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I am voting for everyone else's panels @sxsw Why? That way I can drink more beer with @laughingsquid instead of waking up early for panels.

August 17 from iPhone - Comment - Like - Share

Susan Beebe, Mark Krynsky, sean percival and 11 other people liked this

SXSW is passé. The new cool is to just stay home and drink instead. :) - Cristo

18 more comments

I'm happy to play Stand In Scoble for you if you want to fly me over :P - Johnny Worthington

I'm with Chris on this one. :) - Alex Scoble

Johnny I might need to take you up on that! - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Robert: You could send Johnny out to SXSW for you with a camera and radio the same way Letterman used to send Rupert Jee out around NY - Ken Sheppardson

Ken: will Johnny get a hangover so I don't have to? That is a great idea! - Robert Scoble from iPhone

so a series of breakfast panels are out of the question? - michael sean wright

michael I did one this year. On Sunday no less. That was very difficult! - Robert Scoble from iPhone

can't imagine... we always start around noon but go until late... it's the sxsway - michael sean wright

I wouldn't mind experiencing sxsw. I can stay home and drink anytime. - jcunwired

jcunwired, so you're going then? I will go to Zanzibar and the Seychelles instead. Then, with a drink in one hand, I will log onto friendfeed to see what lameness is occurring at SXSW. - Cristo

I don't mind the hang over... and lord knows I'm up for a bit of camp self-embarrassment :) - Johnny Worthington

If you could OD on camp self-embarrassment, Johnny would do it. - Cristo

Cristo: I could host a session on that! Title: "Pink wigs, Paul Carr, and Vodka: a new and embarrassing way to get into TechCrunch." - Robert Scoble from iPhone

how many panels did you agree to be on? - Rachel Clarke

I'd go to keep Johnny outta trouble, besides I have to keep selling my ideas to smart developers :) - Mark Essel from iPhone

The Gingerman has moved, but something tells me we will be ending up there again quite a bit at SXSW 2010. - Scott Beale

feel free to vote for mine, Robert :D http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas... I promise with this panel there's not going to be any boredom. .. or you could stay up late drinking. - Valeria Maltoni

sounds like a solid plan to me - sean percival

I might go to SXSW next year! which panels should I got to?! - Susan Beebe

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 661 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

516 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 dead

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 dead

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 dead

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 dead

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 dead

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 dead

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 dead

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 Hearts FF

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. - Doug

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!! - DanDan

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! :) - Bleys

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 Jepsen

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 Dillinger ☼

I can't believe this happened - Johnny

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

Friend facebooks feed (FFF) - uyuyang-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

Time to say goodbye to FriendFeed. - René Fischer

FUCK. The internet just lost a good service. Friendfeed is dead - Ryo / Fuck Facebook

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

Robert Scoble

I wonder how many people and companies are changing their passwords and policies this morning because of #twittergate and http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... ? I know I am, I was doing a few of the stupid practices that caught Twitter.

July 19 - Comment - Like - Share

carl morris, Robin Whitson, siggimus and 77 other people liked this

Does anyone have a good blog post for how to come up with strong password names and policies? - Robert Scoble

71 more comments

yep, https://www.grc.com/passwor... - Mark

taht's great, I am also willing to change my password. - Madhav Tripathi

1Password on the Mac... - Holger Eilhard

not for corp use but for personal use 1Password is perfect - Mike Bracco

Holger: beat me to it :) - Mike Bracco

Mike: Sometimes I'm faster. Rarely, but happens :-) - Holger Eilhard

I will write a blog post about it. - Madhav Tripathi

Robert on the network side of things there are programs that generate strong passwords. But you can develop a "feel" for it. I have to create them all the time. Just don't use "memory aids" they lead to social hacks - Melanie Reed

You're okay if you don't use 3rd party apps to login to Twitter, right? - Steven E. Streight

I like this one. http://www.pctools.com/guides... - Logan Lindquist

Sorry, should have linked to the TechCrunch article about how the hacker broke into Twitter: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - Robert Scoble

Steven: this isn't about your Twitter account's security. It's about your security on the Web. - Robert Scoble

Here's some password policies you might find interesting: http://www.nersc.gov/nusers... , http://www.comptechdoc.org/indepen... , http://www.sans.org/resourc... - imabonehead

I have no need because my passwords have always been 12+ characters, include caps, random characters, and numbers. I'm sure most people that use FF are the same way. The engineers I work with bitch about my choice of passwords all the time. - coldbrew

The sad reality is any password can be hacked. It's just a matter of time as in attrition. But you can make it harder for them with strong passwords - Melanie Reed

Yeah, we've always tried to make sure our hosting customers understand how important it is create good passwords, but many still use bad passwords, hopefully all of this recent press will scare them into using better passwords. Most people don't care about their password until something bad happens to them. It's similar to people who ignore making backups and then find out the hard way. - Scott Beale

I use Lastpass.com to generate and save passwords. - mrshl

Just pick a couple good ones that you can use for different things. Practice typing them so you can remember the keystrokes easier. The more you use them the easier it will be to remember. Use keepass or FFox to keep track of them. - Logan Lindquist

1Password hands down for ease of use and strong password creation on OSX and iPhone - Jerry Schuman

I wrote this regarding Twitter, security & the cloud: Here's my thoughts http://www.thetechnewsblog.com/2009... #twittergate - Jim Connolly

Melanie: it's the social hacks that will catch the most people. Not the strength of the passwords. Notice that he didn't need to guess the passwords, he just needed to use the ecosystem against itself. - Robert Scoble

http://esciencenews.com/article... - imabonehead

I agree 100% about 1Password, one of the best Mac apps out there: http://agilewebsolutions.com/product... - Scott Beale

Roboform on Windows. Otherwise 1Password. - Herb Hernandez

Very few. People and companies generally don't make policy changes until they're bitten themselves. - Darren

Good point about social engineering, Scoble. - coldbrew

I ended up writing this http://blog.siliconverse.com/2009... - Ruchit Garg

Robert: yes. its the easiest hack to employ - Melanie Reed

Or there's a business requirement . e.g. Customers inquire about policies based on what they've read in the news and impose requirements on their partners. - Darren

If you need cross-platform then I'd look at http://www.keepassx.org - Jerry Schuman

1 - Mark

Unfortunately most companies don't change passwords until they have too, the IT department doesn't want to deal with the calls when someone can't remember there password. - Kim Landwehr

my 14 character alphanumeric pass for my gmail account was hacked about 2mo ago. After fixing, Ive gone and changed all passes; & none of them are of the same ilk. my twitter account is the simplest; cause i care less if its hacked. - clarke thomas

The best thing to happen to corporate security was the public insecurity of Microsoft software int the late part of the 90s and earlier in the decade. - Darren

I use Roboform Password Manager to navigate and automatically login to websites using complex passwords: http://www.eenmanierom.nl/wachtwo... (Dutch post but Google Translate is nearby). - Patrick Mackaaij

a lot, I hope..... - Alex Griffiths

FTR, I use Keepass (hosted on sourceforge). - coldbrew

I had to this week my XBL account was hacked. - Dylan Richardson

I had to change everything and cancel 2 cards. - Dylan Richardson

I use GRC to gen and never use anything less than 20 chars unless the site doesn't support that length. Sometimes I use the first 20 in a 64 bit key, sometimes I use the last 20, sometimes I pick the middle 20. Sometimes I use 21, 22, 23, 19 char length. I also lie on all reminder questions. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

I use a hosted version of clipperz (http://clipperz.com/), totally random passwords, web accessible from anywhere and hosted on my own server. - Justin Yost

same here, Justin. I use lastpass which generates random passwords, and has one master password, which is a very secure one. - Tim Hoeck

A couple of months ago, my gmail was hacked. They then quickly went and changed my Itunes account over to another email and started buying iphone apps. In the about an hour and a half, that they had control over my email they spent almost $1000. Luckily they made the mistake of changing the name and language on my account. I don't use the email much anymore but g reader so I spotted it.... more... - Rasmus Lauridsen

for years, private corporate systems have had security measures like password strength policies for a domain, password age policies, secure connection requirements, logon policies that deny multiple logons, locking out user accounts after multiple password failures, etc. etc. etc. this incident with Twitter is a huge wake-up call. - Karim

What first caught my eye was this article was written by Nik Cubrilovic. I had wondered what had happened to him, and hoped everything was well with him. - Lloyd Budd

Yeah, Nik was in the TechCrunch office when I was there the other day. I figured a big story was underway cause Arrington told me to stop wasting Nik's time and to go bug the interns. :-) - Robert Scoble

Making an awesomely strong password wouldn't have prevented this attack. It was using the same awesomely strong password that made the attack possible. And who hasn't done that? There's just too many apps that require passwords out there. - marziah

I typically use KeePass to generate as strong a password as I can. I try to keep passwords to a minimum of 20 characters and use letters, numbers and symbols...some sites allow this some do not. If there is a password character max I will use that max (within reason). The problem I have is with some of the accounts I want to be able to access from my Blackberry. Having a 50 character... more... - Sean Brady

I use RoboForm to create all my passwords. I have them backed up and honestly couldn't type one out if I tried, they all are 14-16 chars long - George Handlin

+1 George. A good pw generator like RoboForm or 1password can save you a lot of grief later on. - Bill Sodeman

interesting experiment, make accounts at free websites and have really awful passwords and see how long it takes to get hacked! - Mark

I agree with Sean Brady, makes it tough entering on the blackberry. Especially how sometimes it will cap the first character and when it's masked, makes it even tougher. Wish there was something I could host on my own server that would work with all my machines (Win/Mac) and my phones. I don't like the idea of storing on some hosted service. Thinking of trying RoboForms hosted service since they are trusted and I've gained personal trust for the application. - George Handlin

It makes me anxious not knowing my password is for a particular site... so I've always been wary of things like 1password or roboform. I also need something that I can pull up from any computer, which rules out 1password. I've heard good things about supergenpass - Mark Philpot

Take a look at Clipperz then, if you can get to the internet you can get to Clipperz (http://www.clipperz.com/) - Justin Yost

Justin - @jtyost2 - I just checked out www.clipperz.com for the password mgmt, looks promising, but wish there were better integration w/ Firefox somehow. It's pretty cumbersome to get started. - Alex Schleber

Yeah that is a drawback. - Justin Yost

thanks 4 reminder should do it now arrgh!! as we speak!! - polou/indigo_bow

Robert due to all the virus issues we went to a more secured password format 3 months ago. We use a minimum of 8 characters numbers letter and mixed case password plus you can not use your name. We force our users to change their passwords every 3 months. - Rob Cairns

I think for a security policy to be effective it has to be secret... - Alexandros Georgiadis

