Valleywag: FriendFeed

Robert Scoble, please get back to work Twittering

Owen Thomas — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:00:00 PDT

We remain impressed, if not dumbfounded, that Internet-obsessive videoblogger Robert Scoble talked his way into the absurd title of "managing director, Fastcompany.tv." We'll be even more impressed if he keeps the job, now that the guy who hired him has gotten the boot. But there's evidence that Scoble has buckled down a bit! Or slacked off, depending on how you look at it.

Followcost, a website which quantifies just how annoying a particular Twitter user is, has adopted the "milliscoble" as a metric. One-thousandth of Scoble's average daily output on the 140-character-update service equals one milliscoble. By his own standard, Scoble has been falling behind; in the past 100 days, he's been running 32 percent below the 1,000-milliscoble mark. If it falls to zero, will he suddenly be three times as productive in real life? Nah. It will just mean he's shifted his timewasting entirely to FriendFeed.

No one told Cisco employees Scoble was talking to them

Owen Thomas — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:40:00 PDT

Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, embracer of new technologies and young women, has informed Twitter users everywhere that he is "talking to all Cisco employees this morning ... about the latest Web collaboration stuff." Whom he has not informed: Cisco employees everywhere. "My inbox and trash have no mention of 'scoble' anywhere," a Cisco worker bee tells us. Well, duh — the announcement must have gone out on FriendFeed.

Scoble blames you for the breadlines, Tony

Paul Boutin — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:40:00 PDT

FriendFeed is the best Scoble-tracking technology ever. Without it, I'd never have caught his blurt-out reply to PopTech conference cofounder Anthony Citrano: "Breadlines are coming and I'll personally blame people like you ... celebrating on the backs of the working suckers who will now get laid off." Hey, I'm one of those working suckers. Writers don't get laid off — we get unpublished in advance.

The Scoble 165 -- you're not on it

Paul Boutin — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:20:00 PDT

If you follow Robert Scoble at all — and you sort of have to unless your DSL is dead — you know he can't help overproliferating everything he does. While the entire staff of Vanity Fair takes months to assemble its 100 most powerful list, Fast Company's token webhead spews 165 names in one pass for his "hand-picked list of the people who provide the most interesting tech blogging/tweeting/FriendFeeding." Robert, let me put on my old Condé Nast editor's hat and redline this back to you: GREAT START, BUT PLS TELL US WHO THE FK THS PPL ARE:

Aaron Brazell
Adam Lasnik
Alana Taylor
Alex Albrecht
Alex Williams
Allen Stern
Andrew Baron
Andru Edwards
Andy Beal
Andy Ihnatko
Anthony Citrano
Ben Metcalfe
Benjamin Higginbotham
Bhaskar Roy
Bret Taylor
Brian Shields
Brian Solis
Charlene Li
charles cooper
Charles Hudson
Chris Brogan
Chris Messina
Chris Nuttall
Christopher Allen
Christopher Galtenberg
Chuq Von Rospach
Colide81 (James)
Corvida
Craig Eddy
Craig Newmark
Cyndy
dan farber
Dan Fernandez
Danny O’Brien
dannysullivan
Dare Obasanjo
Darren Barefoot
dave mcclure
Dave Morin
Dave Taylor
Dave Winer
David Armano
David Sifry
David Swain
david weinberger
debbie landa
Deborah Micek
Dion Almaer
Doc Searls
Don Dodge
Don MacAskill
Duncan Riley
Dwight Silverman
Ed Bott
engadget
Erhan Erdogan
Eric Eldon
Francine Hardaway
Fred Wilson
Gabe Rivera
Harry McCracken
Hutch Carpenter
James Kendrick
James Urquhart
Jason Falls
Jay Rosen
Jeff Jarvis
Jeremiah Owyang
Jeremy Toeman
Jesse Stay
Jessica Guynn
Joe Wilcox
John Furrier
Joi Ito
Joshua Dilworth
joshua schachter
Justin Korn
kamla bhatt
Kara
Karim
Karsten Januszewski
Keith Teare
Ken Camp
l0ckergn0me
laura “@pistachio” fitton
Liz Gannes
Long Zheng
Lora Heiny
Loren Heiny
Louis Gray
Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins
Mark Trapp
Marshall Kirkpatrick
Mashable
mathew ingram
Matt Cutts
Mediabistro.com
michael arrington
Michael Krigsman
Michael Wesch
mike “glemak” dunn
Mike Butcher
Mike Cannon-Brookes
Mike Cassidy
Mike Doeff
Mike Fruchter
MikeAmundsen
Mitchell Tsai
Molly E. Holzschlag
Nir Ben Yona
noah kagan
Nova Spivack
Omar Shahine
Ontario Emperor
Patphelan
Paul Buchheit
paul mooney
Paul Stamatiou
Paul Thurrott
Pete Blackshaw
Pete Steege
Peter Semmelhack
Rachel Clarke
Rafe Needleman
Rebecca MacKinnon
Richard Binhammer
Rob Bushway
Robert Hof
Robert Sanzalone
Rodney Rumford
Roger Kondrat
Ryan Block
Scott Beale
ScottBourne
sean percival
seth goldstein
Shel Israel
slashdot
Steve Broback
steve clayton
Steve Garfield
Steve Gillmor
Steve Lacey
Steve Outing
Steve Rubel
Steven Hodson
Stowe Boyd
Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
susan mernit
Susan Scrupski
Svetlana Gladkova
Tamar Weinberg
Terry Heaton
Thomas Hawk
Thomas Vander Wal
Tim O’Reilly
Todd Cochrane
Tom Foremski
Tom Merritt
Warner Crocker
Werner Vogels
Woody Pewitt
Yaron Samid
zefrank
Zoli Erdos
~C4Chaos

