If the FF beta is too fast for you JUST PRESS PAUSE (it's in the upper right corner of the blue strip at the top). When FF is super active at peak times it's going to be TOO FAST if you are following a lot of people. Don't be scared of the pause button. It is your friend.
Or a combination of both. The PAUSE button just made my life sane again.
- Akiva Moskovitz
I think the pause button needs to be much more prominent - I didn't spot it, and I suspect I'm not the only one.
- Ian Betteridge
Filters are going to quickly become you're friend
- Mark Philpot
Amazing the continued impact Twitter has on social network design -- first the Twitter-like Facebook redesign, and now this. As noted by others: Not sure if this will make FF any more mainstream -- especially when you need Scoble to get usage tips. Hah. Am enjoying the font size increase.
- Anthony Baker
New users won't be following a ton of people. Live streaming will be totally manageable for them initially. As they get more active on the site they will learn to manage with pause and filters.
- Thomas Hawk
This new interface will be much more attractive for new users which will be good for ff's growth and mainstream appeal. The site is much less intimidating for the new user now.
- Thomas Hawk
If you're getting dizzy and want to hop off the FriendFeed beta merry-go-round, click on "Filters", enter a name, check "My friends and groups" and click "Save filter". It'll give you a static view you have to refresh manually.
- Ken Sheppardson
Someone else mentioned a "floating" pause button. That's be nice for when you're not near the top of the screen.
- Kenton
Is there a keyboard short cut for pause -- ie: space key would be nice?
- Tom Parish
Definitely feelin' the love for friendfeed. but just wait 'til the bandwidth gets up there and ff critical mass really kicks in. then performance might be more comparable.
- Rob Schieber
Not an entirely fair comparison, most people that use Twitter for much at all are using a 3rd party interface; much of the value of Twitter is in the flexibility of the API
- Dave Schwab
But Robert... Twitter thru the web is useless anyway. It's not a Web site, dude, it's a communications protocol. Who cares what the interface looks like?! We care about the API, about the server performance, etc. We'll code/create/mash our own UIs!
- Alister Cameron
Yes, but I'm dizzy following this. I will have to learn to drive it like a car. I like it for breaking news, but not for real conversation
- Francine Hardaway
unfair.. open old friendfeed and twitter for a real comparison.. when twitter v2 comes out then compare tbh...
- Stuart Evans
Twitter is picking up comments on FF but if FF is linked to Twitter it will republish the Twitter link to the FF comment!
- Justin Long
Agreed, but now FF just looks like Facebook to me.
- Dave Hodson
beta still not available for me, can't wait to test it!
- Arnaud Fischer
checking the brand new beta.friendfeed.com !! is it a combination of iRC , twiter and real time frienfeed and ... wow !!!
- Rocky
I agree with Alister above....Twitter is a utility the way that FM radio is...it carries the convo, there should be no need to use twitter.com
- Jason Stephens
Even with Tweetdeck? There's a balance here. Speed kills!
- Steve Rubel
Please stop with the "Dead" talk. Only attention monger bloggers use that type of language... ;)
- Jeremiah Owyang
Agree with Robert. And Steve has a point about Tweetdeck.
- Roberto Bonini
it's crazy, if I don't at it for one minute everything goes away and other stuff shows up. maybe I just subscribe to too many people but I hate it when the text I'm reading moves on the screen
- Mihai Secasiu
Nice, but easier to do with Chrome or Prism. For Chrome, just go to http://cli.gs/SgyDQe then select "Create application shortcuts....." from the menu that looks like a page (probably called the "Page" menu). Chrome also seem to use fewer resources, but ymmv.
- Chris Rogers
When I first saw this headline I thought to myself I hope this isn't like Valleywag. :-) Although, I guess you all have seen my shower pictures so not too many more secrets than that. Other than I do sneak into the peanut butter occassionally. Seriously, good tips. I couldn't see any holes to fill in, so that's good!
- Robert Scoble
Daniel, you nailed it. Excellent spot on post!
- Mike Fruchter
I am a pretty new ff user...this was great information for me...thank you.
