None of the queries that I tried produced interesting results. What did you try? - Paul Buchheit
I tried questions I wanted to ask earlier this year as I wrote a research paper. This is way (way way way) better than Wikipedia's search. It looks like it would have saved me some time writing that report, as well. - Jordan
I just tried some of the [hand-crafted?] sample queries.. didn't pay much attention to the results, since all they do is query Wikipedia. I do think the interface is quite impressive, great attention to detail. - Aviv
just played with it a bit - for most searches i ran i think the results were significantly less useful than google would be on the same search - it did best with things like 'who is abraham lincoln' (and returned his wikipedia page + the first paragraph) - but 'who is lincoln' gave Lincoln, Nebraska as the first result - overall, fairly underwhelming - bob
"The billionaire—Blockbuster's largest shareholder—has bought into a "game-changing" scheme announced last month in which the troubled electronics retailer would be combined with the troubled movie retailer to create a new national chain selling consumer hardware and software." - Paul Buchheit
I've always liked Best Buy better anyway. Circuit City's prices always seemed to be higher than everyone else's. - Voyagerfan5761
Maybe they can merge with the also-troubled Delta and Northwest. Throw in Bear Stearns. So you can be late flying to your foreclosed house while watching a crappy rental on your overpriced DVD player -- all with one company! - Karim
What I found even more tragic than the girl's death itself is how unremorseful her father was about killing his own child, even going as far as denying he ever had a daughter and saying that if he had known, he would've killed her the moment she was born. - April Buchheit
wow. I can't get myself to "Like" this. - Tudor Bosman
Ugh. What idiot thought we could turn that group into a functional democracy? - Jonathan
Whoa, easy on the generalizations there Jonathan. I don't think you can dismiss a whole group based on one idiot and the idiots who let him go. That might be taking it a little far. It's been less than 150 years since slavery was a common practice in this functional democracy (to give one easy example). - Nick
It sickens me to read this. Remarkable how the father and the mother differ when it comes to Allah's assessment: "[The father:] 'That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,' he said, his voice swelling with pride. (...) [The mother:] 'Now, my lovely Rose is in her grave. But, God will make her father pay, either in this world ... or in the world after.'" - Ole Begemann
Interracial marriage has only been legal in this country since 1967. Back then, instead of honor killings, they just sent you to jail for 25 years. Three cheers for "functional democracy." [rolls eyes] - Karim
That was really tough to read but also very interesting. - Kevin D. White
It's difficult. We see this and are horrified and disgusted, and then we naturally jump on the fact that he has a different faith, a "strange" religion. I'm really afraid of full-blown persecution based on religion... we've been down that path before, and nothing good can come from it. What happened here goes beyond our natural urges to love and protect our children, which is what baffles us. We won't understand his actions, because we can't. Decent individuals are not "wired" to process this. - Vince DeGeorge
What's so disturbing is not just that people do these things, but that their culture condones and even celebrates it. I'm reminded of Niniane's post the other day about the gay guy whose parents put him in a mental institution where he was tortured for years (http://niniane.blogspot.com/20...) and that was only 40 years ago. A friend from HS was "disowned" because he married a muslim girl -- his family was orthodox christian and very traditional -- he never saw his parents again. - Paul Buchheit
I've also noticed that the people who seem most concerned with their "honor" seem to be the most dishonorable people. They put some kind of crazy ideal ahead of actual, decent human behavior. - Paul Buchheit
I am from India, which put me in a unique position to be able to understand both eastern and western 'values'. For east, family care is a value but so is false sense of honor and pride. Most people in east consider people in west to be dishonorable because of free show of sex and sensuality. However, they never notice that 'honesty' , 'sense of duty' and 'individual freedom' are real values of west, which eastern countries has just started to acknoledge. For people in Basra and around it is easy to think that honor is keeping the womanfolk in supressed state and also suppressing sexuality and freedom. This will remain the state of affairs there until west injects their values in there - Varun Mahajan
