Lee Herman - Comments

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Cranking on a proposal. Mom getting moved from hospital to rehab hospital this afternoon. Have to get draft finished and then go visit her.

September 22, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

I'll help you finish your proposal, so you can go visit her :) Good thoughts your way!! - Miley Grandjean

Wow, I'd love that! I did go visit her - really impressed with the rehab hospital. She is happy to be there. Thanks! - Lee Herman from email

Robert Scoble

I thought friendfeed would be the biggest threat to Twitter but I now see it's Seesmic Desktop. Come here and we'll discover why:

May 23, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

Jesper Lind, Thierry R. Andriamirado, Curt Mercadante and 140 other people liked this

1. It has list management like friendfeed has. Twitter doesn't. - Robert Scoble

410 more comments

2. It lets you display both Facebook and Twitter messages. - Robert Scoble

3. It lets you search both Facebook and Twitter messages. - Robert Scoble

4. It displays them all better than Twitter does. - Robert Scoble

5. Friendfeed Support in the works. - Jimminy IS Everybody

6. It lets you comment on Facebook postings - Lee Herman

it sucks all the memory out of my machine. performance suffers. I want to like it. I don't. - Karoli

5. Seesmic desktop (and TweetDeck, which really does most of the same stuff that Seesmic Desktop does) does DM's better than Twitter or Facebook do. - Robert Scoble

Are you arguing that a 3rd party twitter application is a threat to twitter? - Frankie Warren

Karoli: I don't care. I run it on its own machine. It can suck all the memory it wants! - Robert Scoble

Frankie: I can see a case for that, yes. - Robert Scoble

It makes it easy to mark spammers. - Jimminy IS Everybody

6. What happens when you add all your data into Seesmic Desktop and Twitter is down? Oh, move over to Seesmic's own service! - Robert Scoble

Robert, I don't have that luxury. Plus, it's still a client. How can it threaten Twitter when it needs twitter.? - Karoli

6B: Twinkle on iPhone already does exactly that. Tweetie has 200,000 plus members who DO NOT NEED TWITTER ANYMORE!!! Update I origionally said Tweetie but it is Twinkle that has its own database. Sorry. - Robert Scoble

Karoli: It isn't exclusive to Twitter. - Jimminy IS Everybody

A twitter client threatens the existence of twitter?! - Joshua Lee

Karoli: look at Twinkle. They show the way. They have 200,000 people who are on their own service now, even though most of them think they are only on Twitter. - Robert Scoble

I use tweetie. They still rely on twitter's firehose. - Karoli

Including myself... haha care to elaborate Robert about tweetie - Frankie Warren

Karoli: wrong. I was just at their headquarters and Tweetie has its own database and can send messages EVEN WHEN TWITTER IS DOWN!!! - Robert Scoble

Karoli: Tweetie has two databases for each member. One for Twitter. One for its own back end. - Robert Scoble

robert, to everyone on my twitter lists, including those NOT using tweetie? - Karoli

Karoli: no, not to everyone. Right. - Robert Scoble

Karoli: but what happens when all your friends are on Tweetie or Seesmic Desktop? Will you care anymore? - Robert Scoble

I agree with joshua, these are clients, they don't live without the parent service. I don't see how seesmic desktop threatens twitter. - Nitin Gupta

Stop exposing the secrets of us Twitter developers Robert - you're ruining the plan! - Jesse Stay

Jesse: sorry. When you all pay me something I'll shut up. :-) - Robert Scoble

Robert, that's my point. There is interdependence here. All my friends will not be on one or the other. Blackberry users will use Twitterberry. Twittelator is a player here too. I couldn't give a rip about Facebook -- it's one of those necessary evils i have to have but hate. - Karoli

Robert: Does Seesmic do the same thing as Tweetie in terms of redundancy? - Frankie Warren

Nitin: if I got everyone in the world to use Seesmic Desktop why will we need Twitter? Not to mention, why will you pay for "pro" version of Twitter or look at any of its advertising? - Robert Scoble

Interesting. I said the same thing about tweetie desktop and friendfeed - Christian Anderson

AIR apps are a mess, but from an HCI point of view, and from a technical point of view. Native apps please. Tweetie is wonderful. - Jason Wehmhoener

Oooh - I can buy Robert out? ;-) More to my plan for world domination... - Jesse Stay

Jason... yes, native apps, OR web apps. - Tinfoil 2.0

You're not going to make everyone use Seesmic Desktop, you'll pry Nambu from my cold dead fingers. - Joshua Lee

Karoli: I think it's funny you write off Facebook. Looking at the two streams side by side Facebook's is a lot better. There are far better quality people on Facebook in my account than there are on Twitter for the most part. Plus on Facebook there are 225 million. On Twitter? 30 million. - Robert Scoble

You could twitpay Robert a buck to buy his silence. - Louis Gray

Robert, your enthusiasm is infectious, but the hyperbole is still a little on the high side...I think Tweetie is an excellent app. I like Loic and Seesmic desktop but won't use it. I use Tweetie for my desktop app now, and it still needs some tweaking. - Karoli

Robert, I don't write it off. I just hate it. - Karoli

Joshua: what if Nambu, Seesmic Desktop, Tweetie, and TweetDeck made their own database? - Robert Scoble

For me, in terms of signal, FriendFeed trumps Facebook which trumps Twitter. - Louis Gray

Sounds more like someone doesn't like twitter very much. - Mac Sharp

The first thing I would do to Facebook is nuke the frackin' IQ app. - Karoli

Friendfeed is excellent in a browser, but Twitter is awful on the web. Twitter really needs Tweetie. - Jason Wehmhoener

Karoli: hyperbole is what gets people to engage and think differently. - Robert Scoble

I don't suppose Seesmic's secret plan might happen to involve an open alternative to Twitter on the back end, would it? If it's a threat to Twitter in that it allows people to use Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed interchangeably as a back end protocol...sure... yeah... I can see that. If the idea is Seesmic could swap out their own network? Bah. Don't buy it. - Ken Sheppardson

Robert, as long as we're clear on the motive, I'm good. - Karoli

But after all,it is just a client for Twitter and Facebook. - Steve Chou from IM

Tweetie is practically the only reason I even feel bad about leaving Twitter - James Poling

Ryo: have you tried the new Seesmic? I like it as much as Tweetdeck at minimum. - Robert Scoble

I have moved from TweetDeck to Seesmic Desktop. I am here on FriendFeed, just b/c you invited me to come discuss :) Also, did anyone using SDT notice that you can set up numerous active search columns and you don't hit API limits. thinking that TD used API count for everything from Profile view to search columns? Don't quote me, I'm drinking. LOL. - Zaneology

Zane: heheh! - Robert Scoble

Louis, done - Robert, $1 your way via Twitpay and Amazon Payments ;-) - Jesse Stay

7. It let's you give up all your system resources in a single bound. - Rahsheen?

James: there's a new version of Tweetie coming. - Robert Scoble

i learn so much from being on friendfeed and reading all these brilliant threads! thank u scoble! - Jason Pollock

I think it's funny how people are writing Seesmic Desktop off as just a Twitter client. It's set up to be so much more all you have to do is look at everything Twhirl had built into it. Freindfeed, Laconi.ca, Seesmic, Twitter, and Identi.ca. It wouldn't be to hard to create a redundant system for it using Laconi.ca. - Jimminy IS Everybody

James: and the real battle will be over search. Imagine what Seesmic Desktop can do with comparative searches between Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

Rahsheen ++++ - Karoli

Has anyone tried PeopleBrowsr ? - Zaneology

YES LOVE SEESMIC DESKTOP! B U T ...... it does take a WHOPPING amount of memory for such a small app... at present, I have a dual core 4gb RAM PC... and Seesmic desktop is taking: 98,456k ... actually more than OUTLOOK and EXPRESSION WEB! so... it is good, but maybe this is an Adobe AIR thing of course rather than Seesmic... hey lets face it, Adobe hardly have compact low memory code do they? like the idea.. but because of the memory, cannot justify using it. - David Sheardown

James: exactly. Zane I like PeopleBrowsr too. - Robert Scoble

i still think that all this talk of the next thing that everyone will move to is a bit premature... twitter will continue to dominate for some time - Jason Pollock

Scoble: are you inferring that it will support friendfeed? - James Poling

But if twitter is down,those clients can do nothing - Steve Chou

James: Loic says that friendfeed support is coming to Seesmic Desktop. I'll keep bugging him until he does it anyway. - Robert Scoble

Robert: I can't agree more. I'm still using Twhirl for it's filter feature. I can filter my stream so nicely with it to extract data I want. - Jimminy IS Everybody

the general public is still getting used to twitter.. us geeks can talk about the next thing until we're blue in the face but its going to be all about twitter for a while and I think we all know it:) - Jason Pollock

Jason: don't be so sure. Remember a few years ago MySpace was on top of the world. Twitter will probably pass MySpace next year. - Robert Scoble

To get back to your thesis, the only thing that can kill Twitter is Twitter. - Christian Anderson

A client is redundant if the service(s) no longer exist! That is like a "chicken or the egg" discussion. - Allan Besselink

Robert: Told him to make a better user interface by the way,I still don't like Seesmic too much. - Steve Chou

Robert: I can't wait to see how Loic integrates it into SD. It's much more complicated to fit into that platform than Twhirl's. - Jimminy IS Everybody

Robert: i agree that it will be a few years tho.. and by the time twitter is on the decline who knows what will be out by then! - Jason Pollock

Jason: the general public is going to start seeing that search is very important for them to find people talking about things they care about. I can see a world where Seesmic's search will be better than even friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

I tried seesmic desktop for a view minutes but it was so not intuitive that I quit trying it. - rick

Loic ignores serious usability issues. I'm not optimistic for him. - Jason Wehmhoener

Twitter is indeed becoming more popular, I saw a feature on network news about it. If something like twitter is noticed by mainstream media, it's already passed the threshold of being not just for geeks long ago. - Joshua Lee

