"Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features - a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all."
- Itachi
"But you're not limited to just those features. Open Atrium is completely customizable. If you want a feature that's not on that list, you can add it yourself. Read the documentation, specifically the How to Build a Feature section, to find out how to do it."
- Itachi
I'ts not a matter of "open source", it's a matter of deciding how you as an organization define the way to manage "openness" in your context, be it by open sourcing, offering open APIs, initiating or joining product and business ecosystems, or simply being rigidly closed for very good reasons.
- Olivier Biot
"But what if there were only one message, shared in the cloud? Now, your comment on the second paragraph is attached directly to that point in the conversation. There are no redundant copies of portions of the message, as replies are seen in context. As you can see in the screenshot below (click to enlarge), a Wave inbox looks much like an email inbox. But look to the right, and you can see how the replies are embedded right into the middle of the original message, so Stephanie's question about what camera Jens used for his photos appears right in context."
- Daniel J. Pritchett
from Bookmarklet
The huge screenshot is exciting me. This is like what Sharepoint would look like if it were a Google product.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
My only concern is how this service is going to pull in users who prefer/need lo-fi communications. Will it integrate seamlessly with email, text, twitter, and all of those other things that each year's luddites are going to hold onto in lieu of the latest and greatest?
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Daniel, I'm talking like LinkedIn invites to have someone added as a colleague. Are those types of invites really needed in in-house social networks? Isn't it implicit that everyone is your colleague ? Thoughts?
- Luis Benitez
I don't see much reason for private profiles in-house. LDAP for account creation/login with the option for private rooms/groups in the odd case you need one. In general I prefer to make everything open by default for in-house socnets.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
"The print xkcd book is not being published through a traditional company but rather by breadpig — which was created by Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of the social-news Web site reddit. The site has sold high-concept merchandise like refrigerator magnets or T-shirts, but never a book. (Its profits go to the charity Room to Read.) • “We never made any projection — 10,000 seems like a good run,” Mr. Ohanian said, adding that this lack of research “is laughable from the perspective of anyone who knows the book industry. It’s what makes sense.”"
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
Yet another confirmation that I am too old and have failed in life. :)
- Louis Gray
To all you friendfeeders who tell me to create lists and filters: No! I'm busy and therefore lazy. I want a system that will learn from me, rather than me having to teach it. What say you?
Jeremiah: I just want to share my lists with you. That way I can do the hard work and you can be lazy. :-)
- Robert Scoble
jeremiah - i started w/ lists when they first were offered by friendfeed awhile ago, i view it as one of its strongest features, great way to categorization those whose presence you follow, then i drop in and out of interactivity based on my availability :)
- mike "glemak" dunn
robert - it would be nice to share lists, i also miss the ability to expand lists which went away in the beta
- mike "glemak" dunn
mike: all the old features better come back before they move the beta over to the real site. I am finding some of these little missing things very frustrating.
- Robert Scoble
I'm still not using lists. Filters are great, and very easy.
- Eric @ CSTechcast.com
That's why I'm using filters that other people have created. I don't have to do the work, and I still get to use it.
- Elizabeth Parmeter
The problem then would be that you, or others, would complain that the system is "learning incorrectly" and giving you what you don't want. A little effort is always necessary to achieve refined customization.
- Nathan Chase
Eric: the best thing I ever did here was create a list. The signal level there is 100x better than my "everyone" list.
- Robert Scoble
I don't understand: if anyone else were making this statement, or if it were about anything else (say, email and folders) no one would be offering to make his email folders for him. No one would say email should learn from him.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
FF does learn from you; that's what FoF is; but to expect it to do it all independent of effort (or even at least trying prepackaged filters)???? I suppose some people really are fans of getting exercise vicariously too, but I don't understand them either.
- David HC Soul
Jeremiah, Facebook's old model did this. It quasi-intelligently took many variables into account (many of them user-tweakable through customization) and displayed the old (pre-Friendfeed clone) Home page... taking into account the things users liked, disliked, geographic regions, and I'm sure many other factors that are undisclosed. Yet, Facebook (for the worse, IMHO) has abandoned this model in favor of the "drink from the fire hose" model of twitter.
- tollie williams
I'm too lazy to read all the comments. Scoble will you summarize?
- Jeremiah Owyang
Owyang: Do you have a toilet integrated with your lazy-boy, by chance?
- coldbrew
Coldbrew, if you revealed your real name, do you think your attitude will change to a non-sucky one? You're really rude.
- Mona Nomura
Johnny Worthington's consulting services are required here. He educated me on these manners. I now have a pretty decent system going!
