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Dan Hsiao

YouTube - FRAGGLE ROCK THEME - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

August 6 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Maggie, Haggis (Sean Loyless), April Buchheit and 6 other people liked this

I love this intro! - Dan Hsiao

Oh man, I miss this show. It was one of the few children's programs made just for my age, you know? (I mean, at the time.. this is an odd comment.) - anna sauce

I love the intro, too! - April Buchheit

Allen Stern

Wordpress Exploited – 2.8.4 Release - http://www.centernetworks.com/wordpre...

September 18 from CenterNetworks - Comment - Like - Share

Nicholas James, Beau "Slick Foot" Liening, Sam Harrelson and 24 other people liked this

Hmmm...time to switch to MovableType? - Jesse Stay

38 more comments

i don't know jesse - but as i told the guy from rackspace a few minutes ago, this is still happening way too often :( and now that it is inside google, once again i am going to lose rankings - Allen Stern

The Wordpress code-base is a mess. Either some one needs to do a re-write, or something new needs to come out that's written well. These systems are all getting old. Of course (can't say for today), the last time I tried MovableType, its code base was a mess as well. - Jesse Stay

I'm tempted to try MovableType though because I write Perl, and MovableType is part-written in Perl, something I'm familiar and comfortable with, and something I can seriously contribute to if it isn't working well. - Jesse Stay

its too bad that drupal has such a crap admin and can't handle things like trackbacks - otherwise i never would have left :( - Allen Stern

A friend of mine is finishing up his custom blogging solution. I might just give it a test subdomain next week. - Chris Heath from iPhone

I have an MT blog and a WP blog and WP is worlds easier for me to work with. Unfortunately, it appears hackers feel the same way... - Dennis O'Neil

I find WP is easier too Dennis - and you are probably right - Allen Stern

rackspace now thinks it might be an issue with the all in one seo pack - we are going to do some testing shortly - Allen Stern

now they are running some xss scanner - Allen Stern

Possible that your local system has been compromised? keylogger and such? - EricaJoy

Unless someone takes an OpenBSD approach and extends it right down through the webserver and on through to the blog/CMS application, more than a couple (many more) vulnerabilities per decade should be expected. However, the most secure stack would have far fewer features and won't have the sizzle to which a mainstream audience is drawn. - Micah Wittman

Micah, can you expand a bit on what you mean by "extends it right down through the webserver"? what's it? wordpress? and down through the webserver? do you mean making a wordpress specific webserver instead of apache? or on top of? i guess you can see i'm a bit confused - Chris Heath

Based on this post, I went and checked my 3 day old, no weird plugin, WP 2.8.4 installation with my spamcheckr tool, and I find out -- I've been hacked again. No FTP ports open, WP has become too unsecure, period. - Jorge Escobar

And I'm hosting on a dedicated EC2 instance with all ports closed - Jorge Escobar

Chris, what I mean is the security of the "platform" depends on the weakest link of the stack. Debian + Apache/mod_php + Wordpress + Plugins + user customizations is a lot more risk exposure than just Debian. An OpenBSD approach means the whole stack is maintained with a strict, security/correctness standard—raison d'être even—that supersedes and holds back other design goals. Doing so solely within the confines of an OS is hard enough. A commodity blogging solution is a much steeper challenge. - Micah Wittman

I've been considering moving my blog to AppEngine for a while. I've been a fan of WordPress's easy install/customizability/updates, so it's not an easy move for me to make. - Matt Mastracci

Micah, thanks, i kind of thought that's what you meant... sounds a bit like my aforementioned friend's custom solution he's been working on. - Chris Heath

Chris, interesting - keep us updated. :) - Micah Wittman

fyi - rackspace sent over a log showing someone from russia logging into CN through the admin panel and manually editing the footer file. We don't know what username they used but I can assure you the CN password was a strong one. I am going to make a longer post about some very simple things WP could do to make the blogs instantly more secure - for example - why can't i turn off theme editing? i never use their theme editor - clearly if i could this wouldn't have happened perhaps. - Allen Stern

You can always change the permissions on your themes and plugins directories so they can't be changed from the Wordpress admin - Jesse Stay

just did that Jesse - I wonder what percentage of WP users edit their themes using the editor - Allen Stern

i bought exploitpress.com :-P - Allen Stern

Allen, one thing I do that I think would protect you is to use an .htaccess file to protect access to your /wp-admin directory. It gives you a lot of extra protection for only a little bit of trouble. Here's how to do it: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog... - Matt Cutts

It's time for a "new Sheriff in town". We have been avoiding this for sometime, too long. And I don't know why other than the paradigm of response to bad behavior over the 7 disciplines of life has been redirection and avoidance rather than confrontation. Hackers need to be confronted. Period. Stiffer penalties not more castle moats, honeypots and double-locks. Attacks have gotten to... more... - Melanie Reed

Thanks Matt - the only issue with this is that I would have to edit the ftp each time I want to make a post away from home or the office - I guess this is what we must deal with... now I just hope my Google ranks come back - finally the viagra is out of Google for my other sites so I hope those stay clean. - Allen Stern

Yup, that's the main annoyance. But it gives me peace of mind to know that 95% of zero-day attacks can't get at my blog, because they aren't coming from the right IP addresses. - Matt Cutts

I want a WP-retina scan plugin. - Allen Stern

We can't just keep building up defenses and running. We have to fight back with stiffer penalties and focus on tracking software. No more excuses. No more 'we were just having fun trolling and sniffing'. ok, boys, but let's try not to have"fun" like this next time. Thank you , Mr. Gov for going easy on me. No. That's it. - Melanie Reed

Melanie - I don't think that stiffer penalties are the right answer. The determined script kiddies will just wardrive to find an open wireless network (or one with a poor password) and do their stuff through anonymous proxies. It's a technological failure here, not a legal one. We can prosecute a poor, dumb kid every once in a while to send a message but the dangerous ones will be getting away. - Matt Mastracci

Matt, I appreciate that but respectfully, I disagree. I read nothing of Kevin Mitnick's exploits that indicated that he wouldn't have had a change of mind about his activities IF he had been dealt with properly in the beginning. It was his admittance of a growing lack of respect for the paradigm of response that furthered his "wardriving-hacking" efforts. In short, he was laughing at all of us. - Melanie Reed

One thing to consider is that Kevin Mitnick wasn't hacking with the intent of vandalizing and/or spamming. He was hacking to satisfy his own curiousity. I would say that intent has to factor into this - it's the difference between hopping a substation fence to explore vs. hopping the same fence to cause a blackout. If you were caught in that act of hopping that fence, the justice system... more... - Matt Mastracci

Micah, I rang my friend up and asked him about his project and he said that he has thought about open sourcing it, but decided against it -- but i'm working on him. He said that he'd have to code a conversion tool to import your WP database, and I replied that if he open-sourced his code someone else could code the conversion tool. ;-) - Chris Heath

Matt, there's a character in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Razkolnikov, I'll call him, "Raz" for short, who thought the same thing(being exempt from consequence of action because he believes he has more worth to society than his actions against it). In the end, he finds his theory does not pan out.;) - Melanie Reed

I'm not sure that classical literature is the appropriate model for IP crimes like this, myself. This sort of discussion doesn't make much headway on FF, I think. ;) You do bring up some interesting points though- thanks. - Matt Mastracci

Matt, it logically ties my point from the abstract to Drama to "kitchen table talk". That is exactly my point: it is time society stopped sending the message that "you are special" to the already over abundant narcissistic tendencies our highly individualistic society encourages. C/P was making the point though drama what happens to both the individual and society when we allow that... more... - Melanie Reed

Allen: I can't comment over on your blog (the hospital I'm in is blocking access to it), but I see that Matt is still having an attitude that I'm getting some sort of special treatment. I am not. I'm still getting hacked too, despite putting in place all these measures and others. We need Matt to work with us to fix these issues, whether they are Wordpress issues or Rackspace issues and stop blaming (in return I won't blame him in public either). - Robert Scoble

Allen (continued): Rackspace probably is the largest Wordpress hoster outside of Wordpress.com so it's in both of our interests to figure out what's going on and get these issues fixed for our customers. - Robert Scoble

Thx Robert - I told the team tonight that if they can figure it out, it sure could be a great selling point. Rackspace does have excellent customer support - I mean they called me at 10:30pm on Friday night and I am not even a big customer. - Allen Stern

don't think movable type is secure to attacks, it is just that wordpress is very poplular, a lot depends on users' browsing practices too, true wordpress and rackspace need to resolve the issues inflicting such attacks - testbeta

Steve Gillmor

Say Cheese - http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009...

September 5 from TechCrunchIT - Comment - Like - Share

Patricia F. Anderson, Nicholas James, Warner Crocker and 20 other people liked this

There is absolutely no way Twitter will replace RSS - that's ludicrous to think a closed system will replace an open one. - Jesse Stay

101 more comments

It is replacing it - Steve Gillmor

I read your post via RSS, not Twitter - I would have missed it if it came through Twitter. - Jesse Stay

Not to mention that Twitter can't read blogs - Jesse Stay

OK, that's one for Twitter. One for RSS. Keep counting. - Steve Gillmor

at least not without RSS - Jesse Stay

when I read blogs on Twitter they're links. Doesn't go through RSS. - Steve Gillmor

Let's see - Twitter has how many users, vs. the entire internet? I'm counting. - Jesse Stay

I understand what you're saying Jesse. Keep counting - Steve Gillmor

Last I checked, even Twitter has to rely on RSS to aggregate to external sites. - Jason Huebel

And those links were discovered how? I bet each one started as RSS somewhere - Jesse Stay

In addition, there are many technical details in RSS that Twitter simply doesn't replicate. For instance, media enclosures. - Jason Huebel

enclosures are being supplanted by streaming - Steve Gillmor

RSS streams, too - Jesse Stay

Yet, services like Boxee use RSS to pull in content from streaming services. Any 3rd party would be insane to rely on Twitter as a central aggregation point unless they liked seeing FAIL Whales all the time. - Jason Huebel

Amen Jason - Jesse Stay

Twitter != aggregation nirvana. Not by a longshot. - Jason Huebel

see editor's note - Steve Gillmor

FriendFeed uses RSS as well. It's how I read this article. - Jesse Stay

twitter is manual while rss is automagic ;) - Anthony Farrior

I'd say FriendFeed/Twitter has more growth headroom where RSS is somewhat stalled (and currently unfashionable). Polemics are still immature - oliver marks

same arguments were used against RSS originally. - Steve Gillmor

Oliver that's ridiculous. As Twitter/FriendFeed grows, so does RSS. RSS is their backbone. - Jesse Stay

@oliver, RSS is hardly stalled. It's included-- by default-- in all major/notable CMS's, blogs, etc. - Jason Huebel

@Steve, yes but RSS is an open standard. You aren't required to rely on any one company. With respect, that is the flaw in your argument. - Jason Huebel

Jason: why is RSS more open than Twitter or FriendFeed? - Steve Gillmor

Steve, because no one single company controls it - Jesse Stay

Twitter doesn't control micromessaging - Steve Gillmor

Steve, if Twitter or FriendFeed dies, RSS lives on. If Dave Winer dies, it lives on. - Jesse Stay

Sorry Steve, this is just a totally silly debate heh - Chris Saad

But your argument is that Twitter would be the replacement for RSS. - Jason Huebel

Steve, what Chris said - Jesse Stay

I'm now confused at what we're arguing - seems to have shifted. - Jesse Stay

no my argument is that Twitter (read FriendFeed) IS the replacement for RSS - Steve Gillmor

Chris and Jesse if you're bored, leave please - Steve Gillmor

Steve, FriendFeed and Twitter *are powered* by RSS - Jesse Stay

Jesse: and other things too - Steve Gillmor

Steve, I didn't say I was bored. I said it was a silly debate, agreeing with Chris. - Jesse Stay

Steve, so it seems they aren't going to be replacing RSS any time soon if all of this is powered by RSS - Jesse Stay

I'm bored and I think there is far more important angles and issues on the table that need to discussed and I wish you would add your voice to those instead - Chris Saad

I've often wondered why people stick around for silly debates. - Steve Gillmor

@Steve do you mean twitter is the new way to promo content? I would say in that context you have a point - Anthony Farrior

jesse: all this stuff is powered by all the stuff that came first - Steve Gillmor

Steve, so RSS isn't going away? I'm confused now. - Jesse Stay

did I say RSS is going away. no. - Steve Gillmor

Steve, you just said it was being replaced by Twitter/FriendFeed - Jesse Stay

correct, in my house it certainly is - Steve Gillmor

Second comment above, "It is replacing it" - Jesse Stay

RSS is the fuel providing the power - Anthony Farrior

going away != replaced - Steve Gillmor

Steve says "Twitter is replacing RSS" All the arguments here are not addressing that issue, they're saying why RSS is better. That's beside the point. Lisp is best programming language in the world, no one uses it. - Phil Windley

parse my words but please don't replace them and expect me to agree - Steve Gillmor

thanks Phil - Steve Gillmor

So to replace means something has to not exist any more. I'm very confused. - Jesse Stay

metaphors can be confusing. I feel your pain - Steve Gillmor

Phil, but everyone still uses RSS. Not the same argument. - Jesse Stay

twitter recommends content. Are you saying you now prefer what other people give you instead of picking rss feeds to read yourself? - Anthony Farrior

okay setting up my new blog i ll replace the rss-feed with a follow me on twitter banner and then redirect updates for new posts to my twitter stream'? seriously, wtf ;-) - michael h

RSS value & use models are well understood: Twitter is still a mystery to most. RSS scale is an issue: becomes a pavlovian recursive exercise where Twitter is more freeform - oliver marks

ANthony: no, I choose the people who recommend articles and they provide a more efficient way of handling the flow - Steve Gillmor

@michael provide both links - Anthony Farrior

@Steve Ahhh I think I understand .... The "human" suggestion factor instead of the cold push factor - Anthony Farrior

anthony yes, but not instead. the replacement is gradual and never one or the other - Steve Gillmor

@anthony thats an answer, why not BOTH ;-) ? I don t get the big fuss bout the issue. anyone should choose - michael h

There's still a place for both factors. RSS fits in quite nicely with the social element. - Jesse Stay

@Steve the people you choose to recommend you content probably use RSS so you are just moving down one link further - Anthony Farrior

Anthony, exactly - Social is simply a layer on top of RSS. It will grow with social, but like it is currently, not everyone will use it directly. - Jesse Stay

I don't think anything has changed in that matter. - Jesse Stay

Lets see the list of the once that stoped using RSS ...anyone here ? - Johni Fisher

...crickets... - Anthony Farrior

again, the arguments you use were used against RSS itself - Steve Gillmor

See my comment here: http://friendfeed.com/windley... - RSS is the C, or even assembly language, of the social web. - Jesse Stay

Steve :saying that you just have to compare the ways that we consume both servcs - Johni Fisher

don't understand johni - Steve Gillmor

I cant see no one here that will drop the RSS for Twitter ,when you say replacing it is not the right word in my opinion as we all keep our RSS feeds incoming or outgoing at our blogs etc ... Twitter is an additional stvc but not more than that ,, - Johni Fisher

understand that johni. don't agree in the larger context of the trend. - Steve Gillmor

Other important point is the comercial one , I cant see yet the way that we all can benefit from Twitter or a way that Twitter can get an important income from this replacement ,in compare to Google reader or the others ..money move the world if I am not wrong :-)) - Johni Fisher

yes johni, it is harder to see where the money will come, but it will be clearer very soon. - Steve Gillmor

oh boy I forgot you are now part of the techcrunch gang, you probably know something we don't...Is greader about replace rss feeds for twitter updates? *nervous lol* - Anthony Farrior

