no. Right now on day 2 it is just about right. - Janet Tokerud

(b) because of the fact that comments bump stuff up the feed. Paul Buchheit's Tweet soliciting 2-8 word descriptions for FriendFeed has been on my front page on and off for over a month now. Interesting discussion - but that's too long. - Jeremy Raines

yeah, it's a bit noisy for my taste. the main reason is a) - Dmitry Skavish

I wonder if friend of friend entries could be a preference. They are great when you are a newbie but present clutter perhaps once you get lots of qualified friends in tow. - Janet Tokerud

a and b. - David

I like the idea of Friend-of-a-friend entries as optional, maybe on a per-friend basis? I've noticed the friends of some of my friends are worth following, others not so much. But overall, I'd agree that the f.o.a.f. entries can be a little too much clutter. It also might make sense to make comments muted by default, and only "un-mute" when requested, or after you've commented or liked something. - Sage LaTorra

a. but the noise level ain't too bad yet - Adam Kazwell

Yes. (a) is the best thing about FF, i.e. discovering new things. (b) is bad. (c) is my responsibility. (d) I would like a 'mark as read' so I only have to see things once. Rock on. - Nivi

Jeremy, thanks for jostling me into the realization that I would be happier if I muted that thread. - j1m

Yes, mostly due to a&b, but I feel like I'm lucky to have seeded with an interesting group of friends (mostly FFers and Googlers or ex-Googlers) so their friends tend to have interesting things to say as well. It's not as personally relevant since I don't recognize some of the FoaF's names, but the level of discourse sure beats the crap out of Slashdot etc. - Chris Beckmann

Yes: With an increased population I can't keep people straight in my head so it's hard to tell who is worth subscribing to and who is not. (User thumbnails in the list would be great, far better than service logos I think.) I really like it when people add snippets or descriptions, it makes scanning way easier. I wish I could put a blanket mute on some services (Twitter, last.fm) unless there are comments. Also, dupes. - ⓞnor

Being able to delete certain feeds for a particular friend would be great. Maybe I'm into their photos but don't have similar interests so am not interested in their links. Or someone puts up 40 pix a day and I'm not a photo buff but I love their tweets and blog posts. - Janet Tokerud

You can, it's under "Options" ("Hide entries like this"). - ⓞnor

Some people are extremely active, but it's not difficult to hide their stuff. It's just a matter of optimization. ;) - sebmos

(a), definitely. - Wojciech Polak

well, (b), but probably because it's too hard to control (a). I'd like to have a knob on every friend that says how closely I follow them. Some friends go to 11 -- their single comment on a thread is enough to make me want to see it again, immediately and through several following replies by people I might no know. Other friends only go to 6, or 2: if a few of them comment on something, then that's enough new interesting stuff that it should come back to the top. It would also be nice if ff knew when I'd last read this part of the page, and, when it did pull and item up to the top, it exposed exactly the comments I haven't seen yet. - j1m

Would it be better to have lots of knobs, or a magic do-what-I-want system that learns from your behavior, or some astonishingly simple heuristic that's both very direct and easy to understand and also gives you what you want in the vast majority of cases? Facebook is a nice example of magic gone wrong. - ⓞnor

I wear ear plugs while viewing, so no, it's okay... - David Bradley

The 'friend of friend' entries surprised me a little bit. I'm still evaluating whether or not they are a good thing. It would be nice to have a switch in the setting to turn 'friend of friend' entries on and off on a global basis. - Rob Safuto

What ⓞnor said. - Kevin Scott

i like fof. my problem is that certain people i have subscribed to are too prolific :( - Neha Narula

Perhaps some sort of a throttling feature is in order. Something that would allow you to limit the number of posts from a particular user showing up in your friends feed during a specific period of time. I think the automatic grouping of posts, like those from Twitter, helps right now. On the other hand I think that prolific publishers should consider whether or not its prudent to add every one of their feeds to this system straight away. - Rob Safuto

Totally wish FriendFeed would copy Jaiku and enable us to unsubscribe from PART of a person, not the person themselves. I want to read a lot of shared items, blogs, flickr photos, but not Twitter spam. Please, friendfeed, copy Jaiku! - Eric Rice

