Timothy Federwitz - Likes

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CannonGod to CannonGod's feed, FriendFeed Feedback, TheNextWeb Forum, RWW: The Future of Tech, Appetite

It's kinda bizarre seeing the 7 Stages of Grief play out in real-time before me ~ http://friendfeed.com/friendf...

Tyson Key, Carrie Lynn, Ahsan Ali aka. Slick and 64 other people liked this

There there................no stop.......please............ look you are getting me started.......sniff...............now come on stop.................sob.......................and so on........ - Kevin J Hatton

12 more comments

1. SHOCK & DENIAL - You will probably react to learning of the loss with numbed disbelief. You may deny the reality of the loss at some level, in order to avoid the pain. Shock provides emotional protection from being overwhelmed all at once. This may last for weeks. - CannonGod

2. PAIN & GUILT - As the shock wears off, it is replaced with the suffering of unbelievable pain. Although excruciating and almost unbearable, it is important that you experience the pain fully, and not hide it, avoid it or escape from it with alcohol or drugs. You may have guilty feelings or remorse over things you did or didn't do with your loved one. Life feels chaotic and scary during this phase. - CannonGod

3. ANGER & BARGAINING - Frustration gives way to anger, and you may lash out and lay unwarranted blame for the death on someone else. Please try to control this, as permanent damage to your relationships may result. This is a time for the release of bottled up emotion. You may rail against fate, questioning "Why me?" You may also try to bargain in vain with the powers that be for a way out of your despair ("I will never drink again if you just bring him back") - CannonGod

4. "DEPRESSION", REFLECTION, LONELINESS - Just when your friends may think you should be getting on with your life, a long period of sad reflection will likely overtake you. This is a normal stage of grief, so do not be "talked out of it" by well-meaning outsiders. Encouragement from others is not helpful to you during this stage of grieving. During this time, you finally realize the... more... - CannonGod

5. THE UPWARD TURN - As you start to adjust to life without your dear one, your life becomes a little calmer and more organized. Your physical symptoms lessen, and your "depression" begins to lift slightly. - CannonGod

6. RECONSTRUCTION & WORKING THROUGH - As you become more functional, your mind starts working again, and you will find yourself seeking realistic solutions to problems posed by life without your loved one. You will start to work on practical and financial problems and reconstructing yourself and your life without him or her. - CannonGod

7. ACCEPTANCE & HOPE - During this, the last of the seven stages in this grief model, you learn to accept and deal with the reality of your situation. Acceptance does not necessarily mean instant happiness. Given the pain and turmoil you have experienced, you can never return to the carefree, untroubled YOU that existed before this tragedy. But you will find a way forward. - CannonGod

The fun part about the Kubler-Ross stages of grief is that it isn't a linear progression, you can experience multiple stages all at once, and you can always go back to another stage even if you're already reached acceptance. - Victor Ganata

fun? - Chris Heath

Fun, meaning, not very fun at all. :) - Victor Ganata

I would have a little compassion and hug this child. - NANCY DALRYMPLE

this could be a dissertation. - shaun mclane

They really are. I've been going through them since 3:30 PM EST. - Mathew™ one of a kind

Bret Taylor to Bret's feed, FriendFeed News

You can now get a daily or weekly email digest for anybody's feed on FriendFeed. You'll get a daily or weekly email with the most popular posts from that person's feed. To get the email, click the "Email/IM" link at the top of anyone's feed, and select the "Best of day" or "Best of week" email option.

August 6 - Comment - Like - Share

"Serhat Ozan", kang, HealingBrush and 249 other people liked this

You can see all of your email settings at http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Bret Taylor

37 more comments

Thanks Bret! :) - Matt Ruiz

Thanks to Kevin for doing a great design for what turned out to be a more complex set of UI options than we had originally anticipated, and thanks to Tudor for implementing the email backend. - Bret Taylor

Great! Thanks! Love FF! - Scott Monaco

I now get the FriendFeed Feedback posts as a Best of Day email so it doesn't fill up my feed, but I don't miss feedback. I also set up a "Best of Day" email for my "Technology people" friend list so I get a pretty good overview of tech news every day via email. - Bret Taylor

This is a really cool idea Bret, I wish you can make that an RSS feed option as well. I'd be much more likely to read summaries in RSS than in email. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

Neat feature, but it's more focus on big shiney new features, while ignoring the glaring issues in need of polish in the site we currently have. - Matthew DeVries

Mark: http://friendfeed.com/bret... - Casey Muller

Very cool. I like how you give us the OPTION rather than sending a daily/weekly digest like other sites *cough* LinkedIn/Facebook *cough* - Johnny

Lovely. Thanks guys. - Mitchell Tsai

Casey: Thanks for the tip. What's the 7 before the "?" mean in the URL? The number of likes or replies needed to be included? - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

this is killer, the random influx of email during the day was kinda getting fail-ish. I love the daily digest. - Drew Lucas

Very cool! Any way to get archives of previous months? (especially helpful for those of us who leave the internet for weeks at a time...) - Mitchell Tsai

WOW. that's really helpful！ - K.D.

Looks like a great addition for those who are not embedded on the site. Nice intro. - Louis Gray

Cool! - Josh Haley

Just curious - at what time of the day will we get these emails ? Midnight US-Time, or will it respect our timezones ? - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Ahsan: it is somewhat random right now when the emails are sent, but we built in the backend capability to control what time they are sent, and we plan on exposing that control to users in the future. Right now, it is kind of random - sorry! - Bret Taylor

Thanks Bret - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Cool! can i get a daily or weekly email digest for the "Saved searches"? - 0M0M from email

Cool - Nimaa

This will be incredibly useful. Thanks to all involved in the design and execution. - Kathy Fitch

Nice addition! - Michael Fidler

But what exactly is "Best"? Is it anything that has a certain number of likes/comments? - Laura Norvig

@Bret LOL THAT WAS MY PROJECT! I will release it tomorrow. But you've also did it and killed my friendfeed application **sigh** But mine has multi-reporting weekly-daily-monthly at the same time and adjustable entry count! - Alp

@Bret please consolidate me or I won't code new apps with you api! :-) - Alp

Alp: we were not trying to withhold data. Later today the documentation will be updated to reflect the ability to obtain "Best of" for users. The feed id will be USERNAME/summary/N (similar to "Best of" for lists) - Benjamin Golub

Hi Ben, that is pretty funny, I tried that URL earlier today to see if it has been secretly released :) - Paul Kinlan

Bret: While Twitter struggle to keep their fail whale under control, you guys are developing stuff like this. Amazing - Thanks! - Jim Connolly

awesome feature, this will be highly useful for my corporate group ideas / content sharing; projects, etc.... THANK YOU :) - Susan Beebe

Great work. I especially like that it works on lists too. - Meryn Stol

my inbox might say different, but I like that :-) - Dobromir Hadzhiev

Wow, this is really neat! And it links into the idea I expressed earlier, re: reducing signup friction / enabling limited guest privileges. Imagine if I could embed one of my FF rooms on my personal web site, and enable people to subscribe to that feed by e-mail with just a couple of clicks... rather than saying "you can get e-mail notifications but you have to sign up for Friendfeed first." "sign up" -- though admirably lightweight on FF -- is still a huge barrier. - Adam Lasnik

Love it. - Zachary TG

is there a love button cause I dont like this option I LOVE this option..great work guys - (jeff)isageek

Three options I would like (1) Can I select "top 100" instead of "top 30"? (2) Could I select both "best of day" and "best of week"? (3) How about older timeperiods? I'd love to get an e-mail with stuff from last week or Mar 2009? Start & end dates? Anything to help me read FriendFeed off-line would be great since I spend long periods off-line at festivals (especially during summer time) or overseas. - Awesome job guys! - Mitchell Tsai

Great way to keep up with those you're most interested in; things you don't want to miss. - Diego Barros 

So this works on groups too, cool! But we still cannot see Best of for groups on the site on friends lists. :-( I have several friends lists that include just groups and when I select to view the best of the page it's empty (even though if I got to the individual best of for those groups there are entries there). - Kol Tregaskes

does anyone know of a web service that can do this? (I'm thinking weekly email updates of my favorite feeds/people) I don't think there's anything like friendfeed .. - 'Like' robot (frɐnc)

Paul Kinlan

FriendFeed schwag arrived... Or as it looks in the photo beefbneirf

August 7 - Comment - Like - Share

Nispell, localr, Ade Lack and 25 other people liked this

That was the 19th photo I took and it is the best one I could do.... The t-shirt is brilliant it is the thing inside it which ruins the photo ;) - Paul Kinlan

7 more comments

I have a problem that when ever I see a camera, I have to pull a face. - Paul Kinlan

Cool shirt! - Anne Bouey

I love moc.beefbneirf - Jordan Brock

I'm pronouncing that as "Beef B'nerf" which sounds awesome to me! - Tony Ruscoe

Wonder if the name is beefbnerf domain is available and I could try and do a backwards friendfeed :) - Paul Kinlan

want - andy brudtkuhl

these T-Shirts will become a rarity soon, sadly enough. - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

gotta love schwag! just in case any of y'all aren't aware... you can flip the photos from photobooth.app "⇧⌘F" but of course, the pic is funnier this way around. - Alice Liu

CannonGod to CannonGod's feed, Funny Pics and Videos

Robot Kills Man

August 10 from email - Comment - Like - Share

rowlikeagirl, Timothy Federwitz, Nispell and 4 other people liked this

...and they'll kill again. Judgement day is upon us. - CannonGod from email

They must be stopped! - Christopher Harley from iPhone

Who was the next one? - SuezanneC Baskerville

tinypants - Hagitha of FF

My company is FINALLY upgrading us to Vista, IE7, and Office '07. And we're forced to attend an "Essentials" training course. Holy shit, I cannot believe that there are people in this company who are THIS stupid. Srsly. I can feel myself actually being relieved of IQ points while sitting thru this.

August 10 - Comment - Like - Share

Steven Perez, J. Abdul-Qahhar, Hisham Sadek هشام and 14 other people liked this

If you plug your ears, your brains won't leak out. I haven't tested this so YMMV. - ha3rvey (business time)

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Thx for the advice. Attempting this now. - tinypants - Hagitha of FF

You are upgrading to Vista now?!?! Skip it and go straight to Win7! - Sparky

"now, click the big windows logo... goooood" - Sparky

I can't imagine anyone would upgrade to Vista *now* when Win7 has just been released. Win7 is going to make us forget what an abomination Vista really was. - Joey Gibson

The problem is that we started this rollout to Vista about six months ago (I'm at the tail end...EXCRUCIATING) because we're also doing a huge hardware replacement at the same time. And this project started just after Vista dropped ("started" meaning selection of hardware and development of software package). Plus our Vista is extremely customized. So. Switching to Win 7 would have... more... - tinypants - Hagitha of FF

Group computer training sessions are always painful for power users. But entertaining :d - Tony C from fftogo

So, not waiting for Windows 7???? Then again, Corperate made this desicion months ago before people knew how good Windows 7 was, erm, is...... - Roberto Bonini

@Earl: Oh the entertainment value is HIGH with this group. There are a few people in here who have already been upgraded but require this training AGAIN. So hearing their "horror stories" is Hy. Ste. Ri. KULL. "I can never find the save button so I just had to leave documents open for days until someone could show me." "I still don't know how to shut my PC down, so it's not been restarted since April." "I can't believe they took the paperclip away...how can I use Word without that to help me?!" - tinypants - Hagitha of FF

I have to stop reading now. I'm having flashbacks to training sessions I've done in the past - good luck, Amanda (and try not to kill them all!)! - WorldofHiglet

We had to go on a training course with a test at the end when they upgraded Outlook some years ago, yes it was painful. - M F

I used to be a trainer and I also used to write training modules, so I'm used to having to account for varying skill levels within a single group of people. But man oh man, my patience has been waning recently because I'm just frustrated by the level of ineptitude constantly demonstrated by the people around me here. I realize that older generations typically have a harder time dealing... more... - tinypants - Hagitha of FF

It makes you wonder if they're intentionally being dense so as to cause the migration to fail, leaving them with what they're comfortable. Of course, some people simply refuse to ask for help. - CAJ, somewhere else from iPhone

I upgraded my company laptop from Vista to Win7 on Saturday, with the company's blessing (and the company's paid-for copy of Win7). Win7 really puts Vista to shame. - Joey Gibson

@Curtis: I think that a number of these people are doing just that...hoping they'll be told "Oh, we'll roll you back to XP because Vista and Office '07 are a hindrance to your job." However, our company would rather offer them a severance package and pay someone younger and newer. :) I am just evil enough to wholly support that endeavor. - tinypants - Hagitha of FF

@amanda The thing that scared me while I was still at my job was the sheer volume of people *younger* than me (and I'm only 28) with zero capacity to use a computer. They also had zero capacity to think for themselves and figure out what they needed - I lost count the number of times I had people ring me up and ask to install an application that was part of the standard build. They... more... - alphaxion

Yeah, there's an incredible number of younguns coming up right now that just have no ability to adapt and think on their own. It's kind of surprising. And I'm guessing that the only reason we don't have a huge issue with that here is that we don't hire people that young unless they've interned with us for at least two (pref 3) consecutive intern seasons. So we're able to weed out most... more... - tinypants - Hagitha of FF

CannonGod to CannonGod's feed, Funny Pics and Videos

I wonder what kind of wacky extreme video I could make by sending my iPhone up the pod system?

August 10 from email - Comment - Like - Share

Nispell, Timothy Federwitz, Alex Scoble and Admiral Anika liked this

And to answer your question: No - Chemical Pathology would steal my phone before I made it up there ;-P - CannonGod from email

2 more comments

Are those in pneumatic tubes? I love those things. - Admiral Anika

Go go go give it a shot. Like @hannahnicklin says use padding. It'd make an interesting vid 'n' experiment. - Zax Stevens

Make sure to share that!! Hope it turns out nice. My guess though is that it would be going so fast it would just be a big blur. Still would love to see it. ;-) - Timothy Federwitz from Alert Thingy

Christopher Harley to Christopher's feed, The Apple Room, iPhone

Zgrip iPhone Pro - Zacuto - http://store.zacuto.com/Zgrip-i...

August 10 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

alex falkenberg, Zachary TG, FFTornado and 3 other people liked this

"Zgrip iPhone PRO is a completely adjustable, quick releasable handgrip system for shooting professional stable video using the iPhone 3Gs. The iPhone 3Gs snaps into the iPhone cradle, the cradle snaps into the Zacuto Zgrip and you are ready to shoot. The handgrip fully articulates, and all of the red levers allow you to adjust every angle to get those interesting creative smooth shots. We also have a couple of great accessories to help you shoot better sound, lighting & for getting up real high above people standing right by you and crowds." - Christopher Harley from Bookmarklet

5 more comments

sweet... when will we see the first iPhone-shot feature length film? - Nathan Chase

It's in post as we speak, Nathan. - Christopher Harley

A few days ago I saw a post about the first porn filmed on an iPhone 3GS... they always seem to be on the leading edge of technology. - Hector

That is slick... but damn!! It's expensive. I know it's ProSumer equipment, and I've already taken a 22+ minute video of my Grandfather at a family reunion that turned out really well... but I question the 3GS as a great video recorder. Don't get me wrong... I think it's incredible "for what it is" and you can always have it with you... but not sure I'd be willing to spend close to $300 on a handle for it. I'd like to... it's just justifying it. - Timothy Federwitz from Alert Thingy

I think it's cool, but it is so expensive. Can't wait for the cosumour version though. Plus I need an iPhone first, (I have the LG Neon). But I can't wait for the iPhone 4G. (As in the network, or performance). - Zachary TG

I agree, Timothy. I like to post items like this because I think it shows that the iPhone is a practical device in some instances and therefore it's worthy of having supporting gear designed for it's use. But $919 for what we see in these three pics? Not a chance. Great ideas for DIY projects, though. - Christopher Harley

Müjdat Korkmaz to Müjdat's feed, Fotograf, Funny Pics and Videos

When Your Dad’s a Graphic Designer | FrakinCool.com - http://www.frakincool.com/picture...

August 9 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

internettin abi, Alex Scrivener, özlem(Browni) and 50 other people liked this

:-) - Müjdat Korkmaz from Bookmarklet

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süper :) - loylum

mom's got the camera, dad's got photoshop...... - Stephanie Segel

@Stephanie Segel, :) - Müjdat Korkmaz

Its not the dad who did this... - Avenger

:) Süper. - yedincisenol

Bu çocuk büyüyünce kesin bu tiplemelerden biri olur :) - Bora

CEBE, :)) - Müjdat Korkmaz

neye bu kadar kızdı acaba :) - Shawn 'Erman' Ralf

Sormak lazım, ama yüz ifadesi sormaya bile korkutuyor insanı :P - Müjdat Korkmaz

Robert Scoble

Why FriendFeed's designer, Kevin Fox, is to blame for FriendFeed being too difficult to use: he f**ks with affordances. (UPDATE: he answers me toward the end of the comments with a GREAT set of answers).

August 9 - Comments disabled - Like - Share

29travels, Lucas, FFTornado and 138 other people liked this

Affordances. They are important. What does that mean? A door knob "affords" being turned. It almost demands it. Yet FriendFeed is screwing with things like links. Here, click on "hide." That should just hide one item, right? That's the affordance. Yet you'll soon find there's a whole world stuck under that little link. You can hide Tweets. You can hide me. You can hide all sorts of stuff. - Robert Scoble

324 more comments

Is it difficult to use? - Manuel Mas

Hmm.. is it difficult to use?! - Orli Yakuel

It's a peace of cake - Mark

i heard larry wall once say about perl "make simple things simple, and hard things possible"... the simple things are definitely *not* simple in ff, increasing the learning curve right at the start... i rekon if they fix that... they have it made! :) - simran

Ooooo. One does not often see Robert swear. He's really worked up about it. Care to respond Kevin?? - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

#2 Look at the time stamp. Did you know that's also a link? Where's the affordance? Not there. Yet did you know you can click that and that is your permalink? Many people have trouble figuring this out. But here's an ultra affordance killer. Did you know you can click it twice and get a popout menu? Not many people do. Kevin has overloaded links with too many features and he has broken the affordances of what links usually do. - Robert Scoble

Orli: actually, yes, it's difficult to use. - Robert Scoble

Scoble: You may be right now that I read what you had to say. I don't think there is a proper FAQ/guide for all the little details hidden in FF. - Manuel Mas

And noses were designed to support eye glasses. - Todd Hoff

well I just managed to wipe out my entire friend feed account when I was trying to add a new one for a different twitter account - NW Angel

I agree - too many possible results from a given action. Manuel, no one reads FAQs and if you need to, the app is DOA - Sameer

Well, I don't see it as difficult to use. Its more that there are many things in here hidden that would aid users if there were more upfront. - Manuel Mas

Most of us get basic functionality out of the site with how things are at the moment. - Manuel Mas

Look at this complaint too about FriendFeed being difficult to figure out: http://twitter.com/sethgol... Seth Goldstein runs a tech company. He's a geek. Adverse to more pain than a lot of us. Yet he can't figure out how to delete a list. He's not the only one to tell me that FriendFeed is too difficult to figure out. FriendFeed still needs a design rethink to make these issues go away. - Robert Scoble

Sameer: Agree. - Manuel Mas

Valid points, Robert, but a complex interface, once learned, becomes simple, too - although that's not the best design philosophy for a massively public website. - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Its the visual impact of seeing too many options even if you dont use them. V. overwhelming for the try and buy new comer - Sameer

I think it is one of the worst UIs on the web today. Which is why I hardly use it. It violates all the rules of good design. Stuff is not obvious, it is not easy and it is not even quickly learn-able. I've spent years in product management and really, this is one of the worst. - Shripriya

I think the issue here is Discoverability. There are a lot of little hidden secrets to FriendFeed that become obvious only after you've figured them out. They're not very obvious on their own. Personally, it doesn't bother me but that's because I know it. If I were a new user, I'd be at a loss as well. It seems to me that the primary design goal at FriendFeed is a minimal UI (perhaps at all costs). - Akiva Moskovitz

