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John Lennon reconsidered - http://www.berkshireliving.com/John-Le...

July 5 from Digg - Comment - Like - Share

Geez. Kinda harsh. I already knew Lennon was a deeply flawed human being, but this review seems to bend over backwards to deny him any credit at all. Compare the entirety of Lennon''s post-Beatles works with his fellow bandmates and I think it's competitive. "Give Peace a Chance ain't much of a song, but what about "Instant Karma!," "Mind Games" "Remember," "Love," or "Watching the Wheels"? - Paul Rodriguez

Robert Scoble

Can you help teach a class in real time? Right now you are on the screen. Can you teach me everything about "leadership?" Help here:

June 4 - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Schildt, Jorge Barba, Johni Fisher and 79 other people liked this

Feel free to point to blogs, videos, or other things. - Robert Scoble

252 more comments

Hello Y'all - Kreg Steppe

Where do you want it, in the comments? - Ton Zijp

www.whitehouse.org :) - Stephanie Segel

hell NO.. too much noise !! - Peter Dawson

Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. -George S. Patton - Ross Miller

Define Leadership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Kreg Steppe

HBR : Ten Fatal Flaws That Derail Leaders http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009... - David Peacock

or would that be www.whitehouse.gov -- dammit :( - Stephanie Segel

Leadership means taking risks, calculated or otherwise, and being willing to either fail or succeed, but to learn in any case. For many, social media's risky--and that's exactly why you may find leaders here. - dontgetcaught

"I'm going to do something I never do; give a direct order." Captain Hawkeye Pierce, M*A*S*H - Dan Messer

WIKIPEDIA about leadership ---> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Qbat

http://www.risesmart.com/risesma... - Ton Zijp

desmond tutu on leadership - http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Netbooknews

Peter Drucker's books are a good go-to for a start... - Helene

The Art of War (on Google Book Search): http://books.google.com/books... - Josette Torres

If you have to say you're a leader, you probably aren't. - Ladybug Heather

Ok so which thread do you want us in? Leadership means trusting the people who work for you to be good at what they do. And getting out of their way and letting them do it! - Ken Camp

658.4092 - Dan Messer

Best leadership quotes: http://houseofquotes.com/quotes... Because saying something is more important than actually doing it ;) - Carlton Prest

A leader is a dealer in hope. Napoleon Bonaparte - Stephanie Segel

VIDEO - Seth Godin Explains Why You Need a Tribe -> http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Qbat

Leadership is practice what you belive in..courage to stand up in hard times.. and the will to make a difference !! .. - Peter Dawson

Leaders know when to sit in the passenger seat and button the lip. Leaders empower others rather then themselves. - Vincent Lowe

Ken: this thread. This is awesome. - Robert Scoble

How long do you plan to run this class for? 10 years? Leadership is not taught, it's learnt. - thomasrdotorg

Let the students run the class. - Carlton Prest

thomasrdotorg: this thread goes forever. The physical class is for the next 50 minutes, though. - Robert Scoble

A leader is someone who allows his people to do what they need to do, stay out of the way, protect them from interference and let them shine. - Steve C

Carlton: you're running the class!!!!! - Robert Scoble

I haven't had this much fun in a class since I skipped history classes in high school.... - Stephanie Segel

Great idea for a thread but the best I could do would be post a reading list... Leadership is such a deep subject... Siddhartha, 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Fierce Conversations... it could go on forever. - SAM

I remember someone from Pixar did a great speech on Leadership for TED not long ago. I can't seem to find the link. - DocileWalnut

Napoleon Hill wrote that these are the major attributes required to be a successful leader 1. UNWAVERING COURAGE 2. SELF-CONTROL 3. A KEEN SENSE OF JUSTICE 4. DEFINITENESS OF DECISION 5. DEFINITENESS OF PLANS 6. THE HABIT OF DOING MORE THAN PAID FOR 7. A PLEASING PERSONALITY 8. SYMPATHY AND UNDERSTANDING 9. MASTERY OF DETAIL 10. WILLINGNESS TO ASSUME FULL RESPONSIBILITY 11. COOPERATION - Dave Amphlett

Leadership: Don't fake it, people smell fear - Dave Hodson

Listen and take good notes! - Mark Layton

Being a leader is very different from being a manager. - Ladybug Heather

Leadership also means trusting yourself. No wavering or waffling. A leader doesn't flip flop - Ken Camp

Leadership is standing up for what you think is right, and leading the way in that effort - Jesse Stay

open source leadershi p via joi ito :)- http://joi.ito.com/archive... - Peter Dawson

A leader does not command respect or demand respect, he earns respect. - Aron Michalski

"Leading Minds" by Howard Gardner: http://www.amazon.com/Leading... - Fred Yankowski

http://friendfeed.com/search... - Dan Hsiao

Compassion. - Kenley Neufeld

I can show it to you http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Lee

Larson, anything by Seth Godon is just brilliant - Shawn Hickman

Leadership - when you post a question on friendfeed and hundreds reply in several minutes. For free. :D - Sasha Kovaliov(.com)

I am trying to think of a way to tie the Darth Vader Corset featuring boobs into the leadership conversation. - Steve C

This is real, real time - watching the number of comments from 0 to 41, 42..43 44 45 - Ashu Joshi

Join Toastmasters - Prolific Programmer

Leadership is influence. - SAM

http://www.amazon.com/gp... Good book. cheap too - Manuel Arroyo

"A successful leader seeks and accepts responsibility and accountability"- http://www.scribd.com/doc... - Capn' One Eye - adrift

Leaders ask, listen, then decide...a lot like social media best practices. Maybe the technology's helping us catch up to where we should be. So let me ask: what do *you* think leadership is? - dontgetcaught

on the Jack welsh style :)- http://peterdawson.blogspot.com/2007... - Peter Dawson

Leadership lessons from Ulysses S. Grant - Manuel Arroyo

good leaders listen and realize that good ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. - Sara DelektaGalligan

The picture says a thousand words, but a caption helps: http://www.mos95b.com/New... - Carlton Prest

teach people correct principles and let them govern themselves - Jan Dawson

agree with Sara - Manuel Arroyo

Be decisive - Shakeel Mahate

Asking the right question at the right time and listening for the answer. - Aron Michalski

To unleash creativity, sometimes you need to be ready to lead from behind - Sameer

do not be afraid to make decisions - Manuel Arroyo

Building a Dream: The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy: http://www.imdb.com/title... - Ton Zijp

Today I read a tweet in Dutch which translates to: "Power is not a good reason to lead: a good leader creates leaders, not followers". - Patrick Mackaaij

Leadership: doing something no one else does...showing the way. Showing the possibilities. Paying attention. Engaging, reciprocal conversations. - Sheryl

A different way to learn about leadership is to read Memoirs of Hadrian, a novel by French writer Marguerite Yourcenar about the life and death of Roman Emperor Hadrian. http://www.amazon.com/Memoirs... - Paul Rodriguez

"The Art and Science of Leadership:" http://www.nwlink.com/~doncla... - Carlton Prest

Define a leader with Google Search: Just type this in the search field: define:leader - Qbat

The Purpose of Pedegogy - http://elgg.net/vinall... - Peter Dawson

And like Sheryl said. She said showing the way. I like lighting the way. Shine a light in the dark scary cavern, then lead your team into the dark and out the other side. Lead by risk, by example, by doing. - Ken Camp

Henry Ford once said "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'A faster horse'." So try something dumb or unexpected at least once in a while. - DocileWalnut

Hello class: “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” Ohh, and you should bare in mind - Popularity is not leadership. - Nir Ben Yona

Best book I've read on leadership: http://www.amazon.com/Leaders... - Tim Costantino

Robert, are you putting this up on Kyte? - Manuel Arroyo

A good team makes a good leader. Without a good team leadership is nothing but herding cats. - Dilip Dand

Leadership = Responsibility. - Sasha Kovaliov(.com)

Hi Class. I taught a few leadership classes at U of Arizona - Jeff

Learn from the mistakes of others, what you should not do as a leader - you cannot be partial to some, or have favorites, you cannot intimidate, you cannot lie - Shakeel Mahate

I disagree with the "waffling" comment. A good leader continues to consider new points of view and isn't afraid to say, "I've reconsidered." - Vincent Lowe

"A very generic concept of leadership is that of directly or indirectly influencing others, by means of authority, formal or informal, or by personal attributes, to act in accordance with one's intent or shared purpose" - same ref as my last - Capn' One Eye - adrift

The Manager's Cheat Sheet: 101 Common-Sense Rules for Leadershttp://www.insidecrm.com/feature... - Ton Zijp

Leadership: Having the best BS detector in the room. Even if the room is expanding and expanding... like this one... - Mark Zip

"If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you." Issac Jaffe on SportsNight - Andy Roth

If you aren't the lead sled dog, the scenery never changes! - Jim Tierney

according to Carol Bartz of Yahoo, it involves "███████ drop-kicking people's █████ to ███████ Mars" - Karim

"A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be." -Rosalynn Carter - Leanno Software

oh I 4got to like this thought tapestry.. this is actuall open source cull point.. Scobles is da man !! :)- - Peter Dawson

Sorry, I'm not doing video, didn't have a video compatible ccomputer. - Robert Scoble

Leadership is Michael Arrington whining about the lack of a decent tablet device. Then making his own, and making it look really fantastic. - Carlton Prest

How does a company get Leaders in management positions? and why doesn't it happen more often? - Steve C

Monday Morning Leadership was also a decent book http://www.amazon.com/Monday-... - Manuel Arroyo

@Sasha it's more ... Leadership = seeking out and accepting Responsibility - Capn' One Eye - adrift

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. - Dwight D.Eisenhower - Eric Logan

Recognize your own support organization. Leaders are made by the teams that they lead. And borkien by failing to acknowledge that. Never forget that you are the leader "for now". It's not an appointment forever. - Ken Camp

To lead you have to fight the urge to run when things are scary. If they're scary, that's exactly what you need to do. You grow by trying new things. Complacency achieves nothing. - Sheryl

Listen voraciously, speak cautiously, invest in others before asking for something in return, don't assume influence - build it, maintain vision, back it with understanding and knowledge, and continually focus on being the best most creative and humble person you can be. Then try to get others to do it all with you. - SAM

Here http://bit.ly/IRqOk - real time "leadership" on the net :) - Sasha Kovaliov(.com)

at this 2:38am all I can say, what my teacher once told me, take the responsibilities and don't be afraid of them, help people by showing the right way of doing things - Hameedullah Khan

In case we're in a techy mood, Steve Jobs once said that "“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” - Nir Ben Yona

When you scream, tell, me to do something be sure you tell me exactly what to do or you may find you get what you asked for. rough paraphrase of Neil Young (as heard on PBS earlier today) - Angela E. Taylor

One thing I will say is people use the word leadership when they should be using the word management. It is more than a skill set it is a developmental process. - Jeff

@Capn' One-Eye ☠ - agree :) Btw, this is better than http://www.ask500people.com/! - Sasha Kovaliov(.com)

Leadership and management are NOT the same. Large companies have far more leaders who are not managers. - Ken Camp

well said @Hameedullah Khan - Capn' One Eye - adrift

@Carlton , wth was that about leadership and Mike A ? thats Total BS !! - Peter Dawson

management can be taught, leadership cannot. - Sherri

Leadership is knowing your team, their passions, and treating every employee, customer, partner with the respect and dignity they deserve as human beings, regardless of their position, status, tenure, success and failure. Leadership is being able to admit when you're wrong and accepting the consequences. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Just read 'The Prince' leaders are defined by their victories; even companies its the same; once they win in a major market its hard to move to a new style of victory. - James Watters

@Sherri - leadership can be cultivated. - Capn' One Eye - adrift

If your looking for bullet points the John Wooden Leadership Pyramid is a pretty good place to start: http://www.entrepreneur.com/managem... - Bill Rawlinson

@Peter, the man wanted a decent tablet device. Instead of whining about it constantly, he decided to make his own. It's called initiative, and all good leaders have it. - Carlton Prest

@Sasha - agreed! - Capn' One Eye - adrift

Great Leadership doesn't boast. It doesn't need to. It's almost palpable. - Sheryl

@Capn' One-Eye - yes, but only if the seeds are there. - Sherri

Leadership theories in MS-Word format http://www.snc.edu/lsi... - LPH™ and his dog P™

+10 Sheryl! - Ken Camp

@Sherri - yes that's true - Capn' One Eye - adrift

hey scoble! thanks for using social media to change the world! - Jason Pollock

Top 100 Leadership Blogs http://www.bestuniversities.com/blog... - Eric Logan

To Sheryl's point, if you have to ask who the leader is, there isn't one. - Ken Camp

I believe Leadership can be learned, by observing a good leader. I think this counts as leadership can be taught to those willing to learn. - Steve C

Are the people at this conference impressed with your social media prowess yet? i hope so! - Jason Pollock

http://knol.google.com/k... - Nicholas James

An answer I posted on StackOverflow about leadership in tech - before I had an account - http://stackoverflow.com/questio... - Capn' One Eye - adrift

I seen on a t-shirt that said "if you're not the lead dog, the view never changes" - Jason

Leadership comes from people who have a clear vision of what they want and then they go out and get it. - Jason Pollock

+1 sheryl - mehdi

As a starting point I'd want my class to read and try to appreciate Machiavelli's "The Prince" within the context in which he lived: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Rick Bucich

Leadership comes from the dude with the biggest camera lens. - Jason Pollock

A leader does not have to ask to be followed. A leader is one who people want to follow. - Dilip Dand

@ Rick Bucich; The Prince is just about all you need to understand about leadership - James Watters

http://psychology.about.com/library... helps to identify "your" leadership style - Nicholas James

hey nobody brought up knowledge at Wharton - series :)- http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/categor... - Peter Dawson

Leadership is a cloudy concept because people confuse the art of being followed, with the art of directing followers well. - James Watters

Lead Follow or get out of the way! - DivemasterDoug

And leadership is similar to Fonzie teaching Richie Cunningham how to face down a bully. You have to have actually hit one at some point. Leaders are NOT afraid to step on toes. They don't walk on eggshells. - Ken Camp

Leadership Rocks: http://www.shop.slustore.com/images... - Ton Zijp

My answer on StackOverflow is the green one ;) - Capn' One Eye - adrift

Woodrow Wilson said: The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people. - In other words, in order to lead you must pay attention to those around you. - Sheryl

leadership comes from people who take a chance when everyone else thinks they are crazy.. like the characters of my new feature film.. The Youngest Candidate, http://theyoungestcandidate.com - Jason Pollock

http://www.nwlink.com/~Doncla... is you want to throw in a bit a business studies theories - Nicholas James

best read of middle eastern leadership :)- Dubai Media Deputy CEO Najla Al-Awadhi: Empowering Others through Information - Peter Dawson

The ability to move and direct people to a certain destination. - Michele Lorito-Chase

Leaders don't just post links or quotes - James Watters

oppyss heres the linky for my previous comment http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article... - Peter Dawson

Leaders don't need social networks either, James... - Ton Zijp

@ Peter Dawson; don't you think empowerment is slightly separate from leadership? - James Watters

Ton: Zuckerberg is a leader...he needs Facebook ;) - Nicholas James

Leaders may not need social networks, but they use any tool available as a weapon to win. - Ken Camp

I believe everyone is a leader to some degree... it's not a definition but an innate part of being human and being involved in society. Like a sense of humor... everyone has one, even if you can't detect it from the jokes you're telling. - SAM

@James, no its part of being a leader. empowering others ! - Peter Dawson

This exercise has proven a rare breed of leadership - realizing when those around can add incredible value and letting them take center stage. This is a very tough lesson for most leaders to master, but it's illustrated quite well here! - Tom Parnell

Nicholas, Zuckerberg needs money to be a leader. ;-) - Ton Zijp

Leaders don't waste time being critical of others. It's to their benefit to raise their groups morale, not pull it down. - Sheryl

General Petraeus at Harvard ROTC comissioning: "“1st, lead by example. If you lean forward in the foxhole, your troopers will too.”" http://www.julescrittenden.com/2009... - Charles Fenwick

A leader who empowers others will never say it in those words. Thatn's a manager delegating power's phrase, not a leader's words. - Ken Camp

@Ton; I'm not the leader in this case, scoble is, I'm just in the rank and file - James Watters

Interesting, the student is very silent. Is he listening or has ADD :) - Dilip Dand

Mental toughness. No one can lead without being criticized or without facing discouragement. - Jannifer @wordsforliving

A leader listens - Michele Lorito-Chase

Robert, are the students commenting also btw? - Sasha Kovaliov(.com)

@James, most leader empower their team and then get the hell out of way so the team can run the race. they (the leader) are there only to remove the hurdles.. most CEO are chief Hurdle removers !! - Peter Dawson

A truly great Leader can lead with his mouth shut. - Sheryl

+1 Peter. Good point. Remove obstacles. - Ken Camp

Ton: Facebook isn't profitable yet ;) - Nicholas James

people browser is awesome - rich price

I maintain that leadership is just the art of being followed; management is what comes after - James Watters

Scoble, you mind if I sell this thread to Franklin Covey or John Maxwell? - SAM

Nicholas: so Zuckerberg is not a leader yet, one could say. - Ton Zijp

A leader gives credit when contributions are made, understanding that perceptions vary among the collective intelligence. - Michele Lorito-Chase

We are here posting for Scoble because he was one of the first big victors in corporate blogging; case in point; we arent posting for a also ran; being followed stems from victories and conquests always has - James Watters

@Scott, only if you give the $$$ to the SickKids foundation :)- LOL - Peter Dawson

Ton: He's the CEO of Facebook of course he is a leader - he's a leader to his employees - Nicholas James

Interesting that so many people are posting "traits" of a leader - only one portion of leadership. - LPH™ and his dog P™

Michele, there were lots of leaders who didn't listen, but they still lead. They should've, but they didn't. - Ton Zijp

Some Good Leadership blogs: http://www.leadershipnow.com/leading... and http://stevefarber.com/ and http://www.leadershipturn.com/ and http://www.jimestill.com/ - Nicholas James

@LPH - hey yeah traits are better, after all Hitler was a leader too !! let not forget that .. likewise Pol Pot, Stalin and a host of others.. there is the dark side of leadership too ! - Peter Dawson

Leadership is about being genuine, and enabling others to achieve their full potential with your guidance. It's the capability to deliver and achieve while compelling others to do so as well. - Louis Gray

@ Louis Gray; -1 squishy - James Watters

Louis - Agree. Authenticity is a huge part of leadership. - Ken Camp

++1 Louis Gray ! - Peter Dawson

Nicholas: but maybe Zuckerberg is being lead too (not that I totally agree with what I'm saying myself, but I like questions ;-)). - Ton Zijp

A genuine person without a victory will not be followed - James Watters

Also good leaders utilize all the different types of leadership styles depending upon the situation. - Nicholas James

Peter - yes - I was meaning traits is only one theory about leaders. Followers are just as important - as are circumstances - as are so many other factors. - LPH™ and his dog P™

Ton, you are correct. Bad leadership desires a thread of it's own. - Michele Lorito-Chase

Leadership is optimistic! :) - Sheryl

Great leaders need to adapt and change based upon the objectives, needs of group members, and situational factors. - Nicholas James

http://www.leadershipjot.com/ - Thoughts, suggestions, and tips to improve leadership. - Jannifer @wordsforliving

Leadership is listening to all the input from your advisors, then throwing out the crap and not kowtowing to curry favor with your own people too. - Ken Camp

http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2... post responding to gap between social and business leadership traits - James Watters

apparently leadership = speaking in cliché’s - Jeff

The Leadership Challenge from Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner (suggesting leadership is a learned behavior) http://www.leadershipchallenge.com/WileyCD... - LPH™ and his dog P™

@Jeff +10 - James Watters

Jeff: talking about leadership is talking in cliché's? - Ton Zijp

don't be a turd. Bosses are normally turds. Leaders are people that lead first by doing and teach you how to do it the right way without being overbearing or conceded. - Zach Scott

When wolves fight for pack leader they don't fight to the death or great injury; just till the moment they know who would win - James Watters