Google Wave might. - Garin Kilpatrick

I think that there is no other way for Twitter to make 2010 without Google ,when this will come the change with the integration to Wave will be able to replace the RSS ,in the case that you have this info at your side we can agree - Johni Fisher

RSS is a way of pushing out content. There is no need to push it out if it is live. - Garin Kilpatrick

Real-Time > RSS am I right? - Garin Kilpatrick

Garin, RSS is real-time as well. See rssCloud and Hubbub - Jesse Stay

Exactly but Steve has resorted to the human touch, the "I recommend and therefore I retweet"... - Anthony Farrior

publish subscribe hub pubsubhub - Anthony Farrior

http://friendfeed.com/kurtiss... - Kurtiss Hare

http://code.google.com/p... - Kashif Khan

I don't RSS going anywhere. There will always be uses for it. But there are always many different ways of digesting information - Seth Goldstein

There are some truths in here that go beyond the narrow "social" or "tech" tag. Great read. - Aron Michalski

So is RSS the http://tinyurl.com/first-m... or candidate for oldest "living" http://www.scotsmagazine.com/ ? I'm hopeful most folks reading and contributing here were party to the orgy of exuberance for Gopher... I mean HTTP. RSS as it exists today will be something that gets leapfrogged as every other moment-in-time solution has so far. Sitting back and clinging to RSS format is just [insert widget] attention span competition. Format wars are mutually assured stagnation. Stagnation is death. - Jay Cuthrell

So, I was wondering... does RSS afford this kind of debate as part of its structure? - Cliff Gerrish

Cliff - sure, we just post our comments to each other on the doors of the Schlosskirche via RSS - Jay Cuthrell

RSS is dying a slow death. So long as content is syndicated RSS will remain alive; right now RSS is alive and well. But the life of online technologies are short, since technologies shift, and once online content distribution shifts fully from syndication to synchronization RSS will be dead. The Real-Time web will have killed it. - Garin Kilpatrick

Can't we all just be friends? - Francine Hardaway

Francine just gave me a RSS-FOAF flashback :) - Jay Cuthrell

Twitter is not real-time for putting through blog links unless someone happens to be on the news site, reads the article, and posts a link to Twitter within minutes (unless the author manually posts the link). Pubsubhubbub will still beat that by minutes or seconds. Many like me feed through to Twitter using Twitterfeed which uses typical RSS technology. - beersage

Twitter claims to be real-time but it is not there yet. Neither is ff, but they are closer. I am excited to see the mark the Google wave makes on this scene. - Garin Kilpatrick

Francine, I think Scoble tried to be friends with everybody but it didn't work out. - Cliff Gerrish

Does this argument matter? Is it more than a way to pass the time? - Michael Markman

Yes - Steve Gillmor

Is there a compelling reason to further evangelize your point? We get it it. Fantastic, for you, it's dead. Makes perfect sense. But at this point you're not just beating a dead horse, you're beating the top soil covering the hole in which you buried the horse. How about we move on to more constructive things. - Benjamin Taylor

Benjamin: I wrote this in May. Others continue to discuss it. I will respond when my ethics or credibility is attacked. Various folks have asked me to elaborate and I have. If you're tired of it, unfollow me. And expressing what I see as valuable is never unconstructive from my perspective. Leaving insinuation and misinformation unchallenged is unconstructive imo. - Steve Gillmor

Dave Winer

I wish FF had intelligent filters that allowed me to automatically hide all "debates" about irrelevant bullshit. I wonder if they're planning on developing anything like that?

September 5 - Comment - Like - Share

Susan Beebe, Bryan R. Adams, Johni Fisher and 6 other people liked this

Hey Dave - I'd like to set up my own rssCloud server. I'm also considering writing a simple RSS client (at least for myself, but others can use it) that replaces what I need from Google Reader. If I get it set up, should I host it on SocialToo's servers and domain, or would you prefer to push it from the rsscloud.org domain? - Jesse Stay

9 more comments

(trying to get away from the argument and do something productive with it, if you can't tell) - Jesse Stay

I'm also tired of the big companies all controlling this stuff. I'm a developer - I can do something about it. - Jesse Stay

Put it where ever you want under what ever domain you want. That's the point of having a distributed system. Let me know if you want to run my code. I could prepare a release and a Howto. Thinking about doing it anyway. (I would make it absolutely turnkey to set one up on EC2.) - Dave Winer

Dave, yeah, that would be useful. - Jesse Stay

dave - all ff development is now in facebook HA - Allen Stern

<sarcasm>Allen --- really? I thought FriendFeed was the future of realtime web?</sarcasm> - Dave Winer

Dave, friendfeed does have intelligent filters for the bullshit. See "Best of day, week, and month," and lists. If you find the conversations of your friends are irrelevant you should subscribe to some more relevant people and then use the filters in an intelligent way. - Garin Kilpatrick

Thanks Garin! That's some good advice. :-) - Dave Winer

Glad you found it helpful :-) - Garin Kilpatrick

A bullshit filter would kill FF for some of us. - Jack (a.k.a. Jeber)

Louis Gray

FriendBinder's Social Aggregation Console Open for All - http://www.louisgray.com/live...

September 4 from louisgray.com - Comment - Like - Share

Mike Fruchter, James Stratford, Daniel Rowley and 29 other people liked this

You can find FriendBinder's author, Richard Cunningham, here: http://friendfeed.com/rythie - Louis Gray

20 more comments

I would have a first criticism: such an app should promote cross-identification or sign through facebook, twitter oauth, google, yahoo openid! Yet another account to configure. It's so 2008 :) - Jean-Charles VERDIE

Next step: configure my twitter account. It asks me for regular id. No way, I'm not going to enter it again now that oauth is here and working well... - Jean-Charles VERDIE

Twitter's oAuth seems to have a major outage everytime I'm ready to implement it - Richard Cunningham

Kudos to FriendBinder. OAuth for Twitter would be great, but agree with Richard about their recent outages being a problem. OpenID? That'd be cool, too, but unlike friendfeed, once you log into FriendBinder and hook up your services, it fetches all your contacts for you. So I spent 5 minutes setting up another login, but how long did it take me to configure 'imaginary friends' or... more... - Criz

Geez, Richard, I just can't stop evangelizing this. ;-) - Criz

Richard & Criz, I know how hard is working with unreliable services like twitter, but oauth part does not really seem to be faulty, twitter is. OpenID or anyother would just be the way to log into FriendBinder without having to create yet another login/password. It would not save you from the next step to authenticate on fb, flickr, ... But anyway, you only criticize when you have stake into progress, which means you already interest into the product :) - Jean-Charles VERDIE

Why is there only one timezone for Asia in FriendBinder? What an odd limitation. - Andre P. Siregar

Sorry about that - I need to put in a full list ASAP - Richard Cunningham

Richard, I like FriendBinder. It's useful to control various platforms from one location. Categorizing and tagging all my friends is the biggest hurdle, however. - Andre P. Siregar

You can click on a friend's picture in the stream and do it without leaving that page - if that helps? - Richard Cunningham

That's what I'm doing right now. I realize it's an investment, because once I've categorized all my friends, I'll be more efficient. It's just not a trivial effort, that's all. - Andre P. Siregar from email

Not sure sure why I would use this over Streamy, - Kim Landwehr

Works great apart from the refresh time which seems to be quite long, too long for holding a conversation on Twitter. - Paul Cooper

Kim, you reminded me that I have a Streamy account. So I went there and realized why I don't use it much. Other than putting a few services under one roof, STreamy doesn't add much values. I'd much rather use Feedly for RSS reading, for example. I usually use Seesmic to control Twitter and Facebook, but I think FriendBinder is also elegant in its implementation. I like FriendBinder's 'interest level.' FriendBinder's threading of Twitter conversation is also very nice. - Andre P. Siregar from email

I've updated it so there are now plenty of timezones to choose from - Richard Cunningham

Nice tool. - Gary Walter (gwalter)

That was quick, Richard. Thanks :-) - Andre P. Siregar from email

richard : i asked a question and gave some ideas on getsatisfaction about FrienBinder. please check it out. thanx;p - zʍıɔ

It needs to lose that second 'e' from the name :-) - Paul Robertson

ciwz, I'm reading all the stuff on http://getsatisfaction.com/friendb... - Richard Cunningham

well ok,, that's awesomely cool =)) - zʍıɔ

Louis Gray

From the Latest ActivityStrea.ms Meetup « The Real McCrea - http://therealmccrea.com/2009...

September 5 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Wayne Sutton, Ken Sheppardson and 29 other people liked this

"The vision for this effort was to enable the development of a “distributed FriendFeed” (and pointed out how the need for that is even greater now that FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook)." - Louis Gray from Bookmarklet

18 more comments

Very interesting...this could be huge. - Mahendra (SkepticGeek)

go DiSo! - Carlos Ayala

The roster. Wow. - Mona Nomura

Too bad these meetings are on the other side of the ocean. Would love to hear there thoughts on a "distributed FriendFeed" - arjo

Where's Twitter? Where's FriendFeed? Identi.ca? - Jesse Stay

Good question. - John McCrea

Were there any artifacts created during the meetup? Documents, notes, plans? Very interesting. - Alex Kapranoff

Also, I think Dave Winer would be a great participant at these meetings as well - Jesse Stay

great to see yet another meeting in the valley with the same people - woo! - Allen Stern

I think activitystreams is Atom-based, Jesse - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, I see - then sounds like they need Dave Winer even more to give the other side of the story. :-) - Jesse Stay

You are correct, Ken. - John McCrea

I don't understand why an RSS layer couldn't be included though. - Jesse Stay

Thanks so much for this post John. Great update and I'm looking forward to future progress and adoption. - Mark Krynsky from iPhone

Jesse: Sorry... I shouldn't have fanned the flames of some sort of protocol religious war. It's XML. It's all about exchanging objects represented as XML. I guess it'd be nice if we could all just take that at face value and rally behind it. - Ken Sheppardson

Amen Ken - that was my point in response. Let's just keep it open so no religion is present. If it's good technology any religion should be able to embrace it. - Jesse Stay

Isn't FriendFeed, the distributed FriendFeed? - Cliff Gerrish

BTW, Per the link in John's post, the meeting notes are here: https://activitystreams.pbworks.com/Meetup+... - Ken Sheppardson

Cliff: I think when folks say "distributed" they mean "distributed" as in beer. Oh... wait... - Ken Sheppardson

Louis Gray

Blame FriendFeed II - http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009...

August 6 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Nicholas James, Bicentennial (Franc), Rex Hammock and 39 other people liked this

Always an odd thing to find my avatar stuck in someone else's screenshot. Thanks, Steve Gillmor. :) - Louis Gray

48 more comments

Wow, and Steve Gilmore can sure turn a phrase, also: "I still can’t get past the reality that when Twitter farts, FriendFeed becomes a complete and total gasbag." It goes downhill from there. - Rex Hammock

Rex Hammick - Steve Gillmor

I didn't understand a damn thing in that post. - Matt Ruiz

I think Steve needs to stock up on Activia. - Dave Winer

What's ironic is the content of the screenshot and Louis's avatar :-) (Last I heard, Louis is liberal) - Jesse Stay

what is activia dave? - Steve Gillmor

I don't get it. - Kimber Scott

get what Kimber - Steve Gillmor

oh, well, that's never happened before :) - Steve Gillmor

holden: can u splain the activia ref? - Steve Gillmor

The whole article, Steve. Why does he blame FriendFeed? Is it like blaming Drew's cancer, or something? And why anyone thinks Twitter is better than this is beyond me. (Just realized you're the Steve who wrote it.) Still don't get it. Why do you think Twitter is better? - Kimber Scott

Kimber: Where do I say Twitter is better. It just is. And FriendFeed brings out whatever that is. - Steve Gillmor

Steve - Twitter is better at giving voice to teeth whitening moms and life coaches. You can't use Twitter without using some sort of third-party thing. (I use Tweetdeck and FF.) I much prefer spending my time here and checking in there. I have my rooms here. I don't have to click on anything to see a picture. I can talk as long as I want in one post. Liking is much better than RTing and... more... - Kimber Scott

That was funniest Gilmor post I've read. Read it three times and still trying to understand the point but it was great. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

Yeah. Yet another journalist who doesn't know how to use FF. Why do I think this? B/c in his screenshot Louis or Robert were telling him how to use it! haha. - anna sauce

No offense, Steve, but I'd like someone with a big following to review FriendFeed who actually knows how to use it. Perhaps the ease-of-use is way past these folks? I doubt it. Or whip out the old "I don't have time/ I have a job." Yet, these people spend their time reviewing, and using, technology. So.... still unclear on why the non-power-users are reviewing it. - anna sauce

As I said, I'm not a geek and I had no trouble figuring FriendFeed out. It's really not that hard. Really. Actually, it's easier than Twitter. First: You don't have to figure out what it's for. You "get it" right away. It's obviously a communication tool. Second: if you want to jump in on a conversation, which you can actually have on FriendFeed, and as I did with this one, you don't... more... - Kimber Scott

anna I am a power user. Kimber I love FriendFeed but also know why it exists. How hard is it to understand that there is a hugely dynamic symbiotic relationship between the two platforms, dominated by Twitter's reach and FF's depth. Holden, the point was to communicate, which it definitely is doing. And even developers like Dave choose not to explain some of what they write. Activia means what? - Steve Gillmor

Activia is a company that makes yogurt that aids in getting the bowels flowing... - Ryan

So, Steve, what you're saying then is there is a symbiotic relationship between a parasite on a pimple on an ass and a body as a whole? That seems like a one way relationship to me and it doesn't reflect kindly on FriendFeed. So, I guess what I don't get, getting back to my original comment, is how you can love FriendFeed and still call it a parasitic ass-pimple eater. - Kimber Scott from email

Ryan ahh thanks I use Metamucil when I have that problem, but this piece came easily - Steve Gillmor

Kimber it's a reference to the original post, and it represents a size relationship in the post Oprah Twitterscape. And one organism's pimple is another's home sweet home. I love host and tenant, one more than the other -- which you'll have to ask elsewhere for the "answer." - Steve Gillmor

Couldn't you just blame Friendfeed once and be done with it in under 140 chars? - ianf ⌘

is anyone else wondering where gillmor gets off not googling things for himself? steve... double click the word, right click it, and do the search google option in the context menu... i really is that simple - Chris Heath

Guess it's nice that you think you're a power user, but you haven't really shown here that you are. Upset with the "gasbag" of FF? Follow new people. Create lists. Get off the main feed. Trim your subscriptions. You can't complain about the content (well, I can) unless you either know the various ways around it. Then you can complain. Otherwise, it just seems that you, like most of the people reviewing FF, have no idea how to use it. - anna sauce

This whole thread is one the funniest things I have read in a long time, including the post that started it all! Thanks to everyone. - frankiecarl

Unfortunately Steve is right, if Twitter goes down, the quality of realtime information in FF decreases... it is still the best client for Twitter but sharing and discovery still happens first on the fail whale network - Alberto Saavedra from Nambu

Holy smokes! I agree w/Frankiecarl, this is hilarious. - Mark Evans from iPhone

I commented on Steve's article, because I felt there was way more he could have written about the actual problem, the DDoS attack. However, there is one thing that bugs even me sometimes. It's one thing to have the best platform amongst social media, but it needs to be demonstrated in times like this. Needs a few more people using the strengths of FF to do a bit of citizen journalism. - George Hall (Australia)

Alberto, that's exactly my concern in the future as Friendfeed grows. As mass mainstream enters, quality the way we think of it decreases to Twitter Trending Topics. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

ianf: no. anna: what makes you think gasbag is not a term of endearment? George: it's really simple, FF's fault. Chris: I don't use search except as a spell checker, and I trust Dave WIner's spelling implicitly. - Steve Gillmor

