You're forgiven Steve! :-) I love how he didn't name me in his apology. THAT is Gillmor at his best! heheh. - Robert Scoble

Of course you know he is going to bonk you on the head with a giant hammer for assuming that. - Rolf Schewe

Rolf: of course! :-) - Robert Scoble

It'll be good to see more of you around here, Steve. Remember; It's not time for the steam engine until it's steam engine time. - Christopher Harley

sweet another post from steve about how twitter hasnt returned the "track" feature! :P - sean percival

Next thing is to realize that FF and Twitter are very different animals. I spent months trying to figure out which should be reflected in which, with lots of experimentation. Conclusion -- I let FF have all my Twitter messages, but I don't push in the other direction. So much of FF happens in the comments anyway, and I certainly don't want them going across. Plus there's no 140 char limit here. And most of the people are over there so Steve still will need Twitter to do track. But FF is a wonderful... - Dave Winer

... piece of software. But it has lots of rough edges and imho is still a shadow of what it will be when it's finished. - Dave Winer

Dave: I have had good experience sending over to Twitter only new FF top-level items. I agree with you about FF. - Robert Scoble

I tried that for a while. But something wasn't right about it. I never remember those things. I'd have to turn it on again to figure it out. That's what happens when you get old. :-) - Dave Winer

What we still need is the one place for documents to be created that then spew notification of their existence to all known places. FF could be it, but the editor would ahve to be vastly improved. So vastly that it wouldn't be FF anymore. - Dave Winer

now you're getting there dave - Steve Gillmor from IM

Steve, I wrote about it in July in this piece: http://www.scripting.com/stories... - Dave Winer

Spewing notices everywhere ala Ping.fm just feels wrong to me. I'd hope we could move more towards a "this is me" model where I can specify certain sites for certain types of content, e.g. Identica for <140c, Tumblr for short form blogging, comments on others' content via Disqus, self-hosted WP for long form blogging, etc. and the tools take care of the plumbing so if you want to consume "me" you can, wherever you'd liek. Imaginary Friends 2.0. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken: One word.. Tarpipe (http://www.tarpipe.com) - Phil G

Phil: Tarpipe/Yahoo Pipes style stuff is slick, but seems pretty 0.1ish to me. More good old system interoperability would be nice. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken: I tried Ping.fm and stopped. Redundancy is an issue for me on FriendFeed. I have enough noise in my FF stream. I don't need duplicate status messages or microblog entries. I just don't see how FF and Ping.fm can coexist. - Rolf Schewe

I don't think Twitter is ever bringing back track. http://tumblr.yabfog.com/post... - Dan MacTough

Yeah -- probably right about that Dan. My guess is that's a service they're going to sell to consumer marketing companies, based on the model that we're all eyeballs and there's $$$ value in selling what we're talking about to BigCos. To me, this is very old thinking and doomed to fail, just like people living off the rise in equity in their houses. Much better to go direct, get and give money to and from users. There are a lot more of us, and we've got better ideas. - Dave Winer

In other words, track *is* coming back -- that's for sure -- just not for you and me. - Dave Winer

Actually, I have track. I just had to write it myself. ;) (Well, maybe I didn't HAVE to, but I did.) - Dan MacTough from IM

Dan how did you do it?? - Dave Winer

I always thought listening to NewsGang months ago when they discussed how inferior FriendFeed was to the mighty Twitter that it sounded like parents in 1957 talking about how that rock and roll was a bunch of noise. - Dave Slusher

Dan: TwitterSPY didn't cut it for you? ;-) - Ken Sheppardson

Dave, as soon as Twitter took down track and IM I decided it was time to learn python, so I made a project of writing a bot to replace and extend the features they had been providing. - Dan MacTough from IM

Ken - Dustin and I were working in parallel unbeknownst to one another. And I'm just a programming hobbyist -- my bot was never intended to be a general service for other people. As such, I ping the API every minute, which is near-enough to realtime for me. - Dan MacTough from IM

Dan was one of the first people twitterspy introduced me to. Immediately legitimized the project by discovering another guy with the same idea. - Dustin Sallings

Ken: what kind of system interoperability would you like to see on tarpipe? Thanks for the feedback. - Bruno Pedro

I like Friendfeed now that it has the real time feed and IM. before it was just an aggregator; now it's more of a hub. Still figuring out the mobile side of it, though...track helps via the JustSignal tool, but need to reply in same window. - Karoli

Karoli, the value has always been there. It just took the whizzy stuff to make y'all notice it. - Dave Slusher

Dan: If you're working in Python, would you be interested in contributing to Enjit? (http://www.enjit.com). TwitterSPY and IdentiSPY are Ruby, but Enjit is in twisted/python. The idea has been it'll become something of an umbrella app, with little to no independent commercial viability ;-) with additional filtering and routing on the back end. - Ken Sheppardson

Bruno: Let me get back to you on that. :-) Now that I see you're here, I've followed and will dig a little deeper. - Ken Sheppardson

Dave: If by "whizzy stuff" you mean features that made it fit into ones existing workflow (e.g. IM) rather than forcing you to adopt yet another web UI, and the ability push your data out of the silo via the real time API and pushing to Twitter, then yes... the "whizzy stuff" is all it took. ;-) - Ken Sheppardson

Friendfeed is becoming more and more awesome because its listening to what we want. - Christian Burns

FriendFeed's commenting system is so fast and easy to use it makes me wonder why everyone hasn't copied it yet... oh wait, Facebook did! :-) - Jason Calacanis