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j1m posted a link

Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com

2 hours ago - via Bookmarklet - Link

awesome pic. Also, seldom has an article considered a dumber question. Just how difficult is it to know what reading is? - j1m via Bookmarklet

j1m posted a link

Michael Nielsen » The Future of Science

5 hours ago - via Bookmarklet - Link

ⓞnor, Atul Arora and Jim Norris liked this

Like Einstein, we have a small group of trusted collaborators with whom we exchange questions and ideas when we are stuck. Unfortunately, most of the time even our collaborators aren’t that much help. They may point us in the right direction, but rarely do they have exactly the expertise we need. Is it possible to scale up this conversational model, and build an online collaboration market [4] to exchange questions and ideas, a sort of collective working memory for the scientific community? It is natural to be skeptical of this idea, but an extremely demanding creative culture already exists which shows that such a collaboration market is feasible - the culture of free and open source software." - j1m

This article was a big Eureka moment for me. As I read on, it made me realize how much I buy into the idea that the entrenched system of science should stay -- that is, the idea that credit is allocated to journal articles, thus completely setting aside a Release Early, Release Often approach, which would be much more successful. Suddenly, I realize that Science is just as far off-course as the Newspaper industry or the Music industry. And I'm suddenly firmly convinced that the right thing to do is spool your data directly into your www directory as you run your experiment. And have a system where it's a matter of routine for, say, random undergraduates at other schools to analyze your data and write about it, but you get credit for all the buzz you generate, so you don't have to worry about being scooped. - j1m

Bret Taylor posted a link

FriendFeed Blog: Ross's last day

yesterday at 5:59 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Jessie Norris, shandiz, Thomas Hawk, Atul Arora and 30 other people liked this

"Ross, one of our three summer interns, had his last day today. We were sad, and decided to drown our sorrows in burgers, cake, and candy-filled piñata-goodness. It seemed to be an appropriate send-off for someone who made the office so much fun." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet

Liked the day and photos. Un-like that it's Ross's last day. - Dan Hsiao

Show 10 more comments

Thank you Ross! You've been helpful for me. Good luck and keep up your good work! :) - directeur via NoiseRiver

Thanks for all the last day love everyone! - Ross Miller

awesome internship - mike "glemak" dunn

Good luck !! Ross *like*d all my ff-feedback :) - Krishna Gade

Are there open positions now? - Colby Olson

I think we all need to play with more pinatas at work. - JMS

Good luck Ross! - Mitchell Tsai

So glad to see that you are feeding Ross!! Thanks, Bret!! - Skye Miller

Looks like fun. - susan mernit

Whoa, did Gary move to California? - niniane

Niniane, I was just visiting. I did not move to California. - Gary Burd

Oh ok. That makes sense. :) - niniane

you didn't know about visiting? they have these airplanes now. - j1m

Kevin Fox posted a link

McCain Makes Historic First Visit to Internet

July 21 at 10:44 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

fshamsi, Mitchell Tsai, Christopher, LiquidLag and 53 other people liked this

"McCain aides said that the senator's journey to the Internet will span five days and will take him to such far-flung sites as Amazon.com, eBay and Facebook." - Kevin Fox via Bookmarklet

We're already talking about this item here: http://friendfeed.com/e/e65a8f... - Robert Scoble

Show 40 more comments

Funny! - Sean McBride

Yeah, but I wanted to talk about it with *my* friends. Is it a social faux-pas to try and enforce comment consolidation of someone else's entry? - Kevin Fox

I just noticed how useful it was for Scoble to post that crosslink here -- I wish Friendfeed would find and display these crosslinks automatically. One often misses interesting discussions for lack of crosslinks. - Sean McBride

McCain visits the "Tubes"... that make up the Internet! Yay! - BlueMoonMultimedia via twhirl

Kevin: I don't know. I figured your friends might like to know about an interesting conversation going on with my friends. :-) I wish FriendFeed would show where other places a conversation is being discussed. - Robert Scoble

Whoops - hope I didn't step on Kevin's toes by endorsing the interesting crosslink. - Sean McBride

Sean: yeah, I guess Kevin wanted to open a private room here for him to discuss this ONLY with his friends. I think FriendFeed needs to have a construct to make that possible. Maybe my taking items like this into a room where only the friends of that person can get into it? - Robert Scoble

Robert - Kevin raises a valid point when you think about it -- no doubt a software solution is available upon reflection. In any case, I am enjoying the crosslink. - Sean McBride

So my comment about consolidation was intended mostly to initiate a conversation on the subject. Success! To my mind a lot of the value of FriendFeed is the ability to have conversations scoped by friend connections. I actually saw Michael Markman's twitter first, and decided I liked the story, and would like to share and talk about it with my friends, rather than the strangers who were talking about it on that thread. Personally, I wouldn't want someone siphoning off my conversation to the stranger conversation, because the point of my sharing the item is to talk about it with people I know. Also, in this particular case, the phrasing "We're already talking about this over here -->" felt more like an accusation rather than an invitation. Thoughts? - Kevin Fox

