what I would term "friends" or even "associates." They are contacts whose opinions I value, but if I don't hear from them in a while, it's not like I go out of my way to get back in touch. Same with some twitter folks...?? - Justin Long

agree with susan beebe. need to be able to group and prioritize friends. tweetdeck is starting to get at this - rob zand

The issue largely is that fringe contacts and even strangers produce valuable information even if infrequently. But by subscribing to large numbers in order to best get the chance of getting this information you also have to manage noise. Hide helps here. But fundamentally there are top contacts that are more important to you than strangers. By allowing users to rate these contacts as 10s and strangers as 1s you get the best of both under a new category of daily information based on personal relevancy. - Thomas Hawk

As Seth Godin always says it's not how many but who that's important - Jeremy Campbell from twhirl

We deliberately made the UI limiting within 30Boxes so that you would only try to keep up with 2-10 people (ostensibly those that matter most and impact your scheduling and decision making)... - Narendra

Thomas, I agree with your thinking completely. But in theory I can stay under the Dunbar's number here on FriendFeed (I am currently, and I hope to keep it that way) and still get the best of all worlds and the most valuable info so long as a few of the people I am subscribing to uber aggregate like you and Scoble. - Robert Seidman

Robert, even subscribing to the uber aggregaters though you miss a lot. Do a search for a term that you're interested in more broadly on FF and you'll find people you aren't subscribed to that are sharing interesting content that the uber aggregaters might miss. A system that allowed you to rate your higher priority contacts while still including the occasional quality content producer could produce the pinnacle of personal relevancy. - Thomas Hawk

Why does everyone try to define social software by just "friends?" That really sucks. People online are NOT my "friends." They are people I want in my social network. I have more than 8,000 business cards. Are you going to tell me that I haven't met 8,000 people and that I don't need to find a way to keep 8,000 in my rolodex? I would NEVER use such a software. Facebook limits me to 5,000 which makes it far less useful for business purposes than if it didn't have those limits. That said, I'm sure... - Robert Scoble

...that there is a market for such a limiting service. It might even be very popular. But then lots of stupid things are popular on the Internet. - Robert Scoble

140 chars limit instead of duct tape on Scoble's mouth ;) - A.T.

This assumes a lot. Like that Twitter can count. - XDpaul

Paul this limit was invented by the famous 150 number in a time when society worked completly different. This is like saying "because a hundred years ago a person would read 10 books in their lifetime and could not grasp more, how about we limit it to the same number today?". People just need to learn what works for them, how _they_ are comfortable using these systems and then apply it. - Nicole Simon

Thomas,Even at 140 people I had to utilize a lot of the hide always functionality to make things manageable, and that was with a lot of time to screw around with it. Using "search everyone" to follow topics of interests works very well for me as is, and they could retool the "Best Of" some to surface the best stuff across wider areas. There are perhaps a lot of ways to achieve being the pinnacle of personal relevancy but none of them are easy :-) Still, I'd love to see it achieved. - Robert Seidman

Twitter's 140-character limit wasn't arbitrary, it worked well with SMS making it useful on the go. Is there some specific thing that having only 10 friends would help you with? - ⓞnor

Here's the problem with "best of" today. Everyone's "best of" ought to be influenced by personal relationships. If my wife posts something with 3 comments and 3 likes this is more personally relevant to me than a thread about what music people are listening to with 30 comments and 30 likes. By weighting my higher value contacts you ensure that my wife's post is seen in my personal "best of" daily stream even if it pushes out the overall higher ranked thread on music. - Thomas Hawk

perhaps a better system would be 10 friends and 100 people you know then unlimited follow relationships. You could even automate the promotion of people from follow to know. Then weight the best of pages with this info. - John Cooper from fftogo

Dunbar's 150 limit theory is a group theory, not and individual theory. A group is pretty united at that number, but if it passes the 150 limit "people start becoming strangers to each other". But an individual can handle way more interactions. I mean, it all depends on how you view "friendship". If you believe that intimacy is a must to consider people friends, than your # will be low. - Jay Cruz

