DISQUS

I suspect you are right. Twitter may "win" in microblogging but winning in microblogging is something that probably amounts to a hill of beans.

I'm amused that the Facebook employee didn't realize the irony of the fact that with their recent redesign they've done a better job of destroying the value of the social graph on their site than a thousand Robert Scobles adding anyone & everyone to their "friend" list.

I was going to write a post about how Facebook Connect solves the wrong problem and Google Friend Connect is a me too effort from Google that doesn't even consider what users want. Just like Google's other anti-Facebook me too effort OpenSocial.

Then I realized I have better things to do with my time and your post already said it better than I can.

Mike,
Causing controversy and then apologizing the next day after you've generated page views at the cost of attacking people is not a virtue. Especially when this is a pattern of behavior going back years. See at http://burningbird.net/connecting/im-right-im-r... for Shelley Powers talking about the same thing 2 years ago.

Robert,
I don't see any leadership or advise coming from your blog, just panic. In times like this panic only makes things worse.

What I worry about is that the fundamental problem underlying the crises (mortgage backed securities and other financial instruments so obtuse that no one knows how much their assets are worth nor how much those of their creditors are worth) is not something that looks like it will be easily addressed even with the bail out.

I see someone has beaten me to the punch and pointed out that if you build a RESTful service with JSON instead of XML payloads you get all of your touted benefits of XML-RPC and all the benefits of conforming to the Web's architecture. Thus having your lunch and eating it too. :)

I assume you mean "1 out of 10" and not "1 to 10" when talking about people who will actually download mobile apps. I think you are underestimating how accessible moves like integrating the App Store into iTunes will make downloading apps to a mobile phone.

Does anybody in Silicon Valley use Facebook or do you people just regurgitate each others talking points? This is as clueful an analysis of Facebook's new changes as TechCrunch's "FriendFeedization of Facebook" garbage this morning.

>So therefore it's just a matter of time before there are more open alternatives that don't require any sort of sacrifice to use.

People said that about the iPod as well. It's just a matter of time, etc. Unfortunately Apple isn't the kind of company that stands still and waits for competition to catch up. Even if Google Android, Symbian, etc can clone the OS functionality and even the app store while handset makers clone the hardware, it will take them a few years. What do you think Apple will be doing during that time?

I don't see how the XMPP service is related to identi.ca-like federation. How do you see the two being connected besides them both being related to Twitter exposing APIs?

Unsubscribed. Wake me up when FSJ returns.

A similarly naive question is why Google needs to be in the mobile phone OS, social networking or office productivity businesses...is it because someone else is making money at it?

Robert,
It isn't clear to me why you are taking my post so personally. Regardless of how Twitter is implemented, allowing a user to have 25,000 followers and 25,000 people they are following will cause scale problems. There are different optimizations you could make (Single Instancing is not the panacea you claim, see my post at for http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/05/26/So... more) but it doesn't change the fact that Twitter has made some bad design and feature decisions.

As to whether people who generate massive load on the system should be charged...isn't that a fact of life everywhere else? Internet service providers like Comcast are known to fire customers who use too much bandwidth, in fact your buddy Dave Winer just blogged about that happening to him. Flickr, Y! Mail and a bunch of other services also charge for "pro" features. Why would Twitter pursuing such a business model be so wrong? Would you prefer to have ads in your Twitter streams?

I'm glad you got to talk to Dave and he injected some perspective into your "Data Portability" invectives.

On the other hand, I don't understand where how you'd come to the conclusion that sharing content or making it portable (i.e. photos, videos, blog posts) is the hard part compared to sharing identities across different services. Don't we already have the former happening today?

The family thing was an issue at one point but that mostly dissipated after my dad's second term as president ended.

PS: Thanks for the kind words.

If Facebook made it easy for apps to extract my email address, home address and birthday wouldn't that make it Heaven on Earth for identity thieves?

There are people on my Facebook friend's list I barely know who asked me to add them because they read my blog or are fans of software I've written. Should they now be able to extract my phone number, birthday, home address, email, education history, etc into "Random Web 2.0 Wannabe Social Network" because of this relationship? As a Facebook user, my answer is NO.

More thoughts at http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/01/03/Fa...

It wasn't a hoax. I know because I used it several weeks ago and it seems links to it in various popular blogs only showed up after I mentioned it in my post at http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/08/27/Wh...

The person from whom I originally found out about the application is a rather trustworthy source.

You're surprised that Orkut has ~600,000 unique users a month which is less than Vampirefreaks.com and Hoverspot.com? How unpopular did you think the service was?

Oh, maybe you were confused by the fact that they seem to have a huge number of page views per user (in the hundereds)? That usually points to a badly designed user interface in this age of AJAX.

Robert,
It weird to compare the traffic from RSS aggregators to the traffic from a single site. TechCrunch has over 300K people reading it via RSS. I'm pretty sure there are few sites that can send Arrington more traffic than he can get from people who are already subscribed to his feed.

PS: You only have A-list bloggers like yourself to blame for the content on TechMeme. Most A-list bloggers simply regurgitate and hype the same merger and product announcements from big companies that you can get from the mainstream tech press. Why should TechMeme link to some second hand opinions of the news when they can link to the original news articles?

I have to agree with Gabe. I'm glad I don't have to read about every hardware company's new product launch on TechMeme.

And I'm always pleasantly surprised at some of the geek news that makes it there. Speaking of which, today there was a link to the newest version of Emacs on TechMeme. I need to install that this weekend. :)

Doesn't this violate YouTube's ToS?

> I forgot about Flickr’s “pro” accounts. But if that’s really returning a huge return on investment I’d be very surprised.

Do you even use Flickr? The site has ads as well. I'm pretty sure Yahoo! wouldn't have shut down a large, profitable service like Yahoo! Photos to replace it with an unprofitable Flickr.

Seriously, sometimes you need to pause and reflect before spewing on these threads. I doubt the Flickr folks appreciate your questionable conclusions about their business in your attempt to make Zooomr look good.

>Seriously, can you see an executive at Microsoft advocating putting YouTube videos into Microsoft’s search results?

Sorry to burst your bubble but YouTube, MySpace and Google Video results regularly show up in video search results on Live Search - examples include

- http://search.live.com/video/results.aspx?q=cur...
- http://search.live.com/video/results.aspx?q=you...
- http://search.live.com/video/results.aspx?q=how...

Robert,
Try these queries
1.) http://technorati.com/search/www.25hoursaday.co...

Verdict: Fairly complete and fresh. Main problem is that first couple of results are blogroll hits which are ANCIENT but always seem to show up at the top of results. Also missing http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?sh... at 1:18PM PST.

2.) http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=Bcite:http%3A...

Verdict: Most complete and up to date. Main complaint is that it doesn't allow you to pivot on the results of your search like Technorati does.

3.) http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%...

Verdict: Almost complete, very fresh results and allows you to check the popularity of linking blogs and incoming links. Historically, this engine misses blog posts that are found by Technorati and Bloglines/

4.) http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&a...

Verdict: Missing a ton of posts. Of course, if you wanna see how really pathetic this service is then drop the 'www' from my domain and click on http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&a...

How come everyone figured out how to do the right thing except Google blog search?

I've found Google Blog search to be joke compared to Technorati, Bloglines Citation Search, IceRocket and even Feedster. OK, that last one was a joke. :)

The point still remains that it is probably the worst blog search engine in active development today. Luckily for them, the prominent links from other Google properties are enough to give them higher marketshare than all the other players.