Posts Tagged: FriendFeed
10
Aug 09
My self-serving thoughts on Facebook acquiring FriendFeed
I got back from swimming today, opened the laptop and a flood of ‘OH NOES!’ rained down on my feed. Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t rate, but as a FriendFeed user, it’s pretty big. Congratulations to the FriendFeed team.
FriendFeed is one of those sites that just does it right. I’m not 100% pleased with it, but it’s easy and straightforward to use. There’s no guessing at what does what. And it’s easy to manage your content. I use FriendFeed as a Twitter search. I use it as a micro-blog. I use it as a profile introduction. Most importantly, I use it for conversations. The conversations I have on FriendFeed would *never* happen on Facebook.
I do not make it a secret that I detest Facebook with a passion. It’s one of the clumsiest and stupidest user interfaces I have ever seen online. There’s no way to track your comments, there’s no rhyme or reason why this link leads to that page. Even privacy features to loaded under layers and layers of crap. And while Facebook has lifted many features from FriendFeed, they still did it wrong. It is my hope that the FriendFeed team unburdens the Facebook mess and brings innovation to the site.
What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.
What worries me is what happens to my content; my comments, my entries, the crossposting I’ve done to this blog and others. Where does that go besides Google cache? There is a reason I do not have Facebook imported onto my FriendFeed stream. There is a reason, I don’t post my FriendFeed content to Facebook.
I do not want it on Facebook. If I wanted it on Facebook, it would have been posted there in the first place.
12
May 09
Twitter just made FriendFeed more valuable for me
In a rather strange and silent move, the Twitter honchos decided to tell you how to use Twitter. They’ve turned off the ability for you to see @replies to people you’re not following. So say for instance @shayera says something and I reply to her. Well, my handful of followers also following @shayera will see my response, but say @kspidel will not. Why? Because Twitter decided that was confusing for him.
Up until today, we had the option to see no @replies, only see @replies to yourself or see all @replies from your friends. The guys at Twitter thinks that made you all addlepated and shit:
We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.
Confused? That’s understandable and exactly why we made the update.
Now, it’s one thing to remove a serviice without announcing it. It’s yet another to pull a service without soliciting any feedback from users, but when you post a half-assed vague blog entry like that, it just makes you look like an asshole.
Luckily, for me FriendFeed does show the @replies of your friends. So I’ve been seeing @shayera’s replies to people I don’t know. This is good because not only do I get to meet new people via her interaction with them, I just may even start following them. What’s more, I may even add them as friends on FriendFeed and see even more @replies.
UPDATE from Twitter on this mess.
Spotting new folks in tweets is an interesting way to check out new profiles and find new people to follow. Despite this update, you’ll still see mentions or references linking to people you don’t follow. For example, you’ll continue to see, “Ev meeting with @biz about work stuff” even if you don’t follow @biz. We’ll be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts as we release more features in this space.
In other words, you will still now know how your friends interact with someone else. You’ll see their name in an entry, but if your friend is directly talking to that person, you will not see it. Call me crazy, but a lot of cues on how we interact with each other are based on how our friends perceive someone. If I can’t see how my friend deals with a person how will I know if I want to follow them or not? It’s one thing to go to someone’s Twitter page and read their stream, but it’s an entirely different response to see how someone you trust interacts with that person.
Twitter would do best to put back our settings, forget about more useless features unless they’re giving us threading and groups and let allow us to modify our Twitter streams as we see fit.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=72f5456f-28a1-465b-ba98-3eb272b8cb8c)
15
Feb 09
FRIENDFEED MEETUP 02-21-09 @2pm| Five Guys Burgers and Fries
Just heads up for anyone else in Los Angeles, we are going to have a meet up at Five Guys this coming Saturday.
What I posted on FriendFeed:
Our East Coast friends got us curious, but Anna Lynn tipped us to the fact that there’s a couple here in SoCal. So join us *next Saturday (02.21.09) @2pm * to see if Five Guys is indeed better than In-N-Out: Cerritos Promenade ~ 11461 South Street Cerritos, CA 90703 ~
8
Dec 08
Windows Live is doing it wrong
Last week, Microsoft opened up Windows Live, their answer to “social media”. Right off the bat, you can see why it’s a massive fail. Once you remember your Hotmail account from the mid-90s, use your Xbox or Zune login, you can see how the UI is very user-unfriendly. Importing feeds from other services is the only thing that’s quick and easy. However, if you want to add friends, you’re stuck with contacting them via Hotmail accounts that have long been deactivated or given over to spam. You can also add people via LinkedIn or Facebook, but that’s only provided those resources work. When I tested them last week, neither of them would invite contacts. This is fine with me as I don’t want my contacts from either site on this one.
Windows Live Home
This is your Home page. From here you can see what your friends are doing. What you can not do is actually interact with your friends on this page. So say I wanted to comment on Thomas’ photo, I can either click the Flickr link, hunt for the photo and make a comment or I can go to Thomas’s page, make a comment there and hopes he sees it.
4
Aug 08
Why I’m loving FriendFeed
I’ve discovered a whole new world on the internet through this whole social media thing. Even though there is a large amount of wankerism there, I’ve discovered people via social media sites that I would have never have learned about before. Tech people for example. I’m not interested in the tech world online, despite my love of gadgets and technology. Why? So much dick-swinging and not enough meat. Like the liberal blogosphere, there’s a lot of internal drama that everyone gets wrapped up in, but doesn’t ever come close to affecting the other 5 billion people in the world. So, I’d search out gadgets, but ignore names. As I’ve learned over the past few days, I was right to do so. You think Matt Stoller is an insufferable buffoon? Some of these tech guys make Stoller look humble.
Naturally, there’s the B-Z list bloggers who hate the A-list bloggers and all that crap and like so many in the liberal blogosphere, they suck at the writing and analyzing but prevail at the link-making. Every once in awhile, you find gems like Eric Rice, Wayne Sutton and Louis Gray. I’ve “met” these 3 guys in the last month and they all seem to be doing their own thing, having fun, utilizing the tools available without feeling the need to crap on everyone else.
Which brings me to FriendFeed. I “met” Eric Rice via Seesmic. When I found out about FriendFeed, I found him there and subscribed to him. That was when I learned that he was much more than just a tech-geek and fellow Metblogger. FriendFeed has a feature that I found annoying at first; it’ll list random items from friend of friends. It was that feature that I learned of Louis Gray. He was a friend of a friend of two people I subscribed too. I like his writing style, but more importantly I loved the tech-focused articles he’d share on FF. I quickly subscribed. Through Louis Gray, I learned of a guy I had just noticed popping up every once in a while on seesmic: Wayne Sutton. I found out that Sutton is like a tech-god, especially across the country in the east coast version of Silicon Valley.
I was unable to attend the recent (and successful) Blogging While Brown Conference. I saw on FriendFeed that Sutton had a post on Seesmic. So, I popped onto Seesmic and asked if he knew anyone who wanted to go. He contacted me, and suggested Corvida Raven. I was able to get in contact with her and see if she could use my ticket. Without these contacts, it’s quite possible that my ticket would have gone to waste.
It was also through FriendFeed, I learned of a new toy: Wordle.
So, this is a really long way of saying I take back almost all of what I said about social networking sites before, though I’m still not getting a Facebook profile.