- Mike Nayyar
But the point is, list / filter creations should not be complicated. Most users are too lazy. And I agree with Jeremiah.
- Mona Nomura
<- Frustrated that this thread is rehashing the first thread. Building a sub list and [Like]ing items is plenty of effort in and of itself to inform a BoD list. The current FF "lists" feature is great but doesn't need to be a prerequisite for useful Best of Day content.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Daniel - I didn't understand any of that LOL
- Mona Nomura
Mona - Jeremiah doesn't want to do *more* work (i.e. creating lists). He's already implicitly agreed to the work of subscribing to FFers and clicking [Like] on the occasional FF item. That body of work should be more than enough for an intelligent FriendFeed Best of Day recommendation engine to give him the news he needs. Lists are great for completely separate reasons and while they provide a workaround to the Best of Day problem they are not an excuse for shortcomings of the Best of Day page.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Seriously, you are looking for something like a complex learning algorithm similar to Amazon's recommendation engine
- Merry Xmas FFeeders - AJ
FTR I agree with Jeremiah as well. I'm just playing devils advocate. Jeremiah is the least lazy of almost anyone I know.
- Jesse Stay
It's not an easy problem AJ, just an obvious one. Surely you think Paul et al are up to the task...
- Daniel J. Pritchett
I agree, but I seem to be in a minority. I think people should be categorized for me. Either by the system or my their own choosing. If I disagree with where they put themselves, I can make modifications after the fact.
- Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah
Daniel, agree. I'm sure Paul and team are up to the task. But this takes time.
- Merry Xmas FFeeders - AJ
well I want a Ferrari , but I think both of us are pretty much out of luck
- Kim Landwehr
It also kinda sucks that Jeremiah had to start a new thread to refresh the discussion spawned by the old one. The vastly longer discussions enabled by the beta interface are quickly exposing the weak points in the single-thread conversation UI we're given.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
It's way too much to sift through, frankly.
- Mona Nomura
coldbrew, right. and i have the fridge and microwave next to me so i NEVER have to move.
- Jeremiah Owyang
Mona: If you weren't so full of yourself do you think you might be able to understand that some people appreciate some separation between public and private lives? My point was that lazy_as_a_lifestyle has a point at which it becomes ridiculous, what my username is irrelevant no matter what you write. Sorry I can't conform to your way of doing things. Let me guess, I'm using FF incorrectly?
- coldbrew
Owyang: Awesome! Have you seen the Homer Simpson trick of how to get your beer to you from the other end of the coffee table?
- coldbrew
Coldbrew: I gives you a hug. *jeremiah hugs coldbrew*. :) Btw, I really need a cold brew! *jeremiah reaches over from lazy boy to fridge*
- Jeremiah Owyang
Brew: (since you call me "owyang") no, send me URL to hopefully a youtube video of said Homer trick.
- Jeremiah Owyang
I think it's a rare case that Jeremiah even gets to be at home.
- Jesse Stay
While I have no problems creating lists etc, I do agree that FF (or any such tool) ought to be able to start getting intelligent about what i like based on the metadata that I leave on the site
- Anand Sharma
I'd like to think a learn filter could be helpful, but I wonder how well that works on scale, Facebook certainly fails on their new friend recommendations as it auto assumes I want to fan what my friends have fanned.
- Patrick Boegel
Facebook also fails to remember when I tell it once that I really don't want to friend this person it's suggesting. Why do I even bother clicking if it's just going to come back next session? What happens when I up/downvote sidebar ads? They're training me to do all of this crap but I see no persistent results that I can directly connect to my actions.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Agreed Daniel they have a huge problem with those sidebar votes, they are not getting more relevant in general.
- Patrick Boegel
I totally agree with this. Friendfeed already knows who are my eight favourite friendfeeders, so why not let me create a list or feed or whatever that is literally "give me only the stuff from my top x buddies"? That would solve it.
- Marcos Marado
from fftogo
You want something to learn from you... without you teaching it. Hmmm... Is this some sort of Cylon technology we haven't heard of?
- Bwana ☠
@Bwana - i think the personalized version would be called Mememe
- Daniel J. Pritchett
You can create all the filters and lists you want, if you're not following the right people, it's all futile. From your original post, it looks like you don't like the people you chose to follow. So if creating lists/filters is too hard, how about unfollowing those that bother you? Too hard?
- Bwana ☠
I'll wager Jeremiah's problem is more that he follows people with interesting jobs who don't always share interesting links. If Scoble [Like]s a lolcat, should it show up on my feed or not?
