tomio geron › Comments

Hmmm. I plead the fifth. - Robert Scoble

Guilty - tomio geron

Jawbones marketing campaign is great. You know what would be a good marketing move? Auto sellers offering add-on Bluetooth speaker and headsets for free in california. Or making these free as incentives to buy other services(more expensive ofcourse) instead of having ipod shuffle raffles. - Akshay Dodeja

super-guilty. women have been driving for decades staring in the rear view mirror doing their eye-liner and they're no laws against that. - Morgan

OMG I'm not the only one? I am so guilty of this. - Adrienne Van Houten

Add me to the guilty list. Like your average 8th grader, I can text with my eyes closed (and out of police view). Super dangerous. - Jennifer Mitchell

A great comment on the post on what is approved and what's not: http://www.louisgray.com/live... - Louis Gray

what i like about the law is that totally legal for me to text while driving, yet i can't put the phone to my ear. - Admiral Anika

i'd just like to point out that, since the onset of this law, i've ridden at least three Los Angeles buses with drivers chattering happily into cell phones held to their ears. where was i when we finished resolving the whole drunk driving issue? because it must be resolved for this to matter so much. interesting that we managed to take care of that when our buses and trains still stop running an hour before the bars close. - idnan

As long as enough people are talking and blogging about photography, it works. Any archivists on FF, or records managers on FF? - Dave "Freedom 35"

That's the thing David. Google will still excel at obscure search. But if you want to see interesting things about Photography or the iPhone or Obama or alcohol or your favorite company or more general search, social filtering will provide a superior experience to Google or Yahoo or MSFT. It's amazing how good search is now at FF and they *are not even using the social metadata yet!* Just you wait until they let their algorithm loose on the world for that. - Thomas Hawk

No doubt FF is going to be a very useful and fruitful search engine. However they still need to improve the speed of indexing. Search results are far behind the latest entries. - Yuval Atzmon

Now maybe MSFT is actually watching FF. But I don't get the sense that they are. Or Yahoo. But it blows me away that MSFT would pay $100 million for Powerset, a company's whose search technology I've tried and sucks, while ignoring the power in search that is FF. Filtering search by what the general population likes and even more by what your social circle likes is the future of search. - Thomas Hawk

atzmon, that will come in time. What we have today is proof of concept. Everything else is just time. Why does Flickr have the best image search on the internet today? Because of social meta data and ranking. Why is it that Yahoo could never capitalize on this for web search when they had a 3 year head start on everyone else with delicious, flickr, upcoming. etc? - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, I ahve began using FF search as the main Searchlet. google is so web1.0 kindish. My only pain point is that FF does not yeild results for term that is part of the comment content. It is only taking main URI /txt - Peter Dawson

atzmon - i haven't found that to be the case - my searches are returning results that have threads minutes old - ff is a great example of social grid search & how its starting to replace traditional search imho - nice thread thomas :) - mike "glemak" dunn

think about this. As *good* as search is today at FF. they have not even released their "relevancy" feature yet which coordinates rank (comments/likes) with most recent. It will be even more powerful once they do this and I bet that they are working on this right now. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, one of the first things that caught my attention about FF in the first place was its potential in the search area. I'm willing to give them all the time they need because I'm sure it's going to pay off for me as a user. While we're on the subject, they do have a few basic features to implement, like a bit of morphology. Try searching for 'tactic' and 'tactics', compare the results you get. - Yuval Atzmon

I agree with Thomas. The potential is certainly there. But to be truly useful, it needs a much wider range of users. The interests currently represented here are relatively narrow. - Dan Kaplan

Agree, though not sure if they want to be seen as a search engine. - tomio geron

Love Thomas Hawk's remarks about relevancy and interestingness search algorithms, and concur with Dan Kaplan about the need for a much larger user base to make the search results truly worthwhile. - Sean McBride

tomio, they may not yet. In the same way that I'm sure Flickr didn't want to be seen as a "search engine" either. FF has to first and foremost present itself as a community and as a useful social aggregation tool. Search is the byproduct -- but search is where monetization takes place most powerfully. Dan, depth of content will come with time. Same as what happened with Flickr. - Thomas Hawk

Pretty soon, Friendfeed will even be able to cook your eggs and butter your toast. - Shawn Farner

Good point Shawn and a good reminder that BREAKFAST IS FOR WINNERS!!! - Thomas Hawk

Social search is clearly an important monetization opportunity for any aggregator - John McCrea

I'm tremendously amused that the first thing when I do the search is "Why I think Thomas Hawk is a Great Photographer" - David Thomas

http://friendfeed.com/summary... You can filter the day/week/month summaries by service, so that link is the most popular flickr photos this week - Glenn Slaven

Product searches could certainly be highly monetizable and provide much better/harder-to-game results than Google - Nicholas Molnar