A leader also needs to inspire the team and motivate them to fulfil the tasks required - Nicholas James

It's worth noting (if it hasn't been already) that great leadership involves setbacks almost by necessity. It's how those loses are learned from and adapted that differentiate how well individuals move forward. - Rick Bucich

Leadership is not about directing followers, rather it's about influence; acting in a way that others find useful, interesting and engaging. - Marcia Conner

@ Marcia +1 distinguishing between influence and management; thank you! - James Watters

The best leaders I've seen are wise enough to surround themselves with very smart people. Smarter than the leader in many cases. - Kevin C. Tofel

If the students aren't interacting, this is like listening to 300 lecturers at once. - Bruce Lewis

+ Bruce - Todd Hoff

Did I miss someone posting about transactional leadership? People are motivated by reward and punishment. - LPH™ and his dog P™

@ Bruce; yes and since no one can clearly win for best lecture there is no leader - James Watters

Kevin - Agreed, but that doesn't imply a leader should always blindly listen to them. - Ken Camp

LPH: Depends if they are Theory X or Theory Y workers. - Nicholas James

Theory X - only concerned by financial incentives. Theory Y - concerned with being praise and recognition. They need different leadership styles accordingly. - Nicholas James

Robert: I feel like a guinea pig. What are you teaching the students about this? :) - Sheryl

Nicholas: Yes - McGregor's ideas -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - LPH™ and his dog P™

Sheryl; I believe his hope was more about the human search and link engine than our personal thoughts - James Watters

Sheryl: He's REALLY teaching them how knowledgeable the FriendFeed users are ;) - Nicholas James

Thus, they'll join FriendFeed when they get home tonight incase its banned at their school ;) - Nicholas James

http://www.co-intelligence.org/I-leade... - Michele Lorito-Chase

http://www.co-intelligence.org/leaders... - Michele Lorito-Chase

did i make it to the screen - rich price

I'm spent. l8tr - Capn' One Eye - adrift

In a healthy environment motivation comes from within (not reward/punishment). We need people who think & act, not retrieve & salivate. - Marcia Conner

Don't be afraid to make mistakes... or own up to them. - Steve Lynch from twhirl

[adjusts monocle] ja, ja, but reward & punishment in ein hierarchy is der basis of der Führerprinzip ("leader principle"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... a TRUE LEADER demands ABSOLUTE OBEDIENCE from those below him. you Amerikaners are so soft.... [swats riding crop into palm] - Karim

Well, one thing you could teach is that geeks have a short attention span. Over half an hour and we move on.... - Sheryl

Karim - Are you channeling Werner Klemperer? It sounds like Col. Klink is in the house. lol - Ken Camp

glad @marciamarcia pointed me to this. when I've led, I've followed 2 principles: 1) Shunryu Suzuki's principle of control: the best way to control a person is not to try to control, but to watch, and give them lots of space and 2) peer pressure. a person follows me as a leader because the group wants to and the person wants the acceptance of the group - Lou Clark

lol Ken http://www.angelfire.com/pa... - Karim

way 2 go, robert! - Adri Munier

Leading without being in charge: http://www.slideshare.net/selenam... - Michael R. Bernstein

Many of these comments are about a top down leadership style. Leaders are not only at the top they are throughout the entire organization. If you are going to study leadership read about real leadership theories, not the 7 things, or the 10 principals of what ever. I recommend the leaders companion by Wren. Great complication of Leadership authors. - Jeff

Jeff, do the principles that effect good leadership change when you're doing it from the head of the pack as opposed to within? - SAM

Kouzes & Posner are the best foundation ever. 5 practices - their pentathlon: inspire, challenge, model, encourage, enable. Can't beat 'em. www.theleadershipchallenge.com - Dan Mulhern

I think as a leader you are always growing and changing. As you move up your skills will continue to develop and get better. - Jeff

What is the purpose of the class - why do you want to learn everything about leadership? Is it to improve the participants leadership skills or just to tickle their curiosity? If you really want your class to improve their abilities to lead, you need to put them in a position where they do lead. People learn from what they do. So go ahead and give each participant (or group of participants) a challenge: lead us out of this crisis! - Olavur Ellefsen

Jeff: +1 you make a great point. A person does not have to be a top dog, so to speak, to be a leader. Leaders come in all shapes and sizes. (Statuses too) - Sheryl

WOW. The class was blown away by seeing this happen in real time. THANK YOU!!!! - Robert Scoble

Robert: How many in the class already use FF? - Sheryl

Sheryl: only a couple. - Robert Scoble

I would love to stay here longer, but I have a presentation in 20 min. Sorry If I did not respond to any comments. Robert, I hope the class had fun! - Jeff

are you looking to train a new leader or just come up with metrics for identification, Mr Scoble? - Prolific Programmer from IM

Robert: And how many will be on FF tomorrow? Show of hands? - Ken Camp

Robert: WOW! That's amazing! We can still teach those young whippersnappers a thing or two! WOOHOO! :) - Sheryl

And was there somebody to film them being blown away? :-) - Ton Zijp

What an amazing accumulation of thoughts and links to pursue. Thanks for mentioning it on Twitter. - Violet Bliss Dietz

Never try to lead people. It doesn't work. Better off building and guiding a team. If you can organize a team that works well together, you'll spend less time trying to hold the team together and more of your energy guiding them and being productive. Treat every team member with respect. If you don't listen to them, they will not listen to you. Keep your ego and temper in check. It... more... - April Russo (app103)

Leader listens to everyone but when he/she speaks everyone listens. - ashish

Leadership & personal development often go together. I'm inspired by @BrianKlemmer & http://klemmer.com. Repetition & Experience are best ways to remember & learn. Leadership is a choice and an ongoing way of life. - Courtney Engle

Leaders who inspire me have the knowledge: "If I can see further than anyone else, it is only because I am standing on the shoulders of giants" Newton, etc. do not pop up in blogs much, but it seems the game changers know exactly who to thank. - E-Advocate Network

Stupid is as stupid does. - sime0n

What Only the CEO Can Do A,G. Lafley http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009... - Jorge Barba

“Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them.” - Jorge Barba

Gary Hamel: How to Tell If You're a Natural Leader http://blogs.wsj.com/managem... - Jorge Barba

I'm sure this is mostly finished by now. However, I thought I'd add that the Horatio Hornblower novel series, by C.S. Forester is a wonderful lesson in leadership. I believe that the series is required reading at at least one of the US's military academies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Trevor Carpenter

Louis Gray

Twitter's Cap of 2,000 Following In Action!

August 11, 2008 from email - Comment - Like - Share

Nicholas James, Jacob, Voyagerfan5761 and 61 other people liked this

As mentioned earlier today, Twitter seems to have capped your ability to follow at 2,000 people, which just so happens to be exactly where I am. The goal, in theory, is to stop marketing-oriented spammers, but it could be another way to reduce stress on the system. So what should I do now, delete "less favored" people, or wait for Twitter to figure this out? - Louis Gray from email

32 more comments

Maybe it's the legacy talking, but I'm really not bothered by this. :P - l0ckergn0me

I can see why they do it, but it does suck for the people who do it legitimately and are not using stupid mass follow scripts. - David Risley

I'm not super-concerned either, but it does answer why all of a sudden, I started getting these errors last week. It could be part of their "Making Progress On Spam" initiative via the blog, but it hasn't been spelled out all that clearly. - Louis Gray

let blame this one on Scobles... :)- - Peter Dawson

Louis, I think cap is more of the architecture the system. Making it into a more robust platform. Now watermarks have been set, it becomes easier to build consistency of experience and application behavior. <Edit > wait for Twitter to figure it out.. Marketing spammers are targeting the 'stupid' one that have the auto follow !! - Peter Dawson

gotta like it, if I'm the one you are trying to follow! - Ben Hedrington

I don't think there should be limits like this, but I guess everything can't be infinite - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

I honestly am indifferent about it; Twitter is going to hell and i tried my best to convert it; oh well, Hell has cookies - Gordon Swaby

I"m only following 49... with 106 followers.. - Ian May

so what do you think, Louis, is benhedrington worth going to the mat for? - Nathan Rein

I'm sure I can find someone to unfollow in exchange for Ben. - Louis Gray

Twitter needs to build in groups functionality a la tweetdeck for following 2K+ to even be practical. - Nicholas Molnar

Louis: You need to convince the new people to head over here :) - Justin Korn

I'm just curious what the rationale is for following that many people. - Paul Rodriguez

Well, maybe that's why Louis always seems to know what's going on before anybody else. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

I've noticed that most of the time I get followed by somebody with a big number, it tends to be marketing play. It triggers the email to you and then you go look and click on their bio link which takes you to the pitch. Very irritating. I always block em. - Mark Schulz

@Paul Rodriguez, I was wondering that too. I wouldn't have even guessed there are 2000 interesting people in the world </cynicism>, but what fascinate me is that i'm following like 83 people and only about 14 of them tweet regularly. I can assume most of those 2000 do not tweet regularly. Add in the fact that I'm a WAHM to two toddlers, and do other stuff, there'd be a lot of stuff I'd miss. - Admiral Anika

New profit center? Sorry, but now you'll have to join Twitter Pro .... - Charlie Anzman

Info restrictions suck:( - Igor Poltavskiy

Very interesting. System limits is going to be a topic that we all work through in this early phase of the Social Web. It seems to me that it's reasonable to cap the number one follows to 1,000 or 2,000. On the flipside, one would clearly like to enable a very high number of followers. With respect to bi-directional connections, the real number should max at 1,000 to 2,000... - John McCrea

This is awesome! Incidentally, Scoble (@Scobleizer) is still following over 30K. - Vincent van Wylick

So where is the point following 30k people? You might as well hit the main timeline. The only thing that is bad about this limit is that it was not there from the beginning. - Alexander Kohlhofer

@kevinrose: 56K+. Losing 54K+? - Igor Poltavskiy

so what's going to happen to those who follow over 2000? - Wayne Sutton

you follow two. thousand. people.??? never mind twitter; there may be a law against that. - jeneane sessum

I like the new limit. I cannot see how anyone would be able to legitimately follow (and pay attention to) more than 2,000 people. Frankly, even that limit seems higher than it needs to be. If it helps keep Twitter a little more stable, go for it. - Dennis Metzcher

Couple thoughts: the limit impacts the ability to use the service as a direct message router -- for some people. It also reinforces the need for dectralized microblogging -- so if you want exceed the limits you can do so on your own infrastructure. Lastly, nothing prevents you from following everyone or a subset of people through RSS/feeds. - Chris Messina

Are we sure that Twitter has set a 2,000 limit are or we cranking up the rumor mill? I've seen image before with respect to my own account - an account which just reached 1,000 followers today. According the Twitter rep who contacted me, I got - ahem - put in "Twitter Prison" for "Aggressive Following" My ratio of Followers to Following was kinda out of whack - at that time I had only ~800 people following me while I was following ~2,800 - They suspended my ability to follow more people. I removed 2K. - Vincent Wright

I don't understand the motivation for following 2K people if you're not a spammer... someone explain? - Jason Carreira

Jason: For a entrepreneur/VC/angel networker, it would be very easy to hit 2,000 contacts (assuming you used Twitter like a rolodex). From one networking meeting, I might pick up 0-100+ business cards (more at conferences), and during a heavy season I could be doing 7-10 meetings/week. As a angel, I might want to follow 5,000-10,000+ projects/people. Anyone might have a really good project 2-10+ years down the pipe... I've got cartons/boxes of 3-ring binders of business cards in plastic sheets. - Mitchell Tsai

@Mitchell @Charlie - Rumors aside, do you think the cap is a gesture towards monetization? Going after the power networkers? Seems you would have good cause to pay for a Twitter Pro, or would it just not be worth it? - joneilortiz

I use Twitter as both a professional development tool (following people who say useful and interesting things abt health / edtech / social media / libraries ...), a personal tool (friends and folk who are amusing), and a reference tool (following a lot of news streams and information resources). You can hit 2000 fast. A friend says that people are imagining new ways in which Twitter could be used, but Twitter seems bound and determined to force them back into some small box of how it "ought" to be. - Patricia F. Anderson

I would happily follow more than 2000 people, heck I am almost there. And I don't need to see every message. With Tweetdeck it's manageable. I see some Friendfeed users here have thousands to tens of thousands of subscriptions, should we also say it's good to have a cap here? No, please no. I understand that perhaps it has to do with monetization or stressing the system less, these are alas viable reasons. - Jacob

Robert Scoble

Downside of doing pay-to-play media? Cisco asked us to pull down the video for now. Here's the details:

March 18 - Comment - Like - Share

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Cisco asked us to unpublish that video until next month because it contained some info about one of its partners that is under embargo. - Robert Scoble

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We had to listen because they paid us to do those videos. If we had gotten those videos as regular journalists or bloggers we would have left them up and said "sorry, you don't get to pull them down." - Robert Scoble

It will be back up after April 1. - Robert Scoble

Judy: I really wish they would have thought about these issues before we had published. Makes us all look bad. But when partners are involved sometimes you can't see all the issues before publishing, unfortunately. - Robert Scoble

This is why big companies don't give much access to real workers, though. Too many constituencies to serve. One team thinks they are OK to publish. Another team, after seeing them, says "um, gotta pull those down." - Robert Scoble

Downside of pretend-journalism, indeed. Respectfully, you should get out of "real" journalism -- you're fouling the ocean. - Dave Newton

is it a written agreement or not?!! but after all it is a moral agreement, the question to ask is the fellowing, will big company open doors to blogger any time and for any one?I doubt that they will do so often, the amazing fact is however they are big they can do efficient communication, why haven't do those video and to spread them using their own means (blog) or any thing? does big company weak in social ? - abdellah

A couple questions come to mind... You knew the downside of taking the money so 1) why did you? Because of Rocky's situation? 2) Real journalism is blind to these money issues because they are "independent." If traditional papers are going bye-bye, where are we, the people, going to get our independent news from? With Rackable, you will still have some strings attached for certain issues, but at least I know in advance where you are coming from. - Herschel

Anything about EZchip in there? Is that the partner? No, wait Marvell is re selling the EZchip into Cisco. That could be the partner. Network processing at wire speed! - Stephen Pickering

So who exactly is Dave Newton? - "I'm a former broadcaster, advertising agency owner". What water are you swimming in Dave? - Brian Sullivan

The question is, is it clear to the reader that the piece was paid for? If it is then its _just_ and advertisement and if its mixed in with regular journalism then it should be marked as such. Just as it is in the regular print media. - Simon Lucy

Herschel: yes, partly. I was looking for ways to fund Rocky. I also knew I would get inside access no one else will ever get (which is true, I interviewed two guys who've been inside Cisco for decades who never give interviews). I also knew it would have downsides. - Robert Scoble

So your passing on the money to noble causes is a kind of protest to the Cisco actions? - Brian Sullivan

Dave: "real" journalists do pay-per-stuff too, they just do it under "advertorial" banners and often leave their names off of it. Ansel Adams did his art, and he also worked for Polariod and Kodak. People who make media need to make money and as long as people are transparent and disclose when they have conflicts they should be allowed to decide what they want to do. - Robert Scoble

@Brian -Since this is FriendFeed, it was pretty easy to find Dave Newton's LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in... - Daniel J. Pritchett

Brian: my passing on the money is one way to demonstrate that my judgment was not corrupted. Yes. - Robert Scoble

I thought this line was hilarious: "Real journalism is blind to these money issues because they are 'independent.'" - Paul Rodriguez

Daniel -- yes I know -- where do you think the quote was from? I was trying to determine which side of the fence Dave Newton is currently on. - Brian Sullivan

there was one part of that video that unfortunately had some details that made one of our partners uncomfortable until their announcement. It will go back up, unedited, after the embargo is released. (I work at Cisco- http://blogs.cisco.com/authors...) - Douglas Gourlay

Douglas works for Cisco and is part of the team who hired us to do two days of interviews with the top geeks and team. - Robert Scoble

I thought Douglas worked for Cisco data center side? Is "intel" a Freudian slip related to the partner who wanted the video removed? - Dane

Dane: I fixed my comment. Douglas works for Cisco. - Robert Scoble

Ansel Adams is a photographer - not a journalist. There's a big difference. I think you deserve credit for being transparent, Robert, but you did take the money and sell your services to Cisco. My concern is we'll seeing more of this as traditional media collapses: http://tinyurl.com/djw4qs - George F. Snell III

Dark: right, maybe not a good comparison. I do think we'll see a lot more of this too, though. On the other side, though, brands like ReadWrite Web are getting more and more popular because they don't allow people to do these kinds of things. Me? My Microsoft experience taught me that being inside lets me get some kinds of content and that as long as I'm transparent about it so my readers will know my potential conflicts of interest I don't see a problem with it. - Robert Scoble

My point about Ansel, though, was that if you want to do your "pure" stuff, aka "art" or "pure journalism" then you've gotta find ways to pay your rent. I don't mind it when people do both "pure" and "paid" as long as they tell me when they are getting paid so I know it's not "pure." - Robert Scoble

Ansel's son mentioned to me that Ansel approached his photography differently when he was doing it for himself or when he was doing it for Kodak (he did advertising photos that hung in Grand Central Station for Kodak, which is something I didn't realize about Ansel). Oh, and a photographer +is+ a journalist. Ansel's photos of the West are VERY important today as they document a bunch of stuff that doesn't exist today. - Robert Scoble

I would much rather have people reporting information be honest, declare their potential bias or lack of objectivity and state the reasons in a straightforward transparent fashion than to blindly claim they are unbiased and totally objective. Nobody is completely unbiased. - Brian Sullivan

I have no problem with scoble (or anyone) taking the money for work of this type as long as they are clear about it. It gave Cisco the control they wanted (its a shame that this happened but thats what they paid for). I can understand the problem if he was reviewing a product or even worse doing a group test ("i thought hte flip mini was the best camera and by the way thanks to flip for the large brown envelope full of cash i recieved). I say get off Robert's back He did a good thing g and gave us a great r - Jamie Vidamour

Robert Scoble

I took the Cisco job because I wanted to get inside in a way I'd never get inside without doing that. All will be clear in April.

March 18 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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our team hired Robert, not to publicize, but to interview. I wanted a 3rd party interviewer who could connect with people. - Douglas Gourlay

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the neat part is, that a blogger got unprecedented access to everything we are doing with Unified Computing. Something that is pretty clearly shaking the market up... - Douglas Gourlay

Douglas: yup. My videos were not part of the news on Monday. We held them until Tuesday. Unfortunately we didn't see all issues in advance. We'll hold the rest of the interviews until Cisco's partner goes out with its news, then it'll be safe to run these interviews. They are remarkable, because of the access you got us. Sorry for the bumps in the road, we're all learning together how to do this. - Robert Scoble

Same sort of issues are why I wasn't able to record video yesterday when we met with Texas' governor. - Robert Scoble

I guess the downside of unprecedented, and thoroughly unscripted interviews is that sometimes something slips through... I appreciate you dealing with it openly and very professionally. Thank you. - Douglas Gourlay

Corporate blogging often has these pitfalls. Just the price you pay. - Paul Rodriguez

So now you're working for Cisco, not Rackspace? confused. - TranceMist

TranceMist: no, we are working for Rackspace now. The Cisco thing was only last week. - Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble

Why Twitter is not for conversations. I will give you five reasons here:

March 4 - Comment - Like - Share

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1. If you get into something with one other person all your other followers will start complaining. - Robert Scoble

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2. You can't "thread" and "capture" a conversation, like I can here. - Robert Scoble

3. Most people on Twitter that are joining lately are not people who participate. Compare @ev's followers to mine. - Robert Scoble

true... very true. Although when used appropriately, Twitter is very powerful. - Jonathan Beckett

4. Twitter's expected usage is "what are you doing?" Not "what would you like to chat with your friends?" Whenever I try to break that usage I get tons of hate DMs and tons of unfollows. - Robert Scoble

i still have 2 reasons. the first one is that wa have other solution if we want to discuss about all and nothing, the tchat our DM for example and te second one is that twitter is to propose interested news about different interested subjects (it is better :) ) and not to give personal informations - Alice Cordonnier

5. You can't bundle up a conversation and save it for later, like you can with this one. (You can even permalink to this conversation and link to it from a Tweet, but you can't do that in Twitter itself). - Robert Scoble

Jonathan: Twitter is great for attracting attention to something, or just sending out a general update. For actually going into any detail at all about something, however, it's sorely lacking, and not just because of the 140 character limit. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Jonathan: Twitter is great for going back and forth about twice. If you want to get really involved it really really sucks. It pisses off all your other followers. DM's would be fun, but you can only DM people who follow you. Makes that worthless to use for a lot of people. - Robert Scoble

Re. to 4: Interestingly, I really enjoy those conversations that form on Twitter, I start click the "In reply to..." all the time and I end up seeing the twitter pages of new, interesting people. - Javier Altman

Finally, if you get to 1,000 followers or more (like many of my friends), you'll miss a lot of stuff and so the conversation might be disjointed. - Robert Scoble

@robert: there are other services ;) - Capobecchino (Enrico)

First one, impossible to keep track of conversations, 2 user engagement is low 3. Information value is negligible. - Richard A.

