"I agree about the potential for social websites to cause distraction and noise, but are you sure you're not attributing a little too much to the services themselves rather than your usage patterns? I didn't have a good experience on twitter until I followed a small number of smart people, almost all of whom I have met in person (at conferences etc) who post interesting insights that are relevant to my field. I check it every day or so and get a huge amount of value from it. FriendFeed can be far more overwhelming than twitter. For a while, I would get sucked in to public discussions, some of which lasted for days, and then I'd get burned out or realize I hadn't really gained anything. I learned to control who I follow with lists, and to use the email and IM features to let me know about posting from people (mostly close to me) who I don't want to miss. I have collaborated on a paid consulting project using a private FriendFeed room (and it's worked better than any tool I've used), and..."
- Robin Barooah
"Not really. You clearly dismiss whole services outright: e.g. "FriendFeed is pointless, period. Also, it is not completely symmetrical and decreases fidelity of the content it aggregates, which ought to be enough reason for my not going there in months." Sure, you might not find it useful in your particular life, but that's not what you're saying here."
- Robin Barooah
@gregorylent I suggest you give Anathem another try - takes about 100 pages to get into it, and then it's great.
Jonathan LePlastrier and I have been using this to collaborate on a consulting project, and from where I sit, it works very nicely. I did want to upload some video from my iPhone, but it makes sense to me that FriendFeed wouldn't want to compete with YouTube, and considering that you can upload to YouTube direct from the phone, it's not so inconvenient.
- Robin Barooah
If anyone were able to invite us to Google Wave, I would be very interested in doing a comparison.
- Robin Barooah
@Eyebee it was the 'no' that threw me until I looked at FriendFeed.
It's worse. With regular twitter conversations you can actually play detective and figure out what's going on with some effort. If I post something via twitter that gets echoed to friendfeed, and then people on friendfeed comment, and only some of them choose the @reply option, then the audience on twitter has no way to reconstruct the thread or even to discover why lines are missing.
- Robin Barooah
I agree. I have people who I am connected with on both and the signal crossing can get a bit crazy. Integrating those threads, at least with people I am connected to in both services, would be an excellent addition to friendfeed.
- berchman
right - but there Paul is talking about originating the comment on FriendFeed - which does create a link to the FF conversation. This is not the case if the starting comment originates on twitter.
- Robin Barooah
from IM
So you'd suggest FF add ff.im links to the @reply comments too?
- Casey Muller
yes - that would allow twitter readers to figure out what was going on
- Robin Barooah
from IM
I discovered this while trying to understand someone's apparent reply on twitter to something I posted to twitter. It was only fluke that I saw that his comment was part of a thread that had broken out on friendfeed.
- Robin Barooah
from IM
Cool, good to know. For now, you can grab the ff.im link by clicking the share button and paste it in at the end. I'd be interested to know if doing that solved the problems.
- Casey Muller
That doesn't solve the problem, since we know a-priori that most commenters are not following that discipline.
- Robin Barooah
from IM
i.e. I don't get to control whether people who comment on my twitter originated posts do that or not.
- Robin Barooah
from IM
Oh, I see, it's the other guy's comment that needs the ff.im link. But didn't you see his comment on the FF entry?
- Casey Muller
no - because this was all happening on twitter, and by the time I looked on FF the whole conversation had scrolled off - I had to look at the "Robin Barooah" page to see it.
- Robin Barooah
from IM
@psnively It's a great paper, but do you really mean prophetic? The crisis has been with us for quite a while now, pre-dating that paper.
Well, let's see...tomorrow is VI XXV MMIX. I have reserved a shuttle at X:0 (is there a Roman numeral for zero?) so that I can board a flight that leaves as XII:LIII. This was the first trade show that I attended with the new organization of my company, and I've seen several reorganizations since I started working for the company in MCMIXIV. When you look at MCMIXIV and MMIX, it's easy...
more...
- John E. Bredehoft
No. The Romans, for all their innovative civilizing ways didn't understand the significance of a symbol to denote zero
- Ian May