Facebook FAIL Whale: "This content is currently unavailable. The page you requested cannot be displayed right now. It may be temporarily unavailable, the link you clicked on may have expired, or you may not have permission to view this page."
- Jeff P. Henderson
Most likely you don't have permission, Jeff. Not a huge surprise.
- Louis Gray
Google should let Twitter alone, just to give Facebook some legit competition. Then, they will just have to release a new open protocol to kill it. And make it part of Wave.
- Jérôme Flipo
Actually, Wave is actually enough. And that's where the plot fails because Wave is both enough and too much.
- Jérôme Flipo
"Silicon Valley is on the verge of a new bout of Wall Street fever, as private technology companies rush to cash in on the first signs of stock market interest in initial public offerings for more than two years, according to venture capitalists."
- Louis Gray
from Bookmarklet
Impressed that you hand-coded the capturing, I wouldn't know where to start
- Joe Dawson
from iPhone
We're honored to be your first guinea pig for the screencasting :) You should do this often.
- Ethan Gahng
greta video - got straight to the point :)
- Riaz Kanani
Hi Louis Thanks for the heads up about Lazyfeed. I have tried to register but it needs an invitation code. Can you or anyone in your network please let me know what I should put in? Thanks
- Jane Finch
Very well done, I now have a better understanding of how it works. Anymore invites? Thanks
- Mo Hall
why doesn't Lazyfeed have a feed for FF?
- Thomas Power
Thomas, Lazyfeed's founders are just now getting to understand FriendFeed better. Maybe with time.
- Louis Gray
LazyFeed looks great.! Thanks for this video Louis, super interesting (I like your fast pace too). Would love an invite if you have 1.
- Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)
Hi, thanks everyone for your interest in Lazyfeed. We are excited to tell you that we will be releasing more invite codes via Twitter today. To receive your invite, please follow @lazyfeed on twitter and we will DM you an invite code. This invitation will expire midnight PST. Thank you!
- Lazyfeed
I will have to check this out. I admit that the point of it was not immediately obvious the first few times I used it.
- Bill Kinney
Louis, thanks for this wonderful quick tutorial. I am off to experimenting with Lazyfeed now. I wonder how you use it in conjunction with GReader, since I also find you sharing lot of stuff on GReader as well.
- Mahendra (SkepticGeek)
Awesome demo, finally got a chance to watch it.
- Bill Kinney
Love lazyfeed so far, but it won't connect with my Twitter acct even after I set up and click connect - only Flicr, etc..Anyone else have this issue.
- Liza
Liza - I've just tried connecting your twitter to my lazyfeed and it seems to be successfully bringing tags like lazyweb, trip, techkaraoke, etc. Please try again. Thanks.
- Ethan Gahng
Now that is GREAT customer service, Ethan. Thanks.. I want to learn more about lazyweb and ppl interacting from lazyfeed. Seeing it from my google dev friends. Any ideas?
- Liza
Very nice video here. I will use this to share with all my people. Thanks Louis.
- Amani
Yah, I am in complete disbelief over the comments, even over forums like Hacker News. The most polite way you can call them is with the word "jerk". What the fuck are these people really thinking? :/
- Ashwin Bharambe
(I dont work for either Google or Etherpad, btw)
- Ashwin Bharambe
Google's Namebench suggests that Comcast's DNS is 150% faster than Google Public DNS. In fact, Google was the slowest of all tested. (Assuming I read this right)
My ISP (ATT) is as fast as OpenDNS at 11-12ms, and does no domain hijacking luckily. GOOG is coming in at more like 30ms, though I'm sure that will improve over time.
- LogEx
Actually, I was wrong - Google is much slower - I was comparing the wrong DNS providers. Give me a sec...
- Jesse Stay
Seems like the "open" web has made it clear that it doesn't need no stinkin' business model.
- Cliff Gerrish
correct - subscriptions are essential because Google has taken 99% of the available advertising money and there is no second place on the Internet. It's only once all the newspapers are gone that people will wise up.
- Thomas Power
The Internet is free? I can't find the statistics but it's reasonable to assume that the average household spends at least $300 per year on net access. Yes that's for "infrastructure" but it's still a large amount of money that people are willing to pump into the system. Couple that with the average US household spending $115 per month on subscription media and I don't see a problem with the revenue, just how it's distributed. Can't I just pay $10 to the web per month and let the web figure it out?
- Hayes Haugen
Wow, crazy. As an ardent OpenID supporter, GFC is one of the best bootstrapping mechanisms for OpenID adoption ever created. Talk about misunderstanding.
- DeWitt Clinton
Yeah - it's crazy - both GFC and Facebook are OpenID-compatible (as is Yahoo). The only one not supportive in this equation is Twitter.
