Wojciech Polak

nice site, thanks - Aaman Lamba

I would like to have cats just because they're all over the place, but nobody around me likes cats :) - Rah™

I can haz arkitekshural digest? - matt shobe

Welcome to an Indian (as in the country of) train. I have a few pics similar to this from my last two trip st India. - Gina K

I've always been curious about this. Do you need to buy a ticket to stand on top of the train? Does the guy standing at the very front get a discount? - torque

Paul Theroux, in the Great Railway Bazaar, describes the entry procedure for Indian trains as "a reverse fire drill" - people cartwheel through the windows INTO the train. - Roberto Bonini

For these trains (and anything under ac 2nd class) most people do not buy tickets. The conductor will not even go back there, so why bother? - Gina K

wt... omg - AJ Batac ♘

Uhm...What?! - Rah™

Overpopulation. - Raoul Pop

That looks nothing like Darjeeling Limited - Rodfather

The obvious lesson is that we in the United States are underutilizing our public transportation system. I used Muni and BART during my trip to San Francisco last week, and I was able to get inside the car every time; I never had to go to the roof. Come to think of it, I was actually able to get inside the plane also when flying to and from San Francisco; they didn't even have to put any seats on the wings. - Ontario Emperor

@ontario, oh you have no idea, my husband has stories of being on planes that needed to be "push started". - Gina K

err...guys, these particular pics are from a Bangladeshi train? I'm sure Indian trains are similarly efficiently packed but just saying... - /(bb|[^b]{2})/ (Kamath)

This reminded me of a comic I saw; http://friendfeed.com/e/90f752... - Roberto Bonini

lol Roberto. I think that comic is from a line of t-shirts or the other way around. I got a t-shirt from there: http://www.motichoor.com/ Funny stuff. - /(bb|[^b]{2})/ (Kamath)

@petk Yes I am aware of that, but some of the areas I have been in are all but Bangladesh in name (ever heard of the chicken neck area?) And this kind of packing is only slightly more than a rush hour train in Delhi. - Gina K

@Gina, Chicken neck area? interesting... - /(bb|[^b]{2})/ (Kamath)

@petk so called because it looks like, well you get the point. In far south-eastern india, primarily a bengalli or bangla (why do you think its called "bangla"desh) area is a little sliver of India bordering bangladesh which looks like the neck and the area further looks rather like a chicken head. My husband's family lives in this area. - Gina K

I tried that once. But then had to get off quickly when the train approached overhead electrical cables. It only works for certain routes. - Robin Barooah

Duncan - I was really hoping for better filtering capabilities. I envisioned a semantic filtering tool where I can fine tune my river of noise with sophisticated ninja like query logic. Also want native SMS API for posting to FF. Mobile is so impt for me and ability to post (1) pics, and (2) TXT/SMS directly from my mobile to FF. SMS is a critical feature for me. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

agree with Duncan, I find the beta confusing and whatever ff has currently is simple and works. Frankly i dont think there was a need for redesign this. Instead FF should focus on adding other useful features. - Krishna Gade

I'm curious what other people think about this. We are going through a lot of the feedback this week and deciding our next steps, so please don't hold back. - Bret Taylor

Bret, I'm still mistaking the post box for search. I'm sorry I'm an idiot. Could it maybe start as a button, as in the past, and expand to the new configuration? - Chris Baskind

Yeah, I REALLY want that to be search right at the top..not sure why. - Rah™

all I really care about is filtering, and I still want the option to filter by topic (e.g. hide all McCain). The design is fine—apart from the black name-links, will never get used to that. - Vincent van Wylick

With Chrome, posts and everything are kinda screwed up. Being back on Firefox for this. Standard SMS API-people unite! Mobile now. Even the OperaMini midlet isn't able to stand against the page. ;p - Zu aka ElijahBailey

I share the same thoughts as Krishna Gade above. I prefer the current layout, but I look forward to seeing new features. - Wojciech Polak

Well you sometimes need a new design to make new features work. Friend lists would never work, without a side-bar, and rooms are on much better display now too. Don't know about the 'Everyone' link. OK, I never used it in the first place, but it's so far down there that I don't see anyone using it. - Vincent van Wylick

It should have more pictures - zhangtongjie

I couldn't disagree more with Duncan. The favorites tab now overrides the best of the day / week feature for me. The wasted space on the right hand side is now being used more efficiently. I would say continue with the filtering and UI updates. - Shakeel Mahate

I actually like the new UI. The sidebar makes more sense to me than the tabs. One things that needs to be changed back is the color of the usernames in every item, because they don't look like links to the person's feed. Also the color of the service used, because it looks like plain text when it's also a link. And PLEASE, we need filtering by service, keywords and a place were we can manage these options along with the things we have hiding in the past (services and users). - Alejandro S.

