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Nathan Rein posted a message on Twitter

“so I had all my students start blogs, I set up a Friendfeed room for each class, and I subscribed to the Friendfeed RSS in IMFeeds. cool huh”

Thursday at 12:32 pm - Link

Shey, David Owens, Jody C, Benjamin Golub and 17 other people liked this

more teachers need to follow your lead. - Carlos Ayala

very cool Nathan - Anna Haro

Show 9 more comments

What subject do you teach? Interesting use of the platform, and very progressive of you. Bravo! - Haggis (Sean)

thanks all -- I teach religious studies. The jury's out as to whether this will work or not. Some students love it; some think it's ridiculous. In other words, it's pretty much like anything else you try to do in the classroom... - Nathan Rein

that is totally cool. - edythe

and then, what I did is, I set up a Scribd group for each class and piped the feed from Scribd into the Friendfeed room, so whenever I have a handout I just upload it to Scribd and it shows up in the Friendfeed room ... heh. Kinda Rube Goldberg, but kinda neat. - Nathan Rein

And ... one last thing ... I piped each Friendfeed room RSS through Webslides (http://slides.diigo.com) so that it's possible to just page through all the most recent student blogs in slideshow format. It really works. It's nice! And all free tools! - Nathan Rein

yeah cool!~ - Ruth Ferguson

Keep fighting the good fight Nathan. - Pete Delucchi

Now you just need to upload your lectures to Seesmic and feed them in. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

Nice idea re. WebSlides -- love it! - Dave Riddell

yeah, Webslides is a great tool -- everyone should check it out. It works really well. - Nathan Rein

yes, very coool! smart approach... i bet the kids loved it! - Susan Beebe

I hadn't heard of IMFeeds before now. Good tip. - David Owens

Bwana McCall favorited a video on YouTube

World's Most Amazing Trick Shot!

8 hours ago - Link

Dan Hsiao, Mark Trapp, Tim Hoeck, Josh Haley and 16 other people liked this

Awesome - Kim Mahan

That was awesome. - David Owens

An oldie but it never gets old. Amazing what he can do. - BCK

WHAT? That was insane! - Josh Haley

Dan Hsiao posted a link

Splash Page » Should Superman Go Dark? We Ask Kevin Smith, Jeph Loeb And Other Comic Creators

16 hours ago - via Bookmarklet - Link

Jeannie Choi and Benjamin Golub liked this

"fan-favorite writer/director Kevin Smith also had reservations on a newer, darker Man of Steel. “You always have to always keep Superman very distinct from Batman,” he related. “Batman can be brooding and bleak and dark but Superman — if you want to take a realistic approach to him that’s fine, but I don’t think you can turn him into an angry character. Superman is about the hope in people, the good in people, whereas Batman is about the more driven, hungry for justice angry side of us. [So] I don’t know if doing a dark Superman is the approach, but I’m all for a reboot.”" - Dan Hsiao via Bookmarklet

John Worthington posted a message

“What are the 3 places in the world you would love to photograph the most?”

19 hours ago - Link

Kol Tregaskes, BeeLing, Sutee Dee, Melissa and 9 other people liked this

Rome, New York and Cuba - John Worthington

Antarctica, Africa, Japan, someday I'll get around to all three. - Thomas Hawk

Show 14 more comments

Now that I think about it, I could do with about 10 more options :) - John Worthington

I have yet to discover someone who: 1. is passionate about photography 2. lives near me *AND* 3. wouldn't mind teaching me to share their passion. When I do, I think I can revisit this post. Liking to be able to do so. - Michael J Cohen

Greek Islands, Paris, Rome - Sean Alexander

Tokyo & Africa. I have nice shots from Cuba, is a magic place to take photos. - Nicolas Caitan

Christmas Island, New Zealand and Antarctica. Headed to Bodie, Mono Lake and Yosemite today... - Jauder Ho

Vietnam (I went without a DLSR and regretted it) and Africa....can't decide on my 3rd - Benjamin Golub

Giza (egypt), China, Japan. I've shot in Giza, but it was about 20 years ago. Would love to go back there with more knowledge of photography. - jerry

Aleppo (Syria) , Toscana (Sienna), Guadeloupe (F.W.I.)...and many many more - Olivier

Australia's Great Barrier Reef (once I get that underwater housing), Mardi Gras, and perhaps Egypt for the third. - Becca

Cartagena (Colombia), Portugal (All over the place), Japan. Travel photography is my favorite kind of photography. - Juan Pablo González

Portugal for sure! - John Worthington

India, Japan, Brazil. - Melissa

@Olivier: I completely forgot about Syria. Yeah, I'd love to have full access to shoot Petra - jerry

Yemen, Kashmir, Deserts of Arabia - imran

This is a really difficult question, but one that'll be a lot of fun to mull over all day. - Dave Roth

