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Stupid Things Unemployed Men Don't Have To Think About: I have to stop wearing socks until I find a job. Why? Socks leave a little dent around your ankles that is visible underneath pantyhose and look funky when wearing a skirt suit to an interview.

September 1 - Comment - Like - Share

Mitchell Tsai, vijay, gerald miller and 6 other people liked this

oh. I did not think about that. Barefoot in the grass then. - Joe

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Because *that's* where the interviewer is gonna look, the sock-line? - Rene Wirtz

why wear a skirt to an interview? i say this cos my wife never did. - Joe Silence

Rene, you'd be amazed at the seemingly stupid details that interviewers notice. These aren't tight socks, just normal athletic socks in the proper size; they've always done this to me. The dent doesn't last long, just a few hours, but I've been called in to interview with only an hour or two of notice before. And I wear a skirt suit to an interview because that's the suit I have. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Have you considered switching to no-shows? I haven't worn socks that even get up to the ankles in years. =) - Andrew C

Or you could wear boots to interviews. - Andrew C

Tina, oh, you mean you get Michael'd (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define... ) ~ There's an app for that: "Due to the novelty of the concept of the type of sock of the present invention there is no widely recognized or standard testing apparatus and method for fabric-to-leg pressure exerted by socks. It has therefore been necessary to choose an apparatus, adapt it for use with socks and develop a test method." http://www.freepatentsonline.com/EP00397... - Micah Wittman

You wear a skirt to an interview? - anna sauce

Yes, I wear a skirt to interviews: my suit is a skirt suit. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

This is usually only a problem with formal socks (dark)types.I only wear casual socks.Just wear comfortable socks. - gerald miller

Robert Scoble

Twitter Succumbs to Marketer Attack [Toldja So] « The SiliconANGLE - http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2...

May 18 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins, Moushumi Kabir, andy brudtkuhl and 28 other people liked this

This happens for a variety of reasons, all of which are due to a poor design on Twitter. First, a block doesn't remove people from search. Second, I should be able to set the trending topics, Twitter shouldn't choose those for me. Twitter is too enamored with popularity. Popularity is often the WORST way to decide what to display. Third, there's no decentralized moderation system, like there is on friendfeed. Fourth, there's no metadata, so you can't say "don't show me things that don't have a like." - Robert Scoble from Bookmarklet

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Maybe you should stop using Twitter, Robert. ;-) - Chris Baskind

Chris: I'm using it less and less, believe me. I used to be hyper addicted to Twitter. Now I'm seeing more and more people joining me over on friendfeed. I don't think that's due to an accident. - Robert Scoble

Is the velocity of innovation increasing exponentially? Will friendfeed be out done by something new? Are we doomed to mediocrity stuck in mud upon popularity? What model could foresee and adapt? - Eric Standlee

Well Robert, I never got into Twitter mainly because of how hard it was to follow a conversation. The more I use friendfeed I like it more and more its easy to jump in or just follow the context of a conversation without having to bounce to each persons twitter site... or maybe I was just using it wrong. - Nathan McClain

i kinda dug the obscurity of following twitter conversations. it was different than outright plain broadcasts to the world, and you could manually choose not to follow certain 'threaded' topics by not clicking on them. these attacks were bound to happen considering the numbers of ab-users that have joined thinking up 'maven' or 'guru' ways on exploiting said technology for their own nefarious goals. - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

Re: setting trending topics - you can default the trending topics list to be minimized and just add your own custom saved searches. Isn't that essentially the same as setting your own topics, as long as you update them? - Philip Tomlinson

Eric: I don't know about increasing innovation, but this has been going on since the 1980s. Back then I used to be on a BBS. I left that for AOL, Prodigy, CompuService. I left those for Usenet. I left that for blogs. I left blogs for Twitter (mostly). I am now in the process of leaving Twitter for friendfeed. Will there be something after friendfeed? Yes. - Robert Scoble

In the words of Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins "Twitter becoming an MLM and spam cesspool" - Ciro

Twitter is still a fascinating message bus, not a destination, for the reasons you say. FF isn't quite the message conduit that Twitter is, as it's a hybrid communication conduit (responses here, for example), and aggregator. Twitter is still an exemplarary, *pure*, communication bus - like IRC. - Dave Mee

spam is bad obviously, but i must admit i am kind of enjoying the new mainstream twitter. one thing i have noticed for example is the hip hop community migrating from myspace to twitter. i can't see them coming to friendfeed, but who knows. Also while marketing gaming in annoying, its lovely to see people playing tag games at scale. trending manipulation for the masses is fun. hard to manage for sure. but to my mind good to see - James

James: they will come when they figure out the power of rooms and the fact that you can play music right in line here. - Robert Scoble

I don't see anything surpassing FriendFeed as the optimal place to socialize online in the next couple years, unless keyboards/monitors get replaced with some other interface. - Bruce Lewis

holy jebus Robert that really is real time. i have *never* had a comment back in any medium that fast, even IM. - James

In the absence of trust and recommendation systems metadata such as liking would still be prone to attack. - Mike Chelen

Mike, that's true for search, but for your main feed your social network protects you from that sort of thing. - Bruce Lewis

Bruce, the source of the trending topics problem is that they are unaffected by the user's selection of friends - Mike Chelen

I see what you're saying, Mike. I wasn't thinking about that, since I only care about trending topics my friends find interesting. If you're in a position where you have to watch general trending topics, I can see how there would be a challenge to weed out astroturfing. - Bruce Lewis

Bruce: people who use http://www.twitter.com have no choice in what trending topics they see. - Robert Scoble

It strikes me that part of the reason that Twitter is so popular is that it has become a lightning rod for so many good mobile and desktop apps. That's how Twitter has been able to rise above the spam and marketing noise as it has. - Ed Moltzen

Ed: Twitter's API simplicity and the mobile and desktop apps are, indeed, a major part of its success. I really wonder how friendfeed is going to see anything close to that. If I were at friendfeed I'd focus a LOT of attention on mobile experiences. That's already where I probably spend 30% of my friendfeed time. - Robert Scoble

Robert, I think it's their biggest draw back at the moment. I have a hard time interacting with FF when I am not in front of a computer. - Aaron Kurtz

Robert: I went through gopher, bbs, prodigy, aol, msn for awhile, usegroups, yahoogroups, blogs, twitter and friendfeed now as well as facebook. It would be fun to see these plotted on a timeline to see if it is accelerating. The change sure seems to be accelerating. Maybe reviewing the timeline we can predict the next one. - Eric Standlee

Twitter shouldn't be a topic of conversation. It's just a waste of time. Twitter cares more about popularity than the community. One need to browse through their 'Suggested Users' to come to that conclusion. Why should Oprah matter more, considering she has absolutely nothing to contribute to the community other than attract digital fans? Discussing Twitter gives them exposure, which they deserve less and less by the day. My rock stars aren't like their rock stars (borrowed phrase)! http://tr.im/lLIk - Moushumi Kabir

Kevin Rose

i won't say this is a 'google killer', but, it might make things interesting: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screenc...

May 15 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

John E. Bredehoft, Mike Moloney, Robert Wheeler and 13 other people liked this

can't wait to test it with something I am working on. I think this will take a big slice of my time next week - zsafwan 

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It definitely is more of what it says it is "computational knowledge engine" than a "search engine" but still going to take a bite out of google search that's done for research. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

As a computer engineering student, the math functions of wolfram alpha look spectacular. - Matthew Allen Horton

that it does matthew. this demo is amazing. I'm curious to understand more about how the engine is "absorbing" data from the net, and thus potentially "learning" - can it over time become somethign more than a computational engine, and instead bring us more verbal types of information - one example that comes to mind is looking up case law. (looking for something non-computed) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Jason Chambers

Wow... Seesmic made me NotExactly™ a star in their Seesmic Desktop KB: http://help.seesmic.com/forums... How to xfer settings between computers. Honoured

May 14 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Gaines liked this

Thomas Knoll

Calling yourself a SocialMediaExpert is like putting "World's Greatest Boss" on a wishlist and then buying it for yourself. #ThinkingOutLoud

May 13 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

TheDiva Rockin and Michael Gaines liked this

Sarah Perez

Hey Companies, Where Are Your iPhone Apps? - ReadWriteWeb - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...

January 15, 2009 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Eric @ CSTechcast.com, pestwave, Tyson Key and 24 other people liked this

That was quick blogging :) - Bwana ☠

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No love for the FriendFeed feedback...? :( - Mona Nomura

No, this was not about Web 2.0, but major retailers and businesses outside the Valley. Sorry! (Besides, we have fftogo.com and Nambu for now). - Sarah Perez

I think that the apps for businesses do need to come for the iPhone in order for it to really become the "one phone to rule them all". Just saying... - Damien Franco

I think Mona means, no mention that you got the feedback from that FriendFeed thread? amirite Mona? - Bwana ☠

Oh - I meant acknowledgement/credit for the FriendFeed contributions... :( Bwana - thanks for clarifying. :) - Mona Nomura

Oh, heh...I understand...how should I add that in? Comments came in through Twitter, too. - Sarah Perez

Damien: Do you believe it should be the one phone to rule them all? I mean I use my iPod Touch for web hours a day but the landscape is a bit wider for most folks... All: Did you all know that many if not all iPhone specific Mobile Web sites work exactly the same on Android? That's quite a selling feature for that approach of companies I would suspect. - Ben Hedrington

Is it against RWW policies? Ben - I think Sarah is talking about native apps. - Mona Nomura

I'm also not sure, given the NYT syndication, but for now, I added it at the bottom. I will have to bring this up. - Sarah Perez

@Guillame B - I understand that there's more to the mobile world than iPhones. However, apps should be a part of a company's mobile strategy - a strategy which should also include device-agnostic mobile web sites and SMS (if SMS makes sense for their service). But ignoring the popularity of the iPhone platform (and any others that come next - Palm? Android?) is not a smart decision.... more... - Sarah Perez from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Thanks, Sarah!! :) - Mona Nomura

Of course. :) - Sarah Perez

OMG the link is in red!! FriendFeed got a RWW mention! THANK YOU SARAH AND THANK YOU RWW! - I swear I am not employed by them, I jsut get excited when our community gets credit. ;) - Mona Nomura

@Gilzow I'm with @logicslayer on this one. There may be a million store/retailer apps available, but it's not like I would download them all. I would only use the Papa Johns app if I was an *extremely* frequent customer. Otherwise, I would probably call or use the web site, for example. As far as the retailers' apps that I could see myself using on a regular basis, I could probably... more... - Sarah Perez from FriendFeed MT Plugin

That was a fast and well written article. I am happy Expedia, Best Buy and Target got mention b/c I mentioned them too. FedEx and Travelocity are good calls as well. FedEx should be all over this. I think that certain fast food restaurants would be crucial. I ALWAYS go to Chipotle so I would keep this app on my phone. Also, AAA would be an interesting one. Newspapers and even magazines... more... - Amani

@Amani Magazines - that's also a great idea! I was sad to hear about PC Mag shutting down their print version...an iPhone version of their mag would be a great alternative. (And thanks for the compliment, too!) - Sarah Perez

I was quite pleased with Bank of America's new iPhone optimized mobile site (not app). I was also surprised to see WalMart's iPhone optimized site. Seems like a good trend. - Hao Chen

I would have to strongly disagree with you: I might be a bit of a gook and my iPhone might have way too much crapware â but I kwon I'm not the only one with limited slots. One App from SouthWest, one from British AirWays, one from UA. . . That's a bit too much, and not very convenient if you can't remember the operator of your flight. What we need, and what the App Store encourage, is... more... - Bertil Hatt from FriendFeed MT Plugin

@ Bertil: Hmmm, sounds like the real problem is limited slots and limited screens on the iPhone, if you ask me. Maybe in time, Apple will think of new ways for us to access our apps differently so that space is not a limiting factor when it comes to the number and variety of apps we want to use. However, I like your idea of the companies banding together to create one app by combining their APIs...that would rock. - Sarah Perez from FriendFeed MT Plugin

As I was out in bar/club last night, I thought of an additional genre to add. Dating sites should totally have their own iphone app. Jdate.com , eharmony.com and match.com are big ones in the US. I see enough people messing with their phones (including me) while they are out an about. Why not? - Amani

Brands on the iPhone are coming, but lets face it. Apps have been around for less than a year. To develop a truly useful app takes time. I don't want anymore crap apps for my phone. I want cutting edge, useable apps that make my life easier. Amazon's app is an example of where things can start. - Bob Blunk

Hey Sarah - saw this and thought it was kind of interesting - not a company I would've expected much from in this area: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r... - Patrick Jordan

Veronica

http://www.comicvsaudience.net/images...