Islam does not condone this as an honor killing; she died a virgin. RIP Rose. - Mo Jawhari
Varun, just about every time we've "injected our values" somewhere, we've made it worse. Just sayin'. - Nick
Nick, I think it's more a matter of whether values are spread through peaceful/positive means or through violence. Ultimately, it's difficult to spread positive values though negative means, such as violence (but easy to spread negative values). - Paul Buchheit
I agree. It's better to lead by example than lead by invasion. - Nick
(I guess I worry that we get too holier-than-thou in this type of situation and it forever leads us into trouble. Look at that crazy bastard in Austria locking up his daughter in the basement for twenty years while fathering children with her. Yet we don't right off the whole country. The "eastern world" has no monopoly on messed up human behavior. The only thing I can give us, is a somewhat better system of laws... but geez we still have constant trouble in that department.) - Nick
Terrible. This is a tragedy right out of Shakespeare. - Ginger Makela
One of the questions that has been floating around for the last few years is the question "Is this a perversion of Islam, or the truth about Islam?" Honor killings occur often, but it seems that the Muslim community itself may be divided on whether they should be praised or condemned. It's important to note that if the girl had fallen in love with an Iraqi man, we may have never heard about this story. - Ontario Emperor
Wishing the Like link were named something more like Good Read, Useful, or something. My inner linguist says I shouldn't 'like' this, because it's horrible, but FriendFeed and reddit both use such language. Oh well, at least here a comment is sufficient to get it shared with my friends... - Voyagerfan5761
Every Muslim should be appalled that this "honor killing" was done in the name of Islam. - Greg S.
@Nick, if the Austrian police had just let the guy go, then it would be an equivalent case. There are lunatics everywhere, but when the police pat you on the back for your actions, we are in the realm of cultural problem. Not necessarily with Islam per se, but the norms in that region are definitely messed up. - Neil Kandalgaonkar
This is so totally deplorable - and it does happen evrywhere -here's a link to what happned in India a few days back http://tinyurl.com/6a9ynn - viki saigal
what a story. what a story. how does the man feel proud and sure God will reward him and the woman feel horrified and sure God will punish him? how do they coexist like that? - edythe
@Mo Jawhari: would it be a condoned honor killing if she was not a virgin? - edythe
From the title, I don't even want to read it. - TranceMist
@edythe The implication certainly seems to be that there's such thing in Islam as a condoned honor killing. - Chris Johnson
Atrocities like this are the result of "Us vs. Them" thinking. The irony is that it leads to more "Us vs. Them" thinking, and we're blinded to our own atrocities. Late-term abortion of a viable fetus? That's ok in our culture, nobody gets hauled into jail on that one. Strangling the same child 17 years later? Father wishes he had killed her when she was born? Bloody savage! - Karim
@TranceMist , Me either. I don't like the title. It made me uncomfortable. - Roger Chen
The title is relatively innocuous compared to the actual article, which was definitely not an easy read. - Dan Hsiao
Horrible that things like this happen in the world. :( - Mike Reynolds
Yum. I've yet to find a place in SF that I like more than Los Charros. - Ocean
ha, i've heard about the burrito pipeline. :) - edythe
If you are ever in Salt Lake, check out Lone Star Taqueria. Everyone else will tell you to go to Red Iguana but they are all so very wrong. Lone Star also has the advantage of being just a drunken stagger from my house. - Kevin D. White
Difference on cash and credit is not uncommon. One Chevron down the street highlights it as "9 cent discount on cash!" - Louis Gray
Where can I get 100 octane in the Bay Area? That's a lot of juice. - tagami
VP Streetblaze is specialized racing fuel. I would have guessed that was at a track, but apparently some gas stations sell it, see http://personal.linkline.com/d.... - ⓞnor
Yeah, apparently it's racing fuel. You would only need this if you are Speed Racer in the Mach 5 and plan to go up against Snake Oiler. Speaking of Snake Oil, 100 octane is not as high as it goes. - Karim
I think the point of the sign is to make people go, "Whew! Thank God regular is only $4 a gallon!" - Karim
Wow, that's still about half the price we pay for unleaded in the UK. Me, I can go 100 miles on the fuel contained in one egg, even if it does take me all day to walk it. - Slippy Lane