This is a hysterical thread in response to one of the funniest posts i've read in a long time. the stuff about Steve not Googling for himself...that's just rockin' funny. thx for the laugh. I needed it. - Karoli

ff's fault only in that they don't always take opportunities to demonstate FF in such times NOT for what's happened. - George Hall (Australia) from BuddyFeed

how could you possibly know what happened. Me, I Blame FriendFeed - Steve Gillmor

Why is Blame always capitalized? I feel like I'm missing out on something. - Jonathan Langdale

Why, Steve? Why? What did FriendFeed do? I shouldn't even respond to this silly post anymore. It's almost like you're an artist who's painted a mess and is being vague about it with the hope that people might get the impression it must really "mean" something. Twitter goes down from a DOS attack and you Blame FriendFeed, but you love FriendFeed. You sound like my ex-husband. - Kimber Scott from email

Give the resources of TechCrunch to Twitter and just stop spreading shit like this over the web. Everything will be good. - Ryo / Fuck Facebook

Alberto, when Twitter went down, my FriendFeed folks continued to serve me quality contents. Really. - Thierry R. Andriamirado

Steve, your article made perfect sense to me. Sorry others didn't agree. It's clear that the tweetstream is the core of FF's value to most people, even if FF has oodles of other features that we "native" FFers get a lot more mileage out of. - Daniel J. Pritchett

Well said, Daniel. - anna sauce

Why doesn't everyone just pick a horse and ride it? This quibbling over platforms is tiresome. - ZuDfunck

Daniel: wasn't too hard, was it. thx - Steve Gillmor

i'm a tad inebriated, but still... wha? if twitter is the be all end all of online communications then we're f'd... seriously (in an inebriated kind of way) - Chris Heath

and by 'be all end all' i mean 'end all be all' and by that i mean 'core of FF's value to most people' - Chris Heath

Is it because I've just exited the 25-54 demo and now face the death panel, or does anyone else detect some ageism in comments about Steve's opinions on tech? I noticed it when GG was on Leo's network, too, from commenters who needed to teach the old men about things only a gen-xer or younger could possibly comprehend. I get it from younger people, too, who KNOW I won't be able... more... - Amyloo

like which comments Amyloo? sometimes stuff like that can be unintentional just because a younger generation's social norms deviate from the past generation and your perceptions are different than their intentions - misunderstandings and miscommunication are some of the pitfalls that are abound in life (and even more so in online life where there's not facial expression or tone and inflection of voice to give other social weight and cues to our words). - Chris Heath

in regards to steve, his style, and the reactions that his writings and online activities provoke: I think steve is either 1) trying to 'stir the pot' to 'get a rise' out of a certain type of person in a john c dvorak kind of way, 2) maybe he's really just a crotchety old man, and i mean that in the kindest of ways that a stranger can say that about someone or 3) something else -- and i... more... - Chris Heath

chris: I write something, people comment, I comment back. Pot is constantly stirred, doesn't need any extra. some people are trying to inflict damage by calling me old, or fat, or whatever. it usually say more about them since I am 60, fat, and whatever. The ageism thing is subjective: I could outlive all of them or none of them. WHo knows. Their problem, not mine. - Steve Gillmor

cool, fair enough - Chris Heath

Robert Scoble

Steve Rubel's life is on this:

August 23 from email - Comment - Like - Share

Robyn Hawk, Craig Sheldon, Jeremiah Owyang and 29 other people liked this

It is a LaCie IAmAKey -- it is an 8 gig USB key that is encrypted with TrueCrypt. - Robert Scoble from email

20 more comments

Steve Rubel is a genius! - Eric

Who is smarter Steve Rubel or Robert Scoble? - Eric

I love that USB/key. What is the make of it? - MikeonTV

Rubeleizer - Eric

You can't open a door with that. Useless :)) - Burçak Çubukçu

Nice carpet. - Ahmet Alp Balkan

looks like this is it! http://www.lacie.com/ca... - MikeonTV

What is "his life"? - Kahlil Lechelt

I have that exact key, bought it after Steve posted about it on his Posterous. - Jim Graham

Don't lose your keys - does he have a fix for that too? - Jesse Stay

Actually, it's even better if you encrypt it with BitLocker to Go. Totally seamless TrueCrypt - Omar Shahine

That means if he loses it... - Nicholas James

If I lose my keys there go the nuke lock codes! - Steve Rubel from iPhone

I am such a groupie I am over at Scobles and I bought one - Francine Hardaway from BuddyFeed

'You have to turn your key, sir!' - Akiva Moskovitz

@Francine "Scobles" hahaha - Brandon

Blogged on it here: http://louisgray.com/live... (Steve Rubel introduced me) - Louis Gray

Everything about this pic makes me think it was taken in the 70s except for the gadget and clear resolution. - beersage

Yet, Burçak yet ... http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Shawn McCollum

Remove the shit had :D - internettin abi

I'm sure he has a backup of his life though. - ilter Kalkanci

Gina

Import Facebook Phone Numbers into Your Google Contacts - http://smarterware.org/2973...

August 23 from Smarterware - Comment - Like - Share

Jérôme Flipo, Mark Barros, Khosrow and 4 other people liked this

nice find, wish there was a way to integrate this functionality into an app like Addressbooksync - Khosrow

I tried this, and the diff between my contacts list and FB contacts had the unexpected side-effect of showing me the friends I have on Facebook that I can't imagine ever wanting to get in touch with IRL! - Elaine

Robert Scoble

Just announced that @stevegillmor 's "Gang" will be aired at http://www.building43.com/realtim... Thursdays at 1 pm via http://friendfeed.com/realtim...

August 22 - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Ben, keith feighery and 35 other people liked this

recordings? - Panayotis Vryonis

46 more comments

meh - Mattb4rd

It looks like with this announcement, Michael Arrington is now back on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/michael... - Jesse Stay

During the workday? - Jeff Harbert

Robert, could you please explain the hard- and software-setup using for the live-stream? - HansVanRock

Hans: We haven't announced the hardware and software we are using to stream the Gang yet, but for starters it's powered by NewTek Tricaster. - Steve Gillmor

Looking forward to this, and would like to hear about the tech too - Kevin Marks from Android

I'll be asleep on the other side of the world. Let us know when you get the RSS feed up, Steve :) - Edward Coffey

Plans on a downloadable file? I don't think the boss would appreciate me walking around the store with headphones on. :-) - Larry Walker

Clicking the embedded viewer works at any hour in any part of the planet. - Steve Gillmor

Very cool. Thanks Steve. - Larry Walker

Let us know when the bootleg mp3 download gets posted on Friendfeed - Christian Burns from iPhone

RSS please unfollow. - Christian Burns from iPhone

Cool, so I just need to write a script to click that link and record the stream so the file is waiting for me when I sync my MP3 player. Modern technology makes it so much easier than when we had to use clunky old VCRs to record things! - Edward Coffey

you'll be able to download the MP4 as soon as Google fixes a bug they're working on. - Steve Gillmor

Excellent, thanks Steve. (which bug?) - Edward Coffey

Bad Hair Day uses RSS. http://badhair.us/rss.xml - Dave Winer

. @edwardc I am sure the mp3 will be available on the gilmor gang bootleg feed - Christian Burns from iPhone

if everyone insists on bootlegging, then won't worry about Google fixing the bug - Steve Gillmor

no bootlegger me....just need something that will play on my iphone after the fact. :) - Karoli

No bootlegging here either, just need something to show up in iTunes (automatically) with the rest of the podcasts. - PXLated

sounds like you will have at least a few options. I'm not planning to release audio only, so you'll need to either get a blindfold or go bottleg - Steve Gillmor

well, we'll give it a try, see how it rolls. - Karoli

Will there be official 'Gillmor Gang' blindfolds available in the Building 43 gift shop? - Cliff Gerrish

No audio only - Booo! - PXLated

Wait - logo'ed blindfolds at $15/pop is intriguing to m :) - Rob La Gesse

Building 43 GG blindfolds $30 - Steve Gillmor

oh I see Cliff already got there - Steve Gillmor

I'll take 2. it's a bargain these days. :) - Karoli

It's not quite RSS, but it feels the same... - Cliff Gerrish

Option earplug accessories for just 19.95 (plus separate shipping and handling) - Rob La Gesse

John Lennon wore our Firesign Theatre Not Insane button. - Steve Gillmor

Bravos, good to have the show back after your holiday. @stevegillmor are you inviting Leo to play along? - Dave Martin

Curious Steve - Why no audio only? - Seems simple enough to do. - PXLated

Close your eyes - even easier :) - Rob La Gesse

If its video that is released, its video I will take! - Phillip Molly Malone

Can I get a pair of "driver"-style GG blindfolds, please? - Robert J Taylor from iPhone

Attention wise, video is much more expensive than audio. I don't have the money to devote an hour of my eyes and ears to the gill or gang at this time. - Christian Burns from iPhone

Christian, I think what they're saying is that you can put the MP4 on your playback device and listen to it and ignore the video component. I know that works on iPods and iPhones. - Dave Winer

Dave, you are as unproductive as you've ever been. What I've said is that RSS is in the process of being disrupted by micromessaging, and no amount of name calling is going to change that. Your attempts to reinvent RSS will not get traction if you continue to slime the messenger. And having this discussion here underlines how partisan your attacks are. - Steve Gillmor

The message above is out of context because Dave Winer deleted the message to which I am responding. I thought about saving his message and reprinting it below where only the owner of this thread could remove it, but figured it wasn't worth it. This is also why I never respond to anything in a thread Dave owns unless I don't care if it gets erased or the context removed. - Steve Gillmor

Where's the Winer Watcher when you need it? - Matthew Gifford

mmm, popcorn! - Laura Norvig

The iPhone has a bug that will not allow you to download over the air for consuming later mp3s or mp4s unless they are an enclosure to an RSS feed. - Christian Burns from iPhone

once Google fixes their bug (Wednesday) you should be able to download via RSS. - Steve Gillmor

Steve, the msg you're referring to was here just a few seconds, I realized it'd provoke the kind of response it has, and decided I didn't want to go there. Re being unproductive, I've had a cold this week and have been unable to do dev work, but I'm feeling better and expect to releas some new software this week. Don't expect TC to cover it, as usual. Finally Steve as you know the <cloud> element has been in RSS for eight years, hardly a retrofit. - Dave Winer

http://scripting.com/2001... - Dave Winer

So did google fix their bug yesterday? Any idea what the Gillmor Gang RSS feed is? - Christian Burns from iPhone

Tony, Paradox of FF

Posterous: A New Way of Getting Use Out of Your Ailing Blog - http://www.dailyhaggis.com/2009...

August 16 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Sam Harrelson liked this

I had to share since Sean doesn't have me in a group I couldn't comment. Great article, but that attempt at a cover song makes me a sad panda. - Tony, Paradox of FF

Bret Taylor to Bret's feed, FriendFeed News

You can now get a daily or weekly email digest for anybody's feed on FriendFeed. You'll get a daily or weekly email with the most popular posts from that person's feed. To get the email, click the "Email/IM" link at the top of anyone's feed, and select the "Best of day" or "Best of week" email option.

August 6 - Comment - Like - Share

kang, HealingBrush, kuchin and 249 other people liked this

You can see all of your email settings at http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Bret Taylor

37 more comments

Thanks Bret! :) - Matt Ruiz

Thanks to Kevin for doing a great design for what turned out to be a more complex set of UI options than we had originally anticipated, and thanks to Tudor for implementing the email backend. - Bret Taylor

Great! Thanks! Love FF! - Scott Monaco

I now get the FriendFeed Feedback posts as a Best of Day email so it doesn't fill up my feed, but I don't miss feedback. I also set up a "Best of Day" email for my "Technology people" friend list so I get a pretty good overview of tech news every day via email. - Bret Taylor

This is a really cool idea Bret, I wish you can make that an RSS feed option as well. I'd be much more likely to read summaries in RSS than in email. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

Neat feature, but it's more focus on big shiney new features, while ignoring the glaring issues in need of polish in the site we currently have. - Matthew DeVries

Mark: http://friendfeed.com/bret... - Casey Muller

Very cool. I like how you give us the OPTION rather than sending a daily/weekly digest like other sites *cough* LinkedIn/Facebook *cough* - Johnny

Lovely. Thanks guys. - Mitchell Tsai

Casey: Thanks for the tip. What's the 7 before the "?" mean in the URL? The number of likes or replies needed to be included? - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

this is killer, the random influx of email during the day was kinda getting fail-ish. I love the daily digest. - Drew Lucas

Very cool! Any way to get archives of previous months? (especially helpful for those of us who leave the internet for weeks at a time...) - Mitchell Tsai

WOW. that's really helpful！ - K.D.

Looks like a great addition for those who are not embedded on the site. Nice intro. - Louis Gray

Cool! - Josh Haley

Just curious - at what time of the day will we get these emails ? Midnight US-Time, or will it respect our timezones ? - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Ahsan: it is somewhat random right now when the emails are sent, but we built in the backend capability to control what time they are sent, and we plan on exposing that control to users in the future. Right now, it is kind of random - sorry! - Bret Taylor

Thanks Bret - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Cool! can i get a daily or weekly email digest for the "Saved searches"? - 0M0M from email

Cool - Nimaa

This will be incredibly useful. Thanks to all involved in the design and execution. - Kathy Fitch

Nice addition! - Michael Fidler

But what exactly is "Best"? Is it anything that has a certain number of likes/comments? - Laura Norvig

@Bret LOL THAT WAS MY PROJECT! I will release it tomorrow. But you've also did it and killed my friendfeed application **sigh** But mine has multi-reporting weekly-daily-monthly at the same time and adjustable entry count! - Alp

@Bret please consolidate me or I won't code new apps with you api! :-) - Alp

Alp: we were not trying to withhold data. Later today the documentation will be updated to reflect the ability to obtain "Best of" for users. The feed id will be USERNAME/summary/N (similar to "Best of" for lists) - Benjamin Golub

Hi Ben, that is pretty funny, I tried that URL earlier today to see if it has been secretly released :) - Paul Kinlan

Bret: While Twitter struggle to keep their fail whale under control, you guys are developing stuff like this. Amazing - Thanks! - Jim Connolly

awesome feature, this will be highly useful for my corporate group ideas / content sharing; projects, etc.... THANK YOU :) - Susan Beebe

Great work. I especially like that it works on lists too. - Meryn Stol

my inbox might say different, but I like that :-) - Dobromir Hadzhiev

Wow, this is really neat! And it links into the idea I expressed earlier, re: reducing signup friction / enabling limited guest privileges. Imagine if I could embed one of my FF rooms on my personal web site, and enable people to subscribe to that feed by e-mail with just a couple of clicks... rather than saying "you can get e-mail notifications but you have to sign up for Friendfeed first." "sign up" -- though admirably lightweight on FF -- is still a huge barrier. - Adam Lasnik

Love it. - Zachary TG

is there a love button cause I dont like this option I LOVE this option..great work guys - (jeff)isageek

Three options I would like (1) Can I select "top 100" instead of "top 30"? (2) Could I select both "best of day" and "best of week"? (3) How about older timeperiods? I'd love to get an e-mail with stuff from last week or Mar 2009? Start & end dates? Anything to help me read FriendFeed off-line would be great since I spend long periods off-line at festivals (especially during summer time) or overseas. - Awesome job guys! - Mitchell Tsai

Great way to keep up with those you're most interested in; things you don't want to miss. - Diego Barros 

So this works on groups too, cool! But we still cannot see Best of for groups on the site on friends lists. :-( I have several friends lists that include just groups and when I select to view the best of the page it's empty (even though if I got to the individual best of for those groups there are entries there). - Kol Tregaskes

does anyone know of a web service that can do this? (I'm thinking weekly email updates of my favorite feeds/people) I don't think there's anything like friendfeed .. - Bicentennial (Franc)

April Buchheit

Note to self: Don't 'friend' your boss on FB and then bitch about your job.

