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How to tell if you are a geek:

August 30 from email - Comment - Like - Share

quik, Captain Jack, noemigio and 146 other people liked this

Tonight I was faced with this scene at a party in Indianapolis for Monster Energy drink and I figure it is a good way to tell if you are a geek. If you first impulse is to ask the girls for help with your Ubuntu install, you are probably a geek. If you start wondering about what cool iPhone apps they use, you are probably a geek. If you want to ask them where the best places to find wifi in Paris are, you are probably a geek. If you want to invite them to a Facebook party you are probably a geek. If you ask them what they think of Android you are probably a geek. - Robert Scoble from email

108 more comments

به به , چشم مریم خانم روشن - Mil∂d

@scobleizer you follow the scobleizer on here? - Prolific Programmer from IM

By the way, I am a geek. :-) - Robert Scoble from iPhone

If you ignore them entirely and check out what's playing on the media player in the background, you're probably a geek. - Akiva Moskovitz

If you can't spell "Ubuntu" do you get your geek cred's revoked? - Joel Bennett

If your first impulse is to correct @scobleizer on his spelling of Ubuntu in his post . . . you're a geek. - Michael Owens

So did you have wild sex with them? - Dave Winer

geek ---> - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

slut :) - Jeunelle Foster

Well Robert, what did they answer to all these questions? <--- Geek. - Bettina Tizzy

if you dont care, for once, what scoble has to say, and are simply wondering where to find these girls...what are you? - Zachary Adam Cohen

sluts* - Michael Owens

If you know for a fact the girls don't care at all about you and are only there as paid advertisements, AND you still don't care and want to gawk and hang out and get photos with them anyway...you might be a geek. - Josh Haley

Scoble is a womanizer hahahaha - Jeunelle Foster

Damn, Josh, why not just go ahead and win the Internet for yourself, why don't you. - Akiva Moskovitz

It might be a new ad for s3. - Trey Ratcliff

Thank you, sir. - Josh Haley

Dave: I am talking with you so what do you think? :-) - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Dave + Scoble: That's a yes. - Michael Owens

Zachary: they are in downtown Indy. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

If you ask them their thoughts on Faccebook acquiring FriendFeed, you're a geek. - imabonehead

I wonder if Scoble's pickup line is "Hi, Who Are You?" - Bastard Operator From FF

What the.. Why bother blogging this crap when you could actually be striking up riveting conversation.. - Pogmohoin

Imabonehead: definitely! - Robert Scoble from iPhone

on my way, just gonna fire up my get and break out the Nair for Men - Zachary Adam Cohen from email

oh btw sluts* - Pogmohoin

"Hi, I'm Robert Scoble, who are you?" - Prolific Programmer from IM

You guys are a bunch of pathetic losers. Robert did you ask them what their astrological sign was? and if you did you are a geek who's desperate :) - Jeunelle Foster

If you immediately turn to your iPhone and write about it on FriendFeed you are a geek - Jesse Stay

I'm pretty sure I am still a geek, but there is no way any of those questions come to mind when I see this picture. And I think if those questions come to anyone's mind here, it might be time for geek-rehab. - Bill Grant

Pogmohin: I talked with them for a while. Nice people but didn't know what Android was so I moved on. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

hahahaha - Jeunelle Foster

This post is just a cover story for why does Robert have this picture, anyway? - Jason Wehmhoener

So is "What do you think of Android?" the new Turning test? - Micah Wittman

thinking you can pick up said girls by telling them you wrote an iphone app and expecting them to get excited about it then you're a geek. - evablue

Yeah.. I am from FHM mag.. Want to make the big time baby.. Now can the girl at the rear just reach around to the one at the front more...click .. front page Roberts Screen Saver.. - Pogmohoin

Damn. Best photo you've ever taken! - Mike Flynn

Me: confronted with this scene, I'm a slut first, then a geek. ;) (Mike: hella observant!) - Dennis Jernberg

You could also be gay, or female, but that would be in a non-geek-centric universe, so I could be wrong. ;) - Lisa Norman

I have a feeling this is going to show up in the daily "Best Of Your Friendfeed" for anyone subscribed to Scoble. - Michael Owens

Michael: You're right! This one wins the whole day. ;) - Dennis Jernberg

Also, there is an iPod in the background -- clearly these are Apple Fan-girls. - Bill Grant

"Android? Oh, haven't met him yet. Is he still at the party?" *leaves room* - Micah Wittman

What were we talking about again? - Derrich

Bill: Sure enough, iPod, docked. - Dennis Jernberg

The girl at the right said her name was Ashley. Actually she said she was "Smashley." love that. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Ashley owes me money and I better not run into her or her face would be smashley - Jeunelle Foster

Bill: yup. I picked up on the iPod very quickly at the party. I am hoping Ashley sends me her play list! - Robert Scoble from iPhone

@Micah -- Me: "No, that's Mandroid. He stayed home. Wasn't cool enough. Android is...(way short explanation)" - Dennis Jernberg

If you take a picture of three beautiful girls, post it on FF, and your first inclination is to write a caption that includes the words Ubuntu, iphone Apps and Android - OR if you comment on such a post... You are definitely a geek. - Robert Rose

By the way none of the three had been to Europe so they couldn't help me with good places to get wifi for LeWeb. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

If you help them sign up for Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter, you're a geek. - imabonehead

Well they don't look like they know how to boil rice - Jeunelle Foster

Been to Europe?? Man did they say the best thing that come out of Europe was "The Final Countdown" from their Daddy's "86 with a Bullet" tape!! http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Pogmohoin

This scene was the geek's dream while posting this. :) - Bundit

imabonehead: actually they are already on Facebook. Which says something about how mainstream Facebook has gotten. - Robert Scoble

All the Facebook friends in my family (except for my brother) are definitely nongeeks. - Dennis Jernberg

anyone reading this is a geek - Brendon Wadey

++++++++++GooglePlex, Akiva! - Melanie Reed

Well I know I'm a geek. When someone like me, who spends a lot of time helping a sexy geek like Marina Orlova of http://hotforwords.com because she speaks geek and is enjoyable to work with. I might even venture to say she's a bit of a computer nerd. When Marina wakes up the first thing she does is check her email. When she gets ready for bed she can be found tweeting before she retires... more... - Captain Jack

Captain Jack: she sounds cool. What apps does she have on her iPhone? - Robert Scoble

Were they impressed by the size of your lens, Robert? - Raphael, Raphael

Raphael: I didn't have that with me tonight. Was going low key. :-) - Robert Scoble

wow - EhsanDiary

If Robert had taken that shot with is 600mm, he would have had to have been 3 blocks away and you would be able to see the the flecks of color in their eyes :) You are looking at their eyes right?? -- My first thought was well, they can't be geeks as everyone knows true Geeks drink Red Bull not Monster :P Monster isn't all bad, they are big supporters of Surfrider and International Surfing day ----> Surfing Geek - Luke Kilpatrick

If you're a geek, why are you asking someone else for help with your Ubuntu installation? Shouldn't you figuring that out yourself? Turn in your geek card, now. - Andy Bakun

Yeah, they'd have to ask you to help with their Ubuntu installation. Except if they don't know what Android is, they probably haven't heard of Ubuntu either. - Dennis Jernberg

This Ubuntu question can relate this photo and the Ubuntu logo, then that's a geeky question. (I mean this http://www.flickr.com/photos... ) - Mahmood Padura

I guess I'm a dirty old man. - D Lets from iPhone

Actually, I was going to ask what the gadget was on top of the microwave-minifridge combo. - Jay Cuthrell

I'm guessing it's an MP3 player (in the slot) and some kind of speaker array combo? - Jay Cuthrell

I guess the answer is: regardless of whatever you do, you are a geek :-) - Ethan Gahng

It would be a lot easier to tell if those three people were not in the way of the shiny thing in the back of the photo. - Jay Cuthrell

I think Robert took this photo just to keep me wondering all night about that mystery device. - Jay Cuthrell

Geek here :) I'd do a print 'Hello, Girls !' - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

damn it Scoble! I have to like this. - rob friedman

looks like my weekends - sean percival

did they recognize you as the "scobleizer" ??? - zʍıɔ

New blog topic: the decline and fall of FriendFeed - A Mitchell

What's that coming over then hill? - Nick B.

"Well, hello there, sexy ladies! Would you like to come up to my place and read my @scobleizer feed? Hmm?" -bow-chicka-wow-wow- - Kevin Leroux

wow. I couldn't even make out what was that thing in the BG. I noticed the additional thumb/thigh in front -so that makes me a photo geek?? - jomarhilario

Oh my! Now I'm sure I'm not a geek! Hahaha they are beautiful as hell! - Rafael

if you find this picture of these attractive women on this page you are probably a geek...even if you don't read every single comment...including this one. - Lee Sachs

Some of us geeks know what we're doing with women. - Tyler Hurst

true dat,, you really can have it all - Zachary Adam Cohen from email

Oh, how gorgeous. You've got to love that Ipod design. - James Kuypers

I can tell the way the Hottie on da Right is looking at me that she really likes ME a lot!!! - Billy Warhol

@James I hereby award you the true geek award for your spotting of the iPod in this picture. =P (Special mention to the others who said MP3 player) - Silver iPod Nano I would think. - Travis Koger

Perhaps you need to add this app to your iPhone: http://www.beakerbreakers.com/nerdale... - Chad McCoskey from iPhone

Admit it: you told them you were Philip Seymour Hoffman. - Maxwell Kennerly

Two things. 1) Geeks do it better AND 2) they're not sluts... they're leveraging their assets... more power to them - Ankush Narula

davşan kızlara benziyorlar beaaa. - Pilot23

Really lol Scoble maybe u had been having 2 much fun @ the racetrack & geeks does attract some attractive wolla - polou/indigo_bow

Funny old world three attractive women in a fun pose at a launch party and it creates enormous interest? Funny how things never really change in human habits, geek yep that's me but this article made me smile a lot, keep snapping away Robert. - Ian Wright

If you are writing a disclaimer on a picture, you took at a party, because you don't want to be locked out of the house by your wife, you are a SMART geek:) - Maryam Scoble from iPhone

double like for Maryam :D - Alberto D'Ottavi

+1 Maryam - imabonehead

Best of day. - beersage

If you ask them how big their racks are, and you mean rackspace server size, then you are a geek. - Matt Soreco

If you whip out your iPhone, take their picture, and bring them home .... you're a HOT geek ! - Christopher Yeo

Totally.... - N.G. Gordon - RadarSync

Keep up the good work Scoble! :-) - Garin Kilpatrick

Heh, love that Maryam commented on this. I miss her and my two buddies. I'm just wondering why TechCrunch doesn't have parties like Monster drinks! ;-) - Robert Scoble

Robert, you'll just have to bring a case or two of Monster to your next TC visit and see what happens.... just make sure the cam is on. - Jay Cuthrell

Jeez, I must not be geekish at all — *my* first thoughts are all carnal. - Hieronymus Murphy

Me, I'm a mutant. ;) - Dennis Jernberg

3 girls 2 cups - HansVanRock

Only qx...which was your first impulse? I pray for your sake it was to throw down camera & decide where u were going to be in Blonde sandwich. :-) - Brenda Rothaupt

Admiral Anika

h/t to @queenofspain: Pool Boots Kids Who Might "Change the Complexion" | NBC Philadelphia - http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news...

July 8 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Derrick, Rick Cogley, Kol Tregaskes and 8 other people liked this

""When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool," Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. "The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately." The next day the club told the camp director that the camp's membership was being suspended and their money would be refunded. "I said, 'The parents don't want the refund. They want a place for their children to swim,'" camp director Aetha Wright said." - Admiral Anika from Bookmarklet

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"The explanation they got was either dishearteningly honest or poorly worded. "There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club," John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club said in a statement. While the parents await an apology, the camp is scrambling to find a new place for the kids to beat the summer heat." - Admiral Anika

Seriously? What the hell is wrong with people? - Admiral Anika

Stories like this in 2009 make me very sad. - Gunny doesn't side-hug™

WTF. - joey

Smells lawsuity - Christopher Harley

Ridiculous. - Louis Gray

Are you effin serious? - Michelle Martinez

Wait a minute, huh? It's 2009 and not 1959, correct? - Derek Coward

I can't believe it. That's disgusting. - josh neff, geek at large

Joh Doucheler would be a more appropriate name for the president of this club. - Admiral Anika

The comments on the story are very bad as well, such as "Come on people, everyone knows that if you really had this many blacks in one place that there would have been a drive by shooting eventually. It was in the best interest of everyone to prevent that macrabe scene." - Louis Gray

Louis, one thing I've learned over the past several years is that when it comes to media sites in PA, never read the comments. Those people who comment will *always* justify discrimination. - Admiral Anika

Louis, many of the comments are bad but I think that several of them (for better or worse) are intended to be dripping with sarcasm. - joey

Absurd. - Anne Bouey

Joey, some of those don't look sarcastic to me. Some ultra-right wing/racist site had to have linked there, because they are fast and furious. Crazy. - Louis Gray

Wow - I'm stunned. This has lawsuit written all over it. "The complexion" of the pool? Yeah, the black will rub off and dye the water. Idiots. - Sparky

Louis, I'm sure there is a mix (I just read some that seemed sarcastic, though that may not be the best way to get a point across when you're sharing the space with people who literally believe that b.s.). Some people are sick. - joey

and this is why people pay GOOD MONEY to join private clubs... and go to private schools. and live in gated communities, etc. i'm not entirely surprised, to tell the truth. i'm only surprised that the club didn't make their racism known until AFTER the kids showed up, and then they proceeded to make a big show of kicking them out. classy racists would have at least let them swim first. - tiffany

OMG!!!! Absolutely crazy. - Katy S

Oh and feel free to contact the club http://www.thevalleyclub.com/contact... - tiffany

The statement blew my mind - "There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club," Do clubs even have complexions? I thought they probably used paint. Anyway Louis I think the comment you posted was sarcasm but yeah, there were some pretty horrible ones. I remember when I was a kid and we got to go swimming at the pool, I would have been so... more... - Andrizzle Gizzle

Good thing racism was eliminated, right? Man. - Andrew C

The sad part is how the white kids apparently scrambled out as soon as the black kids started to get in. One would hope the mental disease would not be transmitted at such an early age. - Maxwell Kennerly

What the ... - Parth Awasthi

:| - Anna Haro

Hello this is an automated message from the 21st century, get the f**k up here, get the f**k over yourselves and join us. - Mo Kargas

words fail me. - Joe Silence is not Santa

That's fucked up. - Rob Haas

The more I think about it, the more disgusted I am. The white kids left the pool. That's crap they learned from their parents. And the parents who were there had the opportunity to act like they were human beings and chose not to. - Admiral Anika

taken from their website in the "membership" section: *We combine a casual, friendly atmosphere with an emphasis on family. With ten spacious acres of land, there is room for everyone to relax and enjoy themselves at the club*.......apparently, they didn't actually mean everyone.....and "friendly" is obviously loosely defined there. : ( - carlotta fancypants

Those people at that club should be embarrassed. Hell, I'm embarrassed for them. Ugh. - Bren -- Still Believes

Beyond words... I'm stunned something like this could happen today, but I guess I'm probably being naive. WTH... - Rick Cogley

Big, big sigh! - Lyndon Washington

http://www.philly.com/philly... "Club member Bernadette Sinnott, 44, said that although she was not at the pool on June 29, she had heard the club took back the campers' membership because of space issues, not race." Riiiiiiiiight. Come on, the campers paid for the swim time, so it's incredibly unlikely the club's management didn't think about the space issues back then. - Andrew C

Steve Rubel

"Why Aren’t More People Using RSS?" Answer: it's too geeky and doesn't offer non-news junkes enough value - http://hightalk.net/2009...