KeePass (Win) and KeePassX (cross platform) is excellennt! Strong public encryption and publicly available source code. I would love to go with LastPass, they have a beautiful cross platform syncing solution, but since they are closed source (for now) I'm holding off switching to their product. - Daniel Chow

I stopped using the same password years ago. To help me keep up with the various passwords, I have been using KeePass on Windows, Windows Mobile and OS X for several years; I'm waiting for iKeePass to become available. - MiniMage TKDteacher of FF

http://www.yubico.com/home... for hardware PW protection, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US... FireFox addon LastPass is for software app, https://www.grc.com/passwor... for GRC's ultra High Security (put it on a usb flash and copy paste), http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2008... geeks know everything! - Rich_Weaver

Yep the 'ecosystem' is undoubtedly insecure. I believe this type of hacking also has elements of social engineering to it. I dislike the "secret questions" as today when most people's personal information is transparent online what purpose do those questions serve, except to weaken security? Can we please opt out of dumb security questions... someone start a petition or something! - ASKJDOG

Great Post, I learned more about improving my security in 15 minutes than I would have at a 2 day seminar. :) - Robert Higgins

I hope the lasting legacy of twittergate is better security thanks to articles like this one. - Stephen Mack

I use http://passwordmaker.org/ for most of my password, it means I only need to remember a single password and it generates a unique password for each site I use (by hashing my password with the url). For the remaining sites, I use http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ and dropbox to sync my password database across machines. - Wilka Hudson

I see many people using/recommending password generator sites. I also recommend these, but one day I thought - what if the password generators are hacked? --> http://robotterror.com/site... - Robert J Taylor

Password Maker (the first link) isn't just a password generator site - I use it as a FireFox plugin. It's also open source, so if you're really unsure about the safety of it you can have a look at the code yourself. I realise that's not a very good answer for an non-coders, but it does mean that if it was hacked *somebody* would notice and it would be all over blogs like Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com/blog/ - Wilka Hudson

Also, for you those of using Firefox - you should look at this: http://cubicledenizen.blogspot.com/2008... - Wilka Hudson

I think unless we develop somethig better than passwords we will never fix the problem. Using different strong passwords is good but it's no better than locking a cycle up outside a store, they just ensure that only dedicated people hack your acount/steal your cycle, which in general are the worst people to hack your account. - Darren Rollett

Some people on here have informed the world what their password policy is and what tool they use to generate passwords. If this had been a conversation down the pub then probably not a problem but if I want information on high value passwords FriendFeed would probably be the place to go due to the people who use the system. - Darren Rollett

Nobody has mentioned https://mashedlife.com - it uses a bookmarklet to log you into your sites. That way you can use anything for the password. Cliperz looks like a similar system. - Daniel Siva

Robert Scoble

My rules for using FriendFeed's new feature of turning off comments:

July 13 - Comment - Like - Share

SpionKopRed, Thomas Ho, Tristan Seligmann and 58 other people liked this

1. If the mob is going against Mike Arrington, my comments will remain open. (Here's the details behind the new features: http://friendfeed.com/bret... ). - Robert Scoble

82 more comments

2. If the mob is going against me, my comments will close. - Robert Scoble

Good to know! :) - Jigar Mehta

booooo - Daniel Lizio-Katzen

Ahh, don't you like features that can be used to control mobs? - Robert Scoble

LOL - Josh Haley

Too funny. - Jim Graham

sounds fair - Matt Soreco

I'm just kidding, of course. - Robert Scoble

Personally I will not participate in threads where comments are turned off :-) - Todd Hoff

Let's test this! Mike Arrington is pretty bad! - Bryce Montgomery

lol - iTbay

Bryce: more than four people have to agree with you to be considered a mob. - Robert Scoble

They're getting their torches and pitchforks. Give it time. - Bryce Montgomery

@Bryce - mike arrington is really cool - almost god like. Really. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

i love the comment feature. but the question is, isn't this just like wave? - Daniel Lizio-Katzen

I honestly have no opinion on Arrington - Bryce Montgomery

Daniel: except we can use it today. - Robert Scoble

yep ;-) - Daniel Lizio-Katzen

@Scoble - I am shocked you would say this, hopefully you are kidding. - Dave Hodson

Guys, pls don't start the "Friendfeed mob" meme again ... boring - Dave Hodson

oh yeah, and it's ≠ to google - Daniel Lizio-Katzen

Dave: of course I am kidding. And, if I'm not, all I will be doing is encouraging the mob to head over to your comments. - Robert Scoble

Because I can't turn off your comments. - Robert Scoble

Scoble is armed with comments and he's not afraid to use them - Keith Barrett from Android

Loving it! - Jannifer @wordsforliving

Haha! I was expecting a deep philosophical rule system for this. - Adam Jackson

@Adam me too.... where's my top 10 list. - Bill Grant

I've been spending too much time online when things like this make me laugh aloud at my screen. At least no one's here to witness it. - Enrique Gutierrez

I am hoping everything will go on just as before. No comment closings - Mark

Bill: the only time I'd turn off comments is if spammers started to figure out how to take over here. - Robert Scoble

Do the comments need to be pithy to qualify as "mobby"? - Chris Sparno

What if the mob starts cursing his holiness the Pope, or music icon Billy Idol? Will you close them then? - Mitch

Fuck the Pope. Better add blasphemy to that list - Mark

Why would someone spam friendfeed comments? What would be the point there is no one here right? (yep, spammers no one here at all move along and go to your mass email client) - Luke Kilpatrick

Billy Idol, now that's just unfair. Where is my torch fuel. - Chris Sparno

Where do you find the people you blocked? - Myrna

Myrna: I don't know of a place you can see that. - Robert Scoble

I LOL'd - Bwana ☠

Doesn't turning comments off in FriendFeed make it Twitter? - Tony from fftogo

So can you make a test post Robert to test the new feature with us - Mark

Mark: Louis Gray already did that. - Robert Scoble

Crap, i unfollowed him, he always posts pics of his kids. people ask me why im looking at pictures of babies. - Mark

Was wondering, if ppl have been commenting and then you choose to disable does it hide/delete current/previous comments, or does it simply lock the thread? - CannonGod

CannonGod - Example here http://friendfeed.com/louisgr... - Bwana ☠

CannonGod: it just locks the thread. Want me to lock this one to demonstrate? - Robert Scoble

Please lock. (curious) - Jay Cuthrell

Lock! - Mark

can u unlock? - Marco

Jay: I locked this thread for 10 seconds then reenabled them. - Robert Scoble

Lock or it didn't happen!!!! - Mark

A lock mob is forming ;-) - Jay Cuthrell

...once you lock, that is. - Marco

Nicely done. I want to automatically lock threads after 30 days as a defense against spam. - Robert Scoble

Thanks Robert --- I was wondering if the delay was via lock or lull - Jay Cuthrell

Geeezzzzz... talk about circling the drain. - Brian Roy

what do you mean Brian? - Mark

Robert, you can always order the Angry Mob play set here if you need it... http://bit.ly/JiJfP - Chris Sparno

I'm just amazed at how year(s) old features in other mediums are being pulled into places like FF. (i.e. LiveJournal screening, IP address capture, etc...) - Jay Cuthrell

Mark, that's a very funny reason to unfollow. :) - Louis Gray

Is a comment box placed in the middle of the comment stream an indication of a lock taking place or is my UI being dumb? - Jay Cuthrell

It's a cultural thing Louis. In Britain we have a real shortage of male teachers. There seems to be a fear that men working with children MUST be paedophiles. Why would a man work with kids etc? A single 25 year old male looking at pictures of a strangers babies is just slightly uncomfortable here for some reason - Mark

Robert sucks! BOOOOOOOOOOOOO! ;) - Jorge Escobar

Pitch Fork! Pitch Fork! Pitch Fork! - Jorge Escobar

Jorge: you must be more original than that to get a mob going. - Robert Scoble

Robert, what if you want to unblock someone you've blocked? There must be a place..anyone know? - Myrna

True Robert - Jorge Escobar

Myrna: yes, you have to go back to their original account to unblock them. One secret little tip: if you log out everyone you blocked is now unblocked, so you can search for them. - Robert Scoble

I can't believe Robert said anyone who likes Leo Laporte must be a big sissy girly who knows nothing about tech - Mark

Is Friendfeed a touch laggy tonight for anyone? - Mark

So is Mike getting this back? http://friendfeed.com/techcru... - Jorge Escobar

Robert, LOL, not sure of their name..I'm going to persevere. I think I saw it somewhere here. - Myrna

Scoble/Bwana - Thanks for the examples guys. I'm just waiting for threaded conversations for things to be perfect :) - also, setting a timed auto-lock of threads = not a terribly bad idea. - CannonGod

and I thoughts mobs were 'wisdom of the crowds' ;) - Mrinal Desai

Mrinal: if the mob is attacking someone else, it's wisdom of the crowd. If the mob is attacking you, it's a damn destructive mob. - Robert Scoble

Also called 'Bad Mob' - Jorge Escobar

if someone closes comments on a thread, someone else should fork a new thread to pick up where the old one left off. call it a #pitch_fork :-D - Karim

I feel empowered by our mob. And its all Scoble's fault ;) http://bit.ly/rpg8e - Chris Sparno

Karim, I think "forking threads" is not a very nice thing to say. This is a family oriented mob forum (except for the pope comment earlier). - Chris Sparno

I say, "Fork 'em! Fork 'em all!" -- who's with me! - Jorge Escobar

lol Jorge Escobar - Kim Landwehr

+1 Kim. - George Hall (Australia)

Fork this! - Rick Cogley

I click the "best of day" filter fairly often and I don't know how much a problem this is. Seems as though the only point of FF is the comments. So if you say something that drives controversy and you get engagement... isn't that what the service is for? - Sajida H Khan

Robert Scoble

Yesterday Rackspace renamed @Mosso to "the Rackspace Cloud." Makes my job easier in evangelizing Rackspace to startups. More here:

June 10 - Comment - Like - Share

lew, Susan Beebe, Ben Rodrigue and 19 other people liked this

more where? also always been curious why there isn't a real resell option with rackspace - chris demeyere

20 more comments

One of the advantages that's winning us business is we can offer both traditional and cloud based hosting to businesses at the same time on the same network in the same datacenter with the same great support (lower latency and other advantages). This makes it clearer and makes Rackspace's cloud offerings easier to explain as part of the Rackspace family. - Robert Scoble

Chris: whenever I say "more here" you gotta give me a few seconds to type. :-) - Robert Scoble

You have had a "Powered by the Rackspace Cloud" button on your blog for a while. This move was anticipated. - Louis Gray

Here's a search on friendfeed I use to track what people are saying about Rackspace: http://friendfeed.com/search... - Robert Scoble

