Robert Scoble - Likes

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I am beginning to finally get it... If you post on Friendfeed you get comments... If you post on Twitter, you get followers. If you are marketing something (e.g. your blog/brand, your product/service) getting followers is much better than getting comments.

November 5 - Comment - Like - Share

Marc Dong, Keith Pelczarski, Carla and 74 other people liked this

And if you are not wanting to get marketed to? - Cristo

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You need to than unfollow those users...:)) Twitter is a lot more about broadcasting and getting followers is like a drug.. the more you broadcast the more followers you get :) - Bindu Reddy

Are you getting high right now? :) - Cristo

Getting followers doesn't really mean anything: 390 of the 400 followers I have on Twitter never act or do anything with what I say on it. Getting them to convert is the meaningful part of the marketing proposition, and conversations, I've found, are far more effective at that. - Mark Trapp

Mark is right. - Robert Scoble

So, what's the FAQ for interaction on Twitter? I had a post that got 100+ comments the other day here on Friendfeed but no response on Twitter. I must be doing something wrong over there. - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

twitter seems to be great for people who are lazy and not really savvy about marketing. it's sort of like shouting into the void, and you might get a few people to respond, but do you really get people to act? - Bren, Photophobe

@Mark, I agree with you.. However to a lot of people having a follower number like 10K/20K, which seems like a relatively easily thing to do on Twitter, is not only just a high but it is also a good way to keep in touch with your audience without spending too much time... Here keeping in touch with your audience is way more time consuming - Bindu Reddy

Bindu, but keeping in touch doesn't mean anything if they're not listening. You can have a million followers, but if you're not getting any of them to act on what you're saying, it doesn't mean much. Getting conversations going with people, who may or may not be followers, which Twitter is pretty bad at, are more effective at getting people to convert. I just had a relatively popular... more... - Mark Trapp

Bindu, I'm following you (FF) and I just commented too :) - Micah Wittman

@Mark, Curious how did you get them to go to your website? - Bindu Reddy

Bindu, if I knew that I'd have it made. Near as I can tell, people were doing Twitter and Google searches for "twitter list," and then started retweeting it and sharing it from there. - Mark Trapp

Following is such a low-risk endeavor that people don't put thought into it: they'll follow anyone and everyone. You even have people thinking it's common decency to automatically follow people if they follow you without even thinking about if their content is interesting. Following is the 21st century equivalent of receiving a phone book or the yellow pages: you do it just in case you need to contact or get ahold of someone in the future, but nobody ever realistically does. - Mark Trapp

Yep, it's like collecting business cards that get neatly filed into a big binder. It's about the self-satisfaction of the collection - you feel more connected / networked / important and avoid doing the hard work of cold calling or meeting with people and building something or whatever. - Micah Wittman

I agree with following being a low-risk effort... However I have also heard of ppl gaining value from Twitter without much effort. Take for example this coffeshop I am a big fan of - sightglass coffee. They get a lot of customers from Twitter. It takes them relatively little time to tweet and they get customers. It would be very hard to achieve the same on FF. - Bindu Reddy

Bindu, I get lots of conversation on Twitter, too. One of the reasons I am there more than here is because people with common interest in my political obsessions are there, but not here. - Karoli

Karoli - Yes, the Twitterverse is way more diverse than the FFverse. Curious do you get more comments/conversations per post on Twitter as compared to FF or is it that you you post more stuff because time spent per post is lower on Twitter - Bindu Reddy

Bindu, I get very little response to political conversations/comments on FF - a couple of folks follow here but a very small percentage compared to twitter. I tried to pull people over here, but they didn't understand why they should leave tweetdeck and their twitter setup for new territory. - Karoli

Geeks (+ early adopters, influential folks, the elite ...) are on FriendFeed and the proletariat on Twitter? Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat? Calls for action work best when the audience actually cares, so prolly that's all about choosing the right medium for the targeted punters? - Sebastian

Sebastian... yes agree the geeks and tech bloggers are on FF... However if you are marketing say a fashion or beauty blog. You won't get much interest here. twitter is the place for you :) - Bindu Reddy

I disagree with that statement, Bindu. There's a LOT of non-tech getting traction on FriendFeed. So much so that it's the number one reason Scoble no longer enjoys being here: he says he doesn't see enough tech for his liking. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Just butting in here to mention that there are tons of uses for both twitter and friendfeed that have nothing whatsoever to do with marketing. In fact, once could make the argument that social networks such as these were designed to get away from marketing. Unlike radio, TV, or even a web search, you choose who you'll be receiving information from. If you're looking to exchange... more... - Mr. Gunn

Marketing, schmarketing. - Christopher A Carr

Bindu, what I'm sick of is marketers broadcasting their sales pitches to all social media outlets out there, regardless whether the audience might fit or not. Anyways, i'ts possible to attract a few somewhat intelligent responses to geeky topics at Twitter, at least when xmas and independence day share the same date. Most probably I wouldn't try to sell wonder bras at FF, though. - Sebastian

@Tina ... umm I have not been an avid user of FF lately so maybe it has become pretty diverse. Are you saying there are a lot of people on here with specific interests such as politics, beauty etc? - Bindu Reddy

Sebastian - LOL.. agree :) - Bindu Reddy

Bindu: Ning is a better place to go if you have very specific topics you want to talk about. They are growing a FriendFeed every 12 days (they are getting a million new users that often and have just passed 38 million registered). FriendFeed is fun if you aren't sure what you want to chat about and you're cool with seeing lots of family pictures and goofy stuff. Tina is right that the hard-core geeks are mostly on Twitter or Facebook now, I keep watching here, though. - Robert Scoble

Karoli I get all kinds of action here on political topics. I have more followers on Twitter but rarely get a response there. Here I got 80+ comments yesterday. - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF) from iPod

MVB, Karoli is a prolific voice on twitter. Twitter seems quite effective for political advocacy/activism even though longer form convos have to break out somewhere else. Also, just like friendfeed, volume / steady presence can make all the difference. Your tweet count is ~2K; Karoli's over 63K. - Micah Wittman

My presence here is similar to Kaoli's on Twitter, then. So, presence is a mitigating factor. But, Micah, as you so deftly point out, for a long conversation there needs to be a move to another venue. That's where here works better, since it can stay right here. - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF) from iPod

We agree, and can agreed at length right here, folks :) - Micah Wittman

So link your twitter to your friendfeed. Get followers and comments. The best of both worlds. - Hareesh Nagarajan

Does it make any difference here whether the original post was to Twitter and reposted here automatically or the original post was directly here? In other words, does the FF community prefer to comment on direct posts rather than Twitter reposts? - Jimmy Walker

Jimmy: it honestly depends on who you interact with on FriendFeed. There are people who get irate about people only posting to Twitter and openly advocate using FriendFeed directly, and yet, there are interesting people who always get a conversation going around their tweets. One thing that sometimes helps is coming back to FriendFeed and elaborating on your tweet, or to do more than... more... - Mark Trapp

Mark, that sounds like good advice. Thanks. - Jimmy Walker

B.Reddy is right.I complately agree with her.A good view,and a good advice for us.Thank you Bindu... - Dedegi

Following only happens after several good comments. Consistency is the key. - Jeremy (cropmarks)

Jeremy, I am not sure... Someone body or the other seems to come and follow you based on pretty much anything you twitter. Of course most of these ppl prob. do that expecting a follow back? - Bindu Reddy

Bindu: I meant on FF. Twitter...they're pretty loose. - Jeremy (cropmarks)

I don't get followers from posting on Twitter; the only people who see what I post there are my followers. - Glen Campbell, B.A.

I post both places and get almost nothing... so where's your hypothesis now, huh!? ;-)) - Jim Hearts FF

Post more pics of Johnny in a dress. - Jeremy (cropmarks)

If I was marketing something, I would do both... - Johnny Worthington

Bindu: As you had said earlier, most of the followers at twitter don't read what you are tweeting. So it is actually better to get comments as you know those who comment read whatever you post. - Amit

Amit, I completely agree with you about the comments and how no one reads your tweets. As an example I posted a tweet about "anchors" On FF there are 7 likes and 14 comments.. None on twitter. However at the end of the day for every 20 new followers I get 1-2 new friends. On FF much less of that happens. So from a marketing point of view Twitter is better. - Bindu Reddy

Bindu, how many people are subbed to you on FF and on Twitter? What are the total number of subs to each? What is the ratio of your subs to the total subs of each? I bet a crisp dollar bill that you are subbed to a higher percentage of subs on FF than on Twitter. - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF) from fftogo

MVB interesting point of subs. # of subs on Twitter and FF are about the same but the quality of subs is much better on FF. As far as ration goes... yes FF is much better than Twitter and that does have an impact. However I am going to contend that even for people who have many more subs on Twitter (e.g. scoble?) there is much more engagement on FF than twitter. he probably adds more followers though on twitter - Bindu Reddy

Bindu, exactly. Unlike you, I, and most others, are not here to market a product or service so we see a different function of Social Media. - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF) from iPod

Social Media 101: It's a two-way street - relationships are formed via interactions, not uni-directional broadcast. :) - See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

This, btw, is true for all forms of marketing / business function - consider a customer support hotline that never get answered by anyone but just sits there as a 1-800 number. - See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

I'd like to think getting sales is even better than followers, come to think of it, getting leads are better than followers too. Followers are overrated. - Justin Hitt

@Justin... completely agree.. - Bindu Reddy

Paul Buchheit

Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life - http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009...

