Laura Scott (@lauras) - Likes

I'm not sure what it means, but I hope the goodness of Friendfeed stays intact. - Tom Landini

224 more comments

About time! - Rob H. from iPhone

I guess Facebook just got real time search engine! - Robert Scoble from iPhone

What do facebook get out of it? - Ruchit Garg

Fact or fiction? - Jason Cronkhite from iPhone

I haven't seen likes and comments stream real-time this fast before. - ydfeed

It depends on who lays claim to our posted and aggregated material. - jcunwired

it could work. if Friendfeed completely replaces Facebook - Edgar Rodríguez

I think it's a brilliant move, although bringing this into the Facebook walled garden would ruin it. - Derek Shanahan

how much for? - Ruchit Garg

Is it true Robert? - Kevin Whalen

BAD 'n SAD :(( - sid 【ツ】

Great match to take on the Twitter machine. - Ryan Cummins

what is next..facebook killing twitter integration...SCORE....?? - Denis

++Edgar - Ryan

Good for Facebook, BAD for us. NOOOOOOOOOOOO - Nir Ben Yona

Presumably a technology acquisition then, Facebook is buying the team and the tech. - DGentry

I don't like it - Jason Hargrove

Bad news, if true. - LogEx

Just because Facebook bought Friendfeed, doesn't necessarily mean they will do anything with the service. At least maybe not right away. People need to chill out. - Alex Knight

hope it doesn't mess w/ twitter integration - Ken Seto

makes a lot of sense - f.b. now has a power house of real-time all-stars. fixes many of the feature 'wish' lists for f.b. - actually a major positive sign for innovation. congrats to the F.F. team. - michael sean wright

How can i shut down my ff account? - Fotis Alexandrou

I need a few hours and possibly large amounts of chocolate - Bwana ☠

If you are right, that "Facebook just got real time search engine", that is good - as FB really, really needed it for a long time. - Bora Zivkovic

:( - Sinem Co

yes, this is fast. Reminds me of a few hours ago when I was on Freenode - Ian Tindale

There goes your data. - Jason Hargrove

This will probably be bad. like all purchases, it will be an "afterthought" and never be fully allowed to develop and flourish. - Ryan Jones

Man this is really SUCKS!! :((( we all know Facebook strategies on the web :(( Whey will drive FriendFeed to the helll and I'm pretty sure of this :((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( BAD SUCKS SAD :((( - FFTornado

It almost seemed inevitable since Facebook has been copying so much of Friendfeed in recent months. It's good for the founders of FF and may benefit those of us who use both on a regular basis. Maybe they'll just leave FF alone? - Kenley Neufeld

Funny thing is, if you posted about this on Facebook, 99.9999% of it's users would go "huh, what's FriendFeed anyway?" - Richard Matthias

someone tell me what they will do with it? Nothing maybe? Kill it, maybe? - Francine Hardaway

Wonder how they'll integrate, separate services with more interaction or FF swallowed by Facebook. - Steven Cains

Buy as is use it's IP and close it down or run as separate business? Either way, didn't see that coming. - Keith Bennett from BuddyFeed

It was bound to go down. Like we used to say on the block shootin' dice "Big Bank Take Little Bank" - professor daddyo

I do, however, wish tha tmore sites would implement this commenting engine. - Ryan Jones

Fotis: haha, wait too long, and you'll never be able to close your FF account ;) - Jason Hargrove

not believing it until another source confirms... - Benton

Congrats to the friendfeed team. Worried about the future though. - Andy Roth

Whats FriendFeed anyways? - Marco Horta

so that Facebook can maybe copyright the "Like" button? lol - Than R

How are we going to abbreviate it now? FBFF? FFFB? F^3B ? - Harry Wolff

I receive the breaking news via BNO News at this moment: Facebook acquires FriedFeed... - Torsten Eckert

haha you're right Richard - Ken Seto

I am stuck in Texas and have not confirmed myself. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Wow - Rodfather

OMG. - Nathan Chase

maybe they can implement threads? - Jeremy Toeman

It looks like a defensive move. I think it's better fro FB to acquire FF than incorporating twitter functionalities in their status feature. - Pablo Paniagua

double wow. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Friendbook? Facefeed? - Jeff Harbert

If it's true, I suspect FriendFeed as we know it will be gone, but Facebook will be greatly improved. - Costa Walcott

bah. i will go do something else. this news isn't helping - Edgar Rodríguez

trying to look on the bright side - maybe we'll get those iPhone/Blackberry apps for better access to FriendFeed - Stuart Miniman

But if it isn't true we would have heard by now. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

apprehensive about this - Liz Polay-Wettengel

Official: http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Brandon Titus

I want to hear the $$$ number - moo yu

Congrats to ff team...but how does this work? I have 2 different accounts...and I like it that way...I don't want to share/spam my friends on facebook with what I have here... - brainno722 (Peter)

@robert no we wouldnt have - Jeremy Toeman

It's official: http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009... - Costa Walcott

Originally posted this to your other FF/FB post before you astarted this one: I don't see the point of Facebook acquiring FriendFeed. They are pretty much identical services (well, FF represents just the News Feed portion of Facebook) I don't see how they can incorporate FriendFeed into Facebook. If they really did buy it, then I see this as them going for programming talent more so... more... - Christopher A. Wichura

From FF blog http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009... - Tom Landini

I'm hoping this improves Facebook (just like everyone else). Facebook has gotten horrible stale for me of late. - Harry Wolff

Bad bad bad bad bad bad ::runs screaming down the hall:: - Kandeezie from fftogo

This stream itself is the evidence of WHY Facebook bought FF. - Steven Walling

What's looking shiny and new now? :-) - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

I've been needing a reason to get re-interested in Facebook, this could be it. - JonInteractive

Friend management will need to be enhanced/overhauled. Otherwise, the noise will make the combined product unusable. - Peter Ghosh

No! I am going to cry! I HATE FACEBOOK! I have a Facebook account, but FriendFeed is way better. Life is over! Apocalypse. - Zachary TG

Seriously, how can i shut it down? - Fotis Alexandrou

We'll have to wait for more details to see exactly what Facebook is planning to do with FF. - 321

Bodes badly for FriendFeed. --rj - Roger Jennings

Bad bad bad bad bad bad ::runs screaming down the hall:: - Kandeezie from fftogo

I think this is more of a "send the friendfeed traffic to facebook" than any kind of technical leverage. My biggest concern here: in order to exchange dialogue with people on facebook I need to be friends with them vs. being able to do it on friendfeed without having to friend them up. I find this valuable as there may be a topic or 5 that I want to engage with user "X" on, but I don't... more... - Erik Boles

I am disappointed by this news... I don't like Facebook at all... And I'm afraid they will just kill FriendFeed with their awful cluttered interface... - Her Lindsay-ness

It depends on how they integrate it. Did they buy it for the search engine, or did they buy it as a potential for extending the reach of Facebook into real time conversations? It's all about the life stream now right? So probably Facebook's attempt to stake a claim there. - Tony "Frosty" Welch

bad days are coming - Ahmet Soyata

Fotis, why do you want to shut down our FF account? - Alex Knight

This is bad news for Yahoo 360°. Oh wait, too late. - Ian Tindale

Bad bad bad bad bad bad ::runs screaming down the hall:: - mary

Crap! - Zachary TG

This is disgusting. - Zachary TG

First of all, I love the name "Facefeed." ROFL Second, this is business boys. Happens all the time. Why do you think innovation keeps happening. FB will integrate or kill off FF, and something else will happen. It's a natural cycle. - Francine Hardaway

For a second I thought it was a joke, but then I checked Friendfeed's Blog. http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009... Damn it. - Alejandro

Nir Ben Yona +1 - Muge Cerman

Turmoil - Ian Tindale

wondering if i should continue aggregating all my online activity in frienfeed now that facebook owns it!! - Gtp19

I can't begin to process this right now. Too much work to focus on. Later when I read this 10,000 mile long thread and have a glass of Cab in hand. - Michele Lorito-Chase

Geeks and fb not a good mach - thomas elton from iPhone

We fear change - Ian Tindale

Not feeling real good about this, hope fully Facebook will do right by the FF community, but I'm not holding my breath. Glad for the FF team though - Kim Landwehr

Twitter dissed again. - JonInteractive

So FB failed to buy Twitter, - so they buy FF which is just a UI for twitter.. - Nick Halstead

if you look closely at FF the large majority of FF posts are twitter posts, so there was not that much original content on FF in the first place... - Ingmar

Makes a lot of sense for Facebook. And we find this very healthy ^^ - twitscoop

People need to stop freaking out. The Facebook/Friendfeed buy out was just announced. Wait for details people. - Alex Knight

It could be bad, it could be good. As long as Facebook doesn't try to port their functionality over, I'm fine with it being a financial acquisition. - Adam Reyher

Crap, its official ! - Peter Dawson

This is really bad... a wonderful tool based on killer technology will go over into this mass market teeny poking culture. Bah! - Markus Tressl

then again it is great for linking FB, TW, flickr and so on - Ingmar

Here is the FF post on the acquisition: http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009... - Mrinal Desai

Great, why did I bother creating an account here? I could have held out. - desinole

if this is true, for the love of god, please don't Facebook go and mess up FriendFeed as they have their own system, Facebook is a mess these days, Friendfeed is one of the 2.0 sites that actually has concentrated on doing a few things well, complete opposite to Facebook. - Carl Grint

I suppose Friendfeed was considerably lacking in LOLcats. - Ian Tindale

Cuz we all know that facebook doesn't respect user's privacy and you've got basically everything on ff, youtube, twitter, digg whatever you do - Fotis Alexandrou

http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009... - tollie williams

Paul Buckheit will now be a house husband:-) - Francine Hardaway

Confirmed by FF http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009... - David Peacock

Smart for Facebook but I prefer Friendfeed the way it is.What, we'll be throwing rabbits next? - Janet Fouts

FriendFeed listens to the community. Facebook doesn't. Not to mention they're ENTIRELY different communities. - Adam Reyher

If they keep FriendFeed as a separate site, and still upgrade regularly, this is fine. If FriendFeed winds up in the dead pool, then it sucks. - Steve Sill

If true, congrats to the FF Founders! - Jason Cronkhite from iPhone

Maybe I should rediscover my Orkut account. - Ian Tindale

I was just thinking how Friendfeed had stayed out of recent takeovers, mergers and hence cyber attacks. Will Friendfeed now be taken over by celebs and spammers too? - Nils Geylen

Not sure why this news makes me nervous. Please tell me it's going to be ok Scoble... - Lucas

FF has been FB's incubator for awhile. - Peter Warnock

it's true damn!!!! - Edgar Rodríguez

How can I spam on this thread please ? Any idea ? - Toucouleur

Facebook has ZERO respect for users' wishes... Friendfeed is incompatible with that. Friendfeed will be going away. :( Their blog post says as much: "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally **for the time being**. We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product" - tollie williams

Quickest/Biggest thread ever - Ian Tindale

Ideally, FB will leave FF to do the sweet innovating they are doing and just take the awesome features and put them into FB - Ryan

This is the first time I've used Friendfeed in a year. Good move on their part. - chantelle