Cash/Credit is done by certain companies and can be as much as a nickel a gal. Who runs to the ATM to get $50 before they buy gas? Another way to rip $ - Michael VanDervort
This gas station is in Los Altos. They probably get a lot of business from price-insensitive people who just aren't paying attention or don't care. I almost bought gas there once (I used to buy there before they switched to the super-expensive gas). - Paul Buchheit
"After arriving home to Fremont in the wee hours Wednesday from her campaign stint in Indiana, she was back to work the next morning at FriendFeed, where, even for a start-up, the days are more predictable than campaign work." :) - Ana
Congratulations on the interview, Ana. I made sure to highlight your stumping for Obama in Scoble's Qik video from the other day, and Kristine enjoyed meeting you as well. - Louis Gray
Here is a version w/ photos: http://www.mercurynews.com/loc... You have to click on "2" under the photo of the Hillary supporters though. That said, it's not really worth it, since I look sort of strange. Must have caught me in a moment of naive, wide-eyed support :) - Ana
It's a bit ridiculous the gaping hole I felt by this. I hadn't realized how addicted I was. We need to start a support group. - Carla Thompson
Does FriendFeed have a status report area? For example, Twitter has blog.twitter.com, which was used to report on an outage in late April (they reported 3 days after problems started, but that's another story). Does FriendFeed have a similar place to report on outages? - Ontario Emperor
Welcome back online guys. It's okay, I coped. I read a book and listened to some blues. - Slippy Lane
The FriendFeed Blog seems like a good spot for status reports. - Chris Rossini
I still think it was Scoble's fault...somehow. ;) - Alejandro S.
Quick, someone register isfriendfeeddown.com. - Kevin D. White
Wow, FriendFeed really *is* the new Twitter. - ⓞnor
I know I checked blog.friendfeed.com about 10 times during the outage. Makes sense that status updates would go there. - Erica Baker
I used Summize. No news there, but it was fun to watch all the people realizing Friendfeed was down one after the other. - Alejandro S.
Server troubles. We're still investigating exactly what triggered it. - Paul Buchheit
I reckon it was a case of Murphy's law's third addendum: "If something cannot possibly go wrong, and it is the weekend, that thing will go wrong.". I propose a revision - Murphy's law's third addendum as applied to startups - "If it is the weekend, and everything is working, nothing will go wrong, but it will still cause a system outage." - Slippy Lane
"Who can imagine New York City without the Mission burrito? Like the Yankees, the Brooklyn Bridge or the bagel, the oversize burritos have become a New York institution. And yet it wasn’t long ago that it was impossible to find a good burrito of any kind in the city. As the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel approaches, it’s worth taking a look at the remarkable sequence of events that takes place between the time we click “deliver” on the burrito.nyc.us.gov website and the moment that our hot El Farolito burrito arrives in the lunchroom with its satisfying pneumatic hiss." - Tudor Bosman
Reminds me of the now defunct Golden Gate Tunnel. I still have my permit in one of my Google Stuff boxes. - Kevin Fox
Cool, tunnels rule. They are so, well, underneath it all. - Mike Reynolds
"Convincing skeptical businessmen to buy into the plan proved more of a challenge - it took six months to persuade suspicious taqueria owners to switch to a salsa with lower magnetic permittivity." :) I know what I'm having for lunch... - Paul Buchheit
so now there's "data availability" as well as "data portability"? I'm not sure, but it's possible that Myspace actually has this right, or at least not as wrong as some advocates would have everyone believe. Myspace is being somewhat conservative in pushing their user's data out, but that might actually be what users prefer. See for example: http://foaf.tribe.net/thread/a... and http://www.readwriteweb.com/ar... - Nick Lothian
Is there a pimped-out blender requirement for working at friendfeed?? - Shannon Jiménez
There are so many requirements... Pimped out artisan mixers, love of blenders, high-end pepper mills, bacon cookies, and a few other oddities. - Kevin Fox
Okay then foodies, recommend a good mill for sea salt to me. I'm having a hard time finding a good one, as it rusts any metal inserts. - Carla Thompson
The BlendTec can probably blend the VitaMix. - Amit Patel
just ordered a pimped out mixer, blender, pepper mill, and bacon cookie recipe... just in case. :) - David Vasileff
