Gerard van Schip - Comments

auto-follow always seemed like a bad idea. people can always msg you but your stream will get totally cluttered if you dont do a little bit of housekeeping. - William Kapes

"baby I'm a star" -Prince (off purple rain) - Michael J. Carrasquillo

novel approach, seems sound - Danny Ayers

Consider me available for following. :-) - Eric D. Wilson

Okay, I'll bite.. - Tanya

Bring it Scobleizer. - Todd Pringle

I agree, Twitter is much better this way. - Ryan W

I appreciate your work, and your passion for social media. - Evan Travers

sounds simple... - Mateo Yadarola

Scoble follow me baby - Jadito

Oh you are getting quite a response here!!!! I'm commenting so you'll follow me but the thing is you're going to LIKE following me because you'll learn all about Sedona through tons of videos and you'll love it so much you'll want to pack your camera and head out here! =) - SedonaTV

Thanks for the mentions, Robert (and you know I'm not commenting just for the follow - I just like to follow you, which is what counts!) - Jesse Stay

Guess I might as well delete that overpriced twitter app I bought last week. - Shea from iPhone

Actually Robert, now I've seen you've tidied up your twitter, I'll probably follow you there again too. :-) - Tim

hey follow me scoble - Andy Jenks

Meh, who cares really, not like you read everyone you followed. Plus unfollowed you anyways, not like you have to say that's interestined except friendfeed spam. - Steve

joining the crowd - good move Robert. - Adam

follow me - Tai Hsia

welcome to Boulder - Andrew Hyde

@scobleizer just created the most important tech follow list on Twitter. - Christian Anderson

aww shucks, and here I was thinking it was just me who you unfollowed. - Jess Sloss

I underwent the same situation, Robert - I unfollowed almost everybody on Twitter who duplicated their accounts here on FrF. I got a tempest of fury for this action. web3 is too personal still )) - massagin

Scoble in Boulder = Trouble. - Jim Halligan @jim

I feel fortunate that you're still subbed to me on FF. I haven't even noticed whether you unfollowed me on Twitter. But you following me, still hasn't gotten me the chicks. :P Always fun seeing your posts, long as you don't block me, it doesn't matter if you follow me or not. :) - Arlan Koizumi

I did the same thing some weeks ago after avoiding twitter because it got too noisy. It was instantly better. But in the mean time I started to use FF more and I like it better here so I hardly go near twitter now. - Murray Barton

You already follow me here on ff, which i use more than twitter. - dthree

What's up? - Kevin Whalen from iPhone

Hey Robert, so for following >1,600 is it that right way taken by Philtro and Filttr? - Martin Adamek

I'm glad you mentioned Loic, he caught a lot of flack for doing this earlier. - Steven Cains

Hey Robert - fight the tweetspam ! - Michael Neale

Don't think you are following me on Twitter anymore..please do and best regards - Karma Martell

I'm still trying to figure out the following... so I'm watching how you do it scoble. - Matthew Schrock

Good plan. I'm looking forward to your results. I'm trying to figure out all these social media elements. I would appreciate your Twitter follow. - David Stanley

hope this new approach works for you! - timepilot

Oh, so now you are only easy on FF. - James Watters

Odd internal response, I don't follow everyone who follows me cuz of the very noise you talk about. And, there's no good reason for you to follow me since I'm unlikely to deliver news of interest to you. And yet, here I am, posting on FriendFeed so you have the OPTION of following me, a stranger who is not the same kind of SMART as you. Who'd have thought... - Della Mauler

Interesting statement about original content value of FF independent of twitter. Twitter is where you keep your noise level down... - James Watters

This seems like asking for trouble to me, Scoble. But, it's your time and bandwith to do with what you will. Since only a handful of people (by that I think I mean just one) follow me on Twitter, it's pretty easy for me to weed out the bots. The people I follow are my internet nerds (mostly the Rev 3 crew) so I know their interests are in line with mine. Hit me up for some edifying conversations about Lost and video games, Robert. - Jeremiah Green

Here you go Robert! [also via twitter: @Scobleizer Therefore: only approx. 1.7 million "active" human @Twitter users contribute 50%+ of all activity, right? #engagement] Regards, @AAinslie - Alexander Ainslie

The green avatar is so disturbing mate. :) - Jordan Windebank

I'll lead, you follow. So where are we going? - Tom Sheppard

I was sad to see you unfollowed me, but now you may follow me again, so all will be well in the world. - Jodi

following the leader... - John Munro

You're still following me - does that mean I'm a smart feller? ;) - Brett Kelly

so glad I mail Robert a business card every month :) - Christian Anderson

Della: the thing is here I can follow you and put you into a list and watch you less frequently than some of my other people. So everyone wins. But only here on FriendFeed. :-) - Robert Scoble

Some of us have been doing this from our start. Kind of cool, eh? But our numbers don't grow quickly so we were tagged as "slow." Nice to see you catch up with us! Also, this may shock you, there sre folks who follow and communicate with only 3 folks on twitter and they are HAPPY! Imagine.... - lynda spangler

Yay. Now he will follow a librarian. - Joe

Follow this dot!!! . - Bwana ☠

I've long thought the entire Twitter "etiquette" of always following who follows you to be a bit of a folly. I'm following 114 at the moment, and the stream still moves too fast for me to keep up with. - Darren Landrum

Comment! - anna sauce

ok - Vasu Srinivasan

Good test, count me in... I don't follow tons of people, I follow a few prolific Scoble-types and the rest are more focused in areas I'm interested in. - David Ziembicki

I'm not following tons of people, just a select few. More to follow on FB when facebook has completely integrated Friendfeed-funcionality. ;-) - Wolfgang G. Wettach

I only follow people I know or have something interesting to say, did you really have 160000 people that said something worthwhile??? - Gerard van Schip

Well I commented via your Blog so instead of repeating myself I'll link to comment http://disq.us/1ms9 - Keith - @tsudo

Gerard: everyone says something worthwhile once in a while. The trick is to see it when it happens. Here on FriendFeed, by the way, you have a better shot because good stuff usually gets liked and commented on, so it pulls up higher into my view. - Robert Scoble

come join us here folks http://ff.im/6dUHN xxx - Mark

Okay. But will you read and comment on my stuff? - Mellissa Claus

Robert, I posted this after Loic's decision and it looks like it will need another update. http://www.knowthenetwork.com/blog... I think there is value in stating your follow policy. - Keith - @tsudo

cool - Zach Cheatham

Hello? - Vicky

following all the discussion of you unfollowing everyone on twitter has made me think about doing the same thing and starting fresh. - (jeff)isageek

not unless we beat you in the Ashes - Mark

Nice post Robert, and no surprise it's an improvement. ;o) I have seen it for me too. - Rob Sellen :o)

1 thing I find Robert still worth following @Scobleizer when I am not on friendfeed & on my Hootsuite or PeopleBrowsr. therefore not much affected, not much 2 bother me, ego not gone at all. luv your post Robert it is a frank posting - polou/indigo_bow

Follow me Robert, I promise I'm not annoying. :) @cluteman - Greg Clute from iPhone

You've piqued my curiosity. - Kathy

Robert, thank you! I follow you and enjoy your "likes" and your energetic takes. I also enjoy your Building43 interviews! I am a constant FriendFeed user now. Thank you! - Tobin Truog

This made me realise I must be more active on FF and comment/post more :-). - Mats Pettersson

I think I'll give FriendFeed a go! Never tried it, but looks easy and I need to understand the interwebs better. @CodeSamurai_Com - CodeSamurai

butt-kissing is not a prerequisite for being followed, he will follow you anyways :D - Mark

Count me in! (Please??) - Ricky Maveety

lol @mark. ;o) - Rob Sellen :o)

You can follow me, but since you follow a lot of people, you probably can't pay attention to the stream of tweets. - Alex Knight

Alex..that's the WHOLE point he did this... ;o) - Rob Sellen :o)

IMHO 1,647 is still way too many people to follow. - Alex Knight

I will NOT get baited into ... ah CRAP. I follow very few people on twitter, mainly only to find info from Android developers (my topic of choice). If you mention anything about the food you are currently eating, etc.. you will probably not be followed. If you post 80,000 times a day, you will not be followed, since Twitters interface sucks (not so for FF). Also, no offense to other social users, but if you resend your FF/FB/<insert other social site here> entries to twitter, I probably won't follow. - Tim Hoeck

http://socialspark.com/blogs... Chris Pirillo is Scum. - Mark

good move IMO - Joanna Nicol

Love the post, love the response. - Chris Rogers from BuddyFeed

nice hanging out at with beach w/ you last week! follow moi!!! - Raina Lee

I always feel like scoble's following me - Rodney J Woodruff from iPhone

Don't forget your Dunbar number, Scoble! There are only so many people you can have meaningfully connect with online. - Steve Lynch from twhirl

Mark is right. No butt kissing. Ew. - Robert Scoble

"I always feel like, somebody's watching me..." - Wizetux

Comment!!!! Ohh wait but you already follow me... - Amit Nangare

Follow me, if you aren't already....please. Thanks, - Steve de Mena

here is my comment ZOL - Shane Gibson

Comment? What kind of coomment, Robert? :-) - Mitch Featherston

Whoop there it is! On Twitter @jimgoldstein - Jim Goldstein from iPhone

Oh..Oh... Mr. Kotter...Mr Kotter..follow me! - Scott Booher

Glad to see you're writing more than 140 characters on that blog. Doesn't that feel liberating? Maybe we should be allowed character# based on your metric for powerful/smart/newsmaker - Noah Bloom

You already follow me here on FF, for which I thank you. So, I'll just say thanks for the phone call the other day. :) - Jeff Harbert

I'll take a follow! - Jeff Weber

@shaunhess - Shaun Hess

Ok, so follow me again and I will follow you back. Thanks! - Audrey

Robert - I fail on most of your criteria so I'm not expecting you to follow me. The thing is I don't care if you follow me back - this is social media and everyone has their own choice. I choose to follow you because you entertain and inform me. The relationship is 100% one way and I am more than happy with that! - Pon

Robert - Last night at GDGT Party the person at the Blackberry booth said: 1) She had 'heard of Twitter, never friend feed' uses neither 2) Is SCOBLE is coming tonight 3) Wow, your Blackberry is really "archaic" and find out when contract lets you upgrade. F-D UP? Booth babes need primers. - Liza

Interesting theory... people who comment more apt to contribute? - Mark Philpot

I know someone else who tried this strategy last year, with similar results. I've been debating it. Once I got over 3K followers on Twitter life just got weird. Started to spend X amount of time every day blocking porn spam. - Patricia F. Anderson

Liza: yeah, sorry for not coming to the party. I went and saw Obama's CTO instead. - Robert Scoble

Steve Lynch: my Dunbar number is higher than yours is. :-) - Robert Scoble

Nice summary Robert on the whole Unfollow thing, but would it be too repetitive if I re-post on my FF? - Keith Rowland

What is the best friend feed aggregation strategy of non-friend streams (eg RSS, twitter, etc)? Imaginary friend per service, then add to lists? Multiple services per imaginary friend or 1 to 1? Or add the services to a group? What are the considerations? - John Brown

Keith: you can repost anywhere you like, thanks! - Robert Scoble

I'm in! - Craig Shipp

still wondering how you are able to handle such a big load of subscribers here and e.g. so many followers with twitter o_0. I am already (sometimes) lost with the few i got till now. Lately with one sweep almost 40 to 50 contacts in twitter disappeard and i have no clue why ... boah, how are you handling the noise? Hell, with so many ppl in, you might have a terrific noise? Or you wear just good headphones ;)? - Ronald

I very much agree that being choosy is the key to Twitter. I'm not nearly on the scale that you are, but in my experience, freely following people (whetther they follow me or not) and then mercilessly cutting back on them over and over again results in a kind of darwinianly better and better signal to noise ratio. - Tim Maly

Touche! - Steve Lynch from twhirl

Count me in - Johnny

Hi Robert - Randy Allen Bishop

Liked the blog post and totally agree. I've been meaning to do something similar. What I do is occasionally prune and then add some "better" replacements, so my total is always 2000 follows. - Bora Zivkovic

I don't see how anyone can manage so many users without groups. Then again, with groups you could just make an "ignore" group. - Oscar M. Cantu from iPhone

Great blog post. I totally agree on the noise level. I figure I have blocked a few hundred accounts on Twitter, and my noise level has dropped dramatically. Thanks for the follow! - Tony "Frosty" Welch

Hello Hello! - Sam Goldfield

Robert - I figured you were in DC from FF, but she had NO IDEA what a CTO is. Point is, she was eager to give you a Blackberry, but not me, and I wish I had a Scoble costume to pretend for 5 minutes. - Liza

@Robert I think you are starting another mass follow again. - Steve Chou from fftogo

Steve: that's not the problem. As long as spam doesn't enter the system I can deal. Keep in mind here I can choose how I follow. I can put you all in a folder that I never look at, if I wanted to. - Robert Scoble

my feelings were hurt that you unsubscribed to me on twitter, but i agree with your methods - Brian Appleby

I'm in! - Chris Rossini

Brian, yeah, but I follow you here. So there. - Robert Scoble

really doesn't matter as long as i can follow you, that's the beauty of these services - Brian Appleby

How did you come to follow so many to begin with? I get annoyed with ppl and unfollowing is easier than sifting through their garbage constantly. - R1CC1

Autofollow was a horrible idea to begin with. - David Chieng

I kind of tired to keep an eye on who follows me now,the ones I'm following is much more important.:-) - Steve Chou from fftogo

Whoa lots of comments I'm following you longtime lol - Edgar Rodríguez from iPhone

Robert: we need more intelligent spam-follower-filtering on Twitter! We need to fix this. - Steve Lynch from twhirl

@David +1 I think auto follow is such a bad idea to begin with,and people like Robert now even need to pay to unfollow these people. - Steve Chou from IM

How much did SocialToo charge for running the unfollow script? - Shane

I'm in! - rich brant from iPhone

I heard its 25 dollars. - Steve Chou from IM

I've always been very picky in who I follow on twitter. I follow 40 people, and I can't guarantee that I see every single tweet. I don't scroll back usually, unless it's my "Real Life" column in Tweetdeck that couldn't fit on my screen. - Tom Ribbens

My birthday is also January 18th, therefore you must follow me Robert! ;) - Chris Luckhardt from BuddyFeed

Thanks Steve! $25 is pretty reasonable. Wonder if anyone else will be jumping on the bandwagon - Shane

Haha....I also threw the devil horns for Scobleizer...that should count for something. ;) http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Chris Luckhardt from BuddyFeed

OK, let's try it! And what about Twitter? - Alexei Zheglov

Thanks for your post. Last time I checked you follow me here on FriendFeed. OK not to follow me on Twitter. - Pilgrim Five

Smart way to clean house. - Jeremy Chone

u have already subscribing me although i am just a-staying-at-home mum =)). thanx scoble. u are really a nice geek. haha! - zʍıɔ

Let's do it. - Kate

this is like an awesome commentfest - Edgar Rodríguez

You can follow me, but I never say anything. Oh.. wait.... - James Macgill

follow me! - Tate DA FF MVP from BuddyFeed

Sometimes the tortoise beats the hare after all... building organically based on getting to know people and interactions tends to avoid the ghastly spammers, seo peeps and bots - Sally Church

Tap, tap... is this thing on? - Yanik Falardeau

This is the best place to follow you. On twitter you only see post headlines, but friendfeed is where the conversation takes place. - Michael Fidler

Ah crap. You're already following me :) - Jason Nunnelley

I'm outside your sphere, but bootstrapping is bootstrapping right? - Travis Bedard

Tuesday night for the first time in 2 months I UNfollowed everyone on Twitter who wasn't following me. Since you had UNfollowed me, yup I unfollowed you. My Twitter account is so /FUBARed! It only goes to page 506 to show who I'm following and after that it is BLANK! I don't even know if they show in my Home stream. So Robert, I value what you say. Know I can tweet profusely - but it's as @replies to others with the occasional micro-blog thrown in. Question, what DID I do to cause you to UNfollow me? - Arleen Anderson

I hope you'll follow me... - Shane Tilton

Follow me, eh? - Joey Gibson

Trying to fill out those dropped Twitter follows? - Jamie Elgie

Scoble: Have you convinced Guy Kawasaki against his "follow everyone that follows you" mentality? - Kevin Pruett

please do what you must to have the most effecient feed mr scoble, the random will still creep through the cracks, ;) - chaz2b

I still haven't really adopted FriendFeed, but I will get interesting here in time if you follow me. - Lance M. Brown

How are your cleanup efforts coming along? - Jennifer Ruggiero

Oops - I also meant to ask, Robert: how are you managing to follow the couple thousand that you are now re-following on Twitter? You must be using groups, I guess...any other methods? I find ~500 people to be a near max in terms of how many folks I can fully read. - Lance M. Brown

Following your inspiration, I unfollowed almost 100 people last night and blocked about 1000 spammers, cam girls, MLM marketers, and the like. Twitter is more like it was a year ago, its almost like I gave my Twitter account an enema and it worked. Thanks for the original idea. - Mark Edwards

Excellent! - Don Strickland

Robert, I started out only following those I know and those I am genuinely interested in. I've only followed back a few of the people who've followed me. I have a second account that I decided to experiment with. I followed about 700 people on there. It has had about double the followers of my main account consistently. I am about to try some new tricks there with an auto-follow script I'm writing but I think I will stay the course with my main account. - Paul The Raven

Robert, I tried the "follow everyone" (almost) method for a short time - then I'd unfollow about once-a-week. Now I try to schedule a "follow new" once a week. TweetDeck's group feature makes following lots of folks bearable. So does FF, but you've been saying that for-ever! - Kathy E Gill

I am just taking it slow. - Rick Cogley from iPhone

Hey. - Kreg Steppe

I will follow you if you follow me (Genesis) - Keith Barrett

I may not be smart, but I'm smart enough to follow you! - John Pfaff

It occurred to me (and surely to someone before me), that different definitions of "following" might be a big factor here. If I'm following someone, it means I'm following along with their updates. But others might see themselves more as becoming part of a person's "following". Not that they are necessarily reading the person's stuff, but they are willing to be considered part of that person's inflated Twitter posse, as part of the influence-trading aspect of Twitter. - Lance M. Brown

Robert, I think that the biggest thing that changed is not that you were "wrong" (to follow everyone) before but that the Twitter population has changed so much. A year ago, pretty much everyone on Twitter was real, and interesting - now there's so much automated gaming the system going on that the signal to noise ratio has gotten unbearable. So I think anyone who cares about more than... more... - Matthew Blaisdell

I can't imagine how it would happen technologically, but it would be great if there was a way to ditch followers who weren't actually reading your tweets. - Lance M. Brown

Enjoyed recent posts and look forward to more from you! Keep it up. - One Degree Connected

I don't want to be left out please!! - Jannifer @wordsforliving

All right, I'll bite :) - although I'll say that I did the mass-unfollow-thing months ago - long before it was cool. - Justin from Nambu

Your most active followers are on FF. No loss.If you really wanted to make a bold statement you ought to have blocked all of your followers and started from scratch. - Benjamin Taylor

Been a while since I put you and Shel On the record...Online - Eric Schwartzman

blah. - imabonehead

Good article Robert. I honestly enjoyed the perspective. I found the same to be true, but on a much lower scale, of course ;-) - Ken Stewart | ChangeForge

i'm in! - Criz

I don't get it - so now you are using Twitter kinda like a normal person, and its some kind of miracle that it works better? - Nick Lothian

I'm impressed you can keep up with 1600 people. I have trouble enough with the little amount I have. I did find that making FriendFeed imaginary friends and putting them in groups for those I'd like to read occasionally (but not on a regular basis) has helped a lot - Tamara

Follow....how about some promotion! - Bob DeMarco

i'm in - Joshua Smith from twhirl

9/11 Was an Inside Job - bill giltner

Stop it, or I will have to get a restraining order. - Sriks7

Hey, Robert! - tomit from iPhone

In my mind I'm important enough to follow ;-) - Jonathan Callahan

Hello Robert....Whatever your favorite genre is...http://listen.grooveshark.com/#... - Michele Lorito-Chase

Looks like you have a lot of work to do following everybody. - Corbett Barr

now i'll have to write something interesting... - Robert Littlejohn

me! i offer nothing but the warm feeling of having accepted a ff reject. - Marco

ok. so how will you filter the noise now - Kfir Pravda

Ooo, I've won the lottery. You'll follow me now. Wheeee! (how do you have the time to go through all of the names by hand? VA assistance?) - Peggy Dolane

Great :) - Baard @ Pixum

Interesting trend on twitter - I always wondered what sense it made to follow tens of thousands of people, too much noise. I'm finding it hard enough to follow 2900 (looking to cull even that down as I mostly tweet about 30 people!) - Tia Singh, Life Coach

