“To Dear Google/FriendFeed Friends, Why the fuck do you still subscribe to Slashdot, Give me one good reason if you have any and stop sharing stuff from there !! ”
Exactly! The noise to signal ratio is too high. I depend on friends sifting out the shit and sharing the exclusive good ones.. I am yet to find something in /. that is both exclusive and good though! - pramodp
maybe till he is 30. is there a serious threat to his knee with his current style ? - Paresh Jain via twhirl
If he can just borrow my right knee for a match he will be a dead meat .... - Suryakant Patidar
I'd say 3-4 years max, if he continues playing with the same intensity... Nadal's game is all muscle, he runs and runs and runs and returns each and every ball somehow ... ok, not always - when he is playing with the lesser mortals, he will just power them out in 2-3 shots... although with Federer/Joker the rallies run up to 15-20 shots... I'd say he will stay at top for max 5 years from now .... - Kunal
Parry frustoo Sampras shud have played the maximum years. he never put effort in his game. He retired around 30. Nadal keeps running running and running :) - Amal
Sampras was too lazy & good with passing shots. Never played lon rallies except with few players. Nadal on the other hands outruns the other guy. Maybe this is because of his training with his uncle who is a footballer :) - Paresh Jain
@Paresh, I was reading one article yesterday, it said that Nadal does not do normal training like weights/running etc... Instead he just keeps playing and playing for all his physical training ... makes sense, you work all those muscles that are actually used in matches :) - Kunal
"Dhoni met BCCI Secretary Niranjan Shah and expressed his wish to take a break. He wants to opt out of the Test series," BCCI sources said. - Paresh Jain
Who do you guys think will captain india? Cant imagine Sachin being captained by Yuvraj! or .. give ganguly a final series to captain and retire him out of ODIs :D - pramodp
Anything which has information in the order of wikipedia is worth a look. The fact that this is actually in a format which makes it easier to read by programs makes it compelling to check it. Moreover as per the article there is no great startup using it at its core. Powerset is using it but it is just one amongst many for them. - Paresh Jain
"Thomas Joos has ported Flash Lite code to the iPhone, paving the way for interactive applications that make use of the Adobe technology, but not realizing the ability to playback embedded, full-strength Flash content." - Paresh Jain via Bookmarklet
From the very first point, both men bring the best out of each other – they have to because both know that the bloke on the other side of the net is capable of tearing him to shreds. And to see them in action is to realise just how far above the rest of - Kunal
moron, no... biased, an emphatic yes... but still it is a good read - Kunal
C'mon! How would you feel if I called a great piece of art by a cheap name. You would not like it. When we would not stand name-calling for inanimate objects, why sling mud on a proven champion just because he lost a great match after giving a good fight. C'mon you can't Federer by such name as "Captain Cardie". The writer is pathetic SOB. - Paresh Jain
Such name-calling makes the writer look like a sore loser. What is truly sad is the fact that the writer is not the one who ever lost to Federer (maybe he is; i didn't check). Just see how Federer's rivals treat him. Look at Nadal. Whether he wins or loses, he gives respect. Just like Federer. Thats the sure sign of greatness. I am aghast that wimbledon's official site allowed such name-calling. What up with that ? - Paresh Jain
take it with a pinch of salt, if there was a Captain Cardie, there was a Muscleman too... the writer seems to be a comic book fan... and it would not be SOB, but DOB :) so at least that removes the speculation the writer has suffered defeat at Federer's hands... I'd say this is just another example of British humour! - Kunal
DISCLAIMER : I didn't like the article. In fact I did not read past the first para. I am 'liking' it in friendfeed just so ppl might follow this dicussion and maybe join in it. - Paresh Jain
“I dont understand anything except Math and Computers, :). I tried to understand a Gal and failed .. Tried to understand Finance and failed, Now I try to understand myself and I am failing :)”
why ? just coz that loser won on home turf ? - Paresh Jain
Fk it man !! I want Kimi to win .... after Federer's (sobbing sobbing ... more sobbing ) stupid performance, can't take any more shit .... - Suryakant Patidar
@skp: c'mon Federer gave an awesome fight. - Paresh Jain
F1 is surely rocking now :) 2 points separate 4 people! - Kunal