June 7 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Chow, Sean Brady, Tyler (Chacha) and 74 other people liked this

I might argue that people are using it in more ways then just through an RSS reader. Just look at FF for example, it depends pretty heavily on RSS. We also see p2p software now including RSS for video. Trying to define it only as a news phenomenal is too narrow. - Davis Freeberg

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I like RSS more than Twitter :) - yagami

I still use it plenty. - Steve Rubel from email

i feed about 300 blogs through Google Reader. Yes, I might have an illness. - Shawna Benson

Make me Master of the Universe and I can make it less geeky. Seriously. If I could get developers to drop their paranoia, we could make it easy. And get the BigCo's to cough up a few bucks to operate a subscription server. That's the hard part. Going from "I want to subscribe to this" to actually subscribing. The subscription process needs to be centralized. - Dave Winer

"too geeky" is code for badly marketed. - AJ Kohn

No, "too geeky" means too complicated. - Dawn

@Dave, in some ways, isn't Google becoming the master server for RSS content? Newsgator pretty much today announced all of their main RSS clients will soon sync with Google Reader. - Steve Rubel from email

A lot of people still don't use tabbed browsing. We take a lot for granted. - Steve Rubel from email

RSS being too hard is bogus. In FF, the act of subscribing to a feed is the same as bookmarking as a site. People don't subscribe for the same reason they don't bookmark -- they just don't care. And that's why people search for "yahoo" rather than going to yahoo.com. - Andy Bakun

It doesn't feel as personal as something like Twitter or FriendFeed. Most items that can be received via RSS can also be discovered via FF or Twitter...only thru the latter two, it has a social element to it. - Team Frosick

@Dawn: No, sit down with a non-RSS user and explain what RSS really is and how easy it is to use and they usually fall in love. It could use some better UX but really just the freaking acronym is confusing. Blogs on Demand or TiVo for blogs or BlogFlix and it would dawn on people that content can come to them instead of the other way around. - AJ Kohn

Most people are happy with the browsing for content paradigm. So if a person has no problem with the status quo then there's no incentive to even investigate RSS, let alone switch to it. But I would have thought that the explosion of sites like YouTube and Flickr would have really made more out of the possibilities of RSS. But RSS is always an add-on and never an exciting feature. - Scott Wilder

In France, we don't have an "average Joe"; we have a "Madame Michu"(like average Joe's aunt, you see?). And I've been complaining about the fact that it was IMPOSSIBLE for Madame Michu to understand what "RSS" could mean, since she doesn't really fully understand what "browsing" means. - Zackatoustra

I guess that we("geekly litterate people") have failed bringing the power of RSS to the people(and Madame Michu). Mme Michu doesn't care about "Valid RSS feed". But still, she appreciate the stuff that happens when an update of her son status on facebook happens. Soon, she'll be thrilled to see tweets poping up, and, still, she won't give a shoe for a clear defintion of "the so-simple subscription paradigm". - Zackatoustra

RSS is a must for anyone who wants to follow the topics of interest. I don't understand the point people try to make when they say that RSS is dead and Twitter etc is where they read their news. Sign up for Google Reader, subscribe to sites you visit and that will save you a lot of time and make you much more productive. - Marko Saric

I abandoned Google Reader last year. Too much crap and not enough social filtering. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, what do you use primarily now? - © b e e n s w a n k

Agree with Davis Freeberg. RSS powers widgets and wordpress plugins and whatnot that bring weather, news, tweetstreams, etc., onto websites. So, people are reading stuff delivered by RSS (or in some cases APIs), they just don't know it. - Laura Norvig

Twitter is talking about being like electricity. I think RSS operates in a similar fashion. It is already invisible YET it powers much of what we do here. So questions of adoption miss the point to me - it's already adopted. How public should a 'protocol' be? That's the question here...and it might apply to Twitter too, I think... - Keven Elliff

@Keven Elliff, spot on. Sure, people aren't gushing about RSS in their blog posts, but their blogs almost universally have an RSS feed anyhow. RSS is ubiquitous (on the Web, at least). You're right. It comes down to how we use this tool. - Michael Becker

The thing I that I don't like about the RSS process is that it is just not real time. The way it is currently deployed I have to have a tool that regularly polls a whole bunch of sites at infrequent times to determine if anything has changed. That just isn't fast enough - and if I poll fast enough (and everybody else does the same) to satisfy my real time wants it breaks the delivering... more... - Brian Sullivan

I like AJ's comment: "Sit down with a non-RSS user and explain what RSS really is and how easy it is to use and they usually fall in love." I've seen this, too. But I think we're missing another root cause: big sites haven't figured out how to please those of us that want full, ad-free (or ad-lite) RSS feeds, which means they get way less ad placement compared to you visiting their website. Therefore, they bury the "what's RSS?" content (see NYTimes) and they don't help the average Joe/Michu figure out RSS. - Jeremy Schultz

In other words, successful RSS feeds equals less ad revenue for a big site, so why do that? Just a theory... (I know some sites use/try placing ads in RSS, but maybe just posting a summary versus full text is an option.) - Jeremy Schultz

My entire business is based on RSS. No RSS, no podcasts. - Leo Laporte

lots of people use RSS feeds or they get their content via RSS feed, they just don't know it or care. - PC Easy from twhirl

I think RSS is a miracle, yet I can think of very few people I know that seem to be aware of it's for. - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

I totally love RSS. I rarely actually "surf" the web. My biggest issue is to decide whether to use gReader or NNW ;-) - Sven

I can't see living without my Google RSS feed! I follow over 200 blogs, news & information sites using RSS. It is indispensable in my opinion. - Jeff P. Henderson

RSS is not difficult to use. I just think that your average Joe six-pack has no idea what RSS is or how it could benefit them. I know many people who visit multiple web sites every day to see what is new. If they only knew that they could have custom tailored news delivered to them in one place, most people would be very happy to use it. - Jeff P. Henderson

Because all I do on the internet is check my official mails :| - Rohit

I think it certainly could be more user-friendly. - debegray

100% agreed. I can't live without my RSS feeds, its how I start my day with coffee, I am a total junkie. On the flip side, while I have show my wife how, and she has agreed it is awesome, she just doesn't use the net like that and wont do the 2 seonds of admin it takes to enjoy them. - Bush Williams from Alert Thingy

Agreed. Tech people need to take a cue from Apple. Simple = better adoption, period. - Patricia

I find Google's Chrome lack of support for RSS a concern, you have no way to know a site/page has an RSS link, without going into the source with Chrome...why is this? when every other browser, even Chrome's source Safari does, and the worst browser of all, Internet Explorer has done for ages. Really for the average user, they should not need to understand RSS, it should just work,... more... - Carl Grint

I still find it amazing that Delicious or StumbleUpon doesn't have some sort of flag that will ask if you want to subscribe to the site you are bookmarking or giving a thumbs up to. They could even white-label a RSS reader and put their brand all over it. Talk about a way to keep a customer and get them hooked on RSS. - AJ Kohn

I spoke about RSS on a radio station a month or so back. Clip is available at http://andypiper.wordpress.com/2009... I made the same point that many people are "using" RSS without realising it - through various online apps and mashups, through FF, Twitter and other tools. - Andy Piper

I take a Jacob Neilson-esque view of it: RSS offers too much content that overwhelms people. It's why they like Twitter, which forces users to ruthlessly shorten their descriptions. - Maxwell Kennerly

I can't speak to the people who aren't, but I still love RSS and consider it a primary if not the primary source of news for me. - Martha

Wanna explode the use of RSS? Make bookmarks (favorites) RSS subscriptions rather than static HTML. Just bake it right into the browser. Non-technical users needn't have any understanding of RSS beyond a gold star in their favorites folder. But they'll appreciate having relevant information being presented to them after a single click. - Chris Baskind

Chris - to some extent that is already happening although very subtly - Safari 4's recent sites view uses RSS to mark sites as changed, and you don't even have to bookmark them. It's only a few steps from here to showing the RSS content as a 'preview'. - Robin Barooah

Yep, I think you're partly right. But, in a sense, that sucks. Because that means that we "litterate internet users" won't be able to "explode the use of RSS". Only browsers makers(Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Applel) can thus make the revolution move? That's a shame. But, as mentionned many times before in this thread, we do not need to use the term "RSS", or even "Syndication". Those... more... - Zackatoustra from email

11% in 2008? I wonder what the figure is now. I'm surprised that people consider that to be 'low' - it seems pretty gigantic to me when you consider how complex it is compared to say, Google. Also, even the best feed readers essentially have no real tools for managing the potential overload. - Robin Barooah

Robert Scoble

How are Twitter/Facebook/friendfeed/blogs changing how you learn? I'm speaking on that topic tomorrow: (PDF) http://innovationsinelearning.gmu.edu/2009Pre...

June 3 - Comment - Like - Share

Fikrizula, Mike Elliott, Raymond M. Kristiansen and 53 other people liked this

I'd love to know if you have any stories I should pass along. - Robert Scoble

54 more comments

I will definitely be showing off friendfeed, because I learn something from it every day. - Robert Scoble

Expanding what I see, and then I can dig deeper. The socials give you new and different outlooks, viewpoints, etc. This does not happen with TV, newspapers, or friends. - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

Oh, and cats. Lots of pictures of cats. - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

Learning is much more targeted and still organic. Like a good flower patch, you can pick and chose unlike traditional media. The real time web is awesome. News come faster and you can ignore the mundane conversations. It's democratically global at your finger tips. It has HUGE room for improvement. - Yann Ropars

Do you think that people will eventually use friendfeed as something more than just an aggregator? Or is this the space that Google Wave is aiming for (in which case it will render ff useless)? - Nate

adding Wikipedia on that and yes that changed everything I have ever learned and will ever learn in the future in a big way! - Alex M.

Robert is there an agreed hashtag for the "5th Annual Innovations in eLearning Symposium" conference? Would love to tune in. These social networks are changing the way we learn - we're learning, sharing and collaborating in exciting new ways. We're learning faster and distributing this in near real-time - well, with FriendFeed you could argue it is in real time! I believe these tools are a paradigm shift in how we are communicating, and learning. - Tony Hollingsworth

Tony: I don't know. They aren't very web savy. Took me a long time to even find the PDF of the conference, which is funny. - Robert Scoble

Nate: I'm already using friendfeed as a non-aggregator. You gotta find the power in the groups here. I have to do a video on those. - Robert Scoble

Tony: plus, I hate hashtags. Why do you need them? Friendfeed's search engine is so good you don't need them to find this post anymore. - Robert Scoble

I use both services as a magazine surfing through a myriad of topics, sometimes digging deeper into one when I find one that interests me. Sometimes I am reading for specific topics, sometimes general knowledge, sometimes for no reason other than just for fun. - Dave Ploch

robert, could you expand on that 'non-aggregator' terminology a bit? do you mean getting more out of it than just aggregating feeds? like the discssions etc? - Chris Heath

yeah tony: http://friendfeed.com/search... - Chris Heath

Chris: yes. I have a private room where I just talk with a small group of people. VentureBeat and Wired Online use rooms to do their workflow. - Robert Scoble

I meet friends I would never have met on the street. - Randy Allen Bishop

ok, yeah - i though you meant that robert, but in the back of my mind i was thinking 'i use groups to aggregate...' - Chris Heath

Randy: yeah, but what are you learning from them? How is your learning changing? - Robert Scoble

here's where i tried to do a bit of teaching late last night when i should have been sleeping http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Chris Heath

via FF, et al I get news/info through a *human filter* - swineflu was a great example - hype has less effect unless it's legit - if we'd only just discovered that the Earth wasn't flat, there'd still be sites floating around saying it is - to add to this, we can now edit the record on the spot - adds value to the bandwidth in a new way - chad calease

Thanks guys - I'm a n00b at FriendFeed and keep reverting to Twitter and hashtags/Twitter Search to find threaded conversations and "virtual watercooler" stuff - Tony Hollingsworth

I learn from people that I would never have the chance to learn from otherwise - I seek out social media heavies, because I want to learn about certain web 2.0 tools and I look for real estate tech heads so I can see and learn what they are up too. My job combines technology and real estate - so this gives me loads of material to share with my 600 + agents. My FF filters help me decipher and fine tune the information. - Stefanie Hahn

Online social media tools significantly change the learning process, taking it from linear to intuitive and integrative - a multi-spoked wheel. Learn new things everyday from Twitter and blogs, much of which I did not intend but learning resulted as by-product.of exposure. - Carol Lynn Martens

Im not sure if this is a thought but we talk about micro blogging I got to say that Im seeing micro learning. A lot of the interns I get know a good deal but they are missing the context and the ability to put the individual bits together. still it is a fantastic way to find information and interact. - Terry Bruce

Btw, you commented on the savviness of educators and I'll share that Education does digital technology at a very grass-roots level and much of it bootstraped by teachers or others in the classroom. So a broad level of sophistication isn't there - it's in pockets. - Carol Lynn Martens

Gee Scoble, ask and you shall receive. :) - Lon Cohen

We learn a broader range of information relating to our interests, but the great thing is that we focus the learning through consensus, interaction, and reactions to validate the content. - James Stratford

inquiry-based learning is more gratifying than ever before thanks to the social networks. cross-disciplinary inquiries are more accessible, too, because of the range of folks participating, so results return with more relevance - learners should be able to customize the kind of information they're after to a fine degree. the flexibility of these tools allow me to learn in the... more... - chad calease

My take on the classroom/lecture analogy/metaphor (whatever): Any given friendfeed discussion has the capacity to become a learning experience about almost anything. Those who participate are akin to those in class who raise their hand and question/challenge the teacher. There is no designated teacher here, so everyone who participates 'can' be a teacher (and probably is to someone).... more... - Chris Heath

For me, it's kind of like speed reading. You don't learn every detail but you do get a quick, somewhat comprehensive understanding of the topic. Took speed reading classes in summer school when I was a kid. Thanks mom :) - padric toman

Robert, much of learning is about making meaningful connections through meaningful experiences and learning through apprenticeships. These tools provide the ability to experience thought leaders on any/many topics from anywhere and if you participate in the conversation you begin to build your own understanding. As the filters (search & social connections) allow you to fine tune that engagement it can become very effective. - Lee

good point, Chris - chad calease

Robert, as a theory to back up your thoughts, check out the Social Learning Theory by Albert Bandura. - LPH™ and his dog P™

'Study Groups' self-assemble here on friendfeed - once track is back then there will be no excuse for not finding the group you're looking for - Chris Heath

The jury is still out on my appreciation of the social aspect, recently dropping in appears to increase my creative flow. The speed reading concept is also viable, imo. - Carolyn Wood

i don't agree with the speed reading aspect. part of the solution for me is getting away from this partial learning and into something significantly more comprehensive. many of us think a 3-page article on a topic leads us to *understanding* it - surely there's a happy medium somewhere - chad calease

Would like to see more on harnessing the power of groups on FriendFeed and how businesses are using the platform with private workgroups - Carol Lynn Martens

Twitter/FF - I agree with Chad. Well put. “inquiry-based learning is more gratifying than ever before.” The focus for me is on the social aspect of sharing data; both legacy and real time. I follow people with similar interests. People who have a passion for exploring new media paradigms, products, and services that shape the way through which we disseminate information. That social... more... - Benjamin Taylor

yeah chad, i'm with you on that... this format allows for a more in-depth interaction - i do get the speed reading part, but that's just so i can find the bits i want to get in-depth with (like this thread, for instance) - Chris Heath

By the way, to answer the earlier question, the hashtag for the conference is #iel09 - Aram Zucker-Scharff

#ieL09 for clarity - Chris Heath

Robert: I use FF to alert me of new blogs in areas of interest, I then use the blogs to help me find answers to the problems or design decisions they don't talk about in school or books. I think of blogs as one of the best ways to mentor the masses and FF as a way to find out about them. Its like having millions of agents looking for material I'm interested in. - Jim Lavin

Look at what I made: http://friendfeed.com/law-blob Dozens of legal experts commenting in their fields on recent issues, and I'm adding more all the time. Easy to skim, easy to tag, and deeper than the sea. Just as one example... e-discovery is a fast moving area of the law, and by following less than a dozen blogs, my briefs blow the doors off my opponent's. - Maxwell Kennerly

Thanks for the tip, Robert. This conference looks really interesting and I may try to attend. - Sterling Zumbrunn from BuddyFeed

Social Median has been great for taking many sources and shooting back the content from them that interests me on a particular subject, it is good tool for learning about topics relating to current events. - Aram Zucker-Scharff

We no longer need to retain "loose" knowledge - we just need to maintain loose networks of smart people. This is where FF and social learning kick in - Gavin Heaton

Robert: Discovery = Learning -- FF/Twitter accelerate Discovery -- So FF/Twitter = Learning x Learning - Paul Moss

Robert, also consider including excellent Q&A sites like stackoverflow in your talk - Arvind

Robert you have likely seen this http://www.youtube.com/watch... How one teacher uses twitter in the classroom - Peter du Toit (S.Africa)

Peter: yes, but I'm glad you reminded me of that. Thanks! - Robert Scoble

my interest in social networking is in "knowledge management", now everyone knows that you can not manage knowledge, you also can not "capture" knowledge, that is a fallacy, what you can do however is facilitate better information sharing and especially involve different groups in different means of problem solving, twitter, ff and others are very useful tools in aggregating /... more... - Paul Tudor

Just reading these comments is a great learning experience! I find the level of brainpower, imagination and creativity from the friendfeeders to be so exceptional. I have always been an info junkie and now I have these excellent creative info miners-from Twitter and FF giving me great new gems second by second. My problem is managing the time. I can lget caught up in the flow and hours go by in seeming minutes, as I share and connect the various dots in the matrices. - Karma Martell

Oh Robert! You triggered a couple of interesting conversations over 10 hours ago and then, while I was sleeping, you started this one!! I am sure that I have not fully understood your question, but my comment(s) grew so fast that they outgrew this format, so I threw them into a hastily written blog post here: http://johnwlewis.wordpress.com/2009... - John W Lewis

I am late to the conversation and this has proab been said, but using social media I have access to thought leaders and innovators. I have had ff conversation with you in the past and I would never have that opportunity 10 years ago (well maybe blogs). - Jeff

Robert: this just came past http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jessica... (Embracing the Twitter Classroom) some intersting stuff here. - Peter du Toit (S.Africa)

On the off chance that you may possibly mention FriendFeed :) I'll share one of the FriendFeed saved searches that I use to keep up with job information http://friendfeed.com/search... - John E. Bredehoft

Maxwell Kennerly

3rd Circuit Says School Can Bar Bible Reading At Kindergarten "Show and Tell" - http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2009...

