Paul Buchheit - FriendFeed

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0x21 and still just trying to figure it out...

Anton, SuezanneC Baskerville, Luca Perugini and 29 other people liked this

Jesus I feel old (0x22) - Christopher Galtenberg

Halfway to 0x42, when the answer will be yours! - Eric Borisch

That's normal. An article earlier this year said your brain peaks at age 39 (0x27), so the best is yet to come. - Bruce Lewis

thats the trouble with being 0x2B - the hex doesn't help the denial any more. I should go octal with 053 - Kevin Marks

I wonder if that means you can drink [G33K B33R] http://www.bawls.com/product... legally now... - Eric Borisch

Happy Birthday, Paul - Bret Taylor

I have no idea what that means but, it looks like you need a Happy Birthday. - Jim Hearts FF

Happy Birthday, Paul! - Anne Bouey

Happy Birthday, Paul! - Tudor Bosman from email

Happy Birthday - Eric Logan

Happy Birthday :) <insert CAKE> - Susan Beebe

HBTY**2 HBDP HBTY! - Mike Koss

Happy birthday! - Ovidiu Predescu

010001000110111101100111011101010110110100100000 011001110111010101101110011101010110111000100000 011010110111010101110100011011000111010100100000 011011110110110001110011011101010110111000100000 00100001 - Ozgur Demir

I'm really 0x30, but I don't feel a day over 0x2F - Glen Campbell

An early birthday present: The Gmail Javascript compiler was just open-sourced! http://code.google.com/closure... (it compiles JS into smaller, faster JS)

Thursday - Comment - Like - Share

Mo Kargas, Sai Ram Kunala, Chris Lasher and 108 other people liked this

We first started work on it almost 8 years ago. It has come a long way since then :) - Paul Buchheit

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Happy Birthday Paul! - AJ Batac

Today is actually just my internet birthday. - Paul Buchheit

Well, thanks :) But for a verbose API I'll stick with YUI :P Have to inspect the power of templating and compiler, though. - Claudio Cicali ♋

I wonder what happens when you apply it recursively -- can you get down to 1 byte of code that takes no time to execute? ;=) - Brian Sullivan

Finally! This is great. - Tudor Bosman

Happy Birthday! - Robert Scoble

Nice! - Micah Wittman

Unfortunately it looks like the internationalization features may be missing. I wonder why those were removed? (or if I'm just not seeing it) - Paul Buchheit

Paul you are my best-friend :`( - Onur Gündüz

if you were starting a new site today, would you use this over jquery (which friendfeed uses)? - Karl Rosaen

Karl, jquery is a library, this is a compiler. I would use them both. - Paul Buchheit

well, i mean closure library :) but yeah, they could be used together - Karl Rosaen

ah, i see this is a link closure compiler, not the broader closure tools. - Karl Rosaen

Refactoring, JS style. - Gabe

Now, this is a good news - Ozkan Altuner

@Paul the Closure project has three components: compiler, library, and template language. Looks like the Closure/library might be competing with jQuery. - Shakeel Mahate

this is sweet! - Jay

I think jQuery does a lot of stuff that might confuse the compiler, e.g. iterating over an array of string function names and creating new function wrappers (look at the way the parent/child/next/prev/etc functions get installed) The Closure library is also full of type annotations that help the compiler make better optimization choices, so you're likely to get a better compiled outcome using Closure than jQuery + fixes + compiler - Ray Cromwell

@paul -- I know you've been wanting this opensourced for a long time. sorry it took such a long time. Nick Santos and the jscompiler team has finally done it! Cheers! - Jing Lim

Happy Birthday - ashish

Many happy returns!! - Drop dead, gorgeous!

Happy Birthday, Paul! - Andrew Terry

Happy Birthday Paul - Sandeep Kalidindi

Happy B'day Paul! don't be evil :) - sirishkumar

Congratulations to the team (and @Paul & Jing) -- I know everyone's been waiting a long time for this. For anyone considering whether to use jQuery vs Closure, consider that they're meant for largely different purposes. jQuery's good for enhancing static web pages; Closure's much better at building large apps. And as Ray points out above, Closure the library is going to get much better results from Closure the compiler than an arbitrary js library would, because of all the type annotations. - Joel Webber

Paul Buchheit has been at the top of my best of pages all month. Rock on, Paul. - Donald C. Lindsay

Hey HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL !!! Cool present!! <insert CAKE> :D - Susan Beebe

"The Internet is not about technology; it's about communication. The Internet connects people who have shared interests, ideas and needs, regardless of geography." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

Wednesday - Comment - Like - Share

Siavash, Karoli, John Serra and 73 other people liked this

Absolutely. - Mark Krynsky

23 more comments

*salute* - Mo Kargas

I like it, but I think it doesn't go far enough. The telephone allows you to communicate. But when you hang up the phone the call is gone. The internet has persistent objects that can be manipulated, so it is also about cooperation and collaboration. - Neil Kandalgaonkar

Technology sure makes that communication much easier, though. Long live Friendfeed! - Josh Haley from iPhone

FWD: @scobleizer - directeur

I always thought the Internet was for porn. At least that's what I learned one year at SXSW. - Robert Scoble

Robert, you still owe us (me and Joge) $5000, btw ;-) - directeur

I think porn falls under the connecting people with shared interests and needs. ;-) - Brian Sullivan

Hmmm -- I think saying the" internet is not about technology, it's about the communication" is like saying driving is not about the car, it's about the journey. I like John Dupuis' way of putting it -- the communication part was an emergent property -- Michael Neilson has interesting things to say on this topic, too, but I've gotta dash so I'll link later. - Mickey Schafer

YAY, I love the internet. Couldn't agree more. GLOBAL unfettered communication amongst all peoples, socio-economic class, philosophy, etc. is what it's all about; whereas, the technology is there to support the communication layer. THAT is very important in the DESIGN of Information Systems. - Susan Beebe

The following (wild) question just dawned on me: If in 1440—the approx. year of Gutenberg's press—a global electronic network had magically emerged instead, A) What purpose would the power structure at the time deem for it, and B) How would it actually be used within the first few decades? Hundred years? - Micah Wittman

Micah, The Gideon Society would have saved a lot of money on printing costs and no need for this ====> http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Eric Logan

Eric, :) yes, that youtube vid is a classic. - Micah Wittman

Any relation to Bret? :) - April Buchheit

Neil: different communication formats have varying values for similar properties, such as bandwidth, delay, and rate of decay - Mike Chelen

Neil: Good point about persistence, except that Twitter has objects called tweets that last only about 7 days ;) - Alex Schleber

Alex: one compensating strength is that posts are publicly web accessible, allowing them to be independently mirrored - Mike Chelen

High communication: words. Medium communication: pictures. Low communication: grunt, poke. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Internet = TV + Radio + Books + Newspapers + Magazines + Telephone + Soapbox + [add your medium] = Media melting pot - Ciro

Actually, the Internet may be about the incarnation of cosmic consciousness, and may not be primarily about anthropocentric intraspecies communication. I only half jest -- sometimes species are only vehicles that don't necessarily understand their function in the big picture, or what they are birthing. With the Internet, one senses something trying to pull itself together that is bigger than human. - Sean McBride

let's say it again: it's. com. mu. ni. ca. tion. :) - Alberto D'Ottavi

+1 Mike Chelen; to Ciro, Alberto -- conflating function, social value, and technology diminishes the ability to understand what the "internet" is/does/could be, etc. The internet is not portable; certain technological devices are. The infrastructure that supports portability is inconsistent; radio rarely is. It's very difficult to "listen" to books using the internet; the internet is... more... - Mickey Schafer

I agree with you 100% - The connections made here can't be made anywhere else! The transparency and accessibility of people, good people, is prevalent! - Angels In Action

I didn't read all the comments above, but I don't think it's just communication. It's also about knowledge, data, availability of knowledge and data. creativity, etc... I'm afraid with this situation of lots of social networks people are a bit too preoccupied by the community-factor. Internet is more than that. Please don't forget that. - Ton Zijp

To Mickey: 1. "The Internet is not portable; certain technological devices are." splitting hair...Give me the Internet without the "technological devices" as you call them. 2. "The infrastructure is inconsistent..." Video is video, audio is audio...otherwise the TV is also inconsistent and so is the radio and books, I digress on this one. 3. " And I believe it is actually important to... more... - Ciro

Almost nobody understood my earlier webapp idea, so I'll try again. Imagine you were looking at a website such as FriendFeed and you wanted to create a near pixel-perfect copy but in a way that you could move things around, adjust shadows, etc. I want a tool that makes that easy.

September 5, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Maxamad (Amazigh), Meryn Stol, Charles Ying and 27 other people liked this

And without taking screenshots or copying the html, since the point is that it should have the power to quickly create something that looks just like our current ui. Also, it should be web based, because then fonts, etc will be right, and also I hate installing things. My previous attempt at explaining this: http://friendfeed.com/e... (Balsamiq is not what I want). It does not need to produce html though, so it can cheat anyway it likes. - Paul Buchheit

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So you wanna something like "html to png/psd"? Editable graphical interface with layers and stuff? - Selim Yoruk

No, not at all. My point is that you could look at the the FriendFeed ui (with your eyes) and then create something that looked just like it. - Paul Buchheit

Fireworks is pixel perfect, correct font sizes and previews image in browser. Yes/No? - Toby Graham

Are you looking for something like what is mentioned in this article - http://www.labnol.org/interne... - Atul Arora

Are you want something like web-based rich page editor which works with objects in manner the human see them and want change them? - gmarketer

I guess it's difficult to explain something that doesn't exist :( - Paul Buchheit

thats piracy!!! - Arjun

Paul, I like the idea, it's got merit. There's plenty of tools that do half the job, that is, snip the page. The second part, i'm not overly familiar with the tools out there. The manipulation. I guess you could snip the page, and embed into your tool a js library, like scriptaculous, and attach special event significance to the controls/tags, for moving, dropping, dragging. - Stu Andrews

I think I get what you mean now and I agree. That's not very helpful but hey. In the mean time you could edit the page live using firebug maybe? - Toby Graham

It seems to me like you want the Visual Studio Win Forms designer for web apps hosted and served to designers as a web app. Drag and drop elements onto the page and adjust their properties in a property grid. Then send a link to others so you can share your concept. - Eric Schoonover

For this, I use simple vector graphics editing app, like Xara or InkScape - I just make screenshots and use them as raw building blocks - usually I cut out from them small elements like controls/text-blocks/images/etc... In vector graphics enironment managing such kind of blocks is much more easier than in photoshop. - Phil Smirnov

remembers that this idea has been described by David Siegel in 1997 in his book : Creating Killer Web Sites (http://tinyurl.com/5skw63) - Oaksun

Paul, i think the edit-page command on ubiquity with the ability to: visually edit css and publish the changes is close to what you are describing. - Ian

Eric pretty much nailed the description of the dream tool that I think Paul was asking for. In my dream the web app is truly collaborative and has an active GUI. So you can adjust those properties using a mouse or tablet and anyone else on your design team can watch as you do it so they can make suggestions and modifications as you work. - David Muir

Let's say you want to make a mockup of FriendFeed called "FriendFood". You want it to generally have the same layout, only the top blue bar will actually have a background made of lasagna and a font that is made of French fries, and what shows on the page is everything people write about food on the regular FF, like "pasta OR bean OR potato OR steak". But you'd like someone to be able to do that from the web and without messing into much coding. Is that it? - Rodrigo Jaroszewski

http://blogoscoped.com/video... - Philipp Lenssen

I use OmniGraffle for this purpose. - Jason Wehmhoener

Could you achieve it by using Firebug and tweaking the CSS? - Shakeel Mahate

So something with the usability of say, omnigraffle, but that only used webkit for its rendering. With text controlled and positioned by actual css so that line spacing etc were correct, although again with a simpler UI than CSS has. - Robin Barooah

Paul - I _just_ came across a site that did exactly that. Unfortunately, Safari's browser history is failing me and I can't find it anymore. Doh! - Patrick Lightbody

Paul, not sure if you're still reading, but are you looking for interaction design changes as well, or just appearance? - Mark Trapp

Did you try "PENCIL" an add-on for Firefox http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/ - Francois Lamotte

I had never heard of Pencil, but it sure looks a lot like what I think Paul is describing. - Jason Wehmhoener

I use ScrapBook Firefox extension to capture the page as is, and then edit that using Firebug. - Jughead

Paul, I totally got you first time - anyone who thinks it's not a good idea has plainly misunderstood :-) It's the next step up from sketching out your UI on paper, n'est pas? - Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane

Thanks @Francois. Pencil looks quite promising... - Ashwin Bharambe

Firefox Webchunks? Does only the snipping part though. Perhaps an add-on to webchunks that will let us use all those chunks together. - Vamsee

it'd be kind of like pushing edit on a wiki, right. like, firefox would have an edit button then you could visually redo the page - Coleman Foley

There's also Axure RP, something I found a while ago. http://www.google.com/search... - Jauder Ho

Dosen't ASP.Net do that already??? - Roberto Bonini

One quick tip in Photoshop is to turn off anti-aliasing and use your various web fonts (Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, etc.) and use your preferred font size in pixels/points... This will provide you with screen accurate font appearances and sizes. The biggest problem with a "pixel-perfect" browser rendering is that it will never be consistent from browser to browser. They all render ever... more... - Nathan Chase

Idea for a useful webapp: A tool for doing web page mockups that's better than Photoshop because things actually look right (because it's rendered by the browser). It doesn't need to generate good html, so absolute positioning, etc is ok.

September 4, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Laura Norvig, April Buchheit and 25 other people liked this

FrontPage? DreamWeaver? http://refreshingapps.com/showcas... - Her Lindsay-ness

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Totally brilliant idea. I write my own bad html mockups in a text editor or whatever IDE I'm playing with at the time, but a tool to ease this process would mean I could get on to abandoning the half-finished project much sooner than usual. :-) - Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane

Um, isn't that what Balsamiq does?? - Cyndy

Please god no, don't create another "doesn't need to generate good html" code generator. srsly - Jason Wehmhoener

Well, as for the mockups, there is really great Firefox extension called Pencil. You should try it. - Mladen Srdić

using Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser? - huixing

Paul, have you checked out Axure http://www.axure.com/? I've typically used Visio or resorted to whiteboards/paper as they are easier to edit. - Jauder Ho

Jason, I would be fine with it not generating html at all. As for Balsamiq and some of the others, the idea is actually that it would look more like the final product instead of less. Photoshop gets fonts wrong and stuff because it isn't a web browser, and yet people still keep using it, so it seems that it must have some advantage over the other tools. - Paul Buchheit

Photoshop has two major advantages, multiple uses and precision. Photoshop can be used for more than just web mockups. One person can achieve multiple goals with Photoshop while a mockup tool just makes mockups. The second advantage is the mockups look great in presentations because the author has complete control. Photoshop mockups aren't real they're hyper-real. - Kevin D. White

Are mockups that look exactly like the finished product even desirable? I'm reminded of the "Napkin Look & Feel" (http://napkinlaf.sourceforge.net/#Overvi...) - Laurence Gonsalves

Depends whether your goal is to sketch and idea or create a final design. For the latter, you really do want it to be pixel perfect. For the former, you want a "wireframe" or whatever the cool kids call it these days. - ⓞnor

What ⓞnor said. For "wireframes" a whiteboard is fine, but eventually you want pixel-perfect designs. - Paul Buchheit

Paul, you should check out Denim, http://dub.washington.edu:2007/denim... - imabonehead

Paul have you tried Fireworks, that's what our designers use. - Michael

http://www.balsamiq.com I got this link from Cooper U boards a while back, and a lot of my co-workers have found it very useful. While it's not pixel perfect, it allows for really quick mock ups with the idea that the design of the end product will be done by actual designers. - Sam Ee

http://www.balsamiq.com/product... That's a better link. The demo video sold me on the idea. - Sam Ee

Second attempt: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Paul Buchheit

I've been looking for something like this for years. Balsamiq is definitely a good start, but I feel like there's not quite enough depth yet. Has anyone had luck with stencils like the ones found at http://graffletopia.com/ (for Omni Graffle)? - Sutee Dee

pixel perfect? The web isn't print. Complete control over the rendering environment is an illusion. Don't submit to it! - Andy Bakun

Paul, have you checked out Axure RP? - Jauder Ho

http://gomockingbird.com/ - Neil

Vi is pretty good. You just write some text and point a browser at it. - Cliff Gerrish

Try wireframing and prototyping apps - I am not sure if output is rendered at browser level though. Protoshare.com, jumpchart.com, productplanner.com - TrafficBug

Done, already - Ozkan Altuner

That's kind of an understatement :) (these people keep emailing me, completely unaware of the fb deal)

November 2 - Comment - Like - Share

SAM, sridhars, Symon Muchina Thuo and 47 other people liked this

<coffee comes thru nose> - Jeff (the メガマクダジ of FF)

13 more comments

LOL - CW™

I hate recruiters - Ivan Kirigin

Recruiters, gotta love em. Well, actually you don't. - Eric @ CS Techcast

Haahah. That's a good one. - Micah Wittman

You should reply and say, "Man if only you'd called me a couple of days ago I would have been able to do something with you. Now? Well, sorry, you just missed your chance." - Kenton

wtf? - kosmar

what fb deal??? - Gustaf

ha ha.. are they looking to give you a job or get you to hire them on behalf of FF. - Bindu Reddy

Presumably they are offering their services to recruit staff for friendfeed. You're just an entry in a mail merge database, as far as they're concerned. - DGentry

HAHAHAH That is epic!! tooooo funny :D - Susan Beebe

LOL! - Kol Tregaskes

Tell them you'd like a job at Facebook. - Andrew C

All is well Paul....What's happening in FB... - Symon Muchina Thuo

loled so hard. - sridhars

I tend to agree with Scoble about the "forum problem", but at the same time I really like seeing comments. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think it's less of an issue if you keep groups relatively small. re: http://scobleizer.com/2009...