- John-David Lusan
I saw this heading and though of DIGG. Don't get me wrong Digg became what it is today due to the fact that people did most of this stuff to there community. I find that you need to have several Sources of sharing your content, for example: Google, FF, DIG, Stumbleupon. Here is a good discussion on that http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Paul
It's nice to finally see a Daniel Pritchett post, on Louisgray.com
- Mike Fruchter
Congrats to Daniel on your post! One thing I like to do is hide aggressively and partition users into lists. This allows me to focus on the content that I find helpful and can contribute to the conversation. Sorry, I realized that is two things, not one.
- Rob Diana
I just added a few more tips to the comment section on Daniel's post on Louis' blog.
- Robert Scoble
Thanks everyone for your support, especially Louis for giving me this chance to share my ideas with a wider audience.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
@Paul: There is certainly an element of marketing to promoting content on FriendFeed, whether it's your own or someone else's. I don't think there's anything wrong with that though. Paying close attention to metrics and the "success rate" of posts (as judged by likes and comments) helps each of us to understand what makes posts really useful to the community. I'd never suggest that anyone abandon their favorite site in favor of FriendFeed - you can have more than one favorite!
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Congratulations, Daniel!! You're a great addition to LG's site. :)
- Mona Nomura
Funny, everyone who clicked like on this post BUT Jesper Lind subscribes to me (and me to them). What's up Jesper? :-)
- Robert Scoble
This is a very good post, kudos Daniel. And I'm not just saying that because I got a mention. LOL. It's hard for new people to figure out exactly what to do with FriendFeed. THere are also not enough posts like this one to help them along the way.
- Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF
Robert, not everyone wants to listen to you :)
- Rob Diana
AND he's only SUBd to males, Robert. What's up with that?!
- Mona Nomura
Rob, I know that. I just wanted to hear the reasoning. But, still, one out of 40 ain't bad and I'm still following him, so if he posts anything interesting the rest of you will see it too.
- Robert Scoble
genieyclo: yup. I manually checked each one. I was looking mostly to make sure I was subscribed to everyone here.
- Robert Scoble
Thanks for the mention!
-
Excellent post Daniel! The tips are definitely spot on. My sentiments about FF are summed up well, it's definitely about conversation, sharing and promoting things not just from your feed but in others too, especially if you like it and it interests you! Together with Zee's 'unofficial guide' posts, this constitutes a great resource for those who are new to FF!
- Mo Kargas
Oooppsss, Jill, Superhero Librarian isn't following me either. Sob. Heheh.
- Robert Scoble
Great stuff!!! Congratulations!!!!!! :)
- Susan Beebe
How can someone using FriendFeed not subscribe to at least one female? Just off the top of my head, you have to subscribe to Sarah Perez, Corvida, Cynda, Mona and Tina. Those are just the "active" people, not to mention the various people who tweet or write for big blogs like Veronica B, Kristen Nicole and several more. And I apologize to any of the women I have missed in this quick list.
- Rob Diana
No I'm not Robert. No really need to because I follow so many people who follow you. The naked shower pictures freaked me out too much. :-P
-
very good, great information and gets you thinking about optimization thanks for sharing.
- Raymond Marr aka Knatchwa
This was great. When I clicked I was skeptical but I was won over quickly.
- Andrew
Jill: they freaked me out too. Remind me never to get drunk with Valleywag reporters again. :-)
- Robert Scoble
So is this likebait, instead of linkbait? :-)
- Louis Gray
Good stuff but as a FF newbie, I would have loved to seen a few tips about friend discovery. I get your point that the idea is to help people find you, but I wonder if there are search capabilities like a Twellow for Twitter. Thanks
- Brian Schwartz
What i like is the way your personal page can somehow "recommend" users to help you know who to subscribe to.
- tony
Brian, the best way to "find" friends, is to look at the posts people share and the comments they contribute. If you like those parts, you probably found someone worth subscribing to.
- Rob Diana
@Brian Schwartz: I largely rely on Rob Diana's advice about organically growing my FF network. Every so often I still check these two tools to find compatible FFers outside of my extended network: FF Like Compatibility Calc and LA Likers: http://is.gd/8ewf
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Good post. I need to learn about the whole imaginary friends piece. Kind of confuses me. @ Brian - I am a little less new right now and I recommend going to the rooms and joining them and participating there. Then expand your friend subscriptions from there. Also, use your google reader, twitter and whatever else to create your own "feed." . Also include your blog there. If u are into music, sign up for last fm or pandora (I use pandora w/iphone too) and then share your musical tastes as well.