January 13, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

◄ani625Ξ, Mark, Shawn Poulson and 12 other people liked this

Its a freaking matrix... - Tyler (Chacha)

thnx for the link. very interesting stuff - MMB

Where is Mexican Santa in the Book of Revelations? Are they using the same Bible I am? - Brian Buck

Robert Scoble

USB memory key with a password

January 9, 2009 from email - Comment - Like - Share

Nicholas James, Oliver Hörold, Melanie Reed and 25 other people liked this

http://www.takeanyware.com $44-100 keeps your data safe and encrypted -- you put a password in here. If someone finds your key they can't get into your data. http://www.Knox-it.net - Robert Scoble from email

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In her? Does she have a name yet? - Mike Lewis

Don't forget to keep your password safe. On a sticky attached to your monitor means you won't forget it is always a good bet, or on the keyboard of your laptop if you're more mobile. - WorldofHiglet

i'm going to tape my password to the key!! :-) - Russell Thomas

Isn't this much better? http://tr.im/3dhi Adds a biometric finger reader to the mix. - Adam Helweh

Cool...i like! - Susan Beebe

WANT! - Joey Gibson

I bet it's already been reverse-engineered, and someone's discovered that it's using extremely weak crypto. - Tyson Key

was going to buy IronKey Personal, a buddy works there. Wonder if and how this is better than IronKey - Kiran Patchigolla

LOL @ Tyson's comment - probably true - Patrick Jordan

Mac support? - Michael Gaines

I doubt anything's better than IronKey in this space ... that said, it this is a lot cheaper, it might be good enough for most folks. - J. McConnell

Ouch ... no Mac support and not even a mention of Linux ... - J. McConnell

What about a standard PGP encrypted partition on a USB memory key?!... - Andreas

TrueCrypt and a standard USB key...open source based encryption goodness for all operating systems... - Patrick Pushor

Bummer about the Mac support. Need 25 of these for employees at my office. I need Time Capsule, with encryption, on a stick. - Kawika Holbrook

Kawika : As posted, TrueCrypt with some optional applescript wrapping = the same thing. I will write something up on this and link you the post. - Patrick Pushor

Robert Scoble

Nine ways Twitter could make money:

January 6, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

Mike Coulter, Bertrand Doux, Bart Muskala - AdNerd Sr. and 86 other people liked this

1. Look for affiliate revenues - Robert Scoble

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2. Exploit the spaces between content - Robert Scoble

3. Adopt a freemium model - Robert Scoble

4. Add Virtual Goods - Robert Scoble

5. Get recurring revenue, er, find a way to charge for subscriptions. - Robert Scoble

6. If you’re going to do advertising, get into creating ads that are viral and interactive. - Robert Scoble

7. Create “frequent tweeting” programs - Robert Scoble

8. Look for support, or tips, from your users. - Robert Scoble

9. Get outside your website. Try to sell schwag. Do events. Etc. - Robert Scoble

Pro features at some point would be nice. An enterprise version could work as well. - Mike Fruchter

Inserting geo-targetted ads on Tweets. - Mike Fruchter

Got any others? - Robert Scoble

what about truncated, collapsable/expandable threading? - David Lloyd

And maybe "Nine ways Friendfeed could make money" hehe - David Lloyd

Twitter should license their technology to companies for intranets. - Michael Gaines

TweetSense. Ad Tweets served BY Twitter, who has the best idea of your Tweet volume and subject matter. http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/tweetse... Lowest hanging fruit, contextual ads on the Twitter Search page. - AJ Kohn

What about platform support via dev tools? Encourage the ecosystem and make money at the same time? (Apologies, Robert, I replied on Twitter first.) - Tim Beyers

premium blogger services. Cool site integration tools with metrics. - Chris Baskind

10. add premium support for app developers. - Darren Stuart

Considering they have had 100% uptime for a few months, you have to think stability is fine now and they have their engineers beavering away on new features. Of course digg has 80 engineers and hardly ever seems to launch anything :p - David Lloyd

Thanks for this article Robert - bcultral

11. sell inhouse or managed solutions to companies for their own uses internally and sell federation CAL's so they can connect the internal solution to the wider twitter network so that specific users can tweet to the public. - alphaxion

Sell the entire background page to brands by the hour/day with some of the area being made available for discounts/offers. (You need something to benefit users too, not just Twitter.) ;-p - mtlb

I'm a little scared of the day all these FREE Social Networking sites CLOSE THE DOOR ON FREE, with all my data inside. - PaulFrankRizzo

good point..what is the answer Robert? - bcultral

Paul: I don't think free is going away. But I sure would pay for decent DM features, for instance. Lots of companies would pay for custom skinning features. - Robert Scoble

By following a brand's advertising account you consent to receiving ads from them. Add some profiling info to this and it could be a powerful tool to receive adverts on a users terms. - John Galpin

7.1> Post ad-tweets every half an hour from twitter account, which every twitter user will follow by default (have to follow by default). Make changes to API, so that people can't work around it and dodge this tweet. - | Balu |

freemium is definitely the way, one flavor or another. you don't want to kill the value of the network - quantity and quality - by driving away elements of it. plus for every paying site, there will always be a new free site up in less time it takes to say "bob's my uncle" - Pascal Bouvier

Create daily reports for similar types of tweets and licence that data to various companies, this will be user generated marketing report. - Shanthala Balagopal

Chris: in that case I hope they do all nine! Just kidding, but, seriously, these sites need to find a way to make some revenues or they'll go away. If you don't want them to find a revenue model you are NOT a good user of these systems. - Robert Scoble

ugh, can we please look at ways for twitter to make money without resorting to adverts? I'm pretty sure there's loads of ways, I've mentioned the one I have been bleeting on about for months now. How about you? Can you come up with ways to make money without going cap in hand to advertisers? - alphaxion

Phase 1: Twitter Phase 2: ??? Phase 3: Profit! - Alastair Montgomery

alphaxion: most of these are not about advertising. - Robert Scoble

Every local government needs to be on twitter, on their own twitter - and so does every state and federal government, police and emergency service - operated privately and 'independently' from the main twitter stream. - Chris Loft

care to comment about Obama and his 8 million strong email database taken into the Govt side? I am a community organizer and feel that email list belongs to the people - bcultral

Create a premium 'breaking news' service from data mining existing content and sell it to the old media. - Andrew Leyden

apart from 6 ;) Tho I'm addressing the others who are commenting rather than your suggestions. Trying to tease a bit of creative thinking out of people. I think it is a very healthy activity to get people working on ideas for how to make money and excluding the advertisers at the same time. - alphaxion

Chris: friendfeed has the same business model choices ahead of them to make too. - Robert Scoble

Selling my email address is NOT a way to make money. People will lose faith and/or start using phony emails for signups. - Michael Gaines

Alphaxion: #6 is actually about Context Optional, a company that creates very creative, viral ads. If you're going to do ads, that's the way to do it. - Robert Scoble

squeeze the advertisers...users should not have to pay for service ..other then paying to put up with advertisers and regulating and demanding subtlety - bcultral

Chris: hah! Actually most of the dating services are going to free models so they'll need to use some of these 9 too. - Robert Scoble

Robin: problem is that advertisers are going away. TechCrunch is hearing that this year could see some sites have 50% fewer ad revenues than before. So, you'll see more sites use these nine business models on you. - Robert Scoble

point taken - bcultral

How many users on FF at this point? - bravestface

Have Twitter subscribers pick a few products to "endorse", and have ads with their Twitter names attached to them. Then, give those users a discount based on # of clicks. - Michael Gaines

Robert: not forgetting that comps can simply sing up with an account and tweet updates from there, which is where inhouse and federation can be handy. New version release? An auto tweet to the public can be done - alphaxion

Chris: adsense is shit. Pays low CPMs. HotorNot makes $10 by selling virtual flowers. I'd love to be able to put a flower on your comments. Or something else. :-) - Robert Scoble

Turn "following" into a Multi-Level Marketing pyramid! - Rick Tuttle

very interesting discussion, robert. thank you! after 2 months of running Magpie (http://be-a-magpie.com), I can resume that #2 from your list works really well for both tweeps (they earn) and advertisers. - Jan Schulz-Hofen

the sale of commercial API keys so that software such as starteam or sourceforge could tweet out info automatically based on trigger events to both private and public twitter networks. - alphaxion

:) - bcultral

Charge for Groups feature ala Yammer - Sajida H Khan

They should Plax-ify Twitter and create a premium service to share and update full contact details between followers. - matt howard

Rick: I thought following already was a multi-level marketing pyramid! You should have seen my son on Sunday when we were on Leo Laporte's show. He told his 2,000 live listeners that they had to follow my son. He got 100 new followers in a couple of minutes. - Robert Scoble

I think you forgot data mining (which links directly into advertising model, and buzz campaign monitoring). In a nutshell they should have a look at us ;-) (heck, we already do #2 and what I mentionned above!) - twitscoop

bravestface: there are about 250,000 registered users of friendfeed (it's a guess based on available data). - Robert Scoble

cant we think SMS as a strong income model? - Sinan Ata

If you're a company trying sell/advertise via Twitter...I would expect them to pay. That way it doesn't piss off your standard user. The key is charging less than other competing PR firms. - CannonGod

How about a search engine. Soon there will be so many people and companies on Twitter (and similar sites) that people will want to search for those like they do for web sites. It's already frustrating trying to find people now as the current search is very limited. Add to that a similar model to AdWords that could generate money. Would be interested to see what other people think of this idea! - Joanna Butler

A variant on #5 - develop tools for professional/advanced use of twitter and charge for that level of service. Search / stats / archival tools. - Patrick Pushor

Joanna: http://search.twitter.com has tons of places to monetize. I'd pay $5 a month to be listed on top or have a "pro" icon next to my name, for instance. - Robert Scoble

Chris: there are quite a few that I don't even track. Hi-5, for instance. - Robert Scoble

Emphasis on 'could' - AJ Kohn

Robert: I'm with you on that! Once companies are using Twitter, they'd easily see the benefits of a pro listing. I have several clients who'd at least be willing to experiment that. - Joanna Butler

The key is for Twitter to charge advertisers and not users. For example, they could make a mint by placing sidebar ads (a la FB) and justifying $ rates relative to the most popular people followed - such as you, @LeoLaporte, @guykawasaki, oh, and 'That One.' - Jim Mitchem

@jim they would make orders of magnitudes more by selling their software, support of the software and access to their software instead of limiting themselves so badly with conventional advertising. - alphaxion

If you tell Toyota or Coke that their constituency is online with Twitter and they're following specific people, or trending topics - you know they'd pay through the nose for those precious few seconds. It's push vs. pull. - Jim Mitchem

@chris - that's cool, just don't snort coke and drive Trish in a Toyota concurrently. - Jim Mitchem

@chris their software is a product they can sell, the userbase is a compelling feature of that product.. "pay for our commerical API to add twitter support to your product and add the ability of your customers to share their going-ons with the network and stoke demand and interest"... - alphaxion

Chris: exactly. Done right, who wouldn't pay? - Joanna Butler

What's the source of the current online culture of entitlement? Users don't want paid subscriptions nor to suffer ads. The same view that powers online piracy. Shouldn't creative professionals and those who fund them be compensated? If not, there will eventually be a big drop in production. Ps- few companies even use internal IM or digital BBS to share institutional knowledge, I don't see enterprise Twitted as being very lucrative. - Colin Hessel