Jason: Seesmic Desktop is much more usable than it used to be. - Robert Scoble

I just installed the latest version - Jason Wehmhoener

same mess - Jason Wehmhoener

Lets say all the twitter clients work together to build a common database in laconi.ca.. Will we still need twitter? - Varun "Maverick" Pitale

PeopleBrowsr seems quite unintuitive to me. - Chuck Baggett

robert: i agree that real-time search is the the wave of the future and it is the reason that twitter is so dominant right now... too bad the twitter search is always down.. lol.. im definitely going to download the new seesmic right now tho!:) - Jason Pollock

I'm not sure why adobe air twitter apps are so popular, native apps are much more usable and use less resources. - Joshua Lee

Robert: track is the key. - Karoli

Robert, don't all these sources just scream out for common interface pipes? Isn't that the key? Seems like we'll see more and more Tweetdecks, Seesmics, FF, FB Thwirls and Tweeties, all of which will have their pluses, but they all gotta' pass data and interact, like multiple networking protocols going thru a router...right? - Michael Metz

Twitter has a history of killing it's most popular features. How long until they kill real-time search? - Christian Anderson

Karoli: track is coming. - Robert Scoble

If I hear "track" one more time I'm going to scream - Jesse Stay

Christian: they won't kill realtime search. It's the only way they have of monitising twitter. - Joshua Lee

I have track - it's called TweetBeep - Jesse Stay

Christian: I think they already did ;) try searching for something you've said recently. - Frankie Warren

Jesse: track, track TRACK - Karoli

Karoli can I twitpay you a dollar as well? - Jesse Stay

Christian: Frankie is right. Twitter's search is horrid. - Robert Scoble

Seesmic Desktop is getting more friendly on system resources with each build - now it will run for days with the very small increase in memory over time - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Twitter is technically mediocre in general, it proves that if you have a good concept, the technical execution is secondary. Unfortunately. - Joshua Lee

Jesse, sure. :) - Karoli

I seriously doubt that Seesmic Desktop is going to kill Twitter. Besides the people talking on here now, how many people even know what Adobe AIR is? Or what Seesmic is? Look how slow people were to find out about Twitter. I am pulling for FriendFeed:) - Shawn Hickman

I still am a little lost... what do these companies gain by building their own phantom networks behind twitter? It's not like they can just flip the switch off on twitter and expect to keep their users. As it stands, twitter is the only thing that links all these different clients. - Frankie Warren

I love Friendfeed, but i admit...i do not like the name. :) - Karoli

I actually just switched to it today. Though I wish they would do some interface tweaks, but I'm sure they will over time. Able to move the tweetbox around, and be able to take the menu on the right and make it tabs on the top. Just simplify it a bit. - Dean Clark

Joshua: the most important thing about social networks is "are the people I want to follow on it?" Nothing else really matters that much. But once they are, watch the tide move. - Robert Scoble

Shawn: I agree with you, I tried to tell my sister, who just joined twitter, to use a client. She emailed me back like I was some kind of geek! (Well, I am.) - Joshua Lee

our goal isn't to "kill" Twitter with Seesmic Desktop - but rather to allow you to read/use Twitter along side other sources - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Twitter is getting easier and easier by the day to compete with - look at us here on FriendFeed. We're not talking about it on Twitter. - Jesse Stay

Search is pretty broken right now. when they have trouble scaling, they just kill off whatever functionality is holding them up. Twitter may just become email at some point in the near future. - Christian Anderson

Web Apps are the future, downloading will become a thing of the past - Shawn Hickman

Christian, e-mail is more reliable than Twitter - please no - Jesse Stay

The big thing slowing down FriendFeed integration is their own API (note: that's my personal opinion and not my bosses :) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Frankie, I can see some real advantages to building a phantom network behind Twitter. Starting with not having to rely on Twitter and the somewhat arrogant heads of Twitter who do not give a rip about their users. - Karoli

Mike: actually the friendfeed team itself told me that. They know they need to simplify the API. I wonder when we'll see that? - Robert Scoble

Mike, from what I've seen FriendFeed's API is actually more advanced than Twitter's. It's just missing one or two crucial methods. - Jesse Stay

Christian: Yes, Twitter search is dead. Currently hours missing off the top and after 18 days everything disappears. It's a horrible situation for them. - Jimminy IS Everybody

robert: hopefully very soon - there is a lot of movement to happen when that appears - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I can't tell Twitter to only give me certain pieces of data from a user's profile, for instance. I can do that with FriendFeed. They're much more prepared for API scalability than Twitter is, even now. - Jesse Stay

Mike: what do you do at Seesmic? - Robert Scoble

robert: ops, messaging (xmpp), infrastructure - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Mike: awesome. I can't wait until you have friendfeed. That will seal the deal for you guys. Then it's just going to be a race to see who builds the best search display. - Robert Scoble

robert: (again my personal opinion on SD - I'm a user like you all in this regard) I agree, it's the ability to see and manipulate the various streams that is killer, so not having FF is the pink elephant in the room - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

mentions of 'compete'/'kill' in certain contexts in the comments here sounds kind of petty, encouraging some backwards cut-throat sadomasichism. web 2.0's focus on social networks has facets of co-existence and is mutually beneficial in complementing services. everybody is not necessarily out to kill each other, imo. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Karoli... they would still have to rely on twitter right? Things will get crazy confusing if the applications cant talk to each other. Imagine if verizon phones couldnt call cingular phones and you had to worry about who had what handset... thats where theres a problem with having a Seesmic Network, a Tweetie network etc. EDIT: woah i just said cingular haha - Frankie Warren

blackfeathers: whenever you see me use the word "kill" it means to take over the momentum. - Robert Scoble

Yes, Twitter is broken. We were all here a year ago when Twitter's uptime was like 50%. Still, we stayed. Why? Because the people we wanted t follow were there. And people like Jesse were buuling kick ass sticky apps. I don't see that changing. - Christian Anderson

Being able to use the local twitter search to see tweets within however many miles of a location would be nice *hint* *hint* *hint* That seems to be a part of twitter search many air apps still don't support. - Dean Clark

Christian: me neither. Although there's a new usage model that is in play that Twitter has not locked up. Especially around search and zeitgeist display. - Robert Scoble

Christian - thanks for the compliment. Not sure what you mean by sticky though. - Jesse Stay

Jesse: once you start using SocialToo you can't stop. - Robert Scoble

Dean: Local search would be the shit. It really needs to be implemented - Shawn Hickman

Let's make a rule right now. Kill = lose momentum leader status. That is what we mean when we say "kill" - Christian Anderson

Jesse: that's sticky. I call Facebook "velcro" because it has so much sticking power and lots of little hooks that lock you in. - Robert Scoble

I thought FriendFeed was kind of meh, I didn't realize it had this realtime comment feature. I'll have to use it more often. - Joshua Lee

Robert: Unless you're me. I cannot abide all those little sticky velcro stupid things. - Karoli

Joshua: there's a lot of things in friendfeed that lots of Twitterers have no clue about. - Robert Scoble

Ah - thanks again then Christian - that's quite a compliment! We won't be supporting just Twitter for long though, although if Twitter keeps breaking it keeps giving us new things to do to fix it. :-( - Jesse Stay

Steven: trust me, I have my own list of UI issues that I remind the SD devs of weekly ;) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Karoli: oh, really? So if someone tags you in a photo on Facebook you don't look? - Robert Scoble

Not that I underestimate FB. I don't. It's why I have a presence there. I just HATE. IT. - Karoli

Robert, no...I'm the chick behind the camera - Karoli

I just don't believe in support applications that are unnecessarily hogs as far as memory goes. Yes AIR apps tend to be on the larger size, but look at DestroyTwitter. John Hallman manages to get his AIR client to consume less than 70MB of memory. - Alex Knight

Karoli: you're a better man than I am then. :-) - Robert Scoble

Steven: also, if you twitter to @seesmic - our customer team tracks all of the suggestions and gets them to the UI Devs - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Mike: you should open a friendfeed room, too. It's even better than Twittering @seesmic. - Robert Scoble

Mike: I have a suggestion, make it look more native on OS X. We Mac users are interface consistency geeks. - Joshua Lee

Alex - one of the things that bit all of the Air devs in the ass recently was the memory leak caused by the xml parser IIRC - now that was a fun one - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

have not try the seesmic desktop... They are the best if they manage to serve local context too.. (Twitter & Friendfeed, not the 3rd party) - Pico Seno

They just did. The Mac buttons are now in their standard place on top of the window left. - Robin Good

Joshua - they are already doing that in small increments - notice the window chrome items changes recently - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I'll have to take another look, especially if you add friendfeed. - Joshua Lee

Robert - If our customer support guy hasn't already I will make sure he does - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I'm a TweetDeck fan, despite the memory suck on my computer. Tweetie is nice on the iPhone, like new Twitterrific better. Seesmic desktop and Tweetie desktop are just OK. - Geoff Peterson

Robert, love your velcro example - thanks for the clarification - Jesse Stay

Mike: cool, I just added you to my secret group for discussing the 2010web. - Robert Scoble

robert: wow - thanks - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Wild 164 comments in 32 minutes. I guess I touched a nerve. - Robert Scoble

You bet, Jesse. You and your app building Ilk have played a huge part in making Twitter what it is today. - Christian Anderson

Robert: either that or you trolled a bit, in a positive way. ;-) - Joshua Lee

Scoble: at the risk of sounding presumptuous can I join in on that 2010web conversation? - James Poling

Joshua: I was mostly trolling Loic who hasn't shown up yet, which makes it even funnier. - Robert Scoble

lol secret group... you know how to work this stuff ;) - Frankie Warren

Robert - that's why i popped in - I know he is doing some family stuff so he's offline right now - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Frankie and Joshua: soon, soon! - Robert Scoble

Frankie: it has to be an elite group in order for 2010web to become a buzzword, from clique to chic. It's the new pardigm. ;-) - Joshua Lee

Mike, I hear a blank AIR app sucks up 20MB. If that's true Adobe has some work to do. - Alex Knight

Joshua: I hated the name "Web 2.0" and am trying to head off the next thing being called "Web 3.0." - Robert Scoble

Alex - yep - your preaching to the choir on that one :) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Yeah, we don't need x.0 - definitely. - Joshua Lee