Roberto: I can't think of another web app that messes with link affordances the way that FriendFeed does. Can you think of one? - Robert Scoble

People who figure out how to use a system are often the last ones to recognize how difficult it is to use. It's a self selection thing. - Ken Sheppardson

But affordances are subjective and reliant on the end-user. Take the @ sign or hashtags for instance. Unless you're talking about Apple, it's hard to blame a designer for affordance rule enforcement. - Sam Harrelson

There is a balance with "affordances" though -- if you have a very complex set of features you could have a knob/button/link for every feature but that would not work either - Brian Sullivan

@Robert, do you think FF need More Icon? - abdellah

Sam: we've all clicked on hundreds of thousands of links. We all have an idea of what happens when you click a link. - Robert Scoble

Sam, the @sign in Twitter was emergent - something users created. - Sameer

Sure, but I've seen lots of platforms use the date function as a permalink enabler. - Sam Harrelson

Manuel, agree. Robert, I wouldn't say it's difficult, but confusing (or useless sometimes). I'm not sure it's a design problem though. - Orli Yakuel

abellah: an icon is probably better than a link, yes. I know that Kevin (from an interview I did with him more than a year ago) likes sparse UIs. He is of the school that you just watch where people trip over themselves and then build UI for that. I think that's smart, but I wish that FriendFeed would iterate its UI faster to pave paths where people are having troubles. - Robert Scoble

Robert, sorry, but you're late on this trend too :) First, being not to follow everyone on Twitter. FF ui has always been terrible. Most tech people I know don't understand how to use it. And I think I use less than 10% of the available features. - Shripriya

I like FriendFeed as it is. It's obviously a power users tool as is, but then I wouldn't want it stupid simple reminiscent of installing a Windows OS. There just needs to be a decent screencast on the home page explaining all the features. No one reads FAQs these days. Video Game designers just turn the first level into a tutorial for 99% who won't read the manual and I don't mind. Maybe FF needs a tutorial when you first sign up? - CannonGod

Think about the affordances of FF and compare them with Twitter. Then compare the relative effectiveness of desktop / mobile applications developed for both. There is not a one good app for FriendFeed. This is because of the MANY "extra shite" links and an overly complex API, not because of popularity differences in the services. - Michael Owens from iPhone

Holy shit this item is already in Google: http://www.google.com/search... -- Google is going real time! - Robert Scoble

Great designs shouldn't need tutorials. - Manuel Mas

@Sameer right, but we created the @ sign to do a certain feature. Folks on identi.ca have their own signifiers. That will inevitably happen here as well as folks grow comfortable with this platform. - Sam Harrelson

Shripriya - I think most people who come back dont find it confusion. Its the first timers that run away - and thats FFs biggest problem. - Sameer

Needless to say, we all love Friendfeed, but we also need a Greasemonkey script to learn which service was posting into the time-line, and the entire issue of groups/rooms really needs a rethink because it's so hard to find any, especially If you're a newcomer.. - Nir Ben Yona

Engagement is deep; Adoption is sparce. - Sameer

TV ads (at least in australia) are considered misleading if "a person of slightly less than average intelligence" misinterprets them... i think you will find that it takes "smart techies" a while to figure out the nuances of ff, not saying everything should be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, but the defaults that way would give everyone a great start... especially when introducing innovative stuff (like "the live web") :) - simran

Scoble: That Google real time thing is even more impressive than this discussion! - Manuel Mas

Manuel - Yes. I like to say that if you need to write a manual for your product, it's too complicated. - Jeff Harbert

Shripriya: I've been complaining about this stuff both in public and in private for a long time. And I wasn't behind in following everyone on Twitter. Come and study how I use FriendFeed to follow small groups of people closely, especially for Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Wow, this did get into Google fast. - phil baumann

Robert: Holy shit, that's impressive - http://www.google.com/search... - sod Twitter I say, if you're in marketing then you need to get on FriendFeed for instant Google indexing of a subject! - CannonGod

@Manuel there will be always a need to manual and tutorial, people have to sell or to promote so event if you have to explain a basic evidence, write a document make it in pdf format, sell it or share it, but for the sake of simplicity please never ever do FB style document. - abdellah

UI design is a very difficult thing to do because so many people have different ways they use things. However, I do agree with you Robert that FF does need a redesign to make more of the feature more user-intuitive. - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

Sameer - I've been back many times, I still barely use it. All the stuff Robert mentions, I had no clue. And its not worth my the time investment. - Shripriya

i would expect to see the tweet before this one.. http://www.google.com/search... - Orli Yakuel

Robert - the twitter thing (ie. unsubscribing and not following everyone) was a bit of a joke. But on FF, you are the biggest proponent. If you can't get them to change, no one can. - Shripriya

Phil: THIS THREAD IS NOW ABOUT GOOGLE REAL-TIME INDEXING! XD - CannonGod

Agree Sam, but Twitter nor identi.ca expose a gazillion features in the core app.. Its about managing the "first impression is the lasting impression" thing - Sameer

Here's the interview I did with Kevin last year: http://qik.com/video/73962 Shripriya: yeah, I keep hearing that from other people I try to evangelize FriendFeed to. One guy, who is a tech advisor to celebrities in Hollywood told me they will never use it because it's too hard to figure out and because there aren't good mobile clients for it, like there are for Twitter. - Robert Scoble

Jake - :) - phil baumann

@Sameer That's true for a certain demographic, but I look at sites my 8th graders frequent often and I have no idea how they put up with the features. Or take an xBox 360 controller... lots of buttons that do way too many things for my old 30 year-old mind, but my students find it intuitive. - Sam Harrelson

http://scobleizer.com/2008... - 18 months ago you said their UI was brilliant :) - Mark

Shripriya- thats ok. Plenty of people I personally know that have signed up for Twitter and never come back because they couldn't find a use case. No app is for everyone. Its about appealing to a large number of folks that see relevance. - Sameer

Wow, not only is this indexed in Google, but the Likes are getting indexed as well. Don't see the comments indexed yet, tho. - Sam Harrelson

Maybe FF will always be the power aggregation tool online that only a few use. But is the "few" large enough? I wonder. - Shripriya

47 emails in my gmail inbox already from this thread (as i commented and said follow updates on twitter)... surely they can batch them at least by the minute... after all... email isn't realtime :) - simran

Search results for "I don't get FriendFeed" - http://friendfeed.com/search... - phil baumann

Mark: you took me out of context. I said it both sucks AND is brilliant. That is true. Even today. - Robert Scoble

@Robert, can I add that UI is so clean that functionality are just a part of the design, they need to make more light on them (hey they are all blue link the same sized blue link) :) - abdellah

The missing mobile client certainly is a downer. I love a lot about FriendFeed, but lack of a *good* mobile client, and other minor annoyances may keep me from staying here. Sure I know I will come back from time to time (and I haven't left yet), but not sure I can live here on a daily basis like I can with Twitter because of the great clients for my desktop and phone, like TweetDeck. - Timothy Federwitz

Sam, the feature laden apps you mention that your students use, have intent built in them. The purpose is known before you came. XBox = don't do homework. Hell, Id learn how to use very button too :) - Sameer

I think FF is a different beast altogether and not as easy to create a mobile app for, based solely on service functionality and what we actually do here. - Manuel Mas

Tim: that's why I like the IM integration wtih GTalk. Gets around the site UI and works great on the mobile as well. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Scoble: I think this was a pretty rude way of giving your feedback. Why are you being so provocative lately? - Eric Florenzano from iPhone

difficult for who? the basics are easy....getting the most out of all the tools available is a different story but at least the tools are there. Not so in twitter - Craig Shipp

Sameer: Yep, good point. Similarly, I see FriendFeed having a very useful apparatus in my work/personal flow as a news/twitter/info client. I mostly use it via IM but also find the site pretty intuitive for how I use it and prefer it over Twitter, etc. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Eric: because no one engages unless you make a strong point and I sure wish Kevin would fix this stuff so I can evangelize FriendFeed better. - Robert Scoble

Craig: I have shown FriendFeed to many hundreds of people over the past year and I keep getting this complaint over and over. - Robert Scoble

I disagree with that approach Robert. A strong point is not always necessary. Most times it's a turn off and sets the wrong tone. Sure you get a lively discussion, but half of it is trying to explain you're not reallllly upset about it. - Bwana ☠

It's fine to complain but I don't see any useful suggestions here from Robert or any other commenters. A problem without a proposed solution is essentially a whine. - Brian Sullivan

Bwana: we've been complaining about these issues for more than a year. And I am upset about it. It keeps me from having a good time evangelizing FriendFeed. Just search here for how many people don't get FriendFeed. And those are the ones who'll tell you in public. - Robert Scoble

Just reading this, I have learned 4 things I DID NOT KNOW about friendfeed functionality. - Liza

Back again, to say FF still isn't cool! - K.N. Ajit Narayan

Robert: I couldn't disagree more. Please don't fall into that Arrington/Loren Feldman trap. People engage in a more constructive way when the topic is interesting. Just look at Leo's shows for proof that I'm right. - Eric Florenzano from iPhone

I didn't say this wasn't a case for a strong point, I'm simply stating it's not always necessary per your statement "no one engages unless you make a strong point" - Bwana ☠

Liza: that's another reason I did it in a strong way. I knew it would get engagement. WHen you get engagement your item gets spread to more and more people and that helps out the community overall. - Robert Scoble

Timestamp? Click, double click? Permalink? I wish I knew all of this before. - Liza

Ultimately the best thing to happen to FriendFeed would be the mass proliferation of 3rd party apps that offer a better user experience overall. Let the market sort out best functional IxD. How many highly active Twitter users use Twitter.com regularly? Not many, because there are several Twitter apps that afford a more active Twitter experience. Without them, Twitter would be news from 2006. - Laura Scott (@lauras)

I disagree. I came here because I agree with the point (as I stated in another thread), not because of the strongness. You may attract certain types with that, but not moi. - Bwana ☠

The best level of engagement that I've seen regarding Leo Laporte is when Arrington called him out openly and there was the big fuss of him getting thrown off the show. Just saying. - Michael Owens from iPhone

I also show twitter and friendfeed to a lot of new Internet users and they get confused easily. I think the only solution is to show one simple process and then after they master that for a week or so then show them another feature. - Craig Shipp

Eric: OK, heard and understood. But name another designer who does stuff with links that Kevin does. That needs to be pointed out strongly, I think. But then I get crazy about design, especially when people keep telling me over and over that FriendFeed is too hard to use and figure out. Even Liza, who has been here a lot, didn't know all that stuff was "hidden" under the affordance of the link. - Robert Scoble

Robert - I appreciate your sharing this info, but it feels strange that all of this seems like a secret. Intention is bizarre. - Liza

So Robert, do you really think Kevin and FF are actively ignoring this issue? - Bwana ☠

Bwana: yes. Why? Because it's been like this for 18 months. - Robert Scoble

As a user, I do feel like it is intentionally hidden. - Liza

Interesting - Bwana ☠

It isn't about ignoring. It's about continuance. These affordances have been here since FF started. - Michael Owens from iPhone

Michael: and they f**k with the affordances that everyone has learned on EVERY OTHER WEB SITE. This is why I used strong language. - Robert Scoble

Oh, and the "new ui" upgrade that happened a while back did nothing but add to the hidden complexity - Michael Owens from iPhone

Robert, The UI's difficulty is best expressed in comment threads with a huge number of comments, such as yours - http://friendfeed.com/bitchfe... - Aaman (Clone of FF)

And I am tech savvy, not an idiot, but the argument is, oh, you just aren't enough of a techie to get it. - Liza

I think the beauty of friendfeed is the fact that it can be used as a very basic tool but also has the power to do much more in the right hands - Craig Shipp

Who are the right hands? - Liza

And once these get fixed, the real thing that people can't figure out is what is new. On every other website there's an affordance for that. Even in SimplyTweet new Tweets are green. Quick, figure out what is new here that you haven't seen from the last time you were here. You can't. - Robert Scoble

Robert speaks truth. - Bwana ☠

Craig: That's the biggest copout I've ever heard. Maybe Kevin needs to go bak and read "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. - Michael Owens from iPhone

Liza: people like me who click on everything looking for secret features. :-) - Robert Scoble

Don't Make Me Think ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...) by Steve Krug may be the kind of design you are looking for. - Todd Hoff

@Todd: great minds think alike - Michael Owens from iPhone

Robert: but even Wordpress.com uses the date affordance as a permalink. http://bit.ly/Dwnm6 I understand the concerns about the mass of feature clarity here, but I don't see that particular date/link function as a standard bearer. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Scoble: OK point taken. So let's make this constructive: what should they do to fix it? For the timestamp, my suggestion is to make it bluer and underlined--which everyone associates with links. Do you agree? How can they fix the hide functionality, though? I'm struggling to think of a way. - Eric Florenzano from iPhone

Liza: I found a lot of bugs in WIndows 95 by unplugging my mouse and trying to use the entire UI via the keyboard. But then I'm weird. Most people will never try anything. In fact, Google's own research shows that fewer than 1% will click on "advanced search." These weird affordances are even harder than THAT to figure out. - Robert Scoble

So if this doesn't change, FF may not get as wide of an adoption that it deserves. Hide, permalinks, and little things make a huge difference. The technology is too good for this to be its downfall. - Bwana ☠

Not having older items shaded or otherwise marked as old does effectively contribute to noise. - phil baumann

I'm not saying friendfeed can't be made better. I'm just saying it can be used from a basic level with little training. - Craig Shipp

I was accused of working for Friendfeed at an event 2 nights ago, for being an evangelist, and I still know very little about the functionality. AND I do like to think, I do click on a lot, but I also appreciate the intention of inclusion. - Liza

Eric: I would NOT put two hidden features under one link. They need a tab of "customizations and secret features" and put all that stuff there. - Robert Scoble

I'm not sure it's ever going to change at this point... which is sad - Bwana ☠

Liza: everyone knows I'm so excited about FriendFeed that they whine when I don't bring it up. Seriously. It's funny. - Robert Scoble

Whoops sorry Michael, didn't see yours. But it is a good book. Affordances is a bit abstract. He does a good job making the idea concrete. - Todd Hoff

what social site is better? - Craig Shipp

Twitter made a big improvement with contextual menu, such may add a value in FF too. - abdellah

Craig: define better. Twitter is easier. Facebook has more hooks and more users. - Robert Scoble

Which social site has the better UI? - Bwana ☠

Bwana: which is why I used strong language. - Robert Scoble

Until FB and twitter update in real time they aren't even in the game as far as I'm concerned - Craig Shipp

Robert: Twitter has the best UI? - K.N. Ajit Narayan

better UI!! ask myspace ugly by purpose. - abdellah

The problem is w/o knowing the affordances, Newbies create too much noise, feel embarassed and retreat - felt that but did not retreat - Liza

Facebook used to have a great UI imho. It's changed so much, now I can't find anything - Bwana ☠

FF has the better UI would be my guess. But better is such a subjective word. - Brian Sullivan

K.N. define "best." It's certainly easier to understand than FriendFeed is. Especially if you use a great client like SimplyTweet on my iPhone or Seesmic on my desktop. - Robert Scoble

Scoble: I'm not sure about the tab idea. It would add a lot of visual load on ever pageview. Instead, I'm thinking maybe if hide was a hover dropdown. When you hover over it, it says "Hide just this item", and "Hide all items like these" so that you know what you're getting into. This could work just like the top subnavigation items in many websites, which people are familiar with. Thoughts? - Eric Florenzano

Agree Twitter's UI is great - was in a studygroup of power users - most of us use web interface with multiple browsers rather than Tweetdeck, b/c simplicity is preferred. - Liza

Eric: this is why I'm not a UI designer. I like your solution better. - Robert Scoble

Hover is an evil thing in a real-time interface - Bwana ☠

I may repeat it but contextuel menu, yes do it well, that all , FF have to do that , twitter have done it. - abdellah

i hate chasing links - Bwana ☠

Bwana: Ahh yeah, good point. Maybe it would have to pause realtime (considering you are actually doing an action) - Eric Florenzano

Robert: Was talking about Twitter, the site...It's really easy to work with, provided you are not following too many people.. - K.N. Ajit Narayan

On FF you can type in the box and hit enter. How difficult is that? - Craig Shipp

Yeah Eric, it would have to - Bwana ☠

Even this thread is hard to read. No ability to specifically reply etc. Another reason I rarely visit. - Shripriya

FF used to pause real time whenever you your cursor was over a posting or its comments-- somehow that feature got removed. - Brian Sullivan

Basically, Robert, you're saying that FF is too clever for its own good. - Glen, Bespectacled Elder

Shripiya: This conversation will definitely stink unless you find the hidden permalink - Bwana ☠

lisa, that's one thing and four words :) - Craig Shipp

Which supports Robert's argument - Bwana ☠

I don't know if I will be able to handle a better FF - Craig Shipp

I went to grab a glass of water, and have no clue what is going on now - see what I mean? - Liza

@Craig Oh for sure you can remember the alpha version and when beta come. - abdellah

Maybe using IM is best, don't know, but, for now, I find it labor intensive vs. Twitter. I like BOTH, and I will continue to use BOTH, but that does not mean there are not simple fixes to improve the UI. - Liza

@liza no you know for sure what is going on , you know that this thread is about "....", you remmeber what you have said before, you remember the person for whome you talked so for sure you know were you are at the discussion. - abdellah

It would be nice to see some of the FF team on this discussion, Kevin Fox in particular. - phil baumann

I want to reply to indiv comments, it is impossible unless I say @robert or HEY BWANA, that is silly, crappy design. Am I missing something? Plus, everyone calls me LISA not LIZA, so I can hardly answer the questions directed at me without looking for both. - Liza

Robert should have cc'd the FriendFeed feedback room - Bwana ☠

Phil: it is Sunday and they do need some time off of their work. Hopefully Kevin will show up tonight or tomorrow. - Robert Scoble

Liz: yep, I love FF's IM integration. I've got a popout window open on the side of my desktop and can keep up with things (from this thread and everything I monitor on FF) much more easily. - Sam Harrelson from IM

LIZA - not lisa or liz, ha ha - Liza

With that said, I love FriendFeed's comment UI. That's what hooked me to the service - Bwana ☠

After reading about affordances (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...), it appears the problem is that many of them are hidden when they should be perceptible. - Glen, Bespectacled Elder

Robert - I am clicking on everything in site, so if I blow up something, oops, sorry. - Liza

Liza apologies. multi-tasking fail. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Glen, yep, that's where discoverability comes in. Things should be easy to discover based on visual cues. It shouldn't be like playing a game of Myst. - Akiva Moskovitz

UNaffordances - Liza

Robert - yeah, even if they read this tomorrow, there's good stuff here that's important if the service it to grow in use. - phil baumann

Say it with me folks : User-friendly-ability. We HAZ NONE here. - Sean

Robert - now that you are here, I also think it is a mistake to expect users to choose FF or Twitter - recently you have backed off and choose to use both, BUT many of your "followers" are testy with those of us who use both. Until FF is easier to use, I will use both. That is my choice. Positioning FF as Twitter hating is bad move, ppl. - Liza

Who is positioning FF as a Twitter hater? Some people hate Twitter (I personally think Twitter is a waste of mindwidth). How does that have anything to do with FF other than the fact that they post on FF? - Brian Sullivan

Brian, do a search, you will find MANY ppl are positioning FF as anti-twitter, and I don't agree with the approach. I personally get a LOT of grief from both sides of the fence for using both, and I am not going to pick a side just b/c others tell me I should. - Liza

Annoyance: There's no comment, like, etc link at the bottom of the comments. So... I read 160+ comments and have to scroll back to the top to comment? WTF? - Kevin Donahue

Kevin - yes, that is a frustration. - phil baumann

Kevin, totally agreed with that comment, especially when using via the iPhone. It's nice to see comments per OP, but the UI for managing things is horrible and wastes a lot of time, denting my enthusiasm for more participation. - Sally Church

Officially PISSED OFF - using IM FAIL. Opens new page for every feed. Then I respond in Gtalk and get unknown command. F this. Time to breath deep and try not to explode. - Liza