- Amani
Great post, Daniel. #8 is so true - I constantly think about how things are going to appear in FriendFeed when I do things on other sites (do I want it to appear on FF, should I share it directly instead...). And #13 is good advice I still need work on. I try to search before posting, but sometimes I still get petulant when I didn't find the sharable thing first (which is usually).
- Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF
@Mike: I'm entrusting you with the crucial task of creating 6 more FF accounts and clicking likelikelikelikelike. Edit: No, not really.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Anyone know how to add Friendfeed to iGoogle??
- Jez Arnold
Add an iframe gadget to a tab, and set the settings of the tab to 1 column; have the iframe bring up your friendfeed. I've found it really handy ever since Steve suggested it! 8-)
- LJF Wolffe
last.fm app is available for normal iPhones but their buffering scheme is slow compared to Pandora. I hope that "liking" a song on the app will not cause last.fm spam on FF.
- Glenn Batuyong
Some stats: new Pandora on iPhone listener every 2 seconds, 3.3 million tracks played for iPhone listeners, 200000+ stations created, over 35% of iPhone listeners are new to Pandora, #4 on Apple's top downloads list, iPhone usage pushed Pandora listening to all time record over the weekend.
- Tom Conrad
Those stats sound amazing. Did you expect anything close to that?
- Patrick Jordan
Honestly between Pandora and AOL Radio's app, I haven't turned my radio on, or played an mp3 in days. Literally!
- Mike Lewis
I have no music on my touch yet I listen to music all day long thanks to Pandora, last.fm, & AOL
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
@justiphoneblog we've been building Pandora mobile implementations for almost two years now (we're on about 50 different phones across Sprint and AT&T) and really truly the response to the iPhone app is way beyond anything we expected.
- Tom Conrad
After a weekend of playing with my iPhone and these music apps, I went out and bought an iPod touch and a base station just to put in my living room to continue the vibe while I'm in there. The apps with the connectivity of the iPods and iPhones are going to rewrite the digital music consumer appliance world very very quickly.
- Andrew Leyden
Tom - wow - that's very cool. And a great app by the way ...
- Patrick Jordan
I still haven't tried Last.fm. I'm already a big fan of Pandora, but I do see my friends' Last.fm favorites on their feeds and it has me intrigued. Anyone using both? Might I have a few snippets of compare/contrast comments between Pandora and Last.fm??
- Lisa L. Seifert
@Matt - Thanks! That's exactly the kind of input I was looking for. Sounds like both are still very usable for me for different reasons.
- Lisa L. Seifert
Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern on Travel Channel did a segment on Civet coffee while shooting its Vietnam episode. To be transparent I work with Travel Channel. We'll send you the complete season 1 DVD if you like so you can check it out (just tell us where to send it, you can DM us at twitter.com/bizarrefoods). If not interested in the full season, you can grab the episode on iTunes at: http://tinyurl.com/6zgc5p, but it'll cost ya that way. Segment comes 15:54 into the episode if you watch on iTunes.
- James Clark
I want to buy some of this coffee and just pour it all over my body.
- Colette
$50 seems expensive, no matter how many cats it has been through. Sat Bains in Nottingham sells it for a mere £7 ($15)
- jon
I bet the coffee would look nice rolling over different parts of me.. I would just then need someone to lick it off.
- Colette
I want a Techmeme without any business news. Just blog posts that make me smarter, or give me things to try. I think that's why I like FriendFeed so much. Far less "so and so buying so and so" kind of news, and more about "here's how to take a better picture" or "here's a new iPhone app."
Funny. I had an idea for another type of meme ... thinking of talking to Gabe and Atul Arora about it ...
- AJ Kohn
But still tech news (or heavily oriented that way). I would like even more specialized info and discussion -- like what is going on in F1 racing, the bicycle world or other subjects I am or could become interested in. I thought the rooms feature would do it but it doesn't cut it (or maybe the people here are just interested in things that interest me)
- Brian Sullivan
true. find news is easy. find useful post/article is really hard.
- Rafał Nowak
We need a SMARTER filtering services, I really need this kinda service, data flowing everywhere ... Yes Scoble, I love FF for the same reason, let me ask you, did u bookmark your fav. users ? ;)
- Alemsah Ozturk
Brian: those will happen when FF grows. Right now the feature set here is retarding its growth. They are rewriting the backend so they can add new features to let us talk to the database in new ways. WHen that happens it'll take off in growth again and bring in less geeky kinds of people.
