“interesting to watch certain person use ff - they post a link to their goods with a "discuss" link but they never participate in the discussion - interesting!”
Allen knows Sean knows but knows not to say who knows because those who knows shouldn't talk about what they know or who they know but let the discussion dictate who knows. - Allen Stern
what's interesting is that by doing it the way this person is, it makes them appear active even though they aren't really active... would you call this type of use spam? - Allen Stern
It's all about the famewhoring, Allen. And brand-building. I hope to someday get to the point where I can ignore everyone and bask in my awesomeness. ;) - Cyndy
Allen, you're describing a fair few A-listers here :-) - Duncan Riley
a search of the word "discuss" reveals who allen is talking about... - MG Siegler
And they're always links to a certain product of a certain someone... Friendfeed should just put nofollow on said links to fuck with aforementioned certain someone. - Mark Trapp
oh duncan - i need to do more investigating - im not talking about pulling in feeds, all of the defaults do that :) - im talking about something a bit different - in an attempt to keep the story on top and keep moving to the top - its interesting marketing technique i guess - Allen Stern
traffic = value, this stuff = traffic, rinse and repeat across various platforms. its not enough traffic compared to SE traffic, but it keeps the stats looking good/fresh - sean percival
it wouldn't surprise me if some people were trying to manipulate things, re-adding content etc to keep it fresh + on top. They will eventually get caught though - Duncan Riley
allen, ff is totally great for what they call "bumping" on message boards. :) - sean percival
one of the people I blocked has a handfull of friends that likes everything he does. No biggie. I just blocked all of them. - Robert Scoble
Ya you blocked me Scoble! (for other liking related reasons). I have noticed I get a few people who will go through and like everything I do over a few hours. One reason could be to get exposure/presence with my friends and in turn more subscriptions. These wonky social media marketing techniques are both strange and interesting. - sean percival
Interesting. I went to the "Everyone" tab, searched on "discuss" and found Calacanis. Funny, I don't subscribe to him. I don't find the constant marketing interesting enough. - Robert Scoble
See, this is why what Jason suggested makes sense. If every add or bookmark of the same URL were to be aggregated into one conversation, you'd see a hell of a lot less of this type of manipulation. FF seems designed to do exactly what we're talking about here. - Cyndy
Sean - I know all about the bump - remember that FF is just a messageboard so bumping is what it is - except this is web 2.0 bumping :) - Allen Stern
Allen - Exception rather than the rule on FF from my experience. Interesting to see Robert not subscribing to Calacanis (for the same reason many others don't). I used to block Robert (before FF on Twitter) until I realized that in every 5th post or so, he really does bring something interesting and thought provoking to the table. 2) Cyndy ... you're already a rock star. 3) Jason - Shouldn't you guys be in the same room? - Charlie Anzman
Charlie, we are at opposite ends of the same couch. The couple that meets online stays online. ;) - Cyndy
Yeah, we are in the same room... Vive La Social Networking! - Jason Carreira
next week jason will be on seesmic with cyndy telling him what to say HAHA - Allen Stern
Not sure which I like better. Cyndy's articles or Jason's comments here. Allen - Need 3 stickers for my cats before Charlie 'and his staff' appear on Seesmic later this week ... Matt Cutts syndrome at the moment. Cat on keyboard ... funny ... at little difficult to type ... but funny. - Charlie Anzman
dude i can totally send you stickers for your cats - just email me your addy - Allen Stern
If it wasn't for Twitter and FF, I don't think Jason and I would converse at all. ;) - Cyndy
Noiseriver just add the link-aggregation cindy is talking about. That might be the functionality that gets me to be a regular user of noiseriver. Tired of certain people adding links that are clearly being discussed in other strings not started by them. Puling all of those conversations together might eliminate the incentive to link spam - Christian Anderson via fftogo
It's not about public perception: it's about pagerank. Using noiseriver does nothing to solve the problem. - Mark Trapp
This is a great example of why you want great PR people to work with. The S3 group has one of those PR teams and my guess is they had a hand. - Christian Anderson via fftogo