November 3 - Comment - Like - Share

Marc Dong, John Serra, Bertrand Doux and 81 other people liked this

I think the current FriendFeed approach is close to optimal. Do you not see it that way? - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

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FF has the inherant ability for the user to take control, both of what they see and the comments they allow. If a user is judicious in their lists and/or filters they should see mostly relevent content (IF that's what they actually want to see). The ability for a poster to moderate comments on their own post gives us the ability to avoid trolls/spam and/or steer the conversation (again,... more... - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Scoble and other "super users" have this problem much more than regular people because they have thousands of subscribers. This is also part of the reason that Twitter probably works better for celebrities -- it's more of a broadcast channel. - Paul Buchheit

They could have a million subscribers and it wouldn't be an issue, Paul: turn off comments on his FF posts and it would be all broadcast all the time. It's the number of people they choose to subscribe TO that is the issue. To be honest, it's like someone walking into a football stadium and then complaining that it's too loud. If one chooses to follow thosuands of people one must surely expect that the amount of 'noise' is going to increase. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

One thing that was tossed around a while back was the ability to disable comments from anyone you're not subscribed to: that'd allow those with a lot of subscribers to have high-signal conversations that their subscribers can still see and gain value from. - Mark Trapp

Perhaps he'd like a 'hide user' button similar to FB? This would prevent the "brings people into YOUR life that YOU DID NOT INVITE!" effect... of course the conversation could be rather disjointed. Maybe a small 'additional comments hidden' status that would show them when desired... Of course, without the conversations, FF == twitter? - Eric Borisch

Paul, can you help me test something? :) - directeur

The features that would make FF optimal would be to let users follow each other's hides and blocks. For most users this would be a nice, small improvement. For users like scobleizer it might make a huge difference. Of course, implementation details matter. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

The problem is that we don't keep groups relatively small. There are always those who are like me who like to connect, for one, but even normal people add tons of people to their groups. It's just natural. I remember I was first to add 1,000 people to my Twitter account and people thought I was weird. Now thousands of people do that. - Robert Scoble

One thing with Facebook is they capped it at 5,000 friends. Which kept it from being used by super-connectors but also caused it to be seen as a place where you talk with just your real life friends. Now that public pages are coming on strong, we're seeing that change. - Robert Scoble

Bruce: the FriendFeed approach is far from optimal. Many, many people told me they don't like joining a forum and like just lurking instead, which is why they chose Twitter (Tim O'Reilly is not the only one who told me this). Tim Robbins likes that on Twitter he can listen to his heros. He sees it as a learning engine. Those of us here love FriendFeed because it lets us talk. But it definitely turns off lots of people. - Robert Scoble

Paul: the solution is to let us toggle comments on and off. Give the USER CONTROL. If they just want to listen to their friends, hide all the other noise. But then give us who like commenting ability to turn that back on. - Robert Scoble

You have the ability to toggle comments on and off: Edit -> Disable Comments. - Mark Trapp

Robert, comments _are_ content. - directeur

Mark: that is on a PER ITEM BASIS though. Totally useless for what we're talking about. - Robert Scoble

directeur: yes, but they are content a LOT of people don't want to see or deal with. - Robert Scoble

Robert, but then you'll be a megaphone broadcasting "your" views. - directeur

Robert has the same comments (or the same potential) on his blog as he does on FriendFeed, so I don't think it's the comments themselves. I think it's the fact that FriendFeed makes comments almost on equal level as the original post, instead of burying them way down at the bottom of a page or requiring a click to view. Out of sight, out of mind, right? - Daniel Sims

Nothing in the API precludes someone from writing a FriendFeed client that hides all the comments so you just see a river of feed items. That's how Twhirl, AlertThingy, and all the native iPhone apps implement FriendFeed. - Mark Trapp

I have two arms. I barely use my left one. Please cut it off! - directeur

Turning comments off entirely would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you could authorize other users to delete comments on your items, you could minimize the forum problem. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

directeur: that's right. That's what most professional publishers want. - Robert Scoble

I really think the "comments are awesome, why would you ever want to get rid of comments" argument falls on deaf ears at this point. The solution ought to be how to turn off comments if you want to get Scoble (or the people he's saying he represents) back on the FriendFeed train, or to say they're not worth it. I do think if it weren't for the comments, there'd be at least a half dozen other things Scoble or people like him would come up with to not like FriendFeed at this point. - Mark Trapp

I like the idea of having another options to disable comments for people you're not subscribed to. That way you can allow conversation, but limit it to people you "know" if it makes you more comfortable or limits the noise. I think you should have the ability to set the option as a default for all new posts but be able to override it on a post-by-post basis: 1) public comments 2)... more... - Her Lindsay-ness

Her Linday-ness: I want that but it would be hard to design. - Robert Scoble

Mark, I think you make a valid point but then the question becomes: if there are no comments, is FF still the best medium to use? If so, then the ability to turn off comments on one's entire feed should be easy enough to code and implement. I suspect, though, that all things being equal (meaning: there's no ability to comment on an item) FF would no longer be the best medium for a broadcaster. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Mark: I don't think these people will consider FriendFeed at this point. Too much momentum over on Twitter. Look at the news brands: http://twitter.com/Scoblei... you're not going to get them to switch off of Twitter at this point. Sorry. That game is over. - Robert Scoble

I think the real game is how does Facebook evolve? - Robert Scoble

The real game is an open decentralized solution. yes, I'm a dreamer. - directeur

Which leads everyone to wonder why you're trying to nitpick a feature like this, or base your argument on the lack of the feature. The real reason why you (and others like you) aren't into FriendFeed isn't because of the forum problem or the lack of a feature, it's because you think Twitter is better and that's where everyone is. That's fine: that's a great argument. The rest of it is inconsequential to that argument, and wouldn't invalidate it even if you got your way. So what's the point? - Mark Trapp

I've been talking with a lot of brands and celebrities and regular people. For public studying they like Twitter better. That has Facebook wondering what it will be in the future. - Robert Scoble

Mark: sorry, but I spent two years talking to thousands of people about FriendFeed and I'm just passing along why they didn't like it. Take that feedback or leave it. Your choice. - Robert Scoble

Mark: did you speak at dozens of conferences about FriendFeed and Twitter? Did you show hundreds of tech influentials FriendFeed and listen to their feedback? - Robert Scoble

But your feedback doesn't correlate to the real reason why you, and the people you say you represent, are saying why you won't ever use FriendFeed. You said there's nothing anyone could do to get people to use FriendFeed. - Mark Trapp

Mark: if I want to listen to ONLY tech influentials, I can on Twitter. I can't on Facebook. I can't on FriendFeed. http://twitter.com/Scoblei... - Robert Scoble

Robert, if you're going to pull the "don't you know who I am?" crap, it falls on deaf ears. Let's have a constructive conversation on what you're trying to talk about. - Mark Trapp

Can't you make lists in FF? - Dragon Goldmaple

Sure you can: you can import feeds and lists on FriendFeed. - Mark Trapp

Mark: times change and at this point it would be hard to get anyone to take FriendFeed seriously. That said, I believe that it IS possible to move people from Facebook to Twitter or Twitter to Facebook, so THAT is the real battlefront. - Robert Scoble

any comment thread about 20+ without threading and community promotion/demotion becomes difficult to participate in (for me). Though there is a difference between discussing the radiator on a 94 Subaru and the nature of discussion forums. - Hayes Haugen

Robert: is the problem really comments or the fact that each time an item gets commented, the items pops back at the top of the list? Regarding the noise, I think that the "problem" with friendfeed is that it was much easier for people to plug in automated feeds and that as a result, there was less of an explicit action. I do not know how other people feel about this but I really miss... more... - Edwin Khodabakchian

Mark: OK, show me your public list the way I did on Twitter. You can't do that here, sorry. - Robert Scoble

Hayes: BING BING BING. - Robert Scoble

Ok, so it's not about who you read, it's who you can show that you are reading. - Dragon Goldmaple

Bing goes the internet! lol - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Sure Twitter has a lot of momentum now, but how quickly the winds change. Frankly, it's a shame that FF is going to be neglected... I wish that someone with as much motivation and insight as Paul and the original team could take it over now that FB has consumed them. There is still SO MUCH potential in this platform that it is depressing to see it squandered. @Robert - I don't think it... more... - Her Lindsay-ness

Robert, I don't use public lists: I believe you read my blog post about why I don't. But Hutch Carpenter does, and here's his FriendFeed public list on Innovation Management: http://friendfeed.com/innovat... - Mark Trapp

Robert, who do you call "influentials"? Do they talk "tech" all the day? Isn't it unhuman? Let's go back to spring/summer 2008, and redefine "smart" for me, please :) - directeur

Edwin: the problem is on FriendFeed it has the chat problem -- it gets noisy and gets noisy fast. - Robert Scoble

directeur: influentials are people who influence. I picked them. Shoot me. - Robert Scoble

The noise is largely proportional to the circles you're in. If you put yourself in a huge room, it will be a loud room. - Kevin Fox

Robert, do you remember the "MOAR NOISE" phrase? It was THE reason why I built NoiseRiver. Filters, I used to say when you were always saying: MORE NOISE! - directeur

Kevin: exactly. But on FriendFeed the room gets big VERY QUICKLY because as more people join they drag in their followers with them. - Robert Scoble

Facebook has the same problem. While we're chatting here, tons of tech news diversity have swooped by. - Robert Scoble

So Robert, should there be something built in to "warn" others of becoming "chatty". Something that says: "This comment is irrelevant. You may post again when you have something relevant and germane to our discussion"? So WHO makes those distinctions and judgements? - Melanie Reed

Compare this chat to http://twitter.com/Scoblei... which one brought more information to you? The chat is more fun, cause we're engaged, but it's noisy and if you don't care about it, a waste of time. - Robert Scoble

Melanie: in a chat room you can't control people that way. - Robert Scoble

Robert: True, but [big number]*[average number] is far larger than [average number]*[average number] - Kevin Fox

Hayes you are correct. Slashdot has actually had the best discussion forums for more than ten years because it has threading and community moderation. Its not a trendy social networking site though so no one notices. If you had a social network site where you post topics but with Slashdot like forums it would rock. Only down side is moderators tend to inject bias but /. has good signal after moderation kicks in - Ed Millard

Robert, I don't care about more information. I have more than enough. :) - Melanie Reed

Does it really have to be one or the other Robert? - Internet's Tad from fftogo

(Where you (scoble) are the big number) - Kevin Fox

Kevin: the problem with FriendFeed is if you and Melanie were having a conversation it would be pretty small, right? But I follow you. The second I touch your conversation it gets big. - Robert Scoble

If only someone could figure out how to make a room that gets big very quickly appeal to broadcasters... - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

This problem doesn't happen on the private Facebook because you have two-way friending there and a cap of 5,000. But on Facebook Pages? Absolutely. Noise baby noise! - Robert Scoble

Bruce: broadcasters don't like any of this because there's no way to monetize. Why do you think Arrington really hated this? - Robert Scoble

Robert, I don't care about more information. I have more than enough. :) What I would like is what Tad is implying in his comment. You know you can have "...two opposites that have learned how to blaze together" ;) And excuse me, but is wrong with a big conversation? - Melanie Reed

"The chat is more fun, cause we're engaged, but it's noisy and if you don't care about it, a waste of time. " If someone doesn't care about it on FF, they can hide it and not see it again. Problem solved. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Chatting is not intended to provide information. It is like planning -- it is the process of chatting that is what is useful not the words that are spoken/written. - Brian Sullivan

Thank you, Tina! and Brian! - Melanie Reed

Melanie: I love big conversations. That's why I loved FriendFeed. But most people aren't like me. - Robert Scoble

Tina: there are so many things going by on my screen in FriendFeed that hiding them all would take all day long. - Robert Scoble

Robert -- why is it that you think that people are like you and things should be done for your needs? - Brian Sullivan

FF is too busy!! - Joe Silence is not dead

Brian: again, it's not about me. - Robert Scoble

Robert one word: APML. I used to yell it back in 2008, no one cared. You want "filters" by personal interest. - directeur

FreiendFeed sold ME on it two years ago. I've been trying to sell others on it. The feedback I'm giving is from OTHERS. - Robert Scoble

The Forum Problem is a problem? - teh Dork Knight

directeur: APML will never work. - Robert Scoble

oh dear, don't hate the messenger. - Joe Silence is not dead

Robert: who are these "others" and what are their numbers? - Melanie Reed

Paul nailed it - Twitter is a broadcast channel. Massive amounts of subscriptions are fine there - it's all about reach. But if you want discovery, if you want to engage, then FriendFeed and FoaF is where it's all. They're NOT the same. One you can subscribe/follow as many as you want, in the other, subscription abuse will cripple your ability to view and interact. - AJ Kohn

Finally, a thread on this subject that makes sense. - Akiva Moskovitz

Threading may or may not help... it seemed to hurt with GoogleWave... it was so hard to follow all the tangents... of course without threading a lot of the tangents just get lost anyway. I guess I have given up on trying to catch everything... If it's important and I didn't see it the first time, eventually the concept will bubble up enough times for me to notice. That's one NICE thing about following lots of people and participating in lots of convos. - Her Lindsay-ness

why won't APML, or something like it, work? i missed that memo - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Robert, go say this to Last.fm or the BBC :-) Smart recommendation engines are the future - directeur

FriendFeed may make some audience/discussion leak out, but also makes audience leak in through seeing what your friends are talking about. Arrington may be mostly concerned about the leak out. Other broadcasters may be looking for the leak in. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Marshall, me neither! :) - directeur

Also, the meta around the content in FF (likes, comments) is what helps turns random data into information. It's annotated and qualified. - AJ Kohn

Lindsay: true - Hayes Haugen

Thank you, AJ, yes. And you can sort that out when you want to on your own time. That's the utility of it. - Melanie Reed

Perhaps one solution to the 'forum problem' is to allow posters to selectively choose who can participate in the discussion but still be viewable to the public. - Rodfather

I love the noise but I don't subscribe to thousands of user. - ashish from iPhone

So maybe the real question is, why do some people prefer conversation over broadcasting and vice versa? Is the broadcast-mentality simply a matter of popularity (the inability to reciprocate all the connections, so just broadcast instead) or is the effort it takes to connect with people on a more meaningful basis a major turn-off? Or is it just the tools that people use and what makes it easier for them? - Her Lindsay-ness

Rodfather, this will bring wars. Trust me. I'm not a commercial object. So you want to SHOUT and ask me to close my mouth? :) Moreover, close comments, other threads will be started and the noise you wanted to avoid will be even greater. The Streisand Effect, anyone? :) - directeur

For example: this discussion has 80+ comments and rolling. I don't mind that at all. I am engaged. I am also updating a web page on our web site as I do it and switching over to grade 30 some PRF's for students on the play Macbeth. I am not having any trouble with the "forum problem" or any "chattiness" I learned the "ropes" of FF when I joined and accepted that it as it was. - Melanie Reed

To me FF turns data (the river of content out there) into information (the good stuff - explained). The tool set FF provides is superior in this way - but it takes time to dial in the right set of filters to apply to the data set (which changes!) and many simply overwhelm the great filtering system they've provided. - AJ Kohn

A lot of people don't want to put in the time and effort to make the tool work for them like you, AJ and Melanie. I can empathize with that. I think it also has to serve their base inclination of either broadcasting or conversation, and the tool choice is also influenced by whether they already are part of a community on it or not. Most people won't leave their community even if it us using the less appropriate tool for their inclination. - Her Lindsay-ness

directeur, then those people can make their own thread and allow everyone to comment. I'm thinking of in case there's a roundtable event where certain 'experts' in a field can have a thread to discuss a topic among themselves without worrying about others cluttering the thread. - Rodfather

AJ, indeed - the task is to build new concepts with and for filters. Filters, not to shut stuff out, but to mix it better to create a constant flow of narratives. - David Bausola

AJ, is it more that FF provides the platform for the users to turn that data into information? The users are integral to FF. Now with Twitter you can program a week's worth of tweets (I have heard) but I don't wish to do that. Facebook... you could almost do that-although it does have engagement -you could certainly use it without. But FF runs on an engagement engine - Melanie Reed

Marshall: I don't trust automatic systems to guess what I'm going to be interested in next. Never seen a system yet that works. But we should debate this. - Robert Scoble

Robert, we should debate it! The robot that makes all my decisions for me says it's quite likely I would enjoy doing that! ;) - Marshall Kirkpatrick

That's getting into intelligent agents and AI once full blown - Melanie Reed

if you ask me, and you don't, the problem has always been lack of comment moderation and threading. Too many users isn't a problem if no one sees them. Slashdot was one of the first doing this, using an interface which is actually very similar to FF and it seems to work there. - Vincent van Wylick

Web tech needs to look outside their dev environments for richer influences in filter design: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - David Bausola

Is the problem that Robert is looking for a single service solution. I see the same 'content' on Twitter and FriendFeed but I scan Twitter for 'raw information' and go to FriendFeed to 'discuss' it with others. I watch the news at home on TV but I talk about it with my friends or work colleagues around the water cooler or coffee shop table. I am comfortable existing in several spaces - Johnny Worthington from iPhone

@Lindsay: I don't know. I'd rather educate people on the power that FF can provide with a little effort. Or, that it actually doesn't take LOTS of subscriptions. Max it at Dunbar's number (which is what I do for my home feed) and you'd be fine. - AJ Kohn

+++ Johnny Scotty would be proud of you: The right tool for the job - Melanie Reed

@David: Exactly! My home feed - I tweak it. I use people like Robert and Rob Diana and Michael Fruchter and Anthony Citrano and Thomas Hawk and numerous others to bring a mix of themes and concepts into my feed. - AJ Kohn

So are we saying that its not the tool itself...but HOW it is or is not used that maxes utility? If so I agree! - Melanie Reed

@Melanie: Yes, the users are the key. The users are the filters. http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/soylent... And the engagement provides a rich annotation and a secondary level of filtering. So yes, users and their engagement absolutely matter. - AJ Kohn

Sure, yes, how you use it maxes utility. But it also helps if it's suited to how you WANT to use it... if not it's a struggle. And people don't like to struggle, even if it's possible to make something do what you want it to... easier to use another tool if it fits your purpose better. FriendFeed fits my purpose so it's not a struggle for me... but for someone with a more broadcasting mindset than a conversational one, it's going to be tougher. - Her Lindsay-ness

Vincent, most long-time FriendFeeders have spoken strongly against any sort of moderation/rating system for comments. No one wants mobs of people trying to control what other people can see like what happens on Digg. It's why every time the topic of 'Unlike' comes up, people rise up to talk it down because it creates an aura of competition and negativity. - Akiva Moskovitz

AJ, yes! users are the filters. - Melanie Reed

Akiva +++ - Melanie Reed

Anybody use Mailchimp here? It is tangential to the discussion. They have a cracker jack built in user educational system that monitors and makes usage suggestions. - Melanie Reed

Is lunchtime finally over yet? - Hayes Haugen

I'd love to peek in on the recommendation engine discussions. I'm in the 'they don't work camp' myself but I'm open to being convinced and perhaps technology has approached a point where it could work but ... from working in eCommerce I've seen it fail time and time again. Random factors, contextual issues etc. - AJ Kohn

@Melanie: Know of Mailchimp but don't use. The 'monitor and makes usage suggestions' sounds interesting though. - AJ Kohn

AJ, that's because the devs didn't pay attention when their instructors (ahem) were teaching it to them. ;) - Melanie Reed

Another point I'd like to make is that no one is forcing anyone to read the comments here. If people want a broadcast-only medium, it's fairly easy not to click on the 'x more comments' link. Unfortunately, Robert makes a painful observation: he played FriendFeed cheerleader for two years and the people who needed to take the bait didn't or did but then cut loose. That pretty much means... more... - Akiva Moskovitz