There seems to be a growing misunderstanding of how our "recommended friends" feature works. Put simply, it looks for common friends-of-friends, since there is a good chance that you may know those people as well. If you haven't subscribed to anyone yet, then it will make recommendations based on the entire set of FriendFeed users. We should probably do something smarter than this, but I want to be clear that this is not some kind of hand selected list, and it automatically changes over time. For example, I used to appear in the default set, but got pushed out by more well known people such as Scoble. The reason for this is that he brought along a large number existing readers from his blog and Twitter. - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
Paul: agreed. I wasn't on that list four months ago, and I probably won't be on that list in four more months as the readership here expands to new audiences. Imagine if Bono or Obama really joined here (the Barack Obama account isn't really him, it's actually owned by a Republican). They would instantly go to the top of the list. - Robert Scoble
Smarter, please. I know you all are aren't exactly sitting around with your feet up on the desks over there, but when the non-tech-geeks start making their way here (and I'm confident they'll at least touch the shore) they'll appreciate feeds that better match their interests. When tech and industry geeks sign up makes sense...Scoble and the rest are their guys. However, if someone lands here with a primary interest in cooking they're in trouble. - Jim Stanger
Paul: while you're here, though, I find the recommended friends feature to be pretty useless. I want to look for friends who care about certain topics. Not just the popular ones overall. I totally agree with Jim Stanger on this. - Robert Scoble
Robert, the idea behind the recommender is to make it easy to fill out social groups that you are a member of. For example, my recommended friends are mostly Googlers. In your case, you've subscribed to so many different people that the algorithm probably isn't able to identify any social groups. Recommending based on topic is a good idea too, though for now search is probably the best way to accomplish that. - Paul Buchheit
Paul: thanks for acknowledging this and being committed to updating the logic behind the algorithm which controls the display of "recommended friends". What about ranking those users by a new system: Likes/Comment count + category of interest (new feature). This way a user could designate interest in say, technology or blogging or gourmet food; then they would be presented with the most active users in their preferred categories accordingly. *active user = % participation based on comments, likes, etc - Susan Beebe
Paul: good point about using search, that's increasingly how I'm finding interesting people/conversations here. Yeah, I'm there to break all your algorithms. :-) - Robert Scoble
@Paul, It would be nice if we could define our interests in our profile and then your algorithm could recommend people with common interests. As it stands now, all of the people you recommend to me are uber tech geeks, which is fine, as that interests me, but I would also like to find others with a primary interest in photography for instance, which is my other significant interest. - Jeff P. Henderson
Paul: I'm a great fan of FF, but can i ask for a toggle option for "recommendation", so when i want to quick review my friends without noise i can simply toggle it, and when i have time at my sofa, i'll surely turn it on. What's your take on it ? - Ron Shoshani
FoaF Feed, thats what they can call it! - Steve Follmer
Oh yeah, search works, too. IMHO, then, I'd recommend placing it smack dab in the middle of the screen, right after sign up, for folks that don't have friends using it yet. - Jim Stanger
Something else that would lend a helping hand would be referral link to a registration page. I would provide a special link on my own site for current people paying attention to my work to register. As the referring party, once signed up I'm added as their first friend...someone they already track. Bingo, instant relevant contextual friend! - Jim Stanger
By the way, the "recommended" feature that I'm referring to is this: http://friendfeed.com/settings... (which is also presented during signup). Also, another interesting stat to consider is that Bret has appeared in the "default" list from the very beginning, and yet Scoble has 3 times as many subscribers as he does. Furthermore, I have not been on the list for some time now, but Bret only has about 30% more subscribers than I do (he has always had more). - Paul Buchheit
Whoops. With the recent discussions I'm getting them mixed up. Perhaps time for sleep. Feedback still stands, though. :) Ciao! - Jim Stanger
Jim, that's exactly what the "Subscribe" link on your feed does (if they click on that and then signup, they are immediately subscribed to you). We should probably also make some kind of blog widget or something though. - Paul Buchheit
Oh cool...learned something new. I started out tabula rosa and worked forward that way. - Jim Stanger