I think the guys at Twitter are trying, I was thinking of Comcast, who says nothing until they shut you off, deliberately, never apologizing, offering a refund, or explanation. If anyone from Comcast is listening, ultimately this is who you're going to be competing with. You're totally not ready for it. - Dave Winer
Seems Comcast IS trying though. Here's a NYT article, where they talk a little bit about Comcast's recent efforts to pull themselves up from the bottom of customer satisfaction ratings: http://tinyurl.com/nytcomcast - Jason Huebel
Pity that Apple can not do the same after their iPhone and MobliMe debacle. - joubert berger via twhirl
This is a good PR move by being more transparent and open with your customers when something goes wrong with the service your company provides. It pisses the customers less than if you are hiding the problems the customers are facing. When customers understand what's going on, then they tend to be more accepting or else they will walk to another company. - imabonehead
I think a lot of the bigger companies have tried the lame-o-Twitter approach, but the Exxon Valdez event & other experiences have convinced many that good communication can be cheaper in the long run. It's hard to battle the old "knowledge is power & need-to-know only". Amazon used to delete bad reviews and do slimier stuff. Now Amazon shows (a) the most popular good review (b) the most popular bad review - because many people like it. - Mitchell Tsai
Amazon needs to spend some time and resources to bring S3 in line with Web 2.0 developers' expectations for reliability and scalability. - Bill Sodeman
Increased transparency is also beginning in the areas of executive coaching versus traditional psychotherapy. During the past 10 years, there's more effort by coaches to bring their own issues into coaching sessions (e.g. ok, your discussion of issue X is making me fearful & yada yada). We've had 30+ yr veteran psychotherapists come to coaching seminars to learn how the new methods work. People often connect more deeply & faster with transparency (but can be initially scary for the one being transparent) - Mitchell Tsai
Jason, I had dealings with the guy the NYT wrote about, and he says nice things, but he isn't empowered to change anything. Like lipstick on a pig. I'm sure the Times didn't do any more digging other than talking to some users that the Comcast PR people directed them to. If he had done just a modest search the story would have been much different. Comcast does not have much goodwill among users, for good reason. Nasty company. - Dave Winer
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." Leslie Lamport - Edward Vielmetti
after long couple of days being in this kind of company made me feel really good, thanks Hao :-) - Dobromir Hadzhiev
Kind of late to the party here (it's been a busy week) but just caught up with your post, Hao. Thanks for including me on the list! The appreciation is mutual. :) - Lindsay Donaghe
Louis successfully decoded my phrase "special opportunities". The 140 character limit held me back from fully explicating on Twitter. - Gabe Rivera
That's why he's the newest Social Media Expert. He's got a special decoder ring. - loren feldman
AHAHAHAHAH HOHOHO HEEEEE AAAAHAHAHA LOLING feldman is such a funny little comic. - jeneane sessum
Move to PA - You're cost of living will do down about 60% +/- ... and our Starbucks are staying open - Charlie Anzman
@gaberivera move north to Seattle. you can have my home office, couch with stocked beer fridge and free wifi. MEDIAdeluge could stand a month of Techmeme juice;) - Christian Anderson
This was a post about Gabe Jeneane, Try and curb your attraction to me to other venues please. BTW visited your site. Love the tip jar, it's classy. I left a few bucks for you ok? - loren feldman
FriendFeed is like a village, and every village needs it's idiot... thanks Loren! - Jason Carreira
there's always a couch ready for you, Gabe, here at the butthole of the internets in Geelong, Australia. Guaranteed not to smell much of beer. - Paul Montgomery
i swear to God, i have these on my desk right now -- right next to my Bacon Salt. I love bacon. love the BaconSalt, the the mints are crazy TERRIBLE! in a fun way - Christian Anderson
That's got to be 3-4 weeks, is my guess. I did a lot of Twitter "adds" while on paternity leave, to synch up, and now that's all undone. Here's my screen cap from Monday. http://www.louisgray.com/graph... See how that relates to now. - Louis Gray
Re-followed you, Louis... *sigh* Annoying. :-| - Lisa L. Seifert
This is ugly. What happens if you follow new people now, while it's not synched? - Louis Gray
guessing they will get this fixed. I wouldn't spend all night tonight re-adding 1k people - Christian Anderson
