Hard to believe. Maybe they decided to be penny wise and pound foolish after all. - Paul Buchheit
This is similar to when the fine microbrews at various startups were replaced with PBR and Beast. Served warm. In a communal set of tumblers. - Jay Cuthrell
File under "I CAN'T HAS CHEEZBURGER." Attention all staff: Due to budgetary constraints, the hot and cold running champagne taps will be switched to non-vintage blends until further further notice. That is all. - Karim
I guess they decided they don't want people working late. - Gabe Schaffer
Dinner was always the least effective meal at keeping geeks at their desks. I saw it mostly abused by families who would zoom in to have dinner with Dad or Mom and then they'd all leave together. To my knowledge Google didn't even have a dinner serving before 2005 or so, anyway. - Neil Kandalgaonkar
In my experience it's always far worse when a company removes a perk than if they'd never introduced it at all. It's like removing features from software--even if it should never have been there in the first place, users will scream murder if you try and remove something in a future release. - Reto Meier
funny, funny (just coming back from my Google Dinner). this story is fake, as you can guess. - Ihar Mahaniok
@Ihar nope, I couldn't guess that - at least based on the contents of that article. Why do you think it's fake? - Kamath
Kamath, because I know. I work at Google, I have eaten my dinner one hour ago, and my colleagues in MV are having their dinner in a few hours from now. Do I need to post pictures to prove this? :) - Ihar Mahaniok
Ihar, maybe it's the Last Supper? Sorry, couldn't resist. - Sprague D
That is how it should work. Efficient... :-) - Hakan Dahlstrom
One major reason I use FriendFeed is that it is FAST and EFFICIENT. Small companies don't really need conventional PR except to hire employees. - Mitchell Tsai
it only works for hot startups though, otherwise forget it - Loic Le Meur via twhirl
i don't agree loic. i urge all of our companies to do it this way and most do. it works for all companies that are willing to engage in social media. - Fred Wilson
i think only very hot startups get reasonable attention in social media ... - Raza
It also works where there is a lareg community into which it can be plugged - Dennis Howlett via twhirl
Perfect answer Steve - I would wonder if all those blogs drove more than 100 new users. - Allen Stern
Not really, what about the thousands of small companies who has continuously updated blogs and still no one hears about them? - Amit Morson
Fred, it is because you link to all your companies each time they announce something and you get them on TechMeme, if not, you are the one getting on TechMeme for them. It works too but not all startups have a Fred Wilson - Loic Le Meur
It works in the social media space. Not a suitable strategy for most IT and even Web businesses - john conroy
@john conroy, i totally agree. it is about the audience and the audience lives here. - Jonathan Nguyen
It's early adopter marketing, doesn't work in other contexts. - Vincent van Wylick
It works - if it is integrated with other instances of marketing and PR. It is never either or but always both. - Niclas Strandh
Publicity isn't the same thing as PR. This tactic is working in this case as a publicity tool for a hot tech startup. That's a big difference to a PR strategy. What if they face a crisis? Will a blog be sufficient? - Dave Fleet via twhirl
Dave - of course not. Obviously, they would approach a crisis much differently, that goes without saying. These guys at FF are uber smart and I totally respect and admire them for it! - Susan Beebe
If you have a kick ass product bloggers will write about it unprompted. and thats better because readers will sense the bloggers aren't just repurposing a canned PR press release. - Jason Kaneshiro
walk into best buy or circuit city, ask 100 people if they use friendfeed ... think you'll get one? - Gregory Lent
@gregory lent: that's why one can't depend only on one channel. The long tail of information you know. - Niclas Strandh
there is a PR advantage to a product like friendfeed that has divergent use cases and can't be fully explained in a short, repeated message... existing users are compelled to explain how they use it, what they like about it, what it "means". letting go of some message discipline in PR, finding an authentic voice and letting early adopters evangelize... both honest and effective, two words that don't apply to most PR. - tonx
"Early stage venture firm Y Combinator, which has funded over a 102 young startups, has “open sourced” the legal documents that they provide to their startups to use as they seek additional funding. The documents were created with their law firm, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati" - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
Paul Graham is doing a terrific job. FEw days ago, for thr first time, they published a document showing what kind of startup ideas they particularly look for, and now this!!! Cool. - Hayk Hakobyan
