shinchi › Likes

I like the metaphor - Edwin Khodabakchian

: ) Yes Edwin! I like too! - Erhan Erdogan

Very true. - fbrunel

Great metaphor - Mike Doeff

"No phone, no lights no motor cars, Not a single luxury VC"—wait, that's not quite how the song goes. - Micah Wittman

That is what I was thinking, too. - Robert Scoble

You'd think they'd work toward getting something relevant if you search on "cuil launch" - Michael Markman

It's the only thing that makes sense when you look at how bad the results are. You don't roll out something like unless you are just showing off the interface. - Kevin Bondelli

Would also explain the weak branding. Who cares, if it's just going to get plugged into something else? - Chris Baskind

Not very good results at the moment I will say - shinchi from twhirl

It must be so hard to launch something in a realm where there isn't much tolerance/patience for incremental improvement. The bar in this space is high and consumers are very picky. Look at Yahoo. Their search is actually pretty damn good. However, they keep losing share. - Christopher Sacca

agree with Sacca - also, I thought the people behind Cuil had already sold some search technology to Google and hence they wanted to try it out on their own this time - so if anything they'd have more intent than others not to flip. - Adam Kazwell

100% agree with Paul .... what they have launched really sucks and I don't think I would be going back again to search .... Sacca seems to be right that the bar is really high in this space and whatever gets launched really needs to work well or it will fail - Raza from Alert Thingy

It is also strange that Cuil has no presence on twitter or friendfeed. There is no friendfeed.com/cuil. There is a twitter.com/cuil account but no twitters there. It would be interesting to hear from someone at Cuil on the FriendFeed/Twitter as to why they launched with the poor results... - Atul Arora

Yahoo's crawl speed is not close to GOOG. - Michael

It's something, and a reasonable first step. Yes, the results aren't that great but they seem reasonably comprehensive. Their make-or-break will be showing continuous visible progress - if they don't, sure, they're just a $XXXm dog and pony show for another company too scared of Google to see straight, but if they do improve, there may be potential for even more upside than that. - David Weekly

Google Killer? I do not even need to look to know the answer - Mike Reynolds

maybe there could be business in opening up their index? - Alex Gawley

I'm not saying that the results are good, but people seem overly critical. I saw one piece on how their name is too hard to spell. But if they did become popular, this would not remain a problem. - Clare Dibble

It's embarrassing IMO. The results are thin and the images completely wrong. Not good is one thing ... Cuil seems a cut below not good right now. - AJ Kohn

There results aren't -bad- but they are in no way great. Worse yet, anytime you start throwing around X-killer, you are pretty much setting yourself up for destruction. - Steve Spalding

can a startup beat google with a link-based algorithmic search engine? msft's cashback.com is an example of changing the game. trovix.com's deep semantic indexing is changing the game. same for thefind.com. mahalo human-powered engine is too. Who else? - Tim Connors

Paul, maybe they launched because they believed gathering data and feedback from the public would help them improve their ranking and other aspects of their service? I don't think that their ranking is anywhere near as good as Google's right now. But, there's no a priori reason to believe that Cuil ranking won't improve quickly. Anna, Russell, et.al. are actually pretty sharp. I for one am excited to see another player in search with new ideas about infrastructure and user experience. - Kevin Scott

They of all people should have known to release with fast results (latency).. The fact that they did not surprises me, and had the exact effect I would expect.. I have no plans on going back, good results or not.. :) - Derek Collison

Does "launch early" work for search engines? Don't think so.. - Jing Lim

One of the nice things about Google is the speed they index. Consider the indexing of a blog post made yesterday: Google already picked up the post and Cuil has not. http://www.cuil.com/search... VERSUS http://www.google.com/search... Google shows 367 results and that is trouble for Cuil. They'll need to work on that quickly to convince people they are being serious. - LPH™ and his dog P™

it's about as useful as Archie(Gopher ref) - clarke thomas

considering I got server overloaded errors when I tried it at first, I'd have to say launching early was a big error in judgement. - sean808080

The indexing speed of Google and other search engines is pretty good, but another area that needs fixing is when content moves. It takes a long time for Google to catch up. Example: Let's say you move your blog or an early well-praised site goes stale, many search engines have trouble adjusting their rankings to the new site or to push down the older one. - Loren Heiny