November 20 from Paul Buchheit - Comment - Like - Share

Tom Stocky, Fabrizio, scott willeke and 53 other people liked this

When is Facebook going to give people open access to the address book? :) - Bindu Reddy

14 more comments

They already do. My DROID syncs with my Facebook and Google contacts, converging them both for the same contact on either network. Don't ask me how that's done though - LANjackal

You mean your DRIOD can get to the email addresses of your facebook contacts? - Bindu Reddy

Yep, as well as any numbers, addresses or work positions they have listed on FB - LANjackal from IM

There's a reason contact management on the DROID has been praised as the best implementation thereof in the smartphone arena, if not anywhere period - LANjackal from IM

""Open" is a great thing. Everyone likes it." Maybe everyone you know ;) - Clare Dibble

a friend of mine has a bb storm and it integrates w/ facebook (when i call him, my facebook avatar shows up... etc etc) -- the Droid being able to combine contact lists and merge them when applicable sounds like the next step - Chris Heath

It's still not open. That data is locked into the built in contacts app and you can't get it at an api level. Android 2.0 has a complete (well, half-baked) contact model that allows aggregating contact info. Not to mention that when I entered my contact info into facebook that I understood it was going to be shared that way. But from an end-user standpoint it's great! - Hayes Haugen

@LANJackal that sounds great... I guess my information is dated than.. - Bindu Reddy

Very great post. One of the best. This share remember me with two other great peoples described by Katie Hafner is his book (Where the wizards stay up late): Vint Cerf (you known what i mean) and Dave Clark (by his famous quote : "we reject kings presidents and voting. we believe in rough consensus and running code.") With an "open" mind like yours, they make with days, months, years, a very great open life fluid. I'm very happy to follow you. As Louis Gray says : Please keep blogging. Thank you. - Guy Vander Heyden

Just like with any other activity, the intention behind being open is very important. If somebody wants to manipulate or mislead, then it can be dangerous to follow them. We just have to be aware of extremes. That said, I have learnt a lot from following you and thanks for sharing your ideas so eloquently. - Shakeel Mahate

Hey, thanks for the mention - I'm glad you're enjoying Alfie Kohn's book. He makes me think. - Laura Norvig

Thanks Laura. I've actually "outsourced" the reading to April, but she tells me about it :) - Paul Buchheit

Heh, see this is the type of efficiency mindset you've developed by running a startup. - Laura Norvig

No, I've always been lazy :) - Paul Buchheit

lazy like fox! ;) - Susan Beebe

Louis Gray

Keep A Close Eye on Chris Messina for the Web's Future - http://blog.louisgray.com/2009...

yesterday from louisgray.com - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Robert Scoble, Thomas Power and 5 other people liked this

It's sad but I think Google is helping facilitate the death of the URL using site hierarchy search results. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009... - Andrew Smith

Innovators always come before early adopters - many of those you list are the innovators whose technology early adopters will be trying later on. - Jesse Stay

BTW, 2 names I would add to your list: Craig Burton and Phil Windley - Jesse Stay

Steve Gillmor to Steve's feed, RealTime Network

Gillmor Gang recording live 1PM Pacific http://www.building43.com/realtim...

Wednesday - Comment - Like - Share

Kathleen Hassinger, Jim Connolly, Rob Cairns and 8 other people liked this

So, what are we talking about on the Gang today? - Kevin Marks

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@KevinMarks, I have something AS related that I'd like to show you next week. I think you'll appreciate it. Cliqset-related. - Darren

would definitely like to see AS/Webfinger/GProfiles/OpenID being discussed. - Jamie

I'm available for the Skype call. - Robert Scoble

Be sure to discuss Information cards if you discuss OpenID - Jesse Stay

What time is it? :) - Rob La Gesse

Rob: sorry for running a little late. We'll be starting shortly. Steve, I'm on Skype now. - Robert Scoble

4:30 - Jesse Stay

1 more minute... - Robert Scoble

Too late? Nah, nah - it's just earlay, earlay... - Jesse Stay

glad to see i'm not late. :) - Karoli

love that 27 in imac Robert - courtney benson

Mike Arrington is a state now? - Jesse Stay

the 51st state, Jesse :) - Roberto Bonini

My quad-core 27" iMac left China today! Can't wait - it arrives before Jason's baby ;) - Rob La Gesse

If ChromeOS was out today, I would have bought a machine with it, rather than a MacBook for my family. - Matt Mastracci

Ha. - Darren

google knoll is now a big part of profiles and now with openid/webfinger google profile is a big item - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Vizard, Scoble, Marks & Calacanis on the Gillmor Gang: Live Now at http://building43.com/realtime - Cliff Gerrish

Looking forward to buying the Droid this weekend - courtney benson

It won't hit it for everyone until they have a decent online graphics and financial solution - Jesse Stay

knol uses google profiles, just as other google apps do - profiles are a service for google apps - Kevin Marks

They also need to come up with a way to integrate with client-side ID (information cards, selectors, etc) - Jesse Stay

Jesse: I see you saw the light at the Kynetx conf... (from cookies to selectors) - Cliff Gerrish

I think the launch Chrome netbooks will be free - Jamie

Cliff, my eyes have seriously been opened - I am a new man now. I see a whole new future from that conference - Jesse Stay

Although I'm still trying to understand it all. It's all still in progress as we speak. - Jesse Stay

What I think we need is <input type="openid"> for HTML5 so browsers can do clientside ID - Kevin Marks

Kevin, that would be awesome - Jesse Stay

how long ago did it start? - Christopher Harris

<input type="openid"> is the only way OpenID will succeed. It's not usable in its current state right now. - Matt Mastracci

I don't want clientside, I want personal-cloud-side - Kurtiss Hare

Matt, agreed - Jesse Stay

Kurtiss, you need a combination of both - see http://staynalive.com/article... - Jesse Stay

What people are wedded to is the development IDE - Nobody else has built anything near as compelling as Microsoft's IDE - Rob La Gesse

html5 on the iphone is because of webkit - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Jesse: that's not "personal" cloud, at least the way I think about it. - Kurtiss Hare

that was WPF - Jamie

the seesmic for windows uses WPF - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Kurtiss what is "personal" cloud? - Jesse Stay

I still haven't installed Silverlight/WPF on any of my machines and I haven't missed any content on the web. - Matt Mastracci

WPF and Silverlight are converging as front-ends... - Cliff Gerrish

I love the Netflix watch instantly -- it's silverlight... - Cliff Gerrish

silverlight is still a subset of wpf - Jamie

though the lines are blurring - Jamie

It's a cloud that you own, that exposes "local services" like storage, identity selector config, computation, etc. to services you don't own - Kurtiss Hare

Does this silverlight porting path just translate video, or the whole framework? If it's just video, it sounds like a WMV->MP4 codec. - Matt Mastracci

I don't think stream of audio or video via silverlight to a webkit browser counts as a dev platform for iphone - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

has anyone got documentation on sliverlight video playback on iPhone? I didn't see that demo - Kevin Marks

Sharepoint 2010 supports silverlight - Jamie

+1 bear. - Matt Mastracci

Kurtiss - where do you own it? On Amazon? Who hosts that data? If someone else is hosting it do you really own it? The client is the best place for the user to own their data. That can be supported by a cloud service, but your client needs to control it. - Jesse Stay

Kevin http://www.iis.net/iphone - Jamie

Jesse: that part's up to you, it can run from your house if you're into that. otherwise it can run from your amazon or rackspace account, whatever. - Kurtiss Hare

kevin: http://tech.yahoo.com/news... - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Kurtiss, the average user is never going to be able to do that. It has to be something native in the browser or the operating system for the user to get it. - Jesse Stay

@Kurtiss - your Rackspace account :) Please me more ;) - Rob La Gesse

lol - Kurtiss Hare

Also, a cloud-based service can't provide near the context a desktop client can - Jesse Stay

Internal enterprise apps are never a predictor of platforms that'll survive. I could list dozens of dead Microsoft products that were "hot" for a while until they were abandoned. - Matt Mastracci

Jesse, for now, but when the broadband explosion comes.... - Stephen Pickering

Office for Web is .Net right? - Paul Shadwell

Stephen, even then you're never going to have full control so long as you rely on the cloud for full context. See my article above. - Jesse Stay

"turns out, microsoft developed the killer app for chrome os" - office web apps - Jamie

enterprise == large user count behind a firewall with a private network - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Jesse: What's the difference between the way that Windows/Mac OS X exposes my local services and the way a "personal cloud"-based OS could? It's Chrome OS' destiny ;) - Kurtiss Hare

I've just finished installing SharePoint 2010 and now installing the Office Web Apps so I'll let you know shortly. - Paul Shadwell

Robert, make sure you get that enterprise lecture from Steve before going on about Chatter - Ross Mayfield

if chrome os enables a personal VPN experience that I can then allow individuals to "peek into" that would be a huge win - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Kurtiss, a personal cloud is never going to know what you're doing on Barnes and Noble vs. Borders.com at the same time. Please read my article above. - Jesse Stay

Paul: NO. Office for Web is ALL JavaScript. - Robert Scoble

"very loyal to office" == it's a huge pain and cost to translate all those proprietary docs to something else - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Jesse, cloud based services can bring context using social web - bring context in form you contacts and activities - Kevin Marks

Kevin, only to an extent. You still need the client to control that process. - Jesse Stay

Kevin, Jesse's talking Action Cards. - Cliff Gerrish

Robert Office Web has Silverlight "extras" - Jamie

better fidelity, smoother zooming etc - Jamie

Kevin, I saw the demo but haven't the docs for it. Just passes the video off directly to the vid player on iPhone. Here is the demo URL http://www.iis.net/iphone - Jerry Schuman

Robert: Do you think they did that for increased cross browser support? - Paul Shadwell

many companies are just scared to move to the web It seems an insecure place to them and they take the IT guys (who get paid to manage Exchange) word for it. "You don't want to do that. It's insecure." Few CEOs outside our business will challenge talk like that. - Matt Terenzio

I truly love that indictment. LOL...it's only Obama, Congress has not a damn thing to do with it. - Karoli