Javier: Twitter is an AWESOME discovery tool. Yes. But it is a CRAPPY conversation tool. - Robert Scoble

Robert. which is why I use twitter as I do. - Richard A.

That is true, as purely conversational in anything that is more than 1 or 2 messages in "depth" or "length" or whatever you wanna call it, it's quite terrible. Also, I find that if you follow too many people, then every single "conversation" is impossible to follow. I'm following 200 people, and that's hard to manage and follow some times. - Javier Altman

Agreed. Twitter is a great platform for spreading knowledge, not for idle back & forth chit chat. - David Lanning

Javier: Twitter is an AWESOME listening tool (especially if you have TweetDeck) because you can listen to lots of people on specific topics (thanks to search). It's also an AWESOME promotional tool (look how Mashable is using Twitter) but it's a horrid conversation tool. - Robert Scoble

David. Spreading knowledge? A hyperlink with no real description? No value to me. I want to know why someone is linking to something. - Richard A.

David: I wouldn't go that far. Out of 10,000 Tweets 9,996 are pretty stupid. Should I give you some examples? - Robert Scoble

I find I get a lot smarter by using Google Reader and following some people who put some thought into blogging. Friendfeed and twitter are NOT places I typically find deep thoughts unless it's from someone like Tim O'Reilly, Jay Rosen, or Dave Winer and they both are always linking out to interesting stuff. - Robert Scoble

Robert. I really like how twitter used to be "awesome" as a conversational tool in the past. Now though people have far less time for the site. - Richard A.

I definitely agree on that, Robert. Too bad Twitter has become so centralized and developed a "star system" so quickly... a ton of people with interesting things to say are simply lost in the cloud left in the wake of @kevinrose or @levarburton, you know? The big guys get listened to and usually have little of interest to say -- the smaller guys with actual content worth your time are never heard of. - Javier Altman

Javier, the little guys are the community builders, their engagement provides the dynamics the timeline needs to keep people engaged. - Richard A.

Threaded conversations are needed on Twitter. Becomes increasingly painful to understand what people are referring to sometimes - Paul Papadimitriou

Ryo: Twitter is way older and is further along the growth curve. Friendfeed also requires more work and more engagement. Look at all the icons on the people who are following me here (or that I'm following). Now compare those icons to the ones of the users in @ev's account. Not even close to the same kinds of users. I'd rather have one friendfeed user than 100 twitterers. Watch over the next year and you'll see what I'm seeing. - Robert Scoble

@paul: "Threaded conversations are needed" ... sure :) - Capobecchino (Enrico)

Javier: Sometimes what those big folk say is something people do want to hear, though. Levar Burton had a big tweetup in Toronto at the beginning of the week, with only an hour's notice on Twitter. Friend of mine got to meet him, blogged about it, and had his server crash under the load when Burton linked to the post in Twitter. But yeah, things of note from the celebs are usually pretty rare. (The post that caused the crash: http://imaddicted.ca/interne... ) - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

Conversation certainly is easier here both to follow and understand. Less chance of being unfollowed for saying something out of context or annoying new users. - Pete Gilbert

Chris: and Levar is one of the real celebrities who actually engages a community. I met him at CES. Really great guy. - Robert Scoble

If Twitter wants to be a great conversation tool, they should figure some way to spin out conversations from the tweet streams of the conversationalists (and I don't mean DMs). That they don't seem to be bothering with that is another strike against the service, at least in my books. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

@Richard: I don't see how much community can be built when your word isn't reaching anyone -- that's how I feel twitter is working lately, what you say gets missed in the cloud. - Javier Altman

I think that we havn't to blame any service that offer a rest api, if there is some kind of lake in some feature then innovate, the main element to get in mind is to avoid redenduncy. - abdellah

@Chris: Maybe LeVar wasn't the best example, of course Geordi LaForge would have something interesting to say :D - Javier Altman

Javier I have written quite a few blog posts about twitter and community building because of how frustrated I am by how passive the site has become. All those I used to follow are now following thousands. They no longer focus on friends anymore. I agree with you. - Richard A.

@Chris: I think that if the web interface for Twitter somehow added the "in reply to's.." that are chained together onto a collapsible tab below a particular, original tweet on the timeline, the problem would be solved. - Javier Altman

@Richard: Exactly, that's why I actually went back the other day and started un-following people. I want to focus my attention, and hopefully that will trickle down to others in my stream. - Javier Altman

Brilliant and I was angry with you, silly me :). Twitter is more or less like a group IM. Mirco-blogging not so much. - Chirag Chamoli

Javier, Because I did the same thing I had 11 pages of conversation in twelve hours. I was quite happy with that result. :-), made twitter feel vibrant once more. I like feeling that people want to engage for more than one message at a time. - Richard A.

Ooh.. I don't know about this Scobs... I use FF and Twitter, but I have learned a lot, met some Great people, AND had some great conversations on Twitter, whether by tweets or DM. I do agree that FF is a more advanced version of Twitter, but I also agree that you have more "reach" on Twitter. I think Twitter a combo of conversation, info sharing (NOT just linking all the time), and connecting; at least until FF can get more "mainstream." The phone's still always good for conversations. :) - Just OOH

Martin Schecter says I'm wrong: http://www.commonmistakesblog.com/2009... -- but this is something he can not do on Twitter (join together lots of little pieces into one whole). Give it up, Twitter sucks for conversations and building knowledge on a topic. Quick, go to Twitter search and find all Tweets on this conversation. You can't. Don't even try. - Robert Scoble

Just Out Of Home: Friendfeed is totally different than Twitter. You haven't really used them if you believe that. - Robert Scoble

what about app that offer to create twitter users group?!! - abdellah

I actually see a use case for both. As a pure broadcasting channel Twitter is great, many people don´t even care about @replies. All they care about is that many people hear what they have to say. A conversation can and will never happen nicely on Twitter, not only because of the technical limitations but in my opinion also because of the different user structure. Twitter will stay popular but will also get polluted more and more. FF might be able to grow with a different user base towards something bigger. - Bastian

I personally find Friendfeed quite daunting. I like the simplicity of Twitter, it's "shoot and forget"-ness, so to speak. Friendfeed is more involved, which helps for conversations, but because everything is linked together in a feed, it can get unmanageable quite quickly. That said, Twitter is obviously imperfect as well. - Javier Altman

Bastian: exactly. Twitter is a "pure broadcasting channel." It's stunningly awesome for that. - Robert Scoble

Bastian, if you want subscribers get an RSS feed, easier to sort by source. - Richard A.

"Friendfeed is totally different than Twitter" - then I'd love to know why both continue to be thrown into battle against each other. Can't they just co-exist? - Shawn Farner

Javier: right. But that's why your engagement here will increase over time and on Twitter yours will decrease over time. By the way, Facebook is seeing a ton more engagement (per user) than Twitter is. Why is that? - Robert Scoble

Friendefeed is a web forum based around RSS aggregation. We use feedly to find the articles, say why we're think they're interesting and people decide whether to pay attention according to that. Twitter makes that much harder to do. - Richard A.

simply because they take it seriousely, remember friend real life one are watching - abdellah

Adding threading, groups, rich DM, would turn twitter into an IRC-meme product, useless. twitter is more a broadcasting product and needs to focus on search, trends, more than interaction - Jean-Charles VERDIE from Nambu

seriously the most ridiculous is their trend :) have you take time to see twitter trend? - abdellah

Robert: I think Facebook is a different creature altogether -- The engagement could stem from IM-ing, or maybe from the silly apps and quizzes you take in it. I personally don't like Facebook, I rarely go in there, and only update the status by having my Twitter linked to it. And I have to disagree, my engagement is still on Twitter more than Friendfeed, and I haven't seen any particular increase or decrease there. Sure, topics like this keep me refreshing the page, but that happens on Forums too :) - Javier Altman

Robert: Facebook is like Friendfeed. we share our personal images with friends (when not web celebs) share blog posts, comments about small things. It's a more intimate community. There is a lot of common ground. - Richard A.

Javier: you really need to sit down with me sometime and I'll show you why facebook is so much more engaging. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about. YOUR engagement might be high. I'm talking about the aggregate. - Robert Scoble

I have been using both for awhile; per your suggestion actually. I might not be the master of this stuff, but I think it's not really a matter of belief; more to do with how you (an individual) want to use both sites. Like I said, I like Friendfeed more and wish more people I know use it, but it's really up to the person, no? I've been quite happy in terms of how I use both, granted FF is far more organized, and also has more reach if you know how to use it right. - Just OOH

Robert: might be hard to do from Argentina to California, but I'm game :D But seriously, can you expound on the aggregate? - Javier Altman

i want more of my face to face friends here too, but they aren't so tech or early adopters. if they are here, not to participate - just stream. educating the general public on value here will make this stand out more. - Courtney Engle

Courtney: they will come. Twitter had the same feel to it two years ago. - Robert Scoble

"Aggregation"-wise yes. I agree that FF is FAR more better/advanced than Twitter. - Just OOH

Courtney. They're on Facebook though right? Just use the status messages as a form of twitter. It's just as versatile as twitter itself. - Richard A.

from my point of view, FF is more personal, because as some oy you said, we can post fotos, we can play some games, it is for me a distraction, Twitter is more profitable to find interested people who work on your market or have the same interests on particular subjects. That's why i make a big difference btw both sites, the contents i put is totaly opposite - Alice Cordonnier

Robert Llewellyn is another one who's really into it as well he talks back to the twitterers (okay, he was teasing me about knowing about red dwarf 9, but you know) and he's big into blip. and to a point, yes, even bloody ashton and demi :P - Terry O'Fee

I don't get how you could make Twitter be threaded and still have it be Twitter, which is this rolling stream. You can have little micro convos on Twitter but it's easier to get into a fight precisely because most people on Twitter are on broadcast mode, dispensing with a pearl of wisdom they imagine their hundreds or thousands of fans merely want to docilely listen to, and they hate backtalk. Whoever gets the good backtalk app working will win. - Prokofy Neva

This is probably a noob question, but Plurk offers convo threading, grouping in the form of cliques so why aren't people talking about it as a viable option to the address the concerns listed above? - Kimberly Nolting

the interface :) - abdellah

Robert - I believe FB is more popular (not better, mind) because it's social networking at its simplest. it's wonderful for older parents who don't get twitter or friendfeed to sign up and add as much or as little as they want. perfect for the people who just want a small, family connection online.. - Terry O'Fee

personnaly I will not use it for just one reason the damn interface. - abdellah

@Kimberly: probably because Plurk didn't ever get critical mass of users. Without the userbase, you can have the best app, and never get anywhere. - Javier Altman

Kimberly: the UI of Plurk feels like a coloring book to me. I never took to it. The people who joined it at first also were not the kind of people who I wanted to have conversations with. Plus, friendfeed was way way way better at all this stuff than Plurk was and friendfeed was started by three superstars from Google. Plurk? I don't even know the people who started it. - Robert Scoble

terry, FB is more particular due to it rigid rule, compared to twitter or FF the process on mutual fellowing is a walk in fire. - abdellah

Funny that back when I started using Twitter in 2006, it was bad etiquette to have too many @'s in your stream. Now that seems to be inversed. - Sam Harrelson

plurk needs to get rid of that stupid karma crap as well. people on there "plurk" and reply so theyre top of their karma, not because they feel like it - Terry O'Fee

I agree with Alice's point as well. I just don't like rules set forth on this stuff. I enjoy both, wish more were on FF as I would certainly use it more than Twitter, but they are simply not. Let's just agree to disagree on some points and call it a day Scobs. Also, NO need to insult someone's intelligence because they might not be able to use this stuff as well as you do. That's just not a good conversation, speaking of.. - Just OOH

you deserve a kiss for the karma mention, I hate it - abdellah

Just Out Of Home: you are right. I'm sorry. - Robert Scoble

abdellah - mwah! - Terry O'Fee

Robert: I do remember early Twitter. It was still mostly status update. Too much of that now seems like they don't have much to contribute and aren't connecting. If Twitter users just do status updates it seems like they are self absorbed or lack contribution of some sort. They're still learning over there. Wait till their eyes open here. - Courtney Engle

Robert - Wouldn't you consider that regardless of what Twitter's "expected usage" is, that it is most certainly in a nascet stage right now? Facebook was not perfect at 2 years, and is not perfect now. Neither is a GMail or friendfeed. It's best use at the moment is not "typical conversation" but it can have its place. If people would unfollow you simply because you attempt to have a... more... - Patrick Boegel

I'm sorry, but how the hell would you be able to cope with the stream of information on Friendfeed (considering all that gets aggregated) if it had Twitter's mass? You'd be able to "follow" 20 people and that's it, otherwise you'd never be able to be involved with anybody. - Javier Altman

terry , mwah too (what about kiss feature here in FF) :) - abdellah

Richard: I turned the Twitter sync off as I want my FB wall to not be overwhelmed in my tweets. I keep it for friends to post there, reply, and engage. The sync would make it a mass broadcast firehose drowning those yet to know Twitter or FF, but I do have digg, greader, flickr, etc all synced back to my wall. - Courtney Engle

OT a little, do you ever see in the future a greater integration with gps services on phones with social networks?? imagine being able to see twitters from people in your area. able to contact or @ them?? imagine the advertisers, theyd have a field day! a computer twittering deals close by to where you are... - Terry O'Fee

Javier: you are absolutely wrong. I'm following 14,000 and 28,000 are following me here on friendfeed and it's FAR easier to deal with large numbers here than over on twitter. - Robert Scoble

@Terry isn't that called Loopt? - Javier Altman

terry, oh yes and it sound pretty good perspective, but there will be always a spammer here or elswere to make thing collapse, the main problem with twitter is that twitter bases how fragile and how risky to build on fragile foundation. - abdellah

Robert: Hmm, I see. It could very well be the way I interact with these type of service then. If Twitter only has 140 character lines as the only input and I already have a hard time keeping up with the people I follow, I can't imagine how chaotic it'd be to do that here, plus all the other aggregated info (digg, youtube, likes, dislikes, commenting, etc...) - Javier Altman

Courtney, I don't sync twitter with facebook. I tweet far too much. What I mean is that it's short messages people can comment on without having to join a new service :-) - Richard A.

Javier: because you aren't seeing the advantages of having lists, rooms, and the metadata that lets you hide lame stuff (you can hide all tweets that don't have a like, for instance). - Robert Scoble

Terry, Google latitude has been running non stop on my phone for three weeks by now, works fine. used it to meet one friend a few times already. - Richard A.

Javier: you should watch this video: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Robert Scoble

Robert and Javier. I hide all tweets that haven't been responded to. Works well for me. - Richard A.

i dont just mean advertising though, it would be awesome for twitter meetups for example. where is @(insertname), you could have them on a list to see where they are, see just tweets from people in the area as well, i mean out here in the sticks it would be useless, but in the cities it would be interesting. sure, we have brightkite now, but im thinking in a more twitter esque direction - Terry O'Fee

Richard: don't add more than 150 people to Latitude until version 2 comes out. I can't use it on my phone anymore cause I added 250. Sigh. - Robert Scoble

Terry. There's a service that's being developed in Switzerland that would represent that type of information, but still early days... have to see how it evolves. - Richard A.

Javier, have you explored the "Hide" feature and its "Hide entries like this" options? - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

latitude updates an area, mainly brightkite does the same. imagine posting an entry and the phone instantly updates where that post (or reply) has come from. there will still be privacy settings of course but it would put the social really into social media.. - Terry O'Fee

Robert: Yeah, then again that probably happens because the people I'm interested in the most, that would drive me to actually sit down and organize all this information into rooms, etc. isn't here on FF, but they are on Twitter and FB. I definitely see the superiority of FF in terms of app, I guess I'm just a bit apprehensive to its complexity? - Javier Altman

Robert: I'm not going to, but I have invited my direct family to follow and the occasional friend. Working fine for me. :-). I'm loving the service. - Richard A.

Javier: you aren't the only one. Friendfeed is too complex and they know it. Hopefully they'll have an answer to that soon, - Robert Scoble

No prob. Scobs. I know you get passionate about this stuff; just know that most of us are not as advanced as you. There is a learning curve with FF, and I'm sure you agree with that. It will take time.. Anyway, I've learned a lot from you by following you on both, and checked out FF because you suggested it and like it a lot. Just think it's up to the individual in terms of usage. Hopefully this conversation gets more people (including ones I know) on FF as it can do a lot more. Have a good day Scobs~ - Just OOH

@Richard: Dude, if a lot of people do what you do of hiding un-commented stuff, you'd miss, essentially, all of my content on FF. :D - Javier Altman

terry, now after the enthusiast plz make some dark side to the whole project, I mean how could this new service be bad or hurting or make people in danger,!! - abdellah

@Bruce: Not really, I probably should. But I just am not on FF enough to really explore it. I only pop in here when Robert posts this kind of thing that drives me here. - Javier Altman

Robert: Tweetdeck FF video was great. need to clean up my lists of people, conduct searches & filters. Sorting through the pile now could take a while. I just put most into homefeed. - Courtney Engle

محض اطلاع دوستان خارجگینی!!!!! گرووووووووووووووومپ - Moghamer

Javier, but I follow people on twitter with twhirl, so i don't need the same tweets in two places. I don't want to answer without the answer being read. - Richard A.

I'm in the same boat as Javier; the people I'm most interested in are on Twitter and FB, not FF. FF IS much better for having conversations yes, but they are often mostly about tech, food, memes and cats, so the point for some of us is moot. FF still needs a lot of work - you can't hide based on keywords; I may not want to see someone's posts on cats but I might want to see their other stuff, so filtering is very crude. - Sally Church

Javier, you're probably over-thinking it. Try to dumb yourself down a little. Say, "This is something I don't care to see", click Hide, and follow the prompts. I think FriendFeed might actually be easier for late adopters because early adopters have all these preconceived notions about how UIs are to be structured. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

The big downside to FF over Twitter is that it requires a lot more work to make it work well and ends up with over-hiding, filtering or user scripts etc. If it's too much work it gets dispiriting. If you like tech, cats or memes then you will be in hog heaven here. - Sally Church

@Richard: That is perfectly understandable -- btw, say hi to Maggie for me :D - Javier Altman

Twitter is now the "classifieds" section of the social media newspaper. It's a good place to announce something. And you can start a lot of conversations with very little investment. But it is nearly impossible to carry on a dialog though the classifieds. And while you can write (or link to) a long-winded missive on Twitter, it just isn't suited for that. But sometimes, you just need to get a message out very cheaply. And Twitter does that job admirably. - Lorin Olsen

@Robert... Twitter : Megaphone = FF : Coffe ;-) - Luca Perugini

lorin, does this mean that twitter is a buzz machine injector?!! - abdellah

Javier, maggieconv? Will do. - Richard A.