How Much ? $$$ ;-) - Jacopo Gio

I'm heading back to Jaiku where it's nice and quiet - Ian Tindale

So, where do we migrate to now? - Byron McCollum

FriendFeed functionality on Facebook would be nice. The reverse, not so much. They're trying to address two entirely separate purposes and as such, need to remain completely separate. - Adam Reyher

back to the twitter - emresezgin

I want numbers. how much did facebook pay? - Zac Bowling

soon friendfeed will = Jaiku - johnny2009

Hum...let's see what happens. - Chip Hanna

Stay here until FB does something dumb with FF - Ryan

The rhetoric seems a bit too "Facebook will do what they want with us" and not "we will remain FF and continue forward". Seems as if FB went for the tech and we could lose FF as a seperate entity. Boo. - Derek Shanahan

confirmed by facebook press release. - Zac Bowling

Love 'em or hate 'em....Facebook made a phenomenal purchase. - Kevin Pruett

I see a ton of Wall Spam. Facebook users just don't get it when you port your twitter updates over. There is too much for them to wrap their heads around. This will be a hard transition. - Ryan Cummins

And I was REALLY getting fond of FriendFeed. From now on only downhill applicationwise? - Bart

Not happy about this. I use Facebook, but don't like it. It reminds me of AOL from 10 years ago. - David Sharpe

I agree that I don't want FB to mess up FF, but this will also give FF a higher profile and bring in many more users...which we may or may not like, judging by what happened on Twitter. I hope FF doesn't die off like Jaiku because I really think FF offers a more valuable and useful interface. - Cathryn Hrudicka

One thing to consider is this: If we have "trusted" the FriendFeed people not to screw things up, hopefully we can trust them to make sure they're still in control in the terms of the acquisition. - Adam Reyher

What's it going to be called? Failbook? - Ian Tindale

Its going to be called Facebook. - DGentry

I hope this is a joke.. Damn it, I dont like Facebook now there is nowhere to go... F*** - Jacque

I am trying to imagine how this will be a good thing for existing FF users. It feels so right and so wrong all at once!...Maybe at least my kids and wife will finally get what I've been ignoring them for over the past year. - Thom Kennon

FeedFace - Ian Tindale

Is that means we're going to see more extremist groups around, now that FB has acquired FF? - Nir Ben Yona

so where do all the cool kids go now? we need another startup, stat! - h1ro

I am afraid... what johnny2009 have said can really be the future... soon friendfeed will = Jaiku - Ahmed Mubbashir Khan

Damn,I've just"got friendfeed,and i love it.I definately don't like facebook.What does it mean for twitter? - Paul Downing

Any investors want to predict the buyout price? - Kevin Pruett

am gonna wait for google wave... coz in facebook, i cant access the complete stream for a month ago, the site goes down very often while browsing, and privacy issues galore!! congratulations for friendfeed but its jus me!!! - Gtp19

Maybe we´re seeing here one of FriendFeeds biggest discusions ever. I´m sceptic about the future of FF as a standlone service... - Torsten Eckert

What concerns me most is what happens to my friends here (and that I have to interact with my friends THERE). Will we have to be friends to interact in the same way we have the last couple of years? - jcunwired

This is very good for FriendFeed as long as Facebook doesn't corrupt them. I would have preferred to see Google buy FF but I know with their focus on Wave I don't think it would have been a good fit. I like the Facebook platform, but they have done too many shady things in the past for me to trust them. - Adam Teece

all of the conversation is happening on FriendFeed and Twitter - nothing on Facebook. Think we'd scare away Facebook if everyone starts having lots of conversations there - like on Scoble's fan page? - Stuart Miniman

They can or don't have to fix FF's FB app now. - ydfeed

Is Twitter going to buy Myspace? - marcus bösch

Ha Stuart - great point *Facebookers take cover* - Kimberle Kelly

That does it. I'm going back to usenet. - Ian Tindale

What's next- Macy's buying Gimble's? - Thom Kennon

Apple buys China - Ian Tindale

what do you think Robert? - courtney benson

All I can think of is now a lot of people can feel the pain the dedicated Pownce community felt, but at least you're not getting shut down, just yet. - Mike Lewis

I'm not a big facebook user, but my gut feeling is that like twitter buying summize, it will mark the end of major innovations. I hope I'm wrong. But they should totally go with the facefeed mashup name. - motownmutt

I dont see any potential for competition with twitter FB and Twitter serve different purposes as does FriendFeed - iluvblackwomen

Sorry but renaming Facebook to 'Facefeed' is utterly stupid. - Alex Knight

It'll be called ScobleFeed - Ian Tindale

does making google reader more social has anything to do with this buyout??! - Gtp19

yeah this was good for facebook. bad for anyone who liked friendfeed. - Liz

FriendFeed is very good, a better way to use Twitter & etc. Knowing this, I still rarely use FF. Not going to start using Facebook more. - Nicole

Actually, this could be death for Twitter when you think about it. The people I know who are in FB are not likely to add TWO more nets to their lifestream. FriendFeed makes more sense for them. Maybe Twitter just stays as the dumb pipe it's become for many of us here. - Thom Kennon

Echoing what others have said - My guess: Facebook will get better, Friendfeed will get worse, Twitter will matter a lot less. - Matthew Blaisdell

Good for FB UI and search, questionable for the FF community and its independent spirit ... - Bo Stern

last comment 2 hours ago on FF by Paul Buchheit, FF CEO, was just " :)" http://friendfeed.com/paul #friendbook - Jacopo Gio

The main reason why I came to FF was because when I tried to treat FB the same as FF, i was talking to a wall. At least people interact here. At FB, it's all about the cheesy games/apps. - Matthew Horton from iPhone

http://friendfeed.com/sunipey... - emresezgin

Just like most acquisitions, it could be good and it could be bad. I trust that FriendFeed will live on as FriendFeed, only sharing their tech with Facebook. Possibly more integration between the two sites. If you were FF/FB, what would you do? - Nick Humphries

Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook are three entirely different animals. Facebook eats Friendfeed and poops out little bits of content that once belonged to us. Twitter continues to thrive as the broadcast conversation-wannabe that it always was. - jcunwired

Nick - think again. Its going to go away - read the tea leaves in this statement: "Your data will not go away any time in the near term future - we are committed to our users" - Bret Taylor in this post https://friendfeed.com/friendf... - jcunwired

Please no. I don't like FaceBook... - Svartling

We need a Friendfeed alternative: http://www.fftogo.com/e... - Marcos Marado from fftogo

Facebook must want real time soc-net search badly... - martin smith

The biggest thing here, at least within the Twitter context, is that this merger will combine 'verified' identity (in terms of Facebook user ID being slightly more 'real' than Twitter) with real time status updates. - Dan Patterson

I'm looking forward to what this brings to Facebook. I have enjoyed both networks but wondered when FriendFeed/Facebook would face-off and/or be absorbed by the other. I think FriendFeed's tech will improve the Facebook experience. - Jacob Sloan

FriendFeed + Twitter = disruptive. FriendFeed + Facebook = one more app for FB . Facebookers dont know the power of FriendFeed. I agree with : "" So FB failed to buy Twitter, - so they buy FF which is just a UI for twitter.. - Nick Halstead "" - Rocky

Most likely scenario is Facebook assimilates the FriendFeed guys, has them work on improving Facebook newsfeed/realtime/status, and lets FriendFeed die a slow unmaintained death. - Richard Akerman

Well, my friends on FB doesn't give a damn about sharing links, news, pics, vids etc. So I'm not sure how I will use FB+FF now. I don't think FriendFeed will exist, just implemented in Facebook. The name FriendFeed will die. And: on FB you don't want the whole world to see everything you're doing, just your friends. And it will stay this way. So the question is: Who will build the new FriendFeed? - Patrik Johansson

Do this mean, by the way, that we (the FriendFeed users) should start to connect with each other on FB? How will they like that? People who get's 2-3 maybe 4000 connections? - Patrik Johansson

Robert, it means all the time you invested building friends lists and updates there will go to Facebook :-) - Loic Le Meur

could someone start to develop a Frienfeed clon , please ? ASAP ! - Rocky

Seems bloody terrible from this users perspective. Good for Friendfeed the company though. - Quasar

Given Facebook's past, this could be really bad. Given FriendFeed's past, this could be really good. No real way to speculate without talking to the FF crew. - xero

+3273 Quasar! (one for each of my Likes, already on a death march) - jcunwired

Robert, do you know if Facebook is going to put on limits here at FF??? Oh crikey... so much for our citizen journalism here.... Admittedly I am bummed. Uber bummed. - Arleen Anderson

EndFeed. - Alex Schleber

your blog is the most important thing you can own on the web. these sites can come and go. it's a great social point but true friends you've made here you talk outside of ff, right? - Terry O'Fee from BuddyFeed

It's a good time to sell to Facebook, cause Google Wave is imminent and is going to destroy all of Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed. I think FriendFeed employees might even go back to Google eventually as soon as their contracts with Facebook are up. - Charbax

Robert - wow. just wow I am stunned. Sorta sad actually. I love FF innovation and don't want to see that stop !!!!! - Susan Beebe

(RE: Your tweet earlier) When you say the minor league team going to the majors, I don't always feel that this is a positive thing. As in this case, it's like Ferrari being acquired by Ford. I don't think I like this acquisition. - Richard Merritt

the free ride couldn't last forever. I know it sucks that things will change, but they've got a lot more sense than Twitter has about these things.. - Terry O'Fee from BuddyFeed

You must all assimilate to the new FaceFeed - Jonathan.Rivera

From what I'm gathering, this acquisition is more about FB acquiring the talented engineers of FF than it is about the FF software itself. A smart play by FB. Unfortunate for us that value FF. I personally feel that FB is just slowly becoming the new Myspace. Which I don't think I need to explain how lame that is. - Richard Merritt

According to WSJ — FB paid $50 million — a mix of cash and stocks. http://bit.ly/SVTA5 - Richard Merritt

If you ignore all the crappy apps and just comment and post photos, your main feed on Facebook is fundamentally a pretty similar experience to FriendFeed - people post stuff, people comment on it. That is, at-least, the way my network tends to use Facebook. The main difference is that Facebook defaults to being very closed and private while FriendFeed defaults to being very open and... more... - Edward Coffey

edward - pretty much. it's FF for the layman. remember back in the day they used to have forums too? - Terry O'Fee

I think it helps Facebook a lot since now it will have real time news feed. Their old one was pretty lame. It also helps FF since klutzs might have heard of it but never would have joined without such a big announcement. - PJ Edwards

friendfeed is very cliquey. you have your group of people who usually gather round for conversations. now imagine some of this friendfeed stuff in facebook. done right it will help them a lot. - Terry O'Fee from BuddyFeed

I don't think I am liking this but FB does need to add the "edit" feature like on here. - Marika Dye

FriendFeed is Facebooks Summize. It’s All About Search. http://bit.ly/11ZW6l - paul mooney

Thinking Out Loud: Echo issues during a high profile tech show http://www.talkshoe.com/talksho... - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

FF acquisition is expected. But, as a user, I would be bumned, if FF would become a feature of FB. As, I tend to use Twitter as my social network and not FB. - Vasu Srinivasan

