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Yung-Hui Lim › Likes
@scobleizer what do you predict for mobile social networks? Loopt? Foursquare? Or the 'incumbents' like Facebook or Twitter may succeed?
Kyle Case, George Achillias, zʍıɔ and 28 other people liked this
I think Scoble has great social media instincts --he's often wrong --but he's right more than anyone else percentage wise.
- Jeremiah Owyang
More than anybody else percentage wise? Back it up. :)
- Louis Gray
Maybe he should be a VC. Would you give him money?
- Jeremiah Owyang
Four Square raises a round http://paidcontent.org/article...
- Jeremiah Owyang
I agree about Scoble's instincts... I just stay away from things that make him cry
- Bastard Operator From FF
That's a tough test. I'd be hard-pressed to give anyone my money who didn't already have a track record.
- Hutch Carpenter
Scoble might very well have more success than the majority of VCs if given money.
- Mark Evans
I wrote him a five figure check once.
- Louis Gray
I hope to write Louis Gray a five figure check some time
- Jesse Stay
Yeah, Louis, that investment's doing all right, ain't it?
- Hutch Carpenter
After another 35K miles, he might just let you, Jesse. :)
- Mark Evans
Ill write Louis a Four Figure Check so he can turn it into a 5 figure check he can give scoble
- Jeremiah Owyang
What would Scoble invest in if he were a VC?
- Mark Evans
who will write me a 3 figure check so I can give it to Louis?
- Jeremiah Owyang
I love foursquare (when it's up). Congrats to the team on raising a round. Interesting area.
- John McCrea
John I noticed it's been having problems the last few days too
- Jeremiah Owyang
FourSquare is cool. If I could, I would invest in Yelp. I think they are closer to the real money than Twitter or Facebook is. That means that they will either get purchased, or will go all the way on their own. The Yelp iPhone app is already the best one for location. The rest are just games. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Scoble’s strength as a VC would be bolstered by his ability to pull in outside pieces for mashups and outside marketing/publicity resources to build early momentum. This is something most VCs claim to do, but are really only around to write cheques. However, a role that might fit Scoble better than being a pure VC would be to also direct an incubation garage where he could contribute ideas and solutions on a daily, face-to-face basis.
- A Mitchell
Fourquare is not ready for prime time. I'm on it, I play it, but it just isn't stable or accurate or complete enough to be really satisfying. That being said, I am still the Mayor of Sam's Chowder House.
- Francine Hardaway
Brightkite
- Wayne Sutton
Francine, I had claim to New England Aquarium for a short time :-) I only wish it was available in Salt Lake City now.
- Jesse Stay
I used to think Brightkite but Foursquare has the mojo right now. It's tied to places so it's easier to use and rewards frequent check-ins with fun titles like Mayor and achievements. It has a solid business model. And it's much more social. I've use them both and I'm increasingly gravitating toward foursquare.
- Leo Laporte
Foursquare is an absolutely amazing social, location awareness app. Moreover, it is super young and although limited to the city you are in, it should dominate when it picks up steam. Plus, it has a really friggin cool name.
- Braden Douglass
I like Foursquare but Brightkite has more features; upload photos to flickr, sync update with facebook status, comments/mentions and already a few augmented reality mashups. Here's my location based iPhone app review blog post: http://socialwayne.com/pvc . Foursquare isn't in my city yet but I had a chance to "play" with it during a recent NYC trip. It has features that will make users...
more...
- Wayne Sutton
Thanks robert for the comment
- Jeremiah Owyang
Brightkite. Foursquare is a non starter, since they don't operate in any cities I'd ever want to be in.
- Otto
from iPhone
I didn't realize Foursquare had to "operate in cities"... I thought you just added locations when they weren't already in the service.
- Fa La La La Lindsay
Foursquare
- Gabriel
Lindsay: Nope. Foursquare only works in 21 cities: http://foursquare.com/cities . Which makes it a non-starter, since the nearest one of those is 400+ miles away from me.
- Otto
Wikipedia Passes The 3 Million Article Mark http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterpr...
Yung-Hui Lim liked this
FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request - FriendFeed Blog - http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009...
Jason A. Samfield, Srikanth AD, Ozer Wrzl (EN) and 658 other people liked this
We've been acquired by Facebook! We are really excited about joining the Facebook team. (Note: FriendFeed will continue to operate - see the blog post for details)
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
Boom.
- Louis Gray
Grr!
- directeur
Woah...
- Brandon Titus
Uh. Well, that's the end of that.
- Akiva Moskovitz
Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Roberto Bonini
What does this mean for FriendFeed, Bret?
- Kol Tregaskes
Lame.
- Mark Trapp
great title bret. well played.
- MG Siegler
WOW
- Bindu Reddy
Congrat! So, what does this mean to your team and to FF in general?
- Dilip Dand
wahhhhhhhhhh
- Myrna
maaaan
- Jamie
wowow
- Harry Wolff
congrats
- brainno722 (Peter)
Nooooooooooooo
- Mushin
Wait... seriously?
- Ken Sheppardson
oh, noooo
- Tanju Yildiz
Congratulations to the friendfeed team. I know this is huge for y'all. Please don't let us spoil your parade as we weep.
- Ladybug Heather
Seriously?!? .....
- sebastian☆rocket brother
oh boy.
- Carlos Ayala
I am hoping this will lead to nice integration for cross posting! Currently using Twitter App on FB to post and I hate those ff.im links that end up on Facebook.
- Ivan Zlatev
it was good while it lasted, Friendfeed. :(
- holly
division by zero
- Onur Cengiz
OMG
- Onur Gündüz
"FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team." Those are NOT encouraging things to read as a FF user.
- Scott of Two Countries
gratz
- Ali
My heart is sinking as I type this. Please tell me that it isn't a late April Fool's joke. :(
- Tyson Key
Wow, it's true!!
- Kevin Whalen
Big news! I second Kol & dilip's request for what this means for the team and FF's future.
- Brandon Titus
O_o
- Joe Silence is not Santa
So it IS true.
- Hector
Nicely done Bret
- Jennifer Van Grove
Congratulations btw, guys!
- Kol Tregaskes
Sniff... not sure if I'm excited about this. But I have enormous respect for the FriendFeed team... so, I assume they believe in the move as more than an exit strategy.
- Michael Leggett
Congrats, Bret.
- Jordan Hofker
This is just horrible
- Matthew DeVries
Congratulations, I suppose. A bit worried Facebook is going to ruin everything though. I'm not fond of Facebook, to say the least.
- Irma Vermaat
Um.
- Barry Mitchelson
Oh my... Hopefully FriendFeed won't vanish and good luck :)
- Tarmo Aidantausta
Do we call it FaceFeed? FriendBook?
- Tyson Key
Oh no....
- Ben Hanten
Terrible fit.
- Matthew DeVries
damn here it is... :(
- Edgar Rodríguez
FriendFace!!! (i love it crowd)
- Bahriye
*waits for wall-to-wall ads and constant spambots*
- Joe Silence is not Santa
Die.
- Zio Bonino
Congrats
- Zoltan Szendro
I dont want FF to end
- Fee501st
Wow
- Shevonne
Oh mon dio !
- Umar
What did you do? WHYYY!
- Zachary TG
Ostregheta.
- Reloj
Congrats guys, in a bittersweet sort of way.
- Hutch Carpenter
guess there's no way of denying this anymore :(
- BCK
Just another lesson in why you shouldn't put your love and trust in a company......
- Matthew DeVries
Oh no!
- Erdinc YILMAZEL
Congrats, but I hate Facebook.
- Zachary TG
I like Friendfeed and I do not like Facebook. Gratz to you guys though, I think.
- Mark Sorrell
"Oh shit..." came to mind immediately. :(
- Tyson Key
Scott, yep not encouraged by that comment. :-(
- Kol Tregaskes
Congrats on the deal, best wishes to the FF'ers in helping facebook get it together!
- Sean O'Connor
This could get exciting, especially concerning twitter :-P
- Malte Steckmeister
Congrats for Friendfeed team, but I'm seriously worried for us :(((((((((((
- Roberto
Congratulations... I'm sure this is pretty exciting for everyone at FriendFeed... We're all looking forward to where it takes you!
- Nathan Chase
And FriendFeed was just getting popular. Not any more.
- Zachary TG
Wow
- Rodfather
*Sobs*
- Tyson Key
wow
- Jack Wilson, K4SAC
to the dump
- Zachary TG
Wow, very disappointed
- Randy Pollock
come on. Bret, facebook is so closed. so different from Friendfeed. besides that. Congrats to the team
- Edgar Rodríguez
As am I
- Zachary TG
machecazzo
- Sba
VERY disappointed.
- Joe Silence is not Santa
horrible decision
- Randy Pollock
Booo. But, you know, congrats.
- Chris Nixon
i'm not sure i'm happy about this.
- Taylan Aydınlı
OMG WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SH*T
- Alp
Congrats for u guys... probably too bad for us ;-(
- Laurent
God, I can see FB shutting down FF just like Six Apart shut down Pownce.
- DarknessFalls
arg.
- Aron Michalski
Good for you, don't know for all of us
- Cristian Conti
@#$& that's all I have to say. For now.
- Zachary TG
Facebook should have been aquired by Friendfeed. Why they hell would you give up your better product to a worse one? Did none of you give a shit about this service to begin wiht?
- Matthew DeVries
Congrats!
- Alix Whitmire
Coolest web 2.0 site I've ever seen & used. I hope things don't derail. Ads will be coming soon, which is fine, but.... then what 's next? Please no quizzes!
- Ben Hanten
Who would have thought that after Facebook were shamelessly being "inspired" by FriendFeed, the inevitable would have happened?
- Tyson Key
I'm pissed off. I wan to throw away the whole Internet :
- DarkBls
Congrats!
- Moushumi Kabir
Congrats guys. :)
- Meryn Stol
Congratulations. This is awesome for you and for Facebook.
- Mike Sego
mommy?
- Josh Haley
Hey guys, keep in mind that Facebook is blocked in workplaces across the nation. 250 million casual users commenting about last night's party does not intelligent conversation make.
- Hector
FFail
- rael
What will happen to my 92 subscribers?
- Zachary TG
yes you have just failed at failing, no it is not a double negative.
- Bahriye
Tragic.
- Shannon
I really can't see how FB would buy FF only to shut it down. There are way too many innovations and features FF has that FB honestly needs. I'm looking forward.
- Harry Wolff
here come the comments
- Zachary TG
Congrats? Everybody who's saying Congrats doesn't know what he's saying. Go to hell.
- Zio Bonino
Yeah, quizzes are EVIL!
- Tarmo Aidantausta
Wow.
- Zachary TG
Oh, this does not make me happy. Not at all! I've stayed off of Facebook intentionally and FriendFeed is my favorite social network. This is like when the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. :>(
- Larry Hawes
i have stopped using FB for the most part and liked FF alot more. now FF will go the way of FB. screwed again.
- Joe Silence is not Santa
Congratulations. Enjoy the new challenges of acquisition, and I'm looking forward to the result!
- Wade Dorrell
Berge Gazen beat your score in Mafia Wars
- Berge Gazen
Feedface or Facefeed?
- Fee501st
FUCK THAT ! [Anyways good job guys ^^]
- TiTi
Enjoy your fat paychecks, guys. You've sold us out.
- Akiva Moskovitz
Bravo Bret! Been following your successes ever since we had the opportunity to work together on the YellowPages.ca / Google Maps Canada deal. Congrats!
- Sebastien
I wished it was Google or even Yahoo!, instead...
- Tyson Key
i really hope ff stays as it is. fb is kinder carder while ff is a great tool.
- jkkmobile
Facefucked or Fuckfeed?
- Matthew DeVries
Not sure what to make of this. It could eiter be a big win or a huge fail.
- dorn
It could have been Microsoft, which would have been worse for everyone. :(
- Tyson Key
Can I take this opportunity to say I HATE facebook?
- Alex Scrivener
seems the only ppl happy here are the ones in the biz or who stand to profit from the merger.
- Joe Silence is not Santa
I guess we should get ready to get poked by our supposed friends and have various shit thrown at us? Plus 5,000 requests by apps that nearly all suck.
- Joey Gibson
There is zero way this could have been a win for anyone, but the now rich founders.
- Matthew DeVries
duh
- aybars badur
I HATE facebook
- Pedram
this is simply awful.
- Joe Silence is not Santa
If I have to go to FB to use FF then it's a lost cause
- Randy Pollock
Painful. And apparently I completely misunderstood what FF was trying to accomplish both technically and as an organization. I guess Facebook must have dangled a pretty big bag of money in front of them.
- Ken Sheppardson
FriendFeed is Dead! Long Live FriendFeed! :/
- Tyson Key
Awesome. Please fix Facebook email :) http://fudge.org/too-muc...
- Jay Cuthrell
Facebook is going to acquire the web!
- l'Ego di Gigi
To me, FriendFeed is like Porsche and Facebook a Kia. I'm curious to see which will become which..
- Moushumi Kabir
Oh noes!
- Burcu Dogan
Congrats Bret!
- Robin Dindayal
I will reserve judgement, i don't like or use FB but if FF maintains it's current goodness i don't care who cuts the checks.
- Steve C
I hope this doesn't turn into an APP filled hunk of crap. I love FriendFeed, it was the untouched gem of microblogging. I don't want Mafia Wars invited in my FriendFeed!!! Congrats on the sale though.
- Jay Farmington
Where's the "dislike" option?
- Gregor Morrill
+1 Gregor
- Tyson Key
accipicchia che pessima notizia
- massimo mantellini
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE!!! -_-
- Bahriye
I just realized this is like when K-mart bought Sears ...
- DarknessFalls
/ponders the meaning of "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being."
- Philipp Lenssen
And I will officially be leaving FriendFeed today.
- Michael Forian
omg
- John μller
@Philipp: until the new masters start flexing their muscles and bringing in their own people to enforce their own vision.
- Joe Silence is not Santa
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
+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: Dead Like 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
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
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?
- Santa 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
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
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
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
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
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 Beeferman
Noooooooooooooooooooooo!
- LouCypher
I don't see what's so bad about it since no one knows right now what the outcome will be, everyone is just making assumptions that could possibly be wrong..... Might help just sitting back and seeing what happens first before complaining.
- ChaCha Fance
Nooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrghh! I´ve resisted getting a facebook acct for so long...
- Thomas Bøhm
ChaCha, if everybody would do that there would not be much discussion would there? This is part of the fun.
- Rutger Blom
I wonder how the discussion over on facebook would compare to this?
- Don Faulkner
from IM
Drat!
- Gee Ekachai
congrats guys!
- Elad
Don, I doubt there is any discussion going on there. They're too busy throwing quizes at each other.
- Rutger Blom
Congrats, FF! I'm approaching the situation with cautious optimism. A lot of my friends only share stuff via the Facebook wall/feed, so if Facebook is able to make their feed more like the FF feed (i.e. good, instead of sucktacular) through this acquisition, it's mostly a win for me in the end.
- Brian Chang
At least my Feedburner stats might go back to normal again.
- Rutger Blom
/me pokes Rutger. (just getting in practice. ;)
- Don Faulkner
from IM
Where will we go for the FFunderCats, bacon memes, and angry artists fighting over photo reshares now? ;)
- Tyson Key
Don, LOL :-)
- Rutger Blom
If anybody has doubts as to what happens to the FriendFeed community or our stored information here, read this statement from Bret (in this thread) "Your data will not go away any time in the near term future - we are committed to our users". Now maybe you can see "whats so bad about it" and curb your optimism. Not good.
- jcunwired
Congrats FF. Fix their live feed situation please.
- Edward Barnieh
@josh: do you think FB will throw away all the crap people use? various quiz, pick 5 and so on?
- Flavio
@jc: our data will not go away in the near future. what will be in few months? in a year?
- Flavio
Let's see if you can do a bit better than just not being evil this time around.
- Tim Tyler
Wooohooo!!, seems like we are being sent back to "good" old Facebook. Congrats Bret!!
- Danli
Looks like I'm going to repeat the same thing many others did. My first reaction was "Oh my..." I have refused to join Facebook due to its philosophy while I have been with FriendFeed from the beginning for its. I'm sad and somewhat apprehensive.
- Sean Leather
Congrats. I suppose this means the end of FriendFeed but hopefully a better Facebook.
- Harry Toon
Hmm. Interesting.
- Ralf Becker
Add me to the fearful group.
- beersage
Please say that facebook.com will be shutting down, and the combined company will still be called FriendFeed... I bet it won't happen, though.
- Tyson Key
"Regarding FB/FF - Here's how it's [probably] going to work. You will most likely have an account merge, all of the services FriendFeed supports will now be aggregated on Facebook, and all of your FriendFeed friends will be in a "list" on Facebook. The FF Groups will become Facebook Groups. The FF lists will become Facebook Lists." http://ff.im/6pNxq
- Ozgur Uckan
Nothing like an early retirement payout :)
- Owen Greaves
Congrat Bret
- Nimaa
Panic attack. Congratulations, however! :)
- onigiri
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
RT @alirizaesin FriendFeed, R.I.P. Home tweet home!..
- Ozgur Uckan
Congrats to facebook. Now, Twitter is the best.
- Ebru Baranseli
Congratulations to the FriendFeed guys on the Facebook Acquisition. Not a big fan of Facebook, so I hope my favorite Uber Aggregator, Realtime Social, Microblogging site of awesomeness is not entirely absorbed into the Facebook infrastructure. I wait with baited breath to hear what "normally for the time being" means ;).
- Tom Horn
Can I now have comments propagate in both directions as far as Facebook/Friendfeed is concerned?
- Piaw Na
*checks date*. Damn .. not April 1st, must be for real. While I'm happy for the FF team, since I guess this is what they wanted (congrats guys!), I can't help but think this is the beginning of the end for a great service and a vibrant community. There are reasons I don't spend any time on Facebook and do spend lots of time on FF, and some kind of "FF integrated into Facebook" just won't cut it. I hope this service will live on for at least a few more years.
- Andrew Perry
Gratz to the FF team but as a user I'm not completely happy. In short, I like the FF team/product much more than I like the FB team/product. Best of luck to all.
- timepilot
Dang! I've killed another site! Sorry guys... FF was doing fine until I started coming here again! Same with Pownce! Went there and liked it... went underground for a spell... came back and still liked it, so I stayed. A few months later... BOOM! I have the touch! (I'm thinking I'll start devoting a lot of time to Twitter... maybe I can kill that one, too!)
- Mark "DerBingle" J
Все, блядь, пиздец!
- ǝuǝƃnǝ
WOW - very happy for all of you :-)
- Kishore Balakrishnan
Bret, congrats on the acquisition. You guys put in a lot of hard work to create this community. I just hope you learned the mistakes Pownce made, Jaiku etc, and ensured that you didn't sell out your community, but that you helped it evolve into something as great as this into something better. Good luck in future endeavors!
- Mike Lewis
Oh yeah? Ok: take tour money and go to the hell. :-(((
- Claude LaFrenière
Yay for you guys, I mean that seriously, I 'like' what this means for you personally, but -1000000 cool points for doing it with FB. Sad day.
- Threepwood
Karoli: FF search is so useful because it is integrated with all the other great features that help to find relevant content. if FB wants to have a similar capability, they must also develop the underlying architecture.
- Mike Chelen
from IM
Sucks big time.
- Drea
Sadness
- Yasin Jason
I can't believe this happened
- Johnny
Suggested name: FailFriend. :-(((
- Claude LaFrenière
Friend facebooks feed (FFF)
- Filiz Koyuncu
«Experience shows that those who never trust anyone will never be disappointed.» Leonardo da Vinci
- Claude LaFrenière
So what exactly is going to happen? Is FF eventually going to disappear? Will it merge into the Facebook interface? Please don't do that
- Ethan
Gimme my OPML export
- Sriks7
Money is the root of all evil
- Shakeel Mahate
shakeel, the reasons for friendfeed to join facebook are probably about other things besides money, since many of the FF staff left high-paying jobs to join in the first place
- Mike Chelen
from IM
Well I've thought about it, and I'll stick around until I start seeing that crappy Facebook logo, I only have 71 subscribers here, I hate to do it but I'll probably scrap the whole thing and start over somewhere else. still can't believe that shit.
- Scratch5150
Congrats, team! It's bittersweet, though.
- Anne Bouey
So now we will have FriendFeed blocked at work too. Darn.
- Mark Scrimshire
"Your data will not go away any time in the near term future" is not exactly inspiring for the long term for those of us who came here to escape Facebook for a) it's walled garden and b) privacy concerns. Nice for the Founders to make a pile of cash but for the many of us, it feels like we got sold down the river. Sad.
- Sally Church
This is tragic. Tragic. Tragic.
- Ahsan Ali aka. Slick
cacarr: updates for FB have progressed rapidly in the past, count how many months since new features such as api calls and site redesigns have have been implemented
- Mike Chelen
from IM
I can't believe it either. I feel as if — for the moment — I am lost in the wilderness, adrift.
- roamin
Congratulation to the FF team! You guys deserves this. I just hope that Facebook does not change the directions of FF.
- Vinko
congrats, I'm happy for friendfeed...
- amelia arapoff
Congrats you guys, well deserved.
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
Congrats Bret! Hope the transition goes smoothly for you guys.
- Cristo
I hope this means better integration: liking here will auto-like on fb and such :D if that's the case, I won't mind the ads *wink* *wink*
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
Franc, cant stand facebook ads in their current format, hope they will be fixed eventually :P
- Mike Chelen
from IM
Grats, dont spend it all in one place.....
- Robert Higgins
congrads. I think it will be good for BOTH companies.
- Logan Lindquist
boo.
- kelly
The Borg has struck. Alas. Prepare to be assimilated. (Will FB add my FF subscriptions to my FB friends list?)
- Dennis Jernberg
Boo
- Amit Morson
Logan: What do you mean by "both" companies?
- Christopher A Carr
Now that you guys have $$$ you should swap out the not so very pleasing default avatar!
- See-ming Lee 李思明 SML
Hope you guys enjoy your new jobs. Meanwhile we get to watch a great alternative to Facebook with a promising future go down the tubes. A really sad and unfortunate day.
- Todd Holmes
BOO! Hiss! Mondays really do suck.
- Dale
Congratulations to all the FriendFeed team. I hope you'll be able to keep the FriendFeed spirit up at Facebook. Kudos for all the great work you've been doing.
- Paul Papadimitriou
Congrats and good luck..
- Can Koklu
Thanks for all the fish. Saving the so long... for now.
- abacab
Goodbye FF, it was wonderful..
- Francesco Cugurra
I use FriendFeed and Facebook so it would be awesome to see FF features in Facebook. Congratulations!
- krzychukula
from IM
judging by the nearly 600 comments as i type this, including my own earlier one, FF could use a Don't Like button as well. or would, if we were going to be using it much longer.
- kelly
Nice, i like to wish you all the best for your new job (and it's really hard, i know). I'm happy, but... don't let die FF!!
- Seo (ignobile) Guru
Hope FriendFeed remains open. Love the spirit of FF
- Bernaldo Barrena
Seriously, what a coincidence! Just on Saturday I claimed to be both twitter- and facebook-free. I loved FF product and personally helped to bring at least a dozen of my friends into the community. I'll stick around for a while though.
- ǝuǝƃnǝ
This deal makes sense, now fb developers do not need to figure out how ff does it because they can just ask! Congrats facebook and ff!
- Garin Kilpatrick
I suppose Facebook had to do it, with Twitter and Google Wave as competitor...
- Alexander Kruel
обычные дела. http://www.youtube.com/watch...
- ǝuǝƃnǝ
Congratulations Friendfeed :D
- paniaguai
Ok. I'll quit friendfeed, so. Goodbye. Ciao
- valerio fiandra
from iPhone
I am noticing a lot of people going to re-esumate their lifestream.fm account now!
- Flavio
I don't think FB acquiring FF is bad. But I don't think it's good either. We'll see. :-) In the meantime, keep up the good work!
- Alexander Gieg
Oh shit. Love FF, hate FB. I'll NEVER, EVER merge my two accounts. I'd rather unsub from both than merging. I'll wait for the developments, and in the meantime look for an alternative.
- Alliandre (la Ippe)
How long until ex-FriendFeed employees start jumping ship from Facebook? I wonder...
- Tyson Key
Thomas Power still believes that Facebook/FF/Linkedin (2010) will be acquired by Apple (2011) and this is a transitional acquisition in the SN market cycle. The world is shifting to Mac, iTunes, iPhones and FB own the next generation. Apple have $29bn of cash on deposit price is not an issue. Google must jump for twitter while MS fiddle in the sticks with Yahoo. BillG will be back at the MS helm 2012.
- Penny Power
:( Happy for FF people, sad for the service. Was going to move from fb to ff this week..
- Martynas
congrats!
- Ronald
thts good!so i can workin both in my Fb online next
- Arini dewi muchtaram
Flavio: never heard of lifestream.fm before, but I'm going to go check it out. I'll reiterate, though, that I'm now shy of any service like this, since it can disappear just as it's getting good. I heard about sweetcron.com last night (via http://ff.im/6pR2w). Maybe it's time to move from centralized to distributed again.
- Don Faulkner
Just finished setting up my lifestream.fm at http://lifestream.fm/dfaulkner. Lifestream does what it says, and no more. FF's search blows lifestream away. FF is more flexible about adding source feeds, but lifestream does fine without the flexibility I suppose. FF still wins, or would, if I thought it would be sticking around. :P
- Don Faulkner
Must See - Hitler blows up over Facebook / FriendFeed - http://friendfeed.com/dffrnt...