Cambodia, Peru, Greece - BeeLing

New Zealand, New Zealand, New Zealand :-D - Kol Tregaskes

Tudor Bosman posted a link

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Thursday at 10:48 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Rachel L Fisher, Siddharth Deb, Denton Gentry, Rob Diana and 5 other people liked this

Raoul Pop favorited photos on Flickr

23 hours ago - Link

Hutch Carpenter, Mr Jojo, Mahdi Ebrahimi, Grant Bierman and 14 other people liked this

I had an african grey parrot like that one when I was a kid!! Some beautiful photography here. Good taste! :) - Rachel L Fisher

Thanks Rachel! :-) - Raoul Pop

FriendFeed Feedback: Voyagerfan5761 posted a message

“The new widget is requiring a lot of redundant CSS to get a transparent background with no border around the widget. Can it ship with a transparent background by default, instead of white? And please apply background to .friendfeed .feed only?”

Thursday at 1:23 am - Link

Michael W. May (Joffi), Cyvros/fyc, Justin Long, Michael J Cohen and Peter liked this

To clarify, I'm using background: transparent !important; under a truckload of selectors to grab each bit of the widget (.friendfeed .(entry|body|icon|cummary|link|info|bottom)). It's very cumbersome. How about just .friendfeed working and letting me make the background of the whole widget transparent in one fell swoop? - Voyagerfan5761

The old widget wasn't defensive enough. The new one has lots of guards against random CSS leaking into it (unless specificity calls for it). You shouldn't need to dive down into all of those selectors though. If you are just a bit more specific it should work by just doing .friendfeed.widget { background: transparent !important; } (you might also have to apply that to div, span, img, table, tr, td). Check http://friendfeed.com/static/c... to see the defensive CSS at the top. - Benjamin Golub

Show 6 more comments

@Benjamin I tried this, and it does work to make everything transparent, but it also removes the 'like' and 'comment' icons, and that is not what I want. - Peter

Try making sure that your CSS does not apply to the comments/likes selectors as they use background images to display the icons. Or that you "reapply" that bit of CSS after you set the background to transparent. - Benjamin Golub

is there any way to make the comments wrap? - Justin Long

.friendfeed.widget .feed .entry .comments .comment { white-space: normal !important; } should make the comments wrap - Benjamin Golub

You could also try using background-color instead of background. That would fix removing the like and comment icons. - Benjamin Golub

how to remove the border around the feed? i'm trying to set up a feed on http://www.momentum-mag.org where its fairly fixed height (to fill out the page) but that the view the feed & subscribe to feed options are still at the bottom, not overwritten if comment wrapping takes it over the height of the column. - Justin Long

ah, i got it: added border: 0px !important to a bunch of CSS categories. - Justin Long

@Benjamin: Well, I have the CSS in now, so there's no point changing it. It's only a few extra bytes. What I'm still wondering is why the widget is coded to have such a fixed background color. Most sites I see these days use all kinds of backgrounds that are *not* white. Is the idea to maintain a default identity that is easily recognized, rather than blending in with the host site? - Voyagerfan5761

It's hard coded to prevent the colors from changing when people did not mean to do it. Let's say someone setup a sidebar that had all red td elements. That would make the badge look really bad. The defensive CSS makes you work a little harder (because you have to be very specific) to apply styles but it protects unwanted styles from reaching the widget. Read more about specificity if you aren't aware of it yet, interesting stuff: http://htmldog.com/guides/cssa... - Benjamin Golub

Misha Dynin favorited a video on YouTube

Mythbusters draw a MONA LISA is 80 nanoseconds! at NVISION

Thursday at 7:20 pm - Link

Oleg, nadim, з 23, Michael Hylkema and 10 other people liked this

now if only someone would slap together a 1000 GPU's and make a supercomputer to shame other supercomputers! - Rahul Das

Paul Buchheit posted a message

“Have you added the FriendFeed widget to your blog yet? If not, why not? http://friendfeed.com/embed”

Thursday at 4:42 pm - Link

Orhan Yediyıldız, Mark Dorgan, tsudohnimh, Aaron Myers and 8 other people liked this

Because I'm not my own host and WP doesn't support it :( - Mona N.

if we could embed our entire friendfeed page onto our site & have one click signup for non-friendfeed members. That would be superb. - Zee at WeDoCreative

Show 45 more comments

Paul - because WordPress templates frighten me. - Patrick Lightbody

Paul - did you fix the word wrap issue for comments? e.g. on my blog comments cascade across the column into the right margin - http://blog.infinitelymeta.com... not a big deal at all. just wondering. great work on the beta btw. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

you know what Paul - ignore what I said....apart from letting people sign up directly via the widget. Then my friends/family who aren't on friendfeed can comment directly plus you get a whole bunch of new 'non-techy' members. - Zee at WeDoCreative