June 2 - Comment - Like - Share

Bruce Lewis liked this

Interesting quotes, both from the majority and from the dissent. - Bruce Lewis

I was initially surprised by the decisions given the subject matter and the fact that students were asked to bring something in. On reflection, fact is most recent Supreme Court jurisprudence essentially makes schools a "no rights" zone, particularly with regard to the first amendment, so it's all within the school's discretion. - Maxwell Kennerly

Parenting-A-Go-Go: Jen (SquirrelGirl)

What do you pay for a babysitter, on average, in your area? What do you consider reasonable?

May 31 - Comment - Like - Share

Kelly W., Dr. Apps, Matt and Bruce Lewis liked this

Here in Boston it ranges from $15-$25/hr. As a result, I try to use friends and family who will take payment in dinners or babysitting trades. I think $10-$12 is more reasonable, but it depends on the qualifications of the sitter and our financial situation. - Sally: baby flier

8 more comments

I really can't imagine paying $25 an hour. Wow. We try to use friends/family too, but it doesn't work out often. It's $8-12 here. $10 is normal for a college age babysitter. I was just struck yesterday with how much we paid to have a sitter for a wedding where kids weren't invited. The whole things with a tip was $70. I don't think I would have gone to the wedding if we hadn't shared a... more... - Jen (SquirrelGirl)

I cannot imagine paying $15-$25/hr. either - that is crazy. I am assuming that is for an adult babysitting professionally. When I think babysitter I am referring to a teenage girl age 12-18 and we pay about $7/hr and for us that means watching 5 kids - normally starting just around bed time or after. - Robert Freeze

Wow - where do you live, Robert? Here a high school babysitter is about $8. And I get the impression that if you had 5 kids, it would probably be more. Two kids, maybe not. But 5 would be a handful. - Jen (SquirrelGirl)

Between 8 and 15 an hour; the babysitter usually costs more than the night on the town - RAPatton

Here around Philadelphia it's around $10-$20 an hour, depending on babysitter qualifications and transportation difficulty. (I.e., suburbs outside the reach of public transit can cost more.) Most of the market is probably $12-$15, which I consider reasonable, with a caveat that more regular hours warrants a lower hourly rate. - Maxwell Kennerly

@Maxwell - Interesting about regular hours vs. odd hours changing rate. Never considered that. - Jen (SquirrelGirl)

High school kids--about $7/hour, college or adults? $10-$12. - Kelly W.

Jen, I'm out in Idaho and we normally go with friend's kids as baby sitters and 90% of the time it is like I said - at or near bed time - meaning most to all of the time the sitter is getting payed to watch TV. - Robert Freeze

Nannies in Los Angeles can make bank but I tend to find that the families who offer higher wages tend to treat you like shit. I get paid less than I should with my credentials and experience, but my families are great and treat me extremely well. - Lis Miller

Maxwell Kennerly

[Phil Specter's] Lawyer hopes his client will die soon.

May 31 - Comment - Like - Share

Oops. Link missing... http://blawgsearch.justia.com/visit... - Maxwell Kennerly

mashable

JD Supra Opens Up Legal Docs via the Social Web - http://mashable.com/2009...

May 29 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Chris Spizzirri and Maxwell Kennerly liked this

Wish I could get into JD Supra; yet, as a litigator, reposting my work outside court exposes me to defamation claims. - Maxwell Kennerly

Maxwell - Post articles you've written. If you haven't written any, write one, then post to JD Supra. - Chris Spizzirri

Not a bad idea to draft an article for JDSupra, but it'll miss a lot of that see-me-in-action punch. - Maxwell Kennerly

Robert Scoble

Now do you get why we call our new community for Internet fanatics "Building43?" We are just catching Google's Wave. Check out my like feed. It is all "Wave:"

May 28 - Comment - Like - Share

Ho John Lee, Hutch Carpenter, Jeremy Campbell and 13 other people liked this

All from Building 43? - Louis Gray

14 more comments

Ha - Johnny

Louis: ultimately anything at Google is going to come through Building43 cause that is where Larry and Sergei and Marissa sit. - Robert Scoble

So you are eventually going to be run by Google? - Jesse Stay

http://www.friendfeed.com/scoblei... is my like feed. - Robert Scoble

I like 43 because it's essentially the decimal equivalent of 3/7ths. (.428571) Maybe instead of 20% times, all the Building 43 work comes from the 3 days you're plugging away (+1 day meetings and 1 day on 20% time and 2 days for the weekend). - Louis Gray

Jesse we are ALL run by Google! :-) - Robert Scoble

I agree Robert. Maybe we should all start wearing T-Shirts that say "I've been indexed" or "So baby... what's YOUR personal page rank?" - Kevin C. Tofel

I have a Google KO shirt - Jesse Stay

It was made by Google though - Jesse Stay

Google is Big Brother :) - Susan Beebe

Susan - no, Google is Skynet :) - andy brudtkuhl

hahha good one! - Susan Beebe

Now when I ask my Dad a question he doesn't know the answer to he says, "google your mom" - sherry reynolds

From a few days ago: "The reality of the Web is that Google defines the reality of the Web" - @MrGoogleAlerts - Alex Schleber

Google Wave: just like a business meeting, only less personal and literally endless. Ugh. - Maxwell Kennerly

Maxwell Kennerly

@LexBlogSupport No problems lately, even in light of the insane traffic Hacker News and Stumbleupon referred to it today.

May 26 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Bruce Lewis liked this

Bruce - thanks for the submission to Hacker News! Lots of traffic, lots of people thanking me. - Maxwell Kennerly

Steve Gillmor

Anybody care about Google Reader bundles?

May 22 - Comment - Like - Share

Jorge Escobar, Zee., Wayne Sutton and 5 other people liked this

I'm still using NetNewsWire because it works the best for me, but this looks really good! - nick

22 more comments

no... - Roland Hörmann

I made two bundles. They will be ignored like the contents within them. Only 4 people share with me. - Jay Cuthrell

Not really, but Google Reader makes my world go around. It's a top notch web-app. - Wo

yes. I use Google Reader a great deal - if I can start to see bundles from more people I welcome the chance to see my friend's (and others) curation of the web - what they choose to bundle together, how they label it, I hope and expect it will highlight some new and interesting things for me. I also plan on sharing a number of bundles I create that reflect the sorting I've made of the feeds I read - Shannon Clark

Nope. Adding social features to Google Reader seems like a desperate afterthought. - Tech Introvert

Rather make a bundle... - Aron Michalski

no, stop using Google reader awhile ago, nothing about bundles makes me want to start using it again - Kim Landwehr

no hasn't opml been around for like a decade? - BryanSchuetz

no... - Karoli

I care about it as much as I care about Twine. I read Twitter and post to FriendFeed. As much as I would like the read and post everything on FF, it won't happen until I can pull in my follow list natively without using the makeshift imaginary friends method. I have reduced my Google Reader usage dramatically. - Rolf Schewe

remember attention.xml, Steve? - Kevin Marks

Yes - in that we can help others who rely on RSS to find similar blogs. It's like playlists on iTunes. - Louis Gray

I think it legitimizes the idea of people bundling up all their public feeds into a single OPML file (whether as a GReader Bundle or something they host themselves), and let the subscriber then trim the feeds they don't want. - Kevin Fox

yes I do Kevin. attention.xml was about implicit metadata, not explicit sharing. Apples and oranges.GR needs to mine the new stream. - Steve Gillmor

Yeah. I can recommend my favorite marketing blogs to one friend, tech blogs another, and photo blogs to yet another. - Peter Warnock

Maybe you tech pros don't, but it could be a HUGE deal for people unfamiliar with social media. Now I don't have to spend hours explaining RSS and blogs to people. I say, "hey, login to your Google account, click Reader, then choose this link, and you'll be setup with a bunch of cool stuff." Now I can get my mom, my boss, and my peers (lawyers, not tech geeks) interested and following blogs in just a couple clicks. - Maxwell Kennerly

yes, the feature makes a lot of sense, i hope people use it and share their bundles publicly. - coffee

we should care and ask for or build our own better features. oddly enough, i wrote an actual blog post about it this morning - http://asu.ms/4ZpgQR - kris smith

Yeah - Nicholas James

I really liked the GoogleReader bundles for being able to grab a ton of RSS feeds and bring them into a room here on FriendFeed -Now I can see the stories easily and still find them easy if I close the page they were on. (and I have an excerpt to read of most of them here helping me to decide if I want to click the link) - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

Guilty of contempt prior to investigation, I set up a bundle to catch the items that fall through the twitter/FF/no longer scanning Reader crack and find that with the exception of the Google Feedburner/RSS delay it's an interesting way to get wanted items into the FF page for easy liking and commenting. I also see it as a stopgap to add Twitterers who have not made the jump/xerox to FF... more... - Aron Michalski

no - Jamie

wha? yeah i do - Zee.

Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

How Leo Laporte May End Up Owning Twitter - http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2...

May 25 from The SiliconANGLE - Comment - Like - Share

Ho John Lee, Tom Horn, Anant Gairola and 15 other people liked this

Interesting developments. Since I'm offline a lot, keep me informed, please. You're one I never miss reading. You're not only in my home feed but favorites as well in FF. - Molly

16 more comments

An inflammatory headline and a non-issue. It boils down to "Twitter may have to provide some financial compensation to Leo Laporte over Leo's ownership of the Twit trademark, if Twitter gets into producing some sort of TV show linked to Twitter." Leo OWNING Twitter doesn't come into it. - Wayne McDougall

Give 'em hell Leo IMHO - Matt Stevens

@wayne - see my response here - http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2... - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

"Twit" as a word, in the same sense as "Twitter," long precedes Leo Laporte's birth. All he's got is a mark relating to "TWiT," an acronym for something unlikely to be confused with Twitter. Laporte's got a "legitimate" claim, but not one likely to succeed. As soon as Twitter gets bought by Google or the like, their defense team will walk all over Laporte. - Maxwell Kennerly

aye, twit is a word that has existed in the UK for generations. It's a derogative term for someone who is foolish "don't do that you twit". - alphaxion

I think the context is what matters here - it is questionable whether or not Tiwtter and TWiT when strictly talked aobut in their current usages is confusing - some say yes, and others no. What's certain is that TWiT creates audio and video content - and Twitter is trying to encroach -nay build a BUSINESS around that idea. They're trying to make money using a name speicifically... more... - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

I think this is highly unlikely. Leo never uses Twitter, well not directly. As he says contently during his shows, he always uses FriendFeed, yet never Twitter itself. Also Leo's podcast (s) provide information in a way that is accessible to anyone, Twitter allows anyone to access the information, yet it is wide spread and hard to siphon out of Twitter. Leo would have no use in this,... more... - Zachary TG

Which part is highly unlikely? - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

remember that, on leo's trademark discussion, he wrote the following (quote): "Ev told me that when they were considering names for Twitter they knew about TWiT and decided it didn't matter. In their defense, they had no idea what or how big Twitter was to become. We talked about trademark early on and both agreed there was no conflict _as long as we were in different spaces_. And therein lies the rub. - Leo Laporte" - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Mark - the part that's off is the "using a name specifically trademarked for use in that arena." The "arena" is right, but not the name -- Laporte has no claim to "Twitter" at all, and only a tenuous claim to "twit." He has a registered mark of "TWiT," an acronym which stands for something else. Indeed, another party could possibly use something like "Twit" in their TV show, as long as the context made clear it was separate. A wholly different non-acronym word is a different world altogether. - Maxwell Kennerly

@Maxwell - but examine what blackfeathers just said, in quote of Leo... and as Chris Yeh pointed out in a comment on the original post - a "moron in a hurry" would most likely confuse the two, particularly since they'd both be in the world of video together. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...) - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

The quote referenced by blackfeathers makes it sound like this is an "Apple Computer" / "Apple Records" situation in which a party using the exact same name in one arena jumped to another. But these names are actually quite far apart, and even if the Twitter folks thought this could be the case, that doesn't bind them. Here's an overview of the legal standard (http://bit.ly/AkPCg )(I've... more... - Maxwell Kennerly

@Maxwell, I'll admit I'm not a lawyer, nor have I filed infringement cases personally. As I stated in the comments of the original blog piece (http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2...), I've a great deal of experience in this sort of thing, going back to my teenage years (pasted below). - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Actually, when I was a kid (about 13 or 14), I was a witness in a Federal trademark suit between an ISP called Neosoft and a software maker named NeoSoftware. The ISP was suing the software maker for rights to the name because they said it caused brand confusion. It turns out that the suit was dismissed by the judge because it was revealed during the case that the ISP was planning on... more... - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

The bottom line is that the stakes in the game, even when the names are *similar,* and not even the same, are the usage of the name. Rather than go to court, should Leo pursue this, Twitter will likely give Leo points in the name usage on broadcast ventures or points in the company in an out of court settlement rather than risk losing the name entirely. Leo, as has been discovered today... more... - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

I don't doubt your expertise -- e.g., you certainly know the market here far better than me -- I just wanted to point out that Laporte's far from a slamdunk, and has some serious obstacles in his path. Although a 'practical' burden is on Twitter as the encroacher, the legal burden would still be on Laporte as plaintiff. I presume money or shares will change hands, not least so Twitter... more... - Maxwell Kennerly

Indeed - it's made for a nice conversational diversion this otherwise quiet Memorial Day (and kept my head out of boring FTC disclosure guidelines, where they otherwise would have been). I definitely agree with your final analysis here - it isn't clearcut on either side of the case, but I think there are definite merits to Leo's concerns. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Robert Scoble

I've started hating cross posting. I'm now reading Twitter, friendfeed, Facebook and keep seeing the same content in all three. Discuss:

May 24 - Comment - Like - Share

Voyagerfan5761, Rafiq Phillips, Rui Pereira and 90 other people liked this

I'm starting to think it's a very lame practice. Although I still post some things from friendfeed to Twitter, like this one. - Robert Scoble