- Ahsan Ali aka. Slick
Dave, I'm not happy. That video gave me some much needed comic relief .. after waking up to this news.
- Ahsan Ali aka. Slick
good for you, bad for us
- Zachary Earl Strader
I also hate facebook, not because of their silly quizzes and pokes, but because I suspect they would like to maintain massive user base as the determining factor in choosing a social network. I would love to switch to orkut as I use so many other google services, but I can't because nobody else does. That should not be my criteria.... I thought friendfeed would try to make social networks work together.
- Ru Viljoen
I don't understand why everyone is so negative about the situation?
- orionstarr
@orionstarr - it's like Starbucks buying your neighborhood coffee shop and saying it still cares about the customers. You know it's just not going to be the same as what you've come to love.
- Robin Barooah
Presumably FF will go on the back burner - and the team will try and "fix" Facebook.
- Tim Tyler
sad, sad, sad.
- scott willeke
Congratulations! That's huge. I hope all is well.
- Juan Bruce
bad bad bad
- kakilang
bye bye friendfeed!
- Jonathan Crossland
Why-eee!!! ??? What next?
- Wayne Lewis
I've watched Facebook morph from a relatively organised and well implemented social networking tool into the hulking mess it is now - and I really, really hope that a similar thing doesn't happen here with the inevitable changes this will bring about.
- Leslie Moore
Come on guys, out with the long-term game plan, this is tedious.
- Andrew Eglinton
NOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, I mean Cool.
- sofarsoShawn
Teach Facebook how to be FriendFeed. Let the small but fast teach the big but slow. Don't forget what Paul says - don’t be evil.
- whatidiscover
Reminder: The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior (See Stage 4: Entitlement) - http://louisgray.com/live...
beersage, Andrei M. Marinescu, NaHi and 107 other people liked this
"At this point, often in part due to favorable feedback from the service's authors, the early adopter feels a sense of entitlement, that the product absolutely must be architected in the way they say so, even if to move in that direction wouldn't serve the larger installed base. Now, instead of suggesting quick ways the service could update, the calls are more like ultimatums, and if not quickly seeing a response, the early adopter can get extremely frustrated, at times, seeing this annoyance bubble up to the same degree their first comments on the product reeked of praise."
- Louis Gray
from Bookmarklet
Re: This. http://friendfeed.com/scoblei... The feedback is predictable.
- Louis Gray
I get the feeling the Robert has jumped the shark a little bit here. I hope he apologizes to Kevin for his uncalled for ad hominem.
- Brian Sullivan
This is great, but I think it ALSO applies to less than diplomatic responses from early adopters that I go back to Twitter, ha. I don't take it personally, but your point is a nice reminder that it is not about me.
- Liza
science.
- Josh Haley
from iPhone
I may be the only early adopter that doesn't feel entitled to anything
- Bwana ☠
Then again, I'm not your average human
- Bwana ☠
Ever since I posted this, I'm self-aware about potentially slipping from a 3 to a 4, so I think twice about posting criticism without knowing the deciding factors.
- Louis Gray
I for one am appreciative of evangelists especially ones that are willing to reevaluate their perspective, tech or otherwise.
- Eric Logan
Hah! Looking in mirror. Seeing egg on face.
- Robert Scoble
from iPhone
I feel entitled to type in this box and push the button named "comment." Sorry, I thought that was what FriendFeed was designed for.
- Robert Scoble
from iPhone
I don't know that entitlement is the right word. For me, at least, it's more frustration. Here you have this great product. I want more people to know about it, but I'm having issues, be it my tech, user error or just loss of features, it's frustrating. If I'm having these issues, then there's no way I'll be able to explain to my friends and family why things are why they are. When you...
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- Admiral Anika
One point to the one above. I know that many companies who offer free service will or should charge for use at some point. I'm okay with that, but when they mess with functionality it's hard to justify paying for it. When your users are asking for the same thing over and over again, especially when you're in beta, don't give them a useless feature that offers nothing much to usability. At that point, it's hard to justify the ongoing use of something, let alone paying for it in the future.
- Admiral Anika
Is it entitlement or ownership? People support what they help build, right? So maybe it is partly a sense of ownership...
- Liza
Great conversation thread... Rule #1 if you do not own it, then do not falsely allow yourself to believe your vote will ever - or should ever - count. Sometimes the developers listen to your sound words of device, but in my humble findings often this waxes and wanes. Rule #2 is that step 5 is your alternative. Rule #3 is always see Rule #1 when you begin to think your opinion matters ;-)
- Ken Stewart | ChangeForge
Robert. No harm, no foul. :) I'm just glad I wrote this one already last year, so I don't have to do it again.
- Louis Gray
its a pretty graph and perhaps it is true, i have experienced it myself through mmos, beta testing, but did you actually have numbers or is this just instinct?
- Robert Higgins
By the way, I'm ACTIVELY still in the promotion phase. I'm showing FriendFeed to EVERYONE as everyone I met in Boulder last week can attest to. That's one thing that Louis' graph doesn't understand. I go through all of these phases IN PARALLEL. Not serially. So, deal with it. :-)
- Robert Scoble
The graph is simple. People are not simple. :) The downside to acting like a #4 is dorks looking for an excuse tend to use it as an excuse. Just wait. (Not even Scoble likes FriendFeed any more... he says... "x") So don't give the bastards any ammo. :)
- Louis Gray
Louis what is the oldest service that you still use that you didn't migrate from and why?
- Robert Higgins
Interestingly, those seeking to distill life into simplistic terms can be dangerous. Like those dorks who spout off non-sensical rules ;-)
- Ken Stewart | ChangeForge
I do think it is used as ammo, which stinks, b/c a discussion we should have (UI on FF) becomes a territorial battle. There were great points made, but also a lot of juvenile comments which I hope are ignored. As I learned in my first online attack, "don't feed the trolls". They are everywhere and not unique to specific networks.
- Liza
for me the oldest service i still use is hotmail.
- Robert Higgins
Robert: you didn't ask me, but I'll answer anyway: Outlook/Exchange. Although that has changed a lot over the years but I first started using whatever Microsoft called it (MSMail?) back in 1993. Regarding newer web services? Flickr. Wordpress. Google Reader are probably the ones that have had the longest staying power.
- Robert Scoble
Louis: yeah, but if I worried about what dorks think I would just stay off the Internet. :-)
- Robert Scoble
thought about why and the stages of the graph. while i still use hotmail, for family and things i have migrated to gmail mostly. I personally never did step 4 with hotmail, but i did get buddies on it a long time ago before they even had their own computers. It was cool to promote hotmail and messenger in the 90's felt hip to chat with people in China when I lived in USA. I still like sky-drive for the free 25 gigabytes of online storage, so will probably never migrate.
- Robert Higgins
Robert, I still use .Mac mail, and have for a very long time. (Some day I may move to GMail, but not yet). I have stuck with Mac OS through all its iterations from System 6 or so, so I assume that counts. I've been on FriendFeed longer than Twitter, and Facebook longer than FriendFeed and Google Reader longer than Facebook.
- Louis Gray
thats interesting, but in term of early adopter and stages where are you now with Mac OS for example.
- Robert Higgins
I would say Stage 3 with Mac OS. I don't feel like they need to change anything to reward me for my loyalty. I've never been a Stage 2 user for Twitter, so I hang out in Stage 3 or 4, it's just a utility, as is Facebook. I am Stage 2 and 3 with FriendFeed and Google Reader. I will always push FriendFeed and Google Reader, even if I know they could improve, because I get great value from both and trust the teams.
- Louis Gray
Louis: I was through all five stages with the MacOS by 1993. Started over again in 2003. Heheh. I forgot that I still use Hotmail and have for a long time (I remember waiting in line for StarWars #4 overnight with the Hotmail founders and thinking they were pretty cool).
- Robert Scoble
you are such a geek scoble waiting in line overnight for Star Wars #4 with hotmail founder
- Robert Higgins
Robert: that is true, but, as waiting overnight for the iPhone proved, the line itself was more fun than seeing the movie or getting the phone. In Silicon Valley these things turn into impromptu barcamps. Several companies had tents and it was an all-night party. My son did both with us and they were among the best things I've ever done with him. Good bonding time. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Higgins: if I remember right one company even paid for a T-1 line so they could provide wifi to everyone. In Silicon Valley we take these things seriously! :-)
- Robert Scoble
Nice bell curve, this typically represents most things - I can be in different stages at different times! - for example - different features of the product (ie I can discover a feature, then promote, etc). Not sure about Migration phase, I would prefer to call it Withdrawal
- Geer
I think this post was bad form. I have experienced the same problems with admiring the power and brilliance of the features and simultaneously being confused by their counter intuitiveness. In any case if the graph is accurate Robert's activity would have already slowed and will continue to slow down until migration. The bad form is explicitly referencing Robert.
- Ru Viljoen
Ru: thank you. Truth is in just the past week I was in all five phases of FriendFeed and even Twitter. I never liked this post by Louis' even though there's some truth to it and I'm still trying to figure out why.
- Robert Scoble
It's a post more human behavior centric than tech focused. Of course i'm interested in HB and how the brain works. I object to the generalization. We all have unique patterns of usage. There are probably hundreds of tools I use a day and am unaware of
- Mark Essel
from iPhone
Ru, I know FriendFeed is not perfect. But pound for pound, they have the best talent in the business. I also read and enjoyed the exchange in Robert's piece, but didn't "like" it, as he says he didn't this one. Robert and I have a long history of agreeing 95% of the time, and have a mutual respect that lets us exchange ideas this way. I personally would not have approached the issues in the way he did, explicitly referencing Kevin, for example.
- Louis Gray
Louis: Kevin runs design at FriendFeed and he's a guy I've judged that is able to take a huge amount of criticism (earned or unearned) and keep his cool and tell you why he's doing what he's doing. Like you said, they have the best talent in the business. Kevin proved it again yesterday.
- Robert Scoble
My 2 cents about FriendFeed interface design: Overloading/hiding of controls is often used to present a simpler UI. It's difficult to find a balance, and often testing things on novice users is better than on veteran users to get a fresh response. One difficult example (which I don't know if I could improve) is Canon's cameras (of which I've used 4 cameras). Canon had a standard way of...
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- Mitchell Tsai
Sometimes interface design can be complicated with people at various stages of behavior. Yahoo! tried to change their interface after a few years and got a "New Coke" response (e.g. focus groups, testing, etc... before release). The new interface worked better & made more sense, but they got 1,000s of e-mail complaints from older experienced users - ended up staying with the old...
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- Mitchell Tsai
Oldest services I still use: MS-DOS (1981), Unix (1982), Mac OS (1984), MS Word (1984), MS Excel (1985), MS Powerpoint (1987), MS Windows (1987), HTML (1993), Yahoo! (1995), PriceWatch (1995), Post.Harvard.edu (1995), Slashdot (1996), MapQuest (1996), Google (1997), Amazon (1998), MS Outlook (1998), Internet Explorer (1998), PriceGrabber (1999), SECInfo (2000), Network Solutions (2000),...
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- Mitchell Tsai
Goodness me Mitchell
- Thomas Power
Indeed. Outlook 98 is the devil :)
- Roberto Bonini
Thomas - It's interesting to see what "stands the test of time". Used HotBot for search 1996-2000, but Google's cache won me. MS Multiplan was my 1st spreadsheet (not a Lotus 1-2-3 fan), but Excel beat out many better spreadsheets. MS Outlook won me with color e-mails, shared calendars, & event coordination. Google Maps still hasn't beat MapQuest IMO. I'm still resistant to using GMail...
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- Mitchell Tsai
Considering I'm on stage 4 right now, I wonder how much I stand to make from the sale of Friendfeed?
- Andrew Smith
Louis, Robert: It makes sense to me that a service would be forced to field speculative criticism and that the criticism should be answered on the merits of the argument. In this instance I thought that Robert insightfully pointed out the problem with the UI and then must have been totally side swiped by an unrelated personal criticism from someone who is well regarded. I hate to see...
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- Ru Viljoen
It's Interesting that you posted this last night, before the friendfeed/FaceBook announcement! Good intuition!
- Michael Fidler
Someone needs to call Bill Clinton to negotiate with the people doing the DoS attack so we can tweet what we're going to have for lunch. Maureen Dowd's day depends on it.
Steve C, Michelle Martinez, Yung-Hui Lim and James (@willia4) liked this
75+ Excellent Collection of Tutorials, Inspirations And Resources For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In July @ SmashingApps - http://www.smashingapps.com/2009...
Daniel Rowley, Angus Burton, Johnny and 2 other people liked this
table lamp Squeeze by Sturlesi Design - http://www.1designperday.com/2009...
Emma, Lars Clausen, Hanna Wiszniewska and 2 other people liked this
Over 1.4 Trillion People Say "Twitter Sucks" - Twitter Search - http://search.twitter.com/search...
Yung-Hui Lim, Daryl Hunt on FF, Wayne Sutton and 8 other people liked this
Seriously... look at these search results.
- Brad Williamson
from Bookmarklet
NOTE: If you like this article, make sure to join the "Media News And Analysis" group... http://friendfeed.com/media-n...
- Brad Williamson
Well, it does. :)
- Louis Gray
Most of these people have no clue what they are doing - so in that sens it does suck - a lot of people just don't understand it. When you get it, it's just another tool and a great one at that.
- Robert Freeze
Wow! Didn't know that!
- अभिषेक(Abhishek) Das
There's gotta be something sucky about it if over 1.4 trillion people are claiming it sucks. I'm just sayin'...
- Brad Williamson
1.4 Trillion, how much of the world population is that?
- Peter
http://ff.im/3qvtS That is many times over the world poulation
- Brent - Loving Life
That 1.4 trillion figure actually figures in people who haven't even been born yet. They, too, will inevitably say that "Twitter Sucks."
- Brad Williamson
Face recognition comes to Flickr | Webware - CNET - http://news.cnet.com/8301-17...
TiTi, Göze Sencer, Lars Clausen and 70 other people liked this
Without any big fuss, a face-recognition feature has been added to Flickr. The new feature was launched recently by Swedish start-up Polar Rose. It lets users import all their photos from a Flickr account to an account on Polar Rose, where the images are then automatically assembled into groups dedicated to various individuals. As with similar features in Google Picasa and Apple iPhoto, names eventually show up next to faces in the photos once the user has identified the faces. The labels then get sent back to the Flickr account. Polar Rose, founded by Swedish mathematician Jan Erik Solem in 2004, intends to license its technology to numerous Web sites.
- Thomas Hawk
from Bookmarklet
I wonder if it'll work any better than the crappy face recognition in iPhoto...
- Shawn C. Reed
trying this at Polar Rose right now. Not sure how well it's going to handle my trying to import almost 24,000 photos into the site.
- Thomas Hawk
I saw Hakan Dahlstrom use it and thought "FINALLY"
- Shevonne
Catching up with Picasa, huh?
- bnoise
it's still "processing" my images after several hours now. I'm not so sure this thing is going to work for me.
- Thomas Hawk
I think I will wait till Flickr implements this internally. Surely they will have to implement it at some stage.
- CJPhoto
Google should have developed a face recognition system out of Picasa Web Albums. An API or something. They could have offered a way to identify faces on your PC, on Google Image, on FriendConnect-enabled websites and even Street View 2.0.
- Jérôme Flipo
Giving it a try now. Estimates 30 minutes to process my 900 photos.
- Andy Roth
No estimate for m 24,000 photos. simply a "processing your photos" progress bar with no progress indicated.
- Thomas Hawk
There aren't any faces in my Flickr stream, however I do use the face recognition in Picasa Web Albums and it works very well.
- Kenton
I'm alpha testing the face.com Photo Finder in Facebook, and that process seems less complex (at least to the user). Rather than explicitly telling you that Facebook photos are being exported to a separate account, Photo Finder allows you to appear to remain in Facebook as your photos are being processed.
- John E. Bredehoft
Same here... hours later, and still processing. Hmmm.
- Herb Hernandez
Herb, how many pictures do you have?
- John E. Bredehoft
from fftogo
24,000 pictures at once ? going by Andy's estimate, 13 hours worth. plus (hopefully) a 100% penalty for being silly enough to do so many at once.
- martin english
my ff crashed & facebook account would not let back in 4 now, thats ff's problems, I need 2 try w/Windows. I was using Kubuntu, one of the flavor of Ubuntu.
- polou/indigo_bow
so far Polar Rose has performed poorly in recognising other instances of the same person, though it generally knows when there is a face in the photo (although it also spends quite a lot of time asking me if rocks, lights, twigs, shadows etc are people)
- Ned Baker
so far I'm very unimpressed with Polar Rose. I checked it today and it only imported about 2,200 of my 24,000 photos. Worse than that though, performance on the site is awful. I keep getting a Firefox error message about an unresponsive script taking too long. They don't segregate out which of your photos have people in them vs. photos that do not so you are paging endlessly looking at thumbnails that are way to large to try and even find a photo you've got with a photo in it. Not at all user friendly.
- Thomas Hawk
I'm wary of apps like these now. I tried out Fotonaut several weeks ago and the app silently deleted my tags.
- Jauder Ho
Tried again on Win7beta, hmm, face recognition r precise. I am mixed about these kinds of recognition unless they r used for login or security or confirm friendship purposes??? What do u folks think??
- polou/indigo_bow
What do I think? Disclosure - I am employed in the biometrics industry. However, I assert that the possibility of Big Brother ganging up on the populace is remote. For example, after 9/11, it took YEARS for the FBI and DHS to exchange data.
- John E. Bredehoft
from fftogo
I believe the military has been doing this for a while.
- anna sauce
Twitter's Cap of 2,000 Following In Action!
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
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 Rah
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 Rah
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.
- Admiral 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
Facebook Nexus graph for Mitchell Tsai, ~300 friends [Nexus.ludios.net - 8/4/08] - http://picasaweb.google.com/lh...
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Joe Bonner, RAPatton, Andrew Trinh and 18 other people liked this
Try this link to an active Nexus page http://nexus.ludios.net/view... (allows zoom and pan, names pop up with all the people they connect to)
- Mitchell Tsai
(1) Left cluster: 119 Dance friends (1a) Bottom are West Coast (1b) Smaller top are East Coast (2) Right cluster: 77 FriendFeed friends (2a) Lower center are heavy Facebook networkers (2b) Lower-right faint ring around center are Stanford/Harvard people and 38 college/graduate-school friends (who are baaarely connected to each other, since only ~5-7% on Facebook) (3) MANY single dots, since Facebook is still early-adopter-phase for age 30+s.
- Mitchell Tsai
...
- Mitchell Tsai
Neat! Mine: http://www.flickr.com/photos...
- Mark Trapp
To me the edges of the graph are *really* interesting, to see how some friends barely connect into the graph, but they won't mean anything to most people.
- Mitchell Tsai
Mark: Can you redo yours as a "spring graph" (rather than radial)? It's easier to see the groups that way...
- Mitchell Tsai
Sure, here it is: http://www.flickr.com/photos... The island is social media people who friended me up on Facebook.
- Mark Trapp
That thing is far too interesting... I like
- xero
P.S. A feature I really like is (when logged in thru Facebook to your own Nexus) is seeing the groups my friends have in common. Great way to find new groups to join!
- Mitchell Tsai
mine: http://friendfeed.com/e...
- xero
Mo: I've got a lot of Australian friends, but it's a big country (duh). It'd be cool if Facebook allowed 2-3-4-5-6-level searches because we don't have any Facebook friends in common yet, so we're at least 2-degrees apart (aside from knowing each other through FriendFeed).
- Mitchell Tsai
I guess 2+ level searches are easy to implement, but simply take too much resources to run. I've seen it with FFSixDegrees. It's no problem to include the 3rd order network of a person, but then I would have to work through not only 500 but 20,000 contacts. Anyway, I would guess that you can reach the whole network with 4 steps.
- Benedikt Koehler
Okay, will build something like this into FFSixDegrees soon. It should work with Prefuse, I guess.
- Benedikt Koehler
@Mitchell Fascinating none the less. I generated one for my FB account, some interesting things emerge from the chaos
- Mo Kargas
My FF6Degrees chart (courtesy of Benedikt's program) http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Mitchell Tsai
Some connections into real-life from FriendFeed: (A) Mona Nomura - Alex Perlman (dance friend) (B) Pete Cashmore - Oren Etzioni (Freshman dormmate), Henri Duong (San Francisco friend) (C) Michael P. Williams - Heidi Roizen (former VC, now starting music company), (D) Chris Brogan - Jonathan Askin (college dormmate, now internet lawyer in NYC) (E) Lots of people - Guy Kawasaki (VC)
- Mitchell Tsai
Nice find, Mitch :) Funny how I'm sort of connected to one of your friends LOL
- Mona Nomura
[Mon 8/4/08 1:24 pm EDT 7:25 pm CEST-German time] Benedikt: I just regenerated my diagram with your link. Sorry I forgot to do that before I went to sleep last night. You can trace your connections on my Nexus now (through Timo Heuer, Mike Fruchter, and Susan Beebe). I like tracing the 2-3-4-5-6 level connections of people through the different areas of the network. Love to see a Nexus-like thing for FriendFeed. Maybe you can talk with the Nexus people to share code?
- Mitchell Tsai
There are a lot of unexpected connections between my friends on Facebook & LinkedIn. Many surprises! Mona: How did you meet Alex Perlman? Do you guys know each other in person, or via Internet? Chances are we have more friends in common...they're just not on Facebook. Only 5-7% of my real-life friends are on Facebook.
- Mitchell Tsai
@Mitchell: Nexus is great, I have something quite similar in mind. But there is a difference between the 2-3-4-5-6 level connections in this graph and the "true" 2-3-4-5-6 degree connections as in the 6 degrees thesis. In the first case the network consists of the actual links between your FB contacts. In the second case, the shortest links between people would be calculated using all FB users. In the nexus, say, Benjamin Golub and Alex Perlman are 3 nodes apart. Using all FB the distance would be less.
- Benedikt Koehler
Benedikt: Good observation about the distances. Real-world connections would be even more different. Two communities show up very strongly interconnected in my Facebook (dance & FriendFeed), but they also are heavy social networking groups. My family/relatives are light social networkers, so you don't see a dense concentration of relatives (I have ~60 1st cousins, 26 aunts/uncles, etc...),
- Mitchell Tsai
Mitchell - Just re-visited this. Totally awesome!
- Charlie Anzman
Mine is here: http://nexus.ludios.net/view...
- Phil G
Thanks Philip. Just saw your Nexus. Thanks for sharing. Who's Michelle Greer and the group on the right? http://tinyurl.com/5nzej7
- Mitchell Tsai
Mitchell - Michelle Greer is active in the Austin social media scene, and is friends with a couple of nexus people in California. Lynn Bender runs geekaustin.org and does a bunch of meetups and mixers every year. The group in the upper right are all ex-Dell folks I met when ramping the call center in Edmonton, AB, Canada
- Phil G
Thanks Philip. It's cool to see who knows who in this world...
- Mitchell Tsai
Mark Wilson's thread about “Everyone on FriendFeed is adding one another to Facebook today. What the hell is going on?” (20 likes, 36 comments) http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Mitchell Tsai
[Update 5/11/09] See other Nexus charts at (5/11/09) http://friendfeed.com/mitchel... (2/23/09) http://friendfeed.com/mitchel... (12/23/08) http://friendfeed.com/mitchel... (8/4/08) http://friendfeed.com/mitchel...
- Mitchell Tsai
TweetDeck Has a Fierce Rival in Seesmic Desktop - http://mashable.com/2009...
Thomas Power, Daniel Rowley, Nicholas James and 11 other people liked this
TweetDeck has two wins for me: filter and post to both Twitter & FB at the same time. Seesmic Desktop doesn't seem to have either.
- Craig Eddy
FF does that. :-)
- Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)
5 minutes into my Seesmic Desktop's maiden voyage--seems pretty cool so far....
- Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)
There's also http://apps.facebook.com/twitter...
- Hiro Asari
I like the app but feel it lacks polish and feels a bit clunky in areas. I also think the the interface elements are not as economic as TweetDeck and with the requirement of no less than three columns open at a time, efficiency is paramount. I check Facebook only every few hours so the feature set for FB do not interests me and I actually prefer the UI in the FB feed to 3rd party apps. It's close but my vote is still in the TweetDeck corner.
- JP Holecka - Jaypiddy
But why oh why to these app have to be built on Adobe Air? Still looking for the killer native OS X app.
- JP Holecka - Jaypiddy
I like DestroyTwitter alot better than I ever liked Seesmic or Tweetdeck.
- Aaron Myers
Seesmic is a great desktop app for Twitter
- Ryan Gerritsen
from Nambu
Using TweetDeck, and don't feel the need to switch to anything else.....
- Mike Shields
Upgraded to Seismic today -- it supports Hebrew. (Most people don't care but I do)
- Rebecca Rachmany
Trying it out now I really love Tweetdeck but the thought of managing multi accounts is attractive.
- Deano @ Byron New Media
The most disgusting idea I've heard lately is:
Thomas Power, Azzam, Oliver Bouchard and 52 other people liked this
That you are only worth something if you have tons of followers.
- Robert Scoble
Getting your self worth from people who follow you is totally shallow and, anyway, out of your control.
- Robert Scoble
Far better way to judge your participation on social networks? What is the quality of the people you are following? Better inputs = better output.
- Robert Scoble
By the way, I heard that someone said this on Oprah yesterday. I'll try to find a clip.
- Robert Scoble
worth? value? all in the twitter/ff area or IN REAL world? that's the most digusting idea (confusing real world/economy with net tweets).
- Nikos Kouremenos
Nikos: it's a disgusting idea in real life AND on social networking!