Liza, type in "help" for the list of commands in IM or there's a list on the site. Not sure about the page thing... I don't get that in GTalk. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Liza: consistently when people meet me they ask "what is next after Twitter?" I don't answer FriendFeed, I wish I could. - Robert Scoble

I don't like help menus or reading instructions. I appreciate your efforts, but I am just pissed off in general b/c I like to figure things out on my own. I can't spend yrs clicking on FF for hidden treasures. - Liza

People always ask me why should they use FriendFeed over Twitter.... it gets old after a while - Bwana ☠

Robert - exactly, if we knew what was next, it would be dull. Beauty in playing, mashing, exploring. - Liza

Wow Robert, way throw out an HCI term! Are we going to discuss GOMS or Fitts' Law next? :-) - Bill Welense from iPhone

Bwana - I gave it a shot yesterday with some success in the last day. - http://ff.im/6kbAN - phil baumann

Robert - nice comment. Would love to tweet it to share, but don't know how to isolate it on this f-d up interface. - Liza

Liza - I'd like to be able to tweet comments they way Disqus allows it. - phil baumann

This is Liza frustrated and cranky, sorry for letting my evil twin out, but this feed triggered it. #blamescoble - Liza

I'm wondering if FriendFeed will remain the domain of us geeks. Is that a BIG enough market for their business model though? - Jim Connolly

I secretly hope so, Jim. Twitter was great in 2006 B.K. (Before Kutchner) when it was populated only by geeks :) - Sam Harrelson from IM

Holden: Well, I'm pretty sure someone hopes to make some money from FF. - Jim Connolly

Sam: I have to admit, I would hate to see FF flooded like Twitter is. - Jim Connolly

The fact is Robert that These problems have never crossed my mind. Actually, come to think of it. A unified settings page would be nice. However. Just becuae the UI is unconventional, going against the grain, does not mean it's a bad UI. I'd love to see a mockup of how you would do it better. - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

Holden: I didn't say it wasn't great. I still use and love Twitter. I just miss the good ole days. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Don't even get me started with a wish list of options. - Liza

CONFESSION: I did not know until now about double clicking on the time-link to get a pop-out window. - Jim Connolly

Holden: Twitter's a spam-filled hunk of crap. - Jim Connolly

Holden: You may not automatically see a business model, but they would have had to produce something to get $$$ funding. BTW: Twitter's got the audience, though. It's where the people are. Only reason I use it. - Jim Connolly

Friendfeed is not difficult to use. It is so intuitive. I love that I can easily block certain things, search for items that have a specific number of likes, see a user's likes, etc. It's wayyyyyyy easy. - Ben Hanten

Ben: A lot of new users tell me they can't figure it out. - Jim Connolly

they're not trying then, Jim - Chris Heath

If this was put up to a vote, I would vote to have a better FAQ, but I would definitely keep the design as free of extra buttons as possible. - Ben Hanten

Hmm, wow, lots of comments fast on this post. Too bad it's a Sunday, I imagine Kevin is up to other things right this second... - Jason Wehmhoener

Can someone help me find the link to create imaginary friend? - Krishnamoorthy

Holden, well that's their loss if they can't 'get it' - friendfeed is simple and IMHO if you can't 'get it' then that's your problem, not friendfeed's - Chris Heath

http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Chris Heath

Krishnamoorthy - http://friendfeed.com/setting... - phil baumann

the Imaginary Friend function is now a part of Groups. for example, I created a private "group" with my wife's name and brought in all of her feeds since she's not on FriendFeed. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Ok, the imaginary friend thing is a different story. Awesome concept; but way too much work to add a bunch of users. - Ben Hanten

I think a good start would be to have a totally different "entry point" for setting up hiding rules. Also, defaults might need to be reconsidered. Is it the best to always start off by showing everything from a user? FF already asks you to select your "top five" feeds you want to show off in your profile... Could it make sense to only show stuff from people's top five by default, so one needs to opt-in to get any more of their feeds? - Meryn Stol

Perhaps a big, dedicated "mute Twitter" (though I'd prefer "Kill Twitter" ;)) button would also make sense. After all, Twitter is in itself responsible for most items - and thus most potential "noise" - on FriendFeed. - Meryn Stol

you can still quickly create an imaginary friend (as Sam said it's part of groups now) but if you don't want to choose the private group setting yourself just go here http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Chris Heath

maybe i'm wrong and an imaginary friend is different than a private group, but the functionality seems the same - there was a discussion a few months ago about this: http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Chris Heath

Chris, yep... good point. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Imaginary friends are easy to setup, but... you really should be able to do a whole batch of them. - Ben Hanten

Ben, it's rather janky, but my students have private Twitter accts for labs in my class that I read and interact with using the Imaginary Friends + private Groups feature. Plus, I have a nice archive of all student activity that I can search through. Not a great solution, but a good workaround for my extreme case. - Sam Harrelson from IM

there's a lot on the friendfeed roadmap, and i think that's one of the items... if you participate in the friendfeed feedback room you can get lots of answers to these types of questions http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Chris Heath

You can search for the official FriendFeeders' feedback, as Chris suggested, with this saved search: https://friendfeed.com/ffss... - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Interesting topic. For me personally I use FF for reading rather than contributing or commenting, and via mobile more than the web, but I do agree the UI isn't the best. I would like a google reader or better still, a Feedly style interface. I want to know about what I haven't seen that's in my groups or feeds. And I want that simple and easy with no hidden features or maybe simple and expert interfaces. - Keith Bennett from BuddyFeed

You'r right Robert. - ALPER DURUKAN

It's not the UI that's keeping the mainstream from using the site. This is akin to asking why the mainstream has yet to discover the wonders of traditional message boards. Fact of the matter is most people don't have the desire (not to mention spare time) to continually engage with a stream full of random social media tidbits on a regular basis. But if that's your cup of tea, I think the UI is excellent for sharing, discovering, and keeping up with the real-time chatter. - Aviv

ANNOYANCE: Why is it so difficult to find a list of just my "likes"? I can't find it at all. I can only find my likes through the "My discussions" link. Ugh. - Kevin Donahue

Kevin, it's pretty simple to get to your likes. http://friendfeed.com/samharr... - Sam Harrelson from IM

Has Kevin Fox responded to this thread? - Manuel Mas

Not sure he should -- seems like Robert made vicious and personal attack -- and a lack of response might be appropriate and classy. - Brian Sullivan

I certainly wouldn't join into this pile-on if I were Kevin. "Oh hey, I noticed you all were kicking me while I was trying to have a weekend, here I am now, go ahead for another round!" - Jason Wehmhoener

On the bright side, you know your service is about to hit mainstream when your biggest cheerleader starts to hate it (see Twitter). - Aviv

Aviv: nah, that's not a good predictor. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Have you noticed that the time stamp behavior of acting like a permalink is pretty much the norm across many sites? Check facebook and twitter for example. - Tsega Dinka

One thing I would like to know is, where is the link in friendfeed to the application key? I always have to search it from google. - Ru Viljoen

it's unnecessary to be brutally rude RB but these comments are valuable, we are expecting alot from 12 FF supergeeks, they cannot be perfect but they are incredibly good already. - Thomas Power

I think "hide" was perfectly designed. The user doesn't get smacked in the face immediately upon loading a page in friendfeed that resembles the control panel of an old fashioned telephone switchboard. One simple hide link, that the user will click when they want to hide something, that then asks what you want to hide. It's called not overwhelming the user with too much info at once,... more... - April Russo (app103)

April: they can put a lot of functionality into "settings" that would also do the same thing as hide does today. Most people don't figure out that the hide link has extra functionality. - Robert Scoble

It's better than what facebook does, which is to hide their multi-function hide button, until you hover over the item. I'd rather have it the friendfeed way and at least know it's there by looking and not by having to play "find the invisible features" game by moving my mouse all over the page waiting for all the little facebook easter eggs to make themselves known. You have no idea how... more... - April Russo (app103)

I DON'T KNOW WHY WE'RE YELLING! I LOVE LAMP! - Mark "Godt Nyt Ǻr"

(I'm being facetious. Robert's STRONG points are still pretty tactfully expressed, IMHO.) - Mark "Godt Nyt Ǻr"

http://ff.im/6n4fT - hachure

And I don't understand how any twitter user could possibly not know that the timestamp is a permalink. Timestamps on twitter are permalinks too. Ok, the clicking again thing was a bit of an easter egg, but how else could you add a nifty little feature like that without adding any clutter? Even if you gave a full tutorial FAQ, how on earth could you present all these little extras in a way that doesn't overwhelm a newbie and make them run away without reading the huge FAQ? - April Russo (app103)

Missing the point, not about geeks vs non-geeks, even geeks disagree on UI issues,and it is dismissive and insulting to act as if mainstream is not geeky enough to understand crappy UI. My opinion matters, and it was not until a fellow geek, Scoble, brought it up that anyone acknowledged that there may be some UI issues. - Liza

So go back to using twitter. - jcunwired

I know of a site that has worse issues, for example, clicking the RSS icon on a page takes you to a forum thread with a gazillion posts explaining how to subscribe to the content you want, using all the custom crap they have. You basically have to learn how to build your own RSS url before you can subscribe. And don't click the "Mark" button on a forum thread there unless you want to... more... - April Russo (app103)

FF may be messing with affordances, but I don't see it as f*cling with them. I see it as an attempt to innovate. The 'nonintuitive' behavior is a bit of a PITA, but it adds richness to the app. It is also innovation in action. The most painful upshot of suck innovation ia the fet associated with playing with a UI's functionality - you might end up breaking something really important or... more... - Jason Miller from iPhone

JCUnwired That is not helpful or constructive. Stick to one-sided debates. - Liza

Funny thing is though... I have used Excel and Word without ever reading a manual. Now I'm pretty ninja at both but never had any formal training. Neither has about 95% of the people I know how use it, yet everyone I know has worked it out enough to use it well. See, they have these things up the top like File, Edit etc that hold the functions. Those things are not always required and... more... - Johnny Worthington

Well put johnny - Mark from iPhone

Which social app has the best interface? Easy Facebook. - John Hardy

As far as I can tell "affordance" and "discoverability" are different ways of looking at the same concept. And I've been complaining about the timestamp thing for a long time. - Karl Knechtel

I've been complaining about FF's ease of use since I started using it. I'm glad there's some traction on it. ridiculous that the time stamp is not displayed as a (permanent) link. - jbrotherlove

Never mind that the timestamp isn't displayed as a link. The problem is that it makes no sense for the timestamp to be the thing that is clicked. - Karl Knechtel

I like it, its a nice gate. It keeps FF tech based. It keeps things relevant. Its an Acid Test. There are plenty of alternatives. And those alternatives that cater to everyone, are full of Blither Blather. If you pass the gate, and pass the Acid Test, you learn about the community and the discussion. With a robust Community and Discussion, Self Policing and Spammers are annihilated. Self Healing Robust System. - Robert Higgins

Apostol Apostolov, Ana ( http://friendfeed.com/ana ) has confirmed that they're on the issue of adding recipients and groups after posting an item about a month ago - http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Chris Heath

I totally agree with Robert HIggins & Johnny Worthington's recent comments - Chris Heath

Robert, thanks for your thoughts. Three quick responses: affordances aren't something that someone fucks with, they're something that a designer gives to a design and it's fine to say that you don't think I'm designing a product with proper affordances or strong enough affordances, but the implication that I fucked them up is that I took the gestalt natural affordances of something and... more... - Kevin Fox

The above distinction is important because the argument then becomes one of whether or not FriendFeed has been imbued with proper affordances or not. Now naturally the answer varies from person to person, as it does with any UI for any product. FriendFeed is trying to balance functionality with simplicity and, as is the case for any product with that task, any point on the spectrum could be criticized for either hiding too much of the complexity or showing too much, even at the same by different people. - Kevin Fox

So the strategy then becomes, as has been mentioned here, one of making the simple things easy and the complex things possible. The most common tactic to enable that strategy, and one we rely upon a lot at FriendFeed, is that of progressive disclosure. This works for some people and not for others, but it's usually an excellent way to make a UI that's not intimidating to a new user, and... more... - Kevin Fox

As for the timestamp also acting as the permalink: Well, you're absolutely right. This is a completely improper affordance that only makes sense if you happen to be familiar with blogs that use the same convention. Fixing this (with something less heavy-handed than a link that says 'link' or 'permalink' or (gasp) an icon of two links in a chain) is high on our list and I want to fold it... more... - Kevin Fox

When we get that worked out in a way we're happy with then we'll roll it out. Until then, it's also important to consider user confidence, and that tweaking a UI too often when trying to find the right answer makes users less comfortable with the design and their ability to manipulate it, even if they don't consciously notice any change. For this reason a few things stay rough a little longer until we have what we think is the right answer, not just a stopgap one. - Kevin Fox

As always, thanks for the feedback, and for trying to make FriendFeed a better place. - Kevin Fox

Wow - Bwana ☠

Wow. +500 xp to Kevin. - Sam Harrelson

Kevin I love you because you explain why you are messing with the affordances! :-) - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Doesn't sound like they're ignoring it to me, Robert :) - Bwana ☠

Bwana: me neither! Glad Kevin explained. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I'm liking this article simply because of Kevin's explanation of why things are the way they are here on friendfeed. He knocked that one out of the park. - Alex Scoble

Kevins camp. In Japanese there is one word for beauty. Kirei. Actually, it is the same word for Clean Kirei. 奇麗 FF for me is clean and beautiful. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" Leonardo daVinci - Robert Higgins

So if we're going to change the time stamp from being a permalink, can we use it to sort posts chronologically? That is the one affordance no one can discover. - Andrew Smith

I didn't read the full thread, but reading the top and (what is at this point) the bottom really helps me understand what the UI people do. Thanks Robert and Kevin! - Andrew

Big props to Kevin Fox. - Sameer

Kevin rocks. Even on a Sunday night. They pay me to say stuff like that at work. The thought of having to step up to the plate anytime 24/7 with that level of professionalism is daunting, to say the least. So yah, big props to Kevin Fox. - Jason Wehmhoener

I actually like the current UI. I like the feature set. I agree it DOES need a more intuitive and quicker way to know about and learn the deeper features. - George Hall (Australia)

There is something to be said for having the conversation first - then Kevin calmly explaining his pts. It gives others a chance to respond honestly, and then Kevin gets far more valuable feedback. Selifishly, I also like the fact that I can see others' views - many who did not address UI issues but showed a defensive sense of entitlement (see Louis's chart on new adopters)...Robert,... more... - Liza

Great responses Kevin. For the record, I'm a fan of the "progressive disclosure" approach. - Mike Doeff from iPhone

Really great points, Robert. I've learned some things because of this discussion. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. - Brian Adrian

One answer to Kevin. Blogs, since the beginning of when I started to use them used the "permalink" or "#" convention. I guess the thing is that in FriendFeed the CSS here is hiding the blue underline, so people don't know that the time stamp is a link. It's tough designing for the web, I know. That's why I don't do it. At least very often. :-) - Robert Scoble

Twitter uses a time stamp as a perma-link as well. </fuel to fire> - Bwana ☠

Yeah. I just tweeted about that myself. </more fuel to fire> - Dennis Jernberg

Fascinating. Didn't know about the timestamp as permalink, but I didn't suffer from unnatural affordance issues prior to reading this discussion either. Not an ubergeek, but I don't suffer. So, maybe FF is not "above the heads" of the average, but merely yields enough at any level to meet whatever the particular need might be, wacky affordances or not. And people who avoid it because it is "too hard" need to toughen up a bit. This is 2009 and the Internet, after all. - Martha

Also, the "Share" link exposes the permalink as well which I think was a great addition to alleviate the time stamp confusion. - Bwana ☠

Wow. How did Kevin get those 5 paragraphs contiguously posted? Copy-paste-post. Copy-paste-post? Or is there some other secret weapon not yet released? - Nick in Manila

Nick - I'd bet 1000 gil on Notepad/Textedit :) - Bwana ☠

I'm waiting for the twitter theme for friendfeed, to show people exactly how easy FF is to use considering its features and exactly how braindead twitter's UI is. - Andy Bakun

Nick & Bwana: Textedit and copy/paste/post. As I was c/p/p-ing I thought about how I could make a tool using the API to allow for this kind of thing, then envisioned how that would break FriendFeed and banished the thought. (and then I just commented about it anyhow. Oh what have I wrought? I am become death, destroyer of words.) - Kevin Fox

Bwana: hey, at least FriendFeed's designer listens and answers back. That might get more mud thrown his way, but a whole lot of love too. Personally Twitter's design isn't very good, but everyone thinks it is because it doesn't have many features so they perceive that as simplicity. I perceive it as inferior but that really pisses off the Twitter types and they start arguing with me about stuff like the above. - Robert Scoble

Robert - I was just thinking that. We would NEVER get this kind of interaction with a Twitter dev on a work day. - Bwana ☠

Part of me knew Kevin would address this at some point. It was merely a matter of when. - Bwana ☠

I hope this thread/conversation doesn't end any time soon, either here on this post or elsewhere. I want FF to be the best it can. - phil baumann

I think FF is waaaaaay easier to use than Twitter and recently started using FF to follow my twitter feeds. Images and videos are inline and comments are threaded (no silly @ replies). I only wish more of my friends were on it!! (also, it would be nice if comments were formatted with the commenters name first which seems to be the convention on most sites i.e. "May: blah blah blah"). - May

To go back to the top a little bit: does anyone think it ISN'T weird that not all the links on FF are blue? Not just the time stamp: the service your content was imported from, your name at the top of your profile, and the time stamp are all non-blue links. Is there a logical reason for those inconsistencies? I've never understood that. - Andrew

Awesome explanation by Kevin. I happen to love FF's progressive disclosure. I think the 'hide' feature is a great example of this. You could argue that they might make the second stage a bit more obvious, but it's still a lot better than a huge drop down menu at the start. - Ben Reierson

Even Twitter has a ramp up time. It took me about a month of working it to get comfortable with it. Only slightly longer than it took me with Twitter. And it is light years better in most every way. I agree with Robert's desire to enforce change through public criticism, but I think it important to keep it in perspective: FF is generally a better experience on all fronts. Kudos to Kevin Fox and the rest of the team. I feel confident they are more than capable of seeing issues and resolving them. - Martha

i never really had a problem with that Andrew, and I never had the problem with the permalink either... if your mouse changes from pointer to finger, then it's a link and you can see the destination in the status bar - Chris Heath

Andrew: I actually hate blue underlines. Designers have hated that affordance for years. They look ugly. They make text harder to read. I'm in Kevin Fox's camp on that one. Get rid of underlines! Just make affordances that people can figure out without being told about (like clicking twice on hide or clicking twice on the time stamps). - Robert Scoble

robert, i don't get your clicking twice on hide problem... hide seems fine, and while i don't use it much i don't recall clicking twice, like with the timestamp - Chris Heath

Chris: normal people don't mouse over every word in a UI to discover whether there is a secret link there. Also, explain how hovering over "hide" would tell a user that there's different functionality there if you click twice on that word? - Robert Scoble

Chris: if you click twice on the word "hide" you will get different UI that will give you different choices. If you click twice on the time stamp you will get a popout window. Not intuitive at all. - Robert Scoble

when i click hide i get an undo and hide options links, that seems the correct UI - i agree with you on the timestamp, but the hide thing isn't the same - Chris Heath

++Kevin - Cristo

Chris: Hide does act differently, I agree, but most people, in my experience, don't look at the second page because they don't expect to see more options. Remember 99% of people never click on Google's Advanced Options. Do you REALLY expect people to click twice on Hide? I don't. And even if they did, shouldn't those features be in settings too? Where people expect to find them? - Robert Scoble

i don't buy your beef w/ hide, but i agree on the timestamp - i also agree with you on not having to hover everything to see if it's click-able and also don't like underlining, so there needs to be some other visual cue of the link/feature - Chris Heath

sometimes features do need to be learned/taught and everything can't be intuitive... i think we might be overshooting our ideals for usability. remember the days of three ring binders and books and manuals for using any given system or software package? we've come a long way, but users do have to learn some things. i think friendfeed has done a good job of making the site usable for the... more... - Chris Heath