It doesn't make much sense talking about 'Facefeed" and 'Friendbook'... Facebook simply bought a cool 12-people company called Friendfeed for its great search technology paying 15M plus some shares, which is really very cheap in this context, given the value of FF's technology (as it is perceived by us). They are also hiring the talented FF team, which makes the deal even more interesting for FB. Probably there are also some deeper hidden motives and implications that I am not able to get. - Liviu Barbat

I would love it if Facebook integrated the FriendFeed features. I would love it if Facebook had FriendFeed's flexibility with Facebook's privacy control. It sucks that the world may lose FriendFeed, but it is great the Facebook will likely get better. - Andrew

Andrew, Facebook will get better - over time. There won't be any Vulcan website meld of FB and FF overnight. - Bill Sodeman

thank god someone understands that, andrew. it's like "i liked this band better before they went to a major label!" ;) - Terry O'Fee

Bill - But we can dream, can't we? :) I mean, what I love about Facebook is that I'm interacting with my friends as my friends, not as usernames and avatars. But I hate their bookmarklet, the weird delays when I post anything, the comment system, and I hate the Photo gallery tech. I love the FriendFeed community, but would love bringing the FriendFeed technology over to Facebook even more. If only Facebook could buy Flickr next... - Andrew

as long as fb start thinking in creative commons terms... one day .. - Terry O'Fee

they are both great services I think will be a good thing - Logan Lindquist

oh NO! I don't spend much time at FB (everybody there's too busy playing stupid games, at least in my little network), and besides it's more private unlike FF. And now they've gone and bought FF? And I just joined! I guess I won't be around here for long, since FF won't... - Dennis Jernberg

I don't like it... - Harry Mahardhika

No mention of Yahoo. Totally irrelevant these days. Sad. - Scott Schnaars

This deal makes sense! Now fb developers do not need to figure out how ff does it because they can just ask! - Garin Kilpatrick

One of my facebook accounts got closed up. Into this account I fed my friendfeed. And into friendfeed I fed for example my socialmedian shares, diggs, stumbles etc. - Wilhelm Bauer

Time for the next generation app. *Taps foot impatiently for Google Wave* - Karen Masullo

I don't think it's about getting Friendfeed it's self; but having the developers and the information about real-time search. - Chris Martin

http://www.google.com/search... this item appeared very quickly (even now it's only 13 minutes old). - Robert Scoble

44 more comments

Funny how one FF post lead to another even bigger one. - Manuel Mas

Wow! incredible! - ★ Soner Gönül

I'm totally ReTweeting this...wait...no need, Google already has the scoop! ^_^v - CannonGod

"real-time". Are you saying they're indexing information delivered in real-time? e.g. long polling, comet-ish or xmpp? Or just that they're polling more often and making results available sooner? - Darren

I can't wait for google wave. Robert, can you get me an invite? - Craig Shipp

Craig, trust me, you'll change your tune once you've used it. :) - Darren

It won't going to make Google real time. - Madhav Tripathi

i rekon google have a special feed from ff, ff pushing to google, otherwise it will create a lot of useless load to see what has changed - isn't that what google was trying to do with twitter? - simran

Darren: I have no idea. I just know that Google used to take weeks to get items into its index and now is getting them there in seconds. Anyone know how they are doing this, or are they just indexing FriendFeed very quickly? - Robert Scoble

is it pubsubhubhub?!! - abdellah

Craig: I don't have a Wave invite yet. - Robert Scoble

yesterday, I post a blog. And Google show that 4 minutes ago - kang

Abdellah: Was about to say that. - Manuel Mas

I think...Google is real-time index Twitter and FriendFeed - kang

this is crazy how friendfeed is evolving, the realtime discussion here is awesome! - Adam Benayoun

we have juste to rememeber what Greader do this week ! and remember that FF implemented simple update protocol - abdellah

Google-Wave can be used as another google notebook - kang

No. Way. Craziness! - Lisa@MyMarketingPeople

I think google is losing its focus on traditional search which will make it less important. - Madhav Tripathi

i can't see this share in Google... - Zee.

This is what i see when i search for this: http://stash.zee.me/Picture... - Zee.

It could be conicidence (the non-real-time-web spider could've hit FriendFeed at the right moment.) It's also odd that FriendFeed's and Google's timestamps are more than 4 minutes apart. - Wade Dorrell

Zee: I took a slightly more direct route with my keywords ~ http://www.google.co.uk/search... ...I still think you're right, the title should be enough to find the post. - CannonGod

It seems it's not conincidence: http://www.google.com/search... - Wade Dorrell

If they are doing something in the real-time space it would certainly be exciting. I like having Bing around. Hopefully it'll continue to spark competition around small, innovative features in an effort to out "cool" the other. - Darren

Wow, they're really gunning after Bing's psuedo social-media search. This can only be good for the future of search...hopefully! - Steve Farnworth

This post is now in Google: http://www.google.com/search... - Robert Scoble

Wade: Hurrah! This is great news for companies who want to get indexed through keeping an active blog/community through FriendFeed. Fuck buying AdSense keywords :] - CannonGod

hope no, hope that sneaky marketers will not try to screw the system and they can't do, hope that (BTW let make the supposition that FF index is integrated in Google hmm Google buying FF?!!) - abdellah

Abdellah: Absolutely - let's all vote: Google should only index posts with a threshold of comments/likes. That's an easy way to stem the spammers who set & forget their FriendFeed with a gazillion RSS feeds to all their spam sites... - CannonGod

it's not real time! it's highly related with the links through that thread about Kevin Fox. Since Scoble is being followed by thousands of people, the link of the thread is revealed by googlebot very quickly and in a very short time google sees hundreds of links to this thread so it's directly indexed in google's search results. a few thousand internal link is enough for get a url indexed in such a short time. - Eren Baydemir

*Everyone scatters to try it on less-linked feeds after Eren's post. Eren, I think you're right. - Wade Dorrell

It's not indexing Twitter in real time that's for sure. I just "Googled" some of my recent tweets to no avail. - JP Holecka - Jaypiddy

Holden: my posts continually show up within minutes. I've been testing this for a while. But I've also been watching others on FriendFeed and they show up slower, so you're right. Plus my FriendFeed URL has better Google Juice so mine show up higher than others do (I have more inbound links to my account and more links from people with a high amount of Google Juice). - Robert Scoble

I guess we just figured out why Google sees value in hosting a PubSubHubBub hub! Tim Bray was asking about this yesterday, but the real value is being able to know when anyone updates their content and feeding that directly into the indexers. - Eric Florenzano

gotta watch what you write on here now since it's getting to be indexed faster. - Seth Goldstein

Google continues to amaze us - Kent Courtney

Kent Courtney is now in the mix. friendfeed has made the big time! - Craig Shipp

I have seen this on a few sites, namely donationcoder.com and my own blog. At donationcoder, someone will post a question on the forum, I get the popup notification less than 15 seconds later (I am a moderator there and have special tools to make job easier), then I'll do a quick google search for answer and find the forum post on page 1 already. I have google alerts set up for anything mentioning my blog and I usually get an email less than 3 minutes after I make a post, linking to the post I just made. - April Russo (app103)

For me, Google's ability to quickly index comments on Friendfeed seems more interesting than yet another index of Tweets like twitturly - thestaticfrost

My partner James just noticed this afternoon that thirty seconds after Stumbling a blog entry, Google updated. Very cool. - Kisha, Well Conditioned from BuddyFeed

Nice. Nice. Nice. - Mitchell Tsai

Google has definitely changed something because both my friendfeed entries and Posterous entries gets indexed really fast! - Svartling

the downside: you find an unfamiliar word in a post, google for it, and — tada! — come up with that very post at the top of the result page. sorta makes the 'I'm feeling lucky' button less useful :) - 9000 from IM

When it comes to really fast indexing of "normal" blog posts I think it's the PubSubHubbub integration in Feedburner that Google uses for indexing really fast. I noticed that with my blogs using feedburner. Really cool. - Svartling

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 ☠

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

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

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 Campbell, B.A.

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 Campbell, B.A.

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 Jepsen

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

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 of FF

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 Campbell, B.A.

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

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

"It is the end. Jason “The Animal” Calacanis is thinking about maybe quitting using Apple products, reporting that the company has gone all corporate and mainstream and that Steve has lost his hippie, dippy LSD edge." - Ryan - @magicofpi from Bookmarklet

3 more comments

Really? Didn't think that he took sides. I know he has not been a fan of the 'closed' iTunes but he is usually balanced, at least on his time on TWiT. - Kevin J Hatton

Jason is a nice guy and Mahalo is full of Mac, people who dont listen his podcast make the same mistake with Dvorak, 'big apple hater" ...(and he have a iMac) - alex

God, what IS with TechCrunch? "Jason 'The Animal' Calacanis"? - Michel

I really hope this guy is attempting to be funny cause anyone having problems with their install of windows that require a reinstall every few months really should learn how to use a computer first before they are left on their own. Remember the mantra "read first, blind clicking is bad". - alphaxion

Comments let everyone participate. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

43 more comments

Friend-of-friend feature brings tons of people into your view. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Hallelujah! - Sally Church

I wish we could make FriendFeed into JUST an aggregator. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I think a simple switch that let you turn off FoaF completely, and/or only show FoaF for comments, not likes, would go a long way to cleaning things up. - Ken Sheppardson

Even though there is conversation on FF, we can't have proper threaded conversation and that results in noise. - Veetrag

I mean the options are there to turn off FoaF once you "Hide" an item, but they're buried. - Ken Sheppardson

Robert: so, you're not interested in having an open conversation on friendfeed anymore? That surprises me. - Joel

Ken: you can turn off FOAF: click on hide twice. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I noticed you're not following me but I didn't take it personal. I'm still following you, I learn a lot from you so keep smiling buddy. I still think you're the shit. :) - Jeunelle Foster

Couldn't agree more~~ Just too much information to handle by a human beings - Yunkwan Chen from feedalizr

Joel: I am but most people are not. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Interesting that this item only got one response on Twitter so far. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Sean: cool, I have trained you well! :-) - Robert Scoble from iPhone

@Scoble one response on twitter shows that, people like to see what others are replying too. We can't see that on Twitter. - Veetrag

Robert, you can easily turn FF into just an aggregator. Feed your services in and don't interact. The only thing missing is an account setting to automatically disabnle comments on all of your posts, which can easily be requested in the Feedback room. Or, make your feed private so no one can see items to commeent upoon them. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina) from fftogo

Robert - So, how does this insight affect your view of FF now? - phil baumann

Phil: it makes me want better display options in FriendFeed. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

This real-time group discussion on FriendFeed is totally different from Twitter but I can't help but feel if you spend your time here, you might miss out on the general Twitter feed. - Ken Seto

Ken: What is the advantage of general twitter feed, if all the twitter feed is anyways directed to FF? - Veetrag

Robert - what kinds of additional options would you like rolled out? - phil baumann

Well I'm not seeing anything happening on FriendFeed other than comments in this discussion - Ken Seto

Phil: it also makes me want real mobile clients. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I need a TweetDeck for FriendFeed :D - Ken Seto

Robert, do you think to get 'real' feed mobiles have to support flash. because i believe with heavy JS would be unstable on mobile platforms. - Veetrag

Ken - Have you tried PeopleBrowsr? - phil baumann

Robert, the way I see it, everyone's definition of "social media" is different. Some people will tolerate a little higher noise in their S/N ratio to glean extra information from open conversations on FF/Twitter. Others may want to eliminate the noise and just focus on a few select feeds. That's the beauty of social media, you can (within limitations of the software you use) determine your own level of interaction. - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