211th comment: WTF - Geer

Good :) - ★ Soner Gönül

I like your ability to influence so many people. I'm following you (mostly here - on FriendFeed) because it's one of the ways to learn how you do it (but, please, do not follow me if you do not see anything you could learn from me :-). - Hanna Wiszniewska

I would come up w/ a better vetting process. - Joe

why would you do that? - james

got to get a pic up so i can fit the criteria, I only follow 45 people and some of them are on thin ice ( Im lookin at you Scoble) - James Hunter

"Where in The Net is Robert San Diego?" (cit.) :-) - Luca Perugini from iPhone

I'm not kissing your arse,but i do learn a lot listening to you. - Paul Downing

@scobleizer why would you randomly follow people who comment in this post when you just got done knocking FFollo and having to unfollow a gazillion people on Twitter? - Bryan Zirkel

Bryan: because I'm following people one by one and putting them into lists on my screen. Autofollowing means you aren't doing ANY of that thinking. Also, autofollowing will get you spammers, if they ever show up (and they will). - Robert Scoble

@Robert: Read your blogpost and that's indeed what I look at to follow people too. No autofollow and even close friends have to tell something interesting for me to (keep) following. Friends who are new to Twitter (no tweets yet) get the benefit of doubt. - Patrick Mackaaij

If you follow me, great, but if you don't I'll understand. :) And I ought to do some pruning myself... - Grant Bierman

Let's give it a try. :0) - Toma Kazakov

I still don't understand how you want to follow someone who just writes a comment over here. Well, this is not the first time. I did not understand why and how you followed 100k people. I find it hard to properly follow 100 people. - Sumanth Kolar

Sumanth: obviously there are degrees of "following." When you read the New York Times, do you read the entire paper word for word? I don't. Same when I'm following. I only get random slices of some of my lists. Others, which have 500 people on them, get 100% read. - Robert Scoble

I'm still here . . . although tired after teaching all day. Louis Gray came to my PR class at SFSU and WOWED the 50 students [except for one who thinks we are making too much of social media] We won't be following him. - Shari Weiss

I like cheese! - Paul Puri

really? - clockwise from iPhone

Shari: Louis wows me too. Glad to see the class is getting into it. - Robert Scoble

He he :) - Richard Holas

I still like the "stranger stream" of Twitter vs "friend feed" of other applications. I don't feel the need to read all tweets from everybody - and tools let me check my fave tweeples. I think mass unfollowing destroys some of the social contract - Robert you are lucky because you are well liked and can do some risky things but companies for example (not Brands of One) would be in... more... - Laurel Papworth

As @charleneli predicted back in January, 2009 will be the year of de-friending on social networks. It's here. - Mark Evans

Laurel: yeah, you have to navigate these waters carefully if you are representing a brand, that's for sure! - Robert Scoble

you can put me on your boring list... - Charles Tanton

i will not get followed back: not powerful, don't have a brand, not a news maker... but i kinda understand the reasons - Dani Martínez

I still think it all goes into how you use twitter. If your using it as a communication tool it depends on if you are looking for broadcast or 2 way. Its interesting to watch as some of the bigger names turn back from the broadcast and go back to the 2 way. - Luke Kilpatrick

@Robert so when you're taking in information from FF do you have a feed of several dozen/hundred "key" people and then categorize the rest, or are you mainly searching? Do you utilize groups at all or mainly just rely on what comes across your feeds? I guess I'm curious as to how you're using FF to collect information. - Bryan Zirkel

I have found Twitter becomes noise rather than a conversation once the following/follower thing gets over a certain mark. I think this is the dirty little secret of Twitter - if it just turns into white noise, rather than a filter, then it becomes less than useful. - Michael Liss

I'm interested in how we'll all feel over the next few years as social networks continue to change and more people and organizations get on them. Obviously, many of us are getting fed up with spammers and are unfollowing them on Twitter and Facebook. I am also having a hard time keeping up with new subscribers on FriendFeed because I know less about them from their profiles and have to... more... - Cathryn Hrudicka

BTW, I feel like I'm finding lots of interesting new people to follow from these discussions that Robert and others are holding on FF. Cool! - Cathryn Hrudicka

Am I too late to comment and get followed? - Hichame Assi

I'm definitely around :) - KyNam Doan

Aren't you following me already? If not, you should be! LoL - Thomas Ward

I'm definitely late to be followed. :D - Faraz Mullick

I don't get it but ok :) - Parvez Halim

LOL! I follow those I find interesting and which can give me useful information. And hope someone follows me for the same reasons. - Flavio

Very interesting post - I've always thought that you guys who follow loads of people must get completely swamped by noise! Like you, I've found it useful to follow companies I use that have interesting products like Zoho and Evernote as a way of keeping up to date with their latest innovations. Excellent idea spelling out your "follow criteria" - it needs to become standard etiquette for social networks so that people don't get offended when they aren't followed back :) . - David Meredith

aren't you doing the same thing here, that you did in Twitter? Choose carefully who you follow, filling your brain with pollution doesn't make you smarter - Allison

Just finished reading the Mashable post on your unfollow exercise. It's attracting attention from all the other big names now. - George Hall (Australia)

Very interesting indeed, I only to unfollow a few, cause I just never had auto follow on.. So now I just unfollow the ones I'm bored of.. - Jaap Willem

Seems like a good idea. Although Louis Gray also has a few valid points on his latest blog post why it might be a mistake http://bit.ly/19UKxk - Silver Hage

I've never understood the auto-follow procedure on any social network. Even on Facebook, where it is obligatory, one can still lower the noise by simply hiding the updates of those who want to follow you, but perhaps also have little personal connection and therefore can be hidden. - Noah Gray

It seems like the unfollowing was the easy part. Choosing who to follow again must have been a chore. I think it is crucial in twitter (and FriendFeed for that matter) to have a clear out every six months or so otherwise you get bogged down in an information feed you don't really care about. - Chris Nixon

I can totally understand why you had to do this. I'm following 2700-ish folks on Twitter and I need 3 groups to manage it (using TweetDeck). I feel I am keeping up with most of my local community and the general tech community at large though I'm sure I'm still missing quite a bit of stuff from people who are not in the 3 groups. I also wonder how much more I can actually handle. - Ken Seto

Um... well, I made something of myself, but then I didn't like what I made, so now I'm doing it all over again. Not sure how that fits with your criteria! Plus, I really don't have a brand or any influence to speak of. I do look great in boxers, however. - Mark "DerBingle" J

OK, OK, changed my picture. Instead of a green clock (a clock is my personal brand) I put a picture of myself. A lot of people told me to do that.... - Bora Zivkovic

I am still looking for info on holographic technology being used for news delivery. Perhaps it's a technology that hasn't even been invented yet or is sitting on a shelf somewhere. What say you? http://specialdee.wordpress.com/2009... - Denise

Hoping your new look account has had the desired effect. No need to follow me, I'm not the interesting type, I'll just be glad if your insights, links & content continues. Congrats & good luck - JanLawrence

Here's what's interesting, Robert, I've noticed an uptick in followers even if you reply or RT or like someone's tweet, not just if you follow that person. Then again, perhaps that's the intent - if you like or RT someone's idea, that's a kind of stamp of approval. - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Hej hej! - Peter

The Scoble Pendulum.. How long till we go back to FOLLOW!! FOLLOW!!! FOLLOW!!!! ? :) - Adrian Scicluna

I did a purge on Facebook for the same reasons a few months ago. It's under 300 and it's people I actually care about. I've come "this close" to running a purge on Twitter but haven't yet. Maybe this will spark me to do it. I've kept FF tight from the beginning. - Rob Williams

moving from FB to FF ... fewer, longer, more meaningful threads. welcoming your follow. cheers - marc calamia

ok, you´re following me already :-) - Torsten Eckert

alright - follow me... - thx in advance Robert Scoble... - Nilesh

All that commenting in the past counts for nothing? - Kevin Gamble

Hey Robert... Great post... On FriendFeed, I increasingly put people without meaningful and valuable content on a separate feed that I rarely check... Its a more "sensible" way to unfollow, i think... I only unsubscribe if I get pissed at someone etc. I wish, FF gave users the option to only unsubscribe from comments and likes (but keep the main feed). This would be a good tool to control the noise... - Onur Kabadayi

I agree with Robert (duh!). I very briefly made the effort of checking out the new follows and deciding whether to follow back. I think once I hit a thousand I shifted to a model of occasionally saying, "If you want me to follow you, talk to me." Hit two thousand and quit saying anything or checking followers. I don't care if they follow me as long as they either say useful things like real people or don't talk at all. I've never autofollowed back. This strategy works for me. - Patricia F. Anderson

I have a large difference between people I follow (around 2000) and people who follow me (around 1800) - I choose people who are important sources of information. People choose me if they think I am an important source of information to them. I never thought it would have to be a one-to-one relationship as to who is useful to whom: some are informative, others are good listeners and learners. I learn from people I follow and I hope my followers learn from me. - Bora Zivkovic

I also think that those of us who follow larger numbers of people don't use the stream in the same way. It is more dipping in and out of the stream, trusting that the important stuff will be repeated enough to float to the top, engaging with conversations of the moment. I wrote a blogpost on this earlier this year: http://etechlib.wordpress.com/2009... - Patricia F. Anderson

Someone told me twitter can be separated into two types. (id say at least two) - Kay Proskin

Scoble, I am beginning to think you are a cult leader :). Look at all these comments! I am using FF more and more these days... Useful for eGuiders.com that's for sure. - Marc Ostrick

I'm not sure your following me. - Amit Morson

Hey Scobie :D Follow me ! - paniaguai

I like Robert. He was one of the first people I followed on Twitter and brought me to FF. But I don't understand why people are desperate to have him follow them. Status? Some kind of virtual autograph? - Tech Introvert

What the heck. Follow me if you like. I'll be as entertaining & informative as I can. - Aaron Schaub from iPod

Been considering doing the same. Your post just might be the flame that lights a fire you-know-where to get it done. - @katebuckjr

I only follow a few people and keep losing track so lord only knows how you managed to even begin to keep track of a conversation before friendfeed came along - Iain from BuddyFeed

Well done! Who need followers that aren't reading your tweets anyway. - Sean Rasmussen

I just want a toaster! - ZuDfunck

I'm considering doing same once I'm more confident in my use of FriendFeed. I RT'd this and it resonated with at least one of my followers. - Tony Hollingsworth

'Hand-crafted personal network' is the meme of the moment, and whilst I can see the workmanship, where's the value going to be for you, Robert, in following this rag-tag (no offence people :) ) of folks from a gazillion different verticals. (OK, so they're mostly life scientists). - Andrew Spong

I use to want to be Bob Dylan. Now I am not so sure. - ZuDfunck

um..... - Spencer

My take: you can't be an authentic, credible voice to your community if you let 'sex & dollars' spammers hang on to your coattails. Spam followers matter.... in a bad way. Allowing them to be associated with you diminishes your potential value to genuine followers. It's a pain. It takes time. It's worth doing. More on this, if interested: http://tr.im/vJwb - Andrew Spong

I'll have mine to go. - ZuDfunck

Hope to see more "old fashioned blogging", like it better than tweets. Tweets are bound to disappear into oblivion the moment they're posted. - Willem (@wim66) ☠

"Spam followers matter.... in a bad way." - I certainly agree with this. I block pornbots just as quickly as they follow me. I'm less vigilant about the commercial follows, but usually they go away by themselves after a while. - John Craft

You're already following me here (don't care about twitter tough), so i just hope you don't un-follow, even though you probably don't understand what i'm talking about most of the time, since it's in portuguese. - Diego Sana

So what happened to the advantages to following so many people you always talked about? - Bas

Thanks for connecting here, still learning all the advantages of FF - carece

@Andrew Regarding spam followers and the idea that allowing them to follow you somehow dilutes your credibility, I just have to disagree. To me that places the burden on the wrong person. I don't have time to waste pruning those who follow me, unless they are overtly annoying.My stream is public, they can follow me anyway. What matters to me is that the spammers leave me alone. If they don't, I block them. If they keep quiet, I don't care. - Patricia F. Anderson

What is important is not who follows me, but who *I* follow. - Patricia F. Anderson

Follow me if you want, but I gotta warn ya, it's scintillating stuff! - Pierce Presley

Funny my twitter feed is much noisier but I have been very selective on who I follow. I have tried to make the feed relevant and actionable. At times I post things that seem out of the norm on my twitter feed but that is mainly for the few people who follow me that don't get it but I am trying to keep up their interest level. I also control who follows me, yes this breaks the model but I think the follow everyone model was broken and reckless - Richard Gallo

Am I interesting? Dunno. I'm often controversial, tho. ;) BTW, we met in person at a Pittsburgh Blogfest, but I really don't expect you to remember that. - Eric Williams

Enjoyed the post. I just started Twitter a few days ago to get away from Facebook. I like friendfeed the best - can't wait until it becomes more mainstream. - Robby Parker

Awesome move. Consider that my comment please :) - Charlotte Barker

friendfeed is definitively more evolved that Twitter. Conversely, user bases of Twitter is still its real (and unique) point of strenght... - Marco Castellani

Don't want you to follow me (unless you find my stream of interest) but it's quite interesting the number of people that comment to get you to follow! - Ben Drury

Hey Robert! So, I would like to talk to you about a social media company I'm working with right now. They launched a few months ago and their trajectory and momentum is pretty amazing. Oh, and I started unfollowing the noise in my Twitter after I commented on your blog post. - Gregg Le Blanc

Great ideas. I've been selective (though it fluctuates) about following people/accounts on Twitter since I joined about 2 years ago. I can't take too much noise. - Joe Lance from twhirl

I'm asking the same thing Bas asked... what about your video on the benefits of following so many people? I took a stab at that method of madness by starting to follow all kinds of people, and following anyone that followed me... but I always felt like I was missing good content from good people because of all the "spam". I started to use TweetDeck to create groups/columns for... more... - Timothy Federwitz

@Patricia - reminds me that I should probably review all my twitter followers and thin things down. :) - JA Castillo

thanks - Keith

I like conversing with interesting people. Sometimes that means commenting to get followed, @cogiva. ;) - Eric Williams

Hi Scoble! - Pete Gilbert

I did almost the same thing - unfollowed about 1000 from my 1500, no attention is way better - Maarten den Braber

Couldn't agree more. It's about time we all grew up. BTW Don't follow me. :-) - Gee Ranasinha

Robert what's the deal with Twitter? - stockmanmarc

Your post makes good sense. I didn't auto-follow & still find folks to unfollow because their noise gets too loud. - Debra Ellis

Very clever. I imagine the signal to noise is sooooo much better. - Chris Brogan

I've been thinking about unfollowing a bunch twitter folks as well. I'll look at SocialToo again. My initial experience with SocialToo wasn't good. However, it was during their infancy. - Ron Hudson

I don't blame you at all. Leo was all over that yesterday. - Daniel B. Honigman

why would simply leaving a comment prompt you to follow me? - David Wescott

You're not going to change your mind and mass unfollow us are you? - walidmREALTOR

Sup! :-) - Jon Winters

I suspect it identifies you as a real person interested in dialog, David. - Eric Williams

Followers are currency and you have plenty to spend - Lee Odden

Bob, did you do anything on Twitter recently ? Did you massively refollow people ? Seems like you screwed up Twitter : down for a while... ;-) - Enikao

Follow me! @carloscomputers - carloscomputers

very cool timing with just before twitter goes down hard! well done Robert! @crbrowning - Colin

@davidorban - David Orban

I've followed you and have really enjoyed your posts. I think I would miss that - Tom

Good to hear that your experiment has stopped the spam @lindsaydavies - Lindsay Davies

ciao Robert! - alex

Your ego is amazing. You make it seem like it is a special deal to be followed by you. I'm glad there are many very bright, talented people here who follow others, regardless of class, education, social status and not based on some snobbish criteria. - RuthNH

DON'T follow me! I write in Italian :-) - Lorenzo Strambi

Here I be - Robert

Wow, this is a lot of comments. And kudos for following Followable people who have something interesting to contribute to your day. I'm glad you did it, because that means you'll find AND share more interesting things. This, in turn, makes you more followable too. Thanks for seeing the light, so to speak. - ax0n

You killed twitter. - Melissa Pierce

and now with twitter down, many will flock to here! - Mark V. Fusco

I love rob - Mark from iPhone

Did this take down Twitter this morning Robert? - frank barry

That must of taken a long time :-) I've always been a fan of twitter, but I must say they have struggled in the last few weeks. We are working with their API on a project and their seems to be an issue every other day that causes problems. Do they have what it takes? - Chris Nadeau

I follow under 200 people and it's great. I can't imagine 1k+ . I add about three or four a month. - Mike Janicke

I unfollow people when I find I ignore their tweets/updates. After reading your blog, I think we ALL need to be more judicious. - Janet Barker-Evans

Is this why Twitter is down? LOL! Can't check to see if you unfollowed me. Hope not. You, Shel Israel, and Jeremiah Owyang were some of the very first people I followed way back before Twitter even had 100,000 people on the service. -- It's been a fun ride but, of course, the spammers always show up to make things difficult. - Brenda Young

How do you really know if you should be following someone until you follow them for a while? Sometimes I don't start talking to someone until I see a common interest, then I tweet back and we start talking, but that could be months later. I don't follow everyone back, but I follow back those that interact. I will unfollow once I see that won't happen, or I don't like their tweets. - Nadine Gilden

Twitter is victime of it own success, they have to re learn how to scal better, but more important they have to learn to share better. - abdellah

looks like you'll need to follow at least 343 people LOL - Shari Weiss

Friendfeed takes over for twitter finally? - Thomas Resing

@Patricia I don't want potential followers to be put off by who is following me. I wouldn't want them to think I care more about have n+1 followers than I do about what they're going to see if they review who I've allowed to follow me. Not to cull spammers suggests I care more about my experience than theirs. To a great extent, the quality of their experience will determine the quality... more... - Andrew Spong

1600 ... isn't that a big number too? It could be you'll think again before you follow every one here :) - Mario Gastaldi

Hi... do I get a follow? - Jason Mayoff

If you are already following me. Will you double follow me? :) - Brady

Hi Robert!! :) - Zaneology from Nambu

Still waiting for my Building 43 t-shirt. Not that I'm bitter or anything. ;-) - Donna Tuttle

Be sure to come by Dallas when you swing through Texas! - Zaneology from Nambu

Respect your opinion Robert but we'll have to agree to disagree. Yes I despise all the FakePornSpamBots who follow me. I block as many as I can, but can't keep up. Our views differ regarding what is important to SEE! I treasure home Home stream! I read it, refresh, read, refresh and in minutes I have the pulse of the world... at least MY world! EVERYONE has something of value to share at some point. If I UNfollow tens of thousands, I will miss so much worthy of consideration. - Arleen Anderson

Just another reason why it's good to diversify, I can still read your posts here. :) - Luis Sandoval

Cheers! - Jeff Wiant

Funny. I was catching up on news on Friendfeed for some odd reason. Great post; plenty for new and long-time users alike to consider there. - Alex Howard

I'm still waiting for the ultimate tool to manage my followings - I can only manage to keep up with about 1/3 of those following me. I'd love to see something that can tell me what friends of mine also follow those that I am or those that are following me. Maybe it's out there and I missed it? - TheDiva Rockin

Anyone interested in assessing the quality of their followers should check http://tweetblocker.com. It's pretty chastening. I aim to improve on my C rating. http://www.buzzom.com is a fun, fast way of decoupling yourself from non-reciprocal followers. You can select individuals to purge, or flush 50 random non-reciprocal followers at a time. - Andrew Spong

Robert, your timing could not be better. ;-) - Dave Martin

Great post, with perfect timing! Dang it, Dave Martin just took it off my lips. - Vadim Lavrusik

I hereby rename this comment thread neoTwitter <waves at followers> - Andrew Spong

/me waves - Kevin Johnson from iPhone

Awww, you gotta admit, saturation, the level of influence that you have, because of your high follower, count, is a tool of mass destruction. Seriously, did you think if you recommend an online service that people would not try it out? Was this an asassination attempt - Peter Murphy

I'm glad i'm not the only one who misses /me actions from IRC, Kevin. ;) - Eric Williams

With today's Twitter outage your timing is pretty stinking good, Robert. :) - Chris Cree

Now to get the rest of the world to follow that same logic when it comes to follow/unfollow! I only started being more selective as Twitter (and everyone else) started getting aggressive with spammers or anyone that even remotely did a single spammy tweet. Now if only there were the same contact management tools available for the other social networks as with Twitter. No matter what though, I'll continue updating my status when I eat a peanut butter sandwich! (With Fluff of course!). - Paul Monaco

Twitter couldn't handle the mass unfollow load, blew up... - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

I've been followed by Robert Scoble :-) - David Finch

Follow iPolitics - Jacob Kobi Gamliel

Now I think that it is time to think about a way to make money using Twitter. - abdellah