I think that would be an interesting experiment. And I'm sure it would have avoided some of the scale issues they hit. - Dave Winer

Jason realized that his limit was 750 .. (but why email?) - Vishwajith

aren't all relationships social? - Jeremy Toeman

It is surprising that there's not more implementation of XFN across social web apps; as imperfect as it is, it certainly adds much-needed value to the "friend" paradigm. - mabisa

Implementation of XFN or FOAF? "That's the wonderful thing about standards-- there's so many to choose from!" Of course, with so many services implementing APIs nowadays, it's not unreasonable that someone could use Google AppEngine or similar to create XFN from pre-existing services. Such tools may spur more services to start directly implementing XFN. - Christopher Granade

that's a really cool idea...maybe I'll stop at 140 on identica and see what happens! - Sarah Perez

If you want to pass from theory to practice, let me recommend you the book "Knowledge Management Strategies: A Handbook of Applied Technologies", which has a chapter called "Implementing Communities of Practice to Manage Knowledge and Drive Innovation"... I also have here a paper called "Distributed Consolidation: Identity, Reputation, and the Prospects for Online Social Interaction", written this year, but I didn't read it yet. - Marcos Marado

Thomas, on filtering: why not be able to dynamically identify score by staring individual posts, like slashdot and plurk do - if I star a post, I give you a certain number of points; if I star a comment on a post, I give you a certain (but possibly lesser) number of points; and be able to give perhaps multiple stars to indicate significance; two kinds of negative stars: "don't show me this" or "block user" so the system can learn. Then people can aggregate points over time, too... - Justin Long

I would like some kind of Top Friends or Best Friends layer in both FriendFeed and Twitter. It can be anon or fully socialized. - Elliott Ng

I like the idea of limited friends. What if you start with a fixed number, lets say 25, and once certain criteria are fulfilled (activity, no. of posts, etc.) you are allowed more... - Bastian

I've just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point". Very interesting and inspiring. - Niv

I think some people use Twitterfeed to pull the RSS feed for FriendFeed posts into Twitter - Shey, Jamaican of FF

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Watch the 140 character limit - Hutch Carpenter

Couldn't you direct your FF RS to twitterfeed, and have it auto post your posts to Twitter? - Helen Sventitsky

What does it do with posts from Twitter that are reflected to FriendFeed? Does it send them back to Twitter which then would send them to FF, etc etc forever. - Dave Winer

That's almost the reverse of what most are doing: Posting to Twitter and having it go to FriendFeed. Are you looking for an automatic way to take Internal FriendFeed posts, and have something automatically send them to Twitter with a bit.ly URL? - Louis Gray

I wonder the same thing. On the one hand, there are followers on each network that would otherwise miss out on your postings. On the other, you likely have serious overlap who'll get redundant postings. And, of course, if you have your Twitter posts auto-feed into FriendFeed, you'll have an open loop. - James Joyner

Of course I've written my own reflector and this post is here as a test. :-) - Dave Winer

http://friendfeed.com/e... - Dave Winer

My reflector doesn't reflect posts that come from Twitter only if they originate on FF. - Dave Winer

Actually it's a 95 character limit when you add the overhead of "[From FriendFeed]: " and the shortened url linking to the FF post. - Dave Winer

There would be technical problems (FriendFeed posts can exceed Twitter's character limitations), and you'd lose all of the context of the comments that may be attached to the FriendFeed post. That having been said, perhaps a "reshare" to Twitter may be desirable; don't know if I'd use it, though. - Ontario Emperor

I'm worried that redundant postings from other people's feeds are increasing the challenge of following quality posts. Still confused as to the best "home" for different types of content (knowing content never stays home). - Kawika Holbrook

I don't send comments, just posts. - Dave Winer

I tend to do it the other way around. Using Twitter to post here. But I have been trying to build a "funnel" that take comments and replies and brings them to one point. Plus a concept like Ping.fm could work for posting. Run everything into a dashboard like the way Tweetdeck works and then I can stop this jumping from site to site, from software to software crap and go to one place. - Stephan Miller