Thanks for this tip, Thomas... it works great and seems very snappy. Also, it's a reliable way to get at my own twitter archive :-/ - Richard pancakhaus Walker

Agree, this has really turned my head recently. I didn't really use FF, but now find it an extremely useful resource - Kol Tregaskes

Agreed. I often check friendfeed (before Google) on certain topics. I do value the shares (and opinions) of my friends more than that of strangers picked by a Google-bot. - Czar

Yup, mine takes forever to sync minimal data. - Jonathon

yep - me too - seems to have got a bit faster after the first one or two though - Robin Barooah

I think it's also an issue with video? I had two movies and the backup crawled. Then I removed one and the backup goes a bit faster. - Arlan Koizumi

With 3 pages of apps installed my backup took 1hr. - Chris Rodgers

The backup takes waaaay too long. - Grant

You can choose to stop the backup at any point - there's a little X to the right of the progress bar top of the iTunes screen - click that (if you know it's backed up recently etc) and it will skip over to its first syncing activity - Patrick Jordan

why is it backing up if everything is already synched? - tomio geron

A little skepticism goes a long ways... - Kirk Kittell

Is Kevin Rose responsible for this? :) - Bradley Goetsch

The LA Times just ran the Twitter/Jared/Kevin Rose story. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscou... - Louis Gray

freaking a-lister's at it, AGAIN !! - Peter Dawson

The Pros and Cons of Twitter as News Source - http://red66.com/2008... - Carlos Granier-Phelps

Question is: who's at fault here for not fact checking? The guy who posted the original tweet? Or the thousands who re-tweeted it? - Carlos Granier-Phelps

I agree. I think we all need to abandon FriendFeed and set up personal gopher servers instead. - Akiva Moskovitz

Same here, I woke up this morning and that was on my things to do list! - Joe Dawson from Alert Thingy

I do not rellay agree. I think FF can do more, for instance search and filtering. Just like I do now with RSSmeme and Yahoo pipes to filter some noise - Arturo Servin from Alert Thingy

Like the counter point of view Sarah. Gonna think about this one a bit more. - Hutch Carpenter

Is Friend Feed Doomed? Haha, can't imagine anyone here is going to click through on that headline. - Thomas Hawk

The fact that FB & MySpace have implemented 'status message' features hasn't killed Twitter. Why would Google FriendConnect et. al. kill FriendFeed? - Rubin Sfadj

too much bold font - tomio geron

@Thomas It is always the case with the Link Sharing Websites. We just read the titles & less than 5% I guess is the CTR. - Nikpay

certainly not- FF is still in early beta adoption phase. I have to agree @arturo with the filters /Pipes and Search. If FF has a tab where I can create my own pipes across 'friends' and then display results of personalization into a separate tab, then its becomes one of the most powerful vehicles on the internet for content management and sharing. Secondly, an 'alert; tab for terms also would be great - I make and break alerts using google,but this can be implemented on FF (I think). BTW FF can have openid - Peter Dawson

why so much bolding in the post? - acedanger from twhirl

Are posts about Friendfeed being doomed, doomed? - cmiper

I think we need to see the takeup of the social aggregation services that Google and Facebook launch before we pass judgment. I recently added my flickr photostream to my facebook mini-feed, but I haven't seen many people doing the same, or any noticeable effect... - Edward Barnieh

I commented on the post itself, but I can summarize: "Nope." - Vince DeGeorge

According to your theory, Twitter should of been killed the day Google bought Jaiku but that didnt happen because of the particular people that use Twitter. I have a feeling that FF is at its tipping point for usurping the Twitter crowds from Google, MS, etc. - Andrew Baron

I think Jarred wrote a very good post. There is a lot of stuff to think about. I'm inclined to agree with him, although I better not say that out loud on FF. Might get smacked by the FF fans out here ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

</smack> @Alexander van Elsas </endsmack> - LOL, what exactly are you agreeing too ? That if FF is not bought out, they will not survive ?? How can you come to that conclustion without know the business model or exit strategy for FF ? - Peter Dawson

I think it's too early to call it. We thought Twitter was the bee's knees at one time before Friendfeed came along and challenged that. Who knows what will happen in a year's time? - Morton Fox

Didn't really expect anyone commenting here to agree with me, haha, but I have enjoyed reading all your thoughts. This is much different than status messages or Jaiku "not killing" Twitter. Twitter and those services attack a problem in a similar, though competitive way. FriendFeed and the "connect" initiatives attack a problem in opposite, theoretically divergent ways. I think FriendFeed has misinterpreted the direction of the social web. It won't die tomorrow, but I think its days are numbered. - Jarred Taylor

