Roovno

My take is, "ick" and if there is no way to note shares that are being compensated, I would stop using FriendFeed almost completely if people I'm following are availing themselves to such services. - Robert Seidman

Bad bad bad bad bad....and worse! - Andrew Fielding

I don't think this will be received very well. It's PayPerPost for microblogging. - Mike Doeff

nooooooooo - Sarah Perez

I see it both ways, as my post says. But ultimately, if the community hates this then it's toast. - Steve Rubel

Meh, if I wanted to see ads I'd be on blogs right now. Instead, I'm on FF reading what people think about blogs (and hopefully not what they're paid to say). - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

Using friendfeed to promote themselves? er promote something? tsk. tsk. - Morgan Warstler

This one is toast at FriendFeed. http://beta.friendfeed.com/e/8... - AJ Batac ♘

I'd never use it.. I'd hate for people to stop clicking the links I share because they think I'm just after the commission. - Freemor

since when is greed and stupidty called innovation? oh, yeah, in marketing meetings - Gregory Lent

very interesting idea - EXTREMELY interesting comments - Marco (aureliusmaximus)

"Like", as in "hate". - cjmart

Kill -9 - Jonathon

Why shill for other businesses for just a few cents or bucks? Not worth it, keep the Internets pure and clean! - Rudolf Olah

@Rudolf...Internets pure and clean? Too late judging by the easy access to porn. :) - Craig Eddy

no no no. - Dean Terry

@Craig I meant, pure and clean in terms of ads :p - Rudolf Olah

DO NOT WANT!! - Morgan

This will attract spammers >:( - LouCypher

Reason 12: Because we are all narcissists at heart. - Justin Leon

Reason 13: So Chris can make fun of you! - Scott Westerman

Reason 14: So you can see what kind of creepy people you'll be dealing with. *shudders* - Outsanity

Reason 15. Because we all wanted to have our own TV channel as kids. - Vincent Guerrero

Reason 16: Because dropping your pants in public is no match for doing it on a live stream! - Michael Forian

Reason 20: Because a dead video stream would be just... wrong. - Michael O'Connor Clarke

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

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

Eric: I posted on this here: http://www.louisgray.com/live/... - Louis Gray

Have to say I'm leaning towards Eric's view on this one -- and Jason's as well. I just posted on it here: http://www.mathewingram.com/wo... - mathew ingram

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

This debate shouldn't even be about Shyftr. Plaxo Pulse operates in the same way: http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/e... - Louis Gray

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

My issue is I don't appreciate "scraper" blogs like this: http://buwin.com/?p=26593 - Jason Kaneshiro

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

Also something to wear: http://www.noisebot.com/i_know... - Stoyan Zhekov

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

<body class="all"> - Nick Lothian

Cool - priyanhere

Guess it's not fresh roasted anymore - Corvida

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.) - Christopher 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

This will cause a run on brown ink at the copycats: http://www.counterfeitchic.com... - Richard Chen

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

@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

Django integration is pretty smooth - just wrote a short tutorial: http://blog.broxrost.com/index... - Thomas Brox Røst

I like the integration with Django - Sandosh Vasudevan

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