My only complaint is how it handles browser history. I'd prefer a drop down or something other than a full page. - Peter Simard
Chrome is probably the most efficient browser I've seen to date. But maybe that's coz I'm not that old to have seen every browser to date. :) - Imran Hussain
Started Chrome before FF, in fact I don't even have FF open yet. - Roberto Bonini
i am digging it too. weird thing happened to me this morning though. i was in facebook and only certain major nav links were working. I had to revert to firefox. - Don Martelli via twhirl
I haven't launched Firefox since Chrome came out. - Akiva Moskovitz
I'm using Chrome on 2 of my PCs as my primary browser -- it's faster and feels better. Still using Firefox on my Mac, because, well, it's a Mac. :) - Thomas Hawk
Running Chrome on the PC's and Omniweb on the Mac. - Richard Peat
feels like I run into more and more crashes tho..that's kinda a bad thing - Pascal
I've been using Chrome off and on. It doesn't support NTLM so at work I use FF, because I don't want to login to every site. @Imran, lynx was probably the most efficient, but then it was text only. - Shawn McCollum
A lot of spin out there that seems to conveniently ignore the fact that this is Chrome 1.0. You think its just going to go away or something? They'll fix the bugs. And Google has quietly encircled Microsoft, and can now slowly choke off their bloodflow. Lots of users (think parents) can now turn on a computer using a non-MS OS, use a Google browser, to read their Google mail, surf the web, and do a couple spreadsheets and WP on google docs, that's all they need, and also they don't have to worry about disk crashes or viruses. The desktop is DEAD. Hear me now, believe me later. - Steve Follmer via twhirl
Glad Google didn't just release a desktop client, then. - Akiva Moskovitz
Haven't used FF all day. Still missing Greasemonkey, but I love Chrome's speed. - Evangeline
Yeah starting is much faster. only takes a few seconds even with other apps loading, Firefox takes forever. :-( Shame there is no ad-blocking with Chrome, hope that'll come in future versions - Kol Tregaskes via twhirl
I had some issue with Flickr that made me flee back to FF. Can't recall what it was. - Kaia ♥
Startup time is only relevant if you actually close your browser once in a while. I can't remember the last time I did that. - Eric
There are significant differences between SUP and the Six Apart update stream: (1) SUP documents are fixed length. SUP clients periodically poll the server for new updates. Six Apart streams updates to the client. (2) SUP documents contain opaque feed identifiers. Six Apart sends a stream of Atom feed entries. - Gary Burd
SUP can also be used to monitor for updates on any URL regardless of content-type using the X-SUP-ID HTTP header. You are correct though that it's essentially a compact, standardized, generalized, discoverable form of an update feed. - Paul Buchheit
As SUP is basically a "service-to-service" behind the scene protocol, streamed version with persistent connections seems to be more interesting. Also, SixApart streams contain the actual data and stream consumer does not need to fetch individual feeds. - Alex Kapranoff
Alex, streamed is less efficient because it delivers data that I don't care about, has privacy problems (what would Google Reader Shared Items stream?), and is much more complex to implement (try doing it in PHP on shared hosting). - Paul Buchheit
The first and the second things you mention are problems of the SixApart implementation which is not a standard of some unchangeable kind. One can easily add filtering to the Atom Stream protocol and probably do something with the secret URLs. Implementation for small shared hosting based sites is, on the other side, nearly impossible, yes. But why a small site would want to implement SUP? As far as I can see it should be interesting for moderately big services with thousands of feeds. - Alex Kapranoff
How do you propose that Google Reader should implement this Atom streaming in such a way that it would preserve feed privacy? My PHP on shard hosting example is somewhat extreme, but PHP is actually very popular, as is Rails, which I think would also have some difficulty managing endless streams of updates. The SUP design is very much line with how everything else on the web works so that it can be implemented everywhere -- endless streams of Atom data are unique to a single site I believe. - Paul Buchheit