230 more comments

RT @scobleizer is tired of cross posting. Let's talk about this over on Facebook. Someone set up a Twine too. - Chrimmus Tad

maybe you should use Yahoo! Pipes to filter duplicates, @scobleizer? - Prolific Programmer from IM

But that's because Twitter is lame for discussions. Facebook and friendfeed are better to have conversations. - Robert Scoble

Prolific: doing that in the context of Seesmic Desktop, Nambu, or TweetDeck isn't doable. - Robert Scoble

cross-posting isn't nearly as bad as retweeting. at least cross-posting is in different systems. - Andy Bakun

I cc to twitter but I have stopped auto posting to facebook...starts feeling spammy on FB - Gary Gannon

Andy: hmm, I sort of like RT'ing. I find a lot of cool stuff that way. - Robert Scoble

I have to agree... this is a big problem with the different solutions and different mechanisms for sharing the information you post. There needs to be a tool that « aggregates» them into one unique post and just lists the places it has appeared... - Thomas V. Fischer

Gary: I have stopped auto posting into Facebook as well (I only turned it on for a day or two and got a lot of complaints). - Robert Scoble

I feel the same way some times but I'm sure nothing on your level - most of my friends are clueless to this sort of thing. - Robert Freeze

I do have a system to filter my Facebook notifications and email the result to my mobile device, @scobleizer; works brilliantly - Prolific Programmer from IM

At what point does it become cross posting? Wordpress+Twitter? Wordpress+Twitter+FriendFeed? Wordpress+Twitter+FriendFeed+Facebook? - Ken Sheppardson

It's difficult because if you're like me when you feel the urge to share you want to reach the most people possible. To do that for me means cross posting. The problem is, while you certainly reach more people you're definitely hitting some people multiple times. I think most people accept that this happens and simply ignore the extra times. Kind of go with the first time they saw it. I do think it used to annoy me more. Now I simply edit it in my brain. - Sheryl

The neat thing about Facebook is because I haven't posted much there I haven't gotten people to unsubscribe the way that I have over in Twitter (many of the A listers have dropped me because I posted too often there -- I think that's also behind why I didn't get added to Twitter's recommended follower list, other than I talk about friendfeed so often there). - Robert Scoble

I'm going to have to say that I prefer you to add something less perfunctory than "Discuss:" If you're posting from here to Twitter you could add a "Let's discuss this" quite easily. As to the question cross-posting has it's merits because there is only a partial (in my case small) overlap between the different sets of people. - WorldofHiglet

Sheryl: it's interesting, though. I do want to have a system that says "show me this person only on Twitter." Actually this is sort of what I'm doing with Seesmic Desktop: I'm building lists that suck certain people into the list so I can follow certain people well without seeing their duplication. - Robert Scoble

I love that every time I share an item on my google reader, it is posted to my friend feed and my facebook.. Why I love this is because I have completely different circles on FB and FF. - Sabika

WorldofHIglet: I tried to add "please" but I did not have enough characters. Twitter forces me to stick with 140 characters or less. - Robert Scoble

Except you posted this to Twitter from FriendFeed! But yes, it can be annoying. We want to get content out there,yet not be spammy. So how do we do it. - Bob Morris (polizeros)

Sabika: Google Reader I can understand going to both of these places. Twitter less so. - Robert Scoble

could the folks a friend feed or seemic think of a way to integrate or merge the cross posts...perhaps sinc them somehow. - Robert Freeze

Bob: I think that TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop are how we solve it. I'm "white listing" people into lists now to escape the duplication. - Robert Scoble

First, how many people get ALL of your feeds? Item duplication is only a problem for those who are subscribed to multiple feeds from a person. Of the three services you mention, I isolate Facebook from most (not all) of my FriendFeed/Twitter content, and FriendFeed's block of the ff.im URL serves to reduce double posts of some items. - John E. Bredehoft

You aren't on Twitter's recommended follow because you post FF links like a madman lol :/ Nah I dunno if you always have. - Colin

Posting from here to FF truncates the message - the discussion will be here anyway so you haven't lost anything. But anyway, that's just me and my manners talking. - WorldofHiglet

Another problem. Bots like TwitterFeed can result in double postings. (Hi Chris Pirillo on FaceBook.) - Bob Morris (polizeros)

I completely agree but there are people who do not use all services, to send them content we use multiple sources. Not everyone is like us, using all the services. - Veetrag

Colin: I think that's true, but it demonstrated that those recommended follower lists can be used as punishment. Oh, and does it help Twitter's content? Techcrunch has gotten very boring ever since it was added to that list. Yeah, I know Arrington now has his own Tweet account, separate of TechCrunch, but think about why that is. He doesn't want to have his business punished for saying something that Twitter doesn't like. - Robert Scoble

Retweeting may be a cool way to find stuff, but when everyone is retweeting, it's just pollution. FF's "like" functionality is much better. - Andy Bakun

Veetrag: that's why the Seesmic Desktop/Tweetdeck approach is probably going to be the only way to solve it. - Robert Scoble

Andy: people get tired of me saying Friendfeed is better, but it is, so I agree with you. :-) - Robert Scoble

It's funny, because I haven't been on Facebook until Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop added Facebook functionality so I didn't see just how many people are duplicating their content between all services. - Robert Scoble

FriendFeed is kind of ugly and painful to read, honestly for the kind of thread this is. Cross-posting (repeating in several arenas) is ok, but I dislike when people Tweet a link to a FriendFeed which has a link to some blog post somewhere -- it's like people are starved for us to hit every landing pad they have for a single item. That's painful and annoying. - Gib

Ryo: I agree. Lockergnome has gotten very noisy. - Robert Scoble

Does it seem like cross-post duplication litter is like the analog of FW: FW: FW: of the aged world of email? I've stayed away from cross-posting for the most part. But I just decided to focus on the network plugged directly into FF, so my use case is different than a good many. - Micah Wittman

Gib: use a browser that lets you increase font size. Also, click on the time stamp to open up this dicussion into its own window. - Robert Scoble

Gib. once it gets long it makes commenting hard to do and still keep up - Robert Freeze

The Lockergnome coupon posts are tooo much to handle - Gary Gannon

The recommended follow list is a mess, wrong in 1000 ways, the good thing is normal people don't worry about it, because they'll never make it. - Colin

Robert Freeze: open friendfeed up into its own Window and then commenting and keeping up is a lot easier on a hot conversation like this one. - Robert Scoble

There is nothing more noisy than FB IMO. If I get asked to take one more quiz..... - David

David: I don't see quizzes in Facebook's status stream. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Yes, I'm using Safari and blow up the font size. Doesn't make it less ugly -- just bigger! :-) - Gib

cool thanks Robert - i'll open a new window - Robert Freeze

My little Macbook can barely handle Seesmic Desktop for some reason, it freezes in the middle of typing a tweet one or two times. - Colin

Robert, I think you've finally reached the point where too many people follow you: just one entry like this produces as much traffic as all the people I used to follow on Twitter. ;-) - Ken Sheppardson

Own window? Use an SSB like Fluid http://fluidapp.com/ - Liviu Barbat

Ken: heheh. Wait until the real celebrities figure this out. Imagine Eminem doing a live chat with his fans. - Robert Scoble

Robert: how do you turn that stuff off? - David

David: turn what stuff off? - Robert Scoble

This is the midnight hour thread that Scoble starts, I love it. Nothing more interesting in the world is going on at this time! - Colin

Eminem's FF page would be filled with "fsck the free world" and such - Prolific Programmer from IM

Ken: what's even cooler is I'm following every single person on this thread. - Robert Scoble

your the man Robert... this thread proves that friend feed is way better than twitter. - Robert Freeze

Prolific: yeah, but you think my items move fast? Wait until Eminem gets here. Then you'll see tens of thousands of people join in one item. - Robert Scoble

Robert: sssshhhh, keep it quiet for a while longer. Let's enjoy this short period in time before the masses arrive. - Robert Scoble

i doubt he can type fast enough - Robert Freeze

Or read/think fast enough. - Colin

I guess I'm asking how I decrease the noise on FB. A little off topic but.... - David

Robert: he doesn't need to type. You can do live video here, too, and watch the text chat. - Robert Scoble

Robert: FYI, You can do the list thing on tweetdeck too. I have lists on both seesmic and tweetdeck. :) It does help, but honestly you miss some. I know because my lists are MUCH smaller than yours and I still miss and wind up with multiple posting. I really think at some point the size of the stream is just simply too large to do it all right. I worry about ticking off several hundred.... more... - Sheryl

he'll just invent other aliases to do his typing for him :) - Prolific Programmer from IM

is FF planning on letting us share friend lists? - Gary Gannon

David: hmm, I am using Seesmic Desktop with Facebook and I don't have much noise there (in the status updates). Of course I was very lucky. I filled up my 5,000 friends with pretty quiet people. - Robert Scoble

5000 friends...is there a limit? - Robert Freeze

Sheryl: yeah, and what's worse about lists is they don't move from computer to computer. - Robert Scoble

Robert: yes. Facebook can only have 5,000 friends. - Robert Scoble

on Facebook? yes, that's the limit, @robfreeze - Prolific Programmer from IM

Robert: I have 5,400 people waiting to be my friend over there. That's why I ignored Facebook for the past year and took to friendfeed (no limits here). - Robert Scoble

By the way, the conversations are BY FAR better here than on Twitter or Facebook. - Robert Scoble

I guess I don't have enough friends on facebook to worry. - Robert Freeze

My real life friends all noticed the day I installed the Twitter application -- they all started saying, "Wow you're on FB a lot!" because all the texts to Twitter went into FaceBook. Now I have friends who have joined Twitter because everyone else is and I have to say I enjoy seeing their Tweets less because I see it all on FaceBook and vice-versa. - Gib

Robert: Ah! But private messaging on FB rocks! :) - Sheryl

Sheryl: it rocks more here in friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

If everyone used the same service this wouldn't be an issue. Will things ever settle or are we bound to a constantly evaluating new services? - Ryan Stanley

Yes, Ryan. Another day, another service. - Gib

I don't have many friends on FB either but the ones I do have are always taking quizzes and playing games and I see that in my feed. I like FF much better. - David

Gib, the Cleaner FriendFeed userstyle is an option. See my latest comment on it http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - if you're familiar with CSS you can make you're own adjustments. It will work on Safari with GreaseKit installed http://8-p.info/greasekit/ - just shout out if you need tips setting it up. - Micah Wittman

settling is not any fun - it's the innovation that gets me excited. - Robert Freeze

Ryan: I seriously doubt everyone will switch to using one service. If anything something like Tweetdeck, Peoplebrowsr, or Seesmic Desktop will make it all look like one service to their users. - Robert Scoble

That's what I'm waiting for. One app that does it all! - David

The app's dev team would have to constantly studying everyone tom dick and harry's latest API changelog. And that doesn't even address all the third party modules for the app. - Ryan Stanley

David: the problem is that all three services are innovating too, and I doubt that all those innovations will be shared immediately by services like Tweetdeck, Peoplebrowsr, or Seesmic Desktop. Heck, how many of those support friendfeed so far? - Robert Scoble

FriendFeed to Facebook status-update is definitely lame. FriendFeed to FriendFeed-application post on Facebook seems fine to me. You can hide someone's FriendFeed-application posts on Facebook if you don't want to see them, but the only way to hide status updates is to hide that person altogether. - Edward Coffey

Eventbox pulls a lot of goodies in. I just don't dig it too much for some reason. - Gib

At some point all integral tech settles, and then becomes eligible for mass adoption. - Ryan Stanley

Robert: I have never had a private message on FriendFeed other than Ken! :) - Sheryl

I agree cross-posting is lame. But Robert, I've seen your intake rig: you're hard-core. You are all the places that my fragmented audience would be. It's no wonder you see stuff so many times. - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

Man I like Friend Feed. - Robert Freeze

Robert: Twhirl supports FF. Why not Seesmic desktop? - David

Sheryl: I'll send you one. Heheh. - Robert Scoble

FF FTW! - Ryan Stanley

David: Loic promised friendfeed support in a future version of Seesmic Desktop. It's the poor child of the three because it has the fewest users, so it's easily ignored by these app developers. - Robert Scoble

I see - David

I tried starting a FriendFeed iphone app twice last week, but ended up working on Twitter ones again instead. - Colin

Sheryl: DM's rock here because we can go back and forth "live" just like we are here. On Facebook? Um No. On Twitter? Um No. - Robert Scoble

The constant evaluation of different services is kind of frustrating. I keep thinking I'll find a good use for twitter and I sort of get close and then it fails for me again. Friendfeed just seems to be better in so many ways. And Facebook seems great for very personal connections but, casual internet conversations, Friendfeed really seems like the answer. - Steve McLelland

It's only this way because people have not realized it's potential...I use to think Friend Feed was a twitter want-a-be... boy was I wrong - Robert Freeze

Colin: you should do a friendfeed one that adds some cool feature like location. Kick Twinkle's ass. - Robert Scoble

I'm not a fan of cross posting. I define what I am to use each service for and try to keep the content unique to each one, Tumblr for iPhone pics, FB for friends and Family stuff, Twitter for my geek stuff, BK for pics of location, etc etc etc... - Andrew Acomb

Twinkle? Is that for FriendFeed? - Colin

Robert: and you haven't even discovered friendfeed's search, or its groups. - Robert Scoble

Colin: no, that's an iPhone app for Twitter that also tracks location. - Robert Scoble

Never heard of it, I downloaded "MotherFeed", and tried, "BuddyFeed" - Colin

What about the new WebOS for Palm. Will there be a FF app for that??? - David

kind of funny that the poor child with the fewest users has the most robust convos - Gary Gannon

In your opinion Robert, what is lacking most on the iphone for FriendFeed? Real-time commenting? - Colin

funny that all the other service are copying FF - Andrew Acomb

Robert - yah I have and I love it - If I was not married I would be seducing it now. - Robert Freeze

Gary: friendfeed is growing very fast. It might not be the poor step child for long. - Robert Scoble

David: I sure hope Palm will figure out how to get friendfeed support. It has Facebook support built into its contact list, though. - Robert Scoble

I can't wait for the Pre (not to get off topic again) - David

It would really help if FriendFeed could find a way to identify reposts across different services and group them together under a drop down item (or something like that). Didn't the old version of FriendFeed do that? - Paul Jacobson

Paul: the new one does too, but it doesn't always catch the reposts. - Robert Scoble

Robert: isn't that a big reason to cross post? FB support but no FF support in the case of a smart phone OS. - David

Robert: You can do live video in FriendFeed? How? - Shawn Hickman

Shawn: I use Kyte.tv. It kicks off a discussion in friendfeed. Everyone can watch live and comment on both Kyte or friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

They can watch it right in FF? - Shawn Hickman

Shawn, no, gotta click a link, open a new browser window. - Robert Scoble

is that better than ustream's chat and social media integration (I've only tried twitter there and the native chat)? - Gib

People like us read all three. Most people read just one. - Mike Abundo

Gib: I think so. Here's an example: http://friendfeed.com/scoblei... - Robert Scoble

Robert: Thanks, I am going to be checking that out:) - Shawn Hickman

Stuart: I'm not. I was noticing that a very large percentage of the people I read on all these services ARE cross posting. - Robert Scoble

That's a major reason I stopped following Lockergnome, just got annoying - Andrew Acomb

Robert, perhaps you should do a post on your blog about how to avoid cross posting. - Robert Freeze

I started cross posting just because I thought it was cool that I could. But now I see the point. - David

I have started to just post to FF which then sends it out to Twitter. I guess that is cross posting. - Shawn Hickman

Robert: you can't avoid it. Unfortunately. - Robert Scoble

Scobes: I annoyed myself on Friday. Stopped pushing my FF to facebook. I'll just be loud in person. - Kevin Murray

perhaps a cross posting best practices... - Robert Freeze

I just cross posted this manually over on Facebook. It'll be interesting to see if anyone comes over from Facebook. I've found that engagement is a lot lower there than it is on Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Stuart, that is what I like most about FF. It's a great hub for your things - Shawn Hickman

my project tomorrow is to write it all down and figure out how to best prevent this... The issue I have is I want what I post in twitter to go out on Facebook... but I don't want everything I put on Facebook to go to twitter... both end up here... I am sure a solution is right under my nose but I just started using FriendFeed seriously two days ago so I am still learning all it's capabilities. Any suggestions? And Scoble, did you still want to chat? - Sid Burgess

