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Richard Zeidel › Likes
[A bit cheeky..] Q: Why Omniture's in trouble? Incumbent=Omniture. Entrant=Yahoo! Web Analytics. Go: http://www.youtube.com/watch...
![[A bit cheeky..] Q: Why Omniture's in trouble? Incumbent=Omniture. Entrant=Yahoo! Web Analytics. Go: http://tr.im/tU39](http://img.youtube.com/vi/DaKgMcFP4Mo/2.jpg "[A bit cheeky..] Q: Why Omniture's in trouble? Incumbent=Omniture. Entrant=Yahoo! Web Analytics. Go: http://tr.im/tU39")  |
Richard Zeidel and benGü boyacıGil liked this
Card.ly Creates Attractive Online Business Cards in a Jiffy [Address Book] - http://lifehacker.com/5320901...
metalerik and Richard Zeidel liked this
Let's create a list of 100 new startups that should be created right now!
scott willeke, Nicola Greco, Ahmet Alp Balkan and 115 other people liked this
Location based aggregated travel info, down to the street level. I want to be able to instantly know historical facts, reviews, tips, etc. about the building I'm looking at right now.
- Jason Goldberg
A user-curated/voted guide to the best expert advice on anything.
- Jason Goldberg
dont these all exsit or are possible today, bringing together lots of sites... whats stopping us doing these now. is it just the user interface?
- Nigel Walsh
that said, I like your idea.... we should have a news network that starts with positive news!
- Nigel Walsh
@Nigel --> it's all doable with stuff that's out there. That's the best part of where the net is right now. It's all online, now we get to build cool services to make sense of it.
- Jason Goldberg
Jason, this is an interesting idea. Regarding the "expert advice" thing, I would love to get a good version of product recommendations, but in a "wizard" format. Look at HDTVs, I should be asked questions about size, price, picture quality and maybe one or two other things and it should give me the best fit.
- Rob Diana
Other ideas?
- Jason Goldberg
Jason: the first two could probably done pretty easily as Mahalo apps.
- Christian Anderson
Seems to me mashup apps are going to get huge. The companies that have the most open APIs with deep access to information will win the next round.
- Christian Anderson
Further speculation: of the 100, 49 will be localized- or verticalized-search related. Another 49 will be mashups that tie econmerce to existing search tools such that the commerce gets more targeted and powered by one's social graph.
- Christian Anderson
I think the people driven social space needs a metric. Something portable that identifies users contributions and influence. Something peer mediated.
- Richard Zeidel
Christian, I hope you are right about mashups being huge, that would help me a lot :) However, I am not sold on social ecommerce. Product reviews are good, but the "power of the network" or social graph may not extend well with commerce. The social graph tends to use the idea that several people in your network are experts in something. Commerce does not work quite in the same way.
- Rob Diana
Richard, I do not know if peers want to "mediate" as much as knowing how they rank. It is the selfish part of social that drives that. Once you start listing or ranking people, you get the whole a-list and a-list backlash problems. Just look at what is happening with Scoble's list today, http://friendfeed.com/scoblei...
- Rob Diana
Point your smartphone or iPhone at a house or building, and get all the background information. (This is potentially scary -- one could get all the background information on the residents or inhabitants of the house or building. This is doable now -- the technology and data are there.)
- Sean McBride
One startup idea I wish we had was a unified communication platform. Basically, email, IM, twitter, friendfeed or whatever hook into one big "thing". This could probably start as a web app, and branch into mobile and and thick client apps as well.
- Rob Diana
Rob: I'm more hopeful on the ecommerce side. For example, I have several photo geeks in my social graph. I'm thinking about buying a DSLR. They know me and suggested a D90. It's not so hard to imagine someone suggesting where to buy one or even selling me theirs over ff or whatever.
- Christian Anderson
I agree with Rob. "a unified communication platform" could make life way easier for me. Streamy comes close but I am struggling with the interface. another startup that could be helpful is one that does location based social networking no matter where you travel...couchsurfing, socialect and localwoot do similar stuff. i wish the three could be combined :-)
- Freddie Benjamin
Rob: Here's the disconnect for me. The Social Space is about the individual and the individual's positioning is based on their own packaging, contributions etc. Influence is a key factor - Twitter started with followers, Facebook has friends, LinkedIn has connections. But qualitative data begs the SFW - so fukin what!?! We need a measure to understand people and their place - and i...
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- Richard Zeidel
Point your smartphone or iPhone at *anything* and get all the background information. Think about that. Products at stores. Places. People. Documents. Vehicles. Any physical entity.