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Using FeedScrub on some of my RSS feeds definitely makes them more focused. Piping FF via FeedScrub seems v. clunky though.
- Yan
The only way a lazy person can use FriendFeed is to use Techmeme
- Bwana ☠
Social media platforms that don't develop powerful recommender systems for news, discussions and people are going to disappear quickly from the scene. Friendfeed needs to do much more much more quickly on this front. Feedly is already making important strides forward in refining its news recommender system.
- Sean McBride
Developers and software companies that argue that people shouldn't be too lazy to perform tasks that could be performed by software are in the wrong business. Few of them survive in a competitive environment which rewards products that automate human tasks (like finding the most relevant information for a particular person in a particular situation). (Actually, none of them have the slightest chance of surviving -- they don't seem to get what software is all about: more work, less effort.)
- Sean McBride
I love Friendfeed beta the way it's currently designed with real-time updates, infinite filtering options, and ever-updated conversations around topics of the day. That being said, I don't think it will ever reach mass adoption unless it significantly automates the discovery of content or presents a significantly dumbed-down version of what it is. It is too powerful a tool to be adopted en masse. Too much chaos expecting to be ordered. Not everyone's IQ is Scobleized.
- Ryan Miller
Ryan FF is for the outliers. It's not going to be a mainstream tool in it's current configuration. I don't recommend many clients to use it.
- Jeremiah Owyang
Here's a question, does FriendFeed have to go mainstream to succeed?
- Bwana ☠
Depends, Bwana. I don't know about you, but I'm having a dollar a month worth of fun on FF and would certainly pay that.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Bwana. No it doesn't have to go mainstream to succeed. BTW: most of the employees are ex-googlers, many who have cashed out. This appears to be a a labor of love
- Jeremiah Owyang
Bwana, that's a great question. I've got a lot of real life friends over here from Twitter but cannot get them conversing. They prefer convos on Twitter or Facebook.
- Sally Church
I agree, that would be nice I suppose, but what would that learning be based upon? It's almost impossible to have a system learn from people who are predominately lurkers for example.
- David Leip
from Nambu
jeremiah - i do the opposite, i've been recommending friendfeed to our editors and j-school's i've spoken at recently as a great example of an emerging tool that easily allows content publishing, filtering and conversation tracking...
- mike "glemak" dunn
@Scobleizer - can I have your lists? I spend plenty of time in Google Reader, Twitter, & FB but could learn much more w/ your lists.
- Courtney Engle
Bwana: despite not the desired solution, unfollowing people is a possibility. Yet, the issue remains: if friendfeed knows who are those I read the most from those whom I follow, why don't friendfeed tell me who are those who I should unsubscribe?
- Marcos Marado
I also had some troubles to set my lists & filters. Not that I am lazy (not for that ;-) but I didn't know how to proceed, what was the methodology to make efficient filters : reduce the noise and improve signal.
- Stanislas Jourdan
Fortunately, a friend helped me showing his own lists and filters. (thanks Jérôme!)
- Stanislas Jourdan
Do you go to Google and magically have the results for what you're thinking about appear?
- AJ Kohn
Pritchett: Most of us got that from the beginning and simply took the opportunity to give him a hard time. Others, took it way too seriously, weighed-in and acted as if they are the product manager. I know, internet IS serious biz.
- coldbrew
Bah, the comment that predicated my last 2-3 comments has vanished, making me look slightly nuts. I'll cut mine to clean the thread. Sorry coldbrew.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Single best list to create: pick your five most interesting Friendfeeders and make a list of just their likes. Incredible signal to noise ratio.
- Leo Laporte
Leo Laporte -- it would be extremely easy for Friendfeed to automate the algorithm you just mentioned as part of a Friendfeed news recommender system. Most Friendfeed users are not going to take the trouble to create this filter by hand. But they would click on a single button to produce a ranked list of the new/unread items that are most personally relevant and globally important for them.
- Sean McBride
I too have laziness in excess, and am not inclined to create filters and lists. Some kind of learning algorithm that delivers only the content I desire would indeed make the whole system more streamlined for me personally. Such code is, of course, the holy grail of pretty much all content providers and distributors. Maybe friendfeed will take us there one day, or perhaps google will, or even an as-yet-unstarted company, but each day without it brings us closer to it.
- Slappy Line
Exactly waiting for drop down lists & a manageable UI to make list making understandable/manageable, we're not the one's coding here. Further the filter options are inadequate to say the least
- sofarsoShawn
Slippy 2.0 -- Feedly is already there, leaving Friendfeed and Google Reader well behind the curve. I've come to the conclusion that Friendfeed and Google Reader just don't get the news recommendation thing (although I still admire and use them for other features). There is a good chance that FF and GR will suffer the same fate as Bloglines.