What Mona said. I suggested to WP that they add FriendFeed to the "trusted javascript list"; they responded promptly saying that they would add it to their "candidate library". - Neil Saunders

DITTO what Mona said .... - fotographic

Does WP allow iframes? - Paul Buchheit

I tried a couple of times to get it to work, but even with setting the width, the comments still sprawled outside the border of the widget and looked ugly. - Jason Shultz via twhirl

Still using the original script on the front page, but did add 'Share on FriendFeed' to the Blogger post template today. Awesome. - Marianne Lenox

I created my own widget using feedburner's RSS setup and some CSS code, so as I can get my entire lifestream, as set up on FF, to show up. Since I'm a crappy web designer, I may end up using the FF widget, after all... :/ Can we also use Yahoo Pipes on the Widget? I'm thinking of using Rasheen's duplicate removal setup, once he gets it to work... - Helen Is SOOO Not Of Troy

Yepp, works flawless :) (both widget & bookmarklet) - Kemal Yaylali

i haven't because i'm trying to figure out where to put it on my blog. - Morgan

Not sure Paul. I'm using Chris Pirillo's Social Media theme. Not a WP guru myself. Willing to test though. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

FYI: Adding the widgets (other than the "Share on FriendFeed" link) to self-hosted WordPress requires zero knowledge of WordPress templates. You login to WordPress, click on "Design", then "Widgets", and add a "text" widget and paste in the code. - Benjamin Golub

No because my blog sidebar is too narrow and changing the widget width cuts the text off mid-line. May redesign my blog one day when I'm bored. - Deborah Fitchett

I did, before Godaddy lost the location of my blog they host and I can't get it back :( - John Worthington

I had it on my old site design, just added it to my latest. Thanks for the reminder. - Jack Carlson

I just did the other day when someone posted the link here on FF. It rocks, thx. - Victoria/Plautia

Yes - to http://www.ad2025andbeyond.com - with summary feed from 3 friendfeed rooms I can easily share links to. - Justin Long

I'll check it out after work! Thanks! - Ron

can you remove the border from the widget? And is there a way to make the background of the widget transparent? - Zee at WeDoCreative

I did it. I would like some CSS options right in the widget editor--colors, fonts, etc. :D - Josh Lowensohn

how Josh? - Zee at WeDoCreative

remove the border: .friendfeed.widget { border: 0 !important; } - Benjamin Golub

No JS http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/... and no iframes http://en.forums.wordpress.com... on WordPress.com Sadly no flash embedding support either unless WP.com adds support for a site: http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/... - Erica Baker

I have, well, not my blog, but my "main page": http://www.xs4all.nl/~pkleiweg... - Peter

I have had it on my blog for ages and it is great see http://www.loiclemeur.com - Loic Le Meur

awesome, thank you Benjamin. No way to make the background transparent is there? Or is that not poss? - Zee at WeDoCreative

To answer the question, yes I do, but I haven't switched to the new one. :) - Erica Baker

Zee: try .friendfeed.widget { background-color: transparent !important; }. Anything's possible :) - Benjamin Golub

Last time I tried to fit it in a 160px sidebar I couldn't make it look good. Is it time to retry? - Bruce Lewis via fftogo

I like the old one better :P - Shey

hell, yeah! both on the main page and a dedicated page :) http://www.c4chaos.com/hyperst... - ~C4Chaos

dang, no luck - thanks all the same Ben - Zee at WeDoCreative

I didn't like what it looked like. - Andrew Leyden

For some help, see http://friendfeed.com/e/738850... - Peter

I just added mine to http://www.virtualbirdseye.com - don't know if I like it or not... We'll see how I can fit it in better. - Virtual Bird's Eye via twhirl

Used it as an experiment in the 'blog that posted itself' recently. Great. Now I'd like to use it in sidebar as widget. Can't change text size tho'. Too big. - Kate Foy

Ditto Loic - but switched to the newer wider one. Would love to be able to do like 7 or 8 in instead of 5 OR 10. Try to keep the stream clean there for others. Think 7 would be perfect but one size doesn't fit all :) - Charlie Anzman

you can do different numbers, just change the num= variable. I use num=12 - Justin Long

@Peter thank you! - Zee at WeDoCreative

I don't feel like my friendfeed content meshes very well with my blog. I enjoy friendfeed quite a bit, but I don't really feel the need to try to get more people to look at my friendfeed. I did try it a couple months ago before it was really public, when I noticed it on your blog, Paul. I do use the friendfeed comment plugin. Maybe I will add a share on friendfeed button. - Robert Felty

