I had a feeling they might be like facebook groups. - jjprojects

I don' - Dave Winer

They were a novelty at first but they have their uses. I'm going to use a FriendFeed Room so friends and family can follow my adventures in Japan in a few weeks' time. It might make a few of them stick around here too. http://14sandwiches.com/2008/0... - Martin Bryant

The identi.ca room's pretty busy :) - Charlie Anzman

Haven't really used rooms much after the initial launch experimenting. But I think that's just because I don't need this feature at the moment and there may be many use cases for others for this. I guess Friendfeed has the real usage stats on their server... hey FF, care to share? :) - Philipp Lenssen

I've found that rooms are not that useful - but what would be really useful for me would be to be able to assign different people to different groups (or rooms) so I could separate social from business topic from political, etc. Then being able to watch three or four feeds side-by-side rather than have to choose between tabs. - Craig Thomler

Of course every user could choose to group people together in the way that made sense to them - which makes these groups fundamentally different to rooms - which are the same for everyone in them :) - Craig Thomler

rooms may be better suited to private use. i know small groups using them for work collaboration - rob zand

I've only just started to use rooms, so I'm not sure whether they've got staying power. It seems one subscribes to people for themselves but rooms for topics, and that seems like a useful distinction to me. - Michael C. Harris

Yeah, they jumped it. Same syndrome as creating too many subforums on a bulletin board. Fragments the conversation. FF'll need Rooms when the rest of the world turns up here later. - laurence timms

Rooms are a weird concept for subscribed content. If I go to a bar with only people I know and like, why would I put some of them in a room? Why not just stay in the bar? - Cait

Cait, I see it as the difference between going to a bar with people you like - you'll have a good time even if the bar is crap - and going to a bar you like on your own - you might meet some like-minded folk. - Michael C. Harris

No, they've just finally dropped to normal levels of a post-launch. Just like every other product. Now you weed out the bad room and keep the good ones. - Ben Parr

I think the real problem is lack of (easy)discoverability for public rooms - Brian Sullivan

I periodically step through the rooms I am subscribed to and leave the ones that look dead. - J. Phil

I think notifications would help, or some way to integrate new items into or beside your regular feed. That way people would see when new items were posted and jump in. That and some sort of rooms directory. - Josh Lowensohn

I think the rooms are pretty useful for "private" groups where you're focused on collaboration but maybe not so much for general use. The public ones are good for discussion of new stuff (Identi.ca) or for sharing (the Invites group) but it's easier just to post to your main feed for other stuff, IMO. - Lindsay Donaghe

Rooms have some really good use cases for business (lightweight collaboration) and special events (Apple conferences). As specialized discussion places, their usefulness is decreased a bit due to the nature of FriendFeed: your subscriptions determine the content you see. People that would really be into say, knitting, don't need a room. They just do their normal thing here and others decide whether to subscribe to them or not. - Hutch Carpenter

I left a bunch of rooms because they were just spammed. The rooms I moderate are slow but steady (I need to import some feeds). Even FF itself recognizes that they need to do a lot with rooms to make the more usable so I'm sure we'll see improvements soon. - Jennifer Leggio

I grabbed a couple of rooms and haven't yet set them up ... lots of potential, just no time. - AJ Kohn

Most of the rooms that I am subscribed to or moderating are pretty slow. I still think they have huge potential. I think part of the problem is FF doesn't currently offer an easy way to discover these rooms. Some room directories (not hosted by FF) have popped up but these haven't gained much traction as far as I can tell. - Mike Doeff

I'm in a ton of rooms but I just haven't gotten into them yet. I think I need to get rid of 99% of the rooms I'm in and focus on one or two rooms. Bootstrapping community is very tough work. The only way these things will get popular is for one person to really care about a room and tend to it daily. That's the kind of work that I just don't have time to do anymore. - Robert Scoble