Will take a look at PeopleBrowsr, thanks - Ken Seto

Phil: I want to see a TRUE river of news. No popping up of things that get engagement. I want to see NO comments exposed. I want a REAL best of day (the ones I currently get show me old items. That is a start. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Jack: that is true which is why we need better display options. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Robert - so perhaps an option to for a collapsed view (text only - sort of like a reader) with options to define what comes up in the view. (I guess that would bring us back to some sort of modified social RSS :) - phil baumann

Phil: yes!!! - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Phil : We would also need a way in which we can like/unlike comments too. That will help us read only priority content. It can be one way around smaller screens. - Veetrag

Robert - this somewhat reminds me of Muhammad Saleem's post comparing FriendFeed and SocialThing from March 2008. His goal was an aggregator, not another social network: http://muhammadsaleem.com/2008... - Hutch Carpenter

But wouldn't using FF as an aggregator just make it more like a social RSS feed service? For my personal social media paradigm I would miss out on the conversation part of FF. Of course your paradigm may be different :O) - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

Jack: I would keep that option on FOR ME but tons of others tell me they hate coming here because of the noise. I totally grok that now. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I'll use Twitter and FriendFeed though, both were just great. - Vince Ong

Understood. I appreciate that Robert. One of the things that initially drew me to FF was the ability to interact with people such as yourself. I would truly hate if we lost that ability, Of course I am sure your noise is a whole heck of a lot louder than mine :O) - Jack Wilson, K4SAC

Until FriendFeed makes hide even easier, this will continue to happen. People are generally too lazy to use hide to the fullest. I don't know if it's a design issue or a user issue, but people don't like to use it. - Bwana ☠

I think it is a design issue. There are too many features stuck under the hide link. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Good point Robert. But where else do you put those links?? - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

I've been loudly raising precisely the issues which Robert Scoble mentions in this post for over a year -- with zero feedback from Friendfeed developers. This is why Friendfeed's growth has been flat and will continue to remain flat. (But Friendfeed is still a great platform, even in its imperfect and much too noisy state.) - Sean McBride

It amazes me that as of August 9, 2009, Friendfeed's developers, who seem to be brilliant in most respects, still have no appreciation of the importance of elementary design features like list view and the separation of unread from read items. The mind boggles. I really don't get it. And they don't seem to be interested in the hottest field in news reading and management: smart news recommender systems. - Sean McBride

A fact that seems relevant to this thread: I discovered this post in the FFHolic Most Discussed feed in the Featured Sources box on Feedly's My Digest page. I stopped trying to read the chaotic torrent on Friendfeed's home page a long time ago -- a poor investment of one's time and energy. Without Feedly's elegant user interface, I wouldn't have seen this post. - Sean McBride

I think the second thing i did on FriendFeed was to remove friends-of-friends because of you. - Sam Pullara

So, it compresses, it seems like it's uploading, but then it fails and says only that it can't complete the upload. This happens over and over. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. - Robert Scoble

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Talking of which, no background processes, either..... - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

The thing is, it happens on both WiFi and 3G. It happens if you turn off WiFi. It doesn't seem to matter how long the video is. - Robert Scoble

Is this an iphone, network or youtube issue? - Sean Scott

And worse, when it fails, you have to reenter all the metadata about the video again to try it again (title, description, etc). Aaaarrrrrgggghhhhh. This feature was definitely not debugged. Not to Apple's quality level. I guess this is what happens when Steve Jobs takes six months off. - Robert Scoble

Sean: who knows? There's no information. I assume that because it happens on both WiFi and 3G that it's not a network issue. And, since I've never had a YouTube upload fail otherwise I assume it's not a YouTube issue. That leaves the iPhone. Buggy! - Robert Scoble

Been trying to tell you about TweetReel geez ;) - Colin

Apostol: I'm very close to getting an Android. - Robert Scoble

Maybe it's linked to the Twitter DDOS thing? I'm still under DDOS lockdown. - Colin

Colin: no. It has happened to me ever since I got the iPhone, not just in past week. - Robert Scoble

Colin, you mean http://www.tweetreel.com/ -- but why should I have to pay $2.99 to get functionality that's already built into my phone? Sigh. - Robert Scoble

I just tried uploading a video from my Iphone to YouTube and it worked. Might be AT &T problem? I am in Canada under Rogers contract for Iphone service. - Shawna Bergen

Well, it seems to work for me. Go figure: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Carter Rabasa

I can tell that my suggestion to sync the vids using iTunes and then upload is stupid. But yeah. Yet Another Apple Complaint - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

Apple provides hardware, developers provide some of the software, that's the way it works with some things. - Colin

I have not tried this feature, but having a 3G it's kind of moot anyway.The iPhone/AT&T juggernaut gets increasingly underwhelming with every passing day, every new "feature". I'd be on the Pre by now, but can't stand Sprint. Going to have to wait. Meanwhile I may just buy a regular phone to do things that phones do, you know, like make calls without getting dropped all the time. - Laura Scott (@lauras)

I'm in the U.S. but I'm 99% sure it used my WiFi connection to handle the transfer. - Carter Rabasa

Apostol - What's the "best" Android option at this point (from a generally satisfied iPhone user but someone who really likes Google's tools and openness). . .? - DaveFriesen

Colin: TweetReel doesn't upload existing videos, unfortunately. Carter: yes, sometimes it works. Which is why this is ultrafrustrating. - Robert Scoble

Send your vids to Posterous - Dominic Jones

Robert, it sure does upload existing videos heh. - Colin

It's been happening to me for weeks too! Also uploading to MobileMe fails most of the time. And there is no 'retry' - Cameron

As long as you still have them on your phone, right now Apple doesn't give a way to copy videos back to your phone (3.1 it may however) - Colin

@Apostol I was just lusting over a few unlocked HTC Hero's to replace my iPhone. You might have put me over the top. - Sam Harrelson

Yep, I've been waiting out for the Samsung or even the "cheap" Motorola Android's that are supposedly coming soon. Having had an iPhone for a while, I'm (at this point after the App Store mess) more concerned with using a device made by a company that treats me like an adult :) - Sam Harrelson

I have had similar issues - but only with bigger files - ben rogers

Apostol: Gotcha, thx for the info. Looking more like the Hero then! - Sam Harrelson

Encountered the same issue BUT the video miraculously appeared on YouTube! WEIRD. - Rom Feria

Robert, I use new and old video to upload to youtube from 3GS all the time. Only issue is if I try when it flips to Edge. - Alan Ashley

Is it a long video, because I just uploaded a short one 36 sec. without any trouble - Kim Landwehr

Kim: it's about 3 minutes long. - Robert Scoble

Kim, I can't even upload a 15 second with a fail... - Cameron

Use Pixelpipe for video uploads, you can send videos up to 200MB directly from the phone (without re-encoding) to over 50 services of their +100 support destinations - Brett Butterfield

Worked fine for me with a 1:36 video. First time I tried. - Otto from iPhone

Weird, must be a hit or miss thing not good. - Kim Landwehr

What also sucks is that there is no option to choose whether to upload the standard 4:3 footage or crop to 16:9 for upload. Although I guess it doesn't really matter if you can't upload it! :-) - Cameron

On a related issue: Does anyone have trouble playing YouTube videos on their iPhone over WiFi? - Barak B

If people are still having problems uploading to YouTube from iPhone, please direct message me w/ approx date/time and YouTube username so I can look into it. - John Harding

c.f.: http://www.cnn.com/TECH... "What Yahoo does better than any of its competitors is to provide an immediately accessible search system that even the newest of newbies can figure out quickly." -- CNN March 1999 - Simon from Bookmarklet

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Um, in 1999, Yahoo! was still primarily a directory, and it's search functions were outsourced to a little company called Google. - Glen Campbell, B.A.

*bangs head on desk repeatedly* - Roberto Bonini

May be a directory company. - ashish

Glen: in 1999 Yahoo's main search box would return a sorted list of it own directory results first (I think using its own in-house algorithm). The web fall-through search results came last and were provided by Inktomi. Google began powering the fall-through search in 2000. - Simon

Before Inktomi, Yahoo used Altavista. And maybe something else before that; I'm not sure. I think there's a big difference in your focus being in making a web site for end users and your focus being in developing search technology. Inktomi was about technology, not about a site. Google has both. Yahoo has a prominent site but didn't worry about the search technology originally, and now... more... - Amit Patel

Yeah, I think it went something like: Open Text, AltaVista, Inktomi, Google and then Yahoo's in-house search (after they acquired Inktomi). - Simon

We have never been at war with Oceania! - Doug

Follow me! - TheHenry

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TheHenry: I already am! :-) - Robert Scoble

Please don't unfollow me!! :) - Carlo Nasuti

oh yeah! I forgot! lol! #fail - TheHenry

Very interesting approach Robert. If it is working for you that is awesome though. Hope all is well. Give Roc a big hug for me. - C.C. Chapman

Yo... - MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)

Not too much unfollowing please. - Tim

i'm in - Tai Hsia

Can you follow me? - Giorgio

ok I'll allow you - Derry O Donnell

What's going on here? - Andru Edwards

I think you're already following me Robert. - Andrew Leahey

well ok ) - Denverken

Lead, follow, or get out of the way. - Robert Kenney

* - Michael J. Carrasquillo

[comments here] - Nick Humphries

I will comment here! :) - John Ptacek

Great blog appreciate all of your "likes" that I would not have noticed before. Thanks for all the time you spend educating us. - Gary Prechtel

auto-follow always seemed like a bad idea. people can always msg you but your stream will get totally cluttered if you dont do a little bit of housekeeping. - William Kapes

"baby I'm a star" -Prince (off purple rain) - Michael J. Carrasquillo

novel approach, seems sound - Danny Ayers

Consider me available for following. :-) - Eric D. Wilson

Okay, I'll bite.. - Tanya

Bring it Scobleizer. - Todd Pringle

I agree, Twitter is much better this way. - Ryan W

I appreciate your work, and your passion for social media. - Evan Travers

sounds simple... - Mateo Yadarola

Scoble follow me baby - Jadito

Oh you are getting quite a response here!!!! I'm commenting so you'll follow me but the thing is you're going to LIKE following me because you'll learn all about Sedona through tons of videos and you'll love it so much you'll want to pack your camera and head out here! =) - SedonaTV

Thanks for the mentions, Robert (and you know I'm not commenting just for the follow - I just like to follow you, which is what counts!) - Jesse Stay

Guess I might as well delete that overpriced twitter app I bought last week. - Shea from iPhone

Actually Robert, now I've seen you've tidied up your twitter, I'll probably follow you there again too. :-) - Tim

hey follow me scoble - Andy Jenks

Meh, who cares really, not like you read everyone you followed. Plus unfollowed you anyways, not like you have to say that's interestined except friendfeed spam. - Steve

joining the crowd - good move Robert. - Adam

follow me - Tai Hsia

welcome to Boulder - Andrew Hyde

@scobleizer just created the most important tech follow list on Twitter. - Christian Anderson

aww shucks, and here I was thinking it was just me who you unfollowed. - Jess Sloss

