And I was just going on & on about how running "apps" on your "computer" and generating "files" was going the way of the dodo bird, and all about web apps, the cloud... etc. My friend said "what if they did something with your data?" and I reply "what could they possibly do?" Ug. - Dean Terry
FOG - not a bad thing to have. Had a similar issue when "Teh GOOG" thought my wife was a spammer because she has a lot of people to communicate with. Send email, deafening silence. Please, pretty please, let me back in, deafening silence. Wait a week, maybe, hopefully someone will take a look at it. It helps my perspective on these issues to think that primarily Google isn't a company, it's an algorithm. Love what they create, but they're a little short on customer service. - Todd McKinney
i wish the story was more clear on what activities this 'Nick' was doing with his Google tools before the problems occured. we all click right through the long-winded EULA legal-eagle language when signing up for lots of these services...maybe he was violating the Terms of Use. - .LAGizmoto
This totally freaks me out because I've seen that same message a couple times. All of a sudden, I go to my Gmail tab that I left open and it has logged me out. I put in my password and it then asks me to do a CAPTCHA. Then I get the message. I refresh the page though and it's all good again - it lets me login. However, when it happened, I was near panicking for a minute. What's going on, I wonder? I think maybe I should switch but switching email is *HARD*. Time to turn on automatic forwarding though? - Sarah Perez
@Sarah Perez: Just setup Thunderbird and have it POP to Gmail. Instant downloaded Gmail backup. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
The thing that could and should save him is the additional storage. He has a transaction record with his (assumed) credit info on it. He should be able to get somewhere with that. The fact Google did not recommend a course of action involving that upon conclusion of their investigation sucks belly button lint. - Michael W. May
Google owns me too. I have almost all of my email accounts collected into one GMail account. My GMail goes back to 2004 but other mail in there is older than that. If this happened to me I'd be devastated. Google really needs to respond to this. I'm not feeling really safe right now. - Kenya
As I said in my comments, if you are paying for Google Apps -- pick up the phone and call them with your support number from the support screen you should have printed when you signed up for service as a PAYING customer like you would for any bill with a utility company. Did I miss something or gloss past this somewhere in the writeup Chris or was there no phone call placed to Google Apps support? http://www.chrisbrogan.com/whe... - Jay Cuthrell
I have my Gmail setup to forward everything to an alternate backup account at dreamhost, where in theory I have 300GB of space available. It's come in handy every once in a while when Google's servers act up. - Carlos Granier-Phelps via twhirl
So, nothing was mission critical, but still. Think how many services you can't use if you lose your g-account. Gmail, docs, calendar, picasa, etc. It's not trivial. - Chris Brogan
I commented on the blog post, but I'll say it here too: "I’m glad that Nick got his account back. The system to recover your account asks you to try to remember information to prove that it’s you instead of a hacker, but I believe it still lets you recover your account much faster than the previous system that Google used." - Matt Cutts
P.S. One difference between Google and many other companies is with Google you can back up your email for free and easily. If you want to back up all your data in your Google Account, the Google Operating System blog did a nice summary post about how to do it: http://googlesystem.blogspot.c... . At least with Google you can pretty much pull all of your data out and back it up. - Matt Cutts
@Matt - thanks for commenting and for your ideas. It wasn't the Gmail account that was the biggest part. It was the fact that without THAT account, he was locked out of All Things G (don't tell Walt and Kara). That's way more tricky than missing an email or something. Right? - Chris Brogan
I think the key to safety here is diversity of services everyone relies on plus back up - a desktop client for Gmail, regular export of OPML, etc. - Svetlana Gladkova
Another lock-out here: mine just got canned sometime between 9a and 11a EDT. Luckily it's a new account w/ no data, but still... - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
I hope everyone scrolls down to read the comments instead of running way scared. :) - Marcel