I see there are a few people bummed that we're moving away from the Mosso name. Yeah, that had more personality, but it's hard to explain what that is and how it fit into the Rackspace family. - Robert Scoble

good call, everytime i talk about mosso i usually add that they are a rackspace company. Rackspace has a strong brand and is the best hosting company IMO. Only thing left to make them perfect is to have an un-managed dedicated hosting option too. - Diego Sana

Will BizSpark startups be able to benefit of the BizSpark licensing with the R Cloud ? as they do today with Rackspace ? - Julien Codorniou

I agree with robert - as a customer evangelist its much easier to explain - andy brudtkuhl

also the brand recognition in IT for the Rackspace name is high - this adds a correlation that creates more trust - andy brudtkuhl

"Robert and Rocky will push us. Like Robert pushed Microsoft, he will make us uncomfortable. He will praise our competitors and point out our missteps. But, he will force us to get better. He will force us to embrace the future and the commitment required to getting there. " - David Lloyd

"and if it all goes wrong he will bugger off to YET ANOTHER new company in 18 months!" hehehe, love you really Robby xx - David Lloyd

@Robert - as a rackspace/mosso customer I am happy about this, as I found the Mosso brand confusing during my account signup process and when i needed service... - Jeremy Toeman

Mark: I lasted three years at Microsoft. Rackspace is an even better company. ;-) - Robert Scoble

Good move, never heard of 'Mosso' <you gotta give me a few seconds to type> Hee, they want it, and they want it NOW!! - JimmyJet

So if, Robert, you "will praise our competitors", it would be interesting to know your comparative view of the Rackspace Cloud services. As far as I can tell, in this market, Amazon has the ball and is running far ahead of everyone else. - John W Lewis

John: Amazon is ahead of everyone else in a lot of ways. Where we have an advantage is that we provide both traditional and new cloud hosting. Amazon only provides cloud. That might not sound like a big deal, but we've won quite a bit of business lately away from Amazon because companies often do need both. Even new companies like 12seconds.tv run both a traditional server and cloud, so... more... - Robert Scoble

I've also seen companies which get good use of the NVidia CUDA facilities, using the graphics card CPU to offload computational tasks like video transcoding. Virtualized servers don't allow this. Having real servers for heavy lifting, plus spinning up instances in the cloud on demand, is a good combination. - DGentry

Unclear why people would be upset or surprised by this. Rackspace has a great brand and a great reputation. It is silly not to utilize that. Anyway, everytime I said Mosso I had to follow it w/ the Rackspace Cloud anyway. Now I have one less word I have to use - always a good thing ;) - JP Maxwell

Great example was Peter & Ryan's (formally from engadget & gizmodo) running their new live blogging platform on Mosso for the WWDC http://live.gdgt.com/ evert. Props to Rackspace, it never died or paused once! - sean andersen

Smart branding move! simplicity FTW! - Susan Beebe

We moved Nambu, tr.im and pic.im over to Mosso and Rackspace a month or so ago and have been generally happy with them for our couple dozen servers. However their UI for managing virtual servers needs a fair bit of work, not as good as Slicehost (a Rackspace co as well, just with un-needed bandwidth for us). - Gersham Meharg

Michael T. Halligan

BART's parties were so nice, we did them twice: http://halligan.org/partyca...

May 17 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Scott Beale liked this

link not working here - Chuck Baggett

Should be working now. Had a datacenter outage tonight :( - Michael T. Halligan

Louis Gray

Twitter's Cap of 2,000 Following In Action!

August 11, 2008 from email - Comment - Like - Share

Nicholas James, Jacob, Voyagerfan5761 and 61 other people liked this

As mentioned earlier today, Twitter seems to have capped your ability to follow at 2,000 people, which just so happens to be exactly where I am. The goal, in theory, is to stop marketing-oriented spammers, but it could be another way to reduce stress on the system. So what should I do now, delete "less favored" people, or wait for Twitter to figure this out? - Louis Gray from email

32 more comments

Maybe it's the legacy talking, but I'm really not bothered by this. :P - l0ckergn0me

I can see why they do it, but it does suck for the people who do it legitimately and are not using stupid mass follow scripts. - David Risley

I'm not super-concerned either, but it does answer why all of a sudden, I started getting these errors last week. It could be part of their "Making Progress On Spam" initiative via the blog, but it hasn't been spelled out all that clearly. - Louis Gray

let blame this one on Scobles... :)- - Peter Dawson

Louis, I think cap is more of the architecture the system. Making it into a more robust platform. Now watermarks have been set, it becomes easier to build consistency of experience and application behavior. <Edit > wait for Twitter to figure it out.. Marketing spammers are targeting the 'stupid' one that have the auto follow !! - Peter Dawson

gotta like it, if I'm the one you are trying to follow! - Ben Hedrington

I don't think there should be limits like this, but I guess everything can't be infinite - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

I honestly am indifferent about it; Twitter is going to hell and i tried my best to convert it; oh well, Hell has cookies - Gordon Swaby

I"m only following 49... with 106 followers.. - Ian May

so what do you think, Louis, is benhedrington worth going to the mat for? - Nathan Rein

I'm sure I can find someone to unfollow in exchange for Ben. - Louis Gray

Twitter needs to build in groups functionality a la tweetdeck for following 2K+ to even be practical. - Nicholas Molnar

Louis: You need to convince the new people to head over here :) - Justin Korn

I'm just curious what the rationale is for following that many people. - Paul Rodriguez

Well, maybe that's why Louis always seems to know what's going on before anybody else. - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

I've noticed that most of the time I get followed by somebody with a big number, it tends to be marketing play. It triggers the email to you and then you go look and click on their bio link which takes you to the pitch. Very irritating. I always block em. - Mark Schulz

@Paul Rodriguez, I was wondering that too. I wouldn't have even guessed there are 2000 interesting people in the world </cynicism>, but what fascinate me is that i'm following like 83 people and only about 14 of them tweet regularly. I can assume most of those 2000 do not tweet regularly. Add in the fact that I'm a WAHM to two toddlers, and do other stuff, there'd be a lot of stuff I'd miss. - Anika

New profit center? Sorry, but now you'll have to join Twitter Pro .... - Charlie Anzman

Info restrictions suck:( - Igor Poltavskiy

Very interesting. System limits is going to be a topic that we all work through in this early phase of the Social Web. It seems to me that it's reasonable to cap the number one follows to 1,000 or 2,000. On the flipside, one would clearly like to enable a very high number of followers. With respect to bi-directional connections, the real number should max at 1,000 to 2,000... - John McCrea

This is awesome! Incidentally, Scoble (@Scobleizer) is still following over 30K. - Vincent van Wylick

So where is the point following 30k people? You might as well hit the main timeline. The only thing that is bad about this limit is that it was not there from the beginning. - Alexander Kohlhofer

@kevinrose: 56K+. Losing 54K+? - Igor Poltavskiy

so what's going to happen to those who follow over 2000? - Wayne Sutton

you follow two. thousand. people.??? never mind twitter; there may be a law against that. - jeneane sessum

I like the new limit. I cannot see how anyone would be able to legitimately follow (and pay attention to) more than 2,000 people. Frankly, even that limit seems higher than it needs to be. If it helps keep Twitter a little more stable, go for it. - Dennis Metzcher

Couple thoughts: the limit impacts the ability to use the service as a direct message router -- for some people. It also reinforces the need for dectralized microblogging -- so if you want exceed the limits you can do so on your own infrastructure. Lastly, nothing prevents you from following everyone or a subset of people through RSS/feeds. - Chris Messina

Are we sure that Twitter has set a 2,000 limit are or we cranking up the rumor mill? I've seen image before with respect to my own account - an account which just reached 1,000 followers today. According the Twitter rep who contacted me, I got - ahem - put in "Twitter Prison" for "Aggressive Following" My ratio of Followers to Following was kinda out of whack - at that time I had only ~800 people following me while I was following ~2,800 - They suspended my ability to follow more people. I removed 2K. - Vincent Wright

I don't understand the motivation for following 2K people if you're not a spammer... someone explain? - Jason Carreira

Jason: For a entrepreneur/VC/angel networker, it would be very easy to hit 2,000 contacts (assuming you used Twitter like a rolodex). From one networking meeting, I might pick up 0-100+ business cards (more at conferences), and during a heavy season I could be doing 7-10 meetings/week. As a angel, I might want to follow 5,000-10,000+ projects/people. Anyone might have a really good project 2-10+ years down the pipe... I've got cartons/boxes of 3-ring binders of business cards in plastic sheets. - Mitchell Tsai

@Mitchell @Charlie - Rumors aside, do you think the cap is a gesture towards monetization? Going after the power networkers? Seems you would have good cause to pay for a Twitter Pro, or would it just not be worth it? - joneilortiz

I use Twitter as both a professional development tool (following people who say useful and interesting things abt health / edtech / social media / libraries ...), a personal tool (friends and folk who are amusing), and a reference tool (following a lot of news streams and information resources). You can hit 2000 fast. A friend says that people are imagining new ways in which Twitter could be used, but Twitter seems bound and determined to force them back into some small box of how it "ought" to be. - Patricia F. Anderson

I would happily follow more than 2000 people, heck I am almost there. And I don't need to see every message. With Tweetdeck it's manageable. I see some Friendfeed users here have thousands to tens of thousands of subscriptions, should we also say it's good to have a cap here? No, please no. I understand that perhaps it has to do with monetization or stressing the system less, these are alas viable reasons. - Jacob

Robert Scoble

Rackspace announcements: http://scobleizer.com/2008... Cloud Computing Price War to come?