That's not what "jumped the shark" means - Bjorn Tipling

yup - Gary Dobkin

Bjorn, "jumped the shark" in the context of past its peak. Happy Days reference. Mind you, they may still come back again. - Duncan Riley

I have not even looked at rooms, I just don't see the point. - Cait

Duncan, it requires some ridiculous event like Fonz jumping over a shark, that signifies desperation. Something past its peak might never have jumped the shark. - Bjorn Tipling

Great, now I'm getting room spam... and I can't report it... rooms doomed to fail - Cait

@Joel I've come to realize that GWT will take over the world one day. I'm okay with that. :) - Erica Baker

works slick. iphone predictive typing + gtalk = really embarrassing auto corrections. looking forward to the hilarity. - Ginger Makela

Particularly with Brightkite, they force you to search for a location before you can check in. That threw me for a loop. Why can't I just say "This is where I am?" Why do I need to search for it first? - Mark Trapp

bright kite has a number of issues before it's ready for prime time. one that gets me every time is the performance of its sms interface. if you search for something in your area to do a check in, you may well be gone by the time brightkite comes back with the results of the query. FAIL. - sean808080 via twhirl

@Mark, I beleive the search returns results that can be placed on maps vs. you typing whatever you want and they trying to figure out where you are. - Tsega D

Tsega, sure, but why not let me say "This is where i am" and do what Google Maps does: if I type something it doesn't understand, it says "Did you mean this?" Right now, the only cue of where you're supposed to check in is a microscopic question mark next to "You have not checked in" that tells me I have to do a search first. - Mark Trapp

Um..yeah I had exactly the same reaction. I couldn't figure out how to set my location. I still find it clunky. When I was trying to do the company lookup the first time I fought with it for 30 minutes and finally gave up and manually put in the information. I now know how to but...um I use this kind of stuff regularly. If I can't figure it out there is something wrong. - Goldie Katsu

Well, she's one step ahead of me... I haven't signed up. :) - l0ckergn0me

Thats the reason I have not seen that site after I signed up!! - Jigar Mehta via bTT

<yawn> yeah I feel her on this one </yawn> - Mark Forman

I think the most "beta" part of beta releases is the UI/how to portion.Most techies don't know how to talkie. - Mark Forman

was just thinking of how much of a bkite noob i am. they have complex sms codecs to learn. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

I disagree about holding hands when services are still in beta and invite only. I would expect a released version of a service to do better. Getting an invite and being a early adopter comes with some strings - broken software and no manuals are usually at the head of the list. - Doug Brooks

None of this stuff is prime time until it can be properly sold to the masses with a DUH. Also, Brightkite (which I do actually like) isn't the only one here, we could probably list the services that run on geek assumptions. - Eric Rice

I'm sure other people have similar rules, but my rule is the 10/10 rule: the user must grasp how to begin using your software within 10 seconds, and must be able to use it without supervision or help after 10 minutes. Granted, advanced things might take more time, but they should have a working knowledge of how to do day-to-day things in 10 minutes. Any more time, and it's back to the usability drawing board. - Mark Trapp

@mark t: i like that. beta or not, user friendliness should be in the top five of the list. - edythe

10/10 rule ftw! - Mark Forman

Yeah, I really do like bright kite, the idea an implementation is great once you get past the how do I get info in here? I spent more than 10 seconds looking for a check-in button. - Goldie Katsu

Eric - your wife is a savvy Web 2.0 app user. Start-ups that fail to clearly guide the user with a nice, simple straight-forward walk thru on the 1st login to introduce them to their app are missing a huge opportunity to demonstrate the key features of their product. If the user doesn't see these features they will NOT see the *value* in the application and the will not use it. Attrition rates are much higher for apps where there is no up-front training on the 1st login. - Susan Beebe

Usability testing is the solution. Sit some people down in front of the screen, ask them to perform a task. Sit back and watch. Its amazing how quickly you find out that what you thought was obvious, is completely missed by everyone. Doing a Beta release in and of itself will not solve UI issues. - Kevin Shannon

