Disqus - Friends of ubiquit

Re: Techmeme: A Flawed System

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:43:21 -0000

Profy is definitely scanned and I even remember two of our posts were quoted as actually sources. Though I think in this case it is because Cyndy was days ahead anyone else with her coverage but it does not make this case less disappointing.

Corvida, thank you for this post, it is really encouraging to see a blogger really passionate about such imperfections, even when it is not directly related to her own work.

Re: Techmeme: A Flawed System

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:11:23 -0000

I tend to believe Gabe really is unable to make manual changes - though of course I can't be sure of it :) Anyway, to tell you the truth, when Profy first made it to Techmeme discussion, I expected to see new visitors pouring in. And when it did not happen, I was really disappointed. Now I know the real traffic they can send and do not worry very much about it - for me being on Techmeme is more of being in the quoted circle, not really more than that :)

Re: Techmeme: A Flawed System

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:30:02 -0000

It seems to be a major flaw with many services - they only work one way.
Imagine Google coders manually changing search results for some query.
Honestly, I can support human-powered search but not to this extent :)

Re: Google Reader Gets Notes

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 07 May 2008 02:16:02 -0000

@Franklin: Thanks a lot for mentioning Profy in this post. And yes, you are quite right, we really should rethink exactly how we allow people to use blog posts from other blogs as sources on their blogs and we are already discussing it here to make sure the additions to the feature will be exactly what is needed. Anyway I appreciate your kind words about Profy very much - it is great to see that people already like our platform even at this early stage.

@Ryan: I'm always happy to hear feedback from our new users so I'll appreciate you sharing your thoughts about Profy very much.

Re: Building Vibrant Communities

Svetlana Gladkova — Thu, 29 May 2008 07:21:42 -0000

Excellent post Steve, definitely something to make sure you know when you are launching (or managing) an online community. After all, these days almost any website has some social network of its own - thus we should all be aware what are the best rules to build a vibrant community for each website. The only problem for me are the scores - you know, as a new user in some communities I invariably feel too shy to start posting something when I have a 0 in my profile. So while scores encourage power users, they may be very discouraging for a much larger community of new smaller users.

Re: Poll: Web Applications Versus The Desktop

Svetlana Gladkova — Thu, 29 May 2008 07:28:52 -0000

Voted for tools to be used as for me many of the web apps I use are not a necessary evil - they actually help when I need to work and collaborate on something within the team located all around the world.

But the irony I've recently noticed is that early adopters tend to use web apps much heavier when they have some desktop clients (take Twitter - without Twhirl and other clients it would have seen much less messages flowing around). And for some reason we think that early adopters want to move everything online!

Re: Taking a Breather From Social Media? Maybe We’re Doing It Wrong

Svetlana Gladkova — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:25:06 -0000

Louis, sure it does take practice and it is not actually difficult to learn multi-tasking to an extent where you have dozens of browser tabs open plus a few desktop apps fetching you emails, twitter, friendfeed, IMs. But I agree with Sarah 100% - it is definitely time that we measure how deep we actually WANT to be involved and how necessary it is to follow all the discussions on FF. Honestly, I feel that tracking all those talks on FF has damaged my other important activities (not real life even, simply other tasks that constitute my job in addition to being on FF - in fact, I don't think FF should be my major job activity, after all) and after reading this post I am REALLY going to at least impose some schedule of checking/replying to tweets and FF discussion - and at least try to follow the schedule :)

Re: Switching To Blogging 2.0

Svetlana Gladkova — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:49:40 -0000

Duncan, I am really amazed by watching you making The Inquisitr the most 2.0 blog I've seen so far - and evangelizing the concept as well. And I do think that sooner or later all the technology bloggers will have to adopt to the new trends and start actually using them willingly. But, honestly, I don't really see that the majority of the blogging 2.0 trends will be adopted by the mainstream bloggers (like those writing about rose gardening). I have already heard too many people complaining they kind of like FriendFeed but if they don't want to discuss web 2.0 and social media, they just have nothing to do over there. And this looks like a real trend - early adopters scare more mainstream users away by all their (our) geeky talks.

Re: Switching To Blogging 2.0

Svetlana Gladkova — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:28:42 -0000

Yes, and, honestly, if I were a novice blogger writing about any random topic, I would have been scared away from FF after seeing FriendFeed and its advantages and disadvantages discussed everywhere. Have you seen a few comments from people lately asking who Robert Scoble was and why he was mentioned in half the discussions?

Re: Switching To Blogging 2.0

Svetlana Gladkova — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:03:21 -0000

Me neither but I've seen such comments in at least two discussion threads today - the discussion started by the people I follow but comments posted by their own followers. And I myself try to keep it narrow on FF - or it's just impossible to cope with all the noise there!

Re: Signs You Might Be An Early Adopter

Svetlana Gladkova — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:25:56 -0000

Excellent list Steve (and thanks for throwing in Profy as well). Though I am trying to understand if a person really counts as an early adopter when paid for all these things. I guess I'd have to admit that yes - because although it is my job I actually enjoy all the betas for the sake of trying them out (and constantly forgetting I'm already registered :)).

Re: Happy early adopters don’t equal success

Svetlana Gladkova — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 08:07:46 -0000

Excellent post Steven! Strangely I bump into at least one post of this type (trying to persuade startups) to stop thinking of the early adopters as their target audience - so I guess it is a trend already with so many startups simply failing to notice what their real users need after taking all the advice from the Scobles of this world.