October 22, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Anthony K. Valley ©, Greg GuitarBuster and 33 other people liked this

Wow, more of my vendors get thrown together into the same company. Yay, less bills! So I guess the next version of JungleDisk won't require S3? - Mark Trapp

36 more comments

Awesome! Rackspace FTW! congrats guys! - Susan Beebe

Mark: JungleDisk will give you the choice of either S3 or Rackspace's own services. - Robert Scoble

This space needs more competition... I'd like to see more usability improvements (it shouldn't be so hard to set up a simple web host). - Brian Roy

Nothing like healthy competition to benefit consumers. - Tyler Golden from twhirl

Interesting move as the cloud grows and is starting to have some outages - Chris Miller

Robert: any indication of when the JungleDisk and Slicehost merging would be complete? - Mark Trapp

Very nice! Posted this to Hacker News. I'm sure a lot of geeks will appreciate this move (http://news.ycombinator.com/item...) - AJ Batac

Mark: the way they are talking, by the end of the year. I'll get an official answer after the event. - Robert Scoble

The size, quality and resolution of the live video stream is amazing. The best I've ever seen. I even saw Scoble tapping away on his notebook :) - Mark Krynsky

Mark: we're in the Austin CIty Limits studio. Good to hear the video is clear! :-) - Robert Scoble

They just announced a partnership with Limelight Networks too. - Robert Scoble

They also announced a partnership with http://www.sonian.net/ for email in cloud services. - Robert Scoble

It's exciting, and Mosso is a leader in the cloud, but..erm...well...I think you'll see many guys who host websites with Mosso still 'iffy' about the reliability. Wonder if they are going to push some more resources into Mosso operations. - Andrew Leyden

Andrew: Yes, is the answer to that. - Robert Scoble

WOW. Thats huge. So RackSpace is going to need to create more data centers around the world to do this. It wasn't that long ago that they had a major power outage in their main facility knocking out many of my clients servers. - CW™

i'm trying to see what differentiators are vs S3, dropbox, MS Live Mesh etc - adolfo foronda

I wrote a post with coverage from an amazing Cloud vendor called Workhabit who specializes using Amazon EC2 to host Drupal sites. Info & some great presentations from them here http://krynsky.com/highlig... - Mark Krynsky

Christopher: SliceHost was a very profitable company. The founders told me they came to Rackspace because of how many data centers they were building and the resources that were available to them. - Robert Scoble

One of the benefits of Amazon is seamless integration. I wonder how all these distinct services can be brought together into one cloud with an API and fast and favorable bandwidth pricing? - Todd Hoff

Robert: Thanks. One of the things that scares me about cloud vs. server is if my server crashes for some random reason, I can call a techie at the data center who can focus on repairing 'my server' as soon as possible. If the cloud crashes, then I'm sort of at the mercy of when they can deal with the 'bigger issue' which might take longer than fixing say one box. (I should note I use both mosso & ded. servers) - Andrew Leyden

Just a random aside about Friendfeed. Look at all the comments here in just 25 minutes. Definitely a tech interested audience on this site. - Andrew Leyden

Andrew I think we're going to see a move to multi-cloud operations so that instance of the cloud was really down you failover to another cloud. Some cloud vendors are positioning themselves as a redundancy option to Amazon. - Todd Hoff

Ooh, the slicehost offering sounds interesting for personal hosting. I've heard some good things about them and intro packages starting at $20 a month? I need to look into them. - Mark Krynsky

Does this mean they're going to fix Jungledisk on Windows? Around here, we call it Crashy McCrashalot. - Brett Kelly

Mark: I've used them for a few months for personal hosting, and they are definitely worth a look. We just started using them professionally for our low-end sites a month or so ago. - Mark Trapp

@adolfo you're listing services across different layers in their integration of the Cloud. This stuff can be confusing and we need more people to start doing a better job of explaining this stuff. - Mark Krynsky

The Limelight thing sounds very interesting, a lower cost way to take advantage of CDN. I wonder what Akamai are thinking... - Elizabeth McLaughlin

@mark krynsky good point, it's a nice suite of offerings via aquisitions and partners. Guess it never hurts to have competition, heres to price drops across the board. - adolfo foronda

I don't know if I should "like" this or not. I've been a loyal Slicehost customer for 8 months now and I have been very happy with things the way they were. Still, congrats to those guys. - Benjamin Golub

Retweeting @lalorek Rackspace paid $11.5 million payable in cash and stock, with potential for up to $16.5 million more for Jungle Disk & SliceHost - Robert Scoble

I just bought a copy of Jungle Disk this week. - Jason Shultz from twhirl

Thanks for the info Mark Trapp. I've wanted to look into personal hosting in the Cloud, but prior to this it was ~$100 a month to do it and not cost effective but now at $20 it might be worth dipping my toe. I feel there will be a major shift and the majority of sites will be using the Cloud in ~5 years. - Mark Krynsky

I guess I'm a minority here but my favorite feature of S3 is BitTorrent seeding/tracking. Any sign of that coming from RackSpace or other cloud providers? - Louis Choquel

Louis: I asked them about that. It's definitely on their list of features they want to do, but they have other stuff to do first. - Robert Scoble

Did you see that Amazon EC2 just announced Windows installs and an SLA? Probably trying to one-up these announcements. - Dan T

I have waited for the spark to light the silicon valley rebuilding process, let the ideas flow, and I would like to work for Robert and Rackspace. - Nicholas Chase

I would love that. Please reduce my bandwidth costs from EC2 and I'll switch. All this communication with the Twitter API and Social Graphs is getting really expensive! - Jesse Stay

Thomas Hawk

Johnny - http://thomashawk.com/2009...

January 29 from Thomas Hawk Digital Connection - Comment - Like - Share

Derrick, Olivier Castets, Nia and 10 other people liked this

Johnny sounds like an interesting character - Jennifer Van Grove

Love this series, still working up to giving it a try myself. Maybe the homeless in NYC are less forthcoming, or maybe I don't frequent the areas, but I don't remember being asked for money while I had the camera out. Anyway, keep up the good work, always interesting. - Gary Thom

Matt Mullenweg

Signed up for FriendFeed at the behest of Mr Scoble.

November 21, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

oliver gassner, Jon Gosier, Pete Delucchi and 72 other people liked this

for real or is this just a scoble fanboy? - Christian Burns

33 more comments

ELIZA? - Alex Haar

http://friendfeed.com/e... For real - embee

Fo sheazy. - Matt Mullenweg

Woot! - Alex Scoble

Yeah! - Head Ov Metal

Awesome - Enrique Gutierrez from twhirl

Welcome! - DO ANYBODY NO MONIQUE from fftogo

Welcome! - Ladybug Heather

Sweet...immediately subscribed to you and added you to my "A List" list...social media stalking at it's best :) - Jennifer Van Grove

:) Hola - Kamath (नमः)

Benvenuto! :) - Slow

Howdy! - Andrew

Ooo La from Canada - johnpiercy

Welcome matt. Great to see you. - Roberto Bonini

Welcome! You can add your blogs to FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Paul Buchheit

Awesomesauce! - Sally Church

Hi there Matt! - Phil G

Word! - Ernie Oporto

Hi, Matt! - ♥patricia♥

Hi from India. Wordpress is awesome! Looking forward to 2.7. Kudos to the whole team. :} - vijay

Glad to have you join us =) - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Great to see you here Matt. - Scott Beale

Hi,Matt. Your WordPress is great! Thx. - Igor Poltavskiy

Matt, give thoughts after a few days of playing with it. - David Bisset

Welcome to Friendfeed! - Shey, Jamaican of FF

I love it when a plan comes together! - WorldofHiglet

Hi! Welcome to the madness. - Got Love For DB™?

Hi Matt - yes, enter the land of Scobleizer and FF goodness :) This truly is an amazing community of smart, funny, genuinely good-hearted intelligent folks! like my extended Family!!! :) Glad you are here! Oh, and thanks for WP! - Susan Beebe

Excellent! - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)

Cool. Now we'll see even mo' better FF integrations with WP, right? I'm kidding. Welcome to the party Matt! - Kevin C. Tofel

I added you to Scoble's tech list in my own. ; ) Great to see you here! - Erhan Erdogan

Welcome, Matt. You'll find plenty of people here who appreciate Automattic's work. - Chris Baskind

Enjoy. - Pete Delucchi

:) - mjc

Louis Gray

How's Your Portfolio Doing? Mine Is a Complete Disaster.

November 21, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Nikpay, Atul Arora, Anthony Citrano and 16 other people liked this

From eTrade after today's trading (if you can call it that). - Louis Gray

27 more comments

I have stopped looking. I try to work out instead. - Edwin Khodabakchian

My idea of working out consists of baby lifts and the Wii Fit. But the only thing losing weight is my wallet. - Louis Gray

That looks my kids' 529s. Misery loves company. Or whatever. - Rick Turoczy

The mega millions lottery has a $86M jackpot currently, looks like a worthwhile investment to me. - Nigel Stolting

its all about the ultra shorts right now, keep in mind they are also etfs also - sam from twhirl

Mine's all invested in entrepreneurial activities - nothing but up to go here :-) - Jesse Stay

Ugh, it makes me sick to look at my 401k. It's a good time to buy though. I doubled-up my contribution from 5% to 10%. - GeekLad

looks like houses weren't the only things artificially inflated. DJIA is back to where it was before W was in office & worse some. - Enrique Gutierrez

Mine is looking like my life expectancy graph - Floyd Davenport

Oh, it'd be great if real estate adjusted to where it was in the late 90s. I could go buy that $125K house in Freehold. - Morton Fox

I'm not looooo-kiiiinngg - Lah, lah, lah <hands over eyes> ;-) - Ken Stewart | ChangeForge

[Chris White] I didn't bother messing with real estate during the boom/fail - but - mid-next year? I might flirt with the notion - Enrique Gutierrez from twhirl

think long-term... - .LAG liked that

@chris... if people are looking at their current portfolio value, or current home value and comparing it to just a few months ago, all they're going to do is get scared and pissed off. - .LAG liked that

So did you pick your stocks for that portfolio, or did you diversify outside the US? - Ernie Oporto

@chris... i was one of those people who DIDN'T buy that expensive house... like two years ago. it wasn't that i thought the real estate or mortgage brokers were lying to me... it was this: i looked at what i was potentially getting for the offered prices, and i'd say: "you gotta be goddamn kidding me...this house is not worth THAT!" i live in the Bay Area. i think a lot of people got bamboozled...and were greedy and foolish. now, we're all going to have to pay. so nut up, and tighten your belt. - .LAG liked that

Louis, I think we must be holding the same stocks. http://img.skitch.com/2008112... - Mike Doeff

@Mike, we just might. I'm amazed that the 401k mutual funds are doing even worse than I am! According to Mint.com, if I lost the average amount that I've been losing over the last two weeks, my total value will hit $0 in two months. - Louis Gray

Looks a lot like mine - Mike Hussein Cohen

Some good companies are getting close to their cash value. Non- financials my be a good buy. - Robert Hafer

I attended a talk by Mary Hunt on Thursday night. Her advice: if you're not about to retire, don't look at your 401k balance right now. - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

we are on the same boat... well cruise ship, the Titanic was not a boat http://cli.gs/MyPortfolio - Julio F ~ @SocialJulio

First,quiet contemplation. - Igor Poltavskiy

mine is doing really awesome, sorry to say. :-/ also +1 @LAG - Anthony Citrano

I'm afraid to look at my 401k. - Mike Reynolds

Whoa that looks absolutely terrible. *hug* - Susan Beebe

just to clarify: my short term money (say this year and last) has done phenomenally well. my longer-term money, however - such as old-age dough - has been whacked, although not severely. - Anthony Citrano

puta mierda - Ferran

Robert Scoble

I'm sitting with Matt Mullenweg trying to convince him to join FriendFeed and put FriendFeed directly into my Wordpress.com blog (and vice versa). What do you think of that?