I blogged about some interesting options for moving our data out of corporate control and back into the cloud. This is something I've advocated for years, great to see the discussion here. http://theprogressbar.com/arch... - Dave Evans
@Chris, there's several ways to look at this. If you're worried about losing data if an account is disabled, it's easy to back-up almost any data associated with your Google Account (see my previous comment about how to do that). If you're worried about not being able to use All Things G with the disabled account, you could always create a new account to access Google services. On the third hand, if you're worried about the actual disable-ing and how to correct that, there are good ways. - Matt Cutts
@Chris, continuing my comment on reversing a disabled account. :) For example, we provide a self-service tool to help get your account back: http://mail.google.com/support... and account recovery: http://www.google.com/support/... . I think Google provides better tools for online account recovery than most other sites. Some people do abuse Google accounts, so we have to be able to disable those accounts. We try hard, but no service will be 100% perfect. - Matt Cutts
I'd be all over that , like a fat kid on a twinkie - fotographic
I'd be all over that like a fat dude on Paris Hilton - Josh Haley
Now that is funny! McCain should take comedic lessons from Paris. Hmmmm, that energy plan actually sounds respectable (on the surface that is). - Darrell Bell via twhirl
If you asked her what the Oval Office was, do you think she would know? - Chris Rivait
The ultimate FriendFeed client is the URL, it isn't as needy as Twitter is, and doesn't need a client to make it more usable (at the moment). - Steve Isaacs
Perhaps FriendFeed doesn't need a client to make it more useful, but it is certainly needed to make it more accessible (for me anyways). Also, thanks for favoriting this, Louis. Also, thanks for commenting at Performancing and adding me as a friend on FriendFeed! - James Mowery via twhirl
that missing hide feature is indeed a good point. really messes up ff in twhirl. - Martin Spindler via twhirl
Above all else, I don't understand why FriendFeed and Twhirl have not agreed on the display of comments. Why on earth do they have the order of comments different on each one? Personally, I like the reverse chronological order in Twhirl, but when I visit the FF site, it always takes a moment to adjust seeing the older comments first. Regardless, consistency would be appreciated throughout most first and third-party applications. :D - James Mowery via twhirl
I like using FF on the web.. tried twhirl and it sucks... I agree with @Steve - why do we even need a client? - andy brudtkuhl
Andy: I would ask if you believe that Twitter is as useful without a client? If your answer was no... either you don't use Twitter or you are a madman! :D - James Mowery via twhirl
"Client" doesn't necessarily mean a desktop app. I do, however, see a need for alternative web interfaces. IMO, the successful third-party FF apps will be improved and advanced web clients. - Aviv
Yeah, I agree with Aviv. Especially with smartphones coming in their prime with the likes of the Apple iPhone, I see greater importance being put on third-parties. Who knows what could be created to utilize FriendFeed's functionality? I don't think we've even seen the true potential of third-party developers come out yet with FriendFeed. - James Mowery via twhirl
One area of opportunity for a FF client would be w/a native iPhone app. While the FF iPhone interface is fairly good, but an app could introduce some additional functionality (i.e. improved filtering). - Monty
James, I think the Twitter concept itself makes it that much more suitable for 3rd party desktop clients, pretty much in the same way that we have IM clients. I think FF is fundamentally different, especially usability-wise (ie. we comment, we check back for replies, there are rooms, different types of content being shared - from images to Twitter-like messages). Unlike Twitter - and IM for that matter, it'll be difficult for desktop apps to keep the users engaged in the FF experience for a long period of time. It works for Twitter - messages in, messages out. But FF requires the user to pay more attention and interact with the system in ways that I think are bound to be inefficient if using a simplified desktop app. - Aviv
James, while FF's current API implementation is great, I don't think we will see serious alternatives to the FF web client until FF lets developers hook into the constant stream of updates (XMPP is all the rage, it seems). It's still possible to aggregate FF data, but at this stage I think it's the main reason for the lack of rich FF clients. - Aviv