Trouble is that indexing and ranking are closely linked. If all you return is a hitlist there's no good ranking that can be done. Can't yet tell whether they're in that situation. What I don't get is why the rush to launch now. - Daniel Dulitz

I read similar thoughts on Reddit yesterday and they made some sense... is there any chance all the negative buzz right now is going to hurt their buyability though? - Philipp Lenssen

IMHO there have to be better ways to show off your very own crawling+indexing technologies than opening up to the public and getting thrashed for not delivering what people expect when you dub your service search engine. I have a hard time believing that the cuil/cuill guys did not know what they were doing though ... Were they pushed to release by financiers? Were they in dire need of usage data? - Mustafa K. Isik

I do think they built Cuil to be bought. The reason they launched is they hoped their valuation will go up with all the press blitz... Which seems pretty well planned.... I think they went overboard selling themselves to the press and did not expect some of the back-lash. Of course, the saying goes - "All press is good press :)". So who knows this might indeed increase their valuation to 100s of millions :). It all depends on what the folks over at MSFT think/know about search :)) - Bindu Reddy

someone cough microsoft cough - Sarah Perez

M$ bait! ah ha!! Bindu and Sarah, you're on to something there!! - Susan Beebe

I liked this thread so much that I blogged it: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... - Erick Schonfeld

As of yesterday, they didn't even have their own name indexed: http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Brady Brim-DeForest

actually, they are off to a decent start. They have a nice interface that needs work, and some results are good and many others bad. I can tell you it takes about a year to getting your feet under you and figure out where you can fit in the search ecosystem. They are funded for a three year run it seems, so I would give them a year and see where the product is at. - Jason Calacanis

grabbing contextual images process is too weird! (o_O) - Pınar Yanardağ

great discussion. the more I've read about the various GRAVE screw-ups (with porn images being linked to some people's bios, etc.), the more I tend to agree that they must have known that things weren't ready. It just feels too much like a prototype... Thus the buy-out scenario seems plausible. Who knows, buying their indexing technology could actually give a boost to MSFT or even Yahoo, given that they have a hard time keeping up on the tech/scale side of search. One thing we do know is that Google... - Alex Schleber

... isn't going to buy them :) I wrote a post on the branding aspect of the Cuil debacle earlier today -> http://businessmindhacks.com/post... but now I'm not so sure anymore if they were even serious about the whole thing. Maybe they're having a hearty laugh right now that no one is getting the joke. If they are serious though, it's a horrible launch and horrible branding. - Alex Schleber

Is it possible that they might be taking advantage of the disconnect between mainstream and social media? Cuil has made it in the news but to what extent has the negativity made it to the mainstream? If people get their news outside of the social media circle (which, as we are all quickly discovering, is a vast majority) and only hear that "Google killer Cuil has launched today" but... more... - Derick Valadao

Buy the creole restaurant owned by the biggest Bill Cosby fan ever, somewhere near Notre Dame. - Tracy Dempsey

Invest heavily in speech recognition so that video comments can be read textually. - Eric Florenzano

Agree with Eric, speach recognition with simultaneous translation ! - Jean-François Amadei from twhirl

A phone App to seesmic-ing with our iPhone - Jean-François Amadei from twhirl

Myspace and FaceBook integration, and congruency between browsers. Personally I'm a fan of the black UI on Safari vs the white interface on FF - Mona Nomura

Definitely audio/video recognition so people/object can be computationally tagged. Video is becoming like pictures.. and keeping track of videos is going to get more and more difficult. Seesmic is cool but I think it can really stand out if it takes the video technology to the next level. you should also enable audio conversations/replies. Some people want to reply or take part using just speech. ALso i think mobile integration is important, being able to participate and listen/watch through your phone. - Akshay Dodeja

love the idea of speech recognition - ledretch from twhirl

selling the company to xxxx, take the money and run on an island, like the ex "la fraise" CEO did :) (friend of your isn't it?) - aruban from twhirl

A talent contest like Pop Idol(Web Idol) having a great geek jury ; ) Choose the 4? - Erhan Erdogan

without a doubt, speech to text...get it all indexed. - Zee.

