"About a month ago in Bali, Indonesia, the inaugural 2008 Asian Beach Games came to its conclusion. Intended to promote sports and culture, the games (held every two years) encourage tourism, support local economies and allow host countries like Indonesia to present a more global face to the world." - Atul Arora
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"Watching her take the pistol from her belt, unbutton her jeans and slip into bed I somehow couldn’t quite equate the woman in my arms with the bodies I had seen in the local morgue, their heads shattered by gunshots at close range, murders she confessed to having committed. High on a combination of the heady tropical climate, local rum, grade A cocaine and in the arms of nubile 22-year-old, fantasy and reality became blurred. It felt like I was living in a Quentin Tarantino movie." - Paul Buchheit
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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 wanted to see this when it came out... but it didn't stay in the theaters very long. Please report back with whether it was worth renting. - Michael Leggett
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
@Alex, even if HC was the most gifted actor to walk the earth (which he isn't, for the record), nothing could have saved the giant turd that was Episodes 1, 2 and 3. - Ninjitsu Jason Huebel
CG: great, everything else: um. no... - Peter Butler
So far, the commenters on my site _don't_ want Twitter and FriendFeed to go mainstream. Do you want to keep these technologies to yourself? - Louis Gray
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)
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
No question, when a service hits critical mass, the conversation will change. Look at YouTube - people are always bemoaning the boorish, illiterate nature of the comments there. Will we stick around when Scoble or Louis pose an interesting question and half the comments are spam and profanity? - Laura Norvig
I don't want FF to go mainstream because then it will probably be blocked at work like FB, Myspace, etc... - Josh Begin
some ppl should think what this service is about: aggregating the feeds of people you trust and like aka friends as in friendfeed :) - Chris Hofmann
"As for social disruption, Hanauer gave a quick summary of what he meant: —If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks. —If people understand it, you’re too late. —If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks. So entrepreneurship is a dangerous field, he said. “The difference between being an idiot and being a genius is very, very thin.”" - Paul Buchheit
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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
Amazon was the first real real e-commerce business? Really? I get the feeling he doesn't understand why his own product succeeded. Amazon integrated user generated content and community into product recommendations. That's what made them different. There were many large bookstores on the net before Amazon. - todd
"“The difference between being an idiot and being a genius is very, very thin.” reminds me of one of may favorite quotes from Spinal Tap: "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" - David St. Hubbins - Mike Doeff
Of course. Ev looks at it like a business guy or an engineer, but the process isn't about what tools we use, rather its the idea that we all publish in order to inform each other. Blogging and twitter, from that point of view are the same thing, like landlines and cellphones are the same thing, tools for having one-one not-presence-based conversations. - Dave Winer
Somebody told me once: "when you write a post, be brief". Taking this rule to the extreme, microblogging is the best way of blogging around... ;) I tend to view Twitter more as an online conversation than anything else. Blogging is closer to journalism; Twitter closer to chat (although it's not exactly that). - Jordi Soler
@anne, followed shortly by "miguel," "alegra," and half my other classmates from NCKU, though my personal favorite was "tomhanks" the high school student. - Jessie
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
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
Probably there are more conditions: 1) the query is navigational (e.g.: [youtube]); 2) the query is popular; 3) there are many query refinements (e.g.: [youtube u2]) - Ionut
@Joelle, ah but we're starting to see the "Everything must be free" philosophy come back around and bite us all in the ass. Google needs to move more ads, they need you to stick around their page longer. Just wait until Google misses an earnings call... - mikepk
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
"Nicknamed 'Koobface' – see what they did there? – the virus can't actually be downloaded on the site itself, but through a link to a bogus Flash player upgrade site." and how to get rid of it: http://www.facebook.com/securi... (technically, it's malware - but who cares) - Mona N.
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This is a big deal - non tech ppl were asking me about it! - Sarah Perez