- Sean McBride
Sean: See Ted Video Pattie Maes Sixth Sense...http://bit.ly/LdXlr
- Richard Zeidel
@christian -- *could* be done via something like mahalo but i think they are more pure play apps. the first is more of a killer iphone app. I have been traveling so much lately that i want something like this. A service that literally can tell you everything interesting you need to know about the exact place you are at right this minute. The info is already out there online, it just...
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- Jason Goldberg
Nigel: In keeping with your positive news network idea, I'd love to do a series in manner of The Soup... a possibly humorous weekly recap of web culture news (from trending topics and blog top stories to start-up coverage and web series highlights).
- Sarah Crisman
@shawn, i love it.
- Jason Goldberg
Book Recycling. I'd like to see a method developed that would remove the printing from old books and reprint new text..
- Bill Bittner
Jason -- this idea of yours has occurred to me many times, so naturally I think it's brilliant. :) One of the tricks would be to prioritize the mountains of information associated with any given place.
- Sean McBride
Richard -- got it: fantastic link to the work of Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry at the MIT Media Lab.
- Sean McBride
Death Alarm: Follow my online activity via RSS feeds (blog, twitter, facebook etc..) to determine if I am dead!, and if so, activate my afterlife macros. Macros include: sending my letters (e-mails) to family, updating statuses("farewell everyone"), posting blog. Death will be triggered by configurable idle time counter (no status updates for 30 days for instance), followed by e-mail...
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- denizoktar
@sean I would love to know the history of my house - I have a picutre from 1926 when it was just a field, yet a year later it was built... who by, who lived here -
- Nigel Walsh
how about a feature request so that when you comment @nigel or otherwise it alerts you on Friend Feed!
- Nigel Walsh
you know I was thinking earlier - Monday, better Detox, would love to use twitter for global support and tweet what I eat - and everything I tweet, automatically get counted for me and emailed to me every day against a plan.. I rushed back to the PC and someone had done it - almost identical to my thoughts... either Im getting slow or someone has read my mind!
- Nigel Walsh
@Rob - Isn't this Digsby or something similar - the only thing that misses is Skype. Im also doing a lot of work with people like Cisco right now and they have some very cool UC stuff out or coming out - linking Presence and various other API's. Im doing this as part of an Enterprise Mashup - but this could easily be consumer based.
- Nigel Walsh
Twitting credit card. Choose which kind of activities with your credit card to be twittered in your account.For instance: Visa, please twit everything I eat.(Inspired by Nigel) Whenever I buy a food, it will be twittered. (I am assuming credit cards keep track of each item bought. Do they? Here they don't)
- denizoktar
One important start up - web 2.0 for education - there are people in the field but it is not "easy yet". Education is inherently conservative and slow to change - something stupidly simple that would allow/teach/train educators how to use and be successful in web 2.0 would be a great startup. Heck i'd even invest in that one.
- Dan Morrill AKA Techwag
Another important start up - portable health care - in that people can have an electronic version of their health care records, everything that they can carry with them. Personally it should be implanted, on a special card, and be very secure, up datable. The fun part would be dealing with people's MRI's, and other imagery/telemetry systems.
- Dan Morrill AKA Techwag
A critical piece of the social web is status/rank. All the successful plays have some method of measuring one popularity/authority.
- Christian Anderson
A just for fun startup - a true and reliable way to rank internet success, while we have ffholic, twitterholic, compete, quantcast, and other systems, where is the one that ties all this together, is reliable, is accurate, and can not be gamed?
- Dan Morrill AKA Techwag
Jason: yep, a location-aware iPhone app from mahalo could do what you want.
- Christian Anderson
Dan: isn't that internal conversion tracking tools? Or were you wanting to measure other sites?
- Christian Anderson
this probably exsits (someone let me know if it does) but when I comment on blogs I want it to update FF automatically - eg Disquss...
- Nigel Walsh
Ok. try this one on for size. I'm gonna create a website where every feature, including the first thing we build, is decided by a weekly vote of our users.
- Jason Goldberg
I'd like to see a location based social network built around graveyards. You'd create a profile and reserve a physical plot of land and be buried there when you die. Your tombstone would display random status updates you posted to the web throughout your life. And you could look up your dead friends graves on google earth. I've thought about this!
- Jon Gosier
give me a chip no bigger than a credit card which recharges my blackberry in 10 minutes
- Jason Goldberg
an online incubator that turned an idea(s) into a working site in days not weeks or months..
