The First FriendFeed Event: MSFT and YHOO

I find it more on a personal level, where-as you are seeing everyday people share their opinions on the matter, and not just hearing it from people who are so savvy within the niche.

It’s also more interesting because I was in a few of those conversations!

possibly related posts at it’s best: Hey Hog, Stay Away from the Chunky Chews!

I find with all this stuff I’m less interested in the news/speculation, and more interested in how this impacts my life.

What does this mean for Flickr, Delicious, Pipes and Firebug? Those are the pieces of Yahoo that have an impact on my life.

Unfortunately, only time will tell.

Robert … tonight was fascinating, and I agree another step in the internet evolution. I agree with this quote from you on freindfeed:

“Yeah, reading through the page-after-page of items, it’s like a real history. I wish I was able to select this four-hour period and save it as a permanent record of how we all reacted to the news.”

Tonight, I learned about Gillmor Gang real time in twitter, listened in on the phone, and it felt like we were all part of something big.

Funny how there are only 4 comments on this blog post, yet there are 11 replies to the link to this post on FriendFeed. Hmmmmm.

why r u promoting friend feed so much each one of your recent posts contians almost stuff and vieled promotion of friend feed sure u must have got some good bucks under the table for this act of yours

does irs know your vieled transactions

ff I am not paid by FriendFeed. I cover things that early adopters do. And early adopters are using FriendFeed in huge numbers.

The only thing more boring than watching friendfeed is listening to golf on the radio.

Danny: boring is the new fascinating.

Golf, huh? Ouch.

http://friendfeed.com/searchengines

It is no different than chatting or posting on forums.

It is quantity no quality focussed

What really matters are the opinions from industry movers and shakers, insiders and powerful investors – not the geeks on friendfeed.’

What do they know????

How sophisticated are they about life and business???

Just created an account to see what happens – others seem to be so obsessed with SearchEngines

SearchEngines.

Let’s go through who is on FriendFeed’s page that I linked to above.

Louis Gray — one of top 50 bloggers on Techmeme Leaderboard.
John Furrier — entrepreneur, pioneer in audio blogging, my ex boss.
Loic Le Meur — CEO of Seesmic and runs one of Europe’s largest Web conferences.
Shel Israel — my book co author, but long time entrepreneur and insider in Silicon Valley.
Paul Buchheit — one of the founders of FriendFeed, but also one of the pioneers at Google.
Michael Arrington — Time just named him one of the most 100 influential people alive.
Steve Gillmor — runs Gillmor Gang, which now is on TechCrunch.
Paul Kedrosky — is a VC and influential blogger, among many other things.
Rob Greenlee — was one of the earliest audio pioneers on Internet now works at Microsoft on Zune team.
Dan Farber — executive at CNET.
Bret Taylor — founder of FriendFeed and pioneer at Google (was the guy who wrote Gmail).
Jason Calacanis — founder of Mahalo and Weblogs Inc (heard of Engadget).
Jeff Nolan — was an executive at SAP, now is one at NewsGator.
Chad Dickerson — executive at Yahoo.
Jason Goldman — worked at Google.
Allen Stern — founder of Centernetworks, an influential blog network.
Matthew Ingram — influential blogger.
Yosi Taguri — works at Microsoft.
Jeremy Zawodny — is Yahoo’s most influential blogger.
Dave McClure — runs 1/3 of Web 2.0 expo, teaches Facebook at Stanford, etc.
Dick Hardt — investor in Flickr

Should I keep going? That’s just on the first two pages, and I skipped over a lot of people.

The fact that you have no idea who any of these people are, or didn’t spend the time to look them up on Google, tells me that we should spend no time listening to your drivel. Thanks.

Robert – u rock, mate — screw the haters, screw those who are stuck in the status quo and are not prepared to explore the new.

It’s going to be a very very interesting week!

That’s a nice crowd you’re with, Robert.

Comparing Friendfeed to Techmeme, well, I guess it comes down to what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for more news on the event, I guess Techmeme is a lot better. If you’re looking for your friends reactions to it, it would be ff. It also depends on who your friends are. Looking for the reactions of the industry leaders, you have them on friendfeed since they are your friends. But ff sure does look noisier.

FriendFeed +is+ noisier, but I like the noise a lot. TechMeme was just a lot of repeating of the noise, er, news. Got boring really quickly. FriendFeed was much more interesting and much more accessible.

Hey Robert, I’ve just done the comparison of Techmeme to FriendFeed and found neither of them interesting today. My out-of-the-way feeds were 100 times more interesting… always good to have a balanced outlook.

That’s one of the issues I have with FriendFeed. I really have difficulty reading FriendFeed and finding the useful content I haven’t already come across in my Twitter tracks, @newsjumper memetweeter user or Google Reader. I’m reminded of the Wikipedia study paper I read, and the size of articles as an indication of quality… I’d much rather quality over quantity which is all I feel I’m getting with FriendFeed at the moment. That and an awkward interface. With a few management and filtering tweaks I can see a use for it, just not as it stands.

There’s a New York Times article on Friends filtering out the noise seems bunk to me, they only make more noise about the same things – which is fine if you like to immerse yourself in the early adopter echo-chamber, but that’s not entirely my thing – though it can be a fun conversation and make me feel less on the sidelines when I do.