Hi-tech is turning us all into time-wasters http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie... - fotographic

Kevin: get over it. I'm going to keep joining these things because I want MY friends to see all conversations on a topic. :-) Of course, if you take it into a room, then I'll probably leave them there. I don't get why you didn't just "Like" the original item, which would have shown your friends the item and gotten them involved in the conversation. What, you don't want your friends to hang out with my friends? I don't get the value of having just your friends see something... - Robert Scoble

Kevin: my thought: Friendfeed should be infinitely flexible. Users should be able to organize conversations every which way, with any level of inclusivity or exclusivity. You've got a valid point and raised an important issue about social protocols here. - Sean McBride

By the way, I'd love to debate this face-to-face on video. I bet it would get something very interesting going. It also explains some of the design behind FriendFeed and why many people I show it to say "it's too noisy." - Robert Scoble

uh oh - I'm not going to be asked to choose sides here am I? ; ) - Marco

Scoble is operating in the Walt Whitmanesque universal embrace of the cosmos. :) - Sean McBride

Marco: no. But it would be interesting to know your thoughts. - Robert Scoble

"I wouldn't want someone siphoning off my conversation " , Kevin I agree. There are topic and threads which are 'yours' , regardless of whereelse the conversation maybe happening. I would not want (a) somebody to inject themselves into my thread and hijak the conversation (b) to redirect my friend to another thread. We kinda forget our common good sense manners when we get into convos on FF. Both items(a and b) , would be considered rude inturruptions in RL life . Just my way of thinking and I maybe wrong ! - Peter Dawson

I admit, I liked this thread for the FF comments, not the article. - Hao Chen

Robert: It didn't sound like your purpose in commenting was to make sure your followers saw this conversation, but to consolidate the conversation into a single thread. Please don't twist this into a 'what, my friends aren't good enough for you?' I believe that conversational diaspora is a good thing, and that artificial comment consolidation is not. If I had something to say in the other thread I would have not had any qualms about contributing to that conversation but, as I said earlier, your comment read as if you were trying to create a single conversation and cut my own conversation with my own social circle short. If that was not your intention, then I apologize. - Kevin Fox

Actually, the only thing that frustrates me in this thread is that by the time I finish writing a comment, 5 other people have written new comments, making it look like my comment was written with the awareness of those comments. Ugh! Definitely a user experience issue. :-P - Kevin Fox

You know, I'm sure Michael Markman didn't appreciate the siphoning off of comments from his thread when Kevin Fox, authoritative Friendfeed person tons of people are following, reposted the same link. Or maybe it's good to just not worry about where conversations are going? Isn't that the value of Friendfeed? Who cares who's siphoning from whom? Who cares where links are re-shared? Oh, and hey, one more for the road: maybe it's better to assume good faith before having a public, highly visible, comments brawl. - Mark Trapp

Kevin: I wanted to do both. Your friends should know about an interesting conversation happening about that topic somewhere else, and should be able to discuss it amongst themselves too, here. Personally, you should have loaded a comment that made it clear what your intent was. If I want to talk about something with just my friends, I would have loaded a comment with a link to the original, but with a comment saying "I want to talk about it just with my friends, to see what you think." - Robert Scoble

Re a F2F conversation on video: that would be cool. I've been meaning to write a blog post on 'who owns the conversation'. I've got some concrete ideas on the subject, especially how it pertains to conversations about blog posts that happen off-blog, but I also don't feel any one person has the right to speak for others in a 'this is how things should be' kind of way. Definitely one of those social issues that is still contested because it's so new. - Kevin Fox

We're now discussing this here: http://friendfeed.com/e/edfed2... See Kevin how I stated my intent? - Robert Scoble

I actually just made a private room last night just for my real friends (in case any actually decide to join). I think a private place to have conversations is probably a good place to start for people who don't want want to fully expose themselves online. Also, time can be a limiting factor some times and when it is they're the ones I'd most like to engage with. That being said, it would be cool to view all the public conversations on a particular link, so I can jump into the best one. - Raymond

There should be an easier way to view all the conversations on a particular piece of content. FF should connect all the threads in the background through some unique identifier for the content (like the URL that this link points to), then let people decide whether they want to view just their friends' comments or those from extended community (including imported Disqus / Intense Debate comments for the same URL). - Joe Lazarus

Now we know why McCain has not visited The Internet - Shakeel Mahate

@scobleizer on the original McCain/internet piece or the discussion over comment fragmentation it has morphed into? lol - Marco

In Geoff's best McCain Voice "I need The Googles installed please" - Geoff Schultz

don't have to read the article... the title is priceless - Rob Reed

I'm not quite sure what is "historic" about a septuagenarian visiting the internet. Are we meant to be impressed? My mother is 72 and does quite a number of tasks online, as do many people of her age and considerably older. - Ian May