I don't see how abstracting the username by a layer is going to help privacy. It should be up to the feed publishers on how to handle privacy. They can and should offer better privacy controls than an abstraction. Based on what i've read about this so far, I could easily write a script to crawl flickr or twitter and get every single users id and link it to their SUP-ID. I put it on a different comment, but maybe a POLL verb for http would work. - Shawn McCollum
Shawn, The id abstraction prevents crawlers from discovering the URLs of private feeds using information in the SUP feed. - Gary Burd
Private feeds shouldn't be in the SUP Feed at all. Obfuscation as a security or privacy model doesn't prevent, it just delays the inevitable. The SUP protocol isn't going to be universally accepted and no matter what, your going to have to support feeds the current way. Handle private feeds normally since without authentication it's really just hidden not private. I like the way FF allows you to regenerate your api key, something like that should be used for private feeds rather then a id and password. - Shawn McCollum
But Shawn; the SUP ID in the private feed means nothing unless you know the feed it belongs to. And if you know the feed it belongs to then you deserve to know it (ie someone registered it with you). Private feeds and SUP get along just fine. I suppose you could add another layer on top by generating a unique SUP id for each feed for each client. So the SUP id only means something to the client who requested it. But that's a lot more work for the server generating the SUP feed. - Benjamin Golub
Shawn, the advantage of SUP is that private feeds can still be protected by whatever mechanism you choose (such as the FriendFeed remote key), but still feed update information into a public SUP feed because the SUP-ID is completely opaque. (you can't discover the SUP-ID unless you already have access to the feed) - Paul Buchheit
another thought - why re-invent? Did they look at www.sitemaps.org? - Dave Hodson
It doesn't mean nothing, it mean that there is something you don't know. I can do alot with "knowing I don't know something". - Shawn McCollum
I think the SUP-ID concept is interesting but over architecting a solution for a small subset of the issue your trying to solve. It's nice that SUP-ID works to limit the size and help with private feeds. You could also implement something like the base html tag for size. Then either separate private and public updates with the private ones using SUP-ID or use a marker to identify that the backend needs to go through an extra hoop on this one. - Shawn McCollum
"It doesn't mean nothing, it mean that there is something you don't know. I can do alot with "knowing I don't know something"." Fill your SUP feed with random bogus SUP ids and bogus data. Then there will be *a lot* you don't know (including how many accounts the service *actually* has). - Benjamin Golub
Shawn, can you give an example of something you could do, knowing that an unknown feed within OurDoings was updated at a specific time? I don't see the vulnerability here. This is a real question as I already implemented SUP. - Bruce Lewis via fftogo
Just so everyone knows, I'm not trolling and I love friendfeed. I have personal not professional interest in speeding up feed aggregation. Just chatting so... Loading up random data will have a negative effect on the size feature of SUP and will cause more processing to be done by the consumer of the feed. Bruce, I'll put something down to answer your question in a bit, but right now i've got to pick up my son from daycare. - Shawn McCollum
It's funny you mention Netflix personalized feeds indirectly in your blog post, Dare, as I'm not sure a basic SUP feed would work help much for our feeds. The personalized Netflix feeds generate generate about 6 million posts per day (about 2M each of queue adds, shipped DVDs and received DVDs). Given that any given feed consumer is likely only interested in a small fraction of the 8.4M+ subscribers, the signal-to-nose ratio in a SUP feed would be quite low, unless you created a SUP feed per consumer. - Michael Hart
Michael, SUP is intended for large feed consumers, not people monitoring one or two feeds. If you are doing 6 million feed updates per day, and your SUP feed compresses to about 8 bytes/entry (as the FriendFeed SUP does), then that works out to about 555 bytes/second (or 33k/minute). A compressed netflix feed appears to be about 22k, so the breakeven point is around 2000 feed fetches / day. For clients who poll feeds every half hour, that is only 45 unique feeds. For those that poll 1000s, it's a big win. - Paul Buchheit