Yup,http://scabr.com/ - Igor Poltavskiy

Nope - hosted wordpress.com doesn't allow widgets - Hutch Carpenter

Absolutely, I've had the widget on the blog for about a month. KnowtheNetwork.com - tsudohnimh

nope, because I made my own version ;) - Pascal

I did install it but I don't really like its size. I'd like something narrower and with a smaller font. I don't know if this is something I can fix with CSS magic, but that's not my thing. - Robert Konigsberg

From my point of view: How exactly would it help the readers of Blogoscoped? What's the problem it would solve? Not everything I say on Friendfeed is relevant to the content of Blogoscoped. Now, give me a widget that I can customize to make it be relevant just to a single specific blog post and I will give it a try perhaps... an RSS feed for "comments on URL xyz" (where I can make xyz be a Blogoscoped permalink of a new post) would be interesting :) - Philipp Lenssen

+1 to Philipp. The only widget I have on my blog is delicious tags, and I'm not even sure that's useful to my readers. - Amit Patel

Kevin Fox posted a message on Twitter

“Another Kevin Fox keeps using my email address when booking hotels. Next week when he checks in to the Hyatt there'll be a message for him.”

Thursday at 3:50 pm - Link

Hutch Carpenter, Jeff Eddings, Denton Gentry, Dan Hsiao and 15 other people liked this

You should get there first and check in. - Braden Kowitz

I'm suspicious. Why is he using your email address? Unless they're just sending it to the address they already have on file (not realizing it's a different Kevin Fox). You should call and make sure they have the "right" Hyatt rewards number (yours). - Cyrus Lendvay

Show 9 more comments

He's using kevin.fox@gmail.com, an email I don't use, but which I have. Sometimes it's a hotel, sometimes a UPS package, sometimes a conference registration. I don't think it's nefarious, just that he probably has a similar email address but forgets... - Kevin Fox

Maybe he couldn't get kevin.fox@gmail.com and so went for something very close (kevin.foxx maybe) and always forgets? - Benjamin Golub

you should hire a local to leave him a bag of $#it at the front desk. - Dustin

Ben: That's what I suspect. Dustin: Why? I don't harbor him any ill will. I just want him to know he's using my email address by mistake. - Kevin Fox

Better, you should leave him flowers with a note letting him know he's using the wrong email address. - Cyrus Lendvay

I'm sorry, I guess I'm just a little too fresh off of my recent Ebay scam where I was ousted $800 and a lens. - Dustin

Is his address in some of these reservations? At worst you could send SnailMail[tm], an ancient communication type which uses a very inefficient, but generally reliable transport mechanism. If the message is of considerable size, just be sure it's using the African Swallow transport rather than the European. - George Saj

This is happening to me too! There's another Jeanette who continually uses my email address for online purchases. I get her order confirmations all the time. Boy does she buy some crazy stuff... - Jeanette Martinez

This is happening to me too! There's another Kevin Fox who has taken control of my gmail account, and is sending me flowers at every hotel I visit. - Amit Patel

+1 Amit :) - Dan Hsiao

I got an email receipt for another Keith P. the other day for a book on eugenics and nazis and stuff. Oy. - Keith Pelczarski

+1 as well. My notes were from his circle of friends, and I even found the guy due to another address. When his friends still did it a year later, I created filters to reply back to them all with the same note then delete it from gmail. It's gotta be a little confusing to the sender to get it right back... with FW: on it. - Jason Silverstein

Mona N. posted a link

Comcast: Comcast's 250GB Data Caps Now Official, Starting in October

Thursday at 4:31 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Pete Delucchi, Cee Bee, Richard Walker, Igor Poltavskiy and 11 other people liked this

Read with this: http://friendfeed.com/e/cc1177... - Mona N.

Seriously? No one cares? This is kinda huge, guys. - Mona N.

Show 32 more comments

It's not a big deal. This is the same cap they've always had in place. Just now, they are making it public. - Andru Edwards

They did? How so? I live with three people that dl like crazy, and we've never had issues. But that's besides the point. We're gonna end up like other countries where we get charged an arm and a leg. And who knows, perhaps mobile data, too. - Mona N.

*sigh*... Australian ISPs are... just *sigh* - John Worthington

You are so impatient :) Of COURSE we care.. but what the hell are we going to do about it. 80% of us don't have another option. And I have downloaded a crapload more than that, and never got notice before. They are making it public, so they can begin enforcing it more. Just my opinion. - Tim Hoeck

i seriously don't know how you, Duncan, Mo, and the others do it... :( Tim: I don't know WHAT we can do. But I have a weird inkling that it's goign to escalate into more. It starts at the home, then mobile... Boycott? Protest? Petition? I don't know, but this is kinda sucky. - Mona N.

