I really screwed up today. When the plane crash... - Robert Scoble

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I really screwed up today. When the plane crash happened I should have opened a friendfeed room. Here's why:

January 16, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

Bill Romanos, Brad Parler, Carlos M. Gomes and 70 other people liked this

1. A room can hold multiple searches from http://search.twitter.com so I could have tracked a lot more items. - Robert Scoble

2. A room would have been a permanent repository of info about that event. - Robert Scoble

3. I could have mixed searches from Twitter search along with searches from Google News and Google Blog searches. - Robert Scoble

For instance, for the CES/Consumer Electronics Show I created a room: http://friendfeed.com/rooms... -- this room has feeds from quite a few blogs and from quite a few live searches. - Robert Scoble

Next time you'll know better- - Richard A.

What prompted you to think about the room these hours later? - James D Kirk

4. You could have international coverage and integrated items, images etc. - Richard A.

James: I thought about it at dinner and kicked myself. Here's a room I created for Davos/World Economic Forum: http://friendfeed.com/rooms... - Robert Scoble

Truth is you could still do it. But what would be missing is the instant reaction through comments. With work, you could also reshare the most interesting threads and have them there (sans comments). - Louis Gray

Richard: exactly. I could have pulled in Flickr photos and YouTube videos. - Robert Scoble

Louis: yeah, but now it would be polluted. It would be much more interesting to do while the event is going down. - Robert Scoble

What about live video streams, can those be included? - Richard A.

Not a screw up at all. To be honest, I had no idea any of this could be done with a FriendFeed room, so I've learned something, and I'm sure others will here as well. - Brandon Mendelson

Richard: sorta. You can certainly put a URL in to the live stream while it's live. Afterward you can pull in the RSS feed for the video recording. - Robert Scoble

www.frienddeck.com can have multiple searches on one screen at a time. - Paul Kinlan

Brandon: actually that's what I'm hoping that next time there's a news event like this that other people create the rooms so that we can quickly get caught up on a news event just by visiting a room. - Robert Scoble

Really - whatever we lost from the oversight we just gained in your explaination :) - Soulhuntre

I love it. You are learning and helping me along the way as well. Thanks for sharing. Next time you will be on it...and maybe I will be too! - Troy Malone

Paul, yeah, I'm playing with http://www.frienddeck.com -- looking pretty good. - Robert Scoble

Robert, Excellent, I need all the help I can get with it making it better. - Paul Kinlan

Troy: rooms are very powerful. I'm just starting to understand how powerful they are. Here's my ego feed room: http://friendfeed.com/rooms... - Robert Scoble

Paul: you should create a "super like" that lets me automatically shove items I see in frienddeck into a specific room for others to view. I'd use it more often then and that would be crack for important news events. - Robert Scoble

my fear is that all this valuable information (especially the one from Twitter yesterday), will not be here in a few weeks. - Orli Yakuel

Orli, why would it disappear? - Richard A.

Richard: it doesn't disappear it just becomes very hard to get to. - Robert Scoble

yeah, but if you feed search terms into google reader you have an archive for certain keywords. Then can download that locally for posterity. - Richard A.

Twitter is not saving the data (or letting you see/fine it) after few month. I am not sure about friendfeed though. but if it's information that coming from twitter, you wont be able to find it here after a while. - Orli Yakuel

Hi Robert, I think I might be able to "copy" an entry from a searcg to a room and "auto like" it as well. - Paul Kinlan

Robert, you can't find data from 2007... when did you join Twitter? - Orli Yakuel

Only keeps 40 pages worth of tweets, but the database increases, when we look at post number. - Richard A.

Orli: Google can get to older Tweets, but Twitter search can't. I joined in 2006. - Robert Scoble

Robert: I love these lists! I've added this conversation/idea to the Pros and Cons of FF: http://friendfeed.com/e... - B2B Specialist

Another necessary element is load distribution. Quickly sites with first hand images ground to a halt. Maybe we need a site we post to which distributes and caches info for subsequent mass sharing on ff/twitter - mal

Thank god for Web archive: http://web.archive.org/web... but some of my tweets looks like this: http://cli.gs/G9HhtB BTW, did you know that once upon a time you had only 148 followers?! http://web.archive.org/web... - Orli Yakuel

sounds a bit manufactured... - Bob Sonin

Random thought: Google News does a good job of bundling stories about the same event. Maybe FriendFeed should do the same thing, and when a significant term starts getting a lot of buzz, a special 'newsroom' gets auto-generated and starts aggregating items... - Foomandoonian

There is a "Breaking News" room http://friendfeed.com/rooms... - Andrew Leyden

Here's one caveat: If you reshare to a room, geoRSS info doesn't come along with the item. This is of concern to me since I made OurDoings, currently the ONLY way to email geocoded photos from a mobile and have them show up in real time on FriendFeed with a map. - Bruce Lewis