Wow. I didn't notice this because I haven't added anyone for months. I lost about 2,500 followers, though, so something is wacky. I am still following you, though. - Robert Scoble
Twitter has always been ugly...I'm kind of glad I never picked it up before. Hope things don't get too out of wack for you guys. - Justin Korn
I have my fingers crossed that it will return. Until then, I'm not going through and re-following. Except Louis and anyone who shows up as re-following me in my email. C'mon, Twitter... I'm rootin' for you. - Lisa L. Seifert
You're no longer following me on Twitter. :) Can't DM you. Can you shoot it to christian.anderson at gmail.com? I'm playing around on socialmedian and thought i'd create a news network out of it -- call it "emerging voices" unless someone has a better name suggestion. - Christian Anderson
I'm actually a lot more irked over the people I was following. I went down to 30 and I'm not too happy about that. Now I have to go and find them all over again and add them. Plus, I was following people I had never followed, including spammers. That was annoying. - Candace Holly
True, but THAT number went straight to hell too! - Steve Isaacs
coming from the guy who brags how many followers he has. btw, i lost half the people i follow too. so that does matter. - Matt Musgrave
I agree to get the most out of twitter you have to follow the right people - Wayne Sutton
Isn't this a temporary issue? Temporary being a couple days maybe. - Robert Haas
That's all kinds of cool.. "Know a man by the company he keeps" for the digital age. - J. Abdul-Qahhar
...said all the people on friendfeed. /snorts ... i didn't realize my list went down, everyone was talking about it, but yeah, about half. I'm about 100 off now - Eric Rice
Yeah I lost both! So I guess I can whine now:) - Barbara Duck via twhirl
I think that is true even in the general context Robert. Couldn't agree more. - Parth Awasthi
And if they're not whining about followers, they're bashing the FailWhale or complaining that it's down again. People, Twitter is FREE - Mona N
Well, if you use your account as a promotion tool this is a problem. Loosing who you follow is in my opinion a smaller problem, since you'll probably remember if they were posting anything of importance. - Marcin Grodzicki
Boy I feel so much better now that I took the time to whine:) - Barbara Duck via twhirl
I think it's not only missing followers but also a matter of us having a new unexpected glitch in Twitter - and that after many of us spend quite a lot of time building our communities here and claiming we are not leaving because all the people we want to talk to are here. (Posted my thoughts at http://www.profy.com/2008/07/2... actually.) - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl
Robert, I don't think you're right. Following is the bigger part of the game, but it's a lot easier to engage in the conversation when there are people listening, too. - Dan Kaplan
I had all mine saved in my Attensa RSS Feeds so all those folks will probably get another notice that I am following them again, a Twitter stalker:) - Barbara Duck via twhirl
I like what you were trying to say, and to be honest I don't care how it is on Twitter, but at least on FF we are all part of the conversation, regardless of subscriber or subscribee. That is what makes FF such a great idea. You yourself have carried on the conversation with other subscribers in the comments innumerable times, for which you should be commended. - Aaron Krug
Svetlana: You are so right - the issue of 'Twitter being first to the market' was probably just solved :) I bet competition is really happy. - Marcin Grodzicki
Twitter needs a back up system we can save a re-load, a simple OPML would be just grand if it could work and upload for when things like this happen. - Barbara Duck via twhirl
There's always the competition Identi.ca, but nobody's over there - Barbara Duck via twhirl
Yes, Robert, it's shouldn't be a popularity contest about followers. But the people that use twitter for some actual networking, would be annoyed by losing track of some of the contacts they've made in the last few weeks because of this event. Both following and followers that were added in recent weeks are missing. - Louie
Dan: if you follow the right people you will get smarter and will have interesting things to say yourself and THAT WILL bring followers. Plus, smart people look at their responses tab so if you are conversational you will always have someone listening. - Robert Scoble
Checkpoints, rollbacks, audit trails, transaction logs, backups, restores - Database 101 for the Twitter guys. I'm glad the FriendFeed team has Google experience. :-) - Mitchell Tsai
