Nathan McDonald › Likes

Whiner. - Paola Bonomo

I am surprised, most media is writing good things about Twitter - Chris Frost

Personally, I'm over Twitter... for now. - Adrian

The Guardian loves Twitter and has reaped the rewards. @guardiantech is (rightly) one of the most-followed users and the network delivers a ton of traffic to their site, which is full of pro-Twitter stuff. They write these contrary pieces once in a while in a futile attempt to keep the balance. :) - Shéa Bennett from fftogo

Of course they're right, the whole internet is the preserve of the elite. We should never have allowed this computer technology into the hands of the great unwashed majority. Look how they've ruined it for us. - Gilbert Harding

I've never been referred to as neither elite or tiny. I'm strangly honoured. - Kevin Brew

Yay, I'm an elitist sucker. It's all a bit rich coming from the Guardian, that bunch of right leaning conservatives. - David Eedle

I think the global internet is controlled by an elite (edit : for the moment) - Stanislas Jourdan

what does FTM stand for, facebook-twitter-mafia? - Mike Nencetti

It's not a sucker's game that only serves the needs of a tiny elite unless you expected it to be a real social platform and conversation engine. If that's your expectation you'll likely feel suckered. If you expect that it's a internet megaphone ... aka new marketing device ... then you probably feel alright about Twitter. I think the problem comes because people want it to be something other than it is. [edit] Thinking I've become a broken record on the subject :( - AJ Kohn

Sounds like just a misguided user who himself believes that it is about getting the biggest number of followers and believes that all other users have the same goal. He went to a party and he didn't get enough attention. And, uh, the Guardian? Isn't that really only serving a tiny elite? I mean I am not making anything from its existence. - Jim Espinoza

Yes, Seth is right, but so what? - Big K

Not true at all. - Leo Laporte

Hmm, sounds bitter about something. - Jack Humphrey

While Twitter may be a sucker's game (or may not be the verdict is still out on that) it's certainly not just for a tiny elite. Twitter Inc may cater to a tiny elite, but that's not to say thy're the only beneficiaries. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

@nencetti FTM is FriendFeed-Twitter-Mafia. ;) - Daniel W. Crompton

No. They're the tiny elite. - Prokofy Neva

Who? - Michael Kaiser from Nambu

No. My use case for Twitter is very practical. - Laura Norvig

The Guardian also use Twitter... Do they consider themselves part of the elite? - Valentin Danner

Like almost anything, it really depends on how you use Twitter and what relationships you make there. It can be a useful tool and (for what I use it for) it serves my needs. I'm not part of an elite anything. - ax0n

amen - Mark Dykeman

Great post Steve... some great points in there. Thanks. - Adrian Nadeau

Awesome. - Raoul Pop

Thanks a lot guys. I''m really interested in seeing who manages to clear this hump, and what that product will look like. - Steve Spalding

I hear ya Steve, we have been banging our heads off the wall with these issues for years now :) My head is starting to hurt! lol - Adrian Nadeau

"Writing about technology on the web is like building a Starbucks in Manhattan — it seems like a great idea until you look across the street." Nice. :) - Nathaniel Payne

Fabulous post, Steve. It's a message we've brought up ad nauseum on The Guidewire but the irony is, of course, that the mainstream isn't reading either one of our blogs. In an interview on 60 Minutes this weekend, Bruce Springsteen said something I can't get out of my head. "You have to make an audience care about your obsessions." I personally haven't figured out how to do that yet, but am somewhat comforted that none of us in the technosphere have. - Carla Thompson

I think a large part of it is making our obsessions more palatable. We are all saturated in information day in and day out, so we develop solutions to the problems that arise from that, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." The result is that the best ideas I ever hear using social tech come from people who have just been introduced to it. - Steve Spalding

@Nate who knows, so many of them are shutting down it might not be such a bad plan afterall. ;) - Steve Spalding

Seth needs to reread his book Meatball Sunday! Is he pushing a pyramid skim? "Buy my book to join my tribe!" John Chow! - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Wrong thread, Igor. ;) - Nathaniel Payne

Sorry! ;-) - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Word. - Eric Rice

Great post. Mainstream is much bigger. Popular articles on FriendFeed can't usually get anywhere on Digg. - Mitchell Tsai

Even Digg is only a larger subset of "not mainstream." It has a lot of traffic, but I think sites like Drudge Report, DailyKos and Perez Hilton have orders of magnitude more -awareness-. We are very good at rallying numbers, but very bad at getting people to care. - Steve Spalding

Leverage: Do you need to reach everyone though? What about concentrating on movers & shakers (or whichever group interests you)? - Mitchell Tsai

You definitely don't need to reach everyone. The problem we suffer from is that movers and shakers are generally unwilling to -buy- the services that are being offered to them. I am less concerned with saturating mainstream markets than I am in creating services that meet the -needs- of mainstream markets (an enterprise software company is way more likely to be profitable than even the most popular social app) - Steve Spalding