I pay for reliability and accountability - a free service owes me nothing, they can lose my data overnight, be unavailable whenever, disappear. A service I pay for comes with an SLA, some guarantees, etc. Plus, if you don't pay for it, or donate to it, one day it will be gone and you might feel sorry. - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

I would pay for additional features = pro account (stability, groups, counter, threads etc in one interface)... but I am just an ordinary user... - Hanna Wiszniewska

ok, so maybe Toyota was a bad example http://tinyurl.com/99gkj7 - Jim Mitchem

enterprise version already exists look at http://www.yammer.com - Andrew Mueller

Great ideas Robert. Twitter execs will appreciate it but I still think no business model will exist until they are acquired. - Jeremy Campbell from twhirl

yes, i think acquisition was their business model - but the economic crisis did dash hopes of a gold-plated one so they are thinking about value added services now (through the buy-in of sandy it seems "concierge" style message parsing is one option they are looking at. If you can buy, book, plan, coordinate things semi automatically via twitter there is value in there) - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

content partnerships, - imran

Following on from the discussion re FF UI - this discussion shows a BIG issue - I had to expand 95 comments to see Robert's original 9 (and was that the best way to publish the list?) and now I can't compress them! - Mark Warren

Mark: if you refresh the page they will be compressed again. - Robert Scoble

At the very least, show Google Ads on search - Varun Mahajan

I like the idea of selling aspects of the API as a SaaS. Also think they could very easily start charging consumers for Track and SMS. - Clay Newton

They would do well to add the ability to do very robust data mining. You can imagine providing a set of business intelligence dashboards to track and analyze customer sentiment as well as real time trend analysis. - Clay Newton

Virtual goods are a really solid idea as well. Look at what they are doing at Mahalo Answers. Mixes virtual $$ and real $. Twitter could easily implement a number of different levels here. They could also open up the API to provide even greater levels of functionality for app developers, essentially building a tiny-app framework. - Clay Newton

they should sell market info from mining their data, It's a great source of customer data - Tony Jones from twhirl

tony: you then get into the murkey problem of is it their data? By the same standard your ISP could sell their data on your usage. Is it ethical and would your customer base accept it? - alphaxion

I just posted the Social Networking Monetization Golden Goose idea yesterday at http://www.growmap.com/monetiz... - Internet Strategist

@alphaxion - Advertisers will always be in the mix and are inevitable, they should do just in a way that doesn’t interfere with individual tweets/updates. Unless Twitter has an endless supply of financing, they’ll have to go to outside sources, (like subscribers/advertisers). I don’t see Twitter though offering so much value as to make it worth paying for. Not enough features. (ESPN.com has its insider pay service and still runs a ton of ads on the site, so having one rev. stream doesn’t eliminate another.) - mtlb

Someone also mentioned a pay service for exclusive/breaking news on Twitter. First, I have Drudge for breaking news, but more importantly, part of the appeal of Twitter is that people like to feel they broke the news themselves. Why should Twitter or a select few decide what's breaking and what’s not and exclude the rest of the users from contributing to that? - mtlb

I would pay good money for the ability to punch people over the internet. - stretta

Make people pay to block other users! They'll get rich. - Rae21

I was reading this long list of comments and then the system did its hiccup/update thing and it all went away and I had to spend time looking for the damn thread again. Freaking annoying! - Rae21

@twitscoop Twitter data mining (strangely over looked) seems less like a business model then and more like a feature of the social network: transforming the data flow of one's social graph into usable information is why we stick around in the first place. Oh, I guess that does count as a business model. - Brad Kligerman

I've noticed a couple companies contacting me directly via Twitter when I have made noise about their products. Obviously, people say a lot of things on Twitter about products they use... I agree with Patrick Pushor; "develop tools for professional/advanced use of twitter and charge for that level of service". Twitter should send a rep. to companies to show them how to use Twitter to improve their own products and service, by using Twitter Search to find out what consumers are saying about their products. - Colleen

I wrote an article about twitter's fundamental problem yesterday. Essentially, all communication networks move toward being free. www.zachlandes.com - Zach Landes

Robert Scoble

Interesting blog about what's wrong with friendfeed's interface - http://bokardo.com/archive...

January 6, 2009 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Chirag Chamoli, Kevin, Gökmen Karasu and 185 other people liked this

Joshua Porter does an awesome job here of explaining what's wrong with friendfeed's UI. - Robert Scoble from Bookmarklet

122 more comments

I disagree with almost every one of those suggestions. [edit] I'd prefer more, not less on the page. This person doesn't use hide much I guess. Likes allow me to find other people, white space is always appreciated and comments are value added. Again, don't like a title, hide it. It's just not that hard. - AJ Kohn

AJ: why? - Robert Scoble

Friends of friends represent huge potential value. I think getting rid of that mechanic would be a big mistake. Placing less emphasis on it than primary relationships makes sense. - Patrick Pushor

The interface I never knew I wanted - but I totally do. Some really great points in there. - Shawn Farner

+1 AJ. The first suggestion might be valid but others... no, no and no. - Tapio Kulmala

@Robert: I'd be okay with the ability to select how many items showed up on the page (default to 5 for newbies), but forcing it at 5. No thanks. I prefer scrolling to clicking by page, particularly with the speed in which things change on FF. White space is necessary to ensure you CAN scan the page. And comments is where the gold is. This interface would essentially reduce it to a one line Title interface, right? - AJ Kohn

GreaseMonkey does have a script that allows you to filter by content, so I think that is a great idea to already have it in FF. However, the other three opinions, I don't agree with, like the others. You don't care if someone you don't know liked something? The great thing about "Like" is that people that is subscribed to this person can view your content, so you get more exposure. Why wouldn't you want this? - Shevonne

I'm all for compressing more content into the scarce vertical space. I run FF in Firefox using almost all of the 1200 vertical pixels of my monitor, and it's still not enough. But there is a difference between times when you want discovery and times when you want efficiency, I'd find ways to improve the set up for both MOs. - LogEx

If they had everything in a single line, the vertical scrolling would be ridiculous. Maybe FF can have an option for people to hide comments, and click a link to show them, if they prefer. Maybe something similar to the WP FriendFeed plugin. - Shevonne

As somebody in the article comments already posted, you can already turn off friend of friend opinions. Maybe that option needs to be easier to find but I agree with all, keep it on by default. - Patrick Pushor

It appears he wants to use FF primarily as a news/info feed from select people with no commentary. I thought part of the allure off FF was the social commentary. And it always annoys me when people are so dismissive about seeing stuff from people other than the ones they've personally selected. Seems rather snooty. - ronin

I do disagree on de-emphasizing the people though, it is FriendFeed after all. I like to be able to easily see who made the post, via what service, the title, and a quick scan of the metadata. - LogEx

@saeba Bang on. FF is all about the commentary. Any competing service can build an aggregator. - Patrick Pushor

saeba - snooty? I see it as a headache bypass. There are some people that are a huge pain in the head to read on a regular basis and are out there posting as much as possible. I personally do not want to subject my head to that. Snooty, not at all. - Renee Hendricks

Most of the things he doesn't like are things that make FF good. For example, showing a few comments can generate interest in the entry even if the title is uninteresting. Finding new people partially comes from being able to see the full list of who liked the entry. I have to agree with the weighting problem though, I complained about that the first week. - xero

Interesting observations, although I don't feel there's any major problems with the FriendFeed UI. Although that's just my 2p. - Tyson Key

@TK There are definitely problems with the UI. As a web savvy individual the first time I experienced FF I didn't get it. That shouldn't be. However, I am not versed enough in UI design to suggest much else. - Patrick Pushor

"Randomness helps us discover. It can create interest. It can lead to intent." http://friendfeed.com/e... - AJ Kohn

@Susanne Isn't that what hide is for? - ronin

saeba - I was just commenting on the "snooty" part. I'm very low on the "read me I'm popular" end of things and yet I find it necessary to hide a lot of Friends of stuff. Does it make me snooty? Hardly. Makes me headache free :D But, yes, that's what hide is for. - Renee Hendricks

This from a guy that seemingly has never commented on any post other than his own and has made no (or few) direct FF posts. I somehow think he is missing something in the credibility department. - Brian Sullivan

site is down. I didn't do it. - Josh Haley

Went to read post and got this message "Error establishing a database connection". Worked when pressing Gray's links below. - B2B Specialist

Sure, FF could (and will) make some improvements, but it's a pretty darn good UI as it is. I was slow to use Twitter and still don't that much. I never used traditional social sites that much, but "got" FF right away. Compared to any other social aggregation and discussion service, the FF UI is an order of magnitude better. - LogEx

Every suggestion is bunk -- this is clearly not a serious user. Friend names *should* be the top item (this is, ahem, friend-feed). I do care who likes what -- I get to know people that way. A single line entry would be Google Reader -- thanks, I already have that option. Finally, if a title doesn't intrigue me, very often the comments do. +1 saeba, +1 xero - Christopher Galtenberg

I really like the fact that FF shows you who liked what. If pure scannability is what you are after then just read FF from an RSS reader. - barce

I have to say that I agree with a lot of what's already been said here about that article sounding like it came from someone that's not spent too much time in FF. I'll be honest and say that I have "friend of friend" off, and that it took me a while to realize how to do that. I think FF is great and a powerhouse of information if you know how to use it. Lets not remove that power to... more... - Matthew J Hendrickse

What barce said +1. Scanability is *not* the point of the main page. Social engagement is. - Christopher Galtenberg

OK, link works now, and now I can comment on it. Mr. Porter, FriendFeed is not a feed reader. It allows the import of a bunch of feeds and could be used that way, but as you point out, the interface is not designed with that in mind foremost. The killer app of FriendFeed is that it is a centralized, customizable place to have conversations about almost any content. Trying to make FriendFeed like Google Reader (my assumption based on your post) will change the dynamic of what I believe is this killer app. - Josh Haley

There are two major problems with Implementing his suggestions 1. Cluttered screen. 2. Increased need for mouse clicks to get to content. It should be go through serious testing before knowing which approach will give a better experience. - Amit Morson

While I don't care for his suggestions personally, when I couple his ideas with Louis Gray's "Lite" idea, I think he's really on to something. If you want to go the "Lite" route, keep the initial interface as simple as possible, then let the user discover all of the features of the FriendFeed we know and love. Oh, you can see who liked this item? And you can see comments? And you can see things from friends of friends? Joshua is NOT using FriendFeed incorrectly; he's using it the way he wants to use it. - Ontario Emperor

title here should read: "Uninteresting blog about what's right with friendfeed's interface". Sorry, Robert stop pumping links simply because you were mentioned in it. AJ nailed it in the second comment. Up next for this thread, what the author of this blog should learn to do on FF. HIDE. - Carlos Ayala

This would be a cool little tweak - make links open in a 'new' tab. - Jim Mitchem

I've solved most of the problems Joshua mentions by processing Friendfeed friend, room, list and search feeds through Google Reader. And I can absolutely guaranteee you that, using the GR interface, I can run circles around anyone using the FF interface in terms of grokking all the new FF activity in the areas of greatest interest to me (or any areas). Lightning-fast scanning and... more... - Sean McBride

Carlos, let's say that you put me behind the wheel of a NASCAR race car. Before I can drive the thing, I have to make a number of changes to the car to simplify it - "hide" this control, "hide" that control, etc. For newbie car drivers like me, why not come up with a model that's like a Honda Accord? If people insist that I'm using the NASCAR car incorrectly, then I'm not going to drive it at all - which is why more people use Twitter than FriendFeed. The firehose is not for everyone. - Ontario Emperor

Sean, could you post a screenshot of your FriendFeed/GReader-based scanning solution? - Ontario Emperor

OE makes a good point and an good analogy. How many of us circle the block in our cars for days, stopping every other time around to change the suspension settings? - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)

From a user interface standpoint, hiding items strikes me as extremely wrong. Not smart. Not efficient. I want to see the information that is most valuable to me with the least possible effort. - Sean McBride

I wouldn't want a bunch of line items as if I'm reading email. I like seeing the comments and who has liked it. That is what makes me give an item with maybe a boring title another chance. One thing I would like is if my or my friends comments stood out a little better. - Yolanda

