Disqus - Latest Comments for Carnage4Life

Re: Which way will Twitter go? (Scripting News)

Carnage4Life — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:50:54 -0000

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?

Re: Dare left something out (and it's important) (Scripting News)

Carnage4Life — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:59:55 -0000

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. :)

Re: Soon it will be time to start over, again (Scripting News)

Carnage4Life — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 09:57:27 -0000

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.

Re: iPhone Reconciliation - RussellBeattie.com

Carnage4Life — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:21:37 -0000

>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?

Re: Mobile is Amazing - RussellBeattie.com

Carnage4Life — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:16:32 -0000

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.

Re: Josh is wrong — geeks totally rule!

Carnage4Life — Fri, 12 May 2006 17:28:07 -0000

Do you have the numbers to back up that Flickr is a good business or does the definition of good business simply mean that the founders and early investors recouped their investment?

Re: Oh goody, a fresh batch of Nooglers

Carnage4Life — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:33:14 -0000

Unsubscribed. Wake me up when FSJ returns.

Re: Is Facebook’s redesign aimed at Silicon Valley, not everywhere else?

Carnage4Life — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:39:21 -0000

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.

Re: Microsoft: More on the Gay Rights Position…AGAIN

Carnage4Life — Sat, 07 May 2005 19:28:04 -0000

Sometimes you people in the peanut gallery irritate the heck out of me.

Re: Windows Live adds support for Opera 9 Preview

Carnage4Life — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 23:54:52 -0000

Live.com != Windows Live

Re: No AJAXy women?

Carnage4Life — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:35:12 -0000

I'm tired of seeing the same faces at the all these technology conferences. Given that I'm going to ETech, I'm doubt I'm going to go to Mix '06 to see the exact same crowd a few weeks later.

Re: Microsoft takes down Chinese blogger (my opinions on that)

Carnage4Life — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 13:37:12 -0000

Couple of points

1.) Given that you work at Microsoft and know folks on the Spaces team, isn't the intelligent thing to do to get the facts straight first before faning the flames of speculation and making inflammatory comments (e.g. "state run thug")?

2.) Christopher Payne runs MSN Search, he is nowhere in the management hierarchy for MSN Spaces.

This post seriously makes you come off as a jack ass.

Re: Dave worries about Microsoft

Carnage4Life — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 13:04:28 -0000

I think the RSS reading experience in IE is poor precisely because of people like you and Dave Winer. Millions of people will now be introduced to RSS and view it as a poor cousin to "favorites/bookmarks" because we are worrying too much about pissing off developers of existing RSS readers and people like Dave Winer.

From my perspective, I think shipping a poor experience is worse than not shipping anything at all. Bah.

Re: Google announces more sleepless nights ahead for MSFT product managers

Carnage4Life — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 20:36:09 -0000

>Nobody loves MS Office. They tolerate it because it is relatively ubiquitous (which it became thanks to illegal tying practices).

What illegal tying practices? I don't remember any antitrust lawsuits about MS Office.

Re: Has Microsoft changed? WinFS post getting questioned internally

Carnage4Life — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 22:11:53 -0000

Robert,
There were a lot of things wrong with WinFS, none of them had anything to do with the Web.

PS: It's quite provocative to claim this is Ray Ozzie killing BillG's pet projects he didn't like without proof.

Re: Microsoft’s #1 blogger? Major Nelson?

Carnage4Life — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 13:36:33 -0000

I'm pretty sure that http://messengersays.spaces.msn.com is probably just as popular if not more popular than his blog. 300 to 500 comments on a blog post are not out of the ordinary for that blog either.

Re: The blog counting game

Carnage4Life — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 22:50:27 -0000

I'm pretty sure no one with a clue at Microsoft has said we have more blogs than any other service because MySpace's published number of blogs is higher than any number we've published. What I have seen mentioned is that according to ComScore, there were more unique users visiting MSN Spaces WORLDWIDE than any other such site on the planet.

Feel free to point out that MySpace generates more page views than we do with less unique users visiting the site. Bonus points for pointing out than none of your A-list blogging buddies use any of our services.

Re: Scoble says half of all Live Spaces aren’t blogs*

Carnage4Life — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 23:16:27 -0000

Using your logic [or lack thereof] it seems that an internal blog hosted on MovableType isn't a blog since I can't find it in Technorati.

Yeah, right.

Re: “Where’s the blog?” in Windows Live Spaces?

Carnage4Life — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 01:09:08 -0000

Robert,
These series of childish posts is really beneath you. It seems you are upset that someone reported that they heard someone from Microsoft say that Windows Live Spaces hass 72 million blogs and is the world's largest blogging service.

Since that post, two people who work on the product have pointed out that we don't think the number of blogs is relevant (it isn't) and number of engaged users is more interesting. According to ComScore we have ONE HUNDRED MILLION of those per month (not counting China where we are the most popular blogging service).

At the end of the day, all you have done is show some of your readers that you are egotistical, narrow minded and quite petty as well. I'm sure you'll find some way to spin this positively to your cause as well.

PS: Before you bother asking, I don't drink coffee.

PPS: It may be that you are simply arguing that we should call these 'spaces' not 'blogs' since they are much more than blogs. I agree. I don't see MySpace calling themselves a blogging service and I see them as our primary comeptitor, not TypePad and WordPress.