All in favor of simplicity. However there's a group of users that strongly feels that the foaf entries are a bit much. I've have even stronger feelings, but of the opposite type: what makes ff cool is that it let's me see all of my friends' comments, wherever they may be. If ff can capture that difference between user preferences with artificially intelligent nanorobots (awesome!), or with a single slider or checkbox (still pretty cool!), then great. - j1m

@Eric, Options->Hide Entries Like This->Even If They Have Comments Or Likes - Ryan Mahoski

I hadn't tried Hide Entries Like This before. Looks like a good solution for now. At some point would be good to have global settings as I suggested in a previous comment. - Rob Safuto

I definitely feel like I've never finished reading friendfeed... would be nice if it was like my inbox that would be cleared at some point :). - Michael

I have the exact opposite feeling as Michael. I love the fact that it's not like an inbox. - Rob Safuto

I'd say no, there are a lot of items funneled through my stream, but I use it similar to Twitter and have adapted to fast-changing information streams. - Rick Mahn

There is a lot going on, but it sure beats visiting 10 different websites. Here, you can just use the scroll wheel and feel caught up quickly. - Jason Kaneshiro

I don't think so... I've been complaining that we need the "great web 2.0 presence aggregator" and this is it. the activity isn't bad (actually the email daily option has a killer feature for me). - Sean Reiser

Not at all for me. If there's a feed that's too noisy, I filter or unsubscribe. Easy peazy. - Evan Sims

If some users are overwhelmed and not likely to find the Hide Entries Like This link under Options, and you don't want to put a HELT link beside every entry (understandable) how about a link that shows up randomly (more for new users as they get more and more content?) asking "Do you like this kind of content?" If they say no, guide them to the Options setting. - Ed Zwart

Maybe foaf items should only come to the top under some circumstances? e.g. if a new comment (1) is by a friend (2) is immediately after your own, or (3) mentions your name? And it really would be nice if the thing that hides the middle comments were smarter. I can never tell whether I need to open it or not. - j1m

I think making the existing mute options more visible would go a long way. - ⓞnor

I am starting to feel like it is getting too noisy, but only because I'm likely subscribed to too many people. I'd like to have different friend groups, so if I don't have much time, I can just start with a feed of the people I find most interesting. I'd also like a way to know which stuff I've read already, so it doesn't feel neverending, but I see that some people like that it feels that way. - Rich Bragg

Noisy? Actually, it's signally! LIke @Beckmann said, in ways it's better than SlashDot. I also agree with @Jim4's suggestion for a smarter automated “show more comments” especially for feeds and with NetNewsWire. In addition to @e3r suggestion to make the mute more visible, please also thread and let us also collapse the comments, a la Digg. Allowing paragraph breaks in comments would be nice too. - John Lam

In way of an original suggestion, how about groups, like @Rich Bragg says, but instead of a priori categories plus arbitrary groups like http://Multiply.com, use the social graph to magically group friends. - John Lam

I am not sure if I will term it as noisy. I may find the information overload overwhelming sooner than later. - Krishnan Subramanian

Not yet ... plus you have the option of removing someone's Twitter stream if you are already following them on Twitter and they Tweet a lot - Deepak

Need ways to mark a story as read, no matter what comments later pop up - Huy Zing

Huy, the nearest thing to that is "mute comments on this entry" under the options button for each post. - Slippy Lane

been thinking more about this. Where it's not noisy there are things that could be added to FF to cut down the noise. I've blogged some if it here (http://seanreiser.com/node/213) - Sean Reiser

Hehe, not now we have "Super Hide" it isn't! :-) - Slippy Lane

Much noise,but sometimes great signals - Igor Poltavskiy

No, I have my computer set to mute. But seriously, it's all about your connections. I don't mind my FriendFeed-stream at all. It's nice that I don't see all of Scoble's tweets :) - Mike Reynolds

Both a and b, but only through you and Paul. You guys are high profile, so the set of your friends is a huge crowd of strangers drowning out people I actually know. - seth

muting all sounds on my windows computers is the only way i can coexist with them, so...what friendfeed sounds? - edythe

oh, ha! you mean "noise," not sounds. - edythe

(a), though it's not that noisy yet. - Ruchira S. Datta

No. There's usually plenty of interesting stuff in the first page of my feed. I use the "hide" and "unsubscribe" features quite a lot. - Alex Mendes da Costa

you bet...but I find twitter way noiser - viki saigal

Wow! This was fantastic. Sorry if it's yesterday's news for you old FriendFeeders. I just saw this today. What a great "noisy" discussion. :-) - Mitchell Tsai