I'll have to really ponder this - what with an Apple TV and Netflix box. An average movie is 1+ GB and a whole season of a TV show can be 30GB. I think I need to check out the bandwith monitoring on my router and see what damage I do in a month. - Jason Kaneshiro

That would be great to know, Jason. Our household exceeds 250gigs... - Mona N.

@Mona yeah - obviously if having to pay a fee for going over a cap suddenly makes me highly motivated to figure out how to monitor our usage - Jason Kaneshiro

Jason: This is what I've found so far via answers dot com "Gigabytes in use Broom Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones. * The human genome contains 0.791175 GB of data (the 3.1647×109 base pairs[3] represented as 2-bits). * A DVD-5 format disc is specified as capable of storing 4.7 gigabytes (4700000000 bytes), or roughly 4.38 gibibytes. A DVD-9 is capable of storing 8.5 gigabytes, or roughly 7.91 gibibytes. * One gigabyte can hold over 1000 novels (uncompressed at 100,000 words per novel). * One gigabyte is roughly equal to 18 hours of MP3 music (at 128 kbit/s). * One gigabyte is roughly equivalent to 12 hours of Flash Video (at 450x370). * Most 6th generation and all 7th generation game consoles have game discs that are around 1 GB or more: PlayStation (CD-ROM - 0.7 GB), Dreamcast (GD-ROM - 1.2 GB), Nintendo GameCube (MiniDVD - 1.5 GB), PlayStation 2, Xbox, X - Mona N.

I'm still having problems translating that to be more relevant to me, since right now, it's just words lol - Mona N.

Wish they had this before they cut me off. I liked their service, I hated the way they dealt with customers. - Dave Winer

I hate Comcast. Does my bill go down now that its capped? Of course not. Greedy corporate jerk-offs. - Tony Kanzia

Frontier is imposing a 5GB cap: http://stopthecap.com/2008/07/... A friend of mine generates reports for all of his family members internet usage and even his mother uses up more than 1GB a *day* just browsing the internet (no games or torrenting) - Benjamin Golub

5gb? WTF? If we don't do something NOW, it's gonna go into mobile. Then all this iPhone vs Android stuff will no longer matter cuz we're gonna get screwed - Mona N.

Like these companies aren't making enough money. - Tony Kanzia

Thank you!! Everyone should read the comment Benjamin Golub left: "Frontier is imposing a 5GB cap: http://stopthecap.com/2008/07/... A friend of mine generates reports for all of his family members internet usage and even his mother uses up more than 1GB a *day* just browsing the internet (no games or torrenting) " - Mona N.

Next thing you know AOL will rule the internet and we'll be paying by the hour. - Lindsey Smith

Part of the issue is we all have "always on" devices that are doing something over the internet. Download a demo on your Xbox, use TiVo, rent a movie on iTunes. It's hard to measure that kind of internet usage and it all adds up (quickly). - Benjamin Golub

i hate comcast - Tony Kanzia

This is another symptom of the problem. Big media does not want the internet to change their game. And this is also what we get for allowing an entertainment delivery company to be a monopoly on our internet service. Comcast doesn't want you watching TV over the internet. They want you paying them for it so they will control how you use your internet. What's next isn't mobile caps, or telling you little sheep to monitor your download. What's next is cutting off your upload. No blog posts. No video... - Adam Turetzky

.. blogs and youtube and viddler compete with their model anyway. You all will stop doing it. Big media's idea to silence all you blog-in-your-pajamas folks is to tape your mouths shut. No more cheaply publishing web sites when it costs you $400 a month to have upload at all and all your readers are afraid to waste their precious 250Gb looking at your photos or going to your blog. Forget about being the next Dr. Horrible or Revision3 that's all done with. Get back to your cable boxes. - Adam Turetzky

Adam: that scares me even more... thank you for your insight. :\ - Mona N.

http://luke.francl.org/lessig-... <--- read that to see part of how we got here. Then help change it. - Adam Turetzky

Adam, omg, This is excatly the first step I was looking for.Thank you! http://luke.francl.org/lessig-... and Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002 via O'Reilly http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/... - Mona N.

I've donated $100 a year to EFF when I can. Which hasn't been often enough I'm sad to say. I'm thinking of canceling my landline because of the cost. I don't really have enough to donate $100 a month to the EFF, but I should! So what I'm thinking of doing is not just canceling my landline to save the nearly $1,200 a year I'm wasting with it, but to cancel it and setup auto-pay with my bank account the exact amount I was paying AT&T for phone service donate it to the EFF monthly. $57.95 - Adam Turetzky

Lets see: 250GBytes = 2,000Gbits = 2,048,000 Mbits. That is 409,600 seconds of moving data @ 5Mbits/s, or 6826 minutes = 113.7 hours = 4.74 days, or 15% of a given month spent downloading. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it doesn't seem outrageous on the face of it. Not that the telcos are any better, but I'm not surprised that a big cable provider is making this move before a big telco. - Erik S

