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Introduction to Tart — a general-purpose, strongly-typed programming language - http://viridia.org/project...

November 11 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Troy Benohanian, Tracy, Micah Wittman and 26 other people liked this

I hadn't heard of this one before -- apparently its from Python people. Soundss nice! "Some of these motivations are: * The desire for a language that would combine the simplicity and readability of Python with the power of static typing and template metapgrogramming, as well as modern language features such as closures and generic functions. * The desire for a compiler that compiles to highly efficient native code instead of a VM. * The desire for a language which would fulfill the same role as C++, but designed from scratch with the benefit of hindsight. * The desire for a language which would fulfill the same role as Java, but more concise and requiring less verbose boilerplate." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

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Is there a provision for types that are dynamically bound, or is it all strongly-typed? - Cristo

I wonder if the the nullable? feature is just as much as PITA as const in C++. - Gary Burd

oh i was thinking how could i have liked it when i haven't even read it in recent times, good work http://friendfeed.com/jimminy - ffcode

oh, R is going to like this, he's all for strongly typed languages. has it got aspects? - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

Gary: My experience with C# makes me suspect that explicitly nullable references are going to be the occasional annoyance, not the plague of C++'s const. - Gabe

what is going on? a new language every week! there would not be enough computers in this world to run all these languages - Tzury Bar Yochay

Still reinventing the wheel, are we? This really puzzles me to no end..why do they think they need to create more 3rd generation programming languages like Google Go & now this "Tart" thing, when what we really need are everyday useful 4GL and 5GL languages/systems/frameworks that would really move us forward. If we keep things going the way these guys are, THE MACHINES WIN.. - Alex Schleber

Alex: What defines a 4GL or 5GL such that languages like Go, Tart, and C# don't qualify? - Gabe

Gabe, if your average C programmer isn't confused by them, they don't qualify as 4GL or 5GL languages. ;) - Cristo

Looks interesting. I tried to find this "Talin" person and found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... As fascinating as proteins are, I don't think an individual one is up to creating a programming language. :-) - Ruchira S. Datta

Ruchira, you might find these links helpful: http://viridia.org/ and http://www.sylvantech.com/talin... - Michael R. Bernstein

Paul Buchheit

Google hopes to remake programming with Go - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10...

November 10 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg, Barry Mitchelson, Marwan Osman and 103 other people liked this

This could be very good! "Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go. And on Tuesday, they're taking the veil of secrecy off Go, releasing what they've built so far and inviting others to join the newly open-source project." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

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What do you think, Paul? I know it's early, but Python latched on at Google... Think this is a response? And just on a lark, do you think Go may be headed for the browser at some point (to replace javascript)? Many of us have wondered if Chrome will take a stab at reinventing/reworking the web stack. Go feels more like a back-end tool, but wondering what came to your mind when you saw this... - Christopher Galtenberg

Christopher, Python is nice, but we need a new system language, something high-performance to replace C/C++. This may be it. - Paul Buchheit

Yeah, I was remembering your thoughts from here, Paul: http://friendfeed.com/paul.... Wonder how the ooc folks feel today... - Christopher Galtenberg

My first reaction was oh yay, another C like language with brackets to make it acceptable. Having Rob Pike and Thompson on the team is impressive but makes me think of a plan9 resurrection. Using CSPs though is pretty cool and it looks like it supports mobile tasks. - Todd Hoff

"Specifically, Go uses a technology dating back to the 1960s called CSP, or communicating sequential processes, that handles interactions among a set of cooperating programs, Pike said. The technology made an appearance in programming languages such as Occom and Erlang, but it generally hasn't been applied in systems programming." - Paul Buchheit

If Google uses this for internal projects, that will give it a big advantage over something like plan9 in terms of being practical (not to mention the fact that it's free software, which plan9 was not, and a programming language, not an OS). - Paul Buchheit

I am very excited about this, it's not genius or rocket science but it maybe the language to put alongisde C/C++ for real. I thought it was going to be D, maybe this is it - Lawrence Oluyede

D seems too fragmented to be usable. All my hopes are on Go now :) - Paul Buchheit

And note that the language is designed to be IDE independent. - Piaw Na

Plan9 was a set of composable tools. In this case Google is providing the OS and the tools. - Todd Hoff

Go is NOT an OS! - Piaw Na

Where's the link to it? - Gabe

http://golang.org/ - Lawrence Oluyede

Please ; at the end of lines... (I hate languages without ; for some psychological reasons) - Ozgur Demir

I am no fan of language features designed to ease parsing but i suppose that's important for a system language? But it's hardly a user (i.e. programmer)-centric design. I think they should have drawn more from Scala (for concurrency model) and Io (for a beautiful syntax) instead of the messy, old languages they chose. Luckily, it's not designed for my needs so i'll never have to worry about it. - ·[▪_▪]·

@ozgurdemir I agree. Either require them or don't. Don't make them optional in some cases. It confuses what programmers generally expect of a programming language: consistency. - ·[▪_▪]·

Just checked and hated it. Sorry guys, it's not about the rest of the language.. it's just the ;'s. - Ozgur Demir

while checking it, I noticed how much I love C / Java syntax and how lame to trying to change it just for to make a new product different. - Ozgur Demir

@Paul you should know better than to confuse a language with its implementation! The people working on this all hail from the C/Java lineage and I don't know...may be fast but generally C is a hassle and Java is too dumbed-down. Trying to fix the mistakes they made in the past. Wonderful... - Rudolf Olah

For god's sake, who cares what the syntax looks like? What matters is whether it solves useful problems or not. It's designed to clean up a lot of the problems stemming from the legacy of C[++], compile fast, execute fast, be appropriate for systems programming, and have good primitives for concurrency. Those are good goals in my book, and they fill a much-needed niche. - Joel Webber

I do care. - Ozgur Demir

I thought it was kinda weird the way the video highlighted how fast it compiles. Compilation speed is great, and the vid was impressive, but I've never seen a language launch where that was highlighted so much. "Look, it compiles fast!!!!!! Oh, BTW, we are trying to solve concurrency". - Nick Lothian

@Ozgur: Sure, but as long as the syntax isn't broken in some way, or ambiguous (VB6 comes to mind), it's surely much less important than what the language is capable of (compile speed, execution speed, what can be expressed, etc). Syntax seems like a distant third- or fourth-most important aspect to me. - Joel Webber

@Nick: That kind of struck me as well when they first started talking about it. But when you consider that your main alternative is C++, and that compile times can get absolutely brutal (try compileing WebKit sometime -- it takes hours), it makes a bit more sense. - Joel Webber

@Joel. yea, I can't say you're wrong and I am right.. these are all preferences.. for me, syntax is an important aspect in terms of code readability that's why I care since it becomes a real pain in the ass on a midsize or bigger project. - Ozgur Demir

This thread is degenerating into rubbish. You know who you are - please stop. - Christopher Galtenberg from iPhone

@Joel yeah, I guess. But compiling something like that should take hours! Back when men were men and compiling a kernel on my 386 was a major undertaking success was so much more satisfying! Who are these young'uns Thompson & Pike and what do they know anyway! - Nick Lothian

Yeah, really! Real programmers had to swap disks multiple times to run a Pascal compiler on Hello World for the C64 :) - Joel Webber

Yeah, compilation speed doesn't mean too much. Would be nicer if they focused on the *thinking* part with regards to concurrency. - Rudolf Olah

Compilation speeds mean a lot when you're dealing with the google programming model. This is a company that invented code search for internal use. (See as an example: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7613693...) - Piaw Na

Luckily it isn't named "goo". - Peng-Toh

@Piaw - nice example. I only skipped through it, but I can't see why something like that makes compilation speed critical. It seems similar in concept to static analysis - more speed is good, but the lack of speed doesn't break the model. - Nick Lothian

@nlothian: static analysis and compilation both include parsing. efficient parsing of C++ is rather hard to achieve, due to messy nature of multiply included files and macro substitutions. if code analysis takes hours (ok, half-hours), it ceases to be useful. - 9000

Lack of speed totally breaks the model. When you can get your analysis and search tools to respond in sub 500ms, the model for coding completely changes. You no longer remember where files are --- you just search for them and expect the search tool to remember for you. This enables massive code sharing, and allows small teams to be extremely effective, since they can now leverage other teams' work. - Piaw Na

Must be Google.. - ★ Soner Gönül

Why compile time matters: http://xkcd.com/303/ - Robert Felty

Use an IDE for iterative development of the components you are working on, make modules independent through interfaces, do a nightly build so the bulk of build products like libraries etc are available, then these compile issues go away. Justifying based on compile times is so 1990s. - Todd Hoff

Ah, but how exactly does your IDE allow you to do iterative development quickly? You have to be able to compile individual modules (whatever form they take) quickly enough to make this feasible. If you take C[++] as the de facto systems language, it fails badly on this front, because the only way to share interfaces among modules is via the preprocessor, and precompiled headers only get... more... - Joel Webber

Poor Frank McCabe and his ten year old "go!" language: http://www.reddit.com/r... - Daniel J. Pritchett

C++ allows for abstract base classes. No implementation. Compose systems this way and you minimize recompilation. And I'm assuming the initial subsystems are developed in a mocked unit tested environment and then within a very narrow scope, so interface changes are minimized until the system test phase is reached. The compilation argument would make sense if they were talking about a... more... - Todd Hoff

Sure, but you still have to define the abstract base class (interface) in a header file somewhere, and individual .cc files end up depending upon a large number of these in practice, so that any change to one of them tends to force you to recompile a lot of object files. As you say, there are some ways of reducing this effect, but in practice large C++ systems end up taking forever and a day to compile (try compiling WebKit; a lot of Google code has this problem as well). - Joel Webber

C++ templates are also implemented badly, which makes compilation slow. - Piaw Na

Only if you don't compose your system well Joel. I've worked very comfortably on systems that took 12 hours to compile across a cluster of 32 build machines. I'm not saying I don't want a language where you don't have to go through all these hoops, but to say it's inevitable in C++ is not so, you just have to beat make into submission and not create a big ball of mud, which is good practice anyway. - Todd Hoff

@Todd: Fair enough -- I'm definitely not saying you're wrong, and I have also worked on fairly large C++ code bases (mostly games) without everything going to hell in a handbasket. But you have to admit that it would be nice if you didn't have to wait many hours (or use a Google-sized build cluster) for compiling your code :) - Joel Webber

I've worked "comfortably" on projects where the full rebuild time was a few hours on my local machine, but I can't say that I was ever working optimally. Even in the instant-on environment I'm working in now, there are occasionally changes that I have to wait a full build/deploy cycle to test and it almost always takes me 2-5x as long to solve problems in that case. You can multitask while you wait, but it's just not the same (IMHO, of course). - Matt Mastracci

I think 12 hours to compile across 32 build machines is unacceptable. I want instant compilation. You know, the kind that Turbo Pascal used to have. - Piaw Na

I think that there's a dramatic improvement in developer productivity when the compile-link-run cycle time goes from a minute to a second. - Gary Burd

Piaw before you say what is or is not unacceptable you might want to take the trouble to know what problem is being solved. Turbo Pascal to a real deployed product like a unicycle is to the 5th fleet. - Todd Hoff

But any, good, modern IDE compiles incrementally and continuously so there's no noticeable compilation step. Compilation shouldn't be a _highlight_ of a new language. It's nice and the ease of building developer tools is a benefit to uptake but, in the end, the language has to be something developers _want_ to read and write since we have to look at it so much. Syntax matters. It's why so much sugar is added to languages. - ·[▪_▪]·

As stated before, modern IDEs don't scale to google-sized code bases. Go is not designed for your tiny projects that fit in main memory. It's designed for large scale development projects. - Piaw Na

@piaw You seem to assume that Google doesn't organize it's code. Any good project, regardless of size, especially for large projects, should be modularized. If Google has to load every piece of code into the IDE, they have more serious problems than Go will resolve. Trust me, I work on a project with tens of millions of lines of Java code and i've been responsible for analysis and... more... - ·[▪_▪]·

Well, Piaw actually did write a fair amount of the code at Google, so I'd give him a little more credit :) I know plenty of people at Google who *do* use Eclipse/IntelliJ on Google's code base (myself included), but you do have to break it into manageable chunks to make it work. That's sometimes easier said than done, to be fair. - Joel Webber

When I worked for a large company in the internet advertising business, I found that dependency creep was a constant problem. I spent more time than I would have liked trying to get fast compilation time in Eclipse/IntelliJ. I welcome a tool that helps with this problem. - Gary Burd

"I have already used the name for *MY* programming language" http://code.google.com/p... - Maxamad

I think that time spent pruning and organizing your code and library is best instead spent working on better tools that make your development environment super fast and capable of scaling. That's the way Go was designed. - Piaw Na

If you want fast turnaround, eliminate compiles all together. There's no reason why a language can't support a double or triple hybrid model. Look at a language like Factor, image based like Smalltalk, you write a function, and can patch it into the live running app instantaneously, where it will run interpreted in combination with compiled code, until the runtime gets around to... more... - Ray Cromwell

I noticed that Go has an interpreter work-in-progress living in its source. The start of an instant-run mode? - Matt Mastracci

Smalltalk had a massive sharing problem --- you couldn't ever replicate what was in your Smalltalk image on someone else's machine. Eliminating compiles would be nice, but again, if you're solving problems at a massive scale, interpretation would be an order of magnitude loss in execution speed that you can't afford. That said, a Go interpreter would not be out of the question, or even hard to build. - Piaw Na

@Piaw - was just reading "Coders at Work" this week and Ingalls (http://www.codersatwork.com/dan-ing...) was saying the exact opposite. He said he pauses his Mac machine and sends his Smalltalk system state over to a Windows developer and they start right up, debug, and fix. - Daniel J. Pritchett

The point is not to have the production version run in interpretation, the point is to increase developer productivity by allowing a fast edit-run cycle, production builds can take as long as necessary. When you're in development mode, you often don't need full execution speed, you are checking for correctness. Take GWT for example. You can make changes to Java source, hit reload, and... more... - Ray Cromwell

What does production mean? An experiment that processes a large number of records so you can decide how to proceed with your line of research is hardly production, but it nevertheless has to execute fast over large amounts of data. You might think that it doesn't matter how quickly that runs, but the difference between 10 minutes and 100 minutes is huge in terms of productivity. - Piaw Na

Yes, if you copied the entire image over, you could replicate a smalltalk VM. The problem is, then you have to live with the other guy's image and customizations. Smalltalk is great, but it really was designed as a single-user environment. - Piaw Na

It depends how often you are running experiments over huge datasets like that. In the case where I needed some experimental data to proceed, yes, if after every edit, you had such an experiment, then maybe programming in a neutered language would be worth it, but I'd say that for the majority of developers, this is not the case, so being able to run unoptimized builds/interpretation... more... - Ray Cromwell

No, it is not for everyone. It's very much for large scale datasets that are encountered somewhat frequently on the WWW. - Piaw Na

Robert Scoble

RT @googlers: https://www.google.com/dashboa.... #privacy - @j9t (Google knows a lot about me!)