- Robert Scoble
I think it's funny that there's now tools to help you get more followers. How? By following people who autofollow. Lame.
- Robert Scoble
Why the need to judge at all? To each his own.
- LogEx
Thought only belongs to a select group. Now that's disgusting.
- Ken Stewart | ChangeForge
Yeah auto follow sucks. I tried that and then had to unfollow a lot of people. Twitter became noise instead of fun.
- Brian Thompson
Robert: All I meant to say, is since you're a great writer please focus on REAL issues. Keep it up
- Nikos Kouremenos
'number of followers' as metric in social networking is so pre-Web 2.0 - the age of mass media
- Yung-Hui Lim
That computers are a roadblock to development. (so said Mulayam Singh Yadav, an Indian politician).
- अभिषेक(Abhishek) Das
Completely agree. That's asocial media IMO. http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/asocial...
- AJ Kohn
Brian: I have a how-to video that shows how I read Tweets here: http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Robert Scoble
Brian: in the video I show how you can use Twitter and friendfeed together to get past the noise. The noise is actually fun, if you know how to surf it. Even last night I was ahead of all the tech bloggers in knowing that Obama had picked a new CTO because of this system.
- Robert Scoble
Always thought auto follow was lame, why would I want to follow a bunch of people that say nothing that interest me just to build up numbers, but then I was never very good at popularity thing in high school either.
- Kim Landwehr
Kim: I agree, but I needed to be able to get DMs from everyone and Twitter's DM system requires I follow everyone. Friendfeed's system, where I can follow you and then follow other people more closely by putting them in lists is FAR superior.
- Robert Scoble
Teabagging.
- innesm
donating only if you win a competition is kinda up there... ;)
- Krikit Media
agreed Krikit :) .. why not just donate in the beginning and still have the competion for funs sake
- Kashif Khan
there´s one interesting thing in online vs. offline: we know from neuroscience, that listening to people we hardly know is processed by our brain as fiction. what much better related people (friends, family) tell us is processed like non-fiction, taken for real and saved deeper in the brain. so auto-followers and filter-junkies won´t "listen" even if they seem to technically do. but online there´s some relevance in being linked with the more the better. so far about value of quantity...
- esther ♥ ♫
precisely, Kashif :)
- Krikit Media
The idea that your only value is in the numbers, is a value system many people subscribe to. I can see where there may be value, as in the case of an analyst trying to gain some understanding of something, or for businesses where they need the information from many. But Robert, you made a REALLY great point in our discussion when you said, for example, Nielson ratings only need 1000 different tv watchers from across the country to get a good mix of the masses. After the first 1000, what is the point?
- Sheryl
Reference to the above question I posted: http://stardustglobalventures.com/2009...
- Sheryl
Scoble: Thanks for the info. I watched the video and that helped. I guess one has to pay attention to both streams though as tweets from people I follow that don't have friendfeed won't show up in my stream here.
- Brian Thompson
The most disgusting idea I've heard lately is that a famous a-list blogger is doing something mysterious with some yet to be named internet "fanatics" in "building 43"... Secretive and funded by a big company, it sounds very industrial age to me ...we are way past that at this point, we are even past the information age.
- Tweet Feeds
So let's just hide the follower count. Job done! Now everyone is equal and you live and die by your content...
- Bob Walder
from BuddyFeed
You obviously never had to worry about ratings. The number of people "following" my shows has been the ONLY thing that has mattered for 30 years. I'm not so sure it's such a bad metric.
- Leo Laporte
Leo, I'm beginning to agree with you there. Engagement is important, but first impression comes from that list of people following you. However, with it being so easy to gain followers on Twitter (by gaming it), do follows mean as much on Twitter as they mean elsewhere?
- Jesse Stay
Whether or not it's a good or bad metric surely depends on one's goals. It's not an inherently valuable metric, though, and what's strange is that so often folks do treat it like one. Last year when Plurk was taking off, I spent lots of time playing there. "Karma" rapidly became the obsession. Interesting, because just gaining followers isn't the only thing that drives that number up, but still too bad that it became the sole driver for so many--the cynosure of their every move.
- Kathy Fitch
It's a mistake to think that a new medium that is as flexible as twitter won't model what happens in other mediums.
- Ryan Massie
You're telling me that when you speak it's inherently irrelevant if anyone is listening? You can't have engagement without an audience. But obviously the numbers on Twitter are now irrelevant. It's as if the Nielsen company decided to "adjust" the ratings based on their own opinion of a show's merit.
- Leo Laporte
The idea that being the focus of many increases a person's worth is very, very old. It won't disappear, any more than any other form of vanity will disappear. Saying that you only follow or are followed by a certain type of person is just as vain, and just as legitimate an aspiration. It's not a bad thing, though I can see how having the Nouveau Tweets come along would be annoying to those who've been around for awhile.
- jojo, adventurer
The difference between Leo Laporte's view of "audience" versus Robert Scoble's view of his network in real life and online punctuates the difference between old and new media. An audience is a passive thing that "responds" to you and a network is something you "participate" in where there's give and take. Just because Laporte uses new media tools doesn't make him new media. Seems he just revealed here that he isn't.
- Debi Jones
Leo: followers get you and me paid but if that is how we get our self worth (I know in your case it is not) then that is a sad life indeed. Oh, by the way, I blogged when I only had two readers. You don't need a large audience to give a speech. I give speeches to my sons all the time! :-)
- Robert Scoble
Debi: Leo gets paid by having lots of people listening. My paycheck relies on that too. But my self worth does not rely on it and I would still do this whether or not I was paid. (In last downturn I did it while not getting paid).
- Robert Scoble
I'm tempted to do a demo that I can hit a million followers with little to no effort, just to show why it's so flawed. It's really easy on Twitter - followers mean absolutely nothing there.
- Jesse Stay
Jesse: exactly.
- Robert Scoble
1 million is old and busted . We need a new number ;) . Worth of a person != net worth of a person
- Kashif Khan
Whether or not "anyone" is listening is quite a different thing than "more is always better." If we're talking a mostly one-way broadcast that is one's livelihood, then, sure, more is always better for your income. If it's a workshop or a studio atmosphere we're after, then "that's *way* too many!" becomes a real possibility. True, even, of performances--certainly from the audience perspective.
- Kathy Fitch
Absolutely. Quality of audience is as important as quantity, especially in situations where interaction and conversation is important. Even our advertisers care as much about _who_ is listening as how many. That's how we compete with much larger media outlets.
- Leo Laporte
It only takes days now to reach 10s of thousands...shouldn't take long jesse - overall the numbers on twitter are useless and meaningless
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I have a quote on my monitor that says: "_______________ healthy, and numerically strong." Fill in the blank with whatever, but it says the same - numbers don't tell the whole story.
- Gary Walter (gwalter)
It's much more important to me who is listening, and what they have to say in response. It doesn't matter if the whole planet heard it if they weren't listening.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Rob, good point. "Listening" really is quite a different thing than "hearing." In some settings--where exchange is key, or teaching is the goal, or a sense of intimacy is important, for instance--smaller audiences (per performance, at least, if not overall) actually increase the chances that everyone will come away feeling that the experience was a success.
- Kathy Fitch
The way I know that people are truly listening, is by whether or not, and how, they respond...If I don't get thoughtful responses, I know I have not delivered my message. I do the same for others. This is how we become successful together
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I'd rather have an incremental increase of followers as opposed to a large amount at once, and I'd prefer followers I can talk with, joke with, discuss with or learn from. It's still down to the quality of the followers you have, not the number. And really, if all your followers aren't listening, then it's not worth having so many.
- George Hall (Australia)
that brands could 'takeover' social media!? Ha, people move away from each successive over application of traditional advertising in this world.
- Kemp Edmonds
Wealthy, B-list celebrities saying they will only give cash to a good charitable cause, if enough people follow them on twitter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Jim Connolly
Robert I get that audience is important if you want to attract advertisers in one current model. However, if you look the end results of Twit.tv and what you do, there is a very noticeable distinction. Leo Laporte broadcasts and his audience has conversations in chat rooms while he is broadcasting. That not very different than what CNN or other old media outlets do. I'm just pointing that out. - As for your point about self worth, that really feels more like a strawman. There are other angles to consider.
- Debi Jones
Can you monetize a large enough audience - yes. Are your contributions or interactions in social networks somehow lacking value because your audience isn't large? Of course not. One question to ask is how big does your network need to be for it to be responsive and help you get things done?
- Debi Jones
How we realize the benefits of online social networks where we can increase the number of our "weak ties" or acquaintances? The foundational study "The Strength of Weak Ties" by Mark Granovetter http://is.gd/i1s2
- Debi Jones
Money Quote from Strength of Weak Ties: "It follows, then, that individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends. This deprivation will not only insulate them from the latest ideas and fashions but may put them in a disadvantaged position in the labor market..."
- Debi Jones
Debi - I don't think the size of the network need be very large to get things done. It just has to reach the right people. If you don't know who those people are, the numbers can help you find them. I can use the size of my own network as an example. As I decide what I want to get done, I find no difficulty reaching the people I need to. And at the size of my network, I don't miss opportunities to listent that I might with a larger, more blanketing network.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
(which is not to say that I'm arguing with you) :)
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I like seeing my numbers go up, but really, I'm here to provide value for myself first of all. If others gain value from it too, all the better. But really, I'm here to keep tabs on all you guys and learn from you, and pass on what I learn in case there's anyone out there interested enough to hear it again from me.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
My opinion is, if you don't want to hear it from me, that's your loss, not mine. I can still see what you have to say, so I'm not losing anything by you not following me.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Then there's this article from The Economist with commissioned data analysis from Facebook's Data Team. Primates on Facebook - http://www.economist.com/science...
- Debi Jones
And the detailed analysis directly from Facebook's Data Team. http://overstated.net/2009... - Maintained Relationships. The network diagram clearly illustrates The Strength of Weak Ties where light lines connect two clumps of conections under All Friends - http://overstated.net/wp...
- Debi Jones
I know these kinds of people Robert I see them in public on a daily basis.
- James Robertson
I change mine to "a discussion wherein lots of people just confidently say aphoristic sounding statements".
- innesm
After reading this article I've decided that 79% of TechCrunch readers really don't know what they are talking about. - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
Hutch Carpenter, Rui Pereira, urara and 25 other people liked this
TechCrunch's comments are suffering under the "Digg Syndrome." Lots of heat and fury but not much in terms of real understanding. There are some, there, though, that get this stuff at a deep level but you have to dig through a bunch of crap. The real money is coming and even Facebook hasn't nailed it yet. See http://scobleizer.com for my post about business and social networking.
- Robert Scoble
from Bookmarklet
lol 79% eh
- Zee.
i'm 96% sure you made that percentage up
- Merry Xmas FFeeders - AJ
noise without filters :)
- Frankie Warren
I like your accurate calculation there, Robert. ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
I haven't read TechCrunch comments in months because of their decline
- BCK
New marketing slogan for FriendFeed - 79% less crap compared to TechCrunch commenters.
- Mike Doeff
AJ is 99.999999% right.
- Robert Scoble
I prefer Mashable and especially ReadWriteWeb.
- Kol Tregaskes
it's probably the commenters that don't know what they are talking about :)
- Shane Grant
the first paragraph tell a lot about the nature of the rest "FriendFeed is actually a lot closer to Facebook these days. You know, that service that 200 million plus people use. They’re doing a lot of similar things — only FriendFeed is doing them better"
- abdellah
why is everyone so impressed with the %? It's only to one significant figure, and has no standard error of the mean calculated.
- Matthew DeVries
Jason: MG knows very well.
- Robert Scoble
The real money is coming and even Facebook hasn't nailed it yet.
- Robert Scoble
they say 90% of everything is crap Robert.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Robert, of course! The TechCrunch staff doesn't really know what they are talking about either. Consider that they recently compared Saleforce.com's 1K servers to Amazon's 100K servers and acted like SF was 10,000% more efficient :)
- Patrick Lightbody
I'd be worried when TechCrunch don't know what they are talking about. I'm used to read *cough* comments already.
- ilter
TC is a great traffic driver. I've only commented on a few of their posts but to this day the biggest single-day spike I ever got was from posting a quick link to my related post high up in the comments thread for a hot TC article last year. I do OK at avoiding the dark side of the force, honest.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
And anyone who says otherwise is obviously stupid, right?
- Tony, Paradox of FF
79% of TechCrunch writers don't know what they are talking about either.
- Alex Scoble
I saw one of the comments saying FriendFeed had copied Facebook. I think the level is much higher then 79% of the readers and I agree with Roberts opinions that Facebook is going to start to make some real money soon, as its gathering user data and can then use that data to help brands advertise to customers.
- Nicholas James
Tony: if they can back it up with an interesting conversation, no. If they just say I'm full of it, yes. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Ok, we've laughed about the 79% thing. Now, why are the writers of this wrong? I agree that FF does everything facebook does, but better, and without vampire bites.
- Matthew DeVries
I commented on it btw.
- Pico Seno
I wish people would stop trying to compare Friendfeed, Twitter, and Facebook to me they are use for different purposes. Facebook is where I keep up with my family and friends from college, Twitter has become broadcast method. Friendfeed has become a way to follow conversations on subject that I am interested in with people who I find interesting. It is important that they remember their audience
- Kim Landwehr
Matthew: because Facebook is different than friendfeed. Facebook comes at the world from a PRIVATE context. That's why my wife likes it. You can't see her photos unless she adds you as a friend. Friendfeed comes at the world from a PUBLIC context. That's why I like it. You can see everything I do unless I explicitly mark it as private. Which will make more money? The public context. That's why Facebook is changing.
- Robert Scoble
what took you so long, Robert?
- Jim: Dead Like FF
robert, yes FF is more open and more public then FB, and FB s at mile behind FF, but there is also something that FF lake and with is Open acess hope that they will move in such direction, FF have to grow his users base in order to Face FB.
- abdellah
Not all as you say, but i guess everyone just feels the urge to comment on the top blog.. just for the heck of it. Why not put up constructive comments that add diversity/argument to what the writer discusses..
- Sardar Mohkim Khan
Alex: true that re: the writers! :)
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Because that article doesn't cover the philosophical aspects behind the migration of these glaciers, doesn't negate the fact that feature and implementation can be used to rally each platform to their cause, and thus bring about the philosophical shift.
- Matthew DeVries
TC is almost like the editorial section in old school newspapers. They can present interesting information about a topic, but be wrong about the interpretation. Or maybe not wrong, just not in agreement with your own thoughts. Occasionally I do see they make a good point. ;)
- Manuel Arroyo
I read a great quote on Twitter (sorry, no cite) where TC employees said that if they were 75% sure about a story, they'd run it, because they could always correct it. If was from a reputable source, but it's still second hand, so take this with a grain of salt.
- Stan Scott
Ahhhhhh! Robert was dissing the Posters, not the article author!!!! I understand now finally.
- Matthew DeVries
FT.com / Real world faces test to channel flow of streams - http://www.ft.com/cms...
Nicholas James, Manuel Arroyo, Anthony K. Valley © and 7 other people liked this
"With the maximum 5,000 friends on Facebook, subscriptions to 13,000 on FriendFeed and "following" more than 86,000 people on Twitter, Robert Scoble is struggling to cope with social media's move to a real-time world."
- Chris Nuttall
from Bookmarklet
Chris writes for the Financial Times in San Francisco, CA, and wrote about how I use the real-time web to track all of you.
- Robert Scoble
If Twitter is Netscape, who is Microsoft?
Thomas Power, мрачное готическое говно, Peter Renshaw and 16 other people liked this
Google.
- Robert Scoble
Facebook?
- Jeremy Brooks
yeap ! Google !
- Rocky
Google
- Trad Robinson
IBM?
- Steven (optionshiftk)
still Microsoft?
- Matsis
Facebook
- Louis Simoneau
AOL?
- Charles Fenwick
If we're talking about the web browser space as the metaphor basis, then we're looking for an established behemoth who is second to market. So for microblogging it could be Google, or Microsoft. But if we're talking about search then the metaphor doesn't hold because Netscape wasn't trying to overpower Microsoft's browser.
- Kevin Fox
Geocities
- Johnny Worthington
Kevin, Scoble knows I think it's Google cause we talked on the phone about this today. I think Microsoft lost its ego when Gates left the building. They'll do fine without another bout with the DOJ. Google however won't go gracefully, and Twitter is leaving too many openings for them not to take a shot at them. Question is do they know how to do an Embrace and Extend? I think they do if they listen to Vic G. Joe Beda probably has a clue too. But then Facebook has the old Firefox team, they're really smart.
- Dave Winer
But I think for Facebook to produce a Twitter, they'd confuse the hell out of their users, and they have so many more users than Twitter, they can't really afford to do that. Where Google starts off with 0 users in this space. They can do whatever they want without disrupting any of their users.
- Dave Winer
And don't forget Charles Simonyi is a space cadet now. Literally! :-)
- Dave Winer
If Google is really concentrating on Android, Latitude and other location-based stuff, then maybe it doesn't need to be a Microsoft-style market-dominating 700 tonne gorilla if it can monetize those services via advertising. Just in the same way that the TV networks made tonnes of money in their day without any one company dominating the marketplace. What's the point in 90% market share if you're not making a profit from it?
- James
But Dave, Facebook already is Twitter-like. What do people do on Twitter? They update their status, they post links to stuff they read, they post links to vids and music they like (or don't), they have conversations. Gasp! That sounds just like FB. Sure, there's all this other shit you can do on FB, but that's cuz it has a broader view than "what are you doing right now and say it in 140 characters." So if Twitter is Netscape, FB is its MS.
- Dread Pirate PJ
And if I may add... who will acquire MagPie - twitter or Google? http://twitter.com/davewin...
- Ankush Narula
But then if Microsoft is Google - who is Google?
- Nicholas James
Nicholas, excellent question. If history repeats, we won't know for a while. Twitter's challenge is to escape the mediocrity of being a tech wunderkind, and mature quickly enough to be excellent as Google was when they came on the scene.
- Dave Winer
SkypeBook
- Bob DeAmbra
facebook, which ironically microsoft has invested heavily in
- Peter Warnock
Is this question a result of Twitter having a great idea, some buzz and an early lead but ultimately not executing well and not being ruthless enough?
- Paul M. Watson
Facebook for sure.
- Vijayendra (V-Mo) Mohanty
My first thought was MySpace.
- MiniMage TKDteacher of FF
Friendfeed is Twitter and Twitter is Microsoft
- Steve Gillmor
facebook, no question
- kosmar
Funny, nobody mentions News Corp. Never ignore the gorilla in the dark corners.
- Shoq
Steve, what FriendFeed features do you think Twtr/Doug Bowman couldn't implement in 3 weeks, if market or vision warranted? I can't find any.
- Shoq
Twitter *ISN'T* Netscape. It's either AOL or MySpace. But I think FaceBook is Twitter's biggest rival now. Twitter is becoming a cesspool of banality and irrelevant babble.
- Chuck Shotton
to me, the only guess is friendfeed. i believe that twitter's reign will be pretty short
- Kirill Bolgarov
To answer this question there has to be a good guy and a bad guy. So I pick Facebook.
- Kevin Gamble
Microsoft is Mosaic :)
- CantorJF
twitter is not netscape - netscape was based on quality tech from its earliest days and when they had issues they improved them iteratively - twitter is nothing like netscape in this regard...
- mike "glemak" dunn
FriendFeed is Microsoft to your Twitter is Netscape.
- Diego Barros
Bigfoot is the rest of us. Anyone can set up a status feed or micro-blog. Big or small.
- tom murphy
Great business use of Twitter: one of my favorite restaurants in SF @lunaparksf is sending out discount passwords to followers
Hillary Hartley, Pat Kitano, Daniel Rowley and 7 other people liked this
It makes sense that Twitter will become the mobile couponer of choice - especially since it costs $30 grand, I'm told, to start up a similar service using SMS - using a proprietary channel, at any rate.
- MaryB, BrandingBroadOfFF
Would that be "word of tweet" or perhaps "tweet of mouth"? We need new terms for this!
- CAJ, somewhere else
hmmm... And I'll be in SF next week... How about that?...
- ha3rvey (Ho)^3
ha3rvey FYI the discount is for Monday nights only. They'll tweet the password sometime Monday morning. 50% food and 40% off bottles of wine. Not bad!
- Mike Doeff
Oh, my, http://www.cloudcontacts.com/ totally rocks. They scanned 1,100+ business cards in just a couple of days and WOW does this make them more useful!
Benoit Cazenave, Steve Boerner, Ian and 90 other people liked this
Each contact has a picture of the scanned card. Plus a file I can import into Outlook or Gmail. Plus a link to all the social networks that the service can find for that person. I totally want to follow everyone here on friendfeed.
- Robert Scoble
This is Allen Stern's company and it rocks. Yo, Allen, you are onto something here. You can build a real social network: made up of people I've actually met (and I can prove it).
- Robert Scoble
used the service myself, love it! go allen!
- sean percival
Thanks Robert! Glad you like the service.
- Allen Stern
Robert, would this replace Facebook as your Rolodex? https://friendfeed.com/e...
- LogEx
CloudContacts is very cool. So is Allen. :)
- Louis Gray
Logical: no, the two are different. But I would LOVE for them to be more connected.
- Robert Scoble
Louis: I agree.
- Robert Scoble
That's cool Robert! Dynamically build a socnet based on your collection of biz cards. Wow. Allen you rock. I've got a pile of biz cards from the past 15 years sitting around doing nothing. Would be interesting to see what kind of patterns might be extracted in such a system.
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Not to be cynical, but I couldn't find anything in their FAQ, or their Privacy Policy that prevents them from using the information from your business cards in the same way JigSaw does. That seems like a pretty significant oversight of disclosure. Are they creating a master database from all the cards they collect, with names, contact and job titles?
- Chris Kenton
from twhirl
Chris: interesting question! I'm sure Allen will answer that soon. I don't care, really, because I've noticed that business cards go out of date very quickly. That's why I want them hooked up with LinkedIn and Facebook because those are kept up to date much more often than business card databases are.
- Robert Scoble
From the Terms and Conditions page: "CloudContacts may, now or in the future, use the submitted card data to market to you, and provide you with information about, our products and services, including but not limited to our Service. In addition, the card database may be opened to the public at which time all customers will have the option to opt-out or at any point in the future. All...
more...
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
all right I will have to try too
- Loic Le Meur
Brian-- Thanks for pointing me to that. Not sure, though. "The card database may be opened to the public at which time all customers will have the option to opt-out or at any point in the future. All public contacts may also opt-out at any time." Does that mean that when you submit your cards, your submission opts your contacts in to a public database, to which they have to then opt out...
more...
- Chris Kenton
from twhirl
Cool service. Yo Allen, will it ever be available for non US citizens?
- Nir Ben Yona
mmmmm, Amazon's mechanical turk is a more efficient way to do it. 100 cards for $ 29.95 is $ .29 each, very expensive.
- Sebastian Wain
Thanks everyone for the feedback. Let me answer your q's... @Nir - we have processed many orders from other countries - as long as the cards use latin/roman characters, we can process them (no Japanese/Hebrew/Russian yet..) @Loic - sure, we can handle your cards including the ones in French - and we will not be selling your data to any 3rd party or anything like that. Thanks!
- Allen Stern
Pics or it didn't happen.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
@Allen. I appreciate the follow up on not selling data. Can you shed a little more light on the opt out policy for non-customers whose cards are uploaded? When and if the database goes public, is the policy that card data will be public unless someone asks specifically to opt-out? Or is the policy that uploaded card information will not be public unless a non-customer opts-in to have their information public? Thanks.
- Chris Kenton
from twhirl
So we all get them, but do we use them? If we want to know something about someone don't we simply google them? Probably too simplistic.
- Sheryl
I really like Cloud Contacts, think it's a really nifty and useful service. Louis Gray introduced me to Allen at SXSW and we had a great chat, turns out we're both from New York (originally in my case).
- Eric Berlin
Thanks Eric - was great meeting you as well.
- Allen Stern
I'm confused, we have a card scanner at work where we slide in business cards and it imports them into excel, word, pdf, and makes them into address labels which feeds into the label maker. It's just a thing we bought at the local office store, does this do something different?
- Steve C
Allen- I'm still hoping for some light to be shed on the opt-out policy for non-customers whose cards are scanned. If I hand my card to someone who eventually uses your service, and you take the database public, all of my contact information will be publicly published until i ask for it to be removed? I think this is a really fundamental issue, and it's only scratching the surface. Will...
more...
- Chris Kenton
from twhirl
Seriously business cards in a cloud? Talk about tenuous links to a hot industry. What's next Buggy Whips as a Service (BWAAS).
- James Ketchell
i think i would like to use your service Allen, but this question about pissing off people ala Jigsaw is the one thing that stops me. also, i'd love it if the URLs on the cards were followed and semantically analyzed for tagging the person by topic
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
@steve - we save you the time of the scan, the accuracy of the scan and provide contact pages for each person with tons more information than what's on the card. @chris - not sure how much better i can answer the question - I am not publishing your specific information (or the information from your cards) - i hope that helps answer your question - looking forward to your order!
- Allen Stern
@marshall - i like that idea and have added it to the idea list - I am coding as quick as i can -- first up are connections to the web email services via api and categorization.
- Allen Stern
what would make it really valuable on the "find social links for the people scanned" would be if it regularly rechecked. After all, that is the bit of the job I dont get around to doing, searching old contacts to see if they have joined anything - they might not have been on twitter, facebook etc. then but perhaps they joined last week? That kind of search is already hard work to do manually when entering the cards in the first place, but it is just not something you can do manually every 3 months.