November 21, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Phil Crissman, Svein Håvard Djupvik, Mathew A. Koeneker and 41 other people liked this

it makes perfect sense to have friendfeed talk to wordpress. why not? i'd like to have friendfeed talk to drupal. - Lynne d Johnson

35 more comments

I don't know Mr. Mullenweg, but more Friendfeed is more bettah. - Andrew

I think I like that. A lot. - AJ Kohn

why not? :) and meanwhile ask him please what michel v is becoming? :) - directeur

directeur: he doesn't know what michel v is doing other than being awesome. - Robert Scoble

at least get him to allow the ff plugin that shows ff discussion of a wordpress.com post - Christian Burns

Cool. and get him to let WP play nicely with javascript, too - Jim Hearts FF

Hmm. As a widget (easy), or each post in friendfeed automatically becomes a blog post? What about there being two different comment systems? Would comments be duplicated to wordpress, or separately hosted and managed at friend feed? Sounds like an interesting conversation though. (edited) - Mason Lee

I think that is what is wrong with WordPress. Why can't you add your own badges/widgets? - Dave Hodson

Robert! Ah! thanks for asking him! Michel is in fact very awesome :) - directeur

actually the lack of javascript is one of the great things about wordpress.com no autoplaying music, no myspace style layouts, no blogspot gettos - Christian Burns

For the record. Hosted WP is *the best* out there. Flexible and with lots of great plug-ins. Thanks for a great product. - AJ Kohn

I think that's a great idea! Have him look at the tight integration that ReadWriteWeb has with FriendFeed.. that would be great to have on a default WordPress install, or even on wp.com - Phil G

awwww helll yeah.... - Zee.

Okay, I'm on. - Matt Mullenweg

@Matt: Welcome! - AJ Kohn

Robert you are da man, I wanted to do this too! Thanks, Nicholas the video guy at BlogWorld Expo 2008 http://donotreadthisblogunless.blogspot.com/ - Nicholas Chase

Looks like that took all of 10 minutes, give or take. Welcome to the FF cult, Matt - Enrique Gutierrez from twhirl

Hi Matt :) - directeur

C'mon Matt. Do it. - Glenn Batuyong from twhirl

I am waiting for proof that its really matt - Christian Burns

Welcome, @Matt!! Thanks, @Robert, as always, for the primo hookups! :-D - ɐ ɯıʞ sıɹɥɔ

Welcome matt - Tejas Patel

Ok, now when can i except FF and Wordpress goodness? I smell an ultimate lifestream app in the works. - David Bisset

Wordpress, and Friendfeed: probably the two online apps I use more than anything else. At least several times a day for both. - Ian May

Do it Matt! - David Jacobs

By the way, Matt... find a way to get WordPress + FriendFeed as a native plugin. Will go a long way in the social media / blogging space... - Glenn Batuyong

There at least need to be a friendfeed gadget for blogs..i would put it on my blog if there were. - Samuel Lewis from twhirl

great idea, please make that happen for wp.com users, too! - Gaby K. Slezák

I love the idea of a friendfeed widget... - Jean Ann Van Krevelen from twhirl

Welcome Matt! Please let me know if there's anything that we can do to help out WordPress. - Paul Buchheit

you heart that...? Lets get these two boys together! :) - Zee.

YES! Matt - make it so. - Hutch Carpenter

Please matt. That would be awesomesause. - Roberto Bonini

Matt, the FF real-time update is so essential to keeping up with really good content as it is being processed. Please include it into my Wordpress.com blog. - tony

YES YES YES!!! *waves at Matt* Welcome to FF my dear! :) ...oh and THANKS Robert! - Susan Beebe

I put friendfeed on my lifestream site here: http://www.svartling.net/ I think it looks cool :) - Svartling

Joi Ito

Hoder arrested in Iran, charged with spying, could face death sentence... http://www.themedialine.org/news...

November 19, 2008 from Ping.fm - Comment - Like - Share

Bob M. Montgomery, Scott Beale, David HC Soul and 13 other people liked this

again.. "Like" is not the right word to emphasize the importance of ff items... - marcell mars

17 more comments

Oh, crap. I've met him, nice guy, but loves pushing the rules. - Robert Scoble

Why would he go to Iran? - Robert Scoble

FriendFeed wouldn't be the same place if they used a more neutral verb like "appreciated" or "noted", but yeah, items like this really stretch the meaning of "liked". - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Bruce: yeah, I didn't "like" this item, but I wanted you to see it. This is the first time I've personally known someone arrested and threatened with death, so this one hits home more than other reports. - Robert Scoble

Friendfeed should change this button, "like" is too positive in some cases - Fons Tuinstra

Would you prefer the /. moderation system? :) I think a system where it is only possible to mod an item up is preferred to one in which you can mod it up or down. In the world you should your your mod points to make the world better, not to make it suck less. - Daniel W. Crompton

Oh no. Hoder told me at something years ago where are names got confused on the IRC on the wall by others.. (it was a funny joke between us) that he couldn't go to Iran. When I saw the news a few days ago that he was missing, i was worried. This isn't good. - mary

Fons, I'm sure they've thought about this. FriendFeed has some of the most frighteningly good UI people anywhere. The trick is finding a balance among (1) "Like" making for a happier overall user experience, (2) "Like" being inappropriate for certain items and (3) Keeping the interface simple. A neutral word kills (1). A choice of emotional reactions hurts (3). If anybody can come up with a good solution, they will. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Robert: My sympathies. This is very disturbing news, and to receive such news while jet lagged / tired must amplify it. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Bruce: it's interesting that I care more about people I've met personally. I think that's an interesting component in this. There are tons of bloggers who are in jail around the world. Global Voices Online reports on them, and while I care, this one caught my eye because it was Hoder. - Robert Scoble

"he admitted to spying for Israel" man those regimes can make say anything that's Fcking sad. What's his confession though, does anyone know? - TunisianGuy

Also did anyone call CBC or do I have to do it? - TunisianGuy

TunisianGuy: if you put my finger in a vice I would say ANYTHING to get you to stop. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Less feeling for people we don't know is a necessary protection mechanism. If we deeply felt the pain from all the bad things going on in the world, it would be too much. My wife is sensitive, and too much news hurts her. I'm clod enough to put up with bad news, most of the time. Sometimes it really gets to me, though. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

I know a lot of torture happens around the world, but what really gets to me is when my tax dollars pay for it. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

@V for Veselka there was a Fatwa against him??? That's BIG man what did he say? - TunisianGuy

@V I know some folks there I'll make a call immediately. I hate the fact that they're using that specific argument against him. - TunisianGuy

Google apps tend to use a star for the purpose of promoting an item. - Michael R. Bernstein

Louis Gray

Twitter following/followers have been restored - at least for this account. Everybody else good, or do we have lingering issues?

July 24, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Mitchell Tsai, Scott Beale, Andrew Smith and 3 other people liked this

Still missing around 20 or so followers. - Dave "Freedom 35"

9 more comments

the 200 plus that I was following and 200 plus following me are still gone - Richard Binhammer

I'm back to normal on my main Twitter account. The other one that I use is still missing people. - Mike Doeff

Restored as well - Hutch Carpenter

Still missing 100+ follwers & following :( - Jennifer Van Grove from twhirl

I'm closer to 'normal' but still missing a few. - Oliver Ortega Chua

Down about 25 followers. - Mike Fruchter

Looks like it's fixed for me. - John Samuelson

My account seems to be OK, but I hardly use Twitter anymore. - Bill Sodeman

I had 77 yesterday afternoon and it returned back to 89 last night. I'm still ok. - Phillip Jeffrey

We have lingering issues. I still am missing approx. 250 followers, but more important to me, I cannot add anyone. I just met a number of great people ;this past few weeks who are adding me on Twitter, and I have to keep explaining to them why I can't reciprocate immediately. This is a real drag. There has been no indication from Twitter if this situation will ever change. I tried to post a comment about it (politely) on their blog, and they never approved my comment. They have not answered any messages.:( - Cathryn Hrudicka

Louis Gray

Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence - http://www.louisgray.com/live...

July 22, 2008 from louisgray.com - Comment - Like - Share

Erhan Erdogan, Franklin Pettit, Sarah Perez and 44 other people liked this

Or ... when you're busy, you're busy :-) - Keith Teare

30 more comments

I just try to get my guests to interact period. - Jason Shultz from twhirl

Excellent guest post... Louis the guest bloggers are great, it's very refreshing. - Mike Fruchter

Refreshing as in that it's not me, Mike? :-) - Louis Gray

Louis refreshing in the fact that it gives you more daddy time, and less time blogging for the interim.. Oh now don't even go there :-) - Mike Fruchter

It's probably more definitional -- people equate prominence with remoteness. And the more they think you're famous the less they treat you like a person. That's been my experience at industry parties. Every interaction is someone trying to right some wrong they think you did them. If they didn't like the way you said hello that'll turn into a flamey blog post. Makes you want to have some more distance. People still have 20th century attitudes about fame. - Dave Winer

Applying that kind of thinking to blogging is the most ridiculous perversion. Blogging exists to empower everyone to speak their mind. To then impose a hierarchy on it is to subvert the whole idea! Anyway, look for ways you penalize people for expressing their opinions and you might find some of the more "prominent" people coming back into the flow. - Dave Winer

your chart is wrong (at least for me it was/is) - the n00b stage is where i interacted even more than i do today by a small percentage - Allen Stern

Louis, you've always struck me as a person seeking to hear diverse voices, your "Guest Posts" proves this. Nice way to widen the discussion. - michael sean wright

Mitchell Tsai is putting some nice comments together on http://friendfeed.com/e... - Rob Diana

I've never thought of the blogosphere as having a hierarchy. Obviously some bloggers are more interesting to more readers than some others. Some bloggers are simply better at writing - at getting their thoughts onto paper; much the same as some very intelligent people make lousy speakers the same goes for blogging. - Ian May

Definitely not for me. When I was a newb, there was a lot less interaction. Back when I started doing serialized posts on websites, there were seriously about seven or eight people on the internet who'd read that stuff. I was elated when my hit-count went double digits. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Interesting post Hutch, I claim stage 2 as well. - Shey, Jamaican of FF

n00b here :-) Great guest post (again). - Justin Korn

I second that, I would be on stage 2 .I blog for an outlet, if an audience follows and interacts with me, that's an added bonus. - Mike Fruchter

I'm a n00b. That's why I had Hutch write for me. - Louis Gray

n00bs unite! - Mike Fruchter

Well done, Hutch! - Mark Dykeman

ha, Louis. Branding the chart with the LG logo -- hardly n00bish. : ) - Robert Seidman