Ahh, the daily FFFodder. Nope, not even close. - jcunwired

Ok, and for my next FriendFeed link bait of the day... "OMFG FriendFeed is doomed, doomed, DOOMED! It will be dead in 48 hours!!!!!!! digg digg digg this here!!!!!! - Thomas Hawk

doesn't sound inflammatory or anything, or does it ? - Tudor from Alert Thingy

not if ironman can save it! - karl dotter

Today, FriendFeed is fine. Tomorrow, there will be an explosion of new social sites. You'll be able to plug in to every blog you visit. Every time, you'll have to create a new profile, load those details into FriendFeed, and then come here to keep track with limited ability to interact. Why not have identity, interaction, and aggregation through a single log-in? The social web is going to explode, and I don't know that FriendFeed will be able to keep up, especially now that the big boys are in the game - Jarred Taylor

@peter I think Jarred is right about everything becoming social. Destinations are part of a business model that marks the web 2.0 era. Once we get rid of that business model the web will open up and become socially more connected. In that sense Friendfeed right now is doing the opposite as Jarred noted. But I'm sure they will open up too. FF just wants the aggregations to pass through their database, because it will allow them to provide user powered search. Facebook uses the same approach - Alexander van Elsas

It can't. I spent way too much time here (and every minute was worth it... :) - Charlie Anzman

You can even think about it economically. Google and Facebook have enormous server capacity. If they control the identities, then they don't have to waste server load sending spiders across dozens or hundreds of different services checking for updates for hundreds of thousands of users. It's hosted with them. FriendFeed faces the problem that it wants to scale, but it knows more people equals more profiles on more services to ping. And so far, no business model to support expansion. - Jarred Taylor

James , it is not doomed, You can see the number of people commenting on your post, which means that there is big community here(even if we are early adopters). And community makes everything. Including Google FriendConnect. And also keep in mind, guys behind FF are the ones who gave us Gmail, Google Reader and 'Don't be evil' - Varun Mahajan

@Varun, don't assume that since it attracted early adopters FF will also attract mainstream users. That is a huge step that few ever are able to take. - Alexander van Elsas

I think Netflix and Amazon teach us that sometimes simple business models are quite difficult to execute, and first-movers with those business models prove really, really hard to crush. One of FriendFeed's strengths is that it not only competes with other social networks, it extends them. - Mitch Wagner

Interesting how even among the FF comments, there is no solid consensus. (Also, just FYI - that was a guest post on sarahintampa.com - but I love how it made everyone think.) - Sarah Perez

ok just think of it.. if FF is doomed, then why is it that every1 is complaining about twitter being down on FF ?? da whole twitter community is commenting on FF once again as on ( 20/05:4.25EDT). Early adopters and generic twitter users are being driven across properties by simple virtue of availability and ease of use - Peter Dawson

Hmm...a "FriendFeed doomed" post has a half dozen comments at the original post, and tons of comments on FriendFeed. Perhaps this is similar to unusually high statistical spikes for TV shows about Nielsen families, but it's important to note that FriendFeed is more than an aggregator. - Ontario Emperor

It was a good idea to add the FF comments to the blog. Looks great. - Alejandro

At the original post, FriendFeed Comments 35+. Disqus Comments: 7+. Competition? Seems like FF can cut Disqus grass. - Mohamed J

Although I wish FriendFeed comments were threaded... :) - Ontario Emperor

Sooner or later people will get it. Fast forward 12 months, and FriendFeed is the platform Facebook was supposed to be. Consuming raw FriendFeed material will remain popular among us early adopters, but up-and-coming apps/services built on top of FF will successfully reach and cater specific portions of the mainstream audience (FriendFeedInBigFontForTheAlmostBlind.com is probably already in the works! ;) - Aviv

More comments here than on the post means nothing, but nice try folks. :) There is no doubt FF trumps post comments. I never said FF is doomed because it is useless. Today, it is very useful. I argue that FF is probably doomed because the big players are creating solutions to fragmentation that will rob FriendFeed, a small fish, of its mission. We won't need to use FF to aggregate and annotate fragmented content when the content is centralized for us by Google/FB's new id management systems. - Jarred Taylor

My friends are your friends. - Robert Scoble

To hide Robert's friends or all Friends of a Friend, Click "Hide", then "More Hide Options" and finally, "Hide ALL stuff from friends-of-friends". Then you're done! - Louis Gray

that's not very transparent.. I don't like it ;-) - Jonathan

If it were perfectly transparent you wouldn't be able to see it. Perhaps it's translucent? - Kevin Fox

is there a way to decrease the frequency of updates from a particular person? - tomio geron

@alejandro where? - Sarah Perez

@Alejando: Friend Feed does have filter by service, my script makes the links a *lot* more obvious. So instead of having to find an item of that service, you can just click it from the sidebar. - engtech

Is there a way to not get a link twice if people (especially the same person) posts a link on delicious and shares it on Google Reader? - tomio geron

I use the Greasemonkey script, didn't know FF did this. I like the script though. - Mike Reynolds

oh, I get it now. ;) Sarah, you can write service:googlereader (for example) in the search to filter the content. - Alejandro

Some good links on that post. Thanks. - Greg K.