- Nigel Walsh
Days? Let's throw something together, halfassed, let it go down all the time while we get it working over many years. Days would be great, but if you want something good, you can't throw it together in days.
- Dean Clark
Company that makes an iPhone app for SocialMedian
- Jeff (the マクダジ of FF)
from BuddyFeed
I'd like to see a mashup that would work for open networks like twitter, digg, friendfeed etc. that would allow community walls. a block would trigger a whole community to block the same person till a person within the community unblocked. open networks are dying because people don't want to comment on threads with people that they know they don't like. it could be voluntary. we would call these "Unions" and you would have to agree to be a part of one and you could always leave.
- Noah David Simon
Some great ideas here. Really like the unified communications idea.
- Gavin
How about a startup that encourages hobbies for school aged children
- Anthony Farrior
or a startup/networks for artists and animation. Perhaps something that has online tools and copyright ownership. For an extra fee provide help with networking and distribution.
- Anthony Farrior
or a start up like peek that provide gps and text communication between parents and kids
- Anthony Farrior
or a start up for upcoming clothing designers(not tee shirt stuff) where,again, for an extra fee, networking and real store distribution is provided.
- Anthony Farrior
last one, someone PLEASE make me a mobile video phone...As in "Hi yes, i can hear you and see you."
- Anthony Farrior
A free 'app' that helps re-educate those displaced by the Internet / automation / tech revolution.
- Charlie Anzman
Jason, this would be a great idea for a room here. You could create an identical one on socialmedian and import the RSS feed from it over here. If I have one criticism about friendfeed, it’s that so much of what is shared here, winds up in the rear view mirror, and is quickly forgotten.
- Michael Fidler
I can see why you would like a location based service like the one you described. There’s something like it on the iPhone, but I tried to find the name of it on Google with no luck. Additionally a lot of information just became public which would help with such an app. I would like something along the lines of what Rob mentioned, "A unified communication platform". I have a few more ideas but I need to find some info. first.
- Michael Fidler
Jason, there’s a site like the one you mentioned about user decided features also. Loic used it to decide what features to add to Twhirl. It’s called Uservoice http://bit.ly/ykT5
- Michael Fidler
We've already started a series of hyperlocal "best of Twitter" city sites like http://BreakingLANews.com. It's a grass roots initiative that provides these city templates free to community hubs and groups in each city, down to towns like Chico, CA http://ChicoBreakingNews.com. It's a unique way to propagate a new hyperlocal marketing model that, unlike sites like Topix, directly involves members of the community.
- Pat Kitano
Expanding on the UC idea, I was thinking someone could write a connector for twitter that in essence links twitter to all other chat clients, ie if you tweet msn:ndwalsh then you chat with me.. Same for skype:nigelwals, icq: etc etc... The ultimate comms platform
- Nigel Walsh
click sharing company
- Thomas Power
An easy way to discover new websites, not content, but great websites. Check out http://www.lynki.com
- Aloke Fernandes
@michaelfidler: yes, we use uservoice at XING. It's a great tool! What I'm talking about is using a tool like uservoice in a whole new way, to decide everything from the first line of code onwards.
- Jason Goldberg
Hmm I work on a location based iPhone app and unfortunately the GPS is too often not accurate enough to pinpoint the building you're in but can usually narrow you down to a 100 meter area. Also we need a magnetometer on the iPhone to do any accurate pointing (but it's coming in june they say...)
- Raj Advani
Raj, the other option would be to provide users a 3D map of nearby buildings so that they could use their human intelligence to find their correct location. But that might be hard to implement in an iPhone app. ;-)
- Bruce Lewis
Nigel Walsh, Backtype will import all your comments on blogs to FF. FF is even smart about not duplicating your Disqus items here.
- Bruce Lewis
Rob Diana: your TV-Example is exactly what http://hunch.com is all about.
- Richard Metzler
Haha Bruce I was going to say wait a minute...
- Raj Advani
I like Thomas Hawk's idea of starting a company to comb through old game shows and then selling the DVDs at outrageous markups to the original contestants or their family. http://thomashawk.com/2005...
- Davis Freeberg
"Location based aggregated travel info" => Nokia Maps & Lonely Planet: http://www.youtube.com/watch...
- Thomas Amberg
One of my weird ideas: Create a User Profile Management Site that allows users to create / update a common "User profile" (could have multiple "personality" profiles - work, personal, family, etc). The profile site updates would push out to a gazillion other sites and update user profile settings with each update. API adoption by a number of other apps is a must, obviously. The idea...