Imagine if Twitter were stable, opened its protocols for anyone to duplicate (a-la identi.ca) and got groovy with importing, commenting, and/or bookmarking. They could rely on their brand, advertising and future brand management tools to pay the bills. (Really, I just want one service that works well with different types of content and conversations so I don't have to keep flitting about services.) - Kawika Holbrook

Dave, what I do is post on Ping.fm which posts on various services including Twitter, and then I have Twitter pulled by Frienfeed. Of course, that's for things that have less than the 140 character limit. (BTW, ping.fm still doesn't post on FriendFeed, or is it?) - Jorge Escobar

I was using ping.fm to post to twitter & identi.ca, and had them both coming into FFeed. The repetition in FFeed was a pain, so now my default ping.fm posts to all three, and FFeed does NOT pick up twitter & identi.ca. Now my tweeps only see dups if they follow me on more than one service. Still far from ideal. Meanwhile, if I have an identi.ca-specific post to make (for example), I can do it in ping.fm using "@ff @id", I guess. - Tegan Dowling

I know I need to look at all the routing on my feeds, as I'm duplicating stuff. in here - Ian May

Why put "[From FriendFeed]" ? Does that add context that is important? We just want want the content, and it gives you more characters to work with :) - Dion Almaer

That's nutty. It'll be $5.00 before we know it. Seen it at $3.90 tho here in SC. - Brian Carter

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still, aren't our gas prices heavily subsidized? so we still pay only a fraction of the true cost. - sedgewick

I don't think they are subsidized here, I just think gas is heavily taxed elsewhere. - Dave Winer

check out north hollywood recently http://www.flickr.com/photos... - sean percival

No, US prices aren't subsidized but in Europe and elsewhere gas is much more heavily taxed. - Ole Begemann

US gas prices are certainly not subsidized, they're taxed big time. True cost is probably half(??) of what we pay. - Tad

Tad: not quite. "According to national figures from the US Department of Energy in March 2007, 52% of the cost of gasoline went to pay for crude oil, 24% for refining, 15% to taxes, and 9% for distribution and marketing. By April 2008, these costs had changed to 72.7% for crude oil, 10% for refining, 11% to taxes, and 6% for distribution and marketing." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...) - Ole Begemann

It still makes me giggle seeing US folks complain about petrol (gas) prices. Here in the UK we're currently on £1.20 per litre (or around £4.54 per gallon). At today's £ -> $ rate, that's somewhere just over $9. Diesel is even more, at £1.35/l (or just over $10 per gallon). Actually, giggle is wrong when looking at the price of petrol, but you know what I mean ;-) - Mat

Ten years ago I drove out of St. Louis on my way to move to Phoenix briefly and paid 89 cents per gallon of gas. If you'd have told me that we would one day be staring down $5/gallon while the gas companies rake in record quarterly profits while shrugging and saying, 'Whuh? Don't look at us! Not our fault!', I'd have laughed you right out of a Steak & Shake. - Akiva Moskovitz

Uk fuel tax is over 70% :( - Dave brown

Metro Atlanta is $3.99. - Russellreno

Memphis TN is anywhere from 3.50$ to 3.89$ - John Blanton from twhirl

I'm told the price is driven up by speculators (stock market) and that if we start drilling domestically, price will go down, again because of speculation, even though direct effects on cost would take 22 years... any thoughts on that? - Brian Carter

Goodness! Michigan is 4.19 this weekend and it's been higher! - Kathleen VanderVelde

Here's $5.29 in California from 3 weeks ago... (6/10/08) http://friendfeed.com/e... - Mitchell Tsai

