Lars Juhl Jensen - Likes

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How bad *is* "Climategate"? (HT: @anthonyphan) - http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009...

December 9 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Kuhn, Nils Reinton, Lars Juhl Jensen and Neil Saunders liked this

Hmm. That's actually very interesting - albeit focused on one station. Would be nice to see responses from scientists - perhaps they're buried in the (many) comments? - Neil Saunders

2 more comments

Yeah I'm hoping RealClimate or someone like that will do a feature on it... - Benjamin Tseng

Makes me think that the data scientists here should go off in search of public data and see what they can find. - Neil Saunders

Interesting write up... means nothing of course (wrt global warming or not), as the author himselves notes too... but it does make the point that data this important to mankind must be Open. Period. Maybe the people in Copenhagen can decide on that: make all data used in climate studies lawfully required to be Open. - Egon Willighagen

Neil Saunders

Has our quest for completeness made things too complicated? - http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2009...

December 1 from What You're Doing Is Rather... - Comment - Like - Share

Marcos de Carvalho, Brad Chapman, Michael Nielsen and 31 other people liked this

Neil, great post. And you're right, we do make things too complicated sometimes, but do we do that at the level at which we ask questions, or at the software implementation level? My take is the latter, cause you need to ask questions the way you want to, but that doesn't mean what makes it all come together has to be one complex mess - Deepak Singh

42 more comments

Glad you like it. One of those that bubbled up out of frustration at inability to achieve! I feel that science is the business of turning complex (real-world) things into simple models - and that we've moved away from that idea. - Neil Saunders

I'm a sucker for this kind of ambitious thinking. Go Neil! - Bill Hooker

I think it's a good sign that things like this are now obvious. Things start out as a complex mess of disconnected things, overlapping complicated ways of connecting them are devised, then it becomes obvious what the simpler thing to do is. - Mr. Gunn

Great ! But aren't you re-inventing something like RDF Neil ? feature/probe/value is nothing but a RDF statement... - Pierre Lindenbaum

No, I don't want to reinvent anything. If RDF will work for me, I'll use it. I'll also use SQL, NoSQL, key-value pairs, document-oriented or whatever it takes. I just think that trying to integrate data by combining other peoples large, complex representations is not working. We need to simplify the whole business. - Neil Saunders

I think there is a middle road here - we need high level generic descriptions like what Neil is proposing (and like my "We have stuff, we do stuff to it, which makes stuff"), but also a way of pointing to more sophisticated information that might be useful in specific contexts. I think we can have the best of both worlds as long as the data representation is separated from the metadata and the organization of each can be described in a machine readable (and agreed!) form - Cameron Neylon

I'm too old school, leaving comments on blogs... who does that any more. I’m sure you’re aware that you’ve just described a model using *triples*. Which means you could start storing these kinds of simple relationships in a triple store like virtuoso etc. As you say, you don't have to reinvent anything, just simplify the use (conventions) of existing approaches (e.g. RDF). I would like... more... - Greg Tyrelle

@Greg about the web interface, one cool interface for adding RDF statements/triples is freebase/Acre: http://www.freebase.com/apps/ - Pierre Lindenbaum

I like blog comments :-) Yes, my example looks like RDF triples. No, that was not really my intention. Let's ask these questions: (1) what data relationships would make sense to a biologist? (2) what are the commonalities in the data, which a biologist may not have considered at an abstract level? As I wrote in the post, many datasets that look different are really different ways of looking at the same thing. - Neil Saunders

The joys of data modelling :-) For (1): I'm afraid asking for a definition of some data relationships is building an(other?)) ontology. - Pierre Lindenbaum

Let's put it another way. What we have, presently, are quite complete, often large and complex, but useful and usable descriptions of individual experiment types. "Integration" essentially means "parse them individually and mash-up the results". That's what makes it difficult. Perhaps we need an "ontology of integration" :-) But let's keep it really, really minimal. - Neil Saunders

I actually think you will struggle to find data commonalities across bioscience. Even the simple proposal of target, measurement, value could break down in many cases e.g. we tried ages ago to get some intensity data from a bunch of microarray experiments and we gave up because we couldn't get across what we needed. What are you really measuring? Does it mean the same thing to different... more... - Cameron Neylon

I think there's a good case for storing, in the first instance, raw values. Figure out how to process them later (that's statistics). Focus on trends (up, down, stayed the same). Focus on well-defined variables that do mean the same to everyone (intensity, in theory = amount of transcript, regardless of the very real difficulties). And I think more experiments fall into... more... - Neil Saunders

@Pierre freebase is exactly what I had in mind, however the web client (the best part) is not open. @Neil Store the data first, ask questions later. Nice. One of my hopes for semantic web technology was that is could be come a universal mashup system (RDF+ontologies+triplestores). But you start down that path, and you suddenly realise that the semweb is asking you to get your data... more... - Greg Tyrelle

But for me your example of a gel isn't raw data. The raw data is the image. Which might have several targets or assays on it. Up/down stayed the same is only really of interest in particular types of science. And I challenge you to find any well defined variables :-) Intensity to me is a measure of optical density but questions of background, object size, masking, averaging algorithm... more... - Cameron Neylon from twhirl

But agree with what you and Greg are saying, first thing get the data somewhere, with allt the metadata you can automatically collect. Then worry about capturing more metadata as people do stuff with the data. Writing this grant proposal right at the moment. - Cameron Neylon from twhirl

And in microarrays, "raw" data is the image of the slide. But aside from a cursory inspection to ensure that it isn't complete rubbish, nobody much cares about that. I'd argue that there's a point in the preprocessing at which a numerical value emerges which could be called "useful" and which encapsulates the object being measured. It needs more work (e.g. normalization) to get information from it, but it's the "value" in feature/reporter/value. - Neil Saunders

To me this about finding something a bit like an upper ontology that describes the general category that objects (targets, assay, value, inputs, outputs, data, process, sample) fall into. That lets you do the general integration, and the more detailed local data structures become more useful as you can agree more and more on what details are important. So I absolutely agree with what... more... - Cameron Neylon

Heh heh It was exactly that image that we did care about - which was the problem :-) I will admit to being an edge case, but in some ways we're all edge cases, they're just different edges... - Cameron Neylon

Neil, may I link to this FF thread from Book of Trogool? - D0r0th34

It's in a rough state but - http://dl.dropbox.com/u... - Cameron Neylon

:-) Sure, different questions, different "levels" of data. I guess my angle is more a statistical one: how do I compare (seemingly) quite different datasets - what numbers can I extract and crunch? Less interested in the capture and description of data at every stage in the process. - Neil Saunders

Dorothea, sure, not a problem. - Neil Saunders

"This is a gel", "this is a sample",.... AFAIK all those kinds of statements are part of the OBI ontology: http://obi-ontology.org/page... e.g. "Agarose Gel" http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ajax_co... - Pierre Lindenbaum

Sure, and those are very complete descriptions of experimental components. But what I want is: "I saw A on my gel, B in my LC/MS, C on my expression array and D on my SNP array and when I plug all that into some Bayesian predictor, it says cancer" :-) - Neil Saunders

Ontologies are not the issue, it's more low level than that. I also work with microarrays, proteomics, metabolomics, and numerous physiological data sets. To keep all the data in one place I use a relational database, in this case postgresql because I like to store raw intensity values in array datatypes, along with pylons based web interfaces to display various views of the data to my... more... - Greg Tyrelle

My argument would be that the reason you're less productive is not because of the RDF and ontologies per se, but because the ontologies aren't really built for what we want to do. They're for describing certain types of outcomes, not for integrating data in a discovery phase. But Neil's (entity, probe, value) is still an ontology of sorts. It is just a higher level one. My belief is... more... - Cameron Neylon

But keep the discussion going - this is exactly the problem that e.g the SAGE project will have - http://sagebase.org - and as a notional member of the data working group I could do with all the ideas and help that's out there... - Cameron Neylon

We are thinking too much in terms of data representation here. In the end what you are looking at is a data warehousing problem. You have different front end systems and you want to be able to pull data in for offline processing into a warehouse. That's pretty much what you do at any company doing a lot of analytics/business intelligence. Different types of data being collected in... more... - Deepak Singh

This reminds me of the type of approach we were considering a while back - with a focus on each observable event during an experiment. http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/2008... - Jean-Claude Bradley

Neil, I was under the impression that normalization across arrays and labs wasn't actually a solved problem, yet. Surely that would have to come first before stripping things down to just assay-key-value? - Mr. Gunn

Normalization ... aaargh! Most definitely not a solved problem - Rajarshi Guha

Normalizing within your own experiments is hard enough, never mind across unrelated datasets. It's something we have to solve though, to make the most of public data. - Neil Saunders

Neil, you may be intersted in looking at the Ontology-Based eXtensible Data Model (OBX) that was developed by Richard Scheuermann's group at UT Southwestern. It is being used for the ImmPort database (www.immport.org) The OBX model utilizes the BFO / OBI ontology as guides in creating a data model that is robust to new datatypes. You can see a presentation about it here:... more... - Burke Squires

Thanks Burke. ImmPort looks very impressive, I must say. - Neil Saunders

This reminds me of what the TCGA is starting to do, by defining "data levels". For microarray data, Level 1 might be the raw images, Level 2, the intensity calls, Level 3, the normalized intensities, and Level 4 information on whether it's up or down regulated across multiple samples. For people like me, doing integrative analyses, it's easy to focus just on the higher level data and... more... - Chris Miller

which is exactly why you need separation of the layers and tools to bring data together for the downstream stuff - Deepak Singh from IM

Neil, I think you have just explained why tab-delimited files are often more useful than complex XML representations of the same data ;-) - Lars Juhl Jensen

Tab-delimitted files would be grrrreat for me in my lab. If any of the rest of you would like to share our data, however, then you're completely screwed. Is the problem not that we're all duplicating each other's work by writing the same kind of parsers for the same kind of data? Proteomics (for example) has a standard (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pride/). Is it really so hard to use / develop the community-based tools that are being generated around this standard?!? - Neil Swainston

Well, the ratio of usable tools to schemas/ontologies is a whole other debate :-) But sure, in principle the tools are there - for individual types of data. What I highlight in the post is the difficulty of genuine data integration, as opposed to the current "write a parser for everything and mash it up" approach. - Neil Saunders

#1 rule of data integration - if a format exists, it will be used - Deepak Singh

...and if it doesn't exist there is a 70% chance someone will create it :-) - Cameron Neylon

Chris M makes an important point wrt data levels, analogous to trace archives vs sequence dbs. Extending the sequence analogy, obsoleting levels will become important (it will rapidly become cheaper to resequence rather than store sequence). - Chris Cotsapas

Michael Kuhn to Michael's feed, The Life Scientists

A salvo of Science papers by Bork/Serrano/Gavin et al. on Mycoplasma: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi... http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi... http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi...

December 1 - Comment - Like - Share

Pawel Szczesny, Yann Abraham, Marcos de Carvalho and 10 other people liked this

If I have my story right I think this came out of a criticism from a review panel that the structures and computational bio department was not collaborating enough. They came up with the mycoplasma collaboration that Luis Serrano in particular was very excited about. 3 science papers is not a bad way to show results :). I still have to read them. - Pedro Beltrao

News and Views at MSB: http://www.nature.com/msb... - Pedro Beltrao

Editor's choice at Science Signalling http://stke.sciencemag.org/cgi... - Pedro Beltrao

Cameron Neylon

Article-Level Metrics and the Evolution of Scientific Impact - http://www.citeulike.org/user...

