5 ms·
Overnight success takes a long time
- aswanson 18y agoI always look at friendfeed as the beginning of something that I could broadcast to my friends that don't haunt the web that much. What if you could take the feed and somehow turn it into a show, where a more passive web viewer could just watch?
- nostrademons 18y agoThat's what the FaceBook app is for, presumably. I've had one of my cousins tell me that it was kinda-sorta useful for keeping tabs on my computer-related comments elsewhere on the net.
- aswanson 18y agoBut what if you and your friend are not on Facebook? What if you want to give them a feed of your pandora channels, some videos you liked, and 2 or 3 articles without them having to navigate at all once they got the feed? This person has no net prescence and you just want to set up a tv channel for them to enjoy. The interface would be as simple as "turn to channel me" and that's it.
- nostrademons 18y agoWow, that sounds creepy when you put it like that.
- aswanson 18y agoHow so?
- nostrademons 18y ago"Interface would be as simple as 'turn to channel me'" Sounds like The Truman Show. That, and every scare article about Millenials being the most spoiled, self-aggrandizing generation ever. Doubly creepy because that's basically reality now - a lot of us now broadcast are thoughts, opinions, daily activities, and so on to the whole web. It just seems a lot more normal when I say "Oh, I added the FriendFeed FaceBook app" then when you say "Turn to channel me."
- aswanson 18y agoYou are reading "me" wrong. I meant "me" really as in "we", like this is cool stuff you will enjoy based on our shared tastes. Not, a "look at me" vanity fair type of play.
- brlewis 18y agoWhat I did a few days ago was to create a friendfeed account for my family email list, and set it up to get weekly email summaries. The first summary hasn't arrived yet, or I'd tell you how it's going.
- redorb 18y agothe only over night sucesses I have heard of are those 2 startups that flipped within hours for around 1.5k each, so there is some truth in this article
- lunaru 18y ago"Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life." -- Sun Tzu, Art of War i.e. Be patient and don't give in.
- sachinag 18y agoIt's really nice to see him promote Posterous (as opposed to Google's Blogger) as the easiest way to blog thoughts.
- fallentimes 18y agoYet Posterous is not one of the featured services on Friendfeed (you can do it manually via RSS).
- paul 18y agoNor is Blogger or most other blog services. You can simply add them as "Blog" though. The "featured" services are generally things other than blogs where it's friendlier to ask for their username instead of url (such as YouTube), or that require other special processing.
- fallentimes 18y agoAh okay - thanks for the reply.
- rantfoil 18y agoThank you for the mention, Paul. We really appreciate it. I think the main reason why we'd like to be able to add Posterous through the FF main page is the fact that people don't understand RSS, especially our users who are brand new to blogging and are doing it for the first time through email. In the longer term as FF reaches mainstream, these considerations around dead simple import of feeds become even moreso important.
- brlewis 18y agoAs an alternative, vote up (er, Like) my suggestion: http://friendfeed.com/e/c5a09856-762d-43ad-9298-b32080b4190a/Add-feed-X-to-friendfeed-via-web/ http://friendfeed.com/e/c5a09856-762d-43ad-9298-b32080b4190a... Then you, I, or anyone passionate about getting her/his own site easily integrable with FriendFeed can set up a UI to do it from our end.
- rokhayakebe 18y agoStick in it. Adapt to the market, when you are no coding, you had better be selling and when you are not selling you had better be marketing. And be patient.
- brlewis 18y agoMy 2009 resolution is to sell better.
- kajecounterhack 18y agoMaybe the only reason I don't have friendfeed is it's welcome page. FriendFeed helps you discover and discuss interesting stuff that your friends and family find on the web. Like I have time with which to look at interesting stuff after spending all day on news.yc....
- brlewis 18y agoCheck out FriendFeed's "best of day" or "best of week" feature. Or just have it email you a daily or weekly summary.
- nostrademons 18y agoThe risk is that the world will change around you in the meantime and make what you're working on irrelevant. My two previous employers were both started in 2001, in terms of the idea and not the corporate entity. Last I heard, they are both still around, though in one case a founder let the company fold and then ran off to China with the IP to start again with cheap labor. But the ideas are increasingly irrelevant now. In one case, the product was software to tunnel through firewalls. Most recent products just build that into the product itself now (witness: FogCreek CoPilot, AIM, anonymous proxies), using essentially the same technology we were working on 8-9 years ago (FogCreek calls it the Reflector) so there is less need for a general solution. In the other case, the product started out as a desktop quant analytics interface. But then around 2002-2004, everything switched to the web. They did too, but they fell off the leading edge of technology: other firms now have much more web expertise than they do. And now with the financial crisis, I'd guess that people are increasingly suspicious of quant analytics. I keep thinking about whether it's better to go for breadth or depth (in anything, not just startups). The answer always seems "Go for depth, as long as you're going deep into the right thing." But it's often not possible to tell what the right thing is until you've gone deep into it. By then, of course, you've already sunk a lot of effort into exploring the territory. Maybe that's why people ascribe so much of success to pure luck.
- wallflower 18y agoDoes anyone remember Peter Tattam's Trumpet Winsock? Amiable guy - the organization I was part of bought a site license. It provided windows sockets support for Windows 3.x. It was made irrelevant in Windows 95 (and I believe MSFT baking in 32-bit Winsock support was a big deal - that leveled the technical hump of getting online)
- sachinag 18y agoIf it wasn't for Trumpet Winsock, I'd never have learned how to use Gopher. (I see your old reference and I raise you - now raise or fold - there is no call.)
- 18y ago
- bonaldi 18y agoIt continues to baffle me that GMail is the only client* with all-in-a-page threaded email. Some desktop apps make a stab at it, but generally limit it to some kind of highlighting by subject line. Even if it didn't have the search, I'd stay with Gmail for that. * Well, Zoe had a go, but was always buggy and now seems dead.
- boris 18y agoMutt has email threads. It had them for as long as I've been using it (6+ years). It also has regex search and selection, besides other things...
- kragen 18y agoMutt's threads aren't all-in-a-page; you only see one message at a time.
- boris 18y agoYes, you are correct. Though in mutt you can hit 'n'/'p' while reading a message in a thread and you will move to the next/previous email in the threading order. I would imagine one would need to use scrolling in gmail for any substantial thread which results in a pretty similar experience (i.e., you only see one or two emails at a time).
- indiejade 18y agoI really like FriendFeed for the fact that it doesn't try to suck people in. It is efficient. Unlike Facebook (which seems like it's trying to re-invent everything on the Internet inside it's little bubble o'beacon-tracking), FriendFeed unobtrusively allows each one of its services to showcase a core competency: e.g. flickr for photos, twitter for nonsensical tidbits, youtube for video, rss for blogs, SU for those random and great finds, etc. By not nudging users into any one specific direction, it effectively aggrandizes collective genius. Now, it just needs an option for HN posts. . .
- unalone 18y agoI like being contrary, so I'll take the side of Facebook advocacy: by "showcasing," as you say, Friendfeed makes their service far less efficient, and to some degree less valuable. It adds nothing but a place to visit everything at once, which means that it hurts the communal aspects of those other sites and reduces the visual efficiency of each. Facebook, on the other hand, centralizes everything, which means that as a user you can use it and only it and have everything you need. I have relatives who use Facebook because it's so easy to understand. Also, what does it mean to effectively aggrandize collective genius?