Does anyone have a spare invite to BrightKite available? - Joe Dawson

Joe, email me at mark@itafroma.com and I'll hook you up. - Mark Trapp

even after you try and use it, I find it still fails - Jonathan Greene via twhirl

@Mark cheers mate! - Joe Dawson

Brightkite.left me too wondering why I was wasting my time - Noah David Simon

I like BK, but when you are in the exact same location for a few days, it's kinda retarded, conceptually. - Eric Rice

Eric, yeah: I've been wanting to use it in earnest for the past few days, but... I haven't gone anywhere. - Mark Trapp

It's as much as "why should I use it" as "how do I use it." - Leo Laporte

BrightKite was alittle hard to figure out at first, but once you get the hang of it - it's a pretty powerful social feature. I don't really have any friends on BrightKite but using it hand-in-hand with Twitter is great. - Aaron Myers

it's only interesting when you check in away from home/work. it would be especially interesting to see places within a given geographic radius where the most people have checked in. geographic serendipity. also, hopefully, they'll get this working with gps - rob zand

So far, I like it. It's a little tricky to figure out at first, especially posting from the web site using my blackberry, but I think I've got it. The problem is, I haven't gone anywhere since I signed up. :) I'm interviewing for a new job with about 50% travel, and I'm thinking it'll be a lot more useful then. - Harvey Simmons

The one thing I do find interesting with it is doing a search for a place where you are going, have been or are curious about and see the activity there. - Scott Cropper

signed up for it, used it a couple times, but too much of a hassle to keep telling it where i am. my friends can txt me or twitter me for "where i am" info. - Chris Harris

Yes please - churchsg@gmail.com - Sally Church via Alert Thingy

love it if you could chuck one at me please: laurence.timms@gmail thx - laurence timms via twhirl

And when Gadiel runs out, I have dozens more. E-mail is louisgray@mac.com. I passed out quite a few yesterday. - Louis Gray

I have a few too. david@fineartdavid.com - David Owens

I'm on the waiting list for an invite, already, but if you've still got extras to pass out, I'd love one. Thanks! kenneth@lefebvre.us - Kenneth LeFebvre

Im out of my 3 invites let me know when you get them. :) - Gadiel Rivera

Thanks! Got it, Gadiel! - Kenneth LeFebvre

Given Gadiel's note, I assume all of the above have invites. Send me a note if you need one, and I'll take care of the rest. - Louis Gray

Glad to hear you like our feed preview, we actually just added YouTube support yesterday, so if a feed has an embedded YouTube video you can play it right from Toluu. - Caleb Elston

Not to mention that Caleb does a FANTASTIC job of making updates and responding to requests -- and since he's right above my comment, he makes it easy to communicate directly with him. Consider me a fan of the service and I believe, more importantly, the man behind the scenes. - Vince DeGeorge

I think exactly like Vince :). - Gadiel Rivera

yes, please send me an invite to atveit@gmail.com - Amund Tveit

Hey Caleb, any thoughts on this: http://twurl.nl/a4nulr ? - Mark Trapp

Gah, my Google Reader just filled up again with new feeds :) - Sally Church via Alert Thingy

Vince, thanks for the kind words, I do my best to keep up with everyones requests and questions. It is because of all of you that Toluu is growing and becoming more and more useful everyday. It would be an empty shell without you all. - Caleb Elston

I have been slowly adding feeds and so far I'm enjoying the service. You all should join us here and share what you read with us, if you need any invite just ask here. - Gadiel Rivera

Thanks for the invite! - Ian Betteridge

I'd love an invite - thanks! - Daniel Martin

Daniel have you been sent an invite yet? - Caleb Elston

Caleb: I need more invites to dilute the tech geeks with scientists pls :) - Sally Church via Alert Thingy

Sally, I just added a bunch of new invites to your account, I can't wait to see what kind of amazing science blogs your friends follow. It is super cool getting recommendations about a subject you are interested in, but have no domain expertise in. - Caleb Elston