Given a top complaint about FriendFeed is too much noise, Hide needs to be more intuitive. - Bwana ☠

Since I still get the dumb blonde / not techie treatment from many, I am going to go w/ it and say that even I figured out hide early on. The timestamp stuff was news to me. - Liza

I'd wager at least half of FriendFeed doesn't know about the second page of hide options. I've had to explain it countless times and a ton of people didn't even know you could selectively hide services based on comment/like behavior, etc - Bwana ☠

Kevin, Thanks for listening and major props for taking your time to listen to constructive critisicm. - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

9/10 of the folks that use Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc don't know all the features and functions. Having every single function be completely intuitive and/or labeled is not needed for mainstream acceptance or usage if that's what we're all worried about here. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Every single function, I agree. Hide, needs to be more intuitive. - Bwana ☠

Bwana, I agree as a power-user, but how many folks would actually use "Hide"? It's an edge-case function that will/would never catch on with the mainstream. I just don't get these complaints. - Sam Harrelson from IM

Sam: you're right. But I didn't get this kind of pushback when I evangelized Twitter and Facebook had many more hooks to get people into their system than FriendFeed does (and keep them there) and even Facebook doesn't have a lot of the weird affordances that FriendFeed does even though it's more complex. The complaints I get consistently on FriendFeed (a lot of which have to do with... more... - Robert Scoble

Oh, and the number of comments here tells me a lot of people feel very passionately about FriendFeed and want it to be better, even if they are telling me I'm full of it. - Robert Scoble

The complaint is noise. There's too much. There's too many duplicates. I don't want to see "X". These are complaints I see and answer often. The solution is hide and they don't know about them. It's not a power user function imho. - Bwana ☠

FF lost a lot of users during the initial launch because people didn't know about or want to properly hide unwanted stuff. - Bwana ☠

"FriendFeed is full of baby photos" Classic complaint. Solved by hide. - Bwana ☠

It's always the user's fault. Always. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

Robert, I got on Twitter around Thanksgiving of '06 b/c of your evangelicalism (thank you/curse you btw!). But the concept there was/is much more easy to grok. Of course folks are going to think FF is hard b/c it is hard. But to bastardize JFK, "we choose to go to the moon and do these other things in this decade not b/c they are easy but b/c they are hard!" - Sam Harrelson from IM

friendfeed isn't hard...unless you think a blank piece of paper is hard. - Alex Scoble

Depends on your definition of hard. Some people think complicated or inconvenient is hard. - Bwana ☠

Alex, have you ever written a book for a publisher that loaned you money and expects the money back? A blank piece of paper is incredibly hard! - Sam Harrelson

Look at lists. Very powerful tool of FriendFeed, but for some, it's too much work. Some may call it hard, some may call it.... too much work :) - Bwana ☠

Sam: but this blank piece of paper can write itself thanks to the integration with other sites :) - Andrew

I know in the apps I've tested, if the UI was difficult for the end user, they would avoid using it. - Bwana ☠

Andrew, you are completely right. Good point. I'm thinking from a contributing point of view (b/c I'm a teacher and I always want to influence, etc) but you're right. - Sam Harrelson

Alex: is blank paper sort of like a blank Wordpress entry screen? I get it then. - Robert Scoble

Seeing a real-time stream of the full conversation is highly desirable and one of the best features of the service. I design and use software all the time and didn't know about the time stamp link until someone told me about it. Robert is doing them (another) favor by using controversial language to bring attention to the issue. I bet we see an update in a week or two and the service will be better for it. - Chip Ramsey

I can see it now: if entry["from"]["id"] == "scobelizer": theme = "lots-o-links" - DGentry

either that, or entry["body"] = pigLatinize(entry["body"]) - DGentry

Wow ... Great dialog. Kudos to Kevin for his comments! I have demo'd Friendfeed for more people than I can count. Most of the issue has to do with people's time vs value (or just fun). Is it harder than Facebook? NO! Nobody says you have to use it all and 9 out of 10 people I've demo'd Facebook for have NO IDEA what a permission is (Think about that ... and the defaults?!). Twitter has... more... - Charlie Anzman

Then ... The Friendfeed Browser and OS! - Charlie Anzman

Robert, given Kevin's responses, you might want to edit/tweak the Original Post/headline. I wish there was a way to promote the comments so they were 'pinned' to the OP - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Aaman: what's an OP? The headline? - Robert Scoble

Oh, thank goodness. I was wondering what an OP was, and feeling dumb that I didn't know. I didn't want to have to read 328 comments to find out. - Glen, Bespectacled Elder

Yes, the Original Post - I wasn't familiar with the term myself, and saw it first on this very thread, then googled it. (It can also mean Original Poster) - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Glen: I'm not scared of feeling dumb. I feel dumb every day given the quality of the people I hang out with. - Robert Scoble

@Kevin: wondering if there could be a link that would take you to a page that would show what features have been added, disabled, or removed. - Harold - Happy 2010

Robert, you should lock comments, so it's immortalized properly at Kevin's reply - Matthew DeVries

Matthew: you make sense. I've locked the comments here so you can see Kevin Fox's reply without digging back too far. - Robert Scoble

Alex Scoble

When it comes to security, it's impossible to be 100% secure. There is always risk, no matter how many levels of protection you have. Same thing is true of content protection. It is impossible to stop a pirate from cracking your piracy protections that you have built in to a CD.

August 6 - Comment - Like - Share

Michael W. May, TheHenry, Rob Michael (Atmos Trio) and 22 other people liked this

Good security is all about trade-offs; there's always a point beyond which adding security to a system imposes a cost that is worse than the potential attack itself. - Tristan Seligmann

15 more comments

Yes...you can't secure a system to the point where it will no longer be able to meet business needs. At least not if you want to stay in business. - Alex Scoble from IM

OK, so maybe the impossible word works in some technical discussions. Still not fond of it. Who cares? Far more interested in what's possible. - Jason Wehmhoener

I tend to think that the real key... and it's important for both security and other things... is detection and recovery. You can put all the DDOS prevention code in the world in front of your site, but if you don't monitor it so you can spot the one time somebody gets past it and if you aren't ready to plug the hole when it does, you just wasted your time. - Wirehead

I agree, Wirehead. Vigilance is totally key to security. - Alex Scoble from IM

The part about content protection that people refuse to get is that you can't do detection and recovery adequately with any reasonable DRM system. :) - Wirehead

Agree 100% with you on that one Alex. - Jim Connolly

http://ff.im/6fHmz I'd say the message of Strong Authentication, Encryption, P2P, UMSB is like a broken record, but the only records ppl are familiar with any more are database entries. ;-) - michael silverton

Agree. Yet we still have the TSA... - Anthony Citrano

Anthony, you still need the perception that we are secure. :) - Alex Scoble

Ah yes, of course. Forgot the value of theater. - Anthony Citrano

The security the TSA provides is mostly an illusion... I think it's mostly there to create jobs. And give some people a power trip. - Lindsay is in 20-ten

Alex, you're instigating Critical Thinking again. Look out, you'll be The List! ;-) Or, as @hrheingold says http://u.nu/3t6s "So I got very excited about this idea of Critical Thinking, and went to my daughter's school and learned, that phrase, that idea -- Critical Thinking -- is widely known as a plot to induce children to challenge authority." - michael silverton

:) - Alex Scoble from IM

@Lindsay: yes, that's why I like callin’ it security spectacle, security theater. we love to be lied to, even by ourselves. - Anthony Citrano

Agree - Security is all about making the "prize" not worth the effort and/or punishment. Nothing is 100% foolproof, the trick is to make it not worth going after. - Jeff (the マクダジ of FF)

Which is why phishing is so hard to get rid of...the prize is sizable, the effort minimal and for phishers sitting in Russia/Romania/Nigeria/etc. the risk of prosecution is negligible. - Alex Scoble

Jenna Bilotta

I hate my job... - http://origin.reddit.com/r...

August 9 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Benjamin Golub, Ronny Arild, Louis Gray and 3 other people liked this

hee hee! via lily. don't forget to read through to the very end. :) - Jenna Bilotta

Awesome... like others, I didn't get what it was about until the last sentence... hilarious. - Timothy Federwitz

Leo Laporte

From my inbox: Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she'll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal.. If you give her a smile, she'll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be...

August 6 - Comment - Like - Share

Angel Smith, Adam Taylor, SH (Siteler Hakkında) and 143 other people liked this

Such the philosopher. Um, you didn't take your wife to China did you? - Rick Emery

32 more comments

From the great philosopher Leo ! - Chris Ames

It seems Leo got this in his E-mail. - Brent - Loving Life

Heard this from a customer the other day, but he ended it, "So don't giver her any crap." It's funnier that way. - Jeremiah Green

In my house you have to give me the groceries to get a meal, but you can give my wife flour and sugar and she'll give you back bliss in a cookie. - dthree

How true, and how soon us men forget... - Sean Higgins

Give the greats a sad song, they'll make it better - won't bore people w/my list - heretic_twit

If I give her a shirt will she iron it? *ducks* - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF) from iPod

I'll give her the sperm and let the government pay for the baby like all the homies do in compton. - John Hillestad

"when the leaf falls, the tree trembles" - remember Neda from Iran - heretic_twit

If you give her your wallet, it will become full....... (not with money, but with bills) *ducks* - Sudar

Love it. - Michele Lorito-Chase

How true! I just gave a bad answer and got back the Hell. - Opensource Obscure

Too True! - Lillian Banchik from twhirl

I love it. Sent it to my girlfriend. I know she is going to agree. - Parvez Halim

I am a woman ..... trying to give me some money and see what happens FIUUU! FIUUU! :-) - pallina60 Loon

First comes the Wedding Ring then comes the Suffer-Ring ;-) - Richard Bitting

@pallina60Loon LOL a massive exception to the rule - Parvez Halim

@pallina60loon not an exception, still the rule. When a man gives a woman money, that is a small debt, which the woman "then multiples and enlarges what is given to her" :) - Ken & Kiyomi

@ Parvez Halim: I do not think is exceptional. People prefer to think that the woman is sweet and helpful. Sometimes it is not so - pallina60 Loon

@ ❦ ❦ Kiyomi & Ken: I have not talked to repay the money :-) - pallina60 Loon

@Richard Bitting: LOL - pallina60 Loon

um... - Liz Dorland

Someone please create a male counterpoint! - ZuDfunck

For ZuDfunck: Whatever you give a man, he will make less. If you give him a musical instrument, he'll pawn it. If you give him a house, soon you will be homeless. If you give him groceries, he'll give you a mess.. If you give him a smile, he'll give you a grope. He reduces and diminishes what is given to him. - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)

When did you start 'reading' your mail Leo? I had a lot to write to you for years but couldn't find a way to reach you. I didn't bother writing an e-mail since you repeatedly mentioned that you didn't read them at all :) - M. Serdar Kuzuloglu from Android

MVB: Dude! That was Cold. - ZuDfunck

با عضویت در اتاق " در ارتباط با توییتر... " از جدید ترین متعلقات این سرویس با خبر شوید... اسمایلی : (تبلیغات).http://friendfeed.com/twitte-r - سینه سرخ

Am I the only one who thinks this quote is a bit male chauvinistic? The quote has a wrapper that appears to make women look great but underneath, it stereotypes women as a typical "wife" in a submissive male chauvinistic system. Again, my 2 cents based on a cursory reading on a hectic day. - Krishnan Subramanian

Good point. Groceries and meal are chauvinistic, among others. Sorry, but the theme had good intent. - Dan Barber

Too good - Anand Sharma

Hello and welcome to "Proud to be a Woman". - Mine Ekim

LOL - Love it - Tyson Williams

hahahaha excellent!! soo true!! :D - Simply Teeeya

Erin @queenofspain

Seriously you people satisfied with our health care system are lying. You are big, fat, evil, don't want to care about me, lying mcliarpants

August 7 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Tricia Harvey, heretic_twit, Chris Olin and 49 other people liked this

or we're just smart enough to realize that the day we get nationalized healthcare, you can forget about ever having a cure for cancer or aids or what have you - Josh Betz

70 more comments

Josh that is an ignorant and exagerrated view and there is nothing to prove what you just said. The people of this country have been scared for too long of socialized/nationalized medicine. Our law enforcement, fire department, and more have been socialized and they work. I am willing to try anything, as long as its change. - Haggis (Sean Loyless) from Android

Agreed Sean.. - Bill Heslin

Josh, do you seriously think that you get cancer research through the hospital system? - Alex Scoble

watching Newshour and it makes me sick to think the mcliarpants are gonna carry the day with their shrill brute selfishness. it really underscores the essence of American movement and bedrock conservatices: they dont give a damn about anybody else but them and theirs. makes me sick to think we are not going to get reform cuz of the nasty curs. Feh! - Thom Kennon

I don't normally get involved with political topics but I can't help it when it comes to health care. I'm Canadian and our health care is a joke, you don't want any part of it. The reason most Canadians are against Obama's plan is that we'll have no where to go if we get really sick. Canadians put up with 8 hour waits for simple care because its "free" but we flock to the U.S when we're... more... - Justin Luey

Cancer research, for example, is good and all, but we need to be focusing on prevention. - Nick Humphries

According to WaPo columnist Steven Pearlstein, you're also a "political terrorist" if you get in the way of consensus on health care reform. - Garmon Estes

As if cancer research wasn't already funded by the government. Without the NIH, where would we be? The profit margins on anti-cancer drugs aren't exactly making pharmaceutical companies obscenely rich. Anyway, nothing Obama is proposing will prevent the Saudi Arabian sheiks and European royalty from getting state-of-the-art care in Rochester, MN. And Canadians can still come if they're willing to pay cash. - Victor Ganata

48% of U.S. voters now rate the U.S. health care system as good or excellent. 19% rate it as poor. The new polling also shows that 80% of those with insurance rate their own coverage as good or excellent. That's an awful lot of big, fat, evil, don't want to care about me, lying mcliarpants! LOL - Don Smith

I am sorry you feel that way. Unfortunately, sometimes in a two-party system, when one side doesn't like the way that a particular problem is being addressed, whether it's from the perception that it's being pushed through too hastily, or with too many hangers-on or "pork," the alternative that some choose to express is, "what we have now is better than what is being presented." Here in... more... - midnightgolfer

But it's not mutually exclusive. The 80% who like their current insurance aren't necessary averse to health care reform. And it's all perspective. The U.S. health care system is definitely better than the average developing country, but it's definitely broken in a lot of ways. Nothing is perfect. I think people are at least aware enough that just because they really like their insurance now doesn't mean they'll necessarily have their insurance in the next year or so, given the current state of the economy. - Victor Ganata

Josh, that first comment reminds me of a somewhat famous Paul Tsongas gaffe - he claimed that it was America's health care system that produced the treatment that (at that time) saved his life, but in fact it came from Canada. The fact is, medical innovations come from all over the world... (edit: cite here: http://www.sociology101.net/reading... ) BTW,... more... - Andrew C

Good god. FIrst of all, we're not getting Canada's health care or socialized health care. The current program on the table lets you keep your insurance if you want to. But you may not because there will be competition. Second of all, I just spent Mon-Friday in the hospital and anyone who is happy with their health care in this country hasn't been in the hospital lately. - Erin @queenofspain

Justin: I'm sorry you feel like but that is not my experience of health care here in Canada at all, nor of most people judging by the reports seen recently. There is an issue of waiting times but they are a problem wherever you go. - WorldofHiglet

The portion of our healthcare system that is already government funded is problematic, so it's not hard to see why there are concerns about moving further in that direction. Safety net hospitals--those that provide care to low income, uninsured, under-insured, at-risk populations--play a crucial role in community health, but struggle to stay afloat in the face of late and absent... more... - Kathy Fitch

But the private system is in itself broken, and its brokenness overflows onto the public system, exacerbating the problems they already face. - Victor Ganata

No doubt that the whole thing is overdetermined--the issues and the causes thereof are many and complicated. I've been on lots of sides of the thing: a unionized higher ed worker with utterly fabulous benefits, a stay at home mom staring the possibility of COBRA in its very expensive face, a part of an organization having to provide the insurance to its workers, a part of an... more... - Kathy Fitch

Here's a quote from Rep. Mike Ross, one of the Blue Dogs, bragging about how he stalled the bill: "If it had been based on Medicare rates, I can assure you that it would have eventually ended up resulting in a single payer-type system, because Medicare has really good rates, because they're negotiating for every senior in America. Private insurance companies could not have competed with that." -- protecting his constituency from "really good rates", what a stand-up guy. - (dot)lizard kelly

Well--good rates don't change the actual costs, that's the thing. Medicare doesn't cover actual cost. That cost will have to be covered, though. - Kathy Fitch

@WorldOfHiglet - agreed! I'm Canadian and proud of our health care system. There's waiting times for non-essential procedures, but never anything for a life-threatening condition. No-one in Canada is punted off the plan for a "pre-existing condition" or recission. - Matt Mastracci

A system not based in profit would go a hell of a long way towards controlling costs. - (dot)lizard kelly

I expect to profit when I provide a product or service. Seems like most of us do. Research and development, medications, blood products, sutures, medical and surgical expertise, specialized machinery and folks to operate it-it all costs. Who in that chain should not profit from the product or service they provide? Even not-for-profit organizations do need to make a profit, it's just... more... - Kathy Fitch

And that is why, Holden, you are a worthy God. ;-) (When did that happen, by the way? I must have been sleeping.) - Kathy Fitch

Hah--well please let us know if you have any urges toward flooding us all out and starting over with a better class of humans. - Kathy Fitch

No fee schedule--public or private--actual covers the prices anyone charges, although Medicare really is one of the better payers. But since the prices aren't at all subject to market forces, how do we figure out what a fair price is? Basically it's arbitrarily set, although I realize Medicare's RBRVS system (which most private payers tend to adapt to their fee schedules to anyway)... more... - Victor Ganata

Victor, yes, the inflammatory falsehoods part is really a key factor for me. Following the money behind the "grassroots" movement to disrupt and block reform leads to a who's who of the most corrupt health profiteers. - (dot)lizard kelly

That's the crux of it, isn't it, Victor? It's like death and taxes--impossible to talk about it any calm or reasonable fashion because it's an inherently emotional thing. Pushing through a huge new model--so huge that no given individual seems to be conversant with it in its entirety--seems like a really bad idea to me, just on the basis of sheer logic. Even smaller things that seem... more... - Kathy Fitch

The problem is, as Kathy points out, the government is already massively involved with health care. With Titles XVIII and XIX and with EMTALA, that pretty much sets the stage for everyone else. And no one is seriously considering abolishing Medicare, Medicaid, or anti-patient dumping laws. Even many hard-core anti-reformists like Medicare a lot, so where does that leave us? - Victor Ganata

Holden, I will keep an inflatable dinghy handy and watch for animals wandering by in pairs, just in case. - Kathy Fitch

Relatively speaking, a public option is nowhere near as radical as Title XVIII and Title XIX were at the time. Single-payer, now that would be pretty radical. The thing is, I'm getting the sense that the most vociferous and most violent opposition is coming from people who have the least sense of how all the pieces fit together, egged on not-so-surreptitiously by the people who have the most to lose should reform happen, and who don't give a crap about the average American. - Victor Ganata

Yup--and on the flip side, wholesale embrace seems to flow mostly from a "this should be better, dammit" space, which is understandable, but not so useful. It matters what happens here, but it's just so darn big. Just go look at all the active bills concerning XVIII and XIX at any given time! Mind boggling! When things are that huge, people are going to default to emotion, no matter which side they might champion. Fear is a powerful thing. - Kathy Fitch

And we're just talking about how we pay. Quality is a whole separate issue. - Kathy Fitch

Ok, I've read all the comments and I definitely don't have the insight of everyone else, especially the specifics of what the national health care plan look like at this point. But I do have a couple things I want to mention. 1) It would not be like Canada's system, it would be more like France (mixed public and private) 2) I live in MA, and next year I'm off my mom's insurance (I'm... more... - Heather

Cry me a river, srsly - LANjackal

"I expect to profit when I provide a product or service. Seems like most of us do." ... like the police, Kathy? Or is it possible that certain areas of life are not well served by a market paradigm? - Andrew C