Aviv, while I agree, you just can never know. I wasn't specifically talking about desktop clients with this discussion. I think that web-based applications could be developed to better harness the FriendFeed data. For example, I'd love to see a more in-depth view of the activity that takes place on my FriendFeed account (somewhat like Socialistics for Facebook) or have a third-party develop a site that could allow you to aggregate different content types into one single feed for FriendFeed, or perhaps something like a third-party application that could notify you whenever your name or brand is mentioned on FriendFeed (like summize). - James Mowery via twhirl
I'd love to see a live activity heat-map of some sort that can display the relative activity happening throughout the world on FriendFeed. A simple map with color signifying the amount of activity that has taken place within the past hour, day, week, month, and year would be an excellent application. It could be made more useful, but even having something just like that would be astounding to check out. Stuff like that is what I'm interested in. - James Mowery via twhirl
I think a mobile client would be great... But I don't think we need another client for the desktop... @James I only prefer using a Twitter client because it pushes the updates to me - andy brudtkuhl
Andy, I also only prefer Twhirl because it gets the updates to me. When I want to share content from the web, I much rather prefer using the FF bookmarklet. I also use the FF web interface when attempting to catch up on information that I have missed. - James Mowery via twhirl
I like Twhirl, but not for FF - I would give a client that did all of this a try. - Leslie Poston
No client needed for FriendFeed. FriendFeed is the first service where I feel I don't need a local app. - Rutger Blom
Creating this and locating it at a standard URL for all companies (such as companyname.com/socialmedia/) so it could be found easily, would go a long way towards clearing up confusion and regaining some measure of control over an organization's brand onli - Martin Spindler
Creating this and locating it at a standard URL for all companies (such as companyname.com/socialmedia/) so it could be found easily, would go a long way towards clearing up confusion and regaining some measure of control over an organization's brand onli - Martin Spindler
“(eben auf rivva nach dem like-button gesucht, dann erschrocken. dachte bis eben, leute, die so was schreiben [like auf anderen seiten suchen] spinnen)”
mit HTML5 können ja fast alle Seitenelemente zum Hyperlink werden – ich finde, man sollte dann ganz individuell "alles liken" können … Liebe für alle <3 - Frank Westphal
Having seen this rise of the "social media expert", I think it's short-lived, just like Webmasters 10 years ago. These skills will slowly melt into what's typical marketing and PR, and you won't need people who are this specialized.
See: http://www.louisgray.com/live/... - Louis Gray
Haha, webmaster! Haven't heard that phrase in quite a while. - Eric Florenzano
*yawn* It will go the way of the dodo. See also: "Chief of Monetization." - Cyndy
quite funny. we're all talking about specialization in managing communities. we're all talking building your network. we're talking 'brand embassadors'. and all this reminds me of plain lobbyism. only the scale being somewhat smaller. networks, pushing decisions, using influentials. sounds pretty familiar to a poli-sci student... - Martin Spindler via twhirl
Martin, absolutely, it's "lobbyism" or PR taken into the online realm, using all of these new and wonderful social media tools. - Eric Berlin
I see these positions more as educator roles. We early adopters sometimes forget how different we are from average business folks in terms of online tools we use. In 5 years when casual business users are much more comfortable with social media tools a social media expert won't be necessary or wanted but something else will. - Michelle Jones
On the x-axis is the number of direct friends while the y-axis tells how many friends-of-friends you can reach overall. Some users are a bit more efficient in their selection of friends, some contacts lists are (informationally speaking) redundant. - Mitchell Tsai via Bookmarklet
Good stuff, Justin. I've also been looking at who a given user follows as a factor in deciding whether or not to follow them. It's my verison of, "Tell me who you follow, and I'll tell you who you are." - Harvey Simmons
Totally forgot to mention, when I do my weekly (or so) review, I'm using Hao Chen's GreaseMonkey Script. It's a life saver! http://userscripts.org/scripts... - Just updated the post to include the link as well. - Justin Korn