Sid: lets chat tomorrow. Sorry. - Robert Scoble

sorry to ask something off topic but is there a way to do a date range search on FF? - Gary Gannon

One question I kept asking myself was whether I wanted to follow someone on twitter whom I was already subscribed to on FF. I've decided no. - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

didnt hate it till i started using seesmic desktop more :) now i want to stop feeding twitter into facebook - sean percival

While this is annoying for those who use multiple services, I think we're some time away before it becomes a problem for most folks. On the list of things to fix about these services, this is low priority. Smart filtering tools will sort this out, helped by more centralized control for users on where things go out. - Brad_King

Agree - personally, I no longer "auto post" twitter and Facebook. As to friendfeed, I am watching it but not really using it as "central" - Mick Yates

the reason why i can't avoid cross posting is that i know people who follows twitter+ff+fb, but also people who is only on fb, or twitter, and i'd like all of them to be able to read what i'm talking about... - Ivy /composmentis

Micah: Installed SIMBL & GreaseKit but haven't seen anything to make FriendFeed less ugly. Do I need a script? - Gib

Gary: I don't know how to do a date-range limited search in friendfeed. There's a lot of stuff still missing in the search features here. - Robert Scoble

thanks Robert...night all - Gary Gannon

WOW!!! Check this google search out... this conversation comes up... - Andrew Acomb

http://www.google.com/search... - Andrew Acomb

Sorta fast, not bad. - Colin

Andrew: wow, Google is going real time! - Robert Scoble

Twitter is twisting their arm... - Andrew Acomb

I like how it showed up from Scoble and Loic in the sub-result - Colin

Andrew, thanks, I just Tweeted that Google search. - Robert Scoble

I never, ever crosspost to FB. For a number of reasons, not the least of which is that my mother doesn't need to read all the geek stuff I post :) I wish folks would stop sending Twitter to FB, too - Karoli

Interesting, then we'll no longer need gmail ? - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

what's what's what's to to to discuss discuss discuss ? ? ? - Ted Russ

Just realized that my comments were being sent to twitter as well. Oops, just turned that off:) - Shawn Hickman

It's about time you realized that. I always disliked those Friendfeed -> Twitter reposts. - Morton Fox

Ted: nothing nothing nothing, go go go on on on with with with your your your lives lives lives. - Robert Scoble

Morton: THOSE I am not going to stop. - Robert Scoble

Morton: but I scientifically am engineering each one to start a conversation now. :-) - Robert Scoble

I do enjoy sending my "likes" to twitter though - Shawn Hickman

Chacun a son gout! I find twitter is a good place to park a thought in public. I know people who read my twitter posts who will never join facebook and vice versa. Many's the time when a twitter post has sparked off a really good conversation in facebook. - Nic Price

Robert: sorry about the delay coming back.. I was reading the bazzilion comments here!!! Man, this place is much different than twitter or Facebook... very fast paced. - Sid Burgess

Sid: it's only occassionally like this here. Most of the time items don't get any engagement. - Robert Scoble

while it goes with the territory i understand cross posting for many is necessary since it is reaching different audiences. it's the nature of the infrastructures. however, friendfeed's detection of similar content and providing a nested link may be on to something. grouping up related topics by the same poster across platforms may help filter much of the redundancy. having them nested... more... - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

There's no hard and fast rule for reposting, it depends on your twitter audience and what you want to achieve. It's an option, after all. - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Back to the topic... what about a greasemonkey script to cut out duplicates? It wont be helpful for everyone but it eliminates the issue of the platforms adapting and solves the issue at the end user. - Sid Burgess

Sid: that's above my pay grade. - Robert Scoble

Gib, grab the userscript here: http://userstyles.org/styles... but make sure you use the "Load as user script" button (can't be a user style, need to be a user script for GreaseKit). It's a distinctive look, I actually prefer the native FF design most of the time, but the comment highlighting alone is worth the price of admission. Anyway, you can customize it from there. - Micah Wittman

Robert, ouch ;) - Micah Wittman

also, I find the conversations take on different tones depending on which service/site they're happening on - depending on levels of familiarity etc. - Nic Price

sorry, another question: Is there a keyboard shortcut for commenting? I am too lazy to want to have to scroll up every time I see someone say something I want to "opinionate" on. :) Where is my easy button? ;) - Sid Burgess

perhaps i'm biased but i've never invested much on greasemonkey since -as far as i understand it- it only affects locally, client-side & does not reflect what others would typically see. it's more of a local solution to a more widely distributed problem. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

cutting out the duplicates wouldn't work because the posts may trigger different conversations in each place - merging them together might make nonsense of the flow - Nic Price

sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq: But isn't that Robert's issue? I guess that begs the question, if someone cross posts in the forest and Robert Scoble never saw it, did it actually happen? I like the user end solution because if it bothers you, in 15 seconds you could (theoretically) make it go away. If you don't mind, you don't install the script. I have a few scripts that I enjoy using so I am biased toward them. - Sid Burgess

Yes, cutting dups with a client-side script would be difficult because of realtime updates bubbling posts up to the top. - Micah Wittman

Sid, no easy button, but you can use my script that adds a Comment and Like links to the bottom of a thread http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Micah Wittman

sid: i suppose what i'm arguing for is more of a universal solution that does not require installing yet another script. it's something that other users may come across that could havea more elegant solution. don't get me wrong, i'm all for mods, hacks, and scripts but i think that problems like that can be better solved in broader strokes -more utility for more users with the least effort. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

just realised I followed Robert's link here from twitter! - Nic Price

It doesn't deal with dups, but here's a user script you can use to filter out (hide) @-replies and/or posts with a list of stop words you can define http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Micah Wittman

Nic Price: I'm not talking about cutting out duplicates, just grouping them together so they don't clutter up the stream like a Twitter conversation. FriendFeed could take the first instance of the content item to enter the stream and designate it as the lead item. All the subsequent posts could be added to it under a drop down arrow. You can comment on any of them but at least group them together, tidy the stream. - Paul Jacobson

Micah: Thanks for the scripts! Ahhh, my easy button works! - Sid Burgess

Maybe this is only an issue for power users. I can't see casual followers on any single system being hit with the realization what they've read is showing up in all the places they read. They just aren't as nuts about all this as we are and maybe that's a good thing. - Jack Humphrey

Blackfeathers: I completely understand what you are hoping for... I just don't believe it will ever happen unless all social media platforms start using one single unified stream or code (like html is for the internet) - Sid Burgess

sid: perhaps this whole ghoulash of stuff will eventually boil down into more internet standards that will some day work. granted companies by nature will have proprietary technologies and core competencies, but a level of workability across platforms may be necessary. the momentum has gradually started with efforts towards openid, facebook connect, and the like. it may be the beginning... more... - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Paul Jacobson: agreed, the grouping of conversations sounds good. I guess there's also the issue about permissions and conversations happening in public vs private. - Nic Price

I setup as "main entrance" of posting FF where import also RSS from blog, public Delicious, and Shared from GReader, then via yahoo pipe I setup an rss for import ((My FF stream) + (My FFlikes)) into Facebook notes... then i read on TW, FF and GReader, but post only on FF... seems perfect except for the pain of notes import on Facebook that is awful and buggy :( - CantorJF

Someone once told me - it's not who follows you, it's who you follow. Hence, I follow different people on my regularly visited platforms so I don't have a cross posting problem. ;) - Mona Nomura

I am going to have to reread your comment again in the morning when I can process it better... it sounds interesting. I have often wondered about setting up a "mother pipe of all yahoo pipes" which would allow me to post content into a field on a form. The content would then go do it's thing and not duplicate and the replies or feedback from the post would come back to a simple thread (like this one) and the process could start all over. - Sid Burgess

It seems that it would be immensely valuable to so many people who use social media as tool for their business. - Sid Burgess

@Mona Nomura: what if a person you follow on twitter, and you don't follow on ff, starts on ff a conversation about something posted on twitter? - Ivy /composmentis

Nic Price: I am sure the gurus behind the scenes can figure all that stuff out. - Paul Jacobson

Ivy /composmentis - my head just exploded. - Mona Nomura

just thinking out loud. an open source laconica-style interface with threaded discussions seems like one possible way. each user can be on separate services. but unlike info silos, everybody can get up to speed in a single-threaded discussion -similar to blind carbon copy emails. if anything happens it might involve an infrastructure change in transparency. at the granular level, much of the temporal mechanics can be learned & carry over from tcp/ip defragmenting of packets... - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Blackfeathers: so in essence you are saying I can have my cake and eat it? - Sid Burgess

Yup...see the same thing, and don't like that I inadvertently spam my followers/friends. - Carlton Hackett

Sid, you're welcome. - Micah Wittman

sid: just seeing a possible outcome. it can be like a light at the end of a very long tunnel. users would have to change over time and realize what's going on. 'twitter++' could require funneling & processing the twitter stream (as friendfeed and other services are doing but with more sophistication). this would mute out its own direct usefulness as a single entity for a next higher... more... - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Totally agree: Especially the thing that some people do: Syncing their Twitter feed to Facebook. To me, Twitter is for conversations, Facebook for status messages and more general "What am I doing". - Oyvind Solstad

I used to keep my FB seperate from Twitter and FF. Now I see all of my FF posts on my FB. But no one is to blame but myself for clicking on that "link" button. I may ''unlink" if such a thing exists. - Carol E

Go to: http://www.facebook.com/editapp... ; From there you can edit settings to where your posts are no longer published on your FB wall, seen only by you, etc. Good luck! - Carol E

http://friendfeed.com/setting... ; Here you can control your FF/Twitter postings. - Carol E

I wish the aggregation services like FriendFeed were smart enough to recognize when someone is using ping (or whatever tool) to spam their stuff to every service out there when they post something and just show it to you ONCE. I really hate the cross-posting that occurs, too. It just creates so much noise. I generally unfollow/unfriend people across ALL services when they do the... more... - Christopher A. Wichura

The other problem with cross-posting, is any responses are now in separate places in separate threads of conversation. - Christopher A. Wichura

It's interesting seeing how advanced the discussion is here. I know plenty of intelligent and net-aware people who don't even know what FF or Twitter really are yet. It's gotta be client solutions, since plenty of people already have their own mental view of what each service is for. RT is valuable, because it expands ideas across different social circles (preferably, with a comment why too). I'd love to see laconi.ca API take over as a base, but doubt it will. - Shane Curcuru

I also hate cross-posting within Friendfeed itself, I just hate to see the same URL shared by lots of other friends. There has to be someway to globalize the links and show only the views of my friends from that. - Jayavasanthan J

Yes I am tending to agree, its a bit strange to see the same things. The amount of original content at any one time is really not that high. - Robert

Well, I agree. Thanks to Friendfeed though, my accounts are behaving like cross posting. Everything I do on Facebook, Digg, Youtube, Last.fm gets relaid back to FF and FF relays it back to Twitter. If I do something on Twitter, it comes to FF as well... - Manuel Mas

Usenet groups where so much better - Michele Costabile

Some things should be cross posted: Freedom isn't free... Honor our veterans by taking a moment to Join the Memorial Day group on facebook http://bit.ly/zngxm - Bob Stewart

Cross posting can be annoying but as there are now so many posting platforms it seems inevitable, it is simply some peoples response to having so many similar but not identical systems. Either an ettiquette needs to be established or some way to better interconnect things like Twitter, FF, Facebook is needed - Robert Davies

There are too many of these stupid things. Facebook's a winner and loser; it'll win "personal," lose "public" content. Twitter's a loser, too limited in uses, e.g. no real discussions. Friendfeed (or similar) will win. - Maxwell Kennerly

this is getting annoying indeed... Ive started to use FF more than twitter now. Is there a FF blackberry app? - Nigel Walsh

Nigel, have you tried fftogo? Not full featured, but works on ANY mobile. - John E. Bredehoft from fftogo

While I dislike cross posting myself I'm highly guilty of doing it. I blame the disconnected decentralized websites and mediums causing needs to do it. There is no single decentralized network message bus/format. Someone needs to sit down and write an RFC so things will continue to work years after the initial companies FAIL and we can just move on to better problems to solve instead of doing the same ones over and over. - rob friedman

Yeah, what Rob said. - Julie Barrett from twhirl

We need a sort of Digg system that presents material based on an aggregated contact list from our different networks. It should recognize duplicate submissions and I suppose it could also rank content using exponential weighting based on the degrees of separation between viewer and submitter. If this already exists, please point me to it. - Benjamin Winters

Each service I use has a specific purpose - I don't cross post anything :) - Chris Saad

If each service had a specific purpose, then all these websites would stop trying to be everyone's everything online, adding new features or design tweaks that copy another site each week. - rob friedman

@Rob those sites don't get it and will not survive. I use twitter for microblogging, I use wordpress for blogging, I use flickr for photos and video. Everything gets aggregated into FriendFeed so that people can subscribe to a singe stream. What else do I need? - Chris Saad

Cross posting comes off like some form of Tourette's or short-term memory loss. You might understand the problem but it's still annoying. - AJ Kohn

@chris, Well what you need is subjective. WordPress is a blog, and is trying to become a (self)hosted twitter for everyone. Flickr is just a hyper networked gallery installation. FriendFeed is a feed aggregation website, too many similar FOSS to list, special because it does HTTP long polling to the web browser client making updates seem "real" time to the user. Twitter is short, easy has feeds and works via SMS. All want to have a real time conversation or content archived on the web. - rob friedman

I think that an other way to put the question is this: the content I create in the web is scattered everywhere and often is out of my control. In the old days of NNTP, my postings in the news where searchable and all the communication directed to me was in my inbox. Today things are disperse and aggregators, like FF create problems as they solve other problems. I think I would like to... more... - Michele Costabile

who doesn't crosspost nowadays? - polou/indigo_bow

Crosspost is the new "forward" - Andrea Grassi

Heh ... for us old tymers when "the Net" meant Usenet, cross-posting has some good aspects and many bad aspects. - JoWazzoo

Drop Facebook - Estelle Metayer

I still try to post different content, and post content relevant to the readership, you know Mashable is posting different stuffs on Facebook, Twitter (the only time crosspost with their website) and Friendfeed (some content may be similar). - polou/indigo_bow

Cross-posting from Twitter to Friendfeed started to bug me a few weeks ago when I realized most of my tweets where of no interest to people in Friendfeed. I just realized that I can save a custom search from Twitter and use it to filter the messages that get cross-posted using a hashtag (like Selective Twitter for Facebook does). The point is: more granular control of cross-posting. - Andrés David Aparicio

Thank http://ping.fm and talk to Chris Pirillo, it works well for him. - Garin Kilpatrick

Seriously, folks got together on OAuth. Can they get together on a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) on messages? At least then client developers (and UI alike) could develop methods of shrinking duplicate original content. - Jason Nunnelley

the feedalizr app removes or hides duplicates from your stream so you dont see the same Twitter and Friendfeed posts more than once www.feedalizr.com - Rafiq Phillips

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 - Comment - Like - Share

Chris Baskind, Thierry R. Andriamirado, Curt Mercadante and 152 other people liked this

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

430 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 Fuller

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 Fuller

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 Fuller

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

Only thing that is a threat to Twitter, is Twitter. - Fake Elmo

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

I really *really* wish they would fix it so we can resize the main display panel .. it is really irritating to see it "squished" while the other panels are resizable - Steven Hodson

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. - LogEx

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

I agree with Jason. AIR apps look so unnatural. Usability is nil - Bogdan Costea

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

for Windows users bDule is looking to be a serious contender .. still needs work but like Seesmic Desktop it's an alpha - Steven Hodson

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 ™, Coach Rah

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 Fuller

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 Fuller

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 Fuller

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

/me passes Jesse some Valium - Steven Hodson

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 Fuller

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

@Mike Taylor .. can we *please* be able to resize the main display panel .. PLEASE - Steven Hodson

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

@Mike Taylor .. well at least I know I'm not alone then :) - Steven Hodson

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

2010web .. hmmmm - Steven Hodson

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 Fuller

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

yes thanks Mike and if you open a Friendfeed room add me in please - Steven Hodson

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

good point Robert - Steven Hodson

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 Fuller

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 Fuller

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)

FWIW, I love Tiny Twitter on my Blackberry. So much nicer than Twitter Berry - ursi

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

@James .. threaded comments FTW! - Steven Hodson

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 Fuller

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 Fuller

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

@Brett he used to be big on Facebook too :) - Steven Hodson

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 - farewell FF

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

@Steve Chou - Google's record isn't much better really - Steven Hodson

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

So I need a who special box to run seesmic? *rollseyes* So it's like on of those Bloomberg boxes that investment firms have clicking away? And where in my already oversized backpack am I supposed to carry this Seemic machine? - Matthew DeVries

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

I'm going to look so cool taking up 4 tables in the coffee shop to run all the shit I'm supposed to be running to be truely plugged in.... - Matthew DeVries

@Matthew ROFLMAO .. just like the rest of the cool kids at Starbucks :) - Steven Hodson

That? That's the PS3 and HDTV just so i can watch Qor. - Matthew DeVries

I'm going to sit down and deal 5 notebooks out of my back pack like a Baccarat shoe. - Matthew DeVries

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

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

I still rather prefer Twhirl to Seesmic Desktop. (Twitter + Friendfeed) better than (Twitter + Facebook). - Adrian Scicluna

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

This entire thread is silly and nonsensical. It's one thing to argue the merits of an interface's appearance, but the way this reads is like comparing an orange to orange juice. Seesmic Desktop is the orange juice to Twitter's orange; without the source, you can't have the juice. Or, is Loic planning to create a competing SNS? - Ari Herzog

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 Worthington

Not the point, Johnny. If Twitter has one of its legendary fail whale attacks, it matters not what juice you're drinking since it ain't there. - Ari Herzog

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) - Ron Hagenhoff

+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

Walter Olson

@phillyshortcite You notice that Victor Schwartz testified _for_ expanding liability of Chinese cos. at hearing the other day.