Johnny: I am comfortable with all of these too, but it's not about me. But, anyway, the business battle now is between Facebook and Twitter and it'll be interesting to see the choices that Paul's team makes and how those compare with the team NK over at Twitter is making. Then the market will choose which one is best. - Robert Scoble

Akiva: If I were at Facebook and knew that they could turn into the next MySpace I'd put every single engineering minute onto Facebook. Wouldn't you? - Robert Scoble

Like I said before, there is still SO MUCH potential here... and it's a shame to see it squandered. I think there are a lot of ways it could be taken to the next level. For sure it could be a contender to Twitter with a few enhancements, but fat chance of that now that there is no longer a dev team, and that it's "parent" is a competitor. - Her Lindsay-ness

Robert, here's a good example: You want to debate intelligent recommendation agents? Allright, I know that you know Chris Saad. Chris is a very cool guy in fact! But do you know Deniz Oktar? Deniz, who is not as popular as Chris, is a SMART Turkish guy too and works on the same subject. If you limit your view to "popular" people, you'll definitely miss him. And debating such a subject without alternative ideas likes Deniz's or humbly mine, won't be perfect :) - directeur

Not sure, Robert. Is turning into the next MySpace a good thing for you or a bad thing? For me, it'd be bad. - Akiva Moskovitz

Akiva, go take a look at (and experience) mailchimp's monitor and make usage suggestion system. It's adaptable for a number of scenarios - Melanie Reed

I think the business battle (other than the marketing to consumers end of it) will be occupied and won by Wave. Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed are mere toys in that world. - Brian Sullivan

Melanie, I'm not complaining about a solution that MailChimp could provide. I'm fine with FriendFeed as it is (for the most part). - Akiva Moskovitz

directeur: most people choose news brands to curate and find new people that will have something valuable to say. See http://twitter.com/Scoblei... for instance. That already is TOO MUCH so telling people to get more people or more things into their lives just isn't going to cut it for most people. - Robert Scoble

Allowing public panels where only the influential can talk certainly would have a useful role, Its just like panels at conferences. A lot of people would no doubt like to just follow the influential in these forums. On the down side it would make the already influential more so and it would probably lose some audience if it was done a lot because there is no democratic engagement. The people who don't spend all their time cultivating their fame and networks do say interesting things too. - Ed Millard

directeur: and, anyway. if he's in Turkey and not in San Francisco he's far less likely to influence tech in a major way. So I disagree. - Robert Scoble

(FYI - look at this conversation and tell me where else anything like this could take place.) - AJ Kohn

No, we're completely boring and worthless, Ed. We're not worth paying attention to. I mean, who wants to see a picture of our kids? ;) - Her Lindsay-ness

IRC or a phpBB messageboard! - Joe Silence is not dead

Akiva, I meant for those who might struggle "getting" FF but would enjoy and benefit from it once they do. There's an "on ramp" to FF that rivals North Corridor Dallas coming out of an apt complex on to 50mph+ 4 lane traffic. Some of us are better at that than others, but you still see a lot of cars on the road. :) - Melanie Reed

There has also been a lack of creative uses using the FF tool sets. Good uses of the tools inspires participation + it's easy to criticize -- harder to create. - David Bausola

@Robert: Whoa, whoa. Weren't you arguing that adding 8K new people from Twitter Lists was a good thing? Is more better, or worse? - AJ Kohn

+++David - Melanie Reed

@David: Good point, no real developer platform. That's been a big boon for both Facebook and Twitter. - AJ Kohn

Robert, yet he DOES. You just aren't into that speciality :) If you think that every "tech" thing must happen in SF you really miss A LOT. - directeur

Woah, Robert, so you are saying anyone who doesn't live in SF doesn't count in a tech discussion? That's a little self centered isn't it? - Ed Millard

I understand it but I really dislike any discussions where the topic seems to be "how can we turn this thing that the people who use it like into something that people who don't use it and would only use it for selfish reasons like?" Screw them. If something's not as "techy" as Slashdot and it's more chaotic because the comments aren't threaded like Slashdot and there's no moderation... more... - Mark H

Lindsay, I want to see a picture of your kids. I only wish I had some to show back. ;) - Melanie Reed

Ed: you are NOT a careful reader. - Robert Scoble

Robert's not saying that those ideas can't happen, or that a true revelation can't come from elsewhere, but that ... the likelihood that someone outside of SF to influence tech is less. The Capital of the Internet is SF. I'd agree with that. But that doesn't mean it'll always stay that way, nor does it mean that tech from other areas can't be influential. (least that's how I read it.) - AJ Kohn

OK I just read it, you still said if you don't live in SF there is very little chance you will have any influence on tech. If you have no influence then you either have nothing to say on the subject, or even if you do have something to say it wont matter. - Ed Millard

Hrm, I think the whole thing is overblown. My personal FF landing page still has as much utility as my first day (if not more). Bleh, whatever. - Chieze Okoye

@AJ The FF API is beautiful, I don't think dev communities saw the richness that you can create with the aggregation of FF streams. A few valley PR oriented bloggers pushed 'conversation' as FF's 'killer app' - whereas, the realtime aggregation streams and republishing of content is radical and unique. - David Bausola

Well I'm pretty sure all the people in Seattle, Toronto, Paris, London, Moscow,Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Bangalore, Boulder, etc. probably disagree - Ed Millard

@David: I'll take your word on the API and wouldn't doubt it given the FF team's chops. But fostering usage, that community - that's where things may have gotten shaky. Too few people leveraging it. It could still resolve back to an inability to really grasp what FF can do for them. - AJ Kohn

AJ, I think you're on to something. Back in the day, usability (including general user and disabled) use to be a well-known topic. Universities made it a part of the curriculum. Everything before and including e-commerce got the once over. But it occurs that the latest generation (including GLS and SM) have outpaced the community standards for usability. It's really the wild west again-... more... - Melanie Reed

Akiva: I suspect the noise problem Robert's describing from others isn't that comment threads get too long. It's that items keep popping to the top as new comments show up, when they don't want to see the new comments. I don't see any way around that except a separate client. It would take too much away from the FriendFeed experience for the default interface not to work this way. - Bruce Lewis

Mark, I didn't mean to suggest /. is the only solution to the forum problem. If you have really big forum discussions /. is time tested way to control noise and raise the signal level. On the other hand it would probably be a horrible solution for intimate and friendly discussions among friends. Someone earlier Lindsey? kind of had a good suggestion. When you make a post have a row of option buttons and let the poster set the kind of forum for that thread, broadcast, panel, open, modded, thredded, not.. - Ed Millard

Ed: I specifically said "far less likely." I didn't say there is very little chance. But, seriously, this is an argument for another thread. Lots of people think they have influence but actually don't have as much. For instance, I love to think I have influence on Facebook but I'm far less likely to influence that then Paul Buchheit is. Facts are facts. - Robert Scoble

Chieze glad you like FriendFeed. Me too. It's awesome. But that doesn't mean much to the rest of the world. - Robert Scoble

Robert, how often do you use "Add This"? It's germane :) - Melanie Reed

OK we will agree to disagree on that one and drop it. I've lived in the bay off and on, I think there are pluses and minuses to being there. - Ed Millard

Melanie: "Add This" being the "Add Photos" at top of FriendFeed? Not as much as I should. - Robert Scoble

Robert: No this service: http://www.addthis.com/ This is fast becoming the SM share button for many websites. Ours uses it. And FF is on it. Take a look at the entire list - Melanie Reed

FriendFeed's feature set will mean a lot to the rest of the world when it's fully integrated into Facebook in 2011. - Bruce Lewis

Bruce: I don't think it'll take that long. - Robert Scoble

Robert, you may be right, in which case FriendFeed is a relevant thing to look at. Maybe it isn't actually too far ahead of its time. - Bruce Lewis

Just like Lisp can make you a better programmer in other languages, FriendFeed can make you a better thinker when writing about other social networks. Popularity isn't everything, even for a blogger. - Bruce Lewis

You mean, it's not all about attention? :D - Her Lindsay-ness

Who really knows why Twitter got all the traction? Does Scoble? I very much doubt it. I think there's a great effort going into finding a logical explanation for Twitter massive success and FriendFeeds more modest gains. My own best guess is that it has more to do with the madness of crowds than it does with any limitation in FriendFeed. Twitter had a decent enough foothold already by... more... - David Hall from FreshFeed

Twitter got the traction because Twitter's easy. It requires very little effort to get into and it requires even less to participate. It's the same reason why YouTube comments are the cesspool of the Internet and MetaFilter's comments are not: anyone can sit around and watch videos all day and then trash talk them but you make people pay to comment and you'll weed out the chaff almost... more... - Akiva Moskovitz

David: I was there from early days on Twitter and studied how it grew. I know more than you might think. Remember, I was the first person to follow 1,000 people there and I was the 13,800ish user to join. - Robert Scoble

This link is the most illuminating one on FF traction at the time of the buyout. It indicates FF was just starting to regain traction after it had stalled out for a while and it suggests if maybe FF had stuck it out a while longer things might have changed. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - Ed Millard

Twitter got hot in the early days because of Leo Laporte and because of SXSW and because it was goofy fun way for tech influencers to talk to their friends. It just kept growing from there. Another factor in addition to simplicity (Akiva's right there) is the API. Tons of clients and tools and services are built on top of it. FriendFeed got nearly none in comparison. - Robert Scoble

The difference may be luck of the draw ( a la Gladwell) - Brian Sullivan

People had to build tons of clients, tools and services for Twitter because the default web UI is so bad. - Ed Millard

Ed: what that graph doesn't show you is what we now know. Google Wave sucked a lot of attention of geek influentials away (IE Hype) and Facebook's Connect is running away with another game. I went into FriendFeed the week they decided to sell and asked them because I knew Twitter had new features coming that would make FriendFeed less interesting. I think the FriendFeed team looked at the competition and decided to fold. - Robert Scoble

How could I have ignored the API? It's like Firefox's plug-ins: it's the only thing that makes Twitter usable for many users. Without it, they wouldn't touch it. Heck, if it weren't for Tweetie 2, I wouldn't touch it either. - Akiva Moskovitz

And Facebook's Connect platform is getting incorporated everywhere. I think FriendFeed was hoping to become part of the general web, like what we did over on http://building43.com and that just wasn't going to happen because Facebook's Connect platform is rocking and rolling now. In fact, I made a fundamental blunder by not going with Facebook on Building43. If I had, our traffic would have been much higher than it is now. - Robert Scoble

You can be sure that once CNN and other assorted media outlets started plugging Twitter it was game over. Once the band wagon was rolling every "personality" was going to hop on. It is a little disturbing that Miley Cyrus has now joined the "everyone should delete their Twitter accounts" camp. - Ed Millard

David Hall +1 Steven Berlin Johnson would be a good reference - the persistence of babble is incredible valuable in phatic communications. FF, through the web interface hides a lot of that. Instead, the babble was more bookmark centric and less about 'having a sandwich'. That's why you have, on the whole, better conversation threads on FF, and ending up having to duck out of the way of... more... - David Bausola

Disturbing REALLY????? My word, Miley is absolutely right <sarcasm/> - Roberto Bonini

To paraphrase Louis Gray's wife, "nerds in startups are fickle". I speculate they had a lot of self doubt when they stalled out prior to that up tick, and decided to sell just about the time FF was starting to take off again. Someone waves $50 million at you during a period of self questioning that is a potent motivator, I think Zuckerberg saw that and he did nip a potential competitor in the bud. - Ed Millard

But all the above comments is about public sharing. I use FF a lot for project planning and development - it's fast - you can discuss items with good archive search, and you can post media. I wonder how many people use FF in this way, and ignore the public babble? - David Bausola

Having read most of this thread (and Robert, comments are VERY valueble) the"forum problem" is NP-complete. Comments are valuable becuase seeing people reason is often just as enlightening, if not more so, than the original information. - Roberto Bonini

Ed - mind you, there's only a few ways you can get to the helm of the FB API design and product development. :) Who's to say this isn't all going according to plan? - David Bausola

Roberto: me and you agree on that. In my research most people do not. They see these things as noise. But, if you make the comments toggle on and off we BOTH win! Plus, comments REALLY help search! - Robert Scoble

Ed: correction, it was $50 million. - Robert Scoble

Robert you keep talking about "your research". Is this anything more than anecdotal conversations? - Brian Sullivan

David, Well maybe Paul and Co. are doing a trojan horse on FB but what I've read about Zuckerberg he doesn't seem likely to relinquish control of anything he cares about and I am skeptical you are going to turn FB in to FF with their entrenched user base. - Ed Millard

@Scoble you're arguing from authority again. I think on a broadcast platform like Twitter that's an easier one to pull off. On Twitter it's a big "so what" if you've posted a load of BS because most people will simply miss any challenge to your "content." Post the same on FriendFeed and you get tackled and you get tackled in public. Reasonable enough grounds to explain your current stance and certainly as good as any reason I've heard you put forward yourself. - David Hall

Robert, I stand corrected, and it is corrected, this editing your posts thing is one of FF's scarier features. - Ed Millard

OPEN QUESTION: Is FF gaining or losing users? I see very little here now - but I'm told user numbers are going through the roof. - Jim Connolly

Ed: tell me one thing. What's the biggest difference between FF and FB? There's already not as much difference as you'd might think. The one thing I miss over there? Real time search. - Robert Scoble

Twitter got big because it's about ego. Look at me, Me, ME! Twitter flourished because people like to talk about themselves. (FF is not, which is why it hasn't gained nearly as much traction.) It was developed as an update service. It has evolved into ... something else. As for comments, they are invaluable. - AJ Kohn

and the ability to edit comments, moderate comments, import all my feeds, bumping up of older posts - Holden Page from IM

Jim: user numbers are not going through the roof here. I don't know anyone credible who has said that. The registered numbers are going up, but the active numbers are going down. - Robert Scoble

AJ: FriendFeed is just as much about ego as Twitter is. If not more so. - Robert Scoble

Ed, the goal is to design influentially for the web. Paul B does seem to give that ethos in his startup camp talks and general interviews. I would think FB would warm to that ideology. - David Bausola

Very true. Robert. - Roberto Bonini

@Robert: How? Seriously, I'd like to hear your opinion. - AJ Kohn

Robert: In other words, as people like yourself, Arrington and even those little guys like myself with a couple of thousand subscribers leave - we're being replaced by less active users. Makes sense. I used to check in on and off all day. Now, 2/3 times a week, - Jim Connolly

Jim: not true. I don't see a lot of people joining in here and I'm watching it closely. Sorry. More people are leaving the back door than are coming in the front. - Robert Scoble

To me the two big ones are 1) perception that it more walled garden networks and not as open though certainly it has avenues which are more open like FF 2) its home to massive quantities of apps, games, spam from people trying to get rich that hold no interest to me, though obviously many others like them. FF is probably just overlooked by that crowd, if it were bigger it would be infected with all that crap too. FF seems to mostly just be good people from my limited time here. - Ed Millard

All User Centric Design is modeled around the ego. Good software design keeps that in mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - David Bausola

AJ: Twitter is, for many people, about business now. Not ego at all. News brands: http://twitter.com/#... no ego. Tech companies: http://twitter.com/Scoblei... No ego. But here? It's ALL about ego! - Robert Scoble

David is right. - Robert Scoble

On Twitter the default is to show number you follow, number of followers, number of Tweets. That's all playing on ego and popularity. Nearly everything (even lists) is geared to stimulate a innate need to acquire more of something as a way to ... validate contribution or perceived influence or authority. FF does not show this in the default mode. - AJ Kohn

Companies and brands are the most aggressive form of ego there is, and they usually are direct reflections of the ego of the company's CEO. - Ed Millard

Alright Robert. In order to reduce the signal to noise ratio, we can do one of two things, we can use "Likes" to filter the comment stream. If I Like more posts from Robert than i do from LG, Roberts comments appear but not LG's. We can use semantics to (somehow) sort the thread and show comments relevant to the original post. (simply dumping noise isin't a solution - not all noise is noise all the time. Likewise, increasing signal in an echo chamber is fruitless) - Roberto Bonini

@Robert: Oh, I think Twitter is a great business tool! It's a marketers paradise. But I'm not sure that's what most people believe it to be. People still think they're going to get some sort of social dialog there. I think it's why Twitter churn is so high. People get it thinking it'll be one thing and quickly find out it's another. - AJ Kohn

+1 AJ, there are some people that use Twitter in awesome, constructive, useful, ways like Tim O'Reilly and Jay Rosen but a lot of people its pure self promotion. As for news outlets using twitter they are going to go wherever the eyeballs are, and they will go to multiple networks not just Twitter. Those are pure broadcast, no engagement, they aren't really a ringing endorsement of why Twitter is great. - Ed Millard

I'd bet FF *would* take off (but be worse for it) if it listed how many times the content I fed got liked and commented on, and that (along with subscribers etc.) were all listed right there at the top of my home feed. And that upon signing up, I'd get suggested users based on subscriptions but also who got the most likes and comments. Yet, I don't think that's conducive to what FF really excels at. - AJ Kohn

@Robert, biggest difference between Facebook and Friendfeed - reciprocal connections. Without a doubt. The apps, the ads, other stuff, is true, but for me the central difference, and the thing that betrays a fundamental difference of worldview between the two apps is whether or not you can follow someone's content without them having to follow you back. You can only do that on Facebook... more... - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

@Ed: I realized a long time ago that Twitter was a big Internet megaphone. And if you could get a lot of people to 'listen' to that megaphone well, that's powerful stuff. It's about Reach. Twitter gives your message reach. Nothing wrong with that. I just don't see it as ... transforming. - AJ Kohn

Those who study the art of propaganda consider reach to be everything, because following reach is influence, and following influence is control. TV is losing its reach in the Internet era so most of those "brands" and "personalites" are rushing to find a way to regain it, enter Twitter and FB. They are better because they are bidirectional. - Ed Millard

*Noise* :) - ashish

@Ed: I'd be interested to see more on how reach leads to influence. It often does but ... not always. Plenty of multi-million dollar ad campaigns in the graveyard as examples. Reach + ? = influence. - AJ Kohn

Ed I think you're right. I caught that TC piece at the time too. Seems to me that the FriendFeed guys had a bit of a crisis of confidence and grabbed lunch while it was on offer. In any case I always figured FriendFeed as a place to graduate to once you'd rammed up against Twitters limitations. And, as I'm sure you know, that doesn't take long. That's how I got here. I was actually on... more... - David Hall

You don't have influence until you have reach so its the prerequisite. Then it a matter of how effectively you craft the message and push the buttons in your target audience. Some people are good at that part, some aren't, some fail, some succeed. - Ed Millard

Robert, I just wonder. Isn't twitter more about consuming the information and FF more about sharing and discussing? Look at http://twitter.com/Scoblei.... What can anyone add to that or comment on that? I agree it is getting a lot noisy in here (exhibit, this post). But not all posts will be this noisy I think. - Amit