About 7-9 yrs ago, I was driving Los Angeles to San Francisco and saw $0.99/gal gas. It was about $1.10-1.20 in Los Angeles at the time... - Mitchell Tsai

wow, still under $4.00 here.. barely - Michael Gartenberg

Before one complains that the oil company profits are obscene, consider who is really raking in the dollars when you buy gas in the US. Even with our relatively low levels of taxation vs Europe, Federal and state governments make more money than oil companies. - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

I know speculators and war help drive up the cost of gas, and I know the poor are hurt the most, but one advantage (out of many GDP-related disadvantages) is that people are starting to rethink wasteful habits and purchases. - Kawika Holbrook

I paid $4.38 at Costco today in Livermore. That's the cheapet in some time. - Larry Kless from twhirl

$7.20 in Japan. :-) - Ray Grieselhuber

$3.60-3.80 here in Ohio. About $1 cheaper than San Francisco. - Mitchell Tsai

$4.34 average here in Honolulu. - Bill Sodeman

And every single day I'm seeing more small, fuel efficient cars in the parking lots. The really creepy part is there's probably is no way to fix it before heating season. - Charlie Anzman

Around $3 here in Shanghai. Heavily subsidized by China gov't, but they recently bumped the price-cap by 20%. - sage brennan from twhirl

Saw $4.99 9/10@ Littlerock, CA today for premium - LPH™ and his dog P™

I just paid $4.39 today in Anchorage, AK - Brandon Wood

we are paying over 1.50 a litre her in Australia... not sure what that is in Gallons... - Dave Gray from twhirl

My mom told me that now in France the litre is about 2,3$US... - Jean-François Amadei from twhirl

the only thing crazy is that people still buy, regardless of price. - randulo

It's been interesting to watch how I've amended my driving habits and changed plans based on amount of time with engine running. - Cathy Brooks from twhirl

2,3$ per litre mean 8,51$ per gallon...(in europe) - Jean-François Amadei from twhirl

Anyone else find that having Disqus on a blog changes their commenting behavior? Sometimes I want to talk to the audience on a particular blog but I don't want to bring a new audience into the conversation from somewhere else. - Robert Scoble

44 more comments

Why don't you want to bring in FriendFeeders? - Tad

Tad: because you don't have any loyalty to that particular blogger and you probably haven't been following that particular blogger. For me to bring you in would pollute the conversation that's going on over there. - Robert Scoble

I have the reverse issue. Sometimes I want to give more depth and "tell more secrets" to my FF friends because it feels more intimate in here. Spreading that back out to the blogosphere is the only thing that gives me pause occasionally. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

It's like if I have a conversation in my living room and there's a bunch of people in my dining room who are having a different conversation. It takes a lot of energy to join those two groups of people and get them onto the same conversation. - Robert Scoble

Mark: yeah, I feel that too. I spend more time with you all and I know you all are far more up to date on what I'm thinking than some audiences off in the long tail of blogs.Good point. - Robert Scoble

Oh yeah, because comments are so important and so pristine as to be something more important than water that should never be polluted. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. Easy solution: don't feed your disqus stream into friendfeed. - Robert Seidman

pollute the conversation? what the hell? this is the internet, not your living room - Tyler Gillies

Interesting thought Robert. I'd only go to the blog if it happened to be something in which I'm interested. The other thing is this: bloggers love traffic and comments. Are some unruly FriendFeeders getting rude with a blogger? - Hutch Carpenter

Hmm, maybe I'm not explaining myself right. I will do some thinking on this and maybe do a video explaining why I sometimes don't like all my conversations joined into one place. - Robert Scoble

uh oh - is that the tide i see out there? - Allen Stern

I am dealing with that question, trying to decide whether to put FriendFeed, Tumblr or other feeds on any of my three main blogs. Two are business blogs with different audiences/readers; the third is my arts blog. Even though it's cool to have FriendFeed, etc. on blogs, I don't think all the entries speak to each specific readership. Plus, these feeds add more clutter to the blog page. I want the readers to focus on my posts, readers' comments, and pages with my own content. - Cathryn Hrudicka