@Mark, +1. When in doubt, the default delegation of blame goes to Robert. - Dave Martin

what is critical mass for twitter? Too few and nobody interacts, Too many and spam bots overwhelm, Is it 1K or 2K needed to get a real experience? - WarLord

Hmm can you unsubscribe from "comment notification via e-mail" in FF on a *specific* topic? This one :-) - Patrick Mackaaij

Of course I thonk it is a different experience if you hand follow reading each bio from the beginning then these mass purges are unnecessary - WarLord

I thought you already followed me. lol - Duane-PreppyDude

Not sure if you do, but here I am... - Aron Michalski

I am intrigued how RT addict will RT now?!! (ps: FF please don't post this to my twitter) - abdellah

I have been keeping my twitter account private a majority of the time lately b/c I am going through a divorce, but I really kinda like it. Have been reducing followers as well as the number I follow. - Jackson Miller

You should follow me here in FF and on Twitter too! - Karthi

hopefully most of us have proven our worth beyond commenting on this single thread - andy brudtkuhl

I like the way you operate, Scoble. Thanks in advance for the follow! - Dr. Frank Ramblings, Ph.D

Nice way of doing it... - Charles

No need to follow me unless you are actually going to engage in conversation with me. - Jeff Hurt

If you're already following and we comment, will you unfollow? *wink Hoping all is well your way! - Dayngr

4&5 are my favorite! Those are big reasons I decide to follow someone too. - Kelly Mitton

I'm lucky. Have never had Twitter spam. But then again I'm no Scoble either :) - Lori Reed

I am the peanut butter eating bot - Benjamin Spector

If you are already following me on ff does that mean I get a cookie or something? ;-) - Tomy Thomson

I'll add my name to the list. I came back to FF after the Twitter DoS outage. Maybe Scoble broke Twitter by all his unfollowing. He was the "glue" holding Twitter together. :-) - Tom Newman

Robert: Here's the bit you missed off the end of your title here: .... and put them in that group I don't read :-) - Jim Connolly

Hi Robert, greetings from germany. - Flynn (Michael A. Volz)

add me for your social media and the practice of law news! - Rex Gradeless

Great post. I'm sure that some people might say that this kind of mass unfollowing will hurt Twitter, but I think it's just the opposite. Users who are following people they have no interest in just to pad their own numbers are diminishing the meaning of "following." - Mark Denton

@Ulrichmargarita - Ulrichmargarita

To stave off being unfollowed we need to comment here ya say? - Jason

you are already following me here... perhaps you'll consider re-following me on twitter too - t i n y m

I don't know how you ever did it the other way. I am not in the tech world near as much as I used to be, which wasn't a whole lot. I just followed some random people I saw on SMugMug-related people on here when I started. You were one of them. I had no idea who you were (and still don't :-), but you talked about Twitter a lot too, which got me on there as well. Both services have really... more... - James Schipper

Follow away! - Ferdinand Perez

ok 400 jackpot - abdellah

Quality over quantity in all things, including (perhaps especially) Twitter. Loved your friending methodology -- those are the same rules I've applied since being on Twitter. Posted them onto Posterous to share the love with credit to you: http://lorilaurentsmith.posterous.com/ - Lori Laurent Smith

it's not about unfollowing, it's about filtering... - Barak Hachamov

I started out following everyone on Twitter.Then I got wise. When someone's stream becomes more noise than signal, that's when I consider unfollowing. I realize that threshhold is different for everyone, but I'll take "what I had for lunch" over a dozen bogus "marketing tips" any day. - Julie Barrett from twhirl

Well, I am trying to use FriendFeed more after watching Scoble's video on all those monitors he had up. I'm not a big consumer of information and don't own a TV but this online social stuff has been a perfect fit into my life because I can connect with people who are fountains of knowledge on a specific subject or are "human mashups". I like both! - Adria Richards

Why !? - Bertrand Soulier from iPhone

I've been reading al of this unfollow bits, and this point of yours: - Donna

Hey, I think that today you might make your point about FriendFeed being more interesting than Twitter. Hope you are well. Talked with @fransteps this morning and she is excited to work with you at Rackspace. - Kami Huyse

hi - George Desmyter

I would appreciate the follow, thanks! - Jeff Reisdorfer

I've been reading all of this un-follow posts lately, and this point of yours in WHY you unfollowed: "#2 Because I personally care about everyone I am following their noise level is a LOT lower. ." Is exactly what I do. And now I am starting to understand Friendfeed more. and using posterous to do aggregate posts. So is this overload making more people sit up and think first? I think so. At least the intelligent ones. - Donna

I love you Scoble! ;) - Carol Levesque

with all due sycophantism :) - jeff hammond

This is a great move, Robert. It's also a lot more human...I was almost convinced that you were the only person who could actually drink from the fire hose without choking. - Steffan Antonas

That sounds fair. After this morning, I've renewed my love for FriendFeed and Tweetworks. Until the next DDos attacks, of course. I will miss the fake porn stars, but I did when I moved from L.A. - Scott Pierce

Steffan; I agree...there is no way anyone else could do what Robert S. does. It's good to see him become human. - Robert Jones

This has been my problem for about the past six months. I routinely go in and unfollow, get the noise level down to where I want it, and then end up following back a bunch of new people, some of whom I'm incredibly grateful to get to know. When I had track, it was a whole lot easier to manage the stream, but I suspect even that tool would now be out of hand. I have a set of rules for... more... - Karoli

hee hee. i am commenting not so much to beg your follow but what a clever pitch:) - Tresha Thorsen

Robert - I have not read all 416 comments so if this was asked and you answered forgive me. What was the all of a sudden revelation that caused you to reverse stance on Twitter Followers? - Jeff Vreeland

It's difficult to maintain and filter a list on all the social networking sites. I cannot even imagine maintaining the kinds of lists you must deal with, Robert. - Jeremy Brooks

Dude, you broke Twitter! When you unfollowed all of your 100,000 the other day you pulled the rug right out from under it, so it fell down and now it can't reach its beer. :-) - Robert Morrison

Actually I felt rather sad being fav'ed by you on FriendFeed then dumped.. But again. I get more from you from FriendFeed, so oh well, stop talking about Following and Get on more with Tech! :P - Du Senyao Peter

Me Me! lol! - Bill McGehee

i like the idea of importing favorite tweets into friendfeed. i haven't used that favorite feature much because i haven't seen any real use in it. thanks! - Jonathan Blundell

When twitter is down I always wish I could tweet: checkout friendfeed. Nevertheless, how will following folk that leave a message here really improve the quality of your input? While I don't want to judge many of the fine folk on this thread, are they all that interesting? In other words, isn't this the start of the same problem you had on Twitter... - Jon Mountjoy

what like here? this is a comment :) - michelle harris

Barak - isn't filtering just unfollowing while pretending you're still following? ;) - Matthew Blaisdell

Well to bounce back on your Twitter is down comment I think it is time to watch this video again http://www.youtube.com/watch... Hilarious! - 77Agency

Robert, I'm glad you decided to stop auto-follow (finally). :) - Veronica Sopher

I'm in - Jeroen Sangers from Nambu

works for mw - Brendan Jackson from twhirl

Robert, but why clutter your FriendFeed stream? This comment is not to get you to courtesy follow me on FriendFeed, think you've established you've changed your thinking. :) - L.P. NEENZ FALEAFINE

OK, I have enough people to follow so I will close the comments on this thread. Thank you everyone, I will try to get to everyone today. - Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble

I'm thinking of doing what I did on Twitter: delete a bunch of Facebook friends to get it back down under 2,000 friends. I've learned that 5,000 is too many and too unfocused.

August 4 from Facebook - Comment - Like - Share

Rob Diana, Baard @ Pixum, Peter and 2 other people liked this

I think people told you that months ago :-p - Amit Morson

3 more comments

Sometimes, the crowd is right. - Amit Morson

I'm following only 261 people and fin that too much, for me the sweet spot was roughly 150 - Gerard van Schip

Has anyone noticed that their are certain companies and individuals that TechCrunch (Mike really) doesn't like and seems to go after all the time? I think Digg is one. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - Mark

Arrington on Rose: "He needs to pay attention. Or else relinquish his control of the Digg product to someone else who’ll pay attention." - This is because he is spending the weekend in Vegas. Arrington seems to have certain individuals for whatever reason he doesn't like, and it affects his coverage of their startups. - Mark

Robert Scoble

@igorthetroll I blocked you over on FriendFeed. I don't like talking with someone who is a troll. See ya.

June 14, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Chris Clayton, Czar, Dewald Pretorius and 14 other people liked this

What's in a name? I don't think Igor is a real Troll ;) - Pierre-Philippe Martin from twhirl

37 more comments

A lot is in a name. I want to only see people who use their real names so I know where they are coming from. - Robert Scoble

wait, you don't know Igor Thetro II... son of *the* Igor Thetro ?? - Alan Cheslow

oh, come one Scoble, my name is Marcus Debonaventure -- what's in a name ? - General Kafka

I have to agree with Kafka. Why is the name important? What he does and what he writes count more. - Morton Fox

Morton: I don't like him and I don't like someone who calls himself a troll. Especially since I've found over and over again that the name fit. I want to subscribe and see smart people. Not anonymous jerks. If you go jerky on me I WILL block you. - Robert Scoble

The fact is, this is Robert's Twitter and FF and he can ban people if they look at him cross-eyed if it bugs him. He doesn't really have to justify that. - Dana Franks from twhirl

Think it's more that he looks like a troll.... - Rich

If someone harasses me or makes nasty comments, etc. I *might* block them but I would only resort to this if that person went out of their way to be a royal jerk and purposefully make my life miserable, oppress me, slander my name, say terrible things about me, my friends, etc, etc. In that rare case, I would see that they were stalking me and trying to harm my online identity and experience = EPIC FAIL = BLOCK - Susan Beebe

Susan: there are so many distribution channels for anonymous jerks that I don't feel that I need to put up with that here. - Robert Scoble

Robert: So true! and I bet they exist in ALL channels available to them...nice. Being able to be selective via a BLOCK feature is therefore essential for folks who are in the limelight like you are! - Susan Beebe

More important than a real name is consistent identity... if you're "beezlecruft" on every service and your blog, then you're a recognizable persona. This is a good thing. On the downside, you make people around you feel like an idiot by writing things like: "Here's the thing, beezlecruft..." - Roger Benningfield

There's probably an interesting post in here somewhere on why it's necessary to announce who you're blocking. I do the same thing sometimes and always catch flack for it. Unfortunately, I've been up too many hours to properly defend myself intelligently as to why I do it, so we'll see if I'm interested in this topic tomorrow enough to post on it. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

@Roger: For years, I posted anonymously on the 'Net as simply "rizzn." Up until about 2 or 3 years ago, I was the only Rizzn in Google. When I wanted to go a bit more mainstream, I wound up merging the nick with my real name, partly so that there wasn't an identity split, partly for the SEO value, and partly so that folks wouldn't have to feel silly and call me Rizzn. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

one of the advantages of having the #24 most common male first name and the #16 most common last name. I can *roll with my real name... - Jay Martin

"My name is Diego Montoya. You killed my father, not I must kill you." My favorite introduction. I like my name, Micah. Why not use it? Plus most people dont pronounce it right, so I know if you know me. - Micah Baldwin

"My name is Inigo Montoya... you killed my father... prepare to die!"? Very good line :P - Chinkerfly from twhirl

isn't the issue one of transparency, if the handle says "troll" & their actions are trollish, they're a troll, block makes sense - mike "glemak" dunn

Cains..That's awesome. That's like having the name McLovin. :) - Hao Chen from fftogo

er... isn't the whole point of all these SM tools the ability to create your own conversation and experience? To be honest, I blocked "the troll" a few days ago. His comments to me and others were making me uncomfortable. Done, and done. It's not personal, it;'s just the way I choose to shape my social media experience. - Sue Murphy

I'm with Robert on this one. That guy was the reason why I was looking for a way to block someone's comments from my feed. - Dewald Pretorius

oops, sorry, I have been using my handle for like ever. Anyways, I'm the ONLY person on the web who uses puckman as a handle ;) - Gerard van Schip

as I've used my handle for years, I've kept at it; and as I may post things which might be negative about my current employer, I want to make it harder for the HR(non tech savvy) types to find it......add-on to that, my names are not common, google and find me alone + a bunch of dead people with my names - clarke thomas

I only use a handle because I have quite a common name. I'm not tryin' to hide behind anything! - Sue Murphy

@scottbourne, I agree - people need to use their real identity online, otherwise what's the point? - Rich

I had to block igorthetroll too! He was calling me bad names and commenting on everything I said with weird, nasty comments. What a boring life to be "that guy." - Alana Taylor

A good handle when backed by a real person with a consistent personality should be nothing to be ashamed of. Handles are easier to remember. It's part of the personal brand. - Chinkerfly from twhirl

Chinkerfly, it's not about being easier or just as good. It's a principled matter. If you don't want to back what you say and what you do with your identity, you aren't playing the same game as a lot of us are. Speaking for myself and others like me, we're interested in using social media as a supplement to our real-world business, personal, and social relationships, not as a replacement or an alternative. - Mark Trapp

for the sake of scoble, i've changed my comment name to the name I go by. - clarke thomas

Just want to point to the fact that nicknames are soooo web 1.0... :-) - Orli Yakuel

@Orli Yakuel This is oh so true! ^^ - Dan H. Racek

Igor the Troll is just annoying. I'm sure he has good intentions and all, but I can only take so much. - Ben Parr

I don't see the value behind the whole "real name" push - this happens to be my real name, but how do you know that? What's the real difference between a handle and a real-seeming name that might not be real? - David Worrell

You're straw-manning the issue, David. It's not just about the name: it's about a verifiable identity. If you can't be tied to an identity offline, you might as well use a nickname as it has the same effect on how people perceive you. - Mark Trapp

This is so unfair, it's like blocking Loic Le Meur for being too much of a meur. - Andy Roberts

Take a look (some quick and dirty content analysis): Igor the Troll, Noah David Simon, Israel, Mossad: http://snipurl.com/2iquj | http://snipurl.com/2iqv5 | http://snipurl.com/2iqve - Sean McBride

So what are you trying to say, Sean? - George Hall (Australia)

Not sure I like your inference, Sean. - George Hall (Australia)

I am who I say I am. I'm not hard to find. I say what I mean. I don't need to hide. If some of the sites I use would allow me to change my original name (gmail/google, flickr among others) to my real name, I would. Be yourself, life's better that way. - Robert Kenney

Mike Bracco to Mike's feed, Creative Design, Question of the Day, TheNextWeb Forum

Question of the Day: Be honest now - how many of you out there have Photoshoped your profile picture on a social network profile?

July 30 - Comment - Like - Share

Igendesign, Mitchell Tsai, Thierry R. Andriamirado and 30 other people liked this

No, but I did select a picture where I look considerably less crazed/goofy than I look in most pictures. Is that cheating? - Bruce Lewis

81 more comments

never... ;o) - Rob Sellen :o)

picasa'd - Nik

Had to shop the one I have now, it was too dark in the room when I took it. - Amber, Random Time Lord

Bruce: No that's totally cool. However, I did a little color correction on my FriendFeed picture...that may be cheating...haha - Mike Bracco

That's actually not a half-bad idea... Of course, I would usually get carried away, and it would look completely unrealistic. - Carlton Prest

Not that I recall. - MVB (Grinch of FF)

Not, I love myself!! - Zeynel Aslan

Nope, but uh, mine isn't really a photo. - Jordan Hofker

Not I. - Brett Kelly

No way! I look EXACTLY like my profile picture here. - ‘-.-’ Tutivillus Grift

I think anyone who knows and has Photoshop would do this. - Gerard van Schip

I never PhotoShop anything. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

Seriously? This is kind of a silly question. Color balance, contrast, noise reduction...many cameras already do this automatically. So in essence, it's being done whether you like it or not. Many of use who do photography do little tweaks to photos all the time. I'm not going to post a smudgy pic when a contrast tweak will improve it. - ‘-.-’ Tutivillus Grift

Never shopped myself. I am what I am. But ok my pics always suck so maybe I should :-P - Rasmus Lauridsen

Tutivillus: true, although the nature of my question was more about the more drastic things like taking away wrinkles, whitening teeth - stuff like that. Sure, technology is blurring the line between what is natural and what is not. - Mike Bracco

I am all natural, no preservatives, no additives, 100% home grown. :) - The Catz Meow

@Mike Bracco In that case, No. You probably shouldn't be making a fake you. (Shudders...memories of some bad dates) - ‘-.-’ Tutivillus Grift

I adjusted the contrast on mine a bit, but I don't go full on photo editing (since hey - in theory these people know me anyway). - Jennifer Dittrich

My Photoshop skills are so bad my picture would look a Picasso painting if I tried that - Costa Walcott

I color/contrast/sharpness adjusted it slightly, I think. I do most things. I think I edited a zit out once, and a friend just took a towel bar out of a pic for me (haven't posted it anywhere yet, though), but generally I don't bother. - Alix Whitmire

I'd be hesitant to call it photoshopping. I just toned down the colors a little. No physical changes. Actually, I think I used IrfanView. - CAJ, somewhere else

My avatar isn't photoshopped at all. I really do live in a comic book. - Trent Hamm

NEVER ... only Picasa :) - ★Kristy

Does cropping count? - Bryan Zirkel

omfg that's one of the hottest actors evah. - anna sauce

Not me. I wouldn't even know how to do it. - Shevonne

The most I do is mess with the contrast and, if necessary, touch up a blemish or two in iPhoto. - Penguin It's Cold Outside

I would imagine most have - BLOGBloke

My LinkedIn pic was professionally done, but that's about it. Photoshopping on FB doesn't make much sense because pics of yourself tagged by others will quickly show you up. Oh, and your friends *do* actually know what you look like. The only editing I do for FB is cropping and red-eye removal - LANjackal

I did. http://img131.imageshack.us/img131... - http://img131.imageshack.us/img131... - Koray AL

I yam what I yam. - Michael W. May

i have not - (jeff)isageek

nope - Jacob

I never even thought of doing it. - Derrick

Never have. Never would. - Nicholas James

Never. But the picture I use *is* nearly a decade old. - Michael R. Bernstein

Mine's taken off a mobile phone SOOC. - Andrew Trinh

I have, but I'm not telling which one (not the one I use here)... my friends laugh and laugh about it. - Vince DeGeorge

Nope. Don't even know how to shop myself. - Mellissa Claus

The most I've done is auto-level and crop. Other than that, I leave blemishes, etc. - Jason Huebel

gamma corrected, tweaked the colour a little cos of the CF bulbs we have casting a bit yellow and also cropped the image a bit. only blemish i would shoop out would be a pimple, but those are mercifully rare for me at my age. - Joe Silence is not Santa

I know some who use EXTREMELY shopped pics on their profiles. However, since I use a drawing, who am I to judge? - EricaJoy

I honestly wish I knew enough about photoshop to actually put it to use. *All* of my pictures are completely edited, and not necessarily by choice but by lack of knowledge. - Nicholas Kreidberg

Absolutely not. - Mo Kargas

Not me - Amit Morson

Nope, but maybe I should give it a try! - Bonnie Foster

Mo has such lovely red laser eyes! - Joe Silence is not Santa

who doesn't cosmetically :)!! - polou/indigo_bow

I don't own/can't afford a copy of Photoshop. Pixelmator, on the other hand… - Mistletoe Glen

Glen: I love pixelmator, I don't really know enough about it to use it to edit photos but it is a GREAT editor. I actually prefer it to PS. - Nicholas Kreidberg

Moody/James did sepia the hell out of my photo and the full pic has some cool borders added but otherwise no. I just make sure he takes my photograph because his eye is amazing and then I don't have to worry about visually tweaking anything. - Kisha, Well Conditioned from BuddyFeed

I always have to adjust brightness/contrast and levels but I don't think that's the "photoshop" you meant. - Morton Fox

Liars! all of you. yes. but not my webcam photos .. just my sony cyber shot photos (my avatar photos are webcam .. except that blond photo) - Caroline

I'm already perfect looking, how could photoshop do any better? - Chrimmus Tad

LOL @ Mo Kargas who's avatar is a laser-eyed robot! Sure, I have tidied up some of my avatar pics, adjusted color, removed backgrounds... my current avatar is a stylized pic of me done with PS. Is it a "lie"? Maybe... Does it matter if it doesn't look like me when I am at my worst and "most realistic"? Does it matter if maybe it looks a little more how I want people to see me than how... more... - Fa La La La Lindsay

Have not - Herb Hernandez from iPhone

dang, maybe i should use my old passport photo for my profile pic? - Joe Silence is not Santa

Not yet but perhaps I should - My Picture was taken with my mobile and it works :) - Ray Marr aka Knatchwa

never, except for the time I did the OBAMA/OBEY Sheppard Fairey style portrait. - Will Higgins™

+1 Tad - Nicholas Kreidberg

Nope. Don't know enough about Photoshop to even consider doing it. However, the back cover picture for my album will be touched up a bit, yes. - Spidra Webster

Never ! I'm so beautiful ! ;) - Tania Faria

No, I'm only five years old in my picture. - Michael Fidler

I photoshopped just the background. I haven't photoshopped myself. I'm not a pro in it, so I couldn't even I want to. But I don't want. - L. Nora

I just cropped, didn't apply any effect on it - Ozkan Altuner

I havent touched, just cropped. - Jacque

Mine is a cartoon, so take that as you will. - Alex Scrivener

nope. Mine's a distant enough picture that it doesn't matter. Also, I don't care. - ryan

my facebook profile picture is of me...not photoshopped. My face would break GIMP if I tried to shop it :P - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

mine's not shopped - sure shoulda though! LOL - Susan Beebe

No photoshop here! - Smeerch

Only to add an unachievable fro, yup that one --> - Toby Graham

Nero Photosnap, but not to sharpen or retouch the pic, but to add some cool effects:) - अभिषेक(Abhishek) Das

My avatar is photoshopped. ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

I don't know anything about Photoshop, so it's all me. - James Ferguson

not shy about admitting it. i did it recently. pic came out too dark - Victoria from twhirl

Never. - cecily

in fact, on my daughter's 13th b-day, i took a pic of her and i together completely forgetting about the zit dancing between my lower lip and my chin. i wanted to use it as a profile pic and well yeah guess what was missing... - Victoria from twhirl

Can you do that with MS Paint? :) - Bryan Lee

Not Photoshoped. Gimped. - Thierry R. Andriamirado

No, but why not? My photo is too old, though, when I had hair. - Rick Cogley

No. - Mitchell Tsai

Zee. to Zee.'s feed, TheNextWeb Forum, Appetite

Confirmed: web based email wins over desktop - http://thenextweb.com/2009...