@Robert ... Twitter as a Megaphone and FF as a Coffee ;-) - Luca Perugini

It's like a shouting on a market square. - Dimitar Vesselinov

I was showing my non-tech wife Twitter this week and right away she picked up on the difficulty of following conversations. - Paul Rodriguez

There's a reason they call Twitter "microblogging". It's like blogging. It's hard to have an extended multi-way conversation with trackbacks. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Twitter is see current threads and Friendfeed is to talk about them - Kim Landwehr

People who think twitter is about microblogging are the ones I don't follow. - Richard A.

richard, so twitter is about what?!! - abdellah

@Richard: Ok, then that brings me to a question: what is the proper use for Twitter then? I share interesting news stories from Google Reader, comment on life, use it as a cathartic tool on on occasion, comment on other people's tweets... Is that all that Twitter is, or am I missing something? - Javier Altman

@abdellah I used to think of it as a multiplatform chat too. - Richard A.

richard, yes it can but we haven't to do because we can. this is what bring all the pb people travesty the use of the service if they do using the api it would be intelligent and a source of innovation, but they do using the original service what make thing go out of hand. - abdellah

Twitter has suffered from having so man new users that don't know what works and doesn't. As a result the early adopters have really decreased how often they use it. - Richard A.

Twitter is the conversational equivalent of playing phonetag but it is definitely more lightweight than FF. - Stephan Miller from Friend Deck

stephan, the word playing resume the whole really :) - abdellah

These are valid points. Never thought Twitter is an extended conversation tool. Maybe with new features like targeted tweets to different groups it can become one. It's still early days for them when you listen to Evan Williams. - Joe Buhler

it doesn't have to be "all conversation" or "no conversation". Twitter can be for "some kinds of conversations" or "somewhat for conversation". Or you can endlessly argue that "no it isn't for conversation" and "yes it is for conversation". It's in between. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. - Stephanie Booth from twhirl

Evan Williams is the last person in the world I'll listen to when it comes to twitter. I'd rather speak to actual users of the service. - Richard A.

I am new to Friend Feed, but not Twitter. Thanks for the lesson in FF! - Rachel Levy

I think the big issues are #2 and #5. While search.twitter allows you to view a conversation between two people, it's far from efficient. When twitter fixes this problem, it will be a much better conversation platform. - David Spinks

Both have their uses - and Twitter can definitely use an upgrade. I can see more journalists type people (like yourself) get more benefits from FriendFeed. - Chris Gieger

Robert, that commonmistakesblog entry is weird. If you need to be told how to have conversations "correctly", then there is something wrong with the service. - Andy Bakun

Twitter as a broadcasting channel only makes sense if you either 1) have a lot of followers, or 2) have followers who retweet all your tweets. This is actually no different than having a blog. - Andy Bakun

Proof is in the pudding. Would *this* conversation happen on Twitter? No. Twitter was built as a status update service. It does that nicely. Conversations is a square peg being fit into a round hole. - AJ Kohn

I think Friendfeed should add this list functionality into its posts. It is annooyin when people start commenting before the list is done. - Sweyn Venderbush from twhirl

Again I think Scoble is trying to make Twitter what he wants instead of what it is. No problem with that I guess. Twitter is great for general broadcasts and as someone else said a few quick back and forths. Those are still conversations. Just short ones. What Robert wants are discussions. Which Twitter is not for...Twitter is great for the mobile crowd who like to do as they go. There are other forums for those who like to sit at their desk and have long community discussions. - Sidney

@Andy I think too many people who are currently into Social Media (the tech crowd) try to look at Twitter as what they can get out of it on a business level. I think it is much easier to say, "Hey I'm hitting lunch at this place who's joining me?" and it goes to all my friends instead of having to SMS everyone. This is functionality the non-techs are using it for. It's useful. Saves time and isn't meant for long drawn out discussions. - Sidney

Something else struck me about that commonmistakesblog post... it suggests you put context in all your tweets in order to not piss of your followers who don't know what the hell you're talking about. By the time you put in context (repeating what was said already so people can jump in the middle), and @replies, the 140 character limit becomes even further limited. - Andy Bakun

Andy: +100. - Robert Scoble

honestly I like plurk better than twitter.I don't check friendfeed and reply to stuff that often. - Logan Lindquist

Logan: that's cool. I just never got into Plurk. The UI there is too inefficient for me and too goofy. - Robert Scoble

yea I agree the UI could be more mainstream, but the features and community are much better - Logan Lindquist

Logan: I'll give it another try. Everytime I've gone there I didn't like the community. It shows that if you don't see people you recognize you'll not like the service. - Robert Scoble

wow, im surprised that there are still people who try to enforce rules to tools like twitter,how incredibly naive. twitter is a tool, people use tools the way they want and need to, despite what you, or i tell them, its this that forms the basis of human and techno-evolution...if twitter is being used by people for conversations then it obviously meets that need at some level. its this evolution of technology that drives (or should drive) successful product and service developments, - john

Kind of makes you wonder what made Twitter take off in the first place? Identi.ca, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku......Is Twitter really that much better? Is it the name? Viral "marketing"? I tend to lean toward the name. I fear that FriendFeed will never catch on simply because of the name. It's not "glitzy". Neither are identi.ca, plurk, pownce, or jaiku. I'd much rather support identi.ca because it's open source. - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

@slayerboy: twitter's power is a global namespace which allows for interesting social dynamics: you want to know what your friends are doing, you want to share cool experiences with them, you want to follow people you admire. Twitter sux at conversations but they are *very* good at those other use cases and they are dead simple. That and they were able to attract some of the most vocal bloggers and social media advocates (Robert included)! - Edwin Khodabakchian

robert: well of course if the people you follow don't use it then its not much use. its funny how everyone hates twitter and they keep using it. its like the myspace of mico-blogging. - Logan Lindquist

Absolutely agree with #5 Robert - "5. You can't bundle up a conversation and save it for later, like you can with this one. (You can even permalink to this conversation and link to it from a Tweet, but you can't do that in Twitter itself)" I find myself getting more and more frustrated with NOT being able to follow a conversation on Twitter... and esp. a conversation between 2 others... more... - Deanna Belle Govoni

That gives me some inspiration, Deanna. I'd like to see a feature on friendfeed that lets you "lock" an entry to just being commented by a few people, but still be public. You could do interviews and debates this way. It would be asynchronous because new activity floats it to the top where you can see it again. The most recent stuff is the stuff that shows by default (with the previous... more... - Andy Bakun

I guess you could do the same thing with a restricted access room, but they don't have the same exposure, and there's less chance of it cropping up randomly. - Andy Bakun

@Andy Bakun - Yep, the less clicks the better and the less CLUTTER the better - have you seen this post yet?: http://friendfeed.com/e... - too much noise is frustrating, who has time to sift through it all? Your idea is interesting,do you mean that you'd want to be able to "flag" comments from specific... more... - Deanna Belle Govoni

That's a damn good idea, Deanna, the non-focused comments being collapsible. This would help keep things on topic, keep the focus on the target participants, but not restrict other people from participating. It's threads like this one, with 156 comments, that show the power of the FF medium and presentation and UX. Some minor tweaks and there are additional possibilities. - Andy Bakun

Lorin, good comparison the classifieds and trying to have a conversation through them. Even better would be a comparison to the "missed connections" section of the classifieds. - Andy Bakun

Robert Scoble

Just a note: when someone in the community gets bitchy (including me) there often is a reason that they can't make public. Discuss:

March 3 - Comment - Like - Share

Mike Elliott, Eric Berlin, Russellreno and 48 other people liked this

One A lister was bitchy in public cause he was getting death threats in private. Me? I have a lot of chaos going on in my life that I can't articulate in public yet. So, if I'm a bit bitchy, come back next week. :-) - Robert Scoble

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*hug* - Susan Beebe

Even with this disclaimer, there will always be a cadre of people who will ignore or disregard any possible reasonable explanation and chalk it up to your poor moral fiber and/or how you don't have a life and/or how you're so full of yourself because you're an internet celebrity/a-lister. - Mark Trapp

At least you're always honest about stuff that's going on Robert. It's one of the many reasons that so many people like you. You may well have the world's largest ego, but you're also a very sweet and caring person and you're damned good at what you do. - Internet's Tad

I didn't even notice! Re: Twitter... I don't think people care much about attitude on occassion. We can't read all the tweets when we have over 70 followers, so we just "scan"... and I think sometimes, we don't even notice bitchiness because we are too busy. Just my thoughts on it... Sorry you are having so much Chaos. It's in the air these days, but hang in there! - Colleen

Can I just watch? Do I have to discuss? Is this like one of those mandatory fishing licenses? - Matthew DeVries

If someone if going to get bitchy wouldn't it be better to just sit back and take a break? I think everyone would prefer if you didn't say anything rather then say something mean. At least that is what my Mom used to tell me. - Titus Ferguson

I had noticed you seemed a bit upset about things lately, but I certainly wasn't holding it against you. You've more than earned good will from me. Also, most disputes that play out in public have a private backstory that might change your opinion about who's right and who's wrong. - Paul Rodriguez

I was unaware of the "chaos" other than the recent layoff at FC (that would be disturbing for sure!); otherwise I had no clue. Hope you are OK and chaos is going away fast!! Love ya man! - Susan Beebe

You have the right to bitchy once in awhile. Everyone does. - Shevonne

That's almost always the case. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

@Robert, now you are practically forcing us to ask what will happen next week. I hate cliff hangers ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

Hope whatever you're having to deal with gets resolved or becomes easier soon. Always enjoy the content you throw up here and at your site (and a lot of the videos as well) ... - Patrick Jordan

Thanks everyone, it's all good actually. Can't wait to explain this post, but need to tie up some loose ends, get some more video uploaded to Fast Company.tv (some really cool interviews are coming later tonight). Let's just say this economy is causing lots of interesting things to pop into focus in my life and Maryam and me are working through it. This post wasn't just about me, though. Lots of my friends are going through far worse things than I am and I see it leaking into their behaviors a little bit. - Robert Scoble

Going back to MS? - Tomi Itkonen

Tomi: no. But that would be interesting, wouldn't it? - Robert Scoble

But how do you differentiate between the people who are just regularly bitchy and those who are reacting to stress by being bitchy? Isn't bitchy, bitchy? - Trish R

I thought A-Listers weren't allowed personal days? Silly Scoble. ;) - Antigone

Don Miguel Ruiz's 4th agreement: Always Do Your Best Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret. /// So sometimes saying nothing, and eliminating the "coming off as bitchy" attitude is the best. Of course, being human, that is not always possible. I know I wish I could rewind on some of my own less than stellar comments. - Sherrie Rose

Antigone: it's rule #13 in the corporate blogging manifesto (I wrote that a week before I started working at Microsoft to remind myself of my principles): http://scoble.weblogs.com/2003... - Robert Scoble

Trish: when bitchy people are under stress they get bitchier. :-) - Robert Scoble

this is why I prefer not to bitch on friendfeed (or anywhere online). And I try not to post when I'm in a bitchy mood either. Though, I might make a bitchy comment or two, here and there. - Jim Hearts FF

Robert, sorry to hear about that. Call me if you ever want to talk about it. - Jesse Stay

Hope the chaos resolves soon and life becomes more pleasant for you again. Good to meet you in mountain view. We've got your talk up o video at http://blog.smibs.com/posts... I've sent an E-mail but couldn't get through. Keep my fingers crossed that you get on top of the chaos soon. Meanwhile be as bitchy as you feel. - Peter Urban

Jim: I try not to be bitchy too, but sometimes it takes more self control than I am capable of. - Robert Scoble

Peter: cool video! Love your 5D. I want one. Oh, things are actually going great -- today. It's just the past two weeks that were making me bitchy. It's why my blog is constipated. - Robert Scoble

True enough. Sometimes trivial, sometimes not so much. Sometimes just the grind and weight of the environment we are in. I have the luxury of withdrawing in those times, people in higher profiles don't. At least, not so much. - Karoli

Sorry your life sucks right now, Robert. Understand why you can't discuss. I think it's ridiculous that a social media expert would get death threats. Huh? - Helen Sventitsky

Negative people and constant complainers don't do anything for me. On the Internet, I've found it's easier to block them, when selective hearing can no longer be practiced due to them always showing up everywhere you are with their two cents. Makes my Internet life a lot easier. I rarely see you bitchy Robert. - Mona Nomura

Robert, it might be better to stay quiet then. Quietness is easier to understand for people I think. Everyone has a right to vacation. - Meryn Stol

Yep, and I wouldn't actually be that surprised because I assume MS is one of the safest places to be during times like these... Regarding the economy: one can not take it personally because we are all affected by it - we are in this together. Remembering that, it's easier to handle all the negative stuff that comes... - Tomi Itkonen

Helen: I'm not getting death threats. That was Mike Arrington. He's written about that publicly now, but when he was going through it I could see it affect his writing. Plus he wasn't able to stay at his house during that time. Really sucked. - Robert Scoble

Yes, but it usually ends up badly for everyone around. I agree though, there is usually a reason, sometimes it would be cool if the person said "I am being bitchy cause I am getting death threats" or "people want me to do something I am not all that happy about". Those explanations would go a long way to smoothing over ruffled feathers, most would respond well to that. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

Robert - I completely understand. You have every right to 1) share or not share as you see fit 2) have things we don't know about (and shouldn't know about) affect your mood. - Brian Roy

I was feeling bitchy and in despair yesterday, went on a walk, and realized I had eaten too many cookies. - anna sauce

Everyone is allowed to be bitchy - whether they ultimately divulge the reasons for it or not. Uninterrupted happiness can only be induced with chemicals! That said, I think many are more bitchy than usual because of change - primarily in the economy. Tough times are ... tough. That sounds trite but I think it's true too. - AJ Kohn

I just sit down and compose a verses or write a story, any time i feel that way. When I don't I make sure I am making the most noise~ - Sardar Mohkim Khan

LOL - Mona Nomura

OMG is that FF comment spam? True, honest to goodness spam? NOOOOO! - Neal Jansons

Ahh, I love deleting spam comments in the afternoon. - Robert Scoble

Dan: in Arrington's case he couldn't disclose that. AJ: I tried chemicals, they don't work permanently. Having Milan do his happy dance when he sees me, though, gets me out of a bitchy mood every time. - Robert Scoble

@Robert - I do understand that mike had to keep things close, much like Kathy Sierra did as well. There are times to keep quiet and take a break. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

Where is the video of this happy dance, Scoble? - coldbrew

@Robert: Agreed. A smile, a phrase or a dance from your child is the quickest way out of a mood. - AJ Kohn

I prefer the New Yorker's favorite instant-mood-booster...cupcakes! - Megan

I smile, laugh, or humorous comment from my daughter brings instant temporary relief - james

hope whatever's bugging you gets worked out. - Thomas Hawk

Robert - you can come visit us in Iowa ... no one will know you and you can get some nice peace and quiet - andy brudtkuhl

it's true. definitely about 100% of the time with me anyway. - Juho Tunkelo

Robert, if you go visit Andy in Iowa, check out Montebello Inn in Ames. Tiny B&B, absolutely gorgeous and peaceful, great wireless, hidden away from everything. - Patricia F. Anderson

Regarding the original statement, well, duh. True in RL as well as virtual or SocMed. Also often true when someone is not bitchy but just sad, slow and dragging. Now the trick is for the rest of us to assume that something is going on behind scenes and not take things personally. I find that hard sometimes ... - Patricia F. Anderson

When is your last day at FC? - sean percival

Sean: define "last." - Robert Scoble

Excellent advice Robert > 13) If your life is in turmoil and/or you're unhappy, don't write. When I was going through my divorce, it affected my writing in subtle ways. Lately I've been feeling a lot better, and I notice my writing and readership quality has been going up too. - Russellreno

Robert Scoble

Last night I bought into the meme that #'s of followers matter again. I was wrong. Again. Here's why:

February 22 - Comment - Like - Share

Roman Zolotarev, Gordon Saunders, Patricia F. Anderson and 94 other people liked this

1. If you base your ego on something you don't control you'll continually be unsatisfied. Now we REALLY don't control how many followers you'll get. It's like winning the lottery. If you thought that winning the lottery mattered in some way to your life then you'll always be unsatisfied. - Robert Scoble

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2. The list of top Twitterers now has no integrity and everyone knows it, so being on that list no longer matters. It's sort of like the number of results that Google says it has. That number is a joke too and no one pays any attention to it. - Robert Scoble

3. Who is listening to you has absolutely no impact on your life unless you are selling advertising. Who is TALKING to you DOES have an impact on your life. That's probably why I spend so much more time on friendfeed than on Twitter. - Robert Scoble

4. Even if the list had some integrity there would always be someone more popular than you. Even Barack Obama will be passed someday. - Robert Scoble

Robert, there is a saying in business. When somebody doesn't stop talking, it's marketing. When they shut up and listen, its sales. - Patricia

Was it Twitter's "Suggested Follower" feature that's changed your mind Robert? http://tinyurl.com/cc66ow - Jim Connolly

5. Talking to masses is fun and I hope everyone gets lots of friends to talk to because there is some value in having lots of people to respond to your questions or bring you the latest news, but I find when I wake up in the morning I head first to my list with only 150 people on it. Why? Intimacy is more important than popularity to humans. - Robert Scoble

But how else can you tell who wins? - Glen Mistletoe

Jim: yeah, that feature pissed me off last night. Why did I get pissed off? Because I bought into the meme that how many followers you have matters. But, it also reminded me that I am not in charge of how many followers I have. It is not based on any objective criteria (at least now, I thought it had at least something to do with objectivity and that you could earn followers by putting good content out. Now I see that you can earn followers by some subjective criteria and that led to this post). - Robert Scoble

6. Due to http://search.twitter.com and friendfeed's search (and discovery items) you can have conversations with people without having any followers. So, having tons of followers is having less and less value as people go to Twitter search more and more (or use TweetDeck's search features). - Robert Scoble

The list of top twitters has integrity - we know exactly what is and it's true to that - it's just not the way you would like it... - yanwoo

@Glen: is twitter a contest? - .LAG liked that

yanwoo: no, it has no integrity anymore. You have no idea why someone is at the top. You used to know, not anymore. Now if I worked at Twitter I could make someone go to the top of the list just by putting them on the suggested friends list. - Robert Scoble

.LAG: all lists are contests. That's why they piss off so many people and why they are defended by people who are rewarded by them (me included). - Robert Scoble

Robert: You will appreciate this then - How I deleted 23500 followers in 5 minutes (AND why I reset my Twitter account to zero.) http://jimsmarketingblog.com/2009... - Jim Connolly

@LAG Some people obviously think so ;) - Glen Mistletoe

Robert, the # of people following a person on twitter is a bit like a black box. Sure, we know all the accounts that are following someone, but we have no idea if those accounts are real people, marketing spammers, casual users, or something else. Until I can point at a users account and say "This is a real person, I know how to tell 100% of the time" then follower numbers are meaningless HS popularity contests. However, I do feel like once a person gets over a critical mass of real followers, the potential - Daniel Spisak

re: #3... if you are saying good things, and people are listening and being informed or inspired to do good things, then it matters. Maybe not to you, but potentially to others. - LogEx

...for crowdsourcing becomes possible and this is where Twitter has a lot of benefit to the user. - Daniel Spisak

Jim: you are a braver man than me. Based on my talks with geeks who are increasingly finding themselves distracted and addicted by Twitter and friendfeed I would expect more people to do that in the future. - Robert Scoble

Daniel: due to retweeting and Twitter search (and friendfeed) how many followers you have doesn't matter to crowdsourcing (as much). - Robert Scoble

Robert: Thanks! It was getting stupid - Now, I can enjoy the small amount of time I spend on Twitter and DON'T NEED tweetdeck. - Jim Connolly

I don't think this new feature of suggested users is any different from the throwback days of twitter when we had 10 highlighted users on the public timeline a year or so ago. why were you not beefin then? People received "extra credit" back then too. - Liz

Glen, how will you know you've "won?" I judge myself off of how many times I get retweeted. That demonstrates readership, credibility, engagement, interest, etc. Those are attributes I like judging myself by. Not whether I won some popularity contest by figuring out how to get Biz or Ev to put me on some subjective list. - Robert Scoble

The LA Times was also unhappy: http://bit.ly/Zp61T It doesn't bother me too much. There are plenty of lists online, so I won't get too worked up about Twitter suggesting people to follow. It would be nice if they allowed users to suggest who ends up on that list. But, as Robert points out, numbers don't matter, conversations do. - Paul Rodriguez