+1 Jandy, she answered Robert's challenge to me better than I did. - Ed Millard

@Ed: I'm not sure. New memes start with someone small sometimes. Say ... keyboard cat ... and someone who has reach communicates that message and it goes big. So who has the influence? The creator of keyboard cat or the person to has the reach to make it go big? I find it very interesting. - AJ Kohn

Jandy: +100. You just nailed for me why I like Twitter and FriendFeed better than Facebook. Agreed. - Robert Scoble

Robertt, maybe this post and the scads of comments prove your point, but maybe your point is limited to your own experience due to your unique position in tech. You speak, noise follows. But that does not make Friendfeed irrelevant or useless for the average or even just left or right of average user. You have a unique experience that is going to color any forum you put your time into.... more... - Martha

+++Jandy - Melanie Reed

Well put, Jandy. - Akiva Moskovitz

I think the forum problem is not as big in smaller more intimate groups. Recently I've been very active in the DMU group here that includes a lot of folks who've migrated here from Flickr. The relevancy is much more higher in these venues than in the main feed because it's a smaller controlled experience. I do wish though that groups were more full featured like the rest of FF though.... more... - Thomas Hawk

oh of course and photo voting pools for groups would by awesome too. ;) - Thomas Hawk

Lists are not enough. Twitter, FF and other social networks need tagging by default, then filter on list + tag. That's the element that would kill the noise and turn them into interest networks. - howard shippin from BuddyFeed

Martha: you might have a point if we were just talking about me. But we're not. So, try again. Again, I've talked with thousands of people about these things. They tell me they don't like the noise that public forums bring. I've been doing this for 25 years and this isn't the first time I've heard this pushback. Facebook, by the way, on its iPhone app, handles it perfectly: it hides all... more... - Robert Scoble

You all keep referring to this as either chat or comments when actually its a discussion. I think that the ability to discuss anything on Friend Feed or anywhere else for that matter IS where you learn the most. I'm not techy like most of you, I'm just an ordinary 'average' user, but I see twitter more as a 'newsreel' of info, shallow but instant, whereas Friend Feed is more a 'thrashing out of ideas and opnions, and is therefore all the richer for it. - Sandra Large

Sandra: chat/discussion/forum/comments are all pretty much the same thing. Yes, the two are different. There CAN be lots of learning here, it's just that this is a lot noiser than other online things in some ways. - Robert Scoble

Robert, about noise: when you or other tech influencers introduce FriendFeed, you show the things you're excited about, which tend to be big and noisy, right? And if you're the first person someone follows on FF, they're going to get a noisy first impression. The slower growth that doesn't come through tech influencers may have less of a back door. - Bruce Lewis

And about the 25+-year-old forum problem: Moderated Usenet was great until moderators slacked off. Decentralized moderation fixes that, at least for small discussions. Larger discussions can lead to whack-a-mole (though I notice this one hasn't), but with one of the suggestions I made earlier in this conversation the number of whackers could scale with the number of moles. - Bruce Lewis

Moderation = censorship. Censorship sucks. Give the users control to hide and block. The less censorship the better. - Thomas Hawk

@Paul - what about a view to only see the user's posts/content ie no comments of others and no likes => then it becomes twitter like - Kishore Balakrishnan

Come on, it's hardly messier than Facebook, since the default view only includes the first and last comment. Basically the gist I'm getting is that people who think they're important don't want to listen to people who they don't think are important. Such is the human race, I suppose. - Victor Ganata

+++Victor hammer meets nail. - David Hall

Robert said "FB iPhone app ... hides all comments with an arrow that you can then use to expand the comments. That is so much better than this mess here that it isn't funny". Robert, I must be missing your point because FF also hides most comments until you expand them because you want to read them... Don't want to read FF comments, don't expand them, problem solved. Or are you saying FF is a "mess" because it shows first and last comment? - Ed Millard

235 comments! I really don't want to expand *that* on FF! Is this a pain-point for anyone else? - Space Cowboy

Not for me. If I'm interested enough in the topic or dialog I'll click the time stamp and open the post page to read everything. The text amount is comparable to a medium length blog post: if I have the time to read that I have the time to read this if it interests me. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

A typical blog post? Dragging & copying the comments only (which took about a min. of scrolling) produced 9200 words and 23 pages of text. Blog posts also tend to have a more easily read narrative. - Vincent van Wylick

The problem is for big conversations like this one you need threading and maybe moderation, but for more normal conversations that are smaller flat is better. Allowing a switch between the two adds complexity. For big conversations FF lacks the button to reply to a specific poster so the viewer can thread, at least as an option. Much of the noise level in this conversation is due to people having to manually try to fake threading. - Ed Millard

The threading vs. flat conversation is interesting to me - we've tried multiple times to put Disqus or Intense Debate on a film blog I write for, and every time we meet huge resistance to threading ESPECIALLY on long threads. People say they have a lot of difficulty finding the new comments when they aren't all at the top or bottom. - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

Why can't there be a summary fly-out with timestamps based on response rate to single comments and a "last comment made" link as well as "thread count" links and lastly, "participants in this thread" link? Collapse everything else except the initial post. The initial interface looking like this one, should always be available for those who want to "sort through". You want the... more... - Melanie Reed

Jandy, you kind of have to let the user flip between threading and flat to solve the chronology problem. Slashdot has a popup menu at the top that lets you view in "Threaded, Nested, Flat, No Comments". The down side is the UI gets progressively more complex both to implement and use unless you are going to force everyone to lowest common denominator UI. - Ed Millard

But Ed, that's what I have against the traditional "threaded" approach: all the fork like structure. It does get complicated real fast. What's needed is somewhere a "summary" for those jumping in late to "catch up" but also the "single comment" link to democratize the discussion. Threads have all the indentation problems of trying to follow that way IF I am picturing what you mean by thread. - Melanie Reed

+1 Ed - Bicentennial (Franc)

My other observation is this: everyone creates a "story" about the ideas and information they are taking in and immediately starts associating connections in their mind creating a mental picture whether they realize it or not when they are perceiving that information. Our user interfaces don't yet lend themselves to that especially where it come to dialogue and forums. We've accepted a... more... - Melanie Reed

Here's why you don't need indented/tangential threading: FF discussions tend to be small enough to fit in the "RAM" in one's mind. It curtails many threads that might ramble; the exception (like Paul's thread here) comes when the power of the topic/zeitgeist and vibe of a live chat going strong overrides that usual point of decay. Predictablly, one or several commenters here will start a new thread or escalate it to a blog post and summarize their thoughts based on what transpired on this stream. - Micah Wittman

Melanie, have you used Slashdot, they did forums earlier and better than anyone. The forum starts out flat, and then starts threading. Random community moderators start modding up the insightful posts, and burying the trolls, crap, etc. Once the moderation kicks in the "summary" is all the posts that were modded up to 5 which are shown expanded. All the lower moderated stuff is there but you have to clck to see. Slashdot would suck like YouTube comments if they hadn't solved the forum problem. - Ed Millard

It's organic, not hierarchical. As other have stated, there is as much to learn from watching the process unfold as there is to gain from end result. - Micah Wittman

Ed, no, I haven't used Slashdot but I'm willing to give it a try. I'm pretty adaptable. But when I see a problem and it becomes "the picture" for me, in this case a circle then I know its time for the leap out of the present "prison of one idea". ;) - Melanie Reed

Micah, its true threads are bad for small friendly forums. Some of this discussion is about what happens when the forums on "celebrity" social expert's threads get so big they overflow readers brains and they turn in to *noise*. One noise problem is organization, the other is some post and some posters are better than others in the mind of the celeb and the reader. - Ed Millard

Slashdot dealt with most of the forum problems ten years ago, they had to to survive the trolls. The problem is their UI needs to be complex to be flexible and keep everyone happy. Their audience is also mostly geek power user. When you get to social networks the other UI school is demanding the UI be dirt simple so the unwashed masses can cope, but dirt simple mean its inflexible and it ticks off nearly everyone, especially power users. Hard problem to solve... making everyone happy. - Ed Millard

Ed, conferences have break-out groups. The same idea should be employed. - Micah Wittman

Ed, yes, you offered a little explication for others of what happens when you lost the ability to categorize your"story" into a mental picture that is associated with previous "stories" you have stored in the brain. That end result is "noise". Some of us are better at doing that than others, that's true. But there come a point of over flow for all of us. What our UI needs to do is to amplify and assist in that "story" constructing process. - Melanie Reed

Break out groups is a nice idea, but it seems a bit cumbersome. You need to make a new post, post a link here and get some critical mass from the first forum to move. If you do it five times you would splinter the first forum and lose critical mass, especially in a "real-time" forum where people will only watch one forum at a time. Chances are most people will cling to the first forum if its interesting. - Ed Millard

Ed and Micah, what I hear both of you saying, and Robert as well, is that at some point in the "story" constructing process, the dialog from the forum needs to end in the narrative of a blog. Up till now, the blog component has been a random, unattached part of the discussion. AM I hearing that you think that in some way it should become part of the UI? So that the discussion gets... more... - Melanie Reed

Not sure I follow, blog is kind of a one voice, one direction thing, only way a forum morphs to blog is when once person splits off the forum to make a more in depth point and posts the blog link to the forum. I'm mostly just talking about the various methods for restoring order in a big forum, and improving signal to noise ratio. Most entail putting more options and more UI in and around the forum and making the UI more complex which many think is bad on a social network. - Ed Millard

Ed, as I was writing this, it occurs to me that what I'm suggesting is what I may have just figured out (finally) that Google Wave is trying to get us to do. But if so, I beleive FF could actually do it better. the "noise" problem that was created by the various forms of SM, inside and outside of the platforms, was the inability to "connect the dots". We didn't have a framework for how... more... - Melanie Reed

One of the problems that we haven't solved is the usefulness of digression and random access of connective tissue in the "story" process. That's the wild card that often comes up as "noise" - Melanie Reed

I can't speak for Robert. Some of his issue "seems" to be he only wants to see the Silicon Valley/SF movers and shakers in his feed talking about tech and social networks, and he doesn't much want anyone but that same group to be posting on forums under his auspices. Friend Feeds openness is bad for that. The same is true for all the Twitter celeberati. They don't want peons anywhere near their online presence to tarnish it. - Ed Millard

Only way I can see to maintain FF openness for those who want it, and celeb broadcast only mode for the celebs who demand it, in one social network is you have to have an option when you make a post on your feed to control the forum methodology (i.e. broadcast only peons can only look on, panel mode where only my social elite are allowed to speak & peons can watch, private where only my circle can speak and see (FB mode), or completely OPEN(FF mode). - Ed Millard

There also seems to be an issue where someone you follow, through the "like" process, can inject pictures of kittens, babies and man titteh in to your feed. Of course that is kind of the original point of social networks, seeing what your network sees. I think some just want hard core tech news and talk and twitter lists probably do allow an uber though somewhat lifeless feed like that. - Ed Millard

Ed, well, that is the territory of the heart when it comes into contact with the machine. And oddly (or maybe not so oddly) there is a post on my feed that addresses that theme: http://friendfeed.com/faithx5... ;) Digression and Random access at work. lol And I find that refreshing. I'm always excited about how some new idea may be generated because I allowed what... more... - Melanie Reed

@Melanie: I fully believe in non-linear learning. The ability to take input from diverse thematic content and synthesize something ... to apply something from one world to the other. That's where I think we're heading. I think of it a little bit like a digital version of Burroughs' Cut Up technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - AJ Kohn

I can't believe I read the whole thing - Michael Slattery

Such a simple and obvious solution: provide an optional *LIST* view for Friendfeed items. Open the comments only on items that look really interesting. Am I missing something obvious? Then Friendfeed could easily emulate Twitter on all essentials (and surpass it in many other areas). - Sean McBride

Sean, I think the obvious thing you are missing is there are no FF developers any more so FF probably isn't getting anything it doesn't already have. And there are camps here that don't really like the alternatives that FB and Twitter offer which is why this is such a hot button issue. I wish there was one social network that had lists, open forums, walled gardens, and broadcast mode based on the wishes of the person running a feed so everyone could be happy in one network. - Ed Millard

Don't believe your lying eyes (TED Talk) - http://www.cnn.com/2009...

November 1 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Maxamad (Amazigh), April Buchheit, ǝuǝƃnǝ and 13 other people liked this

"Put another way, only by accepting my own humanity can I accept the humanity of others. "Seeing myself see" creates the opportunity for this acceptance. Illusions, then, were not the point of my talk, but simply a tool for encouraging this process. Resolving uncertainty is essential to our survival. Hence our fear of ambiguous situations is palpable -- e.g., the inability to resolve sensory conflict between the eyes and ears can result in nausea (like seasickness). And yet it is only by embracing the unknown within education, science, art and most importantly within our own private lives that we will find new routes to more enlightened ways of seeing and being. Thus, courage not confidence is at the heart of this process of actively redefining normality, which is the route to compassion and creativity." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

2 more comments

Have you read Dan Margulis "Professional Photoshop"? It is all about that. - Matter of Attitude

The quote is a little unclear, but parts of of it seem apropos to the latest big English-language discussion here on FF. - Kamilah Gill

huh? - Daisy

Drop of water at 2000 fps (very cool) - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

October 30 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Eren Emre Kanal, Dan Hsiao, durbin and 74 other people liked this

This is pretty cool. - Bastian

12 more comments

I didn't see this segment, but I was watching this special in my hotel room when I was at the society of rheology conference. It made me think that I need a high speed camera. For science, of course ;) - Clare Dibble

This is very cool. I'd like to see it with other liquids, and water with different this mixed in. Like soap for instance, which messes with the surface tension...what happens then? - Bill Scherer

hi - soso

Are there any liquids that don't have surface tension? - Gabe

My husband and I are addicted to the show Time Warp: random things done in front of high speed cameras. The oldies but goodies like popping a water balloon are stil my favorite... - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

That's amazing, which is why science rocks! :) - imabonehead

Love it! I want to have 2000 fps water drops as my screensaver. - EricaJoy

Very cool! - Garin Kilpatrick

Amazing. What else would be interesting to visualize at 2000 fps? - Philippe

True beauty - Инк Лонгтан from iPhone

There is only as much beauty in nature as you can appreciate and not a grain more. thoreau - Robert Higgins

+Bill I wanna see Quicksilver or Mercury at 2000 FPS - Robert Higgins

Я предпологал!!!! :) Теперь я знаю!!!! - atner

focus

October 30 from email - Comment - Like - Share

Siavash, Chris Martin, Tom Himpe and 10 other people liked this

Where in FB HQ is this one? - Benjamin Golub

4 more comments

Should I say? - Paul Buchheit

I think I remember seeing it in the bathroom - Benjamin Golub

It must be over a bathroom stall. - τorƍue

At Extreme Networks (which builds switches and routers), the plastic urinal inserts were silkscreened with the logos of competitors like Cisco, Foundry, etc. It made vendor meetings... interesting. Given Extreme's current level of success versus those competitors, also quite ironic. - DGentry

I don't get it. - See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

javascript:void(document.body.contentEditable=(document.body.contentEditable!='true'))

October 27 - Comment - Like - Share

Grant Rhoades, Daniel Schildt, Manu and 85 other people liked this

WHOA! Cool! - AJ Batac

35 more comments

awesome! - siniradam

you just made my color blind self cry tears of joy - I can now click that to discover all of the links that some crazy color mad designer has "hidden" from me by their color choices - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

wow neat trick - Onur Gündüz

is there a bookmarklet to make hackernews look good on the iphone? - Ivan Kirigin

Add this to FriendFeed and you've got Wave :-) - Jesse Stay

Reminds me somewhat of ClutterMe http://www.clutterme.com/ - they figured out how to make a whole page in-place-editable (javascript of course) - just click anywhere and start typing: http://www.clutterme.com/pages... - Christopher Galtenberg

Nice, discover links obscured by CSS - Orlando Pozo

Cute trick. Not being familiar with java script (at all) what is the void%200 statement there for? - Eric Borisch

Without the void 0, the browser will navigate to a page showing the result of the computation. - Paul Buchheit

Not grasping the %200, though - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

But that's not the case when I just execute it in the (safari) address bar. I take it that's expected? - Eric Borisch

%20 is a space. I'm not sure about safari -- I use ff. - Paul Buchheit

Cool. This + FB + malcontents + screenshots = ??? - Eric Borisch

What is this supposed to do again ?-- it does nothing that I can discern in IE, FF or Chrome (on Vista). - Brian Sullivan

OK I see what it does on FF. - Brian Sullivan

But only in FireFox presumably? - Brian Sullivan

It works on IE - AJ Batac

So it does -- first time I tried IE8 crashed. - Brian Sullivan

Works in Chrome, too - Jan Ole Peek

It doesn't seem to work in 4.0.223.11 - Brian Sullivan

I'm still on Chrome 3.0.195.27 but it says no update detected... this is in Win7. Pretty sure my OSX Chrome is 4.0.223.11 though. - Jan Ole Peek

4.0.223.11 is the latest in the dev stream. - Brian Sullivan

Works on Chrome Mac version here. I added the script as a new bookmark in the menu. - Jesper Lind

Try this instead to avoid the %20 weirdness: javascript:void(document.body.contentEditable=(document.body.contentEditable!='true')) - Matt Mastracci

Doesn't seem to work either -- maybe a bug in the dev version? - Brian Sullivan

World's coolest bookmarklet, especially those who are creating demo apps. - Mike Reynolds

Wow, this is awesome (works perfectly for me in Firefox 3.5). Simple Bookmarklet code that makes Web pages "editable". Now if only there were save + back buttons or something = Instant Wiki. - Alex Schleber

I realized after playing for a while, some of the keyboard events stop working, like submitting form by hitting Enter .. (FF 3.5.3) - Onur Gündüz

this is the fundamental line of every wysiwyg editor you use. for IE use allowEdit - Tzury Bar Yochay

Clicking it a second time makes it un-editable (and therefore it should respond to events and such). - Paul Buchheit

So how do you discover 'hidden' links.? - Bicentennial (Franc)

Cool, worked for me (the box is Windows Chrome 3.0.195.27) - ǝuǝƃnǝ

I mean in all open tabs and windows, not just in editable mode. It stayed that way, still no keyboard events (not restarted ff yet) :) - Onur Gündüz

Figured how to make it but what's it good for - pretending to rip other people's stuff to sh*t? - Michael Slattery

Michael - I'm thinking about possible use as a minor webdesign tool. Of course other tools are more powerful, but this is a nice simple one. - Deborah Fitchett

Ok, I finally get it - Michael Slattery

Hormesis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

October 27 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

ashish, Keith Bourgoin, Dani Radu and 8 other people liked this

"Hormesis is the term for generally-favorable biological responses to low exposures to toxins and other stressors. A pollutant or toxin showing hormesis thus has the opposite effect in small doses as in large doses. ... The biochemical mechanisms by which hormesis works are not well understood. It is conjectured that a low dose challenge with a toxin may trigger certain repair mechanisms in the body, and these mechanisms, having been initiated, are efficient enough that they not only neutralize the toxin's effect, but even repair other defects not caused by the toxin." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