Of course the math is different with if-modified-since, but from what I can tell netflix does not currently support that. Also, if you want to be a little more clever, the size of the SUP could be reduced substantially by only including info on feeds that have ever been fetched, since the majority of netflix feeds have never been accessed. You can also have separate SUP feeds for queue adds, shipped, and received, since some clients (such as FriendFeed) are only interested in one category (adds, in our case). - Paul Buchheit
And of course that's just the bandwidth savings. Using SUP would also reduce feed latency and the overall number of requests. - Paul Buchheit
Paul, drop me an email and we can take this discussion offline. We have some interesting feed improvements on the way in the very short term including ETag-based cache control and programmatic feed access behind OAuth to get rid of the copy/paste nonsense. You can reach me at mhart at netflix dot com - Michael Hart
It doesn't go far enough for me in terms of granularity. I'd like a way to decouple feed page sizes from updates, so you can know exactly the entries that are updated/new, not just the feeds. This would be fantastic for mobile apps. Right now it's about asking endpoints to support a 'since' parameter on the feed. I wonder if X-SUP-ID will go through mobile networks- what they do sometimes with HTTP is 'interesting'. - Bill de hÓra
Isn't it, you guys? The Sweetcron room is actually ROCKIN. Everyone's giving each other support and posting their sites :) @Benjamin: your comments are disabled! - Mona N.
question: i have a wp self-hosted blog and i was thinking this sweetcron page would be nice as a page added onto that blog. is that possible? just set up the sweetcron page and connect it to my wp blog with a link? - faboo mama
Hey Mona, that looks really cool! How do I get in on it? - Vincent Ferrari
Vince: everything you need to know, is here :) http://friendfeed.com/rooms/sw... The creator of Disqus and um, the creator of the um, source code is there, too... :( - Mona N.
- how does this differ from something like Swurl (aside from self-hosting & themes)? - JA Castillo
this is just a link farm.. we can do the same thing uinsg RSS | EMAIL|BLOGGER|GROUPS. Whats the hue and cry about this service? Tell me what is new here underlying a UI ?? - Peter Dawson
Peter: Do you see the difference of the UIs? Just asking. - and it's not a service. it's a software, since it's FREE and OPEN SOURCE - Mona N.
yes its s/w .. but not on the cloud . and UI is just UI. I really dont see whats the big deal.. thats all. I dont mean to bust any1 ballon, but thats the fact. - Peter Dawson
Peter: it's clean, simple to use, and any non tech savvy person can jump on and click around. the embeddable media is pulled in and displayed / organized. one of the most intuitive templates i've ever seen. plus it's open source and free. why WOULDN'T you jump on it? - Mona N.
I'm going to have to partially agree with Peter. I don't see the big deal either. Sure, it's free and open source but using any aggregator or, creating your own (like Rob does for TGM) is just the same. Creating your own still makes it free. I can't say I like the UI at all. Open source and free doesn't always mean a great product. - Candace Holly
So what about people like me, Candace, who can't create my own? I'm stuck with default templates I have to find around the web. Open Source excites me, because of the possibility of people creating various templates - for free -. I've already showed the site to a few of my non tech friends, and they've all told me it's simple and easy to navigate. - Mona N.
I'd like to see this turn into a Wordpress theme/plugin instead. After installing the auto updater, I don't feel like going through another install process again. - Rodfather
There's plenty of places to get free templates and sites. Wordpress is one. Not a regular WP blog but installing the software in your site itself. There's 50,000 plug ins and ways to customize it (and aggregators too). I think there's more out there with better options. - Candace Holly
Candace, I specifically don't have my own domain because there are way too many choices, too many plug-ins, I don't know how and where to start. I envy you for knowing where to look, because frankly? It's a headache for me. That's the exact reason I haven't registered my own domain. I love the SweetCron UI, it's Tumblr-like look, and the archival system. To each their own :) - Mona N.