(Photo by Brian Solis)

How to build your brand as an Internet addict

Paul Boutin — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:00:00 PDT

"The more you participate the more people will subscribe to you ... or like you," promises Fast Company teleblogger Robert Scoble, whose answer to "How do I build my brand?" starts 20 seconds into this one-minute clip. My 15-word version: If you spend all your time on FriendFeed, you'll be a big deal. On FriendFeed.

Another naked conversation with Scoble

Owen Thomas — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:00:00 PDT

JAMESON'S IRISH BAR, BOSTON, MASS. — If you'd gotten over that unclothed photo of Robert Scoble and Naked Conversations coauthor Shel Israel, here's a new one to haunt your memories. Scoble, Fast Company's pet videoblogger and social media guru, was in Boston for the EmTech conference, and he wanted to go to a bar. Why? So he could sit at a table and ignore everyone around him, constantly reloading FriendFeed, the Web-activity tracker on which he relentlessly documents his nonparticipation in the world which surrounds him. Two startup executives who had just watched the Red Sox play at Fenway Park with Scoble told me he Twittered nonstop through his visit to the Green Monster. The only time he was separated from his iPhone? When he lent it to me to take a picture of him. That didn't turn out, but I found another pic Scoble had taken of himself, fresh out of the shower.

FriendFeed declares instant gratification not fast enough

Owen Thomas — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:00:00 PDT

Faster! In the '90s, people used to reload websites to see if they'd updated. Too slow! Hence the invention of RSS, a protocol for distributing headlines and stories over the Web. Faster! RSS takes too long to update, and requires too much bandwidth to check more frequently. Faster! Visiting multiple social networks takes too long. Paul Buchheit, an ex-Google engineer, cofounded FriendFeed, a site which uses RSS heavily to monitor your friends' activities across multiple websites. Faster! Now Buchheit is working on a replacement for RSS called SUP, or "Simple Update Protocol."

The play on "whassup" seems almost too obvious to mention — but keeping users ultracurrent on their friends' doing is very much the intention. SUP will let sites like FriendFeed pick up news quicker, avoiding the risk that you might be even 30 minutes out of date on swift-moving trends like which avatar style people are using on Twitter. Faster! Faster! Faster!