I agree with that statement of Roberts, interacting is a bitch. I am following over 2/3M user. Ok technically not 1-2-1 basis, but nevertheless, these users (Social networks) funnel to me the top news. I maybe not be the first to get it, but I do get it eventually. - Peter Dawson
while on the subject, what the userbase for del.io.us, Digg, Fark, reddit, Buzz, liveleaks ? - Peter Dawson
FriendFeed makes it possible to interact. - Robert Scoble
Jas: refresh a lot and scroll a lot and have a clear idea of what you are looking for. - Robert Scoble
Robert, are you able to read every tweet? I found it really difficult to keep up with Twitter a while back when they removed the "older" button... I missed a lot of people's posts. If all the people I followed were on FF, it'd be much easier. :D - Daynah
why read every tweet? I do read everyone at certain times. Most are crap, though. Good ones get commented on in FriendFeed. - Robert Scoble
Daynah, I tend to disagree if all the people from twitter (followed) were in FF, then the noise ratio increases 10x. Why ? the very open nature of FF permits a lot of variant content to be pulled and placed here. Like the heck I care about what music you like on last.fm ? so this means another round of filtering from my end. THe burden of housekeeping increases with more followers in FF.Its not easy. I use this space for interaction , but my pvt rooms is where I get my info :0- - Peter Dawson
Well said @Robert -- I have gotten used to using FF as a sort of "filter" in the sense that as you said, "Good ones get commented on in FriendFeed" -- there is no need to read every tweet. - Nicholas Kreidberg
Thx for supporting ! Im very happy to hear that as a Chinese. - Ken
I should really take sometime out and watch the Olympics. Everyone has been raving about it. - Akshay Dodeja
Wow incredible ceremonies. Tiananmen what?? - PC Easy via twhirl
the coverage by nbc and its affiliates is awful and extremely disappointing. prepackaged, heavily edited, commercial-laden and nationalistic - Cee Bee
duh! What would you expect it to be? This is a capitalistic country and they are airing them in order to make a profit. More people care about what their own nation is doing as opposed to the others, sad but true. Live coverage would be nice but that would mean everything would be shown only in the middle of the night. It is unrealistic to think otherwise. - Adrienne Van Houten
I couldn't get amazed as I realize that one of the worst human rights abuse is getting shoved under all the glitterati. - Krishnan Hussein Subraman
Tiananmen Square - "Square of Heavenly Peace" I belive it means. Will have to check that out. But its in the middle of Beijing. the Peoples Liberation Army do their famous flag raising ceremony there every morning. Its also the site of the Tiananmen protests in 1989. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... - Roberto Bonini
yeah,very great,come on ,my china;come on my people! - suso
I thought it was super amazing this year... that running across the ceiling and then torch light-up. Awesome! - Daynah
It really was a spectacle - good enough that if you missed it, you should find out when they re-air it! - JMaultasch
Krish: when we stop torturing prisoners in the US then we can start worrying about the human rights abuses in other countries. - Robert Scoble
Great opening ceremony - could have done without the commentary, though. - David Worrell
adrienne: i completely disagree with your comment. i've lived in several countries in both europe and south america and while there is some feeling of nationalism in other countries when it comes to wanting their respective teams to win, the level of coverage has tended to not be so unilateral nor has the influence of commercials been so over the top whereby the programming gets preempted every 5 minutes - Cee Bee
The synchronized boxes that had people inside them was scary amazing. It was all scary amazing. - Sprague D
Zhang Yimou did a superb job in creating that dazzling show - imabonehead
Robert, I see where you are coming from. I denounce both with the same vigor. In fact, I respect the chinese people and their pride in the Olympics. I just don't respect their govt. and their abuses. - Krishnan Hussein Subraman
Cee Bee I made no mention of other countries, I am referring to the US only. btw I watched for almost 4 hours this morning before seeing a single US competitor. So the Nationalistic viewpoint was shot down. Capitalistic and commercialized must exist or we would have no coverage at all. - Adrienne Van Houten
"The authors of this paper claim to show that other terms can be added to the quantum mechanical action that are consistent with current theory and experiment. However, some of these possible terms include conditions in the future that need to be taken into account and summed over. That is to say, what happens in the future could (according to this paper) affect what happens in the present.
