Thank you for your support! :) - Bwana McCall

These people aren't paying for this, and it's not going to do a thing to twitter. I bet they don't even notice. - Terry O'Fee

They'll just give us our money back. :) - Morton Fox

"Your search - "baaaahhhssssttttaaarrrrdddsss" - did not match any documents." Good luck on the Google juice there, Robert. :-) - Louis Gray

F'ing baaaahhhssssttttaaarrrrdddsss always trying to mess up the search engines. Get a life! :-) - Robert Scoble

By the way, searching on baaaahhhssssttttaaarrrrdddsss on FriendFeed finds this comment cluster. - Robert Scoble

good thing we're not trying get Twitter to listen. Join in the discussion to see what we're up to. - Bwana McCall

I'm also the first person to call this a "comment cluster". I want credit and a plaque, darn it! ;-) - Robert Scoble

If I were Twitter, I'd roll out every update I could right now, less people there to realize anything is wrong. - Shawn Kirsch

@Shawn: what percentage of Twits do you honestly believe are participating in the Twat-out ? 99%, 80%, 55.9%, 30%, 12%, <5%, 0.01%. Come on, have a guess. - Andy C

That would be great, actually. Do all the improvements now and Twitter will be better when we return. - Morton Fox

That's quite the typo, Andy. :-) - Louis Gray

Andy: I'd guess .00000001% - Robert Scoble

The .0000001% of Twitterers who account for most of the noise. :) - Morton Fox

Oh, if we're count it that way then it's at least .0000003% :-) - Robert Scoble

@LG: who said it was a typo ? :-) [ My mum would be ashamed ] - Andy C

the cluster grows... - Bwana McCall

Personally, I don't have anything better to do, so I'm not doing anything... with twitter for the day. :) - Grant Bierman

The people that Tweet more in defiance does that make them Twitout-Outers? - Joe Dawson

In the end, it could be that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Then again, the same could be said when Twitter has downtime... - Ontario Emperor

twitter has reply and DM - two things FF needs? or can they just both be good at what they do? - ben rogers via twhirl

There are advantages to implementing threaded conversations or DMs, in theory. I bet threaded conversations are a lot messier on the eyes than this implementation is, but it'd be worth seeing. DMs are fine as well, unless full profiles with contact information are made available. - Louis Gray

I think FF as it is right now (wihtout @ or DM) allows a much smoothier approach to conversation than twitter! - julian_marain via twhirl

LEt them each be what they are, the synergy is great. FF is a goog backchannel to other content. - Soulhuntre via twhirl

What I find extremely ironic is by everyone posting and tweeting about Twit-Out,they only bring more awareness to cause. Who's the loser now? - Shey

Do a Summize search, or a Google search, or Friendfeed search on Twit-Out. It doesn't matter how many people actually participate, look at the reach. - Shey

Apropos the post itself, not Twit-Out: it's pretty sad that this was my first exposure to Geoff's blog and it'll probably also be my last. I don't have any need or desire to read a blog whose owner thinks this post was a good idea as written. - Chris Anthony

I think exactly like Chris, first and last time on that blog. - Gadiel Rivera

I definitely do not want to see DM added to FriendFeed. You know what we call a 'DM' in these parts? E-mail. - Akiva Moskovitz

Just hoping to stir the pot. Experiment complete and successful. - Geoff

In my case, I'm collecting a lot of data on the deficiencies of using FriendFeed as a mobile microblogging platform. - Ontario Emperor

I think that they are trying to get a life . . . without Twitter ;) - Lyndon Washington

@Geoff While turning a lot of people off from reading any more of your posts. Nice. - Shey

Geoff, this wasn't stirring the pot so much as giving the pot the finger while casting smug looks over your shoulder at the other cooks. - Chris Anthony

@ChrisA Come on, this is just fun dialog, right? btw, I like the Lost in Translation image on your blog. - Geoff

@Andy C. Honestly, a very small fraction of Twitter users are participating. However, they are mostly power users, the ones that keep everybody's stream rolling. I'm not boycotting, and as I watch my stream, it's around 25% of what it usually is. - Shawn Kirsch

@Geoff, thanks! I guess so; I just put up with enough of the "LOSER" crap in high school to last me several lifetimes, you know? I thought we were past that. - Chris Anthony

Phew. Not just me. I like the Google Reader app and the team, which is why it's in part fun to show this. They do a great job, but that's an amusing bug. - Louis Gray

GReader must not like you guys, I haven't had even the slightest hint of trouble at all today. - Shawn Kirsch

@Shawn: Inside, I am crying. :-( - Louis Gray

and here I am with FeedDemon working flawlessly as usual :) - Steven Hodson

Steven, whatever it takes to make you happy and cranky-free. We are at your service. - Louis Gray

Shawn, have you let GReader get recklessly high in unread items? At one point, I was well over a thousand unread entries, and was chalking up the weirdness to GReader's (not so) silent protest. - Mark Trapp

Scratch that, now it's going goofy on me. And yes Mark, I've had well over 3000 unread items before, and as they kept on coming (really busy news day), it took me about 6 hours to get through them. - Shawn Kirsch

