Dave Saunders (madmain) - Likes

It's all part of their plan for total world domination :) - Jim Connolly

Jim, LOL. - Jigar Mehta

i'm going to go out on a limb and bring up this old chest nut...the users have always been there, growing steadily by the day :) - Zee.

The Like feature in Reader, though a small gesture, opens a big window to more of a social RSS experience. Tiny software changes can have huge cultural effects. - phil baumann

Yep... and it appears to be working! - Susan Beebe from iPhone

Zee: not really true. I've been on Google Reader for years and was #1 user for quite a while. In the past week a TON of new people have joined. - Robert Scoble

Why? - Susan Beebe from iPhone

Susan: because of the new sharing and liking and searching features. New features get PR. PR gets people to try something new. - Robert Scoble

Good point! The username feature got me back in gReader this week - Susan Beebe from iPhone

Wonder how much of it is just 'us' - Geeks feeding the same information around different sites / apps? - Jim Connolly

Jim: I don't recognize most of the names of people who've followed me in the past week. So, it might be geeks, but based on the content they are picking I'd say it's going a bit more mainstream than that. Certainly they aren't the same usual folks who I usually see. For instance, on Dopplr about half of the people who follow me there are people I've actually met face to face. In Google Reader, this week's new bunch is closer to 1%. - Robert Scoble

Robert: That would be VERY interesting! - Jim Connolly

Many geeks, but I think there's plenty of other kinds of peeps. Some in mine don't appear to be geeks. - phil baumann

Q: If I Like your Like, do you see that Like back in your feed? << - phil baumann

Phil: What do geeks look like? :-) (Visions in my mind of thye cast from Big Bang Theory) - Jim Connolly

All geeks are hot :) - phil baumann

Not too sure about that! - Susan Beebe from iPhone

Since we're on the topic, do we wanna share each other feeds here? http://www.google.com/reader... - phil baumann

phil: sure, mine is http://www.google.com/reader... - Robert Scoble

mine is: http://www.google.com/reader... - Susan Beebe from iPhone

Just started using it - love it! - BEX

I wonder if Google's giving us a glimpse of where Wave is going. Adding messaging into reader could kick it even farther into the social space. But then that would be sorta FFish I guess. - phil baumann

The "like" move was really smart. Based on one week of stats, a lot more people are likely to like a feature (compare to shared and shared with notes). Regarding search + follow, it is a great step forward compared to the 2 way handshake which was in place. Future will tell if people want to create yet another graph or use friendfeed + twitter. If I had to guess, I would say that friendfeed is the best solution. - Edwin Khodabakchian

phil: except FriendFeed is 1000x faster than Google Reader. The engineering team there really doesn't understand how to do fast stuff like the FriendFeed team does. - Robert Scoble

robert - the FF team is amazing. period. - phil baumann

Wow, Leo Laporte is fuming about the human rights problems he saw in China. More over at live.twit.tv - Mark

"China is a totalitarian state and like all totalitarian states they need to control the flow of information" - Leo Laporte - Mark

Mark: and this is new? I saw the same thing 10 years ago when I visited China. - Robert Scoble

Rebecca McKinnon is doing the best job of covering China. She's at http://friendfeed.com/rebecca... (worked as a journalist there for many years and cofounded Global Voices Online). - Robert Scoble

Robert: The ff team is indeed amazing. But the Google Reader team is also very good: GR has a clean internal structure, awesome APIs and keeps shipping which for a 2-3 year old product is a tribute to the quality of the engineering. The reason why I think friendfeed will win is not engineering or realtime. It is because as a user I do not want to have a sharing tool per application.... more... - Edwin Khodabakchian

yeah I guess - Mark

China blocked Friendfeed he says too :( - Mark

Edwin: the Google Reader team might be good if you are an average user. But on my account it is ssssllllooooowwwww. FriendFeed, however, with 10x as many people interacting with me is super fast. But I agree with your overall thesis. - Robert Scoble

He says the people of china dont seem to care that they live in a totalitarian state with limited freedom and censorship etc - Mark

The slow factor is due to the fact that it tracks "mark as read" which changes the nature of the back end beast. Which as you point out can add a 1-2s per query if you have 500+ feeds. - Edwin Khodabakchian

Edwin: most of the slowness I'm seeing is in adding new friends to Google Reader. Horridly slow. - Robert Scoble

Good point. This is because even if it allows asymmetric follow, the Google Reader platform was not designed for more than 500-1000 following (sources and friends included). This is one more reason why friendfeed is a better sharing and conversation platform - Edwin Khodabakchian

I am back using Chrome and Reader after a stint with Firefox and Feedly. Part of the reason for coming back was the new sharing capabilities. I am having some problems getting my follows to actually stick, but I think that the follow feature will allow me to subscribe to less feeds and more people and make better use of my time. - Sean Brady

Leo Laporte: "my colleagues in the tech world are more concerned with protecting their sources and NDA's then getting the truth out" - Mark

Edwin: this is a common problem at Google. My Google Latitude account crashes with 350 friends because they didn't plan on anyone having more than 100 friends. Lame. Until they fix this attitude they won't be seen as best of breed in social networking. - Robert Scoble

Sean: the 2.0a.012 feedly patch we pushed out last night includes support for like, new profile and the new sharing capabilities. - Edwin Khodabakchian