Rob, that's true, except it's a GLITCH in Twitter that's making people lose followers and people that they follow. That's what the whining's from. - Dave Moyer
Robert - People new to blogging etc. want (need?) to be followed on any platform they can. You can learn from the people you follow. You (if it's what you want) promote and engage by the people following you .... but heck, Mona's right (again??). It is free :) - Charlie Anzman
If it's 'actual' networking, shouldn't contact information be exchanged? And Twitter is FREE. Everyone knows it's still unstable at times. (read: FailWhale hoopla) Why rely solely on Twitter? BAFFLING - Mona N
That is the main problem, Robert, is that Twitter has now put a cap on number of people many of us can follow. When I got to about 2554 that I was following, I abruptly got a message saying I cannot follow any more people, including following back anyone who has added me since a few days ago. Therefore, I am no longer able to follow people I just met or send direct messages to them. I care more about that than how many people are following me. - Cathryn Hrudicka
Cathryn: oh, I didn't know about that. Interesting. That sucks. I hate caps on numbers of friends. - Robert Scoble
Robert it depends on whether you are using twitter as an informational or social tool, no? If the latter, losing followers is much more significant. - jeremy ettinghausen
jeremy: you mean conversational or marketing tool. I wonder if any real followers went away anyway? - Robert Scoble
Yes, actually, I got a "sorry, you've reached your quota of followers" a few days before Twitter cut any of the people following me. Both happened without any prior warning. If they were cutting only spammers, that would be one thing, but they abruptly cut about 1000 followers that included friends and colleagues. I'm intermittently still getting the "quota" message when I try to follow anyone new or re-follow someone they cut without my permission. Hope they get this sorted out and get rid of quotas ASAP. - Cathryn Hrudicka
Mona, if you went out to events, you would see that exchanging twitter IDs is the de facto method of exchanging "contact information" for many people in the SV. Business cards get lost and it's an instant confirmation when both parties follow each other on twitter, on the spot. If people's gmail accounts suddenly lost a month's worth of activity, would it be okay just because it's free as well? - Louie
do we know if they'll restore the friends and followers to a more recent db/backup copy? - Christian Anderson
I like Louie's point about " Business cards get lost", but I routinely photograph 'em with my phone and then sync to Evernote. Gives me a local and Web-based copy. And the paper version goes into my Moleskine. - Dean Barnett
Louie: that is the EXACT reason why I do not participate in Tweet-ups or whatever they're called. My communication method is solely not dependent on Twitter and I personally do not want my Tweets to be a on parade of location blasting and broadcasting to the world, I HAVE A LIFE - Mona N
Umm, you're missing the point. If I've lost followers, it's safe to say that I've lost some of the people I follow. So now I have to go back and find out which ones. - Ian Betteridge
its not the people that follow me it was people that i follow that was bothering me but ok now..at least for me - Uway
Ian: I was addressing Louie's comment to me.... but to address the point I'm missing, it's no secret the Failwhale ate followers and followees. There's a great blog post about how to auto-follow people who subscribe to you. http://bit.ly/38hPFS I mean what's done is done and complaining is not really going to solve anything. just saying - Mona N
i follow my intuition.. dont have a list - gregory lent
Hm, interesting perspective, Robert. But aren''t your followers part of your outreach? The people you influence? The peeps who *want* to hear from you? - Mari Smith
that sounds counter-intuitive; Robert, please explain - Mindaugas Dagys
You NEED people to follow you otherwise if you post stuff no one will respond - Cecil Sandus
In the case of friendfeed, if someone follows you, then other people that are subscribed directly to that someone will see your posts. Makes it more valuable. I wasn't following you Scoble, until i started reading your posts through Leo Laporte (I was subscribe to him, not you, yet i was able to see your posts because he was subscribed to you). Does that make sense? - Justin