- Jesse Stay
@Jesse - actually, GFC lets you sign on to third party sites with an OpenID (or other accounts, now including Twitter). Facebook Connect lets you sign on to third party sites with Facebook accounts (which can in turn be linked to an OpenID or other account).
- DeWitt Clinton
Big network brands have made the OpenID brand invisible. That's a good thing.
- Cliff Gerrish
DeWitt, correct, but Facebook itself is OpenID compatible - my point is I don't see Yahoo and Facebook's integration making OpenID go away. Facebook Connect also isn't all about the login - it's much more than that, whereas from what I can tell GFC is all about the login and giving your users an identity on your site. Facebook Connect is more about the social graph (I even had a member of the GFC team tell me that difference). It's an apples and oranges comparison anyway.
- Jesse Stay
FWIW I use both on my blog because I see purpose in both, for different reasons.
- Jesse Stay
I know FB is supposedly an OpenID Relying Party, but I've never figured out how I can login with my OpenID.
- Otto
@Otto - I'm not sure you can sign into Facebook with OpenID (i.e., treat FB as an RP). However, you can associate other accounts with your Facebook account (My Account -> Settings -> Linked Accounts). Not sure what this does, though. I didn't try it because it wanted to slurp my Google Contacts information as soon as it saw that I was using Google as an IDP. I'm also not sure if you can...
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- DeWitt Clinton
Ugh. I see that Facebook only supports OpenID 2.0, meaning that my normal OpenID won't work with it.
- Otto
DeWitt, if you're already logged in via another OpenID provider it's supposed to auto-log you into Facebook, but there are some known bugs with this, so I hear. It will get better - I trust Dave on this :-)
- Jesse Stay
@Otto - OpenID 2.0 has been out for over two years, it's time to upgrade.
- David Recordon
@DeWitt - If your OpenID Provider supports the checkid_immediate mode (like Google's) then when you visit Facebook and are signed out, if you're currently signed into Google and have already authorized Facebook then you'll become automagically signed into Facebook. It's not perfect yet. :)
- David Recordon
@David: I use WordPress.com as my OpenID provider for most things. I don't want to delegate to somebody else, and don't really feel like running my own. Anyway, 1.1 should be good enough for anybody, 2.0 is a crock.
- Otto
@Otto - I don't have an already written post around why 2.0 is far superior to 1.1, but stuff like http://openid.net/2009... is possible on 2.0 and not 1.1. WordPress.com should upgrade and it's hard to logically disagree with your argument of, "is a crock."
- David Recordon
See, this sort of incompatibility nonsense is another reason why I don't like OpenID in the first place. Before they even got it widely adopted, they already broke it. OpenID just strikes me more and more as an epic fail. There was some talk about including it built-into WordPress, and I'm now really glad we didn't do it at the time. I mean, the spec was way ahead of its time, but...
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- Otto
I guess we'll just completely disagree. Every technology evolves and changes. Isn't it better for major changes to happen *before* there is wide-spread adoption and thus break far fewer implementations? Will Norris has written a great WordPress.org plugin for OpenID which supports both 1.1 and 2.0. Upgrading the WordPress.com Provider should just take dropping in a new PHP library and I can point Automattic to plenty of people who could help if they wanted.
- David Recordon
The short of it is that I took a look at the standards, and for the life of me couldn't work out not only how the thing worked, but how it could possibly be implemented. It's confusing, at best. For example, what's the login identifier? I thought it was a URL, like my website. But Google's OpenID implementation doesn't use that, it uses my email address. Doesn't make a lick of sense to...
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- Otto
Yes, the spec needs to become easier to implement, but at the same time most libraries abstract away a lot of the underlying bits. Google also has great docs around their Provider implementation (http://code.google.com/apis...). You're also incorrect about Google's implementation; it is still based on URLs – even friendly Google Profile URLs now – and also shares...
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- David Recordon
I'm not "believing" a darned thing. I actually tried to implement this stuff before throwing up my hands in frustration and disbelief. Standards should be simpler than this. Documentation should be clearer. Code examples should make some spec of frickin' sense instead of being full of magic words and numbers. Even open-source implementations I've seen make no sense, not to mention...
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- Otto
And don't even get me started on why OAuth is a piece of shit... ;-)
- Otto
Otto, these are all open standards, and this is just the beginning. If you think they can be done better, share your ideas. People do listen. These things have been worked on for years now though and it's not quite as cut and dry to come up with a simple solution - we're getting there. Be sure to get involved and share your ideas though - constructive debate is always a good thing.
- Jesse Stay
Although perhaps it's a lesson in the difference between the process of commodification and establishing a standard from scratch.
- Cliff Gerrish
eh. I maintain a healthy distrust of all companies; especially those that grow as quickly as Google has been as of late. of course, time will tell.