@scoble, @glen —then, godd*mn, I'm getting my *ss kicked on twitter! i should give up. i'm so far behind, i'll never catch up. wonder if there are performance-enhancing drugs i can take to get back into the game. .LOLz - .LAG liked that

Liz: I don't even remember that. But no one ever looked at the public timeline after Twitter got popular. It also didn't let you add one group with one click. - Robert Scoble

Jeez, Robert, you just caused me to read that whole thread about Arrington, look at the Find People feature inTwitter, and try out Mr. Tweet. Spent an hour. Did it do me ANY good? I doubt it. - Francine Hardaway from twhirl

Paul: @leolaporte was unhappy. People who make their livings off of advertising find this stuff disturbing because Twitter can decide who will have businesses on its system (number of followers could translate into money. @techcrunch says that already 2% of his traffic comes from Twitter). Me? I'll have to earn my money the old fashioned way: good content. - Robert Scoble

Francine: I think this stuff is all good. It causes us all to think about the tools we're putting so much of our lives into. Hope things are going well for you, can't wait until you're back in Half Moon Bay again. Let's go get a drink, I have lots of things to tell you when you're back. - Robert Scoble

@scoble: perhaps it's the advertising model that's broken then. - .LAG liked that

Robert, what are the big drivers of traffic to your money-making content among friendfeed/twitter/facebook/flickr/etc.? - Bruce Lewis

Bruce: my referrer page usually has Twitter #1, friendfeed #2, Google Reader #3. When I'm on Techmeme it usually jumps to #1 or #2 for a day. - Robert Scoble

.LAG: bing! Bing! Bing! You win the award of the insight of the day award. - Robert Scoble

Content drives traffic, so it's the quality of the Followers not thew quantity - paul mooney

Facebook has tons more users than friendfeed. Funny that you don't get lots of traffic from there. - Bruce Lewis

Robert, it's hard for me to believe that you actually "bought into it" last night. You've stated numerous times and times again that followers don't matter and we understand what you are saying. But, if it is so hard to stand by what you preach, then don't preach at all. - Michael Forian

Michael: I'm human. I fall into traps just as often as anyone else does. I make mistakes just as much as anyone else does. - Robert Scoble

Bruce: facebook does not have the expectation that you'll discuss science or technology or news. The stuff that comes into my news feed is generally pretty fun stuff, but is not that. When I put videos into Facebook, though, it brings me good views and engagement. - Robert Scoble

@scoble: but otoh, what are the alternatives to advertising? yes great content is critical, but it doesn't guarantee revenue or viability by itself. and then if you're a site with great content, eventually, you too, will probably end up advertising. i think the guys from 37signals have some wonderful ideas about how to survive and thrive using a different model, it starts with not worrying about being so BIG. - .LAG liked that

I'm yet to see any convincing proof Scoble's human :) No one's online THAT much. - Jim Connolly

I was a little confused because you at one time were saying the number of followers shouldn't be included in a tweet pagerank (http://scobleizer.com/2008...), so using the number of followers in this context shouldn't make sense either. Or do you see them as different? - Todd Hoff

.LAG: if I had some answers I would be implementing like mad. - Robert Scoble

The number of followers does not matter... to a point. However if you are a business, charity or person with a strong message to get out you have to also remember that your message means nothing if people don't hear it. So while the number of followers should not matter to your ego or self-worth, it definitely matters when you are shouting on the rooftops. You need a huge number of followers to have a greater impact. To that end followers are extremely important. - Patrick Allmond

Todd: I believe that even more today now that the follower popularity rank thing has been messed with by Twitter's fooling with it with a subjective choice. - Robert Scoble

Patrick: that is true, sort of. I can get my message heard without having any followers. I've seen that proven over and over again lately. How? More and more people are reading http://search.twitter.com or Friendfeed. Let's do a test. You open a friendfeed account. No friends. You post something. You tell me about it. I'll like it. That will put that item into view of all my followers. So, how many followers do you really need? None. - Robert Scoble

Patrick as right. The hard thing is that # of followers is one of many things that do matter, but that we can't completely control. We have to constantly adapt. - Bruce Lewis

Robert, Patrick is still right. What if Robert Scoble didn't have any followers? Who would you tell about your content then? Somebody has to have followers to make this work. - Bruce Lewis

attachment = suffering - William Harryman

"Zen and the Art of Tweeting" by Robert Scoble - coldbrew

This is a great list and SO true! I still cannot figure out FriendFeed though. Many people who follow me on Twitter are just following to see if I will follow them back and are truely not interested in what I have to share and discuss as topics of interest. - Hummie

Even if the list was correctly pointing out who is "the best Twitterer", why does it matter. Millions of people post that don't subscribe to anyone but just people they know. You need to not base your selfworth on the Internet and instead on your happiness. - Jennifer

*in conclusion read the stream of "the REAL Shaq" his twitter diharreaha proves that # of followers doesn't mean the followed is spitting out gems - sofarsoShawn

Would Scoble care about this if he were on it? I don't think so. - coldbrew

Jennifer: if you are in the content business you are getting paid via advertising. Advertising is paid by "CPM" or, per 1000 readers/visitors, etc. Let's say you were making $25 CPM. Well, then, having another 10,000 readers is worth $250. If you can get those people to visit every week, that's a pretty nice chunk of change. - Robert Scoble

coldbrew: I disagree. I am not allowed to accept gifts from the companies I cover. I cover Twitter, so getting this kind of reward isn't acceptable. I also care about the integrity of the communities and tools I use and interact with. I would definitely speak out about this feature and would pull my name out of it to protest that it was using subjective criteria to make people popular. - Robert Scoble

Bruce: I know a lot of people who have lots of followers. I bet I would be able to convince at least one of them to RT my messages. If not, I get traffic from http://search.twitter.com -- just write about something that's trending and you'll get followers from that. - Robert Scoble

So, basically this boils down to $, like most things. Personal motivation is an interesting topic in itself. Anyone that checks their web analytics daily (pageviews/ uniques, email subs, rss subs, followers, friends, etc.) is simply on a completely different wavelength than myself. - coldbrew

By that logic, Scoble, you should request FF to remove you from suggestions, as you do not know, specifically, the criteria for getting on such a list. - coldbrew

coldbrew: yup, when you do this as a business those are the things you care about. My wife, though, isn't doing it as a business and she still is caring about lots of those things on her Facebook account. So, even people who don't do it for money care about things like who is following them. It's a huge trap to fall into and one that isn't very satisfying. Humans are weird, aren't they? - Robert Scoble

Humans are weird for a lot of reasons, but caring about popularity and influence is not one of those reasons. - Bruce Lewis

coldbrew: that is absolutely NOT true. I already figured out the algorithm for how friendfeed works. Did you know that I'm NOT on the default list there? Here, try it. Open a friendfeed account with no friends. First of all, it will recommend NO ONE. Huge difference from Twitter. Second, add someone who does NOT follow me. I will NOT be on the recommended list. - Robert Scoble

coldbrew: friendfeed presents a different list to everyone who comes here. Its algorithm HAS INTEGRITY. It is based on the most popular person OF THE FRIENDS YOU ADD. - Robert Scoble

Just asked my good buddy and girlfriend about how many friends they had on FB (they' barely know what Twitter is). GF, "200 something" and my buddy, "No idea", so I'm sure you are having an impact. - coldbrew

coldbrew: on friendfeed no one is getting rewarded who did not earn that recommendation FROM THEIR FRIENDS. This is one reason I really like friendfeed. Friendfeed really engineers things a lot better than Twitter and thinks through the consequences of doing something wrong or removing integrity from the system. - Robert Scoble

Seems to me it was pretty inevitable as Twitter got bigger that any sense of meritocracy w/ followers would dissipate. I suspect more things will crop up to counter it's importance and offer different views of the best and most interesting Tweeters. Stocktwits is probably an early example of how Twitter may get sliced up. If that is a trend that plays out then #1 tweeter will become a database statistic :-) - yanwoo

Robert, that's only partial integrity. First, that process has an accelerating effect that makes the most popular even more popular. Second, it's popularity rather than interestingness. - LogEx

It is still your perception of some method for bestowing authority, rather than concrete knowledge, that is leading you to the conclusion. - coldbrew

Logical: that is true, but that happens in life anyway. It is based on meritocracy, though. I spent thousands of hours on friendfeed last year when people thought it wasn't important to pay attention to. - Robert Scoble

I'm speaking facetiously about "winning," of course, though some people seem to think it's a contest. Twitter's a bullhorn; even the # of retweets is a factor of how many followers you have. - Glen Mistletoe

I agree with Robert on this one, it is not the number of followers; it never can be the number of followers. What it should be about are people who like you, who you like, who you want to share information with. It should not be a clique, you need to allow new members in and allow for diversity of opinion, yet in the end it will always be about like minds, sharing information that has the ability to change the world, and if not the world, at least the location that you live in. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

coldbrew: wrong. I've done extensive testing of the http://friendfeed.com/setting... feature and understand how that list was decided on. Plus, you can do your own tests to verify what I say. On Twitter the list is totally random and subjective. - Robert Scoble

Glen: I disagree with you about RT's. I've seen people get massively RT'd who only had a few followers. - Robert Scoble

Campbell, most of *us* knew where you were coming from at the outset. Your thoughts on retweeting are spot on. - coldbrew

Scoble, edge-cases, especially anecdotal stories, aren't the stuff that comprises the guts. - coldbrew

80/20 rule? - coldbrew

coldbrew: You've got some good points to make, but it might be easier to move on if you'll first admit Scoble was right about friendfeed's recommendations. - Bruce Lewis

coldbrew: oh, yes, there is an 80/20 rule here in place. Just like most of life. - Robert Scoble

"admit Scoble was right about friendfeed's recommendations" You mean that they seem to be more equitable than Twitter? Or, something else? - coldbrew

That one can empirically determine that Scoble isn't automatically on the recommended list. They aren't entirely a black box. - Bruce Lewis

Bruce: they aren't a black box at all. You can very easily figure out who and why people are on the friendfeed list. Oh, and the list is infinite and you can't automatically add the entire list, so you've got to click one by one and add people that way. There isn't a huge reward for being on the list the way there is on Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Robert, my only point was that a person with 62,798 followers has a statistically higher probability of getting retweeted than someone with only 281 followers. There's simply more chance of seeing what got tweeted in the first place. - Glen Mistletoe

Glen: that's true, but is getting less and less true over time as more and more people use things like Search.Twitter.com. Anyway, I'd rather have 100 active followers who actually talk with me than 1,000 followers who are there just to collect my name on their follower list. - Robert Scoble

Agreed, But the fact that Twitter's recommendations are a "black box" is not what indicated to me (a long time ago) that # of followers was not something to obsess over. Also note: FF does not make it easy to determine how many followers a given person has. - coldbrew

coldbrew: true, but ffholic does that. - Robert Scoble

Search only helps if you're happy to ride an existing trend. If you want to start a new trend it's useless. - Bruce Lewis

I have 1000+ followers, but less then 100 I really know. So in essense, I have 100 followers - Lorraine Ball

I don't use ffholic (it is funny that they use ASP.NET :-), but you'll notice FF obscures these numbers (probably based on values they would like to instill). - coldbrew

When the community is small and relatively homogeneous, a scalar metric like follower count might be a reasonable proxy for influence/popularity. However, as the community gets larger, more diverse, and "multidimensional" a single metric like followers breaks down. - Ken Sheppardson

It's a bit like eBay feedback: consider two members with a 1000, 100% positive feedback score. You can get that by buying 1000 fifty cent Pokemon cards or by selling a $X million worth of collectibles. The bare number means very little, at least when used to compare members. - Ken Sheppardson

BIZ Stone's quote from the LA Times: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone acknowledged that offering “suggested users” wasn’t the ideal solution and suggested that the service might evolve to cater to particular users’ interests. “Right now it’s sort of like staff picks at your local bookstore,” he wrote in an e-mail. - Jim Connolly

Your point is well taken, Sheppardson, that multiple variables should be considered. There was a rumor at some point that Twitter intended to monetize based on this suggestion "engine" which I do not believe had any merit. It is akin to allowing payment for organic SERP placement. - coldbrew

I think it is ironic that one of the best gadget bloggers of our time, Ryan Block (who used to run Engadget), has 1/10th as many followers as his girlfriend, Veronica has. Veronica will see someday why this system has no integrity. Jim: that quote shows the kind of engineering care that Twitter puts into things. That might explain why I see the fail whale on a regular basis. Well, that just verifies that I made the right choice last year to spend much more time here on friendfeed than on Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Robert, I like FF better than Twitter and spend much more time here. You made the best choice in terms of quality. But I'm not convinced you made the best choice for driving traffic to your money-making content. Quality matters, but quantity matters too. It's a tough choice. - Bruce Lewis

How much of Twitter's power comes from tight SMS integration, and why doesn't some "Twitter clone" just make a play for simple SMS services horizontally (B2B style)? - coldbrew

Quality versus quantity. And at end of the day it doesn't matter *if* you're contributing good content and simply using the service. The follower number plays to a person's ego ... it is, in my opinion, a real drawback to the service. It encourages the wrong type of behavior. I think FF has intentionally made these stats less obvious for a reason. - AJ Kohn

Bruce: friendfeed has been growing faster than twitter did in its first year. I'm pretty sure the quantity will show up here too. And, anyway, I do have a few followers on Twitter so I can reach the audience I want to reach. - Robert Scoble

coldbrew: not much anymore. SMS mattered a lot more two years ago than it does today since the iPhone came along. It will matter even less in the future after more people get smartphones. But, yeah, it does matter a little bit today. - Robert Scoble

Coldbrew: I think apps like http://www.tatango.com will provide the SMS glue. That's a cool company, I'll have a video of them up this week. - Robert Scoble

I know about tatango. Funny you should mention that. They seem to be sitting on their hands - coldbrew

"Intimacy is more important than popularity to humans" -Robert Scoble Or rather it is more important to those who are conscious of the love God puts inside all of us to act upon or not: (Matt.5:3) http://www.biblegateway.com/passage... (Psalm 42:7) http://www.biblegateway.com/passage...; And this brings into perspective what we enjoy as opposed to what we love. - Melanie Reed

SMS matters a whole bunch b/c it makes the field more open. SMS was built on the pager tech and I can get SMS when I'm out of phone range. - coldbrew

All these problems will be solved when twitter acquires friendfeed. - Edwin Khodabakchian

Ed, is that an opinion or are you airing fact ? - atul abraham from twhirl

Kambiz: I did not delete any comments here. Not sure what you are talking about. - Robert Scoble

in our personal egoic minds, it should not matter, which is what you point out quite well - as I was expressing yesterday at NV09, I really tweet for myself... some ppl take that to extreme and tweet for themselves to be popular, playing games so they can sit at the cool kids table :( but bigger 'reach' creates more power to make a difference (when used for good). More access to network also means more access to better information (ie, my passport problem) which makes difference in our lives at key moments - Chris Heuer

Good point re: who is talking to you, vs. listening to you. I've stopped following twitter people with a bad ratio - too many followers to who they read. Exceptions: hodgeman & anamariecox. I just don't like the ego of people who have big followings but don't engage. - anna sauce

Last week, Mashable featured me as a twitter professor - in the 16th spot down the page http://mashable.com/2009... The first person listed was our friend (who you should be following) Chris Penn - he added 1400 followers in one day and I received just over 700 in same time http://twittercounter.com/chrishe... - http://twittercounter.com/cspenn (mentioned as real data point) IMHO the 'top100' shows the power laws of the A-List challenge in action, more pop u r, more pop u become - Chris Heuer

Chris sounds like a catch-22 - anna sauce

Featured on mashable? Sounds prestigious... - coldbrew

One must have amazing insight if featured by mashable, knowing how exclusive that site is about coverage. - coldbrew

Nobody deleted comments, you just got confused about where you left your comments. - coldbrew

If Scoble were covered by mashable for his usage of Twitter, he'd gracefully decline b/c it would be a payoff. - coldbrew

Robert prove that you're not on the FF payroll - Bob Sonin

Bob: Techcrunch looked into it. Arrington thought I should be getting paid by friendfeed. But I did not give friendfeed anything it didn't earn. - Robert Scoble

Kambiz, this is the Dr. Jekyll post. You commented on the Hyde one. :) - jcunwired

Then in the interests of full disclosure/transparency, what 'did' you give them - Bob Sonin

Bob: links on my blog and tons of praise. - Robert Scoble

nice work, cool - Bob Sonin

ANA - perhaps, but not really - my argument is for disclosure so people know when its paid placement versus genuine recommendations - not passing judgment on the act, seeking clarifications and trying to further the conversation --- cant say its bad for everyone and then say I am dong something similar - more nuanced discussion then that, which you can read about in this post I just wrote http://bit.ly/30cKv "Is it ok for companies to pay to be featured users in Social Media sites?" (key is word USERS) - Chris Heuer

Thanks for stopping by and dropping a link, Heuer. Stay classy man. - coldbrew

Heuer, quick question: how many comments have you made without leaving a link to one of your own sites? [EDIT: specified type of link] - coldbrew

@scobleizer, I disagree. Of course it matters. Number of followers matters and being at the top of the list matters. BUT, like the weather there is very little you can do about it, so it's probably not worth a lot of time worrying about it. - Christian Anderson

coldbrew - generally about 90+% since I so seldom blog - on this page, with this comment 50% - is there a point you are trying to make? BTW - it seems I mistakenly was commenting on the other question (too many comments here and too many tabs open on my browser) - sorry about that --- do you not think that everyone has the right to start their own conversations and questions and then make others aware of that by sharing the link (insofar as it is on topic) - Chris Heuer

I like your point #2 especially. Also, I have seen a few people who are gaming the system where a few people just retweet each other. Like they have a mob or coordinated thing to up their standing. Also, there are lots of people that are just trying to increase there followers and this is all they care about and you get junk Tweets and it fills the channel up with noise. Just fyi, if you follow lots of people you follow none. The channel will be crowded with junk. Trust me. - Bill Romanos

Ana - are you asserting that people who have more followers then people they are following all have big egos? that they are not engaged? or are being disrespectful of people who follow them? (re: ur statement above) I couldn't disagree more vehemently with your broad brushed stereotyping - the majority of those with big followers and equal follower/following rations are quite the opposite of ur assumption - they are usually the ones in it for their egos - to be at the top of the list and using you to do so - Chris Heuer

Ana, more importantly - what are your tips for dealing with the deluge of inbound communications from thousands of people into your SMS account? clearly you need unlimited text plan for $x per month first - then you need to resign yourself to the fact that you are probably going to miss things that are very important because of the decreased signal to noise ratio... This is a complex issue which IMHO requires us all to respect how other ppl choose to communicate, especially when its not causing any harm - Chris Heuer

This conversation brings up a lot of ideas for me, but I can say simply that, in my gut, quality and not quantity is the way to go in ANY interaction. On-line, off-line, I don't care where. So, numbers without substance isn't going to do you any good on twitter or elsewhere. I guess the only time quantity works is for ad-clicks, because who cares if it is quality if you are just counting ad clicks. - Martha

Heuer, I will spell out my point this time, though I do not believe it requires an IQ of significance to comprehend. You barely interact here on FF, and when you do, it is usually (>50%) in order to get people to take actions elsewhere (e.g. read your blog post, fill out a survey, etc.). - coldbrew

Get it? Fairly insulting, imo. - coldbrew

coldbrew - of course the real reason for putting a bit.ly link to my blog post that reframes this question is because I wanted to get the google juice from Robert - that is clearly what my track record shows to be true. Of course it has nothing to do with the fact that there are limits on the size of comment within FF... btw - with this comment, its over 70% of my comments on this page that dont have a link. wondering why you have a private feed - would be interested to see what you do without registering - Chris Heuer

coldbrew - ah, so I am not native enough for you in FFand you dont like that I use twitter as my primary communications vehicle? well too bad - thanks for initially trying to thinly veil your insult and criticism and for ultimately feeling comfortable enough to insult me openly - no offence taken here at all because clearly you dont know Jack either... - Chris Heuer