Yes. Mainly for a. and then b. - Aditya Kothadiya

(a). Might be nice to have a way of only showing friend of friend entries that pass a certain user-defined threshold. For example: "only show me friend of friend entries than have more than N likes or comments". - Simon

I think I've mentioned this before, but I think services should adapt based on how long it's been since you last looked. If I look every hour, I want more detail than if I look every week. If I spend an hour on FF every visit, I want more detail than if I spend five minutes on FF every visit. Combine expected time I have with what's changed since the last visit to generate the list. Friends, commented, liked are ranked higher; friends-of-friends, duplicate, and similar posts are ranked lower. - Amit Patel

I think the irony is I would love the option to follow every single one of the people I follow on Twitter on FF, regardless of whether or not they have an account -- but that would just make FF noisier and noisier. - Sean Quinn

FriendFeed is no more noisy than the Sunday Los Angeles Times. I don't care about 50% of the LA Times, and I never read more than 10% of the LA Times, but I don't complain that the Times is "noise." I don't complain about noise on FriendFeed (or Twitter) either. - Ontario Emperor

friend feed too noisy? not a chance! - Chris Jones via twhirl

not really, I just scan. It would be nice if I could identify the hot spots in 5 min or less though. - engtech

The real question is how relevant is FriendFeed. - Mike Reynolds

I love the fact that an item about "noise" has generated 60+ comments. :) - Ontario Emperor

I feel like the value of Friendfeed is your ability to manipulate, interpret, and communicate through that noise. Web 2.0 is about channels, fields, lines neighborhoods of communication and the more you survey what is out there, the more opportunity you have to see. - Anthony

Oh yeah! Too much!! We need a very good client app! - Jigar Mehta

no, not at the moment at least. i enjoy reading public feed of the service. - Jansen Lu

I notice that Sanjeev has unsubscribed from me. So I guess the answer is "yes" for him, and "no" for me. :-) - Robert Scoble

Sanjeev never subscribed to me. He is one of the quieter FriendFeeders, which is fine. Everybody has a role. - Louis Gray

Robert, I still get your stuff through friends-of-friends. :) - Sanjeev Singh

No. I only follow 36 people, I genuinely care about and I use Filter: Friend to explicitly read their outputs when the noise gets deafening (or just loud) like after my recent extended 3 day bank holiday weekend. - Andy C

You too Loius :) - Sanjeev Singh

@Louis I think Sanjeev is the only FriendFeeder not subscribed to me yet. Gotta catch em all! - Benjamin Golub

Not too noisy, but too repetitive. How many times do I need to see that Google has Notes? - TranceMist

Repetetive indeed, how many times do I have to see this old thread revived with no way of me telling quickly how many comments are new. (ok ok, m'ing now...) - j1m

Even with self-selection bias, ~40% of angels in the study lost money overall. The odds are not great. - Sanjeev Singh

Also, it's only over a one-year period (and a pretty good year). - ⓞnor

egnor, the data includes deals from 1990 to 2007, but most of the deals were pretty recent (from 2000 on). The full report is available (for free) if you click on the thumbnail on the right. - Sanjeev Singh

I use Hurricane Electric for web hosting, but have also heard good things about their colo. - Jason Chen

savvis is a fail. I tried to get pricing from their "chat widget" on their home page. cs rep insists they need to call me back for pricing so I provide name and phone number. Haven't heard back in over 24 hrs. In comparison, svcolo, abovenet and cogent just emailed me pricing immediately. - Sanjeev Singh

I implemented this to play with a few months ago. It compresses well (it's bzip2, after all), but searching doesn't come close to having a dedicated index -- because, just like decompressing bzip2, you're chasing pointers all the time, which pretty much guarantees a cache miss for every character in your search string. There are ways to improve it by a constant factor (and slightly change the representation so that you can parallelize one search) but I couldn't get it to perform well enough. - Tudor Bosman

and, Sanjeev, you probably know what I was trying to do with this, too :) - Tudor Bosman