Erik: I can't speak 100% on this so I don't want to talk out my ass, but go ask a Korean or Japanese what internet is like in those countries. The point being, we should be going in the other direction. Tokyo residents get 40 megabit /40 megabit dsl connection as part of their regular landline phone at about $40 a month for the whole deal. Same in South Korea (and I think France too). Their idea of using internet is downloading 20Gb a day of video programs.... - Adam Turetzky

.. my Korean friend and his wife got kicked of Comcast in 3 months by mimicking what they had done with relatives over there. Their daily allotment of bit torrented Korean language television shows hit that cap in days each month. Their relatives over there laugh at their crappy USA internet connections. - Adam Turetzky

The more pressing issue is whether or not Comcast is subject to FCC jurisdiction on Net Neutrality issues. - Andrew Feinberg

Andrew, this is in part a move to moot the issue of whether Comcast is subject to FCC jurisdiction on Net Neutrality. A cap substitutes for traffic shaping. - Erik S

Bad news indeed. My current ISP doesn't impose caps, but they're coming in future no doubt. Time to increase my Usenet and P2P downloads while the going's good. - Jonathon

Adam, don't get me wrong, I'd like to see more progress on broadband availability and pricing in the US (and improvements in upstream bandwidth in particular). Right now I have a choice between comcast with their tradition of poor uptime and their conflicted business model on the one hand, and Qwest, who can only get my DSL to 3Mbps and whose fiber to the node offering, when it arrives is still going to have under 1Mbps uploads. - Erik S

BTW 250GB month = 6.3 hours a day, every day of the 720p h264 video that seems popular on bittorrent. On second thought, that drops to 3hours a day if you have a non-selfish share ratio. Still, that's way more TV than I care to watch on a sustained basis. - Erik S

this is the route that all isps will go. it's gonna stifle creativity and the potential that a lot of "regular" people bring to the internet. i think it really sucks - Cee Bee

Here in Taipei, I have 10 megabit up, 10 down, FTTB, $40/mo, no cap. I'll move back to Silicon Valley when they straighten out the bandwidth there... - Steve Follmer via twhirl

Simple Update Protocol: Paul Buchheit posted a link

Simple Update Protocol: Fetch updates from feeds faster (updated)

Wednesday at 7:09 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Miguel Benevides and Niv liked this

"Update: Several people have asked how using SUP compares with using HTTP If-Modified-Since headers. The two features are complementary. With SUP, feed consumers can monitor thousands of feeds with a single HTTP request (to fetch the latest SUP document) instead of having to request each feed individually. ..." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

I've updated the blog post in response to clarify that a single SUP feed will typically apply to an entire site (or a large fraction of it), and so large feed consumers can poll many fewer URLs using SUP. - Paul Buchheit

Show 9 more comments

Would you expect the SUP id of a feed to be immutable? The current design still has the potential to leak information if the privacy of a feed changes: Suppose I fetch feed http://foo.com/X and get SUP id foo-X. Later, that feed changes to be private or restrict access in some way. If the SUP id doesn't change, anyone who got the SUP id foo-X from when it was public can tell that the feed has been updated. - John Harding

Allowing changes to the SUP id could fix this, but that would mean that consumers (ones that still have access to the feed) wouldn't see any updates until they re-crawled the feed (probably not a big deal), but it makes the feed -> SUP id mapping more complicated for the service to maintain. - John Harding

Yeah, I've thought about that. In general, I think the more important issue is that SUP doesn't expose the URLs in the first place, so it can be used for Google Reader for example. In general SUP-IDs should be immutable, but I think it's worth stating that consumers should always watch for new SUP-IDs and that if producers do change the ids, that they should do one final update to the old id (because the feed has in fact been updated). - Paul Buchheit

Aren't those Google Reader "shared stuff" type feeds merely unlisted but not protected and so technically public to begin with, and doesn't that mean they can't expect 100% security in all exotic cases? Or differently put if you want 100% security for a file would it be wise to put it on a web server accessible over http without password? I don't know exactly how GReader manages this so I might miss a point. - Philipp Lenssen

Google Reader uses a very long (don't know the number off the top of my head) ID for their feeds. When building RSSmeme I wrote a script to try to find some feeds by randomly guessing IDs. I let it run for something like 10 minutes and it didn't find a single feed. Yes it is possible to find someone but it would take you a long time and the Google Reader guys would probably notice your attempt before you found anything. - Benjamin Golub

Yes, that's how I think unlisted should work (I remember when Picasa Web Albums were "unlisted" by using the user-chosen album name!). But that's still not fully protected, right? I just checked Ionut's shared items, isn't that URL discoverable to everyone who's linked from that feed if people click on it and the other person checks their referrer log? http://www.google.com/reader/s... I mean just as one random example of many differences between unlisted and protected. - Philipp Lenssen