November 5 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Marco ILLESCAS, Thomas Amberg, Arnaud Fischer and 2 other people liked this

Did you have any doubt about it? - Alberto Gómez Aparicio

No, not really. - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

Jolie O'Dell

@lauriepercival Hey lady, get my boyfriend off that list! Unless he's in a slashfic pictorial w/ Sean, it's off. cc: @eston

November 3 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg liked this

Tim O'Reilly

Above the Crowd post by @bgurley: Google Redefines Disruption: The “Less Than Free” Business Model http://abovethecrowd.com/2009... REALLY IMPORTANT!

November 2 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg liked this

Paul Buchheit

ooc - low-level / high-level goodness - http://ooc-lang.org/

October 28 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Shivanand Velmurugan, JMaultasch, Benjamin Golub and 56 other people liked this

Looks promising. C++ is too much of a disaster -- we need a real successor to C. "ooc is a modern, object-oriented, functional-ish, high-level, low-level, sexy programming language. it's translated to pure C with a source-to-source compiler. it strives to be powerful, modular, extensible, portable, yet simple and fast." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

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Meh. I dislike post-fix'd declarations, and given that the assignment operator is frequently used, I think C's decision to make it a single character operator is the correct one. Otherwise, it doesn't seem any better than say, Objective C, D, or any of the other languages vying to be the next C. - Piaw Na

Have you looked at the D language? http://www.digitalmars.com/d/ It's been around for years and near the top of language shootouts in performance. - Ray Cromwell

Pointers? Do we really need pointers? - Gabe

Yes, if you're doing a systems language, you need pointers --- for writing device drivers, if nothing else. - Piaw Na

Based on the sample code, it appears to have a very direct interface to C, which I think is important for a systems language. For most things I'd rather just use Python, but for lower-level, perf-critical stuff, we need something else. D looks like too much, but I haven't tried it. - Paul Buchheit

Type inference, yummy - a main reason why Scala has mad traction these days - Christopher Galtenberg

Start by creating a really lightweight and easy to use development environment. I should be able to teach Jay Rosen to program in it. Back in the 80s there was serious compeititon in this area -- from Borland with Turbo Pascal and on the Mac, from Think Technologies with their C and Pascal systems. The languages aren't the issue, at least not for me. I want to program in C again, but the curve is too steep in all the environments. Give me a Turbo environment and some nice libraries, and lets go! :-) - Dave Winer

Dave: http://tryruby.sophrinix.com <- that kind of easy - Christopher Galtenberg

Piaw Na: For ':=' I've just made a homepage edit to make it very clear. := is decl-assign. Regular assign is '=' as in C/Java/etc. RTFM! ;) - 'n ddrylliog

Piaw Na: As for trying to be the next C... well, no =) The next C is probably C itself, since C hackers are way too picky to be satisfied with anyside above C (in high-level/low-level terms) - 'n ddrylliog

Btw, why is everyone thinking of ooc as a systems language? It can be used as such, but it's not really the goal. Do you all think so because it's compiled? - 'n ddrylliog

I'm thinking of it as a systems language because that's what I want. We already have reasonable options for higher-level stuff, but when writing a database or whatever, we're stuck with C or C++. - Paul Buchheit

Paul Buchheit: Hmm. High-performance implementations of current reasonable high-level languages are still pretty much experimental :/ (unladen swallow, shedskin, etc.) Why sacrifice performance? Many compiled languages have shown that expressivity isn't reserved to "interpreted" languages. =) - 'n ddrylliog

Piaw Na: about ooc being better or worse than Objective-C, D, etc. Well, D is really complex. It gives a *lot* of control, but it makes code less readable imho. As much as you may currently dislike it, the ooc syntax is (for some at least) more readable, so more maintainable, in general simpler, etc. (a lot less trickier than C++, for example. And if you don't see what I'm talking about, you haven't done enough C++) - 'n ddrylliog

Ocaml is pretty expressive, it has a REPL, and it's been in the top of the language shootout benchmarks for years. - Ray Cromwell

How does ooc compare to C#? If I had to write something like a compiler, I'd use C#. - Gabe

The missing dots really bother me. - τorƍue

C++ a disaster? I don't think so, its main problem is the lack of high level straightforward frameworks. IMHO generic programming is a deeper paradigm than OOP, but like functional languages has a slow learning curve, look at the matrix implementations/compiler optimizations in Boost! - Sebastian Wain from iPhone

Sebastian: C++ has lots of significant problems. For example, it's actually 3 languages: precompiler (#define), C++, and templates. The template language is so powerful that you can't even tell if the compiler will halt on a given program, let alone understand the error messages it produces. Just the shear size of the language, manual memory management, things like multiple inheritance, and vast overlapping standard libraries make it hard to program in by giving the progammer an overly large cognitive load. - Gabe

My two biggest gripes: Error messages from templates, specially from STL, can be notoriously hard to track down. And secondly, default implicit conversions can lead to hard to track down bugs. When you have a type system so complex you have to mentally "run the compiler" as you code, something's wrong. - Ray Cromwell

I've been doing nothing but C++ lately. It's not bad, but only because everyone subsets it. The compilers are horrible, but I don't think that's because nobody has an incentive to improve g++'s front-end. - Piaw Na

Ouch. decl-assign is terrible. I hate that. I think C's syntax (e.g., int a = 3; ) is much better than decl- assign. If you want to imitate C, at least make the declarations C-like. Personally, I think language design should be performed so that you can hand-code a compiler (i.e., no lex & yacc). Why? Because hand-coded compilers can much more easily produce human readable error... more... - Piaw Na

I've seen it argued that LL(k) compiler-compilers don't have this fault, because they generate recursive decent parsers that look somewhat like what you'd write by hand, JavaCC certainly has this attribute for example. Although I'm quite fond of the parser-combinator approach now. - Ray Cromwell

Gabe: the issue is: when you need performance you must follow the C++ path. Don't forget http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp... - Sebastian Wain

What Ray said. yacc uses an LALR parser, and LALR parsers are kind of notorious for producing inscrutable error messages. LL(k) compiler-compilers can generate much more intuitive error messages, and the code they generate often looks like something a human would write. Both JavaCC and ANTLR are good LL(k) compiler-compilers. I believe LL(k) parsers aren't strictly as powerful as LALR... more... - Laurence Gonsalves

On the topic of ooc: the "object [space] method-call()" syntax is the most jarring thing about the syntax for me. I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be any actual introduction to that syntax on the linked page -- it's just used several times without explanation. Also, I have to say I'm not a fan of conservative garbage collection. - Laurence Gonsalves

Yes, when I hand code parsers, I write them in recursive descent form. The problem with C++ is that it's not easily parseable in that form. And seriously, any language where you can write map<string, string>, but have to write map<string, vector<string> > is seriously messed up. - Piaw Na

+1 to Laurence's comment about conservative GC: that's plain evil. - Piaw Na

Yeah, Piaw only uses progressive GC, and even then he keeps complaining that it's finding ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. - Daniel Dulitz

I believe JavaCC grammar repo has a relatively straightforward C++ grammar implemented, using LL(k) - Ray Cromwell

Piaw Na: You got so much wrong in so few comments that it's actually worrying. Decl-assign is not terrible. It's called type inference, and is used in a lot of modern languages (ML, C#, Scala) to make our lives easier, and limits repeating yourself and it works damn well. Grow up and learn other languages. So no, the goal is not to imitate C. Go use Objective-C/C#/C++/Java/D if you want C-like languages. - 'n ddrylliog

Piaw Na: Second: I have hand-written the ooc 0.3 compiler's parser, and it was a piece of cake, because the syntax is so simple and unambiguous. Having "object[space]field" is a non-issues since declarations are "name: type". And you're mistaken in thinking that the fact you can hand-write a parser for a grammar means that it's simple. It's the other way around. If you can write a LL(K)/LR/PEG grammar, then the syntax is *very* straightforward. And the new ooc compiler (rock) uses a PEG grammar.. - 'n ddrylliog

Conservative Garbage Collector: There are advantages 1) the performance is a lot better than you would expect (and actually faster than plain malloc/free for lots of small objects) 2) there are advantages, e.g. seamless integrations with all the C libs out there. 3) Writing a GC isn't easy, the Boehm has been around for years and is well-tested/optimized, portable, etc. Read the papers please :/ This thread is a showcase of ignorance and arrogance. - 'n ddrylliog

As for "Language blah is better". No, sorry, apples are not better than oranges. That's your personal taste. Well, good for you =) One size doesn't fit all. Why do you even bother? - 'n ddrylliog

why `diagonal := Vector3f new()` instead of `diagonal := new Vector3f()` or even `diagonal := Vector3f()` is this because someone felt he must not be like any other language? - Tzury Bar Yochay

I know several typed inference languages. I dislike them --- again, type inferencing never took off not because the technology was hard, but because programmers preferred the declarations --- it really helps. Not to mention tools like ctags/etags, etc., do a good job for popular programming environments (i.e., vi and emacs), which meant that languages without such support never get widespread use. - Piaw Na

Conservative Garbage Collector: 1) this is more an argument abut gc than conservative gc. I have no problems with gc, I just want accurate gc. 2) That's a fair point, but not enough to make me want to use conservative gc. I'd be happier managing resources from C libraries manually than worrying that hash values are confusing the collector. 3) Yes, writing a gc isn't easy, but I'm sure... more... - Laurence Gonsalves

@Piaw, a type inferenced language just means that the type is concretely there, just it doesn't need to be declared in syntax. Thus, any smart editor or IDE, or other tool could reify or show types on demand if the developer so chose. Ctags are a relatively primitive mechanism for source code indexing, once you have an editor which understands your language's AST/semantics, you don't... more... - Ray Cromwell

Tzury: why 'diagonal := Vector3f new()'? Because new is simply a static method: http://ooc-lang.org/blog... Your definition of "any other language" must be "Java and C++" and both are inconsistent/magical on this issue, as opposed to, yeah, pretty much "any other language" (Smalltalk, Ruby, Io, ...) - 'n ddrylliog

I've never heard of this before. Feel a bit disconnected. - mikepk

Ray: for better or worse, most programmers out there are using Emcas and vi. Why? Because no other tool scales up when you're dealing with large code bases. (That's one reason why even some Java programmers at Google use vi and Emacs) I don't care how primitive the tools are, they have to get things done. - Piaw Na

I agree with Laurence about conservative GC. The big one is memory fragmentation. Once upon a time, when all we ever wrote were desktop apps, memory fragmentation didn't matter. For server side applications, it matters a heck of a lot, and any language that uses conservative gc might as well provide the delete operator. - Piaw Na

C++ can be used quite effectively without STL or complicated templates, but it will never be safe from corruption or memory leaks. - Todd Hoff

I love lamp. - Mark Jepsen

@Laurence 1) Yes and no. The performance gap between good conservative and precise (/accurate/exact) garbage collectors is less significant than one would think. 2) That's a valid point 3) Actually, I've thought of using Steve Dekorte's libgarbagecollector (look on GitHub). These are still plans though, Boehm was clearly the easiest option to start with, and ooc itself isn't bound to... more... - 'n ddrylliog

Easily one of the most fascinating threads on FriendFeed right now. You guys are talking mostly over my head but it reminds me that I need to get my ass out of managed languages one day. - Akiva Moskovitz

@mikepk The language+impl has only been out there for a few months. =) - 'n ddrylliog

@Todd Totally agreed, which explains some design choices in ooc. Memory leaks is a non-issue with a GC, and as for corruption, as long as you stay out of manual memory manipulation, the compiler does most the checking for you, statically. - 'n ddrylliog

@piaw: I think we're mostly in agreement, but I really don't think it's fair to say that "most programmers use Emacs and vi". I use vi a lot, but when it comes to Java/Scala code bases, I still use Eclipse (or IntelliJ, or whatever). Even at Google. I just don't map the *entire* Google Java code base into my workspace at once. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Java developers at... more... - Joel Webber

Joel: sure, you can play tricks like mapping only what you use. But a surprising number of Java users at Google kick up vim/emacs just so they can use the *fast* low-latency search tools when they need to read code outside of what they've mapped. The numbers were really surprising to me. - Piaw Na