I underwent the same situation, Robert - I unfollowed almost everybody on Twitter who duplicated their accounts here on FrF. I got a tempest of fury for this action. web3 is too personal still )) - socimediator

Scoble in Boulder = Trouble. - Jim Halligan @jim

I feel fortunate that you're still subbed to me on FF. I haven't even noticed whether you unfollowed me on Twitter. But you following me, still hasn't gotten me the chicks. :P Always fun seeing your posts, long as you don't block me, it doesn't matter if you follow me or not. :) - Arlan Koizumi

I did the same thing some weeks ago after avoiding twitter because it got too noisy. It was instantly better. But in the mean time I started to use FF more and I like it better here so I hardly go near twitter now. - Murray Barton

You already follow me here on ff, which i use more than twitter. - dthree

What's up? - Kevin Whalen from iPhone

Hey Robert, so for following >1,600 is it that right way taken by Philtro and Filttr? - Martin Adamek

I'm glad you mentioned Loic, he caught a lot of flack for doing this earlier. - Steven Cains

Hey Robert - fight the tweetspam ! - Michael Neale

Don't think you are following me on Twitter anymore..please do and best regards - Karma Martell

I'm still trying to figure out the following... so I'm watching how you do it scoble. - Matthew Schrock

Good plan. I'm looking forward to your results. I'm trying to figure out all these social media elements. I would appreciate your Twitter follow. - David Stanley

hope this new approach works for you! - timepilot

Oh, so now you are only easy on FF. - James Watters

Odd internal response, I don't follow everyone who follows me cuz of the very noise you talk about. And, there's no good reason for you to follow me since I'm unlikely to deliver news of interest to you. And yet, here I am, posting on FriendFeed so you have the OPTION of following me, a stranger who is not the same kind of SMART as you. Who'd have thought... - Della Mauler

Interesting statement about original content value of FF independent of twitter. Twitter is where you keep your noise level down... - James Watters

This seems like asking for trouble to me, Scoble. But, it's your time and bandwith to do with what you will. Since only a handful of people (by that I think I mean just one) follow me on Twitter, it's pretty easy for me to weed out the bots. The people I follow are my internet nerds (mostly the Rev 3 crew) so I know their interests are in line with mine. Hit me up for some edifying conversations about Lost and video games, Robert. - Jeremiah Green

Here you go Robert! [also via twitter: @Scobleizer Therefore: only approx. 1.7 million "active" human @Twitter users contribute 50%+ of all activity, right? #engagement] Regards, @AAinslie - Alexander Ainslie

The green avatar is so disturbing mate. :) - Jordan Windebank

I'll lead, you follow. So where are we going? - Tom Sheppard

I was sad to see you unfollowed me, but now you may follow me again, so all will be well in the world. - Jodi

following the leader... - John Munro

You're still following me - does that mean I'm a smart feller? ;) - Brett Kelly

so glad I mail Robert a business card every month :) - Christian Anderson

Della: the thing is here I can follow you and put you into a list and watch you less frequently than some of my other people. So everyone wins. But only here on FriendFeed. :-) - Robert Scoble

Some of us have been doing this from our start. Kind of cool, eh? But our numbers don't grow quickly so we were tagged as "slow." Nice to see you catch up with us! Also, this may shock you, there sre folks who follow and communicate with only 3 folks on twitter and they are HAPPY! Imagine.... - lynda spangler

Yay. Now he will follow a librarian. - Joe....

Follow this dot!!! . - Bwana ☠

I've long thought the entire Twitter "etiquette" of always following who follows you to be a bit of a folly. I'm following 114 at the moment, and the stream still moves too fast for me to keep up with. - Darren Landrum

Comment! - anna sauce

ok - Vasu Srinivasan

Good test, count me in... I don't follow tons of people, I follow a few prolific Scoble-types and the rest are more focused in areas I'm interested in. - David Ziembicki

I'm not following tons of people, just a select few. More to follow on FB when facebook has completely integrated Friendfeed-funcionality. ;-) - Wolfgang G. Wettach

I only follow people I know or have something interesting to say, did you really have 160000 people that said something worthwhile??? - Gerard Vanschip-Miyama

Well I commented via your Blog so instead of repeating myself I'll link to comment http://disq.us/1ms9 - Keith - @tsudo

Gerard: everyone says something worthwhile once in a while. The trick is to see it when it happens. Here on FriendFeed, by the way, you have a better shot because good stuff usually gets liked and commented on, so it pulls up higher into my view. - Robert Scoble

come join us here folks http://ff.im/6dUHN xxx - Mark

Okay. But will you read and comment on my stuff? - Mellissa Jane

Robert, I posted this after Loic's decision and it looks like it will need another update. http://www.knowthenetwork.com/blog... I think there is value in stating your follow policy. - Keith - @tsudo

cool - Zach Cheatham

Hello? - Vicky

following all the discussion of you unfollowing everyone on twitter has made me think about doing the same thing and starting fresh. - (jeff)isageek

not unless we beat you in the Ashes - Mark

Nice post Robert, and no surprise it's an improvement. ;o) I have seen it for me too. - Rob Sellen :o)

1 thing I find Robert still worth following @Scobleizer when I am not on friendfeed & on my Hootsuite or PeopleBrowsr. therefore not much affected, not much 2 bother me, ego not gone at all. luv your post Robert it is a frank posting - polou/indigo_bow

Follow me Robert, I promise I'm not annoying. :) @cluteman - Greg Clute from iPhone

You've piqued my curiosity. - Chainz

Robert, thank you! I follow you and enjoy your "likes" and your energetic takes. I also enjoy your Building43 interviews! I am a constant FriendFeed user now. Thank you! - Tobin Truog

This made me realise I must be more active on FF and comment/post more :-). - Mats Pettersson

I think I'll give FriendFeed a go! Never tried it, but looks easy and I need to understand the interwebs better. @CodeSamurai_Com - CodeSamurai

butt-kissing is not a prerequisite for being followed, he will follow you anyways :D - Mark

Count me in! (Please??) - Ricky Maveety

lol @mark. ;o) - Rob Sellen :o)

You can follow me, but since you follow a lot of people, you probably can't pay attention to the stream of tweets. - Alex Knight

Alex..that's the WHOLE point he did this... ;o) - Rob Sellen :o)

IMHO 1,647 is still way too many people to follow. - Alex Knight

I will NOT get baited into ... ah CRAP. I follow very few people on twitter, mainly only to find info from Android developers (my topic of choice). If you mention anything about the food you are currently eating, etc.. you will probably not be followed. If you post 80,000 times a day, you will not be followed, since Twitters interface sucks (not so for FF). Also, no offense to other social users, but if you resend your FF/FB/<insert other social site here> entries to twitter, I probably won't follow. - Tim Hoeck

http://socialspark.com/blogs... Chris Pirillo is Scum. - Mark

good move IMO - Joanna Nicol

Love the post, love the response. - Chris Rogers from BuddyFeed

nice hanging out at with beach w/ you last week! follow moi!!! - Raina Lee

I always feel like scoble's following me - Rodney J Woodruff from iPhone

Don't forget your Dunbar number, Scoble! There are only so many people you can have meaningfully connect with online. - Steve Lynch from twhirl

Mark is right. No butt kissing. Ew. - Robert Scoble

"I always feel like, somebody's watching me..." - Wizetux

Comment!!!! Ohh wait but you already follow me... - Amit Nangare

Follow me, if you aren't already....please. Thanks, - Steve de Mena

here is my comment ZOL - Shane Gibson

Comment? What kind of coomment, Robert? :-) - Mitch Featherston

Whoop there it is! On Twitter @jimgoldstein - Jim Goldstein from iPhone

Oh..Oh... Mr. Kotter...Mr Kotter..follow me! - Scott Booher

Glad to see you're writing more than 140 characters on that blog. Doesn't that feel liberating? Maybe we should be allowed character# based on your metric for powerful/smart/newsmaker - Noah Bloom

You already follow me here on FF, for which I thank you. So, I'll just say thanks for the phone call the other day. :) - Jeff Harbert

I'll take a follow! - Jeff Weber

@shaunhess - Shaun Hess

Ok, so follow me again and I will follow you back. Thanks! - Audrey

Robert - I fail on most of your criteria so I'm not expecting you to follow me. The thing is I don't care if you follow me back - this is social media and everyone has their own choice. I choose to follow you because you entertain and inform me. The relationship is 100% one way and I am more than happy with that! - Pon

Robert - Last night at GDGT Party the person at the Blackberry booth said: 1) She had 'heard of Twitter, never friend feed' uses neither 2) Is SCOBLE is coming tonight 3) Wow, your Blackberry is really "archaic" and find out when contract lets you upgrade. F-D UP? Booth babes need primers. - Liza

Interesting theory... people who comment more apt to contribute? - Mark Philpot

I know someone else who tried this strategy last year, with similar results. I've been debating it. Once I got over 3K followers on Twitter life just got weird. Started to spend X amount of time every day blocking porn spam. - Patricia F. Anderson

Liza: yeah, sorry for not coming to the party. I went and saw Obama's CTO instead. - Robert Scoble

Steve Lynch: my Dunbar number is higher than yours is. :-) - Robert Scoble

Nice summary Robert on the whole Unfollow thing, but would it be too repetitive if I re-post on my FF? - Keith Rowland

What is the best friend feed aggregation strategy of non-friend streams (eg RSS, twitter, etc)? Imaginary friend per service, then add to lists? Multiple services per imaginary friend or 1 to 1? Or add the services to a group? What are the considerations? - John Brown

Keith: you can repost anywhere you like, thanks! - Robert Scoble

I'm in! - Craig Shipp

still wondering how you are able to handle such a big load of subscribers here and e.g. so many followers with twitter o_0. I am already (sometimes) lost with the few i got till now. Lately with one sweep almost 40 to 50 contacts in twitter disappeard and i have no clue why ... boah, how are you handling the noise? Hell, with so many ppl in, you might have a terrific noise? Or you wear just good headphones ;)? - Ronald

I very much agree that being choosy is the key to Twitter. I'm not nearly on the scale that you are, but in my experience, freely following people (whetther they follow me or not) and then mercilessly cutting back on them over and over again results in a kind of darwinianly better and better signal to noise ratio. - Tim Maly

Touche! - Steve Lynch from twhirl

Count me in - Johnny

Hi Robert - Randy Allen Bishop

Liked the blog post and totally agree. I've been meaning to do something similar. What I do is occasionally prune and then add some "better" replacements, so my total is always 2000 follows. - Bora Zivkovic

I don't see how anyone can manage so many users without groups. Then again, with groups you could just make an "ignore" group. - Oscar M. Cantu from iPhone

Great blog post. I totally agree on the noise level. I figure I have blocked a few hundred accounts on Twitter, and my noise level has dropped dramatically. Thanks for the follow! - Tony "Frosty" Welch

Hello Hello! - Sam Goldfield

Robert - I figured you were in DC from FF, but she had NO IDEA what a CTO is. Point is, she was eager to give you a Blackberry, but not me, and I wish I had a Scoble costume to pretend for 5 minutes. - Liza

@Robert I think you are starting another mass follow again. - Steve Chou from fftogo

Steve: that's not the problem. As long as spam doesn't enter the system I can deal. Keep in mind here I can choose how I follow. I can put you all in a folder that I never look at, if I wanted to. - Robert Scoble

my feelings were hurt that you unsubscribed to me on twitter, but i agree with your methods - Brian Appleby