Mike: thanks for filling in for Loic. His ears must be burning, or will be soon. - Robert Scoble

i like it (2010 web) just because of the Arthur C Clarke memories it brings up - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Robert 2010web is too soon you should have gone with 2013web, just past the apocalypse. - Jimminy IS Everybody

2010web sounds interesting, but it limits the buzzword for one year. - Joshua Lee

Getting to the topic at hand, how is a Twitter client a threat to Twitter? - Alex Knight

hey lets start a 2011 web secret place:) - Michael Metz

James: I disagree. Most businesses have sites that look like 1994 so 2010 will be very useable for a long time. - Robert Scoble

Plus, I always hated the version numbers because the Web doesn't have a version. it's more fashion, like cars. - Robert Scoble

Well im late (in the half hr this has been posted), but i will say that which ever client has the most interesting and frequent updates will prevail, so this debate could go on and on - Chris Nwakalo

And it upgrades constantly. - Robert Scoble

Alex: because these clients secretly piggyback and make their own redundant networks that some think will be able to free the clients of their dependency on twitter. (did i get that right? ;)) - Frankie Warren

Nambu updates fairly frequently. :-) - Joshua Lee

Hey, Robert - it's Yama - I'll be starting a friendfeed room in a bit, but loving the stream here - jyamasaki

I'm trying to get businesses to see that if they are using the 1994 web they'll look pretty lame if their competitors are using the 2010 one. - Robert Scoble

yes. Real-time web might be akin to cold fusion. Guesing vertical and local are the next waves on the web. - Christian Anderson

Anyway, that's all off topic, back to Seesmic and TweetDeck and Tweetie and all the rest. If they all worked together they could totally take away Twitter's air supply. - Robert Scoble

Twitter is definitely on the cusp of something massive. I'm afraid their infrastructure will quickly crumble though. They haven't even figured out a way to make money yet. - Alex Knight

i kind of agree w/ james fuller. there's something too gimmicky w/ all the symmetric number schemes up to 12-12-12 - just for the sake of removing oneself from it, 2013 makes sense to me as a new starting point. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

I find it interesting that many people are willing to pay or donate to developers making Twitter clients. No one donates to Twitter heh. - Alex Knight

blackfeathers: if you are appealing to early adopters and developers you are probably right. I'm trying to appeal to normal business people. They understand that the 2010 automobiles are just now shipping (my 2010 Prius should be here next week) and so if they want to get a modern web site they will understand that they need 2010web technologies. 2013 is too esoteric and future thinking for normal people. - Robert Scoble

Considering how long from the infamous O'Reilly web 2.0 conference to it becoming a popular buzzword web 2.0 became, maybe 2010 is a bit too soon in the future. I'm not sure why I'm trying to help with this buzzword though, considering how much I hate them. :-) - Joshua Lee

Robert: How would the clients make it clear what networks you're talking to and who actually is able to see your content? For example, If Joe is Twitter+Seesmic and I'm Twitter+Tweetie.... when twitter goes down I can no longer speak to joe... - Frankie Warren

Alex: that's because Twitter treats us like crap and has $30 million in the bank. - Robert Scoble

Loic is well positioned to win because he has an honest to God team working on this. They got in early and they've kept a break-neck innovation pace. - Christian Anderson

Twitter is a platform, Friendfeed and Tweetdeck are apps. Well , Twitter does have a native app, but it sucks big time. I think it's a matter of months that the mainstream twitter users will realize that and there will be a huge explosion in twitter apps usage. - Kirill Bolgarov

Frankie - that's a routing-around-failure problem that is keeping me up at night to be honest - when I think of what will be needed to do that - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Ok, I have to go to bed. One last though before I go, one of the reasons Seesmic Desktop is huge is because it pulls your virtual social life back into one location that can exist on you desktop, and makes it easy to manage from it's interface. - Jimminy IS Everybody

its no threat at all - as twitter knows perfectly well, the Platform is everything! Seesmic isn't the platform and never can be as its desktop based - Anthony Feint

Yeh, that was abit offtopic - Kirill Bolgarov

Frankie: in Seesmic Desktop I can tell which Window is showing me Facebook and which one is showing me Twitter. Why couldn't I be shown that I can have more features with other people who are on Seesmic Desktop? - Robert Scoble

Oh suuure Scoble, get me on Friend Feed and already you've declared it passe? - Brett Schulte

Robert - They should spend the $29 million on their infrastructure and leave the last million to pay salaries :P - Alex Knight

Robert, is there a way to do a date range search in FF? - Gary Gannon

Brett: heheh. There's a method to my madness. When I started getting into friendfeed Twitter took off. So, I figured I better find the next big thing so friendfeed could take off. Seesmic Desktop is it! - Robert Scoble

Alex: I hear the team already took a lot off the table. - Robert Scoble

Alex: that's why the management isn't in a big hurry to sell Twitter. They already have "FU money." - Robert Scoble

Gogii is the next Twitter according to @drew... I like it. - Brett Schulte

I still don't think an app could be the next big thing,after all platform rules. - Steve Chou

Brett: hmmm. Why? - Robert Scoble

Mike: do you see like Robert in that you can make a separate network that acts as a Twitter+ - Frankie Warren

Steve: Seesmic Desktop IS a platform. - Robert Scoble

In all honesty it's easy to bash Twitter's infrastructure when you aren't in their shoes. I know our own company has gone through a ton of growing pains in the past 14 years. - Alex Knight

Alex: Twitter was crashing when I had 1,000 followers. It's always sucked. - Robert Scoble

Blackfeather: I'm glad you like the idea, but now I'm seeing Robert's point. The 2010web is constantly changing just like model years. You want to release next years big thing now. - Jimminy IS Everybody

Gogii is SMS based and more universal, and allows custom groups. - Brett Schulte

Frankie - I can't say to be honest one way or the other - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I remember about 2 months that Twitter wasn't crashing in some form or another, when I first started using it - Jesse Stay

Ff on the iPhone is not handling this string very well. - Christian Anderson

Mike: Tweetie is using its network of 200,000 people to do lots of interesting things and will be doing more when they roll out their new version. - Robert Scoble

This is the problem with FriendFeed... 200+ comments from one post. There needs to be a way to flag comments from different users in different ways. - Jay McCormack

Back in the ole days of twitter when you had to walk 15 miles in the snow, barefoot, in order to tweet... - Dean Clark

Mike: it'd be interesting to see if you guys choose to make your own database to add even more features. Like location and better search and "offline availability" for when Twitter is down. - Robert Scoble

i don't know why exactly -perhaps it was the pager days- that makes me see it as yesterday. i skip sms if i can help it. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

robert - understood - I just can't say or comment on anything we are planning or not planning - loic and marco would personally come stomp me into a furry puddle ;) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

You're right Robert, shit programming is shit programming. It's no excuse to not plan/develop scalable infrastructure. Our company is suffering now because all of our internal systems were writing 14 years ago by a bunch of n00bs. - Alex Knight

Jay: I don't see this as a problem. I see it as a benefit. - Shawn Hickman

Robert: I'm sure you're not at liberty to say.... but it seems counter productive that seesmic and tweetie race to get an install base of twitter clients to have their own network gain a critical mass... shouldnt they work together :) Or am I being naive again - Frankie Warren

Am I the only one that would like to see threaded comments or would that get way too messy? - James Poling

Seesmic was interesting but I just can't stand listening to the French guy. - Brett Schulte

Frankie: I wish they would work together. - Robert Scoble

Brett: heheheh. That's Loic. - Robert Scoble

brett - well, you can listen to the German guy if you want - he's the Seesmic Desktop lead - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Robert: He really should get a spokesman people can understand. - Brett Schulte

James: threaded comments would be fun here. I'd love to add graphics and video in here too, but it sure would get messy. - Robert Scoble

Just say it, Robert. As a former Microsoft employee, you should be able to explain to everyone in three little words how Seesmic Desktop/Tweetie/insert_thirdparty_app_here can successfully kill Twitter should it gain a critical mass of users: "EMBRACE. AND. EXTEND." I'm 26 and even I remember the browser wars. Seriously. Scoble's right on this one. - Andrew Feinberg

+ for threaded comments, this is hard to follow. Friendfeed should add to their UI and it should highlight comments that mention you. - Alex Knight

"Even I remember the browser wars" - feeling ancient. - Brett Schulte

james fuller: considering the target audience & the purpose then it would make sense currently. perhaps i'm thinking of time in a scalable sense of passage. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Andrew: yes, embrace and extend. Tweetie showed me the light. Seesmic is doing similar things with Facebook and Twitter (I have groups in Seesmic Desktop). - Robert Scoble

I wish there was a button for commenting at the very bottom of this post. I don't like scrolling back up to comment. - Jimminy IS Everybody

Alex: follow? Just click the time stamp and stare at the screen! - Robert Scoble

Nobody remember the losers. - Steve Chou

James: if you click the time stamp it will open a new window up where the comment window will be at the bottom. - Robert Scoble

James: pop out the window via the time stamp? - Frankie Warren

Didn't you use to be big on Twitter Scoble? :) - Brett Schulte

Robert: Thank you this is so much better. - Jimminy IS Everybody

@Brett you should see the crowds he draws in Japan - Andrew Feinberg

Brett: a very large PR firm told me I have a more engaged audience than Oprah. So, who said I'm still not big on Twitter? - Robert Scoble

Steven: He's not still big on Facebook? Could've fooled me. - Karoli

Brett: It gave birth to this chaos. - Frankie Warren

Does anyone think Twitter buying out one of the big Twitter client products would be good for them? - Alex Knight

Alex: that would be stupid for a platform company to do. - Robert Scoble

Alex - even better, Facebook buying out one of the big Twitter clients - Jesse Stay

@Alex: No. They can barely keep up with their own internal architecture. - Andrew Feinberg

I think Twitter's plan is to offer premium features like advanced search, tracking, analytics, and bringing back the @ replies everyone complained about recently. They won't give this all away for free. - Geoff Peterson

Alex: Twitter effectively killed all tiny URL innovation by partnering with bit.ly. - Robert Scoble