May 22 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

In China, cases typically "resolved" thru politics. Not good enough if they want to transition from just manufacturing. - Maxwell Kennerly

Walter Olson

Suing actual makers of defective Chinese drywall may be difficult, so watch out installers & middlemen http://classactionblawg.com/2009...

May 22 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

My understanding is it's impossible to get judgment or collect from Chinese companies, so don't even bother. - Maxwell Kennerly

Maxwell Kennerly

The Best Weapon Against Pirates? Lawyers. - http://legalblogwatch.typepad.com/legal_b...

May 22 - Comment - Like - Share

A good argument, one that really understands how law and economics intersect to affect capital-intensive quasi-legal operations. - Maxwell Kennerly

Robert Scoble

Easily Create Your Own Feed Bundles Of Joy With Google Reader [feedly] http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...

May 21 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Susan Beebe, Denise Howell, Carl Beeth and 13 other people liked this

I was going to say, "SEE? GOOGLE READER RULES!" except that I learned of it on Friendfeed. Hmmm. - Maxwell Kennerly

4 more comments

I learned of it on Feedly. Heheh. - Robert Scoble

Liked for the feedly comment :) - Charlie Anzman

Liked because Edwin was here. - Russellreno

GR makes babies now? WOW - Capn' One Eye - adrift

Web 2010 is one more step along the way. Not just search, not just bundles/aggregate. Predicative ability. Pandora for Friendfeed. - Maxwell Kennerly

Robert Scoble

Why I don't use Google Reader much anymore:

May 19 - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Kevin Murray, Joe Bonner and 48 other people liked this

I have 585 friends there. That's after spending YEARS there (and for the first year or so I was the #1 user of Google Reader). Compare to Twitter, where I have almost 90,000 friends. - Robert Scoble

103 more comments

Or compare to Friendfeed, where 37,000 are following me after using it for a FAR SHORTER time. - Robert Scoble

Plus, here, interaction is much nicer and I get a nice kick out of sharing someone else's stuff and seeing the reaction to it. - Robert Scoble

How do I share? http://www.friendfeed.com/scoblei... is where I do it. I have 18,000+ items there shared from the world's top tech bloggers. - Robert Scoble

I *never* gave a thought to having "friends" on Google Reader. I just use it to read feeds I subscribe to. Strange how people can use tools in completely different ways. - Ken Sheppardson

I use Reader almost exclusively to read the blogs I follow. I recently got into sharing there but I don't know if it's all that great. - Merry Kuchle

Dean: if I'm going to take time to make a "magazine" out of the world's best web sites/bloggers/ etc yeah, number of followers does matter. It shows me how important the tool is. - Robert Scoble

You spent years there sure, but most of those years Google Reader had no concept of friending. Nonetheless I agree: Google Reader is not (and should not be) yet another social network. It is information presentation, not conversation. - DGentry

I was thinking the same thing, KShep. Sharing my items on GR is an afterthought, because it wasn't there at the betinning - Francine Hardaway

GR is very limited on sharing. It's great for scanning, but conversation is of enormous value. - Holly Rae

I use Reader for reading blogs only... - Vicki T Rodas

I'm thinking about ditching Google Reader too. - Jonathan Brown

I don't use it much either. Once a day to share interesting stuff. Friendfeed and twitter send me the gravy. - Sameer

i am only visiting reader 1x a week now. even then i'm just bookmarking info in Diigo for retrieval later. twitter and FF is where i get all my info now - Chris

When friendfeed has 37x more users for me after a shorter time, it doesn't make me feel good about spending time on another too that has less functionality. - Robert Scoble

I'm not sure I could ditch my goog reader addiction. - Chris Pugh

totally agree dude - I never look at my reader because it's constantly over 1000 - I would far prefer to be a fan of someone or a blog and have the feed come in my news feed - James Stewart

Reader is mainly for RSS, but I like the Sharing tool that I parse into Twitter/Friendfeed. Have a some selected "friends" that I follow closely there. - Paul Papadimitriou

GR is still an excellent Aggregator for me...I like the format and find it to be an easy place for me to enjoy some quiet reading time. - Jamie Ginsberg

The one exception is that Feedly rocks. If I start sharing stuff again on Google Reader it'll be because of Feedly. - Robert Scoble

When I share on Google Reader I have my shared items feed post to Twitter. - Byron Scullin

And for anyone here on friendfeed it doesn't matter because my Feedly shares go to Google Reader which come here to friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

I have to admit that I never used Google Reader so I'm not much help on reasons to abandon it. - LPH™ and his dog P™

I too still use Google Reader to just read certain websites I really like. I clean it out about once a month if I don't really read a site. I certainly do use friendfeed for any sharing/friend stories. - Dean Clark

I just find that I'm getting MUCH better inputs here on friendfeed than on Google Reader lately. That's because I'm following more than 20,000 people here and can see patterns much quicker and now that we have filtering I'm finding a ton of stuff I'd never find on Google Reader. - Robert Scoble

Dean: the thing is, I do the same thing here now. - Robert Scoble

Yeah, Reader is about reading for me. It's like my newspaper except much better. I only have a couple friends on there. - Neal Jansons from IM

I keep realizing that I'm really tired and that it's late and I haven't looked at my bazillion feeds in GReader. This happens virtually everyday lately. FriendFeed and real life have taken over my life. - ha3rvey (free hugs!)

I scan my Twitter crew @Microplaza a couple of times a day; it's cool. - Holly Rae

Robert: You've also put a lot more time into Friendfeed than I have :-) One of these days I swear I'll put some more time into adding and organizing people on it to get better use. One of these days! - Dean Clark

Google Reader has never really been a social media tool in my eyes. - Eric Dunlap

Neal: you're using Google Reader like I did years ago. Even if I try to go back and go down to only a few blogs, friendfeed wins big time. - Robert Scoble

It's scale and quality that make Friendfeed most useful for me. - Holly Rae

I just find it fascinating how this topic is the fastest moving I've ever seen here on FF. - dthree

I dont think you should be comparing Google Reader with FriendFeed or Twitter, totally different uses. I like to use Reader to go back and read all the posts I did not have time to read before, with FF or twitter, you only get to read so much before it gets tiring, plus Reader allows you to mark what you have and have not read. - Mike Cheung

Dean: I put probably 1000 hours or more into Google Reader too. I'm very happy I did, because it makes Feedly really rock (Feedly builds off of the feed base you put into Google Reader). - Robert Scoble

My Google reader has moth balls all over it as well. It just doesn't do it for me. Info is much more real time and network based. - Troy Malone

Mike: you have not yet discovered filters. I have. I need to show you why that's so powerful. - Robert Scoble

David: isn't it cool? - Holly Rae

I have almost friends in GR, though I do like the aggregation of socialmedian friends into GR, and gain a great deal of knowledge from that pool of friends. I share from google reader to Friendfeed mostly to push items I like to the platform I prefer, and if a conversation ensues then the benefits go up exponentially. - jcunwired

This is all true I find myself checking my reader less and less; though I still need it for a few bloggers who I read regularly who don't postback onto FF - Raj Advani

Robert: You're right...I get overwhelmed eventually by my own curiosity and empty my reader and start over. It gets backed up when I am busy with a project and so on, while I can keep FF open while I work and follow the chatter pretty effectively (two monitors, one just for social stuff). - Neal Jansons from IM

Troy: exactly. If news is breaking Google Reader is totally unsatisfying. Yesterday I was at the Social Graph Summit. I was watching stuff pour in here from people in the room with me (I had to leave for one session and that was a HUGE value). Google Reader? Nope. - Robert Scoble

Neal: on friendfeed when that happens just start a new list. :-) - Robert Scoble

I really like NetNewsWire, but have considered switching to GoogleReader for the "share" feature.But I still find myself sharing things I read in NetNewsWire on FriendFeed to start a conversation. - Larry Roth

By filters, do you mean groups and saved searches here? - Holly Rae

i suggest the robert scoble reader, the only source you'll ever need - Daniel Langendorf from Alert Thingy

Larry: that's the #1 reason I spent so much time on Google Reader. The sharing feature there was very powerful. I put thousands of items into my shared items feed over the past three years. - Robert Scoble

1000 hours? Yeah no where even close for me lol - Dean Clark

Larry, is there a quick way to do that? - dthree

Your assumption is that conversation and link sharing is all that matters; GR is a powerful way to find out what others are talking about and have a more private interaction with information; it's an entirely different tool than these. That's like saying that you are giving up apples because you got a new car. - Brad_King

Holly: yes. Shared Searches, sorry. I still think of them as filters. - Robert Scoble

Ahh! Robert, you can share them? in a room? - Holly Rae

Robert: Exactly. I like getting google alerts in my reader, though. When FF unveils the real-time search technology hiding under all of this on the whole web, that will be obsolete, too. - Neal Jansons from IM

Brad: good point. I haven't completely given it up (and if you like Google Reader you'll probably LOVE Feedly) but I used to spend hundreds of hours a month in Google Reader. Now? Less than 10. That's a huge change in my reading behavior. - Robert Scoble

Holly: no, I can't share my shared searches in friendfeed yet, but they dramatically are changing how I read stuff coming through the real time web. - Robert Scoble

RS: Isn't that analogous to magazine, newspaper, blog, social media? Is Google Reader the new magazine? - Brad_King

David: I haven't found one yet--had thought about writing an apple script... - Larry Roth

I have been getting news faster on ff then google reader for a while now. - Asankhaya Sharma

Brad: that's a good way to think of it, except there's too much noise to make it a good magazine anymore. Friendfeed is a better way to create a magazine for people. - Robert Scoble

Robert, thanks for the clarification. I do love the saved search in FF. I use a FF room to aggregate Twitter search feeds and share with colleagues... Google alert feeds could be cool in that room too. Thanks. - Holly Rae

We (my writing partner and I + some other select friends) use Google Reader + social bookmarks to create a collective discussion about specific projects and things that don't necessarily need the firehose that FF/Twitter are. But the thesis that GR is less powerful in this world I think is spoton. - Brad_King

I started using GR for aggregating several feeds into one single location. I'd check it every day to see what was going down. I confess at first I was very lax with it's use. I'd accumulate about 1000+ unread items and being a little lazy would just lightly scan what was there and mark-as-read most of them. Then into my life came Twitter followed shortly by FriendFeed. I'm pretty sure... more... - Wilfredo Guerrero

Google reader is set up so that I can focus on the news and blogs that I know interest me. Friendfeed gives me much more - that which I would never have found on my own, or never would have thought I would be interested in. To me, this is priceless. And by combining the two experiences here its totally changed the way I use the internet. - jcunwired

Wilfredo: I agree that I would like to see more engagement info in friendfeed (like how many people are clicking on links, etc). - Robert Scoble

So Robert, are groups and saved searches the best way to aggregate links and create a list of blogs, stories, ect? I'm not sure I've mastered the UX of FF yet. - Brad_King

main reason I don't use Google reader much anymore is all the good bloggers have stopped blogging. it's still good for picking up the MSM feeds :) - Steve Wart

Brad: no, groups and saved searches are a way to filter your input and find stuff you care about. Your OUTPUT (or sharing) can be done by clicking "like" on the items you like and want others to see. That creates a feed that others can subscribe to. Here's my "likes": http://www.friendfeed.com/scoblei... - Robert Scoble

I think you are right Steve - I've definitely noticed a drop in interesting blogging content in my feeds. Whether that is a good thing or not remains to be seen. (I've stopped reading books, but arguably I shouldn't be celebrating that.) - Mike

The problem with Google Reader is that it is not nearly as good a platform as Friendfeed for discussing Friendfeed. Nothing beats Friendfeed for that. - John Hardy

shiat, I've been looking for the LIKES feed. Where is that located on the UX? I don't see it anywhere - Brad_King

Robert it can be interesting to have FF as a reader as well .... - Johni Fisher

Brad: the feed for your friendfeed likes page is at the bottom of the page. There's an RSS and facebook feed there. - Robert Scoble

Friendfeed and Twitter satisfy my RSS needs right now with stuff that are interesting to people like me. And that's just one part of their service. - Manuel Mas

Mike: my blogging output has gone WAY down because of Twitter and friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

Here is the "cool" feed: http://bit.ly/5Bgv - Mike

Interesting, there ISN'T on mine. Just the RSS and FB and those go to my entire feed + there is no "filter" for likes. - Brad_King

OIC! - Brad_King

Brad, are you looking for your own likes? Click your name in upper right corner, then select Likes - jcunwired

Robert: It's probably got a lot to do with the topics you are interested in. Tech blogging is tired but I can confirm that economic blogging is really hot at the moment. - John Hardy

Brad: your likes Atom feed is here: http://friendfeed.com/wiredbe... I found that on the bottom of your likes feed. - Robert Scoble

John: while that's true, the economic bloggers haven't yet discovered friendfeed. Watch what happens when they do (I estimate that'll happen in 2010). - Robert Scoble

Robert: So basically: I can use FF just as I use GR? - Wilfredo Guerrero

there is no LIKES anywhere, I have to search for it. but I see how to search for the feeds now :) - Brad_King

Wilfredo: that's how I use it. There is one HUGE difference, though. Friendfeed only displays headlines. If you get fast with Google Reader's keyboard shortcuts you can read more information because you don't need to click and wait (and reading in a feed reader is more productive, but only for power users). - Robert Scoble

Brad, you can see (and create RSS feed) from anybody's likes. Click your own name or someone else's, and then click on Likes. - jcunwired

The great thing about GR is that you can enable it to "one touch" share on iPhone which posts to friendfeed and then to twitter, etc. There is no better way to quickly scan and share on the iPhone. - Stephen M. Otto

Brad: what are you talking about? Everyone on friendfeed has a likes page. Just click on your name to go to your account's home page then click on the "likes" on the top of that page (you can do that with anyone's account). - Robert Scoble

I'm learning things. - anna sauce

Robert: Well actually I've gotten to the point that now I have all my items collapsed so I only see the titles. If it seems interesting I click on it and read on, then decide if I share or not. I really cut down on the time spent reading all my feeds. Just skimming and sharing what I like. Now 500+ items are scanned without much hassle. - Wilfredo Guerrero