I'm in! - Chris Rossini

Brian, yeah, but I follow you here. So there. - Robert Scoble

really doesn't matter as long as i can follow you, that's the beauty of these services - Brian Appleby

How did you come to follow so many to begin with? I get annoyed with ppl and unfollowing is easier than sifting through their garbage constantly. - R1CC1

Autofollow was a horrible idea to begin with. - David Chieng

I kind of tired to keep an eye on who follows me now,the ones I'm following is much more important.:-) - Steve Chou from fftogo

Whoa lots of comments I'm following you longtime lol - Edgar Rodríguez from iPhone

Robert: we need more intelligent spam-follower-filtering on Twitter! We need to fix this. - Steve Lynch from twhirl

@David +1 I think auto follow is such a bad idea to begin with,and people like Robert now even need to pay to unfollow these people. - Steve Chou from IM

How much did SocialToo charge for running the unfollow script? - Shane

I'm in! - rich brant from iPhone

I heard its 25 dollars. - Steve Chou from IM

I've always been very picky in who I follow on twitter. I follow 40 people, and I can't guarantee that I see every single tweet. I don't scroll back usually, unless it's my "Real Life" column in Tweetdeck that couldn't fit on my screen. - Tom Ribbens

My birthday is also January 18th, therefore you must follow me Robert! ;) - Chris Luckhardt from BuddyFeed

Thanks Steve! $25 is pretty reasonable. Wonder if anyone else will be jumping on the bandwagon - Shane

Haha....I also threw the devil horns for Scobleizer...that should count for something. ;) http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Chris Luckhardt from BuddyFeed

OK, let's try it! And what about Twitter? - Alexei Zheglov

Thanks for your post. Last time I checked you follow me here on FriendFeed. OK not to follow me on Twitter. - Pilgrim Five

Smart way to clean house. - Jeremy Chone

u have already subscribing me although i am just a-staying-at-home mum =)). thanx scoble. u are really a nice geek. haha! - zʍıɔ

Let's do it. - Kate

this is like an awesome commentfest - Edgar Rodríguez

You can follow me, but I never say anything. Oh.. wait.... - James Macgill

follow me! - Tate DA FF MVP from BuddyFeed

Sometimes the tortoise beats the hare after all... building organically based on getting to know people and interactions tends to avoid the ghastly spammers, seo peeps and bots - Sally Church

Tap, tap... is this thing on? - Yanik Falardeau

This is the best place to follow you. On twitter you only see post headlines, but friendfeed is where the conversation takes place. - Michael Fidler

Ah crap. You're already following me :) - Jason Nunnelley

I'm outside your sphere, but bootstrapping is bootstrapping right? - Travis Bedard

Tuesday night for the first time in 2 months I UNfollowed everyone on Twitter who wasn't following me. Since you had UNfollowed me, yup I unfollowed you. My Twitter account is so /FUBARed! It only goes to page 506 to show who I'm following and after that it is BLANK! I don't even know if they show in my Home stream. So Robert, I value what you say. Know I can tweet profusely - but it's as @replies to others with the occasional micro-blog thrown in. Question, what DID I do to cause you to UNfollow me? - Arleen Anderson

I hope you'll follow me... - Shane Tilton

Follow me, eh? - Joey Gibson

Trying to fill out those dropped Twitter follows? - Jamie Elgie

Scoble: Have you convinced Guy Kawasaki against his "follow everyone that follows you" mentality? - Kevin Pruett

please do what you must to have the most effecient feed mr scoble, the random will still creep through the cracks, ;) - chaz2b

I still haven't really adopted FriendFeed, but I will get interesting here in time if you follow me. - Lance M. Brown

How are your cleanup efforts coming along? - Jennifer Ruggiero

Oops - I also meant to ask, Robert: how are you managing to follow the couple thousand that you are now re-following on Twitter? You must be using groups, I guess...any other methods? I find ~500 people to be a near max in terms of how many folks I can fully read. - Lance M. Brown

Following your inspiration, I unfollowed almost 100 people last night and blocked about 1000 spammers, cam girls, MLM marketers, and the like. Twitter is more like it was a year ago, its almost like I gave my Twitter account an enema and it worked. Thanks for the original idea. - Mark Edwards

Excellent! - Don Strickland

Robert, I started out only following those I know and those I am genuinely interested in. I've only followed back a few of the people who've followed me. I have a second account that I decided to experiment with. I followed about 700 people on there. It has had about double the followers of my main account consistently. I am about to try some new tricks there with an auto-follow script I'm writing but I think I will stay the course with my main account. - Paul Eck

Robert, I tried the "follow everyone" (almost) method for a short time - then I'd unfollow about once-a-week. Now I try to schedule a "follow new" once a week. TweetDeck's group feature makes following lots of folks bearable. So does FF, but you've been saying that for-ever! - Kathy E Gill

I am just taking it slow. - Rick Cogley from iPhone

Hey. - Kreg Steppe

I will follow you if you follow me (Genesis) - Keith Barrett

I may not be smart, but I'm smart enough to follow you! - John Pfaff

It occurred to me (and surely to someone before me), that different definitions of "following" might be a big factor here. If I'm following someone, it means I'm following along with their updates. But others might see themselves more as becoming part of a person's "following". Not that they are necessarily reading the person's stuff, but they are willing to be considered part of that person's inflated Twitter posse, as part of the influence-trading aspect of Twitter. - Lance M. Brown

Robert, I think that the biggest thing that changed is not that you were "wrong" (to follow everyone) before but that the Twitter population has changed so much. A year ago, pretty much everyone on Twitter was real, and interesting - now there's so much automated gaming the system going on that the signal to noise ratio has gotten unbearable. So I think anyone who cares about more than... more... - Matthew Blaisdell

I can't imagine how it would happen technologically, but it would be great if there was a way to ditch followers who weren't actually reading your tweets. - Lance M. Brown

Enjoyed recent posts and look forward to more from you! Keep it up. - One Degree Connected

I don't want to be left out please!! - Jannifer @wordsforliving

All right, I'll bite :) - although I'll say that I did the mass-unfollow-thing months ago - long before it was cool. - Justin from Nambu

Your most active followers are on FF. No loss.If you really wanted to make a bold statement you ought to have blocked all of your followers and started from scratch. - Benjamin Taylor

Been a while since I put you and Shel On the record...Online - Eric Schwartzman

blah. - imabonehead

Good article Robert. I honestly enjoyed the perspective. I found the same to be true, but on a much lower scale, of course ;-) - Ken Stewart | ChangeForge

i'm in! - Criz

I don't get it - so now you are using Twitter kinda like a normal person, and its some kind of miracle that it works better? - Nick Lothian

I'm impressed you can keep up with 1600 people. I have trouble enough with the little amount I have. I did find that making FriendFeed imaginary friends and putting them in groups for those I'd like to read occasionally (but not on a regular basis) has helped a lot - Tamara

Follow....how about some promotion! - Bob DeMarco

i'm in - Joshua Smith from twhirl

9/11 Was an Inside Job - bill giltner

Stop it, or I will have to get a restraining order. - Sriks7

Hey, Robert! - tomit from iPhone

In my mind I'm important enough to follow ;-) - Jonathan Callahan

Hello Robert....Whatever your favorite genre is...http://listen.grooveshark.com/#... - Michele Lorito-Chase

Looks like you have a lot of work to do following everybody. - Corbett Barr

now i'll have to write something interesting... - Robert Littlejohn

me! i offer nothing but the warm feeling of having accepted a ff reject. - Marco

ok. so how will you filter the noise now - Kfir Pravda

Ooo, I've won the lottery. You'll follow me now. Wheeee! (how do you have the time to go through all of the names by hand? VA assistance?) - Peggy Dolane

Great :) - Baard @ Pixum

Interesting trend on twitter - I always wondered what sense it made to follow tens of thousands of people, too much noise. I'm finding it hard enough to follow 2900 (looking to cull even that down as I mostly tweet about 30 people!) - Tia Singh, Life Coach

211th comment: WTF - Geer

Good :) - ★ Soner Gönül

I like your ability to influence so many people. I'm following you (mostly here - on FriendFeed) because it's one of the ways to learn how you do it (but, please, do not follow me if you do not see anything you could learn from me :-). - Hanna Wiszniewska

I would come up w/ a better vetting process. - Joe

why would you do that? - james

got to get a pic up so i can fit the criteria, I only follow 45 people and some of them are on thin ice ( Im lookin at you Scoble) - James Hunter

"Where in The Net is Robert San Diego?" (cit.) :-) - Luca Perugini from iPhone

I'm not kissing your arse,but i do learn a lot listening to you. - Paul Downing

@scobleizer why would you randomly follow people who comment in this post when you just got done knocking FFollo and having to unfollow a gazillion people on Twitter? - Bryan Zirkel

Bryan: because I'm following people one by one and putting them into lists on my screen. Autofollowing means you aren't doing ANY of that thinking. Also, autofollowing will get you spammers, if they ever show up (and they will). - Robert Scoble

@Robert: Read your blogpost and that's indeed what I look at to follow people too. No autofollow and even close friends have to tell something interesting for me to (keep) following. Friends who are new to Twitter (no tweets yet) get the benefit of doubt. - Patrick Mackaaij

If you follow me, great, but if you don't I'll understand. :) And I ought to do some pruning myself... - Grant Bierman

Let's give it a try. :0) - Toma Kazakov

I still don't understand how you want to follow someone who just writes a comment over here. Well, this is not the first time. I did not understand why and how you followed 100k people. I find it hard to properly follow 100 people. - Sumanth Kolar

Sumanth: obviously there are degrees of "following." When you read the New York Times, do you read the entire paper word for word? I don't. Same when I'm following. I only get random slices of some of my lists. Others, which have 500 people on them, get 100% read. - Robert Scoble

I'm still here . . . although tired after teaching all day. Louis Gray came to my PR class at SFSU and WOWED the 50 students [except for one who thinks we are making too much of social media] We won't be following him. - Shari Weiss

I like cheese! - Paul Puri

really? - clockwise from iPhone

Shari: Louis wows me too. Glad to see the class is getting into it. - Robert Scoble

He he :) - Richard Holas

I still like the "stranger stream" of Twitter vs "friend feed" of other applications. I don't feel the need to read all tweets from everybody - and tools let me check my fave tweeples. I think mass unfollowing destroys some of the social contract - Robert you are lucky because you are well liked and can do some risky things but companies for example (not Brands of One) would be in... more... - Laurel Papworth

As @charleneli predicted back in January, 2009 will be the year of de-friending on social networks. It's here. - Mark Evans

Laurel: yeah, you have to navigate these waters carefully if you are representing a brand, that's for sure! - Robert Scoble

you can put me on your boring list... - Charles Tanton

i will not get followed back: not powerful, don't have a brand, not a news maker... but i kinda understand the reasons - Dani Martínez

I still think it all goes into how you use twitter. If your using it as a communication tool it depends on if you are looking for broadcast or 2 way. Its interesting to watch as some of the bigger names turn back from the broadcast and go back to the 2 way. - Luke Kilpatrick