5 more comments

Learned a new thing today. - AJ Batac

Where would you say the 3 martini challenge falls on that graph? :) - Benjamin Golub

Heh, tech rockstars and heroin... - directeur

thanks for sharing - eustress! ;) - Harscoat

This is very vigorously debated and generally hormesis is not widely accepted. - Chris Brinkerhoff

Not exactly but sounds like a vaccine effect which are viral particles at low concentration. - ashish

ooc - low-level / high-level goodness - http://ooc-lang.org/

October 28 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Shivanand Velmurugan, JMaultasch, Benjamin Golub and 56 other people liked this

Looks promising. C++ is too much of a disaster -- we need a real successor to C. "ooc is a modern, object-oriented, functional-ish, high-level, low-level, sexy programming language. it's translated to pure C with a source-to-source compiler. it strives to be powerful, modular, extensible, portable, yet simple and fast." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

89 more comments

Meh. I dislike post-fix'd declarations, and given that the assignment operator is frequently used, I think C's decision to make it a single character operator is the correct one. Otherwise, it doesn't seem any better than say, Objective C, D, or any of the other languages vying to be the next C. - Piaw Na

Have you looked at the D language? http://www.digitalmars.com/d/ It's been around for years and near the top of language shootouts in performance. - Ray Cromwell

Pointers? Do we really need pointers? - Gabe

Yes, if you're doing a systems language, you need pointers --- for writing device drivers, if nothing else. - Piaw Na

Based on the sample code, it appears to have a very direct interface to C, which I think is important for a systems language. For most things I'd rather just use Python, but for lower-level, perf-critical stuff, we need something else. D looks like too much, but I haven't tried it. - Paul Buchheit

Type inference, yummy - a main reason why Scala has mad traction these days - Christopher Galtenberg

Start by creating a really lightweight and easy to use development environment. I should be able to teach Jay Rosen to program in it. Back in the 80s there was serious compeititon in this area -- from Borland with Turbo Pascal and on the Mac, from Think Technologies with their C and Pascal systems. The languages aren't the issue, at least not for me. I want to program in C again, but the curve is too steep in all the environments. Give me a Turbo environment and some nice libraries, and lets go! :-) - Dave Winer

Dave: http://tryruby.sophrinix.com <- that kind of easy - Christopher Galtenberg

Piaw Na: For ':=' I've just made a homepage edit to make it very clear. := is decl-assign. Regular assign is '=' as in C/Java/etc. RTFM! ;) - 'n ddrylliog

Piaw Na: As for trying to be the next C... well, no =) The next C is probably C itself, since C hackers are way too picky to be satisfied with anyside above C (in high-level/low-level terms) - 'n ddrylliog

Btw, why is everyone thinking of ooc as a systems language? It can be used as such, but it's not really the goal. Do you all think so because it's compiled? - 'n ddrylliog

I'm thinking of it as a systems language because that's what I want. We already have reasonable options for higher-level stuff, but when writing a database or whatever, we're stuck with C or C++. - Paul Buchheit

Paul Buchheit: Hmm. High-performance implementations of current reasonable high-level languages are still pretty much experimental :/ (unladen swallow, shedskin, etc.) Why sacrifice performance? Many compiled languages have shown that expressivity isn't reserved to "interpreted" languages. =) - 'n ddrylliog

Piaw Na: about ooc being better or worse than Objective-C, D, etc. Well, D is really complex. It gives a *lot* of control, but it makes code less readable imho. As much as you may currently dislike it, the ooc syntax is (for some at least) more readable, so more maintainable, in general simpler, etc. (a lot less trickier than C++, for example. And if you don't see what I'm talking about, you haven't done enough C++) - 'n ddrylliog

Ocaml is pretty expressive, it has a REPL, and it's been in the top of the language shootout benchmarks for years. - Ray Cromwell

How does ooc compare to C#? If I had to write something like a compiler, I'd use C#. - Gabe

The missing dots really bother me. - τorƍue

C++ a disaster? I don't think so, its main problem is the lack of high level straightforward frameworks. IMHO generic programming is a deeper paradigm than OOP, but like functional languages has a slow learning curve, look at the matrix implementations/compiler optimizations in Boost! - Sebastian Wain from iPhone

Sebastian: C++ has lots of significant problems. For example, it's actually 3 languages: precompiler (#define), C++, and templates. The template language is so powerful that you can't even tell if the compiler will halt on a given program, let alone understand the error messages it produces. Just the shear size of the language, manual memory management, things like multiple inheritance, and vast overlapping standard libraries make it hard to program in by giving the progammer an overly large cognitive load. - Gabe

My two biggest gripes: Error messages from templates, specially from STL, can be notoriously hard to track down. And secondly, default implicit conversions can lead to hard to track down bugs. When you have a type system so complex you have to mentally "run the compiler" as you code, something's wrong. - Ray Cromwell

I've been doing nothing but C++ lately. It's not bad, but only because everyone subsets it. The compilers are horrible, but I don't think that's because nobody has an incentive to improve g++'s front-end. - Piaw Na

Ouch. decl-assign is terrible. I hate that. I think C's syntax (e.g., int a = 3; ) is much better than decl- assign. If you want to imitate C, at least make the declarations C-like. Personally, I think language design should be performed so that you can hand-code a compiler (i.e., no lex & yacc). Why? Because hand-coded compilers can much more easily produce human readable error... more... - Piaw Na

I've seen it argued that LL(k) compiler-compilers don't have this fault, because they generate recursive decent parsers that look somewhat like what you'd write by hand, JavaCC certainly has this attribute for example. Although I'm quite fond of the parser-combinator approach now. - Ray Cromwell

Gabe: the issue is: when you need performance you must follow the C++ path. Don't forget http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp... - Sebastian Wain

What Ray said. yacc uses an LALR parser, and LALR parsers are kind of notorious for producing inscrutable error messages. LL(k) compiler-compilers can generate much more intuitive error messages, and the code they generate often looks like something a human would write. Both JavaCC and ANTLR are good LL(k) compiler-compilers. I believe LL(k) parsers aren't strictly as powerful as LALR... more... - Laurence Gonsalves

On the topic of ooc: the "object [space] method-call()" syntax is the most jarring thing about the syntax for me. I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be any actual introduction to that syntax on the linked page -- it's just used several times without explanation. Also, I have to say I'm not a fan of conservative garbage collection. - Laurence Gonsalves

Yes, when I hand code parsers, I write them in recursive descent form. The problem with C++ is that it's not easily parseable in that form. And seriously, any language where you can write map<string, string>, but have to write map<string, vector<string> > is seriously messed up. - Piaw Na

+1 to Laurence's comment about conservative GC: that's plain evil. - Piaw Na

Yeah, Piaw only uses progressive GC, and even then he keeps complaining that it's finding ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. - Daniel Dulitz

I believe JavaCC grammar repo has a relatively straightforward C++ grammar implemented, using LL(k) - Ray Cromwell

Piaw Na: You got so much wrong in so few comments that it's actually worrying. Decl-assign is not terrible. It's called type inference, and is used in a lot of modern languages (ML, C#, Scala) to make our lives easier, and limits repeating yourself and it works damn well. Grow up and learn other languages. So no, the goal is not to imitate C. Go use Objective-C/C#/C++/Java/D if you want C-like languages. - 'n ddrylliog

Piaw Na: Second: I have hand-written the ooc 0.3 compiler's parser, and it was a piece of cake, because the syntax is so simple and unambiguous. Having "object[space]field" is a non-issues since declarations are "name: type". And you're mistaken in thinking that the fact you can hand-write a parser for a grammar means that it's simple. It's the other way around. If you can write a LL(K)/LR/PEG grammar, then the syntax is *very* straightforward. And the new ooc compiler (rock) uses a PEG grammar.. - 'n ddrylliog

Conservative Garbage Collector: There are advantages 1) the performance is a lot better than you would expect (and actually faster than plain malloc/free for lots of small objects) 2) there are advantages, e.g. seamless integrations with all the C libs out there. 3) Writing a GC isn't easy, the Boehm has been around for years and is well-tested/optimized, portable, etc. Read the papers please :/ This thread is a showcase of ignorance and arrogance. - 'n ddrylliog

As for "Language blah is better". No, sorry, apples are not better than oranges. That's your personal taste. Well, good for you =) One size doesn't fit all. Why do you even bother? - 'n ddrylliog

why `diagonal := Vector3f new()` instead of `diagonal := new Vector3f()` or even `diagonal := Vector3f()` is this because someone felt he must not be like any other language? - Tzury Bar Yochay

I know several typed inference languages. I dislike them --- again, type inferencing never took off not because the technology was hard, but because programmers preferred the declarations --- it really helps. Not to mention tools like ctags/etags, etc., do a good job for popular programming environments (i.e., vi and emacs), which meant that languages without such support never get widespread use. - Piaw Na

Conservative Garbage Collector: 1) this is more an argument abut gc than conservative gc. I have no problems with gc, I just want accurate gc. 2) That's a fair point, but not enough to make me want to use conservative gc. I'd be happier managing resources from C libraries manually than worrying that hash values are confusing the collector. 3) Yes, writing a gc isn't easy, but I'm sure... more... - Laurence Gonsalves

@Piaw, a type inferenced language just means that the type is concretely there, just it doesn't need to be declared in syntax. Thus, any smart editor or IDE, or other tool could reify or show types on demand if the developer so chose. Ctags are a relatively primitive mechanism for source code indexing, once you have an editor which understands your language's AST/semantics, you don't... more... - Ray Cromwell

Tzury: why 'diagonal := Vector3f new()'? Because new is simply a static method: http://ooc-lang.org/blog... Your definition of "any other language" must be "Java and C++" and both are inconsistent/magical on this issue, as opposed to, yeah, pretty much "any other language" (Smalltalk, Ruby, Io, ...) - 'n ddrylliog

I've never heard of this before. Feel a bit disconnected. - mikepk

Ray: for better or worse, most programmers out there are using Emcas and vi. Why? Because no other tool scales up when you're dealing with large code bases. (That's one reason why even some Java programmers at Google use vi and Emacs) I don't care how primitive the tools are, they have to get things done. - Piaw Na

I agree with Laurence about conservative GC. The big one is memory fragmentation. Once upon a time, when all we ever wrote were desktop apps, memory fragmentation didn't matter. For server side applications, it matters a heck of a lot, and any language that uses conservative gc might as well provide the delete operator. - Piaw Na

C++ can be used quite effectively without STL or complicated templates, but it will never be safe from corruption or memory leaks. - Todd Hoff

I love lamp. - Mark Jepsen

@Laurence 1) Yes and no. The performance gap between good conservative and precise (/accurate/exact) garbage collectors is less significant than one would think. 2) That's a valid point 3) Actually, I've thought of using Steve Dekorte's libgarbagecollector (look on GitHub). These are still plans though, Boehm was clearly the easiest option to start with, and ooc itself isn't bound to... more... - 'n ddrylliog

Easily one of the most fascinating threads on FriendFeed right now. You guys are talking mostly over my head but it reminds me that I need to get my ass out of managed languages one day. - Akiva Moskovitz

@mikepk The language+impl has only been out there for a few months. =) - 'n ddrylliog

@Todd Totally agreed, which explains some design choices in ooc. Memory leaks is a non-issue with a GC, and as for corruption, as long as you stay out of manual memory manipulation, the compiler does most the checking for you, statically. - 'n ddrylliog

@piaw: I think we're mostly in agreement, but I really don't think it's fair to say that "most programmers use Emacs and vi". I use vi a lot, but when it comes to Java/Scala code bases, I still use Eclipse (or IntelliJ, or whatever). Even at Google. I just don't map the *entire* Google Java code base into my workspace at once. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Java developers at... more... - Joel Webber

Joel: sure, you can play tricks like mapping only what you use. But a surprising number of Java users at Google kick up vim/emacs just so they can use the *fast* low-latency search tools when they need to read code outside of what they've mapped. The numbers were really surprising to me. - Piaw Na

I've been using emacs for 2 decades and I still use it when I need to quickly edit something or slice and dice text with macros (or I write sed/perl to do it). But when I'm developing stuff, a switchover point occurs where emacs is no longer sufficient and I desire the IDE. Emacs is great for scripts where you can test for errors via a quick eval, but the cost of a compile is high in... more... - Ray Cromwell

There is, once you get into Google-size (or even Linux-kernel-sized) code bases. But I guess I've living in the Google bubble for so long, the concept of not having mega-libraries doesn't even occur to me. And we've built enough fancy tools at Google that make Emacs way faster than Eclipse/IntelliJ (see http://code.google.com/p...). Latency matters! - Piaw Na

Ultimately, this is a search problem, something that google excels at. I'm not sure why you think Emacs has any innate advantage over Eclipse/IntelliJ for this. If GTags can be built for Emacs, it can be done for those IDEs. (Those IDEs already index all symbols and store them on disk) The issue here is that "find symbol" is necessary, but not sufficient, especially on large code bases.... more... - Ray Cromwell

Heh. I open sourced all the infrastructure, but not the ranking algorithms for code (which are google proprietary) Having seen lots of old Google hands work in Emacs, I think you'll find that they disagree. People have tried adding plugins to gtags for Eclipse/IntelliJ, but none have succeeded --- those IDEs aren't designed to take plugins quite the way Emacs does. Even Vim isn't as... more... - Piaw Na

As a practical example, the Linux kernel core (minus the whole driver universe) is about 500kloc. The GWT compiler, which I work on, is about 500kloc. I have zero complains about my IDE's ability (IntelliJ 9) to deal with this code base. Call it a medium sized code base if you will. Too big IMHO to practically use with Emacs/VI (where I desire refactoring and other navigational... more... - Ray Cromwell

What you'll find is that top engineers everywhere have heavily customized environments, scripts, editors, libraries, even their own programming languages, that make switching hard. Anecdotal evidence doesn't really prove anything, if "old hands" is meant to covey argument by authority. Like I said, I've been personally using Emacs since 1987, I use a bevy of ELisp, Perl, Awk, and other... more... - Ray Cromwell

I think the mindset difference is huge. Codebase too big? The IDE solution is to subset. The EMACS solution is to create a search index held in memory and apply search technology to it. The size of the community hacking away on these tools also matters. - Piaw Na

Piaw, you do realize that the IDE solution (I can't speak for Eclipse), is to build a search index and apply search technology? IntelliJ spiders all your reachable code and files on project setup (now, as a background process since it can take some time) and serves up IDE functions by consulting the index. In fact, it's very much like Google Suggest. I can type symbol lookup requests... more... - Ray Cromwell

Oh yeah, but they do it on disk and so have high latency when the code base scales up. I know, because people switch to Emacs/gtags from those IDEs for that reason. :-) - Piaw Na

Google's code base is large? I mean, I know the data it holds and indexes is very large, but somehow I assumed the code itself was quite small. - Andrew C

Actually, they cache some or all of the indices in memory depending on heap, at least according to the IntelliJ lead, if you increase heap, you lower cache thrashing. I still don't see why you think ETags/CTags/etc is any different in this regard. IntelliJ uses a similar index structure, it just records a bitmask on each tag as to the context (comment, identifier, method, field, etc).... more... - Ray Cromwell

@Andrew: I assume Piaw's talking about the *entire* code base, apps and all. That's a lot of code. - Joel Webber

gtags keeps it all in memory on a server, so there's no disk seek latency. There's nothing fundamental about the IDEs that makes this stuff impossible to do. It's just far easier to do in Emacs when there's just one of you. Once the prototype gets going, it's usefulness allows others to add in more useful functionality. Until recently, things like IntelliJ weren't even open source, so... more... - Piaw Na

Thanks Joel. Yes, I'm talking about the entire codebase. All of it. :-) - Piaw Na

@Piaw, Ray: It's becoming clear to me that we're all essentially saying the same thing. To deal with a large, complex code base, you need good tools. IDEs vs. Emacs isn't really much of a dichotomy if they're both building indices and cross-references of your code base and serving them up to you within the editor. They're both IDEs, n'est-ce pas? - Joel Webber

Yes, I'm just saying, if you need to build something in a hurry, it's far easier to do it in Emacs. But more importantly, ignoring a base of Emacs/Vi users when designing your programming language is ignoring a large percentage of the population. And in some cases, it's a large percentage of a very influential population. - Piaw Na

@Piaw I somehow lost your point between the "omg I don't like type inference" and the "you're ignoring Emacs/Vim users". It's still straight-forward to look for declarations of things, what's your problem? It's precisely why := and = are separate operators - 'n ddrylliog

You'll get no argument from me. I'm a fan of diversity in programming, and I do use emacs daily. IntelliJ/Eclipse would do well to offer a simple in-editor tool for building plugins via any Java scripting engine and support saving those persistently. I guess my point is, I can't live without Etags functionality, and now I can't live without all the other features I've gotten used to:... more... - Ray Cromwell

Even without any support, editing ooc in at text editor (I personally use Vim and Geany for .ooc) is very easy, cause you can search for "whatever:" (notice the ':') and be done with it. Try doing that with a C/C++/Java codebase =) That's the payback of a simple, non-ambiguous consistent syntax - 'n ddrylliog

And AFAIK, most ooc users/contributors/hackers use vim. A few use emacs, too. We have a vim syntax file, and a contributor is looking into writing an emacs mode. =) - 'n ddrylliog

@Piaw, Ray, et al: To finish my previous thought -- There will always be some point at which an IDE (be it Emacs or Eclipse) will fail to scale. The time and space required to deal with the code base eventually grows without bound, and you simply aren't going to load it into a single machine's memory. Even if you could load all of Google's code (or at least its index) into a single... more... - Joel Webber

Or you do the work to integrate the external search tool (or whatever) into the IDE. Emacs is designed to make that easy. The other IDEs that are around today, not so much. Code Search introduces a lot of latency. gtags as implemented internal to Google has sub 300ms response times. Whenever it goes down, I get complaints from people, declaring that "it's just too much work to remember where files are." - Piaw Na

I think Piaw's concern with type inference comes from the fact that explicitly stating the type of something acts as documentation. With type inference that documentation goes away. For example, in ooc, suppose I search for "whatever:" and I see "whatever:= foo()". What's the type? Whatever foo() returns. So now I have to look up foo(). Suppose it uses type inference on its return type (assuming that's possible in ooc). Now I have to dig even deeper. - Laurence Gonsalves

I'm guessing the IDE digression related to the fact that a sufficiently smart IDE can add the implicit type information back by doing the same type inference as the compiler. The problem with going down that road is that you're coupling the code editor and the language. Either your editor needs special language support so it can do the type inference, or you have to put up with not having an easy way of knowing something's type. - Laurence Gonsalves

I don't understand how you can do conservative garbage collection without leaking memory. - Gabe

Gabe: In theory, you can't. In practice, Hans Boehm did a lot of studies in the 1990s showing you that the leakage is very tiny. The real problem is memory fragmentation. With accurate GC, you can actually improve the locality of your data structures in memory (e.g., by putting elements of a linked list or array next to each other so a cache fetch brings them all into cache), with conservative GC, you can't do that. - Piaw Na

@Laurence: type inference: For me, the advantages far outweighs the drawback(s) (And, no, no return type inference in ooc). Plus, you don't *have to* use type inference. You can declare type explicitly in your whole codebase if you feel like it. - 'n ddrylliog

For the record: I'm not saying I necessarily agree with Piaw's distaste for type inference. I've thought about the issue in the past, but haven't used languages with type inference enough to have an opinion one way or the other. The lack of return type inference might be a good compromise, as it would tend to limit how far you'd have to search to figure out the type of something, while still eliminating a lot of the "busy work" in languages that require that you specify the type of everything. - Laurence Gonsalves

@Laurence You've come to the exact same reasoning as me =) - 'n ddrylliog

I do still think you should explain the "object[space]method-call" syntax somewhere on that page. Up until the point where you use that syntax ooc looks vaguely similar to C/Pascal/Algol/etc., so seeing this unfamiliar syntax with no explanation is confusing. - Laurence Gonsalves

@Laurence I just edited the homepage. Better now? - 'n ddrylliog

w.r.t. fragmentation and conservative GC: take a look at "Compacting garbage collection with ambiguous roots" by Joel Bartlett. Worked very well when I used it in a home-brew JVM for alphas at Dec/Compaq about twelve years ago. - Sanjay Ghemawat

I really like the way C# handles pointers and GC: All objects are allocated from the GC heap. If you need a pointer to a GC-able object, you only get it by pinning it. Once the pointer goes out of scope the object gets unpinned. And you can only use pointers in code marked "unsafe" so it's obvious to the reader. - Gabe

Gabe - does the fact that C# is not compiled to machine code like C++ make it slower? - Robert Felty

Rob: C# gets compiled to native machine code when you run the code. There's also a program that ships with .Net called ngen which will create a native image without having to run the code. - Gabe

It would be nice if Microsoft open-sourced C#/.net. I know there is Mono, but that seems like it will always be second-class. - Paul Buchheit

What happened to the "Opening .Net Framework's Source Code" project, any ideas? - Ozkan Altuner

I guess Rotor isn't good enough, huh? - Gabe

I was thinking of an actual open/free license. - Paul Buchheit

Paul Graham on object orientation: http://www.paulgraham.com/noop... - Donald C. Lindsay

I was on EconTalk with Russ Roberts last week: http://www.econtalk.org/archive... Finally got a chance to listen, and think it came out pretty good :) Let me know what you think.