Slate tips off helicopter parents to FriendFeed

Paul Boutin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:40:00 PDT

Slate editor Josh Levin and I explain FriendFeed's Imaginary Friend feature for the Olds: "Setting up a single page of all your kids' Internet accounts is a snap. Even if they haven't signed up at FriendFeed, you can do it for them." [Slate]

FriendFeed not cliquey enough for you? Try Frienderati

Paul Boutin — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:00:00 PDT

Guy Kawasaki's A-list generator Alltop has spawned a new A-list: Frienderati is an aggregated feed of the latest five entries from the 101 most followed users of FriendFeed. My browser can't find an RSS feed for the page yet, but I'm sure there'll be one. Just as I'm sure someone will figure out how to sort this thing by popularity rather than alphabetically. While you're at it, can you strip out the posts and just post the pecking order of names? That seems easier.

New Facebook profile goes live

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:20:00 PDT

The much-anticipated and long-delayed redesign of Facebook's profiles are live. Click through to see yours. We'll continue to harp on Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his poor interpersonal social skills, but we have to credit him for an outstanding job with the redesign. We're relieved to find the new profile is both clean and rich with big pictures, videos and comments. Ugly apps designed by less aesthetically aware third-parties are gone from sight. Even moving the user photo from the left to the right side of the profile somehow works. Not everyone is a fan. When we told one widgetmaker "looks pretty good," he responded "if you like FriendFeed." "Or Tumblr," we joked. It's funny because it's true — we do like Tumblr.

Jason Calacanis picks fight in Palo Alto with missing Wikipedia founder

Jackson West — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:00:00 PDT

No, we did not head down to sleepy Palo Alto for the Search SIG meeting featuring small-time players like Mahalo, Wikia and Microsoft, but Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis seems to wish we did. But why bother going when we can get juicy quotes about Jimmy Wales, who founded for-profit Wikia after failing to figure out how to milk Wikipedia for cash from our home office? Those who tuned into Calacanis's Ustream live video channel got juicy quotes like "Guy's got an ethics problem" and "It's naive to think encyclopedias have anything to do with search"? while bemused Wikia representative ~~Jeremie Miller~~ Nick Sullivan sat on the panel. (Wales didn't even show up) You stay classy, Jason! After the jump, a firsthand report from our tipster, including more of Calacanis's wit and wisdom.

Sitting through the Search SIG panel last night I kept worrying the speakers were going to pants Wikia Search’s ~~Jeremie Miller~~ Nick Sullivan. Such a delicate little man, yet so much holier than thou. At one point Jason Calacanis said outright that Wikia Search would fail and that it's goal was simply to make Jimmy Wales rich. I think I actually heard ~~Jeremie's~~ Nick's heart break in response.

The problem with ~~Jeremie Miller~~ Nick Sullivan (and by association Wikia Search) is that he believes by using open source he can do no evil. He was adamant that since Google makes decisions about what you see in your search results the world needs an open source search site. For freedom! But even Wikia Search has to create a system to rank results. There are many that bemoan the politics of the Wikipedia system, so why should Wiki Search be any better?

~~Jeremie~~ would like you to think that Wiki Search is a tool created by the common man, but even he knows the truth. He let slip that 99.5% of his users never add any content to the site. I'm not sure how one could call a site built by the top 1/2 of 1% of all users 'open'. I think even the Bush tax cuts were more inclusive than that.

I was hoping to report on some wild accusation made by Jason Calacanis, but he turned out to be the most level-headed one on the panel. Even FriendFeed's cofounder and CEO Bret Taylor admitted to his site's deficiencies. But I will take the smarmy look of Jeremie Miller with me to the grave. Although if Jason has it right, at least I won't have to look at his site for much longer.

Update: Nick Sullivan writes to point out that he was the lamb despatched to the slaughter, filling in for Wikia's Jeremie Miller. Sullivan disputes his delicacy — after all, he did gamely step in front of the Calacanis bus.

The microbubble in microblogging

Owen Thomas — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:00:00 PDT

If there is a Web 2.0 bubble, it is surely in microblogging, a field popularized by Twitter.. Countless startups are thriving on the myth that sharing yourself online is too hard. Pownce cofounder Leah Culver graces the cover of MIT's alumni magazine. San Francisco's most self-involved Webheads can't stop gabbing about FriendFeed, which, as our intern Alaska Miller smartly explained to his mother, is a place where people who are really obsessed with the Internet can talk to others of like mind. And then there's Plurk, the much-mocked Twitter clone, which has drawn such derision that Web hipsters made up a company and claimed it had bought Plurk.