@Robert so when you're taking in information from FF do you have a feed of several dozen/hundred "key" people and then categorize the rest, or are you mainly searching? Do you utilize groups at all or mainly just rely on what comes across your feeds? I guess I'm curious as to how you're using FF to collect information. - Bryan Zirkel

I have found Twitter becomes noise rather than a conversation once the following/follower thing gets over a certain mark. I think this is the dirty little secret of Twitter - if it just turns into white noise, rather than a filter, then it becomes less than useful. - Michael Liss

I'm interested in how we'll all feel over the next few years as social networks continue to change and more people and organizations get on them. Obviously, many of us are getting fed up with spammers and are unfollowing them on Twitter and Facebook. I am also having a hard time keeping up with new subscribers on FriendFeed because I know less about them from their profiles and have to... more... - Cathryn Hrudicka

BTW, I feel like I'm finding lots of interesting new people to follow from these discussions that Robert and others are holding on FF. Cool! - Cathryn Hrudicka

Am I too late to comment and get followed? - Hichame Assi

I'm definitely around :) - KyNam Doan

Aren't you following me already? If not, you should be! LoL - Thomas Ward

I'm definitely late to be followed. :D - Faraz Mullick

I don't get it but ok :) - Parvez Halim

LOL! I follow those I find interesting and which can give me useful information. And hope someone follows me for the same reasons. - Flavio

Very interesting post - I've always thought that you guys who follow loads of people must get completely swamped by noise! Like you, I've found it useful to follow companies I use that have interesting products like Zoho and Evernote as a way of keeping up to date with their latest innovations. Excellent idea spelling out your "follow criteria" - it needs to become standard etiquette for social networks so that people don't get offended when they aren't followed back :) . - David Meredith

aren't you doing the same thing here, that you did in Twitter? Choose carefully who you follow, filling your brain with pollution doesn't make you smarter - Allison

Just finished reading the Mashable post on your unfollow exercise. It's attracting attention from all the other big names now. - George Hall (Australia)

Very interesting indeed, I only to unfollow a few, cause I just never had auto follow on.. So now I just unfollow the ones I'm bored of.. - Jaap Willem

Seems like a good idea. Although Louis Gray also has a few valid points on his latest blog post why it might be a mistake http://bit.ly/19UKxk - Silver Hage

I've never understood the auto-follow procedure on any social network. Even on Facebook, where it is obligatory, one can still lower the noise by simply hiding the updates of those who want to follow you, but perhaps also have little personal connection and therefore can be hidden. - Noah Gray

It seems like the unfollowing was the easy part. Choosing who to follow again must have been a chore. I think it is crucial in twitter (and FriendFeed for that matter) to have a clear out every six months or so otherwise you get bogged down in an information feed you don't really care about. - Chris Nixon

I can totally understand why you had to do this. I'm following 2700-ish folks on Twitter and I need 3 groups to manage it (using TweetDeck). I feel I am keeping up with most of my local community and the general tech community at large though I'm sure I'm still missing quite a bit of stuff from people who are not in the 3 groups. I also wonder how much more I can actually handle. - Ken Seto

Um... well, I made something of myself, but then I didn't like what I made, so now I'm doing it all over again. Not sure how that fits with your criteria! Plus, I really don't have a brand or any influence to speak of. I do look great in boxers, however. - Mark Jepsen

OK, OK, changed my picture. Instead of a green clock (a clock is my personal brand) I put a picture of myself. A lot of people told me to do that.... - Bora Zivkovic

I am still looking for info on holographic technology being used for news delivery. Perhaps it's a technology that hasn't even been invented yet or is sitting on a shelf somewhere. What say you? http://specialdee.wordpress.com/2009... - Denise

Hoping your new look account has had the desired effect. No need to follow me, I'm not the interesting type, I'll just be glad if your insights, links & content continues. Congrats & good luck - JanLawrence

Here's what's interesting, Robert, I've noticed an uptick in followers even if you reply or RT or like someone's tweet, not just if you follow that person. Then again, perhaps that's the intent - if you like or RT someone's idea, that's a kind of stamp of approval. - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Hej hej! - Peter

The Scoble Pendulum.. How long till we go back to FOLLOW!! FOLLOW!!! FOLLOW!!!! ? :) - Ade

I did a purge on Facebook for the same reasons a few months ago. It's under 300 and it's people I actually care about. I've come "this close" to running a purge on Twitter but haven't yet. Maybe this will spark me to do it. I've kept FF tight from the beginning. - Rob Williams

moving from FB to FF ... fewer, longer, more meaningful threads. welcoming your follow. cheers - marc calamia

ok, you´re following me already :-) - Torsten Eckert

alright - follow me... - thx in advance Robert Scoble... - Nilesh

All that commenting in the past counts for nothing? - Kevin Gamble

Hey Robert... Great post... On FriendFeed, I increasingly put people without meaningful and valuable content on a separate feed that I rarely check... Its a more "sensible" way to unfollow, i think... I only unsubscribe if I get pissed at someone etc. I wish, FF gave users the option to only unsubscribe from comments and likes (but keep the main feed). This would be a good tool to control the noise... - Onur Kabadayi

I agree with Robert (duh!). I very briefly made the effort of checking out the new follows and deciding whether to follow back. I think once I hit a thousand I shifted to a model of occasionally saying, "If you want me to follow you, talk to me." Hit two thousand and quit saying anything or checking followers. I don't care if they follow me as long as they either say useful things like real people or don't talk at all. I've never autofollowed back. This strategy works for me. - Patricia F. Anderson

I have a large difference between people I follow (around 2000) and people who follow me (around 1800) - I choose people who are important sources of information. People choose me if they think I am an important source of information to them. I never thought it would have to be a one-to-one relationship as to who is useful to whom: some are informative, others are good listeners and learners. I learn from people I follow and I hope my followers learn from me. - Bora Zivkovic

I also think that those of us who follow larger numbers of people don't use the stream in the same way. It is more dipping in and out of the stream, trusting that the important stuff will be repeated enough to float to the top, engaging with conversations of the moment. I wrote a blogpost on this earlier this year: http://etechlib.wordpress.com/2009... - Patricia F. Anderson

Someone told me twitter can be separated into two types. (id say at least two) - Kay Proskin

Scoble, I am beginning to think you are a cult leader :). Look at all these comments! I am using FF more and more these days... Useful for eGuiders.com that's for sure. - Marc Ostrick

I'm not sure your following me. - Amit Morson

Hey Scobie :D Follow me ! - paniaguai

I like Robert. He was one of the first people I followed on Twitter and brought me to FF. But I don't understand why people are desperate to have him follow them. Status? Some kind of virtual autograph? - Tech Introvert

What the heck. Follow me if you like. I'll be as entertaining & informative as I can. - Aaron Schaub from iPod

Been considering doing the same. Your post just might be the flame that lights a fire you-know-where to get it done. - Kate

I only follow a few people and keep losing track so lord only knows how you managed to even begin to keep track of a conversation before friendfeed came along - Iain from BuddyFeed

Well done! Who need followers that aren't reading your tweets anyway. - Sean Rasmussen

I just want a toaster! - ZuDfunck

I'm considering doing same once I'm more confident in my use of FriendFeed. I RT'd this and it resonated with at least one of my followers. - Tony Hollingsworth

'Hand-crafted personal network' is the meme of the moment, and whilst I can see the workmanship, where's the value going to be for you, Robert, in following this rag-tag (no offence people :) ) of folks from a gazillion different verticals. (OK, so they're mostly life scientists). - Andrew Spong

I use to want to be Bob Dylan. Now I am not so sure. - ZuDfunck

um..... - Spencer

My take: you can't be an authentic, credible voice to your community if you let 'sex & dollars' spammers hang on to your coattails. Spam followers matter.... in a bad way. Allowing them to be associated with you diminishes your potential value to genuine followers. It's a pain. It takes time. It's worth doing. More on this, if interested: http://tr.im/vJwb - Andrew Spong

I'll have mine to go. - ZuDfunck

Hope to see more "old fashioned blogging", like it better than tweets. Tweets are bound to disappear into oblivion the moment they're posted. - Willem (@wim66) ☠

"Spam followers matter.... in a bad way." - I certainly agree with this. I block pornbots just as quickly as they follow me. I'm less vigilant about the commercial follows, but usually they go away by themselves after a while. - John Craft

You're already following me here (don't care about twitter tough), so i just hope you don't un-follow, even though you probably don't understand what i'm talking about most of the time, since it's in portuguese. - Diego Sana

So what happened to the advantages to following so many people you always talked about? - Bas

Thanks for connecting here, still learning all the advantages of FF - carece

@Andrew Regarding spam followers and the idea that allowing them to follow you somehow dilutes your credibility, I just have to disagree. To me that places the burden on the wrong person. I don't have time to waste pruning those who follow me, unless they are overtly annoying.My stream is public, they can follow me anyway. What matters to me is that the spammers leave me alone. If they don't, I block them. If they keep quiet, I don't care. - Patricia F. Anderson

What is important is not who follows me, but who *I* follow. - Patricia F. Anderson

Follow me if you want, but I gotta warn ya, it's scintillating stuff! - Pierce Presley

Funny my twitter feed is much noisier but I have been very selective on who I follow. I have tried to make the feed relevant and actionable. At times I post things that seem out of the norm on my twitter feed but that is mainly for the few people who follow me that don't get it but I am trying to keep up their interest level. I also control who follows me, yes this breaks the model but I think the follow everyone model was broken and reckless - Richard Gallo

Am I interesting? Dunno. I'm often controversial, tho. ;) BTW, we met in person at a Pittsburgh Blogfest, but I really don't expect you to remember that. - Eric Williams

Enjoyed the post. I just started Twitter a few days ago to get away from Facebook. I like friendfeed the best - can't wait until it becomes more mainstream. - Robby Parker

Awesome move. Consider that my comment please :) - Charlotte Barker

friendfeed is definitively more evolved that Twitter. Conversely, user bases of Twitter is still its real (and unique) point of strenght... - Marco Castellani

Don't want you to follow me (unless you find my stream of interest) but it's quite interesting the number of people that comment to get you to follow! - Ben Drury

Hey Robert! So, I would like to talk to you about a social media company I'm working with right now. They launched a few months ago and their trajectory and momentum is pretty amazing. Oh, and I started unfollowing the noise in my Twitter after I commented on your blog post. - Gregg Le Blanc

Great ideas. I've been selective (though it fluctuates) about following people/accounts on Twitter since I joined about 2 years ago. I can't take too much noise. - Joe Lance from twhirl

I'm asking the same thing Bas asked... what about your video on the benefits of following so many people? I took a stab at that method of madness by starting to follow all kinds of people, and following anyone that followed me... but I always felt like I was missing good content from good people because of all the "spam". I started to use TweetDeck to create groups/columns for... more... - Timothy Federwitz

@Patricia - reminds me that I should probably review all my twitter followers and thin things down. :) - JA Castillo

thanks - Keith

I like conversing with interesting people. Sometimes that means commenting to get followed, @cogiva. ;) - Eric Williams

Hi Scoble! - Pete Gilbert

I did almost the same thing - unfollowed about 1000 from my 1500, no attention is way better - Maarten den Braber

Couldn't agree more. It's about time we all grew up. BTW Don't follow me. :-) - Gee Ranasinha