September 27 - Comment - Like - Share

Alexander Arsky, David Bausola, Micah Wittman and 32 other people liked this

Cool, checking it out now... - Susan Beebe

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I agree that it came out pretty good. Is that the raw conversation, or is it edited? - Gary Burd

Thanks Gary. It's the raw conversation, I believe. - Paul Buchheit

this is really good... :) that's because Paul is uber smart and that makes this really fun - Susan Beebe

I was pleasantly surprised to see it show up on my iPhone. Great conversation. - Cliff Gerrish

I listened earlier this week and liked it. - Bruce Lewis

Russ rocks! I'm an avid Econtalk viewer . I thought the interview was good and useful considering I work on the product you championed. - Hareesh Nagarajan

I was listening to the show while running some errands this afternoon. Had to give friend feed a try and more importantly see the toe shoes. - Eric Nelson

very good Paul so open and honest - Thomas Power

Just got to listen. Nice podcast, I liked the perspective on Google, on mindshare problems, and how you got your "toe shoes" in there :) Thanks! - Vincent van Wylick

Great interview Paul. - τorƍue

We're having some network problems at the moment, but are working bring FriendFeed back as soon as possible.

October 28 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Chris Martin, Sean Kelly, T. Brent, technopeasant and 10 other people liked this

Thanks, Paul. it's back and working fine! - MaryB, BrandingBroadOfFF

4 more comments

yay :) - Holden Page

oh finally!.. i guess i cant live without it. internet seemed useless :( - orkun[:]tiramisuadam

i didn't really notice any problems, but then again i just sat down here about a half hour ago - Chris Heath

I'm getting error messages still . - SuezanneC Baskerville

Guys, I was just joking with that comment I made to Jennifer: http://friendfeed.com/mediaph... - Bruce Lewis

THE LAST DAYS OF THE POLYMATH - http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content...

September 28 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Maxamad (Amazigh), Sean Kelly, я был в лесу and 41 other people liked this

"The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks—policy or science—the experts start to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry,” Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. “Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very difficult and challenging. One of the ways they do that is to develop what they regard a rigorous methodology—often mathematical. “The specialist will always be able to nail the generalists by pointing out that they don’t use the vocabulary quite right and they make mistakes that an insider would never make. It’s a defence mechanism. They don’t like people invading their turf, especially outsiders criticising insiders." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

8 more comments

There is definitely a place for polymaths in some form: someone needs to be that people-person guy from Office Space who takes information from two or more disparate groups to form a coherent picture. But the requirement of an agreed lexicon from specialists isn't a defense mechanism: there's a lot of time that can be spent on trying to flesh out terms which could be better spent... more... - Mark Trapp

I do think there is a tendency for specialists to overcomplicate things though. Even though I know quite a bit about computers, I still don't know what people are talking about half of the time (and it usually turns out to be something simple). Making up fancy terms makes the work seem so much more magical and important, like you're on the Star Trek or something. Now go realign the tachyon beams with the anti-matter stabilizers :) - Paul Buchheit

Haha. My background is in philosophy, where everything one can talk about probably has an -ism or a -ness or a -itude attached to it. The terms lock out people who only dabble in the hard problems, but they are great shorthand for those who are versed in it. Descartes writes about a philosophy of mind in his Meditations on First Philosophy, and a bunch of people over the course of 300... more... - Mark Trapp

Me likey - Michael Ehline

"The question is whether their loss has affected the course of human thought. Polymaths possess something that monomaths do not. Time and again, innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline. Most scientists devote their careers to solving the everyday problems in their specialism. Everyone knows what they are and it takes ingenuity and perseverance to crack them. But breakthroughs—the sort of idea that opens up whole sets of new problems—often come from other fields." - Clare Dibble

The problem with specialization is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Then if you encounter a screw, and hammering a screw is precisely the wrong thing to do. That's why you need generalists. - Piaw Na

it's axiomatic that: a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until he finally knows everything about nothing - Ervin

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert A Heinlein - Bill de hÓra

I have to disagree with you Mark, as also having a background in philosophy, I find it is just as easy to get locked into a semantic argument about some term as it is a possible shortcut to a broader discussion. Most of time time I find people who throw around -isms would prefer not to discuss things deeply because they don't want to ever re-evaluate the basics, it's too frightening,... more... - Ňicķ

Think big. Code small.

October 27 - Comment - Like - Share

John Mueller, Maxamad (Amazigh), Laura Norvig and 89 other people liked this

How small? - τorƍue

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10 CLS - Mattb4rd

Excellent advise K.I.S.S. :) - Susan Beebe

How Big? - John D Reasor

+ John - τorƍue

Big enough to change the world, and small enough to get done right now. - Paul Buchheit

Amen - release early, release often, especially as an entrepreneur - Jesse Stay

Please provide a list of projects that we can get done right now that'll change the world. kthxbye - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, I think the saying is, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" - Paul Buchheit

Yeah, I figured you'd say something like that ;-) - Ken Sheppardson

Paul, when you said "code small", was that just the first step? :) - τorƍue

It's also the second step. - Paul Buchheit

The next trick is taking all those steps in one direction, otherwise you can end up dancing around in one place like a madman, not actually getting anywhere. :-) - Ken Sheppardson

20 ? "Shall we play a game?" - Mattb4rd

Yes, good point Ken, though sometimes we must navigate around obstacles such as mountains and oceans. - Paul Buchheit

And sometimes you have to head downhill to get to the top of that peak off in the distance. - Ken Sheppardson

Don't forget time itself - Jesse Stay

booo yaaa! - Bill Heslin

On average, how much of a code project's big success could be significantly attributed to luck? Luck alone never gets it there, but still. I code because of the small rewards, so whatever the answer is, I'm fine with it. :) - Micah Wittman

This is a more likely result, but keep swinging: http://friendfeed.com/funny-p... - Mattb4rd

Think BIG. Code SMALL. Maintain ZERO! (Ideal conditions!) - Nishant

http://bit.ly/ThinkBi... ;-) - michael silverton

Think small. Code big. http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc... - Kelly Norton

lol @Kelly - Nick Lothian

I'm currently coding for a machine that has 12 bytes of variable memory and 256 bytes of program memory. In a language with 32 commands. Am I coding small enough? - Kevin Fox

Now wonders what Kevin is working on for Facebook ;-) - Jesse Stay

Sounds like a remote control. - Cristo

I've been coding a few of these for Halloween: http://efx-tek.com/topics... - Kevin Fox

Cool. What's the application? - Cristo

Light and sound effects with a few triggers. - Kevin Fox

I must admit to being baffled by systems shipping with many gigabytes of code now that have similar functionality to systems with a few megabytes of code 15 years ago. - Cristo

Kevin, nice! Now I want one. I remember writing a BASIC program in High School that controlled some AND gates via parallel cable on a circuit board we created in my electronics class. The purpose was to control 4 step motors. Awesome that you can just pre-program a chip now on a device like this that will do similar things. Need to look into that. - Jesse Stay

Check out Revision3's podcasts. There are some with Patrick Norton doing this on System (I think that's the right one) - Mattb4rd

@Paul: Which font size do you recommend for the code editor? 14pt? or is 10pt even better? ;) - Jemm

Like jquery - ★ Soner Gönül

Soner - that's a great example, actually. jQuery has been transformative, IMO, even in the face of alternative JS frameworks which aren't bad, just not greatness in a small package. - Micah Wittman

Paul isn't it time for another sip of the premature optimization is the root of all evil kool-aide? You just aren't getting it :-) - Todd Hoff

FriendFeed should be faster again. We were had some network issues which caused a lot of slowness this past week, but I think it's fixed now. Let me know if you are still encountering any extreme slowness.

October 26 - Comment - Like - Share

Her Lindsay-ness, Tomonori Murakami, alfred westerveld and 111 other people liked this

Will this mean I'll be able to upload pictures again? EDIT This does not mean I can upload photos now. - Anika

32 more comments

Thanks for the update Paul! ;) - AJ Batac

Mainly just had problems with email posting and the bookmarklet. The rest seemed fairly okay. - Jason Huebel

I've been told that I'm extremely slow much of the time, but I don't think that's what you meant. Thanks for taking care of the issue, Paul. - Jim Hearts FF

Does seem very zippy, thanks team! - Stephen Mack

Time to time, it's slow. Overall fast (again), however. - Ozkan Altuner

I think the issues were directly related to Cristo's 11 MB PDF upload. - Louis Gray

Thank you, Paul! - Holly Rae, FFer

it looks faster now. thanks - Hakan İyice

I still see Twitter updates coming in here 10 -15 minutes later - Jorge Escobar

Thanks Paul. Much better. - Roberto Bonini

Im experiencing extreme slowness ,,,, but then again , Im 53 - johnpiercy

nice also to know your not Boarding up the Windows - johnpiercy

It did seem a little faster this afternoon. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

The Twitter issue is a separate problem Jorge -- our realtime feed from them is gone, but we hope to get it restored soon. - Paul Buchheit

The Twitter feed went entirely???? o_O - Roberto Bonini

It would be great if you could speed up importing of Twitter feeds. The slowness has been an issue for me lately. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

Got it, Paul. Thanks! - Jorge Escobar

Nice to know that there is indeed a problem with Twitter importing being slow, and I'm not just going crazy. - Tyson Key

it was slow a few hours ago :) - Fikret

Awesome news! - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

Sweet - Josh Haley

Meanwhile, Dad's kids with his new wife get what kind of toys? - Matthew DeVries

Matthew, FriendFeed users have no reason to complain about our toys. And even if we did, bitterness doesn't help. - Bruce Lewis

FriendFeed is dying for me. In fact. it's just about gone. I use it as a control room and discussion space for my Twitter feed, and a searchable archive. Discussion threads are down about 80 percent. "Likes" are off about 90 percent. There's no real time feed in from Twitter any more. Sad. - Jay Rosen

Agreed, Jay. My personal life is in a bit of an upheaval right now, which hasn't helped, but the FB acquisition took the wind out of the sails for me. It feels like there's no future, or worse, a future wired up to the "friending" criteria of my Facebook account. I use the services COMPLETELY differently, however. Inbound updates continue, since they're automatic, but this is the first comment I've posted in weeks. Sad, indeed. - Ken Kennedy

+1 Jay - Daniel J. Pritchett

I am using Twitter and FB more and more lately. On the plus side, it's strengthening some real world connections. I'm missing out on the cool new stuff but I think I had gone overboard on that front. - Daniel J. Pritchett

I like FriendFeed, but I happen to find myself using Twitter and IRC more as of late. I guess I've probably just burnt myself and others out, given that I don't seem to have much in the way of compelling content and commentary these days, and that I just don't feel as motivated as I'd like to. :( - Tyson Key

Thanks - zizukabi

Thanks for the info and the update. - giuseppe c. | markgreene

Still seems to be some slowness. The Innovation Management Room (er...Group) hasn't updated for several hours: http://friendfeed.com/innovat... - Hutch Carpenter

Thanks for throwing some love over to FF :) - Susan Beebe

Is there currently an issue with posting from FF to update Facebook -or is Facebook broken after the re-design ? i dont get anything posted to FB anymore which worked fine before yd - Del_

Awesome.

October 23 - Comment - Like - Share

China Internet Rumors, Voyagerfan5761, Daniel Schildt and 128 other people liked this

hahahaha - MG Siegler

18 more comments

haha - Daniel Brusilovsky

I've been having fun watching the Facebook employees do that today as well - lol - Jesse Stay

Is there a group "I Just plain hate Facebook"? I'd like to join. - Jeff P. Henderson

Scary thing is I think a lot of people are actually taking that group seriously. - Tony, Paradox of FF

Hhahhahaha!!! - Zulema ◕ ◡ ◕

LOL at Mark Zuckerberg joining. That's hilarious. - Haggis (Sean Loyless)

laugh out loud. - Micah Wittman

LOL!! Yes they are, Tony - that makes it so much better. :-> - Kurt Starnes

It's killing me - check it out :-> http://www.facebook.com/search... - Kurt Starnes

I just love how some people have joined, completely ignoring the description of the group and showing the type of people they really are. I don't *love* the changes, but I will get used to them and someday soon I will not even remember the old way it was done. Change is good... long live change! - Travis Koger

hahha that is too funny!! :D - Susan Beebe

Classy! - Tyson Key

ROFL - Roberto Bonini

I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK HOME PAGE, UNTIL ITS NEXT FACELIFT, AFTER WHICH I WILL BITTERLY COMPLAIN ABOUT HOW PERFECT THIS LAYOUT WAS. - Rebecca Sun

Yes, Rebecca, exactly. :) - Dan Hsiao

just joined - johnpiercy

Touché Facebook Employees, Touché. - Navarr

ahahahaha:D - beybinesen

Try http://lite.facebook.com/opozo, the simple the better, but not simpler. - Orlando Pozo

What Startups Are Really Like - http://www.paulgraham.com/really...

October 25 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Hutch Carpenter, Jay, April Buchheit and 21 other people liked this

"The best way to put it might be that starting a startup is fun the way a survivalist training course would be fun, if you're into that sort of thing. Which is to say, not at all, if you're not." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

"It surprised me that being a startup founder does not get you more admiration from women." --- You are kidding right? :) - τorƍue

Great systems presentation by Jeff Dean: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/project... (I especially like slides 23-35)

October 17 - Comment - Like - Share

Sean Kelly, Bruce Lewis, Andres Montano and 114 other people liked this

really liked the numbers, much better than just saying "registers < memory < disk" - Ertuğ Karamatlı

5 more comments

I liked this part: ---Users specify high-level desires: *“99%ile latency for accessing this data should be <50ms” *“Store this data on at least 2 disks in EU, 2 in U.S. & 1 in Asia” - Ahmet Alp Balkan

really good document thx - Nicolas Dufour

Don't just like it - read it. - Hayes Haugen

#WTF - sofarsoShawn

I would love to see more information like this :) Ideas on where I should be looking (other than FF of course!) - Susan Beebe

Interesting stuff. I'm downloading the PDF now... - Tyson Key

I'll be speaking at StartupSchool tomorrow. (http://startupschool.org/speaker...) Any suggestions?

October 23 - Comment - Like - Share

Shanmuganandh, TheHenry, Tyson Key and 28 other people liked this

Will you ignore them like the past time? ;-) - alieb

24 more comments

Probably. - Paul Buchheit

Really liked your talk last year. - Akshay Dodeja

Will it be streamed live? - Cliff Gerrish

talk about Friend Feed! - Jay

I think it would be interesting to hear how do your plan your product/feature roadmap. How did it change over the last 2 years for friendfeed when you were thinking about products and features. - Akshay Dodeja

Oh, also tell them when stream splicing (subscribing to friendfeed feeds within friendfeed - people and search) will be launched. - Cliff Gerrish

Might be interesting to discuss how to distinguish "a feature" vs "complete product" in context of startup development strategy. Is a bright idea going to become a killer app? Or would even just an incremental improvement to current state of the art be a plausible basis for business plan appropriate for a startup? - Dan Freeman

Dont get discouraged by VCs - Khuram Hussain

I suggest a talk on the rich and glorious future of the service FriendFeed on the World Wide Web. - Thomas Hawk

You shall tell them that FF will be the freaky geeky cousin of FB for along long time - Robert Higgins

Actually I don't care what you speak on, I just can't wait to hear it! - Jay

Assuming that acquisition talks had been happening for a long time...how did you decide when was the right time to be acquired (and that Facebook was the right fit)? If the tables were turned (FF was FB's size and FB was FF's size) how would you handle the acquisition of Facebook? How is your role different at Facebook as compared to Friendfeed? - Adam Kazwell

Talk about your vision of the Web to come (1-5 years) -- I can't care less about PR people, social media expert, guru or whatever talking about that but would be really interesting to hear you on this matter, and I guess it is the same for other people and startuppers - alieb

Also useful: http://twitter.com/startup... and #sus09 - Paul Buchheit

PR lessons from the FriendFeed acquisition. - Bruce Lewis

Painting your keyboard black? - Eric Borisch

Key lessons learned from FriendFeed ? What made you to sell Friendfeed to facebook? - Rama Vadakattu

The Startup School is live now at http://www.justin.tv/startup... - Robert Scoble

Geez, the quality of the stream out of justin.tv is unwatchable. - Cliff Gerrish

I'm not even getting any audio/video at all. It says offline. WTF? Why couldn't they use LiveStream? - Maxamad (Amazigh)

ya audio is really BAD! - Roshan Ramachandran

:( - Maxamad (Amazigh)

Please tell me there'll be a recording of the speakers after #sus09 - Maxamad (Amazigh)

Talk about how fun PR is during / after exit LOL :D - Susan Beebe

BTW, the new FB feed is simply awesome!! - Susan Beebe

First, FriendFeed is _not_ going away. (in fact, we're working on switching it to new servers) Second, I know everyone wants to know what the team is working on, but we don't pre-announce things, so for now all I can say is that there's good stuff on the way. Re: http://friendfeed.com/jworthi...