Solid advice. I really like the part about looking into their stream and analyzing what associated services mean what about which users. I'm relatively new so preventing noisy feeds is good. However, you should give a nod to the hide feature which lets me hide services from some users. I am a huge fan of that since it lets me get down to the really good bits of content being shared. - Derick Valadao via twhirl
@Derick: Glad you found my post useful. As for the "Hide" function, I use it all the time, but I did not want to dig into how to deal with the noise issue. My main point was to inform users how I deal with my subscriptions in order to ensure my feed is relevant to me and my interest. In the long run, this is the best noise reducer there is (IMO). - Justin Korn
@Justin: Maybe it would make a suitable topic for a follow-up. I know the hide feature has been documented in many places but it would be really helpful to have a recent, well-written reference on how to filter out the noise within feeds you would normally find interesting. - Derick Valadao via twhirl
@Derick: I agree, it would be a great follow-up, however, I think Louis Gray's article hits home on covering how to use hide (http://www.louisgray.com/live/...). If you haven't read it, give it a whirl and let me know if you still think another write-up is needed :) - Justin Korn
@Justin: ah yes. I remember reading that article. It did to a pretty good job. Thanks for reminding me. I did use some of his hints and it did a pretty decent job of keeping the talking points in focus. Maybe you are better to just link to the article in case others haven't read it :) - Derick Valadao via twhirl
@Derick: Chris Baskind also started this thread (http://friendfeed.com/e/6740da...) which has some good tips. I'm guessing he is thinking up a post on this very topic as we speak/write. - Justin Korn
@Justin: Wow is that ever an expansive list. I think your suspicions are well placed. - Derick Valadao via twhirl
Benedikt: yeah, but when Yuval did this I had something around 13,000 subscribers. Now I have more than 17,000. So, I'd guess that we're more than 100,000 at this point. - Robert Scoble
True. What a difference a month can make. Things I'd like to know about Friendfeed: 1) the more or less exact number of FF users that are followed by at least one user and 2) the share of people having disabled FOAF notifications. - Benedikt Koehler
Let's start counting from zero. I'm +1. - Andrew Trinh
@Andrew ;-) But that's not necessary. We'll just have to count the users not subscribing to Robert Scoble and add 17,000 to this number. - Benedikt Koehler
If the rule of six degrees of separation holds true on FF, one could write an API app that starts with someone's subscriptions and follows them down 6 levels to get an approximation of the number of users. How long would such a program run? - Ole Begemann
I would find that application to be very interesting, we need someone on it. STAT! - Andrew Trinh
Andrew: I would find it interesting too but it's probably not feasible considering FF has some kind of limit on API usage. If you query 10 user profiles per request, that's still 10,000 API requests or so. Quite a lot, isn't it? - Ole Begemann
@Ole Begemann I've already written such a programm. Unfortunately not elegantly enough because sorting out the duplicates simply needs to much memory resources to run beyond 2nd degree :( - Benedikt Koehler
If I had to bet I'd say it's now more than 100,000, maybe even a lot more. Personally I'm interested in the amount of *active* users, not those who just lurk and share nothing. BTW, check out the numbers in this excellent presentation - http://www.slideshare.net/kell... - slide 13 says that on a given day in July, FF crawled Flickr on behalf of 45,754 users. - atzmon
@Ole you can read about the work I've done in this area (http://user21.com). You will hit a few limitations. First of all not all users are public, so you may know they exist if someone follows them, but you won't get their subscription list. Also, crawling this way will miss those users who are not active enough or not followed by others. For me, they were not interesting in the context of what I was trying to accomplish (I wanted the public active users). - atzmon
Benedikt: What algorithm are you using to sort/store duplicates? There are some that don't use much memory. See Richard Korf's work on search at UCLA. We managed to find perfect solutions to Rubik's cube. - Mitchell Tsai
Aviv, Google doesn't know the whole truth ;-) Scoble alone has more subscribers than this. At this moment, FF6° has 20,000 users cached. - Benedikt Koehler