I have multiple clients that draw on my twitter, Poco and other cloud contexts. phones, laptops desktops use them - Kevin Marks

yea, like obama has control over the senate and house or the huge military infrastructure that bush had 8 years to setup - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

BULLSHIT, Jason. - Karoli

Jason, agreed. Not that it's a viable sol'n. - Kurtiss Hare

Jasos is a die-hard libertarian. Love it. - Jerry Schuman

Karoli +1 - Ross Mayfield

obama set stem cell research free, that's crucial - Christopher Harris

My 20-year old innovating son thinks you're full of shit. His diabetes doesn't kill him. - Karoli

ok, adding politics to this discussion just ruined it and reminds me of the bad version of gilmor gang - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Standard of living has increased with population. Not saying there aren't challenges. - Matt Terenzio

Some companies can't innovate because they pay too much for health care - Ross Mayfield

Let's get back to tech please!!!!!!! - Peter Mullen

Ross +1 back to you. - Karoli

Microsoft won't stop innovating, but they'll be innovating in the wrong direction (closed platforms, etc.) - Matt Mastracci

Jason sounds like Ehrlich's genocidal nonsense, not any Libertarians I know - Kevin Marks

when all the normal workers - not those that are like most silicon valley startup wonks - can stop worrying about where the money for the next health bill comes from, then they will be able to spend time making work more productive - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Tim O'Reilly talks about Microsoft being a major player in the open web... - Cliff Gerrish

Kevin, did you get the URL for the IIS demo? - Jerry Schuman

Microsoft innovates but it's not accessible to the murmuring rabble. Like me. at least, not yet (other than Silverlight) - Karoli

Microsoft is the greatest squandering of wealth in the History of business - Stephen Pickering

Microsoft is a leader in the Information card space, and they're doing some amazing stuff with .Net, etc - Jesse Stay

(note that I write this from a *nix-based MacBook Pro) - Jesse Stay

Jesse: see Craig Burton's rant on MSFT's implementation of cardspace. - Cliff Gerrish

Microsoft is the new Newspaper business - Matt Terenzio

Cliff, I'll look at that - Jesse Stay

There's not a company that Balmer wouldn't buy. Gates had to come in and not allow him to bid more than 42 billion for Yahoo - Stephen Pickering

How about Silverlight/Gestalt - running Ruby/Python in the browser. - Cliff Gerrish

ahem - Ross Mayfield

Gestalt is a dead end (I blogged here a while ago: http://grack.com/blog...) - Matt Mastracci

and how is Salesforce managing this change in direction and focus... open source and open protocols I suspect - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Client wars have been going on for 2 decades.. it doesn't matter. You will have multiple native and web based clients from now until the cows come home. - Jerry Schuman

warlords of tech, each guarding their own fiefdom. - Karoli

The apathy of the user community regarding clients was evidenced by the failure of "Write Once, Run Everywhere" - Jerry Schuman

it all boils down to Tower Defense! - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I think you just hit the nail on the head bear :-) - Paul Shadwell

Robert it already exists.. DOM manipulations - Jerry Schuman

Jerry: DOM Manipulations + Action Cards gets you there. - Cliff Gerrish

the major change comes with context awareness. We're almost there.. very close in my estimation. - Jerry Schuman

Jerry: Action Cards are all about contextual browsing. - Cliff Gerrish

There are no generic enclosures is what I think Dave meant - Matt Terenzio

meta data is data - it can be included with other meta data or consumed as is. what is key is removing the silo mentality -- open data api's to allow neutral use cases - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Twitter's 'features' have been a massive user #fail - Karoli

twitter has always been a feature to be included in other apps -- they *are* a pipe - Karoli

yes, they have rolled out a number of new features but they still have fundamental stability issues when followers drop off your account, when api calls still return random errors and other quality of life issues - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

btw: all those things you just mentioned extended Twitters discrete extensions of the backend. You're seeing twitter manipulate and compartmentalize their schema - Jerry Schuman

bear, not only that, but they're anti-community. by sending that message, they tell me they intend to be a pipe for my data, not a host. - Karoli

i've become so accustomed to their slowness of innovation, i certainly don't take the recently developed features for granted like I did when G or FF innovates...sad, really. - Kurtiss Hare

still looking for those 'features'. closing conversations, making retweets a metric, and adding lists...? - Karoli

While I might agree with ppl discounted MS I think discounting Ray Ozzie is a HUGE mistake. Especially if Ballmer gets forced out of MS. - Rob La Gesse

it's all DATA SOUP. Apple had it right with the Newton ;-) - Jerry Schuman

Authoritative ecosystems of record will still rule the day. - Cliff Gerrish

Cliff +1 - Karoli

tweetie iphone is stil the best way to access - Jamie

:) The Newton rocks! (still) - Rob La Gesse

Gah Jerry - Newton Soup was the worlds slowest data model. Nice idea, lousy implementation. - Kevin Marks

my commodore 64 is still in the garage... - Karoli

Kevin, blame the processor ;-) - Jerry Schuman

my C64 is right next to my pc and the mac :) - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Great show guys! Like Mike, I like the Pre - Peter Mullen

bye...good show even with the politics. :) - Karoli

Thanks, sorry @Ross for not mentioning SocialText. - Robert Scoble

short show :-( - Jamie

We should do an enterprise shootout between all these new social enterprise systems - Robert Scoble

Jamie: gotta make Turkey! :-) - Robert Scoble

ah we dont have thanksgiving here - Jamie

don't mind shorter shows if they are focused. except for the "into the ditch" diversion of the political discussion this was a nice tightly focused show - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

SocialText...unfortunate name. Brings to mind the "journal" that was punked by Alan Sokal. - Christopher A Carr

I love SocialText, when I use it :-) - Jesse Stay

Shey, Jamaican of FF

Sorry FriendFeed, But I Agree With Robert Scoble - http://www.sheysmith.com/2009...

November 2 from introspective snapshots - Comment - Like - Share

sofarsoShawn, Steve Borgman, Mark Krynsky and 36 other people liked this

I agree with you that things are incredibly cliquey here, which is an unfortunate side effect of less fresh meat. I think there's a difference between the content of Scoble's point and how he presented that point: Scoble, in many ways, is like a kid in a candy store. He's overstimulated with a constant influx of new tech candy, and it's becomes hard to take his recommendations... more... - Mark Trapp

20 more comments

It doesn't give him a pass to be a jerk about it. It was very disrespectful to everyone in the screenshot he posted. - Rodfather

That's a good distinction Mark. And you hit the nail on the head in terms of one of my main points which is the "less fresh meat". - Shey, Jamaican of FF

See, Shey, you left space for open dialogue. You didn't come in and say it was "sad" and "dead". You just said YOUR usage has changed. You posted the exact opposite of what Robert did. - DO ANYBODY NO MONIQUE

That's an important distinction too Monique. Thanks - Shey, Jamaican of FF

I agree that things have gotten very cliquey here on FriendFeed. - Maxamad

Yeah, I can actually agree with Shey here. It's unfortunate that things have gone in this direction. I'm not afraid of getting jumped on for something I post or a comment I make, but I'm thinking most people are a little more conservative than I. FriendFeed isn't dead, it's just different. I also stand by the comment I have made on various occasions: Your FriendFeed is unique and... more... - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

Mark nailed it. +++ - Carlos Ayala

Rahsheen: that's just the rub. Let's say I want to follow all the iPhone app developers. They just aren't here. 90% are over on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Scoblei... Or, say I want to follow the world's geolocation experts. They aren't here (go ahead and check, I did). But they are here: http://twitter.com/Scoblei... Or, say you want to follow tech companies. They aren't here. But they are here: http://twitter.com/Scoblei... -- see, when I joined FriendFeed I had hoped... - Robert Scoble

...that a far more diverse group of folks would show up here (and brands and celebrities) so that I COULD listen to what I wanted and YOU could listen to what YOU wanted and we all could be happy. But, that didn't happen. I'm being a jerk, yes, but mostly it's just grief because it didn't work out the way I thought it would. - Robert Scoble

Well, two things happen in a lifeboat scenario. People get cliquey (bond close together to cope/survive) and people peer into others eyes and wonder if mania or cannibalism is brewing. People are civilized and instinctual, so there is no inevitable outcome, but in the mean time drama ensues. - Micah Wittman

I can exist in more than one place. I can follow the people on Robert's list on Twitter and my friends here on FriendFeed and my family/friends on Facebook. Social Media Maturity means you don't have to have all your sets of friends in the one room for you to remain being friends with them. - Johnny Worthington from iPhone

Shey, I think this title is a little misleading. As others have said here, I think you're saying something very different from what Robert said, or at least in a very different, much more palatable way. I think you're being more specific and not so general (SOME people's experiences here aren't so great. It's not horrible for everyone.) - Kamilah Gill

Unless you just don't care; The clique thing never bothered me, I have two many of my own things going on. - ThatDBD

"clique" implies exclusionary behaviours, and i have yet to witness that in any great quantity here. - Joe Silence is not dead

If i was robert I would have added all his twitter list accounts to a semi-public room here on friendfeed.... much more useful in here than over there (imho) -- you can use the reply to twitter checkbox when commenting on the entries and when they reply to you it should feed into friendfeed via an ego search.... i do this exactly, but i only follow 64 ppl on twitter and am followed by... more... - Chris Heath

@Kamilah Fair assessment. I agree with Robert's assessment of the forum effect. But we're different users when it comes to Friendfeed and we want to see different things - Shey, Jamaican of FF

I agree that FriendFeed has changed since the FB announcement, but I've been here long enough (and you have too, Shey) to have seen it change several times as people came in and left with various feature changes and overhauls. It will continue to morph into something else again, I'm sure. It's a platform that is suited to a lot of purposes and it changes as the majority of people decide... more... - Her Lindsay-ness