I want more options instead of just like. Such as "dream of seeing this." I considered it a success to have my reader under 100 once this month. - Cyndy

So Cyndy, how does that happen? I check in multiple times throughout the day and bring it to zero. - Louis Gray

Same problem here! - Maryam Ardakani

Dunno, Louis... more feeds? Gah. 300 more in the time I was making a child lunch for school. It's WEDNESDAY people! Stop writing! Wednesday is supposed to be a SLOW catch-up day! - Cyndy

Google Reader has been acting weird all morning. Only now has it's stop giving me error messages. - Paul Grave

I've got the same problem >1000 new items and no unread items? Meh. - Sally Church

yeah, GR has been doing the odd on me today too. Not catching up with the read items properly. - laurence timms via twhirl

very scary - Shey

You've been secretly cut-off dude. Did you buy someone at the reader team a caff instead of a decaf when you were there? - Charlie Anzman

Sounds like something you late nighters faced! :-) Maybe Google did some maintenance overnight thinking you night owls would be in bed. - Hutch Carpenter

I gave up on Google Reader - and all readers - a while ago. Much better to actually go to blog pages than to see a denatured version in a meta-browser. - Edward Vielmetti

I agree with Edward, but then again I don't check 1,000 feeds like Scoble does. Techmeme, reddit, digg and tweets are all the recommends I need. - Justin Gardner via twhirl

I live in the land of the feed reader. I'm right there with Scoble 1000+ feeds to read every day. And I have the scattered across several online feed readers (I like to play around), doesn't stop me from adding more feeds, I don't even flinch. - Shawn Kirsch

As an information junkie, I regularly check out close to 500 feeds: saying just go to the blogs is like telling a heroin addict to just chew gum. - Mark Trapp

Even I was confused with my GReader for sometime. But it got fixed soon - Varun Mahajan

Google Readers been screwy alot reacently- at the moment I can watch new shared items come in from friends, it flashes yellow, and then when I click there's nothing new. Very irritating, but when it works, it's awesome so I don't mind too much, - Fearghas

This just happened to me - I hope "screwiness" means a new feature coming. - Vince DeGeorge

Had the same issue. - Steve Rubel

I'm not sure what you really mean, Viki. A site where you can choose from different providers? Well, since there are hundreds of providers already out there, it might become confusing. And yes, both MyOpenID and Yahoo! are using the same protocol. However Yahoo! just version 2.0, so you can only log in with a Yahoo! OpenID to sites that also support OpenID 2.0. Some sites are listed here: http://gallery.yahoo.com/openi... - Carsten Pötter

Exactly my point - would of thought OpenID is a unique homogenous ID accross all sites that offer their use ...hence every site that offers you the ability to create one be it Yahoo or 37 or MyOpen or for that matter the nearest 7-11 - should all offer the same thingamajig - I am not sure thats the case - If it is - then please treat this as "ignorance" on my part ( what do you expect from a banker by day !!) - viki saigal

I refuse to use my Yahoo OpenIDs. Their implementation was absolutely ridiculous. If I can't use my existing on their sites, why would I want to use theirs on others? - Cyndy

Cyndy, luckily there's tons out there to choose from. I recently started using Beemba (www.beemba.com) over MyOpenID. Very easy to use and works everywhere I've had to use it :) - Jeff Brewster

why no link to the original post that started the discussion? Just wondering. - Stan Schroeder via twhirl

I think the noise in friendfeed is the strength of the whole system. Friendfeed is so good to present information, so I hardly reading RSS Feeds anymore. - Svartling

And now it's noise about the noise about the FF noise. Does no one else see the irony?? - Cyndy

@cyndy: I definitely do (; - Stan Schroeder via twhirl

disagree. Two way nav makes it IMO. - rob via twhirl

what is streaming video on the iphone like? - edythe

@edythe only video that works is QuickTime & Youtube. The streaming like any platform depends on your available bandwidth. - Kevin D. White

I really love the new version. The ajaxification makes it much more responsive - no more reading an article, hitting back, reading an article, starring, hitting back twice. I just want share with note and how many left unread. :) - felix

It feels cleaner and a little faster to me. I think you're comparing a Google product to perfection instead of asking whether it's better than the previous iteration. :) - Matt Cutts

definitely slower than previous version -- but in-line reading and better unread counts for individual feeds is nice - Ravi Udeshi

What's a Google Reader? Is that one of those old fashioned RSS thingys that people used to use in the olden days before FriendFeed? - Thomas Hawk

I think its great so far. - Sean Davis

I'll finally start using my Google Reader on iPhone because of this new version. - arsalan arif

@kevindwhite: thank you. :) - edythe

Hah, I think I'll get a new iPhone, you can't do much on a clunky Blackberry other than read emails :( - Sally Church

Best way to reduce noise? Turn off Twitters that don't have either comments or "like's" attached. That way, the shared items and other things rise up more. - Ian Betteridge

I only subscribe to around 30 but via Scoble another uh...2500? I don't find it too noisy and I like the diversity. The current feature set around "remove this" seems enough. But I'm not looking to turn FriendFeed into a one-stop-shopping for all information. Maybe with proper noise reduction it could become that, but I doubt it. - Robert Seidman