Ontario: a single screenshot wouldn't capture my Google Reader view on Friendfeed. Anyone here can try this simple experiment: create a Friendfeed folder in GR, and add a few FF friend, room, list and search feeds. Be sure to include feeds for FriendFeedLinks, FFholic Most Discussed and Best of Day. You'll be able to rip through hundreds of items with the greatest of speed and... more... - Sean McBride

Sean, assuming the interface isn't omniscient, wouldn't the bare-bones case require you to add sources of information? And isn't that something users would be much less likely to do than Hide? I think the hide-based paradigm, while counter-intuitive, is more likely to lead to the success which is having just the right amount of feeds. - Christopher Galtenberg

+1 Barce - yeah if the guy wants an RSS-feed pure list of his friends' content, just pull his feed it into Google Reader via RSS... then he can scan headlines all he wants, and he doesn't have to care about likes or comments... - Nathan Chase

Christopher - you are correct that it takes a bit of effort to add FF feeds to GR, and probably requires more skill with feed management than most net users possess. We need a slick interface to expedite the process. But try this: go to Best of Day http://friendfeed.com/summary... and click on the RSS icon in the address bar. If you are already a GR user, you will be served up a... more... - Sean McBride

I discovered this post through GR, by the way. - Sean McBride

I also use a Twitter folder in FF to cut through all the noise. From my bird's-eye view, FF and Twitter are just bundles of easily manipulable feeds. - Sean McBride

Sean, that's actually a pretty brilliant idea, cause I always forget to check the "best of the day", so it would make for a good "news feed" to check, since most of the posts are important news/articles, or at the very least, important memes/social conversations among FF users - Nathan Chase

Nathan: in my FF folder in GR I place FriendFeedLinks in the number one slot; FFholic Most Discussed in the second slot; and Best of Day in the third slot. It takes me less than five minutes a day to identify the most important new posts on FF as a whole. If I were unable to create this interface, I wouldn't bother using FF at all -- it would be a serious waste of time. - Sean McBride

Sean: I'm subscribing to you based purely on my respect for your l33t news-reading skillz - Nathan Chase

More: I find the posts of certain FF users to be exceptionally valuable, like Anthony Citrano, Meryn Stoll, Paul Buchheit and Louis Gray. From my GR view, I can quickly see that user X has posted *number new posts. I can then click on a user's feed, scan the headings of all their new posts, and zoom in on the posts that strike me as most interesting. Viewing all their items as a single list/group gives me a much better conceptual understanding of their posts, without wading through torrents of noise. - Sean McBride

More: my FF and Twitter folders in GR are nicely integrated with many other folders, all of which are prioritized by importance. I manage all these feeds under a single interface. My lead folder is Top 10 Feeds, and includes BreakingNewsOn, CNET News, FriendFeedLinks, Lifehacker, NYT - Breaking News, NYT - Technology, Slashdot, Yahoo! News: Mideast Conflict, Yahoo! News: Technology and Yahoo! News: Top Stories. - Sean McBride

Sean - I'll bet your desk is clean too. - Scott Maentz

Nathan - I've been strongly interested in optimizing my news-reading flow for several years now. This current setup that I've described is the best method for news reading I've discovered to date. - Sean McBride

Scott - minimizing to the max, getting rid of clutter, streamlining, more bang for the buck, etc. is almost a religion for me. :) That is why I fell in love with the Google aesthetic from the first week that Google was released to the world. - Sean McBride

Gabe - if I am in the middle of a hot discussion on FF, I simply click on http://friendfeed.com/seanmcb... to read and respond to the latest comments in near real time. But 95% of the really valuable posts on FF are captured in GR soon enough. - Sean McBride

Sean - More power to you! I also love Google products and use them as exclusively as possible. - Scott Maentz

I neglected to mention a key point: ALL the items of interest in ALL my feeds (including Friendfeed and Twitter) are easily searchable and retrievable from a single user interface: Google Reader. And if you star items of interest as you scan and read them, the search space is significantly narrowed. And I can forward any of these items as email, and tag them. What's not to like? - Sean McBride

For all people who are noting that Google Reader items do not appear in realtime, it should be noted that most FriendFeed shares don't make it to the FriendFeed UI in realtime either. So it doesn't sound like you're losing much by using Google Reader as your FriendFeed interface. I'll experiment with Sean's system a bit and see what I think about it. - Ontario Emperor

I would hate that interface. I don't agree with any of it. I love FoaF and if I don't want stuff from a certain user, I hide them. If I don't want a service showing up, I hide it. - Mattie Kenny

The basic Friendfeed user interface is like logrolling or birling: I'll wager that most new users lose their balance quickly and fall off the log. I am a speed reader, and can absorb huge flows of text easily, but I can't begin to get a handle on the FF flow from the main page -- it's mostly random chaos. Surely this interface issue will continue to be a major obstacle to achieving... more... - Sean McBride

Gabe - check out the FriendFeedLinks feed http://friendfeedlinks.com/ Is it really important to see these items in real time? They are valuable to me within 24 hours or a week. The more one is distracted by trivial posts, the less one has time to focus on important posts. - Sean McBride

I know this is a plug for my own code, but https://launchpad.net/myff (demo at can be seen in the iframe on the right at http://zzzen.jottit.com) tries to address such problems. Not exactly the *same* problems [and it shows my discussion stream (comments+likes) and not my "what's new" stream], but the code is there, and it's easy to add features. Feel free to use this with your own user name (e.g. http://myff.zzzen.webfactional.com/api...) as an iframe. - ĎÚβĨŐÚŚ Dod

Ontario - try this experiment: add the feeds for your five favorite friends to a Google Reader Friendfeed folder. I think you will find that you will be able to track their new posts with much greater speed and ease than from Friendfeed. One is not equally interested in all the posts from one's favorite friends: GR makes it possible to find the most interesting posts with a quick scan down the list. - Sean McBride

Dod: intriguing FF interface. But no features for starring, tagging, sharing, emailing, prioritizing and searching. Yes? No? - Sean McBride

Some interesting comments but I don't agree with all. E.g. it's sometimes interesting to see who has "liked" a post as that might be someone I want to follow. However I do think there should be more options for hiding or compressing content as you choose - Mark Warren

I'm pretty happy with the interface as it is. In fact, I think when you compare it to other social networking/sharing services like twitter, identi.ca, facebook, linkedin, etc... I think it wins hands down. The issues Joshua highlights seem trivial to me, and his recommendations might make the service less useful as Mattie noted above. - Jim Misses SP

I agree with the disagreers here. He obviously just wants a gReader with a Gmail UI and links to a (probably mostly unused) commenting feature (to put it bluntly..). - Thomas Bøhm

@Sean persistent storage of MyFF is friendfeed itself, and the only way to change its content would be via posts, comments and likes. | I *could* keep some external info in a database at the app's server, but this would require user-auth, backups, etc. and spoil the "zero-admin" fun. | Search I can [and should] do, so you'd "tag" by saying [e.g.] tag-widget (like I just did) and then search for it. | An "item to top" cheat is to delete and re-add one of my own comments (only works for discussion feed) - ĎÚβĨŐÚŚ Dod

An interesting list, but I'm sure if those changes were made that new ones would spring up. The 100% perfect interface will never likely come. - Jeremy Campbell from twhirl

Maybe FF could allow people to Hide parts of the interface. - Christopher Galtenberg

I responded on josh's blog. He's a smart guy who actually did the first iteration of Grazr's home page. Unfortunately the problem is not the interface. It's what *is* friendfeed. He starts the argument with a supposition of what it is, and that's *not* what FriendFeed is to me (or I gather a lot of other people). - mikepk

That certainly got the discussion going. What this tells me is that there needs to be several (three would be the best number) different pre-configured default types of FF that are easy to find for new users. Provide an icon in the left sidebar that goes to a page that offers the three options with descriptions on how each benefits users. Then let them easily toggle between them so they can pick what they like best without having to know how to alter defaults or know anything more. - Internet Strategist

@Strategist, that's one way to approach it, but it dillutes your efforts. It also makes the interface more confusing, not less for initial users. It also means you have to figure out what the default is, as a large percentage of people will never explore beyond a default configuration. Everything has a tradeoff. - mikepk

choice is good,..but too much choice is bad. regarding the OP i disagree completely with all of his "ideas". i def want to see who liked what. i often feel interested in ppl that like things based on topics. all this screen estate talk bash is silly too. the way FF is structured right now makes it possible for each topic to look the same no matter how much text it contains aso. what i would like to see improved is comment rating as @DIGG and filtering. its essential to sort out spammers. - Chris Hofmann

The post was obviously satire, since he titled it "modest" suggestions for updating FriendFeed, and because his suggestions are clearly chosen to be shocking and wrong. - Joshua Allen

Dod - there is a great deal of FF material sitting on Google's servers now, and easily accessible through GR's search interface. In fact, material that has been deleted from FF is still available on GR. - Sean McBride

Joshua, I'm assuming that comment was intended to be saitire. :) I've met josh, I think his suggestions where legit, although it may have been to just spark conversation. - mikepk

Another intriguing data point, Josh's blog has 17 comments at the moment. On FriendFeed this share has way more than that and is "liked by over 100 people. So again, what is the *purpose* of FriendFeed, what *is* it. That is the hard question. - mikepk

"So again, what is the *purpose* of FriendFeed, what *is* it. That is the hard question." - Is it? "History" is full of examples of products that were created for one purpose, but were more useful doing something else. FF started as an RSS aggregator - it's evolving based on how we use it. - John Craft

FF is a powerful vortex that is going to suck in all the blog commentary in the world. :) Maybe not too much an exaggeration. The interface as its stands blows away all the blog comment interfaces out there, in my opinion. - Sean McBride

@mikepk: I wouldn't be so sure. I subscribe to Josh's blog as well, but the usage of the word "modest" in a proposal hearkens back to Swift's famous "modest proposal". He left some big red flags in there, like pretending to forget that people have mouse wheels. - Joshua Allen

Yes, all SM is in a major state of flux. And perhaps it will always be that way. Making *it* whatever *you* want *it* to be. - Jim Mitchem

Thanks for the comments on my post, everyone. I should have made it more clear that I'm not suggesting Friendfeed get rid of its social features...that would reduce the service to a mere feed reader. I completely agree that those features help make FF what it is. What I am suggesting is that in the current design I think they could be presented more efficiently, and as a result I find it hard to scan to find good content quickly. - Joshua Porter

Yes, it is a hard question. If its use is evolving, and it's not based on it's initial conception (which, you're right, is the norm rather than the exception) then answering that question in the contest of trying to make interface design decisions *is* excruciatingly difficult. you're left with a) leave it alone and allow the evolution to continue b) try to formulate what it is to give users a better experience of *that*. Scoble and Josh have a different use pattern than I do, and probably you do. - mikepk

"answering that question in the contest of trying to make interface design decisions *is* excruciatingly difficult." - I think the answer is to make the interface more configurable. Create your own style in the same way you create a WordPress theme or a date format - using defined components, and styling them individually. - John Craft

John, but the more configurable you make it, the more confusing it becomes for users. I've been at this for almost three years now. It's counter-intuitive but the more options you give someone to tailor their experience the more likely they are to choose *none of the above*. Simplicity suffers greatly when you can't answer that fundamental question of what you *are*. - mikepk

Again - as with any media, it is what YOU make it. Except of course if you subscribe to cable, in which case you get what they give you and pay for it through the nose. My point is that if the medium is in place, and it's pliable, we each use it to our individual preferences. That's why FF will not ever go away - but continue to morph into a highly user-friendly interface that will continue to attract users because of its concatenation/aggregation features. Duh. ;) - Jim Mitchem

Friendfeed has a UI, I'd just a burned-in green screen away from being a Univax Server. Useful? Yes, but elegant and pretty? - Matthew DeVries