This also assumes that FriendFeed is used exclusively in English... - Johnny Worthington

At first I thought Friendfeed was a refuge for the chummy crowd. Then I saw Johnny Worthington was here and I knew it couldn't be a clique. Sorted. - Bernie Goldbach

Why cannot FriendFeed be used just as much as everything else. In the social media world, the more points of connection, the better. - Steve Borgman

WOW good post, and comments,+Mark +Chris, Kamillah I agree the title is misleading differing from Scoble as per Mark's comment. And after after the drop from the big sell to FB, albeit Scoble had all the tact of someone yelling "Fire" in a crowded theatre, people listen to him, the criticism still resonates, and the fact is user #s keep dropping. And consequently I find FF myself less interested, signing in less, it's not as "breaking" as it once was, there's less posts/shares/activity, especially re Tech - sofarsoShawn

Bret Taylor

International growth has started to completely dominate on FriendFeed since August. Below is an unlabeled graph of page views on FriendFeed this month, broken down by country. Guess which country is the largest green slice below? (Hint: it is not English-speaking)

November 23 - Comment - Like - Share

AJ Kohn, ДMIROVSKY☂امیروفسکی, A Mitchell and 211 other people liked this

Iran! - Marshall Kirkpatrick

91 more comments

Turkey?? - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

We are still blocked in Iran - Bret Taylor

Turkey - Cliff Gerrish

Me - Johnny Worthington

Brazil? - Marshall Kirkpatrick

turkey, imho. - 1Co

Oh and good to see you bret. - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

Turkey is in fact the green slice. Orange is also not English speaking. Guess which country :) - Bret Taylor

france - WorldofHiglet

Japan or Italy? Maybe Portugal? - Maxamad

Hmm.. Turkey is the biggest international... I am not surprised (: - Ozgur Demir

i totally don't know my FF :( - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Orange - Russia? :) - Bleys

FF is rising fast in Turkey I guess. And will probably continue to rise for some time. Celebrities are joining too (: - Hakan Deryal

I am guessing the orange is Canada :P - Johnny Worthington

COUNTRY OR CONTINENT?UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.... - Pam Gwenzi

@Brent. is USA one of these countries ? or does chart only show internationals ? - Ozgur Demir

USA is blue. About 23% of our page views now. - Bret Taylor

Does Australia get a slice? - Johnny Worthington

@Bret, Can we get more info about Turkey in FF? - Hakan Deryal

India - Hayes Haugen

The orange slice is actually Italy, believe it or not. Turkey and Italy have been growing like gangbusters the past few months. - Bret Taylor

@Bret. yes, your guess is correct (about gangs) (: - Ozgur Demir

Sweet, correct guess :) - Maxamad

I believe it - RAPatton from iPhone

Turkey. hehe :) - Oğuz Serdar from Android

What is the gray then, Bret? - Maxamad

what is the gray? - Mycaptain

some of our friends from US don't know about FF, lol :) - Ufuk Özgül

Gray is "other" - Bret Taylor

where other is proxied users from Iran. ;) - EricaJoy

If we were not blocked , we would win a big slice for iran :( - Milad.p from FreshFeed

Both China and Iran would have been in there if they were not both blocked currently - Bret Taylor

Is Russia any of the other slices pictured above? (other than gray) - Maxamad

That's where Australia is, in the grey :) - Glenn Slaven

OMG. Friendfeed is going the way of Orkut ;) Btw, is Norway/Scandinavia even visible in all this ? Just curious. - Thomas Bøhm

@thomas. even though Orkut is Turkish (the guy), it is (site) not big in Turkey. - Ozgur Demir

i'm sure finland is forbidden long time ago from this list ;) - Nia from fftogo

Just look at the public feed for 2 secs or 2 hours - yep, definitely. - Micah Wittman from iPhone

Facebook has a very similar story as far as I know.. we are a communicative nation:) - Neşe Uyanık

Who's Gray? It's Gray, Louis of course :) - Micah Wittman

Thank you for sharing this graph, Bret. - Micah Wittman

Interesting - though for the sake of data visualization, pie charts are the worst of all.... :) - See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

See-ming, a-hem, take a look at your avatar ;) - Micah Wittman

@Bret, what is the exact number of Turkish people on FF? - Ozkan Altuner

Ozkan, I'd be curious to know too, but I have a feeling there's an internal policy about not releasing absolute numbers, hence the percentages. But it never hurts to ask :) - Micah Wittman

@Micah, it's the page view, however, not the number of users :) - Ozkan Altuner

Good point, Ozkan. But I can't remember Visitor or View counts ever publicly reported before. But today could be the first time! :) - Micah Wittman

Iran :-) - Nimaa

Everyone knows teh fuckin answer Bret. It's Turkey. Mahir loves you http://www.ikissyou.org - Ahmet Alp Balkan from iPod

I'm not surprised that Turkey is the green portion. I've seen more and more Turkish posts in my home feed. I thought it was just a biased sample, but perhaps not. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

Iran - Assal

Turkey - Shey, Jamaican of FF

Intense competition between Iran and Turkey occurred :D - Nimaa

Hmmmmmmmmmmm...MOZAMBIQUE luminous orange l guess - Pam Gwenzi

the desire to push the boundaries of internet of the turkish is troubling. the possesive tendecies of the turkish can be observed in the currently popular ''ff bu deYil'' (this is not ff) comment. turks are crowding ff, westerners are in panic! - ferayebend

turks are invading ff!!! call norad - aadagger

international growth dominates FF and yet the USA dominates the world. Not always in good ways either. What is the link? I don't think there is one. All I can say is that I love the USA and I love FriendFeed. What does it all mean? More free, cold beer is needed to find the answers. - Morgan Haley

.. because, Turkish Facebook users are 10-20 years old. FF is very good alternative for older users. (and in addition Twitter is non-useful) - Murat Tatar

Bret would that mean that FF has around 200K Turkish users? http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendf... - Cem ARGUN

Murat Tatar. So you've seen that Turkish Facebook users demographics ? even though it's unpublished. - Ozgur Demir

SO when are we gonna party BRET? :) - Bahriye

Actually, I wonder when Bret is gonna post something like "FF bu degil!".. - Ozgur Demir

What do we care :) FF is this. And this is the rl. SO THE QUESTION IS: When are we gonna party! - Bahriye

Bret start learning Turkish. You should have guessed from the reactions the days a.) you changed the design, b.) announced the FB deal. :) - Cem ARGUN

I've noticed it on my feed. It's all good. - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

I've noticed a huge increase in Iran, peaking at about 7-8am Eastern - H0llywoodWh0re

Just curious, what's happening with total page views? (I don't trust alexa, compete, etc.) - Bruce Lewis

@Bret, 1- Turkey, 2- USA, 3- Italy, 4- India, 5- Japan, 6- Germany, 7- UK & Russia 8 - Pakistan 9- Iran 10- Canada.. Is it True? - Kemalettin Bulamacı

italian power! yeah! ;) - Dario Salvelli

Anyone worth their weight in tweets knows that it's turkey. - Richard A.

knew it english speaker are way down - ffcode

Turkey? - ★ Soner Gönül

If that is so, can we get some way of filtering by language? I want to follow more international people but be able to ignore them or their friends when they post in what I cannot read :) - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

Turkiye :) - Mustafa Çamaltı

italy rules!! :-) - batta

Turkey - Melih Bahadır Varol

My bet's on India - Rod Nicolson

Country dominating FriendFeed? My guess...Brazil (have to bet on the homeland) - Victoria Harres Akers

Btw, FriendFeed is blocked in Turkish Schools :( - F. Batuhan Icoz from iPhone

It's blocked in US schools that I attended as well F. Batuhan :( - Maxamad

Italy? - Matte

You may have to develop "hide by language" feature very soon. - Bahadır Yağan

Afghanistan - Pam Gwenzi

go italy! - Alessandro

How much does the UK get? - Kol Tregaskes

Turkey is the winner btw. - Kol Tregaskes

YEAH TURKEY ! - Çağatay " SKYLAB " Şama

different kind of widgets? I don't like with blue line. years fighting with it :) and option to change fonts. please :) - Okeane

#Turkey of course ;) - Volkan Özçelik

IRAN :) - ДMIROVSKY☂امیروفسکی

Iran خودشم تو روحت که دیشب فرفر و خراب کرده بودی . اگه تونستی بفهم چی گفتم ! - حاج مهدی ©

Jeff Sandquist

The Visual Studio Documentary - Alan Cooper, the Father of Visual Basic - http://channel9.msdn.com/shows...

November 24 from Channel 9 - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Robert Scoble and Roberto Bonini liked this

The Visual Studio Documentary Part One and Part Two. S. Somasegar's Full Length Interview Jason Zander Full Length Interview Tim Huckaby Full Length Interview Scott Guthrie Full Length Interview Anders Hejlsberg Full Length Interview For over 30 years Alan Cooper has been a pioneer of the modern computing era. His groundbreaking work in software invention, design and construction has influenced a generation of programmers and business people—and helped a generation of users. Alan is the author of two best-selling books, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, and his visionary ideas and outspoken style make him a popular speaker. Whether you know him as the "Father of Visual Basic," the inventor of personas, or the guy who thinks software should be spanked, we know him as the man whose ideas are the foundation of what we do. - Jeff Sandquist

Paul Buchheit

Tornado vs Rails: http://www.youtube.com/watch...