Mon, I agree each to their own. I am trying to close out my other thread and flod it back again to this one here. Meanwhile ..all my blogs are archieved in Groups. Did you check the link that I posted ? I created one recusive loop as a poc. albiet its manually, and not a cron. :)- howwever, I can cron the same thing in the fwd manner just using an RSS -2-email | filter | Blogger | groups. thats the core events. Zap up a blogger /CSS tempate and voila I can sweetcron without any download at all. - Peter Dawson
I cheat..I'm still not off WordPress itself . I just mask the name. Getting a domain is easy...godaddy.com! (p.s. Pixelbits.me is available I searched ~_^ ) ..For the record, I have no idea what Peter just said. I need Rob to translate that. - Candace Holly
@Candace, mea culpa. its easy. Get an RSS2email service (R|mail.org). Add RSS feeds to rss2email account,. Each time a new pos is created, it will get email to you. Create a filter rule < all emails tha come from rss2email, fwd to blogger account. This will create a blog entry. Set up your blogger profile to email all BLOGS posts to specific group e,g googlegroups. I one for myself for all my blogs. so its < RSS -2-email | filter | Blogger | groups> . Did that make sense ? - Peter Dawson
Candace: It's deciding on the domain name! LOL @Peter: Aside from the technicalities - I mean good for you for knowing all that -, is your site user friendly? - Mona N.
Ya know, with a tweak or two I could use this as an enterprise dashboard for different topics and existing internal feeds. Then when/if it becomes multi user I could use it as a behind the firewall version of friendfeed for workstreams. Of course workstreams doesn't sound all that fun so i'll have to change that. - Shawn McCollum
@mona, pls take a look at the what I posted.< http://lifestreampeter.blogspo...> The site I created was a POC, just for the convo . It took less then 15 minutes to completed. Is the UI heck sweet ? NO WAY 1. Does it have the underly principle of cron, very much so !! So all this sweetness in sweetcron really does not rock my boat. Been , there, seen that done that long long time ago. If you into UI only,. then it rocks your boat. - Peter Dawson
Peter: I already did look at your site, Peter. And that is why I stated what I stated. If all of your visitors are people who do not care about UI, then great! You just built a site in under 15 minutes. You're totally awesome :) However, if you read my blog, I explain -- in detail -- WHY SweetCron is right for me :) - Mona N.
It has it's uses, infact it's saved me building a very similar app. Most importantly, it's open source. If it were a hosted pay/month service, it would be useless. - Cains
"FriendFeed Inc. is enhancing its service in order to fulfill a critical requirement on the Internet today: immediacy. The highly publicized startup is weeks away from boosting the frequency of its updates from social networks" - Louis Gray via Bookmarklet
What does SUP (Simple Update Protocol) do exactly, it's more than a http header last-modified check? - Philipp Lenssen
I'm interested in learning the details, too. my guess is some type of callback scheme that was discussed on ff a while back when ff was (gently) called out for polling flickr millions of times/day. - David Vasileff
also perhaps batching multiple feed requests into a single call - David Vasileff
That's it ... no more hikes in the afternoon! (Sharing .... ) - Charlie Anzman
theory 1: a single "meta feed" which you can poll to get a list of other feeds that have changed recently. (would it cover all feeds on the service, or would FF somehow supply a list of all the feeds they're interested in?) theory 2: a callback/ping/PIMP notification when a feed or feeds change (HTTP? XMPP?). theory 3: a formalization of the "public feed" concept, where you roll every (public) update on the service into a single (rapidly rolling!) feed which FF polls and gets updates for. - ⓞnor
Someone has to talk to someone to indicate a change occurred, so you can't skip that step, be it push or pull. So my guess is it's a way to get a larger aggregated chunk of what has changed and an idea of the size of the change. What might work is a bulk push of what has changed and then a pull of the changes at FF's leisure. - todd
Providing facts is just cheating. Now there's no room for rampant speculation :-) Add a sequence number and you could know if you missed an update which would indicate polling needed to occur or perhaps a download of the old change notices. - todd