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
OK. I've posted 4 times here asking for a basic answer to a fundamental question about the logical extension of your service, and you won't address the question. I don't want to draw conclusions, but I can only assume you're creating what you hope will be a viral service to get people to not only provide you with a mountain of business card data, but to actually *pay you* to upload it...
more...
- Chris Kenton
from twhirl
Thats cool... I am way to lazy/false_busy to ever get all the business cards together, but very cool.
- Cody Heitschmidt
I like the cut of your jib, Chris.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
sounds like Chris is on to something there :)
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
Chris - I believe I have answered your question already but let me try again. I would/will never do anything that I don't want done to myself - I am not posting (and do not plan to post) any personal information from any of the cards to the public. I have revised the terms page accordingly.
- Allen Stern
Totally agree!! It's awesome
- Sarah Perez
Allen, I don't believe you ever answered Chris' question. Even your last post says "do not plan to" rather than "will not" - I won't even bother to go check out your revised terms page - I don't see how it could settle anything when you avoid the issue in open discussion. For one hypothetical: you sell the venture and there is no restraint on the buyer just because you said trust me for I'm a good guy and I've told you thrice "I have no plan"
- David HC Soul
Allen--Thanks for following up. Look. I run my own business. I'm not into going around throwing stones when I'm sure someone will find some stones to throw at me. What ever you do is between you and your customers. I'm just pointing out what I know will trip some people's wires.
- Chris Kenton
from twhirl
just noticed that Twitter is slow in updates today.. anyone else?
Yung-Hui Lim liked this
my timeline froze for almost an hour already; no updates from my Followed. something strange is happening.
- Yung-Hui Lim
my timeline is frozen too
- xekc
can post and see own updates but can't see others' updates.
- Yung-Hui Lim
Every month, I highlight five lesser-known tech blogs. This month, I would love to get your recommendations on FriendFeed.
Nicholas James, Daniel Rowley, Mike Elliott and 65 other people liked this
For the last year, every month has seen five new tech names featured on louisgray.com, from Hutch Carpenter, Rob Diana and Mona to Charlie Anzman, Jesse Stay, Corvida and Kipp Bodnar. Add your favorite lesser-known tech blogs here. I will subscribe to _all_ of them and there's a good chance they get featured.
- Louis Gray
Here is last month's example: http://louisgray.com/live.... Rather than think I know all of them, it'd be great to ask the community. Guidelines would be that the author tends to cover tech, Web, social media, gadgets, business or the Valley. If they have more than 1,000 RSS readers, that's too many. If they have made Techmeme in the last two months, they also don't belong.
- Louis Gray
ask the admin, a very good blog, people ask questions about computers, the admin answers them.
- Dan Morrill AKA Techwag
Microblink.com - covering the microblogging space and fellow Des Moines, IA bloggers! They also run wthashtag.org tracking origins of twitter hashtags
- andy brudtkuhl
Dan, any URL on Ask the Admin? (URLS, please) :) And Andy, I covered Microblink in November. http://louisgray.com/live...
- Louis Gray
Startup Meme (http://startupmeme.com) covers tech news, startups, etc. apart from that there is ArabCrunch as welll
- Sardar Mohkim Khan
Steve Wiseman's http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog... is only moderately active, but he loads it with plenty of practical, readily-applicable tricks & techniques. And he's got a few very handy downloads too!
- Rob O'Daniel
Are you already subscribed to me? @myphillynetwork http://myphillynetwork.com/
- Anthony Farrior
@Louis Ooops! missed that! Well another Des Moines, IA company is running a weekly video series on social media marketing - http://lavarow.com - called "Area 52".. I searched this time to make sure you haven't covered them :-)
- andy brudtkuhl
Anthony, yes, of course I am subscribed to you. I will make doubly sure.
- Louis Gray
on an unrelated note - great panel yesterday Louis. I didn't get a chance to meet you afterwards as I was running to a lunch meeting
- andy brudtkuhl
Check out http://virtualgeek.typepad.com by Chad Sakac (EMC) - great VMware tech deep dives and no vendor bashing
- Stuart Miniman
from fftogo
O_o sorry that sounded insecure :) here's a new blogger http://www.taralassiter.com/
- Anthony Farrior
Andy, appreciate it. I enjoyed participating, and wish I could do it more often. It was a solid group and interesting content.
- Louis Gray
www.gottabemobile.com is a great resource for Tablet PC, netbook, Mobile PC, & Multi-Touch news & reviews.
- Rob O'Daniel
Another vote for StartupMeme here.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
ok to plug our own blog? I'm the owner of http://planet5d.com - We've got more Canon 5D information/reviews/still/video samples than anywhere else on the planet. Yes, very specific, but a hot topic these days as they're hard to find but creating lots of stir
- planetMitch
Mitch, if you write about tech, and aren't a brand name, then plug away. I would also like to hear about sites you read that you bet I don't.
- Louis Gray
Shameless self promotion (and the last post is not tech related and I've written about 40 posts) but have you visited my blog? http://jungleg.com
- Jorge Escobar
Mohomed, I'll pass on KillerStartups. They're very visible, but I don't find that they add much value over other similar sites.
- Louis Gray
Blogs I read that I bet you don't? Real Life Debugged (http://www.lisaksimone.com/phoneon...)
- DGentry
http://www.springstage.com and their network blogs
- Bradley Joyce
Blogs I read that I bet you don't? The Cranky Product Manager (http://www.crankypm.com) though she probably has more readers than your guidelines.
- DGentry
I have mine back on line from a long hiatus, server down, hubby rebuilding it. http://www.notjustanotherwebsite.com I love the name, tried to think of something "professional" but "fun." I think I found that. Back when I created it, was looking for a teaching job. Same is true now. Or technology job!!!!!!!!!!!
- Patty Pinkley
Blogs I read that I bet you don't? Proper Fixation (http://www.yosefk.com/blog) by Yossi Kreinen
- DGentry
if you count gaming as tech then there's my video blog over at http://verticalslice.tumblr.com </shamelessplug> could always do with the extra eyeballs, especially when I'm courting people for distribution or sponsorship deals so I can fund myself and eventually a paid contributer :)
- alphaxion
My own http://www.joetech.com and I'd like to second the notion of http://www.geeksaresexy.net
- Joe Tech
some things i like that might fit: http://www.avenueztoolbox.com/ (light, useful, fun tech); http://blog.pmarca.com/ (is he too big.. probably.. but); http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_e...; and of course, (mea culpa!!) a plug for rassak's own blog (ie i write here mostly): www.everythingcommunicat.es or since that .es doesn't want to translate into a link grrrr http://blogs.rassak.com/everyth... (media/communications/language mashed with a heavy dose of tech),
- Barak Kassar
Blogs I read that I bet you don't? The eponymous Gustavo Duarte (http://duartes.org/gustavo...)
- DGentry
As a side note, I'll be following all the commenters here on FriendFeed if I wasn't following you already. Thanks for participating!
- Louis Gray
Thanks alot Louis, good to see a superstar like yourself gets in the trenches with the little people.
- tony
Tony, any reports of my being a superstar are greatly exaggerated. Case in point, I'm sitting in the hallway at SXSW right now, wearing an LG shirt, and nobody knows me. They just walk by... :)
- Louis Gray
My blog is at http://vinf.net - Virtualization, Windows, Infrastructure and all the "stuff" inbetween. some good blogs posted here that I've not come across before - good idea!
- Simon Gallagher
Louis G shirt ahhahahha
- sofarsoShawn
Shawn, you know you want one: http://www.cafepress.com/louisgr...
- Louis Gray
I love the LG shirt.
- Hutch Carpenter
Tech blogs I read that I bet you don't ? Spinning Guyro http://guyro.typepad.com/blog/ Second one. Brand new blog from what looks to be a creative Australian group. http://www.letsrefresh.com.au/blog...
- Eric Logan
lost in technology http://www.lostintechnology.com/
- Sasha Kovaliov(.com)
Social + Experimentation (App Engine, Rapid prototyping) + a bit of Mobile = my blog http://www.BuildContext.com/blog...
- Ben Hedrington
http://www.greyreview.com : on the business and strategy of web 2.0, with Asian focus.
- Yung-Hui Lim
All of the above have been added to Google Reader, via Toluu. See my activity here: http://www.toluu.com/louisgray
- Louis Gray
Louis, so Toluu is still working for you? Doesn't let me login anymore :(
- Sasha Kovaliov(.com)
Sasha, I've never had trouble logging in to Toluu. You can find Caleb Elston here and on Twitter. http://twitter.com/calebelston http://friendfeed.com/calebel... Make sure you reach out to him.
- Louis Gray
It's Paddy's Day. I do the tech blog thing at http://www.insideview.ie well beyond the month of March.
- Bernie Goldbach
I recommend Margaret Lewis' virtualization and cloud computing blog at AMD: http://blogs.amd.com/virtual... -- if you check it this month it is all guest posts for Virtualization Ecosystem Month, but scroll down to see Margaret's content.
- JulieLass
So that's all of the tech blogs that are worth reading out there? I've subscribed to all, so it looks like the community has spoken.
- Louis Gray
One more blog I read that I bet you don't: The Programmer's Paradox (http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/) by Paul W. Homer
- DGentry
Thanks, Denton.
- Louis Gray
Timepedia.blogspot.com, mostly focused on visualization, google web toolkit, and social media. I try to write posts covering techniques no one has tried yet.
- Ray Cromwell
I'm tempting to push my own blog... but that wouldn't be correct.. If you are into SQL Server.. try www.keepitsimpleandfast.com
- Aad 't Hart
Self-promo alert: I edit a blog about venture investment, innovation, and entrepreneurship at http://goldencapitalnetwork.blogspot.com/ We're a nonprofit advocating for venture-based economic development. --Ax
- Alan Chamberlain
Not a tech blog but this is probably one of my favorite marketing blogs: http://timjahn.com/blog -- he is Seth Godin 2.0
- Adam Singer
Programmer's Paradox made this list this month. w00t!
- DGentry
Tuesday Morning: Live Coverage of Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Event - http://technologizer.com/2009...
Philip J Beyer, gfurry, Dale Larson and 3 other people liked this
A Tribute to Discontinued Cereals - http://www.gunaxin.com/a-tribu...
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Darren Heydon, orionstarr, Carmen and 53 other people liked this
I remember the Pink Panther flakes made me gag.
- Helen Sventitsky
They had Nerds cereal?
- Shevonne
Didn't ALF have a cereal?
- Kelly W.
those banana frosted flakes were the stuff!
- chaz2b
I think he did
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
I remember a friend of mine had the Mr. T flakes and he refused to allow anyone else to eat them when we were over. He could have them but we had to choose another cereal. We probably would've complained but his older brother had an Atari 5200 so we dealt with the kid's weird control issues.
- Akiva Moskovitz
I remember none of these, perhaps showing my age :(
- William Harryman
i totally do't remember pink panther flakes. the cinnamon mini buns were KILLER though. they need to bring that back ASAP
- Cee Bee
a big part of my grown up job is designing cereal boxes. I had a hand in one of these, but many are before my entry into the design universe.
- JoEllen
did you really? cool story. lemme guess -- urkelos
- Cee Bee
mmm, cinnamon mini buns. Maybe this is the reason i stopped eating breakfast?
- chaz2b
I pity the fool who messes with me.
- Thomas Hawk
@ cee bee - yep. It's in my job description.
- JoEllen
shut up, really? that was out of the blue. funny
- Cee Bee
There was endless teasing of my sister because she was said to have "Freakies feet."
- Mark Czerniec
Oh those Mr. T. chunks were horrid. I remember, my mother let us buy a box because it was summer. Worse roof-of-the-mouth shredding since Cap'n Crunch. Stupid little Ts.
- Admiral Anika
there was a cereal whose name i can't recall, which was basically mini chocolate chip cookies. no flakes or anything, just cookies. it was pretty awesome as well
- Cee Bee
Cee Bee, that was Cookie Crisp. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...) Did not like that one. It made the milk taste funny.
- Admiral Anika
yes, cookie crisp. loved it. by the way, did anyone really like dig 'em smacks? i thought that was the worst i've ever tasted. they probably put real frogs in their flavouring. damn typos
- Cee Bee
All basically junk foods anyway, that the manufacturers pretend are healthy.
- Ian May
LOL Dig 'Em Snacks were GROSS. My grandmother used to keep 8 boxes of cereal on top of her fridge so there was always something for the grandchildren. Those Dig 'Em Snacks were untouched all the time.
- Admiral Anika
More arrogance from Twitter. "Normal people," huh? Here's why what @ev said is stupid: - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
Rod Stewart, Rodney Rumford, Rob Schieber and 102 other people liked this
Saying "normal people" will be on the service in five years is stupid. Why? Because it's calling current customers who are on the service "not normal." I find I'm hearing more and more arrogance toward Twitter's existing user base from its management. That arrogance is stupid. Facebook already has normal people, as Ev puts it, and is far more "sticky" than Twitter is. Twitter is actually becoming harder to follow as more "normal users" come on the service.
- Robert Scoble
from Bookmarklet
Here's a tweet on my screen right now: "Back from the Quizno's breakfast run." Is that really more interesting to follow than photos and videos from your closest friends, which is what my wife shows me every night on facebook? No way. And friendfeed has better noise filtering mechanisms than Twitter does BY FAR.
- Robert Scoble
For months now I have felt that twitter should be run be more involved users of the service rather than Ev. I'm happy to see that you too feel this way. It makes me feel less prejudical about the subject at hand.
- Richard A.
Yes, I found that peculiar.
- Jim
"Normal people" will soon figure out that Twitter isn't all that great. Already I'm seeing engagement go down on twitter. As I go around startups I'm seeing more and more addicted people who are trying to escape from Twitter because watching Tweetdeck all day long keeps them from getting anything done.
- Robert Scoble
I'm not sure that I would see that statement as arrogant. The fact that you say more "normal" people are already on Facebook kind of illustrates the fact that Twitter is not in the norm...yet. It's steadily rising to that position, but the truth is, at least from my meager perspective, Twitter is full of those who are NOT in the norm.
- Carlton Hackett
One thing I'm hearing from a lot of users is that they don't feel like there's a real community on Twitter. Here I really feel there are people I know. Mona, for instance. Or Louis Gray. Plus the employees of friendfeed are ALWAYS here. That's something that I never felt from Twitter's founders/employees. Go read @ev -- is he doing anything to build a community? No, he's always on Charlie Rose or at TED bragging about how many users he has. That will backfire.
- Robert Scoble
I'm normal, and I was on Twitter early on, 2 years ago or so. I don't see what all the fuss is about tho Robert. Just unfollow the Quizno breakfast guy and find a less noisy one. FF isn't stick to me because there's too many accordion folds of comments to follow. Twitter plus Search key word is enough.
- Prokofy Neva
I believe that by saying "normal" he means people that are not early adopters, and if that happen and Twitter becomes more crowded, are you going to stop using Twitter?
- Ahmed
Not sure that engagement is decreasing on Twitter. It's about to explode here in Australia. I do find it odd however to devalue the contribution of the very people who have made it so compelling.
- Jim
Carlton: I don't agree and I agree at the same time. That's the problem with using terms like "normal." There is no "normal" in human beings. That term is arrogant.
- Robert Scoble
Prokofy: find me a single Twitter user who isn't noisy some of the time. I've looked. Even TimOreilly is noisy some of the time.
- Robert Scoble
Ahmed: early adopters have already moved to other services. They are on Twitter less and less.
- Robert Scoble
Jim: late adopters don't engage. Sorry, but they don't. At least not at the level that early adopters do. Want to prove this to yourself? Go look at the followers that @ev has. Look at how many Tweets they make. Most have zero!!! Now compare to my followers. Almost every one of my followers has many many Tweets. Especially when you compare to @ev's (Ev is a recommended Twitterer so he's getting a LOT more "recent" Twitterers).
- Robert Scoble
Well I think that he meant "normal" like in "mainstream", which I, for one, find elitist too, because imho: Being an early adopter doesn't mean you're smarter enough to use a product. Or smarter than others that don't use it yet. http://friendfeed.com/e...
- directeur
I suspect that Twitter is in the phase where it needs someone else to take it to the next level. The Twitter founders have created this wonderful thing but seems to me they need to hand over the reigns.
- Jim
directeur: exactly.
- Robert Scoble
Robert this is so true! Facebook and Twitter get worse when more people join. I also love the noise filters on Friendfeed. But above all I love it that they don't force their users to use this or that site or services. This is great while I am slowly removing myself from twitter.
- Bart LePoole
"Normal" people will not use Twitter anymore, if their support can't/doesn't want to answer to a "normal" help request. Mine, after more than one month, is not assigned to an operator yet (my timeline is empty!). Perhaps because I am not a V.I.P: I have seen tweets by "non-normal" twitterers about similar problems, fixed in few hours...
- PaperDoll
To prove the engagement point, visit http://twitter.com/ev... -- click on 100 followers. Almost all have no tweets. Most have no photos. Now visit http://twitter.com/scoblei... and compare. Late adopters, er, "normal people" are lame. I don't wish ANY service gets those!
- Robert Scoble
I think there is something missing in the early adopter/follower conversation (not going to touch "normal") which is am examination of the world of twitter from inside the perspective of the social media in-crowd, vs. that of digitally engaged folks at large. An examination of this dynamic and what it means would be particularly fruitful, as in the end, the success or failure of Twitter for 1,500 social media experts is one thing, and adoption by a significant slice of the population at large is another.
- Robert Davis
"normal" can also mean...not having superpowers gang. "normal" is a reference to people without extraordinary technical knowhow...and they are 80% of the population... so in anyone's definition normal that would be. In fact by "normal" he means "less than"... meaning people who have less than tech savvy...oy c'mon people don't be so sensitive.
- davidlee
Ryo: "normal" people that @ev is attracting are people who do not participate and who have vapid tweet streams. Is that who Twitter is going to build a business around? Really?
- Robert Scoble
I didn't experience this the same way. What you took to mean that Ev was saying we were stupid, I just took as meaning the current Twitterbase is more the early adopters and later it will be more mainstream. And yeah, it is harder to use as more people come on board, which is why filtering apps like TweetDeck are becoming critical for anyone following more than a hundred or so people.
- Lisa Creech Bledsoe
Lisa: and that belief is bullshit. Why would mainstream join in Twitter? Look at Ev's own follower base. That is "mainstream." They do not participate. Now compare to Facebook! I bet that the average time spent on facebook by "normal" people is 100x more than on Twitter. Twitter is going to need engaged users to build a business.
- Robert Scoble
RE engagement @ev @britneyspears etc are all going to have those types of followers. My interest in Twitter has peaked of late due to the increasing diversity in conversation - and engagement with "normal" people.
- Jim
Scoble... you are just mad that Twitter is gonna take off and leave FreindFeed in the dust. :) You put your chips on FriendFeed and it's a bet you are losing... it's okay... you just have to get your head around the fact that when it comes to websites you (and most of your thousands of followers) are not "normal". And you have got to stop being so sensitive about being called out as the exception rather than the rule. Time to face the facts: we are not "normal people". :)
- Matt Shaulis
Robert: What services would you say the early adopters have moved onto? And I agree with you that the people that will sign up now as Twitter hits "mainstream" are more apt to tweet much less, if at all. They will sign up to see what the fuss is about and fall off the radar quickly.
- Jason Kane
Ev has no idea what twitter is about. None of those at twitter really understand how twitter is used, and how strong it is. Best example is SMS in Europe and how they removed that.
- Richard A.
i have been known to say Facebook is for civilians. does that make me evil? twitter was initially used by geeks, not "normal people". Robert- you, for example, are clearly not "normal". think about the terms like a graph- a normal distribution..... twitter isn't normal in terms of adoption yet. far from it. we're still living in the future.
- James
Maybe it depends on your community, where I live facebook is now mainstream, twitter is not yet. I do think that twitter will become 'mainstream' though, the main advantage being the ease of use. Maybe some of the 'mainstream' users will tweet less, but there are many different ways to use Twitter as a tool (none more right or wrong than others) and one of those is to receive information, which does not require a profile pic or posting tweets.
- Angela
Angela; twitter can't become mainstream until the technology is ready (mobile wise) and ideologicaly, when people don't feel sitting at a computer is geeky.
- Richard A.
I hardly think EV's statements are arrogant. I actually think it's pretty accurate. Current Twitter users aren't "normal" they are internet savvy, early adopters, and people that have a general interest in being public. It isn't a slant towards the user base. It isn't a slant towards people who don't use it either. To me, it seems your statements are just shamelessly plugging friend feed. However, there are some substantial differences between Twitter and FriendFeed to market before the offensive.
- Eric Moretti
about what @ev said...twitter existence, 5 years from now sounds very pretentious for me. People still has a sense of time very last century, they think things change every 50 years.
- Sarah
Eric: that was true a year ago. It no longer is true. Twitter is being talked about on CNN and BBC many times a day some days. The user base is WILDLY switching. Go to @ev's follower list to see how. Really really bad trends for Twitter are there. No engagement. Vapid tweets. Focus on celebrity or getting on TV. Not on discussing ideas. Those are NOT good trends!
- Robert Scoble
3 'normal' people asked me what Twitter was today. I explained the history and the application of it. The response was, and I quote, "Oh, that's intresting. So it's like SMS. Why would I want hundreds of SMS's". 'Normals' will come, realize how useless it is, and never come back...
- Johnny Worthington
Johnny: bingo!
- Robert Scoble
The antonyms of normal are peculiar, abnormal and deviant. I don't find it that arrogant but it is a word that should be used carefully in any context when describing people.
- M F
Wildly switching to what? Vapid tweets/comments/profiles etc are going to exist across all social networking outlets. I think what we are seeing now is a steep curve to ambiguous use by all of them, some will fall from grace as media darlings (MySpace) will others will see a drop in user base, but maintain a substantial following (Facebook). To me social networking is still in its infancy so it's hard to make any assumption of what will fail and what will succeed.
- Eric Moretti
Eric: Myspace is popular though, for music lovers. Hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, use it to find lot's of music. It's just part of a sub-culture rather than mainstream. Means the user base is more engaged as a result.
- Richard A.
Eric: you are missing what goes on here on friendfeed. Here we have a way to hide noise and accentuate the signal through liking and commenting. On Twitter you do not have those mechanisms. Clicking "like" for instance does a TON behind the scenes and makes that much more searchable, for instance. It also shows that item to all your followers. Which makes it more likely everyone in the system sees some signal instead of vapid tweets flowing by.
- Robert Scoble
Richard: hundreds of millions of people use MySpace. But that service is stagnating. Other music discovery services, particularly on facebook, are starting to eat away at its dominance.
- Robert Scoble
@Rich: This might be true. I personally can't stand MySpace. Too messy in terms of advertisements and user controlled pages. It gives me a headache, which is why I think the general public over 30 won't stick with it.
- Eric Moretti
Twitter is the Post-It-Note, FriendFeed is the Memo Envelope... I scribble things down on Twitter, I get stuff done here.
- Johnny Worthington
I enjoy the analogy :) but FF is more then a Memo Envolpe
- abdellah
Robert, Twitter is going to turn into the myspace of microblogging. By that I mean that myspace has one purpose whereas facebook has many. People jumped to FB as a result. We'll find the same with Friendfeed, once it gets easier to use. It offers more value to the user.
- Richard A.
I agree... But since it's midnight here, my analogy generator is defragging :)
- Johnny Worthington
Richard: bing!
- Robert Scoble
oh it is still working, what could it generate for the facebook case :)
- abdellah
Robert: Well, hey give me time, I just joined. I'm not arguing Twitter vs. FriendFeed. I think the comment was more directed being over reactionary. For the record, I like it, but working full time, school full time leaves very little time. Does Friend Feed have an Android App?
- Eric Moretti
Depends on what he meant by 'normal people'
- Moses Kpetigo
But am I a normal person or just stupid to want a direct message feature in friendfeed?
- Bart LePoole
Anyone who really knows me (not those who just know me through Twitter) will agree that I am not normal. I guess if it was possible they would describe me as "clinically" not normal. Perhaps what the issue is too many people, many of those I follow, are just using Twitter to market their goods, website or new shows.I don't particularly find people who do this "engaging" .The good news is that the unfollow button is easy to find.
- Keith Beucler
Bart: stupid. You already have direct messaging in friendfeed. It's called Gmail. (Seriously: the worst feature of Twitter is DM'ing. It's a horrid feature. I wish it had never been implemented).
- Robert Scoble
no you aren't, but what make me in trouble is the fact that there is so many way to be in a direct relation with some one :) comment like and damn there is email too :)
- abdellah
Robert: DM is stupid, I will give you that. Why limit a DM to 140 characters? Moreover, the people who I would actually DM, I have their email address.
- Eric Moretti
i am wondering not about the normal people comment - but the 5 years part - really that long? how many new sites or addictions will pop up in the mean time?
- Damian Holmes
Damian: good point. Facebook is five years old. They got 175 million users already and are growing 700,000 every day. Facebook is the Silicon Valley success story of the year.
- Robert Scoble
I've always thought that 'normal' people, when talked about in these terms, are people who aren't like you. Everyone thinks they are a little different, so normals are everyone else
- Rachel Clarke
Robert my desire for DM is to keep one conversation thread and not to have to move to another platform. I want one conversation bundled as one conversation. This you have pointed out is one of those great features of FF.
- Bart LePoole
Robert, thanks to you, I'll never strive to be "normal" again :)
- MiaD
There is a big push to get these services "mainstream". And maybe Ev was tired of saying the word mainstream over and over, so "normal" fit the bill. :-)
- Louis Gray
All my normal friends are exchanging virtual nonsense on Face Book. or they are trying to figure out what to do about these causes. http://bit.ly/h07n Why be Normal ?
