Web/Tech

My blog friend Mathew Ingram has a post up on the new features in Google Reader, which provide the ability to add comments to items you share, and share any items via a bookmarklet. Mathew thinks the features are “kind of lame”, particularly when compared to FriendFeed. However, I think that Mathew is missing a few things.

The thing about FriendFeed is that it’s incredibly Twitter-centric, and provides something that Twitter readers have been complaining about virtually since the services was born: a threaded comment view. This means that it turns Twitter into a pretty decent discussion system, something that it sucks at at the moment. This is why it’s become popular with Twitter users - it meets a need that Twitter itself has steadfastly refused to meet.

But comparing it to Google Reader is a pointless exercise, because the two products are designed to do very different things. Google Reader allows you pretty good granular control over anything that comes in RSS form, and allows you to sort and categorise information whichever way you want. The folder structure means that, for example, I can concentrate on my work-related feeds when at work, and save reading friends till later.

FriendFeed gives you a “river of news” view with locked-in comments (although, to be fair, they seem to want to open that out - hence the ability to post back to Twitter, and, forthcoming, the ability to post back to Disqus). The only granularity you have is to click on the feed source - you can’t tag or categorise feeds effectively.

Does that matter? For people wanting “Twitter Pro”, the answer is no. FriendFeed provides proper discussions for Twitter in a much more useable way than anything else. But that doesn’t make FriendFeed a good RSS reader, unless all you want is a single stream of news/noise. Of course, that’s exactly what Dave Winer has been arguing for for ages, with Scoble agreeing, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Scoble has been a big FriendFeed champion.

It’s also worth noting something that I think a lot of people have forgotten: Google already owns a service which does everything that FriendFeed does, and much more. It’s called Jaiku, and I expect that Google will be starting to make something more of it in the not-too-distant future.

Who Will Tell the People? - New York Times:

“A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.”

My experience of Singapore is exactly the same as Thomas Friedman’s. Comparing the state of Changi Airport to Heathrow makes you weep (if you’re British) and must be a source of pride (if you’re Singaporean).

Now this might just tempt me back to NetNewsWire again:

“NetNewsWire 4.0 will bring new features and changes to fall in line with NewsGator’s aspirations for taming information. At the top of the new features list will be integration with AideRSS and the company’s PostRank technology for automatically filtering newsfeeds for hot topics and headlines. NewsGator is already using this technology in its web-based client for its top 1,000 feeds, but NetNewsWire 4.0 will bring AideRSS and PostRank to Mac OS X Leopard. If you’re drowning in feeds and headlines that you constantly shrug off with the ‘mark all as read’ command, this new PostRank technology should help you to at least catch the stuff that really matters.”

Plus, there’s this wonderful news about the iPhone:

“As far as a release date for NetNewsWire 4.0, Brent has a more general Fall-ish time in mind. On top of 3.2 and 4.0 development, he’s also working on a native NetNewsWire app for the iPhone, but I can’t share many of those details just yet.”

I veer between using Google Reader and using NetNewsWire on an almost-weekly basis. I love using NetNewsWire as a client, but - despite the massive improvements that the company has made - prefer Google Reader to Newsgator on the Web.

Lessons in Lessignomics - broadstuff:

“Thus I think we need to ask the Lessigists (by that term I mean the ‘FreeTards’, the more - um - enthusiastic supporters) to answer the following question - ‘have you actually thought through the consequences if all created content is forever unprotected?’.

And I don’t want to see answers couched in psychobabble, Gift economics, New Economics 2.0, and other various politico-economic flavours whether libertarian, or discredited socialist / humanitarian ideals re-treaded. I want to see it discussed in terms of hard headed behavioural economics, in terms of what people really do, not what they say they will do. I want to see it in terms of business models where I can see the money flowing without the ‘and here a miracle occurs’ phase in the flow, or the ‘3-pot-shuffle-it’ll be-alright-on-the-night’ assurances. I want to see the game theory that shows me why people will do what we think they will do.”

Alan is completely right to ask this question. I’ve asked it, several times, in arguments with those who want to get rid of copyright, and I’ve never got a coherent answer.

Since I got back from Australia, I’ve been using Alert Thingy to view FriendFeed - and it makes the whole thing make so much more sense. Now, instead of having yet another view on everyone’s Twitters (Twitter dominates FriendFeed), you get something that is like a Twitter client with better commenting. It also does Flickr uploading, and of course Twitter posting.

And having things show up in a client which alerts me when things are updated means I can resubscribe to high-traffic feeds like Robert’s.

Now all I want is integration between FriendFeed and Disqus (like Plaxo’s) and it will really start to look good.

Oh, yes - I’m using Disqus again, too.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to spam Twitter… erm, I mean “get traffic to your Squidoo lens”. Because wasting other people’s time is useful. Wankers.

1. Yes, it really is “Google Acquisition Engine“. Of course, using it is also a cert guarantee that Yahoo, Microsoft, and everyone else won’t buy you - unless they’re already a Google partner.

2. I am very glad that Jaiku is moving to this platform. Now, suddenly, the effective radio silence that Jaiku has undergone makes a lot of sense.

I’ve been reading Scoble’s blog for years - way back since he was working at NEC and evangelising Tablet PC to everyone that would listen. I like Robert. Even when he’s at his most excitable, it’s a genuine excitement rather than a “how can I make money?” excitement, or - worse - a “people need to understand how important I am” excitement.

But, much as I like him, I just unsubbed from Robert’s Friendfeed. The reason? Too much stuff. Too much trivia. Too much noise, not enough signal. Too much Twitter (short, largely irrelevant to me) not enough blog (longer, more thought-provoking).

And that is really the problem with FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse, and all the other micro-content aggregators out there. I’m just not that interested in most people’s lives. I don’t want or need to know if they post a new picture in their Flickr stream - I can check their Flickr page when they have something interesting to tell a pictorial story about.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve kept my number of Twitter contacts pretty low - basically, people who I’ve either met or had some kind of conversation with (even just in blog comments). I simply haven’t got time or interest in keeping up with what Arrington (or whoever) thinks is important, but not so important that it requires more than 140 characters to express.

So sorry, Robert - and anyone else who I think is burying me under the trivia of their lives. I’m sure it’s important to you, and I’m sure there are interesting bits in there, but if it’s really important to me it’ll find me. I don’t need to scan everything you do.

Technorati Tags:
Robert Scoble, Twitter, FriendFeed

BBC NEWS | Technology | Gates hints at Vista ’successor’

“Microsoft boss Bill Gates has dropped a hint about the next version of Windows. He said Windows 7 could be released ’sometime in the next year or so’ during a Q&A session at a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank”

Of course, the other option is that Gates is bluffing. But either way, bringing Vista’s successor forward to next year is a real acknowledgment that Vista has failed.

Not only is Walt one of the most perceptive columnists around, he’s also got some very interesting things to say on the future of television - and in particular, the resistance of people to advertising when it’s not properly targeted.