July 24 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

LouCypher, Devon Govett, Thierry R. Andriamirado and 72 other people liked this

Kind of surprised, 24% still use Outlook (express) or Thunderbird or the likes to read email? - Nik

39 more comments

Not for me yet :) - I think this has a lot to do with the people who read lifehacker and the type of user they likely are. I am very much a geek but have stuck with Apple's mail b/c I use the same machine all the time (work+personal) so it's less of an issue. - Mike Bracco

I use both *shrugs* - LANjackal

I use outlook for my Y! and gmail accounts. - David Cook from fftogo

Not surprising especially considering Lifehacker's audience. To be fair GMail accounts for just over 10% of webmail users. Yahoo is still the king of webmail. http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heat... - Adi

I only use gmail via my cellphone since it has push, otherwise, thunderbird on the desktop, tho, when I need to find an old email, it's right back to gmail for search. - Richard Lawler

I've been using Gmail since it came out and never looked back. I'm just so sore we can't have our work email online. Flacid #NHS data security FTL :( - CannonGod

No way. I'm a mail hog and will always want to be able to access/review mail even when I'm offline. Hate the delay scrolling mail when I want to get to something a couple of months ago - Rick Emery from twhirl

@Rick scrolling mail? But with gmal there's no need for that - a quick search and you're there - Zee.

Yup, I would NEVER switch but as IT guy I keep walking into people who have never used a desktop mail client... times are changing! - Gerard van Schip

Gerard, u would never change from desktop? - Zee. from iPhone

I use Outlook (full version) at work to access our Exchange-based E-mail. It blows away any webmail experience I've tried. My personal E-mail is GMail, which has a not-so-hot IMAP interface, so I don't try to use a desktop client for GMail. However, my GMail needs are like 1% of my work needs when it comes to E-mail, since personal is much more things like IM these days rather than E-mail. - Christopher A. Wichura

I use Outlook at work (desktop) because they force us to. We have the web version of Outlook, but to get the optimal experience I have to use IE (blech) or IE tab (also blech). For personal mail, it's all Gmail, all the time for me. - cecily

I still use a desktop client. I work mainly on my laptop and it's very important to have offline access to email. I don't have access to wifi everywhere I might need to get into my email. - Vaughn

If I could get all my old mail [lots of mail] out of entourage into my recent gmail apps account then I would exclusively use the gmail apps. When I think about it, I'm rarely offline. Horses for courses I guess. - 1x29

You can connect to gmail with IMAP. Create another account in Entourage and drag all the email over from one account to the other. That's what I did in Thunderbird to copy stuff from my IMAP server. I tried doing this in Evolution, but Evolution blows any kind of mass email management. - Andy Bakun

At home I stopped using Thunderbird about 5 months ago and never looked back. At work I use outlook, but also use NEO Pro to make it "usable"... http://www.caelo.com/ - Vince DeGeorge

Outlook is horrible, Gmail runs circles around it, it is a crime that Microsoft actually charges money for Outlook. - Kelly Johns

google fails miserably on a coupe of fronts... good examples? contact management and calendars, for starters. I use it for personal mail but I really don't see it supplanting outlook in businesses who actually use outlook for its strengths until stuff like that is improved drastically. I still hate troutlook though :) - mjc

Personal preferences cannot be “confirmed,” and needs vary among users. I swap between desktop and web email when the time calls for it. Web is certainly convenient, but desktop is quite a bit more powerful. I cannot easily select 20 random photos from iPhoto or Windows Explorer and have web-friendly copies automatically created and attached to a Gmail message. But I *can* do that with... more... - David Chartier

I'm a programmer, a sysadmin, and an office IT guy, and I switched my domain over to gmail a few months ago. As for off-line access, gmail can go off-line if you install Google Gears. - Andy Bakun

I'm loving using Gmail for all of my POP3 accounts. - Jeremy Campbell from twhirl

83% of statistics are made up on the spot - Bwana ☠

I use Apple's Mail client for most of my mail purposes, but I will go to my browser as well. Though, in all honesty, my primary means of handling email are through my iPhone. - Mike Nayyar

Attention grabbing headline for sure, but LH readers are not your average Joe. Nevertheless, the shift to web-based email among non-enterprise users is quite apparent, if you see how Thunderbird has lost its shine! - Mahendra (SkepticGeek)

I agree totally. In the past year I have switched entirely to web based. Love it. - Drew Lucas

I used to use a desktop client on my junkbox, a few years ago, and ended up removing about 300MB of mail from my GMail account since I'd configured GMail to automatically remove stuff after retrieving it via POP3. Now, I just use the GMail web UI, for what it's worth. Sadly I've lost all that mail, after reinstalling numerous OSes on the said machine, but it's not a big deal. :( - Tyson Key

I use Mailplane so which one am I? Desktop or web? - Parvez Halim

The reason for this is portability and flexibility. Personally I use both but the big reason I use a desktop client is to offload mail I want to keep on to my pc. - Rob Cairns

From reading through this thread and personal experience, one of the main reasons users are still attached to their desktop clients is for offline access. But, as many of the more knowledgeable readers know, Google, Yahoo!, and others are looking to make this offline access possible from your web browser. Google has implemented and tested Gears with several products including Gmail.... more... - Kevin Mohr

I recently switched over to Gmail's web-based email and I'm not looking back. Webmail FTW! - Amir

I would use gmail...but I run many different web sites from which I need to email customers/site visitors. Gmail won't allow me to send email from a POP3 account without saying "on behalf of <my gmail account name>" in the from field. This isn't acceptable for how I run my different businesses and websites. Anyone know when Google is going to fix this? - Justin

Justin: I got over this by managing my email with google apps. I'm not suggesting its working out perfectly but it does operate my emails as per the domain not 'on behalf of'. - 1x29

@Adrian, thanks for the tip. Haven't done anything with google apps to date. Will look into it. - Justin

I've recently made the switch to Gmail too. Really enjoying the filters and labels, and built in Google Talk. Not looking back yet :-) - Jalada

"google fails miserably on a coupe of fronts... contact management and calendars, for starters." - Exactly. If "Outlook" = "Email and nothing else," you don't need Outlook. Comparing GMail to Outlook is incorrect - compare Outlook to Gmail, Gmail Contacts, GMail tasks, Google Calendar, etc. I use Outlook on my Google Apps domain email, but Gmail's Contacts leave a lot to be desired. - John Craft

I still use Windows Mail at the moment only because I have it set up exactly how I want it - this could change in the future - outofmyarse

Okay, but I still prefer a dedicated IMAP server. 'Control', less bandwith usage.. and it's IMAP ;) - Thierry R. Andriamirado

@hannah: You can route multiple email addresses through Gmail. - CannonGod

I think Gmail only supports retrieval of other addresses via POP - Jalada from IM

Yes, even Hotmail. I use it for that, as a matter of fact - LANjackal from IM

Euan

Bloody hell .... just had a lie in!

July 18 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

What is one of those? - Gerard van Schip

I know! Not had one for ages. - Euan

until when? how many hours did you sleep? - Thomas Power

Danny Choo

If somebody was planning a worldwide No IE Day, how many of you would be up to blocking IE users for 24 hours?

July 5 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Gerard van Schip liked this

I would be more than happy to stick a permanent IE block on my websites. - Gerard van Schip

Btw, if you write the line of code I'm will stick it into my sites straight away! - Gerard van Schip

Guess I was the only one then? - Gerard van Schip

Danny Choo

Farting a lot today. Wondering if staff notice ^^; When in office, do you try to keep your farts in, go outside or drop the bomb?

July 6 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Gerard van Schip and Chu Yeow liked this

I go into the server room, great airco in there! - Gerard van Schip

Euan

wondering if there is a way to access my landline with my iPhone - mini cell tower or something ..

July 3 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Hmm, well you could ditch your landline and use skype with a skypein number. - Gerard van Schip

Robert Scoble

Louis Gray tells us the guy who coded the very cool http://BillieTweets.com is:

June 28 - Comment - Like - Share

Adri Munier, Sheryl, Rene Wirtz and 17 other people liked this

Mike Demers, Louis says: "Mike Demers is a fantastic coder. He did http://www.blamedrewscancer.com, http://veetweet.com/ and http://www.tweetbricks.com as well." - Robert Scoble

6 more comments

You can find Mike here: http://friendfeed.com/mikedem... - Robert Scoble

Fantastic coder, Fantastic mind, Fantastic friend, and a Hodgkins survivor. 1 year and he's clear. Got the word on Friday. Total Rockstar and I'd be lost without him. - drew olanoff

What a cool tribute! http://billietweets.com/ - Julio F ~ @SocialJulio

Am I missing something? I only get a page with links to MJ albums on Amazon which the creator receives fees for? - Gerard van Schip

Gerard: if that is all you see you haven't played the video yet. - Robert Scoble

Thanks for all the kind words guys! - Mike Demers

Definitely the coolest tribute I've seen so far ... and possibly it's gonna stay that way! - Rene Wirtz

Matthew Rees

Judging by all the naff "perfect for Father's Day" presents being advertised at the moment it's just as well that nobody ever buys me one.

June 14 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Was thinking the same thing when I saw a t-shirt advertised as the ideal fathers day gift. There will be trouble if I get a t-shirt next week! ;) - Gerard van Schip

Carl Beeth

Let me google that for you - http://lmgtfy.com/

June 14 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

http://lmgtfy.com/...! - Gerard van Schip

Andrea

@mattgemmell Indeed. Our "spank banks" are woefully lacking - thankfully, we have good imaginations :D

June 2 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Say what? - Gerard van Schip

Andrea

ok. time to go brush teeth, put hair up and get out of moo cow pink pajamas and into real people clothes.

May 24 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Somehow I never thought you would wear moo cow pink jamies. - Gerard van Schip

Zee. to Zee.'s feed, TheNextWeb Forum

25% of all Brits use their laptop or mobiles in bed. Do you? - http://thenextweb.com/2009...

May 20 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

zsafwan , shâhin, Iván Abrego and 33 other people liked this

yes, and I'm not british.. heh - Leandro Ardissone ⍨ from IM

49 more comments

Er, no. - Nick Reynolds

That and a pastrami sandwich, and you are Good. To. Go. - ha3rvey (Ho)^3

My laptop has never even been upstairs, much less in my bedroom. I cann count the number of time I've used by mobile on both hands, and then it's usually to play a game when I can't fall asleep. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Both me and the wife use our MacBooks in bed and recently got one for my 2.5 year old son. ^_^ - Gerard van Schip

For sure! - Simon Wicks

No. I keep the laptop in the bedroom overnight ever since we were burgled and the one downstairs was stolen but it's never on in bed. - Mark H

Yes - Shevonne

Yep, and I am British. - Rich

Probably a correlation between that stat and single Brits also. And yes, I do too :/ - Vincent van Wylick

I use my gadgets in bed. - Annika from Nambu

Yep. - Iain Baker

Hello. - Sid from Alert Thingy

I do. - Smeerch

Hello. - Sid from Alert Thingy

uh huh - Geoff K

If one uses one's mobile in bed, is it on 'vibrate'? - John Craft

I do and I'm not british - Mathieu

I use my iPod Touch in bed whenever I wake up because of its instant on nature - RAPatton

yes and i'm not proud of that - Cee Bee

I do :) But I'm not British :) - Sasha Kovaliov(.com)

Nope. Mines connected to too much stuff for me to bother moving it :P - LANjackal

Yes. Not British. - Ferhad Fidan

I'm British and I do, again for fear of it being stolen from downstairs at night. - Pete Gilbert

yes (not British) - jbrotherlove

If I'm staying home that day, yes. Otherwise, no. Not British. - Helen Sventitsky

on a side note: that laptop stand looks great! - alieb

I would... If I had one :( - Yuvi

Not having a bed must be frustating. - Rich

LOL +1 Rich :) - Zee.

I live in a bungalow - slightly concerned about this ground floor theft trend. - Rich

I'm not a Brit, but I use my Netbook in bed at times, although it hurts my neck. I prefer somewhere with better posture. - ‘-.-’ Tutivillus Grift

Yes. Not British though. - Peter Kruit

Yep iPod Touch and laptop but trying hard to break this habit, it's really not the time or place for such activities :) - Groobers

I do all the time... I'm not British though. - Katie

25% of a survey of 300 people in a city hardly constitutes a quarter of the nation, does it? Misleading headline and an obvious attempt at self promotion. Must be a quiet week in the online marketing biz. - Gilbert Harding

I use my iphone and DS in bed all the time but very rarely my laptop - Rob Brammeld

Aaaaaaaalways. Mainly because I'm a lazy student :) - Charlotte M

^^ always ^^ hehe - Ronald

What do the use them for ; ) - lisa padilla

we got some saucy mofo's on ff...I didn't even think of the sexual side - Zee.

I use both in bed. I'd say about half the time I'm online, I'm in bed. - Admiral Anika

Yeah, 25% seems low to me. ;) Don't have a (working) laptop anymore, but I occasionally 'stream with my iPhone in bed. - Grey Drane

Not anymore. Trying to keep technology out of the bedroom. - joey

Yes. Yes I do. :) - Eva

Yes even though I'm not British - Dobromir Hadzhiev

No, that's where I read a book or listen to one. - Ton Zijp

silly question. Anyone with a laptop or a mobile phone has used it in bed. What's more interesting is the frequency with which that happens. Some laptops are easier to take to bed than others. - Richard A.

Nice study. - TrafficBug

I am using it in bed NOW - Iain Baker

I do when the mood is sour ;) - Joe Dawson

Andrea

oh. weird. my mom is on facebook. do i add her? or what?! AARG!

May 16 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

I'm connected to my mum. - Gerard van Schip

Robert Scoble

Do you think the new friendfeed sucks? Tell us why here:

April 29 - Comment - Like - Share

Rick Turoczy, HΛMΣD ƧΛFΛ, PrometheusUFO and 124 other people liked this

Doesn't suck... needs improvement. - Daniel Zarick

254 more comments

No auto-refresh when you pause the site - Outsanity

No. It's a bit painful at first, but it's useful, clean, and beats Twitter. - Jason Nunnelley

1. Better design/colors/layout - Daniel Zarick

It's wicked! - Ewan MacLeod

I rather like it. - Michael McKean

argh. I just train a company yesterday on FF. Now I have to redo it... :) - gluca - [mini]marketing

FriendFeed is cool. Wondering why bots are not in here yet! Lot of services around Twitter, but not many for FriendFeed! > - Kannan from email

Like it more than twitter... desktop pop-up is great. - Joshua

I like it, def better than twitter - Jan Zimak

I think its great!! - Danli

The colors are nice. - Rishi Talreja

It has a higher learning curve than the old friendfeed - Tony C

Powerful search tools and the bookmarklet update is awesome - Peter Kelley

didn't begin using friendfeed on a daily basis until the changes were initially implemented in beta...so in other words i am a fan - Jeffrey Marsh

Hehehe. I did this too, bringing some colleagues to do some discussions in 'rooms' - ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,

I like it, seems more intuitive. But then I also liked the new Facebook. - Bob Morris (polizeros)

Scoble trolling? - Chris Poulson

Yes, I will be using FriendFeed less. No more rooms, no distinction between my comments and likes. Also a little bit too frenetic. - Baard @ Pixum

beta is better than first iteration. cleaner ux. however value prop of friendfeed over twitter is still unclear - Sean Scott

Just showed it to a pal. He says awesome programming - Nitin Nanivadekar

It doesn't suck at all. Maybe it takes some time for you to get used to it, but once you do, it's great. - Diego Espinoza V.

I've seen lots of mention of the learning curve--to me, this has been a duck to water experience. Seems sensible, flexible, fluid. - Kathy Fitch

I think we covered it pretty well in the new CobWeb podcast from The Cynical Bastards http://www.shootingatbubbles.com/index... - Steven Hodson

when I am commenting, I can still see "real time" like or comment by other people, I think it rocks! - K.D.