According to new stats from Hitwise, Plurk, the least cool microblogging startup around, might have the last laugh. Its Web traffic far exceeds FriendFeed's and Pownce's. And yet Twitter, while growing very fast, itself isn't very large. Its imitators are all so small, really, as to barely deserve mention, let alone magazine covers. Microblogging isn't just about very short updates. It's about very small businesses. If I wrote about them in line with their actual worth, this post would have been far shorters than 140 characters.

FriendFeed spawns yet another A-list no one reads

Paul Boutin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:40:00 PDT

FriendFeed, a largely unused aggregation service for other Web 2.0 services most people don't use, has become the new hotspot for tech's roving band of self-styled A-listers. There's good reason: FriendFeed's user base is catching up fast on Twitter. But yesterday, blogger Yuval Atzmon posted an informal FriendFeed 250 that's already replaced the Twitter Top 100 as the place to be for self-promoters (and for people who like to argue methodologies.) The good news is there's still room for you. A mere 280 followers will put you on the list. But hurry. By August, FriendFeed will look exactly like every other Web 2.0 list ever made. One in three posts will be about a tech conference, and one in five will explain why because of FriendFeed, John Markoff at the New York Times is really scared for his job.

Calacanis, Scoble, Arrington pawns in FriendFeed's smart marketing campaign

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:00:00 PDT

Egobloggers Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble as well as startup PR clearinghouse Michael Arrington all want to know: How amazing is it that after two years of using Twitter, they've each already got nearly half as many "followers" on FriendFeed after just a few months? Asking the question, each offer hypothetical answers involving the social-network aggregator's ease of use — "The comment systems is so fast and easy that it's perfect," says Calacanis — or Twitter's frequent outages — "Twitter downtime plays a big part," writes Arrington. But here's the real answer to the amazing growth these bloggers have seen on FriendFeed:

It's not that amazing. As CenterNetwork's Allen Stern first pointed out, each time a new user signs up for FriendFeed, the site suggests the new user becomes friends with "Popular FriendFeeders." On the list: Bret Taylor, Fred Wilson, Scott Beale, Michael Arrington, Loic Le Meur, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and Leo Laporte — despite, as Stern notes, the fact that many of these "popular" users don't actually use FriendFeed very often. Why? We haven't asked anybody at FriendFeed because the answer is obvious: So that the whole bunch of easily ego-fluffed blog blowhards will blog about how amazing FriendFeed is, without bothering to figure out why, exactly, it seems to be growing so much faster for them than everybody else.

All your features are belong to Mark Zuckerberg

Jackson West — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:40:00 PDT

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may not have strictly stolen the code he wrote for others but kept for himself to start Facebook. But the company is certainly garnering a reputation for appropriation. FriendFeed has offered comments on items from other services piped into a single update timeline. Now you can do the same with Facebook updates. [VentureBeat]

Is Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny going to FriendFeed?

Owen Thomas — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:20:00 PDT

After Yahoo database expert Jeremy Zawodny announced he was leaving the company, a Hacker News commenter speculated that he'd go work for Twitter. "A few months ago Twitter may have been interesting, mostly for the technical challenges," Zawodny responded. "But now I'd rather hack on FriendFeed." FriendFeed, the latest fixation of the Web set, has a redeeming quality for hardcore geeks: The mounds of useless yet constantly updated personal trivia it aggregates from Flickr, Twitter, and other narcissism-enabling Web services makes for one heck of a database to keep online.