Caleb: Crumbs one has signed up already. It's a neat tool, well done. - Sally Church

Sally: Checking out some of your feeds as well as Crumbs. We are still in the very early days of Toluu, we think there are so many opportunities to make it even more useful and easy to use. - Caleb Elston

Caleb: Wait unti more scientists join and drown out the tech geek noise ;) - Sally Church via Alert Thingy

I know! I signed up couple of hours ago - waiting for an invite. - Kamath via twhirl

It's good. I'm impressed with the text-in-image search although it barfs if the text is an underlined link. - laurence timms via twhirl

@Robert, @Kamath: Evernote is absolutely amazing. desktop/webtop sync and OCR capabilities make it the best app in its category. - Rubin

This comes about a day or so too late, methinks. Macworld were offering a promo code for invites.I think it was them, at least.. - Brad McCrorey

More Storage & Direct links to your clips..it would replace photobucket & Flickr for me. - Dedric

Great tool for research. - benedikt

Looks great! I gather web-based or desktop would act the same, just a matter of storage and privacy thoughts, yes? - Mike Sansone

Too bad you only get 100MB storage on Evernote Web... - Svartling

Been fond of this for awhile. I use it to capture and store whiteboard notes all the time. The only thing I don't like is the not being able to choose how I want to sort my notes (e.g. alphabetically or dragging them into whatever order I want, as done in Google Bookmarks) - Bill Bittner

nothing can replace backpackit for me! - Chris Jones via twhirl

A big fan of Yojimbo on the Mac for this. - Christopher Penn via Alert Thingy

Also trying it out. Like it so far and keeping it manly for ideas and supporting stuff. - Johan Bryggare

I am loving it, I use my NOkIA E90 to take photos of business cards, newspaper articles and hand written notes. it syncs to the Evernote servers and to my Mac. - Zamil A. Safwan

Great software...I've used it off and on for years...they've come a long way. - Chris Rossini

I've actually been really happy using evernote. Specifically in organizing online resources for specific issues and technologies. - Kevin Bondelli

This has really helped me cut back on things I was saving in my RSS feeds, emails, etc. Now it's all streamlined in one place. - Jessica

I've got plenty of invites if anyone needs one - mickmel@gmail.com - Mickey Mellen

Not enough storage, not enough organization options, ugly UI. I like it, but I'd like it to have a baby with Springnote. http://www.profy.com/2008/05/1... - Cyndy

how much can you store on evernote? is there a limit? - benedikt

Dream features for Evernote: Content storable on my http://kindle.com and a way to markup/highlight content. - Dion Hinchcliffe via twhirl

it's easier on my workflow than a lot of the other information managers and the fact that I can email a note or picture to it from my iphone is a huge bonus. - Greg Newman

Has some great features, but feels over-designed, @ Cyndy - ditto on the UI; especially compared to Backpack. - Sam

I've been using Evernote for years and the new version is simply outstanding. Highly recommended to everyone. - Akiva Moskovitz

How does Evernote compare with Rememberthemilk? - Sally Church

I've had a Evernote 3 beta login for quite some time but I'm still using Google Notebook. - Morton Fox

Yeah I'm having a hard time remembering to use it. Need to develop a habit - Shey

Sally, I wouldn't use Evernote for that sort of thing. It's a good dump for just about any scrap of website, idea, one-liner, phone number, birth date, grocery list, or any other thing you'd otherwise quickly scribble into a notebook or on a napkin. It is not, however, a task manager by any means. - Akiva Moskovitz

Sally, Evernote is very different to RTM - it's more about document storage and notation, while RTM is primarily to-do management. I use both, for different tasks. - Ian Betteridge

I wrote a piece on using Evernote with business cards: http://unclutterer.com/2008/05... - Stowe Boyd

Thx guys; I like to avoid duplication of tools so Evernote sounds like a cool new thing to try, sort of like desktop stickies then. That would be great - I'm always losing scraps of paper with crucial bits of information :) - Sally Church