November 17 from CiteULike: CameronNeylon's... - Comment - Like - Share

Bill Anderson, Bill Hooker, Anders Norgaard and 37 other people liked this

Article on ALMs by myself and Shirley Wu - Cameron Neylon

27 more comments

Terrific. Are we still maintaining that list of "outputs resulting from FriendFeed"? - Neil Saunders

I was planning on doing a demo of annotation at PLoS before the end of the year - perhaps this article would be a good candidate. As always, anyone willing to join is welcome. - Daniel Mietchen

@ Neil: It's at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc... , and I have added the article as #25 (details missing). - Daniel Mietchen

i added a note once, but now it won't let me add any other notes :( I don't see a rule about one note per person. I should have held off for a good one. - Christina Pikas

I also just noticed that my "annotation" - provided the link to StackOverflow - shows up in the general discussion, where the title "Link" certainly is not helpful, and there is no way I can edit it. - Daniel Mietchen

maybe something is broken, my note appears in general comments but also in that portion of the text as a comment. maybe that's why I couldn't add other notes? - Christina Pikas

Not sure why you can't add more notes. Certainly been able to in the past. I see both notes where they are supposed to be I think. But they will also appear in the general comments as well I think. - Cameron Neylon

Great article! I really need to add some comments or notes, just to prove the authors' point :-) - Björn Brembs

BTW, when does PLoS finally get karma? I've been asking for proper 'show off' userprofiles for like ever :-) - Björn Brembs

As in PLoS Overflow? - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, et al. - What's the most useful thing I could do to nurture and support this renewed interest in article level metrics? (not from a competing data product point of view, but a let's get some good technologies out there with good visibility) - Mr. Gunn

@Cameron: Exactly! I even think having a profile where you can post a pic and see how many papers and comments were published, papers edited, etc.was the very first thing I asked for when I signed up :-) - Björn Brembs

But it needs to be federated across publishers... :-) - Cameron Neylon

if authors put in their 'customer' weight, this will go faster, so why not go syndicate :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

I think I'll use this paper in my spring thesis class -- this is the main one where I discuss publishing models -- and maybe I'll demo Diigo with this as a class project next to an article that discusses IF. - Mickey Schafer

While we're on the subject of functionality wish lists, I would also like an embed functionality for PLoS papers. Collecting my publications together but don't want to duplicate copies and reduce googlejuice for the journal - at least not for the OA papers anyway... - Cameron Neylon

Whilst not a darts-player http://www.flickr.com/photos... , I think Cameron has hit the "triple-twenty" there :) - Graham Steel

BTW, why isn't there a way to register this thread with the article? Why are we posting here and not on the article? There's got to be a lesson to be learned from this :-) - Björn Brembs from iPhone

http://bullseyevaluation.com/yahoo_s... - Graham Steel

Done. See comment #4. - Graham Steel

Search results: http://topsy.com/s... from Topsy http://labs.topsy.com/about/ - Jim Till

I've included a link to this thread in a blog post: Article-level metrics getting attention http://ff.im/bGuNY - Jim Till

+1 Bjoern :-) another question along these lines would be: why does Cameron's intial FF message link to CiteULike and not to http://www.plosbiology.org/article..., or plainly doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000242 ? - Claudia Koltzenburg

Because that was the way I brought the link in. I think that that pointer is appropriate. It is a pointer to the fact that I bookmarked it. Other people linked to the paper directly. Perhaps the issue is that we accidentally aggregated around the "wrong" item to talk about the paper. I'm not sure this is a problem as long as the referral works - its a UI irritation not a problem with... more... - Cameron Neylon

well, not directly, maybe in this ff-thread we're just providing some material for what you say in your paragraph "Technical Solutions to Social Problems", namely: "approaches that gather information from processes that are already part of the typical research workflow are also much more likely to succeed." - even though ff may not be part of 'the typical research workflow' (yet?) - and... more... - Claudia Koltzenburg

That's true, and certainly conversation sparked by the paper. But how to capture that in a way that is useful further down the line might be tough... - Cameron Neylon

I am still wondering if we would not need at least one metric for each 'scientist type' as described in http://dx.doi.org/10... - joergkurtwegner

joergkurtwegner -I'm interested to see what tenurometer comes up with re: h-index correction factors for disciplines. - Mr. Gunn

Neil Saunders

Fox News Makes the Best Pie Chart. Ever. - http://flowingdata.com/2009...

November 28 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Jo Young, Rajarshi Guha, Lars Juhl Jensen and 4 other people liked this

ouch! That hurt! - Björn Brembs

The stupid... it burns. - Bill Hooker

Johnny Worthington

Relative to Distant Relative: "Oh, you should ask Johnny. He's good with computers"... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand my annual Xmas Tech Support Season begins... #bitchlips

November 28 from email - Comment - Like - Share

fatima, Haggis (Sean Loyless), Alfredo and 35 other people liked this

Hahah. Mine's already started. My mom called me this morning to ask about specs for purchasing a computer for my aunt. - Rochelle

9 more comments

He's hardwarey and junk. - Josh Haley from iPhone

If you want to get out of it you'll have to fake a breakdown, then hire a patsy that'll allow you smash him in the face with a keyboard. Depending on who is around to witness the event you may never be asked for tech support again...Just don't overdo it. - Joe Pierce

TELL THEM NO! DID YOU CHANGE YOUR NAME TO DOORMAT WHILE I WASN'T LOOKING?! - Mo Kargas

free tech support. price: 12-pack imported ale per letter - Mike Chelen

send questions with self addressed stamped envelop to Johnny c/o The Internet. Questions will be answered in the order they were received. Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery. *disclaimer: Johnny and The Internet not responsible for unanswered questions. - Michael W. May

Try sending them this: http://xkcd.com/627/ - Lars Juhl Jensen

I know the feeling except now o have computers and cameras to be an expert on, sigh. I'm Gonna have to work on that face for it though. - Phill Price from iPhone

Go get one of those tshirts that says "No, I will not fix your computer". Or at least charge them for it. - Mellissa Claus

I'm in perpetual tech support hell....... (getting unlimited tea, biscuits and cakes makes up for it tho) - Roberto Bonini

I stopped doing tech support for free for people outside my immediate family a long time ago. It helps that I have my own company that does tech support. So it's probably a little more obvious to them that I don't work for free than for someone who works a corporate job. - Jason Huebel

Michael Kuhn

lim (attention span) = 0 as # of papers to read → ∞

November 27 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Lars Juhl Jensen and Konrad Förstner liked this

Jonathan Eisen

Worst new omics word award: Negatome - http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2009...

November 24 from The Tree of Life - Comment - Like - Share

Yann Abraham, Jo Young, Konrad Förstner and 3 other people liked this

Is there no end to the horror of the buzzword-ome? - Bill Hooker

So, should we come up with a new buzzfix then? So far, we had 'science', 'omics', ... who knows what next... I'm betting on complexity... so, proteoplex, bioplex, chemplex, metaboplex, ... not merely the individuals, but also the complexity between them. - Egon Willighagen

I like the complexity angle - we should register all those domain names - Jonathan Eisen

Anders Norgaard

What Does It Say When A Comedy Show Does More Fact Checking Than News Programs? - http://techdirt.com/article...

November 24 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Björn Brembs, Neil Saunders, Mr. Gunn and 2 other people liked this

It's because fact checking is comedy gold. Nothing funnier than making MSM look like a bunch of lazy noobs. - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

Ruchira S. Datta to Ruchira's feed, Typography

25 logos with hidden messages - Amazing Graphic Designing Tricks! http://www.graphicdesignblog.org/hidden-...

November 20 - Comment - Like - Share

Lars Juhl Jensen and 段估唔拉 liked this

Michael Nielsen

Access denied? : Article : Nature - http://www.nature.com/nature...

November 20 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

Peter Miller, mariana, Duncan Hull and 8 other people liked this

"Every weekday, thousands of researchers around the world access the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), which contains the most reliable and up-to-date genomic information available on the most widely used model organism in the plant kingdom. But now, to those users' horror, TAIR faces collapse: the US National Science Foundation (NSF) is phasing out funding after 10 years as the data resource's sole supporter (see page 258). TAIR's plight is emblematic of a broader crisis facing many of the world's biological databases and repositories. Research funding agencies recognize that such infrastructures are crucial to the ongoing conduct of science, yet few are willing to finance them indefinitely. Such agencies tend to support these resources during the development phase, but then expect them to find sustainable funding elsewhere." - Michael Nielsen

AJCann

After my media experience yesterday, the irony of this is not lost on me - http://ajcann.posterous.com/after-m...

November 17 from Son of SoTI - Comment - Like - Share

Lars Juhl Jensen and Neil Saunders liked this

Neil Saunders

My successor on Predikin came top in a DREAM kinase challenge - http://wiki.c2b2.columbia.edu/dream...

November 16 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Andrew Perry, Pedro Beltrao and Lars Juhl Jensen liked this

Maxine

Presubmission enquiry or entire manuscript? - http://blogs.nature.com/nautilu...

November 16 from Nautilus - Blog Posts - Comment - Like - Share

Yaroslav Nikolaev, Neil Saunders, Mr. Gunn and 5 other people liked this

That's actually quite good to know. - Mr. Gunn

Michael Kuhn

Not sure how to describe this brilliant answer on StackOverflow on parsing HTML w/ regex - http://stackoverflow.com/questio...

November 15 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Neil Saunders, Hein Roehrig, Jim Norris and 11 other people liked this

Superb - Rajarshi Guha

very good :) - Pedro Beltrao

Michael Kuhn

congrats to @larsjuhljensen et al: the current issue of Cell contains Reflect tags! http://beta.cell.com/index...

November 13 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Duncan Hull, Rafael Sidi, Andrew Su and 4 other people liked this

How can I not like this :-D - Lars Juhl Jensen

In addition to "Literature, Sequence, Structure...", how about "Expression" with a link to BioGPS? just a thought... ;) - Andrew Su

Michael Nielsen

Structure+Strangeness: Power laws and all that jazz, redux - http://cs.unm.edu/~aaron...

November 12 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

Lars Juhl Jensen liked this

Aaron Clauset summarizes his review (with Cosma Shalizi and Mark Newman) of how to fit and validate power-law distributions in empirical data. A lot of phenomena that people think follow power laws... well, don't. - Michael Nielsen

Paulo Nuin

You drive a big heavy fire truck. Grandma is approaching from the left, on her bike. Do you C) go forward? - http://www.reddit.com/r...

November 11 from Reddit - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Kuhn, Yann Abraham, Pierre Lindenbaum and Lars Juhl Jensen liked this

For the lazy people, just go directly to the action: http://bit.ly/4DXwZv - Lars Juhl Jensen

3 more comments

Wow, it seems that Google has decided to censor out the interesting image - Lars Juhl Jensen

When turning 180° later http://tinyurl.com/yh65ojc you can see that grandma was safe, and the truck has gone. So I guess, Google's staff stopped to help her - Pierre Lindenbaum

mirror of the image Google removed: http://i.imgur.com/deTJ8.jpg - Michael Kuhn

Maybe the fire truck had nothing to with the accident. Maybe grandma saw the Google Street View car and go so excited that she fell on her bicycle ;-) - Lars Juhl Jensen

Pawel Szczesny

Dear scientist, if you ask me to fax signed copy of a license which has more bytes than your program, I won't use your tool at all.

November 9 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Ruchira S. Datta, Pierre Lindenbaum and Lars Juhl Jensen liked this

Majority of software written few years ago isn't available for instant download. You need to print the license, sign it and fax it to the authors. License: 1,6MB pdf; software 180KB executable. - Pawel Szczesny

I think the biggest problem is that often the scientists didn't even want to do that. In many cases it is their institutions that force them to put their software under a cumbersome license. - Lars Juhl Jensen

Michael Habib to Michael's feed, The Life Scientists

Fwd: Facebook for scientists gets millions in funding - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin... (via http://friendfeed.com/habib...) Congratulations to Cornell/Florida/Vivo on their NCRR grant: "The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2...

October 21 - Comment - Like - Share

Matthew Todd, Daniel Mietchen, Paul Bacchus and 17 other people liked this

Here's a link to UF's coverage of the event: http://news.ufl.edu/2009... -- I'm curious, though about this: "The new program will draw information about scientists from official, verifiable sources and make it available using a type of technology called the Semantic Web. For example, information about researchers’ positions will come from their employers and a listing of... more... - Mickey Schafer

25 more comments

How is this different from Biomed Experts, SciLink, etc? After seeing the failure of a dozen of these sites, I'm skeptical of the premise that there's real demand for them. You can build all the semantic infrastructure you want, but if people aren't going to use it, then it's a waste. - Chris Miller

Kind of what I was thinking, too, Chris. But the UF blurb does not address these concerns, so hard to know at this point. Maybe I'll send a message to Sarah Gonzalez tomorrow (one of the UF ref librarians who jump-started the idea) and see if she'll fill me in. - Mickey Schafer

It really hurts to see money be wasted like this on a platform that doesn't really address the issues plaguing these types of sites that already exist. I think someone needs to be given 12 million to figure out how to get scientists to actually use the technology! (Or code tools we'd like to use ;) ) - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

Brian: what are the differences between this system under development and tools that might be considered ideal? - Mike Chelen

Mickey: scientists may be more likely to get involved for those reasons if they result in an effective operation. it is exciting to hear import and export of standard formats being given a priority, yet it may be longer before anyone sees if the process is functional - Mike Chelen

Chris: anytime someone mentions "facebook for ____ " it seems a little vague and hard to understand what might differentiate the service :D - Mike Chelen

Reading the press release, it doesn't sound like this platform is going to be any different from biomedexperts. I'm not sure there is an "ideal" system. It's going to be hard to offer every discipline the proper tools and content that will drive users and spawn collaboration. Having worked on my own site for the last 3 years, I've heard many scientists say the last thing they want to do... more... - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

The question that has to be answered is what is the compelling reason for scientists to trust the people they encounter on "facebook for scientists". Non science social networking is low risk... - Richard Badge from Nambu

"The goal of the program is national networking of all scientists," said Michael Conlon, interim director of biomedical informatics for the University of Florida, in a statement. "Scientists have problems finding each other. We often find that researchers have pretty good networks with students or with scientists at institutions where they received their degree or worked before. But... more... - Attila Csordas