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- Susan Beebe
Distributed Indexing (Search Engine, Classifieds, Auctions, Real Estate) Like MLS for web directories / search engines.
- Matt Robson
@Susan I've been thinking of something like that for a while.
- Gavin
@Susan, @Gavin something like chi.mp maybe?
- Dragos Ilinca
Do we really need another 100 startups? I'd rather see one or two excellent startups come through and form their place on the web then seeing 100 coming through and all burning. Some of the ideas listed are pretty interesting and it would be cool if some of them were implemented although I'd like to see a few of the ideas merged together to see a more feature rich and useful service for users.
- Nicholas James
I'd really appreciate some feed back on the idea I stated above. I think it addresses a very serious issue in making "open" networks acceptable to the mainstream. I'd really like to hear from some tech people if it is feasible: making open networks acceptable for more people http://ff.im/3i7y9
- Noah David Simon
Coin-based economy for kids to help them skirt the issue entirely of having to ask parents for their credit card to play online games. Coins are kid money (and their parents nuisance money). Let's get coin value translated to online money and watch the revenue pour in.
- scott epstein
I want an app that will accurately predict the closing price of the Dow for any given day in the future. I know it’s not realistic, just call me a dreamer.
- Michael Fidler
Jason, I was thinking about your idea today, and that would be an interesting experiment. You could call it Tabula rasa. It’s definitely worth trying.
- Michael Fidler
I had this startup-idea: http://prezi.com/20331/view/ but I droped it. Now I have another one: 1. Start a communities for science & business topics, 2. provide Conference-Life-Streams with Twitter-Comments as usp like this: http://www.ustream.tv/channel..., 3. Provide further information like news, topic-monitoring (twitter), publications-research, 4. Track the use...
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- www.louis-e.de
oh, it's a bit similar to social median, I see ;-) Didn't know that before, sorry. But I can't find info-portals with meme-tracking-technique there. And no conference-streaming. So will built your competitor, haha...
- www.louis-e.de
Just in case people really liked the "unified communications platform" idea, I believe it is now called Wave, from Google (http://wave.google.com/).
- Rob Diana
Nother idea for startup: when riding public transport, service sends notification when friends are on the same train/bus etc.
- André Gallinat
You were right on the money, Rob. Nice Job!
- Michael Fidler
A Google Wave app that integrates with Google Health to provide real-time healthcare between Payers and Providers
- Jesse Stay
How Long Did It Take for the World to Identify Google as an AltaVista Killer? - http://technologizer.com/2009...
Hutch Carpenter, (jeff)isageek, Save As : Panos and 51 other people liked this
I love this kind of stuff. I try to explain this to my younger students. Nothing is forever.
- TonyatMATC
so important to remember that everything is point in time. and time keeps on changing.
- Richard Zeidel
"But at a time when other popular search sites such as Yahoo!, Excite, and Lycos have all morphed into diversified entertainment portals, is there really a future for a pure, advertising-supported search tool?"
- Paul Buchheit
"Leslie, have you visited our online t-shirt store?" Where is friendfeed's t-shirt store? lol
- Ashwani Kumar
I don't know, but I gained instant expertdom when in 2000 I entered firstname lastname of a present party into the searchbox, pressed "I'm feeling lucky" (not a concept easily portable to non-AngloSaxon cultures btw), and landed on Firstname Lastname's dental clinic's page. While the AltaVista drew blank. Go figure.
- ianf ⌘
I'm pretty sure it was that PC magazine article on Google that got me to try it. I could tell immediately that it was better than what I was using at the time, and switched to it. I spread the word around our lunch table at Bell Labs, and pretty soon we were all using it. Rob told me about Amazon, I told him about Google :)
- Howard Trickey
"as good as Google was in 1998 and 1999, it ... wasn’t as good as it would later become". Measured by what? Is it possible that the results quality distance to the next best search engine might have been higher back then than it is today?
- Philipp Lenssen
Philipp, you're of course aware that "results quality distance" is a pretty esoteric metric?
- ianf ⌘
No, I think it's actually the most intuitive thing, though I might have failed to word it well. The quality distance to the search engine you're used to is simply the thing that 1) makes you want to switch, 2) tell your friends, 3) determines the "wow" factor, 4) determines how useful you feel it is etc. It's much less abstract than a comparison towards a hypothetical tool of the future...