*This* is the great friend divide. Scoble got it all wrong. - Benedikt Koehler

Thanks everyone for your comments. A lot of fun doing this. Dave Winer is definitely a Stage 4 guy, interesting to see his perspective. And Mark "Rizzn" - I remember well the thrill when hits went to double digits as well. - Hutch Carpenter

Maybe it's also a country thing. In Germany there are no stage 4 bloggers. That's what I like about blogging in Germany ;-) - Benedikt Koehler

Hutch - Good piece. I would argue that those promoting a specific product engage as many people as possible if they're going to use Twitter or other micro-blogging services (instead of some of the 'nutty' posts that sometimes look really bad). You never know who your next best promoter is. Agree totally that people shouldn't be insulted if they don't get an answer ... the first time :) - Charlie Anzman

I'm blogging in Danish about Social media. I'm trying to get new people interested in the subject and my goal will newer be readers but the conversation and how I can push the Danish marketing community in a new direction. Every comment is still gold to me. I have my niche and I love it. - morten saxnaes

Hey Hutch, Seth Godin just checked in. Let him know what you think about closed comments. http://www.louisgray.com/live... - Louis Gray

Go get him Hutch ;) - morten saxnaes

Wow - Seth actually does get out there. Posted a comment to him. - Hutch Carpenter

"I personally read and answer every single email I get " - seth. g - thats so true, I have emailed to him and he responds ! - Peter Dawson

Hutch, though not in called out in the post, in the original thread I did say Seth is *excellent* at interacting. There are different approaches to interacting. Seth posts his e-mail address on his blog, you don't. Neither approach wrong -- just different. As you note, Seth's posts do stand on their own. Maybe there's a blogging opportunity for someone to analyze Seth's posts and try to start the discussion.. - Robert Seidman

first off, it never ceases to amaze me that you can collect so many comments on friendfeed :). Secondly, I am curious how you are able to encourage people to guest post on yer blog, I have several peers with things to say and I have offered my blog as a forum but I have yet to get any takers - gregory

Greg: Have you heard of being "Louis Grayed"? If not, check out this thread: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Justin Korn

@justin sounds like the digg effect! I was hoping my 'sorry, I have a meeting' post might get this love but I published on iPhone craze day and I didn't get any love... Oh well, keep posting - gregory

Ryan Block

Yep, I’m leaving Engadget - http://www.ryanblock.com/2008...

July 22, 2008 from Ryan Block - Comment - Like - Share

Brian, Timothy Shey, Dave Martin and 18 other people liked this

Congrats. Starting and running your own company is an absolutely amazing experience. I wish you well, and hope it rocks. - Andru Edwards

4 more comments

Congrats dude. Although it was a brief experience (and many moons ago in Web years), it was my pleasure to have worked with you. All the best! - Kevin C. Tofel

Congrats and best of luck - Charles Husemann

Congrats! Good luck then... - Lawrence from twhirl

Good luck. May the winds of life bring you many unanticipated joys and wonders! :-) - Mitchell Tsai

/Gratz and good luck - ·[▪_▪]·

Robert Scoble

Has/How/Why tech blogging has failed you - http://scobleizer.com/2008...

July 22, 2008 from Scobleizer -- Tech geek... - Comment - Like - Share

Yaroslav Nikolaev, Adam, Dimitar Vesselinov and 174 other people liked this

Long rant, sorry, had to clear the air so I can start blogging again. :-) - Robert Scoble

90 more comments

Wow...I'm very interested and excited to see/hear/read what is to come from Scobleizer land next. - Justin Korn

I hope I make your list and if not, please let me know why so I can potentially improve. - Allen Stern

Glad to see that you are starting to realize, despite Techmeme that the world doesn't revolve around just the bay area. - Harold Gilchrist from twhirl

Gotta say you're bang on the mark there. Tech blogging should be about the tech, not the biz. - Luke Robinson

Allen: I like your blog. It's just that I love hanging out with all of you and talking geeky stuff a lot more than talking about this deal and that deal and all that. - Robert Scoble

Harold: I've always realized that. I feel I got unfairly tagged with believing the world only was about the Bay Area. I guess I deserved that to some extent, but this area is quite dominant in the world of tech (including the tool you're typing on right now) so some of my boosterism is to be expected. Funny that the top Israeli company has offices here too. - Robert Scoble

Kudos to you Mr. Scoble, what a very bright post you delivered today! Thank you for bringing some fresh perspective, that's always refreshing and welcome. I'm also happy you cite Lifehacker as an example. They focus on the smartest digital experience possible and help us improve ourselves. That's the biggest deal of all. Techbloggers should never forget it. - c0wb0yz

I love the tech first and foremost but the business is important too, especially in respect to the sustainability of said tech. - Jamie

Jamie: I agree. But the business needs to serve the customers and the customers/participants/users or whatever you want to call you and me aren't coming first in this industry anymore and that's worrying. - Robert Scoble

Wow funny enough thats the way i have been feeling for a while now I am looking forward to seeing what is next from the Scobelizer... - John Spencer from twhirl

I agree overall - CN has only a small percentage of biz - most is trends, analysis, and reviews. I had an interesting discussion about this with someone last week - if i had a computer that could handle video, i'd make a quick video to explain - there's an important part you are missing - Allen Stern

Next is to get some sleep. Gotta be up at 7:30 to be at Fortune Conference at 8 a.m. for breakfast. It's an incredible conference, hope to see some of you at the Tweetup at 5:45 p.m. - Robert Scoble

Allen: will be watching in the morning for what I was missing. I'm sure I'm missing a lot. I had to stop ranting at some point, it was getting too long! :-) - Robert Scoble

This is often relevant from major blogs/ celeb bloggers. The smaller and more personal blogs are still focusing just on tech ;) Perhaps you need to update your feeds :-) - Dennis Bjørn Petersen from twhirl

Dennis: I know. It's why I spend a lot more time here lately than on blogging. The smaller stuff shows up here a lot more regularly and I see a lot less "Yahoo business news." - Robert Scoble

Excellent post Robert. It's why I don't read Techmeme as much as I used to. The life and joy in exploring, playing with and dissecting tech, the geeky exuberance in 'new stuff' has been lessened across almost all tech sites in general, leaving a bland veneer that is just business talk. Things a geek like me doesn't care about, as I'm not an investor. - Mo Kargas

Techmeme has suffered because most of the tech blogs they follow have become nothing more then PR outlets like you said. - Harold Gilchrist from twhirl

As I posted in your comments, that's a really good post. It's great to see the old Scoble back - the one who I started reading back when your "latest thing" was Tablet PC! Welcome back, mate. - Ian Betteridge

Robert, blogging is becoming commercialized, as it becomes popular. I do not see it as a problem. It just might mean that you and a bunch of other likely minded people have to move on to a greener, more fascinating and less populated pastures. Like friendfeed, etc. Luckily, there are lots of them around and tons in the pipeline. Enjoy! - Павел Романовский

I don't know, Robert. On the one hand I agree 100%. And can I say that as editor of WebWorkerDaily I am the one who gets those 15 press releases a day and I *constantly* have the "is this useful?" filter on. I hope that's clear in our postings. Anyway...Your post is kind of like the person who is used to picking their own corn complaining about the supermarket because it's not the same garden. It's not. The grocer has to pay its bills, as does the paid tech blogger. - Judi Sohn

I know I am a newie to all this but I have been reading blogs for a while. I've bee thinking up a response and I'll post later. Long comments on the iPhone make for one queasy bus ride. - Derick Valadao

Finally. Thank you. I follow 357 feeds. Everyday. Granted I have many pop-sites (lifehacker, engadget, etc) on the list. But not one is of these "new breed" of tech bloggers out there. Even though I am in the industry, they do not speak to me. They are just another form of CNN to me. Linking to each other and regurgitating the same gibberish, no matter how relevant or important, it does not speak to me. Anyway, welcome back! This is very refreshing news to me. I will be following it with much interest. TY! - Carlos Ayala

We should all just organize a "Tech Blog Strike", unsubscribing to those blogs that only push press releases. Let's see how they sweat when they see their subscriber count falling... - Jorge Escobar

Obviously my previous comment was "tldr". I just wanted to say how great it is that a person in your position is able to repurpose his content to better fit the goal you are trying to reach with your content. It's a great direction to take in a time where most blogs are just trying to echo up to the top. - Derick Valadao

Excellent post on the state of the blogging nation. - Sheila Thomson

My only real problem with tech bloggins is how easily ideas take hold and spread to get page hits. This is very easily seen in the Vista hatred - there was never any objective reasonf or it... but it was so useful for traffic generation and looking cool that it was rampant. - Soulhuntre from twhirl

It's probably less about the business/tech divide, and more about me-too echo blogging - Dave Pelland

I think so... tech bloggers are jsut as easily victims of peer pressure and memes as anyone. Once an Idea ("love google") defines someone as "getting it" then few will look at it objectively. - Soulhuntre from twhirl

This is a welcome breath of fresh air. Fantastic. - Pete Gilbert

Scoble. Great post. Agree completely. - Tom Quinn

Super excellent post and, ironically, exactly what blogging is all about. One good thing about an economic downturn, it will weed a lot of fluff out of the infosphere -- with less incentive to act as promotional platforms for startups, blogs may get more informative about using established tech. - Sprague D

Great article Robert. It is your authenticity even more than your tech blogging that has made you the great writer that you are. Anyone can report Apple's earnings yesterday. You have always had an honest voice though that makes your writing stand out. - Thomas Hawk

The take away is 'sensational headlines'. Add to the "Rumor:" and we don't need this stuff unless it's coming from a tabloid format site - Charlie Anzman

Blogging is about saying what I want to say, and sharing things that I like with anybody who cares to listen. I'm not interested in driving traffic (thank goodness) or repeating what others have said, but contributing to a discussion. - Chris Nixon

Great post Robert. Very good read and right on the mark. I religiously read feeds in Reader, but only a few that help me. I love Lifehacker. Almost everyday I find something new and useful to my job. - Gary Schmidt

The Techie audience thirsty for knowledge is much smaller then the Get-rich-quick audience, but the largest demographic are the Free-lunch boys. The blogs with the most revenue have tricked their advertisers into believing teenage boys are business decision makers. - paul mooney

I love tech bloggers and the things they write about. The good ones will always come at a common topic from a different angle and I just LOVE that because it makes me think outside the box and start connecting dots all over the place. Robert you are definitely one of those bloggers that I love to read and I don't think any of the ones I read have failed me. - Devlin Dunsmore from twhirl

Awesome reading! THX a bunch!! - Ronald

I have to agree about the comments system though. One thing that we started to see a while ago was data portability and being able to communicate accross services. I think Disqus does that quite well and it's a great first step to making sure that the comments system becomes a little more useful on blogs. - Derick Valadao