OK, I spoke to soon (I saw two Italian names and a discussion about compressed text indexes, and I thought the article was referring to the same thing I played with). That may still be (Paolo Ferragina was one of the people behind both, and I haven't read the article yet), but I was talking about FMindex: http://www.mfn.unipmn.it/~manz... - Tudor Bosman

Is there a compression scheme that doesn't involve chasing pointers all the time? It seems like that's sort of what compression is mostly about (the whole eliminating redundancy through backreferences thing). I guess if you can fit a Huffman table in your cache... but that's not really a big deal. - ⓞnor

Huffman decompression is linear, and so cache efficient (if, as you said, you can fit the table in your cache). LZ77 (gzip) decompression means following backreferences -- references to text you've already decompressed, and hopefully still in your cache for reasonably small block sizes. (more) - Tudor Bosman

bzip2 uses the Burrows-Wheeler transform to transform the original text into a text of equal length that compresses better using RLE (and bzip2 uses Huffman coding afterwards). At decompression, after the cache-efficient and simple Huffman and RLE decoding stages, you have to, essentially, follow one pointer for every byte of decompressed text, and that pointer can lead you anywhere in a ~500k block. - Tudor Bosman

Maybe the Swiss are just smarter. - Paul Buchheit

For one thing, their press might be freer. Transparency helps stop shenanigans. - Sanjeev Singh

I think Switzerland's small size is a factor; it is easier to have direct participation in, say, canton Zuerich (1.3 million) than in, say, California (34 million). And then there is the ingrained culture of letting people do whatever they like in their private lives, which prevents much of the silliness we see in other countries' legislation. - ana

I like the personal freedom/responsibility the swiss have. If you want to rent a sled and ride down a mountain on it without a helmet, then have a blast, but if you end up in the hospital you can't sue the people that rented it to you. - Evan Parker

Wow: "As a direct investor in the States, Switzerland’s share is greater than all of Latin America, Africa, and Asia (excluding Japan) combined. " - Evan Parker

Women in Switzerland didn't get the vote until 1971. (No joke! http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisda...) Minority rights are more than a bit problematic in a direct democracy. - Matthew Ogle

yes, and the whole system is sloooooow, because everybody has an opinion. Until a new law is in the constitution it takes around 7 years..... - minus3

Norway > Switzerland. In many ways, Norway provides a window into what the middle east should/could/would look like if not for our/britain/europe etc. endless mercantilism: a socially responsible sovereign wealth fund - http://tinyurl.com/3jw58t ; a ridiculous high personal savings rate - http://tinyurl.com/3sn9na ; and definitely don't read this article if you want to see what $1.8B/week - in oil revenues buys for a nation's people - http://tinyurl.com/3wvnzl) =/ - William F. DeLuca

"So you might think that all of this good fortune and virtue would make the Norwegians just a little bit fat and self-satisfied? Self-satisfied maybe, but fat, no. According to a new study on obesity, Norwegians are the slimmest people in Europe"..."Most of the Saudi wealth has been pocketed by the royal family. Venture beyond the gilded five-star hotels of Riyadh and Jiddah and you are in a Third World economy struggling with poverty, high unemployment and Islamic radicalism.Russia's oil wealth has raised property values in London's posh Mayfair district and the French Riviera. It also has given Vladimir Putin an intimidating geo political weapon to wield against the West.In developing countries as disparate as Nigeria and Venezuela, the easy money of oil has propped up corrupt and incompetent ruling classes - William F. DeLuca

Switzerland is overrated. http://greg.abstrakt.ch/archiv... - Gregor J. Rothfuss

I've always been neutral on Switzerland. - Louis Gray

*sigh* Why are all the really intreresting Democracies in really cold climates? Where are the great Democracies with white sandy beaches, umbrella drinks, and 300 days of sunshine? - Kevin D. White

"There is one industry that fits the bill [of an impending bubble]: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water. Indeed, the next bubble is already being branded." If this turns out to be true, Denver/Boulder will be affected, with all our new alt energy companies sprouting up. - Ginger Makela

@Ginger: What neighborhood do you live in? and can you name a couple of the new alt energy companies you are referring to? - Clare Dibble