Alex: I think they need to be bought - Shawn Hickman

Robert I think you said it right there - the only way to truly compete with Twitter as a Twitter developer is to become Twitter - Jesse Stay

Shawn: but the minute Twitter buys one the other companies know it's over and they'll move their code to a different system. - Robert Scoble

Do they have a written partnership with bit.ly or did they just switch due to analytics? - Dean Clark

Robert you coming down for e3? - Brett Schulte

Dean: from what I understand it's a written partnership. Bit.ly is even on the same datacenter as Twitter is now. - Robert Scoble

Jesse: is that like the scene in Highlander where Sean Connery teaches Christopher Lambert to "Feel the stag..."? - Andrew Feinberg

Brett: I doubt it. - Robert Scoble

Sure, someone should buy Twitter but who? I would say what Twitter is doing right now would be a good fit for Google. - Alex Knight

Andrew, something like that, yeah :-) - Jesse Stay

Robert: Agreed, but I meant I think they should be bought by another company - Shawn Hickman

Alex: I talked with Twitter investor Fred Wilson on Thursday. He said that Ev really is adverse to selling. - Robert Scoble

Ok call me a newbie, but why would it be a bad thing for Twitter to purchase atebits (tweetie)? Wouldn't that just be like hiring people to make their own client? Or is that bad because Twitter should only be focusing on Twitter, and not clients for Twitter? - Colin

Robert, to your point about search, I would offer this: Even a powerful search isn't enough. There has to be filters. Tracking my name even gives wonky results without filters. - Karoli

So is Twitter's revenue plan to slowly remove the most popular features and then start selling them back to people? - James Poling

Ok, interesting. Yeah written partnership would certainly kill some people trying to innovate. Few out of work people I think will give you different things a try though, certainly won't be see as widely though since short links are a mainstream feature now. - Dean Clark

I heard Robert is buying Twitter - Jesse Stay

wow, it's been a while since I've been in such a fun tech discussion. I've missed you, FriendFeed! - Andrew Feinberg

No, Twitter bought Robert. ;) - Brett Schulte

Karoli: search is equal to filters in my mind. - Robert Scoble

Robert - EV may not want to sell Twitter, but it may have to happen in the not so distant future. We'll see though. - Alex Knight

The obvious choice would be google to purchase Twitter, but I'm sure others could work well too - Shawn Hickman

it's also possible for another company going down to buy twitter for its upward momentum, but maybe not likely. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Brett, no, I just bought Robert - did you see my Twitpay? - Jesse Stay

I bought his puppet, too - Jesse Stay

@James: there was no plan. that would acknowledge they added features knowing they'd be popular, and therefore would have built them better. - Andrew Feinberg

Alex: Ev doesn't have to sell. What's forcing him to sell? I don't see it. - Robert Scoble

Andrew: friendfeed is fun once in a while when you get a topic that rocks and rolls like this one. - Robert Scoble

Seesmic Desktop is Dead - Bwana ☠

Andrew: but the real power in friendfeed is in the real time search engine here. - Robert Scoble

Robert - Nothing at all... but the future is untold. He may not have to sell now but it may become a good move in the future. - Alex Knight

Haha Bwana! - invariant

LOL @Bwana - Alex Knight

I heard Google is buying Seesmic Desktop - Jesse Stay

Bwana makes me laugh. - Robert Scoble

i do like the search engine. I use it to track current event reactions. I just rarely get engaged. - Andrew Feinberg

Jesse NOW THAT would be interesting! - Robert Scoble

I just heard a rim shot coming from Bwana - Alex Knight

You heard it hear first (might as well claim it) - Jesse Stay

ergo seesmic desktop is the new rss? lol - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

bwana - any more lebron pain for you tonight? - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Robert: Conversation you can see is the real power of FriendFeed. Not the disjointed conversation on Twitter. - Geoff Peterson

Maybe FriendFeed should buy Twitter or the other way around - Shawn Hickman

So how does Seesmic make money... or does it not? - Colin

Tweetie is making money. - Colin

Why don't we all just pitch in and buy them both. How many users between the two? - Jesse Stay

Colin - Seesmic desktop makes money from other services I believe. - Alex Knight

Colin: sell a pro version. I'd pay for a version that had friendfeed integration, for instance. - Robert Scoble

@Jesse. Nice bring me in as an investor - Christian Anderson

bear - no, I'm somewhat over it...until I turn the TV on - Bwana ☠

Christian, might still be expensive at what it seems Twitter's asking for - Jesse Stay

well, I'm off to bed. This was fun, see ya in the morning! - Robert Scoble

I heard the LDS church is buying the LHC from CERN and using it to go back in time so they can buy Twitter, add everyone's tweets to their genealogical databases and use that to target ads better than google, AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD AHAHAHAHAHA. Right, Jesse? :-) - Andrew Feinberg

Seesmic desktop runs on AIR. I refuse to use it for that reason. - nick

Robert I thought you were going to kill Gilmore - you got pretty hot. - Brett Schulte

Robert: the average person does not equate search/track/filters . Look at Google usage for examples - Karoli

Colin - I paid for my Tweetie licence but also donated $18 to DestroyTwitter. Love supporting great developers. - Alex Knight

Andrew, I think my head just exploded - Jesse Stay

Brett: he can't kill Gillmor. Two would pop up to take his place. - Andrew Feinberg

hahahaha - Brett Schulte

Good night. 330 comments. Wild. - Robert Scoble

Way to be Alex, this stuff isn't free to make. - Colin

@Jesse: so you don't deny it? :-) - Andrew Feinberg

fun discussion. The pug insists I leave it. Good night all. - Karoli

Good night - happy weekend! - Brett Schulte

Andrew, that one I'll let you make your own conclusions on :-) - Jesse Stay

(I somehow forgot to work Louis Gray into the conspiracy. But we all know he's there. The question is who will play him in the movie starring Tom Hanks as Ev and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Scoble) - Andrew Feinberg

/me wanders off to dream of wiring IRC to FriendFeed - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I think Microsoft should buy Twitter and make their own Twitter client and implement Microsoft Bob to help you tweet! - Alex Knight

and don't forget the CGI "Clippy" voiced by Chris Rock - Andrew Feinberg

Microsoft kills almost every business they bought. - Steve Chou from IM

(too bad Don LaFontaine isn't alive to record a trailer voiceover for Ron Howard's "Twitter/Friendfeed" techno-thriller) - Andrew Feinberg

Matthew: the bloomberg software can run on any laptop now. but you need a special smartcard with a fingerprint reader that reads a barcode off the screen at the same time. - Andrew Feinberg

Wow 350 comments. What a massive comment stream. The comment feature makes a huge diff. It facilitates conversation, which twitter doesn't really provide. - Lawrence Di Stefano from Nambu

What Twitter's at threat!? It has the momentum of an unstoppable train, as to Seesmic being a threat - maybe, unfortunately it's irrelevant. - sofarsoShawn ~presque...

I dumped Tweetdeck after the last Seesmic release. They have such an insane release schedule I don't think people can grasp how difficult it is to roll out the kind of releases they have done back to back.Their version stream just tells me they have bank behind them. When you work from different boxes I don't love the tethered feel of Seesmic however. - Chad Harris

there is potential for all these services (twitter, Friendfeed, facebook etc) to become secondary to the apps. The more services there are, the greater the need to bring them back together again. - Alistair (alpinefolk)

Chad: agree, there is something about SD that I'm not a fan of, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Seems to have lost something from Twhirl somehow - Alistair (alpinefolk)

@Scoble: Can you disclose publicly here that you are not on a pay roll by Seesmic or Loic LeMeur? Don't you have a PR-advisory deal? Please disclose.... - nikolas

Mike Taylor: "dream of wiring IRC to FriendFeed" <- that would be SO great ^__^ (with xdcc support included and stuff...) - minus-one

Robert is high - Alejandro

amazing 355 comments - learned a lot about Seesmic in rellation to twitter; thanks for sharing! - Jeroen De Miranda

Nikolas I have no such deal with Seesmic. I never have been paid by them. I have no investment in them. I don't know where you got that idea but it is totally false. - Robert Scoble

I just cannot bring myself to install one more thing on my computer to take up needed RAM. Plus, I do not want to install anything on my work computer either...and like to just user browser things that I can use on any computer. - Hummie

Scobleizer, Wait, Do I hence assume that your assertion is that friendfeed is no more (or, never was) a threat to twitter? - Lakshman Prasad

Lakshman: Friendfeed I'd not a threat to Twitter, correct. That said it is a threat to http://search.twitter.com - Robert Scoble

Robert: I like it but --- 1. it is a tool not a place, so i'll stick with FriendFeed as my means to "kill Twitter" and 2. it is a total whorish memory hog and i hate it when that happens. - Thom Kennon

Yeah it's a memory hog - Svartling

Robert: Seesmic definitely has potential, but I think that PeopleBrowsr has far more potential and far more power than Seesmic will ever have. As a power user, I'm quite surprised that you haven't taken that tool up, and replaced your Tweetdeck. And I would be surprised if you chose Seesmic to replace Tweetdeck. The search capabilities alone in PeopleBrowsr make me wonder this. Add to... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I would honestly say Seesmic Desktop is more of a threat to Friendfeed than Twitter - Zee.