Here's a simple thought experiment, imagine a poll of the people commenting in this tread "what's the one user interface change you would make that would most improve your experience of FriendFeed". If you didn't get 100 different answers I'd be surprised. That's the hard part. - mikepk

imo, the point of Josh's post is that for the casual observer, FF looks intimidating. As frivolous as it sounds, 'Appearance' and how the UI is organized *is the most important touchpoint* for the consumer. As it stands now, many just don't have the time nor the inclination to tackle the steep learning curve FF requires--there are just too many demands on attention online. Another barrier to entry, which Josh didnt raise, are the confusing account settings which could be better described w/bubble help. - Lee Hsieh

"the more configurable you make it, the more confusing it becomes for users." True - but with a "standard" format (like this one), or a few to choose from, it doesn't have to be. Let new users start with something pre-determined, then migrate to their own custom skin if/when they're ready. - John Craft

Having FoAF defaulted does seem to cause confusion - though it helped me, personally. But if a person is too lazy to scroll, that's not FriendFeed's problem. Sometimes the headline is irrelevant, but the convo contains more valuable information. If I wanted to see headlines from pre-selected people, I would go to Twitter. - Mona Nomura

Lee, good point. There are a lot of competing requirements. Further complicating these kinds of discussions are things like the initial user experience. It's like a variant of the old engineering adage, you can have it intuitive and simple, powerful, or efficient but you can only pick two to optimize. :) - mikepk

Here's something 'right' about FF UI, the 'open in mini-window' live stream. Very cool. - Jim Mitchem

For those who caught Sean McBride's comments earlier about using Google Reader to find interesting FriendFeed content, I *did* give it a try and have taken a couple of screen shots. 1 of 2 (with associated discussion) http://friendfeed.com/e... - Ontario Emperor

2 of 2 (again with associated discussion) http://friendfeed.com/e... - Ontario Emperor

And, as Sean noted, such a system is purported to help you locate things easier. So if you're now interested in Yolanda's item (the one at the bottom), it's here. http://friendfeed.com/e... - Ontario Emperor

I don't know why people are interested in making FF a walled garden. FF remains one of the most enjoyable means of content discovery for me. I think it's something less without FOAF. I would make it a toggle feature on account creation, but not remove it. I'm constantly finding relevant new people through the feature. I think the interface is the strong point - FF is not Google Reader or Gmail - as it's conversation oriented, hence long threads (though for people wanting aggregation *only*, I see the point) - Mo Kargas

Ontario - nice work on the screenshots. Do you notice now that you can view comments and likes from GR? And that it usually takes no more clicks to uncompress comments for the original FF page from GR than from FF itself? One click on "*number more comments" in GR will drop you into the middle of the discussion stream on Friendfeed, with all comments uncompressed. - Sean McBride

Hmm... quickly glancing at my GR subscriptions list I see 2 new posts from Patricia, 1 new post from Paul Buchheit, 2 new posts from Veselka, 24 new posts from Dave Winer, etc. A few clicks exposed the lists of new items to view, and I found six items worth clicking through to. All now marked as read, and no need to see again. That was really fast. Knowledge garnered. Desk cleared. - Sean McBride

So he just wants to turn it into filtered feed reader where only the A-list really gets a look in? What utter bollocks. The strength of FriendFeed is in its social interaction and sharing across the service. Note to Paul Buchheit: please don't do any of these. - Duncan Riley

@duncan: sounds like you're saying that he's missing the "friend" part of FriendFeed... - .LAG liked that

This entry had so many comments it would open up in the home feed btw - Tyler (Chacha)

I guess I disagree with the premise that FF is not supposed to be a firehose. It was a point made by both @Scobleizer and @LeoLaporte in the first seconds of the newest TWiT that FF is supposed to be a firehose. You only pay attention to it when you're looking at it. You step in to it, get your skin ripped off. Then go about your day. There's already readers and such out there that refine the content for you, FriendFeed is about realtime content creation. It only needs the eyes that are on it to run. - Matthew DeVries

And those eyes aren't necessarily yours. You don't sit down to FriendFeed to catch up on a damn thing, you look it to see what is going on now as everything in it whips around and past you. - Matthew DeVries

You can't review history... just too much of it has happened. What this type of medium is going to become is a way to take stuff that interests you, and is currently happening, and being fine if you miss some of it - Tyler (Chacha)

I love the fact that Friendfeed will take the 'likes' of people I subscribe to and give them to me, 435 people can't cover/write/create it all. - Tyler (Chacha)

now we can see who's really on FF - Donovan Slennon

+1 Matthew. I like the fire hoseness of FF. The other great function is to zero in on one friend and see what he/she is up to. That was probably the original intention. The social media blast is a cool side benefit. - Seth Gottlieb

@mikepk dilutes how? I agree that most never change the defaults and get confused which is precisely why I suggest that we offer new users a choice of three "views" with suggestions based on how they want to use FF. - Internet Strategist

@Chris Hofmann Yes, too many choices cause indecision. That is why it needs to be two or at most three and there has to be a VERY simple suggestion on which someone should pick. Otherwise some won't do anything. - Internet Strategist

Ok... I'm not trying to be snippy - and I think discussing how to make FF better is great... but for the love of (name your deity) can we stop the friggin' navel gazing. Things evolve... let's give it some time to do that and stop posting on this thread... jeeeezzzzzzz - Brian Roy

I didn't entirely agree - I like the layout and seeing comments/likes from new people, too - Sarah Perez

I think Friendfeed would be better off focusing on the functionality over the UI. 3rd parties can deal with changing the UI, but adding functionality like Track/Block can't be done by anyone but FF - Tyler (Chacha)

I'd like to correct that last statement .. Track/Block can't be done 'well' by anyone by FF. Because 3rd parties can do it, but probably FF could do it better - Tyler (Chacha)

what a great time to be a FriendFeed developer -- recent tips from power users like Scoble, Gray, and other interesting tidbits like this one. They have so much input now, I wonder what direction they'll take next? - Pete Delucchi

I wish there were a way I could tell FF to give me only the comments of people in my network when there's a huge number like this...as long as we're making a wish list. - Rae21

This entry has so many comments it won't open up without me navigating to its page. Grrr - Tyler (Chacha)

Yeah, Looks like Robert Scoble is a firehose. :) I'm new here. I don't think I'll be friending him. - Rae21

Rae21: that is pretty smart! But I am looking for great items for you. Just build a new list. Call it "noisy asshole" or something like that. Then add me to that list. - Robert Scoble

I felt a little guilty about commenting because I didn't want to take up too much vertical space. Sue me. - Robert Peña

-1. The name is "FriendFeed", not "Firehose". The people are just as important as the feed. Don't lose that, or the mechanisms which promote discovery of new ppl. - Nick Lothian

Added as a CON for now on the FF PRO vs CON list (for now): http://friendfeed.com/e... - B2B Specialist

Nick just said it right ^ - Christopher Galtenberg

Mona Nomura

. - http://donttouchmymoleskine.fi...

October 15, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Sriks7, Chris Weige, Isabelle Ayel and 72 other people liked this

I like this, but it's missing "To be or not to be" to start it off ;) - Michael W. May from twhirl

17 more comments

Job Done MONA MONA N!! - Jason

Do Be Do Be Do, mwm. ;) - Mona Nomura

Did you ever go to bed? - Trish R

"Bounce, bounce bounce the ball, bouncing's so much fun. Use you hand or fist or wrist to keep it on the run" - Mr DooBee - Johnny Worthington

Trish: AIM - Mona Nomura

Bitch, I"ve been on AIM for hours and no one has IM'd me. :-( - Trish R

Is today the day you can blab about your secret? - Yolanda

good morning Mona! - Carmen - Happy 2010!

Trish: Well if you get a NATIVE chat client like we all do, you wouldn't have that problem. I've been IMing your ass and you've been ignoring me, asshole! Yo: YES! I'm waiting for them to launch!!! @Carmen: Morning! :) - Mona Nomura

Mona, you are so sweet. Your terms of endearment bring tears to my eyes. ;) - Yolanda

hahahahha sorry to start off your day w/ my potty mouth! In OTHER news, I seriously CAN NOT wait until they launch omg omg omg - Mona Nomura

Girl please, you ain't heard a potty mouth until you've heard me talking. It is terrible. :) - Yolanda

Oh yeah, what is this big fat secret, tell no lies, I ain't sayin and heard nuthin, I can't tell you, cross me heart cor blimey etc.@@?? We all need to know, it is your royal righteousness :-)) - Jason

Mona, I added you on ICQ. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. - Trish R

Monaaaa, check this : http://friendfeed.com/e... - Alemsah Ozturk

@Mona check this too :) http://friendfeed.com/e... - Muge Cerman

Shameless self promoting of your posts in other people's posts FTL ;) - Mona Nomura

Scoo-Be Scooby Doo - Alan Le

Veronica

Apple in the handheld gaming world - http://www.veronicabelmont.com/2008...

September 26, 2008 from Veronica Belmont - Comment - Like - Share

Daynah, Jason Wong, Michael Gaines and Brad Brooks liked this

"Do you think people will eventually buy the iPod or iPhone with the primary function of being their gaming device?" - Nope. - Percival

I've always wanted to be, but never been, a "gamer on the go". I just can't lug around a PSP or DS in my pocket with my wallet and keys. To have a capable gaming and audio device (and phone) in one sleek package is too good to be true. There's proof that developer applications and submitted apps that are game related get fast tracked through the process. As a indie game developer & Mac... more... - Paul Reynolds

Our household has three portable gaming devices and they all belong to kids under the age of 12. They won't be replacing them with iPhones anytime soon. Each will probably get a DS sometime soon though. - John Massaglia

Robert Scoble

OK, in past hour I've lost six followers out of 42,000 because I posted more than 30 political tweets. Glad I define myself by who I follow.

September 11, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Joshua Oehler, Daniel W. Crompton, Elliott Ng and 16 other people liked this

Hey, I like that you're at least creating a discussion. Not everybody's going to agree. Nice to see people express such strong opinions. Americans, I have hope for you yet. :) - Patricia

17 more comments

separating out wheat from chaff - good! :) be yourself! - Susan Beebe

Just for the record, Robert. I didn't find your tweets all that political, but I guess I'm desensitized by FF - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

When we stopped talking about the actual issues, that's what got us in trouble in the first place... I'd rather argue and get it right than shove my fingers in my ears and think I am... - Johnny Worthington

42,000? Twitter claims 34,000. And if we assume you are including FriendFeed's 16,000 as well, that would be 50,000... - Louis Gray

...except that you know how many followers you lost ;) If I lost a follower, I would have no clue, because I never even look at the number. - Andru Edwards

Hey Robert, those who take you off for talking political are losing out. If I find your political talk offensive or anything I'll just ignore you. But you haven't been that bad. I find your tweets very interesting. - Molly, New Ears :P

Louis, sorry, 34,000. I don't know where my brain came up with 42,000. Gotta get some sleep. Thanks Molly. - Robert Scoble

I actually found it "brave" of you to go into the Political. Although I don't agree with the tenets of your posts, "going there," in your case, didn't make me gauge the value of your feed, posts, links, insights, to me differently - Marko Bon

Robert, no problem. I was curious if you had 8,000 on identi.ca or something you were counting, or if FriendFeed counted as half due to overlap and Twitter hiders. :-) - Louis Gray

Scoble's stat is interesting in that it suggest that a large number of people don't mind the politics while a small number hate it enough to unsubscribe from Scoble (his tech news and all). What does this say about the population in general? That perhaps the great unwashed is not so great a number at all. - Roberto Bonini

Am trying... and failing... to figure out why you track your followers by the hour. - Cyndy

Agreed. You can't control your followers, except blocking them which is too time-consuming anyway. - Ronald

Cyndy - I could easily be wrong and Robert would need to set the record straight here... but I think he was pointing out that he lost followers immediately after he "posted more than 30 political tweets". I seriously doubt he tracks his follower numbers by the hour - but heck he might?! Instead, it appears that he was just noticing and remarking about the folks who dropped out after said tweets. I think it is sad that folks will tune out that fast over some passionate tweets! - Susan Beebe

Robert - don't worry about it. Your strength in this medium is your passion... if aren't talking about what you feel passion for then it won't seem genuine. Sometimes I agree with you, sometimes I disagree but I always respect that you are saying exactly what you feel. - Soulhuntre from twhirl

I'm still following you despite our political in difference - orionstarr

i find myself liking when Robert posts on political issues as well. He has loads of hands-on "being used" experiences as he put yesterday on one of FF threads, and i am quite interested in politics myself! - Hayk H.