August 9 - Comment - Like - Share

Hanna Bretzke, Alfredo, Nick Mutton and 244 other people liked this

Owned. - Johnny

39 more comments

El. Oh. El. You gotta be some sort of stupid to friend your boss before your probation period is up. Fired in front of friends and family? PRICELESS. - Anika

She's a f*ing idiot. A similar thing happened to a friend of mine at an ad agency, who accidentally texted "my boss is a fucking cunt" ... to her boss. She didn't get fired or reprimanded, but she freaked out about it. - LANjackal

It floors me how much people openly vent about their jobs on public feeds like FriendFeed. Even if your boss isn't a direct contact, how are people so sure that a boss or co-worker won't stumble across it? - Mike Doeff from iPhone

If I have complaints about work, I try to mask them as much as possible or make them more about me personally than the job itself. At the same time, I really try to stay mum about any job I have.. - Jon, the Beartato of FF

Mike and how are you so sure that other people don't know who you are talking about? There's a person here on FriendFeed who complains about their coworker. Even though I live in a different city, I know that coworker. - Anika

+1 Anika. I generally refrain from talking bad about my employer/coworkers ANYWHERE online. Even on anonymous accounts. You just never know who might freak out and file an unmasking court order. It's happened before. - LANjackal from IM

It also doesn't matter if anyone sees it when you write it, because The Google sees it and records it for anyone looking for it years from now. - Trish R

Maybe the more general rule that comes into play here is to never say anything about someone you wouldn't tell them to their face. - Ken Sheppardson

Well said Ken. - Benjamin Taylor

What an idiot... When people claim we don't need guidelines for employees using social media, I just have to point out cases of extreme stupidity like this... - Badger Gravling

Ouch! Hope she learned the lesson. And +1 Ken, this is the simplest rule not to forget at any point. - lelapin

this is huge! - Loic Le Meur

OH those lessons learned the hard way. - anna sauce

This is great! Don't bite the hand that feeds especially if you're friends on FB. - Gabe Diaz from iPhone

Why friend your boss in the first place, especially if all you do is complain about the job? - Adrian McMillan

Ouch… :P - Daniel Schildt

Well someone has to make room for other people! From the sounds of it, she was probably already canned anyway. - Robert Fisher

Well that was a bit dumb. The thing about social media is it's just so much a part of our lives. We are encouraged to pour our views and feelings into it but we have to remember who is going to be reading it. In the end we have to censor ourselves so as a result our lifestream is a watered down stream. There are no directors cuts. - Parvez Halim

Absolutely priceless! - Robert Couture

Oh and I forgot the LOL. - Parvez Halim

this is something that may occur very often. More than we think! - Rui

@Rui I remember a colleague of mine did a similar thing. Luckily they got away with a written warning and no pay rise for that year. - Parvez Halim

HUGE! - Nathan Guetta

Interestingly, every time I consider complaining about my job via any social media platform, I stop and think "how can I make my job better? how can I improve myself?" and then end up writing about that instead. It has made me a much happier person. Really. - mike fabio

OMG ! this is awesome - Franck Nouyrigat

OUCH! - Retno Nindya

:). Well it's okay for both of them. It sounded like the employee was really unlucky to got this job. He hated it deep inside. The "Boss" don't need people which don't love their work, ASK YOURSELF: What's more worse? Being fired after posting you real thoughts somewhere, or keep on working without having a bit of joy or patience on the job and face serious health problems after some time? - Ryo / Fuck Facebook

.. and that's why I'm private. I'm pretty good about not talking about work, but never know when I may say something completely stupid - Rodfather

I think there is a serious point here: Your on-line social network pals will be supportive of you regardless of whether you are right or wrong. That's what friends are for, kind of. All the boss does is let in a bit of reality. - sjjh

Maybe she wanted to be fired by her boss? Just questioning... - Torsten Eckert

Splendid. Too bad the story isn't real. OR IS IT...? - Francesco Balducci

I do so love the false sense of anonymity the Internet instills in people. - matthew john ernisse

haha! - orionstarr

Where did you get this? I'm trying to verify that it is actually a real event. Looks too 'perfect' and to generate this much hype I believe it is just two friends that wanted to laugh about how stupid the world is... - Brian J. Reeves

I wondered the same myself. The language suggests it's from the UK - LANjackal from IM

... or somewhere else where the British style of speech dominates - LANjackal from IM

April - you can't imagine how many people e-mailed me screenshots of this :) - Charlie Anzman

I wish I was here in order to press the "Like" button. - Clément Cailly

social media and your boss don't mix well :) - Dave Q

Zing! - Nick Mutton

Dave Winer

Learn how to follow Twitter users in Google Reader. http://www.scripting.com/stories...

August 6 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Faredoon, alaingeenrits and 59 other people liked this

Just tried it. Brilliant! Thanks. - Nick Reynolds

16 more comments

I started sending some of my favorite Twitter posters' feeds to Google Reader a while back so I would be able to search back more than the 30 days Twitter search allows. This article brings things to another level. Thanks for sharing. - Brenda Young

Thank you, Dave. This is the tool I've been waiting for so that I can complete my move to FriendFeed and use RSS for Twitter interaction. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Stupid Question but if you add new Twitter followers then you have to redo the import right? - Nick Reynolds

Davie-Excellent find! - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

Coooooool :) - Susan Beebe

Nick yes you do have to re-import. However if Google Reader would support dynamic reading lists, we could work out a way to keep them in synch. Wouldn't that be nice. :-) - Dave Winer

Now that would be nice! - Susan Beebe

Dave - the comment on Twitter couldn't be more true - I wonder how the social networking world will react to this ... and if some decentralization might start because of it. Seems like a melding of email, RSS, twitter, facebook, etc is what might come out in the end - gregory leff

awesome - andy brudtkuhl

It will be EXACTLY like that scene in the Matrix where they are watching the code scroll by like rain. All feed converge to one, and we see them all simultaneously. Or not. - Ian Wright from BuddyFeed

@Dave yes, it would be nice :) We'll keep you posted. - Mihai Parparita

Is this working? I'm getting an error... "Twitter returned an empty result." - Jason Hansen

Twitter isn't doing well today. - Dave Winer

Dave: I figured it was due to that, but just wanted confirmation. Will try it out later. - Jason Hansen

Thanks. I am going to use Google Reader more often instead of desktop RSS clients. More open. - Zachary TG from iPod

I use Google Reader a *lot*, but I can't see any real benefit to importing your Twitter feeds into it. Page after page of small one line entries? No thanks. - Otto

I use this adaptation and like it so much I stopped using all my other Twitter apps. - earl wallace

Bret Taylor to Bret's feed, FriendFeed News

FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request - FriendFeed Blog - http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009...

August 10 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Jason A. Samfield, Srikanth AD, Ozer Wrzl (EN) and 661 other people liked this

We've been acquired by Facebook! We are really excited about joining the Facebook team. (Note: FriendFeed will continue to operate - see the blog post for details) - Bret Taylor from Bookmarklet

516 more comments

Boom. - Louis Gray

Grr! - directeur

Woah... - Brandon Titus

Uh. Well, that's the end of that. - Akiva Moskovitz

Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Roberto Bonini

What does this mean for FriendFeed, Bret? - Kol Tregaskes

Lame. - Mark Trapp

great title bret. well played. - MG Siegler

WOW - Bindu Reddy

Congrat! So, what does this mean to your team and to FF in general? - Dilip Dand

wahhhhhhhhhh - Myrna

maaaan - Jamie

wowow - Harry Wolff

congrats - brainno722 (Peter)

Nooooooooooooo - Mushin

Wait... seriously? - Ken Sheppardson

oh, noooo - Tanju Yildiz

Congratulations to the friendfeed team. I know this is huge for y'all. Please don't let us spoil your parade as we weep. - Ladybug Heather

Seriously?!? ..... - sebastian☆rocket brother

oh boy. - Carlos Ayala

I am hoping this will lead to nice integration for cross posting! Currently using Twitter App on FB to post and I hate those ff.im links that end up on Facebook. - Ivan Zlatev

it was good while it lasted, Friendfeed. :( - holly

division by zero - Onur Cengiz

OMG - Onur Gündüz

"FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team." Those are NOT encouraging things to read as a FF user. - Scott of Two Countries

gratz - Ali

My heart is sinking as I type this. Please tell me that it isn't a late April Fool's joke. :( - Tyson Key

Wow, it's true!! - Kevin Whalen

Big news! I second Kol & dilip's request for what this means for the team and FF's future. - Brandon Titus

O_o - Joe Silence is not dead

So it IS true. - Hector

Nicely done Bret - Jennifer Van Grove

Congratulations btw, guys! - Kol Tregaskes

Sniff... not sure if I'm excited about this. But I have enormous respect for the FriendFeed team... so, I assume they believe in the move as more than an exit strategy. - Michael Leggett

Congrats, Bret. - Jordan Hofker

This is just horrible - Matthew DeVries

Congratulations, I suppose. A bit worried Facebook is going to ruin everything though. I'm not fond of Facebook, to say the least. - Irma Vermaat

Um. - Barry Mitchelson

Oh my... Hopefully FriendFeed won't vanish and good luck :) - Tarmo Aidantausta

Do we call it FaceFeed? FriendBook? - Tyson Key

Oh no.... - Ben Hanten

What does mean for us? - Rich from iPod

Terrible fit. - Matthew DeVries

damn here it is... :( - Edgar Rodríguez

FriendFace!!! (i love it crowd) - Bahriye

*waits for wall-to-wall ads and constant spambots* - Joe Silence is not dead

Die. - Zio Bonino

Congrats - Zoltan Szendro

I dont want FF to end - Fee501st

Wow - Shevonne

Oh mon dio ! - Umar

What did you do? WHYYY! - Zachary TG

Ostregheta. - Reloj

Congrats guys, in a bittersweet sort of way. - Hutch Carpenter

guess there's no way of denying this anymore :( - BCK

Just another lesson in why you shouldn't put your love and trust in a company...... - Matthew DeVries

Oh no! - Erdinc YILMAZEL

Congrats, but I hate Facebook. - Zachary TG

I like Friendfeed and I do not like Facebook. Gratz to you guys though, I think. - Mark Sorrell

"Oh shit..." came to mind immediately. :( - Tyson Key

Scott, yep not encouraged by that comment. :-( - Kol Tregaskes

Congrats on the deal, best wishes to the FF'ers in helping facebook get it together! - Sean O'Connor

This could get exciting, especially concerning twitter :-P - Malte Steckmeister

Congrats for Friendfeed team, but I'm seriously worried for us :((((((((((( - Roberto

Congratulations... I'm sure this is pretty exciting for everyone at FriendFeed... We're all looking forward to where it takes you! - Nathan Chase

And FriendFeed was just getting popular. Not any more. - Zachary TG

Wow - Rodfather

*Sobs* - Tyson Key

wow - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

to the dump - Zachary TG

Wow, very disappointed - Randy Pollock

come on. Bret, facebook is so closed. so different from Friendfeed. besides that. Congrats to the team - Edgar Rodríguez

As am I - Zachary TG

machecazzo - Sba™

VERY disappointed. - Joe Silence is not dead

horrible decision - Randy Pollock

Booo. But, you know, congrats. - Chris Nixon

i'm not sure i'm happy about this. - Taylan Aydınlı

OMG WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SH*T - Alp

Congrats for u guys... probably too bad for us ;-( - Laurent

God, I can see FB shutting down FF just like Six Apart shut down Pownce. - DarknessFalls

arg. - Aron Michalski

Good for you, don't know for all of us - Cristian Conti

@#$& that's all I have to say. For now. - Zachary TG

Facebook should have been aquired by Friendfeed. Why they hell would you give up your better product to a worse one? Did none of you give a shit about this service to begin wiht? - Matthew DeVries

Congrats! - Alix Whitmire

Coolest web 2.0 site I've ever seen & used. I hope things don't derail. Ads will be coming soon, which is fine, but.... then what 's next? Please no quizzes! - Ben Hanten

Who would have thought that after Facebook were shamelessly being "inspired" by FriendFeed, the inevitable would have happened? - Tyson Key

I'm pissed off. I wan to throw away the whole Internet : - DarkBls

Congrats! - Moushumi Kabir

Congrats guys. :) - Meryn Stol

Congratulations. This is awesome for you and for Facebook. - Mike Sego

mommy? - Josh Haley

Hey guys, keep in mind that Facebook is blocked in workplaces across the nation. 250 million casual users commenting about last night's party does not intelligent conversation make. - Hector

FFail - rael

What will happen to my 92 subscribers? - Zachary TG

yes you have just failed at failing, no it is not a double negative. - Bahriye

Tragic. - Shannon

I really can't see how FB would buy FF only to shut it down. There are way too many innovations and features FF has that FB honestly needs. I'm looking forward. - Harry Wolff

congrats! - Jay from ViewPoint

here come the comments - Zachary TG

Congrats? Everybody who's saying Congrats doesn't know what he's saying. Go to hell. - Zio Bonino

Yeah, quizzes are EVIL! - Tarmo Aidantausta

Wow. - Zachary TG

Oh, this does not make me happy. Not at all! I've stayed off of Facebook intentionally and FriendFeed is my favorite social network. This is like when the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. :>( - Larry Hawes

i have stopped using FB for the most part and liked FF alot more. now FF will go the way of FB. screwed again. - Joe Silence is not dead

Congratulations. Enjoy the new challenges of acquisition, and I'm looking forward to the result! - Wade Dorrell

Berge Gazen beat your score in Mafia Wars - Berge Gazen

Feedface or Facefeed? - Fee501st

FUCK THAT ! [Anyways good job guys ^^] - TiTi

Enjoy your fat paychecks, guys. You've sold us out. - Akiva Moskovitz

Bravo Bret! Been following your successes ever since we had the opportunity to work together on the YellowPages.ca / Google Maps Canada deal. Congrats! - Sebastien

I wished it was Google or even Yahoo!, instead... - Tyson Key

i really hope ff stays as it is. fb is kinder carder while ff is a great tool. - jkkmobile

Facefucked or Fuckfeed? - Matthew DeVries

Not sure what to make of this. It could eiter be a big win or a huge fail. - dorn

It could have been Microsoft, which would have been worse for everyone. :( - Tyson Key

Can I take this opportunity to say I HATE facebook? - Alex Scrivener

seems the only ppl happy here are the ones in the biz or who stand to profit from the merger. - Joe Silence is not dead

I guess we should get ready to get poked by our supposed friends and have various shit thrown at us? Plus 5,000 requests by apps that nearly all suck. - Joey Gibson

There is zero way this could have been a win for anyone, but the now rich founders. - Matthew DeVries

duh - aybars badur

I HATE facebook - Pedram

this is simply awful. - Joe Silence is not dead

If I have to go to FB to use FF then it's a lost cause - Randy Pollock

Painful. And apparently I completely misunderstood what FF was trying to accomplish both technically and as an organization. I guess Facebook must have dangled a pretty big bag of money in front of them. - Ken Sheppardson

FriendFeed is Dead! Long Live FriendFeed! :/ - Tyson Key

Awesome. Please fix Facebook email :) http://fudge.org/too-muc... - Jay Cuthrell

Facebook is going to acquire the web! - l'Ego di Gigi

To me, FriendFeed is like Porsche and Facebook a Kia. I'm curious to see which will become which.. - Moushumi Kabir

Oh noes! - Burcu Dogan

Congrats Bret! - Robin Dindayal

I will reserve judgement, i don't like or use FB but if FF maintains it's current goodness i don't care who cuts the checks. - Steve C

I hope this doesn't turn into an APP filled hunk of crap. I love FriendFeed, it was the untouched gem of microblogging. I don't want Mafia Wars invited in my FriendFeed!!! Congrats on the sale though. - Jay Farmington