I think it is about time to let go the idea of socializing Google Reader any more,Friendfeed does that job very well. - Steve Chou

Why? Google reader is one of my most favorite web app~~ annnnd it's getter even better everyday. - yanchao

I see Google Reader as an important ingredient to FriendFeed, as others use Twitter. I also recognize that many people rely on my shares as an information filter. It also helps me get the top news fast. Combined with FriendFeed, it's a great 1-2 combination. - Louis Gray

if i use (as i do) twitter+friendfeed and sometimes facebook, and i don't have time to look at google reader. my problem is that i have difficulties in choosing feeds, i have a lot of blogs/sites i follow in google reader, and i find it very hard to reduce that number: suggestions? - Ivy /composmentis

Ivy : Sort your feeds by order of priority. I did that about a month ago, and that rocks. It enables you to realize you never read some feeds (or don't want to) whereas they're supposed to be in your A-list ... - Stanislas Jourdan

Anyway to get FF to show content of RSS including images? The Custom RSS/Atom w/ description as comment option shows the text description, but no other HTML. I'd like to keep a similar reading experience as Google Reader if possible. - Jonathan Brown

Friendfeed is great, and I love the filters. But for in depth info nothing beats Greader. Robert Scoble clearly invest a ton of time in Friendfeed, and therefore he/you can enjoy sparring with 100s of people in a way that others can't - their name just don't draw a crowd. Well, the point being, for me who accept that I cannot invest that amount of time in Friendfeed, then Greader will always have a much higher signal to noise ratio, and therefore be of much more value. - Peter Efland

Peter: that's bull. You can subscribe to the exact same people in friendfeed and set it up so it only shows you their RSS feeds and then you'll see EXACTLY the same things you'll see in Google Reader. Also, you're wrong twice. Why? Because the things that get likes and comments have much HIGHER signal to noise ratio so you can filter on just those. That's EXACTLY why Google Reader is noisier for me. I can't filter it. - Robert Scoble

I was curious as to the reason why your shared items are more or less extinct - now I know. Though I agree that likes can take the place of "shared" items on Google Reader and FF serves as a much better place for discussion, I like how streamlined Google Reader is and how much easier it is to keep track of items you read and items of relevance. Currently, one of my only complaints with... more... - Angus Burton

I agree,it is a little bit hard to track yesterday's good stuff,FF only means right now,maybe that's what Real time streams lack of - Steve Chou

good point Steve Chou. Real time often makes it hard to find what was before. I agree with Angus Burton as well. It is far easier to go in and sum up on blogs in Greader or find old posts. Greader does have a google search so though you can't save the searches, they are quite easy to filter... I would love to ditch my Greader for Friendfeed, but it just doesn't do it.... but maybe its not one or the other... maybe they can be complimentary - Peter Efland

Strangely I never used Google Reader until I watched Roberts interview with the Feedly founder and wanted to use Feedly, so I imported my world of RSS feeds into Google, and that was the last time I physically visited GR. I do all my adding and organizing from feedly. As for sharing I use the FF (likes and comments) integration built-into feedly to push content here and from here to... more... - Kevin Murray

For me, Google Reader and Feedly provide stronger features for feed reading than Friendfeed. I especially need list view and mark as read. Friendfeed should offer the option to hide all comments by default (displaying headers only) and to mark the current page or all as read. I stopped visiting the FF home page quite a few weeks ago -- I don't have time to wade through all the comments. - Sean McBride

Robert, appreciate your comment, and you're right. I know I can import blogs as imaginary friends. Though in my opinion the signal to noise of likes in Friendfeed are still way too much quantity instead of quality - This is clearly shown in the "best of day" feeds, which are often just ridiculous... - Peter Efland

I'm sticking with Google Reader. First, FF (and Twitter) inevitably become rivers of info. For many of my sources, I don't want a river, I want a cup, and I want to see it all. Second, the bulk of the people I follow (who are NOT social media mavens) are still blogging, nowhere near Twitter, much less Friendfeed. The latter will change, but the former will not. - Maxwell Kennerly

Steve Rubel

Is Facebook Connect v. OpenID v. Google Friend Connect just Passport v. AOL Screename sign-on wars all over again or is there a bigger deal?

May 21 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, James Stratford, Thierry R. Andriamirado and 9 other people liked this

It's a much bigger deal. - Patrick

20 more comments

@Patrick : How? Educate me. It seems like another standards war. - Steve Rubel

FB Connect requires an account on one particular service. OpenID doesn't. - Bruce Lewis

OK but how is this a big deal without a standard? - Steve Rubel from IM

I don't see any dominating since users don't really care. Bit.ly authenticates me through a Twitter API = future of making your service work BETTER with other applications, not coming up with your own closed baloney. I like this stuff and I'm getting tired of all my accounts everywhere and annoyed they don't bend over backwards to help me authenticate their own stupid service. - Maxwell Kennerly

Won't Facebook Connect just win here? If you operate a web site, which one should embrace? The one with the most users in your target demo, right? - Steve Rubel

Single sign-on tied to a specific company is not a good thing for users in the long run. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that OpenID will have the ease-of-use and fine granularity of controls to make it a good solution either. There are definite disadvantages to aggregating all aspects of your online identity under one umbrella, ripe for commercial and government exploitation. - LogEx

As users it seems we finally have a real reason to actually want a Universal ID. We want all of our friends to be able to see what we Twitter, digg, or share on GReader but we realize that everyone we know is not on each service. I believe the difference between now and attempts in the past, is that today there is an actual market for such a service. What I find interesting is that... more... - Patrick

It's more than just signons though, right? It's about socializing (bad word I know - we need a better one) every web site. - Steve Rubel

Facebook Connect would be the ideal sign-on -- but they're lacking users in key areas like India, China. Single-sign in isn't gonna bring people in. I like FB Connect / OpenID combo. - Andy Sternberg

It's also about identity. You can have an identity that is provably the same as an identity on another site. With OpenID it can also be about nothing more than sign-on. With Clickpass, for example, by default you have independent OpenID URLs so that sites can't conspire to tie all your info together. - Bruce Lewis

Steve, as far as who wins, you may be right. On the other hand, I operate a web site and embraced OpenID (via Clickpass) and not FB Connect because I find FB's TOS obnoxious. For example, you're required to make their login option equally prominent as other options, or not use it at all. For now at least, I'll not use it at all. - Bruce Lewis

I may be wrong but in the end I believe it comes down to where our friends are. I really believe that is the most crucial piece for a service like this. - Patrick

don't forget twitter sign in - Thomas Power

Everybody, see if Patrick is right. Go to my login page, look at the "alternative" choices in the lower left, and decide which one you want to use. You don't need to actually log in. Just come back here and say why you chose the one you chose: https://ourdoings.com/person... - Bruce Lewis

That's some list and explains the problem here. - Steve Rubel from IM

Is the list daunting? Would it help to change "Alternative registration/login" to "Or use an account you already have"? - Bruce Lewis

What does this do other than allow you to sign in? - Steve Rubel from IM

There is no 'OpenID v Google Friend Connect' - GFC builds on OpenID, and can make any website support OpenID in 5 minutes - Kevin Marks

Facebook adopting OpenID+OAuth+PortableContacts sign-in, following FriendFeed shows this is easy for users and good for biz - Kevin Marks

I agree with @Patrick, this is a much larger issue considering the installed base of Google and Facebook (and let's not leave out Twitter here either). - Brandon Mendelson

Steve, my example was just sign-in, but add in the other elements Kevin listed and it gets bigger. - Bruce Lewis

Robert Scoble

This afternoon I'm speaking to CIOs from many of the world's biggest companies about the 2010 Web. I'll put this post on screen, tell them what web things they should be considering:

May 20 - Comment - Like - Share

Dimitar Vesselinov, Peter Efland, Hutch Carpenter and 22 other people liked this

I have a slew of things I'm going to show them and talk to them about from discovery services, to video services, to collaboration tools/services, to enterprise 2.0 suites. What is important for a CIO to know about? - Robert Scoble

48 more comments

To the CIOs in the audience: Your company is not Friendfeed. - Jeff Stannard

make money in a 2.0 way - Lorenzo Strambi

@scobleizer: Privacy, discoverability, compliance - how do those initiatives impact what CIO's should be thinking about when considering adoption of web services. - Nick Wade

definitely the growth of the Real Time web & it's challenge to traditional search engines - sofarsoShawn

Location will become ever more important as mobile devices become geo-aware. - Stu Rich

If applicable to their business, making data available to the public can be a huge plus. This way, interested developers can create things that will have huge benefit without them having to pay large amounts of money to hire someone. It also makes them seem more open. - Brandon Titus

Usability. All these social media tools are great, but they still don't work together very smoothly. Just trying to explain to employees how to follow conversations on Twitter by flitting back and forth between users gives them nosebleed. - Kawika Holbrook

Tell them they should sign-up on Friendfeed and Twitter and they'll get all the information they need - meckimac

Tell them that somewhere out there, at least one of their competitors is going to try and beat them by leveraging enterprise social computing concepts to pull their suppliers and partners into what used to be closed product innovation, customer satisfaction and marketing processes. What are they doing about it? - Sameer

Twitter and Friendfeed are fantastic for conversations, but if you aren't following active users, then it never happens. - Nathan Finley

Tell them to use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube API's instead of creating more sites to login to. - matthew bennett

If they are watching this FF thread, they are seeing a good example of 2010 - Mike Nencetti

Insanely speedy response to world and company events will require a robust team of strategic thinkers monitoring a wide range of media. Knowing when to respond and when NOT to respond to company info, competitor info, industry info as enterprises go bankrupt, go public, go off the tracks, will require CIO, CMO, COO and Company Spokesperson Swat Team Excellence. - Halley Suitt

@scobleizer: oh, and for god's sake tell them that SaaS isn't snake oil. It's just another tool in the shed. Another weapon in the armoury. Deploy it at the right time in the right circumstances and it should work well. SaaS-ify everything just because it's buzz, and things won't go well. - Nick Wade

Data portability: let me both import to and export data from their service. - Will King

tell them or ask them? Ask them what challenges they are facing. - Dan (Dima) Itkis

Web 2010 should be interpolable and intelligent enough to coordinate itself effectively. - ashish

Moving from superficial social/entertainment network to action-based networking (helping with business growth, personal goals, political, spiritual, etc) that effects the real world. - Leif Hansen

Watch friendfeed closely - we may not have the answers, but we're asking all of the right questions. - Iain Baker

Facebook is like Ebay: closed services that casual users will grow tired with over time. - Jeff Stannard

Usability, mobility, privacy and interoperability. Avoiding fragmentation of the informations that came from all the social sites - Lorenzo Strambi

Watching the '4th wall' come down (online/offline, virtual/real) via nowsourcing, mobile tech, location-awareness, etc. - Leif Hansen

First off I would ask them if they know what the web is and how they currently use it. It's a fair bet many won't have a clue beyond email and a bit of porn. - Gilbert Harding

Nathan: Twitter and FriendFeed are great for conversations, but if they don't engage with users, it'll never happen. - Steve Lynch from twhirl

Social media burnout -too many accounts and 'spaces' online will force people to ask hard questions about how dependent they really want to be on technology, where their boundaries lie, how to filter noise, and which 'tribes' offer the most payback to their particular context. - Leif Hansen

For us, there seems to be a big gap between possibilities and actualities for both internal and external audiences - mostly due to disagreements over usage and guidelines. It is frustrating for those of us who want to embrace Web communication tools but cannot seem to progress into implementation! If anything ... embrace what's available and work to make it easily accessible and usable for employees and corporate initiatives. - Ingrid Williams

Transparency - Gambit Fauri

And of course, count on people under 25 knowing more about their business than they do. CIO's should have a Board of Advisors (a dozen) all under 25. - Halley Suitt

Tell them 2010 web is their chance to go from the Cathedral in customer service to the Bazaar. A month ago two separate Comcast "chat" service reps told me my problem needed a tech to come out to the site; a brief Twitter conversation with @comcastcares got the problem solved in five minutes. The Twitter reps were just plain better, friendlier and more proactive. The biggest benefit of 2010 web is NOT this app or that site, it's the change in mindset among the service reps. - Maxwell Kennerly

Enterprise 2.0 (not just business, but NPs, schools, etc.). Organizations will finally realize how powerful social tools can be when they focus on empowering their unique tribe. - Leif Hansen

One of the most important things that is overlooked is that they need to leverage IT assets to preserve institutional memory - RAPatton

We are all turning to micro- Microblogs,Micropayments,Microapps, Micro attention and web is turning out to be one single thing consisting of all these ever growing microthings. - ashish

The next big thing: http://www.building43.com - sofarsoShawn

Any specific companies or services that I definitely should show them? - Robert Scoble

A great topic of conversation (though perhaps not the audience) would be the difficulties enterprises encounter when adopting and adapting to web 2.0 tools internally, and their concern with open web content as it pertains to intellectual property and customer confidentiality. - jcunwired

Jcunwired, agree, that's definitely a massive issue/concern along with user privacy - sofarsoShawn

I agree with jcunwired, do these big companies understand what it means not to be half pregnant when it comes to the open web? Some have built their biz models on not being open, how are they to interact with this new world? Can these companies risk losing some control? - Daniel Kenney

CIOs should note the numerous times small upstarts have taken over from big incumbents on the web. If they want to make successful cutting-edge web projects happen, they need to maintain a small-company mentality in those projects. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

I agree with Bruce - Gambit Fauri

@scobleizer: maybe show them 37signals, Yammer and Cubetree. If they are multi-national CIO's, they'll be interested in collaboration toolsets. - Nick Wade

@Steve Lynch it's true that if I don't engage, things don't happen. But I have to follow, before I can engage! - Nathan Finley

@scobleizer CIOs need to know that these tools can be used to create better rapport with existing customers, attract new customers by creating transparent/honest communication about their company, improve internal processes and reduce costs through community-driven knowledge sharing, and apply the technologies in small ways that are best for them given their compliance and internal governance requirements. Fear of not moving forward is not a valid reason for not doing something. - Altan Khendup

ask them to involve more China and Indonesia.. for we both are absolutely not in crisis! eg. we need more servers and bandwidth.. - Pico Seno

Identity portability: customers will widely expect to engage online with your company via their existing profile accounts - FB Connect, OpenID, Google - take your pick. CIOs will need to drive the reconciliation of their closed registration systems with what these open systems provide. - Sean O'Brien

We've started talking to some of our bigger customers about what is life like after Microsoft Office. Old way: Making word docs, spreadsheets and powerpoints and then emailing them. New way: Still being developed. Opportunity: Companies that get collaboration right will have huge competitive advantages. Products: CubeTree but of course I'm biased. ;) - Carlin

@Carlin - hey hey Carlin, you're welcome ;) Hope you're doing well. - Nick Wade

+1 Sean. I don't want to have to create a profile on every site I visit. - Steve Lynch from twhirl

I don't want to create a profile on every site either, but I also don't want any one site to be the master profile and "know" everything about every site I go to either. Duplication of silo'd profiles is an aid to a sort of privacy. - Keith Fulton

@scobleizer Awesome mindmap. Why does youtube not make the map under video? - Kevin Murray

Walter Olson

Medical negligence in the military - http://overlawyered.com/2009...

May 20 from Overlawyered - Comment - Like - Share

Maxwell Kennerly liked this

Are any anti-tort legislators in Congress pushing for the non-litigation reforms you propose as an alternative? It's easy to suggest the pro-tort legislators are in the pocket of trial lawyers, but unless there's actual legislative support for the alternatives you suggest, then it's hard to blame them for defaulting to the same tort litigation system used by everyone else. - Maxwell Kennerly

J T. Ramsay

What happened to @Scobleizer? Did dude fall off the face of the earth?

May 12 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

I was wondering the same thing. I think he's obsessed with his "Building 43" project, whatever that is. - Maxwell Kennerly

Steve Rubel

Twitter's fail whale is an albatross on its brand, according to the Landor agency http://www.landor.com/...