Congrats on the great article, Brian. - Bret Taylor

this aint gonna happen and here is why http://www.alleyinsider.com/20... - John Kotsaftis via feedalizr

awesome... I just wonder how much microsoft is going to fight back against the onslaught - James Campbell

Choice FTW! - Slippy Lane

@john: alleyinsider is the last source i will trust as to whether it is going or not going to happen. But, really, as @slippy says, choice FTW! The rest will just pan out. - Ashwin Bharambe

That picture is great. It looks like a band photo. - Andrew Burd

Internets are the new rock'n'roll, Andrew, didn't you hear? - Slippy Lane

The photographer, Joe Pugliese, has a great website: http://www.joepug.com/ In fact it's so great I haven't got round to reading the Wired article yet - Adewale Oshineye

Enjoyable read except for this completely bizarre paragraph -- "Not long after that, Brin and Page came by to check in on the furtive beginnings of their browser. "I remember sitting at my desk, which at the time had a stuffed snake running along the back of it," says Pam Greene, an engineer on the team. "Sergey was bouncing on one of those exercise balls, watching Darin give a demo, and petting the snake." - Osi

"The snake, called Mr. Bigglesworth, seemed to purr softly in Sergey's lap, providing a calming influence during the demo. However, when one of the tabs crashed, taking the browser with it, Sergey's voice took a more strident turn. "I have gathered here before me the world's best developers," Sergey began, "and yet each of you has failed to kill Internet Explorer. That makes me angry. And when Sergey gets angry, Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset. And when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset, people die!" - Karim

Sergey then pressed a nearby console button that retracted Darin's chair into the floor below. A flash of flame could be seen as the screaming developer vanished from the conference room. - Karim

/likes Karim's comment - Philipp Lenssen

Somebody help me!" Darin pleads. "I'm alive, only very badly burned!" This proves to be very distracting, and after being interrupted several times, Sergey picks up his phone, and reports the situation to a henchman. "I'll go deal with it," he assures Sergey. "If someone opens the retrieval hatch, I can get out," Darin explains. At this point, the hatch opens. Darin is at first grateful, but then a gunshot is heard. - Capn' "One-Eye" Longman ☠

After a pause, Sergey is satisfied Darin is dead and attempts to continue explaining his plan, only be interrupted by Darin again, who says indignantly "you shot me! You shot me right in the arm! Why did you-". Darin sentence is cut short by a second gunshot, which proves to be the end for him, as the hatch is heard to close. (http://www.moviedeaths.com/aus...) - Capn' "One-Eye" Longman ☠

Guys, if you want Google-related pulp fiction, check out this choose-your-own-adventure game :) http://blogoscoped.com/googlea... - Philipp Lenssen

awesome! - April Buchheit

this entry is the most liked of FriendFeed in last 24 hours (based on ffholic.com data) Congrats! - FFholic.com

This entry is in the most liked list of ffholic.com! Congrats! :) - FFholic.com

lol, plug plug. - Slippy Lane

Google’s Chrome is aimed at Windows, not IE This is no longer about browser but about the an entire marketplace spread between desktop, mobile and web. With Chrome, Google’s taking a shot at Windows, not paltry Internet Explorer I’ve covered this in more detail on my blog http://sachendra.wordpress.com... - Sachendra

I review chrome...need alot of work. see details on my blog http://trustseo.com/blog/2008/... - CeoSeo

The point of Chrome is the same point one would make about the iPhone. Will iPhone outsell Nokia worlwide in total number of phones sold? Not a chance in hell! Has it changed the face of mobile phones forever...absolutely. This is where I think Chrome is a fantastic concept. By open sourcing D8 Google has literally empowered every other browser including Safari and Firefox to be Windows beaters. In actual fact IE may even implemented their own canibalised V8 to canibalise their Microsofts existing fat client business. If you ask me, Google is the master of judo in this case. google 2 MSFT 0 - John Kotsaftis via feedalizr