Robert, let me hear your thoughts on http://ffapps.com/flowcontrol/ - the original design was for a Greastmonkey hack, but due to the complexity involved, I'm incorporating it into ffreader.com - which is essentially a Reader interface that "extends" the default FF interface with a whole bunch of noise reduction features, bookmarking individual items, etc. I'll send you a link to test it out next week - Aviv

Two things. (1) Brandon mentions the item consolidation feature. FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor has a good discussion about that here (http://is.gd/dWm). (2) I like Robert's notion of the # of stars/comments as a guide. I agree. Paul posted a question about super-likes here earlier. That might be OK, but I'm not quite grokking its value. I'd also like to add - I'm enjoying the noise! It keeps it lively and addicting to tell the truth. - Hutch Carpenter

This conversation is a recurring theme here. We could talk all day about "noise" or "fractured comments", but this is the new way of the Web, period. The smart content owners will adjust. Those who want new tech to act "the old way" are going to be less relevant over time. - Louis Gray

I agree with @Louis Gray I think there are improvements that could be made but the core elements are what make me come here and drastic changes to the setup wouldn't be appreciated! - Joe Dawson

Louis - you're right, and I think this recurring theme may eventually result in FF being perceived as yet another noisy distraction in the life of a potential [mainstream] user. And that's not good, and I'm sure that in the coming weeks and months improvements by the FF crew as well as independent third-parties will help users consume their FriendFeed more efficiently and in ways that are tailored specifically for each user. - Aviv

hide is the ultimate tool for reducing noise. - Thomas Hawk

(1) Sometimes the twitter which announces an item with TinyURL has a good discussion. Be nice to include those too. (2) It's be nice when I find an item (aka put it in my del.icio.us), if FriendFeed would flag me with the already-existing discussions - maybe indent them to the right. This would allow me to get rid of many of my duplicate "likes" (which are simply the attempt to follow the interesting conversation in 5 places on the same blog post.) - Mitchell Tsai

@Mitchell either that or they could work it in a similar way to the likes - ___, ____, ____, ____ and ** other people liked this - Joe Dawson

Noise isn't too much of a problem for me in FriendFeed. However: (1) I don't try to read everything in my feed. (2) I'm following less than 300 people. - Ontario Emperor

I've cut down to following 92 people (maybe fewer when I have time). Most people I simply pop by their pages occasionally (by saving those pages in a list). Same on Twitter. I try to trim my listen-to-list to people whose interests match mine more closely. - Mitchell Tsai

Mitchell: I will start hiding people who are not providing interesting info about the tech industry. At least here on FriendFeed. I'll keep Twitter open so I can see the raw noise. - Robert Scoble

Robert: And I thought you were going to listen to 20,000 FriendFeeders, includng all the Farsi ones. :-) - Mitchell Tsai

I already hid the Farsi ones. My wife can tell me what's going on in those. Or they can translate for me. - Robert Scoble

Robert: You should run the script from internetducttape.com and import over all of your Twitter friends. That would be some noise ha! - Joe Dawson

Joe: I tried to, but it crashed. 21,000 friends proved too many. - Robert Scoble

I am keeping Friendfeed fairly quiet for myself as I have all the noise I can handle on Twitter and FB - Francine Hardaway via Alert Thingy

One other way to reduce noise? Look at just the FriendFeed items that I've commented on or liked. That will ensure you won't see my noise, but is the feed where I've found the great stuff coming at me in FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/scobleiz... -- I wish there were a better way to point to this in the FriendFeed UI. - Robert Scoble

Robert: The only thing I didn't like is that the script submitted a message from my FriendFeed account here http://is.gd/dZf - Joe Dawson

The problem occurs, as I see it, when the technology that is supposed to serve human aims instead passes the balance point and enslaves or demands from us. Personally, I believe that this occurs when our lives are out of balance and we are looking for the technology to do what it cannot do, and what it is not meant to do. For example, fulfilling our social needs (as when the industry (e.g. social network) group becomes one's best or only friends). (I'm friendly and make friends with people on social networks, but have a distinct life as well apart from that). When our lives are in balance, then technology fits into its proper place. It's just a tool, like a pencil is a tool, with a functon to serve. - Alex Hammer

Specifically related to noise -- best not to create it in the first place, then there is nothing to undue. I go to Friendfeed when I need to up the information/noise level. When I have enough I don't continue and I don't go back. - Alex Hammer

Robert, while I'm not claiming it's faster than the Web UI, FriendFeedMachine at http://www.friendfeedmachine.c... lets you sort by # of comments or likes, and this is yet another way. You can also "star" real friends vs. people you follow here, to filter the stream. - Louis Gray

Louis: Thanks for the FriendFeedMachine tips. - Mitchell Tsai

Thanks for the heads up Louis I wasn't aware of that either! - Joe Dawson

how are online friends lesser than face-to-face friends? That is often asserted, but rarely supported. And what about those in geographically isolated areas? or those with limited mobility? or those with mental issues that make it difficult for them? An earlier commenter said that he makes friends easily, so of course for him, he will. Not so for everyone. People have different balances. - rambn