Yeah, that's one of xkcd's "things", You should click thru to the site to see the mouseover. I only discovered them after I'd been reading xkcd for a few weeks (how slow am I, lol) and it brought a whole new level of understanding to the whole thing for me. - Slippy Lane
This is so weird. I didn't favorite this photo 12 hours ago, I did it like 3.5 hours ago, but it landed in my feed at the time location of 12 hours ago, which is when I assume it was posted by Patti. Is this a bug or did you guys want it to happen this way? - Rachel L Fisher
I just spent some time looking into the new window problem. It turns out to be an iPhone/Safari bug. I think I figured out a work-around, but I'm going to wait until tomorrow to release it (because I should be asleep, not pushing lightly tested code). - Paul Buchheit
Are there plans for a fuller UI on mobiles? I miss not being able to like or comment from my phone (Windows Mobile) - Colin Walker
what is iphone URL of FriendFeed? I'd like to try it on my S60v3 Nokia phone ;) - silpol
It just hides the entry automatically. Is this the intent? I see the options come up afterward. It's more confusing to me, but that's probably because I've been using FF so long. - Louis Gray
Yes, it immediately hides the current entry and then gives the option of hiding more. - Paul Buchheit
I have to agree with Louis. There are less clicks but makes it more scary to click on it. Btw, are we going to get the mute function back? - Turker Keskinpala
I'm in the same boat as Louis - it seems more confusing to me now than it was before, but then I was so used to the old way. To me the power in the hiding function is not in hiding one specific post, but in the broader filtering mechanism hidden in the 'hide' options. I preferred the mute option over this. - Frederic
When i select "hide", then "undo", plz send the cursor back to the previous location on the page instead of putting me back up at the top of the page. = lost - Susan Beebe
I actually think people will find great use for a "Done! - Keep" pair. I think that sense of control will be great for most users and they wouldn't mind the extra clicks. People would be clicking Done! quite a bit, I think. Only thing to figure out is what to do with the comments - I'd group those entries and let the user see updates depending on the weight that they carry (number of comments, specific users, etc.) - Aviv
With the new Hide functionality (which I prefer over the previous one) - users will still have that nagging feeling of possibly missing out on a good conversation or not being able to easily find it later for reference or whatever reason. One bug I did notice is when you hide, scroll to the bottom, and click the Refresh [hidden entries] link - it displays the Undo info box for the last action (edit: looks like that was fixed :) - Aviv
Not to be overly picky - it might be a good idea to gray out the hidden entry div (the benefit of the feature is not immediately apparent to the user, IMO - still a bunch of text that hasn't gone anywhere), and also lose the "Hidden entries can be found" 2nd line after the first few hide actions (at that point the user gets the idea). Also, the text in italic (and especially the long underlined link) seems a little scary I think - a subtle yellow checkmark or something light would add a lot. - Aviv
I don't think it'd be a bad idea to add another action button in the middle there - "Unhide if commented" or some shorter text - Aviv
I'm with the Traditionalists on this one. In the old days it took two clicks to hide and we liked it! - Kevin D. White
Wow, I make a suggestion 9 hours ago, and it gets implemented! Either you saw my suggestion, in which case I'm touched and impressed, or you didn't, in which case Friendfeed should be inspected for paranormal powers. - Ranjit Mathoda
Using it more I think I am starting to like the new one. A question though: Since there is an option to "hide entries like this", does it mean that the first click on hide just hides a single entry? If so, it is even better. - Turker Keskinpala
Eh. Nevermind. I'm actually kinda liking the change. - Kevin D. White
Turker, that's correct -- "hide" only hides the single entry. Perhaps we need to improve the wording. - Paul Buchheit
i like it. it's quicker. today i was hiding a lot and i felt very slowed down by having to click more than once...plus i was at work and needed to be able to scan *quickly* -- :) - edythe
i am with Susan Beebe on the hide/undo bit. taking you back to the top of the page is indeed bewildering. took me a while to figure out where I had been... - edythe
hide from main friends page only? I only want hide from individual comment= pages (the ones that annoy me, eh?) or the persons page that annoys me (eh?). Rarely from the friend page that I have to navigate to and around and back to find the hidden hide. - Ashton