Well said Robert, left a comment, said my piece, cheers! - Steve Spalding

Wow, an impressive and honest assessment of some major issues in the techblogosphere. - Richard Akerman

Robert - I'm not in the tech industry. But I love what lots of tech stuff has done for learning stuff in my life and for others. And I want to keep on learning. You've certainly helped me here - I wouldn't know a fraction as much about using Friendfeed productively, for example. Glad we're going to see more of this kind of stuff. Welcome back. - Tom Landini

Knocked it out of the park. If we can just get back to being geeks again, a lot of this drama will calm itself... - Jared Smith

this, along with Luis Grey's article today about Techcrunch and Techmeme, are both really interesting features on why blogging, and more specifically high-profile bloggers that were once more passionate, more personal, more engaged, more interesting, are falling to the wayside - Kevin from twhirl

Great read, but kind of depressing the way things have gone. I just like being a bit geeky and all things will work out in the end. - Alan Ashley from twhirl

The key issue for me is that there isn't enough analysis. Just reporting what an app does is useful, but very baseline useful. What are the implications? That's where tech bloggins has really failed. - Shripriya from twhirl

Shripriay, you hit it on the head. It is a shame that all the tech bloggers just wants to be Engadet or Gizmodo these days. - Harold Gilchrist from twhirl

Nice writeup Robert. I enjoyed your detailed analysis & history of the situation. Perhaps you can lead us in a new direction? - Mitchell Tsai

i read the tech bloggers then try to actually use the gadget. would like to hear more results from the usage angle. - Lee Kent

Shripriya, I agree with you wholeheartedly. My original comment was much longer but got cut due to length. I wish more blogs were like Louis Gray and Lifehacker which take a step back and then hit us with posts that are useful/interesting almost 100% of the time. Zero Punctuation is a great example for the gaming crowd--one post a week, internet fame. - Derick Valadao

Hmm... A Scoble article I like.... Is this the Seventh Seal? Seriously, you're right on in that the echo chamber of groupthink has made tech blogging boring and predictable. I think there's a few people out there fighting it, and FF makes it easier to find them. I think you're off on the business side, though... I think it SHOULD be about the technology, but the entrepreneurs coming out of the Valley have made it necessary for us to discuss the business side by not having solid business plans. - Jason Carreira

Anyway, hope this is a sign of things to come from you. - Jason Carreira

Thanks Robert. Great read, and perspectives. Love to see more on productivity, like Lifehacker. Just became a GTD convert BTW and loved the David Allen piece. - Jericho

Thanks for that Robert -- perspective is key. - Shey, Jamaican of FF

I'm sorry but those that don't scale are toast, from a commericial and traffic standpoint. I know that is part of the point (varying aims and objectives of blogging etc.) - Alex Hammer

Slap your self and get back on that horse Robert. You have NOT failed us. Human nature makes us want what we do not have. For some it's page views/revenue, for trolls it's attention, and others it's n-list status. The rest of us are looking to quench our thirst for knowledge. And please give our group a little credit. We have become ever-so-skillful at weeding out those sources that do not provide this knowledge. I repeat...You have NOT failed us. - Andrew Smith

I appreciate what you are saying, and am glad that others share the same opinion as myself. What happened to being the guys who always had some tech trick that seemed like magic to the uninitiated? The joy of tech for me is showing that magic to others and getting them interested in what's out there too, and lately we have all become business whores a little bit. I look forward to the future content coming from you, and getting back to what made tech cool in the first place, the tech itself. - Aaron Krug

One of the things I value most about Robert is his inner homing mechanism. He's very prone to get lost, but something always shakes him loose and he re-calibrates. Or is that re-boots? (Kind of like iPhone 2.0 now that I think about it.) - Michael Markman

I agree w/ your article, Robert. The wonder that makes so many of us interested in tech does get lost at times- I never saw tech blogs as the place for that stuff, but appreciated it when I found it there. - anna sauce

Alex: While scaling is necessary if you want more people to view your content, why should that come at the cost of the content itself? Too many startups are trying to replace a solid marketing plan with social media and end up trying to use big blogs as a means to advertise their product and ride the traffic tail to customers. From what I gather, this tends to make jaded bloggers who... more... - Derick Valadao

I kinda find this funny.. the comments are so distributed between FF channel and Scobles blog channel ? which one am I too follow ? I mean yesterday we had this big huge augments about cluster and fragmentation of conversations. So Robert, here's a suggestion. Turn off comments on your blog and let your readers comment on FF only. Else dont post your blog entry to FF and break your own... more... - Peter Dawson

I just approved a bunch of comments that were held in moderation. Now there's 88 comments over there. Whew. - Robert Scoble

melmcbride: good point. It's easy to just stay on FriendFeed all day. It's hard to come up with something new to say that takes more than a short paragraph. Damn, I'm sounding so old school. The neat thing is when I do a longer blog is comes in here and improves everything. - Robert Scoble

i think this is part of the echo chamber that is the silicon valley. people who live there use the "new" thing for so long they soon get sick of doing it. they are same people who think everyone elses use technology the same way they do and feels the same way they do. - Jonathan Jesse

Scoble steps out of the bubble and takes a breath of fresh air... hopefully more follow or we're going nowhere fast. - Harish V

I thought this was great! Robert, I think what I hear is your desire to just do whatever the hell you want to without regard to "The Man". Go for it. You of all people can do that! - Elliott Ng

Robert the real issues is that everything really only needs to exist once. Conversations don't neeed to exist in many different places. Your blog comments and the conversation here are all the same conversation. I'd love to explain the solution as i see it but it'd take too long. - Anton Mannering

Robert I am still lost- How can you profess to be be a convo aggregator , yet approve 88 comments on your blog ? @Anton, no Blog comments and these comments on FF, are two different sets of conversation happening on the same topic. Lets not confuse this fact !! There is a fork in the convosphere. - Peter Dawson

@ Anton: I sort of agree with you, but i don't think comment fragmentation is all bad. Sometimes well-written comments appearing somewhere else can draw attention to good ideas. If I don't subscribe to a particular blog but see the feed posted here on FF, I'll pick it up and then maybe I'll go straight to the blog. There's value in fragmentation along with the frustration. - phil baumann

I think a service like disqus should be used so that friendfeed comments on links to blog posts (with comments therein) will all show up no matter which medium you use to discuss them. Does this exist yet? I thought disqus would have this covered by now. - Derick Valadao

Great points as always Robert. We're with you on this. - Missionary Broadcasting

Peter: I approved about 40 that were being held in a moderation queue. I don't let newbies post a comment on my blog because then it'd be overrun with spam. FriendFeed has a much better system to protect against spam than my blog's comments. I think that it'd very cool if I could replace my blog's comments with FriendFeed, but that'd require an API that would make a URL, return it to my blog, and get it linked in, all really quickly. - Robert Scoble

I haven't read the comments here, but feel I can comment. Robert, as someone who as known you for five years now - just before the mania began - I am pleased to hear this. What got me into your blog in the first place was your ENTHUSIASM for technology, particularly GTD. Never let that go. You be you. I will be me. And everyone else will be everyone else. In the end, you gotta follow what you love. It works for everyone from Steve Jobs to the Pope. Your friend online and off - SR - Steve Rubel

@ phil bauman Ok 2 things. First of all I didn't say it shouldn't appear in many places. I'm saying that if you're in Roberts comments and I'm on Friendfeed then we should be able to see ALL the conversation from both. But it need not exist in a whole bunch of places only be visible from there. Second I think the argument that there is value in fragmentation is similar to saying there is value in using a ploughshare pulled by an ox. Ther is but not to most people. - Anton Mannering

@ Robert Scoble: Interesting you should mention your blog comments being friendfeed. I know a startup or two working on those problems. In reality though the issues become way bigger when such a service is subject to really large numbers (non-tech crowd). Solving those problems is where the fun and games are and I only know one startup with a real solution for that. - Anton Mannering

Ironic, isn't it--the influences (PR, marketing, big media) the original bloggers were trying to break away from are--surprise-- still here and the game hasn't changed as much as we thought. PR people still push their stories, tech and news blogs focus on a few big name co's and start looking like traditional media, etc. What's needed is more of the energy, enthusiasm and original thought that Scoble and others brought to the game earlier on--otherwise, we've only duplicated the old media on a new platform. - mark ivey

I send you a tweet also but I believe that I must also write here how spot-on was your post... I can't wait to see more real Tech news coming from you and I hope that this will force other bloggers to remember how they started back then... - Manos Matsakis

This is clearly your best post ever. Thank you for all of your hard work. I read your blog because it entertains me. I would love more posts "sharing geeky things." On the other hand, if you blog about news, technology, and a few pro-company biases, that's nothing to be ashamed of. Just because you (or any other blogger) do not provide a perfect balanced news experience does not mean that you have failed. People are responsible for finding their own news this day in age. - Brian Wilson

Great post and I totally agree. "What's needed is more of the energy, enthusiasm..." - Eric_T

Great stuff Robert. As blogging and social media continues to spread outside of tech and into other niche industries and verticals, those of us facilitating and evangelizing that spread should continue to look back at this post so history isn't repeated. See you at the Ritz tonight. - J.J. Toothman

"I think that it'd very cool if I could replace my blog's comments with FriendFeed, but that'd require an API that would make a URL" - yeah I second that motion. If I had a widget that could do that but with bi- directional flow , that would really be a convo aggregator. This will certainly be an interesting challenge to some of the geeks out here ! - Peter Dawson

You can, if you're willing to give up the content. Glenn developed a great plugin that allows for bi-directional flow. It works for Wordpress and (I think) Blogger http://blog.slaven.net.au/wordpre... - Steve Spalding

Great timing :) I got strange looks this weekend when I said that I don't review anything that has been 'pitched' to me - but rather things I discover that I think are cool. I discovered something this weekend at BlogHer that I will review. But no one sent me a press release. :) It's just a really neat gadget! - Lucretia Pruitt

I think you should watch the movie 'Resurrecting the Champ' - its about a Writer. Drew the analogy to your post and the movie (that I just happened to see yesterday) http://mrinal.vox.com/library... - Mrinal Desai

Enjoyed that rant, Robert. I'm not a tech geek, I don't read techmeme or techcrunch as the gist and trends can be followed here on FF, but I do read blogs like yours, Louis, Jeremiah and Hutch's, mainly to learn new things. Before FF I had never heard of Rescue Time, Jott, Evernote or TSheets for example, but hearing about new ideas and then experimenting with them myself, well that gets me interested and excited. The corporate enterprise stuff leaves me cold, it isn't nifty or flexible enough for users. - Sally Church

Nice post. The PR influence bit reminded me of this article by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/submari.... Agree to the fact that Tech blogging has been less 'tech' than it was a couple of years ago. - Nikhil Dandekar