- Robert Scoble
Alemsah: nope, I don't bookmark anything. There's way too many to bookmark at this point. And I refresh so often that I see all good stuff anyway.
- Robert Scoble
Have you spent much time on Twine, Robert? I get the impression they're tackling this problem--in their own way, of course.
- Ken Sheppardson
we're trying to do that with Regator... although we do have business in there, there is much more to it and it doesn't dominate unless it is really top news in the whole blogosphere. We are working to make quality blogs and interesting posts accessible for average people as well as tech geeks... some people just don't care that twitter bought summize - can you believe it??? hit me up for a login if you are interested in taking a look. Please forgive the fairly blatant plug. :)
- Scott Lockhart
Twine is more of the semantic analysis/social news thing. Also has a "grouping" mechanism, but it is user driven. I think we are talking about techmeme for tech blogs here.
- Rob Diana
My biggest problem is still redundancy; I'm not subscribed to that many people here (relatively) and even so I'll still see the same story linked five times, if not the same outright link. The next Google will be the guys who can nail personalization, recommendation, and filtering, as well as a sort of aggregation of conversation by topic. So far no one has gotten even close. FF might, but it's still got a ways to go.
- Eric P
Ken: I have to spend some time on Twine. I should have done that long ago. You like it?
- Robert Scoble
What if a search engine or filtering system, similar to summize for FF ?
- Alemsah Ozturk
hey eric, did you hear twitter acquired summize??? about a million times.
- Craig Ritchie
from twhirl
I definitely still hope rooms take off as the diversity of folks (from an interests point of view) grows. I'm with Brian though in looking for more interaction on other topics beyond the hot tech and social media world...
- Gus Perez
Scoble : did you use feedhub for rss feeds. Basicly, it creates a personalized RSS feed from your RSS feeds .. And it learns with your help (you say I like this one, it changes the algorithm so on...) Would it be nice if similar idea can be applied to FF ?
- Alemsah Ozturk
If "editorializing by algorithms" then you need criteria for what is important; what would be the criteria? how about leveraging likes ? still fixing and open to suggestions :http://www.thredr.com/
- LPH™ and his dog P™
Rebecca: I just looked at Gyzork. It's worse than TechMeme. Less useful stuff and even more regular old news. Sorry, that's what http://news.google.com is for and it doesn't have an awful name, either. Alemsah: too much work. Never will take off, sorry. Needs to be easy for lazy types.
- Robert Scoble
This is why I started reading magazines again!
- David Weiner
Hey guys. This is pretty close to what we're trying to do at socialmedian. The idea is collaborative filtering at the topical level, wiki-like scaling to an infinite # of topics. We call topic-based networks, "News Networks" and anyone can create one and bring in feeds, posts, and people to track, share, and discuss news of interest. We then add an additional layer/filter by enabling people to follow "Newsmakers." It's a tough problem to solve: Turn the volume up and turn it down at the same time.
- Jason Goldberg
Robert: have you checked out SocialMedian.com? Its coming out of alpha now. It lets you enter the topics and the sources you want -- In effect, its a customizable Techmeme.
- Christian Anderson
I like friendfeed because it does a pretty good job with sharing photos and videos, not just text. I've been experimenting with the open source twitter client, Witty, to add videos, drawings, and photos for this reason too. I think friendfeed activity also suggests that TechMeme is going to need to add comments if it wants to keep current.
- Loren Heiny
Christian: I just got added to SocialMedian yesterday, will try it out.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: i too am interested in the "this is cool" type stuff. that seems to be what is popular on socialmedian. I'm still playing with how to create a really tight "news network" for essentially engadget for web 2.0. Setting up the specific topics like iPhone apps is easy. setting one up around "how to take a better picture" is harder.
- Christian Anderson
Robert: We enable people on socialmedian to fully customize their news networks to include all types of sources (e.g. business news, blogs, etc., or just a few favorite feeds). Up to you. It's far from perfect yet but getting better by the day thanks to awesome feedback from our alpha users.
- Jason Goldberg
Jason: All we know how good SocialMedian is! ; ) Great job, congrats again!
- Erhan Erdogan
Erhan Erdogan are you on socialmedian? best you could do if you want to help us is let me/us know 3 areas we're f*cking up
- Jason Goldberg
Robert: RE Twine... I'm just beginning to take a serious look at it. I like the concept of joining affinity/interest groups and having members pool links to resources they come across, but it's not clear to me yet how/if it differs much from a social bookmarking system with tags, tag clusters, etc.