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- Philipp Lenssen
Tried Google for the first time in 1998 or 1999 and never switched back to Altavista (same thing happened when switching from Archie to Altavista and sometimes FTPSearch a few years earlier). btw. according to "A Brief History of Search Engines" - http://www.isrl.illinois.edu/~chip... - archie was the first internet search engine and it used the grep...
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- Amund Tveit
How long did the switch from Mosaic to Netscape take? :-) That happened before it was out of beta.
- iSteeve
What I got from this history isn't that Google got better, but that all of its competitors didn't realize the value of the search engine and "killed" themselves. The big idea at the turn of the century was that portals were going to be king due in part to Yahoo's success. When all the search engines went that route and failed, Google was the only one left. If we're supposed to learn...
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- Mark Trapp
I can't say "how long it took the world to supplant AltaVista with Google," but, in global terms, it wasn't very long, two years perhaps, before AltaVista fell into disrepute. I believe the key to Google's success was PageRank and persistence of its vision, which at the time was largely unfathomable to outsiders: daisy-chained containers filled with racks of cheap hardware doing massive...
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- ianf ⌘
The economics of Google explained by Wired http://www.wired.com/culture...
Arnaud Fischer, Maxim Grinev, ashish and 2 other people liked this
Nice article with history and analysis.
- ashish
Does Twitter need a new game? Twitter investor Fred Wilson told me Tumblr's Tumblarity influence measure is getting more engagement. More:
Crackle, Daniel Rowley, Brad Kligerman and 26 other people liked this
Be right back with more details and discussion.
- Robert Scoble
how is this influence measured?
- Carlos Ayala
From what I read it doesn't just take"followership" into account, which is nice :)
- AJ Leon
Measuring a Twitter user's influence isn't exactly a "new game", Rob. Seems that people have been doing that for some time now, through Web apps like twinfluence.com.
- Thomas Ward
He says that number of followers was a fun game on Twitter but a new game is needed for Twitter: one that focuses more on engagement and real influence. He said that I have more influence on Twitter than Oprah and they need a new way to point that out while encouraging more people to post better tweets.
- Robert Scoble
He pointed to Tumblr's new "Tumblarity" score and said that the engagement has gone up because of it. More people are posting more content there now which gets more people to visit, etc.
- Robert Scoble
The fundamental problem I have with all of the influence calculations is that they take everyone regardless of problem domain. My list of influential folks would be different if i'm looking at the list of people I follow because of XMPP or Python or Ruby.
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
must say that a way to measure engagement and effectiveness of twitter would be a good way to put it forward to colleagues who are doubters. are there any? checking out twinfluence now - thanks Thomas
- Matthew Llewellin
Mike: great point! What if a system could recommend people based on not only overall votes, but by weighting votes from your friends/networks higher.
- Larry Roth
Larry: right - it would need to weight the votes by either tag-cloud or keyword values (or both)
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
Rob, I think he's absolutely right about everything he says in your first quote (that there's no proper measure of engagement or influence on Twitter yet), but I disagree with his presumption that Tumblr has increased engagement because of better metrics. I know about two folks who use Tumblr regularly (and yes, this is anecdotal, but so is the presumption of Twitter influence we're...
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- Adam Lipkin
I doubt the effectiveness of tag clouds. I look at tag-clouds based on 'category' of tweeps and there's quite little evidence that someone is, say, a journalist. I think some measure of influence can be measured by looking at how his followers react to a tweet. If someone gets many replies, retweets, it's clear that at least his followers think he's influential. Followers * tweets * replies * retweets. Or something like that.
- Michiel Berger
A "sneak peek" at the bfast chat ;), Robert couldn't hold this back till the 11th. I've seen pages with retweet stats- twinfluence? Not in front of my PC but I can check later.
- Mark Essel
retweets are a strong measure of influence, imo. obviously the more followers, the more RT, but that's part of it's strengths. other than that there's using a 'Like' type system or how about this... ranks for posting about trending topics, replying to people and recommending people. would have to make it so it wouldn't be abused tho.
- SolidSmack
Maybe the answer lies in groups.The amount of followers or gross conversation turnover generated by each user would not be weighted at all. New groups can be setup and joined by others without restriction but "Influence Groups" would need to be setup only by votes through the entire community. Once an Influence group is set up, the amount of previous followers, gross conversation turn over...would be fire walled off pertaining to that group. Influence would grow vertically not horizontally by niche.
- Chad Harris
Why on earth is Fred Wilson thinking about influence and engagement but not participating on FriendFeed? Somebody needs to tell him in a nice way that he's being stupid. The best thinking he could have about influence and engagement would come from exploring what's right here.