Apparently Kevin because Robert stumbled on your thread, he was already your friend or perhaps in some other way in your Friendfeed vicinity -- and you say you wanted to discuss this with friends -- so from his point of view your entry may have looked like a dupe. And dupes among segments of friends are indeed a problem on Friendfeed. Nobody minds the dupes we don't notice, but we may mind having the conversation on the same thing split up among segments of our friends. - Philipp Lenssen

threaded conversations anyone? - gregory lent

@Kevin - allow sub-comments which are comments to comments to make it easier to allow people to talk the person who's talking. Again making this a simple UI is of a challenge as it may soon turn out to be ugly... Also, please allow to scope your post/comment to only your friend/family/colleagues etc So that you dont want every one to see them... I sort of agree with your point of the need for having private/protected/public conversations on FF. I even posted this in the ff-feedback room a few weeks ago. Looking forward to some progress in this direction :) - Krishna Gade

@Mark Trapp... thank for looking out for my feelings. But I don't feel any ownership in discussions about something that Andy Borowitz wrote. Now, if I had written the original piece, I might feel differently. - Michael Markman

@Ian May It's a comedy bit that combines a) McCain's having disparaged Obama for not visiting Iraq and b) McCain's boast to the NY Times that he's learning to get online. - Michael Markman

Andy's piece is well-written. Thanks for sharing, Kevin, wouldn't have seen otherwise. - Stephen Mack

Why is this thread being highjacked to discuss FF features?! I thought it was about McCain visitng the "Internet" :) - Shivanand Velmurugan

This thread keeps growing and still going nowhere. It is really simple: if you want to discuss things only with your friends, make a private room just for you and your friends, and post "friends only" stuff there. No one else needs to find you've created a separate thread of "their" topic somewhere else. - Dread Pirate PJ

I have a very simple model of ff, which is perhaps a lot like Kevin's. I come here to discuss things with my ff friends. Many of them are people I don't know at all in rl, but it's important to me that these conversations are mostly with the same 100-200 people, over and over again. As a result, rooms are not very useful to me, since when I comment on something in a room, it is not automatically placed in the feed of all my friends. Rooms are at least useful for finding content and resharing it..... - j1m

The feeds of people with very many friends, like Robert, are not very useful either. With so many people commonly commenting on his thread, I mostly don't remember who any one person is from one encounter to another, and for me that makes conversation a lot less fun. So Robert's feed, also, is mostly useful for resharing. - j1m

I do really wish that ff would organize feed items that share a url, by presenting them all (that is, all the ones I can see) right next to one another, or joining them into a single nested feed item, that has the different conversations hanging off of it. - j1m

I made a private room with just myself in it so I could discuss this. - Chris White

Michael Nielsen bookmarked a page on del.icio.us

Wiki set points

Tuesday at 1:49 pm - Link

j1m, Yaroslav Nikolaev, Andrew Perry, Mr. Gunn and Bill Hooker liked this

"Imagine putting the Feynman Lectures on Physics up for public editing on a wiki (Feynmanpedia). Would they get better or worse?... there’s a useful notion of a “set point”, a quality level that an article written by [a wiki] community will converge to.." - Michael Nielsen

But then imagine that you can't log in to the Feynman wiki unless you have at least three papers in arXiv: surely the set point will be higher now? In other words, by gating the community, perhaps you can manipulate the set point. - Bill Hooker

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That's a great idea, Bill, and there would be some prestige value to being able to edit, but you're left with the problem of who decides the criteria. - Mr. Gunn

While it's not quite on par with Feynman, I've considered putting the introduction to my PhD thesis up as a wiki, with an idea the others could expand it, keep it up to date and maybe even correct any errors ... ultimately hoping that the quality "set point" could be raised, or at least maintained. I think in reality the subject (mitochondrial protein import) is probably too small for anyone other than spammers/trolls/vandals to actually edit it ... - Andrew Perry

and adding a qualification hurdle would make the 1 % Rule more like a "1% of 1% rule" ... still, maybe I should think about doing it anyway ... there's really nothing to lose ... - Andrew Perry

Andrew, I think that's a great idea. Every thesis intro is essentially a "basics of X" -- if there were some way to collect them, the result would become an Encyclopaedic Introduction to Every Scholarly Subject Ever. And as a wiki, it could be kept up to date, and the choice of editors is actually very simple in this case: authors of subsequent, related theses. - Bill Hooker

(Curse the FF chr limit!) F'rinstance, yours will certainly not be the last thesis on mitochondrial proteins, or even on import, so the supply of qualified and motivated editors is endless. The more I think about this the more I like it. - Bill Hooker

But we still struggle to find editors. For instance the reviews section on openwetware (http://openwetware.org/wiki/Re...) is pretty moribund. I would worry about qualification though as it reduces your pool. Surely the aim is to try and set something up so that the community is self selecting? Exactly how you do that I don't know of course. - Cameron Neylon