Robert what's the deal with Twitter? - stockmanmarc

Your post makes good sense. I didn't auto-follow & still find folks to unfollow because their noise gets too loud. - Debra Ellis

Very clever. I imagine the signal to noise is sooooo much better. - Chris Brogan

I've been thinking about unfollowing a bunch twitter folks as well. I'll look at SocialToo again. My initial experience with SocialToo wasn't good. However, it was during their infancy. - Ron Hudson

I don't blame you at all. Leo was all over that yesterday. - Daniel B. Honigman

why would simply leaving a comment prompt you to follow me? - David Wescott

You're not going to change your mind and mass unfollow us are you? - walidmREALTOR

Sup! :-) - Jon Winters

I suspect it identifies you as a real person interested in dialog, David. - Eric Williams

Followers are currency and you have plenty to spend - Lee Odden

Bob, did you do anything on Twitter recently ? Did you massively refollow people ? Seems like you screwed up Twitter : down for a while... ;-) - Enikao

Follow me! @carloscomputers - carloscomputers

very cool timing with just before twitter goes down hard! well done Robert! @crbrowning - Colin

@davidorban - David Orban

I've followed you and have really enjoyed your posts. I think I would miss that - Tom

Good to hear that your experiment has stopped the spam @lindsaydavies - Lindsay Davies

ciao Robert! - alex

Your ego is amazing. You make it seem like it is a special deal to be followed by you. I'm glad there are many very bright, talented people here who follow others, regardless of class, education, social status and not based on some snobbish criteria. - RuthNH

DON'T follow me! I write in Italian :-) - Lorenzo Strambi

Here I be - Robert

Wow, this is a lot of comments. And kudos for following Followable people who have something interesting to contribute to your day. I'm glad you did it, because that means you'll find AND share more interesting things. This, in turn, makes you more followable too. Thanks for seeing the light, so to speak. - ax0n

You killed twitter. - Melissa Pierce

and now with twitter down, many will flock to here! - Mark V. Fusco

I love rob - Mark from iPhone

Did this take down Twitter this morning Robert? - frank barry

That must of taken a long time :-) I've always been a fan of twitter, but I must say they have struggled in the last few weeks. We are working with their API on a project and their seems to be an issue every other day that causes problems. Do they have what it takes? - Chris Nadeau

I follow under 200 people and it's great. I can't imagine 1k+ . I add about three or four a month. - Mike Janicke

I unfollow people when I find I ignore their tweets/updates. After reading your blog, I think we ALL need to be more judicious. - Janet Barker-Evans

Is this why Twitter is down? LOL! Can't check to see if you unfollowed me. Hope not. You, Shel Israel, and Jeremiah Owyang were some of the very first people I followed way back before Twitter even had 100,000 people on the service. -- It's been a fun ride but, of course, the spammers always show up to make things difficult. - Brenda Young

How do you really know if you should be following someone until you follow them for a while? Sometimes I don't start talking to someone until I see a common interest, then I tweet back and we start talking, but that could be months later. I don't follow everyone back, but I follow back those that interact. I will unfollow once I see that won't happen, or I don't like their tweets. - Nadine Gilden

Twitter is victime of it own success, they have to re learn how to scal better, but more important they have to learn to share better. - abdellah

looks like you'll need to follow at least 343 people LOL - Shari Weiss

Friendfeed takes over for twitter finally? - Thomas Resing

@Patricia I don't want potential followers to be put off by who is following me. I wouldn't want them to think I care more about have n+1 followers than I do about what they're going to see if they review who I've allowed to follow me. Not to cull spammers suggests I care more about my experience than theirs. To a great extent, the quality of their experience will determine the quality... more... - Andrew Spong

1600 ... isn't that a big number too? It could be you'll think again before you follow every one here :) - Mario Gastaldi

Hi... do I get a follow? - Jason Mayoff

If you are already following me. Will you double follow me? :) - Brady

Hi Robert!! :) - Zaneology from Nambu

Still waiting for my Building 43 t-shirt. Not that I'm bitter or anything. ;-) - Donna Tuttle

Be sure to come by Dallas when you swing through Texas! - Zaneology from Nambu

Respect your opinion Robert but we'll have to agree to disagree. Yes I despise all the FakePornSpamBots who follow me. I block as many as I can, but can't keep up. Our views differ regarding what is important to SEE! I treasure home Home stream! I read it, refresh, read, refresh and in minutes I have the pulse of the world... at least MY world! EVERYONE has something of value to share at some point. If I UNfollow tens of thousands, I will miss so much worthy of consideration. - Arleen Anderson

Just another reason why it's good to diversify, I can still read your posts here. :) - Luis Sandoval

Cheers! - Jeff Wiant

Funny. I was catching up on news on Friendfeed for some odd reason. Great post; plenty for new and long-time users alike to consider there. - Alex Howard

I'm still waiting for the ultimate tool to manage my followings - I can only manage to keep up with about 1/3 of those following me. I'd love to see something that can tell me what friends of mine also follow those that I am or those that are following me. Maybe it's out there and I missed it? - TheDiva Rockin

Anyone interested in assessing the quality of their followers should check http://tweetblocker.com. It's pretty chastening. I aim to improve on my C rating. http://www.buzzom.com is a fun, fast way of decoupling yourself from non-reciprocal followers. You can select individuals to purge, or flush 50 random non-reciprocal followers at a time. - Andrew Spong

Robert, your timing could not be better. ;-) - Dave Martin

Great post, with perfect timing! Dang it, Dave Martin just took it off my lips. - Vadim Lavrusik

I hereby rename this comment thread neoTwitter <waves at followers> - Andrew Spong

/me waves - Kevin Johnson from iPhone

Awww, you gotta admit, saturation, the level of influence that you have, because of your high follower, count, is a tool of mass destruction. Seriously, did you think if you recommend an online service that people would not try it out? Was this an asassination attempt - Peter Murphy

I'm glad i'm not the only one who misses /me actions from IRC, Kevin. ;) - Eric Williams

With today's Twitter outage your timing is pretty stinking good, Robert. :) - Chris Cree

Now to get the rest of the world to follow that same logic when it comes to follow/unfollow! I only started being more selective as Twitter (and everyone else) started getting aggressive with spammers or anyone that even remotely did a single spammy tweet. Now if only there were the same contact management tools available for the other social networks as with Twitter. No matter what though, I'll continue updating my status when I eat a peanut butter sandwich! (With Fluff of course!). - Paul Monaco

Twitter couldn't handle the mass unfollow load, blew up... - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

I've been followed by Robert Scoble :-) - David Finch

Follow iPolitics - Jacob Kobi Gamliel

Now I think that it is time to think about a way to make money using Twitter. - abdellah

@Mark, +1. When in doubt, the default delegation of blame goes to Robert. - Dave Martin

what is critical mass for twitter? Too few and nobody interacts, Too many and spam bots overwhelm, Is it 1K or 2K needed to get a real experience? - WarLord

Hmm can you unsubscribe from "comment notification via e-mail" in FF on a *specific* topic? This one :-) - Patrick Mackaaij

Of course I thonk it is a different experience if you hand follow reading each bio from the beginning then these mass purges are unnecessary - WarLord

I thought you already followed me. lol - Duane-PreppyDude

Not sure if you do, but here I am... - Aron Michalski

I am intrigued how RT addict will RT now?!! (ps: FF please don't post this to my twitter) - abdellah

I have been keeping my twitter account private a majority of the time lately b/c I am going through a divorce, but I really kinda like it. Have been reducing followers as well as the number I follow. - Jackson Miller

You should follow me here in FF and on Twitter too! - Karthi

hopefully most of us have proven our worth beyond commenting on this single thread - andy brudtkuhl

I like the way you operate, Scoble. Thanks in advance for the follow! - Dr. Frank Ramblings, Ph.D

Nice way of doing it... - Charles

No need to follow me unless you are actually going to engage in conversation with me. - Jeff Hurt

If you're already following and we comment, will you unfollow? *wink Hoping all is well your way! - Dayngr

4&5 are my favorite! Those are big reasons I decide to follow someone too. - Kelly Mitton

I'm lucky. Have never had Twitter spam. But then again I'm no Scoble either :) - Lori Reed

I am the peanut butter eating bot - Benjamin Spector

If you are already following me on ff does that mean I get a cookie or something? ;-) - Tomy Thomson

I'll add my name to the list. I came back to FF after the Twitter DoS outage. Maybe Scoble broke Twitter by all his unfollowing. He was the "glue" holding Twitter together. :-) - Tom Newman

Robert: Here's the bit you missed off the end of your title here: .... and put them in that group I don't read :-) - Jim Connolly

Hi Robert, greetings from germany. - Flynn (Michael A. Volz)

add me for your social media and the practice of law news! - Rex Gradeless

Great post. I'm sure that some people might say that this kind of mass unfollowing will hurt Twitter, but I think it's just the opposite. Users who are following people they have no interest in just to pad their own numbers are diminishing the meaning of "following." - Mark Denton

@Ulrichmargarita - Ulrichmargarita

To stave off being unfollowed we need to comment here ya say? - Jason

you are already following me here... perhaps you'll consider re-following me on twitter too - Michelle

I don't know how you ever did it the other way. I am not in the tech world near as much as I used to be, which wasn't a whole lot. I just followed some random people I saw on SMugMug-related people on here when I started. You were one of them. I had no idea who you were (and still don't :-), but you talked about Twitter a lot too, which got me on there as well. Both services have really... more... - James Schipper

Follow away! - Ferdinand Perez

ok 400 jackpot - abdellah

Quality over quantity in all things, including (perhaps especially) Twitter. Loved your friending methodology -- those are the same rules I've applied since being on Twitter. Posted them onto Posterous to share the love with credit to you: http://lorilaurentsmith.posterous.com/ - Lori Laurent Smith

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

I started out following everyone on Twitter.Then I got wise. When someone's stream becomes more noise than signal, that's when I consider unfollowing. I realize that threshhold is different for everyone, but I'll take "what I had for lunch" over a dozen bogus "marketing tips" any day. - Julie Barrett from twhirl

Well, I am trying to use FriendFeed more after watching Scoble's video on all those monitors he had up. I'm not a big consumer of information and don't own a TV but this online social stuff has been a perfect fit into my life because I can connect with people who are fountains of knowledge on a specific subject or are "human mashups". I like both! - Adria Richards

Why !? - Bertrand Soulier from iPhone

I've been reading al of this unfollow bits, and this point of yours: - Donna

Hey, I think that today you might make your point about FriendFeed being more interesting than Twitter. Hope you are well. Talked with @fransteps this morning and she is excited to work with you at Rackspace. - Kami Huyse

hi - George Desmyter

I would appreciate the follow, thanks! - Jeff Reisdorfer

I've been reading all of this un-follow posts lately, and this point of yours in WHY you unfollowed: "#2 Because I personally care about everyone I am following their noise level is a LOT lower. ." Is exactly what I do. And now I am starting to understand Friendfeed more. and using posterous to do aggregate posts. So is this overload making more people sit up and think first? I think so. At least the intelligent ones. - Donna

I love you Scoble! ;) - Carol Levesque

with all due sycophantism :) - jeff hammond

This is a great move, Robert. It's also a lot more human...I was almost convinced that you were the only person who could actually drink from the fire hose without choking. - Steffan Antonas

Laura Scott (@lauras) › Likes