It's a hard problem (cold starting recommenders, etc etc). The Friend-of-Friend thing is the obvious way to go, but here's some ideas I've been looking at in a similar system: 1) Geographic similarity - people near each other may know each other. IP loc. can help (2) Place of work - you don't collect this information, but email domain names can help (3) Name similarity. Look for same surname. Obviously privacy implication are important, though, with all ideas. - Nick Lothian
How many of the Feeds on Friendfeed belong to spammers? The conversation is all about numbers of Friend-followers, so that's telling me no spammer is left behind. - paul mooney
like this thread and the way paul is participating - dislike om's post, again perpetuating the "something out of nothing" sour grapes that the video created - some folks should get a life outside of this internet gamesmanshiping :-p - mike "glemak" dunn
@paul It's easy to get stuck in that thinking, that the whole conversation is about talking about talking about the tools. It's frustrating. This thread, though, Scoble -- the guy I rail against as the big enabler -- just reminded me tonight there's lots of gold in the Search bar. And it's true. Go for the gold! ;) - Jim Stanger
"Friendfeed needs to learn from Twitter. Of course, maybe all the want to do is attract attention and sell the company to Google." FriendFeed isn't twitter yet people keep comparing the two. If you're friends with thousands of people on FriendFeed, there is literally no way for it to be useful. Om needs to learn that just because the noisemakers want to compare the two sites doesn't mean they are alike at all.That bit about selling the company made me roll my eyes. - Erica Baker
Paul - just to clarify, my post yesterday was not really about the right panel "recommended" but instead the people who you have selected to present when someone creates an account - these are defaults - Allen Stern
The "default" recommended friends page would be perfect for some Social Graph API goodness. No friends get recommended until you put in some of your own info at which point FriendFeed figures out who your friends are on other sites and recommends them if they're FF users. - Erica Baker
To be honest, I wasn't overly impressed with the article I think people are having to reach further and further to find something they can consider negative about friendfeed. I use friendfeed primarily as a filtered stream of interesting net-stuff. When more of my kith and kin see the light, I'm sure friendfeed will take on a new angle for me. - Slippy Lane
Paul - Great to see you here answering questions. I would suggest Kevin has been more visible this way and that's simply why he has more subscribers. Agree with Mike ... The dialog is more important, in this case, that the original piece. While I'm at it (since you're getting a little bombarded), there is a Friendfeed Feedback room that IS read ,or has been in the past : http://friendfeed.com/rooms/fr... - Charlie Anzman
Paul, my biggest issue with it is that I can't remove them. I get no suggestions other than the push of the "popular" people. Why do I need to see them there AND at the top of every profile page? When Bob Lee released Twubble, I specifically asked for or a "deScobleizer." We all know who they are, and if we wanted to subscribe to them, we would. Yet I can't get any OTHER suggestions unless I accept these. - Cyndy
Odd. I read that piece and while he calls it a flaw Om winds up really being rather neutral on the topic. It's about virality IMO. New users will grok FF far quicker by subscribing to 'high node' users. You'll still subscribe to others and invite friends. Is this the 'silly season' for FF press? - AJ Kohn
AJ, how do you figure? I'm in no way a high-end user of FriendFeed, and even MY participation here is exponentially higher than Mike Arrington's 1133 vs. 17 all-time comments, for example). How will a user grok FF by viewing one more feed of TechCrunch posts? - Cyndy
@Cyndy, at the very least, there should be a "Not interested" or "Show me more" recommendations page past the first nine. How they handle it is up to them. Should people put in their interests first and FriendFeed would figure it out? - Louis Gray
However Bob did it was awesome, and others have done it with a slider. Show me less popular. I don't even need specific interests; I just need options other than digging through pages of my friends' subscriptions because the A-list is always at the top. - Cyndy
+1 Cyndy: Highlight the people who really interact vs. those who are just here for more shameless self promotion. - Erica Baker
@Cyndy: Mike doesn't participate much here on FF, but I'd bet he has quite a few subscribers. So he becomes a high node in the algorithm. BTW - the interest route can only go so far and becomes too narrow IMO. The beauty of the open format is you can expose multiple sides of your life. You can be a tech geek and love art at the same time. Unless FF has each piece of content tagged, the interests are isolated to user input, which is self-limiting. - AJ Kohn
I do agree that once you decline, the list should be re-populated so it doesn't become stale. - AJ Kohn
It's true what Paul says. In the early days of FriendFeed I remember seeing Erica (http://friendfeed.com/ericajoy) once on the Recommended list and she isn't an A-list blogger. (no offense Erica :) ) - Shey