Why the LHC? The authors argue that these sorts of time-violating interactions could be associated with whatever new particles we create at the LHC. For example, the production of a large number of Higgs particles in the future could have a backwards-in-time causal effect on the machine that produced them, stopping the machine from ever running." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
I've been thinking about this issue of the future effecting the past for some time. I think it's true, but impossible to prove. I even wrote a blog post about it, but I'm not sure if anyone understood: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.c... - Paul Buchheit
This would account for the observer bringing the universe into existence, even though the creation of the universe pre-dates the observer. - Bret Treasure
It seems like there are some people working on making the future effecting the present possible to prove. Impossible is such a strong word. - Clare Dibble
Really? There are so many things that have been impossible to prove for so long! But that might not be the same impossible you're thinking of. - j1m
Schroedinger called, wants his Cat back. - Toby Graham
Sorry, tell him his cat died when we opened the box. - Jason Carreira
so what's the period of time involved here? are we dealing in units of Planck time? do Higgs bosons show up a couple of picoseconds at the target before they are supposed to? Or is the LHC spewing Higgs NOW, before it has been turned on, before it is even finished? What if some CERN janitor holds up a bucket to the LHC, collects all the Higgs bosons before it has even been turned on, and wins the Nobel Prize? - Karim
Very cool! Science fiction meets real life... - Mitchell Tsai
also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.... now i'm wondering if what the janitor is collecting in his bucket is not Higgs bosons, but rather *anti-Higgs* moving *backwards* in time. if mass is a result of Higgs, then does anti-mass and anti-gravity come from an anti-Higgs field? ;-) - Karim
Please ignore the previous comment if it has mistakenly appeared on FriendFeed prior to the year 2093. - Karim
++Karim :) Meanwhile "The world's most powerful particle accelerator, aimed at unlocking secrets of the universe, will be launched on September 10" http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/200... - Eugene
1. 1. Build profile pages. 2. Allow users the ability to rank their contacts and friends on a 1-10 scale.3. Provide a better way to include images with blog RSS content. 4. Provide better contact recommendations.
5. Make the "Hide" functionality work on every section of the site. - Thomas Hawk
I will disagree with the "friend ranking" idea. As I said the other day in another thread, I think allowing for generic user-defined groups (not rooms) would be a fantastic addition. Ranking friends for "closeness" just seems like targeting a symptom not the real problem. - Rob Diana
I think number three is especially important -- it could add so much to the site with a relatively small change - Nathan Rein
Rob, without ranking your friends/contacts there is not an easy way to determine content from higher value contacts vs. lower value contacts. I think if each of us looked at our contacts we'd recognize that not all are equally interesting. With user-defined groups (i.e. group 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) you could accomplish the same thing sort of but you'd then not be able to use these groups to create a "best of" personal relevancy sort of page. - Thomas Hawk
They could simply use the same stats they show us on who we find interesting for that ranking, though - Jason Carreira
@Thomas, I saw it the other way, meaning only I know who my more interesting contacts are. To get your "best of" relevancy thing, maybe some "rated liking" would work, right? Or are you talking about people who are relevant, not content? - Rob Diana
And these enhancements should be for advanced, not required for new people- as I think it would be intimidating until you got familiar with the usage - anna
Like it Thomas. I doubt I'd use the friend ranking feature, but I assume it'd be optional. - Hutch Carpenter
Too much of the UI is hidden. There's a lot of power here and it's not as intuitive as it should be. I'd also like a real dashboard view, not just for groups of people I'm more interested in following, but also topics I'm more interested in following. I think there's too much interesting content that slips through here now unnoticed--or barely noticed--because more active content buries it. I'd also not mind some way of changing how FF updates itself; I may not prefer content float based on activity alone. - abacab