Robert, I've only recently started using Disqus on my own blog, so it's a bit hard to comment. One thing I will say, though: Disqus feeds into FriendFeed can be very difficult to follow. Why? Because you miss the context of the original blog post and the preceding comments, any of which may have had an influence on what someone says in their own comment. Because we're used to seeing the info collected together at the end of a blog post, we treat Disqus commenting just as we would any blog commenting... - Mark Dykeman

So remove Disqus from the list of services you pull into FriendFeed, and just post a link to the blog post itself if and when you want to call something to the attention of your FriendFeed audience. Am I missing something? Not to mention the fact that just posting the comment here without the original context of the blog post really doesn't accomplish anything constructive other than pointing back to the article. - Ken Sheppardson

I think what Robert is trying to say is that people reading the blog will have one type of conversation and FFers will have a different conversation. Combining the two crowds changes the conversation entirely. - Rob Diana

I think I catch what you're saying and I generally agree... but, you are commenting on someone else's blog, so they set the rules... in this case, they installed Disqus, thus opening up the potential for the sort of dilution you're referring to. Perhaps if you comment anonymously (i.e., not logged into Disqus) then your comments won't be broadcast to your FriendFeed. - Kenneth LeFebvre

I don't have this problem. Maybe I am lucky that all my real-life friends could not care less about social media and the folks I interact with online (not offense intended) but that means everyone I chat with is on an even playing field for me. In fact, I like following people who disagree with me on here and my blog so that I get a better idea of their perspective. - Phil G

@Rob - Except the FriendFeed conversation occurs here, right? When I go to the blog and comment via Disqus, I'm commenting there, at the blog. In the flow of the comments there. Right? - Hutch Carpenter

The friendfeeders are not likely to be a problem yet. But if you end up being followed by as many as follow you at twitter & many comment, that could be a problem for the blogerati. Friendfeed, however, is more democratizing than Twitter. On twitter, if I tweet, the powers that be are defaulted to not hear me, no matter how helpful my comment might be. If a question is asked and I respond, if I am not followed by Robert, unless he changed the default setting, he won't hear my response to his tweet. - iSteeve

I think it's going to be a hell of a challenge for Disqus and the other aggregators to pull all of these comments together in a way that makes sense. We're just scratching the surface on this. - Mike Doeff

Sorry, last thought garbled by laptop crash. What I wanted to say is that Disqus comments in FriendFeed are like hearing one side of a telephone conversation because you miss the context and preceeding comments. Maybe we should take more care in adding context to Disqus comments because of the ways they get sliced and diced now. - Mark Dykeman

I have no such worries. Conversations may occur in my Disqus, in my FriendFeed, wherever. If Steven Hodson makes an observation about my content, conversations may occur in HIS Disqus or FriendFeed. Andy C may start a Jaiku thread. Eddykins may write a Usenet post to alt.another.dumb.idea. Someone may write something on a bathroom wall. If I ever wrote something that started so many conversations, I wouldn't be complaining about the lack of control. Just my opinion. - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

@Mark - so Robert's issue is more about folks commenting on his Disqus comment here, eh? I could see that. - Hutch Carpenter

Re lack of context of Disqus entries in FriendFeed - that's why FriendFeed has links, so you can see the entire conversation and the post that started it. - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

@Ontario - true, but you do have to leave FriendFeed to find that context. It's an extra step. - Mark Dykeman

this concern doesn't make sense to me, unless in a private forum all conversations online are reachable in some way, whether done on a normal blogging platform's commenting system or in one of the many comment aggregators - if you don't want that to occur, don't comment online... - mike "glemak" dunn

Hutch: no, it's more about having separate audiences that are passionate about different things. For instance, let's say I participate in a religious blog, and a political blog, and a business blog. Those have three separate audiences. If I mix them all together I'm going to be much more careful about what I discuss than if I participate in all three separately. - Robert Scoble