Where's the "dislike" option? - Gregor Morrill

+1 Gregor - Tyson Key

accipicchia che pessima notizia - massimo mantellini

I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE!!! -_- - Bahriye

I just realized this is like when K-mart bought Sears ... - DarknessFalls

/ponders the meaning of "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being." - Philipp Lenssen

And I will officially be leaving FriendFeed today. - Michael Forian

omg - John Mueller

@Philipp: until the new masters start flexing their muscles and bringing in their own people to enforce their own vision. - Joe Silence is not dead

I read the blog post and one statement stands out to me "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being." The time being. This is not just bad, I think it may be #FAIL - berchman

Such great news! - Steve Rubel

Not sure what to think of this. - Matthew Speicher

where is dislike button ? - Osman Üngür

OMG! - Zac Bowling

now where did I put my twitter password - Randy Pollock

big mistake :(( - emresezgin

I suppose it will be called FriendFace? http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Phil Harrison

Congratulations, guys!!!!!!!!! - Jess Lee

Oh. Hell. No. - CannonGod

Oh My God! They Killed FriendFeed! - Tyson Key

so the (once)new facebook homepage was actually the tip of the iceberg? - Onur Cengiz

It's a win/win! congrats all. - Alan Le

Time to roll your own Frienfeed clone. - Fırat Can Başarır

Congrats to you. - Evan Travers

Congratulations. I look forward to seeing what this new partnership means for users. - Aren Grimshaw

FF will surely be integrated into FB at some point? - Kol Tregaskes

damn Ken is spot on! +1000 Ken! - vijay

not good. - Jacque

Oh. My. Gosh. - Enrico Lamperti

Facebook obviously liked FriendFeed a long time ago. Why would they have copied so many features (feed item comments and the "Like" action, to name a couple) otherwise? It was only logical for this to happen eventually. Doesn't mean I like it, but acquisition is part of the game. I have the same feeling I did when SocialThing! was acquired by AOL, though. - Voyagerfan5761

"Relationship Status: It's complicated" comes to mind. ;) - Tyson Key

Wow, I finally sign up, and read this. This could end up being a very bad thing for FF fans: "Your FriendFeed friend just signed up on this poll, would you like to too?" - Brian Bommarito

sad... - Marvin

Congrats guys. And thanks for your continuos effort in helping promote and integrate web services, like mine, Wakoopa. That's awesome and I hope FB gets better because of it. - Robert Gaal

This will give FriedFeed the attention it deserves. Otherwise it would have been a geek thing forever. - Michael Netsch

Will there be a super poke feature launched tomorrow? - Matthew DeVries

aw, this sux!! Congrats to the Friendfeed team though! - acedanger

please don't merge logins!!! please - earlyadopter

They are deceived when they suffer themselves to be drawn after the image of things, without seeking for the true reason of them. - The Complex Days

I hope it works OK to you guys! - Rodrigo Jaroszewski

D: - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

+1 Netsch - I still like FF more but this finally legitimizes FF to the mainstream. - Daniel J. Pritchett

Friend request una beata fava. Pecunia non olet. - Federico Bolsoman

Yeah, I really can't wait to see what value the Ashton Kutchers and Oprahs of the world have to add to FriendFeed. - Akiva Moskovitz

Please tell me this is a delayed April Fools' Day joke. - Rochelle

Facebook & FriendFeed: don't cross the lifestreams! D:< - CannonGod

I guess this means I'll have toget a facebook account after all.... Hope the API stays up and running.... - Roberto Bonini

"Were rich B!tch!" - Chappelle - adolfo foronda

Another good thing: This ups the bar for Wave. - Wade Dorrell

What a bunch of greedy assholes. - Zio Bonino

So ? - Ercan Bülbül

Does this mean that we'll be seeing an influx of webcam spammers, a la Twitter? Along with abolishment of the rooms feature, crappification of the search feature, and more "privacy features" that really just put more nails in the openness coffin? - Tyson Key

:( - Pavlo Zahozhenko

Some people will do whatever their friends request........ - Michael Muller

I really don't see why people would be anything but excited about this Facebook freindfeed deal. Great news as far as I am concerned. The Friend feed team is going to go over facebook and make it that much easier to connect, share... isn't that what the social web is about? - Kevin Murray

I know a lot of people who use Facebook and enjoy it and that's fair enough. It's just not my cup of tea. The chaps from Friendfeed will get rich and the technology will get absorbed in Facebook but I can't see Friendfeed continuing in anything like it's present form. - Paul Nash

Don't be so negative, something good might eventually come of this... - Tarmo Aidantausta

The End. - Kaan Ertürk

Congrats! I know you all must be crazy excited right now. - Michele Lorito-Chase

chance for FriendFeed to become more mainstream... congrats FriendFeed team! - Jeroen De Miranda

Nothing could make me happier than if they integrated the good tools from FriendFeed into Facebook, which is where all my friends are. So a big "yay!" from me. - Ian Betteridge

happy for you guys, but not for all of us - Flavio

congratulations. this is going to be interesting. - Dave Beckett

I think I preferred the non-mainstream version of FriendFeed... - Tyson Key

I'm turning on my black shirt, my black trouser, my black socks, my black shoes. Although I probably must be happy for you. - Ton Zijp

NASTY NASTY BAD BAD. But we'll see... - Daniel Morgan

Game over. - stark

yeah removing feed also works. - Bahriye

Reminds me so much of Last.fm fall... - Marcos

Given that the FriendFeed team has never been anything but awesome & respectful of its community, I think it's unfair for people to assume that the Facebook acquisition is going to change that. - Jess Lee

Why in god's name are we flying over this shark?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! - Matthew DeVries

Facebook is like a giant who listens to nobody. Please keep your attitude but I don't think you will be able to do so. - Burak "cyrus" Bayburtlu

Noooooooo...... - Sung W. Lim

yeahhh - Çağrı Burak

NO - Cristian Conti

Congrats! That sucks. - Rutger Blom

Where is that evidence Jess? - Matthew DeVries

I don't know, Like it? or dislike it? - Ömer Balamir

What happens to all the content that we've created and imported here, and the associated metadata? Will all that disappear into the ether? - Tyson Key

If the FriendFeed guys can make FaceBook useful and responsive again, this seems like a pretty positive step! - Robin Barooah

Robin, the Facebook users don't want that I'm afraid. - Rutger Blom

I have big loss of data concerns. See http://ff.im/6pHjo Is there any way to archive all my FriendFeed posts, likes, comments, and pictures (friendfeed-media.com) off-line? Can some Archive.org-like snapshots of FriendFeed be made (Once a month starting Sept 2009)? I'd like to see the cross-links between my posts & other people's posts, even in 2020. - - Mitchell Tsai

Mitchell: the FriendFeed site is not shutting down. Your data will not go away any time in the near term future - we are committed to our users. - Bret Taylor

I just overheard a coworker mention FriendFeed. This is how the world ends... - CannonGod

kafa sayımı yapıp köyü satan ağalar geldi aklıma - Alper Ömer Esin

Then provide us with a way to easily make a back-up of all of our posts and all of the posts we have Liked and Commented on. - Akiva Moskovitz

Same question as Mitchel Tsai. How do I export my data? I don't want it to be handed off to Facebook. - Zio Bonino

Near term future? - Kol Tregaskes

I don't see good things coming from this. Although I like Facebook, I liked Friendfeed more. Partly because of the environment and the smallness of it. That is now going to be ruined. So, 10-1 odds that Friendfeed will be no more within a year after it gets intergrated into Facebook? - Mathew™ one of a kind

I doubt it Robin. Bret can only give us assurances about the "near future." Here's what I think will happen. Just like Twitter acquired Rael Dornfest and his awesome web services, Stikkit and I Want Sandy vanished (and so did he), Facebook will acquire all the talent from Friendfeed, shut this service down and Facebook will continue to suck. - Jim Hearts FF

Same question as Mitchel Tsai. How do I export my data? I don't want anything to be handed off to Facebook. And I don't want to lose anything. - Zio Bonino

Congrats obviously, but im not sure about the feeling,, different user groups which can not integrate but collide.. hope there wont be an huge integration in the future. - Yunus Tunak

I'm happy for FriendFeed! But, at the same time a bit worried about the future. Hope you guys convince FB to not be evil too. - Vishal Verma

http://friendfeed.com/sunipey... - sunipeyk

Let's hope this is like Disney's acquisition of Pixar - wherein the Pixar guys ended up in control of the animation studio... - Robin Barooah from IM

Where the f*ck is this option to undo ? - Laurent

Odd that this thread gets modded? - Matthew DeVries

I seriously thought this was a joke. Looks like its not. I don't like it, sorry. - Michael Lynton

Does anyone want to start a bounty to purchase Facebook? ;) - Tyson Key

#FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL #FAIL - Jacque

Congratulations! - John Craft

can't be, shouldn't be... - Kemal

It is! Change is inevitable, my friends. - Bill Sodeman

Jim, I'm less cynical than you - the FriendFeed founders wouldn't do this just in order to become 'talent' at FaceBook. - Robin Barooah

So will we be playing FriendFeed Mafia Wars at some point in the future? Ugh. - Alex Hellstrom

I feel if I should be wearing a black arm band. But I guess when I think about it.............. - Kevin J Hatton

Oh No! I don't like this at all :( - Peter

WTF! Horrible Bret, this the death of FriendFeed.. you know that right? - CW™

I still think Apple will acquire Facebook, Twitter Friendfeed and Google Twitter. - Thomas Power

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! - Stephen Francoeur

My condolences to all Friendfeeders! RIP! - Evgeni Leshtanski

AAAAwwwful! - carolh

I can't believe it! damn! facebook tos will apply to friendfeed too? should i start to move to another service? why anyone would think that facebook public is friendfeed public?! damn! friedfeed was my favorite! I can't understand this move! they want to kill friendfeed or what? - paula simoes ☃

"I bet I can find 1.000.0000 people who dislike this deal."...Welcome to FriendBook. - Jacque

Well, huge congraulations to you and your team, you deserve every success. To be honest I had presumed this would happen sooner or later - the only business model cool little startups have is to hope they get bought by someone bigger for their brains and technology. I'm going to be in San Francisco in a couple of weeks and was going to stop by your office to bring you a cake and thank you for a great product - maybe I still will if you're still there and there's still a FriendFeed! - Alex Lomas

The FF founders must have know this would be a very unpopular move. Most users I know here are not too fond of FB. - Rutger Blom

damn, damn, damn... - Kemal

One of the sadest news for Internet and web creativity :( - DarkBls

Woah woah... This is real? - Jason Huebel

"Your data will not go away any time in the near term future - we are committed to our users" There's a bit of a contradiction in your statement, Bret. Nice try though. - jcunwired

Now I can break my Internet plan at home. - DarkBls

Grats Bret and the rest of FF. To all the naysayers... Lets see what happens before we start bitching.... - Rasmus Lauridsen

wow!! dazed and confused!! - Roberto Arancibia

I don't hate Facebook, but for sharing things Friendfeed is MUCH MUCH better! - Mathew™ one of a kind

I wonder if that Ben Darnell guy who *just* left the Google reader team knew about this beforehand? Wonder what he's thinking now? (http://friendfeed.com/friendf...) - Daniel J. Pritchett

Just great. I'm certainly not very happy about this. Let's just hope FB doesn't ruin FF. Ugh. - Elena

Who cares? Nothing's gonna change in our pitiful lifes. - bluretina

:| - Amin BZ

This ties in nicely with the fact that you soon will have the opportunity to make your Facebook profiles public and get followers there. - Michael Netsch

чатег номер два - лето ближе с каждым днем

Congrats Bret! this is so great! many congrats!!! - Jason Pollock

That is capitalism for you. Luckely, there still good 'ol usenet. - Peter

Is it April 1st somewhere in the universe? - Robert Felty

#ROFLMAO Is there anything more important than money? It seems NOT #ROFLMAO - Lora Lufark

I don't mean to be negative but there's got to be a win-win logic to each merger&acquisiton. Audience high in only quantity is clearly not a win for friendfeed in the long term by considering its unique selling points. Let's wait and see who will benefit from friendfeed's death now. - ayca

It's all about the money. I would have payed a couple of dollars each month to use FF. - Rutger Blom

#DONTSELLMYFRIENDFEED - sunipeyk

Seriously, what is this? It's like Bret just announced that he's killed all your mothers or something. It could turn out good, it could turn out bad, but at the end of the day, who cares, it's just a website (I mean honestly, come on). I could see it going either way, but in the near term, this is a pretty big win for the FF team, so congrats guys. - Chieze Okoye

OMG! - keso

To be honest, my heart sank a little but I am happy to congratulate you and the team for building such a good brand. Well done. - Kevin J Hatton

I'm just surprised, that's all. I'm not saying this is a bad thing (it certainly isn't for the owners of FF). I'm willing to sit back and see what happens. - Jason Huebel

Wow, I specifically use friendfeed b/c it is not facebook. Sounds great for the friendfeed team, but not necessarily for friendfeed users. - Evan Parker

Born to be sold, like in the old "new economy" era. Remember the late nineties? - Federico Bolsoman

Sudden desire to check out Strands again... but hey, kudos on the incoming $$ for FF team - Leslie Poston

#DONTSELLMYFRIENDFEED - Kemal

This is wisdom. Bracing for Google Wave is a good idea............. - Kevin J Hatton

this is clearly a talent aquisition... why am i not excited about this? could it be because facebook has been blatantly stealing features from friendfeed shamelessly. Likes were clearly not an original facebook idea...realtime feeds is another i could go on... - Tate DA FF MVP

While I'm sad, because I suspect this means the best things about FF will disappear or I'll be forced to use FB in some way, if the buyout was for some awesome amount of money, I can't say I blame 'em for taking an offer -- I would. - Andy Bakun

I came to FriendFeed because I don't like facebook. Now the question is, will facebook become more like friend feed? or will they just take friend feed and turn it into facebook? - Tom Ray

FF could be a good R&D arm for facebook. - Andy Bakun

My biggest concern here is that FB has a completely different audience than FF. - Rutger Blom

Fucking morons. FriendFeed is doomed now. Think logically. Facebook has NO REASON to keep FriendFeed alive. It will simply take FF's best features, suck the life of out of it, then trash FF. Way to go, FirnedFeed, damn. - Jeremy Buff

Fail. - Big K

Big Fail! - OnuRC

This announcement should have been held off until the plans for Friendfeed were known. Regardless, this is *bad* for FF users. Best case: it continues on, but with stagnated feature development. Worst case: it's gone. - tollie williams

wtf ?! - Umut

I need to install "super PUKE" application ! - Bart LePoole

http://ff.im/6pQcu - Bahriye

FFail. - rowlikeagirl

I don't want my FF feed on Facebook :( I use both, but maintain both profiles separate - Leandro Ardissone ⍨

Sigh... Happy for the team if this is what they want, but baffled by the move. The users that are going to leave because of this will make FF a graveyard and the users it gains, well... Hello spam? Sorry, but I don't like it. - Vince DeGeorge from iPhone

JEREMY+++++1 - Ahmet Alp Balkan

Wow! - felix

Well, I guess it is time to dismantle my friendfeed. We all know where this is headed. So, so glad I didn't move all my rss feeds from greader to friendfeed like so many cheerleaders suggested. - Matthew Speicher

Jeremy +1 - F. Batuhan Icoz

so what's next? where should we go? - Flavio

It's been fun here. - Capn' One Eye - adrift

Dang, and just as I was starting to get used to how FF works. FF is useful on it's own. I hope this only improves FF's system, rather than having it disappear into Facebook's wake. - Don Faulkner