I miss the time updates on the rooms, and I don't like the color scheme... Also don't really like the real time view and keep it paused. I do like DMs however... that's the best new feature. - Fa La La La Lindsay

i like it ! - patrick

doesn't suck at all..guys at friendfeed have done a real good job..keep it up guys - Arvind

The old colour scheme was better in that it was clearer and gave the impression of a weight and richness. Now FF looks like a cheap blog. Sorry guys - Dan Stuart

The color scheme is a little gaudy and the "look" inelegant. Like going from a Mac desktop to Windows. It's still perfectly functional. Just not as comfortable being here. - Jeff Guin

I use FF more then Twitter and Facebook combined and this is only my first week on FF - Frank Sant'Agata

grey for a background… so pathetic. Imaginary friends added in a really cool way to a mental model of friendfeed, now gone. - Manila Envelope

more like twitter now - Wei Xia

Just imagine if this was on Facebook. All the hundreds of millions of clumsy Facebook users would start hundreds of thousands of hate groups. Since FriendFeed is mostly geeks & early adopters, they are more open to change. Once this thing hits the mainstream, this sort of innovation on the UI will be impossible to implement. - Ben Ackles

That's it? No one else thinks friendfeed sucks? Come on now. Facebook changes and everyone is up in arms. - Robert Scoble

Wait a couple of hours and this comment thread will be quite long and unreadable... Thats something i dont like about friendfeed... - Jeethu Karthik

socialcoop: maybe Arrington is right and no one is using friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

Since it 'pulls-in' so much content...well, that's kind of like sucking--but I guess the old one did that too. The new FF is better--I used th RT mode in the old one too. - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

Maybe that's because facebook's changes actually sucked - Keith Barrett

But facebook is used by people that don't understand why the internet changes. They are used to desktop software, not web applications. Facebook is the first true webapp most of those users have used. - Daniel Zarick

Still up for debate. - David Cohn

@Robert the replies are coming in and getting buried just as fast - there are some who aren't liking it - Steven Hodson

We can see the stream and the person who did it, but it's hard to see where it comes from(twitter, blog,..). In the old version, there was an icon to see it but it has disppeared. (sorry for my poor english, I'm french...) - tristan

Hard to tell - because I just hate change. I'm not a fan of being able to see LESS about who is posting and what they're posting with. - Ciaoenrico

Remember, it's 2am on the East Coast now, Robert. Even _I'm_ about to hit the hay. *grin* - Ken Kennedy

I'm still annoyed that FF offers no option for the real-time displays to show newest post at top - Keith Barrett

I've been using the beta all along, and even with all of the lists I've set up, I find I'm looking at the main feed/lists less than I used to. That's my only real negative. Saved filters are wonderful, and embedding is sometimes useful. - John E. Bredehoft from fftogo

Baard Overgaard Hansen: We still have rooms, they're called Groups now. And for me, the comments and likes links at the top of my profile page distinguishes them quite well. - Sharon McPherson

Only complaint is that I wish it was easier to see where any given piece of information came from. - Angus Burton

people having conversations is so over. what does burger king have to say about this? - Alex C. Williams

No, it's sweet. It's my favorite thing right now, its the coolest thing on the internets. It runs so smoothly too. - Stephen Pickering

no complaints. works for me - Jim Goldstein

welcome to the real world,it sucks but you will like ti,^_^ - 阿石

I much prefer it. - Jamie

There's gonna be some pushback on this one. I've gotten used to it because I switched to the beta over a month ago. I've almost forgotten what the other layout looked like. To those complaining about not being able to see the source service the posts come from. I think that's the point; don't leave here, it doesn't matter where it came from, discuss it here. :) - Adam Turetzky

Was just learning the old but between being able to use rooms/groups and auto-updating of comments in a thread, I like it. - Jim Espinoza

Hate the new FF. Hate the lack of icons for other services. And though I haven't dug around yet (hint! I shouldn't have to!), I can't seem to find a way to parse out different services (ie, just look at Last.fm imports from my friends, or pull out the "internal" RSS feed for content I've personally entered into FF). And right now I'm annoyed by new comments popping onto this page while I'm typing. - Kevin Hessel

Kevin, thereis a Pause button at top right of the column to deal with your annoyance. - Jim Espinoza

Just want "Best of" for my friends list then all will be fine again. It was in the beta, right? - Dominic Jones

Jim, I'm on the unique link (http://friendfeed.com/scoblei...), not on the base FriendFeed page. There's no pause button here that I can see. - Kevin Hessel

i will probably appreciate new functionalities when using them, but i definitely miss the old look'n'feel, looks very much like twitter now, has lost "personality" - Adriana Ripandelli

Ah, I learn something new too. Thanks, Kevin - Jim Espinoza

Looks ugly but an improvement over old version. Workflow on new version is a step back than before. Seems untested and unfinished. I'm seriously looking for something better now. - Chris Nixon from BuddyFeed

the gray background is ugly - Peter Warnock

Just 4 things I'd like to see implemented. First, as mentioned above, a pause button - comment link placed under the last entry so we don't have to scroll all the way back to the top on long posts to enter comments - the ability to send Retweets, and make posts sticky. - Sharon McPherson

Another thing, new FF appears to have been designed for those like you with lots of followers. Most of us hardly ever get comments, likes etc. So it's great for the A-list, but shitty for the rest of us. That might change if more people join. - Dominic Jones

I can't say anything about the new features because I'm too annoyed to look at them. The layout and theme sure sucks though. I thought I clicked onto my twitter page by mistake. Now I need to find TweetDeck for FriendFeed and avoid the web page like the plague to make it tolerable, just like twitter. Why don't they narrow this column down a few more inches - there's really like so much more space they could be wasting. Why only waste 40% of the page? - Christopher Brocious

not at all intuitive... user interface get a grand 2/10.... if that is fixed, could be fantastic... the concept of real time (even though its simulated, as its still doing "pulls" from the browser rather than "pushes" to the browser) is great, the data itself is rich, but it should focus on either being an aggregator, or syndicator... trying to be both is misadventerous. - simran

Sharon--click on the time stamp to pop the thing into a new window. Puts the comment box on the bottom, and allows new comments to scroll in without disrupting your writing. - Kathy Fitch

Whoa, thank you Kathy! - Sharon McPherson

Nope, it doesn't. It's just different. I'm not getting why people hate it. - Hubert Taler

You're welcome! ;-) (Oh, and isn't that cool? I love it.) - Kathy Fitch

Dave Winer hates it, by the way: http://friendfeed.com/davew... - Robert Scoble

FriendFeed is no longer focused on connecting individual services, it's blending them and that's wrong. Aesthetically it's spiraling and that matters too. - Andrew Smith

I say this: 30% doesn't sucks, 70% sucks :P - Kristian Salonen

Define "sucks" - Jack Humphrey

I have yet to fully realize the new features which I'm sure are tremendous. From a UI perspective--design wise? It is very, what I can only describe as, 'early BlogSpot'. It's pretty hard on the eyes and that's the absolute most diplomatic way I can say it. I'll be sticking with the previous incarnation(http://friendfeed.com/realtime) and the real-time pop-out window(http://friendfeed.com/realtim...). - Gregg Scott

Almost forgot, please FF, give administrators the ability to delete groups. - Sharon McPherson

I dont like this friendfeed! I want my old and sweety FF! Return my FF, plz...! - Exir

Agree with Sharon - how do you delete groups? - Liviu Lica

what sucks about friendfeed is that all people talk about on it is friendfeed or other meta issues. also too many buttons to press to distract. No ecosystem of desktop apps. I am sure its a useful utility for pros like scoble, but for everyone else, twitter is ideal, your mum can understand it. - Michael Neale

Too much like facebook and twitter. I come here for news and great discussion not status updates of people I don't know, unfortunately, all my friends are on facebook. - Andrew Royer

Michael: all the "normal" people in my life are on facebook which is more complex than either Twitter or friendfeed. By the way, Facebook adds more people every month than are even on Twitter. So your thesis is TOTALLY WRONG. Users CAN put up with a LOT of complexity. Try again. - Robert Scoble

fine tuning and control on real time flow is missing. - Ouriel Ohayon

I miss the additional features of the old UI for posting. You had separate fields to add links, photos, comments as well as the text of the post. How do you add text and a link now? - Mark Krynsky

FB is daunting, I think. I just hate having to wrestle the danged thing to the ground every time I try to use it. This seems to me to be simple, flexible, fluid, nimble. - Kathy Fitch

I just did: http://ff.im/2sTvr and there is more, I goes too fast now, It looks like a blog, and friendfeed is not a blog... and I don't like it at all... - Aline

Too little content on to much space, I only have a 13inch screen. FAIL - Gerard van Schip

I think it is far away from suck, yes it needs a bit more tweak. But I think its great and more useful than Twitter. - MoRiza

*HIDE* - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

I would like to see the words subscriptions/subscribers dropped from the profile pages and use friends/followers instead.. - Arvind

Why is everybody taking about Twitter? The question is do you think the new FF sucks? And that anser is YES! - Aline

because of a twitter-like interface, even if in realtime - Nicola Junior Vitto

But you can not compare Twitter and FF, that are two realy diffrent things... - Aline

avatar pictures instead of service pictures. this is getting too social for my reading habbits :) and also, text used to span all over the page now it's trapped in the middle. why. my sides of the screen are upset :) - Dani Radu

There's very little "twitter-like" other than the use of avatars to bring the focus to people rather than services. And here I thought FF was all about the people to begin with... - Kevin Kuphal

Hmm. Maybe I'm unperturbed because I've been using the beta from the get-go. - Kathy Fitch

Thats it! The absence of service icons to ID my stream, thats the only sucky part. - MoRiza

You'll get used to "from Twitter" under the post in very short order, people. - Kevin Kuphal

Design is okay, but interface is broken (I've made a detailed list a couple of weeks ago — http://friendfeed.com/friendf...). Here's why: - Juras Vetrau

1) It's now harder and longer to read. First, all posts look the same because of service icons absence — it was needed for visual filtering of the posts. Then, post header are now come in two parts — text and link (it means more text, more clutter, harder to click — every link begins in it's own place). Third, only one comment in a collapsed discussions — you can't see answer-question pair, just an answer. - Juras Vetrau

I did not use the Beta, because it would like to see Icons, and I like to see alle services anyone uses, now I have to click my way troug FF, and when I want to read something, it goes very fast... - Aline

2) It's hard to use FriendFeed as an RSS reader now. Imaginary friends are totally broken. You can still create a private group, but it's inconvinient, it's separates old and new IFs in two lists (subscriptions and groups). I've used FrF as an RSS reader in the first place. - Juras Vetrau

3) It's impossible to use FrF as a browser of your aggregated content — no more filters by service in user's profile. It was very useful for sites with no proper bookmarks system (Vimeo, SlidShare, YouTube etc). - Juras Vetrau

@Kevin, FF is all about people. But people are not avatars (yet). We are what we share online, and untill real avatar interaction - we share via services. That's why imho it makes more sense to use service icons then static avatar pics. - Dani Radu

Naw...tis just different and back to the firehose. :-) - Mathew A. Koeneker

Only thing I don't love is the "more" dealie. Harumph. I'm wordy, I confess it. No need to rub my face in it, FF. Makes me feel scolded every time. <wry grin> - Kathy Fitch

Someone on seesmic who thinks new seesmic sucks http://new.seesmic.com/threads... , I think he's right about imaginary friends but we can still create groups or rooms. - tristan

I don't hate it, I don't like it either, it looks much alike the HTML kiddies designs of 10 years ago. - Amit Morson

I used to filter the content by its source (like http://friendfeed.com/balau...), now it's broken.Apart from that, new FF seems a step in the right direction. - Francesco Balducci

Here's a link to some Greasemonkey scripts for the new FF http://userscripts.org/scripts... Of note is the one that adds service icons to entries. - Mark Krynsky

Cool, Mark, thanks. - Kathy Fitch

I like the concept, but not the look. At least the horrid gray should go. - Johan Aulin

Sing for Absolution: Please let people use the old version of friendfeed via a sub domain address like old.friendfeed.com. We do prefer to use the old version instead of the new. This new version does not match the low speed connections and users with so much subscriptions. Thank you friends. http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Exir

@ Exir, Yes that's a great Idea... :D - Aline

Just a tweak to what Mark (hey, Mr Krynsky!) pointed out: some FF scripts don't have the word "beta" in the name, so http://userscripts.org/scripts... will show more (non of mine http://userscripts.org/users... use the term beta, but most are designed for the beta/live-as-of-today features). Oh, and the add service icons script is here: http://userscripts.org/scripts... - Micah Wittman

Thanks for the clarification and more details Micah...Many of the older scripts may not work on the new site and that's why I filtered to 'beta'. - Mark Krynsky

Why oh why did they feel the need to become *more* like twitter?!?!? - Scott Gould

Good point, Mark. Another tip is to sort by clicking the "Last Updated" link to look at everything that's been updated since beta-to-live (April 29 or later). - Micah Wittman

New features have negative suck. Layout has small amount of suck - seems less information dense than old layout, with right side space lost to navigation stuff. - David Lounsbury

takes some getting used to. i've gotten more subscribers since this change than in all the time i've been on FF. - Alensa

I could like it more if only they could move all the Twitter members over here. :) - Ed Grant

It's aight.. I can't see how to collapse FF down to see JUST delicious links or JUST Digg links from a specific user or group by clicking on the feed icon. Maybe I still can but I don't see how. - Jesse Newhart

Yeah there is definitelly less on the screen. More difficult to scan. Is the font size larger. Did they get a coder to design it rather than an interface designer. - Chris Nixon from BuddyFeed

i think it's great but may need a bit of work on the actual design. also scoble==totally trolling for a big discussion! - Snipergirl

I simply want my old FF back... I have the feeling that I use my mobile phone with so much simplicity... - philos

Bring back imaginary friends!!! the greatest FrF appeal for me was ability to consolidate of all online relationships. Some of these contacts eventually convert and become FrF users, some will never covert and following them via imaginary friend is essential for me. - Maхx Tee

Everything I liked at FF, is now gone... :( - Aline

Strange. The impression is we had lots of features and now almost of things are gone. Strange. It definitely needs UX improvements. - Tiago Vieira

It's good but still had a whole of work to be done to it, as I've stated here: http://friendfeed.com/search... :-) - Kol Tregaskes

The effect each medium has on the human sensorium vary with the medium. This medium will change our way to use it. The New FF completely change the way we use it. This is another tool: more LIVE, more confused, more dispersive. I love the old FF for the ability to create conversation in a simple way. Now the coversation is absolutly disordered because I can't control how to enjoy the conversations. Good attempt ... to create something different. - Giovanni Calia

the old FF interface was much better, why is gone the support for icons for feeds? This was a better way to recognize on what channel was generated!! Is not possible to have both Interfaces???? - Dan Romescu

i dont care! - auburn

Quite the opposite - Michael McGimpsey

It's great.. but seriously miss the icons that indicate the source of the message... e.g. how to easily filter out all blogposts - Aad 't Hart

I woudl show them your post about ugly design. Visually I liked the previous interface, not beautiful but personal. This one with rounded corners and wide borders looks like a default theme. I read beta on a nokia and it is not bad, but I would stay very very simple. Content is king. - Michele Costabile

Friendfeed's new look gives me a perfect antidote to Twitter and I appreciate that, thanksverymuch. - Bernie Goldbach

who cares, friendfeed could be the future. I've known ever since Scoble's Twitter told me so. - Kemp Edmonds from twhirl

it seems a Wordpress comments management :-| - Daniele Di Gregorio

totally sucks. the old version was way better than this. - Gökberk Can

agree re the need to bring back imaginary friends. - Matt Hooper

The new FF is ok, kinda ugly, but ok. I still need to get used to it. - Shawn Hickman

It doesn't suck at all! I like it! Only want a customizable background please - Annette Schwindt

too much wasted white space. The old version was much more compact (and BTW it let us immediately see where the original news was posted). Is it really so difficult to redesign friendfeed so that we can choose the stylesheet we prefer to display our feed? - .mau.

+1 for .mau. even gmail (the most powerful terse interface I know of) has themes. Gmail is my web 2.0 style guide. - Michele Costabile

there's a lot of comments, and we still didn't reach the goldwin point. Maybe, there's not a of people on FF, but people on FF seem to be smarter than the others ;) - tristan

+1 Service icon not being present irritates me at so many levels - Swaroop

briefly: cool features, wrong interface. as someone already said: it looks like a cheap blog; it doesn't have any kind of personality, sorry. - ced

just used it for the first time and I have to agree with ced, right format weak design, - Kemp Edmonds from twhirl

My guess is the look remains simplified in because FF will allow it to be customized like Twitter backgrounds, but something that would be ideally more functional than just form. As far as user friendliness it is fairly easy to manage, but I have had the luxury of not having thousands of subscriptions, once I jumped on board and the beta began shortly after I avoided aggregating too many subs, I might be annoyed if I had used it for a year and was driving merrily on the road. - Patrick Boegel

the new version doesn't suck :-D but not having the old version around still kinda does :-/ re:themes if we have to have them, can they be 'me only' themes or can i tick a box saying 'hide all user themes' ;-) - immaterial

It's a vast improvement from the previous site, but it needs some work still. Threaded comments and date/time stamp on comments please! - Bob Blunk

please keep it light and simple! no threaded comments! - Maхx Tee

I liked the fact that you could see images before. Also the gray background, could be nicer. - Avi A

i don't like the gray background, I think kills readability. Other than that, it's huge. And hope it's going to be much more so. - dario

Come on..you can use also Fftogo!!! http://fftogo.com - Dario Salvelli from fftogo

and, with a giant IMHO, service icons are *not* the point. Once you hit publish, wherever you do, it's "out there", out there (or as good a representation of it you want it to be) being FF, I like this side of it the most. - dario

hated the beta at first, but for some reason I kept using it and now I really like it. not perfect, but better. - Robert DeBord

The new FriendFeed rocks for the pure fact that I am commenting on this post through email! - Kevin Whalen from email

Ugh... Why do these sites have to try and be like Facebook? FriendFeed was a great tool for me to aggregate all of NAPP's feeds and share them on Twitter at a glance. Now I can't tell what's coming from what feed. ((sigh)) - Photoshop User

Dario, thank you! Fftogo is so much better than this Twitter wannabe, space wasting, regressive disaster of a UX. - Christopher Brocious

next point of order: Being ahead of your user base: good or bad? - dario

Overall, it's good. Biggest complaint: Bring back imaginary friends! Private Groups are for something else entirely. Also, what do I do about my existing imaginary friends? How do I delete them if they happen to join FriendFeed? Would that be different if I made a private group with their name? All kinds of questions there! - Don Faulkner

Bring back imaginary friends - otherwise FF is useless for me. A load of my friends just won't spend the time setting up their FF accounts (no need for some of them they perhaps only have a small online footprint) so its back to monitoring shed loads of other sites ie. myspace, delicious, flickr, twitter, etc. etc. Otherwise its great - significantly better than before! - Angus Neil

I can't post through the bookmarklet to my groups. I was very dependent on this feature, and It doesn't work anymore.. Fix IT! - Joe Spake

i think user experience isn't much more better.. - toLga aRıcan

Thank you for calling the Official FriendFeed Helpline, brought to you by Robert Scoble. Leave your message after the beep. BEEP - Mike Nayyar

Joe Spake: You can still use the bookmarklet to post to groups, just takes a few more steps. Click the X to remove your feed, enter the first letter or 2 of the name of the group(s) you want to post to, then choose the group from those you'll see listed. - Sharon McPherson

The commenting here has no formatting so I made this .txt file: http://dazetheory.com/scripts... - Joshua Hatfield

I dig the new UI....then again, I really didn't like the old UI. However, like some have mentioned, I do miss the ability to easy filter on the service (i.e. native FF, Last.fm/Pandora, Flickr, etc). I also miss the ability to see User+Friends out of a user's profile. Being pretty new to the service, it was cool to see the stream of other people I found interesting. - mark

Actually, now that I've used it a little, one thing I HATE is that I can see the number of subscribers and subscriptions anybody has. This is what's wrong with Twitter, as it makes it less about socializing and more about winning at a Ponzi scheme. I'd hate to see that kind of pessimism come over to FriendFeed. - Ciaoenrico

hate the colors - Sarah Perez

Doesn't suck, just agree with Daniel: "Better design/colors/layout" please - Christopher Galtenberg

Ask this again in a few weeks. I started as an immediate hater thinking I would stop using if it continued but it quickly grew on me. I suspect there will be fewer haters then (of course this wait period may provide a self fulfilling wish -- those that really don't like it may leave by then). - Brian Sullivan

No, it doesn't. Those new to it should use it for a few days and then see how they feel. - AJ Kohn

I'm still undecided. I still think real time makes it harder for me to find new and interesting contacts and get noticed by other people. - Kevin Pedraja

Sucks - not usable at work any more because it's so obvious. Plus I'm losing conversations. Give us an option to keep the old interface! - Victor Ryden

It's funny, I didn't even realize that I had even gone over to the regular FF. I didn't start really using FF until the beta, despite having an account for quite some time, so I've been used to the beta. - Aaron Kurtz from IM

Not for me. I used Real-Time all the time in the old version. The only things are A. the mini window is lacking B. The pause button doesn't work like the original pause button so I still feel like I miss stuff when I leave my computer C. The amounts of clicks it takes to do something is a little too much Ex: Refreshing a feed Other than that, I don't see anything wrong with it - Shevonne

Just need a good desktop app to be able to run vertical stream. Or I need 5 screens. I tried AlertThingy yesterday but it's only one pipe. Ultimately, I think a good micro-blog app needs to deliver a mix chosen streams and of organic news which you may not run into via traditional streams - Yann Ropars

Good but lake of filters to remove a source from a view and lake of icons that show from where the entry is (RSS, twitter, ...) - Severin

Don't care for the layout (have to scroll too much to use saved searches), update rate and opening links awkward, seems like features missing, colors not so much. Is beta.FF my default FF anyway? Yes. - Loren Heiny

It sucks. This is a cramped primary-color room. Cramped, dumbed-down, isolating. Hate it - where is the wide-open white that is the FF I know and like? More to the point, what has been achieved by changing it? - david

Meh. I like the readability in general - but for comments it's hard to scroll without going too far (on posts like this with a billion comments. I also miss the buttons for Twitter/blog/etc. - Tabz

I just like to say things suck in general - Athensganews

Apart from the excellent points raised by everyone here, I'd like to add that FriendFeed now makes Firefox3 consume much more CPU and and makes my laptop's fan run faster too, thereby reducing battery charge too fast. Please bring back the old energy-efficient FF!. It's all a blur now! - Siddharth Deb

Like the new features but the look is blah. - Jessica Lee

I was still struggling to learn how to use the previous incarnation, so this change has thrown me a little. But as I was unsure of what I was doing anyway, it's not changed my perception much. Yet. - 5corpion

I hate the color and overall look/feel of the UI. If I was tech savvy enough, I would try to install the cleaner ff greasemonkey script for chrome... but I'm not. May try anything. But I find the new colors and spacing annoying. - Jen (SquirrelGirl)

I love it... beta is LIVE :) - Susan Beebe

I like it actually. Layout is great. - fbrunel

I don't think the new FF sucks, but I wish they hadn't diluted the imaginary friend feature because I just wrote a post extolling its virtues. - Karoli

Since every post, like this one for that matter, becomes quicky a chat room, I say I hate reading comments in gray! I also would like to be able to close the comments I opened. Be simples, give me helvetica and black, say hello to round corners and margins. Do not waste one quarter of the screen for a short sidebar, maybe put commands at top and content on two columns. - Michele Costabile

it's hard to differentiate between the different services now. It all looks the same. - richrecruiter

I installed the greasemonkey script recommended by Micah which enables me to see both the avatars and service icons - http://userscripts.org/scripts... Double the pleasure, double the fun. - Sharon McPherson