Rob: I need to try Peoplebrowsr again. When I first tried it it was too slow and complex. - Robert Scoble

Zee: one major reason I also haven't gotten in Peoplebrowsr or Seesmic desktop is because, well, it is Adobe AIR and my iPhone doesn't run that (in Seesmic Desktop's case). In Peoplebrowser's case? It didn't do mobile last time I tried it. Friendfeed's search and realtime is keeping me going. - Robert Scoble

I think we can all agree that twitter was just the first in a line of ever evolving systems in real time news, twitter is the oldest, and will probably be replaced eventually, but surely it doesn't help to keep jumping ship every few months, nothing seems to be gathering as much steam as friendfeed, and it offers huge improvements over twitter, I really think people do need to persist with one service... rather than constantly jumping - Chris Lloyd

Robert the lack of mobile in PeopleBrowsr is valid, and it is complex, but the light mode makes it much more manageable to start using. The speed has considerably improved since you last used it. We'd love for you to try it again. The AIR version will import your groups from Tweetdeck. Please feel free to ask any questions you have. Jodee is on his way to California now for the conference this week. I hope that you'll have a chance sit down with him and see the improvements. - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from f2p

augh, too many comments to absorb. just wanted to throw in my two cents, though. i started with twhirl, then tried out Seesmic Desktop, and then went back to twhirl because i was able to customize the font size for reading the tweets. maybe i didn't dig deep enough, but Seesmic doesn't have that option, and i find the print a wee bit too small for my liking. - Starshadow Rivaulx

Wow Rob, you are an internet phenomenon. Someone tweeted me the link of this thread followed by "look at the moron, lol". Anyway: If twitter gets shut down, Seesmic will die. If Seesmic dies (gets shut down, w/e), it won't make a dent to twitter. Hence, you are wrong. - H M Elius

I'm with @guruvan on this, PeopleBrowsr is way better than Seesmic Desktop as a power tool. - Svartling

Svartling: Thanks! And, you can see by the via on this post, we already have FriendFeed support, and it will improve as well. And, with all the networks that we support, PeopleBrowsr isn't dependent on Twitter. Twitter access is surely the big slice, but we offer the ability to search Facebook, FriendFeed, Digg, Youtube, flickr, and even custom URLs. And, we provide access to Seesmic's network - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

Loic is gonna love this - David Lloyd

so I go offline for a few hours playing with the kids and Robert launches this conversation when I am quiet and away! Ah! that's fun. If you had written a blog post instead of a friendfeed entry it would definitely be the week-end techmeme headline! Competing with Twitter? Nah I would have to be seriously sick to even think about it. We are just delivering as fast as we can and growing... more... - Loic Le Meur

WOW, what a conversation that was!! - Micky

Seriously. Robert...I think you just proved the value of (at least) FriendFeed forever more...(And Seesmic too of course!:-)...This is what I get for sleeping, eh? - Alan Edgett

The newest SD is much nicer than previous from a functional standpoint. I agree that FF support is a must (as well as Seesmic support). I still do not really like the UI, especially on my EEE PC, but even on the 24" monitor it is not as nice as TD. The functionality is better though so I have switched to SD. Really hoping to have the ability to rename saved searches, it is the searching which is so awesome after all. - Sean Brady

Robert how about a video showing the features or another interview with Loic? Depraved for Content!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Stephen Pickering

Its PeopleBrowsr not Seesmic - Webferret

So, what is this stuff from the top of the thread about Tweetie using their own servers? Little Snitch tells me that Tweetie for the Mac is communicating with twitter.com and s3.amazonaws.com. Robert? - Jason Wehmhoener

Jason: sorry it was Twinkle. I messed up. - Robert Scoble

It would sure be ironic if the 'openness' of Twitter's API killed them. As far as Seesmic goes, I wouldn't count on it emerging as the winner. I'm not impressed with it at all, most of the reasons being cited or commonly known. It has a lot of work to do before even attempting FriendFeed integration. I think Nambu has a lot of promise actually - Angus Burton

Starshadow - I know that better font handling is on our short list - i'll go poke the devs to see if I can move it up a couple notches :) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Loic: who cares about getting on Techmeme anymore? Not me. I'd rather just have an interesting conversation. Seems like a few people found it here. - Robert Scoble

Looks to be the ase doesn't it. I was moving to TweetDeck/Twit but now thininking about exiting ofdf to Seesmic - James Hemby

Robert, you've got me trying both FriendFeed and Seesmic now from this post. Soon enough I'll be on flttr , even. - Raj Rikhy

Robert, I love TechMeme, I read it multiple times a day. I agree Friendfeed has very active users. Both are small groups on the web, if these groups are enough for you as a conversation, then yeah it's cool. Friendfeed definitely did not make me stop reading techmeme. - Loic Le Meur

having said that, yes, Friendfeed is coming to Seesmic Desktop - Loic Le Meur

Loic: I am inviting a bunch of Web innovators to a private room on friendfeed this weekend. It's amazing how many are already here and signed in. They might not be active, but they are active enough to accept my invitations! Watch for yours soon. - Robert Scoble

Wow all these comments about seesmic! Well this got me really curious, until now I only used Tweetdeck,tried Peoplebrowser, didn't like it, will give Seesmic a chance now. Want to find out for my self, and once again thanks to friendfeed for these discussions! - Jacob

I view Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck as almost next generation web browsers customized for the social web. Will be interesting to see how that dynamic evolves and how the traditional browsers like firefox will fit into the picture going forward. - Mike Bracco

Loic: I would love to hear what you feel about my above statement and where you see SD fitting in long term/big picture perspective. If you have a link where you have already discussed this, can you send - thanks! - Mike Bracco

Mike: agreed Loic "Bloomberg for Social media" sums it up perfectly. Also I am not a fan of peoplebrowser think Steamy is cleaner if you want to go untethered. Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T - Chad Harris from email

Chad: Thanks and makes total sense. - Mike Bracco

Thanks also ment to type "Streamy" not steamy, thumbs need a diet :) Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T - Chad Harris from email

Seesmic Desktop is too buggy for my liking... and I've tried to like it. Userlists are often completely incorrect... and randomly at that. I don't much care for any of the AIR apps. They just don't "feel" good. - John

Robert: I'm curious - If Twitter decides to use advertising as part of their business model, how will apps like seesmic etc impact Twitter - if they block advertisements, which are displayed on the Twitter web page? If so many users won't see the ads, how will that hurt Twitter's model? - Jim Connolly

LOL. - Mona Nomura

damn! this thread is still going! scoble's threads are epic! - Jason Pollock

Jim: the advertising money is in search. So, what happens if Seesmic Desktop does a metasearch that uses Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed to present to you the best possible display? Wouldn't that hurt Twitter's ability to sell advertising? I think it would. The one who is in charge of the display controls where the ads go. The one who has the relationship with the user controls the... more... - Robert Scoble

I like Seesmic's functionality but really dislike the interface. It's all a little clunky and a little ugly. Plus the left panel takes up way too much space. Air apps aren't may fav. Seesmic should look at Tweetie on the mac for design ideas. - Wo

How do you search Facebook on Seesmic? - Wo

Didn't read all 400+ comments. Seesmic desktop is poopy compared to Nambu. Try Nambu. - Jason Mayoff from Nambu

Robert: I'm waiting on my invite :) - James Poling from email

does anyone know how many users are registered on friendfeed ? :) - Pretty Monkey Studio

It has 103.33 million accounts - David Lloyd

cool thx mark - Pretty Monkey Studio

can't believe this thread is still active - Loic Le Meur

Wow this is still going on?? LOL - Alex Knight

Jason - Nambu is crash happy, at least Seesmic Desktop doesn't crash. - Alex Knight

Ari... I think the point is you can now drink orange, apple, tomato and grape juice and it all tastes like the same juice. Things like this make 'where' less important than 'what' - Johnny

Hey Robert, you're attracting again heh!!! Had to take 2 days off after all the fun we had. I LOVE SD, btw. - Myrna

Twine Is Taking Off, Now Bigger Than FriendFeed http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... (pretty hard 2 believe) - Chaotic Five

+1 on hyperboles make you think. Just did a twitter search to measure the buzz around twitter clients: tweetie ~70 tweet per hour, tweetdeck ~150 tweet per hour and seesmic ~30 tweet per hour. But seesmic has $12M in the bank and a charismatic leader - It is going to be an interesting fight! - Edwin Khodabakchian

Edwin: TweetDeck also had a multi month lead over Seesmic. That's going to be tough to beat. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Yes. The challenge for Loic I think is going to be to carve out a market segment: 1) companies managing their brands and communities, 2) social media power users or 3) normal users. 1) is where the short term revenue is, 2) is where the vocal/buzz people are and 3) is where the mass and long term search revenue. I am not sure that you can design one product which will fit the... more... - Edwin Khodabakchian

The future is in a desktop app? Everything else is going web-based, into the cloud, and yet for this alone users will flock to some resource-hog? No way, no how. Be web-based or be content to live with only early adopters. - Maxwell Kennerly

I'm loving Seesmic desktop - i look forward to what adaptations it will make - I want that friend feed pull-in. - Robert Freeze

The one thing that I have only seen in Nambu is the unread count. Might be missing something but it is just amazing for having searches in there, for mentions and direct messages. It's just wonderful. And is it not Air which security people will tell you is a major danger spot for hacking. - Oliver Thylmann

Robert: Thanks for the feedback re Twitter's revenue model. Just a thought, but with this thread having (at this point) 425 comments - is there a chance that FRIENDFEED could be the real competition to Twitter? The quality is already here, just a 'little' light on numbers. Thoughts? - Jim Connolly

Jim: I think there's something interesting happening here in search and in groups. Those are both places there's potential money, but a lot has to happen before that can happen. - Robert Scoble

Only if we all get more expensive computers, webcams, etc. - Prokofy Neva

Robert: Are you referring to FriendFeed needing more active users or for the actual FriendFeed platform to change? - Jim Connolly

I dont know if Seesmic is a threat for Twitter, but I know Robert Scoble knows well how to create a hot thread. - Jacque

Jacque: That's what I was thinking. :-) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Can someone please explain to me how you can search your facebook stream in Seesmic - Wo

Ari: Not all of these clients are particularly susceptible to Twitter's failwhales. Many features still continue to work, often including search. Some of these clients have backends that cache/queue tweets so even more gets through. So it's not always like having no juice. Furthermore, if you're paying attention to multiple social networks, you're not as concerned or slowed down by one of them becoming inaccessible - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

I've been using Seesmic Desktop for about a week now. I absolutely love it. I have no use for Tweetdeck now. I sometimes use Hootsuite - mostly for their "Hootlet". But Seesmic Desktop is absolutely wonderful in managing my feeds. - Curt Mercadante

*bumps* - sofarsoShawn ~presque...