great stuff. imho, when adopted, SUP will be - to the organic growth of services updates - like traffic lights to crowded intersections. or like how gps navigation is to asking people for directions :P - Dani Radu
Sounds like it's a protocol that others will need to implement and support so friendfeed can process feeds more efficiently. alot of the issues could be fixed if if-modified-since was used and rss feeds were treated more like a web service rather then a static html page, most are generated from a db real-time anyway. Read RFC 977, NNTP fixed this issue by setting up an easy way to poll what's new back in the 80's. - Shawn McCollum
WOWOWOWOW...this technology is huge! Disruptive and fantastic!! If I had VC level cash, I'd throw it at FF brainiacs and be rich... this idea is unbelievably SMART! - Susan Beebe
Shawn, we actually already use If-Modified-Since and many sites do properly support it. The key difference with SUP is that it allows feed consumers to monitor many thousands of URLs with a single GET, which is not possible using If-Modified-Since. - Paul Buchheit
If anything, it shares a few similarities with Sitemaps (which enable webmasters to notify search engines of modified URLs, etc.) Great work on SUP! - Aviv
This is one of those simple ideas that one wonders why no one thought of before. It's a good proposal and a required one in the rapidly growing aggregation/Lifestreaming world. I am sure the proposal will be widely and quickly SUPported. Well done folks. - Vinay | विनय
paul, I found and read the ff blog post, and I understand the meta-feed approach. Interesting but I think sup-id storage adds a bit of complexity. Even though the sup-id keeps the size of the feed down, full uri would be better. I think the concern about exposing usernames is a little overdone, I mean it's not going to really stop someone who wants the usernames from getting them. - Shawn McCollum
Love it. We've used a different approach to interface with "friendly" crawlers, one that is based on the ability to fetch older items in the feeds by request. But it requires a public "recent" feed, and does not work solve the private URLs issue. This is so much better. We'll be experimenting with SUP and would love to help it mature into a well defined spec. - Yaniv Golan
The earlier lists are better....they seem to be reaching further and further. Or maybe I'm just old... - Courtney S (librarychic)
I thought they were reaching further with this one and wasn't quite as good. some of the stuff hasn't been around for a while and seems like Carmen Sandiego vanished in the mid-90's - Andrew Shuping
For the Wayne Newton, and Roseanne Barr ones most 18 yrs old would say "Who?" - Shawn McCollum
Yeah, I agree with Shawn. I've never thought these lists were very clever; they're usually full of references too outdated for me to get, and I'm not young. - Jason Puckett
They used to be interesting insights into the cultural make up of generations, but now they just seem to mark time. They probably need to sit down and remember what the point of the MindSet list is. - rudibrarian
I didn't configure my home page, but it is chrome://navigator-region/locale/region.properties - Morton Fox
With tabbed browsing its many: Gmail, Hellotxt, Flickr and DeviantART in Firefox - Kol Tregaskes via twhirl
SFGate. I like to see what's up in the analog world of restaurant robberies, car wrecks, status of the marine layer and tiger-taunting criminals. - Sue Radd
mine is about:blank. Clean slate. If I open up my browser I prob have something in mind already. - daniel morgan
I have six of them that open at once - techmeme, igoogle, hacker news, Analytics and G Reader and popurls - they change based on how and what I get from them. - Mrinal Desai
Mine is set to Google right now. Fast, and plain. - Sean Brady
Blank - I hate the delay of opening a homepage when I'm trying to get to a website. - Bill Sanders
I'd like to be able to search for a url. - Shawn McCollum
Is simpler integration/aggregation of users' OTHER social media in the cards? - Dave Roth
it would be nice to be able to cut and paste an email address from a contact rather than have to retype it in every time. - Thomas Hawk
when are they going to fix the messaging features - private message handling is not great in facebook. - Morgan