- Sean McBride
It's easy. Click on the name of someone you like. On the right you'll see their number of "likes." Click that. Then subscribe to it. For best results put it in a list called "Likes" that you can then just click it in your list of lists on the right. Whenever I see someone with good taste in likes I add them to that list. Surfaces everything interesting very quickly.
- Leo Laporte
I hadn't noticed that Anthony. You can't manage Like lists! Weird. That's a serious bug. I'll submit that to the bug room.
- Leo Laporte
I prefer to make my own list and categories, I found that many times when the list is made through an site or algorithm, a lot is missed or assumed. Besides I am not sure what the list would be based on unless it is likes. That brings up another problem, that many times when I click on like, it means I thought the article was interesting, not that I necessary liked the subject. Plus not I am assuming that many people don't necessarily use like a lot.
- Kim Landwehr
prefer my own lists and filters, but it would sure be nice to have an easy to find collection of some of the best ones for several different areas of interest. Then lazy people could use those, and more importantly newbies could find high signal, and quality people to subscribe to, as well as quality examples of how to make powerful filters.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
"This week, at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Boston, computer scientists demonstrated ways to find experts more accurately. Using data-mining techniques, software can help determine what skills a person practices regularly, and how likely she is to respond to requests for help."
- V Mary Abraham
Your FF bio cracks me up by the way... I'm moderately hearing impaired (hearing aids, but can still hear most conversation) and I get pretty defensive about it myself as well. I think it has a lot to do with why I'm so comfortable expressing myself online, too.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
The best way of learning something is by teaching. It obliges you to think about a consistent explanation: "how do I explain this to somebody?"
- Olivier Biot
... In other words, our workforce spans 4 generations and even more levels of organizational leadership, and everyone wants the best ideas at the company to be shared as freely as possible so that we can weather the recession. You won’t be surprised to hear that I think enterprise social networking can cure most of the problems we discussed in the meeting.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Good idea. How about an internal FriendFeed? FriendFeed is much smoother.
- Meryn Stol
I personally prefer FriendFeed but since FB is much more popular I figure it would be an easier sell. Plus the group features are more analogous to real world project teams than an FF room.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
We found it easier to implement Basecamp (URL: http://basecamphq.com) than anything else: no setup, small cost, and no support. The developers we contract with use it, as well: from what they told us and our own experiences, using Basecamp has singlehandedly increased engagement more than any other solution.
- Mark Trapp
Good luck. As far as I could tell from the docs, the facebook platform is more for testing facebook apps then for running a real facebook clone. Is this correct? Anyway, keep us posted :)
- Nick Boucart
I mentioned this yonks ago, ff has so much corporate potential. I'll drag out my blog post on it
- alphaxion
@Itafroma: I'm worrying more about adoption and usability than featureset or ease of installation. Getting this stuff in the door is the hardest part. I'm mostly just guessing anyway - our first step internally is going to be getting better use out of our SharePoint sites.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
from IM
@Nick: I haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to get it up and running - I checked the fbOpen wiki and it looks like it takes a linux server and hours and hours of work just to get it up and running. Doesn't seem like there is an easy to set up package yet.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
from IM
Alpha: Lots of people use private FF rooms for small teams already, it's a great thing.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
from IM
Daniel, if there's two things I've learned from going through the same process myself over the past couple of years is, 1) make sure you can test things out for a month and completely drop it if it's not working. You're going to find that it's going to hit or miss with any internal social system: it's very hard to predict what people are going to take to. This kills any project that...
more...
- Mark Trapp
As an aside: Disqus ports comments properly now, and preserves editing and authorship information (it's below the comments). Whatever tool you're using to port them should probably be turned off.
- Mark Trapp
This is an interesting idea. My environment lends well to small interconnected teams however I don't know if a Facebook style app will do in a clinical environment like a hospital. I need to cogitate on this...
- Andy Glover
http://www.alphaxion.com/... was the blog post I mentioned. And I know about the use of rooms for small teams, we used it too when I was on the rocketboom team.
- alphaxion
@mark- good call re: uncanny valley. Ff2disqus is a little hairy but at least it increments the comment counter unlike the default. I'm not 100% pleased with either option.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
"It's time to party like it's 1234567890 – 'cause it is! On this Friday, Feb 13 at exactly 3:31:30 PM (PST), Unix time (WTF is Unix time?) will equal '1234567890'."
- Vladimir Blagojevic
from Bookmarklet