Robert-After all this time of blabbing on the Internet you're starting to be concerned about what you say and where? Hmm, OK. You of course can opt out on having your Disqus comments fed here. Just sayin. - Mark Forman

ah audience related - got it, ok clearer - i'll be participating in an mit media lab session on this exact focus next month coincidentally... - mike "glemak" dunn

I see where you're coming from Robert: a Friendfeeder is like a Digger or a StumbleUponer: they only have the context of a single post and the resulting comments, not the whole corpus of the blog (unless they're really enterprising). A lot of times a post from a blog, when taken out of context, seems much different than if it was in context. And yeah, specifically with religion, I've been trying to keep that separate from Friendfeed, too. There's only so many times I can have the same "Religion sucks" disc. - Mark Trapp

Mark: I've always been careful about what I say and where. That's why I was able to work for two huge companies and not get fired. - Robert Scoble

Is it actually possible for someone to not have sufficient context in this case? Isn't all your published work appearing on FriendFeed? Moreover, what's the likelihood that random readers would comment? - J T. Ramsay

Robert, perhaps a solution to your issue would be if one can selectively decide in Disqus which comments you want to send out in your Disqus feed and which comments should show on the original blog only. Disqus could implement this with a simple "keep this comment here only" checkbox underneath the comment entry box. When checked, that particular comment won't form part of your Disqus RSS feed. - Dewald Pretorius

Robert, it almost sounds like the guy who made 3 prom dates and he doesn't want them to meet... in the end they always will. I imagine some careful control over participation in certain areas might delay that convergence, but ultimately I don't know that it can be avoided. - Scott Bannon from twhirl

I like that a lot Dewald. Elegant and solves the problem exactly. - Mark Trapp

Robert-If that's the case you can do as I do and use different blogs to comment/talk about different themes. Much better control on your own blog than just cast out onto the Net(Disqus,here,Twitter,etc.) - Mark Forman

dewald: i do this in ff when i reply to some twitters and decide not to push back to twitter as a reply but rather leave it as just a ff comment - mike "glemak" dunn

Scott: you are probably right! :-) Which is why I'll get over this particular fear. Or, more likely, I'll only "date" one of these issues (which is how I solved the problem today -- I just thought it was interesting that I am changing which blogs I comment on, because they are likely to get brought in here). - Robert Scoble

Perhaps one day each comment can be tagged to feed the right services in the right conversations with the right licenses to show up wherever works best for whomever is interested. There's probably a few conversations elsewhere on the net related to this one, but they'll never meet because they don't seek each other out by topic, rank, intent or other factor. - Kawika Holbrook

What is a "friend of Robert Scoble." Why do people post that? - Bruce Curley

Robert: I totally see where you're coming from (or at least I *think* I do). Folks who interact with numerous different social circles have to be able to engage and interact with those circles whilst not disrupting the synergy and ecology of the other circles; even if they *seem* to be related. I visually see these social circles as "communication channels" that can get easily distorted if there is feedback caused by another closely situated channel - like when my blackberry gets too close to my polycom. - Susan Beebe

I'd say that someone who puts Disqus on his blog is by definition inviting the consequences. I think this is one of the advantages of Disqus. And If you don't like that consequence, the party to lobby is not Disqus or FF, it's the blogger who decided to use Disqus. - Brent Logan

All in all, I think that this is why "moderation" exists. I don't know of any comment system that doesn't offer moderation. IMHO, if you publish something on the web, you should be prepared to have a crowd to comment on it, and sometimes, won't you agree? that's why we publish things. So Robert, a dating advice from someone who used to date 4 at once (what a shame! I was 18 ) take her to somewhere where you'll never be seen :p - directeur from NoiseRiver

Great discussion, guys. Lots of helpful nuggets in here. Thanks! - Daniel Ha

"let's say I participate in a religious blog, and a political blog, and a business blog." Actually, while I have some vertical blogs that are laser focused on specific topics, my most popular blog is my personal blog, which covers religion, politics, business, and several other categories. Often there's rampant cross-pollination; just today I inserted a video of Chromeo's "Fancy... more... - Ontario Emperor

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