Rob the idea would be that by your having the option to assign a 1-10 rating to any contact, completely optional and private, FF could then use these rankings to influence your personal "best of the day." Right now the best of the day includes 20 or so items based on everyone's overall activity. This should continue. But allowing a personal "best of the day" should produce a different basket of content by weighting content produced by your higher value contacts ahead of your lower value contacts. - Thomas Hawk
Recommender systems take past activity to gauge potential value of matches to you... FF could do the same based on the metrics they're capturing for who and what you "like" and comment on... It would be compute-intensive but could be done in relatively static batches - Jason Carreira
I'm a big fan of #5, would save me a lot of trouble. Great suggestions Thomas! - Shey
@Thomas, ah I understand. So, we will have to disagree :) My thinking is that I may connect with people because they are interesting, but I may not like all of their content. I see how your version could work, as long as "likes" were involved. I need to think about this one. - Rob Diana
(1) Profile pages are so important and something like name, small bio and home page would make a difference. (2) I have mixed feelings on ranking/filtering/grouping friends, it would be nice but I'm starting to think people don't really want to label their friends, that's so high-school. (3) #1 feature I'm waiting for! I becoming a fan of weheartit for my visual/photo bookmarks (http://weheartit.com/user/t3mu...) but if try to add it to FF is kind of useless, the same goes to my photoblog or favorites RSS - João Almeida
2) use how often someone interacts with a contact to rank contacts automatically. the hell with manual ranking - Chuq Von Rospach
Chuq, you could use some sort of automated algorithm based on that as a default, but sometimes automated algorithms are not the best. The whole my TiVo doesn't get me when making recommendations sort of thing. By allowing users to tweak these ratings you might get a better degree of relevancy. - Thomas Hawk
Thomas: agreed. more granularity on the definition of "friend" is useful, but I really want the system to figure out what I find most interesting and encourage that, not force me into manual bookeeping, because most users won't. - Chuq Von Rospach
Chuq, but power users would and these users still make up a large degree of activity on a social network. A recent study on Flickr showed that 3.7% of the users accounted for 60% of the photos on the site. http://thomashawk.com/2008/05/... Frequently I miss content from high value FF users (even my own wife) because it gets lost in the mix. Allowing me to assign higher values to my higher value contacts would do a better job at ensuring I saw this content. - Thomas Hawk
You could have a default ranking system based on what FF automatically thinks ought to be your personal relevancy ratings with an option to override a rating and submit your own for any given user. - Thomas Hawk
I think you guys should use Noiseriver if you want all this personal ranking stuff. I don't think it has any business in FF directly. - Rahsheen(isSoAwesome)
Please, god, quit telling me to throw one more site onto the pile of sites I already have to try to keep track of! - Chuq Von Rospach
Hao's FF Better Recommender and User Profile scripts work wonders for me! - Marshall Kirkpatrick
Am I the first to suggest flags? The "Like" functionality doesn't provide the level of flagging I'm looking for. Let me set flags, either with labels or colors or numbers or anything. Just give more resolution (and help me avoid saying I "like" bad news). - atzmon
Hao's FF User Profile script is good. I use it myself. But scraping Twitter for a profile isn't the best way to go. Twitter limits profile character length to 160 characters and doesn't allow html. Flickr's profile pages look much better than Twitters'. - Thomas Hawk
Why does the profile info have to be inside of FriendFeed? Why can't you just click the Twitter/Flickr/FaceBook/LinkedIn/etc. icon and view the full profile there? I know it's "nifty" for it to be one-click less, but is there really a benefit here? - Rahsheen(isSoAwesome)
For me i'd like a way to get to the first occurence of a link or maybe the one with the most comments. maybe something like http://friendfeed.com/link?l=h... Sometimes on bigger stories the conversation is split across multiple items. - Shawn McCollum
Good ideas Thomas, but I must say that for me numbers 1 through 5 would all be the same: Fix the discussion fragmentation problem! Every instance of the same URL and all the comments for those should be able to be viewed all together on one page, somehow. It doesn't need to be the default view, but I think it should be an option. Am I the only one? - Daniel Smith