The GR urls are most likely large random numbers. You could run your script until the sun burns out and never find a valid one. It's another form of password, except unlike normal passwords, they are completely unguessable. The way that GR urls do get exposed is when people publish them somewhere public or they appear in referrer logs. - Paul Buchheit

Not "fully protected"; just obfuscated really. The idea is that if someone doesn't ever give out that URL and never clicks through from it (thus exposing themselves to referrer logs) you should never be able to find them even if they are sharing stories all day long. (Paul writes quicker than I do) - Benjamin Golub

"... or they appear in referrer logs" Which I suppose means no one should confuse them with anything remotely private. Not only that a webmaster can see the referrer logs, some stats tools even automatically republish the referrer logs, and something like a Google search may bring up those URLs http://www.google.com/search?h... Google could probably disable this by redirecting outgoing links through their own service, but unlisted still isn't protected.. - Philipp Lenssen

SUP is independent of the protection mechanism used for individual feeds, but this is a good discussion about unlisted, so I'll continue it. Google Reader is an application that revolves around external links, so you can expect a lot of referrer leakage. With Picasa or OurDoings it's a lot less. For any photos you wouldn't mind developing at the drugstore, where the clerk and possibly a random passerby might see, unlisted is good enough. More on the non-technical side of the issue here: http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-1... - Bruce Lewis via fftogo

Bruce, the authentication key of Picasa Web Albums showing up in referrer logs (when you link to third-party sites in the comments of an unlisted album and someone clicks the link) is an excellent point. I just emailed this to Google Security, they should obfuscate the referrer by sending outgoing links of such albums through some kind of redirect. - Philipp Lenssen

Dustin posted a link

Nikon D90 Movie Previews

Wednesday at 4:29 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Atul Arora, Brandon Titus, Benjamin Golub, Simon and 5 other people liked this

I was skeptical at first, but these are actually amazing quality! - Dustin via Bookmarklet

Depth of field for video is awesome - Andrew Smith

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I know, right! - Dustin

Wow. I am impressed with that. If they could add that capability to the upcoming 50D then they might get a few more people to upgrade. - John Ford

I might try and rent one for my wedding just for kicks. It could be really fun. [edit]. So from what someone mentioned on an email list at work, there may possibly be a firmware update coming soon for us D300/700/3 owners :) ... which would be completely rad! - Dustin

Having just received our D700 yesterday, I'm very much hoping this is the case. Technically, it looks like live preview is the essential hardware feature to enable this, so it certainly sounds plausible. - Kevin Fox

Is it MF only while recording? (I assume so) - Benjamin Golub

Yes, but honestly that's how you'd want it. An SLR's AF would be to snappy and jittery. - Kevin Fox

Agreed. Not sure how useful the auto focus would be unless you were recording yourself and you were moving around. Also, the other concern for D700 owners is the 'no mic' whereas the D90 has a mono-mic. But really, I'd be down with silent movies, or have the ability to plug in a mic. - Dustin

Megen Vo posted a message

“OK, this new TV could not have come at a more distracting time. On a related note, I think neurology is not going to be high on my list of possible specialties.”

Thursday at 3:35 pm - Link

Benjamin Golub liked this

Louis Gray posted a message

“Food for thought: According to my last 4,000 visitors, 306 were from friendfeed.com and 273 were from beta.friendfeed.com. The beta site already represents 47% of all FriendFeed referrals.”

Thursday at 3:55 pm - Link

Morgan, Charlie Anzman, Michael J Cohen, Mike Fruchter and 4 other people liked this

It's an early adopterish crowd, those FFers. - Chris Baskind

Dare Obasanjo posted a message on Twitter

“Initial thoughts on FriendFeed's SUP from http://tinyurl.com/5vnleg ,an attempt to standardize a JSON version of http://updates.sixapart.com”

Wednesday at 6:43 pm - Link

Sarah Austin, Karl, immaterial, satoko and 15 other people liked this

There are significant differences between SUP and the Six Apart update stream: (1) SUP documents are fixed length. SUP clients periodically poll the server for new updates. Six Apart streams updates to the client. (2) SUP documents contain opaque feed identifiers. Six Apart sends a stream of Atom feed entries. - Gary Burd

SUP can also be used to monitor for updates on any URL regardless of content-type using the X-SUP-ID HTTP header. You are correct though that it's essentially a compact, standardized, generalized, discoverable form of an update feed. - Paul Buchheit

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As SUP is basically a "service-to-service" behind the scene protocol, streamed version with persistent connections seems to be more interesting. Also, SixApart streams contain the actual data and stream consumer does not need to fetch individual feeds. - Alex Kapranoff