bump - Jimminy IS Everybody

Sorry about that Mark, I bumped it for another conversation I was having about redundancy among the apps. And using various ways of analyzing live data coming in through it. - Jimminy IS Everybody

Robert Scoble

To properly back up you need three copies. What is your workflow? What services work best for you? Discuss here:

January 2, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

CLAVEL DALY, Tom Kimmerer, Renée Barrett and 42 other people liked this

To properly back up you need three copies. One on your local drive in case something gets corrupted. One on an external hard drive or other media in case your hard drive dies. One on an external hard drive or other media or storage service that you store someplace else in case your house or office burns down. - Robert Scoble

72 more comments

Dropbox. Three separate laptops and their Web service. - Stephen Pierzchala

Forget the external hdd in some other location, and just back up to that webspace you have that you never use, or maybe cloud-based backup. - Shivanand Velmurugan

For a local backup I run Time Machine on my iMac to an external drive. I also have a remote backup in the cloud using Backblaze. In addition I use DotMac and Mesh for sharing files among different computers. - Jonathon

Here's mine: The original copy, one stored using Time Machine, one copy on a network storage device (ReadyNAS) using RAID and one copy at an off-site backup location. Works well and I've got my backup scripts running constantly. EDIT: I also use Dropbox for my documents. - Eric D. Brown

#1 hard drive, #2 another hard drive, #3 old stuff goes to DVD - barl0w

Carbonite for local machines. - Todd Hoff

This looks like a good start for rsync to cloud. http://bit.ly/MBB0 - Shivanand Velmurugan

Around midnight I received a weird 'file access error', so I spent the first 90 minutes of 2009 running fsck on my MacBook Pro, then went to bed. First task on waking up? Time Machine (whole system) plus Mozy (home directory). Sadly, using the network support to back up with Time Machine to a disk on my Airport Extreme failed horribly when I tried it, so I'm down to Mozy (over the Internet) and Time Machine to a directly-connected USB drive. - James

Simple enough - internal drives backup nightly to external drives. The backup copy of my system drive is boot-able. I need to add the off-site factor to this setup. SuperDuper! is my backup software. - Tom Harrison

I agree the dropbox solution works well for me except for photos and video. In that case I have main HD, backup HD an HD I try to keep off site. If all else fails I have high res jpegs on flickr. - gfurry

computer, extra hard drive i keep in fire safe at home, WD Passport i keep with me most of the time. I use a self written program to run backups to all 3 places which i try to run it every few days to a week. cheaper then online services! - Russell Thomas

I'm using TimeMachine. I'm thinking about cloud solutions, but didn't find something cheap enough... - Simon Robic

Original, one copy on my Drobo via Time Machine and important (and not so huge stuff) on S3 via JungleDisk and on iDisk. Burning houses aren't as common over here as they are in the US. :) - Holger Eilhard

Each of our pcs has an external hd, an internal backup drive, and we have a backup server. We back up to the internal b/u drive, sync it to the external, then to the b/u server. It may sound like overkill, but we manage a TON of mission-critical data. Websites get backed up daily to the backup server and to off-site FTP. - Ron's Home And Hardware

I have a (1) a portable HD that I bring to work and store (2) there and also another (3) PC running Windows Server with a RAID5 setup. Tens of thousands of photos to lose would be a disaster. - Loukas Koufodontes

RAID 1 NAS, periodically copied to external USB hard drive. - Matt Mutz

Holger we have both fire and earthquakes so I decided no local storage for backups. It's all offsite now and I feel better for it. - Todd Hoff

Mirrored NAS 500GB each, plus portable HDD... cloud coming soon! Evaluating Amazon vs. Mozy - thoughts?? - Susan Beebe

I agree that it feels good to be backed up. I use duplicate external HD for my photos, and SmugVault (Amazon S3) for offsite. Uploading photos to SmugVault is a pain - it is very slow - but it works. Of course, if you forget to pay Amazon, you lose your backup. Backing up current pix to SmugVault is no problem, but I have a 1.5TB backlog. I tried DVD offsite, but they don't last very long. - Tom Kimmerer

Dell's DataSafe runs on my laptop, important files (like my photos, vidoes, and music) are manually archived to external drives on a reg basis, and Live Mesh keeps my documents synced between my computers and the cloud. Everything else is online. - Sarah Perez

todd: if I'd live in earthquake and fire country like, for example, say California, I'd also be worried about onsite backup. But - thank gd - the worst thing that could happen here is a flood, and even that's a stretch... - Holger Eilhard

I use Second Copy 7 for automated backups. It automatically sends backup copies to two other systems on the LAN and one off-site backup via FTP on a remote server. It also makes periodic copies to a potable drive that is sent to an off-site location. Frequently changed documents are copied every two hours, others are copied every day or once a week depending on importance. - Vishwas

Media is stored online. Important docs are on an external HD and back up Gmails. - Mona Nomura

1 weekly copy to external HD, Same again on another HD kept out of the house. Critical files changing more rapidly to Dropbox. Not perfect, but has worked for me. - Pete Marshall

Windows Home Server - two copies of each file. And i'm thnking of JungleDisk or somthing to Amazon S3. - Roberto Bonini

Drobo for storage, I back up important personal docs to S3/Jungledisk nightly. $5/month dirt cheap! I use an external disk for my 750+gigs of media (iTunes, photos (100+ gigs!) and my own videos, etc) that I take off site. I run time machine on my Macbook Pro at the office, take the macbook home, time machine drive stays here for offsite. - Lon Seidman

Time Machine to an external drive does well enough for me. Maybe I'm not paranoid enough, but I just don't see the value in an off-site backup for personal use. - David Wynn from fftogo

2 x Backup drives, alternate backups to each drive daily, and adrive.com for offsite backup (nice 50gig free account :o) ) along with DVD backup on adhoc basis - Carl Grint

Server to local using SyncBack SE, then Carbonite copies the local data off site. - Michael Krigsman

Virtually everyone who chimed in on this thread is a techie. Think for a moment about the typical consumer. There are no easy solutions. Larger hard drives make it easier to accumulate tons of docs, photos, music, and videos. Hard drives last a few years (and what data is there on reliability of drives that haven't spun up for years?). DVD-R and CD-R are probably only good for a few years (and of course are tiny relative to the data sizes we're talking about). Solid state still has a high cost per gigabyte. - Tinfoil 2.0

Online backup is useful, but will the company be around in 3 years? 5 years 10 years? What about the privacy of your documents? Break up your data into chunks and upload encrypted files? Also, consider how fragmented data is for many consumers... multiple computers, gaming consoles, mobile devices, etc. - Tinfoil 2.0

Mozy is in the cloud, backed by EMC, pretty simple to use (even for non-techies) and pretty cheap. Great support when you chat or call in. - Lee Herman

Keep in mind fire safes are designed to keep paper from combusting, not protect electronic gear from damage. Big difference. - stretta from twhirl

@Logical Extremes - your comments are definitely spot-on for Windows users. I think the Mac has a great built-in (and easy to use) solution. While Time Machine may not be configurable enough for us geeks, it's a real winner for trouble-free unattended backups. Very easy to swap disks too for taking them off site. - Lon Seidman

@Logical I see that a lot of non-techies are using external HDDs. They're pretty easy, but yeah, nothing lasts forever. - Sarah Perez

I've been using mozy.com for over a year now for pictures, personal files etc and it works well. I'm kind of a techie (a CTO @ ADP.COM), but, consider myself a consumer when it comes to my home stuff (has to be easy, wife doesn't have to think about it etc). I've recently started using Live Mesh to push files across all of my home devices as well which is great (esp. for one note,... more... - Richard Anderson

Logical: That's what Carbonite does. You can easily backup 100GB to them. David Friend, their CEO, told me he got the idea when a family member lost photos when laptop was stolen from a car. - Michael Krigsman

Every copy of data you put onto S3 is replicated (within and across data centers) so it's highly durable. It's where all my important data goes (through Jungledisk) and has been for a long time (disclaimer: I work there now, but was a user long before). Hard drives at home (a few TBs) are for things I look at every day and for sample libraries :) - Deepak Singh

Right, I know there are tons of components to an overall strategy out there, but for the masses, they're lucky if they have an automatic on-site backup like Time Machine. My point is that computers aren't like a file drawer or an appliance. Good backup today requires a good strategy and a combination of tools, and most consumers aren't up to it. - Tinfoil 2.0

The points raised by Logical Extremes are the same reasons I have not signed up with an online backup company. How do I know they'll still be here in 10 years, and how do I know I can trust them with my data? - Tom Harrison

Quite true @Logical Extremes--We all learn the importance of back-ups the same way: we suffer a data loss. Somethings I have backed up to DVD or another computer or "in the cloud" some projects live on in the "oral tradition" where I simply describe how great this thing is to someone else--an if it's lost--it's legend lives on...(silly)... - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

External hard drive is 1. Mozy is 2. Mesh.com for extra important stuff is 3. Skydrive for paranoia - Jeff (Team マクダジ )

The other issue that hasn't been mentioned is data obsolescence. Us techies can handle it if we plan for it, but as applications and data file formats get older, more and more files become unreadable for most folks. How many of you have old files that you don't have a reader app for anymore? I always encourage people to choose the simplest, most prevalent, and most open data format for a given application. ".txt" rules! - Tinfoil 2.0

And I hope that people rank highly the availability of simple, open format, file export capabilities, when choosing which services will house their data (backup, social, etc.). - Tinfoil 2.0

Re the trust issues with online backup, I think you have to go with a bigger player / name (like EMC owning mozy.com), that was my reasoning at least - Richard Anderson

Microsoft Mesh to sync across all machines, backup (using Syncbackup) of one primary to network attached storage, and Jungledisk to Amazon S2 as well for off-site + periodic checkpoint copies to external disks. I am a fan of backup software that stores the backup as individual files. - Ian D. Nock

Windows Vista Backup to 2 external drives at 2 locations + burning to DVDs. All long-term backups are regularly re-hashed and checked to make sure they can still be read. In addition, most of my backups contain a copy of an entire computer so all the programs are there. - Zian Choy

SuperDuper! plus selective JungleDisk for Mac. unison to server at school for laptop. SmugMug for photos. - Emil Sit