And FriendFeed is a good example here - they did develop a service they (developers) needed and early adopters were happy to adopt because it helped to aggregate all the content we have scattered everywhere. But I try to imagine bringing two of my girlfriends on FF - explaining them how they would be able to follow their friends' blogs and photos and music they like. And so they join and start using it - and obviously they both subscribe to me. So what happens eventually? They both will be virtually unable to notice what they came for - posts from their personal blogs (and mine as well) plus our photos from Flickr. Why? Simply because they are shown tons of my StumbleUpon sites and shared items that are of no interest to them. Honestly, even if an early adopter manages to persuade a couple of friends to try FriendFeed, he (or she) will spoil the experience to them easily and it will do no good to anyone.

Re: Filter Messages In Your Gmail Account [Gmail]

Svetlana Gladkova — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:52:24 -0000

Thanks for the tip on using + to sign up for services - I knew about that but rarely used as it is not very difficult to filter the messages anyway using filters on Gmail. But having the opportunity to see who was selling my email is definitely excellent so thanks for the suggestion.

Re: How Did Zillow Get To The Top Besides $87m In VC? They Ask For Links

Svetlana Gladkova — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:46:59 -0000

This one is pretty strange from such a company, really. And I hate how it does not look personal at all. Can't help but wonder if they have a dedicated person tracking such issues and contacting all the bloggers about this.

Re: louisgray.com: Our Twins' Countdown Enters 20 Day Window

Svetlana Gladkova — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:24:25 -0000

I can't help but support Cyndy's proposal for the names for your twins, Louis! (By the way, I wonder if someone in brand building business thought of such promotion tactics - inviting a public person to name a kid after the advertised company or something like that.)

Seriously, very sorry about your dog and hope you will enjoy the final countdown, the best of luck to your (now growing) family!

Re: Metered Internet Is OK But Won’t Work

Svetlana Gladkova — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:43:33 -0000

Steve, is not it funny how you talk about people and their way of using the Internet but refer not to the people in general but mainly to the people in the US. You will be surprised but in some countries people still pay based on the usage and unlimited service plans are more of a privilege :) For example, here in Russia (not in Moscow, the situation in the capital is better) the ISPs only recently started to offer unlimited plans - and until then heavy users like me used to pay very huge bills here. So metered internet does work in some places - it just depends on what your ISPs actually want to offer.

Re: Metered Internet Is OK But Won’t Work

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:35:27 -0000

Yes, that's what I told in a FriendFeed discussion around this comment - your attitude towards metered internet depends only on how "spoiled" you are by the services you used to get from your ISP :)

Re: Reaching milestones are a good boost

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:59:34 -0000

Honestly, I don't think that they are anywhere near cleaning the splogs out. I track incoming links to Profy on Technorati and on some days every 2nd link is a splog scraping out content. So no, they probably are still doing nothing to move sploggers away but we may be just working harder to get there :)

Re: Why Has Keith Teare Gone Into Spam Blogging? Seriously Dumb

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:34:19 -0000

Allen, I can't believe it, really. How comes CN is still not on Google News? I know it took me 3 or 4 months waiting and talking to the team there but we've done that eventually. But Duncan is never stopping to surprise me with such a speedy process of getting a pretty new blog everywhere, really :)

Re: Pending Sign of the Twitter Apocalypse: It’s Being Talked About By Internet Marketers

Svetlana Gladkova — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:10:50 -0000

Wow, this definitely an extreme example. But this shows that Twitter is really going mainstream. The only thing we are left to do is make sure that we follow only the right people not to be prompted to buy a book in every second tweet :)

Re: Metered Internet Is OK But Won’t Work

Svetlana Gladkova — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:40:55 -0000

Add a post on the same topic to your schedule and we will resume the discussion in half a year :)

Re: When I run out of quota, what then?

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:33:08 -0000

Duncan, funnily this is the second metered internet conversation I participate in this week. And it proves that the US majority of the web 2.0 community simply fails to realize that broadband can (or should) be anything but unlimited. But here in Russia the situation is even worse - only last year some ISPs started to offer unlimited internet to home users - until then everyone had to pay per Mb and it was actually supposed to be normal here. If I used 30 Gb per month, I would have ended up paying something close to $1K at the time :) Fortunately now the times are changing and we seem to actually have the unlimited plans now - though I still can not sympathize with the US guys complaining about limited internet being something ridiculous.

Re: Florida Woman Puts Her House And Herself Up For Auction

Svetlana Gladkova — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:25:35 -0000

Pretty funny, especially since only today in the morning news I've watched a story about some Canadian guy who after divorcing his wife wanted to start his life from scratch so he decided to sell everything he had, including his house, his job, and his car. And someone actually bought everything for $400K (after initial valuation of $500K - but he was not disappointed). And his employer actually agreed to take the buyer for a 14-days probation to see if he or she can replace the seller on the position. Pretty strange trend, I think!

Re: Spanish RIAA sues and wins blog comment case

Svetlana Gladkova — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:12:32 -0000

It would have been quite understandable it he was accused because of the post itself (its title and content) as at least he created the post based on his own thoughts and published it himself. But paying a huge fine for what other people said in the comments? That's really beyond my understanding!

Re: New Flickr Features?

Svetlana Gladkova — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:56:54 -0000

That's what I like about the blogosphere - I rushed here to see what new features I overlooked today on Flickr and it is your own forgotten FF plugin. Excellent, I now know how I could get traffic spikes next time I need them :)