I realize having a private feed and not pimping myself at every opportunity would confuse you. I'm at a loss to explain it to you other than to say I value information and candid, honest conversation. - coldbrew

PS - for people who actually care about these issues instead of trying to pass judgments on others, the very simple reason I request others to look at these things is so that we, as a broader community of practitioners, can connect the dots across communities to learn from one another and take collective action outside of any given echo chamber which creates insular feelings like those expressed by my new best friend here - thanks for making the point clear to all - I dont use FF daily, I am elsewhere often - Chris Heuer

"for people who actually care about these issues "? Are you fucking serious? I have no ulterior motives, and I'm not trying to position myself as a "social media expert"; and, I certainly don't have a site that focuses on "social media" as something one should "leverage." So, before you go on espousing your integrity, take a look at the facts. - coldbrew

OMG, what a spat! Chris, ignore him. - Francine Hardaway

Frankly, I'm a bit tired of the sausage festival that is tech blogging. Veronica is a breath of fresh air. She has the power of "it" and "it" rules the world. - Mattb4rd

@Scobleizer not that you'd worry, but I read what you write because it often gives me something to learn and think about that I would otherwise not find easily somewhere else. And you have a unique way of doing that. The fact that so many people choose to do the same is irrelevant to why I read your material :) - Valeria Maltoni

Yes. When one is interested in finding some sort of "truth" through discussion, the best choice is to ignore those with differing opinions. Brilliant strategy, Hardaway. - coldbrew

Hardaway, I realize you only came into this conversation at the last minute, but allow me to explain. There was a perfectly good discussion being had here, when Heuer (someone with whom you are apparently familiar) decided to chime in with a link to a semi-relevant blog post inspired by this very comment thread. He did not make his argument *here* where the discussion was being had, no; what he had to say required many more words than FF makes available. - coldbrew

So, an entire post was written and Heuer made his weekly FF comment with "appropriate" shameless plug to his post. I suppose I can see how people that only come to FF occasionally don't grok the issue I'm having here, but that won't stop me from making it. - coldbrew

I come here all the time, and often find a blog post comes out of a discussion I'm having here, or a comment on someone else's blog. - Francine Hardaway

That is good. I just ask that you don't suggest someone ignore me for expressing my opinion. I'm no expert, but I do try to be informed about the topics in which I participate. I was offended, and I took it up directly with the offender. Please suggest to me what I might do differently in such a situation. - coldbrew

I would have felt better about Twitter's recommended follows had it been some sanitized Google algorithm but this feels like some whorish self promotion and takes a lot of shine off Twitter. - Ernie Oporto from Nambu

i agree with @scobleizer here. the suggested people to follow in twitter has totally screwed with the 'meaning' of the rankings - Chris Heath

Until WSJ publishes a US$/followers Forex rate I will continue to believe that number of followers is fundamentally worthless - Jeffrey J Davis

For me, it was kind of strange to see the issues of "how many followers do I have" when I started reading blogs in 2008 for the first time. Seems like people like followers for many reasons (1) good conversations (2) boost to self-esteem (3) improve career prospects (4) share knowledge with others (5) etc... On the $ side, one of my friends with a labor-of-love website created over 7 years, now makes $1,000s/day (not thru advertising, but selling his own products)... - Mitchell Tsai

Traffic can help connect people with services & products they like. In some cases, sharing pictures, articles, news about kids-friends-relationships, may be our gift to the world community. Sometimes, people are finding new jobs, developing new life paths, getting helpful therapy or support, or simply enjoying themselves. It's sometimes a little annoying for me to hear people criticizing other people who are here for reasons other than their own, but it's "free speech". - Mitchell Tsai

Even with "trolls", I love the community on FriendFeed (Admittedly, I'm spending more time on Facebook...and unfortunately many people who share pictures there decline my requests to share them on the wider web, so I don't repost Facebook pictures on FF). More power to the people who are having fun accumulating "friends" or "followers". - Mitchell Tsai

It's even useful to connect with 10-20 very-active-spammy-type-friends/followers. I no longer connect with spammers (unless truly interested in their stuff, which occasionally happens), but my few spam connections help me see if other people accept those spam connections. I suppose if my Facebook limit starts hitting 5,000, it'll be time to delete the spammers (after sending them a note explaining why I'm pruning my Facebook connections). P.S. Scoble, you rock! - Mitchell Tsai

Good food for thought as I'm developing my conceptual 'follower' definition. I'm returning to value added in our network. - ka3drr

+1 Ryo - You.

Ryo: I regularly do things to get them into Google for myself to pull out later. The fact that other people are here doesn't matter. - Robert Scoble

Ryo: it's funny, though. You don't need any followers to participate here in this conversation. So, why do followers matter? http://search.twitter.com displays your Tweets even if you have no followers. That way you can find other people interested in a topic. I find lots of things on google.com that have no followers either. Not saying that it's not nice if they show up (followers are wonderful) but they certainly are NOT a precondition to participating and having people participate with you online. - Robert Scoble

Even if you *do* think they matter, using a save search in Twhirl can help you find folks to share with... I have 2000+ in Twitter and I'm nothing huge...just a bit strategic. ;) - Cheryl Allin

The problem with an ego is that sometimes the holder of said ego cannot see over it ... well because it's an ego. - Joe Breen

LOL, Ryo. So true. I can't tell you how many things I've posted on FF, and I get NO RESPONSE. I'm either painfully boring, or I need more followers so that I have a good chance of someone finding it interesting. - You.

Robert Scoble

Getting on Techmeme with the stupidest post of the week is a commentary itself on why I like friendfeed more than blogging.

December 28, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Hutch Carpenter, Timo Heuer, Joe Dawson and 44 other people liked this

thanks to you Robert I am spending a little more time on ff these days ! - Gautam Ghosh

31 more comments

yes, the amount of publicity that earn some intra-a-listers topics is almost irritating :) - George Tziralis

George: none of my 1,000+ videos has evermade it to Techmeme. Most of my smartest posts don't either. But bitchmemes? Techmeme loves those. Why? Cause bloggers link to them. - Robert Scoble

I am using the Friendfeed "best of" feature across my different lists as my personal Techmeme. - Steve Rubel

I am trying to spend more time on FriendFeed because I'm enjoying the conversational aspect of it. I also appreciate the stream of different services from those I like staying updated on. Also, I agree with your comments here and earlier. I thoroughly enjoy and learn from your interviews but yet this weekend meme is getting more attention. Sigh. - Justin Levy

Steve: that's the first thing I checked today. Shows how much my world has changed. TechMeme used to be the first thing I checked in the morning. - Robert Scoble

Thinking I should spend more time on FriendFeed too - will start - Marshall Sponder

Justin: this weekend is in more contrast because we uploaded yesterday the best interview of the year with Tim O'Reilly. That didn't get on Techmeme, but this stupid bitchmeme did. I knew it would when I was writing the post, too. - Robert Scoble

awwwwwww....(tear) back atcha big fella - sofarsoShawn

I really appreciate Robert Scoble for turning me into a ff addict. Now I wish I could figure out a way to get more people to participate in conversations with me over here - I can't seem to get folks away from twittering only - Jannifer @wordsforliving

Robert, have you seen my post on the whole argument yet? - Tyler (Chacha)

Robert, it's a story at techmeme but hundreds of comments (and screens) here about the same topic. I don't see the advantage. - Ricardo Galli

Ricardo: at least here my smart stuff has a chance at being discovered. Over on techmeme? You'd only see my stupidest stuff. - Robert Scoble

On here 30 people gave my Tim O'Reilly interview "Likes:" http://friendfeed.com/e... Over on Techmeme? Crickets. - Robert Scoble

hahhahahahhahahha!! Added: I find the irony funny, not your point, Robert. Just clarifying. - Mona Nomura

that's hilarious Robert. - anna sauce

Robert you nailed it! Techmeme = bitchmeme / gossipmeme. The value is only based on buzz, not substantive content. Terrible that your best work is overlooked and the "twitter search"and "intervention" type crap gets all the glory....Grrr! - Susan Beebe

Susan: it's pretty normal if you define news a certain way. Techmeme loves new things too. Put up a press release before anyone else and you'll probably get on too. But fights are news. We learn that in high school. The geek who wins the science fair? Not news. The fight in the quad? News! - Robert Scoble

Bitchmemes + Techmeme = Pageviews. Disregard the stupid Twitter metrics being discussed... it's all about the sponsorships in tech/geek blogging now (unfortunately). - Sam Harrelson

But people 'like' bitchmemes on FF too... So will FF eventually succumb to the same inexorable crap-creep? - Michael R. Bernstein

Michael: possibly, but because ff is decentralized it probably will prove resistant. As I note above, yes, the bitchmeme got lots of conversation here, but so did my Tim O'Reilly video. - Robert Scoble

I'm finding users are generally too lazy to get the most out of FriendFeed. It's a sad thing. - Bwana ☠

I don't think ff attracts many people with the bitchmeme mindset, other than just for curiosity sake? - Jannifer @wordsforliving

Bwana - I'm still learning & trying to figure out how to get the most out of it. I'm having a problem getting any interaction. Maybe because my niche is boring? - Jannifer @wordsforliving

Robert, but is just simplistic to disregard blogs just because bitchmemes reach techmeme. Techmeme is not by far a representative sample or index of the blogosphere, not FF is a sample of clever comments. I think you should criticize instead the "Silicon Valley bloggers' endogamy" of TM and similar sites. - Ricardo Galli

Bwana- I think it ends up filtering people out- I have a few friends I wish would give the time they give twitter, to FF too. But in a way, you end up getting what you put in. If they are used to more attention, they're not going to get it here. Also, the fact that we can filter out our followers/audience changes the dynamic sizeably. - anna sauce

I feel like I prefer Techmeme because it has reliable sources. I would easily take the word of say TechCrunch or Gizmodo, over someone on Twitter or FriendFeed. - Marcus Beagley

Robert - excellent observation you made about fights and yes that is all soooo High School :(. I am genuinely concerned that we'll see popularity become the replacement logic over and above relevancy. Think about that for a moment ... The balance of power shifts from an open design where all are equal to a gamed design controlled and manipulated by celebrity / popular persuasion. That model defies pure search results; instead, it delivers koolaid results - affects info discovery & flow of cash!!! - Susan Beebe

You want to keep it pure? Think of it like sports. Little Leaguers play for love of the game. College seniors and pros play for the $$$. A Listers- How often do you bring real attention to a no-name because their blog post, or even tweets, are excellent? It is becoming incestuous lately, and that's part of how we got here. - Ed Shahzade /NextInstinct

After all, I think that the question is "What's your flowchart of getting the news?", I set up a new discussion here http://friendfeed.com/e... - George Tziralis

that doesnt matter...as long as YOU reach YOUR audience. FF offers lots of choice what i can filter and aggregates alot = no walls, just the content i look for -> pretty kewl :) - Chris Hofmann

Hi Friendfeed, good to see you all again! - Larry Kless

Someone should run the numbers: What if only X% of everybody's followers RT or @ reply? Scoble gets more traction because he has more followers, but everyone is roughly equal in the impact they make? Just a thought... - Paul Rodriguez

Michael Turk

@tattooedmommie You'd love my wife. She's never seen a reality show she doesn't like.

December 16, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

You should run this list by her: http://www.ew.com/ew... - Paul Rodriguez

Kol Tregaskes

Have you met anyone famous? If so, who, where, how and what happened?

November 24, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Alexander Ebel, Duncan Riley, imran and 9 other people liked this

I've met up with a few national bands after shows and hung out a bit. I've also met face to face with Jeff Gordon (NASCAR driver) when I was 11 or 12 at a race. - Mathew™ one of a kind

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I saw one of the cast from The BIll shopping in Ikea many years ago but apart from that no-one else. I think my parents Russ Abbot at a golf event a long time ago. - Kol Tregaskes

Joe Montana and his family -Vail,CO. Also Formula Car racer A.J. Foyt in Alberquerque when I was a kid (lived next block over from my grandparent's house) - Susan Beebe

I live in L.A., so there are too many to name. - DO ANYBODY NO MONIQUE

I studied philosophy with Ian Hacking (famous among philosophers). Otherwise...well, does internet fame count? :p - Neal Jansons

Ben Folds after his concert, and Jackie Earl Haley (Watchmen) in my office building (his production studio is on the floor above me) - Haggis (Sean Loyless)

Janet Reno in 1998: she spoke at my college and a friend and I waited at the rear exit with the Secret Service folks. Jacob Dylan 2000: same friend and pretty much the same circumstances, minus the Secret Service. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Just met Brandon from the band Rise Against yesterday when I interviewed him, also have met Gary Numan, and spoke to other bands via phone too! - Les Zaldor

Mr. T and Tommy Lee Jones - Outsanity

@Les /jealous you met Gary Numan! - Neal Jansons

Sat next to Audrey Hepburn at a hearing for UNICEF, met Sandra Day O'Connor at the Supreme Court, ran into (literally) Lady Thatcher in Arizona, Kirk Herbstreit used to go to the same grocery store and a bunch of celebs in L.A. because they are everywhere - RAPatton

India Arie used to practice in my basement. Anthony David is a friend of the fam. Met Hulk Hogan in an airport once. Made drinks for "Rudy Huxtable," Johnny Gill, and Babyface when I worked at Starbucks. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

I had classes with Jamal Mashburn(NBA player) and Travis Ford(OK St. basketball coach) in college. I met Anson Williams at a telethon and have met several authors at book signing events. - Alan Simpson

I met Scoble at CES last year in the Bloghaus. Does that count? ;) - Kevin C. Tofel

Met George HW Bush, Dick Cheney (before he was VP), and Ice-T... and, no, they weren't all hanging out together... haha - Shawn Duffy from twhirl

Saw some of the American Idol crew at a local sushi place a year or so ago when they were taping in Charleston. Oh, and I have met Scoble. :) - Jared Smith

I met Gov. Howard Dean during my senior year of high school, which was right around the time he got uber popular in early 2004. It was pretty cool. - Jamelle

Kevin: no. :-) - Robert Scoble

I met @timoreilly once. Does that count? - Stephen Pierzchala

I met the band InMe once... Spilt my drink down the drummers legs and talked to the lead singer as though I didn't know him (which hurt his ego a little) - alphaxion

Martha Stewart served me lunch at Googleplex ;-) John and Elizabeth Edwards are neighbors - we bump into each other in the store. I met Scoble.... ;-) - Bora Zivkovic

@Neal Yeah, very nice guy too - I met him when my friend mike did an interview with him, we went to his tour bus and did the interview there, very cool stuff! - Les Zaldor

Live in LA and freelance write for a magazine so I met a famous person just last week which reminds me...I need to plug my upcoming article. ;) - Derrick

Played basketball with Jerry Rice at the Pacific Athletic Club in Redwood Shores CA. I didn't even recognize him until my wife pointed it out. - Tom Wentworth

I live in LA too, there are too many too count. I've certainly had my share of stupid celebrity moments, some interesting encounters and friendships forged. - Admiral Anika

Sorry, Robert. I tried. ;) In all seriousness, I did meet Faith Hill before she was big. She opened for a Reba concert I was at. Nobody had heard of Faith Hill at that time... she sang 3 songs and offered autographs after the show. Got an autograph AND a hug. Take THAT Tim McGraw! :) - Kevin C. Tofel

I ran into Mike Bibby at a strip club in Vegas. He rolled in with a huge posse, and I talked to him for a bit at the bar. I also lived in LA too so it was common to see celebs. - Rodfather

interviewed mark linn baker from "perfect strangers" (the one with cousin balky) when i was 9. met dikembe mutumbo when he was a hawk at a night club. ditto juwan howard when he was a bullet, but in D.C. met joi (ex lucy pearl) at a concert. met michael knight from project runway at an atlanta magazine party. does that count? met busta rhymes too outside of the ritz in D.C. during howard u.'s homecoming. met the dude that played mr. roper at a restaurant in baltimore. ... - tiffany

I met the rapper "Game" while I was working out in my local gym. He was very cool and friendly, and it was a great experience. - Jeremy Campbell from twhirl

A couple not worth mentioning. Still mad at myself for ignoring the phone call that would have lead me to meeting Michelle Obama - Amber, Random Time Lord

Met Nelson Mandela when he was still president. Never forget that moment. He's a special guy. - Roberto Bonini

also met author pearl cleage. she was so so nice. also have had a few sightings: charles barkley, one of the dudes from das efx, flavor flav and i'm sure i'm forgetting someone. - tiffany

Used to be a label rep for Sam Goody, met many recording artists; Weird Al and Pee Wee Herman were cool, Andy Williams and Barry Williams (no relation) were both dicks. - Jack (a.k.a. Jeber)

My favorite encounter was playing a softball scrimmage game against a team with Al Pacino at 2nd base. He was all into it. So funny. - Rodfather

Met Billy Joel in a cafe in Paris. Super nice guy. Also sat in the original KITT car at a car show as a kid. ;) - Jeremy Schultz from twhirl

I played footsie with Tina Youthers in the dining hall on the set of a sitcom when she was 16 and I was 14. - Kevin Fox

had a run in with James Brown on a flight from Zurich to Geneva. He was sitting in couch 10-15 rows behind me with his posse. Asked for his autograph multiple times but kept on saying later and that he was busy. what an ass. - Randy Ksar from twhirl

I used to work at a talent agency so all the time. They are way less interesting than you'd think. - Wesley Barrow

Jerry West, Lenox Lewis, Angie Stone, Deshea Townsend (Pittsburgh Steelers corner back), Ken Hamlin (Dallas Cowboys). Met them all back in '07 when I was Valet/Bellman at the Westin in Memphis. Jerry West enjoys the company of prostitutes. Lenox Lewis was nice. Immediately upon checking in he asked me where he could get a good cigar, a haircut and some decent BBQ. - Give 'Em DBizness

I worked in politics for a while and met a lot of somewhat famous people during the '08 campaign. - Nation Hahn

Angie Stone was really nice and down to earth. Most folks don't really talk to the support staff but she was cool. She talked to me like a regular person. Like we'd known each other for a long time. She was a great tipper too. Ken Hamlin was a complete ass and horrible tipper to boot. Deshae Townsend was the complete opposite of Hamlin. Humble, kind and down-to-earth. - Give 'Em DBizness

Worked with Robert Preston, I was an extra, very nice man; recently had dinner with Hal Holbrook; met Jim Neibors at the old Chase Park Plaza; had breakfast with Kevin Costner long before he was famous; went to collage with Dave Ramsey; Georgia Fromtier was a regular customer; does Walter Jennings count? - Robert Hafer

As a freshman at MIT I held an elevator door open for a professor and grad student who were moving some equipment. The prof said to his grad student, "We should reward this nice young man" and he gave me a postcard with a photo of a boy popping a balloon. I thought it a little strange, but just smiled and thanked him. Turns out it was Doc Edgerton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Met Jimmy Carter on a regular flight, years ago, london-doha route. What a Great Humble Man. He came out from first class, with secret service guy went thru whole economy section, chit-chatting, photos, lot of smiles, happy end to 6 hours flight. After plane landed, first it went to royal terminal, where Mr. Carter left plane. - imran

All the famous people I've met were either in Twin Peaks or Star Trek, so I'm not sure anyone would even know who I'm talking about. :) I'm nerdcore. - tinypants - Hagitha of FF

Many politicians from my political days. Bush, Sr. Cheney, Gingrich, and a bunch of other Congressman. Bunch of NFL guys when I was a kid working as a 'ballboy' on the sidelines, including Mike Ditka, the 'Fridge', and most of the St. Louis Cardinals. Some movie stars over the years, including Jackie Chan and Lt. Uhura. And by far, the most important celebrity of all-- Robert Scoble. - Andrew Leyden

People I've actually had conversation with include Penn Jillette, Lewis Black, Malcolm Gladwell, and Tom Kenny. And I've met Scoble as well. - Paul Rodriguez

There must be a Therom of celeb distribution in here somewhere. Sounds like grant money - Robert Hafer

Yes, and I never bothered to get a photo any of the times. Prime Minister of Australia, UK Opposition Leader, Australian Treasurer (he was drunk), and some other high ranking political types (State Premiers and Oppositions leaders etc). On the tech side, be it somewhat briefly: Kevin Rose, Mark Zuckerberg and some others. Actors: Geoffry Rush shops at our local supermarket and I once shared a lift with Kylie Minogue. Sports people: most of the Australian cricket team circa 2001, and a couple of Socerroos. - Duncan Riley

Well, I saw Little Richard in his underwear. In his trailer. It was a weird evening. - Chris Baskind

Standing in line at a Nirvana show and Eddie Vedder walks by and said "hey" to me. No one else recognized him. A girl standing next to me in line asked who he was so I told her. She ran up to him and he got mobbed. I felt a little bad about that. Also crossed paths with Sally Field, Greg Brady, Marvin Hagler, Kirk Hammett, Carlos Santana (accidentally stole his hot dog bun at backstage event), Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Jenner, Christy Turlington, Ken Stabler, Patrick Ewing, and Joe DiMaggio. - scott anderson

Louis Gray

What are some songs that you used to really like, that now, you can't stand?