Rahseen, there is value to FriendFeed doing their own profile pages as it builds on identity at FriendFeed. It also provides consistency of user experience. There is value to the fact that all Flickr profile pages use the same format and it helps users digest the information more easily. Disparate profiles off site of FF don't provide the same user experience. - Thomas Hawk
Shawn, aggregating links could also be a valuable tool. A "show me more of this item on FF" button that pulled in other places that FF the same url was being presented would be a helpful tracking tool. - Thomas Hawk
I definitely understand what you're saying about profile formats and cohesive user experience, but I don't think they apply to FF. I don't feel like a user profile is part of what FF is about. I think it's more about the content the person is producing...not the person themselves. Each of us has a million profiles scattered across the net already. Why make us fill out yet another :) - Rahsheen(isSoAwesome)
(1) I prefer the anonymity, rather than having profiles more obvious. (2) The personal 1-10 rank is a great idea. I posted it to the Feedback room http://friendfeed.com/e/c45cf9... - Mitchell Tsai
re: profiles, why not give users the option? A - Import my profile from 'INSERT SITE HERE' B - Create a FF profile C- No profile for me, please - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
Smart filters - I'd love to automatically hide every post, item, entry, note with the words "Friendfeed" or "Twitter" in it. - Eric
@Eric, that is an excellent idea. Add "iPhone" to the filter list and I'd be in heaven! - Jeff P. Henderson
FF supports Media RSS for blogs. You can use OurDoings, the hybrid photo-sharing/blogging site I developed to make a blog where FriendFeed will automatically pick up the photos. I'm sure we're missing features important to serious bloggers, but for a photo-centric blog I think it's your best bet: http://ourdoings.com/ - Bruce Lewis via fftogo
http://friendbinder.com supports number 2, we call it interest levels which are from 1 to 5, selectable with a nice ajax star highlight (like on amazon etc.) - Richard Cunningham
#1 Make FriendFeed not so ugly to look at. In the very least give that generic logo a once over. - CatCubed
anything to help find like minded people to focus knowledge sharing efforts has to be high on the list - Tim Aldiss
Not sure about the profile pages, one of the nice things about FF is that it focuses on what it is that you're doing on other sites, and conversation around that. Creating FF profile pages may increase the pull toward direct content creation on FF, which may be self-defeating. - Yaniv Golan
create a top "non friends" topic page because just like on their blogs many blogstars I follow just parrot each other and I would like a way to discover others and dump the self promoters. It gets tiring. - Wayne Schulz
“I wish there was a new tab in FriendFeed: "close friends." Instead, I'm opening a new FriendFeed account to see what life is like when you only have a few friends.”
I think you will get this. Ana hinted at "good friends" in one of her updates. And third party apps like FriendFeedMachine offer this today. - Louis Gray
It'll absolutely come - we just have to be patient. They can only last so long on hot pockets, coffee, or whatever else they eat while they code... - Ben Parr
let me save you the trouble, its kind of like being ignored half the time - Chris Conway
I'd love to see this implemented so that you can "group" your friends. - Jeff Smigel
Try ignoring this account for a week and just log onto the private one -- enjoy the peace. :) - Robert Couture
Agree with Jeff... I'd like a tab with tech friends and non-tech friends, meat-space friends, work friends, amusing friends, etc. So I could have different "flavors" of FriendFeed depending on my mood. - Lindsay Donaghe
I just signed in. What was amazing was there was someone following me before I even completed the process. I guess she must have added me off of my other email address. Weird. - Robert Scoble
Could creating a room to put your 'real' friends be an option? - Michael
I agree with Jeff. Moreover to be able to define groups/tabs like "close friends," "colleauges," etc., and give each group a priority in terms of displaying contents and have FF somehow displaying according to priority of those groups/tabs. - Hayk Hakobyan
I'm using FriendFeed Filters: Friends & Groups (http://ffapps.com/filters/) exactly for the "close friends" purpose and it's all right. In my case, one wish saved :) - Dani Radu
or nudge tweetdeck to support FF so you could group your collegues into a different stream! - Nancy Babyak via twhirl