Nice idea. Now if only I can find an electronic copy of my thesis. - j1m

j1m posted a link

Einstein Rejected Peer Review

3 hours ago - via Bookmarklet - Link

"We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the - in any case erroneous - comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere." - j1m via Bookmarklet

The Life Scientists: Ntino posted a link

A good blog post approaching the issue of why scientistics are reluctant to Web 2.0

6 hours ago - Link

Donnie Berkholz, j1m, Pierre and Deepak liked this

I'm posting 2-3 snippets from this insightful article: [...Why write a comment when you could be doing something more “useful”, like writing a paper or a grant? Furthermore, if you publicly criticize someone’s paper, there’s a chance that that person may be an anonymous referee in a position to scuttle your next paper or grant application....] - Ntino

[...Some scientists will object that contributing to Wikipedia isn’t really science. And, of course, it’s not if you take a narrow view of what science is, if you’ve bought into the current game, and take it for granted that science is only about publishing in specialized scientific journals. But if you take a broader view, if you believe science is about discovering how the world works, and sharing that understanding with the rest of humanity, then the lack of early scientific support for Wikipedia looks like an opportunity lost...] - Ntino

Like Einstein, we have a small group of trusted collaborators with whom we exchange questions and ideas when we are stuck. Unfortunately, most of the time even our collaborators aren’t that much help. They may point us in the right direction, but rarely do they have exactly the expertise we need. Is it possible to scale up this conversational model, and build an online collaboration market [4] to exchange questions and ideas, a sort of collective working memory for the scientific community?It is natural to be skeptical of this idea, but an extremely demanding creative culture already exists which shows that such a collaboration market is feasible - the culture of free and open source software. - j1m

j1m posted a link

My Hiatus From Twitter - Why You Should Join Me | Stay N' Alive

10 hours ago - via Bookmarklet - Link

Hutch Carpenter liked this

"On Wednesday at F8 I realized something significant - I was using FriendFeed as my primary communication mechanism throughout the day, and I really wasn’t missing Twitter much by doing so (and most of it from my cell phone). FriendFeed, frankly, is much more viral and advantageous to my blog and brand than Twitter because every time anyone likes or comments on an item I post or comment on, that item goes right back to the top of the feeds for all my friends. It brings instant exposure, and in fact, for many posts on this blog I get more traffic on FriendFeed than Google, Twitter, or any other service out there. FriendFeed takes power away from the A-listers and puts it right back in your hands" - j1m via Bookmarklet

39 days here. Can't say that I've been missing much. - Bwana McCall

Sanjeev Singh posted a link

We are all tetrachromats

yesterday at 11:00 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Tiago Henriques, Daniel Dulitz, Nikpay, Nick Lothian and 26 other people liked this

According to the article, our photoreceptors respond to four different wavelengths, but our lenses block the lower wavelengths (the shaded portions in the picture). Surgical replacement of biological lenses with more transparent ones might allow us to see into the UV A range. - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet

FriendFeed is slowly discovering all the links that I've been collecting for my future blog post, “We are all color blind.” - Amit Patel

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This appeals to be in a bizarre fashion. - Jerry Welch

"Note that the above optical density is for a human lens of about 5 mm thickness. The optical density is proportional to the thickness of the lens. As will become apparent below, smaller animals have better ultraviolet visibility than humans because of their thinner lens. Larger animals have even less sensitivity in the ultraviolet and even blue regions for the same reason." - bob

And the fourth color look like pea soup? ;-) - Jim Norris

Yeah but I'm guessing the lens blocks UV A for a reason, which has something to do with keeping your retinas from being fried. Just a guess though ;-) - Karim

How would we process the data, though? (For that matter, how do X-chromosome heterozygous tetrachomats process the data?) Our retina and visual pipeline is pretty set up for trichromacy. - ⓞnor

nor, that's interesting, where could I learn more about "our retina and visual pipeline is pretty set up for trichromacy"? - Jason Wehmhoener

j1m probably has some more technical references, but I very highly recommend reading http://www.handprint.com/HP/WC... if you are at all into geeking out about the fundamentals of color. From http://www.handprint.com/HP/WC...: "Evolution could arrive at a more complex visual system, but it would require modifying a visual cortex specialized to receive and interpret the three cone outputs; adding a fourth cone would mean reengineering the brain as well." - ⓞnor

So has anyone had these new lenses installed? I thought that was a relatively common procedure. Maybe they use uv blocking replacements? - Paul Buchheit

I've heard of experiments where people (probably Army "volunteers") had their vision extended into near-UV, but with the predicted retina-burning results. - Gabe Schaffer

Cataract surgery and the use of replacement intraocular lenses has been around for a while. I am not sure, but I am under the impression that originally people were encouraged to wear sunglasses or UV-blocking lenses to block UV, though lately the replacement lenses seem to block UV (see http://archopht.ama-assn.org/c...). This is to prevent retinal damage. - Karim