I haven't been able to find many details about the V8 design, but it's apparently a straight JIT (no interpreter) with inline caching of property accessors. I didn't see anything about HotSpot/TraceMonkey-style optimizing compilation, and it doesn't seem to use any intermediate language. (http://code.google.com/apis/v8...) Is this the future of dynamic language runtimes? Am I a nerd? - Jim Norris

That's a very interesting idea! I think that for the case of push-generated feeds it will show nice improvements over the current polling approach (which is definitely not scalable). I am wondering if there would be a way to employ the same idea for poll-generated feeds (feeds that are retrieved on request only) though. - Alex Popescu

That's correct Alex. SUP works very well for most common feeds, but it's not ideal for more dynamic feeds such as a search (e.g. http://friendfeed.com/search?q... ). However, the vast majority of the feeds consumed by FriendFeed and others map into the SUP model very easily. SUP does not solve all problems, but it provides a very simple solution that should work for 90% of feed publishers. - Paul Buchheit

I like the name "SUP"... - Clare Dibble

Isn't this somehow similar to the conditional GET? I might be wrong though as at this hour my head might not be fully functional :). - Alex Popescu

sup? ;) - Tyler Gillies

Yeah...Sup? - Rah™

Alex, a conditional GET applies only to a single URL. SUP allows feed consumers to simultaneously monitor many thousands of feeds with a single GET. - Paul Buchheit

I've told you I might not be fully functional :-). You're right SUP is a container for updated feeds. Should I post any other questions directly to the room? - Alex Popescu

Paul this SUP technology is HOT!! I am totally awed by this disruptive innovative idea.... very impressive and incredibly brilliant!! wow!! - Susan Beebe

Thanks Susan! - Paul Buchheit

Your welcome Paul, you guys inspire the heck out me...American techie dream in real time...neat! - Susan Beebe

my flickr upload appeared much faster just now... are you guys using XMPP for flickr? - Travis Parsons

and written in .py :)- but if we throttle "generate_sup_update(db, 120)" and "SUP feed: {"since_time": "2008-08-12T01:44:49Z", "period": 120," [[..|..]]" , so if we take "120" and make it lets say "30", wont this make the load even more to both sides ? - Peter Dawson

Peter said throttle. - Russellreno

It's nice to see FF innovating things... its what I miss about livejournal back when it was just danga interactive. - Dave Dash

just curious, how to read SUP? pronounce sap or soup or syoop? - huixing

'sup, like the shortened version of "what's up?" - Tudor Bosman

So, where's the "omg it's not XML you idiots" backlash? - ⓞnor

Atom streams look more effective performance-wise and just a little bit harder to implement on both sides. See SixApart's: http://updates.sixapart.com/ - Alex Kapranoff

More than a little bit harder! Dealing with never-ending XML streams is a massive pain (see: XMPP), and keeping connections open is trouble. Also, the sixapart updates stream is a firehose that gives you all of the content being posted, you have no opportunity to filter out only those feeds you care about. The FF design is pretty much totally more awesome. - ⓞnor

work with feedburner to give you a ping every time one of the feeds changes and you can replace 5h with 'whenever it occurs' ;) - Nicole Simon

I can't wait for a DUDE or YO companion protocol. - abacab

Actually, I got very confused by the navigation. I keep clicking in the wrong place, and I'm still not sure which actions cause music to start playing. It seems kind of cool though, and apparently they have FriendFeed integration! - Paul Buchheit

Wow, this is really impressive! It's the best new website I've seen in at least 6 months. - Eric Florenzano

5 minutes in, was still trying to figure out how to get a song to play. and then that thing on the bottom left expanded and I figured it out. A little too much discovery involved for me tastes, but cool idea nonetheless! - Chu Yeow

I haven't used experience points since I played D&D. - James Herbert via twhirl

Impressive!! I like the sound of the bubbles. - Ray Chen

yea, the bubbles remind me of those vh1 pop up videos. If only navigation around the site wasn't such a pain. - Raymond

This is pretty sweet - yeah, lil grey box bottom left w/green dot - listening 2 Code Monkey by Jonathancoulton - great find, Paul! - Cheryl Allin via twhirl