I'll put my name on the list of people learning a lot about the use of Friendfeed rooms here. Does anyone know of links where these aspects are reviewed in detail? - Peter Efland

hudsonplane - room : http://friendfeed.com/rooms... still updating web2.0 viralism dynamics analysis on this -plus updates of any kind , followed from original analysis at http://friendfeed.com/e... incl. http://krunchd.com/hudsonplane link collection - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

Great idea @scobleizer, "get a room" is a great idea to capture breaking news. Like multiple search.twitter.com streams. Smart. Next time. - Mike Reynolds

interesting. I've never thought about using rooms that way. Would non room members see the posts in the room though? - Thomas Hawk

Posts to the room wouldn't show up in people's normal feeds unless they join the room. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

I would think that would be a limitation. Especially with breaking news. Not everyone would see the posts, especially right away. It would be invisible to most people on FF I'd think. You could of course post a link to the room in your own FF feed at least to let your friends know you'd make it. - Thomas Hawk

the trouble w/ rooms is that they are not easily visible w/ most FF UIs. once created, they don't 'leak' anything to the public stream and lots of folks will miss the data. need a 'fix' for that. - MikeAmundsen

I think Mike and Thomas are right. An option to make room posts appear in people's regular streams would be a win. Right now people just post about the room, or comment on others' posts on the topic. Works OK, but not the best. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Well, if you want a hacky work around: create your room, pull that room feed through something like Yahoo Pipes and then pull the pipes feed into your homefeed. People will see it then, and it should be marked in the URL that it's a FF room. - FFing Enigma

<plug>who needs rooms when you have search columns on http://www.frienddeck.com</plug> :) - Paul Kinlan

you might be hard pressed to get people to join a room for a realtime event like that. most people would never see it unless you spend half the time promoting the room. Might work for a story as big as 9-11, but this story is pretty much over. - Josh Haley

Good shout, Paul (pph my first post via the real-time page!). :-) - Kol Tregaskes

there, there, next time...next plane crash - The Real sofarsoShawn

Paul, nice app. Any plans to make it show media? - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Yeah, Will try and show media soon. Need to work out a way todo it with breaking the columns whilst make it look good. - Paul Kinlan

I will probably add in twitter search into it soon as well. - Paul Kinlan

Thomas: yes, anyone can see into the rooms I've created. We could create a private room that would be members only, though. - Robert Scoble

Anyone can see what's in the room when they go to its URL, but I don't think that's what he was asking. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

this idea of creating a FF room for news events is interesting. I've been thinking about a related topic, how media newsrooms can use semantic technolgies to identify news opportunties, and engage their audiences. - John Cass from twhirl

oooh! man, it's almost so obvious. that for sure would have been nice! - SolidSmack from twhirl

I think you should also consider a room for this discussion. there was a nice coverage of the plane crash on thomas hawk's page http://friendfeed.com/e..., that too could have turned into a nice room - Xavier Vespa

I just added a feed for the Friendfeed Davos room to Google Reader. If you are already a GR user, this URL should open the feed directly in GR: http://www.google.com/reader... - Sean McBride

Robert, you did an amazing covering the plane crash (and I think I'm not the only one who would say that)! Don't beat yourself up :) - Michael Forian

Robert, thanks for being obsessive enough to think this through. It's exactly what I've been trying to puzzle out about FF and how to use it in breaking news situations. This discussion is extremely helpful. - Karoli

Why does this have to fall on you, Robert? - David Bisset (sn)

It'd be very handy if rather than re-publishing items into a room, you could just create what amounts to a symbolic link to an existing item. You wouldn't lose any comments, no existing flow would be disrupted, it's just that a pointer/mirror would appear in the room when you added the link. - Ken Sheppardson

i tried a 'hudson plane twitter friendfeed'- yahoopipe now, dunno if it sux or not. the argument on the isolated room was good, but i didnt wanna offTopic spam my main feed ; http://friendfeed.com/e... ; http://friendfeed.com/ewing20... ; http://friendfeed.com/rooms... - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

CNN says they are about to interview the guy who took the 'famous' Twitter photo (2:50 PM EST) - Andrew Leyden

he's on 10/10 tonite 01/14, 10 pm too. i think his followers are now in the 4 digits ; http://twitter.com/jkrums - ewing2001akaNicomedy2010

As of Jan 15, 2009 4:48pm EST twitter.com/jkrums had 167 friends, 192 followers, 480 tweets (I snipped it to compare later, which is right now). - Micah

As of Jan 16, 2009 8:48pm EST twitter.com/jkrums has 2,982 friends, 3,063 followers, 487 updates. - Micah

@micah wow. amazing stats. - Morgan

Morgan, I agree. Let's see what happens by next week. - Micah