I've been using emacs for 2 decades and I still use it when I need to quickly edit something or slice and dice text with macros (or I write sed/perl to do it). But when I'm developing stuff, a switchover point occurs where emacs is no longer sufficient and I desire the IDE. Emacs is great for scripts where you can test for errors via a quick eval, but the cost of a compile is high in... more... - Ray Cromwell

There is, once you get into Google-size (or even Linux-kernel-sized) code bases. But I guess I've living in the Google bubble for so long, the concept of not having mega-libraries doesn't even occur to me. And we've built enough fancy tools at Google that make Emacs way faster than Eclipse/IntelliJ (see http://code.google.com/p...). Latency matters! - Piaw Na

Ultimately, this is a search problem, something that google excels at. I'm not sure why you think Emacs has any innate advantage over Eclipse/IntelliJ for this. If GTags can be built for Emacs, it can be done for those IDEs. (Those IDEs already index all symbols and store them on disk) The issue here is that "find symbol" is necessary, but not sufficient, especially on large code bases.... more... - Ray Cromwell

Heh. I open sourced all the infrastructure, but not the ranking algorithms for code (which are google proprietary) Having seen lots of old Google hands work in Emacs, I think you'll find that they disagree. People have tried adding plugins to gtags for Eclipse/IntelliJ, but none have succeeded --- those IDEs aren't designed to take plugins quite the way Emacs does. Even Vim isn't as... more... - Piaw Na

As a practical example, the Linux kernel core (minus the whole driver universe) is about 500kloc. The GWT compiler, which I work on, is about 500kloc. I have zero complains about my IDE's ability (IntelliJ 9) to deal with this code base. Call it a medium sized code base if you will. Too big IMHO to practically use with Emacs/VI (where I desire refactoring and other navigational... more... - Ray Cromwell

What you'll find is that top engineers everywhere have heavily customized environments, scripts, editors, libraries, even their own programming languages, that make switching hard. Anecdotal evidence doesn't really prove anything, if "old hands" is meant to covey argument by authority. Like I said, I've been personally using Emacs since 1987, I use a bevy of ELisp, Perl, Awk, and other... more... - Ray Cromwell

I think the mindset difference is huge. Codebase too big? The IDE solution is to subset. The EMACS solution is to create a search index held in memory and apply search technology to it. The size of the community hacking away on these tools also matters. - Piaw Na

Piaw, you do realize that the IDE solution (I can't speak for Eclipse), is to build a search index and apply search technology? IntelliJ spiders all your reachable code and files on project setup (now, as a background process since it can take some time) and serves up IDE functions by consulting the index. In fact, it's very much like Google Suggest. I can type symbol lookup requests... more... - Ray Cromwell

Oh yeah, but they do it on disk and so have high latency when the code base scales up. I know, because people switch to Emacs/gtags from those IDEs for that reason. :-) - Piaw Na

Google's code base is large? I mean, I know the data it holds and indexes is very large, but somehow I assumed the code itself was quite small. - Andrew C

Actually, they cache some or all of the indices in memory depending on heap, at least according to the IntelliJ lead, if you increase heap, you lower cache thrashing. I still don't see why you think ETags/CTags/etc is any different in this regard. IntelliJ uses a similar index structure, it just records a bitmask on each tag as to the context (comment, identifier, method, field, etc).... more... - Ray Cromwell

@Andrew: I assume Piaw's talking about the *entire* code base, apps and all. That's a lot of code. - Joel Webber

gtags keeps it all in memory on a server, so there's no disk seek latency. There's nothing fundamental about the IDEs that makes this stuff impossible to do. It's just far easier to do in Emacs when there's just one of you. Once the prototype gets going, it's usefulness allows others to add in more useful functionality. Until recently, things like IntelliJ weren't even open source, so... more... - Piaw Na

Thanks Joel. Yes, I'm talking about the entire codebase. All of it. :-) - Piaw Na

@Piaw, Ray: It's becoming clear to me that we're all essentially saying the same thing. To deal with a large, complex code base, you need good tools. IDEs vs. Emacs isn't really much of a dichotomy if they're both building indices and cross-references of your code base and serving them up to you within the editor. They're both IDEs, n'est-ce pas? - Joel Webber

Yes, I'm just saying, if you need to build something in a hurry, it's far easier to do it in Emacs. But more importantly, ignoring a base of Emacs/Vi users when designing your programming language is ignoring a large percentage of the population. And in some cases, it's a large percentage of a very influential population. - Piaw Na

@Piaw I somehow lost your point between the "omg I don't like type inference" and the "you're ignoring Emacs/Vim users". It's still straight-forward to look for declarations of things, what's your problem? It's precisely why := and = are separate operators - 'n ddrylliog

You'll get no argument from me. I'm a fan of diversity in programming, and I do use emacs daily. IntelliJ/Eclipse would do well to offer a simple in-editor tool for building plugins via any Java scripting engine and support saving those persistently. I guess my point is, I can't live without Etags functionality, and now I can't live without all the other features I've gotten used to:... more... - Ray Cromwell

Even without any support, editing ooc in at text editor (I personally use Vim and Geany for .ooc) is very easy, cause you can search for "whatever:" (notice the ':') and be done with it. Try doing that with a C/C++/Java codebase =) That's the payback of a simple, non-ambiguous consistent syntax - 'n ddrylliog

And AFAIK, most ooc users/contributors/hackers use vim. A few use emacs, too. We have a vim syntax file, and a contributor is looking into writing an emacs mode. =) - 'n ddrylliog

@Piaw, Ray, et al: To finish my previous thought -- There will always be some point at which an IDE (be it Emacs or Eclipse) will fail to scale. The time and space required to deal with the code base eventually grows without bound, and you simply aren't going to load it into a single machine's memory. Even if you could load all of Google's code (or at least its index) into a single... more... - Joel Webber

Or you do the work to integrate the external search tool (or whatever) into the IDE. Emacs is designed to make that easy. The other IDEs that are around today, not so much. Code Search introduces a lot of latency. gtags as implemented internal to Google has sub 300ms response times. Whenever it goes down, I get complaints from people, declaring that "it's just too much work to remember where files are." - Piaw Na

I think Piaw's concern with type inference comes from the fact that explicitly stating the type of something acts as documentation. With type inference that documentation goes away. For example, in ooc, suppose I search for "whatever:" and I see "whatever:= foo()". What's the type? Whatever foo() returns. So now I have to look up foo(). Suppose it uses type inference on its return type (assuming that's possible in ooc). Now I have to dig even deeper. - Laurence Gonsalves

I'm guessing the IDE digression related to the fact that a sufficiently smart IDE can add the implicit type information back by doing the same type inference as the compiler. The problem with going down that road is that you're coupling the code editor and the language. Either your editor needs special language support so it can do the type inference, or you have to put up with not having an easy way of knowing something's type. - Laurence Gonsalves

I don't understand how you can do conservative garbage collection without leaking memory. - Gabe

Gabe: In theory, you can't. In practice, Hans Boehm did a lot of studies in the 1990s showing you that the leakage is very tiny. The real problem is memory fragmentation. With accurate GC, you can actually improve the locality of your data structures in memory (e.g., by putting elements of a linked list or array next to each other so a cache fetch brings them all into cache), with conservative GC, you can't do that. - Piaw Na

@Laurence: type inference: For me, the advantages far outweighs the drawback(s) (And, no, no return type inference in ooc). Plus, you don't *have to* use type inference. You can declare type explicitly in your whole codebase if you feel like it. - 'n ddrylliog

For the record: I'm not saying I necessarily agree with Piaw's distaste for type inference. I've thought about the issue in the past, but haven't used languages with type inference enough to have an opinion one way or the other. The lack of return type inference might be a good compromise, as it would tend to limit how far you'd have to search to figure out the type of something, while still eliminating a lot of the "busy work" in languages that require that you specify the type of everything. - Laurence Gonsalves

@Laurence You've come to the exact same reasoning as me =) - 'n ddrylliog

I do still think you should explain the "object[space]method-call" syntax somewhere on that page. Up until the point where you use that syntax ooc looks vaguely similar to C/Pascal/Algol/etc., so seeing this unfamiliar syntax with no explanation is confusing. - Laurence Gonsalves

@Laurence I just edited the homepage. Better now? - 'n ddrylliog

w.r.t. fragmentation and conservative GC: take a look at "Compacting garbage collection with ambiguous roots" by Joel Bartlett. Worked very well when I used it in a home-brew JVM for alphas at Dec/Compaq about twelve years ago. - Sanjay Ghemawat

I really like the way C# handles pointers and GC: All objects are allocated from the GC heap. If you need a pointer to a GC-able object, you only get it by pinning it. Once the pointer goes out of scope the object gets unpinned. And you can only use pointers in code marked "unsafe" so it's obvious to the reader. - Gabe

Gabe - does the fact that C# is not compiled to machine code like C++ make it slower? - Robert Felty

Rob: C# gets compiled to native machine code when you run the code. There's also a program that ships with .Net called ngen which will create a native image without having to run the code. - Gabe

It would be nice if Microsoft open-sourced C#/.net. I know there is Mono, but that seems like it will always be second-class. - Paul Buchheit

What happened to the "Opening .Net Framework's Source Code" project, any ideas? - Ozkan Altuner

I guess Rotor isn't good enough, huh? - Gabe

I was thinking of an actual open/free license. - Paul Buchheit

Paul Graham on object orientation: http://www.paulgraham.com/noop... - Donald C. Lindsay

FFrooms

Jason Huebel: Is posting via email not working? I sent a picture to share@friendfeed.com and it still hasn't shown up. - http://friendfeed.com/friendf...

October 21 from FriendFeed -... - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg liked this

Robert Scoble

The new Facebook feed really rocks and shows mostly items that your friends are engaging on. This changes Facebook fundamentally.

October 24 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Beau Liening, Matt Ellsworth, Sean Rasmussen and 30 other people liked this

better or worse than Friendfeed?? - Roberto Bonini

18 more comments

It still stinks at memory/intuitive usage though. Here is what I mean as an example. A relatively new user goes to upload a picture. They figure it out, and then sign off. Two days later they want to upload another picture. They can't remember exactly how they did it, and are stuck trying to figure out the process all over again like they had never done it before. It's too busy. Two... more... - Robert Campbell

:-) - Jesse Stay

Roberto: in some ways it's better but I'm still getting used to it. I miss the real time comments, though that pop up here. - Robert Scoble

While I like it, it's not intuitive. Example: friend asked me what the difference is between the "News" feed and "Live" feed. I explained it to her, and she asked how it was better then "highlights". I preferred "highlights" for displaying highly engaged items, myself, but I see the value to the two new systems. Time will tell. Knowing Facebook, they likely won't roll back the feature, and keep powering forward. - Mike Nayyar

If they fix the comments and likes to push things back up to the top, highlights won't be necessary because the more active items are still seen (regarding the live feed, which is all that matters) :-) - Jesse Stay

it is better, but hope it doesn't usher in the untimely death of friendfeed - Stuart

Stuart: no, that won't happen until next year but you can see the trend. Twitter and Facebook are getting new features (and Facebook has 200 people working on its engineering team). FriendFeed has almost no one working on it anymore. So, next year you'll see Facebook and Twitter both pass FriendFeed's feature set. Until then we're happy here! - Robert Scoble

Only thing I do on Facebook is play Farkle. Gotta be really bored for that too. - MicahBear78

When you log in, you get the same News Feed as before. When you click Live Feed you see EVERYTHING in your feed - and comments and likes seem to push things to the top. But my latest update failed to show in the News Feed: it only appeared in the Live Feed. - Michael Slattery

I like the new facebook features, very freindfeed´ish but i also miss the highlights section. I would like to have both, but maybe that´s only me - Flynn (Michael A. Volz)

I wonder how the system used to choose what to show you in the highlights section. And is it using some algorithm to SELECT what it shows in Live Feed? (Instead of EVERYTHING as I thought above.) - Michael Slattery

Michael, I think Live feed shows you everything, except those you've hidden. That's the difference from when they had the live feed before. Before you couldn't choose to hide people in your live feed. Also, be sure to use the filters on the left - make some friend lists and filter your live feed by friend list. - Jesse Stay

So when are they going to allow asymmetrical friending and FoaF?THAT'S what's going to change Facebook fundamentally. - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF from iPhone

FB live is really awesome - but buggy!! - Susan Beebe

I like the direction the new features are heading, but it still needs better hide and filter customization. - Tony, Paradox of FF

Agreed. The new Facebook live feed is great and a huge step forward. - Alex Knight

Oh, I agree so much with this post. So many people are not loving it but it really rocks. Fast and vast amounts of information, quickly being able to see what friends, family, contact, networks are up to. While updating live! I love it. - Travis Tasset

This is circulating on FB: "If you dont like the new FB here is how you can change it back to the old. Look to the top left menu and click on MORE. Then drag STATUS UPDATES to the top. After dragging to top, click on it. That becomes your default and it is like before." - Michael Slattery

Except it's not the same: "Status" only gives you updates, without links, photos or notes. - Michael Slattery

Nat Friedman

Cool - just discovered usertesting.com. $29.95 to get a video of someone trying to use your site.

October 28 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg liked this

Bret Taylor

Play framework - the first reasonable Java web framework I have personally seen. - http://www.playframework.org/documen...