My big question to everybody here is this: What are the potential downsides / upsides to this acquisition? I mean on paper I just don't see what the pros OR cons are. I don't care for Facebook but I don't see how them acquiring FF is going to change everything. - Nicholas Kreidberg

furthermore they are 2 different things: I follow a lot of people here that are not in my facebook list, which is for IRL friends! - Flavio

I don't know where to go next either. I had just settled down to make imaginary friends for all my non-FF tweeps, etc. now, I'm not sure if I should bother. - Don Faulkner from IM

I hope friendfeed continues to operate normally but it does not look good. - ashish

integrate best features of ff to fb, then try to innovate in fb if possible, then kill ff... that's it, cheers, all the best. grrrr... - Kemal

niczak has good points. FF & FB aren't exactly competitors, but they aren't orthogonal either. Let's hope FB's smart enough to see the difference and improve both platforms. - Don Faulkner from IM

Nicholas: The upside for Facebook is they just bought an engineering team that's built many of the feature's Facebook's going to need to stay competitive. The upside for FriendFeed's engineering team is $$$ and the ability to build system for a wider audience. FriendFeed's user base is small enough that it'll either get absorbed into Facebook or move on, and FF will become a footnote on the Internet timeline. - Ken Sheppardson

Don, I don't think FB wants to maintain two platforms. - Rutger Blom

first tr.im (heard about it yesterday), now this. I wasn't a heavy tr.im user (yet), but sad to see it go, even if I think url shortening is silly. - Don Faulkner from IM

As FB said they're interested in the people and not in the site, what if the community will keep running FF without its current staff? - Flavio

Congratulations! - Sam Grover

Flavio, that's not very realistic I'm afraid, but I like the idea. - Rutger Blom

rutgerblom, I don't expect they do either, thus my angst over this. - Don Faulkner from IM

if there's a team willing to do it and money, and if we accept some ads as everywhere else, we could make a new FF without FB - Flavio

I have worked hard in avoiding signing up for FB. Does this mean I now automatically will be on FB by virtue of my FF account? - Tony Vota from iPhone

Tony, most likely - Rutger Blom

read carefully: http://blog.socialthing.com/2009... - Kemal

I'll have to go with Flavio's position too. Given this news (plus tr.im and who knows who's next), I'd tend to favor community supported or federated services for things like this in the future. - Don Faulkner from IM

I am purposely not on facebook because I don't really want to talk to people I have not talked to in 20 years. - Andy Bakun

God help us - Johnny

Once again. I'm happy for the FF team. They worked hard and now collect. That's fair. Wonder if they're sitting in a bubble pool drinking champagne while we cry out here ;-) - Rutger Blom

Congrat Bret!! :)) - Cihan Cepni

trouble is (from my perspective), that the philosophies of the two platforms are at odds. FB wants to bring people to the site and keep them there, while FF is a hub, bringing people in and then sending them back out. (That's part of why it's hard for the newcomer to understand, IMHO.) - Don Faulkner from IM

This almost confirms FF will disappear: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - Kol Tregaskes

Great point, Don. - Rutger Blom

+1 Don - Johnny

Does this mean I can throw someone a sheep on FriendFeed now? - Pinksy

I sure hope so, Rutger. I glad for their success too. I just hope there's a next best thing out there for us. - Don Faulkner from IM

Congrats all. Nice work, in spite of any naysaying out there. Keep up the innovation. - Tomas Remotigue

LOLI FFAIL - rael

lame. - andy brudtkuhl

This should be good news for Twitter. - Rutger Blom

post the picture to failblog... - Kemal

Quote «Taylor and Cox say that the Friendfeed product will live on independently, and eventually Friendfeed will be merged into Facebook. But the Friendfeed team is not being kept whole. Some employees will now report to Cox, others to engineering head Mike Schroepfer. In my opinion that means, long term, the Friendfeed product itself is unlikely to be a big priority.¶ But Facebook is... more... - Philipp Lenssen

+1 Kol for the techcrunch article! - Don Faulkner from IM

techcrunch: "Cox agreed, noting that Facebook is focused on being a platform and a service, and not just a destination site." I certainly hope so! - Don Faulkner from IM

Brilliant move by both Facebook and friendfeed. Congratulations!!! I have theories of what they have planned, but I doubt you would verify any of them. This is going to go so well with their SocialTV which they have been developing. I'm so happy for you! - Michael Fidler

Really saddened by this news. - Doug

Noooooooooooooooooooooo! - LouCypher

I don't see what's so bad about it since no one knows right now what the outcome will be, everyone is just making assumptions that could possibly be wrong..... Might help just sitting back and seeing what happens first before complaining. - ChaCha Fance

Nooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrghh! I´ve resisted getting a facebook acct for so long... - Thomas Bøhm

ChaCha, if everybody would do that there would not be much discussion would there? This is part of the fun. - Rutger Blom

I wonder how the discussion over on facebook would compare to this? - Don Faulkner from IM

Drat! - Gee Ekachai

congrats guys! - Elad

Don, I doubt there is any discussion going on there. They're too busy throwing quizes at each other. - Rutger Blom

Congrats, FF! I'm approaching the situation with cautious optimism. A lot of my friends only share stuff via the Facebook wall/feed, so if Facebook is able to make their feed more like the FF feed (i.e. good, instead of sucktacular) through this acquisition, it's mostly a win for me in the end. - Brian Chang

At least my Feedburner stats might go back to normal again. - Rutger Blom

/me pokes Rutger. (just getting in practice. ;) - Don Faulkner from IM

Where will we go for the FFunderCats, bacon memes, and angry artists fighting over photo reshares now? ;) - Tyson Key

Don, LOL :-) - Rutger Blom

If anybody has doubts as to what happens to the FriendFeed community or our stored information here, read this statement from Bret (in this thread) "Your data will not go away any time in the near term future - we are committed to our users". Now maybe you can see "whats so bad about it" and curb your optimism. Not good. - jcunwired

Congrats FF. Fix their live feed situation please. - Edward Barnieh

@josh: do you think FB will throw away all the crap people use? various quiz, pick 5 and so on? - Flavio

@jc: our data will not go away in the near future. what will be in few months? in a year? - Flavio

Let's see if you can do a bit better than just not being evil this time around. - Tim Tyler

Wooohooo!!, seems like we are being sent back to "good" old Facebook. Congrats Bret!! - DanDan

Looks like I'm going to repeat the same thing many others did. My first reaction was "Oh my..." I have refused to join Facebook due to its philosophy while I have been with FriendFeed from the beginning for its. I'm sad and somewhat apprehensive. - Sean Leather

Congrats. I suppose this means the end of FriendFeed but hopefully a better Facebook. - Harry Toon

Hmm. Interesting. - Ralf Becker

Add me to the fearful group. - beersage

Please say that facebook.com will be shutting down, and the combined company will still be called FriendFeed... I bet it won't happen, though. - Tyson Key

"Regarding FB/FF - Here's how it's [probably] going to work. You will most likely have an account merge, all of the services FriendFeed supports will now be aggregated on Facebook, and all of your FriendFeed friends will be in a "list" on Facebook. The FF Groups will become Facebook Groups. The FF lists will become Facebook Lists." http://ff.im/6pNxq - Ozgur Uckan

Nothing like an early retirement payout :) - Owen Greaves

Congrat Bret - Nimaa

Panic attack. Congratulations, however! :) - Большие ириски

Congratulations Bret. For me this merger makes a lot of sense. Facebook will provide the "quantity" of users, which friendfeed deserves :). - Karthick R

:( - goodmachine

FriendFeed + Facebook... Oh noes FriendFace is coming (http://www.youtube.com/watch...)! Now sorry for that link, and seriously, thanks for your work, guys. Please don't let the spirit of FriendFeed to be blown away =) - Anton

СУКИ-СУКИ-СУКИ!!!! - Viktor

hey, that is great guys! interested to see how you integrate. - Brian Walsh

Mind blown. Never expected this. I'm also disappointed, yet optimistic at the same time. - Angus Burton

Kinda curious to see how this will all pan out...although i wouldnt want the friendfeed stuff just integrated into facebook. I feel like im among a group of people who i genuinely share interests with here...dont want to lost that. - Cassidy

Best case: Facebook will continue to support and develop FriendFeed. Worst case: this is great news for Amplifeeder. - David Gaw

aieeeeeeeeeee - Richard Akerman

FAIL. Facebook is the new myspace, and now friendfeed will become a part of that BS. Can't say I'm too surprised because eventually we all sell out. BTW I don't see friendfeed lasting more than the rest of this year, if that. The good news is that we can all be subjected to add 'Are you related to a monkey?' and Blackjack apps while having annoying personal ads on our profile pages. Fuck this shit. - Tomy Thomson

Well done, well deserved, I hope FB's means and infrastructures empower your guys to even better things. But if quizzes appear in "my" friendfeed, evil things will haunt you and your descendents for 3 generations. - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

:( - Eph Zero

Well done Bret! - Alemsah Ozturk

♪ ♪ This is the end.... beautiful friends ♪ ♪ - All for design

Well, I don't see the point of sticking around here if I have accounts in both and this is going to get swallowed whole into Facebook anyways. Put simply, goodbye. - Micah Collard

It was fun while it lasted. - Mr. Gunn

NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! This place will be just like twitter... - The Count Rob

Congrats to the FF team - you've built a wonderful product! - Michael Nielsen

Whattttttttttttttttttttt??? - Nibi

The social community that has been behind FriendFeed creators have built a wonderful product. Only problem is, we don't have Zuck's checkbook :( - jcunwired

friendfeed is a beautiful product, only god knows what facebrook will do to it. Hopefully the ability to upload files (such as mp3s) will not be removed. Zuck is a tool. - Nibi

Congratulations. I'm sorry to say that I don't plan to move with you. - Lars Juhl Jensen

I don't like this.... - Zeki Pehlivan

"Like" to follow this thread. Not because I like what happened. I'm horrified. FF could disappear now. - Kamilah Gill

Same here, Kamilah. - Tyson Key

If FriendFeed had invented the "don't like" button, today would have been the day to press it. - Vishal Verma

and I just bought BuddyFeed for my iPhone this weekend. :( - Don Faulkner from IM

Oh, joy, Facebook's privacy policy is upon us! - Joris

WTF?? NOOOOO!!! Why do such good things have to be ruined by greed? Screw Facebook, and goodbye Friendfeed. - Jason R. Hunter

congratulations! - Loic Le Meur

Facebook is lucky to have such a talented group of people ... Congratulations FriendFeed! - Rob Kurrus

doesn't look like a bad joke, better be for the good then, but... Well congrats anyway guys, you did something AWESOME now let's see where Mark takes it - Dobromir Hadzhiev

That's too bad. Liked the openness if FriendFeed, and the lack crap that is on Facebook. Once FriendFeed dies, it will be Twitter only. - Mike D.

Congrats, but concerned that FriendFeed and its tools may disappear. Merging the tools with Facebook seems impossible. - Mike Reynolds

Congrats guys (and gals) ! - Benjy Weinberger

So, what does the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook mean to us, users of both websites: Can I make a friend request from FriendFeed, and be approved for both, on one click - Reyna Carlos

Exciting news guys. I am actually looking forward to your collaboration with / work for FB. No matter what people may or may not like about FB, it does succeed in reaching a more "diverse" audience compared to most other Web 2.0/social web companies. Paired with your team's excellence in realizing features that succeed in pleasing the geekiest of Web 2.0 affine individuals, I think you are steering towards exciting waters :) - Mustafa K. Isik

*heart sinks* actually a bit of shock - I think that Facebook will leave Friendfeed as-is but I don't think there is hope for future innovation in Friendfeed since their best superstar team members will be pulled onto 'more important' Facebook issues... - Pon

And the metastasizing, walled-garden that is Facebook, continues to eat the Web. Bring on Google Wave. - Christopher A Carr

:-) + :-( very happy for the team, huge achievement, hoping to see export of innovation but not a shut down of this unique community and location - Majento

There goes FriendFeed down the toilet. well I WAS having a good day. until hearing this crap! - Scratch5150

Congratulations, and best wishes for your future together! :-) - Ruchira S. Datta

Wow, I was beginning to use Friendfeed as my defacto social site...Facebook is more for real life friends. They'll just take what makes Friendfeed great, add it to Facebook and slowly kill this site. - Manuel Mas

What is the big deal? I think it'll make FF bigger and better. You should be happy about that! - orionstarr

Somebody has to got pay for it. - orionstarr

I am disappointed. I don't want to have to go to Facebook to do what i do here. I can not imagine they will port over all the features we enjoy here. We lose a lot for only a slight benefit to Facebook. - Robert

It could be worse, myspace could've bought them lol... - orionstarr

Awful news for users but congratulations to you guys. Ideally, FB will run FF as a distinct service but I'm not hopeful. I don't want the diversity and noise that facebook brings - people doing quizzes on which movie star they resemble and playing silly games. I also wanted to keep my day to day social activity distinct from the targeted information and discussion I use FF for. - Rajit

Only just started taking a serious look at FF after hearing acquisition by FB. Sounds like I'm laggard rather than a leader in use of web 2.0 - ManojRanaweera

I think how Pon said it is what I'm feeling: *heart sinks*. - Andy Bakun

Congratulations, i am really happy for you guys!! :) - Mona Nomura

I'm not a Facebook fan, but can't begrudge the FF gang their chance to reap the rewards for all their hard work. However, it would be a shame if FB ruins the good thing we all have going here. - Ken Morley

So what now? a name change too? FriendFace? FeedBook? FaceFeed? god Facebook really sucks. oh well. Adds anyone? - Scratch5150

Congrats to the FF team... I hope the service doesn't disappear into a fold of light and heat. - Brandon

if all the things that make FF great are brought to FB then I'll be happy to use it - Mike Chelen

The community won't be there. Been on FB longer than any other, don't have nearly the relationship or sense of community there that I do here or on Twitter. - Karoli

Karoli: that is due to the effectiveness of the FF platform and interface, which help to join conversations and find interesting people more so than FB does - Mike Chelen

Mike: I suspect that FB wants FF for the search possibilities, not the community-building aspects. But we'll see. - Karoli

i guess congrats are in order, but I'm going to now go and remove everything I have that feeds into FF, and I have to ask -- do I have any rights over my archive? I have a private feed, and I have no interest in offering up my lifestream to the FaceBook data-miners. I hope the FF folks get what they hope for out of the deal, but my FriendFeed experience has been effectively killed. - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

I just learned about the FF acquisition by Facebook - WOW~! Congratulations Bret, Paul and FF team!! holy cow ........Mooooooooo! Where's the FF Acquisition Party? :) - Susan Beebe

Friendfeed after Facebook http://ff.im/6q5EY - Ozgur Uckan

Wow thats cool! - AbZ from Nambu

RT @alirizaesin FriendFeed, R.I.P. Home tweet home!.. - Ozgur Uckan

Congrats to facebook. Now, Twitter is the best. - Ebru Baranseli

Congratulations to the FriendFeed guys on the Facebook Acquisition. Not a big fan of Facebook, so I hope my favorite Uber Aggregator, Realtime Social, Microblogging site of awesomeness is not entirely absorbed into the Facebook infrastructure. I wait with baited breath to hear what "normally for the time being" means ;). - Tom Horn

Can I now have comments propagate in both directions as far as Facebook/Friendfeed is concerned? - Piaw Na

*checks date*. Damn .. not April 1st, must be for real. While I'm happy for the FF team, since I guess this is what they wanted (congrats guys!), I can't help but think this is the beginning of the end for a great service and a vibrant community. There are reasons I don't spend any time on Facebook and do spend lots of time on FF, and some kind of "FF integrated into Facebook" just won't cut it. I hope this service will live on for at least a few more years. - Andrew Perry

Gratz to the FF team but as a user I'm not completely happy. In short, I like the FF team/product much more than I like the FB team/product. Best of luck to all. - timepilot