There is a fascinating article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie... that confirms my suspicions that UV looks like the color white under a black light: whiter than white, tinged with blue or violet. If you have ever seen someone's clothes or teeth glowing under a blacklight, you might have an idea what being able to see into the near UV is like. - Karim

I am not of the opinion that a fourth cone would require re-engineering the brain, so much as it might involve co-opting the existing channels. UV might be perceived as a change in brightness (luminance) rather than a new color (chroma). - Karim

paul, egnor: the studies that this article refers to involved people who had their lense in one eye replaced. One of the investigators is himself akaphic and can see UV: http://starklab.slu.edu/humanU... Karim's link is good too. - Sanjeev Singh

@Karim, the problem is that the perception of brightness will continue to be needed for (a drum roll) actual brightness. - j1m

:-D good point, j1m. i guess i am thinking of UV looking "unnaturally" bright, glowing, the way the color white does under a blacklight. so the perception of UV would be of things being radioactive ;-) just a guess, mind you... - Karim

I think you might actually need to have one normal eye to see uv light: you'd need to compare the differences between the eyes and if your UV eye sees a whitish blue that the normal eye doesn't, then it's UV. - Sanjeev Singh

Well, think about how you see violet -- you don't need a violet-sensitive and a non-violet-sensitive eye, just a violet-sensitive cone, whose signal can be compared to a few non-violet-sensitive cones a few microns away from it. - j1m

From the sound of it, there is no UV cone, it's just that the regular cones are uv sensitive (though the blue more so), which is why it looks like a bluish white. - Paul Buchheit

Paul Buchheit posted a link

Y Combinator: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

July 19 at 3:22 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Samantha Crow, j1m, Kamyar Navidan, Charlie Anzman and 96 other people liked this

"So we're trying something new: we're going to list some of the ideas we've been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms. It may be that recipes for ideas are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn't anticipate." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

Good ideas, mostly. Of course, as always, the devil is in the details (and to some extent, I think that's the point). - Paul Buchheit

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interesting list, surprised to see photo/video sharing sites on there. - Adam Kazwell

From pg's comment "Most people who read that one [search engine that concentrates on design] will think "huh?" But if someone reads it and thinks "Damn, how did he hear about what we're working on?" that's someone we'd really love to hear from." - seman

"More open alternatives to Wikipedia." Wonder whatever happened to Google Knol... - Philipp Lenssen

They should start FF rooms for each of these. I'd contribute to a few. - Amir Gharaat

I think most of these are *great* ideas. This post isn't food for thought, it's a banquet :-) - Karim

Seems a little like bait? Some of the ideas are excellent reading and should be interesting to a few thinking about 'what they can do better'. Some of the other mentions (and wording in particular) leads me to wonder why go public with the list. - Charlie Anzman

Related problem: Using your inbox as a to-do list. The solution is probably to acknowledge this rather than prevent it. --- :-) - Kishore Balakrishnan

Jesus, this single page has more original content and ideas than the last 1000 ff and blog posts I read. Inspiring. - John Murray

AWESOME idea, thanks for sharing Paul... this is going to be fun to watch! - Susan Beebe

Haha i posted thast too. Although Paul is most more visible on FF, of course. - Akshay

Very interesting, especially #4 - Scott Schnaars

did any of the y combinator startup go big ? perhaps an ignorant question... a couple of them i know of are scribd.com, and a search engine for mechanical parts.. forgot the name. - Krishna Gade

We're working on #3. - Ryan Kuder

search engine for mechanical parts: http://octopart.com ? - Peter Stuifzand

Interesting: "Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they're getting. ... What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. " How does TV advertising treat its audience better than web advertising? - Constantinos Michael

TV advertising is generally more entertaining than web advertising. - Ajay Kapal

@ Peter yeah... I was talking about octopart thanks for the link. - Krishna Gade

@ Ryan, what is it ? do you have something outside to try ? - Krishna Gade

would have liked to see this idea for an iPhone App Builder make Paul's list....seems much for YC-esque: http://joelaz.com/post/4294791... - Adam Kazwell

@ Ryan Kuder, I've been looking into #3 for a while, I'd love to chat if your in the bay area - Kris

I definitely vote for better email, or better say, better communication tool. - Jan Horna

What I'm interested in are #5, 6, and 7. :) - imabonehead

Sorry to say... The "Y Combinator" team is a little ...ahem... short on business expertise. - Mitchell Tsai

Adam, there already is an iPhone App Builder. It's called Xcode. :) - Chris White

re 13, I wonder if the ESP-game trick can be spun out into an entire educational system. - j1m

Kushal Dave posted a message on Twitter

“I will smack the next person who says "mute point" where they mean "moot point" and where they probably don't even mean moot.”