Check out Google speech to text gadget --> http://bit.ly/4tiAAe - Jim McCusker

Make it work in Firefox. Vids don't play about 60% of the time when clicked from external link (non Seesmic) - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

I'd hire an interesting VIP and provide people the opportunity talking to someone they would mostly never have the chance to meet and talk with in real world - Margit Hinke

hmmm ideas: 1. I would make a bookmarklet that would allow me to share a link with my video comments. 2. I would get seesmic running in twhirl asap 3. Figure out how to get mobile video working in America (iphone or through a custom email for all the other phones with video capability). 4. I would license Summize.com type search for seesmic so that videos and conversations could be tracked, replied and engaged with greater ease. 5. Wordpress and Typepad plugin development, become the vlog tool of choice - Tony

text to speech, so I can write/SMS/twitter a comment and have my avatar lipsync it as a CGI-generated seesmic for when I don't have a camera. - Bill Thompson from twhirl

+1 for the VIP - Jean-François Amadei from twhirl

thank you all, I will sum up all of your suggestions (and the ones I got on other social software) in one post, keep them going - Loic Le Meur

Convince eBay to integrate Seesmic for feedback, contact on sellers/buyers - Daniel De Luca from twhirl

Robert (Scoble!) iphone would not get you use Seesmic. I am interested in what would make YOU use Seesmic. thanks for your help! - Loic Le Meur

I agree with a bunch of other people an iPhone app but I also think having a version that isn't so reliant on flash would be nice so that some of those things like the OLPC and stuff would be able to support it out of the box (since you are going to start with taht educational version I think I read about) - Andrew Fielding

Loic - if you could give Scoble Qik capability via Seemic except better quality, I bet he'd bite (: - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

The possibility to add special effects on the videos, based on face detection (ie: use another background, put a hat/sunglasses/moustache on the face...) - Federico F. from twhirl

So I am going to take a different approach. As a CEO with $10M in VC cash number one priority would be to grow seesmic. Increase the stockholder value. I think technologically speech recognition would be great but its not going to immediately grow(users/PViews). I think partnerships and bring VIPs as someone mentioned would be a good start. Video conversations is interesting but for people to come to the site and really use a service like this you need interesting content as a topic of discussion.... - Akshay Dodeja

I liked a lot Tony's ideas. If the posibility of croping video/photo partsfrom original video stream were possible, then a stumbleupon feature (specifying video/photo interest and navigating through them) and del.icio.us like feature of bookmarking certain video/photo parts of a video stream or the entirely would be cool. Also a possibility of somehow putting together bunch of photos into a Seesmic video woldnt be bad, via iPhone or on web. - Hayk H.

... like youtube the responses works really well when there is a good content. I think if you are able to bring video content to seesmic, user generated or partnerships and have people discuss those. That can create major buzz. Seesmic does conversations really, but honestly I don't want to take my conversation over there. I want to respond to popular content/ideas. - Akshay Dodeja

download my video's - so I can share them also via other sites - Erno Hannink

Another idea 6. is to have a "room" sort of functionality cooked in that could be private, similar to Friendfeeds model. Except it could be used like 37 Signals "Journal" feature for teams, groups or any other types of social or affinity circles of people. I think a barrier for a lot of people with seesmic could be that everyone sees you, instead of just the people you already know or want to connect with - (ie everyday usage). - Tony

Oh yes, MP4 links so when I embed videos in to my blog they get picked up and sent as podcast via Feedburner - Douglas E. Welch from twhirl

I'd do ADULT rooms... - Margit Hinke

Hahaha ! Adult room, funny idea... - Jean-François Amadei from twhirl

I'd let someone special do her/his VERY PRIVATE seesmic DIARY for a while... for example the wife who gave a special Bday present to her husband:1 year - 365 days sex every day - probably u heard about this story since the couple wrote a book about this special time.... every day 60 seconds talk about ... and Im absolutly sure people will love it. - Margit Hinke

Another idea, if i may add, could be perhaps to organize live chat/conversations/interviews with Seesmic members/invited guests on streets/restaurants etc. Members voting for topic(s) and then once-per-month (periodical) live chat/conversation on that topic(s). - Hayk H.