I'm beginning to think I should try online backup for offsite backups of my personal data. Has anyone used both BackBlaze and Mozy.com? How do they compare? Would anyone recommend another service at a similar price point? ($5/mo, unlimited) - Mike English

Roberto: Also look at Mozy Home -- It is also 5$/month unlimited. - Robert Miller

Different kind of workflow, also for @LogicalExtreme's non-techies: Keep an Outbox folder on every machine. Store pretty much every document you can there. Copy Outbox(es) to USB drive every week or so. Keep the USB drive in your car or on keychain. It's not a full-state backup, but 98% of computer state is not life-critical. Emergencies are rare and it takes less than a week to rebuild computer state. - Christopher Galtenberg

(Can also have VitalNonPrivate and VitalPrivate folders in Outbox - zip and email both to yourself, the latter with encryption -- that's your 'cloud backup') - Christopher Galtenberg

Just spent a few days sorting my backups out. Now have 1) machine image (Vista Ulitmate backup could use Acronis or Ghost) which will only be updated occassionally - on an external drive, 2) system image and incremental (updated monthly) on a protected local partition using Acronis 3) daily incremental backup of user data areas using Acronis on external drive and 4) daily copy of user data areas on an external server using Mozy - easy set up, good price, unlimited capacity. Can't be too careful! - Mark Warren

+1 Mark -- Good practices. - Robert Miller

I love my ReadyNas (http://www.readynas.com/) and have already failed over from a bad disk. Killer timing on this thread; getting ready to rsync to the cloud... - Jeff Malek

Currently Local system RAID 1....soon adding backup to NAS (also RAID1) & using an Offline backup service like Dropbox or other AWS hosted service. - Mark Krynsky

Carbonite. I just lost all data on my laptop a week ago. Restored my mission critical files immediately (after reinstalling Windows), then restored everything else over the next few days. There is no need to personally maintain three copies when you're using an online system with it's own redundancy such as Carbonite. - John Morley

Web-based backup -- Carbonite, Mozy or Jungledisk with Amazon S3 work nicely. I've shared John Morley's experience. - Sean McBride

I'm seeing Carbonite, Mozy and Jungledisk regularly mentioned... anyone care to chime in on why one versus the other? - Sean Katona

Sean Katona: I prefer Jungledisk with Amazon S3 to Carbonite and Mozy, because of price, user interface and reliability. You might want to try all three to judge for yourself. - Sean McBride

I used Jungledisk and switched to Carbonite because it backs up everything automatically as it changes and I don't have to worry about it at all. - Todd Hoff

I haven't tried Jungledisk or Mozy. Carbonite is great for me because it's seamless... you just don't ever have to worry about it. If it's not backing up properly it will tell you. If you have any files over 4gig that you want backed up though, you do have to manually tell Carbonite to keep those backed up or else they'll be skipped. - John Morley

I back up my important files on a back-up server then I back-up the back-up twice on tapes: One copy in my office, the other in my wife's office. - Charles Nadeau

I've found backing up to be far less important than it used to be - almost everything I have is in the cloud. Code is in version control hosted offsite and backed up, documents are in google docs, email's in gmail, photos are in flickr, not much else left to back up. - Parand

I've implemented a tiered system with numerous local snapshots (Time Machine, in my case), and automatic remote sync (Jungledisk). Details and overall considerations for any backup strategy here: http://tr.im/2v7b - Phil

IDrive is one of the better solutions. It is faster for backups and restores compared to other services, and easy to use. But nothing beats a local drive based backup. Online Backup services are simply too slow. - Kitu Gidwani

Some people might find Adam Tow's strategy interesting: http://www.tow.com/2008... - Joe Perrin

Someone needs to come up with software that lets you backup to a USB drive stored at your friend's house. You backup to the drive, take it to his house and plug it in, then do incrementals over the web. Encrypt everything. You do the same for him. - Dom

I just back up things to an external hard drive. And I refuse to back up to the cloud as I can't trust something that isn't under my control. - Mathew™ aka Youngblood

I use Acronis to back up an image to my FreeBSD box with ZFS. (Sorry Scoble, they're western digital drives :). Then, I also use rsync.net (lots of space for cheap), and - you guessed it - rsync the important files (documents, pictures, etc) to the cloud. - David Andrzejewski

I've been using Mozy and have recently been trying Syncplicity [http://www.syncplicity.com]. I don't know if I can justify the $10/mo for 50GB, though. The benefit to Syncplicity for me is that it's near real-time sync with unlimited computers. - Cory

Locally I have a RAID5 array on a dedicated server, otherwise Backblaze/DropBox. - Michael Laccetti

Robert - THANKS! I was one of the lucky 20 winners of the Jungle Disk software by @Mosso - wow, this is awesome and works seamlessly with Amazon s3 online "cloud" data storage services. Finally, I have offsite, encrypted backups!! Thanks again! Keep getting FFers cool promos like this! :) - Susan Beebe

Robert Scoble

Here are the reasons people are giving me why friendfeed sucks:

December 30, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Mitchell Tsai, santiromero, Daniel Krech and 68 other people liked this

1. Tim O'Reilly said that he liked the news aggregation, but gets too distracted by the comments and likes. You can't hide those. - Robert Scoble

67 more comments

2. Ross Mayfield said he gets overwhelmed. I figured out that friend-of-a-friend feature is bringing way too much into his view. If he follows just one person, me, he sees hundreds of items every week. - Robert Scoble

Too much Gmail thinking in FF. They vastly improved e individual utility, but lost the ability to scale beyond a single use case - ming yeow

3. Other people tell me that they don't know how to use it, the UI has too many choices. On further pulling what they really wanted was the "best of day" feature but it is hard to find and not very useful unless you've been very careful on following people. - Robert Scoble

I find way more things to like about FF than I do with Twitter. - Jeff P. Henderson

4. Other people tell me that they want more help in figuring out who people are before they follow them. They have a point. I just visited some people's pages and I have no idea who they are, or what kinds of things they are passionate about. - Robert Scoble

I like it but I don't use it as much because I get overwhelmed by noise friend-of-a-friend introduces a lot of people that just don't fit in with what I want to see. I don't think I would care if I was seeing a lot of relevant information to me. - Jimminy IS Everybody

If I could figure out how to feed Twitter's @replies into FF I'd be all about it. - LA Snark

5. Other people tell me they want to do just see items that have lots of likes. I don't know how to do that for them. - Robert Scoble

Twitter has first mover advantage. I have too many relationships in Twitter that are not on FriendFeed. No easy way for me to sync Twitter followed/followers with FriendFeed and use it as a Twitter client. Then I'd like clean way to dedupe the Twitter stream out of FriendFeed to see the special stuff in FriendFeed. Its not enough to just hide Tweets without likes/comments. - Elliott Ng

It isn't about if it sucks or not, it just isn't for everyone, just like twitter. Twitter is simpler, I can use twitterific on my mac & iPhone. Actually, this does suck. Everytime I hit return to try and add a space, it posts the comment. Beyond 140 characters, you do need white space to be able to read text on a computer screen. - Steve Rhodes

I like FF because it is configurable. You can see as much or as little as you want and you have full control (or almost full control). The other major plus with FF is that it is threaded so you can have actual conversations. - Jeff P. Henderson

6. Other people tell me they want to see a strict reverse chronological view and that I can't figure out how to do that for them either. - Robert Scoble

If I had to stack rank, this would be my #1 tool. Ahead of Twitter, Facebook, strands, and anything else similar - Jeff (Team マクダジ )

7. Ross Mayfield wanted an easy "share this item on my blog" feature. I know how to do that (use the "More" menu, copy the permalink, etc) but that's too geeky and not as nice as Facebook's "share" feature. - Robert Scoble

7. I like how twitter reminds me of birds: cheep cheep - sofarsoShawn ~presque...

Twitter, like email and Google reader, has a nice "author"/"headline" format that is easy to scan...FriendFeed visually makes you work harder to extract meaning from the stream. - Elliott Ng

Fascinating. I can be as negative as or more than anyone else, but I don't associate FF with sucking. - MiniMage

ming: there are lots of people who tell me they try friendfeed and don't get the point of it and leave. If friendfeed solves some of these pain points in 2009 it will make evangelism of the service a lot easier. - Robert Scoble

Format of the FriendFeed stream is not efficient...seems like a lot of scrolling to get infomation...less easy to scan, show/hide, tag, etc. than Google Reader. - Elliott Ng

Not everyone is going to get every thing. I suppose, though, that it's significant when it's LOTS of people. - MiniMage

Is the learning curve for the UI and information flow really overwhelming for the tech-savvy group it's aimed at? I doubt it. That said it's not a perfect product, and I can see how some people may want their aggregation without a social media aspect. - Mo Kargas

Ooh, I like the idea of a view with a strict reverse chronological order. - Eric Florenzano

MiniMage: I didn't say that I thought it sucks, but this is the feedback I'm getting as I show it to others and talk to other people about their experiences. I've heard this feedback enough now to know that these are the roadblocks to adoption. - Robert Scoble

I think #4 has merit. You can somewhat tell what people like by what they talk about and what content they share on various services, but I think FF could allow for a quick "About Me" somewhere on the profile so people would know who you are, where you're from, and what your interests are (other than the internet). - Mark Frost

FF has great potential for the aggregator but needs a simple grid of feeds in and feeds out for everything. That way I could choose where to make updates and control the flows. Twitter is feeding more than one place for me. I could use FF in some of the same ways as TweetDeck but only if I could make it work bi-directionally with Twitter and as needed with other services. - Lee Herman

Bottom line: if I choose to live inside of Twitter where my relationships are, and I have to go into Google Reader to check feeds, FriendFeed just doesn't add enough incrementally especially since I have my Reader set up with important feeds and it doesn't replace the need to go check Twitter anyway. - Elliott Ng

I pretty much ignored Friend Feed until I saw you mention the live feed a few days ago. Now I'm hooked. Darn you Scoble! Darn you to heck I say! :P - MarkCarras

#8: clients like Tweetdeck are non existent. Same for iPhone apps. - Robert Scoble