At least you're reasonable and not a kneejerk radical. I know your opinions are both thought out and nicely worded. - Mike Lewis

Your posts are more analytical than political. Keep up the good work. - imran

Mona Nomura

Customize Your FriendFeed: Hiding FriendFeed Entries - http://pixelbits.wordpress.com/2008...

August 20, 2008 from Pixel Bits - Comment - Like - Share

Alan Le, Michael Gaines, Tim Hoeck and 14 other people liked this

Nice, was that from some greasemonkey script? I missed the first part of the video there. - ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,

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No greasemonkey. It's regular ole default FriendFeed, everyone can do it :) - Mona Nomura

Hide all Mona N.'s Blog entries even if they have comments or likes. - Andrew Trinh

Exactly, reduce 'your' noise! HA - Mona Nomura

Andrew-- - mjc

LOL! Everyone's definition of 'noise' is different, hopefully this'll help reduce the complaining. Cuz to me, the complaints about noise are the noisiest. Just saying. - Mona Nomura

Don't think I do any hiding at all. But now I want to! - Stu Andrews from twhirl

If it betters your FriendFeed experience, go for it! - Mona Nomura

Allright, I was too shy to try it out as I thought it was somewhat of a definite choice. - ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,

Not at all, you can always 'unveil' the entries at the bottom :) To each their own, Elijah! - Mona Nomura

Great tutorial Mona. - Mike Fruchter

good job Mona! :) I liked the 'See - Hide ... Stuff ... From ... All ... Friends .. of ... Friends' - Tim Hoeck

oh, and FYI - FriendFeed is missing one Hide option... Hide all (insert annoying service here) from Friends of a Friend. - Tim Hoeck

'Hide ... Stuff ... From ... All ... Friends .. of ... Friends' LOL. I thought the hide feature was intuitive, obvious, and self-explanatory. Of 100 entries, around 50 are usually hidden for me with this feature (most are twitter entries without likes or comments). - Alan Le

I totally thought it was self explanatory, too. But after hearing / seeing people complain and whine, I got tired of it and offered solutions lol... 'Hide ... Stuff ... From ... All ... Friends ... of ... Friends ...' FTW! ;) - Mona Nomura

Mark Dykeman

Do you'll think we'll ever have another "Star Wars" hit popular culture? Or was Harry Potter the closest that we'll ever come again?

August 14, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Gaines, Alex Scoble, Chris Brogan and Sarah Perez liked this

I was thinking about this. Short answer: not soon. The thing about 70's moviemaking is that it was awful. Star Wars invigorated the movies again. It changed things. Harry Potter never came close. - Michael Gaines

8 more comments

The Matrix? - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

@Rizzn - interesting choice... but the Matrix trilogy seemed to fizzle a bit after the first movie (OK, maybe that's a better comparison than I thought...) - Mark Dykeman

If you are looking for another sci-fi hit, probably not for a while. Hollywood can't seem to get it right very often...and the chances are further lowered by the fact that they rarely make sci-fi movies anymore. The closest they come these days are the comic book movies... - Alex Scoble

Cohort replacement is a beautiful thing. Each generation has their own special moments in film. We will certainly witness more epic and game changing film making. One example is the light jump we have recently seen in animation, the most popular work being done by Pixar, Disney, etc. The best is yet to come. FYI, I recall being begged by 20th to present a Star Wars premiere in Chicago. We did the "space western" premiere, cast with unknowns in trade for the premiere of two hit movies to be named later. - Dave Martin

Plus the way that they cram "blockbusters" into just about every week in the summer season pretty much prevents the sort of experience that Star Wars was. - Alex Scoble

A few other points: movies lasted longer back then. Some theaters showed Star Wars for a YEAR. My local theater played it almost that long. The movie came out in May and I saw it for my birthday in October. That doesn't happen anymore. Also, SW has lasted 30 years. Potter hasn't. Nothing has the rabid fanbase after so many decades. Name any popular movie in the last 10 years and already you can't compare it to Star Wars. - Michael Gaines

@Michael. The economic model of the movie game changed. There were no multiple release windows in the contracts (e.g., second run, cable, video release). btw, the biggest release to date would be Gone With The Wind, the 1939 release is still selling, still featured world-wide at film festivals and holds the record for gross sales far above the combined SW collection. - Dave Martin

@Michael Gains - actually, I remember Home Alone played in theatres for something like nine months. The aftermarket for video (dvd, online, tv) has killed long runs, though, especially since DVD sales are genarally more profitable. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Continuing the discussion at my blog: http://broadcasting-brain.com/2008... - Mark Dykeman

Eric Rice

Gary Vee's keynote set me off and aside from throwing the bus at him and his fanboys, I also have shared the wisdom of "I just wish social media would jump the shark already, so everyone can stop hangin all over everyone else's dick". Thank you, have a nice day.

August 14, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

DYKC?™, Lynne d Johnson, adolfo foronda and 10 other people liked this

Watching it (even for a short while) made me a) be thankful I didn't go to Vegas this year and b) nearly throw up in my mouth - Bob Bichler

he's a very talented man...for a marketer. - Schlomo Rabinowitz

Mona Nomura

Spluch: Simply Unbelievable Egg Stacking! - http://spluch.blogspot.com/2007...

July 13, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

zeynep, Brandon Thompson, Jemm and 58 other people liked this

=O This man stacks eggs. STACKS THEM..expand! - Mona Nomura

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You should see what he does with the chickens. - Chris Baskind

I havethis urge to gently push only 1 egg to see what happens .. :)- - Peter Dawson

oh btw, there are all hardball eggs.. I just made that up ...lol - Peter Dawson

LOL@Chris, I've been meaning to tell you this but you're one of the wittiest people on FF. I crack up ALL the time at your comments haha - Mona Nomura

Michael: Like follow the leader?? What a nightmare - Mona Nomura

"What a great way to enter the world" ? don't you think it will be similar to how Neo comes of "being" in the Matrix ? IMHO, That would be a horrifying way to be born ! <Edit> No just think of it ..all your unborn brothers and sisters stacked up all around you when u r born ?? What would e your first thoughts ?? Holy Crap, lets get the ef'ing hell out of this scray zone. ok ok.. I digress from this convo. My imagination runs pretty wild at times !! - Peter Dawson

WOW - aliatrvash

Wow, WTF!? - Andrew Baron

No, really? I wonder what he felt like when he first figured out he could do this. - Yolanda

Something about 1.5 billion peopel that make labor and scaling non-issues. - Mark Forman

so magnificent building! - ieruo

WTF - Derek

TY, Mona. :-) - Chris Baskind

I'm with Mona, Chris's comment was a classic. Can we vote for a "Comment of the Week"? I've read two contenders today. - Toby Graham

There's a guy at my grocery store that stacks eggs too - Josh Haley

Whoa, what in the.. where did THIS come from?! Posted July 13th? wow! - Mona Nomura

good morning Mona! :p - Josh Haley

he's a genius when it comes to egg stacking - Seckoa

Impressive, but why? - Morton Fox

Veronica

I need a few more suggestions for the Tekzilla segment "Websites We Just Can't Get Enough Of!" A website that's useful, fun, or just plain-old entertaining. What are your favorites?

August 12, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Alejandro, Marten, Charlie Anzman and 5 other people liked this

past sites include evernote.com, gethuman.com, chacha.com, freshairapps.com - Veronica

34 more comments

linerider.com - Michael Gaines from twhirl

http://ffffound.com/ - Charlie Anzman

brightkite.com - nesman89 from twhirl

uh...friendfeed - Josh Haley

http://compfight.com - Phil G

Wikipedia, twittervision, dictionary.com, hot.veronica.pics.com. Ok I made that last one up. - Mattb4rd

tripit.com, trackashipment.com - Brian Blankenship

assuming you're looking for things outside of the Wiki, ESPN, and Craigslist realm, I love and can't get enough of the "Bad Astronomy" blog: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastr... - Robert Seidman

http://www.roofray.com/ - solar power + google maps - Adam

http://www.lipsum.com/ being a web dev, i use this site a lot when mocking up pages. It has interesting insight also on the whole lorem ipsum thing. - Handy Lukman

I second Robert Seidman. http://scienceblogs.com also has a lot of great, accessible science bloggers. - Yuvi

http://fantasticcontraption.com/ - 19Kilo

http://www.homestarrunner.com Still an awesome site after all these years. OR http://www.wdwtoday.com if you want Disney World info...and it's funny, listen to episode 414 (it's my favorite) http://tinyurl.com/5nz4e6 - Brandon Tucker

Georgia's presidential web site, now hosted in Atlanta, GA. You must be able to read Georgian, but it is a total riot. http://tinyurl.com/6dhxs6 - Wilma Stoneflint

How about InterfaceLIFT? Free backgrounds aren't anything interesting, but really beautiful free multi-monitor backgrounds are (at least to me). http://interfacelift.com/ I just found it yesterday, maybe I'm behind the times and everybody else has already been there. - Dr. Apps from twhirl

tumblr.com - David O'Halloran

www.rememberthemilk.com - Robert Hafer

Considering the Olympics games you can try to find something related. It is not web per se but there are some update services in twitter for the olympic. One is twittolympic, other the nbcolympic and beijing2008 - Arturo Servin from twhirl

instantrimshot.com ...endless uses - Adam Cohen from twhirl

http://dealoco.com The site allows you to find great deals and it rates how hard it is to get the deal based on a Grief Factor scale. I love this site. - Jeff from twhirl

I vote for wikipedia. - jered reynolds from feedalizr

http://www.centernetworks.com ! i find that i can't get enough of it - Allen Stern

http://wigflip.com/automot... You should see my cube, it's full of these - adamzap

urbandictionary.com, one of the various Jargon File sites, and bash.org are a handful that I can sit at for awhile and be terribly amused. - Jim Stanger

http://www.hasselhoff.com/ check out the Hoff games. days of entertainment! - Eddie Codel

http://www.visuwords.com/ an interesting visual way to look at the connections between words - Clarke Fielding

Hulu.com - Blake Hall

http://ronaldchevalier.com/ - XDpaul

of course I'm going to say cinevegas.com! we got podcasts, videos, shorts online, oh my! - Roger @ CineVegas

and then my side project: rapskallion.com - a place for hip-hop fanboys - Roger @ CineVegas

I'm so glad rapskallion.com isn't a joke! - Paul Reynolds

I just found this site and I'm totally hooked, it's about used furniture mainly http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ - Jude

http://www.plurk.com - Jon

http://www.bucketofhate.com - Jon

www.fantasticcontraption.com - Mark

Mona Nomura

Dear douche on BlueTooth headset with loud voice: We HEAR youre busy with NO time. But um, please order? You're holding up the EFin line!!

August 8, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Great Scott!, Yolanda, Charlie Anzman and 16 other people liked this

Girl, that's when I cut in front of ppl! "Oh, you were next? Whatever, get outta my way!" - Zulema ◕ ◡ ◕

16 more comments

ugh! Ive done that, but the aftermath is a waste of energy and too much effort! Especially before my caffeine fix haha - Mona Nomura from fftogo

I remember when cell phones were new -- a friend used to refer to these people as Johnny and Joanie Affluent. But douche is non gender specific and more modern. - Brian Sullivan

It's not bluetooth in those cases.. it's douchetooth. - David Worrell

douche on douchetooth? or asshat on douchetooth. there we go. asshat on douchetooth headset. - Mona Nomura

Have you tried ripping the headgear off his head and stomping it to death right in front of him? - Kevin D. White

Hee hee, douchetooth. I think I am stealing that one! - Michelle Martinez

It's actually an "assclown" on "bluedouche". - Steve Isaacs

Reason No. 89475938 I LOVE FriendFeed. Thanks Steve, next time I'll tell the assclown on his bluedouche to SHUT HIS BACONHOLE - Mona Nomura

i always have a notebook with me (bad habit) so when that happens i write what i want in large letters and hold it above the asshat's shoulder. i step around and pay when the order is ready, and for all the other person knows i phoned it in previously. - idnan

@idnan That is g*d d*mn awesome and has serious potential as a photo meme. - Kevin D. White

oooh, my first potential meme! a proud, proud day! :) - idnan

idnan: THAT is AWESOME. ps ATTN: JAY WIEGMANN: YOUR AVATAR FTW - Mona Nomura

welcome to the passive-aggressive tweet club - mjc

@idnan I LOVE that. - Michael Gaines

Haha "douche" is one of the best words to use when you're upset at some moron. It's great in a combo; "What a dildonic douche that guy is!" - Mattb4rd

"Dildonic Douche" FTW! - Helen Sventitsky

the one I heard the other day was Bluetool. - Russell Holliman

Eric Rice

Want into the PlayStation Home Closed Beta Test? Here’s How to Apply - http://blog.us.playstation.com/2008...