I loved the rant earlier yesterday, and even more impressed by the ff reaction. My take on your blogging, having followed you since MS days. Stay on what you think, not what others think. Avoid the whole Gillmor Gang bs, and associated groupthink. - Bankwatch

I think that every new medium matures as it becomes possible to make real money at it - this is inevitable. I don;t think it will be the death of blogging certainly but we are in a new phase. Older blogs will mature and still keep that flavor or they will stagnate and die. The personalities will decide that. One of the things I like about your work Robert is the enthusiasm. Sometimes it makes you a bit naive, others it makes you a little to fast to declare something game changing but it is always good input - Soulhuntre

Robert, just read your wonderful post now, and I'm still fascinated by it. I'm commenting here because I know you'll read here first. You know, this competition that you were taking about, almost cause me to stop blogging, but then I realized that I'm writing because I like it, so as far as I'm concern, I'm not trying to compete anyone, this is why I'm taking things easy and on my own... more... - Orli Yakuel

Orli: you know me too well! :-) Yup, agreed. Just do it because it's fun. The problem is that posts that make us all smarter don't stick around very long because of the flow. - Robert Scoble

Robert, maybe it's because 'blogs' are not so unique anymore. Lets take Friednfeed for example: everyone can get noticed here just because they favorite picture on Flickr or dugg story on digg (regardless if they writing a blog, or giving any other opinion in the subject) this and other massive content mixed up together on a daily basis is flowing so fast, it almost seem that if you'll... more... - Orli Yakuel

Eric Rice

So seeing how Podcamp Boston isn't a real podcamp anymore, can I ask the totally altruistic hippie question of where do the people in Boston go for the freebie camps?

July 16, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Kate Brodock, Scott Beale, siavash and 6 other people liked this

This is Boston, bruh, (a.k.a. Taxachusetts) -- even if it is free, it will cost you. Marinate. - DYKC?™

31 more comments

I'm tellin' ya... if camping is what you want, the city isn't where to look. I should organize a wilderness podcamp. heh - Brian Rendel from fftogo

Brian, that would be an actual "barcamp" -- which, I believe many people would be down with! I heard of something like this happening on the West coast, with quite a bit of success. - DYKC?™

Brian: see barcamp boston link above/below. And dude, people camped at Microsoft's office in San Francisco, but that's not the point. Look, PCB admitted they changed the rules, that's fine, we've been down this road. So it's more a conference and not a camp thing. Not all Podcamps are alike. So I'm just asking a simple question. BROKE ASS BEANGEEKS GO WHERE? Thanks in advance. - Eric Rice

FeeFree Wilderness Podcamp U.P. Michigan Who'd show up? - Brian Rendel from fftogo

Maybe peeps will show up in the hallways :D - Michael Gaines

barcamp 3 was in May. http://www.barcampboston.org/ Great event, lots of fun. Very tech centric, but could be pushed in any direction if enough social media types showed. - Justin Whitaker

mel apparently it's not even about podcasting anymore, i dunno. - Eric Rice

it seems that Podcamps have really turned into How To Create And Leverage My Social Capital In Hope To Make Money Camp. Or maybe it's I Play With Social Media So Why Am I Still Poor And Lonely Camp. - Schlomo Rabinowitz

@melmcbride What the hell is a "friend collector"? Aren't you the person using people from Seesmic for your class without their consent? "This is what a person shouldn't do". - Michael Gaines

@eric - Jaiku? Or maybe even FriendFeed? - Linda Mills

I have no problem with a fee for PodCamps to cover costs not covered by sponsors. But a $99 "day of" fee is ridiculous. So they're punishing people, charging them $49 more, for making a decision to show up at the last minute? Doesn't make sense to me. - Rob Safuto

Yeah the more I think about the seesmic thing, the more I think there is nothing to complain about. All videos have hyperlinks, embed codes and are publicly visible. But heh, this thread is a wacky one, huh HOW ABOUT THOSE GIANTS - Eric Rice

Whether created in a public space or not, it's still copyrighted. I think you should watch Seemsic's copyright expert on Seesmic tonight at 6pm EST. Also, Seesmic uses Creative Commons now. Also, Seesmic has Terms Of Service - Michael Gaines

It's also worth mentioning that I've had a very different experience at a pair of DrupalCamps in New York City. The people who show up are looking to build things, learn and solve problems. Some podcasting related events seem to attract many more "get rich quick" and "consultant/expert" types than I'm comfortable with. - Rob Safuto

I'm curious where academic fair use (or any fair use that is) comes into play. - Eric Rice

"Except as allowed under Section 5 of these Terms of Service, you may not post, download, print, make commercial use of or otherwise use User-Generated Content that you do not own without a license or other prior written approval from the owner(s) of the User-Generated Content in question." - Michael Gaines

Rob, one needs look no further than the differences in dramas of filmmakers and radio djs respectively to see history repeat. I don't know what socmedia has a precedent. Proms, maybe? /snort - Eric Rice

Also, my other point is that you're criticizing these events and yet don't attend them yourself. These are more than a bunch of people getting together to feed their egos. I'm meeting up with people I actually care about. I'm also doing a seesion on teaching people how to do a podcast. I have no hidden agenda. Parents were both teachers. - Michael Gaines

Running out the door, will answer when I get home. I seem to be defending a lot of people lately :/ Three best people that don't lifestream? Hard to say if you consider Twitter/Seesmic that way. I can name probably a dozen people that I personally think are quite intelligent that are going. - Michael Gaines

I'm liking the wilderness camp idea more the longer this thread gets. - Brian Rendel from fftogo

wow - leave it to eric to bring a hockey fight to friendfeed ;) - mike "glemak" dunn

melanie: 3 recommendations - rocketboom, ask a ninja & something to be desired (video) - anything from podiobooks.com & see my podcast.com page for audio recommendations (there are tons of good ones) http://my.podcast.com/glemak/ - as for podcamps, i've never been but have lots of friends involved and a number who enjoy them so wish them well - have to agreed w/ rob, schlomo & eric - get a sense a lot of carpetbaggers jumped on the podcasting bandwagon & use podcamps as way to drum up biz vs helping others - mike "glemak" dunn

For what it's worth, the original PodCamp fee was imposed because huge numbers were signing up and very few were actually attending, meaning the organizers were stuck with lots of leftover food and trinkets. I still think the "fee" should be refunded to anyone who shows up. (And if anyone really needs a commemorative T-shirt, take your own white one and have people sign it, for heaven's sake!). About the "late fee" I know nothing and frankly think it's taking the "community" spirit in an opposite direction. - Linda Mills

The $50 was because we had almost a 60% no show, but had sponsors pay for space, tee shirts, and other things that expected another 700 people. It was a way to show a commitment to participate, and to help us understand who was really going to be there this time. - Chris Brogan

Regarding where to go in Boston, there's nothing saying one couldn't start a free PodCamp in Boston. The rules don't preclude two in the same city. About the content, there are tons of sessions on the basics of podcasting, blogging, and videoblogging, and more. Schedule is here: http://www.podcampboston.org/present... . Throw stones AFTER you investigate the details. Or don't. Doesn't matter. - Chris Brogan

As for the carpetbaggers (great term, @glemak), are they NOT at other community events? I call bullshit on that. - Chris Brogan

I think I should probably start two new threads, one with the Seesmic topic and one with the "So, um, is there a good old fashioned barcamp thing in Boston for Boston peoples?" topic. - Eric Rice

chris: lol - agreed carpetbaggers are everywhere on the web, as soon as anything gets a little traction some sleazeball tries to figure out how they can take advantage of it at the expense of others ;) - mike "glemak" dunn

Seesmic shifted here since this thread is about repurposed content anyway: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Eric Rice

It's hard to pick just three people. Right off the bat I'd have to recommend my co-hosts: Eric, Joe Cascio, Christine, Annie Boccio, and Sarah Vela. Terry (loudmouthman), Phil Campbell, Christian (documentally), Phil2Barro, Scott Johnson, Leo Laporte (learned a lot from him). That's off the top of my head. - Michael Gaines

Nobody can give you an answer other than you have to try it out for yourself. You have to see what's out there, what you like what you don't. When it's new, it's going to be awesome and new, but over time you'll get to that point where you want to start culling your lists - Michael Gaines

agree w/ michael, overtime you'll get a sense of what you like and what you don't plus podcasters change things up sometimes for the better & sometimes not - i've had probably a dozen since they started ~4 yrs ago but that's a rarity - egc's the longest... - mike "glemak" dunn

Dave Winer

Obama's FISA screwup - http://www.scripting.com/stories...

July 12, 2008 from Scripting News - Comment - Like - Share

Shivanand Velmurugan, Andy Lewandowski, Scott Beale and 19 other people liked this

Great post, Dave, but ask yourself this: might a neocon in phony progressive clothing be more dangerous than an overt neocon? Obama would have more political juice than McCain to press on with neocon schemes for Mideast military aggression and domestic police state programs. I no longer have any confidence in my understanding of who Obama really is. - Sean McBride

42 more comments

I have never seen a lucid explanation of why Obama voted this way. What does he hope to gain? - Brian Sullivan

Pretty sure he wanted to deny McC the ability to run an ad saying he's soft on terrorism. - Dave Winer

That sounds plausible - Brian Sullivan

The general consensus I've read is that now that Obama's facing the general election, he's playing toward the middle to get more votes. A lot of his hard-left progressive supporters are freaking out. - Akiva Moskovitz

Akiva -- the pro-FISA position is hard neocon right, not "the middle." Most Americans are disenchanted with and strongly oppose most neocon policies, including the Iraq War and the mad neocon scramble to expand the Iraq War to Iran. If Obama loses his base, the steam will go out of his campaign with a great rush. There are strong indications that this has already happened. (Hillary Clinton lost the nomination largely because she moved too far to the neocon right, under the prodding of Mark Penn.) - Sean McBride

People who see this as a right-left thing are not paying attention. The Constitution is what all Americans agree on, and it's what each of these people, Senators, Presidents etc, swear to uphold. It's an honor and trust thing in addition to being a freedom thing. Any conservative who isn't pissed off by this isn't actually a conservative at all. It's about the most conservative issue there is. - Dave Winer

@Akiva I agree, but now he has to contend with charged of being a flip flopper (and I personally see him as one now). He went from saying he would filibuster the bill to voting yes. @Tim I completely agree. Obama is just another crappy politician in my book now. - JP Landry

Obama sees three straight months of declining donations http://tinyurl.com/5dzuqm - Sean McBride

Democrats have been beat up on national security for so long that they seem to have internalized the criticism - kind of a political version of battered wife syndrome. Obama offers some improvement over this, but obviously he still believes this as well. In any case, Larry Lessig has the best breakdown of this that I've so far seen:

Scott Beale › Likes