Previous discussion here: http://friendfeed.com/cameron... - Mr. Gunn

Oh, and here: http://synthesis.williamgunn.org/2009... - Mr. Gunn

I have the same response to hearing this that I imagine many of you would reading a grant proposal that proposes to do an experiment that others have already done and which didn't work, and the results of which aren't cited in the new proposal. They need to address how they're going to work in the face of all these past failures. If their branding strategy is any indication, I'm not sure they're aware of the past failures. - Mr. Gunn

Mr Gunn nailed it. Where is the strategy for succeeding where so many have failed? - Bill Hooker

Mr Gunn +3 saving role against hype. - Paul J. Davis

I would like to point out that the Facebook for Science line is journalists trying to market this to the public rather than the investigators trying to address this groups concerns. I think that phrasing needs to be taken with a grain of salt. That doesn't mean the other criticisms aren't legitimate. I just think it is important to evaluate the project on its own merits rather than public mass market branding of it. - Michael Habib

One point on how it is different from some other projects. It is NIH funded. I am not aware of any other solutions with such a mandate from the NIH. Second, it is a huge amount of money.to devote to the problem. Neither of these differences directly addresses the concerns expressed, but they are both factors that give this project an edge in potentially addressing the issues. - Michael Habib

"The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools" any people here from those schools funded or know the people funded and can invite them? Would love to hear their angle - Attila Csordas

I'll be doing a post doc at UF. I think I'll contact the head there and see if they need any help :) - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

I am at UF. I have met Sarah G. (one of the initiating reference libs) while doing a guest lecture in her class. But I don't know the other people. We could just forward this discussion to one of the contacts usually listed. - Mickey Schafer

Michael Habib, I agree with your observation that "facebook for scientists" is journalist-speak. And in terms of explaining things to the UF community, it is a good analogy as my students constantly and consistently categorize social networks as either twitter or facebook. - Mickey Schafer

I forwarded it to to Mike Conlon at UF. He said he'd take a look at this discussion and also for more information said we should read the RFA http://grants.nih.gov/grants.... The RFA says that it wants the platform to be a federated network distributed by partner institutions, which is novel in the SNfS field. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with. - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

Thanks, Brian (or really, should I use some southern-ism, like "Thaaank you, sweetie" which is actually what happens here, especially at places like Waffle House?). - Mickey Schafer

The research objectives section makes for a quick and interesting read -- love the "background" info! http://grants.nih.gov/grants... - Mickey Schafer

I think that background just shows how little actual background research was done before proposing this RFA :P - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

I wonder if they'll talk to OWW, Epernicus, SciLink, Laboratree, and the dozen other SNfS services out there to import or otherwise leverage all the data that's already been contributed by scientists. I can see it being useful as an aggregator and motivating standardization and data exchange, but would hate to just see it reinvent the square wheel - Shirley Wu from twhirl

We have a few author profiles in Scopus as well :) - Michael Habib

Richard Akerman

ok copyright gurus, help me out - are scanned page images of a 400-year-old book actually under copyright?

October 20 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Andrew Perry, Egon Willighagen, Lars Juhl Jensen and 8 other people liked this

36 more comments

The scanned images are the property of the entity that created the scans. If you can get your own hands on a physical copy of Sidereus Nuncius in the original latin and scan those pages in, then you will own the rights to *that* set of scanned images. Not to the intellectual property (text) written by Sidereus, but to the scanned images of his words. Yes, that is truly how the law is interpreted. - Jill O'Neill

Excuse my language, but that is f-ing ridiculous. No wonder this Google Books thing is a debacle. - Richard Akerman

Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that, despite any costs incurred in scanning books, scanned images should somehow be free for the taking? As if there was no labor involved? When Dover Books reprints copies of old titles, no one suggests that Dover should be giving those printed copies away for free. - Jill O'Neill

Bear in mind that Dover frequently just used old printed versions of texts themselves, not resetting type or anything like that. - Jill O'Neill

"Sweat of the brow" is not basis for copyright in the US. - D0r0th34

Jill, you're conflating atoms with bits. I *bought* Starry Messenger, I had no expectation that the print version should be free, even 400 years later. http://www.librarything.com/work... However, I do have an expectation that digital page images from a centuries-old book should be placed in the Commons. But anyway, I don't want to rehash what I'm sure has been thoroughly covered in the Google Books battle. - Richard Akerman

"Not to the intellectual property (text) written by Sidereus, but to the scanned images of his words" - true, but the text is out of copyright now. So someone could scan it and place the entire work in the public domain. - Nick Lothian

@Richard - I'm not sure this is all that closely related to the Google Books battle. Most of the argument there is about books that are still in copyright. This work isn't, and the text is available copyright free online. I agree it would be great if someone created public domain or CC-licenced photos of the actual book, but that's a different argument to the Google Books battle. - Nick Lothian

There is a free photo of the cover available on wikipedia, with wikipedia-compatible licence: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki... - Nick Lothian

So perhaps the objection needs to be framed differently. I agree that some copy somewhere of public domain material should be made available at little or no cost to the public (ie as in the instance of Project Gutenberg). I just don't think we should yell at those who do demand some form of financial compensation for their effort. I don't remember the library community yelling at Dover... more... - Jill O'Neill

@Jill - Octavo has a right to claim revenue. I'd prefer if one of the custodians of the physical books took a scan of it and placed it in the public domain, though. (Out of interest, though - how does Octavo make revenue from that scan? Do they sell it or something?) - Nick Lothian

Octavo was a service provider; they were hired by museums and archives (and upon occasion monastery libraries) to provide them with archival quality scanned images of texts that needed to be both preserved and made accessible to scholars. They provided that service to those who protected the artifacts and that was/is their primary source of revenue; in turn, where permitted, Octavo... more... - Jill O'Neill

I understand the frustration of not being able to get to a "free" version of a text or document; I run up against it all the time. Richard was venting a little bit and expressing that frustration and I ought not to have turned this into a confrontation (and for that I apologize, Richard.) But I also get frustrated when I see the wrong people (translation vendors or publishers) blamed... more... - Jill O'Neill

Thanks, Jill, for adding the thoughtful comments to the discussion. - Peter Murray

Sorry for my tone - I'm just frustrated because I wanted to be able to show some students "look at this page from 400 years ago" and I can't. Do I have a "right" to be able to show them something that I couldn't even find before Internet search and digitisation? No. *Should* that be a reasonable right and expectation... well, I think it should be. Just for some added bizarreness, you... more... - Richard Akerman

Incidentally the full latin text is available at http://www.liberliber.it/bibliot... - so then my question becomes, what are my rights to use a screenshot of that site? Would the presentation of the text and accompanying images on the web page be some sort of protected object under Italian copyright law? (There is no copyright notice on the site that I can find.) - Richard Akerman

Incidentally in reading Jill's comments, I should have made the context clear - I don't want the text, I already bought it in translation and showing the students the original latin won't go very far - it was actually the page image itself that I was interested in showing. But naively, isn't this just "faithful reproduction" of a public domain work? Which I thought for e.g. art that's... more... - Richard Akerman

If you ran the scanned pages through OCR, the resulting text wouldn't be under copyright. Similarly, if I take a photo of the Gutenberg Bible, that photo is mine and I have copy rights to it, but I can't stop anyone else from taking such a photo, nor can someone else stop me from publishing my photo. (I'm not sure on that last point, as the Gutenberg Bible may be considered art, and I... more... - Kevin Fox

I think this will pretty much explain it all, using US & Canada law. The answer might surprise most people here, since it doesn't agree with what most of you have said. http://www.likelihoodofconfusion.com/... - April Russo (app103)

@Richard - you can show them the page from wikipedia (linked above). Also, the http://www.rarebookroom.org/Control... explicitly say "For research use", and your usage may apply. - Nick Lothian

My understanding is that the Bridgeman decision http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.... says that Jill's argument is incorrect. Perhaps the entire Octavo CD would be considered in copyright or a Dover clip art book cover-to-cover. But not an individual page, regardless of what the website says. I am, as they say, not a lawyer. But I have covered this on my... more... - s t e v e

Richard — I, too, am not a lawyer, but I thought I would mention that, if your purpose is to show a single page to your students, then you could logically claim that the page is an "excerpt" for educational use. This could fall under the "fair use" clause of copyright law. You should understand, however, that "fair use" is a defense, and, in claiming it, you're admitting to infringement ("Yes, I made a copy, but I believe my copy is allowed") and the people who claim copyright can still try to sue you. - Mistletoe Glen

Actually, Glen, it's not accurate to say that you're admitting infringement. From section 107 "fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, *is not an infringement of copyright.* " (emphasis added) - lris' ghost

Even so, Steve's point is that this new work may not be copyrightable because it is not sufficiently original. - lris' ghost

Iris, according to my law school friends, the courts have held that, if the claim of fair use is not found, the claim itself is tantamount to admitting infringement. Again, I ain't a lawyer. It seems that what's interesting here is what constitutes a "work"—in this case, it sounds like it's not the original document, but the digital image of it. It's tough for me to see how that would stand up under court scrutiny, but I don't have the resources to take it to trial. - Mistletoe Glen

"Slavish reproductions" of public domain works are not eligible for copyright protection. No matter how much work went into making a scan, or how much skill it may have taken to do it, it's a "slavish reproduction". Now, if they added something original to it, not found in the original work, then it would be covered by copyright. But just digitizing by scanning doesn't produce a derivative work that can be copyrighted. - April Russo (app103)

But you don't have to "claim" fair use until you are sued, yes? If I copy a few sentences from a novel and post them here, I don't have to claim anything, I just do it. - s t e v e

If you exceed fair use, then yes, it's infringement (and yes, the definitions aren't set in stone). But that doesn't mean that claiming fair use is admitting to infringement. - lris' ghost

For anyone that doesn't understand what constitutes a slavish reproduction, this is an example, that can't be copyrighted: http://www.appsapps.info/russogr... This is an example of the same works, reproduced in a way that IS covered by copyright, because it is a new work of art: http://www.appsapps.info/russogr... - April Russo (app103)

I _think_ Richard is in Canada, so fair use might not apply (I'm in Australia, and we don't have fair use. We do have exemptions for educational use, though) - Nick Lothian

Dammit! You foreigners and your, your foreign-ness! I am not an international copyright lawyer, though I am an international man of mystery. - s t e v e

I think Canada may have a copyright collection agency, which automatically collects money from educational agencies for photocopying (and - web browsing). In Australia, we have one, and I think it would cover this situation. (IANAL etc) - Nick Lothian

Has anyone asked an art professor about this? Lots of art history classes taught from slides of 'non-copyrightable works'. I would imagine there's a hefty precedent for what's OK in terms of lectures. Multi-discipline FTW :) - Paul J. Davis

I am very surprised, I have to say. I usually work with databases, and what I am always told is that it is irrelevant how much hard work goes into making it - unless the result is a "creative work", it is not protected by copyright law. I find it very hard to comprehend how scanning a book can be considered creative and give rise to copyright. If I take screen shots of things from Project Gutenberg, do I get copyright on my bitmaps? What if I print out the texts and scan them in again? - Lars Juhl Jensen

@Lars - the tendency to give monopoly privileges to non-creative things like database compilation is very different around the world. The EU is particularly bad. More here http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009... - Anders Norgaard

I am in Canada, and i think our equivalent is "fair dealing", plus we have law that covers photocopies but I think is not so clear in the digital age. There is an underlying point that one shouldn't have to be an international copyright lawyer in order to work with digital objects. If I have time I will try to track down more Canadian info on the topic. - Richard Akerman from BuddyFeed

Pedro Beltrao

Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab. - http://ed.fnal.gov/project...

October 15 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Matt Snoulten, Euan, Steve Koch and 17 other people liked this

This one is lovely: "Their jobs sound very interesting because they can do whatever they want and they still get paid for it." ;-)) - Yaroslav Nikolaev

Jan Aerts to Jan's feed, The Life Scientists

Could we have a list of google wave names somewhere so that I can figure out what Life-Scientists are on there?