November 17, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Steven Perez, Mark Wilson, Susan Beebe and 13 other people liked this

For me, that would be anything from Crystal Waters. At one time, Gypsy Woman and 100% Pure Love were high on the list. I just deleted them from iTunes after years of skipping them. - Louis Gray

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Also include: Anything by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. One time, they were seriously alternative. Now, I just skip or change the station. - Louis Gray

Achey Breaky Heart. Cotton-eyed Joe by Rednex. All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth (ok I was 8 when I last liked that one) - Phil G

Sliding but not completely fired: Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead. (And yes, I know these are bands and not songs) - Louis Gray

Man, I love all the songs and artists you guys mentioned. Maybe I'm still stuck in the 90s? - Jesse Stay

Yeah, RHCP seem to be rubbish these days. - Rich

Anything by Lamb. I wore out the first two albums and just can't stand to listen any more. - Kevin D. White

I wear my sunglasses at night, most things by Peter Gabriel. Too much play, get bored with it. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

Being part of the party scene here, take any new club song release, give me 3 months and I'm sick of it. - Mark Martinez

Louis, I hate you. I now have that as an earworm... la-da-dee-da-da-da, la-da-dee-da-da. ARG! - Cyndy

Most stuff by Sting - Internet's Tad

i used to love Rhianna's Umbrella song - now its turned off as soon as it starts - ♥ Stephiepooos ♥

any thing by or with Kanye West... Yes he's talented but every time he issues a statement or does an interview I want to slap the taste out of is mouth. Along that line of thinking you can throw "The Puff Daddy" (or what ever the kids are calling him now) to my needs to be slapped up list... - J. Abdul-Qahhar

The eighties. All of it. - Slappy Line

Almost everything I played when I was on the air. You think YOU'RE tired of the stuff you hear on the radio. After the 50,000th play of "Heartache Tonight," the violent thoughts begin. - Chris Baskind

No such thing! I can go the other direction, but once it's liked, it's liked forever. - Josh Haley

Most songs off the classic greatest hits albums (you know the ones I'm talking about) by the Eagles, Steve Miller, The Doors and Eric Clapton. - Jon Price

I will love Depeche Mode until the day that I die, but if I hear "Enjoy the Scilence" one more time.... - Helen Sventitsky

Finally got rid of the earworm, and thought of one. Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" - Cyndy

Louis, usually every sony I like :) I have a bad habit of looping... Like, playing the song 100 - 200 times ...again and again ... eventually the magic wears off and I start hating the song :))) - Alemsah Ozturk

I'm theorising that great music from 1976 and before has remained great, whilst anything that has been labelled as great since the end of 1976 has, in fact dated. The further we get from 1976, the quicker new so-called great tracks age and cause us annoyance. ;-) - Slappy Line

Roxanne's Revenge - MiniMage TKDteacher of FF

I have to agree that RHCP are pretty crap now. - Mark Wilson

Bryan Adams - "I can't stop loving you" - Bindu Reddy

Survivor - "Eye of the Tiger" :-) - Majento

Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You up - Jesse Stay from twhirl

The theme from "Airwolf". - m13a

Anything by Bil Idol. - Paul Rodriguez

Robert Scoble

I invested a lot of time this year in FriendFeed and Twitter instead of my blog. Was that the right decision?

November 18, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Mo Kargas, Tyson Key, China Internet Rumors and 50 other people liked this

I think so. - Robert Scoble

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Time will tell, but I think it was correct decision. - imran

It's made you one of my favorite bloggers, if that makes you feel any better about it. If you weren't heavy on the social exploration I probably wouldn't read. - Daniel J. Pritchett

what outcome were you going for? - zach

From my perspective, yes. It's a much more interactive and broader experience for all. - Kevin C. Tofel

The right decision from which perspective, Robert? Did you increase "eyeballs?" Revenue? Both? Other? - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)

I like FriendFeed and Twitter, but don't see how they compare to developing thoughtful, deeper blog posts. Really, I think FF and Twitter have their place, and I love them as well, but that place is certainly not a replacement for blogging. - Michael Krigsman

I think yes. Most folks can read twitter 100% of the time -- blogs are scanned. You tend to link to good stuff from twitter and have good headlines. - badgerworks

No question about that. In the past, websites were static compared to blogs. Now blogs are static compared to microblogging services. - Berci Mesko, MD

I think only you can be the judge of that. We're all beginning to look at blogs as sort of the core of our outreach, so I'm not sure investing time in microblogging elsewhere is an either/or question. You are you. Your blog and social media network are simply extensions. If you're happy with your business model and continuing to grow, what's the problem? :-) - Chris Baskind

Mark: Revenue? Didn't change much. Eyeballs? Well, I have almost 21,000 followers here that I didn't have at the beginning of the year. Zach: I just saw that FriendFeed was going to be one of the most interesting new services of the year. Seeing how it was on the screen at the Chinese BloggerCon I think I picked the right services. - Robert Scoble

I consider FF as blogging in many ways and more interesting than a blog. - imran

You certainly moved the ball forward for the two companies. And if you think they're a vital part of the "internet plumbing", you absolutely made the right decision in helping to secure their futures. - Christopher Galtenberg

I've shut down my blog for the time being. Not getting the interaction out of it, the way I'm getting out of experiences on FF and Twitter. I think if you want more conversation online, the blogs (for now) would not be the way to go. - Helen Sventitsky

are the 21K followers different from people who followed your blog already? if so that is in increase. if not then the eyeballs are moving from your blog to friend feed. - Jonathan Jesse

Just wondering. Thanks, Robert. - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)

My twitter lives alongside my blog in the sidebar, and I keep track of all my tweets by feeding it into a lifestream stored on my server. i think that's the key, as the two platforms, microblogging and blogging, work nicely together. - C. K. Sample III

@Michael great thoughts on blogs allowing for deeper thought development. that greater development, might lead to more meaningful discussion on FF then what may occur in the comment section - Jonathan Jesse

Also, check out Twitemperature if you like Twitter. Tells you whether you're hot or cold based upon what you've tweeted and how it ties into online trends and community: http://twitemperature.com - C. K. Sample III

It's a good question -- I've been thinking (and writing a bit) about the question of a blogging / microblogging balance. My working theory: that going forward the most successful bloggers will be strong microbloggers, and vice versa. - Eric Berlin

Robert, then I have a wunderbar über wonderful idea for you! You know, you can trust me :) - directeur from NoiseRiver

YES YES YES YES YES YES! - Susan Beebe

There are plenty of people up at blog-level covering "the scene". You're on the ground with people as they're trying things, talking about what's missing, what they need, what they like and don't. I think this is a good place for a tech-head to be. But blog posts to send signals up and out to the other tech-heads, reviewing your time embedded with the troops, will still be vital for growth of the net. - Christopher Galtenberg

No =) The audience for the standard blog delivery system is different than a hyper-conversation micro-blogging system. While these services are great with interactivity, they do not generate useful long term content in most cases due to short posts (usually under 120 characters) and basically being a link farm rather than useful content. The initial "posts" are not as in-depth as a typical blog post, and the comments are often "me too" type of responses as well. Balance your tweets vs. your blog posts =) - RAD Moose

I found I moved too much of my activity to Twitter and FriendFeed - I have tried to return to more blog postings, since I do have a community of readers that is only there. - Richard Akerman

Hard to say. Who are you, again? :) - Matt Tuley

Yes, I've heard little about your blog posts, but I've heard plenty about you being very open & active on social sites. That kind of interaction with your audience is a refreshing change and I'm sure it helps your reach (though I'm sure that's not what you meant). - Steven Cains

Honestly? You put you in front of me. I would not have gotten to the blog as often, as I've seen you here. Just too much to read. - Ed Shahzade /NextInstinct

I personally miss the longer/thought out posts that used to appear on your blog. While I don't think that using FF/Twitter has been a bad thing, and I know that you don't have time for *everything*, your more "editorial" and reporting style of blogging is missed. - drew olanoff

Cross posting of comments between blogs and friendfeed would be an interesting development. - Andrew Leyden

Jonathan: I think I've gained a good percentage of new people who found me here on FriendFeed. That's why I have more followers here than, say, Michael Arrington does or Leo Laporte do (and they should have WAY more, because of the size of their audiences). - Robert Scoble

I ask myself the same question often regarding whether I should spend so much time on social media sites instead of just writing content on my blogs. What I don't think I realized is that I'm still creating valuable content at all of my outposts that are still ultimately leading to my blogging hub. I think its been well worth it. - Mark Krynsky

@Andrew WordPress has a nice plugin to link to FriendFeed activity. Unfortunately for my platform (TypePad) I don't know of an equivalent. - Richard Akerman

ppl will follow you anywhere on web i think, but this is the best place to folllow you. - imran

I find FriendFeed to be more engaging, but it would be nice to gauge the amount of traffic a post on FF gets. - Spencer

the #friendfeed, #twitter, #socialmedian instantaneous replies, directs, and comments distributed throughout feed aggregation access points establishes a better communication channel for your voice - shayne catrett

depends. did you sacrifice blog content & share it on FF/Twitter? - I stopped blogging about useless junk since I can simply throw that stuff up on FF or Twitter now. Less frequent are my blog posts, but more quality, at least I think - Enrique Gutierrez from twhirl

@Richard if you can migrate to Six Apart's Movable Type 4, they have a widget for FF -- in fact, I'm going to be trying to get it running on my blog tonight - Woodrow Jarvis Hill

Here's how you get your answer: (1) Go get some sleep. You just got back from China! (2) Wake up and look at the likes/comments on this item. (3) Compare those numbers against responses to your best blog post this year. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

It depends what you're after. Knowing you, it was the right decision - twitter and friendfeed are like a quickfire conversation, here there, lots of input, changing topics all the time. Blogs are the considered discussion...or lecture. Different methods of communication, you choose which one you prefer. - Rachel Clarke

Blogging is more of a one-way street, FF and Twitter are interactive. It's pretty obvious they are the natural evolution and successor to web collaboration. - Tyler Hurst from twhirl

Absolutely. FriendFeed and Twitter are so much more interactive and personal than blogs. I'm liking the transition to more personal mediums. - Mark Martinez

Add one more who simply wouldn't follow you regularly if not for ff ... No other method gives the constant positive reinforcement and active conversation - David HC Soul

For those using a blog for SEO and drive quality links to their retail or commercial site, the answer would be no. However, I personally find it difficult to follow all my favorite blogs in a timely manner, ever on a reader. So for me, Twitter & FF is a better avenue to follow your messages. - Rick Bucich

Less smack talk about Twitter on this thread (any?) than FF smack on Twitter. Me senses some insecurity about the topic from those not yet FF-savvy. - Christopher Galtenberg

welp -- yes. I think for reblogging and some conversation both are great. Cross the streams and have a Facebook page updated regularly too. Use a blog for long form pieces and comment threads (although I see less value frankly in the signal to noise ratio on blog comments), and feed your blog to Twitter/FF as well... at least that's my tack. - Robert Denton

It certainly was the right decision.. In fact I didn't even know about you before I joined Twitter and FF...:) and I don't think blogs will get feedback like the way you get on Twitter of FF. Also Twitter & FF can be a major source of traffic to your blog. - Devakishor

Yep. - Mitchell Tsai

YES - Charlie Anzman

It doesn't have to be either/or, but there's no one right answer. Do what makes sense for you. - Louis Gray

I don't know if it was the right decision, but it's the same thing I've been doing this year. - Paul Rodriguez

I'm actually coming to realize that spending more time on Twitter and FriendFeed isn't so bad. The integration of FriendFeed + Twitter + General Folksonomy is like reading the headlines, when I want to write an Op-Ed or unique article or just some General Musings then I do. - Daniel W. Crompton

@webhat totally agree, its a great way to see the important stuff as you need it, from people you respect, as opposed to slow and biased news websites. - Simon T Small

depends on what your end goal was. - Duncan Riley

Duncan: well, it got me kicked off of the TechMeme leaderboard! So, if that was my goal, goal accomplished! :-) - Robert Scoble

Yes - Mike Reynolds

re drop kick from TechMeme leaderboard, also remember - on a slightly different note - Dan Lyon's Syndrome, Once Removed - David HC Soul

No - JMaultasch

Magelan invested a lot of time going round the globe. Was it a good decision, since he did not even make it back home? You bet it was. For the rest of us... - Nikos Anagnostou

I agree with RAD Moose. Each platform serves a different audience and a different purpose. - Yasser

This was the breakout year for micro-blogging and life-streaming to me. - rab

Plus, it's becoming easier to micro-blog, and to monitor the "bloglets" than ever before. It's mainstream! - Robin Monks from IM

absolutely - David Goldmann

No. Your blog is much better, and it's where the ads are that pay your bills, and the denser conversations. Twitter & FF shld only be the sprinkling on the icecream. - Prokofy Neva

Robert Scoble

We are in a recession but Hong Kong is still damn impressive. @rocmanusa and I are going for a walk to see the city.

November 17, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Alemsah Ozturk, Lars Rune Jensen, Jayavasanthan J and 8 other people liked this

Are you saying that Hong Kong would be even more impressive if the world weren't in a recession? I wish I lived in a place where a tourist's first impressions changed depending on the health of the global economy. It sure would be interesting. - Mitch

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If you read some of the local newspapers you would think HK is sinking into a hole though. Busy street != good economy :p - Clarence Chiang

Robert I always wondered 'bout Chine but, after your whole feed about there...Now i have an urgent feeling to visit there! China gov. has to pay you for your presentation :) - Olcayto Cengiz

Olcatyo: it's an interesting place to visit and a LOT cheaper than Paris. You should have seen the club we hung out in last night. As good as any Vegas club. - Robert Scoble

Robert: My wife is also a FF user, so i have to reply as "Good for you" for your comment :) When you gonna share more photos? I mean China. Not the club :) - Olcayto Cengiz

Olcayto: I gotta run, so no photos right now. Maybe later after we go out and party, but might be a couple of days. - Robert Scoble

Have a great time, I've been to HK many times, it's a beautiful place. The food and shopping is amazing, so inexpensive compared to US and Canada! If you have time, take a subway to go around the city and do some shopping and eating. - Alvin

The first portable gaming device I ever bought was in Hong Kong. We used to stop by there often on our way back to the US from Indonesia when I lived there growing up. - Jesse Stay

@alvin "The food and shopping is amazing, so inexpensive compared to US and Canada!" - not quite, it depends how you choose to spend your money there. It can be *very* expensive as well. - Kevin Chan

What he may be referring to is that there is a ton of high-end stores everywhere (e.g. Armani, Chanel, etc.) You keep wondering who buys all that stuff. - Paul Rodriguez

@yinkei "What I mean is the local Chinese food is inexpensive, same as in Beiing" - Alvin

Jason Calacanis

Please rate Obama's acceptance speech on a scale of 1 to 10: http://www.mahalo.com/Obama_A...

November 5, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Christian Van Der Henst, Roberto Bonini, Neal Jansons and 2 other people liked this

10 - Jon Lee

25 more comments

9...one point off due to the mentioning about "our enemies". We don't want to hear about that right now. - Fleagle

that was a nod to the right-wing people. they like that stuff. - Jon Lee

10 - Inspirational, but still addresses the real problems that face America, even though a new president-elect is waiting in the wings. On the contrary, Fleagle, I think it's right for people to hear about the problems to help temper their hope and joy with the reality that there's still a lot of work to be done to get the country back on the right track. - Cheryl Jones

i give it a 3, typical political BS speech that doesn't mean anything. - Spencer

11 - Lon Cohen from twhirl

10. - CW™

the original "yes we can" speech was an 11. the 2004 DNC speech was a 10. the post-Rev. Wright race relations speech was also a 10. this was a 9. - Chris Hollander

liked the race relations speech, sold me on obama. can't wait for the inaugural... - Wilma Stoneflint

10 - Bryan

Truly one of the best political speeches I've ever heard. Right up there with EMK at the 1980 De. Convention. 10 - Jeff Jones

10 - He mentioned a puppy, that was just cool. It made him seem - unlike many politicians - human. I've heard other speeches he's given that are 10's too, like one on the dangers of religious indoctrination he gave at a church, which got many cheers despite the audience. - Will Higgins™

10 - History in the making. He has the ability to fill you with hope & joy - and I'm an Aussie girl. Congratulations America! - JanLawrence

9.5...only .5 lost because for some reason I liked his 2004 speech just that little bit more. - Zee.

Why? - Mona Nomura

is that to me Mona or Calacanis? - Zee.

10 times 10 - Jorge Escobar

10. I cried. - Neal Jansons

10 I couldn't imagine how to make that speech any better. - Nelson de Witt from twhirl

Talk to Obama, Yes we can! http://tinyurl.com/5oqdzd - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

thats a lot of 10s! i think it was a 10 moment, but the speech was an 8 - Jason Calacanis

Speech was a 7/8 by Obama standards; the moment was a 10. - Paul Rodriguez

I haven't listened to it yet. What I read of McCain's makes me think I will like his speech a great deal. - ComicList

10 - great oratory. I'm now considering filing my application for citizenship! - Joe Buhler

9. It was a well rounded speech. Although, I'm not going to lie, The best part of Obama's speeches are the words: "Yes we can" - Adam Posey

10 - I can feel the intelligence level in the country rising! Did you see the looks of rapture in the audience? - Rebecca Briggs

10 It was great watching in with a crowd of people at CNN in NYC. - Steve Garfield from twhirl

Jeff Jarvis

Obama should act presidential and appoint his shadow cabinet now.

October 11, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Jessica liked this

let's see who he has in mind for Treasury Secretary and how long before Hank really feels the heat/wrath - David Blumenstein from twhirl

He is moving along with transition plans, but it's too soon to announce cabinet. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008... - Paul Rodriguez

Nah, that'd look arrogant... - Leon Green

Jason Calacanis

Rocking out to the Don't Stop Believing Video right now! Genius! DON'T STOP BABY! We'll be back! http://www.youtube.com/watch...

Rocking out to the Don't Stop Believing Video right now! Genius! DON'T STOP BABY! We'll be back! http://tinyurl.com/45zzdb

October 11, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

As lip synchs go, doesn't match up to best of breed. And the Web 2.0 bubble isn't bursting, the American economy is. - Paul Rodriguez

Jesse Stay

Hints at an $800 Apple laptop, Bloggers Report, Stock up 4 points - http://technosailor.com/2008...

October 10, 2008 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Richard Peat, Eddie Codel, Mitchell Tsai and CW™ liked this

told you so - Jesse Stay

2 more comments

Apple is going to have a brutal Christmas. When you're laid off you aren't about to buy an $800 laptop. If you are forced to buy a laptop, you're going to go for a $300 Netbook. - Robert Scoble

Or you are going to buy a used one at the pawn shop, eBay, or craigslist. - Wizetux

My daughter needs to replace her iBook, so I'd buy one as well. - Paul Rodriguez

Jeff Jarvis

This Am Life taught me that $700 billion bandaid won't cover a $60 TRILLION debt swap gash.