- Ken Sheppardson
Although there have been about a million "so and so buying so and so" posts on FF today
- James Joyner
that's kind of what i turn to reddit, digg, and fark for.
- Brian Ries
Jason: Thanks for your invite. ; ) I got the mail for - and also send me a feed back form or just send an email erhan(at)erhanerdogan.com.tr ;-)
- Erhan Erdogan
I want a site like Techmeme, but with a way to buy books. You can't read news all the time -- you need books too. Maybe that's why I'm always going to amazon.com.
- Gabe Rivera
Regator.com is in private beta right now, but I want to do a friendfeed experiment (even though this thread is a little old now). I have just created 30 invites that will use the code friendfeed. Just go to www.regator.com and pop in the invite code and see what you think of our site. Its definitely not Techmeme but take a look and see what you think. We're eager to get your feedback on what sucks and what rocks and what is just kinda okay. I will put this on my feed as well and see what happens... :)
- Scott Lockhart
But that's what Lifehacker is for! ;) Of course, I may be biased.
- Tamar Weinberg
@Gabe: Why not develop a bookmeme site then. I'll gladly help.
- AJ Kohn
@AJKohn - I would be more than happy to handover the domain you may be alluding to (in your comments up above) Gabe if he is interested in using it.
- Atul Arora
Techmeme has lost for me a long time ago. I hope that someone builds a newspaper view out of someone's personal friendfeed homepage (in effect a personalized, subscriptions-based techmeme)
- Meryn Stol
The headline was a bit misleading but, talking about our privacy and encryption made it a good article.
- Candace
One man's control is another man's protection... see it from the IP owner's perspective who just wants to protect his/her earning potential from their work and it doesn't seem like a desire to control as much as basic job protection.
- Scott Bannon
i like that the gang at TPB is finally thinking about actual profitable ventures now
- Pete Delucchi
@Scott bannon the only perspective I care about is the end users'.
- Jim Hearts FF
@Scott Bannon: the world doesn't owe you a living. if your business model involves selling people the product of 4*4, you should not be surprised when people share this knowledge with others.
- Sam Levine
The internet always has and always will view censorship and surveillance as damage and will route around it. Control is a business plan for failure online. Always has been, always will. If you create a market with artificial scarcity, you create value for competition and black markets.
- Mike Seidle
@Sam Levine, I didn't suggest anybody is owed a living, only that it's reasonable for everybody to want to protect their own livelihood.
- Scott Bannon
"Embracing the atom is key to winning the war on warming: Electric power generates 26 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and 39 percent of the United States' — it's the biggest contributor to global warming." http://www.wired.com/science...
- Johan
As usual, Wired's "gee whizz!" approach to technology misses lots of points. At current levels of use, we have about 85 years' worth of uranium, with an estimated 500 years that we haven't discovered yet. Convert over to 100% nuclear, and that shrinks to 17 years/100 years. In other words, fission is a short term solution, unless you rely on uneconomic technology (like fast breeder reactors) or unproven technology (like thorium reactors) to come to your rescue.
- Ian Betteridge
@Sean I agree that's exactly my outlook when I think of nuclear power!
- Joe Dawson
Oh, and nuclear is, sadly, still one of the most expensive ways of generating electricity. Build more reactors, and demand for uranium goes up, which increases the cost still further. That's simple supply and demand. Jumpnig from oil/coal to nuclear is jumping from one finite, short-term solution to another. And it's short-term thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.
- Ian Betteridge
Going Nuke makes good sense. The only other tempting option (orbital solar with beamed power downlink) is simply too vulnerable to consider in the current climate. The uranium problem is there, but there are ways to stretch that. The safety problem is basically solved and frankly the overblown fears about nuke power are part of what got us into this mess.
- Soulhuntre
Robert I believe I sent you link to my interview with Dr. Moore from earlier this year. Worth a listen.
- Andrew Feinberg
Never thought about any of this. Intersting. I think that the safly problems re overhyped by the media looking for a story to tell. Chernobyl is too good a backdrop to pass up. In in that case, we know why it happened: unstable reactor technology that the Russians developed. We don't use that tech in our reactors.
- Roberto Bonini