- Eric Logan
Robert, I'm not a twitter-fan but I'm not sure you're right. I believe you should follow less people on twitter than you follow here on FF or on Facebook, just because you have less filter tools on Twitter, and because you should be interested in what your friends are doing, not anybody wherever he is. And that's what "normal" people would do, if they ever get there.
- Markingegno - Donato
Perhaps a poor choice of words, but valid point that the masses (normal people) have not yet latched onto Twitter.
- David Lanning
By the time "normal" people figure out Twitter, the rest of us will be onto something else.
- The Way Things Are
I signed up for twitter a week ago and I still don't see any reason why I'd use it for anything that facebook or friendfeed don't already provide me in a way that's much easier to use. It really seems like facebook status updates that don't have comment threads. So, I feel like I'm missing the whole point of twitter.
- Steve Koch
Plus: I hate birds.
- Steve Koch
one makes the world "idiot" proof and then the world will make a better idiot !! If your not living life on the fringe or the edge, then you are taking too much room on the this planet :)-
- Peter Dawson
@scoble: thanks for starting this thread. I thought @bart's comment was the best line here: "...Facebook and Twitter get worse when more people join..." Ironically, those are exactly the conditions FB and TT need in order to become viable businesses... but from a user experience pov, it's a race to the bottom as more people get on. <sigh>
- .LAG liked that
Twitter isn't built for 'normal' people. All my real friends hate me because I refuse to add them... but I talk to them via IM. I don't need to know if they bought a new pair of shoes or if they're sick - AGAIN. What I don't understand is why Twitter gets as much fuss and attention as it does.
- Mona Nomura
@scoble I really think you are blowing the word "normal" out of proportion. He's clearly referring to non-early adopters. Goes back to the common "my parents" metaphor all consumer internet folks refer to. It's flawed, but quite pervasive.
- Clay Newton
@Mona: +200! Seriously, Twitter wins for most over hyped site. I frankly contribute to that through stomping around about how much attention it gets for so little added value. The sands are shifting under Twitter and I'm not sure they get that. People are on overload, they're shifting to trusted networks. And Twitter is now overflowing with affiliate, spam and black hat SEO. Not a peep (or chirp) out of Twitter on how they're dealing with that and the very quick backlash it will likely get from users.
- AJ Kohn
Jason - that doesn't really describe why it's getting buzz. What a lot of the Twitter early adopters (I wasn't) were saying about the usefulness and versatility of Twitter has finally been recognized by...uh..."normal people". Well, as normal as Shaq and Jimmy Fallon and Karl Rove are.
- Hutch Carpenter
Shouldn't it get recognized once it is finally stable (FailWhale after it was mentioned on The View by Barbara Walters? Still?) and monetizing? What kind of standard does this set for start-ups across the board?
- Mona Nomura
Normal just means people between the tails of the bell curve. Which, come on, we all are.
- Matthew DeVries
2.0 is to Twitter and 1.0 is to Pets.com ????
- AJ Kohn
PEOPLE: Pile off Robert. This is obviously one of those mulligan overly sensitive statements he warned us all about yesterday that were going to be coming. Give the dude a pass and move on.
- Matthew DeVries
Mona - monetization is not something the average user obsesses about. You think the news guys that are getting on Twitter spend a lot of time worrying about that? Fail Whale is an issue, it nearly brought the service to its knees last year. It's better, but needs improvement still.
- Hutch Carpenter
Robert, I'm advising for a company that is doing an amazing alternative for Twitter, targeted just at Moms. I'd love to give you and Maryam a demo some time. (I think Maryam would really love it). I'll e-mail you some more details shortly if you're interested.
- Jesse Stay
Oh, perhaps I was misunderstood. Why is this service (Twitter) garnering as much attention as it does when there is no guarantee it would even last? It just heightens its worth for a buy-out. What kind of standard is this setting for products and services moving forward?
- Mona Nomura
@scoble I think this is totally blown out of proportion. He clearly meant, "not tech obsessed" or cutting-edge. Like Clay said, he meant people like my parents. My only disagreement is that it'll take 5 years -- it's already happening. Of course, how long people stay or use the service is always the big question, but people who aren't plugged in (like my sister) are already trying it out.
- Christina Warren
Mona - YouTube
- Hutch Carpenter
Here's what I don't get - why would anyone keep working there? With all the new financing they've been getting, normal employee stock has got to be mostly diluted at the moment. I wonder if they realize that. It's no longer worth working there as a "startup environment".
- Jesse Stay
Hutch - Indeed. As well as many others. But seriously, is Twitter *that* useful?
- Mona Nomura
Mona - I think it is, because of its relative simplicity. Ultimately, of course, "useful" is a market call. Right now, the market says "yes".
- Hutch Carpenter
I just think it's a good example of how not everybody was meant to do press junkets and interviews with Charlie Rose. Time to invest in a PR person
- Dave Powell
from twhirl
Robert, do you think the language is a call back to the days when developers used the terminology "dumb user"? It seems that way to me as well..just the "lite" version of the arrogance that sadly has been endemic in developer culture since at least when I came on board in the late 90's. I'm even ashamed to admit that our university allowed instructors to use this "geek-speak" in the classroom as part of the curriculum. Esoterica often provides its own set of "ear-muffs" to its users.
- Melanie Reed
I think we contribute greatly to the market saying it is useful, by hyping up a service that is still missing many rudimentary features. I truly don't see why Twitter is a great marketing tool. Supplementary, yes but it certainly doesn't deserve all the attention it gets as a service since it's the people on Twitter, not the tool itself that makes it 'useful'.
- Mona Nomura
@Mona is on fire. + 1MM.
- AJ Kohn
Mona: That's like saying the Interstate isn't a good tool, it's the cars on that move the people are the useful thing.
- Matthew DeVries
Mona - I hear the argument about how easy Twitter is to build, nothing special to it. The *concept* was special. The early adoption was critical. The community is the barrier to entry. Twitter hit 'escape velocity' while others failed to do so.
- Hutch Carpenter
Matthew - I don't see the correlation. Interstates are a necessity. Twitter isn't. And Aaron? The mainstream is bigger than Twitter AND FriendFeed.
- Mona Nomura
I thought by not being into sports I would get out of this my ___ is better than yours thing. Guess not.
- Stephan Miller
from Friend Deck
Evan Williams says "normal people" and the ones who are offended are the geeks on the social networks. I rest my case.
- Shawn Farner
@Aaron: I use Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation.
- AJ Kohn
I always love the Twitter bashing on FF...especially from Scoble. We all know that 'normal' is mainstream and we also know that most of us are far from mainstream. Twitter is entering that sphere and as many people that think Twitter is useless there will be 2 more saying, 'Whoa! this is cool'. I'm far from a tech guru and love being able to keep in touch with friends and family via Twitter and SMS. It is the broadcast aspect that beats out plain old SMS.
- Sidney
Shawn - maybe that's why I call my blog "I'm not actually a geek". :-p
- Hutch Carpenter
Why be normal?
- Thomas Hawk
It's like Pepsi or Coke. Preferences only. And people start a war. I don't care unless I own the company, lol. But I guess it's a good time waster.
- Stephan Miller
from Friend Deck
Nonsense? Blasphemy Aaron! There is nothing more important than discussing services and measurements that clearly have no resolute answers!! ;)
- Mona Nomura
Mona - that's why I tend to be market-oriented in a lot of my opinions. Probably the closest approximation of the "answer".
- Hutch Carpenter
Mona - Interstates are not necessary, and when Eisenhower built them, everyone on Route 66 thought no one would use them, and died.
- Matthew DeVries
Hutch - indeed. Only time will tell. @Matthew - I still do not see the correlation with Interstates to Twitter. But it's me, not you. :)
- Mona Nomura
FF is futureproof. FF acknowledges that other services exist and encourages you to not be centralized. FF provides a platform for integration. Twitter wants you to use only twitter. This is what causes vapid content on twitter, it offers nothing, and doesn't have the potential to offer anything other than what you see in front of you. Twitter is a talking platform, FF is an integration...
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- Andy Bakun
I agree with Andy, except to say, perhaps FF will go away (noooo!), but something that does the same thing should rise to take its place if that happens.
- Kamilah Gill
Andy's right.
- Thomas Hawk
@Andy I would disagree to a point. It would be rude of me to walk up to a group of people and go, "I'm heading to the movies" and walking away. They'd expect me to sit around and wait for a comment from them. With Twitter I can say it and be gone. If someone wants to comment they can and I can get said comment on the go. Phone, generally one on one. Email, you can broadcast but again, no sms integration which is vital to reach people mobile. not everyone has email on their phone. Twitter does it all
- Sidney
agree w/ thomas - andy nailed it, exactly my pov too :)
- mike "glemak" dunn
Arent all humans noisy?? Prokofy: find me a single Twitter user who isn't noisy some of the time. I've looked. Even TimOreilly is noisy some of the time." Scoble????
- Francisco Kemeny
The reason why Twitter works is because of the number of people who use it. Yesterday I was having issues with Better Gmail 2, I did a quick twitter search and realized other people are having the same issue at the same time, I replied to them and we talked about it. Can't do that on Google or FriendFeed. I love FF but bottom line is most people I follow on twitter are not on FF, so I have to manually enter these people as imaginary friends to filter the twitter noise - this is a pain.
- Kelly Johns
OMG. I agree completely with Robert.
- Chris Baskind
I was helping somebody set up a new Twitter account today and noticed that during the sign up process they bring up a list of recommended people on Twitter to follow with the check marks already highlighted so you have to actually uncheck them to not follow them. Among various brands such as Dell the number 2 recommendation was a blogger, @dooce. Some of her tweets are very explicit. She refers to herself on her blog as a Sh*t A** H* M*****r F*****r (dooce.com). Interesting pick for #2
- Mike Elliott
Another thing to consider is how twitter could change their feature list or UI such that anything new wouldn't seem "bolted on". I don't think they can. If they added the ability to "browse" tweets and show threads (in the right order), something I think it desperately needs, rather than just a list of obviously ephemeral and no longer relevant entries with the most recent at the top,...
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- Andy Bakun
Mike Elliott: +100. Insightful observation.
- Robert Scoble
I am new to FF, but I like the context and conversation I can get from FF. Twitter seems masturbatory.
- Rick Cogley
Naturally he says normal people. Robert, I hate to break it to you, you are far from normal! I am certainly not normal either. Early adopters are, as a general rule, not the norm. That's fine.
- Daniel W. Crompton
I believe both FF and Twitter serve a purpose. FriendFeed, for me, is much like a university library whereas Twitter is much like the university cafeteria. It depends on 'type' of conversation one wants/needs at a particular moment.
- ka3drr
lol - no not library, twitter is like the roxbury (full of posers) and friendfeed is like a park outside a library on a sunny spring day (chilling with friends and having interesting conversations) imho of course :)
- mike "glemak" dunn
Scoble is wrong on this one, normal people are on email not twitter
- imran
Hmmmm, I'm normal, or at least, I THINK I'm normal... I use Twitter to communicate with people I normally wouldn't be able to find with any other means. I use it for information gathering too. And, bouncing ideas off of people. I don't know, I like it, and I am pretty sure that I am normal. I use Facebook for my real life friends and family, and that's it. Facebook I have locked down, so I can be more at ease there.
- Danielle Closs
My mom is on twitter - she's pretty normal
- Antonio Altamirano
this thread with the amount of quality comments back and forth illustrates the viability of FF as a great medium for debate! IMO: As busy as Mr. Scoble is, he should get mad props for starting and maintaining the discussion.
- shayne catrett
This is a nonissue. Evan's point is that like blogging was 5 years ago, twitter today seems a little offputting. To technological optimists, twitter will always be awesome, but to joe sixpack (or joe-who-has-no-blog) it may be sometime before twitter does not incite: "Well who the hell would want to know what I'm doing all the time?" The idea of 'normal' does cannot be so quickly reversed into "Evan just called me a freak." Grow up.
- Daniel Morgan
Guess I was not so stupid after all... Friendfeed implements DM !
- Bart LePoole
Why Twitter is not for conversations. I will give you five reasons here:
Joshua, Brad Coy, MLx and 139 other people liked this
1. If you get into something with one other person all your other followers will start complaining.
- Robert Scoble
2. You can't "thread" and "capture" a conversation, like I can here.
- Robert Scoble
3. Most people on Twitter that are joining lately are not people who participate. Compare @ev's followers to mine.
- Robert Scoble
true... very true. Although when used appropriately, Twitter is very powerful.
- Jonathan Beckett
4. Twitter's expected usage is "what are you doing?" Not "what would you like to chat with your friends?" Whenever I try to break that usage I get tons of hate DMs and tons of unfollows.
- Robert Scoble
i still have 2 reasons. the first one is that wa have other solution if we want to discuss about all and nothing, the tchat our DM for example and te second one is that twitter is to propose interested news about different interested subjects (it is better :) ) and not to give personal informations
- Alice Cordonnier
5. You can't bundle up a conversation and save it for later, like you can with this one. (You can even permalink to this conversation and link to it from a Tweet, but you can't do that in Twitter itself).
- Robert Scoble
Jonathan: Twitter is great for attracting attention to something, or just sending out a general update. For actually going into any detail at all about something, however, it's sorely lacking, and not just because of the 140 character limit.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Jonathan: Twitter is great for going back and forth about twice. If you want to get really involved it really really sucks. It pisses off all your other followers. DM's would be fun, but you can only DM people who follow you. Makes that worthless to use for a lot of people.
- Robert Scoble
Re. to 4: Interestingly, I really enjoy those conversations that form on Twitter, I start click the "In reply to..." all the time and I end up seeing the twitter pages of new, interesting people.
- Javier Altman
Finally, if you get to 1,000 followers or more (like many of my friends), you'll miss a lot of stuff and so the conversation might be disjointed.
- Robert Scoble
@robert: there are other services ;)
- Capobecchino (Enrico)
First one, impossible to keep track of conversations, 2 user engagement is low 3. Information value is negligible.
- Richard A.
Javier: Twitter is an AWESOME discovery tool. Yes. But it is a CRAPPY conversation tool.
- Robert Scoble
Robert. which is why I use twitter as I do.
- Richard A.
That is true, as purely conversational in anything that is more than 1 or 2 messages in "depth" or "length" or whatever you wanna call it, it's quite terrible. Also, I find that if you follow too many people, then every single "conversation" is impossible to follow. I'm following 200 people, and that's hard to manage and follow some times.
- Javier Altman
Agreed. Twitter is a great platform for spreading knowledge, not for idle back & forth chit chat.
- David Lanning
Javier: Twitter is an AWESOME listening tool (especially if you have TweetDeck) because you can listen to lots of people on specific topics (thanks to search). It's also an AWESOME promotional tool (look how Mashable is using Twitter) but it's a horrid conversation tool.
- Robert Scoble
David. Spreading knowledge? A hyperlink with no real description? No value to me. I want to know why someone is linking to something.
- Richard A.
David: I wouldn't go that far. Out of 10,000 Tweets 9,996 are pretty stupid. Should I give you some examples?
- Robert Scoble
I find I get a lot smarter by using Google Reader and following some people who put some thought into blogging. Friendfeed and twitter are NOT places I typically find deep thoughts unless it's from someone like Tim O'Reilly, Jay Rosen, or Dave Winer and they both are always linking out to interesting stuff.
- Robert Scoble
Robert. I really like how twitter used to be "awesome" as a conversational tool in the past. Now though people have far less time for the site.
- Richard A.
I definitely agree on that, Robert. Too bad Twitter has become so centralized and developed a "star system" so quickly... a ton of people with interesting things to say are simply lost in the cloud left in the wake of @kevinrose or @levarburton, you know? The big guys get listened to and usually have little of interest to say -- the smaller guys with actual content worth your time are never heard of.
- Javier Altman
Javier, the little guys are the community builders, their engagement provides the dynamics the timeline needs to keep people engaged.
- Richard A.
Threaded conversations are needed on Twitter. Becomes increasingly painful to understand what people are referring to sometimes
- Paul Papadimitriou
Ryo: Twitter is way older and is further along the growth curve. Friendfeed also requires more work and more engagement. Look at all the icons on the people who are following me here (or that I'm following). Now compare those icons to the ones of the users in @ev's account. Not even close to the same kinds of users. I'd rather have one friendfeed user than 100 twitterers. Watch over the next year and you'll see what I'm seeing.
- Robert Scoble
@paul: "Threaded conversations are needed" ... sure :)
- Capobecchino (Enrico)
Javier: Sometimes what those big folk say is something people do want to hear, though. Levar Burton had a big tweetup in Toronto at the beginning of the week, with only an hour's notice on Twitter. Friend of mine got to meet him, blogged about it, and had his server crash under the load when Burton linked to the post in Twitter. But yeah, things of note from the celebs are usually pretty rare. (The post that caused the crash: http://imaddicted.ca/interne... )
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Conversation certainly is easier here both to follow and understand. Less chance of being unfollowed for saying something out of context or annoying new users.
- Pete Gilbert
Chris: and Levar is one of the real celebrities who actually engages a community. I met him at CES. Really great guy.
- Robert Scoble
If Twitter wants to be a great conversation tool, they should figure some way to spin out conversations from the tweet streams of the conversationalists (and I don't mean DMs). That they don't seem to be bothering with that is another strike against the service, at least in my books.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
@Richard: I don't see how much community can be built when your word isn't reaching anyone -- that's how I feel twitter is working lately, what you say gets missed in the cloud.
- Javier Altman
I think that we havn't to blame any service that offer a rest api, if there is some kind of lake in some feature then innovate, the main element to get in mind is to avoid redenduncy.
- abdellah
@Chris: Maybe LeVar wasn't the best example, of course Geordi LaForge would have something interesting to say :D
- Javier Altman
Javier I have written quite a few blog posts about twitter and community building because of how frustrated I am by how passive the site has become. All those I used to follow are now following thousands. They no longer focus on friends anymore. I agree with you.
- Richard A.
@Chris: I think that if the web interface for Twitter somehow added the "in reply to's.." that are chained together onto a collapsible tab below a particular, original tweet on the timeline, the problem would be solved.
- Javier Altman
@Richard: Exactly, that's why I actually went back the other day and started un-following people. I want to focus my attention, and hopefully that will trickle down to others in my stream.
- Javier Altman
Brilliant and I was angry with you, silly me :). Twitter is more or less like a group IM. Mirco-blogging not so much.
- Chirag Chamoli
Javier, Because I did the same thing I had 11 pages of conversation in twelve hours. I was quite happy with that result. :-), made twitter feel vibrant once more. I like feeling that people want to engage for more than one message at a time.
- Richard A.
Ooh.. I don't know about this Scobs... I use FF and Twitter, but I have learned a lot, met some Great people, AND had some great conversations on Twitter, whether by tweets or DM. I do agree that FF is a more advanced version of Twitter, but I also agree that you have more "reach" on Twitter. I think Twitter a combo of conversation, info sharing (NOT just linking all the time), and connecting; at least until FF can get more "mainstream." The phone's still always good for conversations. :)
- Just OOH
Martin Schecter says I'm wrong: http://www.commonmistakesblog.com/2009... -- but this is something he can not do on Twitter (join together lots of little pieces into one whole). Give it up, Twitter sucks for conversations and building knowledge on a topic. Quick, go to Twitter search and find all Tweets on this conversation. You can't. Don't even try.
- Robert Scoble
Just Out Of Home: Friendfeed is totally different than Twitter. You haven't really used them if you believe that.
- Robert Scoble
what about app that offer to create twitter users group?!!
- abdellah
I actually see a use case for both. As a pure broadcasting channel Twitter is great, many people don´t even care about @replies. All they care about is that many people hear what they have to say. A conversation can and will never happen nicely on Twitter, not only because of the technical limitations but in my opinion also because of the different user structure. Twitter will stay popular but will also get polluted more and more. FF might be able to grow with a different user base towards something bigger.
- Bastian
I personally find Friendfeed quite daunting. I like the simplicity of Twitter, it's "shoot and forget"-ness, so to speak. Friendfeed is more involved, which helps for conversations, but because everything is linked together in a feed, it can get unmanageable quite quickly. That said, Twitter is obviously imperfect as well.
- Javier Altman
Bastian: exactly. Twitter is a "pure broadcasting channel." It's stunningly awesome for that.
- Robert Scoble
Bastian, if you want subscribers get an RSS feed, easier to sort by source.
- Richard A.
"Friendfeed is totally different than Twitter" - then I'd love to know why both continue to be thrown into battle against each other. Can't they just co-exist?
- Shawn Farner
Javier: right. But that's why your engagement here will increase over time and on Twitter yours will decrease over time. By the way, Facebook is seeing a ton more engagement (per user) than Twitter is. Why is that?
- Robert Scoble
Friendefeed is a web forum based around RSS aggregation. We use feedly to find the articles, say why we're think they're interesting and people decide whether to pay attention according to that. Twitter makes that much harder to do.
- Richard A.
simply because they take it seriousely, remember friend real life one are watching
- abdellah
Adding threading, groups, rich DM, would turn twitter into an IRC-meme product, useless. twitter is more a broadcasting product and needs to focus on search, trends, more than interaction
- Jean-Charles VERDIE
from Nambu
seriously the most ridiculous is their trend :) have you take time to see twitter trend?
- abdellah
Robert: I think Facebook is a different creature altogether -- The engagement could stem from IM-ing, or maybe from the silly apps and quizzes you take in it. I personally don't like Facebook, I rarely go in there, and only update the status by having my Twitter linked to it. And I have to disagree, my engagement is still on Twitter more than Friendfeed, and I haven't seen any particular increase or decrease there. Sure, topics like this keep me refreshing the page, but that happens on Forums too :)
- Javier Altman
Robert: Facebook is like Friendfeed. we share our personal images with friends (when not web celebs) share blog posts, comments about small things. It's a more intimate community. There is a lot of common ground.
- Richard A.
Javier: you really need to sit down with me sometime and I'll show you why facebook is so much more engaging. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about. YOUR engagement might be high. I'm talking about the aggregate.
- Robert Scoble
I have been using both for awhile; per your suggestion actually. I might not be the master of this stuff, but I think it's not really a matter of belief; more to do with how you (an individual) want to use both sites. Like I said, I like Friendfeed more and wish more people I know use it, but it's really up to the person, no? I've been quite happy in terms of how I use both, granted FF is far more organized, and also has more reach if you know how to use it right.
- Just OOH
Robert: might be hard to do from Argentina to California, but I'm game :D But seriously, can you expound on the aggregate?
- Javier Altman
i want more of my face to face friends here too, but they aren't so tech or early adopters. if they are here, not to participate - just stream. educating the general public on value here will make this stand out more.
- Courtney Engle
Courtney: they will come. Twitter had the same feel to it two years ago.
- Robert Scoble
"Aggregation"-wise yes. I agree that FF is FAR more better/advanced than Twitter.
- Just OOH
Courtney. They're on Facebook though right? Just use the status messages as a form of twitter. It's just as versatile as twitter itself.
- Richard A.
from my point of view, FF is more personal, because as some oy you said, we can post fotos, we can play some games, it is for me a distraction, Twitter is more profitable to find interested people who work on your market or have the same interests on particular subjects. That's why i make a big difference btw both sites, the contents i put is totaly opposite
- Alice Cordonnier
Robert Llewellyn is another one who's really into it as well he talks back to the twitterers (okay, he was teasing me about knowing about red dwarf 9, but you know) and he's big into blip. and to a point, yes, even bloody ashton and demi :P
- Terry O'Fee
I don't get how you could make Twitter be threaded and still have it be Twitter, which is this rolling stream. You can have little micro convos on Twitter but it's easier to get into a fight precisely because most people on Twitter are on broadcast mode, dispensing with a pearl of wisdom they imagine their hundreds or thousands of fans merely want to docilely listen to, and they hate backtalk. Whoever gets the good backtalk app working will win.
- Prokofy Neva
This is probably a noob question, but Plurk offers convo threading, grouping in the form of cliques so why aren't people talking about it as a viable option to the address the concerns listed above?
- Kimberly Nolting
the interface :)
- abdellah
Robert - I believe FB is more popular (not better, mind) because it's social networking at its simplest. it's wonderful for older parents who don't get twitter or friendfeed to sign up and add as much or as little as they want. perfect for the people who just want a small, family connection online..
- Terry O'Fee
personnaly I will not use it for just one reason the damn interface.
- abdellah
@Kimberly: probably because Plurk didn't ever get critical mass of users. Without the userbase, you can have the best app, and never get anywhere.
- Javier Altman
Kimberly: the UI of Plurk feels like a coloring book to me. I never took to it. The people who joined it at first also were not the kind of people who I wanted to have conversations with. Plus, friendfeed was way way way better at all this stuff than Plurk was and friendfeed was started by three superstars from Google. Plurk? I don't even know the people who started it.
- Robert Scoble
terry, FB is more particular due to it rigid rule, compared to twitter or FF the process on mutual fellowing is a walk in fire.
- abdellah
Funny that back when I started using Twitter in 2006, it was bad etiquette to have too many @'s in your stream. Now that seems to be inversed.
- Sam Harrelson
plurk needs to get rid of that stupid karma crap as well. people on there "plurk" and reply so theyre top of their karma, not because they feel like it
- Terry O'Fee
I agree with Alice's point as well. I just don't like rules set forth on this stuff. I enjoy both, wish more were on FF as I would certainly use it more than Twitter, but they are simply not. Let's just agree to disagree on some points and call it a day Scobs. Also, NO need to insult someone's intelligence because they might not be able to use this stuff as well as you do. That's just not a good conversation, speaking of..