I *really* dont like the Friend of Friend feature - Sam Houston

Sam: you know you can turn it off, right? - Robert Scoble

Recall I adopted FriendFeed before you. :) Still like the aggregated feed for myself but haven't become a Kung Fu Master of FriendFeed to make it really work for me. Maybe completely hiding Twitter, setting up more groups, hiding more media types, and adding more people, would make it work for me. - Elliott Ng

So really, most of the complaints could be resolved if some of the folks making those neat Twitter applications made one for Friendfeed or if FF implemented these on their own. Sounds like a great 2009 for FF either way:-) - Brandon Mendelson

This is a feature recommendation list for the FF team. - Gadiel Rivera

scoble: I am just not sure if the world needs friendfeed. I am a big fan of reducing noise as the most direct form of value add (think google), aggregating and then recommending seems a little twisted. Hope I am making sense - ming yeow

Until recently I had hard time understanding how to make good use of FF. It was too noisy and difficult to use as compared to Twitter. However, after seeing your video on 20 reasons for using FF on FastCompany, I am now able to understand it a lot better and making good use of it. Since seeing that video, I have not been able to stop using Twitter and FF. Thanks Robert for producing that awesome overview video. FF team should have created that a long time back. - Amar Shah

So, basically, it doesn't suck. They just don't know how to use it. Everybody is not built to use everything. None of these points raised have much substance to me. - Rahsheen?

ming: the world might not need friendfeed but I sure do. Also, it's really the only competitor to facebook out there and facebook needs more competition. - Robert Scoble

FF grew on me - it's organization is a bit off-putting for me but I've managed to wrap my oddly mapped out logic around it. It does help drown out the noise of Twitter. - Renee Hendricks

FF is simply confusing. Not a friendly UI at all. Don't Make Me Think says Steve Krug. FF is making me think and I just don't have the patience for it. - Bora Celik

Robert, I guess my problem is..is that I can't find that option :P I'll go look now :) - Sam Houston

Friendfeed has been a fairly fluid concept since I started using it, and the kinds of suggestions you're hearing from Ross and Tim get addressed and fixed all the time. The question is, even if the Friendfeed crew could get every nuance tuned to exactly the specifications people are giving you, would they actually come around and use it, or would there just be another excuse? Sure, it's not perfect, but it's a work in progress -- and they progress fast around here. - Pete D

I can't stand Facebook. Totally different though. One is all about time waste pokes, super pokes, and other useless crap and Friend Feed is more about networking and sharing actual content and thoughts. Friend Feed is about actual communication. - MarkCarras

Sam: click hide on an item twice. That will bring up the hide options dialog where you can select turning off friend of a friend. By the way, even if you turn off all that stuff you'll still be able to see those items at the bottom of the page. - Robert Scoble

Pete: as friendfeed gets better it pulls more people in. Fixing roadblocks to evangelizing a product DOES pull more people into using it. - Robert Scoble

Lets not forget there is no easy way to follow conversations that you did not originate, I should have the option of being notified when someone else comments on a thread I posted on. FriendFeed is awesome though - Kelly Johns

Mark: I have 5,000 people on facebook and I never get my time wasted through poking or other useless crap. The news feed there is quite good and the social graph is way more advanced than friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

Well, maybe I am missing somethings, but everything I have seen at Facebook just bugs me. Maybe I should look at yours and see what I am missing. - MarkCarras

To me, FriendFeed isn't about being a social graph. It's first and foremost about aggregating items I publish irrespective of the source service. The ability to subscribe to a person is more comparable to subscribing to a news feed as opposed adding a friend on Facebook. In terms of subscriptions, FF is basically Google Reader with a proper commenting system. - trextor

Bora, I found Facebook's UI more confusing than Friendfeed's. The difference for me is the more I use and discover the nuances of FF the more I like it, where as Facebook has flat-line. Granted, a component that's hard to factor out (for me anyway) is FB is people-I've-known centric and FF is people-I'm-discovering oriented + grappling with ideas. - Micah

Contrary to Robert's opinion, I hope FF developers don't start thinking that they need to compete with Facebook. Subscribers != Friends. It's that simple. If anything, they're competing with RSS readers. For what it's worth, many of these same issues also plague RSS readers. - trextor

FF does have an iphone app coming any day now (Friendly). And with some more options with the IM feature (like activating it when you comment on a post like this so then it notifies you when a response is made) then it could become even more conversational. I view this as more professional and higher IQ than Facebook personally. - Amani

I'm with you on that Trextor. Friend Feed is more like RSS style of social networking. Facebook is not. Facebook just doesn't have a focus of info like Friend Feed. - MarkCarras

I have to be honest that I don't use Friendfeed as much as I probably should. They have so much automated features that I don't even bother to login in weeks. - Vlad Zabblotskyy

57 comments and 29 likes in 48 minutes. Interesting! - Robert Scoble

I feel as if Robert is doing an evil (not really) little experiment with us and showing someone else to prove some point ...LOL. - Amani

Amani: I just noted that because it seemed to have touched a nerve. Got a lot of feedback very quickly. - Robert Scoble

Robert, many of those are very valid points and it's easy to see why a new user can get overwhelmed. I know that Brett keeps talking about making the service easier and friendlier for new users. I think they should perhaps offer a 'Lite' version for new users that hides a large number of features which can later be accessed by enabling the 'Advanced' features. Just a thought. - Mark Krynsky

It took me 5 minutes just to figure out where my post was in this huge list of comments! Amani is right, FF will become way more conversational when it notifies you on additional comments on posts like this. Facebook is good at doing this when you comment on wall posts. - Kelly Johns

The 'Send an IM when someone comments on my posts' feature has probably been my favorite of the year as it keeps me very engaged with people that comment on my items. - Mark Krynsky

The 'date of post order' and some sort of basic profile are my 2 highest requested features for FriendFeed. - Kol Tregaskes

Very useful list. - Dave Winer

My biggest problem is that all my real world friends are just now getting onto facebook. a few are moving to twitter finally. it will be a year or more before my network migrates to friendfeed. you have to go where the people are! unless of course you could define a network on one platform and use the features of another platform to view/interact with that network. too much 'friend adding' duplication now. i wish you could treat these tools as readers rather than network definers. - Jeff DiStanlo

UI has too much clutter. Customization support is needed. Post aggregation could use custom filters, - anand

I consider FF the "heavy duty conversationalist". If I want wih a few folks I know for a little convo, FB is great. If I want a little convo with more folks I know a little less and make it public, Twitter is great. FF is about longer, tied-in conversations, holistic. FF needs a mobile client that works WELL with more phones than just the high-end ones else it will be in nichedom for a while." - Patrick Moorhead

It mostly boils down to information overload. Friendfeed needs to invest substantial resources and effort in dealing with that problem before it can appeal to the masses. Friendfeeding is an activity for a small elite at this stage -- for people who can easily process huge torrents of text. - Sean McBride

Robert, re: #8: clients that work with FF include Twhirl and PeopleBrowsr. - Will King

I'm surprised there's not more of an outcry to be able to dynamically filter services in Friend list/feeds (home, list1, list2, etc.). It'd be a lot easy for me to scan these if I can a) filter-out 1 to many services (eg, don't display twitter, flickr, rss on list1) and b) filter-in 1 to many services (eg, display only twitter, only twitter and plurk, etc). - Matt Albiniak

On FF vs FB: I think FB may be a competitor for FF ("ok, I can do this in Facebook" says the mainstream user) but FF is not a competitor to FB ("Facebook is much more fun", says the mainstream user) due to FB's app aggregation. - santiromero

Robert Scoble

Milan caught me on FriendFeed again! - http://www.flickr.com/photos...

December 25, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

rajeswar, Justin Levy, Lu Tao and 21 other people liked this

"Oh, dad!" this face is saying as he caught me on FriendFeed again during Christmas gift opening. "You're so busted, Mike Arrington is going to give you hell." - Robert Scoble from Bookmarklet

11 more comments

Cutie!! - Daynah

Other fun photos of Milan are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Robert Scoble

Wow cute and growing up fast! - Joanmarie

Seems like OK FriendFeed use since there's no tech content! - Lee Herman

Sweet picture! Merry Christmas Robert :) - Susan Beebe

@Robert mybe you need to talk to your buddies at FrienFeed and have them write you a special program - FamilyFeed - Michael VanDervort

lol.. good looker eh...take after mom then ;o) (todays denting done!) ;o) - Rob Sellen :o)

that look is priceless! - Mike Hussein Cohen

Rob, oh, yes. His mom's looks for sure! He is going to be trouble, can't you just see it? - Robert Scoble

what a sweet little man he is... - mike "glemak" dunn

if he takes after dad...yeah. good looking.trouble...;o) - Rob Sellen :o)

it's done - i am naming one of my (future) kids Milan too...what an awesome name and he's got the cheeky smile to go with it :) - Zee.

Veronica

The reason I don't use Twitter apps 95% of the time is because I get the "exceeded limit" problems. API issue? Just me? Fix plz?!

December 22, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

AJ Batac, Louis Gray, Susan Beebe and 3 other people liked this

I get the same message, too. It really takes the fun out of the apps! - Mattie Kenny

6 more comments

@Mattie you running more then one twitter app at a time? if so that will cause it. - Fee501st

yeah, i didn't know it was 100 requests for ALL apps. running more apps causes more requests, and exceeded rate. - Veronica

Yea, I had no idea that it also applied to FF, my twitter badge on my site, etc., Interesting. - Mattie Kenny

That could be a business plan, Charge for more API requests an hour, lol - Fee501st

Could be an interesting model to use, but it would have to be a component of a much larger model. I'm not sure how many of us really *need* to buy more API requests. - Mattie Kenny

Twitter limits API calls. Tweetdeck manages its API load well & lets you tune usage. Haven't used other clients for a while. - Lee Herman

It's a huge pain in the neck for developers - Jesse Stay

Lee Herman

Twitter / wellwishes - http://twitter.com/wellwishes

December 19, 2008 from tipjoy - Comment - Like - Share

tipped $2.00 - Lee Herman

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