Plurk, yet another microblogging platform, hailed by The 250

Jackson West — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:20:00 PDT

Not happy with updating your friends publicly via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce and Jaiku (and feeding all those updates into FriendFeed)? Then, um, try Plurk, a startup which declares, "We've taken the time, the complexity, and the deep introspection required out of blogging." Also, too, the irony. [The Inquisitr]

Why Silicon Valley just won't shut up about FriendFeed

Owen Thomas — Mon, 05 May 2008 09:20:00 PDT

"Cathy Brooks is a typically unapologetic Silicon Valley Web addict," writes Brad Stone in the New York Times. "Last week alone, she produced more than 40 pithy updates on the text messaging service Twitter, uploaded two dozen videos to various video sharing sites, posted seven photographs on the Yahoo image service Flickr and one item to the online community calendar Upcoming." Usually, when one identifies a friend as an addict, an intervention is in order. But Stone, who seems to have spent so much time in San Francisco's tech circles that he's gone native, suggests more technology instead: Specifically, FriendFeed, which gathers all of this online activity in one place, making it marginally easier for Brooks's benighted friends to keep up with her online logorrhea.

Brooks is employed by Seesmic, a videomail startup, so some of the "two dozen videos" she made could arguably be seen as all in a day's work. But the rest? The mainstream readers of the Times must wonder what people like Brooks do all day. One supposes they could sign up on FriendFeed to find out, but they, unlike the people of the Valley, have real jobs. Brooks, for her part, makes no apologies for her online chattiness: Her website sums up her career from a first-grade report card: "Cathy likes to participate in any project, so long as she gets to talk." In that, she has found a community of like minds.

"The question from our standpoint is, how you find signal in the noise?" asks Peter Fenton, a VC backer of FriendFeed at Benchmark Capital. That assumes that there is any signal. Such is the complaint of Michael Arrington, who bemoans his 954 unread Facebook messages, and demands that Facebook make changes to accommodate him. Has it ever occurred to Arrington that he is, in the argot of product managers, an "edge case"? Entrepreneurs desperate for coverage, and aware that he never reads email, are trying a new way to reach him — and Arrington, in his compulsive neophilia, actually tries out the new medium, for a while. He then quickly tires of it, and throws a tantrum. Catering to such a person's whims is no way to run a company.

Is information overload really anything more than a self-inflicted disease of the Valley? I doubt it. But to the extent it is, Facebook is far better poised to solve the problem than a startup like FriendFeed. The Times mistakenly reports that Facebook is playing catch-up in gathering up its users' online activities from across the Web. Balderdash. It's just done a lousy job of marketing its ability to do so.

The technology behind Beacon — the Facebook feature which ruined Christmas for some Facebook users, by revealing their online purchases, and has gotten Facebook sued for allegedly violating a Blockbuster video-renter's privacy — is now being used to report posts to Twitter, Digg, Yelp, and Flickr. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg botched Beacon by presenting it as an advertising technology last fall. His recent spin that it was a technology meant for programmers, not Madison Avenue types, hasn't taken hold. It's likely Facebook will have to drop the Beacon name altogether before it successfully revives the technology.

But Facebook's News Feed is the most logical place to gather together the sum of its users' online activity. The users, after all, are already there. FriendFeed might make a logical acquisition for the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, or most likely of all, Google (its founders are all ex-Googlers). But a radical paradigm for the future of communication? Sorry, Zuckerberg got there first.

(Photo by Brian Solis)

Social media begins to fold in on self, space-time collapse imminent

Jackson West — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:20:00 PDT

Lovably cranky early adopter Eric Rice points out that the reverb in the echo chamber is beginning to cause eye-splitting feedback loops. Normally harmless Twitter posts are automagically crossposted to Jaiku and Tumblr, where all three show up on FriendFeed, polluting your friends' RSS readers. They then curse your name, take screenshots, upload them to Flickr and blog about it. If you're not a member of The 250, you can probably ignore this budding trend safely — at least until it starts happening on Facebook.

FriendFeed cofounder: Hang in there, there is life after Google

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:40:12 PDT

During this interview with Fortune, FriendFeed cofounder Bret Taylor explains why he and three other ex-Googlers happily left Google's organic, locally sourced swaddling for an uncertain future at a startup:

When we make decisions, I get to just look up from my computer and and say 'Hey do you think we should do this?' and if my people say yes, we just do it. I haven't made a single PowerPoint presentation. We just talk to each other. No matter how innovative a culture is at a large company, you can't really reproduce it.