Reason number 17: Because quantum physics says that there is a very slight chance that any given object could spontaneously teleport, and when it happens somebody darn well better catch it on camera. - Trevor Lee
Reason 18: Because who wouldnt be interested in watching me feed the cats?! - Lisa Lee
I'm sure it would be even more interesting with my Nokia N800... but I don't ever desire to have one. - Jake (aka Jawee) via twhirl
Its still very walled garden-ish. Google Apps premium should be included in your comparison:
- use your own domain
- supported on mobile (awesome on Blackberry)
- email, calendar, docs/spreadsheets
- shared presentations with chat
- works with linux, windows and leopard - bankwatch
No, I honestly think Apple's doing this the right way - and I wouldn't be surprised if you saw more of Apple's software on the Windows desktop in the coming years. Not so much, the other way around. - l0ckergn0me
Except that #1 is now Mashable, #2 is Louis, and Feedly.com itself is nowhere to be found through 5 or 6 pages of results... Sure it will change soon, but both Louis and Mashable link to Feedly, you'd think that would be enough. - Jeremy Felt
feedly is actually in second page. The link is www.feeddo.com. I am sure Edwin will put a 301 redirect to the feedly.com site soon - Atul Arora
Louis and all: the reason this happens is 2 fold: 1. google loves, trusts and indexes RSS feeds extremely fast, and 2. Feedly domain is very new to the index therefore it ranks lower than established domains like lg.com and mashable.com. The fact that they do not have a blog/pressroom rss feed also hurts feedly.com. Note: they link to their blog in top nav, however that blog has a completely different URL and there are no autodiscovery urls on the homepage or a direct link to the aforementioned. - Stepan Mazurov
Eric, while there's no commenting here on FriendFeed, your article is the "Most Popular" on Shyftr right now. Take a look and see. http://www.shyftr.com/item/?id... - Louis Gray
Yeah, noticed that it was picked up over there the other day. I was a little unnerved that Shiftyr basically pulls your full RSS feed and creates a community around that (without the publisher's consent)... am I missing something? - Eric Berlin
Eric... it's essentially an RSS reader with comments (just like everybody wants Google Reader to grow up to be). Anybody having issues with comments there instead of the blog should have them with FriendFeed or anything else (Digg/Slashdot/etc.) We first wrote about them in March: http://www.louisgray.com/live/... - Louis Gray
Louis, I don't care what you call it, pulling someone's entire blog posts and then making money around that (which is what they'll eventually do) is content theft to me. Shit by any other name still smells like shit. If they ever pull my feed and use it there, they can expect to get hit with a DMCA take-down notice. It's really uncool to do that. Google Reader is a feed reader. Period. You have to subscribe to a feed. A reader of my posts makes me money, in one way or another. FriendFeed only posts links. - Raoul Pop
Louis, interesting piece and Shyftr seems to be attempting to provide a valuable service... but I remain uneasy. Essentially Shyftr authors are helping to seed a community that they have no control over, no voice in, and have not agreed to be a part of. I may not have even known that my piece was doing gangbusters over there unless you told me, for instance ! - Eric Berlin
I'd distinguish it from Friendfeed because you're not seeing the full text of the article. There's a "danger" in friendfeed too I suppose in that aggregators have the power to sap strength from individual publishers, AND publishers like you and I are providing RSS feeds on our work as a tool to let others read it more easily... but there's a line here where the publisher is getting abused, I'd say. Don't you think that Shyftr (man, that name is difficult for me to spell without extra care!) is... - Eric Berlin
...at the least creeping up on that line? - Eric Berlin
By the way, this is all great grist for a blog post ! - Eric Berlin
Raoul, I'm surprised that no one commented with same sentiment on Louis' fine coverage of the site. I don't know if I feel quite as strongly as you but am troubled. And to bring friendfeed in, it's slightly troubling that this conversation is taking place here instead of on one of our blogs.... it all gets sort of bizarre and confusing and fuzzy when you start to play it out, but a great conversation to have nonetheless. - Eric Berlin
It sounds like good discussion for a blog post. It's clear there are multiple opinions here. But the time for RSS readers and social aggregators to be passive without comments is gone. If we're still needing transparency for two-way deals, sure... but I bet I can find your content, in full, in many other places. Have you seen Social|Median? Same deal. It's the way things are going. - Louis Gray
Damn, while I initially thought this was an interesting idea, I do rather side with Eric here. That's like the entire blog post. What's the difference between a startup or a scraper blog in this case? Because one of them sends you an invite? - Jason Kaneshiro
maybe it is time for a fully distributed post/read/comment anywhere ecosystem - tagami
not certain that there is going to a widespread amount of adoption in that regard, there are already voices clamoring about wanting to put all their content back onto their blogs- but if there is a way that the post/read/comment anywhere system can also be accumulated in a single place at the same time, then you might just have a solution. - Nathan Eckenrode
@Raoul Pop I can't see the diference between what google reader does now and what shyftr does, The intent of both is to make money around pulling your feeds and delivering them to users outside of your site. I don't see how having to subscribe to a specific feed is relevant at all, maybe you can explain. It's only theft if you don't credit the content creator, which is not the case here. - Mario Romero
I commented over at Louis' blog but the short version is- the amount of work chasing around the conversation will probably shove me to a point of not caring and pulling it all back in, so I can be more magazine-like. When everyone is in the conversation, it's just loud. And suddenly, I hate to realize that I'm thinking Old World and all, but yeah. Shit happens. 2.0. Or something. - Eric Rice
I admit I don't get the discussion - once I publish my posts, I'm neither in control of the discussions around it, nor do I want to be, nor do I feel the need to know everything everybody might be saying about it. Besides that, what does Shyftr do that Google Reader, FeedGator, Netvibes and others haven't been doing for years already. - Frederic