yesterday at 10:16 am - Link

Take them to the moot court! - Jeremy Hylton

Will you be smacking for "hone in", too? - j1m

Paul Buchheit posted a message

“It seems that there is a cognitive limit to the number of social relationships a person can maintain. Twitter created an interesting product in part by limiting updates to 140 chars. What if they also limited them to 140 friends? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...”

yesterday at 3:42 am - Link

Arif Siddiquee, Mario Romero, Derick Valadao, Elliott Ng and 65 other people liked this

social MEDIA relationships have no limit :) - Luigi Centenaro

Nice idea. Though when you hit the limit, you would end up having to chose who to kick from your list. Unless that kicking were automated. Which brings us back to the original problem that defining such relationships in the first place often adds more worry than an auto-triggered-by-your-everyday-actions kind of approach (which does have its own world of problems, admittedly...). - Philipp Lenssen

Show 45 more comments

Did they meet Scoble? - Steve Rubel

Tag+Rate>set strike out limit/Filter/reduce/visible tags+but hopefully soon lists fold/collapse>file view../ Tag/Rinse repeat. This will come in handy also for Stephen Colbert when he joins his Thetruthiness room;-D, and I bet for you too Paul/FF Co, for the wood for the trees it may need a nice hot air balloon/or summat like a hand held mini helicopter which runs on its own propulsion! filter etc, Anyways a bit of Friendfood for the road, speaking of which its tummytime!:-P - Jason Brooks

The number of relationships one can maintain is clearly limited but the number of information sources one can process is far greater. I suspect most of the Twitter/FF/other social media friends are much more like RSS feeds than relationships. - timepilot

I seem to remember reading some research that theorised that the maximum size community/relationship we can maintain is limited at around 200 people. I'm trying to find where I read it now... *edit*: hah-nevermind, clicking on your link showed me exactly the research i was citing. - David Adam

Social media apps need multiple friend "TYPES", i.e. family, real-life friends, colleagues, online friends / acquaintances, and business contacts. This way you could have multiple groups of friends. I can dream... oh, wait Facebook already has this - they have groups with permission controls - and yes I really use that set of features!! I love that! - Susan Beebe

Dunbar's number is usually taken to be the maximal size of a cohesive group, not the maximal number of relationships one person can maintain. Some sources (including the Wikipedia article) confuse the two. It's an interesting question how the social sites would change with a friend limit. A room size limit on FriendFeed would also be an interesting experiment. - Michael Nielsen

Limiting Twitter friend count to 140 would drive slackers to other micro-blogging platforms. ;-) No really, we have (an growing number of) tools to filter relevant content from much greater number of users. - Nenad Nikolic via twhirl

Let us also not lose sight of the fact that, all other things being equal, the human organism is an engine of adaptation. I don't have a background in neurobiology or in developmental psychology, to say nothing of anthropology, but it's hardly dizzying leap to imagine that the emergence and subsequent evolution of the human mind was (and is) an exercise in testing and overreaching boundaries...[to be continued] - Derrick Burns

[continued]...which is to say: humbug. The internet with its shiny social media toys is nothing more or less than a novel environment, with its attendant resource distributions, evolutionary pressures, and selection mechanisms. What I think we'll find is that those pressures and mechanisms will affect us not only intellectually, but, over time, physiologically as well. Have 140 friends, or 1400. Whether for the better there's no way to say, but we will adapt. It's what we're best at. - Derrick Burns

150 relationships to maintain, sure: but isn't the old mantra of if you aren't building your network, you're doing it wrong also true? You may only really interact on a regular basis with 150 people, but if you only choose to subscribe to or friend 150 people, you'll never find out about new people or new ideas. Maybe subscriber 151 and higher are people trying out for slots 1 through 150: oh dear, did MySpace have it right with their top friends list? - Mark Trapp

I wonder how much that limit may be changing, though. It seems like we interact with more and more people all the time. - Christopher Granade

If you assume that the sole purpose of Twitter ought to be to the maintenance of social relationships then this might make sense. If on the other hand you look at Twitter as partially being about maintaining social relationships but also partially about getting fast breaking news early, meeting new friends, forming new social relationships, being informed about interesting subjects by fringe connections, broadcasting your own social media, etc. then the 140 limit becomes a significant barrier to use. - Thomas Hawk

depends on the degree of reciprocity. I can be a follower to many (with the right tools), maintain a sense of their identities (sometimes aided by good UI), and have only rare interactions with them that, while ephemeral, can be rich, useful, and/or meaningful. I think the new forms of asymmetric friending/following and the tools for interfacing among these folks change the rules. What is a "social relationship" in 2008? What is the cognitive overhead to "maintain" it? - tonx

LiveJournal did this for a while. People just got multiple journals and X-posted between them. An online friend isn't always the same thing as a real friend. - Jonathan Tang

What is better needed is an actual way to filter the significance of a large pool of social relationships from strangers to closest friend. The answer here is relatively simple and straightforward. Allow users to use a 10 point rating system for every contact with 5 being a default. By incorporating this rating data into future systems of rank, relevancy and eventually search it would be more powerful than anything that exists in social media today. - Thomas Hawk