- Bruce Lewis
Bruce: Fred is very knowledgeable about friendfeed. I think he's just very busy. Engagement is tough when you're really busy. Plus he's an investor in Twitter so I can imagine that if he engaged only here that might cause him problems in board meetings and such.
- Robert Scoble
SolidSmack: actually that's not true (that having more followers gets you more RT's). Fred and I both know that Guy Kawasaki gets more engagement than people who have 5x to 10x more followers. That's why we know that Twitter needs a new game. It's not about how many followers you have it's about how many followers care about what you have to say and are willing to take action based on that.
- Robert Scoble
Scott: like I said, you need a new game! :-)
- Robert Scoble
I'm not saying he should permanently ditch twitter for FF, but if you want to really understand it, you have to participate at least for a while. Then again, maybe he's not the one to dive deep into the engagement/influence world and come up with feature ideas. That could lead to micro-managing the companies he advises.
- Bruce Lewis
If you need gimmicks for community involvement, you FAIL as a Soc Net site.
- Mona Nomura
Google should acquire Friendfeed, the leader in the real time web - http://eliasbizannes.com/blog...
Chris Myles, paniaguai, Thierry R. Andriamirado and 124 other people liked this
i said this a long long time ago here: http://friendfeed.com/zee... and got shot down...hard! :)
- Zee.
by whom?
- Christopher Galtenberg
true.
- Orli Yakuel
Don't take it too hard, Zee. Folks just had to hear it from the common man before it became a mainstream idea. BTW, it is a good idea. But it implies monetizing the feed/stream. Here come in-stream ads.
- Lorin Olsen
Frankly, it doesn't matter if Google buys them or not, FriendFeed _has_ to monetize it at some point. They're not Twitter, they can't just keep raising venture capital indefinitely ;) But, they could stick ads all AROUND the stream just like Google does on gmail. They don't have to jump to the worst possible solution ;-)
- Joel Bennett
No please no, the last thing I need is google running another service I use. DIVERSITY!
- Raj Advani
well we've already seen how they incorporated advertising for their 'twitter' 'facebook' connect stuff...and i definitely noticed that. I think advertising, particularly within groups, could be huge! :)
- Zee.
Friendfeed was started by some ex-Googlers. Does google really want them back? Do they want to go back?
- ax0n
I suppose these people left Google to work on FriendFeed, would be very dramatic if Google acquires them.
- Burcu Dogan
What if both Google and Friendfeed are working together secretly?
- ashish
BTW - Sharing does not indicate endorsement. :)
- Louis Gray
Louis, maybe you should that disclaimer to your bio. :D
- Meryn Stol
Yeah, no thanks.
- Wade Dorrell
My guess is that Twitter has a much higher chance of being mainstream (simplicity is key). It's scale will be much more interesting for 'real-time'.
- Alexander van Elsas
my fav quote from the article - "Friendfeed, quite frankly, craps all over Facebook and Twitter in real time search."
- Mark Bockenstedt
@Mark, maybe so, but they currently cover a very tiny bit of the real-time web. Facebook and Twitter win on scale right now
- Alexander van Elsas
Alexander: but it's got a head-start on being a solid content-discovery mechanism. The scale hurdle is a big one, but FF can also just sit in the back of the room and aggregate all your stuff after you set it up once.
- Mark Bockenstedt
@Mark it is a pretty big if for now. FF covers too little of the universe. But, who knows?
- Alexander van Elsas
It's not about market share now, but about potential for the future. Why would you wait until a service is big and hopelessly expensive to buy into it? FriendFeed could collect knowledge for the social Web the way Google does not for Web pages. It could be the non-monopolistic social glue that Google needs to dominate the online space for the next 10 years.
- Steve Lynch
from twhirl
I don't see why they should buy them when what Friendfeed (and Twitter, for that matter) does is easily replicated. And it's not like FF has a huge installed user base to go with it (yet.)
- Brandon Mendelson
Brandon: that's the most clueless thing I've read on the Internet this month. I keep hearing this belief, too. I remember when a Microsoft engineer told me they could clone Digg in a week. That was five years ago. They still haven't done it. Building a system like friendfeed is NOT easy and is NOT doable by just anyone. If it were, Google would already have a real time search engine and...
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- Robert Scoble
Yeah it would be great :)
- Svartling
Brandon, on what basis do you argue that FriendFeed and/or Twitter is easily replicated?