Jason - absolutely - they cross every moral line. I'm working on a long post about spammers and scrapers - hope to publish it next week. That's a really dirty and slimy sub-culture... - Frederic
I wonder if CommentsPortability.org or OpenComments.Org are available? A system must be devised to send the comments back to the blogs. An open standard will come out of this. I can see Disqus being one of the early players. As for the offenders they are too numerous to name. Disqus, Digg, Del.icio.us, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Shyftr, Mixx, etc. Anyware you post a link and comment not on the original blog would be included. I think this applies to linkers as much as the sites that pull the full text RSS. - Franklin Pettit
Very interesting Franklin, would love to learn more about this. This is basically what Scott Karp is calling for in his piece today. - Eric Berlin
is this a trend? will this bring back the blink tag? :) - felix
I figure if someone looks at that but doesn't get it, they're not a geek. :P But to me, it's just more funny like the rest of the jokes on teh intarwebz. :-) - Voyagerfan5761
It looks almost like a challenge: “cut here” - John Lam
I actually went to the Starbucks shareholders annual meeting a couple weeks ago and got to taste this new blend. Pretty smooth stuff. Keep your eyes peeled for the new Clover machines they are rolling out. Offers French press style individual cups. (*Dislcaimers: 1) I never have owned a share of Starbucks stock and am not entirely sure what I was doing there and 2) I haven't had more than three cups of coffee in my life so my opinion should be worth zero.) - Sacca
I noticed the same thing today. I asked if they got new cups and shirts and they said yes, from now on, its back to the original. They also pointed out that the flavor-of-the-week coffee is no longer in rotation, but permanently a Seattle original. When they asked if I would be having a triple espresso, I looked around in hopes no one heard and said, "um hm." - Andrew Baron
Story goes they're rolling out 'standard' coffee. Kids are going back to Dunkin - Charlie Anzman
I like it when companies go back to their "roots." Of course, I'm also a big fan of throw-back jerseys in football as well. I just like old-school, I guess. - Vince DeGeorge
The former CMO of Starbucks is one of my mentors, and he told me that the original logo was changed partly b/c people were offended by the exposed breasts. Even the "new" old logo on the cups unveiled yesterday are a slightly altered version of the image above--her hair covers up her breasts :) - Ana
how is your mentor a starbucks guy? you dont even drink coffee! - eviltom
i know the story behind it and i could care less about the sexual implication and then some, but i liked the green logo far better :( :( - Nicole Simon
Interesting. This would explain why Schultz was giving an interview out in front of the Pike Place store last week: http://flickr.com/photos/rundf... Also, the coffee out of a Clover machine is amazingly strong and unlike any other drip or espresso drink I've ever had. An 8 oz cup in the morning literally makes my heart race until the afternoon. - Jason Chen
Thats Schultz in action - have you tried their new roast Pike Place? - Mrinal Desai
Not sure I like the black logo... Green has always been Starbucks to me. How, oh how, will I change my automatic perception? - Voyagerfan5761
I'm not a developer, so I'm curious what the engine means for app consumers like me? What kinds of cool stuff can you do with this? - Ginger Makela
@Ginger: I'm in the same boat as you. What it means is that we can expect to see a wider number of choices for web applications. Things like this and the Amazon AWS offerings allow more developers to turn their web app ideas into a reality. - Rob Safuto
I've got FriendFeed Stats up and running (locally) using Django + Google App Engine, this is really cool. Spoke too soon - can't use sockets which means I can't use urllib2...grumble grumble - Benjamin Golub
I think it means we'll see lots more small apps that try to do one thing well. They won't need to make as much money or get as many users to stay in business and so there will (hopefully) be a greater diversity in the range of people who build these apps. - Adewale Oshineye
Benjamin: yeah, those restrictions leave no choice but to use EC2 and the likes, especially when it comes to crawling. But nevertheless, AppEngine is actually fun. I personally still prefer a more traditional setup for a web service/product, but it seems ideal for smaller pet projects. - Aviv
Thanks Adewale -- I'm all for diversity and smallness. - Ginger Makela
I'm going to give Django a 2nd chance sometime - haven't used it in a while. I like the bare-bones feel of web.py - Aviv
Soon, creation of web apps and services will be available to the same subset of computer users who still have to phone up the family techie every time they forget their XP login password. I'm changing my phone number. - Slippy Lane
@Slippy: haha, I doubt my mom or grandmother will be using App Engine any time soon. :-) - Voyagerfan5761
Nice post Bret. Keep it up. Seems like I'm going to have to bite the bullet and learn Python... What the best book I can buy for a weekend crash course? - Alex Gawley
@Alex, I learned Python from the 2nd ed. of "Python Essential Reference" by David Beazley. If you liked K&R you'll like this book (I did). - ƃuɐʞ
GAE looks very interesting. The many restrictions are a problem, though, as many others have said. I had an idea for an app that would need to use some of Python's networking libraries like urllib2. UPDATE: Ok, I saw here: http://code.google.com/appengi... that GAE has an URL fetch service - that may work. - Vasudev Ram
sweet blog bret, Its amazing that you did it under 100 lines of code, im sure you could even shorten that a bit, do you have any advice for future web app developers on what to read? Thanks for sharing your knowledge! - d e f c o n
I've suddenly realised that this is going to lead to a new PerlGolf style game: reimplementing popular online services in as few lines of code as possible. See: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Shortes... for where this eventually leads. - Adewale Oshineye
I am reading friendfeed through Google Reader, as I read Twitter. So I can always find things. Otherwise I can't keep track of all this stuff. - Francine Hardaway
Robert, I enjoyed the FriendFeed interview today. Good Job! - Josh Kenzer
We love Friendfeed and also we love you Scoble! You are a great man! - Erhan Erdogan