There was an argument a while back that Free Twitter should be limited to say 150 followed, more should be paid for as that is increasingly the realm of pro-sumerdom. That would also allow us to discover the marginal value of online friendship. - Broadstuff

I don't think we have much in common with the villages, tribes, and other organizations that Dunbar was studying. All of the groups he studied had a common interest in cohesion as a unit as a means for survival. I'm not convinced that many of us view our social network interactions as "necessary" (at least, I don't see it that way). - Jason Wehmhoener

Dunbar's number is the reason I prefer to work for companies with fewer than 150 people. - Ginger Makela

If you can and want to keep up with 150 people then you will. Some of them will fade in and out of your social circle, effectively giving you many times that number if needed, but only around 150 at a time. (In your head that is.) - xero

The Dunbar number was arrived at by studying primates picking fleas off each other, not tribal humans ;) - Broadstuff

=Derrick, =timepilot. Also, note that even though we know about Dunbar's number, no one imposes an actual limit of 140 real-life friends. - j1m

I'm not sure that the people I have on my FriendFeed are what I would term "friends" or even "associates." They are contacts whose opinions I value, but if I don't hear from them in a while, it's not like I go out of my way to get back in touch. Same with some twitter folks...?? - Justin Long

agree with susan beebe. need to be able to group and prioritize friends. tweetdeck is starting to get at this - rob zand

The issue largely is that fringe contacts and even strangers produce valuable information even if infrequently. But by subscribing to large numbers in order to best get the chance of getting this information you also have to manage noise. Hide helps here. But fundamentally there are top contacts that are more important to you than strangers. By allowing users to rate these contacts as 10s and strangers as 1s you get the best of both under a new category of daily information based on personal relevancy. - Thomas Hawk

As Seth Godin always says it's not how many but who that's important - Jeremy Campbell via twhirl

We deliberately made the UI limiting within 30Boxes so that you would only try to keep up with 2-10 people (ostensibly those that matter most and impact your scheduling and decision making)... - Narendra

Thomas, I agree with your thinking completely. But in theory I can stay under the Dunbar's number here on FriendFeed (I am currently, and I hope to keep it that way) and still get the best of all worlds and the most valuable info so long as a few of the people I am subscribing to uber aggregate like you and Scoble. - Robert Seidman

Robert, even subscribing to the uber aggregaters though you miss a lot. Do a search for a term that you're interested in more broadly on FF and you'll find people you aren't subscribed to that are sharing interesting content that the uber aggregaters might miss. A system that allowed you to rate your higher priority contacts while still including the occasional quality content producer could produce the pinnacle of personal relevancy. - Thomas Hawk

Why does everyone try to define social software by just "friends?" That really sucks. People online are NOT my "friends." They are people I want in my social network. I have more than 8,000 business cards. Are you going to tell me that I haven't met 8,000 people and that I don't need to find a way to keep 8,000 in my rolodex? I would NEVER use such a software. Facebook limits me to 5,000 which makes it far less useful for business purposes than if it didn't have those limits. That said, I'm sure... - Robert Scoble

...that there is a market for such a limiting service. It might even be very popular. But then lots of stupid things are popular on the Internet. - Robert Scoble

140 chars limit instead of duct tape on Scoble's mouth ;) - silpol

This assumes a lot. Like that Twitter can count. - XDpaul

Paul this limit was invented by the famous 150 number in a time when society worked completly different. This is like saying "because a hundred years ago a person would read 10 books in their lifetime and could not grasp more, how about we limit it to the same number today?". People just need to learn what works for them, how _they_ are comfortable using these systems and then apply it. - Nicole Simon

Thomas,Even at 140 people I had to utilize a lot of the hide always functionality to make things manageable, and that was with a lot of time to screw around with it. Using "search everyone" to follow topics of interests works very well for me as is, and they could retool the "Best Of" some to surface the best stuff across wider areas. There are perhaps a lot of ways to achieve being the pinnacle of personal relevancy but none of them are easy :-) Still, I'd love to see it achieved. - Robert Seidman

Twitter's 140-character limit wasn't arbitrary, it worked well with SMS making it useful on the go. Is there some specific thing that having only 10 friends would help you with? - ⓞnor

Here's the problem with "best of" today. Everyone's "best of" ought to be influenced by personal relationships. If my wife posts something with 3 comments and 3 likes this is more personally relevant to me than a thread about what music people are listening to with 30 comments and 30 likes. By weighting my higher value contacts you ensure that my wife's post is seen in my personal "best of" daily stream even if it pushes out the overall higher ranked thread on music. - Thomas Hawk

perhaps a better system would be 10 friends and 100 people you know then unlimited follow relationships. You could even automate the promotion of people from follow to know. Then weight the best of pages with this info. - John Cooper via fftogo