i lost all my friends, now im all alone in the internets, i go back to irc they dont lose my friends - Allen Stern
Yesterday I went down from 500 to 50. Today I am just up to 390. They say the problem was solved. NOT! - Alex Popescu via twhirl
@Alex: I think they mentioned that it would take time so maybe some patience could do? - Svetlana Gladkova
@Allen: That's hypocritical - chatting to me on Skype and claiming you are alone? :( - Svetlana Gladkova
@Mitchell: It's not mine, credits to the creators of Twitter Counter application that I mentioned in the post. - Svetlana Gladkova
There are some benefits to being relatively unknown in the Twitter-sphere...the follower issue halved my follower list but I think most of those lost weren't active with my feed anyway. I'm more concerned about regenerating my "followed" list as right now other Twitterers provide more value to my use of the service. - Sally Robinson
@Sally: Yes, this is a bigger problem: when you are not an A-lister and don't have thousands of followers, you are supposed to actually track what the people you follow do. And this is a huge problem for such people - though I think it will be wiser to wait a little for the promised changes to propagate. - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl
updating my post to link to yours :) - Sarah Perez
Svetlana wrote, "you are supposed to actually track what the people you follow do." Horrors! :-) - Brent Newhall
@Sarah: Thanks a lot, appreciate the mention. Funny how we both ended the post with "ironically" on the Twitter Counter app :) - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl
@Brent: Sorry, it was not supposed to be "supposed", it should rather be "you have better chances of actually tracking" if you don't follow thousands of people. - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl
Fail Whale (outages) + Follower/Follows Counts all screwed up! + Sending of random, unauthorized tweets (I did NOT write!) = corrupted database and management fiasco - Susan Beebe
@Susan: Definitely. I myself think this is absolutely enough and as soon as I see a new clone launched that would allow to import all the contacts from Twitter itself, I think I will jump on it and be its most passionate evangelist. Developers here? - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl
@Susan: I'm over there as well at http://identi.ca/profy and I've been subscribed to you anyway but I have not actually started to use the service. Though I am sure I will start with it now, after all. - Svetlana Gladkova
Man I hate it when they do that! I feel so violated! - Aura Mae
Spamarrest.com works really well for me, Jeff. I always publish my full email on my posts. 85.5% of the email I get, as a result, is total spam. But spamarrest kills them all. The only problem -- when you email me for the first time, you have to verify you're a human. An arse. But the only way I can manage. - Ewan MacLeod
Looks like Facebook is fighting back and avoiding its usurping by FriendFeed. Facebook now allows me to view my FriendFeed page inside their site. - Jared Evans
It already has. But it isn't called FriendFeed, it's called Facebook Activity Stream. - Martin Spindler
I think it might, I'm not much of a tech-savvy guy, and it's only recently that I've found the conversations accessible enough that I can jump in. Maybe the "people factor" has now outweighed the "tech factor" in my mind... - Danny Gregory
@Jared that's an add-on application, correct? I'm not sure it's an officially supported one. - Paul Whitaker
No, none of Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. are truly mainstream, I would argue. - wrecks
Probably not. Friendfeed for masses would be called Facebook's or another social networks Activity stream. - Doruk
I think it's a feature set more than an application. It's a nice app right now for us early adopters, but it will go mainstream as features added to existing bigger networks. - Jason Goldberg
Oh stop! :-p Friendfeeding about Friendfeed is so meta.... just... just... just stop! :) - Aaron Brazell
LOL @ Aaron facebook is good but different and twitter doesn't allow enough space - Cecil Sandus
My bet: no way FriendFeed will go mainstream in its current form. But I imagine that what we see now is not FriendFeed's endgame by any means. My take: it's all about the data they're collecting. They've got implicit data (our clicks) and explicit data (our shares, likes, and comments). Get enough of that, and there are all sorts of wonderful things you can do. Comments, Paul? - Dan Kaplan
I access FF primarily through FB. For me, mainstream adoption boils down to two things - ease of use and ease of access. PS: I had no idea this conversation was going on until I checked my referrer list. Yikes! I need to get better at tracking conversations around the net. - Mia