i'm happy with the recommend feature because it jump started this service. it forced recommended people to take notice and participate as they constantly received invites. the community would leap in size again if other "celebs" were recommended as scoble points out above. not sure if you want to break away from algorithm, but if you could get some musicians, politicians, artists, photographers etc.. and recommend as "featured guests, they would receive a bunch of invites and be drawn into the conversation. - Travis Parsons
@Travis: +3 I like the idea of a 'featured guests' as another branch of recommended. Would be a nice way to get writers, musicians, artists, politicians etc. into FF in a more dynamic fashion without breaking the current algo. - AJ Kohn
hey paul, so how hard would it be to make the 'default' list a little bit smarter? seems like you could keep a few big names static, but dynamically suggest others / less well-known folks based on some other logic pretty easy. (anyway, i know you guys likely have a feature request list a mile long...) - dave mcclure
If users were allowed to "rate" some of their friends on a 1-10 basis this could be *very* valuable data in providing better recommendations. These ratings could be non-public info that the algorithm could use to weight recommendations. This could also be a powerful tool towards serving up a new flavor of FF based on weighted relevancy vs. more static likes/comments that produces the "best of" today. - Thomas Hawk
One very easy fix also would simply be to page the recommended list. I agree with a lot of the comments here though. It would especially be interesting to filter the recommended list by the SF Bay Area. - Thomas Hawk
I think people already understand this, but just in case: if you are invited by anyone or connect to Facebook or your address book, you never see the list of globally popular people. You just see the friends recommended based on the people who invited you. Most people come to FriendFeed via invitation. - Bret Taylor
This server has encountered an internal error.
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We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you. - Colby Olson
kinda makes me wonder what the plan is for services that rely on tinyurl (like twitter). in twitter's case, how many of the shared links are pointing to nothing right now? - acedanger
"The phones support maps, music and media sharing like HSDPA browsing, wireless LAN and 3G connectivity, Quad-band GSM 850/900/1800/1900, Bluetooth 2.0, automatic switching between GSM bands and Nokia Mobile Search option.
Both E71 and E66 are integrated with 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, FM radio, music player, assisted GPS (A-GPS), 8 GB external memory, 110 MB internal dynamic memory, mobile VPN support and Nokia Maps for navigation.
The E71 and the E66 will be available in grey and white colours across the country for Rs 22,949 and Rs 23,689 respectively." - Paresh Jain via Bookmarklet
"The Neo FreeRunner will be available in two versions; an 850 MHz model or a 900 MHz tri-band GSM model to match the wireless frequencies in different countries.
The black, oval-shaped handset weighs in at 6.5 ounces and features a 2.8-inch 480 by 640 resolution VGA touch-screen, Wi-Fi connectivity through 802.11 b/g, AGPS, GPRS 2.5G, Bluetooth 2.0 support, two three-axis motion sensors and 128 MB of WSDRAM and 256 MB of NAND Flash memory. OpenMoko's suggested retail price for the Neo FreeRunner is $399." - Paresh Jain via Bookmarklet
"Nobody wimped out, backed down, made excuses, took potty breaks, tried gamesmanship, yelled at the umpire, blamed the camera that calls the lines or whimpered about the three rain delays. They just played, hitting shots like we may never see again, under pressure neither may ever feel again, with stakes the highest they play for in this sport.
And when it was over, when the greatest forehand in the history of the game let Federer down on match point and settled into the net, the five-time king praised the new kid on the throne as a worthy champion and the new kid was properly deferential to the replaced royalty.
Which is not only refreshing, in this era of me-only sports stars and Egos-R-Us pro athletes, but it is how it ought to be.
Think of all the events you have watched recently and try to remember when you saw this great a competition in sports and this much great sportsmanship." - Paresh Jain via Bookmarklet
What this is telling you is that you can easily get noticed in any community simply by participating. "Yes, other factors do matter, but just by participating you’ll build an audience that “the popular kids” can’t get to." - Paresh Jain
Perl is charismatic. Agreed that much of legacy code is in Perl because there were no comparable alternative. But it is a language with HUGE resources available in the developer community and is charming in its eclectic way. I am sure you'll love it. - Paresh Jain