- Just OOH
you deserve a kiss for the karma mention, I hate it
- abdellah
Just Out Of Home: you are right. I'm sorry.
- Robert Scoble
abdellah - mwah!
- Terry O'Fee
Robert: I do remember early Twitter. It was still mostly status update. Too much of that now seems like they don't have much to contribute and aren't connecting. If Twitter users just do status updates it seems like they are self absorbed or lack contribution of some sort. They're still learning over there. Wait till their eyes open here.
- Courtney Engle
Robert - Wouldn't you consider that regardless of what Twitter's "expected usage" is, that it is most certainly in a nascet stage right now? Facebook was not perfect at 2 years, and is not perfect now. Neither is a GMail or friendfeed. It's best use at the moment is not "typical conversation" but it can have its place. If people would unfollow you simply because you attempt to have a...
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- Patrick Boegel
I'm sorry, but how the hell would you be able to cope with the stream of information on Friendfeed (considering all that gets aggregated) if it had Twitter's mass? You'd be able to "follow" 20 people and that's it, otherwise you'd never be able to be involved with anybody.
- Javier Altman
terry , mwah too (what about kiss feature here in FF) :)
- abdellah
Richard: I turned the Twitter sync off as I want my FB wall to not be overwhelmed in my tweets. I keep it for friends to post there, reply, and engage. The sync would make it a mass broadcast firehose drowning those yet to know Twitter or FF, but I do have digg, greader, flickr, etc all synced back to my wall.
- Courtney Engle
OT a little, do you ever see in the future a greater integration with gps services on phones with social networks?? imagine being able to see twitters from people in your area. able to contact or @ them?? imagine the advertisers, theyd have a field day! a computer twittering deals close by to where you are...
- Terry O'Fee
Javier: you are absolutely wrong. I'm following 14,000 and 28,000 are following me here on friendfeed and it's FAR easier to deal with large numbers here than over on twitter.
- Robert Scoble
@Terry isn't that called Loopt?
- Javier Altman
terry, oh yes and it sound pretty good perspective, but there will be always a spammer here or elswere to make thing collapse, the main problem with twitter is that twitter bases how fragile and how risky to build on fragile foundation.
- abdellah
Robert: Hmm, I see. It could very well be the way I interact with these type of service then. If Twitter only has 140 character lines as the only input and I already have a hard time keeping up with the people I follow, I can't imagine how chaotic it'd be to do that here, plus all the other aggregated info (digg, youtube, likes, dislikes, commenting, etc...)
- Javier Altman
Courtney, I don't sync twitter with facebook. I tweet far too much. What I mean is that it's short messages people can comment on without having to join a new service :-)
- Richard A.
Javier: because you aren't seeing the advantages of having lists, rooms, and the metadata that lets you hide lame stuff (you can hide all tweets that don't have a like, for instance).
- Robert Scoble
Terry, Google latitude has been running non stop on my phone for three weeks by now, works fine. used it to meet one friend a few times already.
- Richard A.
Javier: you should watch this video: http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Robert Scoble
Robert and Javier. I hide all tweets that haven't been responded to. Works well for me.
- Richard A.
i dont just mean advertising though, it would be awesome for twitter meetups for example. where is @(insertname), you could have them on a list to see where they are, see just tweets from people in the area as well, i mean out here in the sticks it would be useless, but in the cities it would be interesting. sure, we have brightkite now, but im thinking in a more twitter esque direction
- Terry O'Fee
Richard: don't add more than 150 people to Latitude until version 2 comes out. I can't use it on my phone anymore cause I added 250. Sigh.
- Robert Scoble
Terry. There's a service that's being developed in Switzerland that would represent that type of information, but still early days... have to see how it evolves.
- Richard A.
Javier, have you explored the "Hide" feature and its "Hide entries like this" options?
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
latitude updates an area, mainly brightkite does the same. imagine posting an entry and the phone instantly updates where that post (or reply) has come from. there will still be privacy settings of course but it would put the social really into social media..
- Terry O'Fee
Robert: Yeah, then again that probably happens because the people I'm interested in the most, that would drive me to actually sit down and organize all this information into rooms, etc. isn't here on FF, but they are on Twitter and FB. I definitely see the superiority of FF in terms of app, I guess I'm just a bit apprehensive to its complexity?
- Javier Altman
Robert: I'm not going to, but I have invited my direct family to follow and the occasional friend. Working fine for me. :-). I'm loving the service.
- Richard A.
Javier: you aren't the only one. Friendfeed is too complex and they know it. Hopefully they'll have an answer to that soon,
- Robert Scoble
No prob. Scobs. I know you get passionate about this stuff; just know that most of us are not as advanced as you. There is a learning curve with FF, and I'm sure you agree with that. It will take time.. Anyway, I've learned a lot from you by following you on both, and checked out FF because you suggested it and like it a lot. Just think it's up to the individual in terms of usage. Hopefully this conversation gets more people (including ones I know) on FF as it can do a lot more. Have a good day Scobs~
- Just OOH
@Richard: Dude, if a lot of people do what you do of hiding un-commented stuff, you'd miss, essentially, all of my content on FF. :D
- Javier Altman
terry, now after the enthusiast plz make some dark side to the whole project, I mean how could this new service be bad or hurting or make people in danger,!!
- abdellah
@Bruce: Not really, I probably should. But I just am not on FF enough to really explore it. I only pop in here when Robert posts this kind of thing that drives me here.
- Javier Altman
Robert: Tweetdeck FF video was great. need to clean up my lists of people, conduct searches & filters. Sorting through the pile now could take a while. I just put most into homefeed.
- Courtney Engle
محض اطلاع دوستان خارجگینی!!!!! گرووووووووووووووومپ
- Moghamer
Javier, but I follow people on twitter with twhirl, so i don't need the same tweets in two places. I don't want to answer without the answer being read.
- Richard A.
I'm in the same boat as Javier; the people I'm most interested in are on Twitter and FB, not FF. FF IS much better for having conversations yes, but they are often mostly about tech, food, memes and cats, so the point for some of us is moot. FF still needs a lot of work - you can't hide based on keywords; I may not want to see someone's posts on cats but I might want to see their other stuff, so filtering is very crude.
- Sally Church
Javier, you're probably over-thinking it. Try to dumb yourself down a little. Say, "This is something I don't care to see", click Hide, and follow the prompts. I think FriendFeed might actually be easier for late adopters because early adopters have all these preconceived notions about how UIs are to be structured.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
The big downside to FF over Twitter is that it requires a lot more work to make it work well and ends up with over-hiding, filtering or user scripts etc. If it's too much work it gets dispiriting. If you like tech, cats or memes then you will be in hog heaven here.
- Sally Church
@Richard: That is perfectly understandable -- btw, say hi to Maggie for me :D
- Javier Altman
Twitter is now the "classifieds" section of the social media newspaper. It's a good place to announce something. And you can start a lot of conversations with very little investment. But it is nearly impossible to carry on a dialog though the classifieds. And while you can write (or link to) a long-winded missive on Twitter, it just isn't suited for that. But sometimes, you just need to get a message out very cheaply. And Twitter does that job admirably.
- Lorin Olsen
@Robert... Twitter : Megaphone = FF : Coffe ;-)
- Luca Perugini
lorin, does this mean that twitter is a buzz machine injector?!!
- abdellah
Javier, maggieconv? Will do.
- Richard A.
@Robert ... Twitter as a Megaphone and FF as a Coffee ;-)
- Luca Perugini
It's like a shouting on a market square.
- Dimitar Vesselinov
I was showing my non-tech wife Twitter this week and right away she picked up on the difficulty of following conversations.
- Paul Rodriguez
There's a reason they call Twitter "microblogging". It's like blogging. It's hard to have an extended multi-way conversation with trackbacks.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
Twitter is see current threads and Friendfeed is to talk about them
- Kim Landwehr
People who think twitter is about microblogging are the ones I don't follow.
- Richard A.
richard, so twitter is about what?!!
- abdellah
@Richard: Ok, then that brings me to a question: what is the proper use for Twitter then? I share interesting news stories from Google Reader, comment on life, use it as a cathartic tool on on occasion, comment on other people's tweets... Is that all that Twitter is, or am I missing something?
- Javier Altman
@abdellah I used to think of it as a multiplatform chat too.
- Richard A.
richard, yes it can but we haven't to do because we can. this is what bring all the pb people travesty the use of the service if they do using the api it would be intelligent and a source of innovation, but they do using the original service what make thing go out of hand.
- abdellah
Twitter has suffered from having so man new users that don't know what works and doesn't. As a result the early adopters have really decreased how often they use it.
- Richard A.
Twitter is the conversational equivalent of playing phonetag but it is definitely more lightweight than FF.
- Stephan Miller
from Friend Deck
stephan, the word playing resume the whole really :)
- abdellah
These are valid points. Never thought Twitter is an extended conversation tool. Maybe with new features like targeted tweets to different groups it can become one. It's still early days for them when you listen to Evan Williams.
- Joe Buhler
it doesn't have to be "all conversation" or "no conversation". Twitter can be for "some kinds of conversations" or "somewhat for conversation". Or you can endlessly argue that "no it isn't for conversation" and "yes it is for conversation". It's in between. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
- Stephanie Booth
from twhirl
Evan Williams is the last person in the world I'll listen to when it comes to twitter. I'd rather speak to actual users of the service.
- Richard A.
I am new to Friend Feed, but not Twitter. Thanks for the lesson in FF!
- Rachel Levy
I think the big issues are #2 and #5. While search.twitter allows you to view a conversation between two people, it's far from efficient. When twitter fixes this problem, it will be a much better conversation platform.
- David Spinks
Both have their uses - and Twitter can definitely use an upgrade. I can see more journalists type people (like yourself) get more benefits from FriendFeed.
- Chris Gieger
Robert, that commonmistakesblog entry is weird. If you need to be told how to have conversations "correctly", then there is something wrong with the service.
- Andy Bakun
Twitter as a broadcasting channel only makes sense if you either 1) have a lot of followers, or 2) have followers who retweet all your tweets. This is actually no different than having a blog.
- Andy Bakun
Proof is in the pudding. Would *this* conversation happen on Twitter? No. Twitter was built as a status update service. It does that nicely. Conversations is a square peg being fit into a round hole.
- AJ Kohn
I think Friendfeed should add this list functionality into its posts. It is annooyin when people start commenting before the list is done.
- Sweyn Venderbush
from twhirl
Again I think Scoble is trying to make Twitter what he wants instead of what it is. No problem with that I guess. Twitter is great for general broadcasts and as someone else said a few quick back and forths. Those are still conversations. Just short ones. What Robert wants are discussions. Which Twitter is not for...Twitter is great for the mobile crowd who like to do as they go. There are other forums for those who like to sit at their desk and have long community discussions.
- Sidney
@Andy I think too many people who are currently into Social Media (the tech crowd) try to look at Twitter as what they can get out of it on a business level. I think it is much easier to say, "Hey I'm hitting lunch at this place who's joining me?" and it goes to all my friends instead of having to SMS everyone. This is functionality the non-techs are using it for. It's useful. Saves time and isn't meant for long drawn out discussions.
- Sidney
Something else struck me about that commonmistakesblog post... it suggests you put context in all your tweets in order to not piss of your followers who don't know what the hell you're talking about. By the time you put in context (repeating what was said already so people can jump in the middle), and @replies, the 140 character limit becomes even further limited.
- Andy Bakun
Andy: +100.
- Robert Scoble
honestly I like plurk better than twitter.I don't check friendfeed and reply to stuff that often.
- Logan Lindquist
Logan: that's cool. I just never got into Plurk. The UI there is too inefficient for me and too goofy.
- Robert Scoble
yea I agree the UI could be more mainstream, but the features and community are much better
- Logan Lindquist
Logan: I'll give it another try. Everytime I've gone there I didn't like the community. It shows that if you don't see people you recognize you'll not like the service.
- Robert Scoble
wow, im surprised that there are still people who try to enforce rules to tools like twitter,how incredibly naive. twitter is a tool, people use tools the way they want and need to, despite what you, or i tell them, its this that forms the basis of human and techno-evolution...if twitter is being used by people for conversations then it obviously meets that need at some level. its this evolution of technology that drives (or should drive) successful product and service developments,
- john
Kind of makes you wonder what made Twitter take off in the first place? Identi.ca, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku......Is Twitter really that much better? Is it the name? Viral "marketing"? I tend to lean toward the name. I fear that FriendFeed will never catch on simply because of the name. It's not "glitzy". Neither are identi.ca, plurk, pownce, or jaiku. I'd much rather support identi.ca because it's open source.
- Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ
@slayerboy: twitter's power is a global namespace which allows for interesting social dynamics: you want to know what your friends are doing, you want to share cool experiences with them, you want to follow people you admire. Twitter sux at conversations but they are *very* good at those other use cases and they are dead simple. That and they were able to attract some of the most vocal bloggers and social media advocates (Robert included)!
- Edwin Khodabakchian
robert: well of course if the people you follow don't use it then its not much use. its funny how everyone hates twitter and they keep using it. its like the myspace of mico-blogging.
- Logan Lindquist
Absolutely agree with #5 Robert - "5. You can't bundle up a conversation and save it for later, like you can with this one. (You can even permalink to this conversation and link to it from a Tweet, but you can't do that in Twitter itself)" I find myself getting more and more frustrated with NOT being able to follow a conversation on Twitter... and esp. a conversation between 2 others...
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- Deanna Belle Govoni
That gives me some inspiration, Deanna. I'd like to see a feature on friendfeed that lets you "lock" an entry to just being commented by a few people, but still be public. You could do interviews and debates this way. It would be asynchronous because new activity floats it to the top where you can see it again. The most recent stuff is the stuff that shows by default (with the previous...
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- Andy Bakun
I guess you could do the same thing with a restricted access room, but they don't have the same exposure, and there's less chance of it cropping up randomly.
- Andy Bakun
@Andy Bakun - Yep, the less clicks the better and the less CLUTTER the better - have you seen this post yet?: http://friendfeed.com/e... - too much noise is frustrating, who has time to sift through it all? Your idea is interesting,do you mean that you'd want to be able to "flag" comments from specific...
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- Deanna Belle Govoni
That's a damn good idea, Deanna, the non-focused comments being collapsible. This would help keep things on topic, keep the focus on the target participants, but not restrict other people from participating. It's threads like this one, with 156 comments, that show the power of the FF medium and presentation and UX. Some minor tweaks and there are additional possibilities.
- Andy Bakun
Lorin, good comparison the classifieds and trying to have a conversation through them. Even better would be a comparison to the "missed connections" section of the classifieds.
- Andy Bakun
What is your Google Analytics IQ? - http://conversionroom.blogspot.com/2009...
Yung-Hui Lim liked this
what about AnalyTWITS? ;-) http://twurl.nl/nh482n
- Yung-Hui Lim
Skittles, Yes Skittles, Nails a Simple but Effective Social Media Stunt. - http://www.wedocreative.com/blog...
 |
Hutch Carpenter, Yung-Hui Lim, Iain Baker and Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah liked this
Skittles brand anarchy :-) http://twurl.nl/7i7w32
- Yung-Hui Lim
Research: well-connected people communicating a lot are more productive - http://blog.contentmanagementc...
Meryn Stol, Daniel Rowley, Philip J Beyer and 15 other people liked this
"Since information does not diffuse randomly in organisations, but rather reflects the nature and structure of human relationships, providing the right tools that support human social relationships, communication and interaction, will provide a significant ROI to the enterprise."
- V Mary Abraham
I seriously want to see the research mentioned in the first reference-- which is not a link to the actual research. I've written Pentland asking for a citation and have received no response. I've seen that quote about productivity several times and it needs to not be repeated so frequently without referencing the real deal.
- Kevin Gamble
Kevin: If you get a reliable link, could you kindly share it with the rest of us? Inquiring minds want to know. Thanks!
- V Mary Abraham
Prove that Techcrunch did not pay @biz $10,000 to get on Twitter's suggested friend list. They sure were not more popular than @leolaporte two weeks ago.
Wayne Sutton, Iván Abrego, Jay Neff and 114 other people liked this
Leolaporte deserves to be on the list -- he had twice as many followers as @Techcrunch did a week ago. Twitter's list is corrupt.
- Robert Scoble
Interesting suggestion but hard to prove or disprove.
- Liz
I'm out of the loop. Where is the list?
- Will Johnston
How about prove that they did?
- Omar Gallaga
Will: you go to friends/suggested friends on Twitter.
- Robert Scoble
wow's he's totally left you for dead, he's a smartie that arrington
- Bob Sonin
Omar: that is easy. Twitter has no criteria for getting on this list and mostly added big brands onto the list.
- Robert Scoble
Why $10,000? Are you just making up a figure or are you privy to some information? (As an aside, I see Brooke Burke on the list with 62,000+ followers. Wow, when did THAT happen?)
- Omar Gallaga
Bob: I will have the final revenge. In a year all the influentials will be on friendfeed.
- Robert Scoble
Yeah, I'm liking this, on the 'guilty until proven innocent' premise that Techcrunch seem comfortable in applying to all and sundry, including FB and Last FM within just the last week..
- Andy Connell
Scoble, interesting assertion, but... I must ask: who the f*ck cares? :)
- l0ckergn0me
I'm on the list, and I certainly don't have $10,000 to give anyone. Do you think I somehow bribed them, Robert? Hmm?
- Veronica
l0ckergn0me - I echo that sentiment completely.
- Mitch
who cares?? i'd rather follow that interest me. not how many followers they have..
- Terry O'Fee
Couldn't this also be taken as a statement on the morals of TechCrunch?
- MarkCarras
guilty until proven innocent?
- Mark Collier
I just noticed Robert's not on the list. Oh my God, I think I just figured it all out!
- Omar Gallaga
Robert, if you're so big on meritocracy, why have you, or the friendfeed founders driven by my ff posts without a 'like' or 1,000 retweets by now? You follow me. I've tweeted big news or quality stuff, and watch the "A-List" wait to see it from another "A-lister" before they'll retweet. Power liking some small fries mixed in with friends just so you can point to your proof is bs. Why hammer Twitter for the 1,000th time?
- Ed Shahzade /NextInstinct
so now we know Twitter's monetization strategy
- practicehacker
Way to spread FUD.
- Veronica
way to spread BS :P
- Terry O'Fee
Mark - yeah, gupi.. too complicated?
- Andy Connell
Hmm, never checked the list before. Wonder if new users use it a lot, or maybe I'm the only one who doesn't.
- Will Johnston
Ed: just today I Twitteted several people with fewer than 50 followers.
- Robert Scoble
Veronica: prove it is FUD. THAT is why this feature is corrupt.
- Robert Scoble
REALITY CHECK, ROBERT: NOBODY CARES. :)
- l0ckergn0me
Please... prove it's true. Is this just TC you're accusing, or everyone on the list?
- Veronica
Robert, you made the accusation. I think it's on you to prove there's something to your finger pointing beyond just... you know... your finger.
- Omar Gallaga
Veronica: I am not on the list. Neither is @leolaporte. We both had more followers than you did (and more than many on the list). Now I am wondering.
- Robert Scoble
@techcrunch and @veronica don't appear on my suggestedfriends list so is it a random list then?
- Iain
l0ckergn0me - Reality check .. YOU don't care...
- Andy Connell
Veronica - let's forget about Robert's question - being on that list provides more eyeballs and more pageviews for those on the list. for those of you on the list using twitter as a marketing platform (i.e. all of the list) - it provides more traffic and you know what that equals.
- Allen Stern
Note too Veronica that I did NOT say you paid. It is just that the criteria for getting on the list is corrupt.
- Robert Scoble
HAH! This is the funniest thing I've heard all day. Are you really just that bored this afternoon to accuse people of spending money to be on a suggested users list? #1 As Chris says, who the frak cares. #2 Do you honestly think someone like me or iJustine have that kind of money? #3 Wow, man, I thought we were cool.
- Veronica
I've made several "who to follow on Twitter" lists for the publication I work for and it's never just about who has the most number of followers. Maybe they just find the people on their list more interesting/appealing to newbies, from their point of view. Why do you assume the criteria is only "most followers?
- Omar Gallaga
Allen, I understand that. But the fact of the matter remains that I (I cannot speak for anyone else) never asked to be on the list, nor did I ever pay anyone to be there.
- Veronica
Veronica: I did not accuse Techcrunch of paying either. Read my question VERY carefully. I did accuse Twitter of making a feature that looks corrupt.
- Robert Scoble
Robert... Do you have any proof that this occurs? Is there any accounts of this occurring in the past (anecdotal or stated). I'm don't know either way but asking people to prove a something didn't happen without an established cause of suspicion is intimidation and, frankly, wrong.
- Johnny Worthington
If you are not accusing us of paying, then how are the criteria "corrupt?"
- Veronica
Veronica: the fact that Twitter is picking its stars with subjective criteria is corrupt.
- Robert Scoble
thanks veronica - yea my point is the marketing and "top of mind" that being on that list gives you special folks - i am not discussing the money point, robert is.
- Allen Stern
Robert -- aren't you the one always laughing it off when people unfollow you and saying that the number of followers you have isn't as important as the number of people commenting on Friendfeed? Now you're saying that if Twitter bases this list on anything other than number of followers it's corrupt? Or is your initial question in some third language I can't parse?
- Omar Gallaga
Veronica: prove you did not pay. You can not. The feature is corrupt. I can prove I did not pay to get on top of friendfeed. You can no longer prove that on Twitter.
- Robert Scoble
Um, Robert... they onus is on you to prove they did... sorry.
- Johnny Worthington
And what if they decide to rotate the list? If you're not still on there, will you continue to throw around accusations? Sounds like sour grapes, and you're better than that.
- Veronica
Omar: yes. Who follows you does not matter. But that does not change fact that this feature corrupts the integrity of Twitter.
- Robert Scoble
I agree with Johnny. C'mon, Robert! Show us some of that investigative blogging! Prove that TC (or I, for that matter) paid to be on there. Would you like me to send you my banking statements?
- Veronica
Omar: it is corrupt because you can no longer trust Twitters' follower numbers. The people who are most popular on Twitter did not earn their position through objective criteria. That is corrupt.
- Robert Scoble
I asked if you think a feature like this should be based solely on number of followers. Is that the only criteria you think is fair for making suggestions on who to follow?
- Omar Gallaga
Veronica: you did not earn a position higher than @leolaporte. So why are you defending this feature?
- Robert Scoble
Omar: it should be based on objective criteria everyone can figure out so no questions of propriety will stick.
- Robert Scoble
Allen is on point with his comments. Being on the list does equal more $. Regardless of how folks got on it. But again this list does show that who you "know" is critical in the social web.
- Kipp Bodnar
Perhaps, Robert, it is not a position to defend? Does Veronica use Twitter as a revenue tool? If not, this is moot.
- MVB (Grinch of FF)
I think you should enter some criteria to generate the suggested user list (likes etc)
- Iain
What criteria besides number of followers? That's the only one you've brought up.
- Omar Gallaga
Robert the influentials won't be on FF, it's just an aggregator, the influentials will have their own quality medium with distribution
- Bob Sonin
I do not know why Veronica is on the list and not @leolaporte so now I am wondering what is going on and no one can prove money and gifts did not get exchanged.
- Robert Scoble
I'm not defending a feature. I'm defending myself from being accused of paying a company to feature me.
- Veronica
Robert, you're a bank robber. Prove to me that you aren't. See how dumb that sounds?
- Veronica
I heard he stole $10,000.
- Omar Gallaga
That is easy: I have not received a gift from a bank I did not earn.
- Robert Scoble
In that case Robert, you are traveling the path of Joseph McCarthy. Rather than presenting evidence of corruption, you are throwing around accusations and telling those you accuse to prove you wrong.
- Johnny Worthington
Prove it.
- Veronica
Johnny: people are getting gifts from Twitter they DID NOT earn with subjective criteria. Why?
- Robert Scoble
@Scoble your headline is linkbait - but your point is valid - the recommender is crap. They should buy @mrtweet
- Chris Saad
I think Robert is making weak arguments, but his base point is sound--if there is an algorithm that is making those picks, then it's not very transparent. If the list is editorial, it would be nice to at least know who has made the picks.
- Eric Florenzano
Tell us what you think the criteria should be, Robert. Other than "being Robert Scoble."
- Veronica
@ev posted that they just picked some names. It's not really that big of a deal.
- Christian Burns
Veronica YOU received a gift from a corporation you DID NOT earn. I did not receive such a gift. This feature is corruptible.
- Robert Scoble
Great question Robert... maybe you should lead with that rather than dropping corruption accusations. I actually think there may be some underhanded work in a few selected cases but unless I have evidence, I'll ask questions first, set up witch hunts later...
- Johnny Worthington
Why didn't I earn it? Also, it's not a "gift," it's a recommendation.
- Veronica
I say the feature is done by hand and the appearance of impropriety is nothing more than lack of research by an intern.
- MarkCarras
@Veronica Robert is not suggesting he should be on the list. He has always actively worked to flatten these tools, not do land grabs which he could easily do. Suggesting that's what he is saying is not very productive.
- Chris Saad
Chris, it's hard not to take personal affront to this bad logic.
- Veronica
@Veronica, as I said his initial tweet is linkbait - it's clearly an exaggeration - but his underlying point is valid.
- Chris Saad
Johnny: note that I did NOT accuse anyone of anything. PLEASE read carefully! I just am pointing out that some people are receiving gifts without earning them. This is why Fast Company forbids me from accepting gifts. So MY integrity does not get called into question.