September 10 - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, 7 DownGraded Goblins, Louis Gray and 116 other people liked this

;) - Paul Buchheit

26 more comments

awesome - Ayman Shurafa

wow. insane! - Caio

Looks like Tornado won! - Private Sanjeev

love the metaphor :) - andy brudtkuhl

brilliant. Alternative comment: this metaphor is a train wreck - Ivan Kirigin

haha love it - Ras - Dago-Baadass! of FF

Smashing! Simply smashing... - Chris Heath

Ivan +1! - Kevin L

I couldn't take my eyes off of it. It was like watching a train wreck! - Chuck Adams

so sad story :( trains are so unprotected.. - я был в лесу

physics is a beaatch for sure - Robert Higgins

That video never gets old. Never underestimate the power of nature. - Jim Goldstein

This highlights the need for additional Superman III technology investment. - Jay Cuthrell

wow!! :) - Oğuz Serdar

:) - Micah Wittman

\m/ - 'Like' robot (frɐnc)

AMAZING footage. Dayum! - Josh Haley

That was worth watching even ignoring the obviously cute pun. - Greg Grothaus

Paul is probably just joking - but if he is serious about this pun i would assume it's for good reason. - Chris Heath

and i bet paul just couldn't wait for them to open up tornado when he first saw this video - Chris Heath

amazing - boro

should hitler be saying something about it now :) - vinod

MOther Nature indeed - Mark Mason

WOW! That reminds me...I still have some video from this summer's train trip to post. Nothing this exciting happened, I'm afraid. - Eph Zero

YEAH BABY - Çağatay " SKYLAB " Şama

Just as I expected, it's all twisted. - Dustin Sallings

very punny. - winterismute

Bindu Reddy

In this "real-time" world where the half-life of most posts is about 30 min. We are losing the signal and drowning in the noise. This also incents people to constantly post to be in the conversation...Making the signal to noise problem even worse...

November 23 - Comment - Like - Share

Gökmen Karasu, phil baumann, Joe D'Andrea and 34 other people liked this

http://friendfeed.com/summary... - Paul Buchheit

29 more comments

FF has 2 great ways of addressing the problem - best of day and bumping up popular posts. Twitter has none... it is insane to watch your twitter stream go by during the day. 95% of the posts are really not interesting/relevant - Bindu Reddy

I'm tempted to make "best of" the default view somehow (perhaps with new stuff streaming in at that top). I'm afraid it would kill new stuff (and therefore itself) though. - Paul Buchheit

What about doing something like Facebook... if the post gets enough "likes/comments" only than bump into the default view and have a link to the "live feed" - Bindu Reddy

You know...I rarely go into my BOD page because I can tell exactly who is going to be in there. It is *always* the same 6 people everyday. BOM is even worse. And I don't see how post have a expiration date. I go back weeks, sometimes months for some people. - Anika

Anika, interesting... Yes I see what you are saying about BOD having the same usual suspects. So technically the BOD does give you "quality" posts relevant to you. It gives you posts from people who have the most "engaged following".... I think the FB news feed has the same issue. - Bindu Reddy

Therein lies the rub that wouldn''t make it "real time" anymore. Except, the real time web is a buzz word for suckers #doanybodyno? I'm on the same page with Anika, I'm looking for fresh content, though not up to THIS SECOND (twitter) - sofarsoShawn

Problem is, if the "signal" posts aren't timed right, they don't get enough initial response to appear in Best Of Day. - Bruce Lewis

Exactly. BOD often strikes me as the same people circle-jerking each other. If I want interesting content, I have a list for people who post interesting things and of course, stalking *their* friends. The posts may not have many comments, but to me that's a good thing. I often get a better quality-more engaged conversation with just another person. No snark-offs, IOW. - Anika

& Bindu you make an awesome point, on those "who have the most engaged following"...? Scoble's called them a "cult-following" - sofarsoShawn

I hardly visit BOD too. I go through it if I'm not signed on for a decent length of time in case I miss a birthday post or announcement ;) I like jumping in and out and sometimes look up certain people / lists. I'll miss a lot of peep's content who are active in other timezones. - Rodfather

"cult-following" is a good name. In some cases it is also a band of people who comment on each other's posts bumping it up. My FB is something like that. I have set of friends who comment on my posts and they comment on mine... this bumps up my posts to others who don't really like it much - Bindu Reddy

Better to have tags, filters. BOD reminds me too much of jr. high popularity contests (not bitching about people who regularly land there, I'm just saying that BOD is not necessarily a measurement of quality of content). - Spidra Webster

I had lists on FF ... than I deleted all of them, simply cause I was finding it hard to click-through to lists and read. - Bindu Reddy

Maybe you just need one list called "signal". - Bruce Lewis

he he :) - Bindu Reddy

I will visit the BOD page if I have not been on FF much during the day. That way I can find out what the important / popular topics if the day were. I really like the BOD feature. - Jeff P. Henderson

I think Anika just outlined above what makes FF so great. You can follow who you want, and filter specific content. Lists, which FF has had for a while help this immensely You can create your own BOD by creating a list of interesting people, filtering out all posts that don't have, say 5 comments. - Jeff P. Henderson

I subscribe to fewer people that are very active so it makes it easier. - ashish

What you, in theory want, is a "Best of Day" tailored to you based on your interests. That's what my6sense is trying to do (on the iPhone for feeds), calling it "digital intuition". The more I use it, the better it gets. - Louis Gray

It depends who you subscibe to. My BOD is very good. - Paul Buchheit from iPhone

catch that double-entendre? hé hé *smirks* my BOD's like soooo hawwwwt toooo, like phenomenal! But I wanna see Buchheat's!!! - sofarsoShawn

Paul, I almost agree but I'd add "it depends who you subscribe to AND who's subscribed to them"…Obviously you'd know better than I, but to me it seems like BOD links became a collection of what the most popular (and not necessarily the most interesting) users were sharing. I wrote a brief bit more here: http://friendfeed.com/kaz... - Adam Kazwell

In general if you are pretty selective about your subscriptions your feed is going to be good :)) - Bindu Reddy

[the default] BOD doesn't really interest me either, not as much as the regular feed lists I have. - Andrew C

I disagree that the half life of posts is 30 minutes. They can live far longer here on FF. - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

Yes FF posts have a greater half life... I should have mentioned I was talking about twitter - Bindu Reddy

Tweets -- snowflakes that melt before they hit the ground. - Sean McBride

This is why I am such a big fan of Topsy, and now use it on a daily basis to discover big signals in the noise. Leading patterns of tweets in the aggregate can have a shelf life of weeks or months. We definitely need a Topsy-like front end for Friendfeed. - Sean McBride

BOD is ideal for emails. People should get those emails maybe by default. As far as the default screen, maybe just two tabs at the top: Now and Best - Christopher Galtenberg

I hold time order responsible. Every tool we use for reading seems to order by time rather than relevance: http://akkartik.name/blog... - Kartik Agaram

Bindu Reddy

Ads are only annoying because they are irrelevant and distract you from the real content of the page. Highly relevant ads are equivalent to other links on a page?

November 22 - Comment - Like - Share

Gökmen Karasu, Daniel Rowley, Vit Kolesnik and 16 other people liked this

Yes, but the trick is defining what is "relevant." People working in ads for a living tend to think that any ad that shares a topic with other links on the page is "relevant," but that's not the kind of relevance that is required. Ads should be useful content that help you fulfill the purpose for which you came to the page. (And that purpose might be "to be distracted with something cool and shiny," depending on the page.) - Daniel Dulitz

24 more comments

Agree, it is not an easy problem. But take for example Google - ads are promoted to the very top spot when Google's algorithms think they relevant and in most cases Google more or less gets it right. I think the same principle should apply for all types of ads/content. - Bindu Reddy

Ads are annoying because they are rarely objective (even if they are somehow relevant to a need I have). - LogEx

LogEx, most content on the web is "subjective" it is the subjective opinion of someone or some organization. - Bindu Reddy

Yes, relevant ads add value to the page, whereas irrelevant ads are spammy. But how do branding ads fit into the picture? The great Ogilvy said the first time you see an ad it pisses you off, the 20th time you see it, you're writing a check for the product. And what about serendipitous ads? Things you didn't know existed, but once you find out about them, you become interested?... more... - Stephen Pickering

Stephen, I think "serendipitous ads" also need to be "relevant". As an example if you are following/reading a tech blog and see an ad for "hair extensions" you will no-doubt be annoyed. However say the tech blog posts one "sponsored ad" about a new technology, you might find it really useful...Most tech blogs and journals including the WSJ already do this... - Bindu Reddy

Yes, I agree. As I was writing that, it occurred to me, even something serendipitous needs to be relevant to the content. No question. - Stephen Pickering

Yep, I have found that increasing ad relevancy is better than trying to increase coverage. If users do relate to the ads in terms of content and context the CTR is higher. I think it also depends on where the ads are shown and how they are displayed. It would be interesting to know if there are numbers that justify this case. - Ravinder Reddy

Yes, that is the case for Google AdWords and the philosophy behind it:) - Bindu Reddy

I think talking about this with the broadest possible term, "Ad", actually makes the discussion too narrow. - Micah Wittman

If a producer/vendor makes a value claim that's reasonably testable AND there's high relevancy, I'm potentially slightly interested. But that's the specific type of ad + scenario. - Micah Wittman

Micah - Agree the value claim matters a lot. In fact, I would say it also matters who the value claim is coming from. - Bindu Reddy

the standard of relevance applies to all content, and it is a challenge for publishers - Mike Chelen

Mike, agree with you.. this should apply to all content. Sadly ads, esp the banner / display type have a bad name because they tend to be distracting on not-relevant. Even AdSense ads are pretty banal and don't really engage you - Bindu Reddy

Bindu, my example is small scale to be sure (last 4 weeks 8500 uniques), but I've run Adsense (multi-year test run) and projectwonderful (under a year) ads on my bebepool.com website, and the relevancy is terrible. I would approve by hand all ads in the case of projectwonderful, and it was still pitiful. I've recently pull both of those placements and am now testing out a tinyprints affiliate placement which I think has good likelihood of value to my site's user base (birth announcement cards). Jury is out. - Micah Wittman