I think it got quite a big push now that Twitter self destructed the followers. Just going down is one thing, but going down and taking acct info (such as who follows who) with you is quite another. I think we are now seeing the beginning of the end of twitter (which is great for FF). - Aaron Krug
To some extent, I think it already is. Lots of 'non-techies' already on board - Charlie Anzman
mainstrea, implies lowest common denominator, exactly what everyone wants to avoid :-) - Gregory Lent
I see FF as a critical component of an open social web - i.e. it _is_ the equivalent of the FB activity stream - except that the activities FF tracks are those happening on independent sites, rather than the walled garden of FB. To me that means that FriendFeed's success is dependent on there being a decent ecosystem of independent social sites out there. - Robin Barooah
FF isn't Facebook and Facebook isnt FF. Different audiences and different purposes. - JMS
I don't think FF will go mainstream. It's too much of a nerd/geek hangout, and that's FAR from what the mainstream cares about. If anything, FF will be absorbed by a bigger already mainstream social networking service, once all of the kinks are worked out. I'm no expert though. - Louie
"These are the times that experts will look back and officially classify as the Social Revolution, distinctly and separately from the Internet Revolution. These is the genre when big media and its supporting services started to listen and we the people embraced and employed the ability to share our individual and collective voices. We're at the dawn of new era in media production, participation, and literacy. You are making history." - Oscar Antonio Moralí
But at some point, bloggers seem to move into a different point in their blogging career. They no longer need the interactions with readers so much. They've arrived. And in the case of Jason Calacanis http://calacanis.com, after arriving, they leave. Del.icio.us http://friendfeed.com/e/452dfb... - Mitchell Tsai via Bookmarklet
Two characteristics of Stage 3 "Established Voice" bloggers also emerge: (1) The sheer volume of readers makes keeping up with all of them impossible. (2) A new kind of reader shows up, people who exhibit troll-like behavior. - Mitchell Tsai
The blogger really is playing a different game at Stage 4 "Industry Legend". At this point, you've become established in the market, you're busy with a lot of non-blogging endeavors, you've got too many readers to count, the trolls love to come at you and you've become expert in a field - Mitchell Tsai
Not surprisingly, your interactions decline. Jason Calacanis folds up his blogging tent. Seth Godin and Marc Andreessen don't accept comments. Even Robert Scoble feels it. - Mitchell Tsai
Robert Scoble is a Stage 4 blogger who interacts more than anyone on earth. He is truly the exception that proves the rule. But the limits of his interaction have been tested as well. In a post entered this morning http://scobleizer.com/2008/07/..., he decries the types of comments he receives on his blog as those from people "with an axe to grind". Digg readers' comments "are simply disgusting cesspools." - Mitchell Tsai
There are physical limits as well. Once your number of readers hits a certain level, there just aren't enough hours in the day to personally interact with each one of them. Those with superhuman energy like Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuk do better than most anyone, but it's nearly impossible to maintain that level of engagement. - Jeff Beckham
yup, this is true, staying interactive at high levels is pretty difficult, especially because there are more demands on your time from other places. - Robert Scoble
With my very busy friends (e.g. CEOs), often all I get is a few-word-e-mail in lower-case from their Blackberry, but I know from their schedules that even that takes a huge effort on their part. It's why golf is such a great business skill - spending hours of time with people normally unreachable (or charging $1,000-10,000+/hr). - Mitchell Tsai
![Friendfeed’s network magic [Benedikt Köhler - 8/4/08]](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/4eb07a0ad7ff9892f3151e44f5ce8d4d5c09d521 "Friendfeed’s network magic [Benedikt Köhler - 8/4/08]")
![Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence [Hutch Carpenter guest post at Louis Gray - 7/22/08]](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/e09738bef30311d2e0c591733ae0369c96fcb83c "Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence [Hutch Carpenter guest post at Louis Gray - 7/22/08]")