- Robert Scoble
@techcrunch prove to us that you are not plotting to take over the world while you pretend to drop out and take pictures of tropical beaches. I bet you aren't even going to answer me.
- Christian Burns
In that case, I'd like my gifts BACK
- Chris Saad
If someone added up all the pro ff posts, anti-twitter posts, link direction, they'd assume Robert was into the FF funding.
- Ed Shahzade /NextInstinct
This is absurd. What gift, in tangible terms, is being given?
- MVB (Grinch of FF)
Chris -- in a separate post Robert said " two weeks ago I was more popular than Techcrunch and @leolaporte was a lot more popular than me. Today Techcrunch is way more popular than either of us" -- that's flattening the tools?
- Omar Gallaga
Robert, your inflammatory remarks and accusations (and they are that, no matter how many times you tell us to READ CAREFULLY) come off as really childish and insulting. If you have an issue with a feature of Twitter, there are better ways of pointing it out than accusing people who considered you acquaintances, if not pals.
- Veronica
I just can't believe I am not on the list! I sent @biz 5 bucks too. WTF?
- Beebo Wallace
Veronica: you did receive a gift. Advertising is sold by 1,000 viewers. Ask Ryan how much 1,000 people are worth. You did NOT earn that gift by any objective measure.
- Robert Scoble
Must have some troubles with the American to Australian translation but without this thread for explanation, it sounds like you wondering out loud if Techcrunch paid biz to get on the list...
- Johnny Worthington
@Omar ok well that's an even lamer way of expressing the point haha
- Chris Saad
Beebo: obviously $5 wasn't enough.
- Robert Scoble
It's well-known you can't "prove a negative". Or make logic with such as "clearly, pigs fly, because we have a black president" - more to the point, that list stinks, and bad -- McCain and Tony Robbins are on my list, and a bunch of corporations.
- Richard pancakhaus Walker
Robert, you keep avoiding the question of what you think Twitter's objective measures should have been if not just number of followers. What do you think they should have been?
- Omar Gallaga
I've been saying for years that recommendations should be based on interest overlaps, still, no one listens. www.socialwhois.com
- Chris Saad
@scoble just admit you are asking Twitter to implement APML Profiling and Matching and let these people chill out
- Chris Saad
Insulting people is a great way to get a point across.
- Veronica
I think it is definitely a gift. You are gaining followers who are in turn being effected by your content. They aren't mailing it to you with a bow on it as in a physical gift, but they are making it much easier for you to generate revenue or web influence power.
- AJK
Robert, there is no such thing as CPM for Twitter because followers -- and recommended user spots -- are not bought and sold. Period. You think they are? Prove it.
- Ryan Block
Who gives a frak? Honestly. Accusing @techcrunch of paying $10,000 is stupid. How do we know he DID? Did Twitter contact you and say "the only way you can be on the list is if you pay $10,000?" And all the bagging on Veronica isn't necessary. It's a stupid list. GET OVER IT.
- Zach Flauaus
Veronica: it is interesting that you feel accused. This feature sucks. Some day you will see why.
- Robert Scoble
I feel accused because you accused me, and everyone else on this list. Not indirectly, directly. Oh, someday I will see why? When I'm not longer ON the list? Actually, Robert, that will be fine with me because I won't care. Because I haven't invested in BEING on the list.
- Veronica
Zach: I did NOT accuse anyone of paying. I am accusing Twitter of designing a corruptible list. Friendfeed's list is defendable. This one is not.
- Robert Scoble
Scoble obviously "deserves" some sort of recognition. If he doesn't get it, others must be paying. Right?
- coldbrew
Read about this and other social media revelations in Robert's next e-book, "Scobleized: Destroying Relationships, Throwing Out Baseless Accusations and Talking Down To Peers."
- Omar Gallaga
@Everyone who is saying the discussion is pointless just doesn't get it. These things are worth $. They seriously affect the way twitter works and who gets attention. Attention = $. Social tools are about finding niche audiences. If Twitter is biasing towards celebrities or given individuals (for whatever reason) it changes the medium and the message. Stop pretending that these things don't matter.
- Chris Saad
@Omar - LOL.
- Veronica
Robert... do you think that Techcrunch did pay biz $10,000 to get on the Twitter's suggested friend list?
- Johnny Worthington
This whole discussion is rather petty and absurd.
- coldbrew
@Johnny *sigh* he was making a point by giving a clearly exaggerated and baseless example. Our inability to prove it either way IS THE POINT
- Chris Saad
has anyone tried to find out how the suggested friends algorithm atually works or are we assuming its a manually generated list cos they haven't said much about the suggested friends feature?
- Iain
Perhaps the problem is that Robert should just say what he means. Also, still waiting for that objective criteria. Waiting... waiting...
- Omar Gallaga
Veronica: well since there is no objective criteria for being on the list and since being on the list is a gift of tens of thousands of in earned followers and since you don't care anyway why don't you tell Twitter to make the list based on objective criteria and pull yourself off of that list until it is? That is what I would do (friendfeed fixed its list after that kind of pressure). Not to mention I can not accept unearned gifts anyway.
- Robert Scoble
Chris.. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want my name used in this way. My issue is not with the point Robert is trying to make, it is the way he is going about it...
- Johnny Worthington
Scoble: "Prove that Techcrunch did not pay @biz $10,000 to get on Twitter's suggested friend list." That's not accusing @techcrunch paid $10,000 to Twitter? Twitter designed that list for who they (read: employees) think people should follow. Perhaps it was money, but I highly doubt it.
- Zach Flauaus
How has your follow rate increased since being on the list? My assumption would be that it has increased significantly since being on the list.
- AJK
Yeah, this is like a high school kid whining about his brother having all the friends, and mindlessly laying blame.
- coldbrew
@Scoble accusing @techcrunch is not making things personal. @techcrunch is a big boy and Arrington and Scoble are friends. It was clearly a statement to reveal ambiguity in the process - @Veronica no need to read any more into it than face value.
- Chris Saad
Haven't logged into Friendfeed for a long time, but this is rather insulting, Robert. You're seeing dollar signs and personal gains in # of twitter followers?
- Derek Reiff
@coldbrew I think everything is reminiscent of high school... I'm in the damn place. lol
- Zach Flauaus
Johnny: no I do not think Techcrunch or Veronica paid to get on this list but there ARE brands on there. Did they pay? I have no idea. But this feature is as corruptible as shelf space at Fry's.
- Robert Scoble
Robert -- you're saying that you would have asked to be removed from such a list had you been included? What if you and Leo were both on it, but this phantom "objective criteria" you keep mentioning was not transparent?
- Omar Gallaga
One man's corruptible is another man's monetizable.
- Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
Definitely Chris! Recommendation algorithms MUST be based on something else than "popularity". We've discussed this, you and me, often, and I still believe that these algos could be 100 times smarter using "personal relevancy" — I'm sure you still share this opinion with me :) I hope I'll be able to provide a proof-of-concept thingy (yes, the one you've seen) still experimental but surely optmizable.
- directeur
Omar: yes. I would be forced to remove myself from thiis list if added.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: To me it looks like a list of people who aren't going to overwhelm new users and people that are going to be interesting. The reason your not on the list is because you would flood a new user and might make them want to leave the service. And all Leo does is promote TWiT and doesn't really present much value to the newer users except to lead them to his show. Honestly Scoble there is nothing corrupt about this. This list wasn't designed for us anyways, it's for new users, just let it go.
- Jimminy Fuller
I'm checking out of this conversation now :)
- Chris Saad
Robert, that's cool, but again without the context of your friendship with Mr Arrington and this thread for explanation, .normal' people will think that the list is corrupt and, by extension, cast dispersions on the name of the people on it (which I think is a part of Veronica's issue). While your point may be valid about the integrity of the list, please be advised that your words will have an effect on those not on the inside of social media.
- Johnny Worthington
I am not allowed to accept gifts worth more than $100 and being on a list decided on subjectively is a no no for journalists. Especially those at Fast Company.
- Robert Scoble
@directeur - is it popularity, an algorithm, or just a random sampling of people the folks at Twitter have heard of? it doesn't seem to be randomized whatsoever.
- Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
Robert. you have more than enough people following now. Why does this bother you so much? it's rather sad.
- Terry O'Fee
Good point James. I never thought of those reasons for the picks. I think Robert posts stuff of great value most of the time, but the point is still very much on target.
- MarkCarras
Terry: the integrity of the tools I use for my living concerns me a lot.
- Robert Scoble
Robert -- did you ask to be removed from this Forbes Web Celeb list? Seems like that was quite a gift: http://www.forbes.com/2007...
- Omar Gallaga
Mark, sure, it definitely is not random! It can't be random and show the same faces all over the web (friendfeed, twitter..) You've described very well "popularity". But the fact is, that me "directeur" (a given user) would really like to see people who'll share my interests, this is imho the next step in socialmedia: connecting people "smartly", and providing content for users smartly too! and this could really be done (I've crafted 3 modest proofs of concept) using notions like APML. This is really DOABLE
- directeur
his ego would be mended! :P
- Terry O'Fee
I have no stake in whether Tech Crunch did or didn't pay someone to get @biz on the suggested list on Twitter, I do however believe that the twitter suggested list it self encourages herd following , and that those who have a massive jump in following over a short period, have a very shallow following, while those who acquire their followers over time have a much deeper following
- Kim Landwehr
I understand Scoble's point. His post is misleading and deliberately provocative, but the underlying point is fair: "Twitter's suggested friend list generates lots of followers for those who are on it." Decoding his original post: "1. Two weeks ago, @techcrunch was less popular than @leolaporte. 2. Then @techcrunch ended up on the suggested friend list. 3. Now @techcrunch is more...
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- Stephen Mack
The fact that we're having this discussion is just sad. Just one blogger's opinion, though.
- Ben Parr
Mark: I totally agree that Robert posts stuff of great value but he can throw controversial ideas out that he can't back up sometimes, case in point. The main reason that I don't see him on the list isn't quality but moreover the quantity of his tweets. I wouldn't want to be on the list either just out of respect to new users.
- Jimminy Fuller
Well, directeur, your model is incorrect unless it places Scoble at the top of everything. If it does not, you're taking a pay off :-)
- coldbrew
ben - i agree. instead of using this for what its meant for, people cry that they dont get on the top of the list. it's hillarious..
- Terry O'Fee
coldbrew :) No, Robert will be just like you in this system. BUT, there's something else and I've had the pleasure to discuss it with a very smart guy: AUTHORITY. This is NOT popularity, it's smarter (should be - because the current used definition in socialmedia is wrong) more specialized and could be done too (collaboration planned with that smart guy)
- directeur
directeur: The issue is that they can't predict who someone would like. We're talking about something that none of us should be using. It's an introductory tool not something you use once you have developed your network. It's impossible to create a recommendation that works using a non existent data-set. The only way they could modify it is if they ask the user some questions about themselves during registration, that's not user friendly. Would you like to be trown a bunch of questions when you sign up?
- Jimminy Fuller
James, very smart question, and yes it's doable. The content submitted by a user, the content a user likes, comments on, retweets is a very rich dataset that could be used to establish an APML profile.
- directeur
thank you, jason. probably one of the smartest comments ive seen on this useless conversation...
- Terry O'Fee
Robert, would you be in the same position on this if you were on the list? Or would you promote the list and the fact that you made the cut?
- Debi Jones
i wonder if he would of posted it on his website too...
- Terry O'Fee
Firstly, can you prove they did?
- sofarsoShawn
directeur: You didn't get me though, it's for new users they have no data, they haven't retweeted, followed anyone, hasn't liked or commented on anything yet. And the majority of people aren't going to have an APML. Therefore trying to pick people off of this nullset is impossible. Honestly if I want to follow someone on twitter I'll ask my current followers for suggestions. Starting out Tabula Rasa on a new service though it's not possible.
- Jimminy Fuller
Looks like we have a good old fashioned weekend BitchMeme going on here.
- Mike Doeff
what bugs me is it's impossible to find people/friends/followers with interests and careers outside of tech. I've been trying since October to get a good list of science posters, and I have a grand total of 1. Kiki Sanford, and she never retweets, so I can't poach people from her.
- Matthew DeVries
I don't follow @scobleizer because he's a twooshbag. But I did learn that @brookburke twitters, so I'll be following her.
- kchu
terribly done yes. Paid no. Twitter should just buy MrTweet or one of the location based twitter recommendation services so it would provide people close to the new people or related interests instead of throwing random bigwigs who don't respond, not related to their interests.
- BCK
Wow I can't believe you are getting so bent out of shape about this "corrupted feature" Scoble. I respect what you do but I had to stop following you because it was just too much and became annoying after a while. But seriously, who cares? Why is being followed considered a "gift?" And why would you tell them to take you off this list if you were recommended? That's just stupid. Being followed is like me walking up to you and saying, "Hey I read your blog." Is it not? I can't believe you reacted this way.
- Eric Bland
hmm.. look at it the other way: some new users are joining twitter and the twitter team is simply trying to improve the experience of those users so they put together *a* set of profiles to help. This is how it works in startups. Over time, they will improve that feature so that it is more transparent, targeted, effective but you have to start somewhere. I do not think that twitter is trying to bribe anyone: they are way beyond the point of needing to do that. Too provocative Robert!
- Edwin Khodabakchian
Honestly, I would never recommend @scobleizer, or any frequent twitterer, to a n00b twitter user because he would scare them away. Scoble is for hard-core users.
- kchu
The burden of proof lies with the party making the claim, as this is obviously not a case of prima facie. And even if it were true, who the hell cares? This is fascinatingly idiotic.
- Mouse
This entire thread reads like petty, petty bickering, mostly on the part of Robert. It's this kind of narrow minded, stubborn soap boxing that gives blogging in all its variants a bad name. I imagine what really happened is a few folks at Twitter saw some fun twitter peeps with a high profile name and a nice signal/noise ratio and decided to throw them on a list without much second thought and then moved on to more important business of the day.
- Joost Schuur
One thing I take away from this is that true journalism will never be dead. Robert saw something intriguing, something that didn't add up, something suspicious. In the Edward R. Murrow days, someone would have methodically, slowly, and doggedly chased the story, built the story and told the story. Bloggers however, have a whim and fire off a post. Yeah, it will precipitate the truth, as twitter is forced under the pressure of 100,000 voices to come clean or explain the algorithm, but I guess.....
- Matthew DeVries
.....I just find Murrow's way to be more elegant
- Matthew DeVries
OM NOM NOM ... hmmm these grapes are very sour today...
- Terry O'Fee
Robert Scoble is playing the Bullshit card on TC! I see a war coming...
- Outsanity
The only thing to be answered by this unanswerable question is: you get tons of followers by being on Twitter's suggested friends list.
- sofarsoShawn
Hell, I can't even prove that *I* didn't pay @biz $10,000 to get on Twitter's suggested friend list.
- Mistletoe Glen
I was on that list (@cinevegas) and did not pay to be on it. Somebody actually alerted me that I was since I didn't even know.
- Roger @ CineVegas
Also this feature is a month old, why now are you attacking it?
- Roger @ CineVegas
Lord all mighty. All of you don't get it do you? Twitter is about community, conversation, relationships. You are all to narcosistic to see that. Quit arguing like children. Just Twitter or shut up. Ge'ez! Act like an adult already.
- Norbert Davis
What if it's just who Twitter happens to want you to follow? Was it corruption when the video store workers would all post their weekly pics? Was "Steve" on the take because he pick 5 Warner Brother's films? They should tell how that list is compiled, but you don't defame to force candor. This isn't fucking Nam, there are rules.
- Matthew DeVries
The fact that this conversation happened on FriendFeed was not lost on me.
- MVB (Grinch of FF)
it screws with the integrity of everything on twitter. in every way. i have 18K followers, but am not on the list. maybe i got all those followers in some side-deal with twitter that wasn't disclosed? or one day i lose 10K followers and my competitor gains 98K. is it because @biz was given some stock? or they didn't like something i said? it could all be totally innocent but it still taints everything.
- Dave Winer
#followfriday = Communism
- Andrew Smith
The thing is that the Twitter Suggested List is simply corrupt because there isn't an actual method behind it.
- Tyler (Chacha)
Robert is simply saying the the list isn't based on popularity.
- Tyler (Chacha)
I think that is a valid statement (I think I've ended the comments.... boo)
- Tyler (Chacha)
ITS A CONSPIRACY I TELL YA! THE WORLD IS OUT TO GET US!
- Tyler (Chacha)
Twitter needed to pick some suggested names that would be most likely to get a beginning tweeter to continue tweeting. If Twitter decides that Hammer is the way to get people to continue using the service, that's Twitter's prerogative.
- Ontario Emperor
As long as it's obvious and transparent that this primer list completely due to some person or some committee's fancy with no metric whatsoever, then Twitter is doing nothing wrong. Have they admitted this? It should be apparent on the page itself.
- Matthew DeVries
It's brilliant way for twitter to expand it's user base from tech geeks to the larger populace overall.
- sofarsoShawn
It is quite reasonable for companies to make subjective recommendations to their customers. The Apple iTunes store, for example, provides several very subjective music, video, and app recommendations on its front page. Robert's employer just recently published a very subjective list of fifty companies that they thought its readers would find interesting. Time magazine compiled a list of 100 people they found interesting in 2008. Wait, wasn't Michael Arrington on that list?
- Steve Wilhelm
Robert's argument are weak at best, founded on the assumption that Twitter's "suggest" feature should only be based on a user's # of followers. While it would be nice to know how they choose who makes it on the list, I honestly don't think Twitter has to disclose it. This is a parallel to Flickr's "interestingness" meter, which decides who make it onto their "Explore" page. The fact they don't tell you exactly how the photos are chosen, doesn't mean that it's corrupt.
- Trevin
Coming to this late, but just want to thank Chris Saad for laying out the objection to an arbitrary list of recommendations in clear and sane fashion. (As opposed to inflammatory fashion, which resulted in all this hot air.) Saad's right: attention = $.
- Ian Wilker
None of this will matter when celebrities and sports figures get on Twitter, and Twitter really goes mainstream. Scoble's 63K and Laporte's 90K will be dwarfed. Reality check: Twitter is much bigger than Scoble.
- Mohamed J
@Mohamed J I would much rather have scoble who is real on Twitter than some PR person for a celebrity.
- Michael McGimpsey
from twhirl
MichaelMG: I haven't seen the suggested users list but @TechCrunch, @aplusk, @the_real_shaq, @mchammer are not run by a PR employee. Plus, Scoble is too noisy for the Twitter newbie (who is most likely not a tech head).
- Mohamed J
Leather ♥ Donut - ftw.
- kchu
A few questions: 1. Does 'suggested friends' imply impartiality? To me 'suggested' or 'recommended' connotes a subjective opinion while 'popular' or 'top' implies a strict numbers-based ranking. 2. If a service's 'recommended friends' list is created by number of followers and is in itself the most effective way to get more followers, then how can this help but be a feedback loop? How...
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- Kevin Fox
Put a different way: Why do we assume that Twitter should only recommend the most popular people?
- Kevin Fox
Isn't this more about one person wanting a different set of criteria for 'eminence' in a list vs a set of criteria decided by another person(s)? Sounds like you should make your own list to your criteria; folk love lists and someone is bound to look at it. Their list, their criteria ... your list, your criteria.
- Colin Wheeler
Even when you are on holiday you are causing trouble Mike
- Chris Saad
just seems to me that twitter made a selection of accounts that might be of interest to a new user, trying to cover a wide range. Perhaps their criteria are not as ominous as you make it, perhaps they looked at a stream that someone new could feel would be accessible to newbies?
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Pay @biz :)
- Josh Lam
@michael arrington HAHAHA!!!!! While I agree with scoble's premise that the list is fundamentally flawed. I do think this whole conversation is very very funny!!! Now has twitter responded with how they are making the list?
- Benno
i am convertible to 1 e-token of intangible 'value' in this imaginary perceived point value system of social media numbers
- sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq
& i rate your performance by the # of sounded claps i make @ a given rate per sec w/ respect to the db emitted. right this sec, this is convertible to 1/3rd the popularity rate unit counted in the perceived cumulative total + 1 in regards to the gross popularity total i just made up and substituted from other people's realities assumed to be true. this is my derived perception of social media popularity that may change at any time and may be replaced for another assumption.
- sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq
Ah the smell of conspiracy in the morning.
- Robin Wauters
I think twitter should replace all the little avatars with Tom from MySpace.
- Wes Hoogenboom
Wow this stirred up a lot of shit. I actually have to go with lockergnome, why should we care. This article: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technol... clearly states that the suggestions are staff picks and therefore subjective. The people that sign up and start following the twitter staff picks most likely are going to be annoyed and bored with most of the tweets because they dont know those people and because they werent served with suggestions by interest..
- Kahlil Lechelt
This should be re-named as "pre-selected list", not suggested. Twitter is just trying to quickly increase usage for future monetization.
- William Mougayar
if recommend is synonymous of "most followed", then #1: @scoble you say the contrary all day long (followers are pointless) #2: this feature itself is useless since we just need a search engine "by number of followers". I therefore assume that twitter tries/is trying/intends to/ put value other than simply nr of followers. and how can you do this with objective measurable inputs? Finding someone interesting or not is based on your own standpoint. So the feature is controversial per se
- Jean-Charles VERDIE
I'd pay 10K to get a profile there, do i twitpic a check in?
- sean percival
To market my brand, I'd pay 10k, get put in front of 1m faces, and another mil or 3 over time after this post gets thoroughly read. All this attention is worth quite a bit more than 10k, wouldn't you say.
- Zax Stevens
My first thought was that they would sell spots on that list if they hadn't already. Robert's topic is provocative only because Twitter's added a feature that looks so baldly commercial. Not that there's anything wrong with it!
- Michael Pilla
Here's a simple test: Go to 2 different Twitter accounts you may have (e.g. personal/business). Check that list. It's the same! So, this isn't a "Recommended list" in the way that FF or APML might do it. It's not related to who you follow/don't follow & what you like. It's just a list that's marketed by Twitter- let's take it as it is.
- William Mougayar
"Robert -- did you ask to be removed from this Forbes Web Celeb list? Seems like that was quite a gift: http://www.forbes.com/2007... - Omar Gallaga" So Robert, how about it? Did you pass on the "gift" Forbes made you?
- Alexander Kucera
Wow, longest conversation every!
- Sweyn Venderbush
from twhirl
Omar and Alexander: I didn't pull myself off of the Fortune list because 1. that didn't end up getting me much of anything, certainly not provable. 2. It was a subjective list done by a professional group of editors and it was presented as subjective. 3. it reflected real-life popularity. In fact, one could argue that being high on Twitter and friendfeed follower lists is why I got onto Fortune's list. Before two weeks ago those follower lists had integrity. Today they do not. But no big deal, I'm over it.
- Robert Scoble
I didn't see him on the list.
- Patricia
This is eerily similar to a high school election.
- Oldengrey (Jay)
Twitter has a suggest list? don't remember the last time I used it if ever
- Jeff Quinton
Biz Stone - From The LA Times: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone acknowledged that offering “suggested users” wasn’t the ideal solution and suggested that the service might evolve to cater to particular users’ interests. “Right now it’s sort of like staff picks at your local bookstore,” he wrote in an e-mail.
- Jim Connolly
Robert: I view the Suggested Users feature on Twitter as a Staff Pick in iTunes. They have no relevance to anything else. It's just what the guy behind the screen wants to pin. I was very sad to read this. I love the idea that the individual user is beginning to rise over traditional mainstream media. It's something I've worked toward for the past 3 years. However, I see this as the death of journalistic integrity.
- George Force
Robert: You speak of Twitter's Suggested User feature being corrupt, however, within the same action you lay down egregious accusations. What ever happened to the days of fact checking? You have to keep in mind, no matter what your intentions are, you swing a big stick. Thousands of people are going to read what you say. If you do not intend for something like this to be taken as media, then you need to make clear what your intentions are.
- George Force
Everyone has been waging war to try to win the popularity contest, and they've focused so hard on this that they've forgotten the basics. As the paradigm shifts, we are starting to create a high tech sewing circle where the words slander and libel have no meaning. We all need to work a little bit harder to try to remember that there are real people with real emotions on the other end of the wire.
- George Force
George: read again. I did NOT lay down ANY accusations. I did not accuse anyone of anything, I just said this creates a situation where we can not be sure how they got on this list. Please read carefully. This feature is corrupt. Why does Ryan Block have 1/10th as many followers today as Veronica? (They used to be about the same). Because Twitter "picked" Veronica to be popular. That's subjective and ruins the integrity of the follower system.
- Robert Scoble
George: right. Subjective systems pick stars for weird reasons. Do you pay to get on the iTunes list? I don't know, but given the music industry's past of payola I really wonder. How did the brands get onto Twitter's list? Did they pay? Why Veronica and not Ryan Block? Ryan ran Engadget. He deserves to be on the top of any list too. This system is stupid and lame and not well thought out (which even Twitter admits in the Los Angeles Times this weekend).
- Robert Scoble
I understand that you want change on Twitter. I don't blame you for that. But why should they listen to what you have to say? You go onto their platform and out them publicly more than once a day. Twitter doesn't owe anyone but their VC anything. If you hate Twitter so much, then stop using it. It could easily be said that you're giving friendfeed a gift by going to Twitter and talking about friendfeed. Are you receiving a check from friendfeed?
- George Force
Your whole argument could then be boiled down to, "Twitter made a poor choice in thinking about their recommended accounts feature and it is poorly thought out." Good thing this was just an FF thread and not a blog post.
