Joelle Nebbe

fascinating - Rahul Deodhar

intense - Deva Hazarika

Great story, and for someone with such a short attention span I'm glad I stuck with it. - Toby Graham

"“When I killed the first person, I was afraid, I was scared. I killed the first person just to see if I could. But there is an obligation to kill. If you don’t, they kill you. That’s why the first was very hard, because the person I killed was kneeling down begging, crying and saying, ‘Don’t kill me. I have children.’ That’s why it was difficult and sad. But if you don’t kill that person, someone else from the AUC will kill you. After the killing, you keep trembling. You can’t eat or talk to anyone. I was at home, but I kept imagining the person begging not to be killed. I shut myself inside, but with time I forgot everything. The superiors always say, ‘Don’t worry, that was just the first time. When you kill the second one, it will all be OK.’ But you keep trembling. “The second time is only a bit easier, but as they say here, ‘If you can kill one, you can kill many more.’" - bob

You've got to admit, there's really no profession sexier than assassin! - Gabe

@Gabe: Just don't leave the toilet seat up. - Dylan Parker

This is just an incredible read...... - Iain Baker

I enjoyed it. It was a decent action movie. - Ninjitsu Jason Huebel

It's not bad. Hayden's wooden acting brings the film down a bit, but the special effects and action scenes are pretty good. - Ninja Haggis (Sean)

apparently it is pants. was absolutely panned by the critics over here. plus i'm still smarting from HCs contribution to the star wars debacle... - Alex Gawley

I do, I'd say Twitter probably has the best shot right now. FF is still over the head of too many, they dont know (and dont want to know) about rss - sean percival

I really hope with the continuous feature additions and improvements to FriendFeed, it would soon have a universal appeal. There are so many Nay-sayers but I'm behind them 220%. :) As for Twitter - I don't really use it anyway, so it doesn't make a difference. Although I would LOL if they were to start charging monthly fees. ie: Threaded replies are only for premium accounts haha - Mona N.

This weekend I excitedly told an engineer-friend (hydrologist) about meeting the "inventor of RSS" last week. And he said "what's that?" -- Bastard. - Brian Hendrickson

I'm with friendfeed. And yes, it should go mainstream ASAP. Many just want to go to friendfeed because "nobody else but you are on there, I know". So that is the real problem. - Ryo

Twitter will go mainstream as people always want to be noticed. Friendfeed has a harder road because it is not about the user, it is about the information. If Friendfeed goes mainstream, it will be in a much different way, like a major research or news tool. - Rob Diana

FF will go mainstream as soon as people realize that it's *not* about the information, it's about the conversation. Twitter in its current form is a megaphone broadcasting system a la FB status updates, without a realistic and understandable method of replying. FF on the other hand not only let's you share information, but creates a method to *discuss* it. It's biggest obstacle for going mainstream is the UI. - Stupid Ninja (aka Tina)

Tina, I mostly agree about the conversation, but the conversation is typically based on the information at this point. I think the amount of information that passes through will be too much for most people until better filters are in place. I admit, I tend to be very pessimistic when it comes to growth and mainstream adoption of most tech. - Rob Diana

I am all for both apps hitting mainstream fast. Both serve excellent online communication needs. Twitter provides broadcasts and quick short replies; whereas FriendFeed provides the ability to share information and generate conversation / feedback regarding that info., which can blossom into an entire community around that topic. Twitter's challenge is stability, scalability and UI. FriendFeed's challenge is search, organization and UI. - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)

Rob, I can only base statements on my experience of course, and they're going to be affected by who follows me. With that said, my most engaging conversations on FF have usually been around a topic tossed up as a status update/question, not a link to an external post. Also, unlike FB and TW which offer a one to one conversation model (excepting FB groups), FF automatically offers a one to many conversation model. - Stupid Ninja (aka Tina)

FriendFeed will go mainstream because it's a better medium than email for sharing links and news. I wrote in detail on this here: http://friendfeed.com/e/c2f76d... - Bruce Lewis via fftogo

couple quick comments: not everything needs to "go mainstream" to be a success, it is ok to fill a niche & some things are not products but rather features best integrated into or augmenting something else - i think friendfeed fits both these criteria (current and future) and i see that as a good thing personally... - mike "glemak" dunn

@Mike - I've been thinking this too lately. What is "a success"? Is Apple a "success". They only have about 5% of the market of computers, yet I think there is a lot more media buzz about Apple unveiling a revised macbook than there is about Dell or HP introducing a revised 1050e or whatever they call them. If you get 1% of Americans using your product, that is 3 million people. That is a lot. - Robert Felty