Would love it if Songbird could pull tracks from it... - abacab

updates remind me of the iminlikewithyou UX - tagami

Thanks for the feedback. We just added a mouseover tooltip for songs to make the action of playing music more obvious. - Samuel Hsiung

hey raymond, what issue did you have w/ the navigation? if you would be so kind: james at thesixtyone dot com - James Miao

Amazing good UI (or even genius), very nice site and I found a lot of interesting and unknown music there! I somehow never liked last.fm and ilike.com was a bit better for me, but still not the best. I'm not interested in sharing what I'm listening to at the moment (as I often listen to one album for many days or weeks), but I like to discover new music and maybe share recommendations with friends. I'm highly impressed with thesixtyone. - Wojciech Polak

Loving the interface! Any new music service is a blessing these days. - Majento

Somthing to keep an eye on. That, is if the RIAA don't get hopping mad. Anything to keep music going.... - Roberto Bonini

Damn it's a great implementation of JS and UI - JungleG

Also, a friend developer of mine tried it on a Linux desktop and it didn't work - JungleG

he probably needs to update flash: http://www.thesixtyone.com/sta... - James Miao

awesome work -- great JS magic. well done Sam. yet again. - Puneet Thapliyal

About 2 hours of listening now, the default station, great tunes and perfect connection. - Majento

Thanks James! I am hooked! Great job... - JungleG

thanks, glad to hear people are enjoying the experience. - James Miao

i go there, haven't a clue what to do .. so i leave .. i don't care about points, just wanted to listen to music.. - Gregory Lent

@ gregory: candidness appreciated. while thesixtyone's positioning is very deliberate, we can always improve on communicating the wide range of benefits for using the site (i.e. you can listen without having to interact with the site). - James Miao

Excellent site and great service, I check out the Hot tunes each week - Kol Tregaskes

I believe this site is a lesson in how not to design a UI. After a couple minutes of registering and trying to figure stuff out...I'm done and I haven't even heard a song yet. Someone's going to have to make it a bit easier to get started. Going to this site for the first time is just like running Emacs. - Todd

agree with greg, todd and whoever else who felt frustrated and left tuneless - viki saigal

OK, after restarting Firefox, I seem to have music playing. Not the best experience...but since I'm into music and always looking for new ways to discover music, I went through the pains. I don't think I can point my non-techie friends to this site, though. - Todd

Hmm, music started playing for me immediately, and it was pretty obvious what to do. But I'm not sure why that thing at the left is closed by default. If I hadn't read about it in this thread, I might not have discovered it. - j1m

I've been using this site for a while. A great place to find new music. - Dennis Jackson

It reads like a tragedy. Things are going fine in the beginning, but you know it's going to end badly. - Chris White

Paul, good find! - imabonehead

OMG this guy totally fell for the loser salesguy ...how sad! - Susan Beebe

hiring decisions can kill your firm - Bill Sodeman

Really enjoyed this, though felt bad of course for the author. Really shows that doing as much legwork/homework/digging up front as possible is a good thing and well worth the time put in - Eric Berlin

While reading this, I kept thinking about your job titles "senior executive vice director of VP coordination & vision".... funny - but sad article. - Erin

Similar experience: My employer hired a supposed "expert" from a BIG 5 consulting firm. This person was a Global Manager and was going to come to our 30 person IT shop and do us right! Boy, that hiring manager was sooo excited! I about died when I learned that person was coming on board to be my new boss. Long story short: She left 90 days later with her tail between her legs when it was abundantly clear that she completely lacked requisite skills for her position. Couldn't even use PPT or email! - Susan Beebe

we need a salesperson for our business and this is exactly why we haven't hired anyone over the past 4 years. we're terror-frozen. - Faboo Mama

Interesting story. Thanks for sharing Paul. The hardest thing for an entrepreneur is to ask the hard questions. - Edwin Khodabakchian

Lesson 5: A turkey was chatting with a bull. 'I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree' sighed the turkey, 'but I haven't got the energy.' 'Well, why don't you nibble on some of my droppings?' replied the bull. They're packed with nutrients.' The turkey pecked at a lump of dung, and found it actually gave him enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree. The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch. Finally after a fourth night, the turkey was proudly perched at the top of the tree. He was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot him out of the tree. Moral of the story: Bull Shit might get you to the top, but it won't keep you there.. - Alan Cheslow