October 23 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Ashwin Bharambe, Wojciech Polak, Thomas Amberg and 21 other people liked this

"However Play is a very unique Java framework. It does not really rely on the so-called Java Enterprise standards. It uses Java but tries to push all the good things from the frameworks based on scripting languages like Ruby On Rails, Django, ... etc. to the Java world. We really tried to get the best of the Java platform without getting the pain of traditional Java web development: slow development cycle, too much abstraction, too much configuration..." - Bret Taylor from Bookmarklet

And Bret is probably the first reasonable evaluator of existing Java web frameworks I see. Because 95% of those are in fact unreasonable. Bret! I will appreciate if you also try to find some reasons in HybridJava - http://www.hybridserverpages.com/ Alex - Alex Serov

Jason Huebel to Jason's feed, FriendFeed Feedback

Is posting via email not working? I sent a picture to share@friendfeed.com and it still hasn't shown up.

October 21 - Comment - Like - Share

Kol Tregaskes, Thomas Amberg and RAPatton liked this

It's been taking about 2-3 hours lately. - Rochelle

2 more comments

I did an email test earlier today, and it took 10 minutes. http://friendfeed.com/nencett... - Mike Nencetti

Discussion from earlier today: http://friendfeed.com/shey... - Rochelle

Yeah, it took about two hours for the picture to post. http://friendfeed.com/jhuebel... - Jason Huebel

The Archangel ωαřмaiden

Scoble says friendfeed is dead. Friendfeed says Scoble is dead. Who to believe?

October 20 - Comment - Like - Share

Boiled Frog, Chris Martin, Holly Rae, FFer and 27 other people liked this

Lennon? - Aaron the Librarian

34 more comments

I only hear ff - JSNFLMNG

Friendfeed - RAPatton

Shatner. William Shatner. - Derrick

I believe Nas. - Chris Z.

I believe in Chuck Norris - Onur Cengiz

Louis Gay or I mean Gray - sofarsoShawn

I believe in coyotes. - Steve is older than ever

I believe the children are our future... wait, wrong thing. - Kendra K

Kendra wins - Mary Carmen

also, you should believe me as I write your eval. ;-) - Mary Carmen

Which one will burn when put to the stake? And do either of them float? - ‘-.-’ Tutivillus Grift

I believe in Swordfish! - Mary Carmen

Friendfish - Joe Silence is not dead

well Friendfeed is looking a bit pale these days. Not the same kind of party as before. So I would say Friendfeed : Dead, Scoble : Alive - Mark O'Neill

Can't they both be right? - Kevin Shaum

FriendFeed's less shiny, but that's a good thing. Scoble? His opinion matters as much to me as that of any other A-lister. - Walt Crawford

The Walrus. - Robert Scoble

*lol* Nice, Scoble ;) - The Archangel ωαřмaiden

Paul - Jesse Stay

Doesn't look dead to me. - Amit Morson

Does this make us necrosomethings? - Rochelle Rochelle

Neither, in this case. Though "the Walrus" is a good answer. :-) - Chris Baskind

I'm still here. - Alex Scoble

I don't believe Robert Scoble uses FriendFeed anymore after saying it's dead. Whoever uses his account on FF must be a ghost writer. :P - imabonehead

imabonehead: there is life after death. - Robert Scoble

Who said Alex was dead? - Matthew DeVries

Matthew: I did. Many times when we were kids. - Robert Scoble

Glad you weren't so big on follow-through back then. - Matthew DeVries

We may need to send the Ghost Whisper after Robert Scobe. - imabonehead

Not so good on follow through now either - Ed Millard

Matthew: our bark is worse than our bite. Who is PetuniaGreenBeans? And why doesn't Petunia know how to use Google? - Robert Scoble

42 - Steve Mott

42 is dead too - Amit Morson

Google is dead - Amit Morson

kanye west lol - zʍıɔ

Paul Buchheit

There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage -- if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge :)

October 19 - Comment - Like - Share

Alfredo, Fabrizio, david beckwith and 243 other people liked this

What is transforming... FriendFeed, or the idea of FriendFeed? - Christopher Galtenberg

117 more comments

Thanks for the update, Paul! - Anne Bouey

THANK YOU! - Dork Knight (not Ha3rvey)

Fabulous News :) - Susan Beebe

Noticed the "leaked" Facebook UI screenshots and the groups blog post today, and both seem FriendFeed inspired: nice to see Facebook trying to bring the stuff we like about FriendFeed to a larger audience. - Mark Trapp

To Robert Scoble: I told you so ;-) - Jesse Stay

Sounds like they're adding some of FF's features to FaceBook. yay - Internet's Tad from fftogo

Mark - got link? - Susan Beebe

Thanks Paul :) - ashish

Devil is in the details: "couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world" == Facebook projects with FriendFeed-like elements == no work on FriendFeed itself. - EricaJoy

Paul, FriendFeed rocks as Gmail does ;) - Orlando Pozo

Thanks for the update, the more you communicate, the less we have to speculate. - Peter Hoffmann

The fact that these improvements are coming to Facebook and not friendfeed will not sway those who like friendfeed but dislike Facebook. - Alex Scoble

Thank you Paul for bringing "FriendFeed goodness to the larger world" -- THAT sounds awesome!! - Susan Beebe

integration with facebook? - Rocco Galluzzo

@Alex Scoble: That's true - Jorge Escobar

Susan: http://blog.facebook.com/blog... and http://mashable.com/2009... - Mark Trapp

I hope out of the chrysalis emerges an infested Kerrigan. That'd be awesome http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki... - Ivan Kirigin

Thanks Mark, much appreciated... I'll check those out - Susan Beebe

+1 Ivan :) - Benjamin Golub

But we knew this was the deal the moment the full details of the purchase of friendfeed by Facebook became public. - Alex Scoble

Yeah, I don't give a crap about Facebook. I want to know about FriendFeed. - Rochelle

Is it the interface people dislike about Facebook or the people they're friends with on Facebook? I can imagine being able to import all your subscribers from FriendFeed and have them in a separate group that doesn't interact with other groups you may have on Facebook. - Cristo

sadly, no one with any power seems to care about FF anymore. - Joe Silence is not dead

I'm glad to hear this. I prefer FriendFeed to Facebook any day of the week. - Nathan Clayton

And the answer for me would be some of both. I have real life friends and family that I don't necessarily want to get into the same discussions with as I do with people here. - Cristo

And there's your answer, Rochelle. friendwho? friendwhat now? Oh, you mean Facebook! (No I mean friendfeed) friendwho? (rinse, lather, repeat) - Alex Scoble

there are some ui differences (and i tend to prefer friendfeed in those cases) but i have friended quite a few FF people in FB and the experience is remarkably similar in many ways. - Jason Wehmhoener

Another big difference is I don't think you get the same FOAF interaction on Facebook as on FriendFeed. - Cristo

yep - Jason Wehmhoener

I hope my FaceBook peeps are ready for the FriendFeed firehose ... past experience would say that they're in for a shock. - Crutis

Thanks for the transparency on the Friendfeed "ghost town" matter Paul. Much appreciated. - Alex Knight

Thanks Paul... bring the special sauce to Facebook: http://blogs.zdnet.com/weblife... - Andrew

I like the "chrysalis stage" analogy - sounds cool.... goes an looks for FF goodness butterfly! - Susan Beebe

Good to know that FriendFeed still has some fight left; hope that translates into a viable and sustainable platform/utility for the masses (though I quite enjoy the close-knit, uber-geek community that it's become). - Christian

I don't like the chrysalis analogy. The butterfly emerges from the chrysalis and buggers off leaving the shell. Of course, it might then also get eaten by a bird. Tweet, tweet. - Mark H

Mark LOL nice, ... haha - Susan Beebe

Note that he didn't say that FriendFeed.com was going away, only that they're diverted to bringing it to a much larger audience - Jesse Stay

The problem is Scoble (Robert) and MG both just sent half of FriendFeed away so most of those that would benefit from this announcement won't even see it. - Jesse Stay

Jesse, I didn't get that from Paul's comment. I read that some of the friendfeed ideas will be going into FB. I like that idea, but I still prefer FF to FB because of the different conversations here that I don't have with friends and family. - Travis Koger from iPhone

Yeah, Paul's statement won't help friendfeed. This will just either give people more reason to go to Facebook or find another service entirely. - Alex Scoble

What Alex and Rochelle said. This sounds like a "we're bringing FF to Facebook" announcement, and I don't give a damn about Facebook. I want to know what's happening HERE. And Cristo, both, but more the interface. I care about the friends I've made here, and I'm connected with many of them now on Facebook as well, but I prefer to interact with them here, because I like it better. - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

Travis, he didn't say that - you read that, but he didn't say that. I'm willing to bet FriendFeed.com will not go away. - Jesse Stay

As much as I agree about Scoble and MG driving people away, they have also effectively flush out some comment from the FF team. - Travis Koger from iPhone

Travis, there are better ways of getting the FF team to comment - Jesse Stay

:( I quite liked the caterpillar. - Nick Lothian

I think it's the opposite, the butterfly is becoming this crawling caterpillar :) - Jorge Escobar

Oh I don't think FF will go away, and damn will hope it doesn't either! - Travis Koger from iPhone

What I do see is more Facebook integrated into the FriendFeed environment - I think that's a good thing - Jesse Stay

The critical difference between Facebook and FriendFeed is the social model. With Facebook as it is today, you need to be mutual friends to see each others content. There is a "fan page" model but it is oriented toward "publishing/celebrity" rather than information sharing. FriendFeed has an asymmetric model like Twitter, where you can easily discover someone's content without any "friend" gesture whatsoever, and you can follow without friending. This makes the converation more discoverable, and useful.. - Adina Levin

Agree Adina. - Travis Koger from iPhone

If the integration is bringing public/asymmetric to Facebook, then it will be very useful indeed. If the integration is to add FriendFeed-style service integration into the symmetric/private Facebook model, it will be much less useful - it's more of the same - I'll be able to more easily share updates from youtube or last.fm or delicious to my friend network, but be unable to discover new people and infomation. - Adina Levin

Adina: And unless Facebook goes radically toward that model, it won't suffice for me. I could not care less about their upcoming redesigns. - Christopher A Carr

@Jesse - I can't see any sign that they are working on FriendFeed at all. All the indications are that the FF team is now working on Facebook, and only Facebook. That's great for Facebook, and I'm sure they will do wonderful work there. But don't delude yourself that FriendFeed is going to get anything more than critical fixes, and maybe the occasional thing done in someone's spare time. - Nick Lothian

Butterflies look totally different than caterpillars and they also fly away - Melanie Reed

Crickets chirping... is this site alive?? :) - Christopher Galtenberg

+100 Adina. The things I like best about FriendFeed (easy content/people discovery, FoaF, asymmetrical following and being followed) are completely opposite to Facebook's core model. That's why as much as people keep talking about Facebook adding FF-like features, I don't see the REAL FF core features making it over, because the mindset is different. - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

I don't see this announcement as anything new, or as reassuring. We knew from the time of the acquisition that there would be would be some movement of FF capabilities into FB. The real question is whether this means absorption of FF into FB or attracting the FB user base into FF. The comment about "bring[ing] FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world" still leaves that question open. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

+1 everything Alex Scoble has said. Friendwhat? What's a feed? Who uses RSS anymore? We've got PubSubWTFOMGBBQ now! - Mr. Gunn

Agree with Jandy on +100 Adina. - Amy℠

Also, I agree with Jandy and Adina's comments. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

Nick, Paul just said they're working on other projects right now. That still doesn't mean FriendFeed is going away. I'm not deluding myself at all. I'm telling everyone else they're deluding themselves by assuming it's going away. All the FriendFeed team is still using FriendFeed, and Paul just tried to give us comfort not to worry. For some reason we all don't want to believe him. It's actually kind of amusing. - Jesse Stay

I wonder what the powers that be mean by "FriendFeedy goodness"? Is it understood what WE like about it vs. FB? - Amy℠

Paul - Wishing you all the best as you tend your new butterfly garden :) I'll be here to enjoy them! - Susan Beebe

Jesse: "For some reason we all don't want to believe him." <-- Don't want to believe what? He didn't really say anything. - Christopher A Carr

This is not the news that Friendfeed fans were looking for. - Vezquex: God of FF

The issue isn't belief that they are going to do something. The question is what they are going to do, and whether that will continue the core value of FriendFeed, which is not just information aggregation but discoverability. - Adina Levin

I know more about the "Last Days" and heaven than I know about what's going to happen to FriendFeed as we have come to know it than was given in your rather cryptic answer, Paul. :) And while that may not be a fair comparison (God actually gave details and signs), there is something definitely not forthcoming about your response. A person usually withholds details that affect another... more... - Melanie Reed

Melanie, in other words, Paul works for a technology company in Silicon Valley that doesn't disclose future features, products, and services until they are ready. - Cristo

Hopefully this helps to quiet all of the "friendfeed is dying" talk. Because this thread proves ff is alive and well. - Garin Kilpatrick

@Jesse - I read it differently to you. To me, Paul is saying "We are taking what we were working towards on FriendFeed, and trying to bring that goodness to a bigger audience". No one is claiming they are going to shut down FF. - Nick Lothian

@Jesse - Want to make a bet on the number of new features added to FF before the end of the year? - Nick Lothian

You read my mind. Having seen a few acquisitions, I am wondering if FF staff was told to put the site in bugfix mode. - EricaJoy from IM

Cristo, to deliver some straightforward talk is not about giving away company details. If you have a product that is original and stands on its own, you don't need to refer to it as a "butterfly". Many companies even promote something new and upcoming especially to their loyal user base. It gives a signal. A proper one. It tells your users and future users enough so that they can make an informed decision about what they want to do instead of keeping them on tenderhooks - Melanie Reed