Mark: I wish Leo would start up a chat for this stuff here on FriendFeed. I hate IRC. - Robert Scoble

I am not hearing him on the mic are you? And I agree. - Robert Burgin

re: scoble, edwin ; i'm sure google [earth] has their own beacon logfiles for this, therefore it's not really 'lame' from *their* side , j/k ; in other words, they didn't care about the front end customers, just about themselves and *their* customers, which should be real estate, bioFarma and privatized defense contractors ; http://friendfeed.com/search... - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

Robert: agreed. I do not think that Google can come back to in the social networking game unless they do a major acquisition. But they have a great play in the identity, profile, single sign-on field. - Edwin Khodabakchian

Edwin: and their business listings are great, overall. They could use those to get back into the game. - Robert Scoble

right now i think twitter might buy twitpic pretty soon. Google will buy both twitter and friendfeed by next year , since both are run by former employees anyway ; - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

I think that the facebook vs. twitter vs. myspace vs. friendfeed battle is going to be interesting to watch. Friendfeed is definitely behind but they have such a better technology. They just need to find a couple beach heads and a few more Scoble's for something interesting to happen. - Edwin Khodabakchian

I thought MySpace was dead toast fish. - Bill Sodeman

Edwin: FriendFeed needs to do a few things to get to the next level: 1. Give us the ability to brand ourselves. Themes are cool, but we need them on rooms and on our own accounts. 2. We need better tools on search to get rid of duplicates. I'm getting a lot of duplicates from rooms, for instance, and there's no way to get rid of them even though they are quite consistent. 3. We need... more... - Robert Scoble

Robert: I know. What friendfeed really needs is to bootstrap an twitter like eco-system of apps: a lot of the issues you are highlighting are real and could be easily addressed by different clients offering different experiences. We have been seriously thinking about being one of those client applications. I am wondering what is the ingredient to make the ecosystem a reality. Any thoughts on that? - Edwin Khodabakchian

the satellite electronic defense league around EADS, Thames UK, SES Dutch Skies and others don't allow Microsoft/Facebook any longer to climb higher in the power league, coz he did his stuff in the 90s with Iridium. It's more than embarrassing , that DEMS still don't know that he was in league with the Bin Ladin Group and so was the current U.S. Intelligence Head in charge , Dennis Blair [DNI ; also in charge of CIA and FBI since 2004] http://www.muckety.com/Dennis-... - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

Thanks for the good conversation. Back to work now! - Edwin Khodabakchian

Edwin: FriendFeed also needs a mobile strategy beyond hoping the world gets iPhones. Start bootstrapping developers there. I wish Friendfeed had a search service that let me search all of Facebook and all of Twitter. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I gather Friendfeed works good on the iphone? I really need help Robert, I mean, seriously, I cannot decide which smart phone to get. I don't want to buy an apple just to be cool if its not the best. Wikipedia has a huge list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Mark

But developers seem to move toward platforms that have a few things: 1. Users. 2. A decent chance of monetizing. 3. That do something unique. 4. That are open and/or resharable 5. Simple and consistent. If FriendFeed can do those things with an API it would be most impressive. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Mark: I love my iPhone but you have to come to your own decision there. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

waz this new Verizon wifi IPhone-Compaq Notebook about? big PR campaign on weekend ; - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

I learned from this thread that some Google products actually have scalability problems. Amazing. Their experience with scaling stuff doesn't perpetuate through the whole company it seems. I mean, I think the right attitude for Google would be to design for a million feeds and a million friends. - Meryn Stol

Mark: that list is comprehensive, but some of the phones on there are old - Kashif Khan

google *has* billion of feeds. After all, G Earth/Lockheed/InQTel/FCS executed main parts of 9/11, even if conspiracy smashers deny all this.... - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

...and of course Google is also in bed with Transnational Fascists around Obama: http://friendfeed.com/search... ; http://ff.im/3RyHf - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

ewing2001: are you an automated spam bot? - Edwin Khodabakchian

nope i'm around since 1993 and can type and research fast ; - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

i'm also a comedian coz politics suk ; http://www.youtube.com/watch... - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

robert: good list. I think that it would also help them if they made "developers" a priority and were being vocal about it (one thing twitter did/does well). Enjoy the rest of the week end!! - Edwin Khodabakchian

Ewing: you are very close to getting blocked for taking my threads off topic. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

i was made invisible by ff during the davos economy forum, therefore i'm sure Edwin is one of the ignorants, which define, what "spam" is as well.goodbye and over and best to Scoble ; - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

what an odd person - Mark

To Robert's points re:branding & filtering issues on FriendFeed, I would add the need for a "Subscribe feed to FF" bookmarklet as described here: http://friendfeed.com/alexsch... - Alex Schleber

I wish they would rename the "like" features on FF and elsewhere, can't think of an appropriate word. - Mark

Robert, just so you know, I was following your shared Items as a standard feed for months. When Reader made their changes, I showed up on your lists. My behavior didn't change, though. - Alex Scrivener

I just dumped Newsgator after many years of use because it just kept using up too much memory on my Blackberry. I tried out Google Reader, and found it was slightly better. I won't go back. - Amac

Actually, I suspect that almost all of the people you think have joined have actually been using it for a while - the social stuff just makes them more visible. - Ian Betteridge

Oh, and my GReader feed is at http://www.google.com/reader... - Ian Betteridge

Dave Saunders (madmain) › Likes