October 12 - Comment - Like - Share

Tom Tullius, Jeannette Høvring, Daniel Jurczak and 21 other people liked this

toddwharris@googlewave.com - Todd Harris

82 more comments

just added you to Life Scientists wave - Cameron Neylon from twhirl

A Google Wave might be appropriate for tracking such a group. - Shiran Pasternak

shiranpasternak at the same domain. - Shiran Pasternak

search "with:public research" and you will find the "Research collaborations in Wave" wave endre.sebestyen@googlewave.com - Endre Sebestyen

yann.abraham@googlewave.com - Yann Abraham

Searching Google Wave with "tag:the-life-scientists" will get you to "Research collaborations in Wave", a good starting point for life scientists. - Martin Fenner

b.brembs@googlewave.com - Björn Brembs

mndoci - Deepak Singh

I also missed out on the invites .. if anyone knows someone .. :) - Pedro Beltrao

I'm firstname.lastname - Ruchira S. Datta

firstname.lastname here too - Andrew Clegg

I don't get how you search in public waves. I've tried searching for tag:the-life-scientists and it gets no hits -- I think it's just searching my own waves - Andrew Clegg

there was a thread by Kol about wave usernames couldn't find the link - ffcode

Aha -- with:public . They really should include a button for that - Andrew Clegg

anna.k.croft - Anna Croft

Lots here: http://ff.im/91NZC - Kol Tregaskes

thanks Kol - ffcode

attilacsordas - Attila Csordas

I never got invited to the party :( - Lars Juhl Jensen

AndrewJamesPerry - Andrew Perry

avijitguharoy@googlewave.com - A Roy

allyson.lurena@googlewave.com - Allyson Lister

@Endre: You can link to waves, eg: https://wave.google.com/wave... - Nick Lothian

mbembee@googlewave.com - embee

000.cacarr@googlewave.com - Christopher A Carr

cassjohnston - Cass Johnston

plindenbaum - Pierre Lindenbaum

firstname.lastname också - Egon Willighagen

diegomorelli76@googlevave.com - diego morelli

abhishek.twr@googlevave.com - Abhishek Tiwari

Would like to be added to life scientists wave, please! david.rothman@googlewave.com - David Rothman (☤)

@David: done - Pierre Lindenbaum

Many thanks, Pierre. :) - David Rothman (☤)

churchsg - Sally Church

life scientists wave: me too, thx - Attila Csordas

Don't know if I actually put myself here :-) jan.aerts@googlewave.com - Jan Aerts from email

Count me in: matt.j.wood - Matt Wood

jeanclaude.bradley at googlewave dot com - Jean-Claude Bradley

chrisamiller@googlewave.com - Chris Miller

Matt: added. - Jan Aerts from email

inspiring2designllc@googlewave.com - Justin H. Johnson

somebody please add me too attilacsordasat... - Attila Csordas

Attila: can't seem to find attilacsordas@googlewave.com. - Shiran Pasternak

it does exist I can tell ya :) - Attila Csordas

@Attila: tried a different way... yer in. - Shiran Pasternak

Done. - Jan Aerts from email

An undergraduate student in our lab, Caleb, just got his wave invite. I told him to look at this thread for possible people to connect with. - Steve Koch

+1 skhadar@googlewave.com - Khader Shameer

got it, thanks - Attila Csordas

murvine - thanks! - Christopher Murvine

Afternoon all. I've written my first robot, which hopefully will embed an interactive mass spectrum into a blip whenever a UniProt name is encountered in the text, and corresponding mass spec data is found for this protein. I say "hopefully", as I've not been able to test it for real, as, alas, I have no account. When are the next batches released? If it's not for ages, does anyone fancy testing it anyway? - Neil Swainston

Am now Waving as ben.blackburne. - Ben Blackburne

Now waving as lars.juhl.jensen - Lars Juhl Jensen

waving too: sciphu@googlewave.com - Nils Reinton

waving as fgibson - Frank

aemonten@googlewave.com. How can I get started with the life scientists wave? - Alejandro Montenegro

my wave ID: macmanes@googlewave.com - Matthew MacManes

dan.swan@googlewave.com searching is sloooooow trying to find the life scientists wave right now! - Daniel Swan

chris.lasher@googlewave.com - Chris Lasher

sjcockell@googlewave.com - Simon Cockell

jwhabig@googlewave.com - Jeff Habig - Jeff Habig

comprendia[at]googlewave[dot]com Mary Canady - Mary Canady

rebeldad@googlewave.com Brian Reid (PR guy for life science types ... I promise to behave) - Brian Reid

bronxman - Jack H. Pincus

I'm trying to get a Solexa/Illumina Sequencing Wave going. Search "with:public Illumina" or add me macmanes@googlewave.com - Matthew MacManes

waving as georgkam - george

For some reason, I'm stevekoch3 but glad to finally have a preview account! - Steve Koch

And I found the research collaborations wave by the following search: "with:public tag:the-life-scientists" - Steve Koch

mine is pedrobeltrao@googlewave.com (thanks to Mr Gunn) - Pedro Beltrao

In case there is still someone with spare invitations: piotr.byzia at gmail.com - Piotr Byzia

tom.sante@googlewave.com - Tom

Im steelgraham7@googlewave.com - Graham Steel

sametstalker@gmail.com - Samet Güngören

michael.kuhn - Michael Kuhn

Requesting for life scientists wave, abhishek.twr@googlevave.com thanks in advance - Abhishek Tiwari

The usual, neilfws. - Neil Saunders

now that I am finally on board: danjurczak@googlewave.com - Daniel Jurczak

i'm mightyfib(at)gogglewave(dot)com Your most welcome to add me...:O) - Jeannette Høvring

mine is dave.lunt - Dave Lunt

michael.chelen@googlewave.com - seems to use the google contacts system like gmail - Mike Chelen

pengwen.not.penguin@googlewave.com - Parvez Halim

mstalnos@googlewave.com - Tresterling

I'm on (thanks to Steve Koch!): tom.tullius@googlewave.com - Tom Tullius

Maxine

Guardian gives Google Sidewiki 6 mths until internet roadkill. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technol... I am neg as it is part of G toolbar which I hate

September 24 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Lars Juhl Jensen, 'Mummi' Thorisson, Roderic Page and 2 other people liked this

Interesting that the focus here seems to be on webmasters losing control over how their websites are seen. Errr hasn't that already happened. Greasemonkey? Stylish? Just in those cases the user has the choice about what is put in place - reducing the potential for spam - Cameron Neylon

20 more comments

I'm waiting for that Google wave thingy, Cameron - sounds much better. For people like me for whom words like "greasemonkey" are a mirage, we want some kind of application for us that will do it....I suppose. BTW is Twitter full of spam today, looking at the trending topic list? (will not repeat the words here just in case they all follow). - Maxine

I like the idea of a global, shared annotation system. I have lots of notes in, say, Evernote, about data records that are wrong, or could benefit from some extra links. But these are not shared. If I moved these to Sidewiki then chances are others might use them, including (gasp) the person responsible for the original page. Indeed, web sites could subscribe to ATOM feeds for individual pages to get feedback and annotations. - Roderic Page

Well I wouldn't mind that at all (on a much less technical level) but would Sidewiki be the way to do it? Not according to the Grauniad and others (eg John Batelle had a neg post about Gsidewiki too - concluding that Yahoo! should do it instead. ?!). For me, I'm not installing that Google toolbar again, whatever! I like some google apps but not that one. (or any toolbar along same lines by other companies.) - Maxine

Inappropriate name or not - this stuff has serious potential!! As Rod alludes, like the other Google Data APIs this based on AtomPub (http://www.atomenabled.org). I'm not terribly keen on the toolbar / separate install thing, but the principle is good and presumably one could write JS widgets to make this work just like regular comment threads (like Disqus: http://disqus.com). - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Also, would be kinda nice if there was a way to leverage the same/similar infrastructure to gather and archive annotations on bio-db entries to one or several repositories (as to not rely on Google for storage and, ehm, not do Evil). If this could be done + without the toolbar, I could agree to Todd's sentiment ( http://ff.im/8CnSo) when he asks if this might be "the answer for scientific databases wishing to add community annotation features?". - 'Mummi' Thorisson

@Maxine - if you could leave a SideWiki comment on a site without having to use the toolbar thingy, would you be more positive, and also would it matter to you whether the comment was hosted on the site or with our overlords @Google? - 'Mummi' Thorisson

The idea itself isn't bad. The implementation on the other hand, means it won't catch on. - Deepak Singh

Google is not the first company to do website annotation like this. All the others were killed by spam and, although Google must have some super-strength anti-spam algorithms, I predict that this will be too. For now though, sidewiki is going to be built into Chrome, which slightly alleviates the toolbar issue. Also you can already view sidewiki without the toolbar. Just make a... more... - Matt Leifer

@Deepak - the UI implementation you mean, or do you have reservations about other things? - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Thanks, Mummi - yes, I'd have a go at using it if I didn't have to install a toolbar first. To me as a user, what I like is the ability to integrate all the conversation in one place, does not matter to me where. But as Deepak says, the devil is in the implementation....Spam also a major issue - an increasingly major one it seems to me, as spammers increasingly learn the increasingly sophisticated anti-spam algorithms ;-( - Maxine

Mummi, the interaction model is a show stopper for a lot of people, and integration into chrome is not going to help (since such a small number of people use it). Personally, I believe the ability to annotate and collection information on a web page at scale should be part of some core web standards, otherwise it ends up becoming interesting to just a few people. And yes, spam is going to be huge issue (regardless of model) - Deepak Singh

@Deepak - regarding spam: surely it will help that you have to at least have a Google account to use this. - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Mummi, perhaps. But that'll get circumvented some day. That's not my main problem. First they need to get non-spammers to use this - Deepak Singh

Still, given that Google are in fact building this on standards (more or less), that seems like a step in the right direction to me. Like Todd, I've been for some time interested in something like SideWiki for annotations of individual database entries. Not merely annotations gathered by each individual db (many resources will not have the resources to build this) but more likely one or several specialized bio-annotation servers. - 'Mummi' Thorisson

..If we have Google SideWiki + a number of these bio-annotation servers implemented as AtomPub servers, theoretically one could aggregate feeds w/ comments from whichever sources would be appropriate. If SideWiki is full of rubbish, don't aggregate it, and stick to the two bio-annotation servers X and Y who are used by the specialist 'non-spammers'. - 'Mummi' Thorisson

Mummi, one could argue Anyone should be able to collect annotations across the web and pull in the parts they need to. So in that context Sidewiki just becomes another interesting part of the equation. The fun part is the core sources, and those sources opening themselves up to annotation, which to me is the more important problem. Is making sure that source data has APIs, allows third party annotations and or curation, etc - Deepak Singh

BTW it seems Google are building on some of the ideas explored in the W3C Annotea project: http://www.annotea.org / http://www.w3.org/2001... - 'Mummi' Thorisson

One blogger's opinion: http://thefowle.livejournal.com/391464... "Annotea was never tasked with designing syndication-- their assigned role was to define what document markups we may need. SideWiki appears aimed almost exclusively at syndication, at sharing the most primitive of content. The hybridization of these two technologies is the sweet spot hyper-geeks dream of, stirred in amidsts all the diverse medias of the web-- web pages, sound, & video." - 'Mummi' Thorisson

@Deepak - agreed, for the most part: decoupling the annotations from the sources seems key to me here. Many data sources will, yes, have APIs for retrieving data, but no need for or interest in opening up (harvesting?) for external annotations themselves. So, enabling annotations to be 'stuck onto' *any* database entry identified by a URI using 3rd party (SideWiki, whichever) is crucial. - 'Mummi' Thorisson

there I agree. You can address this from two directions. As I said, the SideWiki idea is not bad in itself. It's the interaction mode which is going to be the challenge (of course I remember saying that for the original Google Reader) - Deepak Singh from IM

Well if they develop it like GR, that would be good. However, they do add features to GR which only work for Blogger, eg the "following" function - unnecessary if you are already signed up to GR. And none of these blog platforms seem to integrate with each other (blogger, Wordpress,Typepad) although they all integrate with Twitter, FB and sometimes FF. Has anyone noticed the freq. crashes if you try to make a comment to a Blogger blog using your OpenID as opposed to your Google ID? All a bit irritating. - Maxine

Chad Orzel

RT @MitchBenn: It's official: George Bush was such an asshole you can win the Nobel Peace Prize just by not being him.

October 9 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Simon Cockell, Lars Juhl Jensen, Björn Brembs and Christopher Granade liked this

Björn Brembs

Middle of nowhere :-)” (at Kurort Oybin, Saxony, Germany)

September 27 from brightkite.com - Comment - Like - Share

Lars Juhl Jensen liked this

I would have placed "middle of nowhere" 3-4km further west, close to the end of the unnamed forest "road" between Hinterdorf, Jonsdorfer Str. and Leipaer Str. ;-) - Lars Juhl Jensen

Ok, it's not the end of the world, but I could see it from there :-) - Björn Brembs from iPhone

Peter Murray

Elsevier’s ‘Article of the Future’ resembles websites of the past | Online Journalism Blog - http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009...

August 23 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

Ricardo Vidal, Lars Juhl Jensen, Duncan Hull and 4 other people liked this

"Instead, the prototypes resemble an enthusiastic bash at a multimedia-infused online encyclopaedia circa 1997, when multimedia was still a buzzword, or such as you might have found on a CD-ROM magazine cover mounted giveaway around the same time. Now, I know relatively little about the scientific journal community, or how they consume their publications online. But I imagine they will be intrigued though underwhelmed by an international publisher of scientific journals presenting them with these prototypes as the future of their work online." - Peter Murray

Bret Taylor to Bret's feed, FriendFeed News

FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request - FriendFeed Blog - http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009...