"the chrysalis stage in most butterflies is one in which there is little movement" (via wikipedia) So if you follow that metaphor then eventually FriendFeed will go through a metamorphosis -- that means it's not dead... really how hard can it be to get what he's saying? - Chris Heath

Its pretty hard :) The burning question is if they are putting FF goodness in to the walled gardens that are Facebook or are they bringing FF openness to FB too. I think the people here want the open forums that are FF not the closed ones that are FB. If FB is going hybrid with both walled gardens and open forums that would be OK too. People on FF want open forums... like Twitter and FF... without the crude interface that is Twitter and without the uncertainty that is FF now. - Ed Millard

Facebook is gonna have to rip off much of the privacy to maximize their product in the real-time web world. I am going to assume FF goodness is going to be applied to FB :) *crosses fingers* - Susan Beebe

Just a thought... why does "longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world" JUST mean facebook.com? What I get from this is that they are working on a range of things, maybe bringing the FriendFeed sauce to a range of sites, powered by the Facebook back end. Who knows what that means. A FriendFeed service powered by FacebookConnect? Also to...... more... - Johnny Worthington

LMFAO. Johnny++ - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

FB needs to leave the privacy for the walled garden and the inner circle. Their current user base likes that. They just need a second feed that is an open forum and you can talk there without it bleeding in to your inner circle feed. - Ed Millard

Seems like the inner circle is breaking down some now, what with parents and other relatives friending teenagers. I'm guessing the information posted on the walls these days is not as private. Is there a way on FriendFeed to limit what on your wall can be seen by particular people and groups? - Cristo

Yes, but blocking doesn't work so well since you can just use Chrome's Incognito mode to get around it. - Alex Scoble

Translation: if you haven't switche to Facebook yet, you better do it now so you can get a good vanity URL. - David Chartier from iPhone

I don't know what all the fuss is about. But could we have the long answer too, please? - Laura Norvig

Although I'm interested, FB != FF. I don't see how the two mix in a way that makes me feel otherwise. Mixing audiences is not a good thing for me (with a few exceptions) and I know others share the same thought. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

Did anyone notice that Robert Scoble didn't comment on this thread? What does this mean? Does it mean Robert Scoble won't exist soon? He must be working on a Monday afternoon, no? ;) - Cristo

Paul, will FF be here in 1 year, 5 years? - Robert Higgins

Robert, will you and I be alive in 5 years? - Cristo

Thanks for the update Paul.. - Chris Myles

Cristo I am funking nobody, I would like Paul to quantify his post. Simple. Will FF be here in 1 year? Will FF be here in 5 years? - Robert Higgins

Robert, I was trying to make the point that he might not know and can't predict what will happen over time. - Cristo

IMO friendfeed shoud attract more general audience... Facebook and twitter are having more general users. Most of the FF users are tech bloggers or those who needs aggregation services... I dont know it's just my feeling or not . but this is my impression on FF. but it's great service.. the features are too good... but we will roam were we meet our friends... thats most of the people are into twitter and FB. - Sarath

Sarath, is there a place you can get away from tech bloggers? :) - Cristo

Ohhhh a perrrttty butterfly, I'm moist with anticipation. - sofarsoShawn

Glad to hear it, Paul. - WorldofHiglet

Cristo: i almost made the same observation an hour or two ago when i first read through this posting and its comments. I was skimming and kept seeing alex, alex, alex... and thinking to myself... where's Robert!?! - Chris Heath

Great news. Thanks! friendfeed team. :D - 'Like' robot (frɐnc)

@Sarath - I have a lot more in common with the people I've met here on FriendFeed than FB or Twitter. Twitter is too hard to search, and FB (and Twitter to a good extent) is driven by the people you know in RL (and unfortunately I don't have nearly as much in common in RL with my family, co-workers and acquaintences as I do with people scattered all over the world who I have met on FF).... more... - Her Lindsay-ness

I think that in his cryptic statement he means, and a lot of people here agree with me, that more Facebook's going to get more FriendFeedy. Which doesn't mean that FF still isn't dead or doomed. After all, he works for Facebook now. FriendFeed=open forum, Facebook=walled garden, totally opposite master metaphors; but I don't think Zuckerberg gets it, and FF belongs to Zuckerberg now. So this is really about FB; FF's still in limbo. Still, some FF people friended me at FB, and I put them in a special list. - Dennis Jernberg

@FF-team keep on rocking :). BTW I also think it's really cool you guys open-sourced tornado. - alfred westerveld

+1 what alfred said, and good to hear words like "longer-term" & "beautiful" coming straight from The Walrus - keep that vision strong. Hope all goes well for FF team doing some good re-inventing the Octopus Garden of FB - seems you've got your work cut out for you there! It would be so nice if any way to keep a "simple & pure" form of FriendFeed alive (maintained and developed - more open source?) for us to enjoy, but no worries .... you've simultaneously raised the bar and paved the way for the rest! - Dan Freeman

Good luck with the development Paul! Hopefully Zuck has some positive insight. - Garin Kilpatrick

I like butterflies. - Harold Cabezas

Paul: If someone offered me a bag of money to do what you guys did, I would have done exactly the same (probably a lot faster too). However, it would be nice if you spent an hour answering some of the questions here. It might also give people like me a little more faith, in what used to be your primary project; Friendfeed. You made the best platform on the planet - why not use it to let us know what the heck's going on? - Jim Connolly

I'm assuming that Facebook wants to keep their roadmap quiet. I respect that but leaving you community in the dark for a brand that the applications stand for community building is rather ironic. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

SUPER!! I don't Blame ya 1 Darn bit fer Dumpin' FacePOOP Paul!! ;PPP Wait FacePOOP is the Maggot Stage!! ;)) - Billy Warhol

If I can still have all my friends that I have here on friendfeed and share things with them the exact same way, I don't care what "www" address I have to type in to get it. I just hope i don't have to give up any of FF's awesome features! Thanks for the update Paul! - David Cook

The problem is I don't know whether to wrote an app on your API or not because i'm not sure whether it will all be dropped in the "transformation". Imagine speding late nights and weekends coding something up only for it to be dropped suddenly. Need a decent long term picture. Looking at Cliqset. - Steven Livingstone-Pérez

Good point Steven - and one of the reasons many of us are spending so little time developing our networks here. - Jim Connolly

waiting.... - ffcode

ffcode: Good luck with that ;-) - Jim Connolly

So the changes are at Facebook not FriendFeed, Paul? - Kol Tregaskes

And good luck to all of your team - Ozkan Altuner from iPhone

This is a truly disappointing/concerning post and I think it would have been much better to hold comment until something more tangible could be discussed. Thanks for adding to the confusion/drama Paul. - Nicholas Kreidberg

yemezler - MobilAdam

I do care about what happens next, but this is the best news of the day nonetheless ! thanks for giving us updates at last ! and I do hope FF will awaken again ! such a great tool, but letdown since the announcement of the buyback by FB - laetSgo

will I see this post in my "best of week" email from FF? - Kirill Bolgarov

If Facebook is going to get fixed, please remember that it needs fixing politically, not just technically. It needs to give people the option to open their data to Google - for instance. A walled garden where the walls are fixed in place sucks. - Tim Tyler

@Paul, or perhaps an Alien will erupt forth from its stomach? (kidding, kidding!) - j1m

Robert Scoble

The most damning thing is that no one from the FriendFeed team or Facebook has joined the community here that is talking about it to tell us what's happening in the future. That, more than anything I've written or said communicates the future of FriendFeed.

October 18 - Comment - Like - Share

H0llywoodWh0re, Sandeep Kalidindi, Shivanand Velmurugan and 117 other people liked this

I keep hoping someone will tell me I'm wrong and will post a slide deck about the future of FriendFeed. But the lack of information is confirming what I'm hearing from my sources. - Robert Scoble

113 more comments

So true - nail in the coffin! :(... - Susan Beebe from BuddyFeed

It's Sunday. - Anika

Anika: geeks in both companies are online and working on a Sunday and last night is NOT the first time I've been talking about the lack of direction here. Also, over the last week lots of blogs have been posting about the traffic hit that FriendFeed has already seen. - Robert Scoble

If there really was a team working on FriendFeed you BET they would contact us on a Sunday. They used to in this old days. - Robert Scoble

Remember, Facebook has a PR team of more than 10 people. You think they aren't watching what people are saying about Facebook nearly 24/7? Not in my experience. They are the most engaged PR team in a new company I know of. - Robert Scoble

The reality is that this is still a very useful service, and people stay because of the functionality and the community. There is no other service out there that accomplishes what this one does. There is still nowhere else to go. - LogEx

LogEx: that's true, but it's also true that most people will go places where there's a clear future. Unless it's just to post non-consequential things. Me? This is both my fun time (which is why I'm still here) as well as my business (I won't be betting any of my business decisions on doing stuff here because of this lack of direction which tells me that no one is really working on FriendFeed actively anymore). - Robert Scoble

Robert, I understand the perhaps reasonable conclusions you're reaching, but breaking the silence could send too much signal to FB's competition when they'd rather send more silence which ends up, really, being noise. - Micah Wittman

FriendFeed is like an old dying dog left out in the pasture alone; abandoned by its Master to die in the silence. - Susan Beebe from BuddyFeed

Most social network content is ephemeral. If people really want their stuff to have a clear future, they should own and host it on their own domains. - LogEx

Robert, so maybe you're not giving their PR _enough_ credit. It's speculation on my part, granted. - Micah Wittman

Micah: sorry, that dog don't run. Healthy companies signal future directions, even under NDA. It would be pretty easy to meet with a few members of the community, NDA them, and tell them what's going on. If Louis Gray came on here and told me he's under NDA and that I'm wrong then I'd feel much better. The truth is I've talked with people inside Facebook and I know what the former FriendFeed team is working on. Hint: it isn't FriendFeed. - Robert Scoble

Logex - yup! - Susan Beebe from BuddyFeed

I still wish they'd make it open source or something so that people could continue to develop on it. :S - Her Lindsay-ness

Susan, I don't think "human master - canine pooch" analogy really applies to Friendfeed team - community that's formed. - Micah Wittman

By the way, Facebook meets with bloggers/journalists all the time to give us secret hints at what's coming. I've been to Facebook several times this year for just that. Facebook has no serious competition, by the way, so they don't make PR decisions based on what Twitter is doing. - Robert Scoble

I guess I'm not most people then. If I find something that works, I prefer to stay put as long as it meets my needs. New things are nice, but I don't have time to constantly try out new services to see if they are better that what I am presently using. (That's why I follow people like Robert ;-)) The new shiny service would have to be significantly better than what I presenlty use to make me want to switch. - Jeff P. Henderson

Do you have any services that offer the same functionality, are widely available, and actually have a future, Robert? How about offering a solution for once instead of just bitching? - LANjackal

Robert. Can you reveal the information you have from your sources. Discussions where one person has information they won't reveal is frankly frustrating. If you have some inside knowledge yet continue to make statements like this and FriendFeed is dead? then it really is frustrating to the community. - Johnny Worthington from iPhone

If your business is posting to social media, and you think your content is "consequential" based on how long it will be around on the web ... I think you've misunderstood the current moment in social media. - Joel Bennett

There's much less interaction than there used to be - but I still have faith in the users. This (was) is a vibrant and interesting place to be - and that's testament not only to the people that made the site, but also to the people who breathed life into it. I'll be following friendfeed still, but i'll also be following the friendfeeders i've met here. I'm not sure where the future is, but it'll be something to do with the people here. I'm sure of that. - Iain Baker

+1 - LANjackal from IM

Micah - lack of innovation and development on FF platform will cause obsolesence soon. Social web apps must innovate or die. When Facebook acquired FF, we all knew that FF would wind down due to this. Communities will migrate to current platforms that meet their needs. I am sensing a large contingent of the FF community is about to leave FF, myself included. - Susan Beebe from BuddyFeed

Re Tina: IIRC she got laid off and is prolly busy trying to find new employment - LANjackal from IM

@Susan: "social web apps must innovate or die" really? tell that to Twitter, lol - LANjackal from IM

Robert, did Wolfram-Alpha indicate their future direction being a $50 iphone app? All I'm saying is Facebook's strategy may include support to FF that's not in a time-frame worth pushing through PR yet. - Micah Wittman

My favorite thing about this whole "Facebook is dead, move on" campaign is that these guys are basically just trying to shoe you BACK to the service they talked most of you OFF of in the first place: Twitter. I'm still looking for their motivation. - Joel Bennett

Only one thing to say. Jaiku - Moved to Facebook

FB is dead? Anyone who's saying that in view of their soaring stats and the roaring success that FB Connect has been needs their head examined - LANjackal from IM

The way I see it, Robert, your constant bitching and declaring friendfeed dead is what is killing the community. While the software it runs on may be dead, the community is not. I have to separate it and explain it to you, because you don't seem to understand the difference and how being a vocal part of this community affects it. The more you put it down, the more people won't come here... more... - April Russo (app103)

^ My thoughts exactly. http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - LANjackal from IM

Susan, social web apps need utility/affection by a set of users. If cutting/bleeding edge aficionados is the particular user set in question, then what you said generally holds true. But it's not the general case unless a true replacement (in this case for FF) is available. - Micah Wittman

I don't think he's killing the community, he's just killing the community's participation with him. - Alex Scoble

Robert. Can you advise the information you have from your sources? - Johnny Worthington

I am stuck in the middle on this one... - Allen Stern

Fair point, Alex. I think this issue needs the two Scobles to put their heads together and clear the air. - Micah Wittman

http://ff.im/6HqPf - Chris Lasher

Naw...I like friendfeed. I'm not going anywhere as long as my friends are here. - Alex Scoble