Micah, I know exactly what you mean. It is a good idea to pick out what exactly reasonates with your audience - Bindu Reddy

:) - Micah Wittman

Bindu: yup, although adsense is an improvement, it still fails the relevancy test more often than regular content. new tactics like social recommendation might be the only solution because nothing can gauge the relevance as well as other humans - Mike Chelen

I find ads displayed when I am actively searching for stuff most relevant. I don't really like the social network ad approaches for two reasons: 1) I only care about ads if I am already receptive/predisposed to what they are liking. Else, I don't really care that someone on my network just bought some speakers. If I'm in the market for speakers, it's great, if I not looking to buy... more... - Ray Cromwell

Completely agree with you on 1. You don't want your social network to be filled with deals for speakers. Clearly that is not relevant. I there is an ad anywhere it needs to be relevant... As an example if you see an ad for a new cloud-computing technology from a hi-tech blogger you are following. I would argue that it is as relevant as the other content. On number 2, I would argue that... more... - Bindu Reddy

Ray: the criteria should be whether the friend thinks the topic is worth discussing - Mike Chelen

If a person posting the ad actually uses and believes in it, I'm down with that. But the example I read in the NYT about personalized M&Ms is one that would likely annoy me. BTW - nice pic there in the NYT Bindu. - Hutch Carpenter

I agree... I think the biggest issue with ads is that relevancy of some of these ads to the end user. As an example John Chow writes a blog about "making money online"... People who follow him probably ideally want to hear about "making money online" and not M&Ms - Bindu Reddy

There's a certain segment of people who are passionate about the things they recommend and/or review, and affiliate payment is a nice bonus. But it seems there's many more people who love milking the system and they are quite ingenious at it, spamming, link-farming, scamming lead gens, I just think that the monetary could potentially distort what was previously 'friendly' behavior, or... more... - Ray Cromwell

Ray, I agree with you on that as well. Payment/monetary reasons have helped promote wrong kinds behavior. The trick than is to build a system to incent the right kind of behavior. The right kind being recommendations that will be useful to your audience. - Bindu Reddy

Ray: banner ads also appear on spam sites, if companies like google do not block them - Mike Chelen

MG Siegler

Google Opens Chrome Extensions To Developers, Will Only Review Certain Ones - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...

November 23 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Dedegi, Chris Martin, Daniel Rowley and 5 other people liked this

Woohoo! - Matt Cutts

Kevin Fox

National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009 - http://www.boston.com/bigpict...

November 23 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Seth, Jérôme Flipo, Kol Tregaskes and 24 other people liked this

This is one of my favorite Big Picture installments yet. It's only a coincidence that the three shots I picked involve water. - Kevin Fox from Bookmarklet

LogEx to LogEx's feed, All Things Google, Google Reader

Google Reader "Send To" custom links - add yours here...

August 13 - Comment - Like - Share

Marco Balzerani, Brian, ovigia and 97 other people liked this

FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/bgolub... UPDATE: looks like FF is in the default list now :) - LogEx

26 more comments

Posterous: http://blog.posterous.com/send-to... - LogEx

Several good tips here: http://www.labnol.org/interne... (Save to PDF, Convert partial feed item to full feed via email, AddThis/AddToAny/ShareThis, Backtweets/Technorati/GoogleBlogSearch related conversations) - LogEx

Instapaper: http://www.willw.net/adding-... - LogEx

Google Bookmarks & AddToAny: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009... - LogEx

ping.fm: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009... & more in other comments: Gmail, generic email, Google Calendar,... - LogEx

WordPress “Press this…” on your domain: http://thingelstad.com/using-g... - LogEx

Autotranslate from another language: http://translate.google.com/transla... - Matt Cutts

This could get VERY powerful if/when GOOG adds more substitutions :) - LogEx

Is Backtype available> - TrafficBug

WOOOOOWWW - Susan Beebe from BuddyFeed

Is Hellotxt available too? - Kol Tregaskes

Does it add pictures to post for FF like Bookmarklet ? - Jacque

And Shareaholic? - Kol Tregaskes

No pictures yet that I can figure... will either need another (smart) substitution or a URL that triggers a bookmarklet? - LogEx

GReader will need an OPML-like facility for batch-loading these ;) - LogEx

I've been dreaming about that for a long time... :) - Stanislas Jourdan

Stanislas, not quite the regular dream but good for you. ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

@kol hehe, don't worry, i have others dreams in my life ;-) - Stanislas Jourdan

Stanislas, that's good, I was worried for a bit there. ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

Lifehacker adds PrintFriendly & Identica configs: http://lifehacker.com/5339214... - LogEx

Feed Buster allows pictures from GR to FF. It's just slow and limited... - Kamilah Gill

shorten with bit.ly: http://exde601e.blogspot.com/2009... - George Moga

I haven't seen Twine yet. - Mahendra (SkepticGeek)

MakeUseOf.com adds Iterasi & ZapReader: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag... - LogEx

another 5 services, including LinkedIn and j.mp: http://exde601e.blogspot.com/2009... - George Moga

...so G-Reader is becoming a little like FriendFeed now? - .LAG liked that

that change in greader is how I found FF - Jeremy (cropmarks)

Benjamin Golub

National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009 - The Big Picture - Boston.com - http://www.boston.com/bigpict...

November 23 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Kol Tregaskes, Bertrand Doux, Elena Shuvalova and 25 other people liked this

It was hard to pick the thumbnail for this one. They are all great - Benjamin Golub from Bookmarklet

They're awesome! Not a single picture which is not amazing. - David Schmidt

DeWitt Clinton

To those noting what the web can't do today, I ask: what can it do tomorrow? Re http://friendfeed.com/dewitt...

November 22 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Jérôme Flipo, Robert Scoble and 9 other people liked this

A friend and I were discussing Chrome OS with my wife, and he made the point that there are many things, such as Excel, that don't have complete analogs on the web yet. To which I turned to my wife, who is a heavy user of Excel professionally, and asked, "when was Excel great? When did it do everything you needed?" She responded, "it's always been perfect. Since forever, I guess." I asked, "and how is Google Spreadsheets today?" Her: "Well, it's pretty good, but not quite there yet." Me: "How was it three years ago?" Her: "Huh? It didn't exist three years ago." Me: "Exactly." - DeWitt Clinton

17 more comments

It's all about trajectory. - DeWitt Clinton

It works the other way too. The next time someone complains about some missing feature in Docs compared to Word, ask them how they live-edit a document with other users. - Nick Lothian

The next best Office will be a web app. Mark my words. - DeWitt Clinton

What's more important, that an app be "web" or that it be networked? - Cliff Gerrish

@Cliff: That is be "web". "Webbyness" is an enabling feature in ways that being networked isn't. - Nick Lothian

Nick, and by that do you mean: http or browser rendered html? - Cliff Gerrish

Both. http(s) should be assumed. HTML+JS makes it a real web app. Flash can be used to provide functionality that HTML+JS cannot (and I suppose in some circumstances Silverlight can substitute for Flash). - Nick Lothian

So, it's just bits delivered to the local cache over the Network, and writes files back upstream. - Cliff Gerrish

I'm a big fan of the idea, though I hope the resulting solution is not the same kind of monolithic monstrosity that Office has turned into over the years. Word takes for-freaking-ever to start on my Mac (one of many reasons I never actually use it for anything) -- much longer than I think I'd be comfortable with in a web app (I know it's a little odd to have different expectations for startup time on web apps, but I think most people feel the same way). - Joel Webber

Also, we've got a ways to go before something like Word is feasible in a web app. I know the Google Docs team has worked *really* hard to beat "contentEditable" into submission, but there are still a lot of edge cases (on all the major browsers), and it's damned near impossible to make all (or even most) of the bugs go away. And if you decide to roll-your-own text editor, you've got a... more... - Joel Webber

@Joel, with HTML5 "startup" time is more like "install" time, and after that you're running from cache. At least that's the theory; I wish it actually worked that way on say the iPhone. In terms of monolithic, I'm intrigued by Android Intents, and I wish something like them were in HTML5. Intents:userscripts::functions:goto. But I can't even imagine what that would look like. Sounds like Sergey said they should think about ChromeOS/Android convergence, so who knows. - Daniel Dulitz

@Joel - what do you think of the Bespin approach to solving the text editing problem? That seems to go some way to dealing with font-metrics doesn't it? (measureText() etc) - Nick Lothian

After dealing with contentEditable and it's designMode sibling for a few years now, I'm convinced the only way forward is replacing the whole disaster lots of clever trickery. Every browser implementation falls over with some combination of formatting, pasting or key navigation. We need to pave over most of the logic and start from scratch. - Matt Mastracci from iPhone

@Daniel: Agreed on HTML5 startup time, modulo the problem that js parse time eventually becomes a huge issue. Probably an architecture closer to Android intents/activities would alleviate this. I don't think it really needs to be a spec thing -- I think it's just more of an architectural decision. - Joel Webber

@Nick: Bespin gets to cheat very heavily (fixed-width fonts have a way of making the calculations easier). Canvas' measureText() method is kind of a joke, as it's nowhere near enough to do anything complex -- you can't even ask for text height. Even with that, there would still be a host of other issues -- think about stuff like Thai segmentation and ideographic input methods. There's a... more... - Joel Webber

If you can cache the source, you can cache the parse tree. :-) What excites me about Intents is that they work cross-app, cross-vendor. I don't know any way to architect HTML5 apps so that e.g. I can install a photo picker that is used by all apps that need a photo, like I can in Android. - Daniel Dulitz

If CanvasRenderingContext2D borrowed more of Java2D's set of APIs, things would be easier. The standards groups are too timid and too political. Like tinkering with healthcare, they are only willing to add small compromise APIs that everyone agrees on. This limits how fast the web can evolve. Take my pet peeves: Video recording (instead of just <video> playback), binary WebSockets, etc.... more... - Ray Cromwell

Java Applets did a lot of things wrong, but the new APIs being exposed to JS are too conservative in the opposite direction. You want HTML5 to supplant Flash and Silverlight? You want next-gen apps? You need to expose more functionality and fix others. (just look at the Keyboard event mess). WebGL is a step in the right direction. But there are still huge gaps of functionality missing.... more... - Ray Cromwell

Louis Gray

Reporters accepting freebies - http://www.scripting.com/stories...

