Melissa Gonzales › Comments

Hey! Could you send me an invite? - Tyler (Chacha)

Nope. I am only inviting people I've met face-to-face and who I want to follow. I'm already following you here on FriendFeed, though, which is even better. - Robert Scoble

that makes complete sense... so after your jaunt across the ocean head over here to Hawaii :-) - Crystal Clear

Isn't it a little rude to refer to hidden feeds? As they used to tell us at NSA, true secrets are those shared with no one. - Jack (a.k.a. Jeber)

Jack, it is very rude to talk about a secret group, but that's one of the things I'm studying too. Humans are fun to study. SEO types are going crazy over trying to get into this account, by the way. - Robert Scoble

Robert, really, I'm just going to say this just once - repeatedly talking about your "secret feed" is ridiculous. It completely looks like an 11yo trying to grab attention and prove he's a "popular" kid. You admit it's completely rude to talk about hidden feeds, and yet you justify it because "I'm studying humans," which is another arrogant and incredibly rude thing to say (you do not refer to people as subjects, ever). Scoble, for someone with your accomplishments, I expected better character... - Ben Parr

Just open it up, let us follow @SecretScoble, but refuse to follow us back, whats the big deal? - Mark

They trade Scoble nudes like baseball cards in there. That's the word on the street. - Geoff Schultz

I can see your use of the secretscoble account to be very simalar to my use if twitter. I have started to put a cap on the people I follow, rather than blindly following everyone back, about 60% of the people in my twitter stream I have met in person, and about 20% are people I hope to meet. I have found I start missing things important to me if I go over 450. I do respond to every... more... - Luke Kilpatrick

Ben: sorry, every Twitter company is studying Twitter's users. Every single damn one. If that's rude to do, then go postal on all the Twitter developers. Mark: it's a big deal because I want to talk with a very specific audience there, not with everyone. I am studying how that changes my writing, or what I want to do. In my research of how normal people use the Internet they want... more... - Robert Scoble

Ben: and how will this make me more popular? Or prove to others that I'm popular? You have some weird ideas of how to prove you're popular. James: my secret group. Gotta go, the black suburbans are here. :-) - Robert Scoble

As a uk tax payer I'm helping to pay for your blogger holiday - can I get in ? - Adrian

Adrian: no. It's like the Suggested User List. Only less fair. - Robert Scoble

Hmmmm... I think I was following that account on my old @freddavis account... another hassle with Twitter never giving me my account back... add me as @fucktwitter, or just follow me here ;-) - Fred Davis

So in other words, you're finally experimenting with "the friends are the filter"... you know, the method that you were absolutely insistent wasn't as good as "follow everyone" a while ago? I'm not going to say "I told you so" but... I told you so :) - Ian Betteridge

Great friends can be the best filters and can allow you to get a much cleaner stream of what's happening than following everyone - same story with RSS feeds - I think Ian is quite right, but maybe you are onto something different Robert... - Robin Good

Robin, I think we're actually both right: a lot depends on what you're looking to use your feed for. Robert uses his quite differently to the way that I use it. I don't care about 99.99% of the stuff which comes up enough to need to know about it *right now* - Michael Jackson's death being a classic example. But there are certain things that I do want to know about now, and those tend to be the kinds of things that friends would pass on. - Ian Betteridge

Robert, you could extend the walled garden concept and have an invite only blog, or paid access (that's one way to find your dedicated fans). I don't think that form of community conflicts with open formats either. Both have strengths and advantages. It behooves us to understand and interact with specific communities within both. I prefer the open type due to the nonexclusivity. For... more... - Mark Essel from iPhone

You could do a quick mashup on your site that could authenticate with twitter and show the home feed for @secretscoble on that page to everyone, without them having to join. Couple of issues with that, though. It would also show tweets from people whom @secretscoble follows who otherwise have protected feeds. Also, basic HTTP authentication b/w your server and Twitter - not very secure. - sameer

just take screen shots from time to time if you want to make a point about what you are seeing there. then get your friends' permission, and write a blog post about it. - Laura Norvig

I would keep it that way scoble - polou/indigo_bow

@secretscoble yes it is - - Kevin Tunis

Scoble has the first premium Twitter account, because I am certain that people would pay a lot of money to become a follower. - Bob Blunk

Bob Plunk have you been on the sauce? Just add the people he follows to your account and you have a replica of @SecretScoble. I promise you Robert is not saving all his pearls of wisdom for that twitter account. He isn't tweeting revelations that will change the world on his alternate account. It's just some experiment he is running on things such as how much attention people pay to invites. - Mark

kewl and best ; Scoble rox lol ; http://www.youtube.com/nicomed... [WE LIVE IN PUBLIC-participant, Sundance Film Price, imdb at http://www.imdb.com/name... ] nicomedy aka ewing2001 - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

Until you figure it out, I'll use your SUL as a filter to find interesting streams I am not currently following. - Alberto Saavedra

Twitter should just display posts from everyone you are following in a stream, just like they should allow anyone to sample someones followers. Basic. - Steve Garfield

Theres no way to push the rss feed out to ff? - J. Abdul-Qahhar

Yes you can let us see.. Read Friends "Timeline" section: http://support.autoblogged.com/forums... - CantorJF

I dont want to see it anyway!! - Matt G

Would you like to show that as a widget in your blog? I could code a wp plugin to do that. - Diego Sana

What are the thoughts so far? Would be interesting to understand. I always feel that Twitter is really cool as a comms tool aslong as you use it that way. Its down to the individual. - Paul Rawlings

Very interesting. Cant wait to hear about your findings! - Sean Simkins

Sean: so far the signal to noise ratio is much like my lists on FriendFeed. I like FriendFeed better, but there are quite a few people who aren't yet on FriendFeed. The thing is, though, most people aren't on Twitter, either. They don't watch their accounts very closely and/or they don't act on them if they do. - Robert Scoble

I don't understand why you invited people like Ijustine though? Go look at her friendfeed account, a typical day would be a dozen or so bikini pictures, a video about Apple and a bunch of tweets on some new shoes she is buying? - Mark

@Mark, yeah exactly, that's why I stopped following her myself - Stuart Evans

Another interesting experiment would be to allow anyone in who wanted to but to screen people before hand to make sure they weren't spammer, etc. You could create an account of tech-savy people that you could draw news from and do experiments with. Like a twitter that actually knew what they were talking about. - Sweyn Venderbush

Mark: because I've met iJustine. She's part of my experiment. - Robert Scoble

I trust you will be documenting this experiment? Or is it all just going to be in your head? What's your hypothesis? :-) - Mark

How will you control for extraneous variables ;) - Mark