- Micah Wittman
Micah: many developers are arrogant. They think they could build something of similar value in a weekend. They are wrong. But they keep that belief up. I keep hearing this crap and it is ALWAYS wrong. ICQ looked very simple, but it took Microsoft 30 months to clone it and ICQ is 100x simpler than friendfeed is.
- Robert Scoble
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Hmm but does it make sense for Microsoft to come up with a new Digg or Google to come up with a FriendFeed clone? These companies let the startup spirit to test if it's going to work or not, and acquire if it's cooool for the mainstream.
- Burcu Dogan
On this replicating topic, I find it's easy for a single developer to create a prototype that looks like another service, even over a weekend -- but that's not the same thing as building a fully featured, working, polished, scalable product, which can take months
- Raj Advani
Burcu: believe me, Google is VERY focused on friendfeed and Twitter and Facebook right now. But it takes a LONG time to make something like this that can scale to hundreds of millions of people. Raj: you're right. Plus, if you copy something (like they do in China and Russia) you look lame and you won't understand WHY something works. Or even how to break it and make something new. Getting that understanding takes years of working with customers and shaving the splinters off of what you're building.
- Robert Scoble
Yes right, friend feed is absolutely not the front-end we see, it's very hard to imagine the constraints they have: ten thousands of concurrent users. But I also believe that these companies are not really talent fetishes since the #1 reason to acquire is the market share + user base to extract information.
- Burcu Dogan
If fear the in-house Google's Friendfeed will end up like Knol vs. Wikipedia.
- Jérôme Flipo
The only way for Google to win against Twitter, Friendfeed & Co. is to integrate private updates from all their services (Google Docs, Talk, Contacts, Latitude, News, Calendar, Youtube...). And the semi-private ones (shared between contacts).
- Jérôme Flipo
@Steve. Scale matters. You can have the best technology for real-time search but if you index only a fraction no one will care. Twitter and Facebook have proven they can scale. FF needs to do that too
- Alexander van Elsas
Alexander: Twitter is scaling alright, but is full of spam on search and they are going to find it very difficult to get rid of. Friendfeed's architecture is much better there. Also, Twitter had problems (fail whales) all along its lifespan. Friendfeed has been near perfect so far. The team at friendfeed built Gmail and Google Reader and Google Maps, so I think they know something about scale.
- Robert Scoble
And I sometimes wonder if all those twits are for machines or real people. Friendfeed is a lot better, I became an active user one month ago and never missed Twitter.
- Burcu Dogan
I'm so confused. Isn't FriendFeed a Google 20% project? :)
- Cristo
I am wondering what I should do. I think FF is where I am going to end up
- Jim Gaudet
friendfeed would make more sense as a google aquisition than twitter, but it seems to that googles realtime strategy is more based on heavily promoting open standards (ex: jaiku using the OMB spec on appengine, PubSubHubBub for distributed real time feeds), and wrapping all their properties into Google FriendConnect (which is an open social container) to capture real time from the inside.
- coffee
We're talking much about success in scalability but both Twitter and Friendfeed suffered from downtime very recently. How practical it'd to distribute real time data to different data centers and constantly replicate between different farms? Isnt real time's itself a bottleneck?
- Burcu Dogan
here's a link to the PubSubHubBub protocol homepage http://code.google.com/p...
- coffee
@Robert I realize that. But I'm not talking about technology scale. I believe the FF team knows more about this than anyone. But that us only relevant if you can index a huge part of the real-time space. You need a large part of the web to be using your service. Twitter is deadsimple and will scale for that reason. FF needs to do that too. Not suggesting they can't, but it is a challenge for sure
- Alexander van Elsas
Alexander, re. real-time market share (I hate this example because it's brought up so much but...) Apple survived long, hard times with the Mac and its tiny market share. But it was powerful to the design/publishing and multimedia user base (still small, but they had a base from which they are now their leapfrogging because of mobile + itunes / desktop integration). Time horizons are much shorter in today's world, but scaling doesn't have to happen over night. Of course, stalling out is always a danger too.
- Micah Wittman
Burcu: ff downtime recently was due to datacenter power backup failover design flaw (that is being fixed in most datacenters currently - those things take time) - the Twitter downtime is because... well who knows what it really is due to - Team Twitter is horrible with their PR
- Chris Heath
Alexander: if you think twitter will scale well because it's dead simple - you're dead wrong. Where have you been for the last 2+ years?
- Chris Heath
@Chris, Dead wrong about dead simple, about scaling, about both? Twitter is growing with % well above 1000 right now. How is that not scaling? For Twitter I need to type 140chars. With Friendfeed I have to understand RSS, figure out a lot of the (hidden) functionalities, have access to other services etc. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm just wondering if FF can make the same leap into the mass market. BTW I hang out in Amsterdam, and ever so often in SF and NY.
