"Paul Buchheit
Co-founder // FriendFeed
Software designer Paul Buchheit was Google employee No. 23 and the creator of both Gmail, the company's popular email service, and the first prototype of AdSense, its highly profitable online-ad program. But perhaps his biggest contribution was coining the phrase "Don't be evil," which expresses to the world how the search giant intends to conduct business." - Karen Padham Taylor
"EVIL SLAYER Software designer Paul Buchheit was Google employee No. 23 (think of the stock options!)" - bob
I like how they photographed everyone in their normal work clothes. =) (btw—not too shabby of a group to be bunched together with...) - Dan Hsiao
I don't understand, Dan. Who wasn't in their normal work clothes? - Kevin Fox
No one as far as I could tell. They're all in their normal work clothes, right? - Dan Hsiao
I particularly liked Paul's choice of shoes. It was an uncharacteristically girly moment when I saw the angel costume and my first thought was not "I can't believe I went to college with Paul and don't have any pictures more silly than ones published in magazines" but "What shoes would possibly go with that outfit?". - Clare Dibble
Wow. Paul, what did they pay you to slum with all of those other slackers? - Sacca
Wow, congratulations - that is a pretty amazing group of people to be in a story with!! - Jennie Lin
Murdoch looks very old. Paul looks very ... ugh ... white?! :) - Charlie Anzman
@charlie: what's the matter with "very white"? - April Buchheit
April - Should have seen that coming!! :) Strictly a reference to the photo hue ... Nothing more, nothing less. Is that why I can access FF?? .... JK :) Have fun! Charlie - Charlie Anzman
"This is how pollination works. It’s the definition of word of mouth marketing. You want people to take something from your community and jam it into their communities. You want this to happen again and again, constantly bouncing a brand or idea from community to community virally and organically. Fragmentation is good in this regard. However it requires giving up control.
This idea that conversations have to happen in your ecosystem or you will lose page views is silly. You should experience an increase in page views from users unaware of your brand, idea or content in the first place. You’ve made new connections to new markets. Tap it! Don’t bitch about it!" - Paul Buchheit
Funny how old habits die hard. Many people building websites are still thinking the road to success is to keep people on your site for as long as possible. It's not only comments, it's also those funny bars that hang out over external sites or splitting a top 10 list over 10 pages.... - Jason Kaneshiro
/like Jason's comment. Page views, total time on a site... total comments, of course I count them, but it's not all that important. - Louis Gray
I would like to see comments become a real focus of data portability both for publishers and for the individual "contributing" their opinion... I feel like the ownership of someone's thoughts (a "comment") belong solely to that someone. I like that different services have found ways to isolate niche conversations on some posts that are un-commentable (think gawker policy, WSJ, etc.)... empower users with the right to their opinion but empower publishers with the right to air that opinion if they want. - Matt Shaulis
I think if users want to comment in FriendFeed to their friends, those comments should only be published more widely if those users want them to be. - Chris White
@chris white : I could see that sentiment going a lot further for a service that supported a "private" commenting feature, as it is all these comments are public and syndicated globally. The comment is left publicly, and I think it's okay to display it wherever it may be relevant... and blog authors do such a great job at bringing us all this wonderful content, many of them just want a simpler way to stay on top of the vibes their content is creating, and share those vibes, i think that's understandable. - Matt Shaulis
Well, FriendFeed comments become conversations, and I would prefer to limit my conversations to a relatively contained group. I am hesitant to participate in what may turn into the kind of low brow, flame war style back-and-forth that occurs on more widely accessed comment boards. I also have the ability on FriendFeed to edit/delete my comments if I decide to retract something. If I don't have the ability to control my posts/comments, I would probably participate much less. - Chris White
ff does support private feeds, and the comments on them are therefore private. You could imagine this being made more flexible in all sorts of ways. Having private comments might work quite well, if comments were nested, for example. - j1m
Ever since conversations were implemented, I have made the assumption that they are public. Frankly, the only drawback about having conversations about an artifact away from the original artifact is that the original writer may not know about it. However, search, tracking of entry paths, etc. help alleviate this problem. The only time that I ran into a problem is when people were coming to my blog from a password-protected site; I had no idea what was being said behind the wall. - Ontario Emperor
Bloggers may have a different opinion on this issue than non-bloggers. BTW, if I make my feed private, will everyone see this comment or just people on my friend list? And if only my friends see it, won't that make conversations strange with some parts visible and others hidden? - Chris White
Chris, comments on public feeds are public, and comments on private feeds are private. - Paul Buchheit
I've been working on putting RSSMeme's Disqus comments inside Google Reader: http://tinyurl.com/2k2ex9 - not a complete destination-discussion, but I think it's a good start. - Paul Arterburn