Dang! I've killed another site! Sorry guys... FF was doing fine until I started coming here again! Same with Pownce! Went there and liked it... went underground for a spell... came back and still liked it, so I stayed. A few months later... BOOM! I have the touch! (I'm thinking I'll start devoting a lot of time to Twitter... maybe I can kill that one, too!) - Mark Jepsen

Все, блядь, пиздец! - ǝuǝƃnǝ

WOW - very happy for all of you :-) - Kishore Balakrishnan

Bret, congrats on the acquisition. You guys put in a lot of hard work to create this community. I just hope you learned the mistakes Pownce made, Jaiku etc, and ensured that you didn't sell out your community, but that you helped it evolve into something as great as this into something better. Good luck in future endeavors! - Mike Lewis

Oh yeah? Ok: take tour money and go to the hell. :-((( - Claude LaFrenière

Yay for you guys, I mean that seriously, I 'like' what this means for you personally, but -1000000 cool points for doing it with FB. Sad day. - Threepwood

Karoli: FF search is so useful because it is integrated with all the other great features that help to find relevant content. if FB wants to have a similar capability, they must also develop the underlying architecture. - Mike Chelen from IM

Sucks big time. - Drea

Sadness - Yasin Dillinger ☼

I can't believe this happened - Johnny

Suggested name: FailFriend. :-((( - Claude LaFrenière

Friend facebooks feed (FFF) - uyuyang-Filiz Koyuncu

«Experience shows that those who never trust anyone will never be disappointed.» Leonardo da Vinci - Claude LaFrenière

So what exactly is going to happen? Is FF eventually going to disappear? Will it merge into the Facebook interface? Please don't do that - Ethan

Gimme my OPML export - Sriks7

Money is the root of all evil - Shakeel Mahate

shakeel, the reasons for friendfeed to join facebook are probably about other things besides money, since many of the FF staff left high-paying jobs to join in the first place - Mike Chelen from IM

Well I've thought about it, and I'll stick around until I start seeing that crappy Facebook logo, I only have 71 subscribers here, I hate to do it but I'll probably scrap the whole thing and start over somewhere else. still can't believe that shit. - Scratch5150

Congrats, team! It's bittersweet, though. - Anne Bouey

So now we will have FriendFeed blocked at work too. Darn. - Mark Scrimshire

"Your data will not go away any time in the near term future" is not exactly inspiring for the long term for those of us who came here to escape Facebook for a) it's walled garden and b) privacy concerns. Nice for the Founders to make a pile of cash but for the many of us, it feels like we got sold down the river. Sad. - Sally Church

This is tragic. Tragic. Tragic. - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

cacarr: updates for FB have progressed rapidly in the past, count how many months since new features such as api calls and site redesigns have have been implemented - Mike Chelen from IM

I can't believe it either. I feel as if — for the moment — I am lost in the wilderness, adrift. - roamin

Congratulation to the FF team! You guys deserves this. I just hope that Facebook does not change the directions of FF. - Vinko

congrats, I'm happy for friendfeed... - amelia arapoff

Congrats you guys, well deserved. - Shey, Jamaican of FF

Congrats Bret! Hope the transition goes smoothly for you guys. - Cristo

I hope this means better integration: liking here will auto-like on fb and such :D if that's the case, I won't mind the ads *wink* *wink* - Bicentennial (Franc)

Franc, cant stand facebook ads in their current format, hope they will be fixed eventually :P - Mike Chelen from IM

Grats, dont spend it all in one place..... - Robert Higgins

congrads. I think it will be good for BOTH companies. - Logan Lindquist

boo. - kelly

The Borg has struck. Alas. Prepare to be assimilated. (Will FB add my FF subscriptions to my FB friends list?) - Dennis Jernberg

Boo - Amit Morson

Logan: What do you mean by "both" companies? - Christopher A Carr

Now that you guys have $$$ you should swap out the not so very pleasing default avatar! - See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

Hope you guys enjoy your new jobs. Meanwhile we get to watch a great alternative to Facebook with a promising future go down the tubes. A really sad and unfortunate day. - Todd Holmes

BOO! Hiss! Mondays really do suck. - Dale

Congratulations to all the FriendFeed team. I hope you'll be able to keep the FriendFeed spirit up at Facebook. Kudos for all the great work you've been doing. - Paul Papadimitriou

Congrats and good luck.. - Can Koklu

Thanks for all the fish. Saving the so long... for now. - abacab

Goodbye FF, it was wonderful.. - Francesco Cugurra

Time to say goodbye to FriendFeed. - René Fischer

FUCK. The internet just lost a good service. Friendfeed is dead - Ryo / Fuck Facebook

I use FriendFeed and Facebook so it would be awesome to see FF features in Facebook. Congratulations! - krzychukula from IM

judging by the nearly 600 comments as i type this, including my own earlier one, FF could use a Don't Like button as well. or would, if we were going to be using it much longer. - kelly

Nice, i like to wish you all the best for your new job (and it's really hard, i know). I'm happy, but... don't let die FF!! - Seo (ignobile) Guru

Hope FriendFeed remains open. Love the spirit of FF - Bernaldo Barrena

Seriously, what a coincidence! Just on Saturday I claimed to be both twitter- and facebook-free. I loved FF product and personally helped to bring at least a dozen of my friends into the community. I'll stick around for a while though. - ǝuǝƃnǝ

This deal makes sense, now fb developers do not need to figure out how ff does it because they can just ask! Congrats facebook and ff! - Garin Kilpatrick

I suppose Facebook had to do it, with Twitter and Google Wave as competitor... - Alexander Kruel

обычные дела. http://www.youtube.com/watch... - ǝuǝƃnǝ

Congratulations Friendfeed :D - paniaguai

Ok. I'll quit friendfeed, so. Goodbye. Ciao - valerio fiandra from iPhone

I am noticing a lot of people going to re-esumate their lifestream.fm account now! - Flavio

I don't think FB acquiring FF is bad. But I don't think it's good either. We'll see. :-) In the meantime, keep up the good work! - Alexander Gieg

Oh shit. Love FF, hate FB. I'll NEVER, EVER merge my two accounts. I'd rather unsub from both than merging. I'll wait for the developments, and in the meantime look for an alternative. - Alliandre (la Ippe)

How long until ex-FriendFeed employees start jumping ship from Facebook? I wonder... - Tyson Key

Thomas Power still believes that Facebook/FF/Linkedin (2010) will be acquired by Apple (2011) and this is a transitional acquisition in the SN market cycle. The world is shifting to Mac, iTunes, iPhones and FB own the next generation. Apple have $29bn of cash on deposit price is not an issue. Google must jump for twitter while MS fiddle in the sticks with Yahoo. BillG will be back at the MS helm 2012. - Penny Power

:( Happy for FF people, sad for the service. Was going to move from fb to ff this week.. - Martynas

congrats! - Ronald

thts good!so i can workin both in my Fb online next - Arini dewi muchtaram

Flavio: never heard of lifestream.fm before, but I'm going to go check it out. I'll reiterate, though, that I'm now shy of any service like this, since it can disappear just as it's getting good. I heard about sweetcron.com last night (via http://ff.im/6pR2w). Maybe it's time to move from centralized to distributed again. - Don Faulkner

Just finished setting up my lifestream.fm at http://lifestream.fm/dfaulkner. Lifestream does what it says, and no more. FF's search blows lifestream away. FF is more flexible about adding source feeds, but lifestream does fine without the flexibility I suppose. FF still wins, or would, if I thought it would be sticking around. :P - Don Faulkner

Must See - Hitler blows up over Facebook / FriendFeed - http://friendfeed.com/dffrnt... - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Dave, I'm not happy. That video gave me some much needed comic relief .. after waking up to this news. - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

good for you, bad for us - Zachary Earl Strader

I also hate facebook, not because of their silly quizzes and pokes, but because I suspect they would like to maintain massive user base as the determining factor in choosing a social network. I would love to switch to orkut as I use so many other google services, but I can't because nobody else does. That should not be my criteria.... I thought friendfeed would try to make social networks work together. - Ru Viljoen

I don't understand why everyone is so negative about the situation? - orionstarr

@orionstarr - it's like Starbucks buying your neighborhood coffee shop and saying it still cares about the customers. You know it's just not going to be the same as what you've come to love. - Robin Barooah

Presumably FF will go on the back burner - and the team will try and "fix" Facebook. - Tim Tyler

sad, sad, sad. - scott willeke

Congratulations! That's huge. I hope all is well. - Juan Bruce

bad bad bad - kakilang

bye bye friendfeed! - Jonathan Crossland

Why-eee!!! ??? What next? - Wayne Lewis

I've watched Facebook morph from a relatively organised and well implemented social networking tool into the hulking mess it is now - and I really, really hope that a similar thing doesn't happen here with the inevitable changes this will bring about. - Leslie Moore

Come on guys, out with the long-term game plan, this is tedious. - Andrew Eglinton

NOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, I mean Cool. - sofarsoShawn

Teach Facebook how to be FriendFeed. Let the small but fast teach the big but slow. Don't forget what Paul says - don’t be evil. - whatidiscover

George Dearing

{damn, Spotify is getting some pub} "Spotify Is the Best Desktop Music Player We've Ever Used" [Lifehacker] - http://lifehacker.com/5330148...

August 6 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Per Gustås, Arshia and 15 other people liked this

Looking forward to getting this in the States. Odds on Apple approving for the iPhone? 1000 to 1. - Leo Laporte

5 more comments

We should get Spotify in Canada in maybe 2015 or 2016 ? Spotify 3 will be out by then. :-) - Richard Sigouin

agreed on AppStore approval..gonna be ugly..others will mimic Spotify though..too hot of a space for 1 or 2 players. - George Dearing

Any word on if its coming for Android? I hope they don't forget about us. - Neeraj Kumar Agrawal

Neeraj: The Android app has been in the works for a while. I would make sense for it to be released when/if Apple approves the iPhone app currently in the queue. - David H

I can't see Apple approving this, but I hope they do! - Brian Matthews

Spotify ROCKS!!!! Been using it for a few days and...MAN! The collaborative playlists are awesome! Making some sweet playlists with some of my friends :D Where's Spotify for iPhone?!?!?! Stop screwing around Apple! - sebastian☆rocket brother

Robert Scoble

Fwd: Facebook acquires FriendFeed. Interview with Paul Buchheit, cofounder of FriendFeed. - http://btre.blogtalkradio.com/74_2996... (via http://friendfeed.com/scoblei...)

August 10 from iPhone - Comment - Like - Share

Phillip Stewart, paniaguai, Bart LePoole and 175 other people liked this

Well that was fast, Robert. - Adam Reyher

68 more comments

Wow. I honestly did not see THAT coming.... - Carter Rabasa

Nice work Robert. - Alex Calic

ya talk about real time news, thanks - sean percival

listening - Chris Saad

This is beginning to resemble journalism. - Ian Tindale

im not sure its such a great thing facebook and friendfeed sitting in a tree. - Eran Even-Kesef

Good job Robert - Ruchit Garg

Definitely, I'm listening now. Wow! This is breaking news! - Manu Ullas

hopefully this turns out okay, don't want friendfeed to get ruined. great interview, that was fast reporting! - Dakota O'Neill

What are your thoughts Robert? - Amani

WD mate - Chris Saad

Hoping this will lead to an improved/cleaner interface for Facebook...I prefer Friendfeed - Rick Bucich

That was quick. Thanks robert. - Akshay Dodeja

so, so sad. I like(d) Friendfeed much more than facebook - Francisco Kemeny

home run for FF.. Facebook will be able to give developers a treasure trove of data one thing that Twitter is dominating on right now. Twitter has a huge developer community but isn't managing that. Here FB is poised to be huge - John Furrier

So classic that Robert has the first interview about this...Where's Louis? :) - Anthony Farrior

Wow! - Ideas At Random

I think FriendFeed can help Facebook more than the other way around. - Manu Ullas

"very cool...." - Carter Rabasa

How do they plan to mix the teenagers with the geeks? - Jordi Soler

Amani: I am excited! Facebook has 800 employees and 300 million users. This makes both companies much more important. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

here was a comment on SiliconANGLE blog .. very funny .. "Hey, since we've copied almost every innovation you've had, guess you might as well play on the company softball team!" - John Furrier

Nice strategic move - Interesting to see how this will integrate and looks in 12 months - Alex Vermeule (@alexve)

to be honnest I was predicting google offer, then facebook preceed google on this, they are doing well, now rarding FF this is great, the sucess is to know when to pass to something else, the future will make the abtle wave, facebook rude for all geek it is time to code. - abdellah

You rascal Robert, bet you had wind about FriendFeed and FaceBook merger before today? Yes? Have not used either SM apps. much UNTIL Twitter locked my account. May have been a fortunate mishap as it turns out. Getting to know the beauties of both apps. =) - SashaKane

Awesome. Thanks. - M. Kong

Should be so very interesting. - Adam

Robert wastes no time on the reporting. CNN needs reporters like this. - JonInteractive

Not sure I am so jazzed about it....but congratulations to the FF crew. - Kreg Steppe

Good job, Robert. Good questions. - Bryan Penczak

Honestly, I won't get used to following Robert Scoble in Facebook. Seems out of place to me. - Jordi Soler

Wow! I was not expecting that. - Devon Govett

Letter 'F' affinity and alliteration merger, classic playbook move. - James Watters

Did I hear someone laugh in the background when you asked about FF users being disappointed? - Paul Saarinen

Agreed Jordi - Rick Bucich

A good interview Robert. - Thomas Hawk

Thanks Robert! - shared and linked over on Phreadz : http://tech.phreadz.com/v... - kosso

Robert, mind if I transcribe this? (Unless someone else already has.) - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Congrats on getting this story Robert. I agree--this is great, realtime journalism! - Sunshine

No mention of twitter? - Ivan Kirigin

Hahahaha...all that time you invested over here on FF paid off today! LMAO - Francine Hardaway

Francine: just watch what happens now. :-) - Robert Scoble from iPhone

do you have a small amount of FriendFeed shares Robert? - Torsten Eckert

NOOOOOOO. Damnit! I am praying that Facebook doesn't wall up Friendfeed. I was starting to build a site around Friendfeed :( - beersage

beersage: as Facebook is trying to break their users into a more public world, I doubt that you really have anything to worry about there. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Starting to listen to this now. Hoping you are right, Rob. - beersage

I hope so to. But regardless, I think that it was in reality necessary for FriendFeed to sell to really put the technology in front of a sufficient number of eyeballs. Facebook is probably the best acquirer that FriendFeed could have. (I would have not felt the same had FF been acquired by Google) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

The thing with Friendfeed though is how I can share things outside of a 'wall.' I prominently feature the FF widget on my site. I'm just concerned of losing that capability as I was tinkering with delivering a new site w/ content primarily running through my Friendfeed account. I am to this day unable to do much outside of the wall. I am unable to subscribe to Fan Page updates in Google reader for instance. That is what concerns me about FB acquiring FF given my goals. - beersage

Robert sounded quite breathless in that interview. Thanks Robert. - Roberto Bonini

Great interview great Job!! - Kevin J Hatton

Wow! I'm in shock. I can't wait to hear this interview. - Micah Wittman from iPhone

This deal was about getting Paul and the team and nothing else - Stephen Pickering

@stephan, are you serious? FB is buying a concept, a technoloie, a structure, a content and a user list - abdellah

now how could a team that left google resist under a unique perception system, where the leader vision is upon any thing - abdellah

Unconvincing Paul Buchheit, the team is more exited of being part of bigger story - logical for them to move on - patrickdh

They want a way to turn their white pages into a yellow pages and the only guy on Earth who knows how to do it, is Paul - Stephen Pickering

It was only about the technology and the people. Most people are on also FB anyway. - James Myatt

My guess is that Paul got a tooooooooon of options and will soon be the No.2 guy at Facebook - Stephen Pickering

Glossing over of that "short term" question by the FF boys. It just seems more about the individuals at FF than it does the users of FF. "Their (Facebook) long term goals" Nice interview, Robert! - Melanie Reed

Well, it looks as if pass-through of FriendFeed Likes, Comments, etc. to Twitter is down. Will it be for good? Did Twitter do this in response to the acquisition? Or is it just a regular (though curiously timed) hiccup? - Alex Schleber

twitter dow!! - abdellah

Alex, my Facebook posts have been going through FriendFeed to Twitter today. :) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

How did you record the phone conversation with Paul Buchheit? I went to BlogTalkRadio.com but... it‘s not clear at all :-( - Florin Grozea

Florin, rough transcript here: http://friendfeed.com/brlewis... - Bruce Lewis

I have a few choice words. @#%&. That is all. - Zachary TG

To do this call I used BlogTalk Radio's Cinch: http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/ - Robert Scoble

dugg: http://digg.com/tech_ne... - Gaith

Thanks for this, Scoble. - mp3WatchWorld

this is why your own personal website is always more important than friendfeed, Twitter and all the rest. that's never going anywhere - Terry O'Fee from BuddyFeed

Jesse Stay

Official Google Reader Blog: PubSubHubbub support for Reader shared items - http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009...