Me neither :) - LANjackal from IM

Amen, Alex. - Jack (a.k.a. Jeber)

Is Friendfeed dying ( if it is) because of it being purchase by Facebook, or by members reaction to that purchase? Did people forecast the death of Friendfeed and then leave, therefore creating the exact scenario they predicted. - Kim Landwehr

That's exactly what happened - LANjackal from IM

Robert, doesn't this put the denouement on the donkey for all those who thought it too sharp a call to say what was going on in that sale and before it? It seemed fairly clear to me what had been going on mainly from seeing the actions at the time of the sale and "doing the math". As Aristotle said: "Plot is character" - Melanie Reed

Some times the lab rats do understand and stop sniffing for the cheese, looking up at the lab coats above them with a knowing twitch of the whisker. - Melanie Reed

Can FriendFeed be another StumbleUpon two years later? http://stumbleupon.com/sublog... EDIT: "I don't want it happen though. I hope FFers let me entertain us again on FB" (excerpted from http://ff.im/6pO0a in Japanese) - NaHi from f2p

I'm more of a social media *consumer* than I am a participant. From a consumer's point of view, FF is more interesting than its competitors. A nice place to hang out, enjoy, learn, and sometimes discuss. Less guesswork is involved in deciding whether to click through to sources. From a consumer's perspective, as long as it remains interesting there won't be a reason to move on. - howard shippin from BuddyFeed

Johnny: yes, my sources inside Facebook tell me that the FriendFeed team has been split apart and is working on Facebook items only. So far no one has refuted that. - Robert Scoble

April: you can believe that I'm personally killing the community but that really is giving me far more power than I actually have. The community has dramatically changed in the last two months. The alpha geeks I follow and that I build my business around have largely left. Everytime I meet geeks at conferences they tell me they are not spending as much time on FriendFeed as they did before the sale to Facebook and that the lack of direction from the team is largely responsible for that. - Robert Scoble

And, April, if you read my blog post you'll see that I believe a new community is already moving in here -- one that doesn't care if the technology will see new features. - Robert Scoble

I'm not on FB that much, but do people from their team actually get involved on the site? Is that even possible, with the privacy controls? I said it on another thread: you can't serve two masters. If FB is paying the bills now, that's probably where erstwhile FF staff must spend their time. - .LAG liked that

I agree with Robert here - Matthew DeVries

.LAG: yes. I have dozens of Facebook employees as friends over on Facebook and they do engage all over the place. - Robert Scoble

.LAG: the head of PR at Facebook, Brandee Barker, even has a Twitter account: http://twitter.com/faceboo... and there are TONS of employees who hang out on both Twitter and Facebook like Dave Morin, head of Facebook's platform team. - Robert Scoble

Kim: I did one of the first interviews with the FriendFeed and Facebook teams after the sale was announced (within the first hour) and even then you could tell that Facebook had no plans for FriendFeed's technology and mostly wanted the team. The fact that Gary Burd (who ran the Google Talk team and is VERY influential in Seattle technology) has already left speaks VOLUMES to what is going on behind the scenes. Guys like Gary don't leave if they are having fun and making a huge impact. - Robert Scoble

April - Robert actions and Roberts threads have nothing to do with the death of Friendfeed. Robert's threads still have traffic and activity. The place where I see, where Robert would probably not ever be able to appreciate is the fact that there was once a time when a postless thread was impossible. Every single one of my threads had traffic. Even if it was one or 2 silly posts of... more... - Matthew DeVries

http://friendfeed.com/bwana that right there.....that is the saddest thing. That was once what I considered to be the most important account on Friendfeed. - Matthew DeVries

That's a stupid call he made for himself - LANjackal from IM

I'm a new user. i quite enjoy what's here, at the moment. I can't say that I'm a sophisticated social networker, but I have already grown to trust many of the folk i've met here. Like someone earlier in the thread said, if enough of my friends on friendfeed decide to move on, i'll likely follow. i don't suspect that that kind of 'distant early warning' would arrive via Facebook. - T. Brent, technopeasant

My experience on FF does not hinge on Robert. The community of thinkers and feelers will find a way to interact, here or somewhere else. By the way, some of us are left out of the loop 99% of the time when it comes to knowing what's next. Welcome to the club. - Aron Michalski from BuddyFeed

Matthew: you aren't the only one to notice this or tell me the same thing. Many won't point it out in public, either, because they just don't want to piss off those who are still here. Me? Being public with what I'm hearing, experiencing, deciding, etc is the way I deal with life and the conversations with others tend to either confirm the direction I'm aiming in, or they pull me back from the brink. So far not much has changed my opinion, and, in fact, has augmented it. - Robert Scoble

Aron: Twitter is about to turn on lists. That's one feature FriendFeed had over it. Within six weeks they will turn on a new retweet feature that looks more like FriendFeed's "likes" than it looks like RTs, so that's another feature. Twitter is working on real time search and I'd expect them to turn on a much better search within six months. So, what's left? Comments. Those are added on... more... - Robert Scoble

I still get a lot of activity on my posts but it's not what it used to be. The big thing I've noticed is a rarely get new subscriptions yet I'm still quite active here. Going from getting several or more a day to one or so a week is a big indicator to me of FriendFeed's decline. - Akiva Moskovitz

It's time to open source FF. Start the chant. - Todd Hoff

is it possible that things are levelling off, naturally? can growth, here or elsewhere, expect to be exponential forever and ever? - T. Brent, technopeasant

Brent, you bring up a salient point. For some, the constant movement is what they are really excited about more than the community. This is not to say that these ones don't enjoy the community, they obviously do. But they enjoy the "building" up of it. It's like getting trapped in the "I always want to be falling in love" feeling and never, as you bring out, get to and enjoy the natural leveling off. Some do enjoy that part. And there may be enough of them to keep this version of FF going. - Melanie Reed

There's a problem with stasis, though. For one, it almost always leads to entropy and, for two, it means that there isn't an influx of new blood. It's the same people doing the same things having the same conversations. It decreases how dynamic the experience is. It becomes stale. - Akiva Moskovitz

I'm not saying that FriendFeed's hit that stage yet but it most likely will. I'm still having a great time here but it's not nearly as exciting as it used to be and, no, that's just because the honeymoon period's worn off. - Akiva Moskovitz

Akiva, I respectfully disagree. It's like exploring a new path in an old garden. This is the place most people are either afraid to traverse or have not developed the discipline to want to go there. There are always new things yet to be discovered in the same relationship. We just get "ants in our pants" not wanting to sit still long enough to discover it. ;) - Melanie Reed

Melanie, oh yeah? Well, you're WRONG! In all seriousness, I think it's two sides of the same coin. And I want both. It's why I hang out both on Twitter and FriendFeed. I get different (but good!) experiences out of both. - Akiva Moskovitz

Matt - Yup, I've experienced the same thing as I have over 2,500 FF followers and now see a very low user engagement; whereas, in the past, I could get a ton of likes / comments on any topic. Now I see only crickets!! FF is dying. - Susan Beebe from BuddyFeed

Akiva, Its more about learning to "exult in monotony". ;) - Melanie Reed

Hah. Sorry, Melanie, but when it comes to social networking, I'm definitely polyamorous. - Akiva Moskovitz

Akiva, I've just come to appreciate the wisdom of Solomon: that there is "nothing new under the sun". lol Or as Shania Twain would say: "That don't impress me much." - Melanie Reed

With Friend Feed I can go to the site, and watch in realtime all the action going on with those I follow. I see Likes, Comments, Pictures, Nicely grouped and can type more than 140 characters if I want to. With Twitter, it's all a kludge to add on this and that and this client or that client and I just don't see how Twitter compares technically to FriendFeed at this time. Twitter was... more... - Keith Rowland

Yeah, the 140 character cap is the most baffleing thing that makes me wish FF wouldn't die and Twitter become king. I want more than 140 characters, I want it in real time, I want it in conversation, and I want it 100% free of super poke and my highschool neighbor's grand mother following me. - Matthew DeVries

It is the weekend and some people sleep :) At least that's how I'm looking at it ..for now.. plus I'm begging: Friendfeed please don't go away.. - http://new2me.posterous.com/friendf... (via http://ff.im/a57K2). - Chris Myles

FF activity is like the Bears defense tonight... far less vibrant than you'd expect - Jay Cuthrell from BuddyFeed

sorry 2 say that Scoble friendfeed is slowing down 2 :( - polou/indigo_bow

Not dead yet. Thank goodness. - Aron Michalski

The truth is we know nothing more than a few weeks after the sale when the team commented that they will keep it going as long as they could. We all knew development would stop. We all knew it would run on auto-pilot. No one here seriously expects FriendFeed to continue forever but a lot of us aren't pulling the plug and walking out the door. Interaction is down, to be expected, and I'm... more... - Johnny Worthington

well-put, Johnny. - T. Brent, technopeasant

Agree Johnny.. - Chris Myles

Here we go again... - BLOGBloke

OH MY DEAR LORD! THE FRIENDFEED TEAM ISN'T INSTANTLY AVAILABLE ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON TO TALK ABOUT THEIR STRATEGIC PLANS! ALERT THE MEDIA! - Glen Campbell, B.A.

Glen, the last 13 words took your statement from accurate to inaccurate - Matthew DeVries

What Twitter client are you using these hours anyway Robert? Have you checked out CoTweet? - Matthew DeVries

Regardless of the Friendfeed team's lack of comments, the volume on some threads like this does prove to me that life still exists on FF. I will agree that the volume is lighter but nothing has officially shown me that Friendfeed is dead, only bogus news articles trying to create news... - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

Look at FriendFeed. Look at Facebook. Which one needs improvement? Of course the team isn't working on FriendFeed now. But they're still using it, and would be upset if Facebook killed it. Facebook values them. They won't kill FriendFeed. - Bruce Lewis

strictly speaking, since the time of the sale facefeed staff have added new features http://friendfeed.com/friendf... posted news about technology development http://friendfeed.com/friendf... and responded to user support http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Mike Chelen

Mathew: I use Tweetie on iPhone for almost all Twitter tasks. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

You also started it at 3am in the morning on Sunday - kind of a bad time to get their attention, don't you think? - Jesse Stay

Social Media Epertistes are vampires, they'd shrivel up and die otherwise after a night full of exsanguination orrrrrrrrr we could just fwd. this to the Feedback Room [done] - sofarsoShawn

Great, so its over? I wonder how many times the community is going to be willing to put themselves into something like this before we realise that all this stuff needs to move over to an open platform. I have a few great great communities die because of financially/politically motivated owners. shitty. - Jason Strachan

Which reminds me: Anybody know how the OpenFF project's going? - Dennis Jernberg

We had this discussion about the future of Friendfeed back when the buyout was first confirmed. We assume it's treading water, and maybe some day we'll be surprised by an update. - Vezquex: God of FF

Shawn, well done - Jesse Stay

Vezquex, yeah - how many more times do you predict this will come up again? FriendFeed just gave an excuse for people to say something's dead. I predict this will happen many more times until it is actually dead or they start really vamping it up again. No one in this thread has the authority to know that. - Jesse Stay

Maybe we will just roll our own waves. - Sean Oliver

Re: Shawn http://bit.ly/g7zYA - Matthew DeVries

Let's stop comparing elephants to fleas. Even if having 10 PR people allowed Facebook to be the "most engaged" new company, adjusted against the number of inquiries originating from members, 10 people cannot support that volume. With 250 million (or how ever many more) members, the right level of PR staffing would have to be closer to 250 (one PR person per 1 million members) to get... more... - Rich Reader

Wow, I hadn't realized Bwana had completely left. Did he blog about it? - Laura Norvig

I'm not sure if he blogged about it, Laura, but he certainly did talk about it...I'm surprised that he made his feed go dark as abruptly as he did. - Alex Scoble

Laura, Alex, yeah that abruptness took me by surprise too. My iphone shed a pixelated tear. - Micah Wittman

screw this thread.... Robert Scoble crushed my friendfeed fantasy... and you people are still talking about friendfeed being dead, Now let the damn thing die quietly thank you...... - Cjay

Start using Hide, Cjay - Alex Scoble

All Hail FriendFeed. FriendFeed is dead. Long Live FriendFeed. I like it better than wave, twitter, fb. If anything the signal to noise ratio has improved. - Robert Higgins

Paul's Response on Read Write http://thenextweb.com/2009... - Robert Higgins

You guys do know that Paul did post about this,right ?? Rendering Roberts shock a moot point. - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

Paul Buchheit speaks up! http://ff.im/a8LNU - Susan Beebe

Every time I see this, I keep thinking that "damning" is entirely too strong of a word... - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

The walrus replied - Steve Gillmor from iPhone

Roberto (and the walrus): oh, really? Did you READ what Paul wrote? How does that differ from anything I've said? - Robert Scoble

Robert, you said FriendFeed is dead and Paul said it isn't. Keep in mind you're using said "dead" site to respond. - Allred

Twitter is undernourished FF is chronically ill. FB is fat with clogged arteries and 10% of its users have disabled accounts including me. - Darrell Hudson

Robert Scoble

coldacid: A great analogy for what's happening at FriendFeed since the Facebook purchase, by @silas216: http://bit.ly/1uQMAu #goodnightsweetprince - http://twitter.com/coldaci...

October 18 from Twitter / Favorites from... - Comment - Like - Share

Russ, Thomas Amberg, Micah Wittman and 3 other people liked this

Nailed it! - Susan Beebe from iPhone

Robert Scoble

MSFTResearch: Microsoft Research unveils The Fourth Paradigm, a downloadable book of essays by data-intensive-science experts. http://tinyurl.com/yhlu37p - http://twitter.com/MSFTRes...