August 10 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Jason A. Samfield, Srikanth AD, Ozer Wrzl (EN) and 658 other people liked this

We've been acquired by Facebook! We are really excited about joining the Facebook team. (Note: FriendFeed will continue to operate - see the blog post for details) - Bret Taylor from Bookmarklet

514 more comments

Boom. - Louis Gray

Grr! - directeur

Woah... - Brandon Titus

Uh. Well, that's the end of that. - Akiva Moskovitz

Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Roberto Bonini

What does this mean for FriendFeed, Bret? - Kol Tregaskes

Lame. - Mark Trapp

great title bret. well played. - MG Siegler

WOW - Bindu Reddy

Congrat! So, what does this mean to your team and to FF in general? - Dilip Dand

wahhhhhhhhhh - Myrna

maaaan - Jamie

wowow - Harry Wolff

congrats - brainno722 (Peter)

Nooooooooooooo - Mushin

Wait... seriously? - Ken Sheppardson

oh, noooo - Tanju Yildiz

Congratulations to the friendfeed team. I know this is huge for y'all. Please don't let us spoil your parade as we weep. - Ladybug Heather

Seriously?!? ..... - sebastian☆rocket brother

oh boy. - Carlos Ayala

I am hoping this will lead to nice integration for cross posting! Currently using Twitter App on FB to post and I hate those ff.im links that end up on Facebook. - Ivan Zlatev

it was good while it lasted, Friendfeed. :( - holly

division by zero - Onur Cengiz

OMG - Onur Gündüz

"FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team." Those are NOT encouraging things to read as a FF user. - Scott of Two Countries

gratz - Ali

My heart is sinking as I type this. Please tell me that it isn't a late April Fool's joke. :( - Tyson Key

Wow, it's true!! - Kevin Whalen

Big news! I second Kol & dilip's request for what this means for the team and FF's future. - Brandon Titus

O_o - Joe Silence is not Santa

So it IS true. - Hector

Nicely done Bret - Jennifer Van Grove

Congratulations btw, guys! - Kol Tregaskes

Sniff... not sure if I'm excited about this. But I have enormous respect for the FriendFeed team... so, I assume they believe in the move as more than an exit strategy. - Michael Leggett

Congrats, Bret. - Jordan Hofker

This is just horrible - Matthew DeVries

Congratulations, I suppose. A bit worried Facebook is going to ruin everything though. I'm not fond of Facebook, to say the least. - Irma Vermaat

Um. - Barry Mitchelson

Oh my... Hopefully FriendFeed won't vanish and good luck :) - Tarmo Aidantausta

Do we call it FaceFeed? FriendBook? - Tyson Key

Oh no.... - Ben Hanten

What does mean for us? - Rich from iPod

Terrible fit. - Matthew DeVries

damn here it is... :( - Edgar Rodríguez

FriendFace!!! (i love it crowd) - Bahriye

*waits for wall-to-wall ads and constant spambots* - Joe Silence is not Santa

Die. - Zio Bonino

Congrats - Zoltan Szendro

I dont want FF to end - Fee501st

Wow - Shevonne

Oh mon dio ! - Umar

What did you do? WHYYY! - Zachary TG

Ostregheta. - Reloj

Congrats guys, in a bittersweet sort of way. - Hutch Carpenter

guess there's no way of denying this anymore :( - BCK

Just another lesson in why you shouldn't put your love and trust in a company...... - Matthew DeVries

Oh no! - Erdinc YILMAZEL

Congrats, but I hate Facebook. - Zachary TG

I like Friendfeed and I do not like Facebook. Gratz to you guys though, I think. - Mark Sorrell

"Oh shit..." came to mind immediately. :( - Tyson Key

Scott, yep not encouraged by that comment. :-( - Kol Tregaskes

Congrats on the deal, best wishes to the FF'ers in helping facebook get it together! - Sean O'Connor

This could get exciting, especially concerning twitter :-P - Malte Steckmeister

Congrats for Friendfeed team, but I'm seriously worried for us :((((((((((( - Roberto

Congratulations... I'm sure this is pretty exciting for everyone at FriendFeed... We're all looking forward to where it takes you! - Nathan Chase

And FriendFeed was just getting popular. Not any more. - Zachary TG

Wow - Rodfather

*Sobs* - Tyson Key

wow - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

to the dump - Zachary TG

Wow, very disappointed - Randy Pollock

come on. Bret, facebook is so closed. so different from Friendfeed. besides that. Congrats to the team - Edgar Rodríguez

As am I - Zachary TG

machecazzo - Sba

VERY disappointed. - Joe Silence is not Santa

horrible decision - Randy Pollock

Booo. But, you know, congrats. - Chris Nixon

i'm not sure i'm happy about this. - Taylan Aydınlı

OMG WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SH*T - Alp

Congrats for u guys... probably too bad for us ;-( - Laurent

God, I can see FB shutting down FF just like Six Apart shut down Pownce. - DarknessFalls

arg. - Aron Michalski

Good for you, don't know for all of us - Cristian Conti

@#$& that's all I have to say. For now. - Zachary TG

Facebook should have been aquired by Friendfeed. Why they hell would you give up your better product to a worse one? Did none of you give a shit about this service to begin wiht? - Matthew DeVries

Congrats! - Alix Whitmire

Coolest web 2.0 site I've ever seen & used. I hope things don't derail. Ads will be coming soon, which is fine, but.... then what 's next? Please no quizzes! - Ben Hanten

Who would have thought that after Facebook were shamelessly being "inspired" by FriendFeed, the inevitable would have happened? - Tyson Key

I'm pissed off. I wan to throw away the whole Internet : - DarkBls

Congrats! - Moushumi Kabir

Congrats guys. :) - Meryn Stol

Congratulations. This is awesome for you and for Facebook. - Mike Sego

mommy? - Josh Haley

Hey guys, keep in mind that Facebook is blocked in workplaces across the nation. 250 million casual users commenting about last night's party does not intelligent conversation make. - Hector

FFail - rael

What will happen to my 92 subscribers? - Zachary TG

yes you have just failed at failing, no it is not a double negative. - Bahriye

Tragic. - Shannon

I really can't see how FB would buy FF only to shut it down. There are way too many innovations and features FF has that FB honestly needs. I'm looking forward. - Harry Wolff

congrats! - Jay from ViewPoint

here come the comments - Zachary TG

Congrats? Everybody who's saying Congrats doesn't know what he's saying. Go to hell. - Zio Bonino

Yeah, quizzes are EVIL! - Tarmo Aidantausta

Wow. - Zachary TG

Oh, this does not make me happy. Not at all! I've stayed off of Facebook intentionally and FriendFeed is my favorite social network. This is like when the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. :>( - Larry Hawes

i have stopped using FB for the most part and liked FF alot more. now FF will go the way of FB. screwed again. - Joe Silence is not Santa

Congratulations. Enjoy the new challenges of acquisition, and I'm looking forward to the result! - Wade Dorrell

Berge Gazen beat your score in Mafia Wars - Berge Gazen

Feedface or Facefeed? - Fee501st

FUCK THAT ! [Anyways good job guys ^^] - TiTi

Enjoy your fat paychecks, guys. You've sold us out. - Akiva Moskovitz

Bravo Bret! Been following your successes ever since we had the opportunity to work together on the YellowPages.ca / Google Maps Canada deal. Congrats! - Sebastien

I wished it was Google or even Yahoo!, instead... - Tyson Key

i really hope ff stays as it is. fb is kinder carder while ff is a great tool. - jkkmobile

Facefucked or Fuckfeed? - Matthew DeVries

Not sure what to make of this. It could eiter be a big win or a huge fail. - dorn

It could have been Microsoft, which would have been worse for everyone. :( - Tyson Key

Can I take this opportunity to say I HATE facebook? - Alex Scrivener

seems the only ppl happy here are the ones in the biz or who stand to profit from the merger. - Joe Silence is not Santa

I guess we should get ready to get poked by our supposed friends and have various shit thrown at us? Plus 5,000 requests by apps that nearly all suck. - Joey Gibson

There is zero way this could have been a win for anyone, but the now rich founders. - Matthew DeVries

duh - aybars badur

I HATE facebook - Pedram

this is simply awful. - Joe Silence is not Santa

If I have to go to FB to use FF then it's a lost cause - Randy Pollock

Painful. And apparently I completely misunderstood what FF was trying to accomplish both technically and as an organization. I guess Facebook must have dangled a pretty big bag of money in front of them. - Ken Sheppardson

FriendFeed is Dead! Long Live FriendFeed! :/ - Tyson Key

Awesome. Please fix Facebook email :) http://fudge.org/too-muc... - Jay Cuthrell

Facebook is going to acquire the web! - l'Ego di Gigi

To me, FriendFeed is like Porsche and Facebook a Kia. I'm curious to see which will become which.. - Moushumi Kabir

Oh noes! - Burcu Dogan

Congrats Bret! - Robin Dindayal

I will reserve judgement, i don't like or use FB but if FF maintains it's current goodness i don't care who cuts the checks. - Steve C

I hope this doesn't turn into an APP filled hunk of crap. I love FriendFeed, it was the untouched gem of microblogging. I don't want Mafia Wars invited in my FriendFeed!!! Congrats on the sale though. - Jay Farmington

Where's the "dislike" option? - Gregor Morrill

+1 Gregor - Tyson Key

accipicchia che pessima notizia - massimo mantellini

I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE!!! -_- - Bahriye

I just realized this is like when K-mart bought Sears ... - DarknessFalls

/ponders the meaning of "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being." - Philipp Lenssen

And I will officially be leaving FriendFeed today. - Michael Forian

omg - John μller

@Philipp: until the new masters start flexing their muscles and bringing in their own people to enforce their own vision. - Joe Silence is not Santa

I read the blog post and one statement stands out to me "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being." The time being. This is not just bad, I think it may be #FAIL - berchman

Such great news! - Steve Rubel

Not sure what to think of this. - Matthew Speicher

where is dislike button ? - Osman Üngür

OMG! - Zac Bowling

now where did I put my twitter password - Randy Pollock

big mistake :(( - emresezgin

I suppose it will be called FriendFace? http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Phil Harrison

Congratulations, guys!!!!!!!!! - Jess Lee

Oh. Hell. No. - CannonGod

Oh My God! They Killed FriendFeed! - Tyson Key

so the (once)new facebook homepage was actually the tip of the iceberg? - Onur Cengiz

It's a win/win! congrats all. - Alan Le

Time to roll your own Frienfeed clone. - Fırat Can Başarır

Congrats to you. - Evan Travers

Congratulations. I look forward to seeing what this new partnership means for users. - Aren Grimshaw

FF will surely be integrated into FB at some point? - Kol Tregaskes

damn Ken is spot on! +1000 Ken! - vijay

not good. - Jacque

Oh. My. Gosh. - Enrico Lamperti

Facebook obviously liked FriendFeed a long time ago. Why would they have copied so many features (feed item comments and the "Like" action, to name a couple) otherwise? It was only logical for this to happen eventually. Doesn't mean I like it, but acquisition is part of the game. I have the same feeling I did when SocialThing! was acquired by AOL, though. - Voyagerfan5761

"Relationship Status: It's complicated" comes to mind. ;) - Tyson Key

Wow, I finally sign up, and read this. This could end up being a very bad thing for FF fans: "Your FriendFeed friend just signed up on this poll, would you like to too?" - Brian Bommarito

sad... - Marvin

Congrats guys. And thanks for your continuos effort in helping promote and integrate web services, like mine, Wakoopa. That's awesome and I hope FB gets better because of it. - Robert Gaal

This will give FriedFeed the attention it deserves. Otherwise it would have been a geek thing forever. - Michael Netsch

Will there be a super poke feature launched tomorrow? - Matthew DeVries

aw, this sux!! Congrats to the Friendfeed team though! - acedanger

please don't merge logins!!! please - earlyadopter

They are deceived when they suffer themselves to be drawn after the image of things, without seeking for the true reason of them. - The Complex Days

I hope it works OK to you guys! - Rodrigo Jaroszewski

D: - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

+1 Netsch - I still like FF more but this finally legitimizes FF to the mainstream. - Daniel J. Pritchett

Friend request una beata fava. Pecunia non olet. - Federico Bolsoman

Yeah, I really can't wait to see what value the Ashton Kutchers and Oprahs of the world have to add to FriendFeed. - Akiva Moskovitz

Please tell me this is a delayed April Fools' Day joke. - Rochelle

Facebook & FriendFeed: don't cross the lifestreams! D:< - CannonGod

I guess this means I'll have toget a facebook account after all.... Hope the API stays up and running.... - Roberto Bonini