Still, I like you challenging my method with the passion you show for new technologies that you actually use, you just haven’t won me over with your FriendFeed advocacy yet.

FriendFeed or Techmeme? Well, I don’t really use neither of them

Why? Well… my life doesn’t revolve around things like this as much as yours. Besides sleeping/eating/etc.. roughly I spend 60% working (on something I love BTW), 25% with the family, and 15% on hobbies – you might consider that reading blogs (like yours), etc. is a hobby, but fortunately I also have others away from the computer (bless them!!).

And of course, it’s really cool to live a life like that too . I don’t swear against FriendFeed, I just don’t use it.

Am I an early adopter? I’d say I’m an “early observer”. In other words, I don’t go nuts about Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. but I’m very much aware of them and how they’re impacting other people’s lives (early adopters for now . And I’m sure I’m not alone. There probably are a lot more “early observers” than “adopters”, don’t you think?

Oh and I can’t stand the noise You’re certainly one of a kind

RBA: well, if you don’t want noise, just read the New York Times tomorrow and be done with it!

But I like to understand how people react to the news. I don’t like just having one source of news. And, because I don’t just want to be spoon fed the news by the New York Times (or worse, someone on TV) I need to put up with the noise.

But, yes, FriendFeed needs to have a better way to see just what you want to see. Even FriendFeed’s search is broken right now.

+++

Craig: I wish you shared some of your stuff with us in FriendFeed. Then we could comment on it even more. I find it’s the stuff with comments that really has the value. That’s what grabbed someone’s attention.

I think it really depends on the inflow you have (how many friends you have on FriendFeed). FriendFeed with one friend is really really lame. With 400? Now you start seeing what’s cool about it.

But, I am a news junkie and, so, I’m biased toward that.

Of course I still keep up with about 630 RSS feeds too.

See my earlier comment, though. There is NO WHERE ELSE I can go to hear such a smart group of influential/connected people “talking” about today’s news in live space. That’s why I like FriendFeed.

Robert,

Fun and interesting for you because you’re participating, but frankly it was pointless for someone on the outside.

But then Techmeme was ridiculous, too. One story?

And I have skin the game as a stockholder and so I am interested, just not *that* interested.

I see this all as a sign that the tech blogger space as become far too myopic and self-absorbed.

Less is more.

Well, true. If you aren’t a participant then just getting the jist of the news is OK. Heck, I got that at 5 p.m. on ABC News on Radio.

But I thought we were writing blogs not for the late adopters, or the non influencers, or the non passionate ones, but for the early, influential, passionate types. At least that’s who I care about here and on my various places I do things.

The person who is happy hearing news in 30-second-digestable chunks just isn’t really going to be too happy with long videos, or tons of blog posts.

Keep in mind that the mass media is even worse. Did you see all 2,045 articles over on Google News about this? http://news.google.com/?ncl=1154376246&hl=en&topic=h

Come on people, the amount of “noise” involved in any of these social sites is directly related to the people that you follow. If it’s getting too noisy, just don’t follow them.

I’ve not started using friendfeed yet so I can’t speak to that one but in general you have power to choose who you are connected to and filter out the stuff you don’t want to see. It’s all about contributing to the conversation and choosing which conversations you want to be a part of.

It all comes down to the people, really. That’s why you see things like Kevin Rose, founder of Pounce (a twitter clone and competitor), start to use twitter regularly. You end up going where the people are that you want to interact with, regardless of the tool involved.

Big-O: true. And Google News is even noisier than FriendFeed. Check this out: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=Yahoo&btnG=Search — those are almost all articles done by “professionals.”

If the people are interesting, then the noise is interesting. If it’s someone you want to hear from then you’re going to be happy to see more of it.

Although, how does friendfeed handle people posting the same content to their different networks? It seems like if you had that aggregated that you’d end up with a lot of repeat information.

No, I didn’t look at google news because I know that you are right about what I will find.

I guess what I want is the Bloomberg or WSJ piece that will be based on hours of research and interviews with the people who were in the rooms making the decisions. Or at least, that’s what any half-decent news business would be working on right now.

I’m looking for meaning in the madness that is now on Techmeme and ff and google news.

Whoever can come up with a way to find the signal in amongst all this noise ultimately will win the eyeballs, and rest will just be chattering amongst themselves.

Bloggers were once a great source of insight, but now they’re just becoming noise. Not a new thing, but its reached a point where the noise is deafening and I fund I just shut it out. Something like 9/11 taking over Techememe I can understand, but MicroHoo? Come on.

So the high quality MSM again become preeminent, if they smart enough to figure out that they need to be *less* like blogs, twitter and ff and more like their old selves.

OK, I eat crow. The signal comes from a blog. This is the only item that should be at the top of Techmeme:

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080503/microhoo-the-odd-couple-meetings-led-nowhere/

Ok Dude – check it out …am going to be as impartial and unbiased as I can possible be . I did a quick 90 secnd scan of both feeds. TO me the comparison is as follows – one of them is a like talkshow = Jay Leno , the other is like a mix between a talk show and a newscast = CNBC . No prizes for guessing .