Mindaugus: yes. I'm trying to give you an insight. Let's say followers ARE important (if you read between the lines of my writing I do find them important for many of the reasons listed here above). Well, how do you get great followers? Well, I've learned that if I listen to jerks, I become a jerk myself. If I listen to brilliant people, I become more brilliant. If I listen to romantics, I'll become more romantic. If I listen to artists, I'll become more artistic. Since I want to have conversations with... - Robert Scoble
...smart people, isn't it more important for me to worry about subscribing to smart people than worrying about who follows me? After all, if I respond to a smart person, they'll see that response in their responses tab in Twitter (or under their clusters here in FriendFeed). If they find me interesting enough they'll also follow me. So, by worrying only about who I'm following, I'll probably gain the kinds of followers I want (add in a few blocks here and there to get jerks out of my life). - Robert Scoble
The problem with all of this is Twitter is really screwed up. I thought it was just messing up the counts. A few months back it screwed up the counts for people who had 10s of thousands of following and followed. It sounds like this time they rolled back the database and actually lost data. And people wonder why I've moved most of my life over to FriendFeed. - Robert Scoble
twitter's continual mis-management of their product which is now resulting in corrupt data of my Following / Follower "count" is extremely troubling. twitter has shot itself in the proverbial foot! They've destroyed credibility and trust in their product and their making themselves appear like total dim-whits! I care about both stats because I use it as a 2 way conversational tool with my network, which has been compromised. - Susan Beebe
It seems like it would be a really good idea given the dissatisfaction from many users over down-time. One of the biggest complaints is that Twitter isn't very honest or up-front about outages, and a community manager could definitely assuage that. - Kevin Bondelli
Here we are tonight all bitching that we lost x percentage of followers, and I'm thinking it'd be cool if someone were there to tweet, "I hear you." Have you READ the typical @ev or @biz stream? It's like they work for another company altogether. - Chris Brogan
Well, okay. I'm wrong. Ev's talking about it. - Chris Brogan
It seems to make sense. I, for one would like to see one. I am unable to log into my twitter acct and can't get to find a solution. - kamla bhatt
you think they could use a little transparency and occasional..oops sorry we Fd up :-)......its your actions that count, as we noted yesterday :-) - Richard Binhammer
Jeez, they have a status blog. What more do you expect? - Ken Sheppardson
No doubt, visited whiners.twitter.com lately? Er, I mean status.twitter.com - Gregor Morrill
I love the new pseudo news headline spam messages. Been collecting them: "Theodore Roosevelt was a gay man." Yesss! Spam we can actually enjoy. - Chris Baskind
10 months is way too early for a baby to be saying video -- even Scoble's baby - Christian Anderson via fftogo
Isn't that... what the show is? I'm so far out of the loop. - l0ckergn0me
hmm. that doesn't suprise me. What would is if the spam said "Teletubbies caught in sex video with Spears." Now that would be a twist. - Ben Hwang via Alert Thingy
I wonder if there's a list somewhere of the most (and least) successful spam subject headings - Anna Star
A tiny bit off subject, but nice interview with Sen. Coburn, put it on the blog, and btw Twitter had some glitch going on, deleted all my followers and followees today, and I found someone else who had the same problem too, big pain! - Barbara Duck via twhirl
I guess that headline caught Patrick's eye. heh - Daynah
When Milian starts talking, do you think he'll say Nokia or iPhone first? ;) - Daynah
fftogo served up a tip when I signed on that prompted through it. You can also go to the settings at the very bottom of the page and adjust font and number of entries shown, etc.. - Christian Anderson
fftogo will give you a reminder every time you login that there are a number of settings you can change. I found nobody had any idea that you could set your font size or other options until I displayed that message. - Benjamin Golub
Ben, having the settings at the bottom of the page hides it. I have changed my settings so that it looks better, but it took a while to scroll to the bottom. - Rob Diana
Yes it is hidden down there but I'm not sure where else to put it. Screen real estate is very precious on a mobile device. - Benjamin Golub
Ben, I agree that it is a bit hidden at the bottom, but to your point, real estate is precious. I think your tips are a great solution. - Christian Anderson via fftogo
SUMMARY: Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.
It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. - Christian Anderson