Yes, precisely like the police, who get paid for their work--who profit from it, as should all who work for a living. Is it possible to work for no pay? But of course, I do it all of the time. I call it volunteering or doing pro bono work, and I think it's important. I love psychic income. Unfortunately, no one lets me write psychic checks to cover the bills. - Kathy Fitch

Just because a system is non-profit doesn't mean the people who work there don't get paid. - Andrew C

Yes, I believe I pointed that out above. Not for profit enterprises must actually generate a profit in order to meet payroll, pay vendors, build, secure loans, etc. "Profit" is not the enemy, and shouldn't be conflated with "profiteering," which is a whole different ball of wax. - Kathy Fitch

It seems to me the health insurance system of the US has tremendous perverse incentives which are basically inevitable results of trying to provide it via a open market. Healthy people willing to gamble may find it advantageous to not get insured, and insurers have huge incentives to dump sick people - both those who have individual plans and those who have small enough employers that the insurers can and will dump the entire group plan. - Andrew C

And non-profits don't need to make a _profit_, they just need to cover costs. - Andrew C

Ah, it's splitting hairs, Andrew. They need to make money. A hospital's costs include things like new machinery. To cover that cost, they have to make money--there has to be some gain after all current costs are covered. They roll that profit back into the organization, and then they might be able to afford, say, a decent MRI machine. In any case, not all hospitals are not-for-profit ventures. There are some great investor owned hospitals in the world. - Kathy Fitch

I'm relatively fine with for-profit hospitals. I am mostly unconvinced that for-profit health insurance is workable. - Andrew C

Seems like we're about to get a chance to compare, doesn't it? I can't pretend to know what will happen. It's going to be an interesting ride. There have been some actual studies that correlate lower quality of care (fewer qualified staff, higher rates of errors) with free market forces in healthcare. If the concern is constantly the survival of the institution, then perhaps the health... more... - Kathy Fitch

The reason pubicly funded institutions and most health care delivery institutions (like where I work) struggle is that there is a huge number of people who aren't insured. This drives costs up for everyone as we just try to break even and what the reform really is trying to address. We're talking about adding about $100 billion a year to a >$1 trillion dollar a year industry. This is... more... - Carey Lumeng

While I am not opposed to health care reform, I am opposed to having the government run health care. We'll end up with mediocrity, just like our government run education system! - Darren

None of the proposals currently on the table intend to implement a government-run health care system. This is a strawman that we really need to stop bringing up if we intend to have fruitful discussions about what direction we need to go. - Victor Ganata

Healthcare isn't perfect, there is many things that can be done to help, however, having the government take it over is the worst thing that can happen. The good thing is most Americans are waking up to Obama and his nonsense, hence his poll numbers dropping. I would also bet that most who still support him, have not read any of the bill. The truth is, the government does not run... more... - Spencer

The statement that rings truest to me is that profit is ok but profiteering isn't. :-) - Mathew A. Koeneker

The revenue that you have to reinvest in your infrastructure isn't usually referred to as profit, though, is it? And neither are wages paid in fair compensation for labor provided. I realize it's semantics, but I think it would be pretty evil if fire fighters and police actually derived profit from their work, although I'm all for them receiving fair compensation for the difficult and dangerous work they do protecting us. - Victor Ganata

CapEx is a sound investment usually and not one that I would refer to as profit. I would actually like for first responders to get a little extra compensation much as I would for teachers as these are industries where going the extra mile should in my opinion be rewarded. I just become enraged at "for-profit" healthcare companies as they do derive their profits not only from the argument of economies of scales and vertical domination of the market va their "in-house" pharmacies. What a racket? - Mathew A. Koeneker

I'm in my 20s, employed, I've got health insurance from my employer, and I haven't been to a hospital since I was young (and only once then). However, even I am wary of the pain that I will have to go through if I lose my job; I'm sure COBRA would be too costly. Besides, it wouldn't matter even if I did find a new job (not easy to do right now), thanks to pre-existing condition rules... more... - A. Karl Kornel from twhirl

I'm in my 20s and got laid off. COBRA's $145/mth, which has been OK for me. I'm not saying it'll be the same for everyone else, but I'm ok - LANjackal from IM

No, I'm actually looking forward to having a 23-year-old high school graduate in Washington override my doctor's decision on what medication I need. - Glen, Bespectacled Elder

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help." -- Ronald Reagan - Don Smith

Everyone misses the key --- the what's-mine-is-mine crowd who "want gummint off their backs" (but i bet they like the interstate highway system, a standing army, state colleges, subsidized cotton, regulated utilities) and the humanists (who believe people all deserve a basic right to food, health, shelter, safety). And the key is this: fee for services. This is the single most important... more... - Thom Kennon

I am not for "Obamacare." I am for having a discussion on things that need changing and making those changes. I don't care how it's done, but these things need doing. 1) Stop dinging people for pre-existing conditions 2) Stop over-charging for prescription drugs 3)Stop giving care that isn't effective or necessary (restless leg syndrome, overactive bladder, etc. We've gotten to the... more... - Francine Hardaway

Glen, what you said happens now. Except, one, the 23 yo bureaucrat might not be in DC, he or she is wherever your insurance company is headquartered. And two, under Obama's proposal, you can keep your current health insurance if you think it's good enough. - Andrew C from Android

I'm conservative, but I'll be honest, the 66% COBRA subsidy under the ARRA has been a lifesaver. Just FWIW - LANjackal from IM

Francine, yes, everything that takes away from worker productivity has been labeled a condition. The question is, who gets to decide what is effective treatment? Researchers? Clinicians? Insurance companies? Government officials? I do agree that incentives should be geared towards outcomes with objective measures rather than volume of procedures performed but the problem is that the... more... - Victor Ganata

I'm thinking of profit in more basic terms--the amount of money left after expenses have been subtracted from income. It seems natural to me that folks object when the portion that might actually be left, there, is quickly sucked up by the government, which isn't exactly renowned for efficiency and ethics. - Kathy Fitch

I'm not making an argument here, but really just posing a series of philosophical questions: *Do* people have a basic right to healthcare? If so, where do we draw the line? A basic right to immunizations, to health education, to emergency care, to open-heart surgery, to hip replacement, to orthodontia, to treatment for acne or eczema? The difficulty of drawing those lines is one source... more... - Kathy Fitch

I think people have a basic right to health care, both on ideological and pragmatic grounds. The ideology is down to what's right and wrong; the pragmatic argument is that society is not well served by having the poor suffer from treatable problems. I can see drawing the line for trivial and cheaply solved problems like usual teenage acne, paper cuts, etc. I can also see drawing a line for extraordinary costs. Every insurer, whether nationally run or private, for-profit or not, draws such lines. - Andrew C

Offering carrots and sticks for healthy lifestyles can only go so far. Who knew tobacco was carcinogenic back in the 1940s? Or asbestos? I think the idea that people willingly lead unhealthy lifestyles _because they plan to fall back on health insurance_ is ludicrous; everyone prefers to live a healthy life rather than get by with massive surgeries or other catastrophic interventions. - Andrew C

When people are in need of new organs, the health care system already does judge them on behaviors, like not allowing alcoholics to get new livers. But I think preventative medicine, at a basic level like annual check ups, screenings for high risk patients, vaccines, visits with a nutritionist, that kind of stuff, is totally reasonable to offer everyone. I mean before I got back on my... more... - Heather

Very true, Heather. Already, we must make these calls, and already we aren't so hot at it. If we have a right to healthcare, why shouldn't we have the right to a new kidney or lung or heart, even if our lifestyles in some measure caused those organs to fail? The junk food junkie might be the best teacher or counselor in the community, the drinker might be on point of composing the most... more... - Kathy Fitch

Teenage acne, by the way, is not at all trivial to the ones who suffer from it, and it's hugely expensive to treat. Check the prices on something like Doryx, for instance. Might seem like a purely cosmetic issue, but of course it has social implications, and mental health implications, as well. http://dermnetnz.org/acne... A friend of mine always used to say that the definition of "minor" surgery is "surgery on someone else." Just so, it seems, with many health afflictions. - Kathy Fitch

To those of you concerned about a single-payer option and the elimination of Employer Insurance, the President clarifys those concerns in this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Sharon McPherson

LOL ... That Oburkel! Such a kidder!! - Don Smith

Of course you're right Erin. I have Parkinson's Disease and Fibromyalgia that is going untreated because the Government Run Medicare system says my husband's $500 per wk pay check puts us over the threshold to receive assistance, although our monthly expenses amount to $2400. And my young grandchildren are desperately in need of Dental Care because the State Run Florida KidCare program... more... - Sharon McPherson

Sharon, the problem is that the opposition isn't addressing any of the issues you raise. They are lying about "death panels". Let's address the real issues, please. - Tom Talbott, Jr

The US is the only country in Western World that doesn't have some sort of nationalized system (and it is arguably one of the worst). I am confused at anyone who thinks that a corporation is going to operate in the best interest of the customer. It operates in the best interest of the share holders - it must. It is time to consider some government control, so people don't have to pay +$500 for "mostly covered". - Jeff Waite

Jess Lee

Grow a Mini Lawn On Your Fingers With Chia-Pet-Like Jewelry - http://www.refinery29.com/the_goo...

August 7 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

James (!?), Mahdi Ebrahimi, Kol Tregaskes and 34 other people liked this

with this you can now deliver eco-friendly knuckle sandwiches =P - vijay

15 more comments

Grass knuckles! - Joe Pierce

Chia knuckles...for when you want to beat some ass organically. - Neal Jansons

wow. i dont know. - Melissa

'scuse me while I mow my knuckles. - ronin

lol @ ronin :D Knuckle-mower has a nice 'ring' to it :D - vijay

wtf - Snipergirl

For the true autarkic life - until you die. ;) - Meryn Stol

lol - Anna Haro

WANT!!! - Steve C

wonder if it comes with it's own sprinkler system =P - vijay

They picked Grasslands! I wonder what Orion would look like in brass knuckle form. Steampunk would be easy enough... - Kevin Fox

Also useful for punching out Hummer drivers. - Kevin Pedraja

Bring me...a SHRUBBERY!! - Carlton Hackett

That is one phat mossy 4 finger ring, yo. - Timothy Federwitz from iPhone

Um....no. - April Buchheit from iPhone

Yeah, Ugh. - j1m

Jenna Bilotta

We'll Know When We Get There: Sincerely, John Hughes - http://wellknowwhenwegetthere....

August 7 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Ken Gidley, Ronny Arild, Tudor Bosman and 5 other people liked this

wow. fantastic post. - Jenna Bilotta

2 more comments

This is very impressive. A wonderful connection was made. - Louis Gray

That's just amazing. I'm sorry for Alison's loss! - Kevin Fox

A really well thought out and delivered post. I'm a huge John Hughes fan! - Timothy Federwitz

Mo Kargas

Death is Milliseconds Away… - http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/feature...

August 7 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Daryl Hunt on FF, Antonio Correnti, Demetrios the Traveller and 13 other people liked this

Oh, Mo! - Kate Foy

4 more comments

It's the dance of life, no different for humans really - Mo Kargas

Yikes, need a "do not like" button - Gwen Sutton

Don't we all feel like that poor red-breasted robin from time to time - motszi from iPhone

+1 for the "do not like" button... I have ever thought this would be very useful specially with regards to controversial news.. - Gordon Freeman from iPhone

He's behind you! - Kevin J Hatton

Dave Winer

FriendFeed API v2. http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009...

July 20 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Devon Govett, Thomas Amberg, Timothy Federwitz and 50 other people liked this

Thanks for posting this link, don't know how I missed it - Mark

14 more comments

Mark, you haven't subscribed to http://friendfeed.com/friendf... or http://friendfeed.com/bret - Jérôme Flipo

I WAS subscribed to Bret, but he went to a private feed? Either that or be blocked me for some reason. Edit, yep, blocked me. Don't know why, don't think I ever even commented on any of his posts :/ - Mark

It looks like Bret's feed is now private. At least, that's what a quick test on his feed thru the API says (error 405 : Not Allowed) - Zackatoustra from IM

Zack: 405 means method not allowed (IE you used a GET when you should have used a POST or vice-versa) - Benjamin Golub

One important thing FriendFeed API doesn't seem to have on a very cursory fast read: location, location, location! Really it's too bad. - Robert Scoble

Robert: geo is included in the output (http://friendfeed.com/api...), and you can tag new entries with the geo arg on input as well - Bret Taylor

bgolub Oh, ok. Thanks! I've done this too quickly... - Zackatoustra from IM

You can create entries with "geo" information now: http://friendfeed.com/api... - Benjamin Golub

Benjamin, I take that back, very cool, thank you! - Robert Scoble

Thanks Dave checking it out. Great work Benjamin & team. Now to figure out how to use this to save many hours coding up similar stuff for my selfish project. - Mark Essel

Geo location features sound awesome :) - Susan Beebe

I hope Atebits will do a FriendFeed client for the iPhone now! - Ralf Rottmann

Agree with Ralf. We *need* a killer FriendFeed app for the iPhone!! Please? - Timothy Federwitz

Why are posts from weeks ago coming up now? - Mark

Probably me discovering older posts and liking? Nope it wasn't me :) - Mark Essel from iPhone

Brian Hendrickson

updated my imgfave - http://imgfave.com/brianjesse

August 6 - Comment - Like - Share

James Furlo, Alex Scrivener, AJ Kohn and 11 other people liked this

My God. It's full of stars. - Lindsay is in 20-ten

I knew this would look cool on ff - Brian Hendrickson

You have some great photos over there! Awesome perspective shots. - Timothy Federwitz

Baard @ Pixum to Baard's feed, iPhone

App Shopper: 360 Viewer (Photography) - http://appshopper.com/photogr...

August 7 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Mohammad Abdurraafay, Vishal Jain and Timothy Federwitz liked this

"Widen your horizon with 360 Viewer, a 3D Panorama viewer for iPhone. With this application you'll be able to download, manage and experience high quality Virtual Tours using iPhone touch capabilities. 360 Viewer is great for real estate agencies and hotel owners who want to be able to show their properties on iPhone." - Baard @ Pixum from Bookmarklet

Robert Scoble

Twitter is down. Oh, what will the SEO experts, the celebrities, the spammers, the bots, and the social media experts do?

August 6 from iPhone - Comment - Like - Share

Asha Tampa, Bruce Lerner, Laurentiu and 221 other people liked this

Come to FF! - Simon Wicks

236 more comments

Give Friendfeed a shot? - Rubin Sfadj

Hopefully they don't come to FriendFeed :) - Robert J Taylor

Hang out on FF - Roberto Bonini

they will spam friendfeed instead? - Denis

They are so freeeking out. - SolidSmack

I couldn't tweet about it, so I told my wife instead. - Patrick Lightbody

Big ups to the FriendFeed massive! - Josette Torres

I tried retweeting that. *sigh* - Andy McIlwain

Call them to join friendfeed, and make - Madhav Tripathi

Hopefully FF won't get killed by the Tweeters flocking over here. - phil baumann

ok.. here ya go..twitter being down has forced me here. Haven;t tried FF yet so... - cheapsuits

just like ya possibly twiddle their thumbs... - Baba

I suspect the bots will rejoice.... - walidmREALTOR

Let's see where these so-called "social media experts" go to fill the void of Twitter. - Christian

I can't open twitzap.com - ybs

Can FF servers manage such a massive movement? - Samuel Goëta

since bots supply at least 25% of Twitter traffic, should we feel the worst for them right now? - Kevin Norman

write a post about twitter being down as a threat to humanity, may be?:) - Nikos Anagnostou

Twitter down... can't post on Facebook,,. so it's FriendFeed! - carrotmadman6

So your're not responsible for that ? Strange... :-) - Enikao

lay on the floor and spin in circles - SolidSmack

Maybe the SocMedExperts will go back to Plurk since Scoble likes Friendfeed. :) - Jay Gilmore

thank God, now we can get back to work - E.P. Scott

if they are the experts they claim to be then they should be here! - Mark V. Fusco

Facebook seems frakked too. - Gregg Le Blanc

I get tweet trough tweetdeck... - Giorgio

I need serious help with FF. For an idiot like me this isn't so intuitive really. Help section is nice but I need someone to hold my hand ..bleeech. Don't get me wrong I am sorry I was reluctant to try FF before - cheapsuits

I blame Scoble. It's always his fault :-) - Keith Barrett

but how am I going to tell the world I need a cup of tea???? nooooooo - Rachel Clarke

Giorgio - I'm seeing some activity through the Twitter API, too (that's what TweetDeck uses, I believe); not a lot, but some - Robert J Taylor

I thought it was just my connection. ;-) I'm also having problems with Facebook today. - Timothy Federwitz

yeah, it seems the web interface is down but the api is working.. - Giorgio

I think the social media experts are going to spend the next hour talking about Twitter being down - Keith Barrett

Maybe read a book for a change? - Yiorgos Adamopoulos

Scoble's followers where the glue keeping Twitter together! now that he's 'pulled the pin' and released them all, Twitter has fallen down and can't get up. - MikeAmundsen

Seems to me like some sort of an (DDoS) attack on Twitter and Facebook. - Jari Hakkarainen

I'm so lost this morning without my cup-o-Twitter - frank barry

You broke it Bob! All this follow/unfollow madness. - ZuDfunck

They'll comment on it, much like I just did. - Marlin Forbes

Man imagine if this had happened on #followfriday... - Rob Paller

Yiorgas: read a book for a change? I do that anyway, but only about 10/month. need more twitter time to balance it out - Rachel Clarke

Facebook is copying twitter too closely...even to going down at the same time - Robert Littlejohn

Does Twitter have what it takes to be a big player? We've been working with their API on a project and every time there is something out of whack. Anyone else have the same issues? - Chris Nadeau

twitter is really down, I think twitter itself should have a site that tweets when it's down :) - Ata İsmet Özçelik

They will use FF to inform their friend that twitter is down - Didier Girard

They'll use Identi.ca ;) - Nicholas James

No actually the blog: http://status.twitter.com/ ("We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.") - Patrick Mackaaij

Show up here I'm thinking. :-) - Dion Hinchcliffe

Huge exodus to FF! - akihito

We will start feeding friends and keeping up our identi.ca 's - JuneM

They're probably crying so loud right now that they can't do a thing ;-) - Caio Cesar

What's been the longest twitter outage on record thus far? - Dusty Edenfield

hmm at least they found a solution with a blog :) - Ata İsmet Özçelik

I don't understand why you maintain an account when you have such contempt for Twitter & those who use it. - Liz

they will cry in their soup - Bobby Griffith

holiday - Ronald

Well Robert, where will you go when they all come here? - Tokyo Dan from iPhone

it's back up. made ya look - Kevin Norman

Strangely, search.twitter.com is up. - Marlin Forbes

Tokyo: I already have a private group setup. Sort of like a bomb shelter in case the rats take over. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

i noticed that twitter is down... anyone know how facebook is ssOOO slow 2...???? - Sebastiaan van den Akker

Just noticed it... - k00pa

do not waste time and do their job :D - Roldano

twitter outage and news of the PubSubHubbub feature in Google Reader (http://is.gd/24YvH) make FF look pretty good right now. - Dusty Edenfield

facebook too! i guess i'm going to have to do something like "get a life" which is abhorrent to me... ^_^ - Kayce Maisel

friendfeed is having some issues but for the most part is still up and going :) - (jeff)isageek

find another medium such as friendfeed ;). - rick

Roger, Mr. Scoble! - akihito

@Sebastian they connected somehow... ahhh scary :) - Dani Martínez

good. so not the only one with issues with FB.. wel atleast is FF is going strong.. - Sebastiaan van den Akker

what we all are going to do??? =) but if seriously i remember this video on youtube - trouble with twitter: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - obolonskyi

They will all sit in their chair and stare at their monitor! - Gabe Diaz

@Dani, who knows... the might merge or something... explain the strange twitter is pulling fb down 2.. - Sebastiaan van den Akker

Did Scoble bring Twitter and FB down as he unfollowed everyone ? winks -) - Del_

This is still up... even this FF tweet. http://search.twitter.com/search... - Johann Chiang