- Alexander van Elsas
To figure out Friendfeed, all you need to do is punch in your user ids from various sites, use the Subscribe button, and maybe the Bookmarklet if you're hardc0re. RSS/Blog if you're uber. Yeah, sorry, this shit is easy.
- Christopher Galtenberg
@Christopher, there are so many things in your comment not easy for non-tech people (mass market) that I wouldn't even know where to start. I was talking of mass-market adoption when talking about scale. Grab anyone from the street and give him a 2min demo of FF and Twitter. Which of the 2 do you think that person could actually understand and use in that time? How many actually have 5-10-or more services they could import here, etc. etc.
- Alexander van Elsas
I totally agree. The tech they are developing here - even the UI around search is leading the way.
- Tony
I disagree completely. Google is where startups go to die. But beyond that, google has proven it's inability to figure out how to monetize anything but search. I think that FF needs to figure out its own business model before anything else...
- felix
I hate all this "Google should acquire X, Y and Z" stuff. Why are people so keen on creating "big tech" when they despise Big Tobacco, Big Pharm, Big Oil, etc. etc.?
- Dawn
Alexander, it isnt really important to import some 20 services to Friendfeed. The overall organization of comments and auto topping behavior makes it very useful.
- Burcu Dogan
I am too new to FF to say, but I do like the conversation better.
- Jim Gaudet
@Burcu I understand. I just used it as an example. It's hard to compete on simplicity with 140 characters. We tend to look at Friendfeed using our own needs and projecting those needs on the rest of the world. I doubt there are many mass market non-tech people that have similar needs
- Alexander van Elsas
I hope Google does not acquire FriendFeed, because FF would disappear into a black hole for some time while they assimilate it...
- Rick Cogley
Robert Scoble's comments about it not being easy to copy technology, despite claims to the contrary, are spot on. I factor "developer hubris" into project plans all the time, and developers telling me they'll just "whip something together" is practically the bane of my existence. (OT, but if you find a developer who actually does estimate well and accurately, treat them nicely; they're truly few and far between.)
- Rick Cogley
Alexander: if simplicity is all that matters why is Facebook STILL growing faster? 225 million users? Facebook is not simple. Or how about MySpace which has more users?
- Robert Scoble
Facebook grows the size of Twitter every six weeks if my math is correct.
- Robert Scoble
Robert: FB grows that quickly because they make it easy to find people you already know (by name) based on places where you've known them (i.e. your town, your schools, your job). Finding people to connect with EASILY is key. Neither Twitter nor FF offer this kind of ease of connection to people you already know that might be on the service.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
And if Twitter's simplicity is so important why is Twitter's churn much higher than Facebook's?
- Robert Scoble
@Robert Scoble - I believe Twitter's churn is higher because ultimately, there's a certain amount of "cementing" that has to be done in any relationship to make it work. Twitter seems to be more about just broadcasting rather than conversing, and I think it's easy to get disillusioned with Twitter. It's the conversing that makes for stronger relationships.
- Rick Cogley
Holden: Methinks Facebook has more compelling social features and better discovery options that Facebook, as well.
- Steve Lynch
from twhirl
I agree that google should buy ff because this will give friendfeed the brand name clout it needs to go mainstream.
- Garin Kilpatrick
Okay, but what a pitty if people only admit that FF is an interesting web project & use it only because there's a Google logo on it.
- Thierry R. Andriamirado
On deck with Tweetdeck? The Power is in the Browser! PeopleBrowsr FTW! (Why I switched from TweetDeck to PeopleBrowsr) | guruvan: The TechnoMystic - http://guruvan.gurus.net/app-rev...
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Nicholas James, Fred Yankowski, Alex Sauceda and 5 other people liked this
FriendFeed Enables People/Group Tracking - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
Naser ziab, Benjamin Golub, ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0, and 11 other people liked this
I'm curious to know why there's a photo of John Locke in that post.
- Tamar Weinberg
Cause he's a master tracker!
- Jason
exactly
- MG Siegler
Very nice. If only they'll change the background color we'll be set.
- Brandon Mendelson
thanks for clarifying @jmortonscott! was wondering the same thing.
- Elizabeth Koh
ha, my husband suggested that before I posted it, but I figured there was something else at play there ;) I don't think he's tracking in the pic!
- Tamar Weinberg
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