Alex, streamed is less efficient because it delivers data that I don't care about, has privacy problems (what would Google Reader Shared Items stream?), and is much more complex to implement (try doing it in PHP on shared hosting). - Paul Buchheit

The first and the second things you mention are problems of the SixApart implementation which is not a standard of some unchangeable kind. One can easily add filtering to the Atom Stream protocol and probably do something with the secret URLs. Implementation for small shared hosting based sites is, on the other side, nearly impossible, yes. But why a small site would want to implement SUP? As far as I can see it should be interesting for moderately big services with thousands of feeds. - Alex Kapranoff

How do you propose that Google Reader should implement this Atom streaming in such a way that it would preserve feed privacy? My PHP on shard hosting example is somewhat extreme, but PHP is actually very popular, as is Rails, which I think would also have some difficulty managing endless streams of updates. The SUP design is very much line with how everything else on the web works so that it can be implemented everywhere -- endless streams of Atom data are unique to a single site I believe. - Paul Buchheit

I don't see how abstracting the username by a layer is going to help privacy. It should be up to the feed publishers on how to handle privacy. They can and should offer better privacy controls than an abstraction. Based on what i've read about this so far, I could easily write a script to crawl flickr or twitter and get every single users id and link it to their SUP-ID. I put it on a different comment, but maybe a POLL verb for http would work. - Shawn McCollum

Shawn, The id abstraction prevents crawlers from discovering the URLs of private feeds using information in the SUP feed. - Gary Burd

Private feeds shouldn't be in the SUP Feed at all. Obfuscation as a security or privacy model doesn't prevent, it just delays the inevitable. The SUP protocol isn't going to be universally accepted and no matter what, your going to have to support feeds the current way. Handle private feeds normally since without authentication it's really just hidden not private. I like the way FF allows you to regenerate your api key, something like that should be used for private feeds rather then a id and password. - Shawn McCollum

But Shawn; the SUP ID in the private feed means nothing unless you know the feed it belongs to. And if you know the feed it belongs to then you deserve to know it (ie someone registered it with you). Private feeds and SUP get along just fine. I suppose you could add another layer on top by generating a unique SUP id for each feed for each client. So the SUP id only means something to the client who requested it. But that's a lot more work for the server generating the SUP feed. - Benjamin Golub

Shawn, the advantage of SUP is that private feeds can still be protected by whatever mechanism you choose (such as the FriendFeed remote key), but still feed update information into a public SUP feed because the SUP-ID is completely opaque. (you can't discover the SUP-ID unless you already have access to the feed) - Paul Buchheit

another thought - why re-invent? Did they look at www.sitemaps.org? - Dave Hodson

It doesn't mean nothing, it mean that there is something you don't know. I can do alot with "knowing I don't know something". - Shawn McCollum

I think the SUP-ID concept is interesting but over architecting a solution for a small subset of the issue your trying to solve. It's nice that SUP-ID works to limit the size and help with private feeds. You could also implement something like the base html tag for size. Then either separate private and public updates with the private ones using SUP-ID or use a marker to identify that the backend needs to go through an extra hoop on this one. - Shawn McCollum

"It doesn't mean nothing, it mean that there is something you don't know. I can do alot with "knowing I don't know something"." Fill your SUP feed with random bogus SUP ids and bogus data. Then there will be *a lot* you don't know (including how many accounts the service *actually* has). - Benjamin Golub

Shawn, can you give an example of something you could do, knowing that an unknown feed within OurDoings was updated at a specific time? I don't see the vulnerability here. This is a real question as I already implemented SUP. - Bruce Lewis via fftogo

Just so everyone knows, I'm not trolling and I love friendfeed. I have personal not professional interest in speeding up feed aggregation. Just chatting so... Loading up random data will have a negative effect on the size feature of SUP and will cause more processing to be done by the consumer of the feed. Bruce, I'll put something down to answer your question in a bit, but right now i've got to pick up my son from daycare. - Shawn McCollum

It's funny you mention Netflix personalized feeds indirectly in your blog post, Dare, as I'm not sure a basic SUP feed would work help much for our feeds. The personalized Netflix feeds generate generate about 6 million posts per day (about 2M each of queue adds, shipped DVDs and received DVDs). Given that any given feed consumer is likely only interested in a small fraction of the 8.4M+ subscribers, the signal-to-nose ratio in a SUP feed would be quite low, unless you created a SUP feed per consumer. - Michael Hart

Michael, SUP is intended for large feed consumers, not people monitoring one or two feeds. If you are doing 6 million feed updates per day, and your SUP feed compresses to about 8 bytes/entry (as the FriendFeed SUP does), then that works out to about 555 bytes/second (or 33k/minute). A compressed netflix feed appears to be about 22k, so the breakeven point is around 2000 feed fetches / day. For clients who poll feeds every h

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