August 8, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Andrea Mercado, Michael Gaines, Phil G and 2 other people liked this

This is kinda a brilliant way to apply for a beta thing. And if it's not brilliant, well at least it's not the same ol'. - Eric Rice from Bookmarklet

2 more comments

Hmm, I may have to get a playstation earlier than expected, now. - DYKC?™

Dude no way! I downloaded this just yesterday, I didn't realize it was a brand new theme. - Phil G

meant to dl this last night, but got tired after working out. I'll probably get around to it tonight. Here I come Home Beta! - Chieze Okoye

Eric Rice

posting this using Dragon NaturallySpeaking which is a hysterical process when you try and speak bizarre things like ruffle copter LOL

August 8, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Kim, Christoph Thelen, Brian Ries and Michael Gaines liked this

pour from foreign month end and say I have no business what does = por favor mantengase alehado de las puertas ( please stand clear of the doors) LOL - Eric Rice

First thing I did when I got spinvox was leave myself "Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe". Of course it turns out SpinVox is people who did a remarkably good job of it, but same impulse, I guess! :) - felix

Corie

Pacman Sugar Cookies - http://www.snackordie.com/2008...

August 7, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Aaron Krug, Marco(aureliusmaximus), Stephen Cropp and 31 other people liked this

Now I just have to find a tulip cookie cutter. :-) - Corie

6 more comments

@Corie: make one out of a clean tomato paste can - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

??? - Corie

Remove both ends from a tomato past can and thoroughly wash it. Carefully bend one open end of the can into the tulip shape. The metal is soft enough that it bends it easily, but you might want to use some household items to help you bend in the details (like the petal points on the tulip) - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

yummy!!! - Josue Salazar

I'm going to have to try that. Great tip. :-) - Corie

I agree with Josue. - Fa La La La Lindsay

Hydrogenated? - l0ckergn0me

Cyndy

Linden Lab to give Second Life an HOA - http://www.thestandard.com/news...

August 7, 2008 from Industry Standard Unique... - Comment - Like - Share

TechFuga, Michael Gaines, Steve Spalding and 3 other people liked this

Am I the only person saddened by the time and effort being poured into a virtual world when those people could be working on things in the real world? Zoning in Second Life? That's really a big concern in their lives? Jeebus. - Jason Carreira

47 more comments

It is when they are making money in there. Like it or not, it's a business for a lot of people. Not much difference in my mind between SL shop owners and eBay sellers. - Cyndy

Pioneers always look lile they're wasting their time. I'm not into SL myself, but I hope they continue to take the thing as far as it'll go - Roger Benningfield

Look, SL gives some people an outlet for creativity, communication and socialization that isn't available to them in their "real life". Some people make a significant amount of secondary income off of their ventures there (and a very few make enough for a living). Unless you've given it an honest try, don't knock it. Just like in the real world, sometimes you want to control who you deal with. Real estate in SL costs real money. You don't want to work hard on your land and have flying gonads next door. - Fa La La La Lindsay

As far as worthless pursuits of time and effort, I can think of a lot worse than Second Life. At least a lot of people are actually creating and building things and that is a useful activity for personal development. - Fa La La La Lindsay

Jason should come with a disclaimer that he's always grouchy about something too new for his liking. I was just pointing out last night that when I was working with one of the guys who developed the Bluetooth spec and was going on and on about it, he said it was crap and no one would ever use it. :D How's that Bluetooth mouse working for you, honey? - Cyndy

Hey, there's far too much cheerfulness around here. Guys like Jason and I have to balance it out. - Akiva Moskovitz

Sure, they can express creativity there, but what if they were doing it in REAL life... Like creating artwork, starting a business, writing a book, volunteering , or doing something REAL? Be honest, Second Life is an escape from real life. Real life is too difficult and messy, so people are looking for an escape, just like drug and alcohol abuse. It's just a shame, IMO, that they choose to escape this way instead of by doing something useful to society. - Jason Carreira

Jason, you are missing the point. Many of these people ARE starting a business, and they make real money doing it. Sure, it's primitive, but so was the Web when we first set out on it. Could I have gone to BlogHer this year? No. Did I get to at least experience some of it via Second Life? Yes. - Cyndy

As much as I think Second Life is depressing and pathetic, I can't be mad at people for taking advantage of it. People are using it to drive real business and make real money. Just look at Britney Mason. Do what you gotta do, I say. - Louie

Sure, there's some people making money in SL, but who are they making from? The other people in SL, who are NOT making money... - Jason Carreira

@Jason - as much as I want to there's no way I COULD create the things I can create in SecondLife in real life. For instance Tad and I built a memorial park to one of our favorite authors/philosphers when he passed away last year. It has a nice sculpture that I created in the middle of the garden, trees, a walkway, a forum building for people to meet... I couldn't make any of that in the real world, but we've had people thank us for making it in SL because they appreciated the guy's life and work as well. - Fa La La La Lindsay

I simply don't have the money or resources to build the things I can build in SL in the real world, and some of them would be physically impossible. But it gives me a way to express creativity and other people can share in it. Isn't that one of the points of art in the first place? Is the creation of art not something worthy of time regardless of what format it's in? - Fa La La La Lindsay

Second Life = FAIL since they specifically target too narrow of audiences, in lieu of appealing to the masses. Perhaps they are trying TOO hard to be *un*-like SIMS? - Mona Nomura

And frankly, everyone needs some downtime every now and then. It's FUN to participate in SecondLife. Why does time always have to be productively spent? SecondLife is not comparable to the destructive escapes of drugs and alcohol. And it is something useful to the society of the residents. - Fa La La La Lindsay

Mona, they don't target any particular audience... that's the point... YOU define YOUR PURPOSE for being there. Much like real life. - Fa La La La Lindsay

Jason: Why would that even concern you, as a business, if your customers are making money in SL or not? People are willing to pump money into SL regardless of your business being there or not. Tap the well while you can. - Louie

But it's SO ultra confusing. There are so many islands? Or whatever they're called and takes FOREVER to get to one place. I don't care about concept cars, Bow-Wow's house, farming, etc., and don't have the patience to fly? transport? whatever it is around. Plus people are in really odd costumes, have horse heads.. It's kinda creepy. IMHO, if they wanted Second Life to be as 'real' as possible, shouldn't they have kept some sort of congruency? - Mona Nomura

@Louie it only concerns LindenLabs in the fact that it's a major draw for people to participate. If there's an opportunity to make real money, people will pour tons of time into it as soon as they see a return. The more time they spend in SL, the more money they spend on SL, which does benefit LindenLabs. - Fa La La La Lindsay

Lindsay: That comment was directed to Jason in reference to businesses on SL, in general, and not LL specifically. Of course, LL wants to do whatever it needs to to keep its residents happy and paying. - Louie

@Mona - it's like the WildWest... anything goes. And like RL you stay in the "safe" places unless you have a high tolerance for being uncomfortable. It took me several attempts before I "got" what it was all about. And it was about me figuring out what I wanted to do there. I like to create stuff and build stuff and I found a community of people that I liked to hang out with. And there are a lot of people who share my niche interests I can socialize with, unlike in real life. - Fa La La La Lindsay

It's also not about being as "real" as possible, it's about being what you always wanted to be but might not be able to in real life. I want to be tall, skinny and beautiful with gorgeous hair... can't do that in RL but can in SL. And maybe today I'd rather be a bird... no problem, just change my avatar... - Fa La La La Lindsay

Mona: You don't have to fly around and visit all of those weird places. You can hang out in your own little land, like Dwight Schrute. =P - Louie

@Louie which is precisely why they're working on HOAs :) - Fa La La La Lindsay

@Lindsay, it costs too much money to create artwork? Really? Paper and pens? A digital camera you probably already have? Some cheap acrylic paints? I don't buy it. I'm glad you enjoy SL, and I'm glad people liked your monument, but what if you'd tried to bring together people who appreciated that authors work in RL and had raised money to found a scholarship or set up a RL memorial? The bonus is that you meet people with similar interests, in real life, and make a change to the real world... - Jason Carreira

..that can affect more people. I guess I don't see the point of Second Life when there's plenty of Real Life out there. - Jason Carreira

SecondLife is like a virtual FriendFeed... you find people you like to talk to and you hang out with them... but you can all be in one place or not... and you can collaborate on stuff, or not... but it's major draw (for me) is the socialization. And the fact that I have my "space" that I can build stuff on to share with others. - Fa La La La Lindsay

@Jason - that's fine... and you won't understand unless you make an effort to try it out (maybe several times) and find your purpose for being there. It's ok if you don't... but it's not ok to say people are wasting their time participating just because you don't understand it. Again, it's about getting experience you CAN'T get in real life, for whatever reason. - Fa La La La Lindsay

Well, I'll answer with a story from my life... I was a Physics major for 3 years (until I realized I didn't want to do it for a living), then I changed Universities and was looking for a major. I had always been interested in drawing and painting, but I never thought I could really do it and had never really thought of myself as a creative person (more of a geek). Then I took some art classes and realized if I let myself I could create anything I wanted.... I ended up with a BFA in Photography.... - Jason Carreira

... and now I write code, which I taught myself to do.... You see SL as enabling potential, I see it as stifling RL potential. - Jason Carreira

As for creating artwork in real life, believe it or not but those supplies can get expensive. And NO, I don't have the money or skills to build a giant sculpture in real life, but I can make one in SL. You can't just switch mediums and expect to be proficient. As for bringing people together in real life... that's incredibly hard and expensive (promotion) but incredibly easy in SL (post a notification or start a group). - Fa La La La Lindsay

@Lindsay and are you into immersion or into augmentation? or... ? ;) - A.T.