October 6, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

"The Giant Pool of Money" was a great TAL episode on subprime. http://bit.ly/2jwBFm - Paul Rodriguez

But they also stated, pretty clearly, that some form of bailout was necessary. - Kevin Pedraja

Cynthia Brumfield

Here's how McCain-Palin define "journalist:" Anybody who asks a question. We're all journalists now!

September 30, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

And a question from a voter is "gotcha" journalism. - Paul Rodriguez

Louis Gray

Is Anything Off the Record? - http://www.markevanstech.com/2008...

September 30, 2008 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Sarah Perez, Christian Van Der Henst, Atul Arora and Franklin Pettit liked this

This very issue came up in the BWE panel that Scoble was on. Off the record is gone in the sense it's hard to keep secrets once it starts to slip out. That said, it's kinda rude to quote someone's e-mail without asking them first. Many bloggers ask you to identify if you want your e-mail quoted. - Paul Rodriguez

Robert Scoble

@redmanbluestate I know that Democrats and Republicans share the blame. I don't care about blame. What do we do together?

September 29, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Mona Nomura, Ontario Emperor, Howard Keziah and 12 other people liked this

Vote them out of office... easy to say, but most people still vote back in their home state reps and senators. - Jim McCusker

10 more comments

So with you there. Blame is part of what got us here. No more blame, only solutions. - Aaron Krug

finger pointing will get us now where good fast. However, i am a firm believer in accountability and transparency and I am just not seeing it! - Susan Beebe

But I unfortunately have little faith in people actually doing it. - Jim McCusker

I vote we beg McCain to suspend his campaign again :-) - jcunwired

++ Jody. I think Palin might do that for him on Thursday. - Internet's Tad

Much better comment, Robert...stop the blame games and figure out how to solve it WITHOUT the PORK and pet projects... - Live4Emma (L4S)

no pork means that people will have to be responsible, that might not happen. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

Right on. Forget the blame, just fix it. - Jaemi Kehoe

Check out the votes here --> http://tinyurl.com/4ju5gv - Jim McCusker

Spend the 700 billion on a new congress. - Oldengrey (Jay)

It's an odd business. Both D's & R's voted against bill because they're afraid of getting punished in the election. On the other hand, their constituents are telling them they hate this bill, either because they think it's a fat cat bailout or because it's an abandonment of free-market principles in favor of socialism. - Paul Rodriguez

Steve Rubel

New rule: I am abandoning the phrase "new media" in all client decks and memos. It's not new. I have replaced it with "digital media."

September 20, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

oliver gassner, фыр, Seamus Condron and 36 other people liked this

what sparked this? - Jason Kintzler

27 more comments

I'd suggest it's because "new" is scary to the enterprise. They want something that is proven and established. Good move. - Louis Gray

@Jason inspiration. I am working on a deck. - Steve Rubel

good. i started using digital media and online media last week in conversations and got a lot less ???-looks. new media required explanation. - Admiral Anika

True. "New" is not only vague & ultimately meaningless, but something can only be "new" so long. "Digital" is more accurate. - Paul Rodriguez

like that. Especially when new is no longer new. - Joe Buhler

similarly, the BBC renamed its New Media and Technology division a while back. It is now called Future Media and Technology. - Luca Belletti from fftogo

I call it @TheAntiChrist media http://noahdavidsimon.blogspot.com/2008... - Noah David Simon

The only problem with this is that outside our little sphere, plenty of people still consider "media" to be old media: print, TV, radio. The Internet itself is still a scary unknown for a lot of people and companies--even very large ones--still. Start talking about microblogging or social media, and they'll think you're playing some sort of goof on them. - abacab

About time. - Steve Isaacs from fftogo

(I agree with dropping 'new', btw.) - abacab

Agree with Gregory although I use "social media" as I think it is the social aspect of it that makes it different with "old media"... but in the end of the day it is "media" indeed. - Philippe Borremans

I dropped "social" and "new media" and "2.0" - and I used to call it "digital media" back in the day (1998). - l0ckergn0me

agree. 8/10 times i have to explain what i mean - ray

I like "SM" because it sounds kinky and obnoxious at the same time - Noah David Simon

honestly, it might confuse people. digital right now means that switch for TV to a lot of people. - Patricia

i've been using "emerging" instead of "new" for years - folks get it - mike "glemak" dunn

I was saying that a year ago on a CES panel. Of course, it was a "new media" type panel so it wasn't very well received. - Russell Holliman

I do think this is in part why collectively whole industries like media, internet, etc. need to determine names for things. just one guy deciding it should be called digital media often coincides with another guy wanting to call it new media, and so on. switching things up like that makes it harder to train audiences and get them to adopt. Slower adoption makes everything harder on... more... - Patricia

Don't you mean *online* media? TV, radio, CDs, DVDs, etc., all have *digital* forms. - Brent Logan

I think I ditched 'new media' around 2001. Digital & Social Media almost covers the bases, but because it's really alien and unknown territory, definitions are difficult to make stick. Interactive media still has its place, but even 'emerging media' is going to be dated once somethign has emerged. - David Petherick from twhirl

I never liked to term New Media, I have beedn using either Digital Design or Digital Media for like forever - Bryan Thatcher from twhirl

I had an interesting discussion with my team last week regarding the terms "digital" vs. "interactive" - Christian

david: that is why i personally use "emerging" because once it has emerged you can call it something else, so it only refers to those forms of media that are truly emerging for their day... - mike "glemak" dunn

steverubel i still think interactive describes the medium best just my 2 cents - Jason Cronkhite from twhirl

Digital is good, better than "social" it is more neutral and more accurate imho. - Tom Foremski

Digital is insufficient, IMO. Most media is/can be digital, but that doesn't make it social or interactive. - Mark Logan from twhirl

I think "new media" could mean whatever is newest at the time. - Jason Kintzler

I can "digit." - Phil Boiarski

Louis Gray

Q: Were there any good blog posts that covered the Blog World Expo panels? All those bloggers, and no "coverage"? Did I miss them? #bwe08

September 22, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Mark Krynsky, Jesse Stay, Daynah and 8 other people liked this

The best coverage was live Tweets and conversations on FriendFeed. That's what http://search.twitter.com and FriendFeed's search is there for. But, yeah, it would be nice to be able to bundle all that learning up into something with a single URL. - Robert Scoble

35 more comments

My question there, Robert, is that if you put hundreds of bloggers at an event with good discussion and potentially news, that there should be "recaps" or "highlights". Journalists do this all the time, reporting panels and speakers. It's what I did for Bret and Loic's panel the other week. Using only Twitter and FriendFeed are the easy way out. - Louis Gray

There are a few of those here: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsea... - Robert Scoble

what a good question and ironic answer. - jeneane sessum

Jeneane: is Twittering blogging? In my mind it is. - Robert Scoble

hello - Virtualgoodz

Robert, no twittering isn't blogging. it's ubiquitous IM. - jeneane sessum

jeneane: I disagree. Who wrote the rule book that said that a blog needed to be longer than 140 characters? :-) - Robert Scoble

And yes, Robert's link to Google Blog Search does find some good ones. - Louis Gray

@Robert, a tweet is not a blog post. It's a tweet. Louis' point was that for a blogging conference, the lack of blog posts (reflective, substantive, and I have more adjectives if you want them) covering the goings-on is noteworthy. - jeneane sessum

Jeneane: and exactly what is the difference other than one is limited to 140 characters? A blog is an individual voice of a person. My Tweets are my voice. - Robert Scoble

So then if anyone other than those who were there care about BWE, they can search Twitter and sort through idle chatter, meet-up organization, and weblebrity sitings, Jeneane. Otherwise, the information presented there is only for those cool enough to have been there. ;) - Cyndy

Robert - again: substance. If blogging is the same as twitter and friendfeed, then quit your blog and just use those formats. Consider yourself dared. Cyndy +1. - jeneane sessum

jeneane: I use the right tool for the job. A lot of times it's Twitter. Sometimes I have more to say, that's when my Wordpress-powered blog comes into play. Sometimes I want to post a picture to communicate with you, that's gonna be up on Flickr. Sometimes I want to do a video. etc etc. Personally I go to conferences nowadays to enjoy myself, not to be a reporter or a PR person for the conference. I don't get paid to go to conferences, when that starts maybe I'll start doing work at them. :-) - Robert Scoble

wasn't twittering originally called "microblogging"? I'm still struggling to know when the right tool is for the right job, but I use FF for most discussions ABOUT posts, twitter for microblogging casual stuff in under 140 chars, and my blog for anything that's longer than a few paragraphs (which I try to post at least once a day). - Justin Long

It's funny that we haven't talked about the real reason why this conference didn't get blogged about that much: every blogger knows that anytime you blog about blogging your traffic goes down by 10x. Unless you are problogger. So there's actually an anti-incentive to covering a conference about blogging! Interesting that no one posted that yet. - Robert Scoble

Robert, I don't find that to be true. Blogging about blogging trends can at times be as engaging as blogging about services. - Louis Gray

Actually I think it depends on audience. I've been writing in part about using blogging as a tool for missionaries trying to explain their purpose and vision, and I've seen my traffic go up steadily over the past week. But if your readers ARE existing bloggers, then traffic would probably go down? unless you have something new and powerful to say. - Justin Long

Louis: well, you are sort of in the same bucket as problogger. Among other circles they know they are losing their audience when they do that. Imagine you have a blog on, say, Alzheimers. Why would you write about a blogging conference to your audience? (I met a lot of people who blog on topics like alzheimers or quilting there). - Robert Scoble

Would be nice to here a summary of trends, or thoughts on how things have changed or where they are going (from those "creating" the industry)...ACEdge - Alan Edgett

I agree the live tweets were valuable. I probably should write up my insights, but I probably fear they'd seem trite once I put 'em down. - Paul Rodriguez

Alan: trends. Video up. Blogging steady. Microblogging big up. Aggregators up. Monetization mixed. Mobile video: new on scene, expected to be way up. :-) - Robert Scoble

Robert, you think the reason that there weren't more posts about BWE from bloggers is that bloggers didn't want to lose traffic? ("It's funny that we haven't talked about the real reason why this conference didn't get blogged about that much: every blogger knows that anytime you blog about blogging your traffic goes down by 10x.") I doubt that's the case. Your point about people wanting to enjoy conferences instead of blogging them these days is well taken. But you sound defensive. - jeneane sessum

Alan: more trends. Watch networks of bloggers. Way up. Oh, and watch them to become media companies and move away from blogs. - Robert Scoble

jeneane: I don't have a bet on this table. So, I don't really care and if I'm defensive it's cause the info is already out there and those who complain about it are in a position to gather the info together and bundle it and add some value. The world is changing and conferences won't be blogged all the time. I know I hate writing about conferences or covering them. Other people make the money and I get less traffic thanks to competing with others for the same stories. - Robert Scoble

For instance, Louis was there. Where's his "coverage?" I only attended one or two things, but hung out with my friends most of the time (or my wife). I followed a lot on Twitter, though, and didn't see any real news that made me say "oh, I have to write about that." The few things I saw I liked on FF so my readers would see them. - Robert Scoble

maybe all the good bloggers were on the panels ;) - Owen from twhirl

maybe all the good bloggers stayed home. ;) - Cyndy

Robert: I'm now siding with you on Micro-blogging = blogging. Thanks for the summary, hugely helpful for a Corporate soc med guy like me to hear your take on trends (even in 140 bits)! - Alan Edgett

Maybe all the good bloggers ate roast beef, or maybe they had none, or maybe they went wee wee wee all the way home. - Jason Carreira

I think conferences like these are mostly useful in the way that they connect different bloggers in real world so that they can share experiences and even more like get feeling of community. Also, could be great way to get new friends and learn about different things. As for topics of blogging, many people write about wide range of topics but still have some specific things that they mostly cover. It's about what you and your readers are mostly interested and that depends on what type of blog writer does. - Daniel Schildt

And does it really matter if conference had or did not had some more of really popular megastars of blogging? Events like this don't always have to be hyper. The most important thing is people, whoever they happen to be. Everyone learns something when talking to different people interested of writing about different subjects even if there wouldn't have been any of the panels. - Daniel Schildt

Robert, I wrote a blog post about blogging a little while ago for LouisGray.com and it ended up on the front page of Techmeme, so I disagree as well that blogging about blogging reduces traffic. It's all about learning to write good posts - you can really write about anything with good content. - Jesse Stay

Robert, the last few posts I've put on the site have mentioned findings from the panels I attended or participated in, and referenced them. But no, I didn't recap the panels myself, so partially guilty as charged. - Louis Gray

I've got notes from Louis's panel I'll be posting tonight, btw - Jesse Stay from twhirl

I blogged about on one ourI blogged about on one our daily vibe today. The panel with Tim Ferris was blogged by daily vibe today. The panel with Tim Ferris was blogged by Rohit Bhargava. http://blog.vibemetrix.com/2008... - VibeMetrix from twhirl

yuck. I don't know what Twirl just did, sorry about that :/ - VibeMetrix from twhirl

drew olanoff

#add #bwe08 @stoweboyd "when you follow 5000 people its meaningless"

September 21, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Bill Sanders liked this

That is bullsh** - Robert Scoble

Everybody uses these things differently. - David Risley

I've actually come around on this issue during BlogWorld. Certain people, for certain purposes, should absolutely be following thousands of people and can do so effectively. - Paul Rodriguez

Cynthia Brumfield

Just met with my financial advisor (used to head fixed income securities at T. Rowe Price). She thinks bailout plan is good in long run.

September 21, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

You've heard that a firestorm has erupted on liberal blogs against the bailout, at least under current conditions? - Paul Rodriguez

Maryam Scoble

I feel obliged to tweet that I am in the microjournalism session @ BWE08 listening to everyone talk about twitter:)

September 20, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Lou Paglia, R. Ferguson, Louis Gray and David Risley liked this

Glad I skipped today in favor of doing work in my room. Not that I had a choice! - Steve Rubel

2 more comments

Good to meet you this afternoon, Maryam. - Louis Gray

Microjournalism; Journalism for Midgets. - teh Dork Knight aka Kenny

Second thrill of the day: Scoble read aloud one of my tweets. - Paul Rodriguez

Erin @queenofspain

Blogworld Expo 2008 Pre Pre Party - The Iceroom at the Red Square, Queen of Spain, Erin Koteki - http://www.flickr.com/photos...

September 19, 2008 from Flickr favorites - Comment - Like - Share

Karim, Andrea Baker and Cathryn Hrudicka liked this

That was quite an experience. They sell you some expensive Vodka and you get put in a room with fur coats on that's freezing and drink up. Lots of fun. - Robert Scoble

The ice room is indeed awesome. Last time I did it, they had a selection of three different vodkas to try. - Paul Rodriguez

Robert Scoble

We are here with Louis Gray and about 10 others. Like they say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Louis, NO iPhone photos in the ice room!

September 18, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Dobromir Hadzhiev, Mathew™ one of a kind, Alex Scoble and 20 other people liked this

ha! - Justin Korn

15 more comments

Sounds smelly. I hope there are females in there, too. - Mona Nomura

Louis is putting on a fur coat. Call PETA! - Robert Scoble

I hope he's wearing more than that.... - WorldofHiglet

Pictures or it didn't happen, Robert! - Mona Nomura

WHA??? ok that sounds ridiculous!! PHOTOS please! - Susan Beebe

There are pictures, but not from me... - Louis Gray

cool... hope they show up here on FF! - Susan Beebe

sounds like a sausage party - Dave Hodson

Great to hang out with you guys. Crashing to bed. - Paul Rodriguez

Actually there was some non sausage present. - drew olanoff

Oh, to be a fly on that wall.... - Lindsay

I wish I could have made BlogWorld. I will have to settle for BlogOrlando next week. - Michael VanDervort

It was too dark for iPhone photos, but Brian Solis brought his telephoto lens. - Louis Gray

"non sausage" - love that. That could be my new handle. - Laura Norvig

*sneaks away to check out Brian Solis' Flickr photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Susan Beebe

Great, now I wish I had some bratwurst (and the clout to make it a meme!) - MiniMage TKDteacher of FF

Jesse Stay

would *you* pay $5 a month for Twitter?

September 19, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Zulema ◕ ◡ ◕, sean percival, John Frenette and 7 other people liked this

no - santiromero

49 more comments

No - I would maybe pay $5 a month for friendfeed :-) - Søren Larsen

no I could just go to a different free service. - Colide81 (James)

Two weeks ago, I would have said NO. However, twitter was very helpful to me during Hurricane Ike when I lost power, internet access, landline service and had sketchy cell phone service. - Trish R

no - Lindsey is Fierce!

Nope. - Nicholas Kreidberg

no - Alan Le

$20 bucks a year max I would. - Zee.

FUCK NO! - Outsanity

No, but there are some people I would pay $5 to to STOP TWEETING - Josh Haley

Not for Twitter. Would happily pay $5 a month for FF. Even given Trish's example of emergency use above, I have more and stronger connections on FF should the situation necessitate them. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

hell no! - Helen Sventitsky

no - Yolanda

Nope. There'd be some similar service free elsewhere I'd move to. - Jeremy Hall

Are you serious? LOL - Mona Nomura

No. - Steve Lowe

Maybe. If they paid me $10 a month in return. - Jemm

Nope. Where's the ROI? - Jack (a.k.a. Jeber)

Tina, if I could have used FF, I would, but I couldn't, when I had limited cell phone service. I could send text messages but nothing else. I would gladly promote and pay for FF over twitter if that had been possible, because I prefer FF over twitter. - Trish R

No. I get $5/mo. of value out of twitter, but if it became a paid service half of my contacts would leave. Catch-22. - Daniel J. Pritchett

No. I gunna not pay doubloons fer any social network. - Mathew™ one of a kind

nay - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

No. But Guy Kawasaki says he would. - Louis Gray

If i have to pay to use Twitter, I might use another free Twitter-like clone or write my own Twitter! :D - imabonehead

most of this room (bwe08) raised their hand yes to that question. Guy will pay $50 a month for the service. - Jesse Stay

uh-uh - Alan

That's understandable, Trish. That's one of those things that may really depend on all the other services you use and not just the social media service in question. For instance, could I use my phone to send an email to FF in an emergency? Depends on my phone service.... - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

not on your life or mine for that matter. - AJ Kohn

Jesse - that shows the difference in utility for folks. A-Listers use Twitter to communicate with thousands of people. Everyday folks don't. - Hutch Carpenter

Not just no...but H-E-Double Hockey Sticks no - Alex Scoble

@Jesse: Please relay our united FF 'no' back to your colleagues ;) - AJ Kohn

Hell no - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

I don't even use Twitter *now*. I doubt I would use it if there was a $5/mo charge for it. ;) - Nathaniel Payne

No, it's not all that. - Carmen

yes - sean percival

NO, but maybe it's because I'm not following or being followed :( - Jonathan.Rivera

Ask the people who have Pownce pro accounts. - Kevykev

Trish brings up a good point, but there are other methods to communicate via SMS that I would choose over paying for twitter (I wanna say Utterli is a viable replacement in that respect and includes pics/audio as well) - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

I would've before I lost all faith in the twitter developers' ability to run a reliable service. Would I pay $5 for a twitter that didn't have wells? Absolutely. Would I pay $5 for FF? Yes. - James (@willia4)

Nah. There are too many free alternatives. I just use it because it's the one I like the most and the one on which I have the most contacts. - Voyagerfan5761

NO. I don't even use it. - AJ Batac

nope. i'd go $5 a year if it kept ads off my page, but otherwise, i'd use another service. - Admiral Anika

Hell no! I pay that for my SMS/MMS plan and it's essentially teh same thing! - Zulema ◕ ◡ ◕

well ask herb kohl about his related question - why is SMS/text charged at over $800/MB? - Scott Moskowitz

no... comment - Dobromir Hadzhiev

I would now that they have fixed the majority of their fail whale problems, but they would have to add a few more features like groups. - Josh from twhirl

no, but friendfeed is something I would think about paying for. - Rob Diana

Damn straight. Maybe not $10. - Paul Rodriguez

Nope. There's way to many other options out there to pay for status updates. - David Cook

+1 Joshbucklin' Haley - David Cook

Hardly:) - Igor Poltavskiy

Paul Rodriguez › Comments