I like the fire and forget for the new hide, but, the resulting ui seems out of place. The undo is certainly frightening. - Ashton
is it hide, hide this entry one, hide this entry only unless it has comments ... yes, wording needs update. - Nicole Simon
The undo function is *extremely* frightening. It reloads the page and you lose your place. It would be easier if it would restore inline just like it hides inline. (I still like the old way better, but that's after about ten minutes of thinking, so we'll give it a bit longer.) - Voyagerfan5761
This is the first time in FriendFeed I wish there was a "Dislike" button. Hiding is very easy now, but when you UNDO it, the page snaps to the top, and you loose track of what you were writing. Plus, I like to tell FriendFeed the reason I'm hiding, as I don't actually do it that much (I hide only Scoble's and Calacanis' Twitter posts that have no comments, because I already receive them on Twitter itself, and they're many). Please, keep it the old way. - Rodrigo Jaroszewski
I like the old way. In fact, this new way confused me and I lost track of this post for a minute. To me, HIDE is about hiding people or specific streams from people. There's no way I'll devote time to hiding individual posts, especially projecting into a future where I may follow several hundred people. - Mike Reynolds
Mike, I think the merit of hiding individual posts comes into play when you are no longer interested in a post but more people keep commenting/liking and pushing the post to the top of your page every time. - Turker Keskinpala
In general, I'm *really hating* the acknowledgement messages that reload the page and bring me to the top of the page. I completely lose my place if I add a friend, etc. - engtech
Agreed with engtech. In the case of unhide, it's not that big of a deal, how often are you going to unhide anyway? But subscribe to someone on the third page, and you not only go to the top, but also back to the first page, ugh. - James Prudente
Undoing a hidden entry takes the focus to the top of the page, this occurs because of the yellow status bar that is displayed on the top of the page. I expected it to show the entry. - Shakeel Mahate
By the way, I like the UI for the hidden entries on a page, it is shown separately and it allows me to hide it again. Very cool - Shakeel Mahate
btw is it possible that there now no more "hide friends of this friends" option? this is particular annoying since there are suddenly so many fof entries - Nicole Simon
Good catch Nicole. That bug was caused by a change earlier today, but it should be fixed now. Let me know if you spot any other bugs. - Paul Buchheit
I think it's an improvement as it gets the overly verbose options dialog out of the way most of the time, except that you're losing the focus of where you were when you undo this, as others mentioned. - Philipp Lenssen
Yeah, I know the undo is lame -- I just haven't had time to make it better and figure that it's a rare operation anyway. Hopefully I'll get to it at some point though. - Paul Buchheit
Of note is that the video is primarily of Louis Gray giving details of the crew at FriendFeed. He will be employee #8 heading up PR :) I kid....I kid.... - Mark Krynsky
Robert Scoble interviews Louis Gray, as he introduces the FriendFeed (Oct 2007) team of 7 people. Tudor Boseman (#7) joined last week. Sanjeev, Jim, Ana Yang (stumping for Obama), Kevin Fox - Chief Designer. -- If you'd like to Digg the story, click http://tinyurl.com/5sq7y5 - Mitchell Tsai
Robert Scoble interviews Kevin Fox (as Louis Gray states "designer extraordinaire and all-around nice guy") - Mitchell Tsai
Q: Why is the FriendFeed interface so simple and easy-on-the-color? A: We want to walk before we run. Maybe a richer UI after FriendFeed has more features. - Mitchell Tsai
Q: Why are some features (like discussion feed) so hard to find? A: It's an early stage of design. We don't know yet how vital or frequent features will be for users. (e.g. hide-UI). - Mitchell Tsai
Q (6:15): Do you do user testing? A: (1) User-off-the-street (2) Friend-testing (3) Public-at-large --- We want to use Tiered testing - broad view, then drill-down. - Mitchell Tsai
Q (7:05): What about "noise"? A: (1) Duplication-noise (2) Looping-noise (3) Fast-user-noise 15 very fast Twitters - we do that well - Mitchell Tsai
Duplication-noise (8:55) - Hash on same URL (final source) isn't good enough. People reference things in different ways (a) link to primary source (b) adding extra sources (other related articles). - Mitchell Tsai
![SNL Spoof Of Hillary 5-10-08 [video]](http://img.youtube.com/vi/tLFJTc3oExE/2.jpg "SNL Spoof Of Hillary 5-10-08 [video]")