"Were rich B!tch!" - Chappelle - adolfo foronda

Another good thing: This ups the bar for Wave. - Wade Dorrell

What a bunch of greedy assholes. - Zio Bonino

So ? - Ercan Bülbül

Does this mean that we'll be seeing an influx of webcam spammers, a la Twitter? Along with abolishment of the rooms feature, crappification of the search feature, and more "privacy features" that really just put more nails in the openness coffin? - Tyson Key

:( - Pavlo Zahozhenko

Some people will do whatever their friends request........ - Michael Muller

I really don't see why people would be anything but excited about this Facebook freindfeed deal. Great news as far as I am concerned. The Friend feed team is going to go over facebook and make it that much easier to connect, share... isn't that what the social web is about? - Kevin Murray

I know a lot of people who use Facebook and enjoy it and that's fair enough. It's just not my cup of tea. The chaps from Friendfeed will get rich and the technology will get absorbed in Facebook but I can't see Friendfeed continuing in anything like it's present form. - Paul Nash

Don't be so negative, something good might eventually come of this... - Tarmo Aidantausta

The End. - Kaan Ertürk

Congrats! I know you all must be crazy excited right now. - Michele Lorito-Chase

chance for FriendFeed to become more mainstream... congrats FriendFeed team! - Jeroen De Miranda

Nothing could make me happier than if they integrated the good tools from FriendFeed into Facebook, which is where all my friends are. So a big "yay!" from me. - Ian Betteridge

happy for you guys, but not for all of us - Flavio

congratulations. this is going to be interesting. - Dave Beckett

I think I preferred the non-mainstream version of FriendFeed... - Tyson Key

I'm turning on my black shirt, my black trouser, my black socks, my black shoes. Although I probably must be happy for you. - Ton Zijp

NASTY NASTY BAD BAD. But we'll see... - Daniel Morgan

Game over. - stark

yeah removing feed also works. - Bahriye

Reminds me so much of Last.fm fall... - Marcos

Given that the FriendFeed team has never been anything but awesome & respectful of its community, I think it's unfair for people to assume that the Facebook acquisition is going to change that. - Jess Lee

Why in god's name are we flying over this shark?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! - Matthew DeVries

Facebook is like a giant who listens to nobody. Please keep your attitude but I don't think you will be able to do so. - Burak "cyrus" Bayburtlu

Noooooooo...... - Sung W. Lim

yeahhh - Çağrı Burak

NO - Cristian Conti

Congrats! That sucks. - Rutger Blom

Where is that evidence Jess? - Matthew DeVries

I don't know, Like it? or dislike it? - Ömer Balamir

What happens to all the content that we've created and imported here, and the associated metadata? Will all that disappear into the ether? - Tyson Key

If the FriendFeed guys can make FaceBook useful and responsive again, this seems like a pretty positive step! - Robin Barooah

Robin, the Facebook users don't want that I'm afraid. - Rutger Blom

I have big loss of data concerns. See http://ff.im/6pHjo Is there any way to archive all my FriendFeed posts, likes, comments, and pictures (friendfeed-media.com) off-line? Can some Archive.org-like snapshots of FriendFeed be made (Once a month starting Sept 2009)? I'd like to see the cross-links between my posts & other people's posts, even in 2020. - - Mitchell Tsai

Mitchell: the FriendFeed site is not shutting down. Your data will not go away any time in the near term future - we are committed to our users. - Bret Taylor

I just overheard a coworker mention FriendFeed. This is how the world ends... - CannonGod

kafa sayımı yapıp köyü satan ağalar geldi aklıma - Alper Ömer Esin

Then provide us with a way to easily make a back-up of all of our posts and all of the posts we have Liked and Commented on. - Akiva Moskovitz

Same question as Mitchel Tsai. How do I export my data? I don't want it to be handed off to Facebook. - Zio Bonino

Near term future? - Kol Tregaskes

I don't see good things coming from this. Although I like Facebook, I liked Friendfeed more. Partly because of the environment and the smallness of it. That is now going to be ruined. So, 10-1 odds that Friendfeed will be no more within a year after it gets intergrated into Facebook? - Mathew™ one of a kind

I doubt it Robin. Bret can only give us assurances about the "near future." Here's what I think will happen. Just like Twitter acquired Rael Dornfest and his awesome web services, Stikkit and I Want Sandy vanished (and so did he), Facebook will acquire all the talent from Friendfeed, shut this service down and Facebook will continue to suck. - Jim Is Not Smart

Same question as Mitchel Tsai. How do I export my data? I don't want anything to be handed off to Facebook. And I don't want to lose anything. - Zio Bonino

Congrats obviously, but im not sure about the feeling,, different user groups which can not integrate but collide.. hope there wont be an huge integration in the future. - Yunus Tunak

I'm happy for FriendFeed! But, at the same time a bit worried about the future. Hope you guys convince FB to not be evil too. - Vishal Verma

http://friendfeed.com/sunipey... - sunipeyk

Let's hope this is like Disney's acquisition of Pixar - wherein the Pixar guys ended up in control of the animation studio... - Robin Barooah from IM

Where the f*ck is this option to undo ? - Laurent

Odd that this thread gets modded? - Matthew DeVries

I seriously thought this was a joke. Looks like its not. I don't like it, sorry. - Michael Lynton

Does anyone want to start a bounty to purchase Facebook? ;) - Tyson Key

#FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL - Jacque

Congratulations! - John Craft

can't be, shouldn't be... - Kemal

It is! Change is inevitable, my friends. - Bill Sodeman

Jim, I'm less cynical than you - the FriendFeed founders wouldn't do this just in order to become 'talent' at FaceBook. - Robin Barooah

So will we be playing FriendFeed Mafia Wars at some point in the future? Ugh. - Alex Hellstrom

I feel if I should be wearing a black arm band. But I guess when I think about it.............. - Kevin J Hatton

Oh No! I don't like this at all :( - Peter

WTF! Horrible Bret, this the death of FriendFeed.. you know that right? - CW™

I still think Apple will acquire Facebook, Twitter Friendfeed and Google Twitter. - Thomas Power

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! - Stephen Francoeur

My condolences to all Friendfeeders! RIP! - Evgeni Leshtanski

AAAAwwwful! - carolh

I can't believe it! damn! facebook tos will apply to friendfeed too? should i start to move to another service? why anyone would think that facebook public is friendfeed public?! damn! friedfeed was my favorite! I can't understand this move! they want to kill friendfeed or what? - paula simoes ☃

"I bet I can find 1.000.0000 people who dislike this deal."...Welcome to FriendBook. - Jacque

Well, huge congraulations to you and your team, you deserve every success. To be honest I had presumed this would happen sooner or later - the only business model cool little startups have is to hope they get bought by someone bigger for their brains and technology. I'm going to be in San Francisco in a couple of weeks and was going to stop by your office to bring you a cake and thank you for a great product - maybe I still will if you're still there and there's still a FriendFeed! - Alex Lomas

The FF founders must have know this would be a very unpopular move. Most users I know here are not too fond of FB. - Rutger Blom

damn, damn, damn... - Kemal

One of the sadest news for Internet and web creativity :( - DarkBls

Woah woah... This is real? - Jason Huebel

"Your data will not go away any time in the near term future - we are committed to our users" There's a bit of a contradiction in your statement, Bret. Nice try though. - jcunwired

Now I can break my Internet plan at home. - DarkBls

Grats Bret and the rest of FF. To all the naysayers... Lets see what happens before we start bitching.... - Rasmus Lauridsen

wow!! dazed and confused!! - Roberto Arancibia

I don't hate Facebook, but for sharing things Friendfeed is MUCH MUCH better! - Mathew™ one of a kind

I wonder if that Ben Darnell guy who *just* left the Google reader team knew about this beforehand? Wonder what he's thinking now? (http://friendfeed.com/friendf...) - Daniel J. Pritchett

Just great. I'm certainly not very happy about this. Let's just hope FB doesn't ruin FF. Ugh. - Elena

Who cares? Nothing's gonna change in our pitiful lifes. - bluretina

:| - Amin BZ

This ties in nicely with the fact that you soon will have the opportunity to make your Facebook profiles public and get followers there. - Michael Netsch

чатег номер два - лето ближе с каждым днем

Congrats Bret! this is so great! many congrats!!! - Jason Pollock

That is capitalism for you. Luckely, there still good 'ol usenet. - Peter

Is it April 1st somewhere in the universe? - Robert Felty

#ROFLMAO Is there anything more important than money? It seems NOT #ROFLMAO - Lora Lufark

I don't mean to be negative but there's got to be a win-win logic to each merger&acquisiton. Audience high in only quantity is clearly not a win for friendfeed in the long term by considering its unique selling points. Let's wait and see who will benefit from friendfeed's death now. - ayca

It's all about the money. I would have payed a couple of dollars each month to use FF. - Rutger Blom

#DONTSELLMYFRIENDFEED - sunipeyk

Seriously, what is this? It's like Bret just announced that he's killed all your mothers or something. It could turn out good, it could turn out bad, but at the end of the day, who cares, it's just a website (I mean honestly, come on). I could see it going either way, but in the near term, this is a pretty big win for the FF team, so congrats guys. - Chieze Okoye

OMG! - keso

To be honest, my heart sank a little but I am happy to congratulate you and the team for building such a good brand. Well done. - Kevin J Hatton

I'm just surprised, that's all. I'm not saying this is a bad thing (it certainly isn't for the owners of FF). I'm willing to sit back and see what happens. - Jason Huebel

Wow, I specifically use friendfeed b/c it is not facebook. Sounds great for the friendfeed team, but not necessarily for friendfeed users. - Evan Parker

Born to be sold, like in the old "new economy" era. Remember the late nineties? - Federico Bolsoman

Sudden desire to check out Strands again... but hey, kudos on the incoming $$ for FF team - Leslie Poston

#DONTSELLMYFRIENDFEED - Kemal

This is wisdom. Bracing for Google Wave is a good idea............. - Kevin J Hatton

this is clearly a talent aquisition... why am i not excited about this? could it be because facebook has been blatantly stealing features from friendfeed shamelessly. Likes were clearly not an original facebook idea...realtime feeds is another i could go on... - Tate DA FF MVP

While I'm sad, because I suspect this means the best things about FF will disappear or I'll be forced to use FB in some way, if the buyout was for some awesome amount of money, I can't say I blame 'em for taking an offer -- I would. - Andy Bakun

I came to FriendFeed because I don't like facebook. Now the question is, will facebook become more like friend feed? or will they just take friend feed and turn it into facebook? - Tom Ray

FF could be a good R&D arm for facebook. - Andy Bakun

My biggest concern here is that FB has a completely different audience than FF. - Rutger Blom

Fucking morons. FriendFeed is doomed now. Think logically. Facebook has NO REASON to keep FriendFeed alive. It will simply take FF's best features, suck the life of out of it, then trash FF. Way to go, FirnedFeed, damn. - Jeremy Buff

Fail. - Big K

Big Fail! - OnuRC

This announcement should have been held off until the plans for Friendfeed were known. Regardless, this is *bad* for FF users. Best case: it continues on, but with stagnated feature development. Worst case: it's gone. - tollie williams

wtf ?! - Umut

I need to install "super PUKE" application ! - Bart LePoole

http://ff.im/6pQcu - Bahriye

FFail. - rowlikeagirl

I don't want my FF feed on Facebook :( I use both, but maintain both profiles separate - Leandro Ardissone ⍨

Sigh... Happy for the team if this is what they want, but baffled by the move. The users that are going to leave because of this will make FF a graveyard and the users it gains, well... Hello spam? Sorry, but I don't like it. - Vince DeGeorge from iPhone

JEREMY+++++1 - Ahmet Alp Balkan

Wow! - felix

Well, I guess it is time to dismantle my friendfeed. We all know where this is headed. So, so glad I didn't move all my rss feeds from greader to friendfeed like so many cheerleaders suggested. - Matthew Speicher

Jeremy +1 - F. Batuhan Icoz

so what's next? where should we go? - Flavio

It's been fun here. - Capn' One Eye - adrift

Dang, and just as I was starting to get used to how FF works. FF is useful on it's own. I hope this only improves FF's system, rather than having it disappear into Facebook's wake. - Don Faulkner

My big question to everybody here is this: What are the potential downsides / upsides to this acquisition? I mean on paper I just don't see what the pros OR cons are. I don't care for Facebook but I don't see how them acquiring FF is going to change everything. - Nicholas Kreidberg

furthermore they are 2 different things: I follow a lot of people here that are not in my facebook list, which is for IRL friends! - Flavio

I don't know where to go next either. I had just settled down to make imaginary friends for all my non-FF tweeps, etc. now, I'm not sure if I should bother. - Don Faulkner from IM