October 16 from Twitter / Favorites from... - Comment - Like - Share

Kevin Tunis, Thomas Amberg and Victor Ryden liked this

Allen Stern

Anyone Still Using Friendfeed? - http://www.centernetworks.com/anyone-...

October 13 from CenterNetworks - Comment - Like - Share

rukku, Carlos Sousa, Jimminy and 72 other people liked this

dreadful death.:( - Igor Poltavskiy

109 more comments

:( - Yolanda

A slow, lingering death is the worst. - Greg GuitarBuster

article is pointing at Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, too. - Joe Silence is not dead

i'm not predicting the death of FF until they shoot it in the base of the skull. i actually use Facebook LESS post-acquisition. - Joe Silence is not dead

Maybe things were down in September because so many people went back to school? - Nine

NO, IT'S THE FFPOCALYPSE! SHUT DOWN THE SERVERS NOW!! :P - Joe Silence is not dead

Long Live FriendFeed - Chris Heath

LONG LIVE THE NEW FFLESH! - Joe Silence is not dead

FriendFeed is still the best place to 1) Aggregate all content from around the Web and 2) See others activity around the Web. Also, if you assume Facebook wins, piping content through here fills out your Facebook profile. So of course I'm still here. - Louis Gray

There you go, Allen. Straight from (one of) the horse's mouth. :) Louis is still here, still active and even interacting with you. - Curtiss Grymala

yep - i just saw a pic of his kid in a tshirt :) - Allen Stern

Yes - Alex Scoble

"Consultant Louis Gray appears to be using Google Reader to share content he finds interesting." Wait, I see him right up there.^^^^^ - Christopher Harley

why are folks abandoning? :( - ffcode

hate facebook, and scoble's prediction that facebook would be the next big thing! you just can't help those folks that just get there for the girl-boy thing...or for their friends and family, there is a lot of people doing it there and a great section of that isn't of any help when it comes to questions and tech stuff, it might be a big thing but compared to friendfeed it is... more... - ffcode

Guys, this is FriendFeed comment bait. The chart on CenterNetworks isn't that good either. :) http://siteanalytics.compete.com/centern... - Louis Gray

Ouch :p - Chris Saad

oh snap! Louis is just mad because Cal lost again last weekend - Allen Stern

Guys, this is not Friendfeed comment bait - The chart on Louis Gray isn't that good either :) http://siteanalytics.compete.com/louisgr... - Allen Stern

URLTLDR - Jay Cuthrell

Allen, October will be an up month for me. :) - Louis Gray

why did the twins get computers? **oh snap** LOL - Allen Stern

Me-ouch - nice work Louis about CenterNetworks! - Shane

still here. (been posting this a lot lately....) - Mike Nencetti

Still my favorite network. Why? - Jesse Stay

You know it would be cool if everyone left FriendFeed because then Louis and I would have the edge against everyone else that left it in the dust. It's still an awesome tool guys! - Jesse Stay

Using it every day - Christopher Galtenberg

I keep telling you guys: this internet thing is JUST A FAD - Ken Sheppardson

The chart on mine's going up, kind of: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/staynal... - Jesse Stay

nice Jesse - keep it up! - Allen Stern

Allen, I just hope that everybody stops blogging so I am the only one doing it. If you naysayers all stop FriendFeeding, that's fine too. Go have fun on your Twitter. :) - Louis Gray

I noticed a decline, but it really seems to be picking up lately, especially in the last week. - RAPatton

i thought we were all going to posterous? i booked a big coach bus to take us all over there! rubel is driving! :-P - Allen Stern

hahahaha "go have fun on your twitter" there isn't anything like friendfeed, no not even posterous... - ffcode

*fierce eye roll* - Chieze Okoye

In the old days this would have had hundreds of comments. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Allen, no, we're all going to SocialMedian now - didn't you get the memo? - Jesse Stay

Robert, that's because your brother quit ;-) - Jesse Stay

it's really simple: I control what I see and respond to on FriendFeed. On Facebook others control what I see. - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Robert, are you coming here to tell us again that nobody uses FriendFeed anymore because it's too noisy? - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

yup Robert i am with Bruce on this...:) - ffcode

If it's too loud, you're too old. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

one of the reasons might be because FF team has moved on... - ffcode

WHAT? YOU GUYS ARE BEING TOO NOISY - Jesse Stay

I haven't noticed any big declines since the week or two after the Facebook announcements. Most of the people I interact with are still here... and I've subbed to new people... I don't know what that article is talking about. Seems like the article is a self fulfilling prophecy: let's say that everyone is leaving FriendFeed so that everyone will leave FriendFeed. Actually, it almost... more... - Her Lindsay-ness

kind of, though I've noticed most have changed exactly how they use it before and after the big sell, for example there are fewer imports of the particular services and more of personal blog RSS's, which I'm sure is due to who own the content issue - sofarsoShawn

ffcode, Paul Bucheit posted something just yesterday, as did Benjamin Golub. They're still using the site. - Jesse Stay

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/louisgr... - Chris Heath

moved on as in moved on to another projects are they still working on ff? - ffcode

jesse, but their activity has seen a drop, bret isn't doing much - ffcode

I've personally noticed a large drop among the usual people I subscribed to. My main feed was so dead I even had to ask if the real-time feature broke down. - sofarsoShawn

ffcode, they're working on the facebook code now... figuring out how to move forward while integrating the friendfeed features (iirc) - Chris Heath

oh okay... - ffcode

This makes me sad. :( - April Buchheit from iPhone

Great... Just when I was getting used to FriendFeed... So what's the new fad service? Outside of Google Wave and the still going strong Twitter/Facebook news, I haven't heard of anything new coming out lately. Maybe it's just me but I'm itching for more revolutionary free stuff. Posterous FTW though. :p - Fake Name

ffcode, they released Tornado server recently. I think that was a pretty significant activity - Jesse Stay

Fake Name, don't go anywhere... Long Live FriendFeed - Chris Heath

For the record, Allen, Cal didn't lose this weekend because they had a bye week. :) - Louis Gray

looooooooooooooool - Allen Stern

Still here...... - Iain Baker

i'm of the opinion that FriendFeed (the service) is of more value -- to me-- than FriendFeed (the community) and if the community goes off and disipates it will be a loss, but the service is still worth a lot to me - Chris Heath

April, please elaborate. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Louis, you mean a BYU week? Did you see how much BYU beat UNLV by? :-) - Jesse Stay

Ok, Chris. I'll hold your Feed up to that scrutiny. :p - Fake Name

agree with Judy... - ffcode

In answer to the original question: yes! :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Yeah - April can't just say she's sad and leave it at that :-) Does she have insider information we're not privy to? - Jesse Stay

this thread tops my best of day. - Mike Nencetti

I stopped pruning my FF feed to promote interaction and don't bother sharing with FF as much. I just post links through twitter now and upped my usage for facebook. I also stopped updating the rooms I started. - Alan Le

FF is still my favourite, although I'm quite. But that's due to other activities. - Ton Zijp

this is control, and you all who registered on ff need to be here ASAP...and we need to rebuild the conversations ETA a day at most... - ffcode

I'm still here. More active some days than others. But when we DO need to abandon the ship, why not try Cliqset? - Patrik Johansson

hahhahaaaa, yeah that'd be FriendFeed done right - sofarsoShawn

Yeah I read that article. I don't think it's better than FF, not close. But when FF goes down, maybe Cliqset could be something? - Patrik Johansson

Fake Name, what scrutiny are you holding my feed up to? Not sure what you mean. - Chris Heath

I use FF for aggregation, for discovery of interesting stories, and for following discussions. I never received much interaction with my own posts here. It's a mystery to me why people complain about FF complexity when Facebook is way more complex and less intuitive. Twitter is too simple, and therefore requires ridiculous hacks like RTs and @s. Unpopular Jaiku is better than Twitter.... more... - howard shippin

@Chris Heath, it was just a fancy way of saying I've subscribed to your feed. - Fake Name

btw oward, why is Jaiku better than Twitter? You didn't exactly clarify. Personally though...yeah, end of the day I either want a better RSS or a better RSS segmenter than anything else. FriendFeed is nice but it's still more of a lifestream than a Yahoo Pipes' Dream. - Fake Name

Fake Name, well that makes sense... i kind of thought you might have been putting me down in a sarcastic manner, but that makes sense too - Chris Heath

Haven't found anything to replace it with just yet, so yeah, I'm still here. - Steven Perez

To be honest, I have stopped listening to a lot of social media 'experts'. FriendFeed has always been about social interaction for me... After 1,000,345 stories on Twitter vs Facebook, it's getting old. Interaction may be down... but it may be the content, not the service. - Johnny Worthington

Good thread, my comment on the post here: http://alexschleber.posterous.com/my-comm... If FF goes away entirely, it would be a huge loss of the (Twitter) archiving capabilities. I still don't get why FF didn't go the full-on Twitter client route, they could have pwned TweetDeck with better groups, MUCH better persistence, etc. They could have ridden the Twitter hype wave all the way. Of course to make that happen, they would have had to optimize the Twitter use cases. - Alex Schleber

I like FF for everything it does that Twitter DOESN'T. I'm very glad they didn't just make it another lame Twitter client. How many of those do we really need? - Her Lindsay-ness

FB could easily inject thousands or millions of new users. The fact that they don't, and probably won't, sucks. I think ff was bought because it was seen as a threat, and now I fear it is being left to die. sigh. - Garin Kilpatrick

I think the 50 mio is a transfer payment to FF guys... They dont need anything and I dont think that they seen ff as a thread. - Atif UNALDI

pity, i was just starting to enjoy using friendfeed even though no body ever replied to any of my comments lol - Loc

@bluecockatoo / Lindsay, I wasn't saying that FF should ONLY be another Twitter client, rather the best, on top of also being the best for other services and FF discussion (different use cases). BTW, you may have noticed that FF was always at least 50% Twitter content. Why deny/fight reality, especially if that reality could have greatly bolstered FF instead of seeing it flounder and then having to sell out to Zuckerberg for the coding talent (AKA liquidation). - Alex Schleber

I've actually been spending more time here lately, still subscribing to interesting feeds - but also started looking for decent replacement. Expecting may be some time before I find one - no hurry .... - Dan Freeman

Uh yeaah bitch, I just signed up today, bow down and worship. - Gina

To the end - Wayne Sutton from iPhone

Yeeee - Joe Dawson

Garin, i suspect ff guys had facebook in mind when they were designing it... - ffcode

"While comparing Posterous to Friendfeed is like comparing a bagel to a piece of fish, ..." lol. But.. can't argue with the OP; it's a shame.. - thinkQuick

I still open up FF and leave it running all day long. - Chris Jackson

Yup, still using it. At the Mac FriendFeed still rules over Twitter. Slightly different story on the iPhone where Twitter is served by several superb third party clients, in particular Twittelator Pro, which drag me to the platform. On the Mac though it's a no contest. I'm staying in the hope that FriendFeed will see further updates. If this doesn't happen and if it rots on the vine then I'll consider other services. For now though FriendFeed seems the best there is out there. - David Hall

have we passed 100 comments yet so Scobelizer will take note - Chris Heath

Chris: No, I mean, yes. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

No, nobody uses FriendFeed any more. I certainly don't. - Mellissa Jane

I still use FriendFeed, although I haven't been as active as I would have liked, as of late. :( - Tyson Key

I didn't want to respond to this yesterday but I think it's really sad that blogs\news try to put things into the Deadpool before they actually happen. Throughout my career I've seen this, X is dead and in many cases they still exist. Why does media (including blogs) feel it is there role to speed up or create a death? My view is that if they are still talking about it, it's normally still doing OK. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

I especially liked how she called us idiots as we had it wrong this whollllle damn time. Oh yes, because she's in the superior position to make such a crude judgment call. Dumb fug. - sofarsoShawn

Shawn, who's she? and where did she say this? now i'm interested... - Chris Heath

Here we go, my Backtype's not importing so, Christina Warren wrote a thoroughly idiotic article for mashable: http://www.backtype.com/connect... & Louis G's take: http://friendfeed.com/louisgr... - sofarsoShawn

I do, but I wish there was a way of filtering what the Facebook app posts, e.g. no "@" replies... - David "Lefty" Schlesinger from Nambu

I use Friendfeed a lot more than Twitter because there is less noise and spam so it's fine if the numbers are low as long as they keep running it. I do spend most on my time on facebook because that's where my close friends and family are. It would be easier to be here if there was interaction on any of my posts. - Jason Williams from iPhone

@fake name (Twitter vs. Jaiku) ...It's not like I actually use Jaiku, but I see that it has threaded conversations. That's an improvement right there. - howard shippin

I find myself using friendfeed even more after the acquisition. I usually start conversations here and auto-post to twitter. I just seem to get more interaction here than twitter. I get a few @replies here and there on twitter but its usually my close friends. - Bryan Lee

Still here... - Carlos Sousa

so am i... maybe it's december, not friendfeed? students are back to their studies, business people realize that the quarter ends in september and so on... i've cut my browsing to minimum - no twitter, no facebook, only friendfeed - Kirill Bolgarov

Off topic: Do your Twitter updates come as fast as usual or are they late? Because mine are unusually late. Google Reader shares too. - rukku

Thomas Hawk

Adobe Launches Free Photoshop iPhone App - http://thomashawk.com/2009...