November 22 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Robert Scoble, Jim Connolly and Jesse Stay liked this

sofarsoShawn to sofarsoShawn's feed, Senat Populusqu Roman, Twitter, FriendFeed Feedback, Social Media

"Let’s Watch Twitter Become FriendFeed" RT @centerworks - now the inevitable ironic "lol" insertion - http://www.centernetworks.com/lets-wa...

November 12 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Kol Tregaskes, Stylish Eve, Daniel Rowley and 10 other people liked this

"It seems the hot Twitter news of the day is that the service might be slowing in U.S. growth. You can read the Twitter stats story on Mashable and TheNextWeb. Earlier in the week the big news for the so-called social media experts was the on and off status of the new “retweet architecture system”. Twitter turned it on for many users (I was not one of them) but then turned it off so they could fix some bugs. Apparently there are two camps when it comes to the new retweets…one camp likes the consolidated concept and the other camp hates it because they can’t add their 2-cents to the conversation. My guess is that 90% of re-sharing on Twitter is either direct sharing of something Mashable posted or the addition of “lol”. This past summer I wrote about how Friendfeed could generate massive income and also reach the mainstream. Sadly that never happened because Friendfeed sold out to Facebook. While it looks like Facebook wasn’t reading, this morning I started to think that perhaps... more... - sofarsoShawn

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wow i didnt' think that friendfeed allowed complete scraping :( but thanks for sharing. - Allen Stern

I saw the 'retweet it' button in twitter and I miss it. It is easy to do one-click retweet rather than typing in RT @nameofperson here. Lets say you are retweeting a message you are looking up in somebodys profile page on twitter that is several tweets down on the page and not from your incoming tweet stream/time line. The retweet it link is a huge timesaver. I dont understand why anybody would oppose it. - TrafficBug

It's a great article (very funny too) & I hope it doesn't go unnoticed it's thorough in its appraisal of the ReTweet issue & in the overall larger issues at play. Taking note of the disproportionate @mashable ReTweets's ~ when'd he become a cell for the Twitter Jihad? Following the RT tree they originate of course from mashable then his proselytes errr or ummm I mean his writers &... more... - sofarsoShawn

I don't mean to name drop here but do you know Leo? Or @LeoLaporte :) Funny guy, well he had an awesome share on pagerank http://ff.im/3Y0S7 "Judge me by my PageRank, do you?" Helllll yeah we do! Mashable's just perfecting it's manipulation via Twitter. - sofarsoShawn

great, "likes"/retweet feature down, now twitter only needs: comment threading, realtime updates, foaf, multimedia embed, groups, email integration, and search that works for things older than a couple weeks, then it will really be the same as friendfeed :D - Mike Chelen

I think Twitter also really needs to get rid of 140 chars limit ... what is it there for?? to bother people? have a 'more' button, so that user can 'locally' roll out the remainder of a post over 140 - Petr Buben

The character limit is so that tweets fit within the constraints of every SMS service around the world. You can literally start using Twitter by sending a text to 40404 (or your country's short code) without ever visiting the site. 100% platform portability is one of the major reasons it's done so well. - David Chartier from iPhone

Petr: the character limit becomes less noticeable after ongoing use because any longer text can be broken into multiple posts, which are unlimited in number. however this runs into the issue of comment threading and difficulty in following a conversation, which remains ones of twitter's limits in comparison with other platforms - Mike Chelen

right .... multiple tweets is not going to help it. and would they somehow also point to each other, to be accessible if one is displayed alone?? - a mess. ... a simple solution is that 'more' button :] .... hey, we might even call it a censorship, a constitutional rights matter :] ..... it is darn silly to express oneself in 140- chars .. it might damage the intellect of tweeters == and let Twitter make all optional - to turn on 'more', to turn on 140+ chars ... - Petr Buben

That's hilarious @petrbuben the 140 character limit equates to either genius aphoristically speaking (there's been maybe 5 people in history who can claim as much) but is more likely the obverse, at least link to a url where there's further explanation or if you can fit a cohesive thought into 140 characters, you should probably expand your mind, so to speak - sofarsoShawn

Writing quality depends on much more than length :P - Mike Chelen

@Shawn.. to me, that limit has become a major problem and a drag on Twitter. unless they are trying to dumbify a twitte nation. ... @Mike.. yes, but 140 is a limit on quantity, and that translate very often to limits on quality ... just let's GET rid of 140 chars limit :] .. put there that dam 'morz' button |||| also, Twitte needs historic search .. time span, user, list scoped .. in fact, something as ff search ... or where can i find tw historic search? - Petr Buben

Matt Cutts

Lots of Google stuff this week. My fave four: 1. Chrome OS released as open-source. 2. US caselaw added to Google Scholar. 3. Real-time translation as you type at translate.google.com, plus romanization and text-to-speech. 4. Auto-captions (speech recognition) on YouTube and auto-timing (upload video transcript, get accurate time code alignment).

November 21 - Comment - Like - Share

Gökmen Karasu, 'Like' robot (frɐnc), Elmer Thomas and 27 other people liked this

Links: 1. Chromium OS: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009... 2. US caselaw: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009... 3. As-you-type translation: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009... 4. Auto-captions & Auto-timing: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009... - Matt Cutts

4 more comments

And a bonus video: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009... More detailed Google Earth models based on StreetView imagery. - Matt Cutts

I love the new Real-time translation. I found less usefull the new adsense panel layout (you know.. now i have to wear glasses to check the old things.. but it's only a css issue, so...). :) - Seo (ignobile) Guru

I think it would be nice of Google Translate offered an automatic reverse translation. Also, if I type in my language and get something translated into a language I don't speak, what good is the text to speech version to me? I can't understand it. Am I supposed to record it and post the sound file somewhere? - SuezanneC Baskerville

If you translate something into a language you don't speak, it might be a helpful aid for learning to speak a new language. I can read and understand some italian, and more if I hear it, but what I know when reading it isn't the same as what I know when I hear it, since I can't associate the way it sounds with how it is spelled at the same time. This might help me with that. - April Russo (app103)

didn't know about text to speech thanks for letting us know, real time translation is good and is like the translate page/site - ffcode

Jolie O'Dell

12 Thanksgiving iPhone Apps Worth Checking Out - http://www.bonafidereviews.com/blog...

November 21 from Digg - Comment - Like - Share

Roberto Bonini and Robert Scoble liked this

Paul Buchheit

Chrome OS will help kill Silverlight and other non-open tech, preventing msft and others from recapturing the web. (though I expect that it will support Flash by necessity)

July 7 - Comment - Like - Share

ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,, Charles Frith, Vladimir Yashnikov and 150 other people liked this

Good point. - Robert Scoble

124 more comments

I hope it doesn't. After all we need good media delivery platforms. - Swaroop

Including GNASH - the open source alternative - would solve that problem - Bogdan Costea

yeah, nobody really needs flash. kill it. - Zio Bonino

Chrome OS might be a compelling case for SVG/<canvas> + <audio> tag replacements for flash. Dunno what SVG's perf is like on WebKit tho. - Matt Mastracci

Microsoft will port it. It's all about codecs & DRM. Ogg Theora isn't all that great. - Rodfather

Is that Steve Jobs disguised as Zio ? - Swaroop

@Swaroop Yes, we do. Like HTML5. - Benjamin Dobson

@Swaroop eh eh, I've got flash disabled on all my systems :) - Zio Bonino

@Benjamin I'd prefer HTML web apps over native apps anyday. But it'll take time for it to mature - Swaroop

Rodfather, I don't think that will be an option for msft :). If Chrome is built the way I would do it, there is no installation per-se -- everything runs in the browser and the config in stored in the cloud (and cached locally). The computer is a pure appliance. - Paul Buchheit

@Zio You're the real Steve Jobs - Swaroop

Microsoft moves much too slow to force new standards these days. - Louis Gray

@Louis: IE8 flunking ACID test :) - Swaroop

What about more standard codecs like h.264? That isn't open and is in hardware already. - Rodfather

h.264 is established and must be in there, but it's not a platform like Silverlight is. - Paul Buchheit

I know some of the guys behind silverlight. It is some great technology. Too bad it's from Microsoft and is closed. - Joe Beda () from iPhone

A world with no Flash and Silverlight. I can't wait. - Paul Grav

Yeah, it's too bad they didn't open-source it. This stuff with Mono is silly -- if you want to make a real standard you need to make the real implementation be open. - Paul Buchheit

MS are about 10 years too late with Silverlight. And they'll most likely be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting HTML5. - Paul Grav

Zio sez (hopefully humorously): "yeah, nobody really needs flash. kill it" -- have you ever watched a single YouTube video in your life? Like seventeen gazillion other people across the wired world. yeah, you're right, nobody needs Flash. ha! - .LAG liked that

Remember Dave Clark in 1992, "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." - Guy Vander Heyden

.LAG: most YouTube videos are playable without Flash now. My iPhone plays most of them and it doesn't have Flash. Certainly by the time the Google OS came out YouTube would be converted completely to non-Flash capability. - Robert Scoble

Robert: The youtube flash application helps read the flv files on Youtube's servers and provides a UI (decoder too). - Swaroop