October 21 - Comment - Like - Share

Tsali, The Native of FF, Nick Uva, denzuko and 316 other people liked this

I know that doesn't answer everyone's questions, but I hope it helps. - Paul Buchheit

156 more comments

Paul, working on friendfeed.com stuff or facebook.com? - Kol Tregaskes

I like the first sentence. The rest is just gravy. - Derek Coward

I'm totally happy if we just reside on decent servers, and get occasional IT help... We'll keep the rest of the ship running :) - Christopher Galtenberg

Paul - is that why it's been slower lately vs.pre-fb ? - Allen Stern

Paul please repeat it in re-phrased form: Friendfeed is NOT going to repeat destiny of Jaiku? Y/N - A.T.

*processing statement...* - Micah Wittman

Can't wait... **Fingers tapping desk impatiently** - AJ Batac

But what does "going away" mean, Paul? And what does "team" mean? And when you say "pre-announce", are you talking about the Palm Pre? - Ken Sheppardson

Allen, the slowness is due to growth (more users and more data), but I put in a few fixes yesterday that should speed things up a bit. - Paul Buchheit

thanks paul - Allen Stern

Paul, sometimes when I open up threads I get the Opps... error. Is that related? It has been happening more and more these last few days. - Kol Tregaskes

Still better than twitter and facebook. Thanks for the update! - Mike Nencetti

Paul, thanks for the incredible work with FriendFeed. Please, keep it alive! and most importantly keep it FriendFeed! - Ciro

as long as FF doesn't go dark or fall to pieces due to lack of maintenance, i think most ppl would be appeased. - Joe Silence is not dead

Does this mean that the sky is not falling and we should stop running around screaming GODZILLA! and pointing in the direction of FB? - Moved to Facebook from fftogo

also, thank you for making such a great service in the first place! - Joe Silence is not dead

Paul: Did you see http://www.thetechnewsblog.com/2009... & can you understand why it got so many people talking / blogging? - Jim Connolly

I second that!! - Kol Tregaskes

Thanks Paul. - CW™

Always nice to hear Paul talking about Friendfeed. - ashish

Thanks Paul for the update. - Roberto Bonini

Thanks for the update! Would like to know if there will be actual development done on FriendFeed in the future (other than bug fixes/minor updates) but I understand if you can't really talk about that too much. - Brandon Titus

Paul: so still no answer from you as to if your 'good stuff' is being developed for FB or FF? The silence suggests it's FaceBook you're working on, or at least transferring FF into an 'add on' for Facebook? - Jim Connolly

Kol, fb platform and openness, primarily. - Paul Buchheit

David Recordon FTW - Jesse Stay

i made a post here - http://www.centernetworks.com/friendf... - one interesting note - maybe FB keeps FF running nice and smooth to keep the early adopters happy as it's a great way to get new features out to them via this channel... just a thought. - Allen Stern

Wow. I've had to eat my words before but these are the best-tasting ones yet! - Akiva Moskovitz from BuddyFeed

Akiva, just add salt. You know which kind :) - Micah Wittman

I'm anxiously waiting for FF->FB Platform integration (drools...) - Jesse Stay

These are the best words I could have expected by Paul. There is obviously a cultural difference between the two platforms and audience and I'm assuming both the former FF team and the FB team recognize that and are sensitive to the community. Thank you Paul and I hope you are feeling better.... - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

Allen, you're in good company on that thought - there were musings on that concept right after the buyout. - Micah Wittman

Damn, 20+ likes within a matter of 2 minutes. - Maxamad (Amazigh)

When the leader speaks, everyone listens.... :-) - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

I feel a few "I told you so's" coming though... :-) - Jesse Stay

Thanks Paul. Glad you're working on maintaining/improving performance. I've definitely seen issues here. Looking forward towards your influence and changes over at the blue giant. - Mark Krynsky

Paul - thank you for letting us know, and I do hope you feel better! - Jennifer Dittrich

The big question though is will FriendFeed continue to add new features? There's a difference between that and it going away. (and hence my argument w/ Scoble the other day) - Jesse Stay

Paul: Seriously weird that you're there reading this, and totally ignoring each relevant, yes no question. No one's asking you to pre announce anything - just genuinely concerned (and increasingly so) that they do NOT include developing for FF. - Jim Connolly

Jesse +1 - Jim Connolly

I for one want to say: I'm excited! - Jorge Escobar

Jesse: Paul answers that question - BOOM - rumour mill dies and we finally get something positive to say. Ya know what - we won;t get an answer though. He's reading this, he knows the answer, but he won't. - Jim Connolly

Jesse: For now, FF has more features than any other platform for this type of niche. There's some catching up to do before I'm worried about new features. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

AWESOME!! Thanks for helping to quell some concerns Paul. Looking forward to what comes next, but hope that FF never dissappears also. - Travis Koger from iPhone

Shouldn't we be asking the facebook guys, and let Paul keep working? Or is he wearing many hats (friendfeed head honcho and facebook openess builder)? - Mark Essel from iPhone

Paul: I'm right, right? There's something stopping you from saying that you are no longer adding new features to what 'we' know as Friendfeed? - Jim Connolly

Not for nothing, but I took my friendfeed embed off my tiny blog for a few weeks after the facebook buy out. There was just this empty spot on my eyesore of a website, so I put the embed back. We care because we like the connections we've made here and don't want to lose them. It's personal for us to. - Mark Essel from iPhone

Paul: Amazing how quickly you guys have adopted the Facebook attitude to silence. Pity. - Jim Connolly

Paul: blink twice if you will add new features to FF. I won't tell anyone, honest. - Edward Zwart

FWIW he did just upgrade servers. My e-mail notifications are almost real-time. Sounds to me like they're still improving the service. - Jesse Stay

Jim: Don't blame Paul on that, it's not fair. He's only allowed to say so much at this point but I'm very satisfied on what he said. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

Jesse: The questions not if they keep the servers running - we want to know if this is a dead platform. - Jim Connolly

Jim: in Paul's defense Facebook's PR is more controlling than FriendFeed's was. I'm sure he's having to consider the effects his words will have on other people inside Facebook. But, I'm VERY HAPPY that Paul is here giving us hints as to what's coming. I wish it had happened six weeks ago so we wouldn't have lost so many people, but maybe that would happen anyway. - Robert Scoble

Jim, there may be a few new things, but as I said, the team is mainly working on fb platform and openness, so it's unlikely that there will be any big new features of ff (except maybe one that I've been thinking about for a while...). - Paul Buchheit

Did the Walrus think about Feed Splicing? :-) - Robert Scoble

Paul: Finally - THAT'S what we were wondering. - Jim Connolly

Cool Dude: Need it to have a classier forum than the parent; Parent is still good but the options here make it just a bit nicer. - ThatDBD

Paul: Pity. At least we now know not to expect any developments or improvements. Thanks for answering the question. Whilst it confirmed my fears, it's good to know what's happening. - Jim Connolly

Johnny said it nicely here: http://www.johnnyworthington.com/... - Mark Essel

I have no problem with FB integration (notice my drool above). Hoping for good friend conversion tools to bring subscribers over as friends or fans on Facebook from FriendFeed. (Connect.registerUsers FTW!) - Jesse Stay

Jim: I'd modify "any" to "many." - Robert Scoble

As a result - Jim has left the platform. - Jim Connolly

Jim: this is a change from last week, by the way. My sources were telling me that we weren't going to get any new features and now Paul is refuting that and saying we might get one new feature here. - Robert Scoble

I'm still drooling - anyone have a towel? - Jesse Stay

Jesse: I'll buy you a virtual one over on Ning. - Robert Scoble

personally, i would be happy just to have FF not fall apart and die. given the post-acquisition situation, anything beyond that is gravy! - Joe Silence is not dead

Robert, I heard Ning is dead - care to send me one on Facebook? ;-) - Jesse Stay

Robert, think of it as 20% time. If there's a feature I want, I'll just add it :) - Paul Buchheit

Thank you for the clarification, Paul, and hope you are feeling better. - WorldofHiglet

a communication channel that will be around and getting improved no matter what happens, our blogs :D I'll be commenting on yours Jim. 20%, that's a helluva light better than 0%, that's actually much more than I expected. Could we crowd source funding to buy you more %? - Mark Essel

Even if there no new features in Friendfeed, I am happy with Friendfeed just staying on. - ashish

how many users are there on friendfeed is there any chance we could buy it out (and get a full time dev staff back)? This platform rules, the dev team is incredible (albeit on facebook stuff now). - Mark Essel

Paul, if you wanted me to bake you some cookies, all you had to do was ask, GEEZ. - Derrick

Question: how many facebook bucks do we have to buy in total to get Paul and team working on friendfeed more of the time (100% ;) - Mark Essel

Twitter doesn't accept cupcakes any more (just check Foursquare when at their offices). How about FriendFeed? :-) - Jesse Stay

Mark, I'm okay with better Facebook integration. There's a lot of power in that (hence my drooling). - Jesse Stay

I've got mixed feelings Jesse. I have friends on facebook. Then I have people that get excited by the same stuff that I do on friendfeed - Mark Essel

Mark, I'm really hoping it ends up the best of both worlds - that would be really cool - Jesse Stay

im going back to efnet - i got a bus for 7pm - anyone want on? :-P - Allen Stern

I don't think you can mix the two sites at all. This has been repeated over and over. FriendFeed's technology might be portable, the concept, no. - Jorge Escobar

Is it too late to do something about it. If it's a question of funds, can't we raise some? I mean this is the best communication platform I've come across yet. Facebook could be, if they just handed over the reigns to Paul, but its unlikely that sort of shift could happen. - Mark Essel

Is the user perceived need of a full time devoted dev staff a fallacy? - Mark Essel

I think you could make the case that some sites and services can in fact be "done" at some point, and simply require resources to keep them up and running. - Ken Sheppardson

Thanks, Paul. - Josh Haley

Ken: That's a potential advantage of turnkey application-level hosting such as App Engine: the resources to keep them up and running are almost entirely outsourced. ~All costs are variable costs, monetization improves over time, variable costs decline over time, so services that are "done" can literally just coast. - Daniel Dulitz

They could open up something like friendfeed. Distributed social networks, with many servers would make search more challenging (search like status could help). The Internet keeps on chugging, it's a distributed information network that's been alive for many years. Our social networks should live, as does the underlying Internet. - Mark Essel

Nice Daniel, I've been having fun playing around there (frankensearch.appspot.com). I'm using it to get to learn a little more about scala and lift now. - Mark Essel

might be a full-time job times 2 or 3 for any fresh devs - safe to say Paul's got a bit of a head-start which changes that equation significantly! .... Also maybe almost as important is simply keeping spammers in check - that makes the difference between a ghost town vs the happy place here we want to keep coming back to enjoy ... - Dan Freeman

Istanbuldan buyuk bir eferimi hakketti bu cocuklar, bizim icin calisiyorlar - MobilAdam from fftogo

Yes, this helps a lot. Thank you, Paul. We were beginning to fight amongst ourselves over these things. - Kamilah Gill

I bet a good contextual advertising box off to the side could generate 35-50million dollars in 6 months with a user base of 1 million people. The assumption is that the average user spends 100-200 bucks on the site making purchases they'd normally make anyway and the affiliate percentage goes to the social host. - Mark Essel

Friendfeed's health needn't be measured by the team's willingness to add new features. Shovels haven't changed in hundreds of years, but nobody is running around saying shovels are dying. A shovel is a great tool --a simple one, at that. If anything, I'd take away features on FF, but that's just me. Thanks for jumping in, Paul. - Chris Baskind

Chris: the problem is that a shovel doesn't get more utility the more people that use it. FriendFeed does. - Robert Scoble

I think the problem is that some people feel extra messianic some days (which is perfectly okay), and then refuse to see/believe/accept when others don't feel the same way AND point it out. The refusing part is not really okay, I guess. - Michael Bravo

Thanks for these reassuring words Paul. Have been working hard to get more Flickr users over here after the recent rash of censorship there. Friendfeed's TOS and lack of censorship is a breath of fresh air compared to Flickr. - Thomas Hawk

I wouldn't say lack of censorship, but community moderated filters. ;) - CW™

I think you're unnecessarily complicating the discussion by adding new vocabulary, Robert. Now you're talking scale, not features. A product needn't expand its feature set to remain useful. Feature creep is the devil, anyway. ;-) - Chris Baskind

You can’t predict what the future of technology will bring; so trying is a fool’s game. You can only adapt to the new realities as best you can. Paul's word is that it is still worth the time to invest in FF the tool. The tool may stay in this form but that's still a better design for me than Twitter. If FF is a shovel, Twitter is a spoon feature-wise. Audience volume-wise, it is the reverse. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

"Feature creep is the devil." truer words! - Joe Silence is not dead

Now this makes me feel hopeful!:) - Patrik Johansson

Ok here's an example of what the social media + contextual ads could like like (sorry can't embed iframe twitter they go full screen so I showed it with friendfeed). But the idea is clear: http://victusmedia.com/social-... This works by sending your tweet stream to zemanta, and then does some backend stuff (which we're working on improving) to get relevant ads from amazon - Mark Essel

I've been rough on you guys in some comments around, but I'm VERY encouraged to see that you guys see a future for FF. Thanks for shining some light, Paul. - Scott of Two Countries

Clarification is appreciated. - DGentry

A respectable amount of information. Thank you. - Matthew DeVries

Chris: Pownce had more "features" than Twitter did, yet it died. So did other aggregators like Jaiku. It's not "features" that matter in social software. Well, at least not completely. It's a combination of features with crowds that matter. If the crowds leave FriendFeed has a lot less utility to everyone than if they flow in. Look at this item here. Why is it interesting? Because there's people here talking about it. - Robert Scoble

take your time PB Bear take your time - Thomas Power

This is definitely more of the answer we were looking for. Thanks, Paul. - Alex Scoble

Thank you - Johnny Worthington from iPhone

All I can say is "thank you" for letting us know what's going on. I'm glad to hear FF will be around for the foreseeable future. :-) LONG LIVE FRIENDFEED! - Jason Huebel

yea - happy happy.... - Chris Jackson

I can't find any wave that is even remotely comparable with friendfeed's conversation, if you found one will you invite me? (muzzle at googlewave) - Emme Ci

Great news, I await the new functions eagerly - Mo Kargas

looks like good news ... - johnpiercy

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is the best thing I've seen ALL day!! woo hoo!! Thanks Paul :) {{{ HUG }}} - Susan Beebe

Just a few words of assurance go a long way, Paul. Thank you for finally giving us something more solid to stand on. It's been frustrating for a lot of us waiting for the other shoe to drop and this news makes it much easier to keep investing time in FriendFeed. Please don't be shy about reaffirming that it's not going away on a regular basis because it's always good to hear. - Her Lindsay-ness

I will say it for the least time! Friendfeed kicks ass :). The rest who is saying friendfeed is dying. please SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! - alfred westerveld

Good to read. - Grant Bierman

Tnx Paul, people just want to see that are not "alone" - Lucio Riccardi - CantorJF from FreshFeed

"As a result - Jim has left the platform. - Jim Connolly" - Was this guy ever on the platform?! A quick glance at his most recent posts [first page] show pretty much 100% of posts made from other platforms. Cut him and his blood runs blue. Twitter blue :) - 1x29

IF you glance over the Right Wing guys publications-there is some serious Terrorism encouragement from those sociopaths. This looked like a real strong example of what they are encouraging their followers to do??? Been saying we need to pay attention they are respectable foes to intelligence and their agenda is to win at all costs. Dudes they are great foes, need to,got to, have to pay attention to what they are doing. Peace love your neighbors dudes. - ThatDBD

@ThatDBD I think you're responding to the wrong thread... - Her Lindsay-ness

still curious, but understand - Kim Landwehr

It's fascinating that so many people seem worried about new features. Until recently Twitter added almost no features at all and yet it continued to grow in popularity. FriendFeed's recent slump is all about perception, not tech. - Eoghann Irving

Exactly Eoghann. - Maxamad (Amazigh)

these conversations take too much time for narcisists with tight schedules (stars). Publicity skyrocketed Twitter to the limelight. Friendfeeds champions are tech geeks, and folks that love chatting and sharing. There aren't many of us though. Give us time, or let us own the platform with a public ipo /buyin from facebook. Free friendfeed! - Mark Essel from iPhone

Looks like it's official then: FriendFeed lives! On new servers, even! (At least for now...) - Dennis Jernberg

Hoorah! - Ron Bailey

Very glad to hear it!! - Rosalinda Mojarro

word! - Dylan Casey

This is great news! Thanks, Paul, for the update, and if you get a hankering for a feature, great! I'm fine with the tech being your personal sandbox in exchange for keeping the service alive. Robert, I hope this means we'll see more of you and your family - and hear from the ones who have mastered the art of rolling over. Johnny, thanks for having the courage to ask the hard questions (and Louis for helping you frame the issues.) wow - life feels good again! - MaryB, BrandingBroadOfFF from iPhone

This is brilliant news from Paul! Now can we put this FriendFeed is dying business to rest please? It's a self fullfilling prophecy because by saying FF is dying, folks begin leaving, causing a downward spiral which would then cause it to come true! - technogran

Wan't it to stay? Then begin spreading the word! Get others to use it! At the moment its not mainstream so encourage ordinary users to use FF! The more popular it becomes the less likely it is to fold. - technogran

Yes :) Paul . Thanks. we love ff :) - sunipeyk

Questions? No just enjoy it. - ★ Soner Gönül

technogran: sorry, today you see what's going on. Bing? Displays your Facebook and Twitter tweets. Google? Twitter. Where's FriendFeed in this equation? Now do you get why FriendFeed is destined to be a tiny niche player and why the real action is on Facebook? - Robert Scoble

Good news :) - Maryam Ardakani from FreshFeed

Is not FF that is going somewhere else (?). Is its user base. - Claudio Cicali ♋

Good to know. - orionstarr from iPhone

Robert, if FF gives me what I'm looking for, why do I care where "the real action" is? If FF serves its niche well, what's the downside? - Scott of Two Countries

Robert, do you mean that Google doesn't index Friendfeed posts? Friendfeed is the first site that comes up if you search for my name. - Victor Ganata

Excellent point Victor - but FF only imports a small % of twitter's posts. Ergo Google is still not getting Twitter. - Roberto Bonini

@Scobleizer - this item is not interesting because of the conversation. it's interesting because of who it's from, and what he said. The fact that there's a conversation around it and that conversation is easy to find and read is a bonus (a feature) that sets this service head and shoulders above others (IMHO). There's really not much interesting in the comments here, if you ask me. You could get rid of all the comments that aren't Paul's and the value of the entry doesn't diminish that much. - Chris Heath

That isn't to say that conversations around items aren't ever useful or valuable (or interesting as robert says)... but in this case i would say it's who it's from and what he said. - Chris Heath

Chris: you nailed, in a single paragraph, why Twitter is winning. You now can choose who shows up on your screen and under what context. Well, I can because I have list support. Everyone else will get that next month. Victor: Roberto is right. I barely see ANY of the good stuff I see on Twitter come over here. Well, it comes here because of my favorites feed, but that isn't in nearly as useful a form as it is over at http://www.twitter.com/scoblei... - Robert Scoble

Robert, you keep saying that's the reason Twitter's winning - I can do that in Facebook and FriendFeed as well. - Jesse Stay

Well, the problem is that Google doesn't seem to index tweets as well as it indexes Friendfeed posts. And Google has never been able go inside Facebook's walled garden. Hopefully that will change. - Victor Ganata

(and I have been able to for the last year or so) - Jesse Stay

Victor, that changed today - see ReadWriteWeb's post. Facebook is opening up public status messages to search engines now. - Jesse Stay

Why is Twitter/Facebook/FriendFeed a zero sum game? I use both Twitter and FriendFeed a lot - they have different strengths - and they feed into each other. Facebook I use less, but that's a personal issue because I simply like it less. Why does there have to be a winner? And +1 Scott, if I'm in the niche market that FF is serving and I'm happy with it, why should I care if "the real action" is on Facebook? If that's the case, I'll take FF's "fake action," thank you very much. - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

Good point Jandy - sunipeyk

Paul: Thank you for letting us know status as much as you are able. The fact that you took time to write anything says a lot. So thank you for that. And thank you for FriendFeed in general. It truly does rock. Have a great day. - Morgan Haley

Thank you. - amygeek

Why don't you just give us all Facebook accounts for the one's that don't have them and be done with it. But the Turbocharged FF/FB accounts!! - Gene Williams

@Gene, sorry, you'll have to wait for a FB invite like everyone else! - Andrew C

@Andrew Oh that sucks, I'm still waiting for my Facebook invite. Do you have one to spare? - Patrik Johansson

FF team needs 20% time at FB to keep inventing the next. - Christopher Galtenberg

This is great to hear, it would be bad that a major peice of my microblogging arogration just died off. - denzuko

Bump for clarification and Happy Birthday Paul! - Charlie Anzman

Back to Mono - http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009...