I think its Sexy. I am thinking it's cooler, as far as appearance and users, than Twitter. - ZuDfunck

Sharon, Micah - thanks so much for the greasemonkey script link. Friendfeed without the services icons was really starting to bug me. I hope Friendfeed brings service icons back to the stream as well as imaginary friends. Taking away features = bad. I don't mind the beta but Friendfeed should integrate previously available features into it IMHO. - Jesse Newhart

I like the new look, would like to customize the way it updates, move newest commented topics up. - James Rowe

right James, new comments shud stack upwards...not at bottom. wat say Scoble? - Roshan Ramachandran

New comments at the bottom is ever so much nicer for archives, though. Makes it easier to scan the conversation after the fact, to catch up on a long one late in the game, and to catch the flow at a glance. - Kathy Fitch

It seems a bad and old Wordpress theme. - Gianluca Neri

FoaF hiding doesn't seem to be working the way it used to... http://friendfeed.com/kenzoid... - Ken Kennedy

Ken, nice point. - Ahmet Alp Balkan

Kathy: FF being realtime service, updates are easier to read as they "drop in"...specially when you are watching a discussion in separate window, where comments are not collapsed like here. To read an archive, doesnt matter u read upwards or downwards...sequence will always be there...IMO. - Roshan Ramachandran

No, the new Friendfeed works for me. But then, I watched the launch videos and participated in one of the those Scoble Salons that pop up here. Without those learning aids, I probably would be disoriented here, at least for a while. And that's one of the problems with Friendfeed attracting new users: it's powerful, but it's not really that simple. - Tom Landini

but ya...then the comment box also need to move to top :) - Roshan Ramachandran

I have never used FF as much, as I have since the new beta - Props to the FF team!! - Jim Connolly

Love the new FF except for when you hover over a DP it only shows max 5 services and has a "more >>" link. Wish FF showed all of the services on hover still. - Garin Kilpatrick

The new FF has become.. Twitter. I used it as a different service: to gather all my feeds. Now next to my avatar only 4 icons are shown! More, next to each entry it doesn't appear anymore the logo of each service (fb, twit,...). FF is now like an RSS reader, but definitely less funnier, so boring, so similar to twitter (which I like anyway). Another great social network is dead :( - marilena

@marilena has pinpointed my biggest complaint. "next to my avatar only 4 icons are shown" I like the real time feed for most things.However I have a private / business related feed which has now lost almost all utility. Custom RSS feeds run off the screen when you hit add/edit and there is no way. I have found to utilize this data in it's present format. It is now more useful in a feed reader. - Eric Logan

Bring back imaginary friends! - Mark Chandler

I do love the real-time web stuff though. - Mark Chandler

Yeah, it's not much of an improvement. I liked the "people you find interesting" and "people who find you interesting". It was interesting to see who thought I was interesting... interesting. It was nice to see who was subscribed to my feed. - t i n y m

I like it lots. Twitter is down half the time. - tojfs7931

It's good. The only things missing are the source icons... It's always good to know where the content came from - Mirco

Alright guys, I made a Greasemonkey script: http://dazetheory.com/scripts... I'm not the popular one on here, but I couldn't take the background any longer so I fixed it. Screenshot: http://dazetheory.com/scripts... (Share this!!!) - Joshua Hatfield

1. I would like a widescreen option, now it is just wasting space for long texts, 2 how can I see e.g. all my posts from one of my feeds, only, e.g. only the linkedin feed? This function was great, now I can not find it back. - joergkurtwegner

@joergkurtwegner: go to your feed and type in the search field "service:linkedin" - Alejandro

I like the way FF keeps changing and keeping everyone on their toes. Don't think the wide screen ideas would work if that would mean widening the column of text - it isn't comfortable to read wide text columns. Louis wrote the other day that sites/software should be kept simple. I like the ones that are simple on the surface, but slowly reveal their features - that's the way it is for me with gmail. The a-ha! experience. - howard shippin

I just think the "pop up" link should be more obvious. - Stanislas Jourdan

You could use ◥ for clarifying the entry "pop-up" link. At least temporarily: the pop-up link is the time stamp in Twitter, too; who doesn't use/know Twitter? - Jérôme Flipo

@Jérôme : ?? (it's not really for me, i'm used to the current link location) - Stanislas Jourdan

@Stan, You = FF team :) I read lots of complaints about this "hidden" link. I can't find an easy way to make it obvious. The mouse-over idea they tested few days ago wasn't well accepted. Addind a "link" link would take some unnecessary space, etc. The UTF character in "16 hours ago ◥" , as ugly as it may be, could shows that the timestamp is popable. This character or another (the Gmail chat pop-up icon would be far prettier). - Jérôme Flipo

Ok Jérome! That's a nice idea ! - Stanislas Jourdan

The new friendfeed is great - Joe Azzara

It looks a little better, but I still don't get it. It introduces more noise and is really weak in the filtration department. - Brian

I think the main feed area looks better, but the side areas are wasted. The things that niggle me the most are: the rows are (1) too close together in the lists of feeds etc on the right hand side (and i don't like the font) and (2) The Me Feed has gone. That was a really quick, handy way of checking whether i'd already posted something on a topic. - Eyoki

side bar is a bit wasted.. but like the overall feel of this better :) - Rachael Depp

It's taking time to readjust, but I'm liking it. I like the real time updates, I like the layout (couldn't give a fig if the graphics are 'sooooo 1990s' as I saw one comment. It does what I want - it aggregates and distributes my social networking life. It does what it promises. I just hope FF doesn't become distracted by bolting more bells and whistles on eg personally couldn't give a toss about the new email function. - David Eedle

OH, God I hate it. If the changes were optional, if I could pick and choose which ones to enable, that would be one thing. I am a recovered epileptic, and the constant scrolling and jumping on screen makes me QUEASY!! Ugh, I can't look at it, and I can't stay here if they don't give us a way to override it or stop it. I loved picking fave FF posts and tracking the whole conversation and linking back to it, but haven't figured out how to do that yet. - Patricia F. Anderson

having to scroll up through some 200+ comments in order to make a new comment is a royal PITA .. as for my final thoughts on the whole mess that is FF http://bit.ly/2F0fU - Steven Hodson

Found the pause button - thanks, folks. That is (shall we say) not intuitive? - Patricia F. Anderson

Robert, they might want to create an option for people who don't want to express there info on "how many people they follow/subscribe to" and "how many people follow/subscirbe to them". - Michael Forian

A big step backward. They removed features I rely on (imaginary friends, the feed icons), made the UI generally more obtuse, and failed to add any features I particularly want. Real time update is particularly awful: a nice gimmick for ~30 seconds, until you realize that in a feed with a slow update rate it makes no difference, and in a feed with a fast update rate it make the page unreadable, and forces you to pause the stream, putting you right back into non-real time, but with extra effort required. - David Gaw

give me icons please - Rubin

David: Hovering over slows down the stream ;) - Nicholas James

Rubin: Icons were removed to take the weighting off items i.e. Blog/FriendFeed item having more value then a Tweet for instance. - Nicholas James

joshua hatfield: I just installed the script for your background, definitely an improvement over the default gray. Thanks - Sharon McPherson

The name SUCKS. Really. Twitter wins hands down. Ever read Jack Trout on Positioning? - Nitin Nanivadekar

I just Wordled this thread to visualize the comments. http://www.wordle.net/gallery... - Andrew Smith

major suckage. to use a profession term. - michelle lamar

and where are all my friends? Can't see the friends. Grrr. - michelle lamar

michelle, do you have a friend list in place? if not, make one. (go to friends and start picking 'em out to put on the list...) - Karoli

Not working from FB feeds... Not mine... Not yet... - derek Bee

I think this thread sucks, OP and all 254 previous comments. - ianf ⌘

Old ff didn't suck & neither does the new - this thread alone provides a great example of why I love ff in ways I'll never love Twitter - Forrest Cox

@Forrest .. on that I do agree with you. - Steven Hodson

Absolutely NOT, it's better and most beautiful that before ,, keep THIS design up - FFTornado

The commenting scheme on FF is horrible, and this "thread" is a prime example of comments gone wrong. - Bob Blunk from Nambu

Yeah, kinda, because some things are harder or impossible for me to do now, but some things are way cooler. The concept of real time is important and I'm glad they're going for it. I'll deal. I'm here, aren't I? - Laura Norvig

I'm not using #FriendFeed so much now - without 'imginary friend' feature. Going back to Tweetdeck and others to group new twitter only follows - Julian Edward

it's really slick. - Aldrin Calimlim

I can't quite imagine reason that #imaginaryfriend taken out - unless friendfeed aiming to be alternative to twitter ? surely not. Universality suits friendfeed Perhaps it is to do with data volume and the marketing effectiveness of specific data flows. Would love to know more. In meantime I'm going back to Tweetdeck and looking for a web alternative to grouping twitter friends. - Julian Edward

well - Tweetdeck still too slow and unstable! Surprised by that after all this time. Seesmic a little slow too but beta. - Julian Edward

Poor layout, twitter-like, and I hate twitter - Daniele Severo

It's OK. I prefer the layout to the old FF but the old version felt more 'friendly'. Disagree about Twitter btw. I love it. Its simplicity, you could say its limitations are what i like about it. Sometimes FF overwhelms me and i when i log on feel like someone who's just arrived at some kind of high-powered party, i.e. an outsider. I never get that with Twitter: it always feels like 'mine'. - Eyoki

Andrea

OK! CAN YOU ALL JUST STOP BEING INTERESTING SO I CAN GO SHOWER PLEASE?!!!! KTHX!

April 19 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

You go to bed at 9??? - Gerard van Schip

Robert Scoble

Homework project: open Twitter and new friendfeed next to each other. Compare how they act. Twitter feels old and dead.

April 6 - Comment - Like - Share

Myroslav Opyr, Alex Sauceda, Nicholas James and 43 other people liked this

Beta still not open for me yet. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

39 more comments

robert without even getting the new FF, the pause button tell a lot - abdellah

Still not live as far as I can tell. Bret Taylor did just suggest he might move it up early in another thread though. - Daniel J. Pritchett

Brian: it will be at 9 a.m. - Robert Scoble

FriendFeed is real time (reality), twitter is too slow :) = FriendFeed is the NEWS feed - Susan Beebe

just a question, how DM will work? I mean how will FF define Friend from subscribers? - abdellah

Thanks Robert. Safe travels down to Rackspace today! - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

checking out Beta right now...love it :) nice, simple design - improvements are well conceived - Susan Beebe

hmm just checking it... not sure if I dig it or not. - mikepk

gosh..it' up! - Zee.

oh yes susane it is here too :) - abdellah

Definitely feelin' the love for friendfeed. but just wait 'til the bandwidth gets up there and ff critical mass really kicks in. then performance might be more comparable. - Rob Schieber

Just got the beta. Posting from it now. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Cool, how do you like it? - Robert Scoble

I like the new interface on the beta and its animation of new/latest comments - Damian Holmes

Like the speed of the updates - Ravindran Navaneethan

Have to say that I like the new FF more than the old one. :) - Matti Leppänen

The live update motion is interesting, but might get old pretty soon ... will reserve my judgment. - Clarence Chiang

Yeah but i use tweetdeck which is fast, but no FF integration... - Justin Long

Ah scoble found a new toy. I love your youthful enthusiasm. - Gerard van Schip

Not an entirely fair comparison, most people that use Twitter for much at all are using a 3rd party interface; much of the value of Twitter is in the flexibility of the API - Dave Schwab

the rounded corner !! too much - abdellah

Twitter doesn't feel old and dead at all. It just feels different, and very valuable. - Andru Edwards

Takes one to know one, I say! - John Graham

You might change your mind once twitscoop v2 is out, Robert... - twitscoop

twitscoop: let me know when that's out. - Robert Scoble

yea i am definitly liking this live real time feed - Jason Stephens

not with powertwitter add on - Ouriel Ohayon

But Robert... Twitter thru the web is useless anyway. It's not a Web site, dude, it's a communications protocol. Who cares what the interface looks like?! We care about the API, about the server performance, etc. We'll code/create/mash our own UIs! - Alister Cameron

Yes, but I'm dizzy following this. I will have to learn to drive it like a car. I like it for breaking news, but not for real conversation - Francine Hardaway

unfair.. open old friendfeed and twitter for a real comparison.. when twitter v2 comes out then compare tbh... - Stuart Evans

Twitter is picking up comments on FF but if FF is linked to Twitter it will republish the Twitter link to the FF comment! - Justin Long

Agreed, but now FF just looks like Facebook to me. - Dave Hodson

beta still not available for me, can't wait to test it! - Arnaud Fischer

checking the brand new beta.friendfeed.com !! is it a combination of iRC , twiter and real time frienfeed and ... wow !!! - Rocky

I agree with Alister above....Twitter is a utility the way that FM radio is...it carries the convo, there should be no need to use twitter.com - Jason Stephens

Even with Tweetdeck? There's a balance here. Speed kills! - Steve Rubel

Please stop with the "Dead" talk. Only attention monger bloggers use that type of language... ;) - Jeremiah Owyang

Friendfeed is now Twitter on crack. - pcnerd37

Agree with Robert. And Steve has a point about Tweetdeck. - Roberto Bonini

it's crazy, if I don't at it for one minute everything goes away and other stuff shows up. maybe I just subscribe to too many people but I hate it when the text I'm reading moves on the screen - Mihai Secasiu

TheNextWeb Forum: Shevonne

Shots Leak of Lenovo Pocket Yoga Netbook, Looks Like it Actually Fits In a Pocket - http://i.gizmodo.com/5170542...

March 16 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Numan Arda Çebi, Roland Hesz, Wazza T and 23 other people liked this

Toooooooooooo mutherf*ckin' small! - Russell Wagner

4 more comments

Pretty much yeah. - Shevonne

Erm... so its a Sony ripoff? - Gerard van Schip

or a nokia communicator ripoff. - Carolyn Chan

that's a great one Zehra! - Laura Norvig

or a Jornada 680 ripoff? circa 1998 http://www.pocketpcfaq.com/wce... - April Russo (app103)

Danny Choo

Mac users - Is you being FF or Safari? マッカーさん、あなたはサファリー派それともFirefox派？

March 13 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

FF because of the extensions. - Gerard van Schip

Loic Le Meur

Printing the NYT costs TWICEas much as sending every subscriber a Kindle: http://www.businessinsider.com/2009... (via @ThomasCrampton)

March 8 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Alexander Benker, Glenn Batuyong, Roberto Bonini and 8 other people liked this

I would love a kindle but it's way out of most peoples budgets. - Gerard van Schip

Robert Scoble

Why @dbarefoot wants me to stop linking to friendfeed likes and why I won't stop. I will discuss that here:

March 4 - Comment - Like - Share

Ontario Emperor, Susan Beebe, Patricia F. Anderson and 51 other people liked this

1. I link to friendfeed because the conversation is important. - Robert Scoble

99 more comments

2. The link often does not have all the data. The crowd does. - Robert Scoble

3. Friendfeed is way more searchable than twitter is. - Robert Scoble

4. By getting you to participate on the things I'm liking we add value to the system which is useful for everyone. - Robert Scoble

5. I'm not getting paid to Twitter, so excuse me if I decide what I want to do with my Twitter account. I love @dbarefoot but when he starts paying to read my Twitter feed is the day he gets to decide what I do there. - Robert Scoble

thanks for not stopping :) - chaz2b

Friendfeed provides CONTEXT. - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

(1) your commentary is insightful - chaz2b

6. I am not paid by friendfeed. I do not own investments in friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

(2) you have an experienced educated eye - chaz2b

(3) your the life of the party, lol - chaz2b

7. I use "likes" because they are easy way to tell you about something awesome I saw. I click the "like" button here (you can do it too, go ahead and try). When I click like all 28,000 people following me on friendfeed see that item and so do the 70,000 on Twitter see it. - Robert Scoble

If threads don't get too long--redundancy can sometimes be avoided. - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

That's fair enough. Here's why I voted against your linking to FriendFeed. It breaks the way I want to use Twitter: http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Darren Barefoot

8. By forcing you to click over here first before clicking you over to the web site, you see the community and conversation that is happening around an item. - Robert Scoble

Actually, preceding all your tweets with 'Like...' diminishes its value and makes it easier for your followers to ignore. It's analagous to using all caps to get attention when all it really does is make one look obnoxious ;-) - Lee Hsieh

9. By adding "weight" to my favorite items by getting you to participate here you make those items much easier to search for in the future. - Robert Scoble

Robert - plenty of people do check out your Likes on Twitter. Over the weekend, I noticed a large number of hits to my tweeted link about Atlassian hitting $100mm in cumulative revenue after you Liked it. - Hutch Carpenter

10. By clicking "like" I add that thing to my database at http://www.friendfeed.com/scoblei... -- you can search for high quality, no noise, items on that database and see what everyone said about them. - Robert Scoble

This was new, so I figured I'd provide my two cents on the subject. Apologies if you took offense. - Darren Barefoot

sorry for interuptingm, btw, i thought you were threw Mr Scoble - chaz2b

11. Likes get retweeted over on Twitter in HUGE numbers, which brings huge audiences, like Hutch says. - Robert Scoble

12. @jameswanless says my FF posts are a turnoff. He doesn't want to have another account to participate. Here's the trouble. If he participates over on Twitter no one will see it. If he participates here 70,000+28,000 will see his comment. Also, his comment will be much more likely to be found in future through search. - Robert Scoble

13. Darren: you always have the unfollow. I'm not holding a gun to your head. I really don't care if I have any followers anymore. That isn't what is putting food on my table anymore, if it ever did. What is? Having engaged people around me who like improving the web and who like having interesting conversations. - Robert Scoble

Twitter has it's limitations, which is part of the fun. ff has few limitations which is why I'm here. - Joe Bland

Let me put it another way: I'm a member of your audience. I can choose to consume everything via FriendFeed, or your individual streams via the various channels: your blog, Twitter, and so forth. When you merge those streams, you reduce the choices I can make about consuming your content. Obviously the upsides of doing so outweighs this, which, as I've said, is totally fair enough. - Darren Barefoot

Darren: this stuff is all an experiment. The point is my paycheck in the future will come from having people around me who are engaged. Having vapid "followers" really does not matter to me anymore. - Robert Scoble

Darren: I tell my friendfeed audience about my twitters, so it's fair to tell my Twitter audience about my friendfeed behaviors. - Robert Scoble

You know what makes me laugh out loud... Twitter users scream bloody murder or dismiss something so out of hand if it doesn't allow them to dump, and I use that word on purpose, all their tweets onto another service without thought or consideration to what that does to the users of that service. Yet when I do the same, either by 'dumping' my FF stuff out to Twitter or by filtering out... more... - Johnny Worthington

That's just it. I do want to subscribe to your pre-FF Twitter stream (and your blog, as it happens), so I'd obviously rather not unfollow you. As you say, it's entirely your bag, so you're welcome to undertake whatever approach you like. - Darren Barefoot

Robert - I follow you here more than I ever did on your blog. Plus the conversation is here. - Russellreno

By autofollowing me you brought me to twitter, which has been great for my confidence and education. I'm still at the starting point with a number of followers that it is just about manageable to follow what they are saying and to know who they are plus I don't autofollow but read the people's posts before following so that my streams have people that I can learn from. That is either... more... - noxhanti

What I really need, truth be told, is better tweet-filtering software that would enable me to remove the FriendFeed stuff from your Twitter stream when I view it. Can Tweetdeck do that? - Darren Barefoot

Darren: then unfollow me on Twitter and follow me here. You'll get the best of both worlds. You'll see all my original Tweets here, and all my friendfeed likes without breaking the model. - Robert Scoble

Darren, doesn't that expose a limitation with Twitter though. On FriendFeed I can filter out all of Robert's tweets without losing any other information he generates - Johnny Worthington

Darren, Tweetdeck doesn't have good filtering yet. Facebook and friendfeed are working on filtering and are ahead of Twitter so far in doing that but there's not a perfect solution. - Robert Scoble

Johnny: bing! Twitter is totally broken for a whole lot of reasons. Finding old conversations is impossible. Here, quick, find me all the important Tweets that happened around the Chinese earthquake. You can't. That's why I use friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

I can describe Friendfeed to someone and they can see the value in it (non-'tech' people). I can't describe Twitter without feeling kinda stupid. - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

Johnny - Understand that I'm not dissing FriendFeed (though, obviously, it could maybe use threading in conversations). Rather, I'm trying to reconcile how I want to use Twitter with how Robert wants to. - Darren Barefoot

Robert - I could follow you here, but there are plenty of people on Twitter who aren't on FriendFeed (yet). So wouldn't I have to split my attention between the two apps? I already have a too-much-signal problem with Twitter alone (hence the need for more robust filtering across the board). - Darren Barefoot