Lindsay: I probably need getting used to, as well. And I agree. Like FF, there are tons of people I'd rather interact with, because of similar interests and such :) - Mona Nomura

SL is weapons grade Bolognium. It's usership is massively over estimated and its functionality is that of a square wheel. BTW I don't have a problem with people using it enjoying it and profiting from it, I just think it is hyped by the media as something it isn't. - Geoff Schultz

SL also lets you write code... you can script anything you can create. That's another cool thing about it. I'm not denying you can learn to do stuff in RL but it's easier and quicker in SL. RL potential is just that if you never have the time and money to develop it. And maybe there are things that aren't worth me making a life change and quitting my job to go back to school to learn the skills for that I can dabble with in SL. Maybe I dabble in SL and decide that IS something I want to pursue in RL. - Fa La La La Lindsay

@silpol - I think there is awesome potential in both. I'm for whatever makes my life better and more interesting. I don't see nearly the distinction between my "online" life and "offline" life that some people do. - Fa La La La Lindsay

There is also massive potential in using it as a training tool. There are already colleges and universities that teach "real" courses there. It allows people to interact from all over the world. There are possibilities for modeling stuff too. I envisioned a physics/chemistry course where someone created molecules you could walk around, take apart and put back together... Can't do that in the real world. - Fa La La La Lindsay

The funniest part of this debate is that Jason says that, yet knows that a) I spent a decent amount of time in Second Life, b) I have NO ability to be artistic in the real world at all, c) He IS artistic in real life, and has been banned from making the children anything with PlayDoh since they want MOMMY to make a dolphin that looks like a dolphin and she can't, and d) we spent money all the time on industries we aren't personally involved in. Carry on!~ - Cyndy

I have nothing to add just now, but thank you for the interesting discussion, guys. - Kamilah Gill

@Cyndy - what's your take on it then? Is it all just a frivolous waste of time or do you feel you get anything "real" from your participation? - Fa La La La Lindsay

I commented on the blog. Personally, glad for it. This is spatial social networking where the presence of another users content in a plain and visible manner, affects the quality and value of yours. Like someone shitting out their house making your neighborhood lower in value. So, I'm happy, but not affected, because I have a private 'island' where I'm in complete control. - Eric Rice

One other thing, SL is very hard to write about because people get on these goofy opinions and tangents. I could show you a lot of damn people who WANT DRM but if you can't get past the virtual fake property furry thing, then that's your problem, not the rest of us. Disclosure, four years in SL and many many other worlds. - Eric Rice

@Eric - the frustrating thing is that people just dismiss it out of hand as stupid but they haven't ever given it an honest try. But I understand that PoV because I didn't "get" it after trying myself several times... But one time I logged on and met some people and got pulled into their circle and found my purpose and *boom* it all made sense why I'd want to spend time there. It's "stupid" until that epiphany comes and it doesn't happen instantly. - Fa La La La Lindsay

Life is a frivolous waste of time Real or otherwise, do what makes you happy. Once you approach it all existentially the boundaries between the real and the intellectual is quite blurred. - Geoff Schultz

Yeah that's right i just steered this debate to something much more easily debated, Metaphysics. - Geoff Schultz

Yeah Lindsay, when people don't 'get' it, I believe it means 'i don't like it' or 'i don't like what people do'... people don't get, say, quantum physics. Any blogger or social media type ripping on SL is a hypocrite, mainly because the fundamental principle is that everything people have made there is user generated. And damn, look at gaming. 18 billion dollar industry of top-down controlled 'fake stuff'. Yeah, funny, that. It's like people are accidentally supporting Andrew Keen, LOL. - Eric Rice

Geoff, but how do you MONETIZE metaphysics? ;) And does it post to Friendfeed? - Eric Rice

Lindsay, I think it's very, very raw right now. The ramp up for new users is a barrier to entry, and a lot of it is kludgy. It's a lot like the Web in '94/'95, so I see potential, but I don't think it's where it can seriously be useful for everyone yet. Then again, I still occasionally wear my car instead of rezing it. :D - Cyndy

Who's to say that the confidence and skills people are gaining in SL won't pay off in some future outside endeavor? It hasn't been around long enough for anyone to really know what it's impact could be. I haven't tried out SL myself, but many of my other online activities have greatly enhanced my ability to deal with the rest of the world, even when they didn't/don't seem especially practical at the time. - Rebecca

Trent Olson

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Snowl - http://labs.mozilla.com/2008...

August 6, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Zulema ◕ ◡ ◕, Tac Anderson, idnan and 3 other people liked this

"It’s a prototype Firefox extension that integrates messaging into the browser based on a few key ideas: 1. It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They’re alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources. 2. Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones. 3. A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use than one that makes you organize your messages first to find them later. 4. Browser functionality for navigating web content, like tabs, bookmarks, and history, also works well for navigating messages." - Trent Olson from Bookmarklet

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this seems like an interesting project to "aggregate the aggregators". so far only integrates rss/atom and twitter, but if it could integrate ff, disqus, etc. it could become very useful. - Trent Olson

It's like a mash-up of Google Reader + Outlook + Flocker! Not sure how I feel about the UI - Mona Nomura

i agree the UI needs a lot of work. but i do think there's some potential here... - Trent Olson

Hmm, messaging in a browser with no support for IM clients. I think I'll wait. - jcunwired

Sarah Austin

Tumblr - http://www.tumblr.com/dashboa...

August 6, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Dan Hsiao, Bret Taylor, Larry Kless and 17 other people liked this

That is awesome! - BuBBy Oxide

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wow - Adam

Great photoshop skills! - Sarah Austin

finally--a way to monetize twitter! ;) - Amie Gillingham

Linked to it here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/enterpr... - Dennis Howlett from twhirl

Thanks for the link Dennis, I love that you linked to my friend feed. - Sarah Austin

hehe - Sarah Austin

That completely rocks. I want it. - Alan

Fa La La La Lindsay

Dark Roasted Blend: Hilarious Signage, Part 11 - http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008...

August 5, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Zoe, Sarah Perez, Derick Valadao and 23 other people liked this

hehe - Fa La La La Lindsay from Bookmarklet

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My father owns a cigar store and *needs* the Burger King sign - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

I love the instructions "For Help" - Tad

hahaha!! - Mona Nomura from fftogo

When I was working at the mall years ago, there was a door in the back alley that said "Door open's out". It drove me NUTS. - Michael Gaines

I sometimes wonder if people were serious when they produced these signs. - Scot Duke

My favorite was a sign on a door that said "not an entrance." - Tom Landini

Signs, signs, everywhere signs . . . blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind. - Steve Spalding

Jesse Stay

California Can't Perform Pay Cut Because of COBOL - http://rss.slashdot.org/~r...

August 5, 2008 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Dan Liebke, Steve Spalding, Charlie Anzman and 19 other people liked this

And this is the state that houses Silicon Valley??? - Jesse Stay

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COBOL?! LOL!! What's THAT? hahahahah - Mona Nomura

Sounds like the guy in charge of the payroll system needs to be replaced - Brian Sullivan

hey, quiet, you! i've written stuff in COBOL. and minimum wage in CA is $8, isn't it? - idnan

Cobol was antiquated when I started in computing (and that was a long time ago). Next they will be saying they need RPG programmers. ;-) - Brian Sullivan

Hah, I was in a night class decade ago (*shiver*) where the teacher asked if people had programming experience and went around to the people who raised their hands. A group in front all said COBOL, to which he said... no I meant *programming* experience. Doh! :) Hey, there's always cobolscript. - felix

...and most government buildings still have dot matrix printers. LOL - Mona Nomura

lol - "The article quotes a consultant on how hard it is to find COBOL programmers; he says you usually have to draw them out of retirement. Problem is, if there were any such folks on the employment rolls in California, Gov. Schwarzenegger fired them all last week, too." - Chris Harris

It's not so antiquated any more. COBOL 97 is object-oriented: http://www.wiley.com/legacy... - Morton Fox

Don't knock the Dot Matrix! It's still an important tool for forms and they are generally cheaper to operate - David Knight

Morton: My dad used to punch index cards and I've even changed tapes. TAPES!! - Mona Nomura

@Mona - what David said. My dad uses a Dot Matrix printer to print out huge reams of reports, and a Laser one just won't do... - Yuvi

Dot matrix printers work with carbon paper. Laser printers don't. - Morton Fox

To be fair to my fine state, when they conceived the system, did someone think to add this requirement? "The system must, with one day's notice, be able to reduce all wages to the minimum wage. No, not the state minimum, the FEDERAL minimum. Yeah, the minimum wage that's illegal in this state. Oh yeah, I almost forgot - the rollback is temporary, and the difference in wage will have to... more... - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

You'd be surprised. Every other part of CA is more advanced than Sacramento. Otherwise, BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA - Helen Sventitsky

laugh but i know several cobol apps written ages ago, which perform better then many nowadays extra super cool hyped apps (and i won't mention names here) - Naor Mark

Many of the legacy systems still run MF-COBAL. Certain beaurcarct IT folio's are still in the stone ages on IT. The primary reason is why fix something that is not broken. Secondly wrt to dot matrix printers, they are still used extensively in the Shipping and transportion industry. Not to mention .gov platforms that spew out reports. If you think that the IRS reports for Audit Targeting gets run off a laser printer- think again ! - Peter Dawson

Making fun of Cobol is just ignorant! 90% of banks run on Cobol! That is the architecture. Web services are run with PHP etc but back end is Cobol on main frame. - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

@Ontario Emperor true, but the state did try to modernize the system many times before but were denied the funding to do so. so they might have not seen this coming but the state saw it was outdated and wanted to update it before. plus they just pissed off a bunch of retirement ppl by laying them off working part-time. i bet some were COBOL programmers. - Chris Harris

Tapes are still used for backup or you get FAIL when your RAID dies on corrupted drive! - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Yeah, I'm taking Introduction to COBOL 1 during my Fall '08 semester, so don't hate. - Aaron Myers

I'm 29 and I wrote an RPG program at the company I just left. My one and only RPG program I've ever written. It made me sad. /tear - acedanger

That is indeed hillarious - Jim Goldstein

I bet you knowing Cobol will get you a real programmer job, with pay! <wink> Some of the code is miles long, just to update one routine will require you to be a wiz kid not a LOLcat! - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Holy fracking lords of Cobol! JUMP! - Josh Haley

I was a card puncher when I first got started. IBM assembler language. You haven't lived until you've dropped an entire week's work on the floor! - jcunwired

Chris Harris, good point. Even if the requirement couldn't be conceived, it probably would have been easier to implement in a more modern system. - Ontario Emperor

it does get work. my friend's mother up here in Poughkeepsie (where IBM is) made a boatload after being unemployed from IBM for a decade. She made a lot of money at the millenium because of the year 2000 thingy... but then she sadly died of breast cancer. my friend inherited. too bad... his mom was a nice lady - Noah David Simon

Ah, the legacy apps never really die. - Bill Sodeman

Mona Nomura

Ok fine. I sometimes pull the 'brb' and never come back trick... I don't have the guts to say 'Go Away!' or merely block. Sue me.

August 5, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Mike Fruchter, Beth, Michael Gaines and Bren -- feeling merry liked this

Sued - Yuvi

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Consider yourself sued for gross twitter negligence - Geoff Schultz

I'm a DM and @reply hater, too SUE ME - Mona Nomura from fftogo

I don't like the reply thing in twitter at all. I guess they will have to sue me as well. - Geoff Schultz

I usually just up and leave - Outsanity

DM Hater? So says the person who sent me 2 dms yesterday :P - Yuvi

Mona, BRB - Mike Fruchter

Tom Merritt

Maybe thi sis old, but I just discovered the ACME catalog - http://home.nc.rr.com/tuco...

August 5, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Wa Conner, Eric Geller, Michael Gaines and Rachel R. liked this

Fa La La La Lindsay

Sean - For Tad - http://poobah.tumblr.com/post...

August 4, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Neil Bernhart, tomit, Whitney Drake and 42 other people liked this

I'll take "The Rapist" for 500. Suck-it, Trebeck. - Fa La La La Lindsay from Bookmarklet

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I'll take The Penis Mightier! hahahahahahahahahaa!! Suck it, Trebeck. Suck it long. Suck it hard! - Tad

*wonders if Tad's package from Amazon arrived a day early because of this thread* - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Sean Connery = LOVE. That man is SO sexy - Mona Nomura

I had a serious crush on him when I was a kid. Him and the guy from Remington Steel... what's his name?? The accents did it for me. - Fa La La La Lindsay

I remembered... Pierce Brosnan. :) - Fa La La La Lindsay

You're the man now, dawg. - Tad

I liked Sean Connery until I heard him say "Sometimes a woman just needs to be slapped" in an interview. Nevermore! - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Well, he IS the "cock of the walk", Alex. - Bill Sodeman

The original and still the best ytmnd http://yourethemannowdog.com/ :) - felix

little known Scoble trivia: I worked for Connery's son-in-law and setup Connery's computer. He called me soon after and said "Scoble, what did you do to my computer?" I thought James Bond had called. Funny. Wish I had a recording of that. - Robert Scoble

@Scoble a recording of that would make the most fantastic ring tone ever - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

omg Scobez - that's one of the coolest stories I've ever heard! I sooo wish you had a recording of that. Did he slap you through the phone too? - Tad

"I'll take anal bum cover for 7,000" - cmiper

ZOMG SQUEEEEE @ scoble - Yuvi

Michael Gaines › Likes