Maybe have a hotkey that will do a picture-in-picture from an image on your computer. For example, if you're telling a story about your vacation, while you're talking you can hit the ctrl-1 key to show a pre-defined slide as an overlaid PIP. With another key you can make it toggle full-screen. This way you can do lectures with visual aids. Online video presentations and education FTW. - sergiooo

63 now :) - Myriam

apparently the voting thingy worked eh Loic?! coolio! - Susan Beebe

it worked fantastic! thank you all for your help - Loic Le Meur

Seesmic I've heard of what is this Youtube? - Mark Forman

Hope everything will go well for this deal :) - ledretch from twhirl

Is seesmic the new google ? - Frédérick 2 Baro

Buy Twitter while you're at it. - Raphael, Raphael

Good work, any rebranding? YouLoiBe? - Joe Dawson

Get Yahoo while you're at it, show Microsoft how it should be done ;) - Garrido from twhirl

You're buying YouTube OMG that's awesome... you rock man! ;*) - Susan Beebe

Yea, buy twitter... they need you bad!! puuulllllllleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaazzzzzzzzzee - Susan Beebe

I cahn haz Microsoft buying Yahoo? You cahn haz YouTube? - David Newman

wait, we are in June right? Is this a delayed April Fools' joke? - Rob Diana

great, so you know how to monetize that beeatch?!? ;) - dave mcclure

You should buy Google first and make a new design at their favicon^^Buying YouTube : is it serious or viral? - Samuel Goëta

Hmmm, merging with Friendfeed?-) - Patrick Chanezon

Great decision with the acquisition Loic, hope you already know how to deal with copyrighted content over there :) - Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana, yes, I found a solution with copyrighted content on Google, we will turn off video upload on YouTube. - Loic Le Meur

Loic, I hope you aren't going to turn it all off, I like some of the things over there especially the record companies who put up there content for people to listen to and enjoy!! - Paul

Of course... everything should be filmed real-time! Even the copyrighted material... :) - directeur

Lend me $20? - john conroy

Turning the uploads off is definitely a clever solution. Why have not the guys from Google thought of that yet? - Svetlana Gladkova from twhirl

ok so as you could see I could not raise enough money to by YouTube yet. I found $6M and would have needed $6 billions... - Loic Le Meur

OOps, I guess that M and B in $6M and $6B are a slight bit different ;*) - Susan Beebe

I'm buying Youtube too! - Dave Winer

Dave are you buying Youtube too? Ah. We're competing then, we should talk to try not to make the acquisition price not go too high. - Loic Le Meur

I offered them $82 billion, maybe I should try lowering the offer? - Dave Winer

Let's see, I've got a dime, a penny and a piece of gum with pocket lint all over it. Can I buy a share? - Jack (a.k.a. Jeber)

And if you bork the exposure, you have a much better chance of fixing the image. - ThePicMan

I've caught this bug as well, and with it the desire to get a better camera. - Doug Brooks

I just went back in my catalog. I made a nearly clean break in early 2006, with absolutely no regrets. It's saved my butt on many shots. - Kevin Johnson from twhirl

So much data in there and white balance no longer matters. - Andrew Smith

can you open a raw file just like any other image file on a mac? - raincloudcat

someone should collect them for a high school dev center - they are still useful as dev test devices - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

nothing like a $400.00 or $500.00 disposable phone eh - Steven Hodson

Coaster - MG Siegler

use it as a vnc remote control! - shinchi from twhirl

because it was shiny ;) - David Petar Novakovic from twhirl

that should be: suckers who bought a 2G brick because it was shiny ;) - David Petar Novakovic from twhirl

Family member gift, like all my not-quite-old-but-not-used computer equipment. - Bret Taylor

Here's a thought: Keep using it. I know....radical thinking. - Bwana ☠ from fftogo

I agree with bwana. Keep using your iphone. The only big difference is like 30 seconds less loading time on the browser - Anthony

as a matter of fact it would cost you the 199/299 plus 120 dollars extra a year service charges plus a long day at the apple store that you could spend complaining about the iphone with me on FF - Anthony

@Bwana shame on you for suggesting something so sensible after all how's His Jobness suppose to advance the power of Apple if such talk discourages the emptying of wallets .. Moshe gonna be on your ass in the morning :) - Steven Hodson

plus activation - Anthony

plus the "im steve jobs so give me money" fee... - Anthony

Oooh, the iPhone->iPod idea sounds great. Sign me up for that. - Don MacAskill

My plan is to make the current iPhone the jail-broken one and use the new one with my current AT&T sim - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

I'm going to frame mine. And worship it. - Richard

send it too the third world - Brad Stevens from twhirl

your 1st gen iphone is now reduced to an ipod touch. it's not worth having 2 phones and both are at&t isn't it? - Danny M from twhirl