August 5 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Dan Fitek, Laurent, Kaan Bingol and 52 other people liked this

NOOOOOOO WAY!!! TOO COOL!!! And finally! - Jorge Escobar

23 more comments

Now if they can just fix the speed issues of Google Reader's web client itself - Jesse Stay

I shared this very item from Reader about 4 minutes ago. It has not shown up. - DGentry

Weird, isn't working for me either... - Jorge Escobar

Jorge: Your FriendFeed profile is configed to take in FF links through the feedbuster thingy, so you won't get this behavior. If you use FF's built-in handling of Google Reader shared items, it'll work. - Brett Slatkin

And so Brett saved the day. ;) - Jorge Escobar

BUT -- will the images show? No. Argh. Middle ground. - Jorge Escobar

You'll have to follow up with the FF guys when it comes to images. Sounds like a feature request! - Brett Slatkin from email

Or the Google Reader guys. If Google Reader just produced their Feeds in MediaRSS format the feeds would be automatically imported into FF with images. - Jesse Stay

the switch looks off to me. - Caio

I got this working with Google Reader but it was not all that easy to find the URL for sharing. Even with the hint from FF, I had to poke around in Google Reader to locate the right address. Maybe a small usability point here but it could make a difference in use of this with Google Reader. - Hans Eisenman

+1000 Jesse - YES, MediaRSS format would be the way to go. - Susan Beebe

This is the beginning of something really good. - sean808080

@Jorge - Whoops, sorry 'bout that. I'm working on getting feed-buster to play nice with PSHB :). - Ivan Zuzak

@Brett - I'm actually working on porting feedbuster to PSHB using superfeedr and some of the open-source code from the reference hub implementation. I've exchanged a few e-mail with Julien (from Superfeedr) about the larger issue behind this - RSS/ATOM/PSHB architecture does not support end-user defined insertion of feed processing services (e.g. feed-buster) into the flow of delivering... more... - Ivan Zuzak

Hey Ivan! That sounds like a great topic to research. Would love to have a wiki page devoted to this concept. The idea of composition and filtering works like this: 1) Feedbuster provides a virtual feed which advertises itself as a Hub, 2) User adds the "busted" URL to FriendFeed, 3) FriendFeed requests a subscription for the feed from Feedbuster, 4) feedbuster pulls the original feed,... more... - Brett Slatkin

Another solution is to enable callbacks in the filters themselves, like we saw yesterday with webhooks. Say you have a filter at http://myfilter.com/subscri.... and you want to receive notifications on http://final_client.com. You would then provide the following url to the hub : http://myfilter.com/subscri... The filter would then have to 1: redirect... more... - Julien

@Brett - thanks! I'm glad you think there's something *there*. I'm definitely up for writing a wiki for the concept. :) Also, what you outlined is actually exactly what my idea is for the new feed-buster prototype and what I'm in the process of implementing. Though, what I was trying to stress is - doesn't it seem like a lot of overhead for a conceptually simple thing? Developing a... more... - Ivan Zuzak

I think it would be a reasonable extension to the protocol, but one of our goals here is to keep the core protocol as simple as possible. I'm working on a way to formalize these protocol extensions and keep a catalog of them, as well as discovery. - Brett Slatkin

@Julien - that's a cool idea - hooks-within-hooks. So, in case of FriendFeed and feedbuster, what would be the callback (http://final_client.com/) where the notifications would be sent? Is it the Friendfeed URL for receiving PSHB notifications? - Ivan Zuzak

Hum, that is not very clear to me what you're trying to do. Do you want to post some content to friendfeed through feedbuster? - Julien

@Julien - I'm sorry, let me clarify. Let's say a FF user wants to use feed-buster as a filter in the way you described - she wants to import a feedbuster-processed feed into FriendFeed with pshb support. In order to import a feed, FF asks the user to enter the feed URL, and my question was - what would that full URL be? - Ivan Zuzak

hum... it should be something like http://feedbuster.com/... In this case you wouldn't need the callback, because you can't "control" FF's abililty to receive pings. However, if you add the <atom rel="hub"> link at the top of this generated feed, FF should take that into account and fetch the content right after they receive a notification. (please let's continue this chat somewhere else, since I always forget to come here;)) - Julien

the name itself, PubSubHubbub, triggered my interest. I kind of understood it was about pulling not pushing (or vice-versa) but stayed pretty much at the doorstep. I'm eager to learn more about it though. - lelapin

@Julien - agreed. Let's continue this off FF. - Ivan Zuzak

Steve Rubel

I would like to see Friendfeed become "Facebook Labs" - give us new stuff here, let the geeks hack at it, then bring the best back in.

August 10 - Comment - Like - Share

Meryn Stol, Jokin Lacalle, Can Turanlı and 24 other people liked this

Nice idea. - Tom Guarriello

5 more comments

That'd be a fine compromise. - Ryan - @magicofpi

That would actually be a really good idea. - Ian Betteridge

The big question is whether or not FriendFeed.com the site will continue to operate independently or shut down. - Mark Krynsky

That would be nice. I have recently added the term "curator" where it fits. Even in a world of UGC, choosing and picking is even at the top of the list for us FF'ers. Great point, if they used FF as a sort of filter (content not censorship) it would make crazy sense. - professor daddyo

As long as we don't get a "Friendbook" or "Facefeed," I'd like to see a Facebook Labs. The services serve separate audiences and, I think, work better independently. - Kawika Holbrook

or feedbook, LOL. @kawika your choice may be limited to lists. - innit4theminute

Wendy Lou

figures, the day i decide to give friend feed a try, they go and get bought by Facebook.

August 10 - Comment - Like - Share

Sam Harrelson liked this

Same here. - Wade Aaron I. from fftogo

Robert Scoble

I love Kevin Fox. Designer of FriendFeed Who answers me in a great way toward the end of conversation on affordances: http://friendfeed.com/scoblei...

August 9 from iPhone - Comment - Like - Share

Stephen Mack, Chris Luckhardt, pea ♥ fierce as a woozle and 15 other people liked this

A man that can take criticism and answer it without making the critic feel bad is a better man than me. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

4 more comments

And did it without making a "strong point". ;-) - Bwana ☠

awesome conversation... really great points. thank you guys for speaking up. I constantly get requests for FriendFeed demos and training - it is "too complicated" or "why do you like it, I don't get it." - Susan Beebe from BuddyFeed

Quick to go to Kevin Fox answers: http://friendfeed.com/scoblei... - Lizunlong

Holy crap, you can name-anchor individual comments. I go away for a few days and this gets implemented? I like. - Josh Haley

Lizunlong: How'd you do that? :) - Frankie Warren

Chris Messina

Dear bit.ly and Twitter overlords: please buy tr.im and save the links. Think of the children!! #savetrim

August 9 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Walter Logeman, Rob Diana, Sameer and 3 other people liked this

You seem to want 2 companies that don't have a business model to buy another company that doesn't have a business model. That can't end well. - Adewale Oshineye

3 more comments

Bit.ly seems to be in a good position, given their default status on Twitter. Seems like an acquisition is somehow inevitable. Either by Twitter or by a Twitter competitor. - Chris Messina

Who are Twitter's competitors that you believe might buy bit.ly? - Adewale Oshineye

I have no idea. But bit.ly is funded by the same folks who made Summize, so I would imagine that Bit.ly would be able to demand a pretty solid premium for someone that wanted to disrupt Twitter. - Chris Messina

I strongly doubt that such people exist given the network effects and the situation outlined here: http://scobleizer.com/2009... - Adewale Oshineye

dave mcclure

random iPhone msg pops up: "Nothing to Undo". how very inaccurate, re: my indelicate past. #skeletons #dead.hookers #controlld.substances

August 9 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Sam Harrelson liked this

Robert Scoble

Why FriendFeed's designer, Kevin Fox, is to blame for FriendFeed being too difficult to use: he f**ks with affordances. (UPDATE: he answers me toward the end of the comments with a GREAT set of answers).

August 9 - Comments disabled - Like - Share

29travels, Lucas, FFTornado and 138 other people liked this

Affordances. They are important. What does that mean? A door knob "affords" being turned. It almost demands it. Yet FriendFeed is screwing with things like links. Here, click on "hide." That should just hide one item, right? That's the affordance. Yet you'll soon find there's a whole world stuck under that little link. You can hide Tweets. You can hide me. You can hide all sorts of stuff. - Robert Scoble

324 more comments

Is it difficult to use? - Manuel Mas

Hmm.. is it difficult to use?! - Orli Yakuel

i heard larry wall once say about perl "make simple things simple, and hard things possible"... the simple things are definitely *not* simple in ff, increasing the learning curve right at the start... i rekon if they fix that... they have it made! :) - simran

It's a peace of cake - Mark

Ooooo. One does not often see Robert swear. He's really worked up about it. Care to respond Kevin?? - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

#2 Look at the time stamp. Did you know that's also a link? Where's the affordance? Not there. Yet did you know you can click that and that is your permalink? Many people have trouble figuring this out. But here's an ultra affordance killer. Did you know you can click it twice and get a popout menu? Not many people do. Kevin has overloaded links with too many features and he has broken the affordances of what links usually do. - Robert Scoble

Orli: actually, yes, it's difficult to use. - Robert Scoble

Scoble: You may be right now that I read what you had to say. I don't think there is a proper FAQ/guide for all the little details hidden in FF. - Manuel Mas

And noses were designed to support eye glasses. - Todd Hoff

well I just managed to wipe out my entire friend feed account when I was trying to add a new one for a different twitter account - NW Angel

I agree - too many possible results from a given action. Manuel, no one reads FAQs and if you need to, the app is DOA - Sameer

Well, I don't see it as difficult to use. Its more that there are many things in here hidden that would aid users if there were more upfront. - Manuel Mas

Most of us get basic functionality out of the site with how things are at the moment. - Manuel Mas

Look at this complaint too about FriendFeed being difficult to figure out: http://twitter.com/sethgol... Seth Goldstein runs a tech company. He's a geek. Adverse to more pain than a lot of us. Yet he can't figure out how to delete a list. He's not the only one to tell me that FriendFeed is too difficult to figure out. FriendFeed still needs a design rethink to make these issues go away. - Robert Scoble

Sameer: Agree. - Manuel Mas

Valid points, Robert, but a complex interface, once learned, becomes simple, too - although that's not the best design philosophy for a massively public website. - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Its the visual impact of seeing too many options even if you dont use them. V. overwhelming for the try and buy new comer - Sameer

I think it is one of the worst UIs on the web today. Which is why I hardly use it. It violates all the rules of good design. Stuff is not obvious, it is not easy and it is not even quickly learn-able. I've spent years in product management and really, this is one of the worst. - Shripriya

I think the issue here is Discoverability. There are a lot of little hidden secrets to FriendFeed that become obvious only after you've figured them out. They're not very obvious on their own. Personally, it doesn't bother me but that's because I know it. If I were a new user, I'd be at a loss as well. It seems to me that the primary design goal at FriendFeed is a minimal UI (perhaps at all costs). - Akiva Moskovitz

Roberto: I can't think of another web app that messes with link affordances the way that FriendFeed does. Can you think of one? - Robert Scoble

People who figure out how to use a system are often the last ones to recognize how difficult it is to use. It's a self selection thing. - Ken Sheppardson

But affordances are subjective and reliant on the end-user. Take the @ sign or hashtags for instance. Unless you're talking about Apple, it's hard to blame a designer for affordance rule enforcement. - Sam Harrelson

There is a balance with "affordances" though -- if you have a very complex set of features you could have a knob/button/link for every feature but that would not work either - Brian Sullivan

@Robert, do you think FF need More Icon? - abdellah

Sam: we've all clicked on hundreds of thousands of links. We all have an idea of what happens when you click a link. - Robert Scoble

Sam, the @sign in Twitter was emergent - something users created. - Sameer

Sure, but I've seen lots of platforms use the date function as a permalink enabler. - Sam Harrelson

Manuel, agree. Robert, I wouldn't say it's difficult, but confusing (or useless sometimes). I'm not sure it's a design problem though. - Orli Yakuel

abellah: an icon is probably better than a link, yes. I know that Kevin (from an interview I did with him more than a year ago) likes sparse UIs. He is of the school that you just watch where people trip over themselves and then build UI for that. I think that's smart, but I wish that FriendFeed would iterate its UI faster to pave paths where people are having troubles. - Robert Scoble

Robert, sorry, but you're late on this trend too :) First, being not to follow everyone on Twitter. FF ui has always been terrible. Most tech people I know don't understand how to use it. And I think I use less than 10% of the available features. - Shripriya

I like FriendFeed as it is. It's obviously a power users tool as is, but then I wouldn't want it stupid simple reminiscent of installing a Windows OS. There just needs to be a decent screencast on the home page explaining all the features. No one reads FAQs these days. Video Game designers just turn the first level into a tutorial for 99% who won't read the manual and I don't mind. Maybe FF needs a tutorial when you first sign up? - CannonGod

Think about the affordances of FF and compare them with Twitter. Then compare the relative effectiveness of desktop / mobile applications developed for both. There is not a one good app for FriendFeed. This is because of the MANY "extra shite" links and an overly complex API, not because of popularity differences in the services. - Michael Owens from iPhone

Holy shit this item is already in Google: http://www.google.com/search... -- Google is going real time! - Robert Scoble

Great designs shouldn't need tutorials. - Manuel Mas

@Sameer right, but we created the @ sign to do a certain feature. Folks on identi.ca have their own signifiers. That will inevitably happen here as well as folks grow comfortable with this platform. - Sam Harrelson

Shripriya - I think most people who come back dont find it confusion. Its the first timers that run away - and thats FFs biggest problem. - Sameer

Needless to say, we all love Friendfeed, but we also need a Greasemonkey script to learn which service was posting into the time-line, and the entire issue of groups/rooms really needs a rethink because it's so hard to find any, especially If you're a newcomer.. - Nir Ben Yona

Engagement is deep; Adoption is sparce. - Sameer

TV ads (at least in australia) are considered misleading if "a person of slightly less than average intelligence" misinterprets them... i think you will find that it takes "smart techies" a while to figure out the nuances of ff, not saying everything should be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, but the defaults that way would give everyone a great start... especially when introducing innovative stuff (like "the live web") :) - simran

Scoble: That Google real time thing is even more impressive than this discussion! - Manuel Mas

Manuel - Yes. I like to say that if you need to write a manual for your product, it's too complicated. - Jeff Harbert

Shripriya: I've been complaining about this stuff bo

Sam Harrelson › Likes