In the event that twitter goes down I tend to frequent FF more. - © b e e n s w a n k

This is very interesting that it is impacting more than one social network ... can't even speculate what the cause is yet. Not getting much work done today I'm afraid, going to be following these conversations.. - Joe Magennis

I haven't been on twitter for days. I guess I picked the wrong morning to jump back in. - Jeff Stannard

Robert: The most important question>> How many new sign-ups for FF today? - K.N. Ajit Narayan

...and who wins? FF great :) - Dani Martínez

Was just able to post to Facebook but took several tries. Wow. FF FTW! - Tom Guarriello

so!! - abdellah

The smart ones will go to FriendFeed ;) - Helene

The spammers should go to MySpace... - Dennis Bjørn Petersen

Tweeple will come to FriendFeed! - LauraLee Dooley

That's why I joined FF a while back. Then I found all the useful features- and the bonus is having Scoble here to show the way. - Brenda Young

No, the smart ones are ALREADY on FriendFeed :) - Susan Beebe

and? - abdellah

@obolonskyi nice. vid.. ROFL... never seen it before... - Sebastiaan van den Akker

GUILTY ! I have had a FF account for awhile just never used it-- - cheapsuits

What the celebrities like you do. Talk about it on Twitter. - Tad Chef

This actually made me laugh out loud, because I was thinking the same thing! - Dan

This kind of reminds me of a line from Office Space: "I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail." - Jari Hakkarainen

haha lets get FF down also :D - Salim Sarımurat

Could this mean that CNBC was right??? Nooooooooooo! - Travis Koger

I was planning to unfollow a bunch of followers due to Twitter's follow limit rule kicking in at the ~#2000 user level. I have to wait with that then... ;) - Martin Lindeskog

FF FTW - Eran Even-Kesef

Is the Twitter bubble bursting? - Travis Tasset

Let's see how well Friendfeed handles this Twitter outage :) - Rene Silva

Re previous comment of mine, 'Nooooooo!' was for CNBC being right, not that twitter is dead. ;) - Travis Koger

life goes on - Eran Even-Kesef

Hey don't tell anyone about this FF thing, its our little secret - Jeff Wiant

Twitter better be back up by the time Rick Sanchez is on CNN this afternoon or he won't know what to talk about ;) - cjcubs

telnet 80 twitter.com ? - Gordon Joly

@gordon wont work - k00pa

FF was down for me for about 10 min just now. - Dusty Edenfield

Blogger's having some trouble as well - Crispin Heath

No address associated with nodename (twitter.com) - Gordon Joly

If friend feed ever gets as popular as twitter were will everyone go to to avoid the popular crowd? - JP Holecka - Jaypiddy

Panic? - Dean Clark

@scobleizer I'm seeing issues with twitter and facebook. Social website attack? - Michael Fierro

Panic? Aren't we all used to this already? :) - Sasha Kovaliov(.com)

if this is the North Koreans with a coordinated attack I WILL laugh - cheapsuits

@scobleizer I'm seeing issues with twitter and facebook. Social website attack? - Michael Fierro

Robert, please follow back 106,000 and everything will be ok))) joke =) - obolonskyi

I can not play 140mafia!!! This sucks sooooo bad :( - Sam Beckett

Twitter outage is causing issues with both facebook and friendfeed. I guess we know where everyone is going instead of twitter. - April Russo (app103)

facebook? no way :) - Sasha Kovaliov(.com)

Twitter being down is a a relief to me this morning! Now I can stay OFF it rather than fitting it into every 30 second change of task! n - Arleen Boyd

at this rate they will have to start sending out junk mail via the post office again... oh the humanity - Terry Bruce

Let's all chat on Friendfeed - johnpiercy from iPhone

Nothing seems to work, I think it will be the Friend Feed greatest traffic boost ever - Jacob Kobi Gamliel

guys, is it Ddos attack? or smth like that? as I understand twitter is hosting somewhere and this datacenter is down. am i right? - obolonskyi

FriendFeed traffic is rocking now... - Jacob Kobi Gamliel

social media "experts" might need to actually find other work to do. - Luis Sandoval

thanks God, Youtube is working - obolonskyi

More info needed. Where is there an alternate feed to real time news? - SenderOK

seems unlikely I'll do anything productive in the interim - WarLord

Friendfeed is an excellent choice :) - Hunt from BuddyFeed

http://theloopzilla.blogspot.com/2007... - Gordon Joly

Hopefully they will move to FF :) - Martynas

it could be ff provocation - obolonskyi

I feel like we are all stranded on a tropical Island together - Jeff Wiant

was afraid for a moment that out IT blocked all social networks or something horrible like that. Thank god FF came back up quickly. This might have gotten me to use FF more. I often neglect it. - Ryan Cummins

Wondered why tweetdeck wasn't loading anything. actually got some programming work done. lol - Justin Long

friendfeed rules! - Kevin Dolan

twits will move, but only until twitter is back online, then there will be a mass exodus. Remember during all of the 2007/2008 fail whales users still flocked back to it regardless. - Travis Koger

Twitter, Facebook, now Posterous... 4chan organize an attack or something? - Sam Harrelson from IM

Thank goodness FF is still working. :) - 3Cinteractive, L.L.C. from twhirl

http://status.twitter.com/post... - Martin Lindeskog

Friendfeed + Facebook :) - Rafa Lacerda

http://whentwitterisdown.com/ - Josette Torres

From status.twitter.com: "Site is down 1 hour ago. We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly." - Martin Lindeskog

Having issues with Facebook as well as Twitter. Can sign into FB but unable to go to anyones profiles- process just hangs - outofmyarse

chinese attack? :) - Roldano

Touché Robert, Touché - Jeff Woelker from twhirl

"We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly." from Twitter Status - Kurt Jarchow

North Koreans I tell ya.... - cheapsuits

took inordinate amount of time to get into ff today as well - A Zmaj

Hmmm DoS attack...someone wanting a ransom from Twitter? - Mike Gargano

Guess they'll have to either pick up the phone or do some work :) - Graham Bunting

Can someone with 94k followers really mock the the celebs and experts devoid of Twitter? - Augie Ray

Hey, no bogus follow messages in my inbox for a while! ;-) - Julie Barrett from twhirl

This is teaching us something about the framework of the current Internet traffic patterns. We're watching cascade scale problems from one major Internet program going down. - Melanie Reed

Facebook is giving up the ol', "Transport error (#1001) while retrieving data from endpoint `/ajax/inline_comments.php': A network error occurred. Check that you are connected to the internet" message now. - 3Cinteractive, L.L.C. from twhirl

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com - Martin Lindeskog

I think this is bigger than Twitter and FB... I think it's some interweb routes or something. I had a VoIP call going with a party local to me and two across the country and I lost the two across the country, but maintained the local party. And others are commenting on other sites showing signs of outages. - Timothy Federwitz from Alert Thingy

Twitter is Down....panic..run.,,SOS! - Veetrag

Yeah, had all the characteristics of a DDoS attack. What do perpetrators of such attacks get from doing that, I've never understood. - Jari Hakkarainen

What will they do? Use FriendFeed! - Chuck Huckaby

It's official. Twitter's problem is a DoS attack per twitter/status. - Roger Jennings

http://status.twitter.com/ - giuny

shhhh they'll come here - andy brudtkuhl

The real bummer for me is, now I actually have to listen to the radio to get the word of the day! - Travis Owen

is twitter connected with FB or Friendfeed? I am having page errors with both, Ajax issues with FB intermittently , I am no tech geek so I have no clue whats up and come here to learn - lisa coultrup

Maybe Ev's interview on the BBC last night didn't go down well with the Iranians! - Andrew from iPod

Status Blog says "We are defending against a denial-of-service attack." Mmmm... http://status.twitter.com/post... - akihito

Friendfeed it is then. - Aren Grimshaw

Now, It's up! - Martin Sliacky

Posterous isn't working properly either, at least for me. - Steven Melfi

http://status.twitter.com/post... We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly. - Zalt Woo

What does DoS mean? - Kimberle Kelly

denial of service - Justin Long

I meant what does denial of service mean? (dumb blonde here sorry) - Kimberle Kelly

If it's true..or is it propaganda? - Alex Schleber

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Zalt Woo

It's down, again. - Martin Sliacky

Tracing route to twitter.com [168.143.162.100] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 172.16.1.1 2 25 ms 29 ms 28 ms lo1.br57.fra.de.hansenet.net [213.191.64.45] 3 24 ms 24 ms 23 ms ae1-252.prju01.fra.de.hansenet.net [62.109.64.13 7] 4 24 ms 23 ms 24 ms fra32-hansenet-3.fra.seabone.net [89.221.34.61] 5 120 ms 119 ms 195 ms ash1-new50-racc1.ash.seabone.net [195.22.206.2] 6 125 ms... more... - Zalt Woo

Thank you :o) - Kimberle Kelly

Ev coming onto the BBC last night and saying that they were asked by the US Goverment to keep Twitter up and running during the Iranian protests cannot have gone down well in Tehran! - Andrew from iPod

DoS on large portions of the internet. Is this 4Chan... Chinese... N. Korea... durkadurkastan... - Ryan Cummins

now having trouble getting to Friendfeed - Justin Long

look, few days ago Clinton back home with two imprisoned american journalists from North Korea and today Korea is attacking twitter? it is revenge))) - obolonskyi

maybe Robert's great unFollowing crashed the servers... no loss! Go FF - Jay Shapiro from BuddyFeed

some government is DDOS'ing the real-time internet to cover up something :-) http://leeprovoost.posterous.com/the-twi... - Lee Provoost

hmmm - abdellah

As I said, I predict a baby-boom in 9 months... wait and see! - Jordi Soler

SEO Experts can analyze their charts, celebrities and wannabe's can entertain us with video (maybe some cool Twitter Whore like stuff) , and social media experts can quickly become Fail Whale Experts. - Michele Lorito-Chase

@Lee Provost don't you thing you're going to be a little apocaliptic ? :-) - Filippo Ronco

Twitter downing has to be a lesson for all of us. if sometimes gmail or even google will be down. what we all are going to do in that situation??? - obolonskyi

@Filippo i've been suprised many times that reality is often more wacked up than the conspiracy theories of geeks :-p - Lee Provoost

I'm hoping the social media experts go away and do something useful. - Parvez Halim

@Lee this is true too :-) - Filippo Ronco

@Jordi LOL, considering that there are a vast amount of single male computer geeks out there in the twitter community, baby boom effect might be negligible :-D - Lee Provoost

what is bad here? here doesnt exist reply button =( - obolonskyi

@Lee single male computer geeks - LOL)) - obolonskyi

The realtime updates of the comments is great. FF rulez. Would be better though to have the comment link not on top - Flynn (Michael A. Volz)

Go back to MySpace? - Juliana

Maybe some will switch to FF if twitter is down for a while - Flynn (Michael A. Volz)

The twitter bots are rebelling - Charles

@Flynn, go check out this Greasemonkey script, solves it: http://userscripts.org/scripts... - Alex Schleber

Come here and moan about it! - Kami Huyse

Read post on 100k unfollow - I love how people are commenting and blaming Twitter being down on that! lol - Helene

@AlexSchleber: thanks, great :) - Flynn (Michael A. Volz)

AAANND.. it's back. At least for a moment I guess.. - Alex Schleber

AAANND it's GONE! ..Again. At least I managed to send out a quick FriendFeed SOS, as in: "Still think you shouldn't have all of your favorite tweeps in a "backup system" on FriendFeed? Join here: www.friendfeed.com/alexschleber " - Alex Schleber

Either collapse or back to use their phones in voice only mode, do some shopping, get eye to eye contact ... Blame god, and then. Give a serious try on FF ;p - Marco ILLESCAS from iPhone

They will still be able to Tweet to themselves - not sure if they will realize it is down until it comes back up. - Phil Harrison

I hope everyone will be ok...lol - April Mendez

Hey, can I hang out here on FF while my Twitter is down :) - Kevin Krewell

Welcome to FF Kevin! You can tweet from here too! - Arleen Boyd

Thanks Arleen. I hear all the kool kids hang out here now - like Scoble and you! - Kevin Krewell

I'm glad I joined FF yesterday, great timing! - CodeSamurai

I also micro-blog or create my own Twitter, but in more than 140 characters. - polou/indigo_bow

FF and Tumblr are working fine! :-) - Tim Moore

A good FF day- new familiar faces on this thread. - E-Advocate Network

What will the blackhat SEO experts, the SM spammers, and the social media experts do during a widespread outage? The answer is obvious: While sitting out the crisis they're fine-tuning their methodology. Seriously, your question offends me. There's a gazillion of SEO experts out there who do not abuse social media. - Sebastian

Sebastian there can't be a gazillion SEO experts! What's 10,000 keywords times 20?? (and that's being generous!) - Arleen Boyd

Would a social media expert consider it to be a crisis? If they rely so heavily on just one or two tools that it's enough to throw them into a tizzy, their expert status would seem to me to be ... questionable, at best. - Gord McLeod

Agreed. - Greg

Arleen, 10,000 keyword phrases times 20 is a tiny fraction of the search terms that are worth optimizing for. Think of the long tail. Also, consider lots of webmasters and even publishers / site owners / bloggers / Web developers ... SEO experts who are able to optimize their stuff quite successfully but don't sell or publish their expertise. Many of them, and even many SEO consultants, do make sensible use of social media, as plain users. - Sebastian

Gord, in a social media spammer's book 2 hours of outage, IOW 2 hours w/o sales from sneakily distributed links to questionable sales pitches, can sum up to way more than a good day's beer money. ;) However, "crisis" might be a term too strong for this potential loss. - Sebastian

+1 Sebastian - Bill Sodeman

I'm hung up on hop 12! - bev

I love FF! - John Giglio

come to Friend Feed? Not - Rob Cairns

You must be dying of laughter now Robert! - Arleen Boyd

Arleen: yes, reading this is fun. Sebastien SEO types are so easy to wind up. ;-) - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Gotta love it... @RobCairns says "come to Friend Feed? Not" and then his page shows ONE POST from Twitter in the past 18 hours! And that one talks about how Twitter seems to be slowing down again! (Sorry Rob, but that's just too good to let pass!) - Mark "Godt Nyt Ǻr"

Robert, admit it, you broke Twitter by massively unfollowing people. The DDoS attack reports have just been a ruse to cover up the fact that you were the backbone of Twitter all this time. - Louis Trapani

Louis: that is true. I pissed the bots off. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Keep running into the wall a few times then find alternate outlets such as ff, linkedIn, etc... - Kirsten Mitchell from iPhone

Looks like the devious plan to move everyone to FF is working well. LOL :) - Geer

Ha! The whole Facebook Twitter slowdown may have been just people clicking on spam (not a DDoS botnet). How funny! Manual DDoS. See Bill Woodcock's theory at CNet, AP, SF Gate, and The Register http://ff.im/6gLmO - Mitchell Tsai

There you go again implying the only ones that use twitter is SEO experts, the celebrities, the spammers, the bots, and the social media experts - This is definitely SPIN. Perhaps you should join CNN also LOL - RetiredTeacherD

Ironic, given your status as a celebrity social media expert who constantly spams about bots... :-P - David Kettler

Now they'll have time to shower and do their laundry! - Ron Hagenhoff

Louis Gray

To Jump on the Massive Unfollowing Trend Would Be a Mistake - http://www.louisgray.com/live...

August 6 from louisgray.com - Comment - Like - Share

Harold Cabezas, Sheldon Harker, A. Karl Kornel and 60 other people liked this

"So too do I see it better that 100 spammers fill my feed than I lose access to the innocents who remain. I am not so self-centered as to believe I know the full set of people who I can learn from and derive value. So don't look for me to start shaking my numbers down on any of the networks - even if it is getting more popular. " love this part of the post, however I want just to notice... more... - abdellah

62 more comments

fighting talk - I do believe you just called scoble self-centered. Still I am sure he has been called worse ;) - Riaz Kanani

it's not about unfollowing, it's about filtering - Barak Hachamov

filter before you fellow - abdellah

Riaz, Scoble and I get along great. I wouldn't call him self-centered. - Louis Gray

I shared this in GR as soon as I read it. Congrats on a great post, Louis! All I can say is finally someone has said it. This trend of unfollowing is rather disturbing imho and shows how self-centered some people are, how desperate for attention others are, and how they all are rather clueless at creating valuable networks on these social tools they so much love to love. - Vlad Bobleanta

true, but people who don't appreciate following others shouldn't do it and shld unfollow..keeps tweeting young and influential. also, the only way to get rid of spam is to unfollow/block each such perp - Amit 'zyaada' Mittal

Louis: you will come to dislike your choice here. I used to say the same thing, but as you get more and more people who you aren't interested in you'll realize you just aren't getting anything out of the home page on Twitter anymore and, worse, you are getting spammed both on it and via DMs. That might not be a big problem for you with 12,000 friends, but as your numbers move up (and they will) you'll hit the same problems I did. - Robert Scoble

Why is Louis' followers number growing very very slowly relative to his popularity on the net - Mark

Robert, I never did get anything out of the homepage of Twitter anyway. :) - Louis Gray

I think unfollowing makes sense on Twitter. On Friendfeed Lists are your friends. - Paul Kinlan

Mark, I would say it has to do with not being put on any kind of suggested list. :) - Louis Gray

I don't find that the Twitter website does a good job of making Twitter usable. The applications are what make it usable for me. - Michael Owens

Unfollowing kinda makes sense. Have you ever played an RPG the second time through... you know what to do in the beginning, you aren't lost, and you know what your end goal is? Yeah. That's pretty much what we are talking about here. - Evan Travers

I like that Evan :) RPG - michelle harris

Yeah, the real thing here is we both are heavy users of FriendFeed. That's why I didn't care that my Twitter feed was getting worse and worse. Over the past year I've done almost all my Twitter reading here on FriendFeed. Now that I've restarted it, though, damn is it 100x more useful! And, yes, there are lots of people who are on Twitter who aren't on FriendFeed. - Robert Scoble

I could barely handle following 600 or so people, even with appropriate tweetdeck filters. There were too many people who just weren't adding value. I made a particular point to unfollow anyone who regarded themselves as an "SEO" or "Internet Marketing" expert.. I had made the mistake of following back anyone who followed me and slowly began to realize that they were just playing the numbers game. - Neeraj Kumar Agrawal

abdellah: I am starting to agree with "filter before you follow", which I also believe is what Robert Scoble is doing now as he starts to follow people. Louis Gray: I don't think it is a movement to unfollow everyone, at least, not for me. I think Scoble had to start from scratch because of the number he had... for me, having a very small number in comparison, I will start unfollowing... more... - Timothy Federwitz

If you've never mass followed, and managed your connections in the way that's right for you, why would you have a reason to mass unfollow to being with. Good points Louis. - Ken Camp

I've been curious as to the counter argument to this trend. Scoble's reaction albeit extreme is one I can empathize with, but unnecessarily severe. I appreciate the alternate perspective and grounded reasoning to your approach. While I have far fewer followers the numbers have crossed the line of unmanageable with out an automation service. Thanks for the great post and food for thought. - Jim Goldstein

Scoble has this big 7 point list of criteria for following you on twitter, but on Friendfeed he will follow anyone who asks! - Mark

Mark: that's because on FriendFeed I can have lists. So I can use a variety of different following strategies here. On twitter I can only follow or not. - Robert Scoble

I think I am in the middle on this. I am not about to wholesale unfollow everyone, but the noise from news bots etc in my twitter feed is getting insane. I am still nowhere close to "getting" FF so I am still struggling a bit here too.. In fact, I have fallen right back into the trap I was in a few months ago. I think it's time for another social medai diet - Andy Glover

Robert, you can certainly use tools like tweet deck to create groups, but . . .whatever. To me, it's just not an issue, either way. I like it when folks that I find interesting (and Robert is certainly among them!) follow me back, but it's not essential. I don't need to follow the Roberts of the world on Twitter in order to check in on what they're up to, from time to time. Unless someone has a private feed, it seems to be a non-issue. - Kathy Fitch