October 19 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Kol Tregaskes, Daniel Rowley, Turner Burns and 26 other people liked this

I don't know enough about the Beatles. Is it good or bad to be the walrus? "Yoko didn’t break up the Beatles. The Beatles did. FriendFeed isn’t dead. It’s just getting started. And the walrus is Paul." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

26 more comments

Well, Lennon based "I Am the Walrus" on Lewis Carroll's poem, "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...), but didn't realize the Walrus was the villian, so you decide I guess! - Mark Trapp

The Walrus was only Paul when looking through a Glass Onion. - Cliff Gerrish

Yeah, hard to explain all those references... It's worth spending some quality time with the albums Gillmor mentions, and learning about the people that made those albums. There are a number of Beatles documentaries as well... Paul, seriously, you don't know the Beatles? really? <shakes head in disbelief> - Jason Wehmhoener

The real question is: Is Paul the John of Friendfeed? Or is that Bret? - Cliff Gerrish

Seems like the easiest thing to do would be to just ask Steve. :) - Cristo

Easy, yes, but certainly less interesting. - Jason Wehmhoener

I'll add learning to Beatles to my TODO list. - Paul Buchheit

Why even have references or allusions at all? Everyone should just simply know everything. - Christopher Galtenberg

I'd say Bret is Paul and Paul is John, just 'cause Paul is Paul would be too simple. The real stumper is who's Ringo? Kevin or Ben? Whichever's not is probably George. And is Gary Stuart Sutcliffe or Pete Best? Or is Jim Norris Stuart Sutcliffe? And what about Sanjeev? My head hurts. - Ken Sheppardson

By the way, up until the fifth paragraph I was expecting this to make reference to Miguel de Icaza and Richard Stallman. Doh. - Ken Sheppardson

Someone should ask Paul McCartney if he'd like to be Paul or Bret. - Jeremy Hylton

Paul - I was wondering what your reaction would be to being called "the Walrus" LOL :D - Susan Beebe

Pretty funny stuff for FF fans. - Tim Tyler

Wait... you guys are reading that "the walrus is Paul" as a reference to Paul Buchheit? Rather than McCartney, which is what it's meant for 40-some years now? - Ken Sheppardson

I think Steve threw that in to be clever and folks are reading a bit much into it. (just as they read a bit much into "I buried Paul" at the end of Strawberry Fields.) of course, the Beatles expected you to read into it, and get confused, and have discussions like this one... BTW, John Lennon felt the Lewis Carroll poem was a criticism of capitalism. Somehow I doubt Steve was trying to say Paul B is an overly greedy capitalist though... - Jason Wehmhoener

I just DM'ed this via FF to Steve Gillmor hoping for his input on the whole Walrus bit :-) - Susan Beebe

OK, I don't know why, but I remember quite distinctly that when I was a kid, the lyric, "the walrus was Paul," was taken by some to be a confirmation of the rumor that Paul McCartney had died and the Beatles were covering it up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... In 1969, when the rumor gained traction, I actually created a Halloween costume consisting of a bunch of headlines from reputable sources like the National Enquirer about Paul's death... - Laura Norvig

I'm sitting here with Steve. And he told me the Walrus is John. - Cliff Gerrish

haah awesome! thanks Cliff - Susan Beebe

Although he didn't say who Paul is... - Cliff Gerrish

"If you don't know who the Walrus is, the Walrus is you.." G. Marx - Parody

Paul is just Paul, of course, but then again he can't be. - Ken Sheppardson

FriendFeed is dead. - I Am the Walrus

Goo goo goo joob. Paul, how about you andme get together for a beer or something snd then go kicking Edgar Allen Poe before climbing up the Eiffel Tower. - Jim Hearts FF from iPhone

Wow the Beatles are a TERRIBLE reference to show how friendfeed is still alive. Only two of the original members of the Beatles are still alive and they are not getting any younger. - Garin Kilpatrick

Yeah, and the remastered Beatles catalog has hardly made a dent in the charts: http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot... - Cliff Gerrish

The Walrus was was a sort of villain, but I think Steve was emphasizing his role as a pied piper--the guy calling the shots that everybody is listening to and (most blindly) following. The question remains, what will happen to our Oysters? - Kurtiss Hare

There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage -- if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge :)

October 19 - Comment - Like - Share

Fabrizio, david beckwith, James Myatt and 242 other people liked this

What is transforming... FriendFeed, or the idea of FriendFeed? - Christopher Galtenberg

117 more comments

Thanks for the update, Paul! - Anne Bouey

THANK YOU! - teh Dork Knight

Fabulous News :) - Susan Beebe

Noticed the "leaked" Facebook UI screenshots and the groups blog post today, and both seem FriendFeed inspired: nice to see Facebook trying to bring the stuff we like about FriendFeed to a larger audience. - Mark Trapp

To Robert Scoble: I told you so ;-) - Jesse Stay

Sounds like they're adding some of FF's features to FaceBook. yay - Internet's Tad from fftogo

Mark - got link? - Susan Beebe

Thanks Paul :) - ashish

Devil is in the details: "couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world" == Facebook projects with FriendFeed-like elements == no work on FriendFeed itself. - EricaJoy

Paul, FriendFeed rocks as Gmail does ;) - Orlando Pozo

Thanks for the update, the more you communicate, the less we have to speculate. - Peter Hoffmann

The fact that these improvements are coming to Facebook and not friendfeed will not sway those who like friendfeed but dislike Facebook. - Alex Scoble

Thank you Paul for bringing "FriendFeed goodness to the larger world" -- THAT sounds awesome!! - Susan Beebe

integration with facebook? - Rocco Galluzzo

@Alex Scoble: That's true - Jorge Escobar

Susan: http://blog.facebook.com/blog... and http://mashable.com/2009... - Mark Trapp

I hope out of the chrysalis emerges an infested Kerrigan. That'd be awesome http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki... - Ivan Kirigin

Thanks Mark, much appreciated... I'll check those out - Susan Beebe

+1 Ivan :) - Benjamin Golub

But we knew this was the deal the moment the full details of the purchase of friendfeed by Facebook became public. - Alex Scoble

Yeah, I don't give a crap about Facebook. I want to know about FriendFeed. - Rochelle

Is it the interface people dislike about Facebook or the people they're friends with on Facebook? I can imagine being able to import all your subscribers from FriendFeed and have them in a separate group that doesn't interact with other groups you may have on Facebook. - Cristo

sadly, no one with any power seems to care about FF anymore. - Joe Silence is not dead

I'm glad to hear this. I prefer FriendFeed to Facebook any day of the week. - Nathan Clayton

And the answer for me would be some of both. I have real life friends and family that I don't necessarily want to get into the same discussions with as I do with people here. - Cristo

And there's your answer, Rochelle. friendwho? friendwhat now? Oh, you mean Facebook! (No I mean friendfeed) friendwho? (rinse, lather, repeat) - Alex Scoble

there are some ui differences (and i tend to prefer friendfeed in those cases) but i have friended quite a few FF people in FB and the experience is remarkably similar in many ways. - Jason Wehmhoener

Another big difference is I don't think you get the same FOAF interaction on Facebook as on FriendFeed. - Cristo

yep - Jason Wehmhoener

I hope my FaceBook peeps are ready for the FriendFeed firehose ... past experience would say that they're in for a shock. - Crutis

Thanks for the transparency on the Friendfeed "ghost town" matter Paul. Much appreciated. - Alex Knight

Thanks Paul... bring the special sauce to Facebook: http://blogs.zdnet.com/weblife... - Andrew

I like the "chrysalis stage" analogy - sounds cool.... goes an looks for FF goodness butterfly! - Susan Beebe

Good to know that FriendFeed still has some fight left; hope that translates into a viable and sustainable platform/utility for the masses (though I quite enjoy the close-knit, uber-geek community that it's become). - Christian

I don't like the chrysalis analogy. The butterfly emerges from the chrysalis and buggers off leaving the shell. Of course, it might then also get eaten by a bird. Tweet, tweet. - Mark H

Mark LOL nice, ... haha - Susan Beebe

Note that he didn't say that FriendFeed.com was going away, only that they're diverted to bringing it to a much larger audience - Jesse Stay

The problem is Scoble (Robert) and MG both just sent half of FriendFeed away so most of those that would benefit from this announcement won't even see it. - Jesse Stay

Jesse, I didn't get that from Paul's comment. I read that some of the friendfeed ideas will be going into FB. I like that idea, but I still prefer FF to FB because of the different conversations here that I don't have with friends and family. - Travis Koger from iPhone

Yeah, Paul's statement won't help friendfeed. This will just either give people more reason to go to Facebook or find another service entirely. - Alex Scoble

What Alex and Rochelle said. This sounds like a "we're bringing FF to Facebook" announcement, and I don't give a damn about Facebook. I want to know what's happening HERE. And Cristo, both, but more the interface. I care about the friends I've made here, and I'm connected with many of them now on Facebook as well, but I prefer to interact with them here, because I like it better. - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

Travis, he didn't say that - you read that, but he didn't say that. I'm willing to bet FriendFeed.com will not go away. - Jesse Stay

As much as I agree about Scoble and MG driving people away, they have also effectively flush out some comment from the FF team. - Travis Koger from iPhone

Travis, there are better ways of getting the FF team to comment - Jesse Stay

:( I quite liked the caterpillar. - Nick Lothian

I think it's the opposite, the butterfly is becoming this crawling caterpillar :) - Jorge Escobar

Oh I don't think FF will go away, and damn will hope it doesn't either! - Travis Koger from iPhone

What I do see is more Facebook integrated into the FriendFeed environment - I think that's a good thing - Jesse Stay

The critical difference between Facebook and FriendFeed is the social model. With Facebook as it is today, you need to be mutual friends to see each others content. There is a "fan page" model but it is oriented toward "publishing/celebrity" rather than information sharing. FriendFeed has an asymmetric model like Twitter, where you can easily discover someone's content without any "friend" gesture whatsoever, and you can follow without friending. This makes the converation more discoverable, and useful.. - Adina Levin

Agree Adina. - Travis Koger from iPhone

If the integration is bringing public/asymmetric to Facebook, then it will be very useful indeed. If the integration is to add FriendFeed-style service integration into the symmetric/private Facebook model, it will be much less useful - it's more of the same - I'll be able to more easily share updates from youtube or last.fm or delicious to my friend network, but be unable to discover new people and infomation. - Adina Levin

Adina: And unless Facebook goes radically toward that model, it won't suffice for me. I could not care less about their upcoming redesigns. - Christopher A Carr

@Jesse - I can't see any sign that they are working on FriendFeed at all. All the indications are that the FF team is now working on Facebook, and only Facebook. That's great for Facebook, and I'm sure they will do wonderful work there. But don't delude yourself that FriendFeed is going to get anything more than critical fixes, and maybe the occasional thing done in someone's spare time. - Nick Lothian

Butterflies look totally different than caterpillars and they also fly away - Melanie Reed

Crickets chirping... is this site alive?? :) - Christopher Galtenberg

+100 Adina. The things I like best about FriendFeed (easy content/people discovery, FoaF, asymmetrical following and being followed) are completely opposite to Facebook's core model. That's why as much as people keep talking about Facebook adding FF-like features, I don't see the REAL FF core features making it over, because the mindset is different. - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

I don't see this announcement as anything new, or as reassuring. We knew from the time of the acquisition that there would be would be some movement of FF capabilities into FB. The real question is whether this means absorption of FF into FB or attracting the FB user base into FF. The comment about "bring[ing] FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world" still leaves that question open. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

+1 everything Alex Scoble has said. Friendwhat? What's a feed? Who uses RSS anymore? We've got PubSubWTFOMGBBQ now! - Mr. Gunn

Agree with Jandy on +100 Adina. - Amy℠

Also, I agree with Jandy and Adina's comments. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

Nick, Paul just said they're working on other projects right now. That still doesn't mean FriendFeed is going away. I'm not deluding myself at all. I'm telling everyone else they're deluding themselves by assuming it's going away. All the FriendFeed team is still using FriendFeed, and Paul just tried to give us comfort not to worry. For some reason we all don't want to believe him. It's actually kind of amusing. - Jesse Stay

I wonder what the powers that be mean by "FriendFeedy goodness"? Is it understood what WE like about it vs. FB? - Amy℠

Paul - Wishing you all the best as you tend your new butterfly garden :) I'll be here to enjoy them! - Susan Beebe

Jesse: "For some reason we all don't want to believe him." <-- Don't want to believe what? He didn't really say anything. - Christopher A Carr

This is not the news that Friendfeed fans were looking for. - Vezquex: God of FF

The issue isn't belief that they are going to do something. The question is what they are going to do, and whether that will continue the core value of FriendFeed, which is not just information aggregation but discoverability. - Adina Levin

I know more about the "Last Days" and heaven than I know about what's going to happen to FriendFeed as we have come to know it than was given in your rather cryptic answer, Paul. :) And while that may not be a fair comparison (God actually gave details and signs), there is something definitely not forthcoming about your response. A person usually withholds details that affect another... more... - Melanie Reed

Melanie, in other words, Paul works for a technology company in Silicon Valley that doesn't disclose future features, products, and services until they are ready. - Cristo

Hopefully this helps to quiet all of the "friendfeed is dying" talk. Because this thread proves ff is alive and well. - Garin Kilpatrick

@Jesse - I read it differently to you. To me, Paul is saying "We are taking what we were working towards on FriendFeed, and trying to bring that goodness to a bigger audience". No one is claiming they are going to shut down FF. - Nick Lothian

@Jesse - Want to make a bet on the number of new features added to FF before the end of the year? - Nick Lothian

You read my mind. Having seen a few acquisitions, I am wondering if FF staff was told to put the site in bugfix mode. - EricaJoy from IM

Cristo, to deliver some straightforward talk is not about giving away company details. If you have a product that is original and stands on its own, you don't need to refer to it as a "butterfly". Many companies even promote something new and upcoming especially to their loyal user base. It gives a signal. A proper one. It tells your users and future users enough so that they can make an informed decision about what they want to do instead of keeping them on tenderhooks - Melanie Reed

"the chrysalis stage in most butterflies is one in which there is little movement" (via wikipedia) So if you follow that metaphor then eventually FriendFeed will go through a metamorphosis -- that means it's not dead... really how hard can it be to get what he's saying? - Chris Heath

Its pretty hard :) The burning question is if they are putting FF goodness in to the walled gardens that are Facebook or are they bringing FF openness to FB too. I think the people here want the open forums that are FF not the closed ones that are FB. If FB is going hybrid with both walled gardens and open forums that would be OK too. People on FF want open forums... like Twitter and FF... without the crude interface that is Twitter and without the uncertainty that is FF now. - Ed Millard

Facebook is gonna have to rip off much of the privacy to maximize their product in the real-time web world. I am going to assume FF goodness is going to be applied to FB :) *crosses fingers* - Susan Beebe

Just a thought... why does "longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world" JUST mean facebook.com? What I get from this is that they are working on a range of things, maybe bringing the FriendFeed sauce to a range of sites, powered by the Facebook back end. Who knows what that means. A FriendFeed service powered by FacebookConnect? Also to...... more... - Johnny Worthington

LMFAO. Johnny++ - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

FB needs to leave the privacy for the walled garden and the inner circle. Their current user base likes that. They just need a second feed that is an open forum and you can talk there without it bleeding in to your inner circle feed. - Ed Millard

Seems like the inner circle is breaking down some now, what with parents and other relatives friending teenagers. I'm guessing the information posted on the walls these days is not as private. Is there a way on FriendFeed to limit what on your wall can be seen by particular people and groups? - Cristo

Yes, but blocking doesn't work so well since you can just use Chrome's Incognito mode to get around it. - Alex Scoble

Translation: if you haven't switche to Facebook yet, you better do it now so you can get a good vanity URL. - David Chartier from iPhone

I don't know what all the fuss is about. But could we have the long answer too, please? - Laura Norvig

Although I'm interested, FB != FF. I don't see how the two mix in a way that makes me feel otherwise. Mixing audiences is not a good thing for me (with a few exceptions) and I know others share the same thought. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

Did anyone notice that Robert Scoble didn't comment on this thread? What does this mean? Does it mean Robert Scoble won't exist soon? He must be working on a Monday afternoon, no? ;) - Cristo

Paul, will FF be here in 1 year, 5 years? - Robert Higgins