This is why I'm not usually impressed by resumes/titles. I want to see real work. Then I'm impressed. It can be a catch-22 though hiring people (for a guy, like getting a date with a beautiful lady - how do you have conversations, until you've had some). "Consultant" can be for real...or mean that someone is "out of work". - Mitchell Tsai

As a 19-yr-old college grad, how did we get clients that $500 million companies couldn't get? Well, the experienced CEOs know that McKinsey and other consultants just hire sharp (but inexperienced) people from Harvard, Stanford, etc..., and it's a total crap-shoot who you get (for $500-1,000/hr). If we did a good job for CEO of X company, he told VP friend at Y company, and we got the work. There are so many fly-by-nights in this world. Experience isn't worth much if it's "bad experience". - Mitchell Tsai

Another example of how people with great charisma but no skills can be promoted far beyond where they should be. Another great example is a guy who will be leaving his current job on Jan. 20th. - Robert Felty

This is really sad isn't it. So difficult to get it right, yet it is the most important success/fail factor for any company. It starts with great people. - Alexander van Elsas

Dang, that story was rough. I mean did you even proof read it? (LOL) - Drew Lucas

man, this could've been taken straight out of the E-myth revisited. Definitely a book that guy should read. - Vincent van Wylick

i just wish i couldn't tell so many similar stories of hiring senior execs w/ great looking experience, resumes, and references who turned out to be completely incompetent - Deva Hazarika

Actually he was lucky that the guy was so obviously lame and came clean in the end, and that his business wasn't destroyed. What's far worse is a somewhat competent person with great political skills. Much harder to detect and so they have time to do a lot more subtle and potentially fatal damage to the fabric of an company. - Robin Barooah

From the slides: FriendFeed's crawler sent 2.9 million requests to Flickr in one day to get updates for 46K users. "Polling doesn't scale." - Bret Taylor

Nice :). Polling scales just fine though -- it just isn't very efficient (regardless of scale). A good public feed would work just as well for us though, and it would be a lot simpler than xmpp. - Paul Buchheit

"Linux started as a terminal emulator".. !!!? Or not. - Nick Lothian

Definitely a lot of points that rang true for me, especially the "Chicken and Egg" point. - Adam Thorsen

I myself have worked on two start-up concepts and a revitalization effort, each of which bombed, but each one taught me something different. I finally threw in the towel on my last start-up and picked up a full-time day-job because I couldn't find anyone willing to share hats. We were already incorporated, so I was the CEO, book keeper, technology evangelist, sales guy, support tech, development lead, and development team. Needless to say I fried myself within a year and nearly went off the deep end. On a happy note, I'm loving my work now and haven't given up the entrepreneurial bug yet; I'm preparing myself to be the best co-founder in the world, knowing that the time will be right when the right team comes together to solve the right problem. - Chris Stewart via twhirl

I'm surprised by how few page views they have. - Paul Buchheit

Paul, how about submitting some info regarding FriendFeed architecture to HighScalability.com? That would be a very interesting read :) - Wojciech Polak

I realized this before and benefit from its 'google' rating for our FF room : ) ---> http://friendfeed.com/rooms/li... linkedin really needs some interaction addition like this room. - Erhan Erdogan

It's interesting how they're not using an ORM. Recently read http://is.gd/rkt about whether ORM's are worth it. I like a very light ORM that doesn't do a whole lot for you and doesn't get in the way if you want to do something complex. :) - felix

About pageviews: The difference between sites that people use to kill time and sites that people use only for a specific purpose is huge. LinkedIn doesn't have a lot of time-killing features. That's the way I see it, but Paul, you know more about these things than I do. What made the low page views surprising? - Bruce Lewis

Perhaps ~Bruce, I like that I can get to the info I want quickly and get out on LI. Sites that throw lame filler pages into the mix, putting "stuffing" between query and answer, to inflate pageviews annoy me. Both as a user as well as as a businessperson -- I know to heavily discount their fluff pv's (and especially the value thereof, not good to piss off users trying to get info). - Casey

Casey, I don't disagree. I only meant the difference in number of pageviews is huge, not that the value difference is huge. - Bruce Lewis