Still luuuurve Google Notebook, with my tags and Google Bookmarks all talking to each other & no issues on memory - viki saigal

Has anyone used Microsoft's OneNote and does it compare to Evernote? - Lindsay Donaghe

I made the switch over from gNotebook to EverNote because it has a much better mobile support that I saw. I can snap pictures and send them to EN, send text emails, and their mobile version of the website is also better formatted on my phone's screen (LG Voyager). With gNotebook I could only retrieve notes from their system, only add them when at the computer. - Aaron Kurtz via twhirl

I've switched over from Google notebook, too. But I was sad to do it. - Francine Hardaway

i love evernote... I don't think I can ever not have it - Nathan Manley via Alert Thingy

The service is pretty damn cool. I think it would be great for trying to go totally paperless. Which I pretty much have. - Andrew Dobrow

@Francine Hardaway Sad? Which feature did you miss the most from Google's offering? I'm just curious. - Aaron Kurtz

Phew. Not just me. I like the Google Reader app and the team, which is why it's in part fun to show this. They do a great job, but that's an amusing bug. - Louis Gray

GReader must not like you guys, I haven't had even the slightest hint of trouble at all today. - Shawn Kirsch

@Shawn: Inside, I am crying. :-( - Louis Gray

and here I am with FeedDemon working flawlessly as usual :) - Steven Hodson

Steven, whatever it takes to make you happy and cranky-free. We are at your service. - Louis Gray

Shawn, have you let GReader get recklessly high in unread items? At one point, I was well over a thousand unread entries, and was chalking up the weirdness to GReader's (not so) silent protest. - Mark Trapp

Scratch that, now it's going goofy on me. And yes Mark, I've had well over 3000 unread items before, and as they kept on coming (really busy news day), it took me about 6 hours to get through them. - Shawn Kirsch

I want more options instead of just like. Such as "dream of seeing this." I considered it a success to have my reader under 100 once this month. - Cyndy

So Cyndy, how does that happen? I check in multiple times throughout the day and bring it to zero. - Louis Gray

Same problem here! - Maryam Ardakani

Dunno, Louis... more feeds? Gah. 300 more in the time I was making a child lunch for school. It's WEDNESDAY people! Stop writing! Wednesday is supposed to be a SLOW catch-up day! - Cyndy

Google Reader has been acting weird all morning. Only now has it's stop giving me error messages. - Paul Grave

I've got the same problem >1000 new items and no unread items? Meh. - Sally Church

yeah, GR has been doing the odd on me today too. Not catching up with the read items properly. - laurence timms via twhirl

very scary - Shey

You've been secretly cut-off dude. Did you buy someone at the reader team a caff instead of a decaf when you were there? - Charlie Anzman

Sounds like something you late nighters faced! :-) Maybe Google did some maintenance overnight thinking you night owls would be in bed. - Hutch Carpenter

I gave up on Google Reader - and all readers - a while ago. Much better to actually go to blog pages than to see a denatured version in a meta-browser. - Edward Vielmetti

I agree with Edward, but then again I don't check 1,000 feeds like Scoble does. Techmeme, reddit, digg and tweets are all the recommends I need. - Justin Gardner via twhirl

I live in the land of the feed reader. I'm right there with Scoble 1000+ feeds to read every day. And I have the scattered across several online feed readers (I like to play around), doesn't stop me from adding more feeds, I don't even flinch. - Shawn Kirsch

As an information junkie, I regularly check out close to 500 feeds: saying just go to the blogs is like telling a heroin addict to just chew gum. - Mark Trapp

Even I was confused with my GReader for sometime. But it got fixed soon - Varun Mahajan

Google Readers been screwy alot reacently- at the moment I can watch new shared items come in from friends, it flashes yellow, and then when I click there's nothing new. Very irritating, but when it works, it's awesome so I don't mind too much, - Fearghas