I'd LOVE to be able to favorite FF users I read most so I could see their stuff at the top of my pile. :) - Leslie Poston
I'd like "favorite users" in different tabs. And the different groups. Also like to have a clipboard tab, where "clipped" users/articles stay (and I can follow them) and are removed from the "friends" tab (temporarily). - Mitchell Tsai
i also think that there is enough space for additional (custom) tabs here - Dieter Schwarz
I would definitely like to see this feature added! I like Lindsay's suggestion to have several tabs with groups of friends. - Jeff P. Henderson
I've been wanting friend groups for a while, just so I can filter things quicker. - xero
Great idea, group friends and/or related tabs. An idea I've had for a while was "Friend Weight" where as a friend is slower to leave the front page or be buried down. Who knows what's up FriendFeed's sleeves? - Colby Olson
Friendfeed should simply let you privately rate all relationships on a 1 to 10 scale. You could then filter FF by these numerical ratings. It would also be useful information for them to use when they come out with their "best of the day, week, month, etc." algorithm based on social metadata and personal relevancy. - Thomas Hawk
do you find that your friends list on twitter is different from friendfeed? at least for me, friendfeed has some of my closer friends and/or people who's content I follow everyday, whereas twitter has just about anyone. - Chris Salazar
If I tried that, I'd never see FriendFeed update as only two of my close friends use it and neither of them use it that much except to mainly comment. - Akiva Moskovitz
"to see what life is like when you only have a few friends.” -- welcome to my world...most of my close friends just aren't into this stuff like I am. - Stephen Shelton
I've been dreaming of the same thing. I don't want to get rid of the "friend of" concept all together; I find lots of good stuff that way. But there are times i wish i could switch over to a subset of people quickly. Maybe two new tabs? "just friends" and "close friends" ? - jeff
It would be great if : 1 - one could limite the update to connected people (and not receiving updates of friend of a friend - eventhough this info could be accessible somewhere), or may be I missed something here, 2 - create lists of friends (like family, work, techy which would be displayed as tabs) - Olivier
this sounds like a job for @directeur and noiseriver ;) - Ruben Llibre
there could be an acquaintances tab? no? I would follow more people if I could filter it a little more, regardless of the system applied. Sometimes I want to see what some folks are saying/doing and sometimes I want to get a little adventurous. While we are at it, for finding new people to follow you could have FOAFOAF... maybe not. - Scott Lockhart
you could have just borrowed mine Robert! - Morgan
Friendfeed should pull a Twitter and aquire some of the better apps. - Roberto Bonini
NO! I don't want FF pulling a Twitter. FF is fail whale free, let's keep it that way :) - jeff
Agree I would follow more people with this tab but I try and keep to feeds that particularly interest me (ie photography-related in my case) - Kol Tregaskes via twhirl
I like this idea a lot. tell us how it goes. - melmcbride
I would like this as well. :) They can call it the BFF tab! :) - Daynah
I would love the idea of grouping friends. - Bob Blunk
Hey Robert... how is Day 1 with your super secret new FF account? Like it? Learn anything you care to share with us? Thx! - Susan Beebe
i like being able to eavesdrop on the big boys .. - Gregory Lent
Susan: I am back to my real account. I like the noise. :-) - Robert Scoble
It's a good idea... make it reputation based, or use some other criteria. - Bill Sodeman
The friend / close friend dynamic is one that no social networking/media site I've seen has quite ever gotten exactly right. If anyone can do it, I would bet on FF ! - Eric Berlin
FriendFeed needs an additional tab (as does Twitter, Identi.ca, and others) allowing you to show posts from only "favorited" friends. I am currently doing this with RSS, but IMO that's a hack. - Jesse Stay
Heh - just realized I was commenting the exact same thing you were saying in the post - need to read better. ;) Consider it a me too++ - Jesse Stay
I do not like the idea of "close friends" as defined by any application. A generic grouping mechanism is more helpful because you can create your "close friends" group, and you can create a "techies" group or whatever else you desire. I am actually surprised that FF does not have it already given that rooms have been around for a while. - Rob Diana
@Robert, why does it not surprise me that you went back to your real account? Good to see that you are experimenting though. - Rob Diana