Andy: on FriendFeed whenever things go nutty, just open up a new friend list and move your high quality follows into that. Leave all the other people in the old list, so you can check in once in a while. - Robert Scoble

I don't see how anyone could follow as many people as Robert w/o losing control. Twitter would become marginalized by sheer un-manageability. Even with groups etc. there's only so much real estate on a monitor. I have groups on FriendFeed as well but honestly I spend most of my time on the home feed. - Rick Bucich

That said, when I'm launching a new twitter presence (as I just have for an organization), it's *really, really great* when people and organizations with similar interests follow back. If nobody did, that would just be sad. Still, I'm mostly interested in the feed aspect of things, so even then, it's not really crucial to have followers. - Kathy Fitch

What I don't get, and what has never been explained to me despite asking, is why have low "quality follows" in the first place? I know you follow me, and given that there is seldom interaction its quite apparent I'm not on the high quality follows list. If its not for ego, what's the point? Mass unfollow, filter, etc. that's entirely your decision, but why follow to the point that mass unfollow is necessary? - jcunwired

I've always had the policy of being quick to follow and even quicker to unfollow. As soon as someone begins to bore or annoy me I just unfollow them. But on the other hand I'm glad to follow people on a whim. You never know. - Leo Laporte

Rick--so true. In some ways, the conversations that these folks with massive followings are having around the follow/unfollow issue just is utterly irrelevant to those of us with more moderate goals and purposes. - Kathy Fitch

Nice to see Leo Laporte being more involved on Friendfeed - Mark

Right Leo - follow to see what's interesting, unfollow when you find out there's no value. The alternative, if I may say so, is misleading and unfair to the end user. - jcunwired

Value in this instance is pretty subjective, and that's the point, really. What is your subject position? I'm in SMB mode, so what I'm after is quite unlike what a twit guru would be after. For me, the following/follower # some are cutting down to would be massive. If I hit those numbers, then I'd probably want to trim it back down. Robert is still about 500 over anything I'd be interested in. - Kathy Fitch

One of the first people I looked through was Leo Laporte's following page. He has some great people who he is following. - Robert Scoble

Take a look at Dave Winer's RSS Cloud technique - a great way to assess a following list in your newsreader before adding. http://www.scripting.com/stories... - Leo Laporte

Why limit yourself? Someone asks to follow me, I check out their profile and tweets. If the words SEO,check out my webcam, or Arrington are there, I don't follow, If I do follow, I give them a month and then unfollow if any major douchbaggery makes its way to mine eyes. - Paul Puri

Ah, somewhere there's an SEO person who is offering useful tweets about how beginners can use the basic Google Analytics and Webmaster tools to help them create better, more useful sites for users and potential users. That person could be good for some folks to follow. - Kathy Fitch

On the "low quality followers/follows" point, I really needed some of those at first to help me get a feel for the ebb and flow. The trajectory of any given twitter user's account, if it's public, probably follows that basic pattern of "whoo hooo, followers!" to "what the heck?" to "now that I get how it works, how would I like it to work for me?" Seems pretty common sense. It's okay that answers to the final question vary. All as it should be. - Kathy Fitch

I'm just generalizing, of course, but most of the people who try to follow me that have SEO in their bio have 10 tweets and they are link bait. - Paul Puri

I shared w/ Robert and will share with you, YES I spend too much time trying to block all the FakePornSpamBot accounts. And I miss blocking many. BUT, my HOME Stream is the most amazing view of the world! With a few refreshes I can get the pulse of what's going on! Besides, even if someone is often a voyeur, there are those times they pop up and share the most insightful things! I believe I can learn from everyone! So if you're real and follow me - I'll follow you! - Arleen Boyd

In parallel to this, I do manage a corporate account for one of the companies I consult for. Every follow and unfollow there is measured. But I learned a long time ago, that at least for me, people just want to be connected, on any network they prefer, so I try not to get in their way. - Louis Gray

Louis: there's another aspect to this too: every follow you make signals to the world what kind of person you are. Look at my following list. You'll see geeks, VCs, journalists, entrepreneurs. Who isn't there? Not many celebrities. Not many plumbers or quilters, if any at all. That signals to the world the kind of people I want to have in my life and the kinds of information I want to hear. If you are autofollowing that opportunity to signal to the world is totally lost. - Robert Scoble

You're doing it wrong, Robert. ;-) - Chris Baskind

Chris: always. :-) - Robert Scoble

Oh, Paul, point well taken, of course. I'm just pointing out that they've no doubt ruined it for a handful of smart and useful SEO folks. Arleen was actually one of the first folks to follow me back, and just watching her from a distance (I guess that makes me a voyeur? <grin>) helped give me a good feel for how someone at her level of #'s worked with the system. Very educational! - Kathy Fitch

The "signal to the world" bit makes much more sense to me on the corporate accounts I'm working with. For the Catholic parish, for instance, who to follow gets really important. I can't afford to have anything with even a whiff of inappropriateness about it in the stream. That's going to be a very small list! - Kathy Fitch

I just think the only way you can do this wrong is if you don't continually revise your thinking and your approach. Right on to all of you for exploring this topic. - Holly Rae

Leo, I can usually tell by the last 4 to 5 tweets whether I should follow back. But, everyone is annoying or boring sometimes (including myself) so I don't unfollow very often unless someone's stream becomes overly promotional or full of gimmicks. - Rick Bucich

What's the benefit of following thousands of people? if you say its because you have to in order for them to DM you, how can you possibly respond to potentially thousands of DM's consistently? Once, I tried following everyone that followed me and it made my follower count jump quickly, but it made twitter less fun because I had random automated DM's from people I didn't know, and a useless stream of info from people I followed for no reason. - Dusty Edenfield

Robert/Kathy: I think who I follow making a statement of who I am and what I'm about is less important to me since I am using it for a personal experience and my likes are wide and deep. If I was using my Twitter account as an outward facing presence for my business/organization, then it would matter much more to me... but I'm just having fun with it and like the idea of seeing lots of... more... - Timothy Federwitz

The DM thing. Sigh. Here on FF, it's totally useful. I've never had a single pointless DM. On Twitter, it's a thing to scan very occassionally, and ignore the rest of the time, seems like. - Kathy Fitch

The thing that is being overlooked is this: The real issue is the auto-follow, NOT the total number of "following". It is what removes the vetting process. Once vetted, I'd say the more the merrier, b/c there is real value in your "with friends/following" stream, precisely b/c it is way different to search/filter it vs. regular Twitter Search. It is a huge omission/mistake that this is... more... - Alex Schleber

Since I mass unfollowed I've had SIGNIFICANTLY better interactions with the people I genuinely want to communicate with. A good % of the social media gurus who just follow in the hopes that you'll follow back unfollowed and it's seriously been like a weight lifted off my shoulders. - Ryan Stephens

(cont'd) For this reason, I will openly admit to trying to get as many of my Twitter peeps registered into FriendFeed as possible, & I won't even care if they sub to me there or not (not required for conversation on FF anyway). It's to get them into the stream that I can then search over, and further add people into separate Friend Lists from there. Currently I'm at about 1k of 3k... more... - Alex Schleber

Also see "My comment on: 'Why You Should Start Over On Twitter With A BRAND NEW Account - Twitip' Hint: I disagree" http://post.ly/1owO This about sums it up: "..the solution to overwhelm by technology is better technology, not retrenchment..". - Alex Schleber

Louis, I only read part of your post, but I agree as far as the types of people that are following others. Twitter has become a place more for business than meaningful conversations. Best thing to do is look at who is following you and purging those who just seem to market links to " Ways To Generate Massive Cash " through whatever they might be involved in hawking. - Lew Newmark

@Lew funny you call this "business". I call it "racket" - Jorge Escobar

Somewhat parenthetically, like the 19th century theoretical "corporate shield" that was supposed to shield individuals from liability, artificial demarcations between "my personal site" and "my business site" are increasingly obsolete. We are all complex, intertwined, interdependent, human-computer, systemic hybrid participants in an increasingly systematized hybrid world. The old silos... more... - michael silverton

@Louis - I think you are right. Doing something because it's a "trend" is dumb. Can you tell me what the metric is you use to measure when something breaks through to "trend" status? When "unfollow" hits Trending Topics, maybe? I didn't reboot my following list to join a trend. I did it because I really like following the people I follow...and they were getting drowned out by the people... more... - Rex Hammock

I'm going to mass unfollow everyone who ignores me :) - jcunwired

Lets be honest, this unfollowing thing by "certain" people is nothing but a PR stunt - Spencer

Spencer--well, of course this thing does have PR implications. After all, the big wigs are all talking about it non-stop, and then those on the next few tiers down from there are talking about the talking. Still, having PR implications and being a stunt aren't exactly the same thing. Many of these big name folks *are* established brands, which isn't something most of us can claim.... more... - Kathy Fitch

@Spencer - I know my unfollowing thing was nothing but a PR stunt. As is my commenting here. - Rex Hammock

agree. More than reasonable post, Luis.. - Marco Castellani

Svartling

Ffollo - Automatically follow who you need to on FriendFeed - Looks useful! - http://www.ffollo.com/

August 5 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

John Field, Nile Flores, Richard Lazzara and 59 other people liked this

"Find and Follow people with similar interests to you - automatically, for FREE" - Svartling from Bookmarklet

42 more comments

N1, thanks for the info, will give it a try for sure :) - Patrik Arwengrim

Still early stage, I am still ironing out issues. - Paul Kinlan

there are some people who has problems with it. there must be an option : undo all things ffollo has done - Ahmet Soyata

Oh good point Ahmet. Will see if I would need it soon hehe. - Patrik Arwengrim

As Paul said, It is still in early stage. Can be really great! - Svartling

You can place all follows into a custom list so that you don't see it in your home feed, you can then pick and choose everything you like most - Paul Kinlan

That was a great idea Paul. - Svartling

can you build in a throttling system to limit the number of people you auto subscribe to per day? I clicked one too many boxes and now am fearing the upcoming deluge of subscribe e-mails :) - Jason Wyttenbach

Yes, I need to think of how to throttle it, at the moment each follow is seperated by at least a minimum of 20 seconds, - Paul Kinlan

Paul that is what I did. put the new followers in there own list and check them out there. then move over to the home feed. enjoying finding the new peeps! - (jeff)isageek

I have been trying to find a local "Key West interest based" community on FF by posting location specific info under a non-personal feed this tool should enhance that effort. - Eric Logan

And down the hell hole we all go... Not me. I've seen how this movie ends up. Full of spam. Full of idiots. Full of noise. Full of bots. - Robert Scoble

I don't need a bunch of me's trying to one up me - Outsanity

Please make a service that would remove from friends, those who have not added you to friends. - altblog #❶

Robert: for sure, but I am trying to do it differently to the way I did twollo so that it is only following people in your conversations.... you yourself said that you would follow anyone who comments on your posts. - Paul Kinlan

This is very neat. Unlike the Twitter version, sorting out your rhizome of subscribers into Lists, from where they found you, will be interesting to watch. Visualisation of this would be brilliant. - zeroinfluencer

It's cool. - ★ Soner Gönül

altblog, that's a good idea. I also like the idea of a throttle. - Kol Tregaskes

I'd also like to select the amount of likes and comments too. Say if someone comments or likes something on my lists or I posted then auto-follow. - Kol Tregaskes

altblog: I am loathe to create an auto-unfollow I held off on twollo.com and will probably not do it for ffollo - it encourages very spammy behaviour - Paul Kinlan

Kol: I am looking into how to do the "the this user must like two of my items"... it is not too hard though - Paul Kinlan

Shame about that. I'd need checks on this service, like whether they are posting anything natively themselves. I'm not interested if users simply have a stream of their Twitters on FF, for example. - Kol Tregaskes

I'd prefer, however, a recommendation page, where it takes the options selected and simply lists users that meet the criteria. It could be sorted in most compatible order with 'subscribe' buttons. - Kol Tregaskes

Kol: I would agree, but the basic options only pick up people who are actively using Friendfeed, so a basic setting would be only follow people who like my stuff, or comment on my stuff - Paul Kinlan

Kol: my suggested usage would be to follow people but automatically put them in a dedicated list that is not your home feed that way you can follow people but only move people into your home feed if they meet your needs. - Paul Kinlan

OK, Paul. I'll test it and see but I'm not generally keen on auto-follow services. :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Paul, just a small request but not important - I'd like to select a friends list for each of the 4 options at the top. I'd like to have one list for people who like my stuff, one for who comments, etc. Just to test more than anything. :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Paul, I am just signed in, will give it a try. - Jacque

I mean no disrespect towards FFollo, but can this thread please be removed before all of FriendFeed starts dabbling in an app that's not ready for prime time yet? I'm sure there's plenty of beta users by now. - Brad Williamson

One annoyance with adding them to a separate list and managing them is that it's not easy to check their feeds on the friends list. If FriendFeed amended the friends list add/remove page so that we can view their feeds directly from there then it would help a lot. - Kol Tregaskes

I could make friends list for each of the options (wanted it simple to start with ;) - Paul Kinlan

Hi Brad: sure I can see the point. There is also a group http://friendfeed.com/ffollo for anyone who would like to continue the conversation there. But this thread does contain a lot of good information and which I like to respond too. - Paul Kinlan

No problem, Paul. Just a suggestion ;-) I have one question though... Say you auto-follow someone, realize they're someone you don't have any interest in and then delete them. Will FFollo then go right back and add them again after you've deleted them? - Brad Williamson

Brad: like twollo.com I record every follow that occurs and you should never re-follow the user. - Paul Kinlan

@Paul Cool, cool ;-) - Brad Williamson

The problem I have to work out is that on twollo the follow list for all the users is 125GB - Paul Kinlan

太imba了。。。 - kang

Kol: you can now select which list you want each type of follow to go into individually - Paul Kinlan

Cool, ta Paul. :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Great, Paul! - Svartling

Long overdue. Thanks Paul! - Michael Fidler

super useful.. - Can Koklu

done, signed up, thanks #shankargallery - Richard Lazzara

Robert Scoble

RT @dariusdunlap "for me twitter is for getting interesting insights and ideas. I'm sure not going to get them from those who follow me!"

August 5 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Mitchell Tsai, Daynah, Hanna Wiszniewska and 13 other people liked this

I think it's funny that some folks aren't getting the joke. :-) Subtlety doesn't always translate in 140 characters. Working on a blog post about following, and specifically the strange idea that you should ONLY follow those who follow you back. Part of the power of Twitter is that you don't have to "be friends." I can listen to folks I find interesting, whether or not they listen to me. - Darius Dunlap

8 more comments

And now that Twitter's down, everyone can write their own blog post on why they're unfollowing their tens of thousands of followers ;-) - Helene

Agreed Darius. Scoble and the other big movers may not follow me, but I can listen to them and glean information that I find informative, even if they don't "follow" me. For people like me that can't be on FF or Twitter a lot during the day at work, I can still keep informed. - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

Darius: Very good point (humor understood). I am rethinking my stance on how to use/utilize twitter. - Timothy Federwitz

I don't understand why some people feel obligated to follow back. I want my incoming stream to have a very high signal:noise ratio. You've got to earn followage from me. - Pistos

gndn or GIGO - Rosemary Gongora

Rosemary + Helene + Pistos, I sooooo want to 'like' comments sometimes ... - Sebastian

@sebastianx: Me too. :) We'll have to settle for something like: @Pistos +1 - Pistos

Sebastian - and TAGS for comments. ;-) - Darius Dunlap

@Pistos @Darius I second that. In many cases comments provide way more value than the initial item. Just looking at who commented to an item offering those to possibly interested users based on whatever criteria is a good first step but not enough. - Sebastian

cheapsuits

I don't feel like I am cheating on twitter being here. That's a bad sign for twitter.

August 6 - Comment - Like - Share

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cheapsuits

oh man looks like I have to get the FF iPhone app....

August 6 - Comment - Like - Share

Timothy Federwitz liked this

Do you know of an "official" FF app? There are a couple 3rd party apps you have to purchase and don't look great to me. I haven't looked recently though, so maybe there is something I'm not familiar with?? Love to hear what you find/try. - Timothy Federwitz

No, looking through the app store all I see are motherfeed, buddyfeed,freshfeed ,amigo and alertthingy -- I have the same view as you, nothing jumps out. FF is configured for the safari mobile browser so I am sticking with that until I get a better lay of the FF land and what I need in an app - cheapsuits

Yep... it's unfortunate (I think). The FF for Safari works, but it still feels lacking. I think I want something like TweetDeck for FF. I just wish TweetDeck could also integrate with FF. Nambu does both Twitter and FF, but it just didn't fit my wants/needs. Motherfeed was okay, and I occasionally open it... but certainly nothing has screamed "this is the one". - Timothy Federwitz

cheapsuits

Well, I *might* be kicking myself for not giving FriendFeed a better try earlier. I have discovered that FF has those real conversations that the old twitter used to. Also as Justin Whitiker said:"Twitter has speed, FF has depth" I like it thus far

August 6 - Comment - Like - Share

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see we probably would not have connected if not for this outtage... :o) - Kimberle Kelly

No we would not have. Although I have had a FF account for a year or so I was enamoured with twitter. The @ reply thing began to grate on me. And now it's just too spammy and non conversational and I am there out of habit. Like anything else this takes some training wheels and I was too lazy to really give it a try. - cheapsuits

I completely agree... FF, for me, offers the depth I was looking for... but I'm not getting rid of Twitter just yet. I think it has its place, but I will be unfollowing anyone I think is a spammer or has a ton of posts that mean nothing to me and are just noise. I'd like to consider Twitter as a lot of micro blogs, but with my current follows it is lacking in that area. And it's nearly impossible to follow anyone's conversation. - Timothy Federwitz

Rob Diana

Can Apple Save Newspapers? - http://www.markevanstech.com/2009...

August 6 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Timothy Federwitz liked this

I just hope that some more content like this could come to the iPhone. i know the screen is small, but i ALWAYS have it with me and it fits easily in my front pocket. I can't say that about the Kindle's or an Apple Tablet. While I like the larger devices, I think they are less practical because of their size and me not carrying it everywhere with me. I've read several books on my phone though, because I always have it with me. I still get wireless delivery as well. - Timothy Federwitz

exactly, I am not sure I can walk around with a tablet- The iPhone is 'pocketable'. What I really need is the ability to use my iPhone AS my wallet to be able to use it for 'money' transactions (debit & credit) at the register-- - cheapsuits

cheapsuits: I like the idea, but it kinda scares me too... what if you misplace your phone and someone picks it up? I know the same can be said for your wallet, and I may even personally keep tabs on my iPhone similar to my wallet (after all, replacement cost is $600 and tons of my personal info is on it as well)... just thinking. I almost NEVER use cash anymore unless I'm forced... debit cards all the way for me. - Timothy Federwitz

Rob Diana

Before You Create a To-Do List - http://michaelhyatt.com/2009...