- jbrotherlove
Not only are you legally required to agree, DeWitt, but you are quoted. :)
- Louis Gray
Ha. But I was about to add: But please never stop keeping Google honest, and holding the company to the highest standards. Call out Google on any BS or funny business you see. (I certainly do, though I usually do it internally...) I have tremendous faith in the people I work with, but it takes the whole community to do this right. And thank you, Louis, for your help here.
- DeWitt Clinton
My problem is that Google is into so much, and has so many good products, that it puts people into a situation where they end up with too many of their eggs in one basket. And no matter how good the basket is, it's still not a smart thing for people to do. And while Google may not be openly and willingly sharing its data with the government, it's only one subpoena away from being forced...
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- April Russo (app103)
April, if you were running Google, what would you do to make users feel more at ease? I'd be curious to get your take on what we should do.
- Matt Cutts
The way I see it, Google has no choice but to continue on the road its currently on, getting bigger and better/worse. So I have no advice for Google. I do have some advice for the rest of the world, however... Startups need to have a business plan from day 1 that includes the idea of profitability without being acquired by a bigger company. The idea of "build and sell to one of the big...
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- April Russo (app103)
"Google is not going to be evil because it hasn't been built to be evil. Will they work to speed up browsers and Web sites to give them more traffic on their search engine and more ads in more places? Sure. But that's just good business, not trickery." - Google's interests lie in creating a fast, ubiquitous, diverse and distributed web - that's what their business model needs. Today....
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- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
I am not saying to avoid being critical or trusting naively. But I think we should give a company credit for having set a foundation and trajectory that is to be respected and trusted, when others are not.
- Louis Gray
@April - cheers to that. Interestingly, just two years ago Facebook was the little company that decided to go it alone and not sell to the big guys, and now you list them *as* one of the big guys. Who knows, maybe the next big company is two people hacking away in a garage right now, plotting a course not to get bought, but to be the best.
- DeWitt Clinton
I hope so, and I hope there are a lot working in garages with those plans, because we need them.
- April Russo (app103)
They have always worked to align their interests and that of the users - and that was smart and good and created tremendous value online. I have my set of biases that make me suspicious of any business with too much control, too much market share. "Don't be evil" is not a nice-to-have marketing concept, it is an absolute requirement considering the flabbergasting amounts of information...
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- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Just a sidenote - not being evil is what will keep Google from nailing the telcos with their efforts in GoogleVoice and Gizmo. To win in that market they will have to play a very evil and dirty game. They'll be going against masters at graft and corruption who own the legislators and regulators. If they don't learn to play evil and dirty, they will have a tough time winning in telco...
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- Ken Camp
Louis, I hope you are right. Google is a great company with a lot of great services and a lot of great people. But April and Joelle make some excellent points. I know I do a lot of half-tongue-in-cheek tinfoil stuff, but diversification is always a good idea (intentions can change, there can be rogue actors, etc.), as is pushing to know exactly what information is used, how it's used,...
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- LogEx
I'd suggest Google split up. 1) A super lean, but ultra focused semantic advertising team. 2) A blazingly awesome search company (those datacenters make me wistfully dream of virtual assistants of the future) 3) and split off every other focus (changed from service) they have into a separate entity. Allow the separate business entities to develop independently. Can big companies shrink successfully, you bet. They can do it on their own terms.
- Mark Essel
I agree that the public DNS is not likely a tipping point on the evil scale. But "Not going to happen" --implying never? -- are you saying that Google is somehow special, blessed, different from every other corporation on the face of the earth?
- Brian Sullivan
@DeWitt, I follow all of those regularly, thanks. Perhaps best on another thread or offline to convey some of my more detailed concerns. @Can, very true, ISPs are notorious for bad data practices, but from my perspective I think the main reason that DNS raised this issue yet again is the growing extent of access Google has to people's online activity.
- LogEx
@Matt Cutts: I would ask the Chrome and Wave teams to make the use of Google technologies possible and easy *without going through Google's servers* (as a 20% project). A Chrome + Wave system à la Opera Unite... Sure, the result wouldn't compare to Google's own cloud computing offer, but it would prove that Google is serious about our privacy and independence, and that "cloud in...
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- Jérôme Flipo
Killing Etherpad WITH all users' data looks nothing short of evil. Really, Wave is not ready to take its place.
- Alex Kapranoff
from Android
I wish someone would buy Tribe.net and blow some life back into it. That was the rockin'est online community I've ever been part of. Add some real time to it and MAN!
- Spidra Webster
This is why non-compete agreements are becoming more and more popular with employers (where they are legal), prohibiting employees to work in specific fields related to their current job, for a period of up to 2 years after they leave. What good is it to collect contacts if you can't use them after you leave your job, in the same way you did while you worked for the company? I have a...
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- April Russo (app103)