This just happened to me - I hope "screwiness" means a new feature coming. - Vince DeGeorge

Had the same issue. - Steve Rubel

Am I the only one who thinks they shouldn't be merged. I like keeping them distinct - Deepak

@Deepak, if done elegantly I think you'd be ok. For instance, a toggle button to swtich from either service would be nice. The challenge on a merge is that I follow folks on Twitter that don't have FF accounts and conversely I follow users on FF who I don't on Twitter. So handling the Tweets from these 2 types of users may be a bit challenging. - Mark Krynsky

with the comment about merging Friend Feed and Twitter... although have AlertThingy already! - Laura Whitehead via twhirl

I like Twhirl but I can't use it because it won't remember my login info, every time I load it I have to enter everything again.I have uninstalled and reinstalled 10 times and no luck. I posted something on getsatisfaction.com and no answer. - Kelly Johns

I think they should remain separate, too. I'm not enough of a fan of FriendFeed to want them merged. However, I would like a way to keep tweets of people I follow on Twitter from appearing in the FriendFeed window. Right now, I see the tweets twice; once in each window. - Gregory Pittman

It should show you entries from the last time you started it only, so I don't re-read old posts. - Ranjit Mathoda

I second the request for a status-aware version that only shows new entries. No need to re-read old tweets. And **please** keep twitter separate, or at least enable an option to keep twitter/friendfeed separate. - Kevin Donahue

I like the fact that I can keep twitter/ff separate, but an option to combine them would be nice. Plus, right now commenting on FF works much better in alertthingy. - Will Johnston via Alert Thingy

having both open in twhirl is pretty much awesome (when they are both up) - Chris Jones via twhirl

Merging would be great, but only if it would automatically de-dupe at the same time. - Chuck Lawson

I prefer them merged in one window. Agree comments are easier in Alert Thingy. - Sally Church

Thanks for asking Loic! I too like the idea of merging, but add the *option* of having 2 windows merged into 1, but maintain current functionality (let folks choose this). DeDuping would be a must for the merged option. Alternately have 1 window with 2 TABS - for twitter or friendfeed. - Susan Beebe

Loic, now if only it didn't have two screens..... - Duncan Riley

I prefer the one merged too. - Shinya ICHINOHE

I with you would allow for scrolling within a post to get to more comments when they are over a page long - Sweyn

I am not sure about the merged window. I like being able to keep the streams separate. FF would push twitter content offscreen too fast. As an option? Sure. What I DO want is an option to reply to FF about a tweet right from the twitter stream - Soulhuntre

For one it would be great if it didn't delete my FF post while I'm writing when it updates. I prefer the separate windows as well over a merged one. Tabs could work but only up to a point. My suggestion is to use some contextual UI that could include having just one single window with an update bar to show the user which services have new entries. The user could then click on the items in the bar and open the respective feed. I like the idea of separation but I don't think a window for each service is the answer given the limits of screen space. - Devlin Dunsmore via twhirl

Perhaps the update bar could show/hide itself only either when it has updates or when the user mouses over a particular part of the window. That way the navigation is only temporary but reveals itself either on demand or when it is relevant to the user. - Devlin Dunsmore via twhirl

I'm not a fan of Thwirl's UI. Too much clutter. Who came up with the color scheme? Click targets (buttons) are too small. - Ole Begemann

Twhirl is ugly. :) - sebmos

nothing for me beats visiting the website itself at the moment - Ian Rathbone

@sebmos just like seesmic, functional but as ugly as sin - Duncan Riley

I like Twhirl and don't find it ugly at all! Just my 2p. - laurence timms via twhirl

@sebmos Tru the different color schemes, I never use the default - Garrido via twhirl

wew that is a lot of feedback thank you all so much! - Loic Le Meur

I have yet to find a FF client which I feel comfortable with. Although twhirl is a cool application, it just does not provide the same experience as visiting the FF web site. Maybe the interface is too busy compared to the FF web interface? - Scott Jarkoff