Dunbar's 150 limit theory is a group theory, not and individual theory. A group is pretty united at that number, but if it passes the 150 limit "people start becoming strangers to each other". But an individual can handle way more interactions. I mean, it all depends on how you view "friendship". If you believe that intimacy is a must to consider people friends, than your # will be low. - Jay Cruz

I think that would be an interesting experiment. And I'm sure it would have avoided some of the scale issues they hit. - Dave Winer

Jason realized that his limit was 750 .. (but why email?) - Vishwajith

aren't all relationships social? - Jeremy Toeman

It is surprising that there's not more implementation of XFN across social web apps; as imperfect as it is, it certainly adds much-needed value to the "friend" paradigm. - mabisa

Implementation of XFN or FOAF? "That's the wonderful thing about standards-- there's so many to choose from!" Of course, with so many services implementing APIs nowadays, it's not unreasonable that someone could use Google AppEngine or similar to create XFN from pre-existing services. Such tools may spur more services to start directly implementing XFN. - Christopher Granade

that's a really cool idea...maybe I'll stop at 140 on identica and see what happens! - Sarah Perez

a limit on number of relationships has merit. hard to say what value of N should be. I am positive that tens of thousands is the WRONG answer. people with very high numbers use Twitter et.al as a publishing platform. - ron k jeffries

If you want to pass from theory to practice, let me recommend you the book "Knowledge Management Strategies: A Handbook of Applied Technologies", which has a chapter called "Implementing Communities of Practice to Manage Knowledge and Drive Innovation"... I also have here a paper called "Distributed Consolidation: Identity, Reputation, and the Prospects for Online Social Interaction", written this year, but I didn't read it yet. - Marcos Marado

Thomas, on filtering: why not be able to dynamically identify score by staring individual posts, like slashdot and plurk do - if I star a post, I give you a certain number of points; if I star a comment on a post, I give you a certain (but possibly lesser) number of points; and be able to give perhaps multiple stars to indicate significance; two kinds of negative stars: "don't show me this" or "block user" so the system can learn. Then people can aggregate points over time, too... - Justin Long

I would like some kind of Top Friends or Best Friends layer in both FriendFeed and Twitter. It can be anon or fully socialized. - Elliott Ng

Chris Reed posted a link

John McCain 2008 - On the Road WHERE?

Thursday at 5:00 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Michelle Trent and Shellee liked this

Want to know what's funny about this "On the Road in Iowa" page? It's the RSVP for an event in Sparks, NEVADA...... Apparently, there's a Nevada-Iowa border similar to the Iraq-Pakistan border.... - Chris Reed via Bookmarklet

Iraqistan? - j1m

As of this morning, this STILL hasn't been corrected..... - Chris Reed

Paul Haahr posted a link

David Byrne Journal: 07.09.2008: Modern Music - Die Soldaten

Thursday at 7:51 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Adewale Oshineye, silpol and Howard Trickey liked this

"There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmerman, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects?" - Paul Haahr via Bookmarklet

Of course, some of that alienating music is quite awesome. And is that really that different from the approach of, say, NIN? - j1m

"As classical music followed this bizarre, perverted road for some half of the 20th century, the audiences left in droves. I hope the composers were pleased, because it seems they got what they wanted in that respect. Their compositional ideas live, and even thrive in movies; but as a form of music and music-theater, they simply died — rumbling and roaring all the way." My response to most modern classical music in one word: "BLECH!" - Adam Lasnik

j1m posted a link

the ideology of voters v. politicians

Thursday at 10:14 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

(resharing to include the image) - j1m via Bookmarklet

Tessa MacDuff shared an item on Google Reader

The ideology of voters, congressmembers, and senators

Thursday at 7:59 pm - Link

Nice. - j1m

Paul Buchheit posted a link

Color + Design Blog / As Seen By The Color Blind by COLOURlovers

Thursday at 8:45 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Tiago Henriques, Gordon Bowman, Gavin, Chieze Okoye and 45 other people liked this

"In the U.S. 7% of the male population – or about 10.5 million men – and 0.4% of the female population either cannot distinguish red from green, or see red and green differently." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

Crap, they all look the same to me :( - Guillermo Esteves

Show 13 more comments

don't they say dogs are colorblind, too? - Michelle Trent

Interrresting veddy interesting...U.S pop 07 est. would work out about right to 10.5m for male (148m), and just..612174 for females based on 153m...why? Could it be a maternal genetic code thing../? 'Friendfeed for thought' anyway.. - Jason Brooks

Color-blindness is recessive and on the X chromosome, so women are far less likely to get it. - Alex Power

@Paul, the quote is completely misleading. 7% of males are anomolous trichomats, but their vision is much more like mine (or, I assume, yours) than like a color blind person's (dichromat's) vision. In particular, they can distinguish just as many colors as you or I, they just chop a different 3 dimensions out of the hyperspectral space of true colors (that is, they have different metamers). Dichromats are 2% of the male population. - j1m

Don't forget the tetrachromats!