I hope friendfeed continues to operate normally but it does not look good. - ashish

integrate best features of ff to fb, then try to innovate in fb if possible, then kill ff... that's it, cheers, all the best. grrrr... - Kemal

niczak has good points. FF & FB aren't exactly competitors, but they aren't orthogonal either. Let's hope FB's smart enough to see the difference and improve both platforms. - Don Faulkner from IM

Nicholas: The upside for Facebook is they just bought an engineering team that's built many of the feature's Facebook's going to need to stay competitive. The upside for FriendFeed's engineering team is $$$ and the ability to build system for a wider audience. FriendFeed's user base is small enough that it'll either get absorbed into Facebook or move on, and FF will become a footnote on the Internet timeline. - Ken Sheppardson

Don, I don't think FB wants to maintain two platforms. - Rutger Blom

first tr.im (heard about it yesterday), now this. I wasn't a heavy tr.im user (yet), but sad to see it go, even if I think url shortening is silly. - Don Faulkner from IM

As FB said they're interested in the people and not in the site, what if the community will keep running FF without its current staff? - Flavio

Congratulations! - Sam Grover

Flavio, that's not very realistic I'm afraid, but I like the idea. - Rutger Blom

rutgerblom, I don't expect they do either, thus my angst over this. - Don Faulkner from IM

if there's a team willing to do it and money, and if we accept some ads as everywhere else, we could make a new FF without FB - Flavio

I have worked hard in avoiding signing up for FB. Does this mean I now automatically will be on FB by virtue of my FF account? - Tony Vota from iPhone

Tony, most likely - Rutger Blom

read carefully: http://blog.socialthing.com/2009... - Kemal

I'll have to go with Flavio's position too. Given this news (plus tr.im and who knows who's next), I'd tend to favor community supported or federated services for things like this in the future. - Don Faulkner from IM

I am purposely not on facebook because I don't really want to talk to people I have not talked to in 20 years. - Andy Bakun

God help us - Johnny

Once again. I'm happy for the FF team. They worked hard and now collect. That's fair. Wonder if they're sitting in a bubble pool drinking champagne while we cry out here ;-) - Rutger Blom

Congrat Bret!! :)) - Cihan Cepni

trouble is (from my perspective), that the philosophies of the two platforms are at odds. FB wants to bring people to the site and keep them there, while FF is a hub, bringing people in and then sending them back out. (That's part of why it's hard for the newcomer to understand, IMHO.) - Don Faulkner from IM

This almost confirms FF will disappear: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - Kol Tregaskes

Great point, Don. - Rutger Blom

+1 Don - Johnny

Does this mean I can throw someone a sheep on FriendFeed now? - Pinksy

I sure hope so, Rutger. I glad for their success too. I just hope there's a next best thing out there for us. - Don Faulkner from IM

Congrats all. Nice work, in spite of any naysaying out there. Keep up the innovation. - Tomas Remotigue

LOLI FFAIL - rael

lame. - andy brudtkuhl

This should be good news for Twitter. - Rutger Blom

post the picture to failblog... - Kemal

Quote «Taylor and Cox say that the Friendfeed product will live on independently, and eventually Friendfeed will be merged into Facebook. But the Friendfeed team is not being kept whole. Some employees will now report to Cox, others to engineering head Mike Schroepfer. In my opinion that means, long term, the Friendfeed product itself is unlikely to be a big priority.¶ But Facebook is... more... - Philipp Lenssen

+1 Kol for the techcrunch article! - Don Faulkner from IM

techcrunch: "Cox agreed, noting that Facebook is focused on being a platform and a service, and not just a destination site." I certainly hope so! - Don Faulkner from IM

Brilliant move by both Facebook and friendfeed. Congratulations!!! I have theories of what they have planned, but I doubt you would verify any of them. This is going to go so well with their SocialTV which they have been developing. I'm so happy for you! - Michael Fidler

Really saddened by this news. - 253 other people

Noooooooooooooooooooooo! - LouCypher

I don't see what's so bad about it since no one knows right now what the outcome will be, everyone is just making assumptions that could possibly be wrong..... Might help just sitting back and seeing what happens first before complaining. - ChaCha Fance

Nooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrghh! I´ve resisted getting a facebook acct for so long... - Thomas Bøhm

ChaCha, if everybody would do that there would not be much discussion would there? This is part of the fun. - Rutger Blom

I wonder how the discussion over on facebook would compare to this? - Don Faulkner from IM

Drat! - Gee Ekachai

congrats guys! - Elad

Don, I doubt there is any discussion going on there. They're too busy throwing quizes at each other. - Rutger Blom

Congrats, FF! I'm approaching the situation with cautious optimism. A lot of my friends only share stuff via the Facebook wall/feed, so if Facebook is able to make their feed more like the FF feed (i.e. good, instead of sucktacular) through this acquisition, it's mostly a win for me in the end. - Brian Chang

At least my Feedburner stats might go back to normal again. - Rutger Blom

/me pokes Rutger. (just getting in practice. ;) - Don Faulkner from IM

Where will we go for the FFunderCats, bacon memes, and angry artists fighting over photo reshares now? ;) - Tyson Key

Don, LOL :-) - Rutger Blom

If anybody has doubts as to what happens to the FriendFeed community or our stored information here, read this statement from Bret (in this thread) "Your data will not go away any time in the near term future - we are committed to our users". Now maybe you can see "whats so bad about it" and curb your optimism. Not good. - jcunwired

Congrats FF. Fix their live feed situation please. - Edward Barnieh

@josh: do you think FB will throw away all the crap people use? various quiz, pick 5 and so on? - Flavio

@jc: our data will not go away in the near future. what will be in few months? in a year? - Flavio

Let's see if you can do a bit better than just not being evil this time around. - Tim Tyler

Wooohooo!!, seems like we are being sent back to "good" old Facebook. Congrats Bret!! - Danli

Looks like I'm going to repeat the same thing many others did. My first reaction was "Oh my..." I have refused to join Facebook due to its philosophy while I have been with FriendFeed from the beginning for its. I'm sad and somewhat apprehensive. - Sean Leather

Congrats. I suppose this means the end of FriendFeed but hopefully a better Facebook. - Harry Toon

Hmm. Interesting. - Ralf Becker

Add me to the fearful group. - beersage

Please say that facebook.com will be shutting down, and the combined company will still be called FriendFeed... I bet it won't happen, though. - Tyson Key

"Regarding FB/FF - Here's how it's [probably] going to work. You will most likely have an account merge, all of the services FriendFeed supports will now be aggregated on Facebook, and all of your FriendFeed friends will be in a "list" on Facebook. The FF Groups will become Facebook Groups. The FF lists will become Facebook Lists." http://ff.im/6pNxq - Ozgur Uckan

Nothing like an early retirement payout :) - Owen Greaves

Congrat Bret - Nimaa

Panic attack. Congratulations, however! :) - Irrational homeophobe

Congratulations Bret. For me this merger makes a lot of sense. Facebook will provide the "quantity" of users, which friendfeed deserves :). - Karthick R

:( - goodmachine

FriendFeed + Facebook... Oh noes FriendFace is coming (http://www.youtube.com/watch...)! Now sorry for that link, and seriously, thanks for your work, guys. Please don't let the spirit of FriendFeed to be blown away =) - Anton

СУКИ-СУКИ-СУКИ!!!! - Viktor

hey, that is great guys! interested to see how you integrate. - Brian Walsh

Mind blown. Never expected this. I'm also disappointed, yet optimistic at the same time. - Angus Burton

Kinda curious to see how this will all pan out...although i wouldnt want the friendfeed stuff just integrated into facebook. I feel like im among a group of people who i genuinely share interests with here...dont want to lost that. - Cassidy

Best case: Facebook will continue to support and develop FriendFeed. Worst case: this is great news for Amplifeeder. - David Gaw

aieeeeeeeeeee - Richard Akerman

FAIL. Facebook is the new myspace, and now friendfeed will become a part of that BS. Can't say I'm too surprised because eventually we all sell out. BTW I don't see friendfeed lasting more than the rest of this year, if that. The good news is that we can all be subjected to add 'Are you related to a monkey?' and Blackjack apps while having annoying personal ads on our profile pages. Fuck this shit. - Tomy Thomson

Well done, well deserved, I hope FB's means and infrastructures empower your guys to even better things. But if quizzes appear in "my" friendfeed, evil things will haunt you and your descendents for 3 generations. - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

:( - Eph Zero

Well done Bret! - Alemsah Ozturk

♪ ♪ This is the end.... beautiful friends ♪ ♪ - All for design

Well, I don't see the point of sticking around here if I have accounts in both and this is going to get swallowed whole into Facebook anyways. Put simply, goodbye. - Micah Collard

It was fun while it lasted. - Mr. Gunn

NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! This place will be just like twitter... - The Count Rob

Congrats to the FF team - you've built a wonderful product! - Michael Nielsen

Whattttttttttttttttttttt??? - Nibi

The social community that has been behind FriendFeed creators have built a wonderful product. Only problem is, we don't have Zuck's checkbook :( - jcunwired

friendfeed is a beautiful product, only god knows what facebrook will do to it. Hopefully the ability to upload files (such as mp3s) will not be removed. Zuck is a tool. - Nibi

Congratulations. I'm sorry to say that I don't plan to move with you. - Lars Juhl Jensen

I don't like this.... - Zeki Pehlivan

"Like" to follow this thread. Not because I like what happened. I'm horrified. FF could disappear now. - Kamilah Gill

Same here, Kamilah. - Tyson Key

If FriendFeed had invented the "don't like" button, today would have been the day to press it. - Vishal Verma

and I just bought BuddyFeed for my iPhone this weekend. :( - Don Faulkner from IM

Oh, joy, Facebook's privacy policy is upon us! - Joris

WTF?? NOOOOO!!! Why do such good things have to be ruined by greed? Screw Facebook, and goodbye Friendfeed. - Jason R. Hunter

congratulations! - Loic Le Meur

Facebook is lucky to have such a talented group of people ... Congratulations FriendFeed! - Rob Kurrus

doesn't look like a bad joke, better be for the good then, but... Well congrats anyway guys, you did something AWESOME now let's see where Mark takes it - Dobromir Hadzhiev

That's too bad. Liked the openness if FriendFeed, and the lack crap that is on Facebook. Once FriendFeed dies, it will be Twitter only. - Mike D.

Congrats, but concerned that FriendFeed and its tools may disappear. Merging the tools with Facebook seems impossible. - Mike Reynolds

Congrats guys (and gals) ! - Benjy Weinberger

So, what does the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook mean to us, users of both websites: Can I make a friend request from FriendFeed, and be approved for both, on one click - Reyna Carlos

Exciting news guys. I am actually looking forward to your collaboration with / work for FB. No matter what people may or may not like about FB, it does succeed in reaching a more "diverse" audience compared to most other Web 2.0/social web companies. Paired with your team's excellence in realizing features that succeed in pleasing the geekiest of Web 2.0 affine individuals, I think you are steering towards exciting waters :) - Mustafa K. Isik

*heart sinks* actually a bit of shock - I think that Facebook will leave Friendfeed as-is but I don't think there is hope for future innovation in Friendfeed since their best superstar team members will be pulled onto 'more important' Facebook issues... - Pon

And the metastasizing, walled-garden that is Facebook, continues to eat the Web. Bring on Google Wave. - Christopher A Carr

:-) + :-( very happy for the team, huge achievement, hoping to see export of innovation but not a shut down of this unique community and location - Majento

There goes FriendFeed down the toilet. well I WAS having a good day. until hearing this crap! - Scratch5150

Congratulations, and best wishes for your future together! :-) - Ruchira S. Datta

Wow, I was beginning to use Friendfeed as my defacto social site...Facebook is more for real life friends. They'll just take what makes Friendfeed great, add it to Facebook and slowly kill this site. - Manuel Mas

What is the big deal? I think it'll make FF bigger and better. You should be happy about that! - orionstarr

Somebody has to got pay for it. - orionstarr

I am disappointed. I don't want to have to go to Facebook to do what i do here. I can not imagine they will port over all the features we enjoy here. We lose a lot for only a slight benefit to Facebook. - Robert

It could be worse, myspace could've bought them lol... - orionstarr

Awful news for users but congratulations to you guys. Ideally, FB will run FF as a distinct service but I'm not hopeful. I don't want the diversity and noise that facebook brings - people doing quizzes on which movie star they resemble and playing silly games. I also wanted to keep my day to day social activity distinct from the targeted information and discussion I use FF for. - Rajit

Only just started taking a serious look at FF after hearing acquisition by FB. Sounds like I'm laggard rather than a leader in use of web 2.0 - ManojRanaweera

I think how Pon said it is what I'm feeling: *heart sinks*. - Andy Bakun

Congratulations, i am really happy for you guys!! :) - Mona Nomura

I'm not a Facebook fan, but can't begrudge the FF gang their chance to reap the rewards for all their hard work. However, it would be a shame if FB ruins the good thing we all have going here. - Ken Morley