Even Google admits they're not sure I'd bit for bit html5 video is less bandwitj consuming than flash. And flash isn't just media delivery, also interesting games and apps like tonepad, splicemusic.com's online sequencer, etc (I'm musically inclined, so most of my examples will be along that line) and please don't suggest we redo it all in java - Ed F from Nambu

Does this mean the next Silverlight release is codename Seppuku? - Jay Cuthrell

Maybe we'll see commercials encoded in movies if everything is open. - Rodfather

Flash is too established to kill off right now, so I'd be surprised if Chrome didn't include flash support. It will take many years to get rid of that thing. First they need to fix the standard browser to not be so broken (lack of video, multi-file upload, etc), then they need everyone to switch to the new html5 solutions. - Paul Buchheit

Scoble ...that may be true, and YouTube plays on my Pre without Flash (yet)...but that doesn't mean that "nobody needs Flash." really? what would replace it? - .LAG liked that

So Google's NaCl http://code.google.com/p... (now integrated within Chrome/Chromium) was just a temporary workaround, right? - Jérôme Flipo

Use HTML 5 instead! - Minh Bui

Is it just me or does Native Client (NaCl) remind you of the Microsoft Active X approach? - Daniel Chow

But who prevents Google from taking over the net? - Andreas

youtube videos play on iPhone/iPod Touch as they are higher res mp4 files NOT flv files. It was a big deal when Steve negotiated that deal with youtube. - vijay

You have Moonlight to run Silverlight applications in Linux. Not perfect, but then an application made on Silverlight is "not perfect" by definition - Marcos Marado

The point here is that Google has no motivation to include Silverlight on these machines, and installing software likely won't be an option (it's a web appliance), so it will be absent from a lot of netbooks, just as it is absent from iPhones. That cuts into market share, which is a bad thing for a platform that is trying to compete with more universal tech like Flash and HTML.... more... - Paul Buchheit

@DanielChow: NaCl has very little overlap with ActiveX, apart from running native code. It runs in a provably safe way, and explicitly does *not* allow it to access arbitrary host APIs. But it can be quite useful when you need to run code that would be too slow in Javascript (even on v8): e.g., heavy encryption/decryption, possibly codecs, definitely game physics, and so forth. - Joel Webber

There is a time and a place for Flash and Silverlight so I hope it will run it. There are simply some things you can do which aren't possible, or practical in html/css/javascript. - Steve Temple

Paul: why wouldn't Chrome OS come with Moonlight? And if not, why wouldn't you be able to just install it? And third, why the hell would people want Moonlight for? I never installed it and not even once felt the need to! - Marcos Marado from fftogo

because of moonlight http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlig... the potential userbase of silverlight is greatly improved, agree that projects which don't consider compatibility are limiting their potential - Mike Chelen

@mindboosternoori Ryanair site uses silverlight: http://www.ryanair.com/site... that's the only website I know that uses it - for this you would need moonlight :) - Ihar Mahaniok

Flash is needed for the google os to be useful in education. Many education based websites are flash based. - Willowdale

@Paul "Google is probably paying OEMs to ship with this OS, so instead of paying $x/machine to include windows XP, they will get paid $y/machine to include Chrome." - paying present tense, already? Isn't it enough for OEMs not to have to pay hefty licenses to Redmond, etc., while being able to ship with a free, stable OS+browser combo; they need to be paid to do that as well? - ianf ⌘

I sure hope so. I think the wide array of JavaScript libraries have been killing Flash for years. Silverlight was never really a player. The only think keeping Flash afloat is video - Scott Radcliff

I don't know what's under the hood of Silverlight (nobody knows), but Flash is basically a sprite engine controlled by Actionscript, which is basically an adapted version of Javascript anyway. It's nicely packaged though, and has an army of developers, so it won't go away that easily, at least not until there are Flash-to-Canvas/ HTML5 porting tools/ translators and the like. - ianf ⌘

to follow that logic...photoshop is needed as well - Chris Hofmann

somebody call me when http://playboyarchive.com is working in Chrome OS (it's currently implemented in Silverlight) - Karim

If it gains any traction at all, MS will just make Silverlight version that will run on Google OS. Sure google could block it, but they haven't done so with the Chrome browser. - Jeff Weber

Interesting. I doubt the Google OS will get that big anytime soon though. - Scott Radcliff from email

Silverlight doesn't have a chance now...I wonder what would Adobe Air do. - Saad Kamal

not really, if google want to be open then they will need a plugin architecture for it and then MS could just port for it. I really don't see this troubling mainstream users any time soon. - Darren Stuart

Though I agree with the view that MS monopoly may erode as alternative devices get adoption over PC/Notebook, and these devices will mostly run on open source OS, but it may take years to create a significant change in every day usage of normal users. In the end, OS choice is mostly done by manufacturers, and they would be happy to get paid by open source vendors for putting their OS on... more... - Kaan Bingol

People want media. Hulu, Netflix, Kindle, iTunes, etc. They need to address that or they are DOA. - Hayes Haugen

Hayes, what makes you think it will lack media support? - Paul Buchheit

I don't think it will lack licensed media support but what deals they are able to make will be crucial. - Hayes Haugen

Hayes, i thought you were going to say that Netflix was using Silverlight. ;-) - Karim

Yes, they are, what is their deal with MSFT? Can they do non Silverlight distribution? - Hayes Haugen

i believe the Netflix non-Silverlight distribution is a format called "DVD" that works over the "Snail Mail" protocol. ;-) but clearly if Google is paying OEMs to install Chrome OS, they can pay Netflix to go back to Flash which Chrome OS will probably support "by necessity" ;-) - Karim

How can Google make money from Chrome OS? Or does it want to make money from it except through advertisement? I still can not imagine that all software and service are free and sponsored by advertisements. - Derek Wei

All Chrome OS questions are answered by today's Fake Steve Jobs ;) - Hayes Haugen

Is there a need to make money? If more and more people eschew desktop offline applications in favor of online web based apps, it means more pageviews, more eyeballs, more advertising inventory, plus has the side effect of undermining a big competitor's cash cow. - Ray Cromwell

That's the key, Google wants everything online. They figure the more people online, the stronger they become, and the more money they make. At least that what was said at the Chrome launch. - Scott Radcliff from email

I'm amused that the "backwards compatibility" argument against alternative operating systems has slowly turned into "does it support flash", and when you unpack that it really means "does it play YouTube". I suspect Google will make sure ChromeOS cna play YouTube and they don't need Flash to make sure of it. - Nick Lothian

Is it possible that Microsoft will write Office for the Web using Volta instead of Silverlight? Could be a showcase announcement for their attack on GWT - Ray Cromwell

I think Microsoft is going to focus less on the front-end of the web and more on the back-end, middle tier and database sides. Azure is a big deal that consumers aren't talking about because it's not flashy but will be pretty important to developers (and especially enterprise-level applications) when it's finally ready because everything becomes an interface to the cloud. Microsoft is... more... - Her Lindsay-ness

Azure looks really cool. Hint: so did Blackbird. - Michael R. Bernstein

lol blackbird (scary redmond flashback) - a good example of azure platform utilization can be seen via jon udell's elmcity project - http://blog.jonudell.net/elmcity... - mike "glemak" dunn

Nosense, I want silverlight, flash, html and any other technology in my desktop & mobile phone. Silverlight? yes, there you can develop under Python, Ruby et al, instead of the outdated javascript. - Sebastian Wain

Good Point, Paul. The web has to be free from proprietary software. And to h.264, sorry OGG Theora is free and superior. - Ryo / Fuck Facebook

It looks like with Native Client, you should be able to write your Chrome OS app in any language you feel like. So far, they have some examples in C/C++, but one of the things they ported is a Lua interpreter. If Adobe isn't going to invest heavily in fixing the show-stopping bugs on non-Windows versions of Flash, it's inevitably going to die, and there's really nothing either Google or Apple can do even if they wanted to support Flash better. - Victor Ganata

...ActionScript3 is ECMASCript-compliant. I know nothing about standards bodies, and shii like that, but what if Adobe dropped ActionScript and said, "You can now use pure Javascript to build Flash applications..." It wouldn't be a big leap. I'm pretty sure that would shut-up all the Flash haters. And to the folks who say Flash is hanging around just because of video...well, video is... more... - .LAG liked that

Actionscript is just the glue for the more advanced what-iffy graphic functionality of Flash. They can not drop it for Javascript, because it contains additional graphic primitives that JS lacks. But it's not the JS-or-Actionscript that makes it a target for hate, it's other things. Nobody denies that it's pretty capable, but it is also badly written, eats up memory like no other, makes... more... - ianf ⌘

I like this post! - Mohammad Abdurraafay from iPhone

I honestly don't know how necessary Flash is. Apple seems to be doing fine without supporting it. But certainly Gnash and Swfdec should be implementable on Chrome OS. The fact is that without Adobe's full support on a given platform, Flash apps will always be second class citizens on alternate platforms, and so far, there's no indication that Adobe is interested in fully supporting any platform other than Windows. - Victor Ganata

ianf ...you bring up great points about Flash's detriments, as does Victor, but until there's a better way to bring video to the Web, I can't see it disappearing. Adobe seems to keep improving the Flash VM, hopefully they'll address those CPU-hogging issues and make a more efficent runtime. Yeah, I hate hearing the fans kick-in when visiting a Flash-heavy site too. <sigh> - .LAG liked that

alternative to flash video such as ... html5 :) (requires ff3.5) http://www.dailymotion.com/openvid... - Mike Chelen from IM

that only covers video and audio... *sigh* - Ed F from IM

Ed, only??? thats one of the main reasons cited for the continued requirement of flash on popular sites like youtube - Mike Chelen

I know, and it seems I'm the only one who mentions Flash's other uses... :-/ - Ed F from IM

Ed, those other uses can be accomplished through pur

Robert Scoble › Likes