What is mainstream? 25% of US population? 10% of RSS/tech geeks? 1% of the world? 10% of people who would pay for this service? FF's current UX won't scale to a large population having lots of real conversations here. But it does serve a good niche (or two or three) right now. But what % of the world has/wants to have conversations like this? Mainstream would drive FF to be everything to everyone. Would we (as early adopters) still like it then? - David Lee

I have a radical idea... how about Twitter just finds a way to make some money. Mainstream is great... but completely misses the point... - Brian Roy

I am "mainstream", but I've been on FF for a year as of tomorrow. - Anne Bouey

Has anyone else noticed the push the major media give to some services and not others? How often did Television Programming (news, sitcoms, talk shows) talk about "googling" something; did you ever hear them talk about "yahooing" or "asking" anything? Then it was myspace, myspace, myspace followed by Facebook. Makes me wonder if those who own the media heavily invest and then push their investments. - Internet Strategist

Internet Strategist: media people just want to be cool. It's easy to understand why they push certain stuff. I do the same. I have no investments in anything. - Robert Scoble

Will Twitter and FriendFeed become mere commodities, fed to the masses by media moguls, to sell their product ? Because that is their job. I think Twitter is becoming more mainstream, more noticed and talked about - but not generally understood. How would it be affected by advertising and ten times the traffic? FF will take longer to catch on, even though it is better. Twitter plants seeds that can be grown in FriendFeed. - Chris Loft

frankly i don't think Joe the Plumber is really that interested in such a mass of content/dialogue, Facebook is about as much feed as an average person can handle. FF/Twitter are downright manic for them and they don't have/don't want the mental faculty to deal with the multiple perpetual conversations/topics - it creates more anxiety than fun and if it's not fun it's toast. Neither will get double digit % of the population using them - Bob

OTOH, is text messaging considered mainstream yet in the U.S.? (I realize we lag way behind the rest of the world in this.) I don't think the "mainstream" can handle more than one technological breakthrough at a time :) I still know people who are even just getting used to using a computer. - Victor Ganata

@Bob I think Twitter is so powerful that it can be used for many different purposes. Imagine a multi-dimensional Twitter with single or more refined services. For local councils, government, media companies, business services, geeks, gossip, etc. Each with their own customised Twitter serving their needs. This is where Twitter will produce an income stream; hiving itself off into customized services, without the noise. - Chris Loft

i dont think it is a "we dont want it to go mainsteam" it is more of a "the technology isnt quite ready for it to go mainsteam, we couldnt handle all our friends and family and colleagues nattering on our feeds, we can barely handle the information flow at the moment". We need better filtering, a better way to have several spheres in parallel on these services. - Joelle Nebbe

(translating my previous comment in pragmatic speech:) I am happy to have all that crowd happily segragated on facebook sending each other quizzes, i dont want them coming on my FF and twitter. I love them to bits but they are, well, embarrassing! I don't want "what peanut character are you" on my friendfeed, and it will come with the mainstream - Joelle Nebbe

hmmm, this bubbled up so I re-read it. man, that was a great old post - Sarah Perez

By old you mean 9 weeks, right Sarah? :-) - Louis Gray

Just remember what comes with being mainstream...tons of spammers. - April Russo

FriendFeed should go mainstream. Despite our selfish desire to want to keep it to ourselves, it is a smarter way for news and information to be disseminated that would benefit all once they are aware of it. - Thomas Hawk

Something I've noticed: new Internet companies and products which precede their release with a wave of publicity and hype almost always fail. Google just quietly put their product out there, and it was so good that word of mouth pushed it to global preeminence. Don't tell me about your product -- show me your product. And it had better hit me between the eyes in under a few minutes, otherwise, next. - Sean McBride

By the way, I found this post with Google Reader, and almost certainly would have missed it on Friendfeed. - Sean McBride

I found it on Friendfeed. - Jason Wehmhoener

It's actually slightly misleading as it just does a site:sfgate.com on Google. When I first saw it I thought that it would send you to their site using OpenSearch or something. Searching Google is probably better though since most sites don't have good search of their own. - Paul Buchheit

Many big sites have a search box like this one. http://skitch.com/zest/7w88/ro... - Larry Hudson

Judging by http://googleblog.blogspot.com... it's "when [Google] detect[s] a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of [Google's] snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users." Not that that explains much of the how. - Scott from Canada

google is sure getting clutter and featureitis - i dont want all these gimmicks i just want a good efficient search. Not getting it anymore. - Joelle Nebbe

??? - Anne Bouey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... - Gary Burd

Do many people use pickles? I know that mailman does. In my opinion I would rather use plaintext or a database. What is the advantage of a pickle? - Robert Felty

Pickles taste good. - Amit Patel