August 6 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

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Robert Scoble

Yeah @KNAjit I don't get the unfollowing fuss either. Just comment on FriendFeed here, for instance, to get me to follow you:

August 4 - Comment - Like - Share

Body Indigo, Timothy Federwitz, Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic and 24 other people liked this

I will follow you on FriendFeed. Why here? Because I can put people into lists. On Twitter I don't have that ability. What's wacked is I actually read a lot more people's stuff on FriendFeed than I ever did on Twitter. I think the real fuss is due to those jerks who did autofollowing schemes to help people get lots of followers artificially. That and SEO types who only are in it for the game of getting more followers and links. - Robert Scoble

122 more comments

I got my first official "Unfollowing you for not following back" @ reply today... Weird people, especially if you try to sell things - which the person who send me that is trying. - Holger Eilhard

Yeah, like this guy: http://twitter.com/webaddict - Robert Scoble

hahaha, it's all rather hilarious really. No one else I know in the world, in person, cares about any of this junk tho :( - Mark

You know, some people consider "following" as an active form of politeness : fail, they didn't get the networking concept at all. Some other don't get the concept of "spring cleaning" either. So, I can understand that some people don't understand the concept of "social network spring cleaning"... - Zackatoustra

Yeah, I know. Here's his Tweet: http://twitter.com/webaddi... -- he claims I'm gaming my way to more followers (he's autofollowing too, so isn't that like the kettle calling the pot black?) Plus he's an SEO expert. - Robert Scoble

In my case it was http://twitter.com/network... - Holger Eilhard

Holger: yeah, it's amazing that people think that's cool. If those folks ever move over here to FriendFeed then I'll know it's time to move on. - Robert Scoble

Some expert, his website was last updated with a social media post in May - Mark

It's getting to the point one has to go for quality over on Twitter, not quantity, now. - George Hall (Australia)

I cut myself back to 280 I follow and 320 followers. - George Hall (Australia)

There must be a social media expert School around here someplace. - Mark

And then there's all this "Pay us for followers" thing going on... In various ways, either by being featured on a "big" website or - the really stupid way - by being followed by some bots, which will be deleted sooner or later... - Holger Eilhard

I did the unfollow thing once on Twitter because I couldn't read all the noise, then, I added a bunch of people back because I convinced myself that I shouldn't read all the noise. Now, I'm leaning towards a lean following list again. Thanks for the boost. - Adam

Well, @JeffreyHayzlett is one person who still thinks following back is a polite thing to do. - K N Ajit Narayan

Interesting, not a single new FriendFeed user has joined this comment area. I'm already following everyone who has commented here. So, I guess the migration is already complete. - Robert Scoble

Hmmm - its this type of effort to evade the bots that makes me things may all break down into a soup of failure. Why can't the follow system only actually *follow* someone if there's a two-conversation at least once? - Justin Howard

K N: the thing is I know that person is NOT reading your Tweets. there's no way he can, especially if he's a busy executive. - Robert Scoble

Well Sir Robert of Scoble, you did say a while back Friendfeed growth has stagnated but all other social sites are growing exponentially :( - Mark

Mark: that is true, but Facebook is doing it by getting normal people to join up. Twitter is doing it because of celebrities. FriendFeed's growth will be slower and more organic. - Robert Scoble

Mark...don't worry, I think Friendfeed could still catch up. Especially if people are finding Twitter needs too much spring-cleaning too often. - George Hall (Australia)

Robert: What's the difference for you with following x thousand people on FF but not on Twitter? Are you using the Hide feature much and/or do you use many lists? Sorry, if this has been asked over and over. - Holger Eilhard

George: that's true. If FriendFeed hits the right UI they could really take off well. - Robert Scoble

Holger: I use lists. I need to do a video explaining my new methodology. But generally the smaller lists are more useful. Same on Twitter. - Robert Scoble

well they have plenty of smart people working at FF - Mark

If (when) twitter releases Group support, you will have to go back and start all over again rob :D - Mark

Robert: I don't think FF is that far away now from hitting its critical mass to take-off. That spammer situation on Twitter is starting to make it less joyful to use. - George Hall (Australia)

Mark: nope, I'll be in a great position! My first group is already complete. :-) - Robert Scoble

God those spammers are annoying, I was reporting them to @Spam from the public timeline yesterday. Twitter seems to act on @Spam very quickly - Mark

Robert: The UI is a major problem with FF. I still don't feel like using it. Only @Scobleizer brings me back to FF :( - K N Ajit Narayan

We were following the Cricket match with the #ashes tag and the fucking spammers were including it too so it was ruining the experience - Mark

Heck, if the situation on Twitter is such I can safely trim/block around 400-500 people, it means it isn't really that valuable in the long term. - George Hall (Australia)

Mark: yeah, spam noise in search really makes things suck. In FriendFeed you can search by groups. That is so freaking cool. - Robert Scoble

K N: have you tried a different theme yet: http://friendfeed.com/setting... I use Grasslands and like it better. - Robert Scoble

I'm also noting that real and talkative/friendly NEW followers on Twiter are getting fewer and far between. - George Hall (Australia)

George I've noticed that new users are hard to get here too. - Robert Scoble

But at least the subscibers here are great to talk with. - George Hall (Australia)

Yup, agreed! The community here is a lot more fun. - Robert Scoble

was this true Rob? http://ff.im/698cg - Mark

Robert: Hmm, Grasslands looks better. Will give FF another chance. - K N Ajit Narayan

There is something about destroytwitter.com client that has me not use FriendFeed more though... I really like a skinny window sitting on the desktop that i can glance at occasionally :) re the unfollow thing - I get lots of randoms following me that I'm not going to follow back - don't interest me - Nicholas Orr

In terms of enjoyable experience, I think I've enjoyed this past week here on Friendfeed a bit better than I enjoyed the Twitter experience in the same period. The gloss is really starting to come off Twitter itself, although a lot of my social media friends are there. - George Hall (Australia)

Why would you want someone who would not be able to see your posts to follow you? Numbers? - Anton Tanderup

Mark, yeah, that was true, a couple of times. - Robert Scoble

Robert - I think you do such a great job about discussion the "new tech" and trends and now trying to bring the tech stuff to small business. I thought you followed so many people becasue they could lead you to something new stuff you have not seen or ware of. What has changed? do you have new sources that can keep you updated? I assume as you said before FF is enough for that ..right? Joao/Techfuga - TechFuga

I'll venture a guess Twitter's own spammer purge showed us all something about the follower lists we hadn't noticed before. - George Hall (Australia)

Anton: why wouldn't a follower be able to see you? I don't get that. - Robert Scoble

I always thought it was great that you followed me, but I don't think I offer that much in the way of "value." :-) So I'm not put out.... Seriously. - Joanmarie

Joanmarie: I follow you here already. - Robert Scoble

One other thing: you should get a return on your investment/time..I hope you already do with RackSpace :). By the way we changed all our hosting architecture to Cloud at RackSpace thanks to you and thanks to me following you here in FF. we are very very happy ...please tell that to your boss at RackSpace....Joao/Techfuga - TechFuga

Robert: If he's following 100k people :) - Anton Tanderup

Robert - This is what I was getting at yesterday; even though you might not follow me on Twitter, I know you'll see - and respond to, when appropriate - any comments I make here on FF, so I'm not "missing out" by you not following me. - Andrew Terry

I always wondered how you made sense of a 10k+ person stream, Robert. - Tech Introvert

Tech: big screens and FriendFeed. That took most of my attention over past 18 months. Now I saw that Twitter really was a chore and wasn't fun because of all the spam. Now it's a lot nicer. - Robert Scoble

I like to talk to real people not spam bots - Randy Allen Bishop

I get so much more information from friendfeed, and I follow significantly less people. - Jordan Patterson

Lists are very powerful in lieu of better information tagging tools. Search is even stronger but requires me manually poking around - Mark Essel from iPhone

You finaly got me to sign up - I resisted this long. In my head I guess i was getting my head round twitter, last thing I needed was to get my head round twitter 2.0 aswell.. but it ocured to me, the worst case, is its like a client for twitter, and a post you did a few days ago, sugested, maybe using twitter as a client for FF.. Anyway, can't hurt to have a go, can it! - Nathan Vingoe

I feel the same as Joanmarie. I'm not likely to be the one to break new tech news, so don't know that my tweets contribute much value to Robert's stream. Pretty sure I can just @scobleizer if I really feel like I'm on to something. I constantly try to keep my follows lean, and spend way too much time checking out new followers who I have no idea why they follow me. - motownmutt

I don't see much spam at all on Twitter, but that may be because I follow maybe 1 person for every 30 or so that follow me (300:9000). I think spam is the result of "courtesy" following if someone follows you - in other words, you cause your own spam. - Trent Hamm

Not everybody who is involved with SEO is just using Twitter for followers. Some are professional online marketers with an interest in tech. - Paul M Evans from iPhone

I keep playing Sam Jackson from Pulp Fiction in my head, "Say SEO (or Social Media Expert) one more time mutha-******"! - Shaun Hess

thanks for the follow robert .. hope you and the family are doing well , greetings from canada - johnpiercy

Hey robert. How is the experiment working out?????? - Roberto Bonini

I posted this two days ago (But I'm not Scoble so very few saw): So if you follow someone on Friendfeed, should you unfollow them on Twitter? Why not? - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

scobleizer has been following me here on ff ever since i started participating... i was very flattered, until i learned that he just followed everyone - Chris Heath

Appreciate Scoble's embrace of innovative & effective ways to communicate, including video, which we're all about. We've been kind of obsessing over your work lately on http://www.market7.com/blog and hope we'll have opportunity to meet again soon (last time was at Salt Lick in Austin) -- next time hopefully over our web service for better video production instead of an awesome plate of ribs - Market7

I really don't see Twitter and FriendFeed as having the same uses. I use twitter to communicate with my real life friends, for the most part. FF is more about conversations on things that interest me. Sure, some of my RLFriends are here, and I follow them, but that's not the primary use I get from FF. - Otto

Looking forward to joining the conversation here too... - Brian Baumley

Im gonna use the Screen Door Analogy ,, I recently put the Screendoor on my Twitter "the lock on my account " it allows me to control all the bugs coming in and I still get all the fresh air and the same view - johnpiercy

The ability to put people on lists here on Friendfeed makes it very easy to use it for real friends and as a way to keep up with other interesting people and thus seems to me that it's just a matter of time before it replaces twitter if people really use that feature. - russellcoleman

I think Samuel is the first person I've seen that uses Twitter as a real life friend system (instead of Facebook) and FriendFeed as the wide open conversation tool. Usually I see Friendfeeders were/are wide open Twitter users as well (the gateway drug). I'm sure there are more using the tools that way, I just find that perspective interesting. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

FF is great for those who like to share visually as well as converse ,, Twitter is the quick water cooler chat , FF is the dinner time chat - johnpiercy

I think the problem for some people is that they want a higher number of followers and so may not want to unfollow people—even if they are just spammers. Personally I'd rather have a smaller network of people following me who are actually interested in what I post on Twitter. (And who actually read their Twitter messages at least once in a while.) - David Rondeau

Hi Robert! I follow you on twitter and FF. I like to keep up with you since I'm an avid social media user and new media content producer. @marylynn3 here & on Twitter. - Mary-Lynn

You better be following me, is all I can say :-) Course, I'm on Friend Feed too. - Jay Rosen

Robert, I continue to be amazed at how you do what you do, across what, 20 different social media channels? When do you sleep exactly? Would be great if you could add me to your follow list, thanks - Scott Booher

If someone follows me on Twitter, I read every profile, the stream, their profile/blog link, and then decide. It does take time, (& I follow a bunch), but worth it to me. I like to read what great minds are thinking. On Twitter however, the increase in Spammers has really driven me to look for better ways to engage. I hate housecleaning. - Karen Masullo

On Twitter I usually first follow lots of people and sort them out later - tweet by tweet. I also follow more than 2k people on FriendFeed, and it's fun! If it gets to much for you: The group function will help. Greets from Germany! :-) - Kolja

I really only read anything on FF. I go follow people on Twitter and then update from FF. That's the extent of my twitter interactions. I have one problem though: you can't insert a line break on these comments, so I inadvertently post before I'm finished. Btw, I don't mind if you don't follow me since I'm a bit boring. Your posts, on the other hand, are like mini conversations; It's awesome! - Californian

Mark Nielsen: I use Facebook as a real life friend system too. Realistically, I think of Twitter much more in the way I think of TXT messaging. Because that's obviously the underlying design principle there: Broadcast SMS Messages. So, on that level, I tend to only want to receive the text messages of people I know and of services I use. This limits who I follow to those that I want to have two-way conversations with, which tends to be people I know IRL. - Otto

Makes sense. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

You know, I haven't even checked to see if you follow me anymore or not. I think people will just get over themselves and make social media work in whatever way is best for them. I'm trimming out the SEO junk from my time line, but I find value in following real people on Twitter be it 100 or 600. It's not fair to call people 'noise', just trim out the people you're not interested in keeping up with and be done with it. Right? - Mike Lewis

If someone follows me, I look at this as an opportunity to see what they write about (be it on Twitter or Friendfeed). If they are funny or interesting, I follow back. But if they don't continue to be interesting or funny, I unfollow. There's just too much information and I want to absorb some of it - and not waste time or brain cells on the uninteresting (or unfunny). - amygeek

I agree Robert. I tend to read much more of the posts and comments out there in FF than I ever did/do/would on Twitter. I love Twitter's simplicity, but it's a bit too simple sometimes--mostly on the sharing side of the thing. The Like and Comment features are my faves for both FF and Facebook. - Hans Eisenman

"If those folks ever move over here to FriendFeed then I'll know it's time to move on" LOL :) I god a kick out of that one. :) - Frode Stenstrøm

Cyber-sixty-niners are just a quite popular way to proclaim brain amputation. Reminds me of a self-sucking Ron Jeremy ... I mean, can't for the sake of common sense in social media those attention whores leave the InterWeb alone? Doh! - Sebastian

That idea that Twitter would replace RSS last what? A month? I have never seen such an overrated tool/website/platform. ;P (Not that I don't use it, mind you, hehe.) - Marcos

Note what could be the next competitive frontier for Google vs Apple and Google vs Microsoft for mobility and search in The Genome Based Economy.Jack M. Germain in TechNewsWorld, http://www.technewsworld.com/story... on the stunning development that Genomics moves to PDAs, at the very moment that Google clashes with Apple on mobiles, and Google and Microsoft confront each other... more... - Suzanne Matick

I'm thinking that I might have to start giving my FriendFeed account much more attention. On Twitter I have 2 orders of magnitude less followers than you Robert, but even for me the spam is starting to get a bit ridiculous. It does seem to be becoming a haven for spammers & scammers and not the networking place that I really enjoyed for quite a while. If Twitter doesn't want to die before it reaches maturity, it really needs to find a way to control spam & find a way to build community in new ways. - David van Sunder

<chuckles> scobleizer does a mass unfollow and it generates some decent discussion on the negatives of twitter. Its almost fun watching the people who follow you promptly unfollow you a week later because you didnt follow back.. for about a week. I keep saying it would be good to add a meta layer to twitter (or maybe friendfeed would do it?) that allows for some context or grouping. Not everyone wants to see all of someone's tweets. - Riaz Kanani

Well I'll give you this Robert, at least you do still "listen" and respond. :P First of all, I am not calling the kettle black because my point was that due to you autofollowing everyone & then unfollowing them all that was gaming the system. Just as you didn't have time to follow every single person following you, I don't either. Of course I auto follow. I don't see anything wrong with... more... - Joel Mackey

Joel: if I am gaming explain how I lost 7,000 in one day. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I am so glad I am a nurse and I earn an honest living doing something important. I would be ashamed if I "earned" my living helping people get higher ranked on google. - Mark

I hear you loud and clear Robert. I'm not saying you aren't taking a major hit & will probably continue to see that come your way for a few days. I see your loss & a majority of it is probably autounfollows, LOL, ah the cycle of automation. Listen Robert, I'm really not taking a shot at you, just voicing my opinion & feelings that due to you participating in autofollow for a very long... more... - Joel Mackey

Mark: I'll respond to you once because you seem to think you have a grasp on who I am. I'd like to set you straight real quick before you get that good feeling inside of you thinking you are making any sense or good points at all. Just because I can do SEO does not mean that is what I do for a living. I have a programming degree & do a ridiculous number of things. Just because I'm not... more... - Joel Mackey

sorry for being a dick, had a bad day xx - Mark

Mark: Sweet. No problem. You're always entitled to your opinion. Hope your day gets better. Nurses deserve to be paid better & get more respect. You've got mine but I also admire that you apologized. That's rare in this world. :P Take care buddy. - Joel Mackey

This is a long post so I need to check I get it, "gaming googles SEO gaming isnt gaming on the autofollow gaming game of Friendfeed gaming twitter game? - Robert Higgins

Joel: I disagree. I had a very large following before I even turned on autofollow. And I don't have autofollow turned on here and I have a very large following. I never got into using TweetDeck for groups. If anything I use FriendFeed for that. Anyway, your point that autofollowing increasing followers is right, but as I have demonstrated once you unfollow all those people go away. They... more... - Robert Scoble

I've ALWAYS said who you follow is more important than who is following you. Now I'm putting that into practice even more. If you're following me just to have me follow you back you're following me for the wrong reason. - Robert Scoble

It really doesn't matter what social network you using there are going to be a group that you connect and interact with regularly and the rest of your following. My reach is farther than what I see everyday, then again maybe I have just fallen for the hype. - Dawn Pigoni

Agreed, never follow just for the follow back. As for the inability to put people on lists on Twitter, there are twitter clients that work just as well. - Brian Ellis

Robert's right. I'm almost a fanatic about that. - Dennis Jernberg

I don't see it as necessary to follow someone both on Twitter and Friendfeed. Although I generally like to catch what you have to say, Robert , so I follow you on both services. - Martha

One I use is Twibes. I never liked that Twitter itself doesn't have a groups function. - Dennis Jernberg

I use T-Deck. I have multiple accounts and T-Deck makes it very easy to control them. - Brian Ellis

What do you guys call your friendfeed groups? - Mark from iPhone

Let's be Twitter buddies again, mmk? :) - Joshua M

Don't follow me, my twitter feed is really dull. - Alex Scrivener

Robert: You said, "I never got into using TweetDeck for groups." I specifically used to refer people to your videos demonstrating TweetDeck and how it enables you to follow so many people. I laughed when I saw them because it allowed me to not have to explain it & just send them your way. So at one point you were evangelizing the use of TweetDeck for Groups & filtering all of the people... more... - Joel Mackey

I've made my "lists" in PeopleBrowsr, so for me Twitter and FriendFeed works the same when it comes to filtering the noise. - Svartling

Svartling: I'm so heavily dependent on Peoplebrowsr now that Twitter's almost unusable without it. I like Friendfeed a lot. just still figuring out how to work it into my daily flow. - Kevin Arth

I didn't read any of this but i was here - Doubledown_inSL

I haven't been using FF much, but this conversation is giving me a reason to take a second look at FF. I can not keep up with the spam. I do enjoy Twitter for the conversation, but not to keep up with a lot of people. I miss the interesting tweets in the mass of spam and porn. - Michele McGraw from iPhone

I feek the same way, Michele. What I am uncertain about is whether I can use FriendFeed to organize my Twitter friends right out of the gate or do those whom I wish to follow using FF have to using FF as well? I just haven't quite had the time to explore it. If it's the latter it would be another app I would have to get friends to use and that would probably decrease the # of actual... more... - Hans Eisenman from email

I use FriendFeed as kind of a 'best of the best' of Twitter. Where I can really read and digest what's going on. Brilliant blog post, btw. - Thor

Loved your blog post. Still trying to figure out how to make the most of FriendFeed, but following you is probably a good start. - Ed

I personally find FriendFeed to be more pleasing because of the ease in following threaded conversations. But I have been using TweetDeck and it allows me to place tweeps in groups/columns, similar to FF groups, so I can parse out things I WANT to see. However, I was following anyone who followed me, and now I have a lot of spam and market/MLM posts that I need to sift through... annoying. I will be going on an unfollow twitter spree once it's back up and stable from the DoS attacks. - Timothy Federwitz

Gonna have to get that Peoplebrowsr from the sound of it. - Hans Eisenman from email

Been trying to login to Peoplebrowsr with my Twitter ID and it's telling me wrong pw, and yet I can log in to Twitter with same pw. Wonder if it's at all related to the DOS attack Twitter was having. - Hans Eisenman

It always takes some effort to shift a dynamic. I appreciate you rethinking your social networking preferences publicly, it's given me a lot to think about. - Jo Golden PhD

hopefully i didn't get lost in the "twitter-shed"...I totally support what you did - Crackle

Thank you for the insightful post Robert. Great points to your discussion on WHY you did it. We can all learn. - Matthew

Rob Diana

Apple now bans e-books from the App Store - http://www.tuaw.com/2009...

August 6 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Timothy Federwitz liked this

Yikes! I don't like the direction Apple has been heading in with app rejections to the app store. My *guess* is they are gearing up to offer their own eBook reader and books, so therefore want to steer all people through that "experience". I like variety and choices personally. I have used "Kindle for iPhone" for several titles, but I am liking the formatting issues less and less and am starting to look more at Stanza and potentially others. - Timothy Federwitz

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