Veronica

Unsubscribe - Jeff McNeill via twhirl

sometimes when the VCs or stock market love you, it can make you slip away from sound business practice. I am someone who always advocates giving employees some space and enough fun (we all work better when we like our job), and for flat structures and openness. But some of the things at google seemed preposterous - very dotcom excess. Excess is frowned on at the moment. - Joelle Nebbe

My point is more along the lines of: it's better to keep a smaller group of star employees happy, than to hire with abandon and then have to cut the quality for everyone. - Chris White

Hmmm. I once mocked the idea of Google selling any of its properties. Now it seems plausible. And maybe sensible too. Who knows... - Nikos Anagnostou

("Like" in this case just means interesting, in case there's any doubt.) - Bruce Lewis via fftogo

Completely agree with you Chris.... However, at this point, I wonder what choice GOOG has. IMO, to get to the nirvana stage of having a smaller group of happy employees, GOOG will have to do lay-offs and I doubt they will do something like that. - Bindu Reddy

Bindu, yes. It's just too bad that they couldn't prevent the problem while they had the chance, but I've seen a lot of companies go crazy on hiring when times are good. - Chris White

While it's good to treat employees well, I don't think it's good when the perks / benefits get so cushy that employees are more focused on them than the product that's being made. As a case in point - look at the car companies. - Jason Kaneshiro

Jason, I'm not sure that's a fair criticism of Google. In my experience, most of the people were focused on their jobs and excited about them. The perks just made it more attractive and were used as advertising for hiring and partnering. The car companies are something completely different and I have no direct experience with them, but it does seem having a profitable company should be job #1. - Chris White

Jeff, were you trying to unsubscribe to someone (or something)? I'm pretty sure typing unsubscribe as a comment doesn't do that in FriendFeed. ;) - Chris White

Jeff is not subscribed to me right now, Chris. :-) I can take it. - Louis Gray

@Chris, I didn't mean that it's happened today, but if Google keeps going on with the perks you will get there. Yahoo! is a great example of a company where people lost focus on the product. Many companies during Web 1.0 overdid it with the perks, too. Google should cut back now to avoid turning into Yahoo! at the very least. - Jason Kaneshiro

Jason, hiring more people is not as cost-effective as hiring really good people, and treating them really well. You can control how many people you hire, and therefore you can control your costs. Perks are rarely a huge percentage of your overall costs. - Chris White

Sometimes what the star engineers want most is more engineers. :-) - Kevin Fox

The article is misleading. "He says the company is 'not going to give' an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore." This has nothing to do with 20% projects. It just means that a project like Lively is not going to get an entire team working full-time on it. - Andrew Bonventre

Begs the question[s] what is innovation? what is net neutrality? how does google view invention & patents? when will users get to share in the upside of how data mining & tracking is used to drive google profit-centers? what is the value &/or definition of "privacy" & "fair use"? - Scott Moskowitz

+1 to Andrew. The WSJ clearly says "20 people" projects, which is completely different from 20% projects. This article confuses the two, in my opinion. - Matt Cutts

But isn't "hiring more people" the mistake Google has made? Otherwise, why are they supposedly cutting costs at present? Meanwhile, there are really passionate people to whom perks are completely secondary. Those that work for the love of an idea even without getting paid and for Jolt cola and a pizza. Those are the folks who work at startups. - Jason Kaneshiro

@Jason You appear to be making the assumption that the majority of existing Google employees hold perks above all else as their primary reason for working there. Startups offer a certain dynamic, and a larger company offers another. Both can be rich with or completely devoid of passion and perks, but the two are not mutually exclusive. - Andrew Bonventre

Sometimes what the star engineers want most is fewer engineers. Or so I hear. - Jim Norris

Lol Bob i dont think Larry & Sergey will be sleeping like babys...the N97 seems good competition for android in my opinion - Eldon via twhirl

Eldon, there is no, and there will be no competition in near future for Android. If you want functionality, a open world of apps, there is no alternative. When you want to have a lifestyle gadget get an iPhone. Android (which is a whole platform, not a single device) is for tech guys, not for snobs. - Ryo

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 Blogger (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 Blogger (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