Well done.. - Dave Peck

I don't view the "law of large numbers" as a "dirty little secret". I agree with you across the board though which is why I've never wasted any time chasing Digg or Stumble traffic. We just got a stable link from Drudge to TVbytheNumbers -- no branding, just "TV Ratings" (which makes a lot of sense for a few reasons). We didn't ask (never have communicated w/Drudge). It's not as much... more... - Robert Seidman

Great post. congrats - jonathan

Steve: How about concentrating just on "influencers" (not big movers & shakers, but people who are heavy networkers)? There was a marketing book (forget name) which said that "Old money" tends to hide info - my favorite hairdresser, vacation spot, etc..., but some types of "New money" are the guys who share their favorite tips around the golf club - cool car I got, great vacation spot, neat electronic toy, good business connection spot. - Mitchell Tsai

Targeted marketing. My favorite recent books are "Buzzmarketing" - Mark Hughes, 2008 http://amazon.com/Buzzmar... "Meatball Sundae" - Seth Godin, 2007 http://amazon.com/Meatbal... I think the quote comes from one of these, but not sure. - Mitchell Tsai

brilliant - yvons

Excellent post Steve, for a minute there I thought it had to do with fraud. - Mike Fruchter

Great points. In the past few years of writing my blog, I figured out that nobody cares about what I think is cool. But when I solve problems that plague others, ones which I personally might brush off or consider trivial, such as how to recover a lost password or use a spreadsheet to budget your money, the traffic pours in. - Tom Harrison

Mitchell, that's another good point. Especially when growing a product, but many times you are going to have to move past initial influencers to scale your income. - Steve Spalding

Steve: I think the cool web 2.0 idea is to have the *influencers* be part of your marketing team. It's a more-refined and friendly version of MLM. I'd rather have 100 other people do my selling, than try to sell everyone myself. - Mitchell Tsai

Good post Steve. I wrote something about this phenomenon this morning. The problem is both a lack of creativity on the entrepreneur side (lets use the free model everyone else uses in web 2.0) and on the demand side. The mainstream user doesn't need services the early adopter crowd over here gets all crazy about (including Friendfeed). It doesn't solve a problem, address a need, so people won't pay for it. It's dead simple really. Create something that produces user value, and the user will be happy to pay - Alexander van Elsas

fantastic article. So many good points and analogies. - Chieze Okoye

@Alexander Right on, and there are a bunch of problems out there just like that. While there were a lot of problems with the pre-bubble days, the one thing they did well was recognize how the web could help with real, brick and mortar problems. - Steve Spalding

http://www.patientslikeme.com/ is a good example of a company doing something useful, I think. - Meryn Stol

Very cool Meryn, thanks for passing this along. This is exactly the sort of application that made the web so interesting for me. - Steve Spalding

I loved this article. I was discussing Knol and data portability with a friend of mine last week and he informed me that he barely even uses facebook. This is both a challenge an an opportunity. The future lies with applications that are both ubiquitous and dead simple while adding real value to the lives of it's users. Facebook came close but the abundance of applications was both a... more... - Derick Valadao

Interesting concept, comparing effort to usage. How easy is it for someone to just "pick up" something like Friendfeed. I'd dare say it's harder than we might think. - Steve Spalding

What is the saturation of digital devices to people? I'd say 90% - Jeremiah Owyang

I love this photo as well, I think Obama is great! - Joe Dawson

Jeremiah: Sure... if you're going to attend a political rally/speech, you take a camera, no? Not sure you can use this sample to draw any conclusions RE the general population. - Ken Sheppardson

Of course Ken, I was just reffering to that particular picture. - Jeremiah Owyang

Give the Germans a vote! - john conroy

Ladies & Gentlemen, the President of the United States! - Rev. Dr. W!cKeD Rock

The revolution will be photographed. And then posted to Flickr. - Sarah G.

I think it’s a bad way to help new folks find friends because probably half the people on that list don’t participate FriendFeed at all or have minimal usage — including yourself. They have FriendFeed setup to pull in their activities from others sites, but there’s little to no participation from many of them (not all). How many times do we have to tell folks to participate in... more... - Shey, Jamaican of FF

but shey that's the way you use ff (frankly its the way i do too) however not everyone will want to use it that way, its a pretty free-form environment that can be used in many ways other than the one we personally prefer - to be clear though i don't like lists either, but the fact is alltop has the right to create them if they desire and chris has the right to put his stuff into ff and not interact that much - we should be tolerate of any way folks want to use this great platform, shouldn't we? - mike "glemak" dunn

@Mike Just to clarify — I’m not saying that you HAVE to comment and like stuff in FriendFeed — you can just read or use it anyway you want to. But I wouldn’t recommend following someone that only pulls in shared content. Chances are there are others around who are having discussions around that same content — which is where I believe the value is. - Shey, Jamaican of FF

shey: don't disagree w/ the way you recommend using ff - i use it the same way but i do also have some "input only" friends (both imaginary & subscribed to) that allow me to view/aggregate their presence, which was the original premise of ff & still a very valid one - the community discussion aspect is a very nice feature but not everyone may want to utilize it - to each his/her own works fine in an opt-in, subscription, block or hide as you see fit model - at least it does for me - mike "glemak" dunn

