"Modular Innovation is fully explained within the article and provides links to more details for those that are interested and take the time to read the article." - The Product Guy
Hey I lost my car keys on twitter.Anyone see them? - Mark Forman
I was unclear, I think; I don't know if the entries are disappearing. I just meant the feature had temporarily disappeared, as in, it's disabled. My fault for trying to be too succinct. - Phil Crissman
"It's dead as far as progress, updates, or other signs of life. As a product it has a lot of good things going for it. But, any company that has no updates or news for a year -- is effectively dead, if not actually dead." - The Product Guy
"what about how it compares with firefox 3??" - The Product Guy
Sure it's fast, but it does not compare to the functionality and features of Firefox 3 (And well, even 2). Also FF3 is pretty darn fast itself :) - Bartek Gniado
Netflix enters the Net-to-TV video race with the introduction of a $99.99 player that enables its members to stream up to 10,000 movies and TV shows. The company has let paying members of its DVD-by-mail service watch content on their computers for some t - Leo Laporte
Interesting, but not quite there yet. What I'd really love is the ability to watch Netflix movies through my Apple TV, but I have a feeling that's not going to happen any time soon. This just adds yet another box next to the TV, and what's worse, I need to keep my PC on while I use it, eating up more electricity. - Raoul Pop
Looks like the device doesn't require a PC to work. Requirements are internet access, a tv, and a netflix account. - Jason Kaneshiro
it would be even better if they had movies worth downloading - The Product Guy
Looks like the PC doesn't need to be on while you watch... but you need it manage your Queue and select movies for streaming - Michael Markman
I never did use Facebook much myself. And I signed up more than a decade ago. - Morton Fox
Facebook is just another web services company. In the near future, social networking is giong to be a feature, not an end in itself. Their only real hope is that they can get more sites to adopt FB Connect. - Steve Lynch
via Alert Thingy
Forums have moderators, multiple threads on a subject are locked or deleted, but almost always there is a link back to the source thread. - Mike Fruchter
There is a link back to the source on FF - Glenn Slaven
What's the problem with discussions taking place in different locations? It's not like someone is jumping from one to another making them confusing. - Alejandro S.
Alejandro, there is no problem with it! There is just an ongoing complaint of some about the fragmentation of "comments" and this is further fragmentation. But it's not the fault of friendfeed or any software -- it's just how PEOPLE work. Many different people wind up having the same conversations. Some people participate in the same conversation with different groups of people. That's how people work in real life and...anywhere else they are. - Robert Seidman
FriendFeed's search capability mitigates this somewhat. If I were at a computer, rather than my phone, I could search for "one failing of FriendFeed" and find the relevant conversations. - Ontario Emperor
Discussion fragmentation will happen on various sites. The problem the author has is that even on FriendFeed there is not one place to collect comments. This has to do with the fact that friendfeed really does not look for duplication. Several people can share the same story, but they are not linked in any way. This is definitely something friendfeed needs to fix or they will become a victim of their own success, the noise will become too great. - Rob Diana
Rob, if FriendFeed were a tool designed for bloggers and used only by bloggers I'd agree with you. Right now, there is a much higher percentage of bloggers subscribing to feeds of other bloggers than there will be as time passes. I'm pretty sure it won't be the only use case for FriendFeed. - Robert Seidman
Yes, conversations are distributed. Sometimes that's a good thing. - Mike Reynolds
I agree with Mike -- it allows conversations to take different directions on the same topic - Shey
If FF added the ability to search for a particular link in the API bloggers would be able to pull the different conversations back into their blogs... I think conversations going in different directions are interesting - Sean Reiser
via twhirl
@Sean the various conversations are good, and yes the links are missing. As Shey said, I developed YackTrack which does put all of the conversations for a URL on one page. I think FF needs to make it easier to figure out that there are comments on multiple shares. I know you can search and various other multi-step things, but it really should be easier in an aggregation service like this. - Rob Diana
Is it possible to search via the API? If you did a search for a post title instead of the URL then most related shares would be returned. - Colin Walker
@Colin there is a standard search in the API which can be used for both keyword and URL searches. They work fairly well. The bigger question is whether duplicates can be grouped or linked together to make it easy to find the conversations. I know they can be, I don't know if it is on the FF roadmap. - Rob Diana
@RobertSeidman I think if more people join FF, the problem will just be spread out more. So, we would still see a decent amount of "share" duplication but it won't increase exponentially. As "early adopters", we tend to find the things that make a site more difficult to deal with than it should be. If we make FF easier to use, everybody wins. - Rob Diana