I offer to buy your fully functional iPhone for 70 dollars. :) There you have it, suckers! *g* (They said that you could trade in the old iPhones for 200 bucks. I wonder what Apple will do with all these old iPhones, after all.) - sebmos

What's the matter with giving it as gift to a family member? - Francine Hardaway

So there are actually people, on this post, who own the 1st gen iphones, and are going to get a 3G iphone. If so, i guess i just want to take this time to tell you that you are now officially a slave to trends. Who fuckin cares that its only 2 hundred bucks, that new iphone is a slap in the face with no video support - Anthony

You don't hear Blackberry users whine when some faster, slimmer, curvier or bolder one comes out - you keep on using it until it dies or the plan runs out - Sally Church

Well, how about not buying a new iPhone in the first place? I generally try to avoid updating my hardware until it's too late, which is why I still have a fifth generation iPod video. Now excuse me, I've got to fix one of my punchcard computers. :P - Rishabh Mishra (p248)

Just like the last iteration was a slap in the face with no 3G or GPS or MMS or ..or..or? Yet it sold millions. Apple knows this stuff better than we do. - Bwana ☠

Yeah, liked that posted by Robert and I think he should adopt the (D) choice i.e. send me that old stinin' iphone :) - directeur

They need to change the cap that's in place! - Joe Dawson

You are just too good for them. :D - Daniel Schildt

LOL - Erno Hannink

I hate Facebook because of this. Who are THEY to tell me you have too many friends? - Robert Scoble

They have good reason for that but still... there are power users like you and Scoble (and whole bunch of others) that would like to have more connections than what is possible. - Daniel Schildt

I guess guys like you and Scoble should not have user profiles but be groups, to be honest. I'm sure the groups have larger limits. - Gerard van Schip

Gerard: the problem with groups is that they don't have things like apps. - Robert Scoble

You can never have too many friends... facebook must be wrong! :) - Lucretia Pruitt

Loic, Robert: Is Facebook slow for you guys? - i.e. is there any truth to Facebook's claim that the 5,000 friend limit is there for performance reasons? - Mike Doeff

You are truly one of the Cool Kids. - Chris Baskind

Mike: it's sometimes slow, yes, but never as bad as Twitter's direct messaging capabilities are for me. - Robert Scoble

Mike, yes it is sometimes slow but they fixed the add a friend now much faster. However I can't add any anymore but you know that already! - Loic Le Meur

Be careful not to get Banned, there are a lot of users being banned off Face Book for having too many friends. http://getsatisfaction.com/faceboo... - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Igor: the bans are only if WE add more people, not if people add us. I haven't added someone myself to Facebook in a very long time. In fact, I really don't use Facebook much at all. - Robert Scoble

Loic, try to add yourself as a friend to yourself and check what happens ! - Ron Shoshani

why the hell would I want to add myself as a friend to myself !? - Loic Le Meur

@Ron S -- Shhhh!! Doing this will open up a Scrabuloous paradox and rip the fabric of space and time and release the Zuck demon to reign over the universe for four Quatoon-epochs. (That's pretty much what's happening anyway, but we don't want to accelerate te process.) - john conroy

Lucky you!! Think of all the poking you're going to get!! - Mark O'Neill

that's hillarious & 1 of the reasons I hate facebook! Who r they 2 tell Anyone they've got TOO many friends! Wth?! Is there such a thing?! Shheeeesh! (shakes head) - Deborah Micek

In Soviet Russia, you do not have too many friends. Too many friends..have..you? - Mike Lewis

One can never have too many friends! - Michelle Trent

There you go.. Its facebook's 5000 friend limit, I think which you are hitting! - Jigar Mehta

Is it only me that the 5000 friend limit annoys? - Leslie Poston

Its annoying to all 'famous' people, but I think Facebook has got their scalability limit!! ;) - Jigar Mehta

I just can't agree with all this. What subset of Facebook users has or even WANTS 5000 friends? - Bwana ☠

Hey! We're talking about followers here, not friends! :) - directeur

Yes indeed, there is not that many of those that really have that much of Real friends. - Daniel Schildt

Maybe they should do a premium version with a subscription fee:-) - Patrick Chanezon

wow, I did't know that! Which is the limit? - Matias Sulzberger from twhirl

I'm his friend woohoo. i got added awhile ago biatches ;) - Tyler Gillies

if you were prickly like me, you'd not have this problem! - sean808080

Is it still 500? - Muthu Ramadoss