Adobe Launches Free iPhone Photoshop App

October 9 from Thomas Hawk Digital Connection - Comment - Like - Share

Nicholas James, Arnaud Fischer, Rob McNair-Huff and 29 other people liked this

I played around with the app a little bit this morning and have to say that I think it’s very cool — especially for a free app. The app allows you to do some of the most basic edits with your iPhone photos including cropping, adjusting exposure and contrast, converting an image to black and white, rotating an image etc. It also has a very basic set of effects that you can apply and filters that you can add to create effects (like an image border, sketching or blurring effects, and the effect that I liked the most, an effect called “warm vintage”). I especially liked the cropping tool of the app and found it reasonably robust (for a free mobile app) allowing you to do things like constrain crops to certain aspect ratios (a square crop for example). You can also use the app to offload your iPhone photos to a free photoshop.com (2GB storage limit) account freeing up storage space on your iPhone. You can also easily access your photoshop.com account via the app to share show people photos from that account via the app later. - Thomas Hawk

10 more comments

Very cool. Going to download now. - Spencer

US and Canada only - CJPhoto

Looks awesome. I only need an iPhone. Idiot parents. - Zachary TG

I loved the app. Pretty straightforward and surprisingly powerful for such a small application. - Roberto Teixeira

Downloaded it earlier tonight. Played with it a little, looks very cool! - Jeff P. Henderson

I can't wait to try it! - Michael Fidler

App not available in Europe at this moment, Adobe sucks and fuck you globalization. And by the way Adobe: instead of Photoshop i now use Pixelmator on my Mac and instead of Audition (Windows) i use Reaper (Mac/Win), both apps are way cheaper, slicker and don´t tend to crash. One more thing: i hope Flash will die soon .... - HansVanRock

I wonder why it's not available in Europe. - Thomas Hawk

I suck at Photoshop, and I'd already bought Photogene long ago, but I'm downloading PSM. - MiniMage TKDteacher of FF

No Australia either... Can't access Photoshop.com either... - Johnny Worthington from iPhone

Loveing to live in Canada now. Well, sorta! - Zachary TG

Mike Chelen to Mike's feed, Computer Science, FLOSS: Free Libre OSS

LavaRnd process in detail - http://www.lavarnd.org/what...

October 9 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg, J. Abdul-Qahhar and Konrad Förstner liked this

"LavaRnd turns real world physical chaotic events into random numbers in 3 stages: Stage 1: Digitization of a chaotic source Stage 2: Chaotic to Random Transformation Stage 3: Presentation " - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

Shevonne to Shevonne's feed, FriendFeed Feedback

I've noticed that sometimes a comment I share from Google Reader is repeated twice

October 7 - Comment - Like - Share

Kol Tregaskes, vijay, Jason Adam Young and 3 other people liked this

Me too - Moved to Facebook from fftogo

3 more comments

Alot actually - Maxamad

+1 - Bonstio

Yes, happens every time to me. - Steve "Daddy do it!" Lacy

Mee two! - ‘-.-’ Tutivillus Grift

ⓞnor

Devices - Shiny Devices - http://shinydevices.com/devices

March 31 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

testbeta, Jack (a.k.a. Jeber), Ozkan Altuner and 19 other people liked this

"See those two screws at the bottom of the picture? If you connect those screws to a switch of some kind, and plug the whole thing into the USB port of a computer, the switch will act as a one-key keyboard. This one happens to be an Enter key." - ⓞnor from Bookmarklet

24 more comments

$33 for a 1 key keyboard? (minus the actual key) - Paul Buchheit

It sure is pretty though - Jesse Stay

surely this could be done more inexpensively with an atmel or pic with usb - joshua schachter

Or the guts from an old mouse. - Ken Sheppardson

This is an elaborate AFD joke by Jacques, right? (Edit: by "joke", I mean I wouldn't be surprised if the description is accurate, but kind of underpromises what it can do.) - Andrew C

Wow, he got shinydevices.com? That's a pretty good domain! Also, this device is way, way prettier than I expected. I'm really impressed by how pretty it is. - niniane

It is kind of pretty. Who is making these? - Paul Buchheit

Paul: When I first read "$33 for a 1 key keyboard? (minus the actual key)", I thought you were talking about an actual Apple product. - Gabe

^^^^ like :) - A.T.

@Gabe :D - Jemm

Having a real "any" key is probably totally worth it. - MiniMage TKDteacher of FF

Dan was kind enough to manufacture the plastic casing pictured. It is indeed prettier than I had expected! - Jacques Frechet

I've been thinking about hacking up a cheap USB keyboard (a la http://www.instructables.com/id... ) for a project. This device looks like it'd be easier, prettier, and possibly smaller, but $33 does seem a bit steep considering the fact that USB keyboards can be found for less than $10, and it sounds like I'd need several of these if I want to control multiple keys. - Laurence Gonsalves

What's the project, OOC? - ⓞnor

I was just thinking to make pedals for modifier keys, particularly shift and maybe also control, possibly starting with piano-style pedals like these: http://www.sweetwater.com/store... - Laurence Gonsalves

How 'bout starting with some USB dictation transcription pedals? - Ken Sheppardson

I hadn't heard of those before. Thanks. From my searches, it looks like they're for "rewind", "play/pause" and "fast-forward". I'm guessing there are special keycodes for those? I could probably remap them to the keys I want with software, but it'd be nice if they could be more "plug-and-play" (so I could move the device between machines without having to set up mappings). Do you know if any of these transcription pedals are configurable through hardware (eg: dip switches)? - Laurence Gonsalves

BTW: I've actually seen a few companies that made exactly what I'm looking for, but they all seem to be discontinued. This page has a bunch of links: http://www.halfbakery.com/idea... - Laurence Gonsalves

Laurence: I'm afraid all I know about them is that they exist. Sorry. - Ken Sheppardson

Laurence: have you seen this? http://www.piengineering.com/custom... - Gabe

...or to cut out a whole lot of work: http://www.piengineering.com/xkeys... - Ken Sheppardson

Those products from piengineering look good. A bit pricey ($119.95 for what is effectively a 3-key keyboard) but they seem to be programmable, and I guess economies of scale work against them. - Laurence Gonsalves

If you keep increasing the pricetag you'll reach the Optimus 3 Mini, the 3-key keyboard with separate LCD screens for each key. $179.95. - Amit Patel

Amit, I think the Optimus 3 uses OLED screens, not LCD. Presumably that's why they're so expensive. - Gabe

The impressive part about those devices seems to be the reprogramming of the device ROM via USB directly from this web page http://shinydevices.com/setting... (check the source) - Thomas Amberg

Seth

Is it the future yet? - http://www.flickr.com/photos...

October 5 from Flickr - Comment - Like - Share

Private Sanjeev, Thomas Amberg, NaHi and 4 other people liked this

very nice. Did you print it? - Rachel Lea Fox

6 more comments

Based on the different colors, I'm going to guess that each piece was printed separately. I can't wait until we can print the whole thing in one pass! - Gabe

Z-Corp printers can easily make objects like that in a single pass -- they basically have inkjet heads depositing colored glue onto layers of powder, and like ordinary inkjet heads they can print in full color. I don't expect the moving parts work very well, though. - ⓞnor

It wasn't me, but a friend of mine who's developing the printer. The car was from a test run, and I'm told they can turn out prettier if you care about the outcome, rather than about testing the printer. I think it was in one pass. Indeed, it is Z-Corp. And no, the parts don't move. - Seth

They can look slightly prettier, and you can soak them in epoxy, but they never *quite* shed that whole "bunch of powder glued together" look. If you've ever seen the Toy Story zoetrope (on display at Disney currently) -- http://www.flickr.com/photos... -- those figures are all made with a Z-Corp printer, and look about as nice as you can possibly make them look. - ⓞnor

Oh, my comment was predicated on the assumption that the thing worked. - Gabe

"that whole "bunch of powder glued together" look." - sounds like a problem for a surface coat of primer or thinned modelling putty. I suppose that doesn't exactly scale. - Andrew C

A similar model was on the cover of The Economist's technology quarterly - http://www.economist.com/images... (see also http://www.economist.com/science... ) - Thomas Amberg

Paul Buchheit

A New Web Tool to Take Control of Your Health - http://www.nytimes.com/2009...

October 6 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Robert Scoble, Daniel Rowley, Gary Burd and 8 other people liked this

"That is why on Tuesday, a start-up company led by Adam Bosworth, former head of the Google Health team, plans to become the newest entrant to the online consumer health business. ... The ideal, health experts say, would be to combine personal data with health information to deliver tailored health plans for individuals. That is what Mr. Bosworth and his San Francisco-based company, Keas (pronounced KEE-ahs) Inc., mean to do. Using the Keas system, for example, a person with Type 2 diabetes might receive reminders, advice on diet and exercise, questions and prompts presented on the Web site or delivered by e-mail or text messages — all personalized for the person’s age, gender, weight and other health conditions. Although success is far from certain, Keas has some big partners, including Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. " - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

2 more comments

I sincerely hope these guys don't get gobbled up by the big insurance cos. Having worked for a recently acquired division of a big insurance co (<cough>UnitedHealth</cough>) all innovation goes out the door once the company gets bought. - Jesse Stay

wait... web and my health? no, I do not think so... not enough privacy - A.T.

tell that to mint - sridhars

Jay Niemann

Weather proof, Bluetooth capable RFID reader - http://www.instructables.com/id...

April 5 from Instructables: exploring -... - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg liked this

This instructable connects the popular BlueSmirf Bluetooth module to the ID12 RFID reader and shows how to make a dust and water resistant (IP55) RFID reader that sends IDs to your PC or mobile phone over Bluetooth radio without an additional micro controller and without an external power source. Cr... By: tamberg - Jay Niemann

Johnn Luevanos

Weatherproof Bluetooth RFID reader - http://blog.makezine.com/archive...

April 8 from MAKE Magazine - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg liked this

Instructables user tamberg writes: This instructable connects the popular BlueSmirf Bluetooth module to the ID12 RFID reader and shows how to make a dust and water resistant (IP55) RFID reader that sends IDs to your PC or mobile phone over Bluetooth radio without an additional micro controller and without an external power source. Created as a prototype for an online swim lap counter system named Rfish, it can be used for any project in need of a self contained, weather proof RFID reader. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Instructables | Digg this! - Johnn Luevanos

Robert Scoble

cfsilence: AIR 2.0 - usb detection, native application hooks, memory usage improvements (#tweetdeck uses 35% less RAM on 2.0) - http://twitter.com/cfsilen...

October 5 from Twitter / Favorites from... - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg liked this

Robert Scoble

Adobe: #Air 2.0 local audio recording! big win. Developers wanted this for a long time. #AdobeMAXgs - http://twitter.com/Adobe...

October 5 from Twitter / Favorites from... - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg liked this

bre

Congratulations! RT @fynflood: Proposed to @t0astbandit in iceland with a ring I printed with @makerbot she said yes!

October 5 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Thomas Amberg liked this

Matt Cutts

Chrome Frame: Run Google Chrome *inside* IE - http://blog.chromium.org/2009...

September 22 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Aaron Draczynski, Yesudeep Mangalapilly, Jeff Weisbein and 69 other people liked this

Yay! - Matt Cutts from Bookmarklet

21 more comments

Awesome. - Paul Buchheit

Whoa. - Micah Wittman

WHOA! - Anika

Ewww. - τorƍue

Now we just need to make the Chrome plugin as common as the Flash plugin :) - Paul Buchheit

Are commas required? - dannysullivan

wow, my prediction was right (you totally need to put it in toolbar also): http://www.satine.org/archive... - Charles Ying

that is cool and cruel - Thierry Lhôte

Hahaha :) Very cruel indeed. Curious to see if this is adopted, corporate users who have IE may still be unable to even install a plugin... but at the very least this still lowers the barrier to HTML5 enabled pages. - James Kuypers

It is not even fork, it is inside piracy... this is provocation ;-) - Thierry Lhôte

Do the people who don't have permissions to install a non-IE browser have permissions to install plugins? - Sean O'Connor

Sean, think of enterprises who have IE6-only legacy internal apps. CF lets them build _new_ internal apps to HTML5, so that someday they can leave IE6. Otherwise they need to dual-target _all_ their apps to IE6 and modern browsers before they can switch. Painful. Also, many enterprises who feel it's too disruptive to move from IE6 may be okay with installing CF, because it's default-off. Let's say half of all enterprises do. Now the need to support IE6 goes down even more. - Daniel Dulitz

Fantastic hack but won't take off. Fix the core issue and get people to upgrade or switch, enough with the band-aids. - Dave Evans

Very cool stuff - Charlie Anzman

Now what about a firefox plugin? Is this open source chromium or chrome... - James Michael Mike DuPont

Dave, the core issue is that enterprises with IE6-only legacy internal apps don't have the resources to run a modern browser. CF fixes the core issue. - Daniel Dulitz

Dave hit my issue dead-on. Installing a plugin is a cheat when the real issue is educating people on why more modern browsers are better. - Zulema ◕ ◡ ◕ from iPhone

Cool! - Kol Tregaskes

"education" is typically the worst solution to a technical problem. - Paul Buchheit

yes, education is a slow solution, because most people tend to resist change. better show them there is a better way without forcing them to change anything :) - George Moga

I'd actually love to see the opposite: IE8 running inside Chrome, just like the IE Tab plugin for Firefox. I use Chrome for almost everything, but Outlook webmail looks and works so much better in IE8, and I doubt that Microsoft will be working very hard to fix that. - Tudor Bosman

Tudor, yeah being able to choose the browser type for a tab would be really cool for testing websites. - Cristo

Tim O'Reilly

Ebook upgrade offer: for the next month, upgrade any O'Reilly book you own to add an ebook for only $4.99 http://post.oreilly.com/form...

October 1 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Stomenhoff and Thomas Amberg liked this

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