Robert - Which reminds me, I want to interview you about FriendFeed and lifestreaming for our book. - Darren Barefoot

Darren: that is a problem, but is getting less and less over time. Already I have 14,000 people to follow here. You might be surprised as to how many people are here. They are a lot more engaged. - Robert Scoble

Robert, if Facebook makes the stream more public and removes the friend limit will you move back there? I see much greater potential for Facebook, assuming that's what they do. - Jesse Stay

FriendFeed could use threaded conversations, though, don't you think? - Darren Barefoot

Darren. I know, I understand the frustration. I guess I get to defensive sometimes because people (not accusing you) like to attack the player, not the game. Twitter is good, it's not great. The reason i know this is there is 1,001 different programs out there now to try and manage Twitter, all with limited success. Honestly, I have no solution for your problem... except join FriendFeed. But if that's not your bag, alas, we are creatures of the cutting edge and some of us have to bleed... - Johnny Worthington

@kencamp says "I want you to stop liking FF too. It's leading me to pay far less attention to your tweets. I see them as an annoyance myself." That's fair. I guess if I were getting paid to Tweet I'd care. But Twitter's audience is changing and it's hard to engage in a way that adds value to everyone. Over here? There's a huge amount of value. I could link to this conversation from my blog, for instance, and talk about it. So could all of you (see the "More" menu for a permalink). - Robert Scoble

Also, after seeing Facebook today my feeling is Twitter is under major attack. I want to invest my time in platforms that have a future and for me Facebook and friendfeed are those platforms. - Robert Scoble

Darren: I would love more threading in conversations here, but we already have more threading here than Twitter has. - Robert Scoble

Robert - True, true. It's a frustration of mine in Twitter, as well. Each tweet seems so utterly free of context. - Darren Barefoot

@Robert if FF built in deep threading it would really be a big - huge - plus that would make all the difference to the user experience ... now if they could add comment liking as well :) - Steven Hodson

Darren: bing! Now you are getting where I'm going! For building a community of engaged users friendfeed is 6000x better than Twitter. For someone who wants to build a business around a community that cares about one thing Twitter is totally unsatisfying. - Robert Scoble

fascinating conversation you guys should really keep going - Loic Le Meur

What Facebook did today is huge, by the way. I'm reading the blogs and most of them don't have any real idea about the huge shift that just happened. You'll feel it over next two years. This argument is just a precursor to what's really coming. - Robert Scoble

Here's why Twitter's in trouble. The bloggers and vocal proponents are getting tired of them. Twitter is not listening. When the most vocal begin telling people to go elsewhere, people will follow. This conversation is an example of that. - Jesse Stay

it might be huge Robert but I don't think the shift is one that is going to benefit Social Media or the users of it. - Steven Hodson

How do you think FriendFeed will match up against Facebook in the longer term, given FB's big head start in terms of users? - Darren Barefoot

My theory: an engaged person on friendfeed is worth 100x more to a business than a Twitterer, especially the non-involved ones. Go to Techcrunch's follower list, for instance: http://twitter.com/TechCru... click on 100 people there. Are any engaging in anything? Only 2% are, according to what I'm seeing. Now compare to a list here on friendfeed. HUGE difference. Advertisers, businesses, sponsors, etc will care about engagement at the end of the day a LOT more than just sheer "numbers." - Robert Scoble

Darren: that is the $64,000 question. I was over at friendfeed's headquarters today and I told them "well, how does it feel being facebook's R&D department?" They laughed. But then they started talking about where they are going. Friendfeed understands public communities a LOT more than Facebook does. Facebook's API is also way too big and way too hard to use. Twitters is dead simple. I think you'll see friendfeed do some real innovations there. Also, friendfeed is working on UI updates that are coming soon - Robert Scoble

Remember, facebook is catching up to where friendfeed is today. Friendfeed is ahead in its understanding of the news feed. Facebook, though, is definitely the Microsoft of its space. Steven: I don't agree. There's a lot of value in having a "yellow pages" in the social graph. The key is in the filtering. - Robert Scoble

Well, all I need to do is get the 228 people I'm following on Twitter onto FriendFeed. Now I need a web service that solves the problem "show me who among my Twitter followees is on FriendFeed?" Or maybe that already exists? - Darren Barefoot

Darren: that already exists. Let me find the URL. - Robert Scoble

@Robert I would really like to see those UI updates as that has always been one of my major points of contention with FF - Steven Hodson

that exists actually in Friendfeed. - Tony

Darren, I'm not sure if that exists, but you can add them as Imaginary users: http://friendfeed.com/setting.... Edit: Darren, this may prove better: http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Mo Kargas

https://friendfeed.com/setting... Here's the Twitter import. It'll be interesting to see how many people from your list are already here. - Robert Scoble

The biggest fallacy in all these pro-Friedfeed arguments is that it assumes your avg twitterer, non-techie person has the cognitive bandwidth to consume the firehose of organic discussions that FF enables. And therein lies the rub, quality of conversation becomes a moot point if only a small percentage of folks have the time and inclination to get sucked in, hence the beauty of taking quick sips 140characters at a time... - Lee Hsieh

Lee... The 'avg twitterer, non-techie person' is on Facebook. - Johnny Worthington

Lee: ahh, but that's precisely why Twitter is going to fail. You just don't see it yet. The mainstream is on facebook and they aren't going to see any reason to join Twitter. Especially not with followers like Techcrunch has. There is no "there" there. - Robert Scoble

Johnny: bing. And after today even more people will be on Facebook. In two years every business will be on Facebook. What they did today should not be missed. - Robert Scoble

JW..no doubt as there are a lot of non-text based 'shiny objects' calling for attention. Friendfeed's primary value-prop is around in-depth, text based conversation...apples/oranges. - Lee Hsieh

Lee: advertisers (big brands) tell me they care more about engaged communities than vapid brain-dead users. THAT is why your strategy is the wrong one. Small audiences that are fanatical are worth much more than big audiences that couldn't give a shit. - Robert Scoble

Robert, what they did today might be missed, which is not always a bad thing. My wife and my sister care little for the inner workings of social media development, they just like talking to friends on Facebook. The developments put in place today will be absorbed by them and integrated into their understanding of how 'this stuff' works. We may feel the earthquake, but not everyone needs to shake to be affected :) - Johnny Worthington

Scoble...i dont buy it and refuse to drink the FB kool-aid. by virtue of being a walled-garden, has no alternative other than to monetize personal user data, which in turn will drive the very users away that made them so popular. - Lee Hsieh

Johnny: when your wife turns to you and says "43 of my friends liked this restaurant" I want you to think of today. It will happen, I guarantee it. - Robert Scoble

Lee... Twitter is a garden with no edging, can't tell whats growing where, full of weeds and can't make a cent... Pass another glass will ya? - Johnny Worthington

Lee: the wall is coming down. Berlin used to have a wall. Now it's a tourist attraction. In two years we'll see Facebook's walls as the same thing. You have no clue what's really going on there. But that's OK. You will in a few years and then you'll say "Scoble, you were right." :-) - Robert Scoble

Robert, they day that happens, I will smile a very large smile :) I have tried to explain 2.0 to her, but alas, unless it has context for her life and interests, no dice. - Johnny Worthington

Scoble...i would hardly call my twitter 'habit' a strategy, more like a very controlled pseudo-addiction. I dont expect to conduct intellectual discourse but rather connect/share/consume w/others around the globe. Twitter enables this in a manageable, at your own pace sort of way that doesnt require huge time commitment. - Lee Hsieh

My wife's twitter account... http://twitter.com/R_A_E enough said. - Johnny Worthington

Lee: that's funny. Today I visited EyeFi and they had Twhirl up on the screen. Sure looked like a huge time commitment to me! Seriously, lots of geeks are really seeing loss of productivity with all of these things. I agree that we need a far simpler view of the data on friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

So many of the arguments on (and about) Twitter are because of just one thing; Twitter's lack of functionality. If, for example, Twitter had a "hide likes button" - this thread would not have existed. I dumped Twitter in January and reset my account (and my 22500 followers) to zero. The bigger Twitter gets, the less value I GET from it. For me, it's getting real old, real quick. - Jim Connolly

Scoble...in 2-3yrs if youre right, i will publicly pay homage to your insight via twitter. If you're wrong, then you will need to 'follow' my insight via twitter :-) - Lee Hsieh

Lee: I will be wherever you are. - Robert Scoble

Scoble...productivity loss cant be blamed on twitter but the lack of self control. Social networking via Twitter is like the advent of Asteroids et al in the early 80s or B/W TV... - Lee Hsieh

Robert - Thanks for that. 52 Twitter users were also on FriendFeed--about 22% of all the people I'm following on Twitter. - Darren Barefoot

Jim - Coincidentally, I just recorded a video on the question of Twitter becoming less useful as more people join: http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archive... - Darren Barefoot

I find it hilarious that I stepped away from this conversation to watch an episode of the IT Crowd featuring 'FriendFace': http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Darren Barefoot

Darren... I find it hilarious thinking about if we tried to hold this conversation actually on Twitter :P - Johnny Worthington

Darren: do you complain about how Mashable uses Twitter? Why me and not them? http://twitter.com/mashable (they are one of the most retweeted Twitter users on the web). How about how Techcrunch uses Twitter? http://www.twitter.com/techcru... -- they both take you elsewhere to serve their business purposes. - Robert Scoble

I can't get any of my usual blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook peers to talk here. I notice the same thing with a lot of other folks. I like the conversations here, and I gain a lot from them, but I also miss not having more of my usual crowd around. What can I do? - Dominic Jones

dominic: I don't know you can do that. People hate change. - Robert Scoble

What people at my college have liked about twitter (it's not used as yet, Facebook is) as well as the real time updates is how you can connect to people outside their immediate social circle and the amount of info they see in the links. More of them are thinking of joining, keeping Facebook for friends and twitter for personal branding/work - noxhanti

twitter is great in times of emergency or whatever, because it's instant. However, it's shown that it fails during the most important times all too often. FriendFeed hasn't failed for me yet. I keep FB "real" and FriendFeed/twitter more of a broad-reaching friend-in-a-myspace-sort-of-way. The only thing MySpace has over Facebook right now is media. Bands have literally gotten popular simply because of their MySpace page. I find it hard to do on FaceBook, Pages is nice, but lacks customization like MS. - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

slayerboy: friendfeed has a much better architecture. It's never down and I refresh it hundreds of times every day. - Robert Scoble

Darren: Just shared your excellent video http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archive... some great points!! - Jim Connolly

What applies to Scoble may not apply to the rest of us. With 90,000 followers, you're able to have rich conversations about topics you like because everyone joins in. If we all did what you're doing there would be forks and small conversations all over the place. It's just all so... messy. - Ryan Stanley

Ryan: did you know that if I click "like" on your items here in friendfeed that they get shoved over to Twitter and that everyone on friendfeed sees that item? So, you don't need to be Robert Scoble to get a huge distribution very quickly. You just need to do something interesting. - Robert Scoble

Good point Robert but some of us don;t do something interesting, we have jobs ;) Following the likes of you is my bright point in the day :P - Gerard van Schip

My point is: as the # of users grow how do disparate conversations around similar topics get linked? I would like to know, as I’m typing a comment or post: a) if someone else has typed it, and b) if there’s a different place I should be posting it. - Ryan Stanley

Brian Solis' blog post today really speaks to this point "I Like You: The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation with Macro Impact" http://poprl.com/NSr - Susan Beebe

Robert - I like how you use Friendfeed - don't stop - ever! :) - Susan Beebe

Joi Ito

In a study group meeting listening to a Japanese economist discuss the recession from a Japanese perspective

February 25 from Ping.fm - Comment - Like - Share

Gerard van Schip liked this

Would love to see a writeup on that ;) - Gerard van Schip

Robert Scoble

Homework project: how many followers on social networks are "real?" My initial findings are astounding, participate here as we discover what's going on:

February 23 - Comment - Like - Share

polymath22, Nicholas James, Lorin Olsen and 115 other people liked this

Visit http://twitter.com/TechCru... and now click on each follower. How many messages have they written? I just visited about 100 and only two had written more than a single message. - Robert Scoble

134 more comments

Now you know why I say followers don't matter. If I fake 100,000 accounts and follow myself with them do those accounts matter to anything? No. - Robert Scoble

But I didn't understand just how bad the spam account problem is. On friendfeed I only follow accounts that are putting content into the system. I am only putting people into my ultra special lists (ie, the ones I read first thing in the morning) if they participate. Those are the high value accounts that make being part of this fun. But how many of those accounts do each social network have? That's what matters, not whether a blank account was produced. - Robert Scoble

Who is a bigger fan of you then yourself. :) So if your not following yourself then why provide any content? :P </sarcasm> - Uncle CW™

They matter because other twitter users think that you are popular because you have been followed by 100,000 users. Thus, in result will entice new followers. - charles

this is in line with participation stats from other communities like Open Source or UGC - online a thin minority contribute (in the 5%/15% range) - but it doesn't mean they're fake - just shy or dumb - Marc Brandsma

Beau: I wish I had a tool to delete everyone who hasn't posted at least 10 Tweets from the list of people I'm following. - Robert Scoble

I have found that a lot of people who are on social networks like Facebook or Twitter are not really there to participate but to be the voyeur (to borrow a term). They are more interested in what others are doing but rather not share their selves. It is not an uncommon social trait to be curious to what others are doing but not want them knowing what you are doing. It's small town living on the internet as I like to say. - Christopher Mercer

Marc: I don't agree. After visiting a few hundred of these accounts now, they sure look fake and "spammy" to me. - Robert Scoble

Christopher: that's interesting, but is very weird. Why would you want to watch what people are saying if you don't want to participate? I wonder if anyone will cop to having such an account here? - Robert Scoble

What's your definition of 'real'? There's a difference between spam accounts (let's say created for SOE or to get you to click on a link to just 'blast' marketing) and passive accounts, where someone is happy listening. They don't *have* to participate, most are perfectly happy just watching. - Rachel Clarke

There are 3 types of followers - real people, PR accounts and special like you :-). On my personal twitter ( http://twitter.com/michalblaha ) I prefer real people. On my project's twitter ( http://twitter.com/ontheroadto ) I prefer mix of them. I got severel very usefull contacts for http://www.ontheroad.to from my twitter followers . Its reason why I never (rather) block any of my followers. - News from ontheroad.to

Rachel: you make a good point, but lots of these have weird names, look like spammers, and don't participate. What value are they? - Robert Scoble

I don't know if I really understand the problem here. Granted, if you have a lot of fake followers that makes you look bigger than you are. But otherwise, who cares? I personally follow (and follow back) people based on the quality of their posts, not on how many followers they have. - Matthias Catón

Special followers like you are real people with unbelievable number of accounts they follow - not for PR, not for spam, but to be informed. Strange think on it (for me) is how you can handle so much unstructured information together. You know some magic which I don't know ;-) - News from ontheroad.to

Interestingly, the few I've found so far that have posted real content have had photos on their bios/accounts. I think that's a good way to filter out spammers. "No photo, no friend." :-) - Robert Scoble

I think the major difference between me and TechCrunch would be the people who look for me and whom I add on facebook are people I actually know. I have some very close friends who are not active users of social networking sites but use them to keep up on their active user friends. As for twitter, yes a lot of accounts follow for the purpose getting follow backs. I subscribe to the the idea that just because you followed me does not mean I will follow you. - Christopher Mercer

There are a lot of people, at least in India, who are in strict readonly mode. A lot of them just follow interesting people and read their tweets and shares. Its almost like a substitute for Google Reader. So judging by just the tweet count would be unfair. If there were a last login time in the twitter api, it would make more sense. - Ritesh

Matthias: well, I have been getting more and more spam into my DM column, so there's the danger of that. Yeah, there really isn't too much harm other than if you are in this to just game your follower count that people will figure out that you really don't have an engaged audience there. That will catch up with you eventually. I know I'm more likely to follow someone who has a really great set of friends/followers. I'm sure I'm not the only one. - Robert Scoble

I think that you are most likely to follow a person who is in the field of your interest, much the same way you subscribe to a feed. I, for one, follow many of the social media geeks since the subject interests me, but I very rarely participate in discussions. I enjoy reading what others are saying and shared news and links. So I guess I am a social network voyeur (@Mercer) :) - "Jazzperous" Isaksson

Robert - agree with you about the spammers. I block them all. I also block those who aren't automated spammers but still doing the same behaviour. They have no value for you, or me. I'm wondering what value they have for themselves, if they are like spam email where they get enough interaction to make it worthwhile. - Rachel Clarke

I was followed last night by someone, who it took me 6 pages of back tweets to find 3 actual tweets that did not say 'thanks you for following me' targeted at followers, looks like a real person, but boy so little content, not worth following back. - Carl Grint

I think its the amount of posts is the give away. Even if people are just taking it in I do not like the idea of passive tweeters. You have to get in and get your hands dirty. - Sam Philp

Techcrunch has a lot of inactive followers recently because they're listed in the recommendation box for every new Twitter user. But I agree with other commenters, who follows you and how active they are is irrelevant. The real power of Twitter and all social media is in the conversation, not in the lurking. - Stuart Dallas

On twitter I always page back through recent tweets before following someone back. Generally speaking if I find at least one message or link that's interesting I follow them. I'm not hugely bothered if I'm not followed back. It's not always bidirectional, what you get out doesn't always correspond to what you put in and that's why I find it useful. - John Samuelson from BuddyFeed

I think reasons to why I don't interact more, is that 1) my English is limited 2) I feel I don't know enough about the subject, but still have a great interest in it 3) I am a quiet person... Would you guys block me? - "Jazzperous" Isaksson

"No Photo, No Friend" Sounds like a good qualifier. I can't help thinking though that there is a ton of people who try something like twitter just to see what it is, don't get it in the first 3 minutes and then give up. Shame. - Jay McCormack

I try to participate as much as possible but being just a happily married regular "Joe" with a nuclear family may not be very interesting to most. That said, I have received benefits in the form of personal and professional growth as a direct result of participation in social networks. - Mattb4rd

Sam, Stuart, John, Carl, bing, bing, bing. This is exactly what I'm talking about. Interesting how you can classify users based on who they are following and who is following them. The amount of interaction I'm getting here and on Twitter about this (despite it being 3 a.m. in the morning) tells me that people are finding this a real problem. - Robert Scoble

A bunch of ghost followers can make the difference, that's for sure. Stupid as it may seem, as a presentation card when you first check someone's tweets, it works. You say, hey this guy has 10000, 20000, 60000 followers so that must be for a certain reason spammers included. But still I wonder what the use is except for a bunch of extra work. It is clear that many will hold on to your tail just to feed on the hosting tweeter but they count too. I suppose that a proper balance is ok. - Carlos Lorenzo

Jeppe: I think it is a mixture of things. On facebook you'd never get friended because I use it for friends and family. On twitter you just would not get a follow back. Since everyone uses these applications differently it is really a contextual issue. Following me is much different than following Robert, Mike A, Doc Searls, etc. - Christopher Mercer

Mattb4rd makes an interesting point... problem is I don't think there's such a thing as a regular 'Joe'. Everyone has something to share, a passion, a hobby, a special knowledge of some sort. It's getting beyond the 'what i had for breakfast' posts that provide the real value. - Jay McCormack

Christoper: Yes, think you are right. - "Jazzperous" Isaksson

Carlos: well, now that the number of followers people have has no integrity I am looking under other rocks too and finding no integrity elsewhere. Some people really try to keep their accounts clean. Others, including me, let all sorts of muck in. I think I will clean that out. Why? Because now that I'm looking at other people's followers I see that having lame followers around isn't good at all. - Robert Scoble

Christopher: it's interesting, now that I stuck my foot in my mouth over the weekend on the Twitter suggested friends issue people who work for big brands have been talking to me about what they want on social networks. "Real" is a word I hear over and over again. Why? Because users who participate and push the brands are much more important than users who sit there and do nothing. They've already learned that, so why do we feel so compelled to gather up do nothing followers? I'm going to change that. - Robert Scoble

John: That's exactly the approach I use. Someone follows me? I will check out his tweets to see if there's at least a few that interest me - then I will follow back. The number of followers is of secondary concern to me. As for the number of tweets, I go for the opposite: I prefer less. - Matthias Catón

I don't follow anyone new back. Too many of them were flooding my timeline with no participation. If you want to follow me that's fine, but it's only with @ replies that you'll get me to pay attention to what you're doing. I might however drop by the blog. - Richard A.

I found a new algorithm: the quality of your follower count is totally dependent on how many accounts have non-default pictures. The problem is that if you actually wrote that algorithm and implemented it then the spammers would quickly figure out they better put a new photo on the account. - Robert Scoble

Robert: In my case I work according to a different algorithm. I unfollow anyone that hasn't replies a single time. I don't follow anyone new until they've exchange a few messages with me. If I want to listen to a monologue I simply go to their blog ;-) - Richard A.