At present, I use it as a way to see the larger story around someone's media. I don't live on here. I've yet to find the right interface. I'm having trouble even knowing who I do or don't follow. The "friending" aspects are really rough here. The way it works? Clever. Friending, not so much. But hey, I don't sit around in here too often. Feels like commenting where the person won't see it, is my fear. - Chris Brogan

FF makes it easy to participate, even with people we don't follow on twitter or we don't have in our feed reader. - Mário Pires

Have to agree with the "who the heck is following me? am I following them?" aspect. It's kind of tricky. The only thing that helps somewhat is that the little balloons to the left are yellow if I'm following someone or white if I'm not. Still, I'm slowly getting sucked in bigtime. - Lucretia Pruitt

I'm all for anything that raises the marvelous Ms. McCray's profile: she's truly doing a service for the small town biz person with her work all over the web (and off of it, too). That said, I'm not nuts about Alltop or Frienderati-rama. Want to like them, really I do: they're striving to provide a service just like Becky is. But they seem...off. There's something missing. Chris, I'll agree with you that FF is some tough wrangling. I like it, but it's like wrestling spaghetti or something. - colleen wainwright

That list seems to be mostly tweets and google reader shares, but there are some gems in there. I'd like them to look a little deeper for people who are really bringing something to the platform. How about Hao Chen's scripts and Directuer's Noiseriver? There are plenty more. - sergiooo

How did Kawasaki get on the list? He's never left a single FF message (just tweets and stumbles) and subscribes to just one person (Arrington, surprise). - Sprague D

@droffset: I second both of those nominations. Both of them could use a little more exposure (for the good of all FriendFeed users) - Thomas B from NoiseRiver

i appreciate Shey's argument. - edythe

+ Shey (and edythe by proxy). Chris makes an excellent point: he's concerned about his audience NOT seeing his conversations here in FF... Unfortunately, FF is *not* yet mainstream, so I can see folks being reluctant to adopt who have large public audiences / communities established outside of FF. Those folks would have to use Disqus or another integrated means of aggregating their content - related conversations all in 1 spot (thus the entire concept of FF). - Susan Beebe

It appears that Alltop has already made quite a few changes to the Frienderati list. I see Mona and Max Gladwell and a bunch of new names since yesterday. - Chris Baskind

Chris - Definitely better but not quite there yet (I'm not sure there's a formula for this since everyone's interests are different). Still at least 5 that just recently started using FF - Charlie Anzman

still don't like lists but i think the fact that shey is now on the list is pretty ironic ;) - mike "glemak" dunn

Excellent Mike. We should render this into a 'delicious' like library. - Jeremiah Owyang

its just because I'm on my iPhone and want to come back and read later - but your idea is cool - mike "glemak" dunn

Interesting post. I think employee productivity may be the best first step for companies into social networking, versus solely focusing on the marketing side. - Paul M. Banas

I'm surprised that the BBC is covering this tbh. - john conroy

mike's idea is a good one: turn "like" into searchable delicious-like FF feature - Tom Guarriello

k - finally got the time to read it, pretty good article and strange to see such bright emerging topics attributed to a gartner person (there is hope i suppose)... - mike "glemak" dunn

"Mr Mann noted that their work uncovered that in many cases social networking was actually taking the place of email, or at least taking a place alongside it." http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008... - Hutch Carpenter

yeah hutch - your post was a good one, read it when it came out - mike "glemak" dunn

Thanks Mike. When a firm of Gartner's caliber talks about it, it's got some weight. - Hutch Carpenter

hutch, gartner is not alone :) - Jeremiah Owyang

True Jeremiah - kudos to a Forrester guy sharing a link about Gartner. Forrester guys always impressed me from my BEA days. - Hutch Carpenter

agree w/ hutch - very "miracle on 34th st" of you jeremiah :) - mike "glemak" dunn

Jeremiah rises above the noise, chatters like a focused Mad Men - Marc Canter

Thanks Marc, Mike. Hutch. What matters is looking at the larger trends, when you see multiple independent data points all point the same way at the stars, you can start to really see a pattern. Aside from that, those Gartner guys are smart. - Jeremiah Owyang

quick aside - i live in the town that gartner has its headquarters so my kids play sports w/ their kids & we end up seeing some of them socially at these events - makes it sort of awkward when they're trying to convince me to re-up our acct or about some tech trends and i can't help but recall when they berated a referee or rival team the previous weekend :-p - mike "glemak" dunn

How times change! Here's what I wrote about Gartner and Web 2.0 in April 2007: "Assessing Gartner Support for Corporate Web 2.0 Planning" http://www.ddmcd.com/gartner... - dennis d. mcdonald

Loic - question: can you do a video reply from here in Friendfeed or do you have to go to Seesmic to do so? - Tom Landini

Tom, the FF team will be pushing an update of our player very soon which will give you access to the thread and let you reply straight from FF - Loic Le Meur

grégory I am not sure I andurstand - Loic Le Meur

Great company and great product - Dave Peck