So what now? a name change too? FriendFace? FeedBook? FaceFeed? god Facebook really sucks. oh well. Adds anyone? - Scratch5150

Congrats to the FF team... I hope the service doesn't disappear into a fold of light and heat. - Brandon

if all the things that make FF great are brought to FB then I'll be happy to use it - Mike Chelen

The community won't be there. Been on FB longer than any other, don't have nearly the relationship or sense of community there that I do here or on Twitter. - Karoli

Karoli: that is due to the effectiveness of the FF platform and interface, which help to join conversations and find interesting people more so than FB does - Mike Chelen

Mike: I suspect that FB wants FF for the search possibilities, not the community-building aspects. But we'll see. - Karoli

i guess congrats are in order, but I'm going to now go and remove everything I have that feeds into FF, and I have to ask -- do I have any rights over my archive? I have a private feed, and I have no interest in offering up my lifestream to the FaceBook data-miners. I hope the FF folks get what they hope for out of the deal, but my FriendFeed experience has been effectively killed. - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

I just learned about the FF acquisition by Facebook - WOW~! Congratulations Bret, Paul and FF team!! holy cow ........Mooooooooo! Where's the FF Acquisition Party? :) - Susan Beebe

Friendfeed after Facebook http://ff.im/6q5EY - Ozgur Uckan

Wow thats cool! - AbZ from Nambu

RT @alirizaesin FriendFeed, R.I.P. Home tweet home!.. - Ozgur Uckan

Congrats to facebook. Now, Twitter is the best. - Ebru Baranseli

Congratulations to the FriendFeed guys on the Facebook Acquisition. Not a big fan of Facebook, so I hope my favorite Uber Aggregator, Realtime Social, Microblogging site of awesomeness is not entirely absorbed into the Facebook infrastructure. I wait with baited breath to hear what "normally for the time being" means ;). - Tom Horn

Can I now have comments propagate in both directions as far as Facebook/Friendfeed is concerned? - Piaw Na

*checks date*. Damn .. not April 1st, must be for real. While I'm happy for the FF team, since I guess this is what they wanted (congrats guys!), I can't help but think this is the beginning of the end for a great service and a vibrant community. There are reasons I don't spend any time on Facebook and do spend lots of time on FF, and some kind of "FF integrated into Facebook" just won't cut it. I hope this service will live on for at least a few more years. - Andrew Perry

Gratz to the FF team but as a user I'm not completely happy. In short, I like the FF team/product much more than I like the FB team/product. Best of luck to all. - timepilot

Dang! I've killed another site! Sorry guys... FF was doing fine until I started coming here again! Same with Pownce! Went there and liked it... went underground for a spell... came back and still liked it, so I stayed. A few months later... BOOM! I have the touch! (I'm thinking I'll start devoting a lot of time to Twitter... maybe I can kill that one, too!) - Mark "DerBingle" J

Все, блядь, пиздец! - ǝuǝƃnǝ

WOW - very happy for all of you :-) - Kishore Balakrishnan

Bret, congrats on the acquisition. You guys put in a lot of hard work to create this community. I just hope you learned the mistakes Pownce made, Jaiku etc, and ensured that you didn't sell out your community, but that you helped it evolve into something as great as this into something better. Good luck in future endeavors! - Mike Lewis

Oh yeah? Ok: take tour money and go to the hell. :-((( - Claude LaFrenière

Yay for you guys, I mean that seriously, I 'like' what this means for you personally, but -1000000 cool points for doing it with FB. Sad day. - Threepwood

Karoli: FF search is so useful because it is integrated with all the other great features that help to find relevant content. if FB wants to have a similar capability, they must also develop the underlying architecture. - Mike Chelen from IM

Sucks big time. - Drea

Sadness - Yasin Jason

I can't believe this happened - Johnny

Suggested name: FailFriend. :-((( - Claude LaFrenière

Friend facebooks feed (FFF) - Filiz Koyuncu

«Experience shows that those who never trust anyone will never be disappointed.» Leonardo da Vinci - Claude LaFrenière

So what exactly is going to happen? Is FF eventually going to disappear? Will it merge into the Facebook interface? Please don't do that - Ethan

Gimme my OPML export - Sriks7

Money is the root of all evil - Shakeel Mahate

shakeel, the reasons for friendfeed to join facebook are probably about other things besides money, since many of the FF staff left high-paying jobs to join in the first place - Mike Chelen from IM

Well I've thought about it, and I'll stick around until I start seeing that crappy Facebook logo, I only have 71 subscribers here, I hate to do it but I'll probably scrap the whole thing and start over somewhere else. still can't believe that shit. - Scratch5150

Congrats, team! It's bittersweet, though. - Anne Bouey

So now we will have FriendFeed blocked at work too. Darn. - Mark Scrimshire

"Your data will not go away any time in the near term future" is not exactly inspiring for the long term for those of us who came here to escape Facebook for a) it's walled garden and b) privacy concerns. Nice for the Founders to make a pile of cash but for the many of us, it feels like we got sold down the river. Sad. - Sally Church

This is tragic. Tragic. Tragic. - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

cacarr: updates for FB have progressed rapidly in the past, count how many months since new features such as api calls and site redesigns have have been implemented - Mike Chelen from IM

I can't believe it either. I feel as if — for the moment — I am lost in the wilderness, adrift. - roamin

Congratulation to the FF team! You guys deserves this. I just hope that Facebook does not change the directions of FF. - Vinko

congrats, I'm happy for friendfeed... - amelia arapoff

Congrats you guys, well deserved. - Shey, Jamaican of FF

Congrats Bret! Hope the transition goes smoothly for you guys. - Cristo

I hope this means better integration: liking here will auto-like on fb and such :D if that's the case, I won't mind the ads *wink* *wink* - 'Like' robot (frɐnc)

Franc, cant stand facebook ads in their current format, hope they will be fixed eventually :P - Mike Chelen from IM

Grats, dont spend it all in one place..... - Robert Higgins

congrads. I think it will be good for BOTH companies. - Logan Lindquist

boo. - kelly

The Borg has struck. Alas. Prepare to be assimilated. (Will FB add my FF subscriptions to my FB friends list?) - Dennis Jernberg

Boo - Amit Morson

Logan: What do you mean by "both" companies? - Christopher A Carr

Now that you guys have $$$ you should swap out the not so very pleasing default avatar! - See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

Hope you guys enjoy your new jobs. Meanwhile we get to watch a great alternative to Facebook with a promising future go down the tubes. A really sad and unfortunate day. - Todd Holmes

BOO! Hiss! Mondays really do suck. - Dale

Congratulations to all the FriendFeed team. I hope you'll be able to keep the FriendFeed spirit up at Facebook. Kudos for all the great work you've been doing. - Paul Papadimitriou

Congrats and good luck.. - Can Koklu

Thanks for all the fish. Saving the so long... for now. - abacab

Goodbye FF, it was wonderful.. - Francesco Cugurra

I use FriendFeed and Facebook so it would be awesome to see FF features in Facebook. Congratulations! - krzychukula from IM

judging by the nearly 600 comments as i type this, including my own earlier one, FF could use a Don't Like button as well. or would, if we were going to be using it much longer. - kelly

Nice, i like to wish you all the best for your new job (and it's really hard, i know). I'm happy, but... don't let die FF!! - Seo (ignobile) Guru

Hope FriendFeed remains open. Love the spirit of FF - Bernaldo Barrena

Seriously, what a coincidence! Just on Saturday I claimed to be both twitter- and facebook-free. I loved FF product and personally helped to bring at least a dozen of my friends into the community. I'll stick around for a while though. - ǝuǝƃnǝ

This deal makes sense, now fb developers do not need to figure out how ff does it because they can just ask! Congrats facebook and ff! - Garin Kilpatrick

I suppose Facebook had to do it, with Twitter and Google Wave as competitor... - Alexander Kruel

обычные дела. http://www.youtube.com/watch... - ǝuǝƃnǝ

Congratulations Friendfeed :D - paniaguai

Ok. I'll quit friendfeed, so. Goodbye. Ciao - valerio fiandra from iPhone

I am noticing a lot of people going to re-esumate their lifestream.fm account now! - Flavio

I don't think FB acquiring FF is bad. But I don't think it's good either. We'll see. :-) In the meantime, keep up the good work! - Alexander Gieg

Oh shit. Love FF, hate FB. I'll NEVER, EVER merge my two accounts. I'd rather unsub from both than merging. I'll wait for the developments, and in the meantime look for an alternative. - Alliandre (la Ippe)

How long until ex-FriendFeed employees start jumping ship from Facebook? I wonder... - Tyson Key

Thomas Power still believes that Facebook/FF/Linkedin (2010) will be acquired by Apple (2011) and this is a transitional acquisition in the SN market cycle. The world is shifting to Mac, iTunes, iPhones and FB own the next generation. Apple have $29bn of cash on deposit price is not an issue. Google must jump for twitter while MS fiddle in the sticks with Yahoo. BillG will be back at the MS helm 2012. - Penny Power

:( Happy for FF people, sad for the service. Was going to move from fb to ff this week.. - Martynas

congrats! - Ronald

thts good!so i can workin both in my Fb online next - Arini dewi muchtaram

Flavio: never heard of lifestream.fm before, but I'm going to go check it out. I'll reiterate, though, that I'm now shy of any service like this, since it can disappear just as it's getting good. I heard about sweetcron.com last night (via http://ff.im/6pR2w). Maybe it's time to move from centralized to distributed again. - Don Faulkner

Just finished setting up my lifestream.fm at http://lifestream.fm/dfaulkner. Lifestream does what it says, and no more. FF's search blows lifestream away. FF is more flexible about adding source feeds, but lifestream does fine without the flexibility I suppose. FF still wins, or would, if I thought it would be sticking around. :P - Don Faulkner

Must See - Hitler blows up over Facebook / FriendFeed - http://friendfeed.com/dffrnt... - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Dave, I'm not happy. That video gave me some much needed comic relief .. after waking up to this news. - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

good for you, bad for us - Zachary Earl Strader

I also hate facebook, not because of their silly quizzes and pokes, but because I suspect they would like to maintain massive user base as the determining factor in choosing a social network. I would love to switch to orkut as I use so many other google services, but I can't because nobody else does. That should not be my criteria.... I thought friendfeed would try to make social networks work together. - Ru Viljoen

I don't understand why everyone is so negative about the situation? - orionstarr

@orionstarr - it's like Starbucks buying your neighborhood coffee shop and saying it still cares about the customers. You know it's just not going to be the same as what you've come to love. - Robin Barooah

Presumably FF will go on the back burner - and the team will try and "fix" Facebook. - Tim Tyler

sad, sad, sad. - scott willeke

Congratulations! That's huge. I hope all is well. - Juan Bruce

bad bad bad - kakilang

bye bye friendfeed! - Jonathan Crossland

Why-eee!!! ??? What next? - Wayne Lewis

I've watched Facebook morph from a relatively organised and well implemented social networking tool into the hulking mess it is now - and I really, really hope that a similar thing doesn't happen here with the inevitable changes this will bring about. - Leslie Moore

Come on guys, out with the long-term game plan, this is tedious. - Andrew Eglinton

NOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, I mean Cool. - sofarsoShawn

Teach Facebook how to be FriendFeed. Let the small but fast teach the big but slow. Don't forget what Paul says - don’t be evil. - whatidiscover

Shirley Wu

FriendFeed after Facebook | Sean Percival's Blog - http://www.seanpercival.com/blog... (via http://friendfeed.com/ozuckan...)

FriendFeed after Facebook | Sean Percival's Blog - http://www.seanpercival.com/blog/2009/08/10/friendfeed-after-facebook/ (via http://ff.im/6q5EY)

August 10 - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Kuhn, Noah Gray, laura and 5 other people liked this

All too accurate, I fear. - Bill Hooker

Jonathan Eisen

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...

August 10 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Jean-Claude Bradley, Ian Holmes, Peter Miller and 4 other people liked this

oh wow. I hope there's no forced merging of accounts / friendships - Michael Kuhn

7 more comments

The times, they are a'changin'. - Thomas Sharpton

Mmm... I'm not sure I like this news... - Egon Willighagen

Early doors. Time will tell. - Graham Steel

Oh well - good while it lasted. - Matthew Todd

+1 Matthew - Richard Akerman

+1 Matthew - I'm also already considering where to move - Lars Juhl Jensen

Going, going, gone. Subscribed directly to everyone's imported services and unsubscribed from everyone on FriendFeed. - Lars Juhl Jensen

There are other "lifestream + discussion" services. I used profilactic (http://www.profilactic.com/) for a while, but it became very slow. I like storytlr too (http://neilfws.storytlr.com/home...), but it's a small, hobby project, unlikely to last. Maybe the NPG web team should get to work :-) - Neil Saunders

Lars Juhl Jensen › Likes