Robert: This 'particular' influx of masses of spam accounts into Twitter is relatively new. Leo Laporte spoke about it recently. As Twitter gains more and more media coverage, it becomes a more attractive place for people to produce these spam accounts. I got an email through http://thetechnewsblog.com from one of my readers, to say she had been told that they controlled my a few users, who are planning some kind of mass attack on Twitter. Who knows? - Jim Connolly

Robert: I have been slowly coming to the same conclusion; it is not enough to be careful who you follow, you should also care about who follows you... But doesn't this mean Twitter should change the behavior of the Follow button to Ask Permission To Follow ? (or at least provide it as an option for those who want to filter their followers) - Antoine Bertier

Does it matter whether it's a picture (like of a human) or just non-default? - Jay McCormack

Twitter should forget about celebrity accounts and encourage dialogue. What makes any social network work is dialogue. Without conversation twitter would be gathering dust as a home server somewhere. - Richard A.

Robert, I think in your case the nothing followers are people who have decided to user twitter (in the example of twitter) to follow your activities. In my case they likely just want to spam me (hoping I follow back) and in the one case someone used @<username> to spam me, I blocked them. - Christopher Mercer

Jim: but look at the accounts that are following TechCrunch. Then compare to the accounts that are following me. Mine have pictures on them. Techcrunch's don't. Mine are participants who Tweet. TechCrunch's are not. It's very strange. - Robert Scoble

Christopher: I disagree. Some accounts are gathering a lot of these "fake" accounts than my account is, for instance. Why is that? - Robert Scoble

Robert: That's because Michael doesn't speak with his followers - just broadcasts TC posts. It's easy for spammers to 'follow' him without him noticing. You would notice it AND make some noise. - Jim Connolly

Jim: maybe, I'm not sure that's true. But it does seem to have something to do with the new Twitter suggested friends list. - Robert Scoble

A lot of posts are very helpful links to interesting things - which I appreciate. However it's seems really difficult to engage anyone in a real conversation or get an answer to a question. - Breck Stewart

Robert: If a spammer follows one of those 'suggested friends', they get MORE followers themselves. These accounts are super-active right now. By being seen on those follower lists, people follow the spammers too. It's only a small percentage, but if Veronica or Michael can get 60k new followers in 14 days, the numbers these spammers can get is higher, than if they followed me. On my list, very few people would 'see' them. - Jim Connolly

Finally some traction on this as I only brought it up on the 14th Feb ;) http://twitter.com/styleti... , as I commented on thetechnewsblog its not just about the fact they are fake and bolstering the numbers think what chaos or hram these 10's of 1000's could do to Twitter if they all started spamming or tweeting at once!? - roger byrne

You know, there is a website that lets you unfollow inactive users and users that never posted a tweet. Twitter Karma! http://dossy.org/twitter... - Gloson Teh

and if you look into it further the 'Norm' for these accounts is one update and all following 20-22 of Twitters suggested followers! - roger byrne

what Christopher Mercer said, on my personal id I only follow people who I think have something interesting to say or whose info I want to see, this also includes friends and family. On my projects id I look at every follower and as long as I don't think its a spam follower I follow them also, but I don't read the posts apart from the first page when I first sign in. There I'm providing info for others. I will reply to any questions of course. - Tina Clarke

Beau: no, thanks, I hadn't seen that yet. @ev is full of crap. These accounts are totally different than the average Twitter account. Look at my followers. Then go and look at the followers on any of the top 20 accounts. Totally different behavior (no icons, no posts). Personally I don't mind. Twitter has now corrupted itself and I really have lost all caring I used to have over that service. It's why I'm putting my friendfeed likes into Twitter now. I really have no incentive not to push everyone here. - Robert Scoble

I bet that by the end of March that Twitter goes through and deletes all sorts of accounts. Just watch. These accounts don't help the system out. They look lame because they are lame. - Robert Scoble

I'm real. I may be boring, but I'm real. ;) I block spammers and I don't automatically follow non-spammers back. I only follow people I am already friends with or new people I find interesting. A particular pet peeve of mine is being followed by self-gurus and social network marketing "experts". Ironically, after complaining about these "Tony Robbins types" on Twitter I was followed by the director of Robbins' films. ;) - Eric Williams

Eric: no doubt YOU are real. But here's one of the lame accounts: http://twitter.com/Serious... -- following only 20 people. No followers. No messages. Only standard icon. This was created by a computer, not by a human being. Now, go through any of the 20 people he's following and look at the follower accounts. They are all lame! I love it, create tons of fake accounts and make your numbers higher and higher. - Robert Scoble

"This was created by a computer, not by a human being." - As a categorical statement, I think this goes too far. It could easily be the equivalent of discussion forum lurking. - John Craft

John: sorry, I disagree. The pattern is out of wack. I'm sure there might be a few people who exhibit this pattern, but not thousands among thousands. Also, the pattern changed a few weeks ago. Explain that. - Robert Scoble

@john craft Bull and you know it ;) check through pages of followers in fact pick page 200 of any of the ppl and you can see how many accounts this really is that we are discussing here, you ever saw 100,000 lurkers before because this is what this amounts to! Now opposite to Robert I believe these people have no responsibility for this but also the fact there has been no action against it beggars belief why? This could seriously screw up their service! - roger byrne

And, John, let's say you are right, that these are real humans who created on their own the same kind of account. Follow just the same 20 people. Don't change your icon. Don't post a Tweet. Etc. Etc. Are they as valuable as, say, the people who are following me who actually post, actually have attractive icons, actually follow more than just the defaults? No way, no how. They aren't "real" to advertisers. Why not? Because they exhibit no behavior that will turn into sales. THAT is what advertisers want. - Robert Scoble

the pattern changed for all accounts at the same time chk twitter counter its 9th -11th of Feb for all these accounts... - roger byrne

"They aren't "real" to advertisers." That, I agree with. - John Craft

Roger: Twitter is now corrupted and we are just starting to understand the beginnings of what happens when you corrupt your community. Luckily we have a non-corrupted community here to contrast with Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Thank Robert I love Twitter and it HAS changed my life so I have no plans to leave or to accuse people of wrong doing but if it was my baby I sure would be taking care of it much more! - roger byrne

roger: me too, but they don't listen to their real users. I guess I should have just been a user like TechCrunch. In fact, I'm starting to understand just how right Mike Arrington is when he pointed out to me that I should blog more on a service that I can control. - Robert Scoble

This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. If I'm twittering a robot then I'm wasting my time! - Captain Jack

Captain: nah, I've learned over and over again that blogging/twittering into the wind actually can be useful. I've Twittered things just to get them off my chest, for instance. I've also blogged things just to get them into Google so I can pull them out later. On Twitter I could get readers just by having fun with http://search.twitter.com -- no followers needed. - Robert Scoble

Captain: it's a serious issue because this, and the very lamely developed suggested friends feature, demonstrate that there's something Rotten in the State of Denmark. But we already knew that because of how many times we have seen the fail whale over past two years. - Robert Scoble

I find myself checking to see if someone has a blog in their profile also. So for me it's photo+blog=friend. - Jay McCormack

As the government is so keen to do when there is wrong doing, they call for an investigation. I think its time to call for an investigation and demand answers. I for one don't want to use a system that inflates its number for personal gain. I have discovered that having control is better when social networking. Twitter reminds me of those networking lunches where everyone is expected to give 2 referrals. - Russ Jackson

And all of these "followers" follow exactly 20 people... I'm enlightened. I was wondering what was happening to my modest Twitter account when it suddenly started attracting all kinds of unlikely followers recently - but it's probably the same thing, machines, and not a sudden burst in popularity. Oh, well. Thanks for reminding me of my FriendFeed account via Twitter. - Terje Fjelde

Jay: that certainly works for me. Russ: I don't worry too much about it. If I can figure this out with 15 minutes of poking around so can everyone else. I am sure a bunch of these accounts will disappear soon. Twitter doesn't want to be embarrassed by this because it won't help them monetize anyway. Unless they are charging per thousand views and then advertisers will figure out the accounts aren't real very quickly anyway. - Robert Scoble

Playing devil's advocate: Isn't it also possible that many of these "lame" accounts belong to people who just recently joined? They haven't spruced up their profiles, haven't had the courage to tweet, only follow recommended twits, and are generally feeling their way around the service before getting fruitfully involved. Of those, I bet a large number decide Twitter isn't for them and leave their accounts dormant. - Eric Williams

Eric: it's possible, but very unlikely (it's also possible I could win the lottery four times in a row). After all, this was NOT the behavior of lurkers BEFORE Feb. 6. Why would it change on that date? You really think there are lurkers out there who'll behave exactly the same in groups of thousands? I don't. Not possible, because of how people get pulled into Twitter. You get pulled in by your friends. So, there will be some variability there. - Robert Scoble

Robert I agree if you can figure it out in 15 minutes than everyone else can too. I was saying it tongue and cheek. It says something about those who have to inflate there numbers though. Perhaps they are lacking in something or in an area. LOL - Russ Jackson

Sounds like you're really letting this nonsense get to you. Relax. The free market of ideas that is the net will sort it out before long. If Twitter sucks, it won't survive. Then again, I'd have expected MySpace to die a horrible death long ago. Hmm...maybe Twitter won't die, but it'll become an internet ghetto for the terminally lame (like AOL). ;) - Eric Williams

my app works on its own as well as as the frontend for the twitter team themselves. Instead of having to report @spam and then go through all your friends to find the bastard to block.... it would auto-parse out 'potential and known' spammers into a group.. one click and your account is clean, meanwhile any new ones are sent off to a convenient way for the twitter team to once-over the account to see if its legit or if its spam. - Brent Terrazas

Eric: online communities have been getting to me since 1985. You're right, just because something sucks doesn't guarantee its death. In fact, it can easily get much more popular, even with these flaws. That said, now I have something new to think about. It's not the end of the world. Just the end of the importance of followers. :-) - Robert Scoble

In the last month there have actually been close to 7 full blown twitter mass account creation and/or twitter mass account spammer apps released. Some cost over $200. Regardless, everyone i Affiliate marketing is going ga-ga over this... this is literally the beginning of a new era of twitter spam.. - Brent Terrazas

I never gave a rat's ass how many people followed me anyway. As long as I have enough followers to maintain interesting conversations, I'm happy. :) - Eric Williams

Eric: you don't need any followers to have interesting conversations. Friendfeed proves that. :-) - Robert Scoble

This is my first real FriendFeed convo. I'm still not entirely comfortable here. Keeping track of conversations feels like too much work. Either I have to visit the web page and manually reload or use something like Twhirl and drown in a flood of data. Am I just really dense? Is there an easier way to keep up without being overwhelmed that I just don't know? Is the learning curve less steep than I think? - Eric Williams

Are followers following someone else's follows just because they deem that person to be an influential tweeter? - Mark Fletcher

Eric: I just use the web page and refresh. - Robert Scoble

Mark: I don't think so. Three weeks ago I was on Twitter's top 10 list, so should be getting nailed if that's the case. I'm not getting nailed that way. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Excuse my ignorance, but surely you know someone with connections at Twitter? Ask them. There's something seriously weird going on. - Jim Connolly

Jim: I'll ask Biz when I wake up. - Robert Scoble

Still trying to get my head round friend feed. as far a Twitter goes, I follow a few "celebrities" and interesting people but most of my actual "tweets" are intended for my family and real life friends. I guess most people who don't know me personally won't be interested that I've just walked the dogs or I'm going to bed, but friends and family will be as they will know if it is ok to phone or visit me. My facebook is really only intended for my family. - Andy

Robert, you and I think a lot alike so there's really nothing more I can add. It. would be nice to have some sort of threshhold setting that a person has to have nnn posts before you can follow them. But then, that could be gamed also. - Keith Barrett

they're building them like you build blog farms.... at first while amassing quantity, you don't spam outsiders, u link up and spit out aggregated comments, then at somme point boom.. all 5k go off and spam.... onto the next 5k...etc..friending a top 10 would=ban - Brent Terrazas

I don't twitter a lot but that is because who would find my changing nappies and going to pick up the kids from school interesting? Okay maybe one day of that but everyday the same tweets? I'm one of the ones that find other lives more interesting than my own at the moment until things start to get interesting in my own!!!! and no I'm not embarrassed to admit that. - May

A large chunk are just people that are hoarding contacts. - Gerard van Schip

Beau: the main goal of a private account seems to be to make the tweets private (they are do not appear in everyone, or in search for instance). The interesting side effect is that you get to filter your followers, but there is no reason to limit this feature to private accounts. The issue is not to prevent valueless accounts to get my updates (since they are meant to be public) it is rather to prevent them from polluting the list of followers that appear on my profile. - Antoine Bertier

Almost every time I "tweet" I get several notices that so and so is now following me. when I go through to their accounts, twitter have usually deleted them or they have nonsense tweets about this or that product that i "need" to enhance my life - Andy

What is real? I have to remind you, Robert, that we met online. And now we are real. I met @stevegillmor, @karoli, @mobilejones, and so many more people online and they are as real to me as @chelseahardaway, my daughter, who is now also my online friend. It' a blur. I know tons of my Twitter and FB friends personally. - Francine Hardaway from twhirl

Where's the white paper on this? You should be writing it. - Francine Hardaway from twhirl

I seem to have added about 50-60 followers in the last day or on Twitter, which is unusual for me. Honestly, I wonder why as I am not a heavyweight twitterer...nor do I think I post anything particularly profound or even useful. The only things I changed recently were putting a bio, blog link and headshot in, so I assume that this is what many people look for...I think the human factor is sometimes lost with the proliferation of social networking. - John Samuelson

I have a number of accounts in places where I participate by observation. Seriously. We all pick and choose what we do with limited time and endless choices of what to do with that time. I've only been "twitter-active" for the last week or so, "twitter-dormant" for a year or two. The point is that I don't recommend writing off the silent majority as spammers or of no use. They contribute by being the audience for much of what goes on, via Twitter and other channels. - Colin Wheeler

Are you going to blog your numbers? That would be cool if you did. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

Also, an analogy I like using - swimming in the sea; some folk are OK to jump in where it's deep, others want to slowly inch their way into the waves, others will stand still and wait until the tide reaches their chest ... but they are all getting wet! And probably all will end up swimming to one degree or another. Well, it sort of explains my point ;-) - Colin Wheeler

It's amazing how many fake accounts I see trying to connect with me. I'm still a small Twitter user and getting everyday a couple of spams, is way too much. - Zack Brandit

Robert, are you trying to fight with Turing test? :) - A.T.

Speaking only for myself: I follow a lot of people because in my position (someone who teaches new media journalism) it is a potentially valuable way of keeping up with thought leaders (like you, Robert!) ... and is increasingly replacing my use of RSS feeds. While I would also like to accumulate my own cadre of followers, at this point in time I still prefer to spend my time on longer, more thoughtful items (i.e., blog posts) than tweets. That may change in the future. - Rich Gordon

i'm real.... just real quiet :) - todd

I am a human :) - Joe Dawson

I like to follow Twitter conversations from my iPhone but often don't like to type out a response if I'm away from a keyboard. And it just feels odd responding to a tweet that's been up for a while. So not sure if that makes me one of the odd ones that watches more than comments, but it works for me :) - craterdweller

Have you seen Brooks Bayne's post on this subject: http://brooksbayne.com/post... - seems to confirm what you're saying Robert. I've been thinking of zeroing my twitter followers and asking the real people to re-follow. Bet I'd lose 50% or more. - Leo Laporte

Maybe I should start working again on my little web app, that lists your followers and the date of their most recent tweet. I guess it's also possible to get the number of updates along with this time/date... - Holger Eilhard

Last summer I took a look at the full feed from Identi.ca, and found that around 25% of all registered users had posted only once. Only half had posted more than 5 times, and IIRC, the 80/20 "rule" applied and ~80% of the traffic came from the top 20% of users. I'd be surprised if Twitter's stats were much different (chart: http://kshep.posterous.com/more-id...) - Ken Sheppardson

I think there's a lot of dormant accounts. Join, use the service for a bit, then fade away. Takes too much work to maintain a lot of networking sites. - Barry Biddlecomb from twhirl

I think there are only 5 real people out there. :) - mikepk

I think real <> volume. Isn't the value of this technology many frequent intersections on many different threads...Is there a map that shows the frequency of those people's interactions elsewhere? We (I) don't all have time to trawl through the feeds alll the time. It's an attention economy and we (I) split it between about 7 sources on average every day..? - dromologue

mikepk: I'm convinced there are ~101,000 real people, as I've seen that many in one place at one time in person (Michigan Stadium.. Go Blue). The rest is all CGI. Of course there's no reason you should believe me, as I'm just part of the plot to deceive you. - Ken Sheppardson

I'm real . Blip beep zip <CR> <LF> - Ken Pruett

I'm real, at least I'm pretty sure I'm real. - Aram Zucker-Scharff from twhirl

Far better of an argument is how much traffic is truly real. - Patricia

I think active users who are authentic = real. I have been getting lots of phonies following me lately. Get real! - Jeremy Campbell from twhirl

wow, such a long and winded thread discussing phenomena of followers and following. it is very simple, really. follow whom you think is interesting to you and with whom there might be possible exchange of information and life experience. I do find Robert and some of his friends quite intersting. I do however not follow the A-lister bloggers or entrepreneurs whose feeds are prevalently twitter insider info. Fake followers? That happens, it is inevitable with FF- and Twitter-like architecture. Live with it. - Hayk H.

I find twitter is just a entertainment tool. It's better served for popular people to make fans feel like they have a live channel to their idol. Marina of hotforword.com uses twitter for such purpose. She doesn't even follow me on twr and I'm her assistant on her website. Micro blogging just waste too much time when one could spend it on adding more content to your master blog. - Captain Jack

I'm real. But I must admit that I do a lot more following on twitter (and here) than posting. And I only follow informed people. Don't care for the silly stuff. - lolise

I just got a bunch of new Twitter followers with obviously computer generated names like e3fG4q etc. - KyleHase from twhirl

This thread proves one thing, Robert: your friendfeed followers certainly are "real." :) The number of comments on this thread are a bit overwhelming. - Steve Lynch from twhirl

It's not about "how many" - it's who, in what context, and by what percentage. Check out http://twitter-friends.com for a glimpse of the social network analytics that addresses these questions. - Lawrence Liu

Greetings Robert, some of us use the social channel as our news source. We do not input a lot however we are consumers of the feed. Does that make us not real? - James Tallman

James: you're real, I wouldn't worry. Here's the deal, though. "Real" people always exhibit random behavior. Always. Whenever you see 10,000 people who sign in, add the same people, don't do any posts, don't customize their icon, don't add any random friends, that can be demonstrated to be fake. Why? Cause everyone hears about Twitter from someone else and there's variability in the friends they add. At least there was before February 6. What happened after that date? Twitter's community was corrupted. - Robert Scoble

I'd say based on recent twitter experience about 25%. I'm a relative nobody, and my followers quadrupled. My guess is they are all REAL nobodies. - jcunwired

The challenge is that many tools use the number of followers to "rank" you and make you an influencer. Is it right? No, but we have to play with the rules we have. - Julio F ~ @SocialJulio

For us newbies on twitter and friendfeed, it's pretty challenging navigating all the comments. A lot of interesting stuff out there but it moves so fast you almost have to be plugged in 24/7 to catch the conversation that most interests you. That's tough when we all have lives outside the Internet ;-) I'm wondering if there are unwritten "rules" I missed somewhere...How long can we be silent (attending to other business) and still be considered "real" followers? - Donna Horne

Julio: bing. Which is why the integrity of Twitter is now gone. Advertisers might be fooled, but not for long. This world passes info around so fast it'll make your head spin so anyone who buys advertising (or hands out access or something else like review units) based on Twitters follower numbers is lame and deserves to be ripped off. - Robert Scoble

I believe twitters integrity is being challenged by its own success and spamming, hopefully this opens up the market for friendsfeed and 3rd party filtering applications. - Carl Plant

Carl: Twitter's integrity is being challenged by its own stupid decisions and lame algorithms. But they probably will just arrogantly write off this as the ranting of someone who was punished by them. Which is true. - Robert Scoble

Robert - bingo! - Susan Beebe

I'll only follow if people have made the effort to upload a photo, sent at least a few messages to show me they're going to give me something to follow and most of all - dont proclaim they are the best at anything / use their twitter account as a billboard.. - Matt Randles

also, a tool to go through existing contacts and see those who have less than 10 updates or say no updates in the last 90 days ... with intention of removing would be cool, unfortunatly the twitter api limits mean running it would have to be low process and could take a long time.. - Matt Randles

Stephanie Booth

Guess again! http://twitpic.com/1kgg0

February 19 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Erm... is that motion tracking stuff? - Gerard van Schip

Gerard van Schip › Comments