Indeed, I was feeling the same thing. It really felt like it was stalling. I was having lunch with a friend yesterday mentioning exactly that, but with the beta it seems to have leaped out of the ditch and back into action. I've enjoyed FF much more today than I have in a number of weeks. - Thomas Hawk

funny, I was just drawn back here after a few weeks away having read a twitter about new features :) - Dave Pook

Robert can you provide a link to where you see the growth rate increase? and which metric are you referring to? - Allen Stern

Allen: since I'm one of the top recommended people to follow I can see when growth on the service slows down or speeds up based on how many are following me. - Robert Scoble

Dude. - Josh McHugh

that's pretty cool, Robert, you're actually a Metric? :) - Iain Baker

no comment - Allen Stern

That's true. Actually, I'm using FF more since the re-design than before. In LatAm, though, Facebook is not (yet) the most popular social network but it's growing super fast. - Martin Añazco

We're like monkeys. New features = bananas! Time to feed the monkeys! - Steve Rubel

Well said Steve. ;) - Nicholas Kreidberg

There is a lot of excitement here, but it is also August so slow growth is expected this time of year. - Russellreno

Everyone I knew was using friendfeed like a month ago. Now I am the only one left. It's dead. Next - PC Easy via twhirl

FF released their beta yesterday and I got my friendfeed shirt today....coincidence!! - Satya

It only looks like new users. They're probably all fake-followers. - ɐ ɯıʞ sıɹɥɔ

So FF growth can be correlated with ego growth... interesting - Jason Carreira

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE using small groups of 5 or 10. I can run "best of week" on the small groups & see tons of new stuff. Whether or not I delete someone from my main feed (the "fake follow") is meaningless. People just get swamped out when following 700 people. - Mitchell Tsai

Is it that FriendFeed introduced new features, or is it that people were talking about FriendFeed? For example, if the news reported that Britney Spears mentioned "FriendFeed," would the Scoble Metric show a spike solely based upon publicity for the FriendFeed brand? - Ontario Emperor via fftogo

The real question then is why anyone would follow 700 people in the first place. - Cyndy

Cyndy: I don't know, I follow 3,200. I find that the noise level is just right. - Robert Scoble

i guess i am confused - you are ok with being a default and letting everyone follow you but you only care about the people "I follow". - Allen Stern

Allen: I wasn't a default when I started using FriendFeed. I personally don't like being a default. The recommender engine is useless to me too. We need a far better one. But first they need to rebuild their database. There are far more important things to fix in the database. Why can't you see all items that mention Allen Stern and have two or more likes? Because the database needs major work. If that work gets done then all of a sudden we'll get a better recommender page, too. - Robert Scoble

Cyndy: I'm at a dance camp in Maine with 630 people (part of a larger community of a few thousand). If everyone at this camp was on FriendFeed, I'd love to have them send stuff into one folder. This community has been running for 30 years, and people have married/divorced/had kids etc... I'm not interested in following 12,000 nameless business cards, but I enjoy following people with good posts, and there are many here at FF! I'm thinking about making 100 groups of 10, to hear more people. - Mitchell Tsai

Okay, sorry, but gotta butt in and ask: which dance camp? :) - Adam Lasnik

just curious: how do you know that the new beta version brought in new users? maybe it was the blog posts that just brought FF back to more readers that drove new users? - Jeremy Toeman

I am waiting for the next wave of traffic charts. Seems like its been much more than 30 days. Yuvi? Thomas? - Russellreno

I've been tracking the compete chart, but it'll probably be another week or so until they are updated with August numbers. - Thomas Hawk