Rob Diana, it depends on what you want the product to be and how closely that mirrors what FF wants it to be. What if for example, a guy like Steve Rubel who is seemingly at least 2-3 days behind Louis Gray in the links he posts. And what if he has many people following him that don't follow Louis. is it bad for the link to show up again to Steve's followers as a link from Steve? - Robert Seidman
Robert Seidman, first let me say FF is doing a fantastic job and I am just suggesting. Also, by removing duplication I am saying group the links in some way so that we can see that two people shared the same thing. This may be getting away from the "people-centric" idea but that is just the idea that I had (see yacktrack). Everyone who shares a link should get credit in some way. - Rob Diana
@Hutch The Bret Taylor post makes sense for FF as it is totally person centric. I am not sure if link centric idea really works in their model, but I am sure they could find a way. Everyone, I promise I will shut up soon, this topic is obviously very dear to me. - Rob Diana
Rob, I hope you never shut up about that which you're passionate about! I'm all for de-duping and FriendFeed needs it. my preference is that individuals can set the preferences (much like w/"hide") rather than anything systemically done on FriendFeed's end. - Robert Seidman
This should like be like the word press feature just implemented. http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008.... FF comment/content recommendations based off the most active topics. With the main goal of allowing you to show were the topic started, and the option to go to that thread or others on the topic. The feature is there currently via the search function, lets make it automatic. - Mike Fruchter
What's funny is this complaint about duplicates in friendfeed has been mentioned before many times by many different bloggers. Is anybody working on a technical solution to "de-dupe" blogging topics? How about a service that checks your draft headline against google and says - someone already wrote about this :) - Jason Kaneshiro
I think the problem with removing duplication is the end result: another Metafilter. Keeping conversations decentralized allows comments to remain at least somewhat orderly and at least centered around people you know and people they know. Instead of combining things into single, massive comment threads, I'd rather see links to other instances of that shared something so you can see what other people are saying about it. - Akiva Moskovitz
We all have the same problem, seen the same items multiple time. But you have to keep in mind that because this aggregates all your activity if you read a post and bookmark it on any of the services you have connected to FF it will show up here, so even if you don't want to, you are contributing to the problem. - Gadiel Rivera
What if FriendFeed created a search "view" where you could enter the url you want to track ALL references to (through various services and people) to aggregate all the comments there grouped by discussion. At least then a blogger could find and participate in those conversations (which they may not be aware of otherwise) and FF could create a blog wiget for that so it would be easy for bloggers to include the conversations from FF in their posts. Everyone wins. - Lindsay Donaghe
Lindsay, that has been done by other services as well. YackTrack is one that does what you ask, though it does not yet post back to the comment stream. Akiva has a good idea with the links to other posts and it may stay in line with the people centric approach of friendfeed. - Rob Diana
Hmm, YackTrack sounds good but which url do you use? I just tried the one for this conversation (http://www.technovia.co.uk/200...) but get no results, though I would expect this entire conversation to appear there... - Lindsay Donaghe
Lindsay, I have tried searching for the url that got shared, but it is a url for feedburner so I am not sure exactly what is happening there. The main story url will not show these comments either. So, I will look into this as most of the google reader stuff will be through rss of some sort. - Rob Diana
Rob, iIf you get all that sorted, and it can resolve urls back to their source too (if the link was posted from the feed) then it will be quite an awesome tool. I'll keep an eye on it. :) - Lindsay Donaghe
The problem with totally decentralised comments from my perspective is simple: I like to read what a wide range of people are saying about something I've posted, so I can better understand their points of view. If I post something and someone comes up with a great critique of it in a comment I don't see, I'll never be able to learn from it - and that's a bad thing. - Ian Betteridge
Conversations take place in a lot of places on the web. It's impossible for you to see every comment people makes about the stuff you write. - Alejandro S.
""This idea that you just sit there and interact, touch, you don't have to learn anything, that naturalness really draws people in. So, it's been a strong success so far, and that form factor is going to get cheaper and smaller," predicted Microsoft's chairman." - RAPatton
I really like this kind of functionality -- where you can just dive right in without having to learn a lot. I think that's why the Wii has been so successful. - Ginger Makela
"That seems to be a common theme. BBC has been doing some good things and been paying special attention to usability and overall user experience that I enjoy, too." - The Product Guy
"There are many more options than I will be able to cover in this series; that is why I had to limit the scope to the most popular. (I could spend every day, from now to the end of the year, and would probably be still reviewing more wikis. )" - The Product Guy