When will FB allow users to export their own attention stream? (ie the newsfeed about them) - Sean Ammirati
ask them when will they change their stupid TOS to stop being so unethical - Marcos Marado
their notes/blogging platform is very old skool. when will that be upgraded to allow import of photos,video,etc..? - Randy Ksar
Why do something like Connect when there things like OpenSocial and OAuth that do the same? I understand not using OpenSocial, but OAuth is a fairly generic authentication/authorization standard. Do we really need another proprietary one? - Rob Diana
Why can't I only see those people that I have not sent a fan page or group invite too? Why can't I segment by network on that screen like I can for an application invite? - C.C. Chapman
Ask them who it is that has the secret crush on me! - Greg Lowe
i don't follow Facebook stuff closely, so maybe this has been answered ... offhand, i'd be interested in whether there's any plan to adapt Facebook policy for international markets (ie, allowing greater anonymity in Japan), and if not, what other plans they might have to overcome that sort of hurdle (if any). - idnan
I second the Firefox 3 problems. Links on the new layout die more than half the time. - Sean O
Are they planning on giving more importance to video distribution on the platform? - xavier vespa
I would want to know how users could export more of their personal information to make backup of it. - Daniel Schildt
And yes, they need to change TOS so they don't own every photo people add to their profiles. - Daniel Schildt
They should also fix chat and add support fox visible logs for it (or option to avoid logging) like Google does with Gtalk inside Gmail. - Daniel Schildt
Can we expect OpenId kind of features in the future? Can they also be used by third party websites that have nothing to do with facebook? - Corné Wielemaker
Ask them also if they would do mindmap styled diagram that would show your connections and how each of them are connected to other people you know. Some sort of interactivity in that (if made with JavaScript or Flash) could allow quite great learning experience as you could find out much easier who knows who. There are some third party apps that do that kind of stuff, but I don't personally trust them that much. - Daniel Schildt
a) how long will they keep the "classic" design available and b) how many people are choosing the new design? - Laura Norvig
Ask why Facebook Mobile doesn't support T-Mobile. - Jeff Lopes
When they finalize transfer of people to new design and how long they keep the old one around? Does old design make apps developement more difficult when compared to new one? What changes they recommend for people making add-ons for Facebook? Are apps going to have more reasonable privacy restrictions to not get access to all info? - Daniel Schildt
livecast.com works good on my windows mobile for all you winmo users out there - Tyler Gillies
Does the new design increase or decrease traffic to applications? - Jamie Ginsberg
How could users add more customized fields to their info tab in profile (and would that make Facebook more bloated)? - Daniel Schildt
do they plan on allowing video streaming etc in the future AND will they come out with their own FacebookIM client for the desktop - Travis Cooper
When will they add photo commenting (and viewing of photo comments) to the iphone and mobile web interfaces? - Andrew Fielding
Can you ask their Chief Privacy Officer to take phone calls from reporters? - Andrew Feinberg
Why does their site degrade to a blank page when javascript is turned off? - Brandon Titus
I hate being held hostage in an email thread listening to unending chatter from people I don't know and don't care to know. And can the apps under "Boxes" be made collapsible? It's like a dumping ground for useless apps now, I hardly go there. I keep those apps for peeps who can't live a day without poking me. And yeah, the blogging feature needs a major upgrade. Wait, their TOS gives them rights to my profile pictures? What the... - Carolyn
we've got mcd's sweet tea in michigan for a $1. To me it tastes a little off, but most likely their using a corn based sweetener rather then pure cane sugar. - Shawn McCollum
“FriendFeed experiment please participate. Please post your bookmarking rss feed. It can be from Delicious, Diggo or any boomark service that gives you an rss feed of your links.”