I would rather have Close Friends that the current Subscriptions listing on the sidebar of my personal page - Mark Dykeman
Robert: Wow, that was fast! I was wondering how long you'd stay away from the firehouse of cool noise! :-) - Susan Beebe
I was kind of sad to see Robert split off with a second account, and uncomfortable with the possibility of others following. I'm having a great time learning from and interacting with everyone, and honored to be able to do so. Welcome back, and thanks! - Jody C
at first I thought you were saying 'close' as in 'close the door' to your friends...but that wouldn't make much sense! :) - Stephen Shores via twhirl
You are being too nice to me, Charlie. Appreciate your very positive sentiment. Hope I don't let you down. - Louis Gray
Life's a 2-way street Louis. Too many people forget that. It was an honest and hopefully insightful piece. I'll probably get A LOT of krud over the monetizing part :) - Charlie Anzman
Louis is a great example to anyone who wants to learn how to get noticed as a blogger. It's funny, b/c I'm just finishing up an article on the future of blogging (hint: the lifestream) which I think will become the new way for people to casually "blog." I think there's going to be a much wider gulf between powerhouses like Louis Gray and the occasional blogger. I think the latter of those 2 will turn to lifestreaming instead while dedicated, passionate bloggers like Louis will rocket to stardom. - Sarah Perez
And if you think that's totally wrong, I'd love to hear why in the comments/FF comments when it goes up (on RWW) - Sarah Perez
Your network data can be obtained via ffsixdegrees, just click on the "Export pajek .net file" link. Then load the data into Pajek and do some visualization magic. Or send me a mail and I see what I can do. BTW: if someone knows a good interactive visualization toolkit, tell me! - Benedikt Koehler
Benedikt: here's my email: smbeebe {at} gmail dot com ... very interested in this for my social network here on Friendfeed; use my account "susanbeebe" Thanks! - Susan Beebe
Susan, is your FF account set to private? I haven't integrated authentication yet. :( - Benedikt Koehler
Looks like somthing to come out of CERN, eh Scoble! - Roberto Bonini
Benedikt - I would also like to run your script against my friendfeed cloud. I sucked out my data from ffsixdegrees. Can you work some visualization magic and get me the results? ffuser: infinitelymeta email: brian dot eisenberg at gmail Great Work! Thanks. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Benedikt - Want to connect on Facebook and share Nexus graphs? http://friendfeed.com/e/12d872... We're connected directly through Timo Heuer & Mark Fruchter, and we can trace some of our 2-3-4-5-6 level connections in Facebook via our Nexus graphs. The Nexus visualization tool is neat (e.g. you can type in a person's name to highlight them in the graph). Perhaps you could contact them to share their code? - Mitchell Tsai
When will we be able to do this with twitter + friendfeed + facebook + myspace + youtube + etc +++ something that will aggregate ALL friends into one list? That would be useful, n'est pas? - Chris Loft
@Chris: Yes, then the links could be weighted depending on how well you are connected with a friend. Social Graph API could make this possible. - Benedikt Koehler
highly useful view into the economics of a traditional vc by a not so traditional vc, always amazed at fred's openness ;) - mike "glemak" dunn
Given the fantastic detail on this post, it makes you wonder what other information he is going to share. The info on how much they "need" to make for a good investment was really enlightening. I had always heard a requirement of 10x investment for a "success" so this makes it more interesting. - Rob Diana
one of the genius guys of the new era, showing what openness is about, and how useful it is. inspiring, hope-giving, useful. - Gregory Lent
Fred, thank you for openly discussing this information. - seman
I am not a VC but I believe that greater transparency in investing, while not fully "open source" as a model will (or can) be nonetheless transformative in results returned as it educates the marketplace and harnessess the "wisdom of crowds". VC efforts are scaling (e.g. Google, Intel and many others) so smaller entitites (although no $100 million entity by definition is ever small) will need to perhaps add additional sources of value to positively differentiate itself. With the various size players I believe that an increasingly complex (and perhaps integrated) ecosystem will emerge, in which some firms may serve as feeder firms for others, and more specialized investing niches may continue to develop (market segmentation or partitioning). - Alex Hammer