April 13 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Chris Vickerson, Lou Paglia and rob liked this

I'm dumbfounded by how unreliable Twitter is - is Amazon Web Service really that expensive? Can't they just buy a Sun or Google shipping container and be done with it? - Maxwell Kennerly

Maxwell Kennerly

Apple Adds Still More DRM to iPod Shuffle - http://origin.reddit.com/r...

March 14 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Unacceptable - I can't even use my own headphones? - Maxwell Kennerly

Maxwell Kennerly

More Lowdown on AIG - http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archive...

March 6 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Totally unacceptable. - Maxwell Kennerly

Kol Tregaskes

BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook offers control to users - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1...

February 26 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, TheHenry, Mark Shoemaker and 8 other people liked this

"Facebook has responded to criticism over the way it handles user data by handing over control to its users. Members of the social network will have comment and voting rights over the firm's future policies regarding how the site is governed." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

3 more comments

Excellent!! I'm so happy to see this, we somewhat won! And this will make it easier for them too. Great decision. - ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,

Yeah, right. Just another example of corporate deception by the yellow, running dog, imperialist lackeys of our dictatorial Fascist overlords! How do you now they're not really implementing the original plan? YOU DON"T!! "All warfare begins with deception" Sun Tzu- Art Of War - Russell Wagner

Definite improvements: California law applies, license is restricted to privacy settings. But it might also create liability for third-party developers, whom users may be able to sue to enforce Facebook's terms: http://is.gd/l0Vw - Maxwell Kennerly

Rusell can you add any more adjectives to that last comment :) good one I especially liked the "Fascist overlords! " I have to remember that and use it sometime. I will give you full copyrights - Gabriella Sannino

Maxwell Kennerly

A Not-so-Modest Proposal to Changing Life at the Supreme Court - http://blogs.wsj.com/law...

February 23 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Bruce Lewis liked this

I'm all for it. It's silly how we make our constitutional doctrines highly dependent upon the health of a handful of judges. - Maxwell Kennerly

Robert Scoble

User data ownership on Facebook and why it doesn’t matter - http://scobleizer.com/2009...

February 17 from Scobleizer -- Tech geek... - Comment - Like - Share

Xiangzhen, Kevin Murray, Shivanand Velmurugan and 95 other people liked this

I'm glad to see Robert back to long-form, insightful blog posts, rather than getting distracted by twitter and friend feed. - Steven (optionshiftk)

53 more comments

You do realise that they extend their license to stuff you link to right? They can subicence as steve points out to their hearts content and you lose the value of your own content. I agree with your blogs sarcastic point about serving facebook. I made a similar one myself. - Anton Mannering from twhirl

I took a different angle on this too. I'm less worried about the things I know, and more worried about what we do not know. In essence we transfer all control to Facebook, but they are not transparent about what they actually do with our data. We don't know if we are signing up for the next best thing or selling our soul to the devil. Mark is answering the wrong question and we fell for it again: http://bit.ly/19GmYF - Alexander van Elsas

BTW here is an excellent writeup of Amanda French comparing TOSes of different sites like Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Youtube. Moral of the story? The uproar is justified: http://bit.ly/tJJBK - Alexander van Elsas

As a person who builds very consumer facing products and features I believe it DOES matter. With power (175 millions users) comes responsibility. FB has an obligation to transparency regardless of whether there service is free, and it's TOU is one piece of that transparency. If you claim one thing and do another, or you claim one thing and then claim another thing because your business is changing, that matters... - Ryan

Who uses FB to publish original works? Promotion yea. But don't people who have something to protect get their ©, ®, ™ before putting it out there and then just link to it from the various mediums? - Ryan Stanley

Just read Alexander van Elsas post. We should be discussing this on his FF feed. Great post and insightful analysis. Glad to see someone actually read and posted the TOU. - Ryan

@Ryan, @Jason, thanks guys! You're welcome to discuss it on my FF feed, it's here: http://friendfeed.com/e... , but here is fine too ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

Robert and Alexander, I have to agree with Robert. As I mentioned to you, Alexander, if you go to any institution implementing a GLS or CMS, you pretty much have to play by their rules and (having learned by painful experience) your data is not necessarily treated as if you are an esteemed author who could sue THEM for plagiarism. ;) That's as Robert says, reality. So I agree with his response. - Melanie Reed

In the early days, I treated my portfolio as a catchall for everything. I went with the bait. But having learned who really has the most "rights" to it and then with their upgrade, having seen all my legacy RSS link and bookmarks destroyed I was forced into the realm of Robert's reality. Facebook, Flickr, etc are going to do what they are going to do. Now, I can adopt a strategy that serves my needs out of that....or not. I'm learning as I go. - Melanie Reed

@melanie the most important issue is the lack of transparency. We are forced to give up everything while they do not. It is not an equal balance. Saying that that is just the way it is is accepting a bad practice that could easily be replaced by a good one. - Alexander van Elsas

@Alexander I agree that lack of transparency is the important issue. Now whether I like it or not I have to try to understand the other party here. I can see (but not like) the effectiveness of the ad targeting FB uses. How pivotal is that to FB's revenue? Seriously, would any of us say 'yes' willingly to allowing ANY of our demographic information to be used by Ad customers? - Melanie Reed

@Ryan, Your copyright is still valid and is not changed by Facebook's TOS. It you read their TOS carefully, you will find that by posting or sharing your content on FB, you are granting them an unlimited license to do whatever they want with your content. You still own the copyright, but it's value might be greatly lessened by allowing FB unimited usage rights. - Jeff P. Henderson

What if I'm a unsigned and indie band that uses Facebook to promote our music in a group or fan page. Does the TOS give FB the right to "use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute" those works for commercial purpose? - Matt Albiniak

@Alexander This brings up how business on the Internet is done. How do we want that done? How do we want businesses to conduct their research on target audiences? What should they know before hand in order to market to us? How do you want them to do that? I'm not fighting for their "rights" so much as I am asking that the methodology of what is acceptable marketing practice (that will be effective) is defined. BTW- I have a stake in this as our org has copyrighted material up on FB, too. - Melanie Reed

@Matt, Based on my interpretation of the TOS, I would say probably yes. - Jeff P. Henderson

@melanie my simple answer would be to choose a business model that monetizes user value. It would force you to do the right thing, always. Check out smugmug as a very positive example. They do not just have paying customers, they have paying fans! - Alexander van Elsas

@Alexander If I understand you, that would indeed cause a problem that many are trying to avoid: disenfranchisement in the digital world. Not everyone is capable of paying. So as I understand it, thus the two-tiered system as Flickr does with their pro accounts and the free. So how do we address that? - Melanie Reed

"Zuckerberg is saying: "We're not evil. Just trust us!" But this has been the mantra of nearly all companies that handle personal information. What company would say: "Yes, we intend to use your data maliciously and in ways you'll abhor"? There are many problems with Facebook's policy of 'trust us'" http://www.concurringopinions.com/archive... Solove, as always, gives an excellent analysis of the pitfalls. - LogEx

@melanie, you do not have choose a model in which every user has to pay to receive value (although that is the cleanest model there is). freemium is definitely a great model too. Provide a service for free and extra's as a premium. Either way. A user centric model will ensure you give more value to the user than to anything else. - Alexander van Elsas

@logical extremes, I recall banks and insurance comapnies saying the same things and look where that got us ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

@Alexander, exactly. Facebook should either drop the pretense, or adjust the TOU to describe exactly what they intend. - LogEx

Matt, Melanie, etc...I'd definitely suggest you take 5 or 10 minutes, and go read the earlier mentioned comparison by Amanda French http://bit.ly/tJJBK . The differences between what MySpace, for example, asserts as a right over your data, and what Facebook does, are both real and relevant to any creative type. Amanda has ferreted out the relevant sections of the license terms for multiple sites, and compares and contrasts well. - Ken Kennedy

Scoble's missed the boat, same as Chris Brogan. Facebook (and LinkedIn) has Terms that are NOT the same as everyone else's, and which, unlike MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Picasa and Twitter, do NOT permit you to revoke their license to use your content. I dove into the legal issues here: http://is.gd/jJXy - Maxwell Kennerly

Article on the new Facebook TOS changes and protecting yourself http://tinyurl.com/d4oeps - Chris Miller from twhirl

@Ken, thank you for replying and @Alexander, thank you as well! Ken, I did read Amanda's post. And, with respect to you and others, I still agree with both Robert and Matt. And in regard to MySpace, they are the ones who allowed access to everyone's private data to the search engine Spock. That's why I don't use MySpace or Spock among other reasons. - Melanie Reed

the point is if you upload it to facebook and decide later you want it deleted, and it's not deleted then....well it's nice to want things. I don't think this justifies the uproar, only that people should (have already been) thinking twice about what they put on those sites. It may, and probably won't, ever really go away once it's out there. - Richard Lawler

Really good side by side comparison here- http://amandafrench.net/2009... - Ryan

@Melanie ... no worries! As long as you've got the data, you're more than entitled to make your own decision. If I were you, I'd keep stuff I want to monetize off of FB, though...you really have no control once you've uploaded it there. It's a walled garden that FB can cash in on as they will. (note: I expect this will get restated before too long...this is too big a grab even for FB, but as of now, that's how it works out). - Ken Kennedy

@Ken, Interesting that you said that just now as there was a Facebook Ad, (company unknown as I didn't clickthru-that's one less cpv they'll have to pay for) that popped up on my right in Profile view that claimed "Monetize User Content" -"Grab content off your site from users and put it on T-shirts." roflol. This does provide some humorous aspect to me especially when you consider, I could get our ministry content out to a greater territory. ;) - Melanie Reed

GOLDEN Rule: Don't put anything on any site/form/webpage that you may change your mind about. Once it's out there it will never disappear. imho - walterh

@walterh, I hear what you're saying, and I definitely grok the spew of 'information wants to be free' (FTW!), but that's not really what's critical here. This is "boring" legal stuff...regardless of whether or not the data is available in some cache somewhere (which it is), this is FB asserting the right to use whatever you upload for it's own commercial purposes, forever. That's a whole different issue that "it never gets deleted anyway". - Ken Kennedy

@ken I am not really trying to argue your points. I was trying to say that all forms like FB will at sometime try to sell your info when they reach a critical mass. A perfect example of this is the phone scam going on right now were people call you telling you that your car warranty will end soon. These people are calling me on my cell phone. I only give my cell to trusted contacts as it is the only real way to get a hold of me in real time. That so-called trusted contact or service has sold my info. - walterh

@ken .....if you don't put personal info out on FB then when this happens you will not be regretting what you have done or posted. - walterh

@walterh Just FYI, the car warranty thing isn't a sold data issue...it's just a "brute force" attack on phone #s (ie, they call them all). It's gotten so cheap to make phone calls, even LD, that much like email spam, the minuscule response rate they get pays for it. As for personal data on FB, again, I understand that, but it's not really what we're talking about. Consider a band that wants to share their music, but not intending to let FB monetize it if they get popular. They're out of luck. - Ken Kennedy

So the expiry clause was in there when I signed up (i.e. if I leave they lose their rights over my content). If they have now changed the terms but I've not agreed to the new terms, then I'm not bound by them, right? Or did I miss a "we can change the terms whenever we feel like it and you're still bound to them" clause? - Yan

@ken I understand your point. Let me ask you this. Has a case like this gone to court yet. PS the warranty people have never called me at home. Had that number for 20 years. Every other sale company calls me at home. I do see your point that it could be "brute force" - walterh

The blog post has merit, the headline, not so much. - jcunwired

I basically agree with Robert that this isn't shocking since Facebook hasn't respected user's much; however, I do think ascerting ownership to data already in the system crosses the line. This is similar to the Google Reader shared feed issue that Steve Gillmor railed on for a while. - Robert W. Anderson

yeah, he reels em in with the hyperbole - Josh Haley

hyperbole Josh? yeah that Bill of Rights crap is overrated. BTW Google fixed that problem. - Steve Gillmor

Beyond the argument over who owns what and who's creating value for whom is a more interesting question, I think. Most people will not give a second thought to their rights to the intellectual property they create on Facebook. They just use it. They upload photos and videos and talk to each other. It strikes me that one thing Facebook is remarkably good at is capturing a user's... more... - David Erickson

hmmmm ... fascinating and important points being made here. However we are at the core talking about the morality and selflessness of corporations. The only way to own your own data completely is keep on your hard drive. Look at the terabytes of data Magnolia unfortunately lost last week. Their intentions were entirely altruistic, yet a technical malfunction intervened. We are in the midst of a radical shift and "ownership" is going to be defined by security, trust, and new elements ... - Bankwatch

... that have yet to be defined. Do you trust Google? Do you trust your bank? Do you trust gmail Apps Premium? These are fundamental questions and the answer will define internet and our future. Market forces will take care of it, but getting there might be ugly. - Bankwatch

It is a cheap and risk free business model for the service provider: The user generates all the content, is responsible for all legal consequences (even when the provider reuses the content in an unanticipated way), but the service provider may make all the profit out of it. whereever, forever. This business model was once called Web 2.0... - Arnd Gronenberg

you're right. facebook should be used as a hub, flickr gives you CC options, it's not hard to set up a wordpress blog for the same, i think youtube are the last in the list. there's plenty of apps on facebook that will update your profile when you upload photos to flickr, or make a new blog post. they're not perfect but they're getting better. - Terry O'Fee

They changed their mind: http://blog.facebook.com/ - Liron Eizenman

Most people wun care too much. But yes i agree it's creepy. - Alekkus

Well, then there's the 25 Things you didn't know about in the Facebook TOS: http://bit.ly/25thingsTOS - Steve Woodruff

To me it clear from Mark Z's post that the lawyers were tasked with drafting a revised TOU and blew it. ROLLBACK! - Ryan

doesn't say much for their lawyers on the writing and the way the TOS was handled... - Stuart Evans from twhirl

This is the new age of transparency. The big CEOs will have publicly available pictures of them from college. Professional images will become humanized. Social media has allowed us to share everything about our lives and so we did. I thought Mark made a great point in his first post regarding the issue when he explained that in order to give the community the services that they want, certain legalities are necessary and must be represented in the TOS. We just have to get used to the new age. - David Spinks

@David, if Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg too for that matter, are just as transparent as they force you to be then it would be fine. Until that moment it is pretty ridiculous that privacy only works one way. You must disclose everything and they take it all without providing the slightest clue what they actually do with it - Alexander van Elsas

I wish someone would analyze TOS that bank credit cards, mortgages impose. The funny thing is that while Facebook is having to backtrack - it probably never would have screwed us over - but banks that increase rates from 3.9% to 39% over night - regularly do. - Anshu Sharma

Good post, Robert. It's always been clear that Facebook has put their own interest in content assets first, but in fairness it's not so different that way than say...Friendfeed. One does pay a certain price for posting in Facebook, but to reach those who are more interested in relationships than in marketing their content, it's a good price oftentimes. I do think that over the next year that more publisher-friendly terms will come to Facebook, they've been lazy and now they'll have to catch up. - John Blossom

Robert Scoble

@jeremybuff if you think Facebook cares about you think again. I've been yelling and screaming about its policies for a year now.

February 17 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Marcus McCurdy, Kevin Whalen, Kenton and 14 other people liked this

Does the TOS include a line saying that they can update the TOS at any time, or would there have been pop up message asking users to agree to the new TOS at some point. - Jamie Vidamour

6 more comments

It states pretty clearly that the terms are subject to change at any time and that if so, users have the right (read: are expected) to reagree or leave. - Tyler Brownfield

kinda like health insurance, oh we cut those benefits but to better service you we will have to increase your.... but if you don't agree..... see ya. - JuneM

FB cares, I guarantee it. It has to. If users don't trust the service they'll walk. - Ryan

Ryan : you guarantee that FB cares ? - atul abraham from twhirl

The only guarantee I can see is that Facebook guarantees that most people will never fully read the TOS and therefore they can put in whatever they want. - Kenton

Legally speaking, of course not ;) But I think they care very much about doing the right thing. They need users, it's their business and without them they fail. - Ryan

New terms aren't enforceable w/o notice, may not even be enforceable w/o proof of consent to them. See http://is.gd/jJXy - Maxwell Kennerly

Maxwell Kennerly › Comments