Re: The elephant in the kitchen

Carnage4Life — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 02:48:13 -0000

I wrote a number of things refuting your points in that comment but you decided to focus on the one aspect of my post instead of addressing the various legitimate things I raised.

I tend to forget that at the end of the day you are a marketing guy and all you do is spin. A code monkey like me is definitely outclassed by you.

Re: The elephant in the kitchen

Carnage4Life — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 03:14:58 -0000

Robert,
So what is your point?

- Is it that there is no point in counting number of spaces created? You have no disagreement from me or anyone else on the product team for that matter. What is more important is how many people are USING the site whether it is posting or reading blogs, photos and/or user profiles. That is where we have objective 3rd party numbers from ComScore that we are #1 in the world.

- Is it that lots of spaces have more photos albums and profiles than blogs? Yes, we know that. In fact, Spaces is probably more of a photo sharing site than a blogging site (6 million new photos uploaded a day, over 5 billion photos uploaded total).

- Are you trying to argue that your readers are somehow more valuable than readers of Spaces? If so, you're entitled to your opinion.

- Is it that although we have a large number of users, they are usually Windows Live Messenger users? That is true to an extent. However if you think it is so easy, why aren't AOL & Yahoo! the #2 and #3 blogging services on the planet since they also have attempted to integrate their blogging services with their IM products?

By the way, I still stand behind my comments about this entire series of posts being childish, egotistical and petty. An argument style that boils down to "Shutup!!! I wrote a book about this topic, what do you know?" is egotistical. If you want to get technical, it's called 'Argument from Authority' and it is a common logical fallacy when trying to debate a point.

As for childish and petty, you don't have to look much further than this particular comment thread where you have resorted to bringing up my family history to prove your point.

Re: The elephant in the kitchen

Carnage4Life — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 15:54:53 -0000

Robert,
It seems you have now resorted to making up motivations for Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! now that people have called you out on your A-list blogger elitist crap.

Mike Torres and I have blogged several times that we are more interested in getting everyone blogging and sharing their experiences with Spaces than simply catering to A-list bloggers like yourself. That's the power of the long tail. Instead of targetting a few users with lots of readers like yourself and other A-list bloggers (i.e. the head of the tail), we've built a platform that millions of people with a few dozen readers can enjoy.

I guess it makes you uncomfortable to realize that a few A-list bloggers aren't as important as millions of Z-list bloggers to us.

Re: Personal note to David Berlind

Carnage4Life — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 17:51:03 -0000

Aren't you beating a dead horse? The president of your country is in the middle of running a FUD campaign that argues that the GENEVA CONVENTION is an outdated document that is too vague to be honored and you think it is more important to spend 3 weeks blogging about some exec who hired over-zealous private investigators to find a snitch on her board of directors.

I can understand the mainstream tech press harping on this because some of their own were the targets of the investigation, but why are you wasting so much digital ink on this?

Re: Google replaces SOAP API with AJAX one

Carnage4Life — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:26:56 -0000

This looks like another example of pretty myopic, Microsoft-centric analysis. Sometimes you sound like you still work in B0rg cube.

See http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/archive... for a more insightful take on the news.

Re: Raising a stink doesn’t bring the traffic

Carnage4Life — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 14:51:52 -0000

One of the interesting things I've noticed is (i) TechMeme doesn't send you much traffic and (ii) the number of new subscribers you get from traffic due to online controversy is negligible.

If you get lots of traffic from posting good content or a hot scoop, you'll likely get a lot of new readers that way. On the other hand, online flame wars may make entertaining reading but don't encourage people to subscribe.

Re: Technorati developer moves to Google Blog search

Carnage4Life — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:42:19 -0000

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.

Re: Technorati developer moves to Google Blog search

Carnage4Life — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:24:51 -0000

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?

Re: Google to Yahoo and Microsoft: the $1.65 billion was worth it

Carnage4Life — Thu, 17 May 2007 14:09:12 -0000

>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...

Re: An evangelism opportunity…

Carnage4Life — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:49:43 -0000

> 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.

Re: NEWS: Real Networks Takes YouTube (and other Flash) videos offline

Carnage4Life — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:43:51 -0000

Doesn't this violate YouTube's ToS?

Re: TechMeme, not quite Google News

Carnage4Life — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:17:22 -0000

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. :)

Re: TechMeme, not quite Google News

Carnage4Life — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:17:58 -0000

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?

Re: VC looks behind the numbers of social networks

Carnage4Life — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:59:06 -0000

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.

Re: Google Facebook app a hoax?

Carnage4Life — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:29:37 -0000

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.

Re: What I was using to hit Facebook — unreleased Plaxo Pulse

Carnage4Life — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:03:27 -0000

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...

Re: I miss Dare’s blog

Carnage4Life — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 10:18:27 -0000

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.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Carnage4Life — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:50:25 -0000

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?

Re: Should services charge “super users”?

Carnage4Life — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:31:47 -0000

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?

Re: Will Microsoft Search use Mahalo techniques to change the game?

Carnage4Life — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 09:20:15 -0000

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?

Re: “Sky isn’t falling” blogger says

Carnage4Life — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:36:46 -0000

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.

Re: More on Microsoft and not going to PDC

Carnage4Life — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:53:07 -0000

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.

Re: Scoble responsible for destroying the utility of the social graph

Carnage4Life — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:40:21 -0000

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.

Re: Mike Arrington and I disagree on the future

Carnage4Life — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:38:39 -0000

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