- coldbrew
There is no reason to say vile things about a service on their platform due to a matter of preference. If you don't like Twitter, stop using it. It's that simple. Twitter works very well for what I need it to do. friendfeed serves another purpose entirely. Twitter does not need to be friendfeed. You said in a different post about how we need to stop focusing on followers and start focusing on who's talking. I would say we need to stop focusing on followers and start focusing on what we're saying.
- George Force
George: I do not receive checks or any compensation from friendfeed. I didn't receive any compensation from Twitter when I talked it up a LOT two years ago (my readers got sick of me talking about Twitter all the time back then too).
- Robert Scoble
Now I'm going to go watch some guy get kicked in the groin on YouTube!
- George Force
coldbrew: who said this is not a blog post? :-) There's no real definition for what a blog is. Friendfeed is blogging. So is Twittering.
- Robert Scoble
George: I totally disagree. These are communications platforms and one of their uses IS complaining about how they are built. I used to use the telephone to complain about AT&T too. So there. :-)
- Robert Scoble
I'd like to wrap up my opinion about the whole subject in 2 sentences: 1) Who are you to recommend people to me? 2) Recommending people to me means that you know me, that you know what I'm **interested** in. i.e. Every recommendation algorithm that **IGNORES** the user is by definition stupid.
- directeur
Jason: I did not make any claim. Go and read it again. This time read it. Don't react emotionally. Read it like a computer compiler would. Parse each word. I will admit I was sensational and stupid. I did NOT call out Techcrunch. I called out Twitter. That's different. I did say that I am not sure how people got on the list. Why did Veronica get on this list and not Ryan Block? You can't explain it. Neither can I. So, that opens up the door to corruption and graft. Perception does matter.
- Robert Scoble
The only fault I can find with twitter is that it has created a new breed of egomaniacs.
- jcunwired
Because my name was used in Robert's post (and we discussed this ad nauseum on Gillmor Gang) I'd like to weigh in. I know it sounds like sour grapes when I say anything about this. And I suppose some of it is. I did enjoy being at the top of Twitterholic. And there's tangible benefit to it - it gives you cred (some, not a ton). I suppose Twitter leaves me off its recommended list because I'm not always a fan of how Twitter does business. That, in itself, points to a problem with how the list is generated.
- Leo Laporte
Why does perception matter? Because you are not even able to unemotionally read a sentence without reading meaning into it. Now, try to read a sentence (like what Twitter is communicating by making Veronica a star and not Ryan Block or not Leo Laporte) and add that same emotionality into it. THAT is what I was trying to point out.
- Robert Scoble
I do admit I made that point in a stupid and lame way, though, and for that I'm sorry. But it did get you to engage on this and think about it and for all the hurt feelings this morning THAT is a positive thing.
- Robert Scoble
If you don't think number of followers is important, then the "suggested list" is irrelevant. And I think that's what Twitter is saying. "Who cares if Whole Foods is acquiring thousands of unearned followers a day? We just want new users to have someone to follow." My point is that Twitter has immense power to influence the course of Twitter. This simple suggestion list thrusts some users forward for arbitrary and opaque reasons. This is why an open solution is ultimately better for us all.
- Leo Laporte
Leo: I prefer to use the words "algorithmic" and "objective" instead of "open" but I get what you're getting at.
- Robert Scoble
Look, Robert, I'm not trying to bust you up. I respect you and what you've done for the community. What I'm saying is that "Prove that Techcrunch did not pay @biz $10,000 to get on Twitter's suggested friend list," sounds an awful lot like an accusation. That's it. Hence, the focus on quality. People need to stop a second and think not about WHAT they're saying, but HOW they're saying it.
- George Force
@scobleizer That's because you want to preserve Twitter. I don't think _any_ private micro-messaging solution is adequate. It needs to be open, like email. No algorithm is going to make a proprietary solution acceptable in my mind.
- Leo Laporte
George: the point is that I don't know what the criteria is. So, you can't prove anything about anything on this list. That causes a perception problem for everyone involved. I know people who WOULD pay to get on this list. Why? At some point thousands of followers will mean money. I used to work for a magazine with 110,000 subscribers that made millions every year. This list ruins integrity of community. It is corruptible.
- Robert Scoble
Goodness gracious, folks. I'm in la la land right now and I still understand the point Robert was trying to get across. Pour out the Scoble haterade for two seconds.
- Shawn Farner
Leo: ahh, I see what you mean by open. I thought we were just talking about the recommended follower feature. Now that you are talking about the entire system I totally agree. I have on my to do list to take another look at Identi.ca. We should start another thread about whether or not that's the answer and if not, why not.
- Robert Scoble
I have to agree with Jason H. Robert, you DID accuse TC of paying off Twitter. You creatively arranged the words to make it look like you are not directly making an accusation, but we can read between the lines. You do have something against TC, but that is your issue to resolve, don't bring it here. Ba a man and either say it out loud and to Arrington's face or shut the hell up about this. If you have a problem with Twitter then bring it against them. Sack up or shut up. Investigate or go home.
- Norbert Davis
Robert, I'm not disagreeing with you entirely, and I'm certainly not becoming overwhelmed with emotion. Would you be interested in having a round table with myself and Ben Heckendorn on my podcast? Leo would also be welcome.
- George Force
I'm not trying to get ratings or promotion. I'm interested in this subject.
- George Force
Norbert: Mike Arrington (founder of Techcrunch and I are friends. I picked Techcrunch because he would get what I was trying to say. He speaks out against corruptible systems elsewhere (like his competition with Demo conference, which companies pay to get on stage). I didn't accuse anyone of anything. I did say that this system raises the perception issue. This is why journalists aren't allowed to own stocks in the companies they cover and why they aren't allowed to take gifts. This is a corruptible system.
- Robert Scoble
Scoble could post about the air-land speed of a European Swallow and get "engagement" much like TC and their one-word post, "Twitter."
- coldbrew
Twitter needs the cash, good for them. It's about time they found a way to make a little $. Also, I don't think popularity is the best indicator of a friend. @Techcrunch has been good to me, Leo on the other hand...(-;
- tarafireball
"And, therefore, Twitter is a witch. Burn Her!"
- coldbrew
Spill it, tarafireball. What'd Laporte do?
- coldbrew
Its amazing that this topic gets more comments than the ISP/wireless bill, that will affect us all.
- Joe K
Here's Arrington's post with 442 comments: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008...
- coldbrew
This post wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention with a less incendiary title. Even "I can't prove Techcrunch didn.t..." probably would have blown over quick.
- Bruce Lewis
It'd be interesting to see some eye-tracking type analysis on threads like this to see, on average, how many comments people read before commenting themselves. Seems like there's a whole lot of repetition.
- Ken Sheppardson
That's not entirely fair, Lewis, I wouldn't continue if I didn't have some assurance that some smart folks would chime in.
- coldbrew
There are 256 comments on this post. I guarantee you I'll not be reading them all before I post this.
- Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah
Rasheen, it is a summary about how they chose the Knights of the Round Table. Hint: The Black Knight always wins, b/c it is merely a flesh wound no matter what happens :-)
- coldbrew
FTR, I read every last comment (like always), sigh.
- coldbrew
As someone who moved away from just numbers to quality numbers, it's all a tempest in a teapot to me. I can reevaluate my relationship with either TC or Leo at any time, but the specter of payola makes it feel like 1999 all over again.
- Scott Pierce
I am amazed at the level of BS people are spewing here to grind their personal axes - also amazed that some people would take this so personally as an attack when it clearly wasnt an attack on them at all. Robert, in a rush to post like he often is, did not craft his words carefully enough and issued a challenge using incendiary language and referencing a friend (who will survive the debate clearly). This sort of thread is what makes Andrew Keen squeal with delight...
- Chris Heuer
Q1: is twitter adopting a pay to play model for being featured anywhere on its site? Q2: Will the user community (especially new signups) be better off if they are open about how they are doing it? NO DOUBT - FAIR DISCLOSURE ALA ADVERTORIAL Q3 Does this sort of advertising (and the sort that has GaryVee using adsense to promote his twitter account) have a positive or negative impact on folks or does it matter at all? does this use of money as power to get attention take away from open/meritocratic ideals?
- Chris Heuer
one disclosure piece - last week I contacted the folks behind twitter counter to see if we (aka me for Social Media Club) could buy a 'follow us' ad on their top 100 page - as the noise gets louder, we need better ways for getting noticed. http://twitter.com/socialm... was in the top 100 there for several months until recently being kicked off list by hollywood celebtrities joining conversation - Q4 should celebrities and companies be on separate lists - should we have user 'types' to differenentiate
- Chris Heuer
I own twegomaniacs.com. I will gladly accept $10,000 from anyone who wishes to be placed on that list :)
- jcunwired
How is this at all different from Google Reader's suggested content bundles, or the defaults that are included on start pages (some of which actually do pay to be there). Frankly, I'd have no problem if Twitter did charge for these spots, though I'm confident they haven't done so thus far. People are clearly willing to pay (see twittercounter) ... it's a good biz model
- Adam Ostrow
Robert, the fact that you claim over and over again that you didn't make any claims, makes it even worse. The implication is there, even if you didn't mean to suggest it. A lot of people read that implication as an assertion. You are a polarizing person, and people aren't going to be carefully parsing your words anymore. You must realize this by now, and if you don't recognize this passive aggressive aspect of your nature, then that is the real issue here.
- Joost Schuur
Why does it even matter if Twitter is 'broken' just because they don't have a perfect way to recommend followers at a time when they've just started opening up to non techies? Twitter suggestions have been available for a few weeks now. Can't we just let the system try and balance itself out for a while, before we freak out? Twitter is going to improve the system on their end, and some...
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- Joost Schuur
Joost: OK. It was a lame and stupid way to make a point but I think we are all adults here and everyone can see I wasn't asserting that corruption had already taken place. I just wanted to point out that this is a corruptible system that is rewarding significant gifts to some people in the community.
- Robert Scoble
It doesn't matter that Ryan Block has 13,000 and Veronica has 110,000. You are right. Onward!
- Robert Scoble
FWIW, I follow you, and everyone else on my list, because you post what I find to be interesting content. Leo is also there, Techcrunch is not, Veronica is not. Isn't it more important to have a fan base that is fascinated by the work you do than the random choosing of an arbitrary list that few people take seriously? I'm not a fan of suggestions in this regard anyway, not unless there is a compelling reason why I might be interested, and Twitter doesn't provide it, so its useless to me. No big deal.
- jcunwired
PC Easy: so not being on this list is punishment for bad behavior. Got it. That is why I hate subjective lists.
- Robert Scoble
Haha, we run mrtweet. We were #5 two weeks ago, and we were absolutely shocked by the massive increase in numbers by everyone. It is pretty puzzling for us - we are pretty sure we did not get recommended at all, since our growth remains very consistent. Oh well. ;)
- ming yeow
This is why the top Twitterer lists have ABSOLUTELY NO VALUE ANYMORE. I think Twitter really screwed up by using the suggested users.
- Bill Romanos
@ Robert: A) According to Merriam-Webster a gift is "something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation". So no, since you call being on Twitters recomendation list a gift, Veronica did not earn it neither did TechCruch and neither did Leo. B) Your statement "Prove that Techcrunch did not pay @biz $10,000 to get on Twitter's suggested friend list." sure sounds like an accusation of coruption. C) Your ranting is really only damaging your reputation and FF by association.
- ChiliMac
Who even uses this feature anyway? I know I don't. I'm only going to follow people I find from other people I follow. That way I'm getting people with similar interests not what Twitter or FriendFeed THINK I might like to follow. PS. I just checked out my suggested user list and TechCruch wasn't on there. Maybe because I already follow him. But, in that case, if Robert knows he's on there doesn't that mean Robert doesn't follow him?
- ChiliMac
ChiliMac: Re "Who even uses this feature anyway?" Every new Twitter user sees this list. After you sign up, you're first asked if you want to try to import friends from another service (i.e. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, etc.) The next screen is 20 users selected from an apparently larger (~100ish?) list --with all 20 checked--and a big "Finish" button. Following everyone in the random(?) group of 20 is the default for new users.
- Ken Sheppardson
I think Roberts problem is not that they implemented this feature but that the way it has been implemented. If the selection method was clearly paid or algorithm based then I don't think too many people would have a problem with it. It would appear at the moment that the criteria is just "people that I think are good". That is open to abuse as it has a bearing on the influence certain...
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- Anton Mannering
from twhirl
I bet $10 you are mentally handicapped :D
- coldbrew
Wow, I think you can get posted in Who's Who for only $35. Who cares?
- Todd Kulick
Well, it's either pay up or join the train of Twitter users who wave through the system and are fast approaching 40,000 followers even though you've never heard of them, nor have they ever added anything of value to your life. Coercion is a bitch.
- matt
gila kuasa, gila nama... (power crazy, name crazy!)
- Pajama Domain
How do I get on this list? I have all this money that Obama gave me to spend to stimulate the economy. Can I stimulate Twitter's economy? Where do I mail the check?
- Stephen Antonucci
This is a provocative post, Robert. iJustine did give Evan cupcakes. I remember their public exchange and acknowledgment. Was that a coerced coincidence or just innocent cavity propagation? I think the real power of the "suggested" followers "scam" is choosing high profile folks while including the lesser folks you have been calling out. The nobodies who are now the most popular proves...
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- David W. Boles
There are a lot of comments, so if this is duplicating what someone else said - so sorry :) If you want a great way to get a REAL recommended list, head over to HubSpot's Twitter Grader - get graded and there will be a recommended list below.
- Mitch Canter
lolololol
- "Joey"
Not trying to bash anyone, but I'm curious as to why people think that twitter is under any obligation to make their free service "open". Twitter seems to be saying that they reject the meaning of twitter follower counts as defined by others. Twitter's ultimate goal, I think, isn't to be a public service so much as to be a profitable company. "Their house, their rules" so to speak. If people want an open system, then they would probably prefer services like those that Leo Laporte proposes.
- James Brodman
James: For me it sorta boils down to a monopoly power argument. What's wrong with Twitter not being open (and thereby controlling the "micromessaging" market/protocol) is the same thing that's wrong with AT&T controlling the phone service market or Microsoft controlling the operating system market.
- Ken Sheppardson
Robert, by your metric, wouldn't any celebrity (tech geek or otherwise) also have an unfair (and unmeritorious) advantage in getting followers? Thus, having unfair influence? Veronica, you did get a gift. However, I am not sure you can earn a gift.
- Rob McNealy
"promotional consideration" disclaimers are standard practice in TV game shows. Why not on Twitter?
- Michael Markman
Why $10,000? Do you a have a copy of a check or a receipt or some such?
- Chuck Baggett
Twitter / Database maintenance (Twitter "inch worm?") - http://twitter.com/
Denise Howell, Daniel Rowley, Thomas Hawk and 16 other people liked this
I'd rather have the fail whale. The inch worm goes too slow.
- Robert Scoble
from Bookmarklet
a fail whale by any other name...
- Brian Roy
Tina called it "The Cone of Silence" when this made its debut.
- Jared Smith
inch worm in the hole!!
- Yung-Hui Lim
It's one thing if it was animated. But this? Lame.
- Robert Scoble
twitter is down and I feel like I have no idea what's going on in the world. I might as well go to bed.
- Lise
Down again! It must have something to do with the updates their testing.
- Michael Fidler
Updates are no excuse... I'll take 1M of that $$ they just got to help them figure out how to not be down to update...
- Brian Roy
whales are celebrating valentine's day...
- Pico Seno
Twitter joke, what's the difference between twitter and the stock market? ..... none, they're both down.
- Richard A.
@Cone person: speak for yourself, you got ice cream on your head!
- sofarsoShawn
Twitter are a bunch of wankers, which is what I've been saying for over a year now. By now they've had more than enough time to rewrite a code that works.
- Richard A.
I love insulting twitter, but I don't want it to reflect badly on me ;-)
- Richard A.
lol...
- Bryan B
It's back!
- Chris Mayer
yeah planned maintainence is alot less aggravating
- Mike Chelen
Funnily enough, twitpic complained at first, but then let me log in and upload a pic. API still available?
- Glenn Huther
seems so, tweets from friendfeed were posted
- Mike Chelen
tweetdeck was reporting my API would reset at 16:00. Now seems back to normal.
- Scott Kingery
It's up again, they only go down for a short time ;-)
- Richard A.
Is the real-time web a threat to Google search? - http://scobleizer.com/2009...
Chris Patterson, Eric Bowen, Iggy Mwangi and 90 other people liked this
Yes.
- Meryn Stol
All about how friendfeed search is kicking ass and taking no prisoners.
- Robert Scoble
Yes and no, but considering they want to be the end all be all of the web- then Yes.
- Dan Rockwell
Glad to see there are still white spaces that google is yet to squat.
- Jim Posner
First of all Yes, it is a threat for google! I see you why the question popped up. I just hope twitter understands the importance of integrating the search in their
- Sampad Swain
could be a big play. my tweet 2h ago http://twitter.com/cemi...
- Cem Dalgic
Yes! I can ask my friends and followers a question on Twitter and get better answers from them than Google search, simply because I trust real people and their judgments.
- Jennifer James
no, it just gives early adopter like you/us some advance. The average user will continue to drink their usual website information. But if Google doesn't achieve to do the same as FF and this is a need, they will buy them ;-)
- Frédéric Sidler
Yes, it is! I just hope twitter don't forget to give much importance to the integration of the search since monetization is one of the biggest question in their mind. Still they goto remember that google didn't earn much the moment they launched google-search. Something so important does take sometime to evolve as, I see it! Infact I see for the 1st time that their is a feeble chance that something can give shot at search in google's arena!
- Sampad Swain
in need for creative destruction (yet again) in the search marketspace. let's see if google can jump the curve
- Yung-Hui Lim
My 2 cents: real time is about things happening now, being up to date with your friends, areas of interest, etc - out of all these conversations only some live up to be relevant in the long run - and this is where google steps in to sort out
- Lucian Nicolescu
I think the argument shaping up is trusted info (Twitter, FF) vs anonymous info (Google, et al.)
- Jon Mason
Yeah, it definitely is a threat. All the web needed was a central place to discuss what is happening right now, and Twitter is it. For real-time news, there is nothing better than Twitter. I only wish I could participate in creating that real time awareness, but can't because I'm protected on Twitter.
- Scott Breakall
so mahalo + google = twitter ?
- Cem Dalgic
No threat at all. I can't name five university or high school friends that use any realtime websites. Friendfeed is no threat to google search.
- Richard A.
Yes, it is a threat. First googlebot went out and started crawling and indexing. Now people let google know (and other services know) when they updated their blog, think of xml-sitemaps, ping services. What is the next step? Take a look at google friend-connect and you might have an answer.
- Imran Ashraf
hard to call it a threat when Google can just imitate or purchase the tech, but I agree that it could change the game. I hope you folks at friendfeed see this and keep improving and pushing search - and monetize it somehow!
- David Knight
Is the real time web a threat to Google search -- maybe sometime in the future. Is Twitter a threat to Google as Moorman indicates? Never in a million years. Twitter is a toy, a fad, like CB radio in the 70's.
- Brian Sullivan
I would say the bigger threat (and to the web, not just Google) is people putting their personal data into proprietary silos. I'm not talking about FriendFeed here, but lots of people are putting their data into places where not only 1) not only no general search engine can reach, but 2) people can't always get their own data back.
- Matt Cutts
@Matt - I agree with you there I wish more services would do something like Wesabe's Bill of Right - https://www.wesabe.com/page... It makes me feel much better about trusting them with something as important as my financial information.
- David Knight
Wow I never i quite thought of it like that, I getting into this instant gratification mode lately, this is why... real-time web
- Tate DA FF MVP
when more of the web embraces real time it will be, for now google is safe
- BCK
Left a comment on your blog saying something similar but hasn't been approved as yet. Basically all the search functionality that you speak about is possible with google search. However, the real-time and trust aspects are something that google is going to have to work on. They have introduced the ability to flag a search result as the one you were looking for. Eventually, if it isn't already, google will feed this into their search results and probably put something like X people recommended this.
- Phil Leggetter
Wouldn't it be easy for Google to expand its command line language? For instance, to search on Friendfeed from Google: /ff *searchexpression
- Sean McBride
Excellent points Robert. I agree, I come here now to gain personal opinion on factual issues to sway me in a particular direction. For purchasing, this was the power of Amazon reviews for products, but that doesn't cover everything and I trust the people here more. For example, I'd rather get a web application opinion from Zee in the Apps room than a Google search. I know he knows what he's talking about :)
- Eric @ CSTechcast.com
Yes, in many ways!
- Emmanuel Anumonwo
As a journalist, one of the laws I follow in reading stories is that "any story which ends in a question mark can be answered 'no'". This is no exception :)
- Ian Betteridge
No - there will still be an archive that needs to be searchable
- andy brudtkuhl
Ian, you must create an exception for this rule for questions posted by Robert. He's of a very special breed. :)
- Meryn Stol
Friendfeed needs to move quickly to make itself more commercial, most people do not yet understand Friendfeed. Twitter is a lot easier for the mainstream and Facebook already has the numbers.
- Chris Frost
I agree with your statement regarding FriendFeed. I keep seeing posts from Scoble and I wanted to know how I can maximize the service. I'm still not quite sure of the answer but if I keep playing with it and meeting others who use it then maybe I'll get a grip.
- Damond Nollan
twitter search is most of the time the better alternative to google search
- Thomas Acosta
from Nambu
Little OT: often Delicious and Reddit offer better search results than Google. Not real-time results, but filtered by people interest.
- bnoise
Integrate Gtalk / Twitter into Google Latitude and that's all the real-time web I'd need! 10 Reasosn Latitude will succeed (The Next Web) http://thenextweb.com/2009...
- David Petherick
from twhirl
No. This is dumb. I'd rather get results that are 15 minutes old and *accurate* than right this minute completely unverified results. Social search (who seriously cares if it's "real time"?), will be a game changer though. Which Facebook and Friendfeed are well positioned to make headway in. Not Twitter.
- Eric P
I wonder if this emerging trend will give rise to twitter users being paid for click-throughs on links in their tweets; why not? If the link is relevant, truly written by someone I trust, and meets my need, I'm all in favor of that person being rewarded monetarily (and socially in terms of increased trust capital between myself and that person). Twitter could shave a few cents off the top and actually monetize their service while not disrupting the signal-noise balance. Your thoughts? @socialtopher
- Chris Stewart
@codinghorror and @scobleizer should get together
- You.
Are we coming full circle? [near-]Real-time, archivable discussions were the stuff of Usenet 20 years ago. Sure, it's more "web", but there's much about how a discussion starts, blossoms and expires in FriendFeed that is comfortingly familiar somehow. So could FriendFeed be the new Usenet, where instead of news servers relaying posts blindly to the next-in-line, we have information distributed and filtered via mechanisms based on human interaction and recommendation?
- Paul Robertson
I think there are a lot of people who don't have the time to keep up with the real-time Web. That having been said, I think there are some opportunities to expand Google Alerts as a product....
- Steve Lynch
from twhirl
rtw humans are preferable to the algorithms since the algo's have an industry (SEO) consumed. IMO the first one evolving the real time web into mainstream information retrieval wins
- shayne catrett
Is it a threat? No, it's not. Just because some CEO has a theory and Robert Scoble is using Google less does not mean it's so. I like that you have posed the question, but you've also started to make a point. If I'm looking for an opinion, I might turn to my 'friends'...that being, my real friends.
- Ryan
It's not a threat, but it does give us options
- paul mooney
Interesting - I'm writing a blog post about this right now. Long story short - no, real-time web is not a threat to Google search. Recency is flawed (hey, how many times would Steve Jobs be dead now?!) and authority is flawed (real-time web spam is a problem.)
- AJ Kohn
I agree real time can be helpful, but will not be a threat to Google. The volume and history that google has adds scope and context to searches that real time can not.
- walterh
This just means that Google will need to look into real time indexes, parsing Twitter and FriendFeed feed's, although this will cost a lot b/c there can't be much/any caching. If they dont will we see another Google, are we back to '97, a whole medium without any search?
- Brad Arsenault
from twhirl
Google is like a Casino, if you think you have a system that can beat the house, they'll send a limo to pick you up and bring you down to try. Then, if your system actually works, they'll buy it and make you a pit-boss...
- Wallace
I think it is more a threat to SEO - when many people ask their network before they search, being found becomes more than buying adwords and optimising the site... and that in turn might erode some of google's advertising revenue.
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Maybe... all I know is I wish some of you guys would grow a pair and not be "yes men" just because an a-lister asks a question! Provide a unique viewpoint... please quit with the "great post! i totally agree!". C'mon people!
- Adam Curry
Adam: I had to go back and look for the "great post! I totally agree!" comments here. Wonder what thread you are reading?
- Robert Scoble
What Wallace said.
- Ciaoenrico
It all depends, if you're searching for what people had for breakfast, the currency of wtf, lol, omg and a torrent of PR both personal and corporate then maybe. If you're searching for the ports of magellan's voyage, the cheapest price for a home cinema system and who was the director of Gone With The Wind, then no.
- Simon Lucy
It really depends on how well-versed and -informed your digitalized friends are
- Jeroen Fransen
from twhirl
There is still some data that will need to be indexed. Factual information like Simon is talking about is WAY easier to find on Google than FriendFeed. If you are looking for news or a conversation then real-time, social news is the place to go.
- Brandon Titus
I think it depends on what you are looking for. For real time news and conversation I think friendfeed and facebook are way beyond Google. But for searching for other content, archive etc internet search is going to be better.
- Chris Patterson
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