DISQUS

Looking forward to the new announcements on the spam front, but I would suggest that you not refer to Devin as your "back-end developer." Despite the fact that I was responsible for marketing a server subsystem, I had a former boss who refused to call me a "back-end product manager." He thought it meant I was managing butts. Since I have a high regard for the Disqus staff, I assume that Devin isn't developing a bunch of butts. :)

Looking forward to the new announcements on the spam front, but I would suggest that you not refer to Devin as you "back-end developer." Despite the fact that I was responsible for marketing a server subsystem, I had a former boss who refused to call me a "back-end product manager." He thought it meant I was managing butts. Since I have a high regard for the Disqus staff, I assume that Devin isn't developing a bunch of butts. :)

While I'm with Rita (and Steven Hodson) in noting that microfame has always existed, I'm also in agreement with Sheldon Steiger (and you) in noting that respect is more important than fame. Or, to put it another way, it's better to have microrespect than it is to have microinfamy.

I've never bought anything because of YouTube, but then again I'm not really a TV or movie person. I have, however, bought two CDs as a result of hearing the songs on last.fm. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, RIAA.

(The CDs, for the...um...record, were Sarah McLachlan's "Bloom" and Midnight Juggernauts' "Dystopia.")

Thank you for sharing the forecasting abilities of this talented Rottweiler. If his pee froze before hitting the ground, I would assume a long winter, shadow or no.

Robert McLaws, I guess Apple has a succession plan in place now. :)

Robert Scoble, it appears that Louis Gray has taken a different view of Jobs' importance to Apple's long-term prospects. However, it helps to remember that Apple survived without Jobs for several years, and in the process became not only a viable firm (Macintosh II, etc.) but also introduced some interesting products (HyperCard). I don't know the personalities in Apple, but I'm sure that even if Jobs goes off to India rather than staying at Apple, the company will survive and still do great things...maybe not insanely great, but definitely great.

I can understand your reluctance to share things EVERY day. Sometimes God's message is for you alone, and sometimes our limited human minds require more than a day to process things.

I especially liked your part 2. I'll often conceive an idea in the shower or while driving or whatever. And when you get an idea, jot it down (Dave Winer uses Twitter for this; private or semi-private FriendFeed rooms can work just as well).

One thing that you implied, but didn't really state explicitly, was to write in a lot of different media. Books, tweets, posts, thank-you notes, blog comments, what have you.

Coincidentally, I cited this verse on Monday, but in a more secular context. In a post "To everything (turn, turn, turn) there are two seasons (turn, turn, turn)" (I got the earworm also), I noted how I ended up repeating myself in my blog posts.

In the process I also cited the related passage Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"). While we go through the events of life such as those that you mentioned, we also need to realize that there are people before us who have gone through those same events. And, of course, Christ has faced everything that we will face, and has overcome these things.

The underlying assumption above is that this blog has a single comment system. In actuality, it has two - the comment system I'm using now, and FriendFeed.

So why not add a third comment system by invitation only where Gary Shapiro, Barack Obama, and other proven people can post?

While most of your points are valid (especially point 7!), I'll quibble with a couple of them.

1. I have found FriendFeed's Bret Taylor to be just as accessible, if not more accessible, than Twitter's Biz Stone. I was talking about some feed refresh issues on FriendFeed one day, and Bret Taylor joined the conversation, acknowledged the problem, and said they were working on it.

9. My experience with FriendFeed has been quite different, and I have run into some fairly deep conversations within my FriendFeed circle. And if you use FriendFeed rooms (a feature not available in native Twitter), you can get some fairly targeted responses.

Re number 5 - as of a few months ago, Patrick Ruffini was squatting on the Barack Obama FriendFeed, as he tweeted back in February http://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/statuses/7534... and as you (and Louis Gray) noted back in June http://friendfeed.com/e/407424cd-4b31-4740-825f... .

Did Ruffini end up surrendering the account to Obama's staff?

Hilarious post, by the way, but there are millions of people in the U.S. for whom both Twitter and FriendFeed are too complex. Twitter may be easy to use, but it's nowhere near as easy as a telephone - or a pen.

We run into problems when we idolize ANYBODY. Charles Barkley had it right.

This will be nice, since most everything that I put into Upcoming is business-related anyway.

However, I'd like for LinkedIn to fix their existing applications. They still don't load for me at times.

Referring to mike n's post, the difficulty is in determining what will be important in 2108, and what won't be. Perhaps information about our cats WILL be important in the future; I have no way of knowing. Bear in mind that the majority of the contemporaries of Johann Sebastian Bach probably wouldn't have bothered to save his old-fashioned work. That's the danger in editorial decisions.

It's more than likely that people in 2108 won't be able to access the text of this post. No one saves everything, and at some point someone makes an editorial decision regarding what to keep and what to junk, and considering the sheer amount of data that's being generated, those editorial decisions are going to be made more frequently.

It's odd to see what is being preserved, and what isn't. Google's Usenet archives have preserved some of the postings that I made in the 1980s during my undergraduate years. But last night, when I searched one of my old Blogger blogs in the process of working on a post, Blogger's built-in search facilities couldn't find the relevant stuff that I had written in late 2003 or early 2004.

That having been said, it's still a lot easier to find out about things that happened in 2001 than it is to find out about things that happened in, say, 1981 - much less 1681. I guess partial data is better than none at all.

Annotated. Thanks again for arranging a great evening at the Thirsty Bear.

I really really hope this doesn't start a trend.

Timely post, Chris, inasmuch as Oracle OpenWorld 2008 is only three days away.

Didn't FeedBurner just make a change that reduced feed amounts? I saw the announcement in passing, but ignored it because I don't use FeedBurner.

(Disclosure - I work for a provider of Android applications.)

Re your statement that “'1,000' similar but different Gphones" could potentially confuse the customer - don't we already have 1,000 similar but different Windows Mobile phones already?

I will grant, however, that you have a point with Apple. Despite our love for open this and open that, our darling is one of the most proprietary companies out there.

One thing that I do in Google Reader is to not only classify my feeds into categories, but to put some of the feeds into a second category called "PRIORITY-Low." When time is short, I mark all of the PRIORITY-Low items as read; when I have more time, I'll go through them.

Groupthink can certainly be a danger if you only read feeds from a particular category, especially when you consider that one person may attempt to influence multiple tech bloggers with a hot tip, therefore resulting in several stories that only come from one source.

I meant, of course, FriendFeed or Summize. Oops.

Random thought; it would be nice if Twitter or Summize provided the ability to filter search results by date/time range.

If you were mobile during the earthquake, FriendFeed might not have been an option. I've been locked out of fftogo for several hours now, apparently because of an issue with FriendFeed's API.

My real problem, however, was with mobile phone voice/text service (in my case, Verizon); I wasn't able to make or receive calls/texts for over an hour after the quake hit. Yet I was able to get to a mobile web browser and tweet.