Paul Buchheit

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Just finished voting. FriendFeed does have the ability to change the world. I've offered some suggestions at http://www.growmap.com/monetizing-social-networ... and hope you'll consider them. I can elaborate, clarify, and offer suggestions on implementation on request.

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I voted those three... please subscribe to http://friendfeed.com/kopi so you know me too..

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3 votes for FriendFeed, done!

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si se puede

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One enhancement I can think of is language filtering. If one is subscribed to many multilingual friends, his homepage can be messy with messages of several languages and many people can only read one language.

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Sure.

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Its interesting to note that you EVEN have to write this post - Good to Great would be a great read for those seeking silver bullets.

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"My expectation is that big success takes years...This notion of overnight success is very misleading..."

Well said. In the music business, there's the notion of overnight sucess, but even if you look at something that looks like that, such as American Idol, you'll find that the winners have been performing and honing their skills for years. I like FF a lot, and I see the potential, and hope to go along for the ride as you shape it into a product that even you have no complaints about. Great post.

.LAG

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Exactly. If you think the answer to the question is exactly one of 1/2 and 2/3, then you're wrong because there is simply not enough information provided to justify the ruling out of the other interpretation.

Just as you said, it comes down to whether the child is chosen first and sex is reported or the sex is chosen first and the # (= 0 or >0) of children is reported.

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Hi Paul. Both your probability and Jeff's are way too low. More likely, something like 99% of the time if an English speaker "told you they had two children, and one of them is a girl," the intended meaning is that exactly one of them is a girl. To precisely answer this question you need to determine the percent of people geeky enough to say "one of them is a girl" without necessarily meaning exactly one of them is a girl. Your analysis of choosing algorithms, while correct, is likely in the noise. Additionally, if the person is that geeky, then "I have two children" might not mean they have exactly two children. They might have three or more.

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well, i think gmail and friendfeed both are entirely different services and it is not good to think friendfeed in the gmail way.

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I love Friendfeed and hope that it continues to evolve. One can never expect perfection, but I am more than happy to put my two cents in as I see areas for improvement and hope with all my heart the Friendfeed goes the route of Gmail (another tool that I have adopted over the past year and have found love for). I definitely had some ramping up with FF because I initially found it complicated and harder to jump into than, say, Twitter. But now that I understand it, I am definitely seeing its promise. I don't think I am adequately using all that it has to offer, but I will get there.

For the very short term, I would love more discussion on how to use it and all of its benefits. Twitter has volumes much written about it for such a simple product. I find it astounding that I haven't seen more on FF - a tool with so much more to it.

Martha

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Hi Paul. Can I translate this article and then republish it at weeyee.com or some other places?
I didn't realize gmail had such an interesting history. Gmail is the most brilliant, ingenious product I have ever seen (no exaggeration).

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Now THAT is interesting! What is the right kind of behavior? I think you're onto something there, but want to hear a lot more of what you consider the "right" kind of behavior.

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I've got an idea... nup...lost it. What a relief.

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FF is awesome, just not for 99.75% of the population who lack the smarts/interest in such a noisy thing IMHO. Niche is fine but it needs a dramatic overhaul to appeal to the masses and not just Louis and Robert.

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Paul - The fact that you immediately engage the Friendfeed community when there are questions, suggestions or blog posts (as the FF team has all along right on Friendfeed) speaks volumes for the future of the product. (Keep it comin'!)

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Paul - The fact that you immediately engage the Friendfeed community when there are questions, suggestions or blog posts (as the FF team has all along right on Friendfeed) speaks volumes for the future of the product. (Keep it comin'!)

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Thanks for the insight on making an overnight success! This gives a wonderful insight to the process involved.

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Yeah, Paul, tell George about your home based business!

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yes!!
i have some links

http://tinyurl.com/8ru5fr

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nice stuff!
http://rgitbangalore.blogspot.com

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Paul, it's obvious that Louis Gray's post touched a nerve and caused a lot of people to respond, me included.

But I think that Louis' first marketing requirement suggested a possible direction for exploration.

Rather than asking Louis, Robert Scoble, myself, or any current FriendFeed user what the perfect FriendFeed would look like, perhaps a better investment of time would be to ask someone who isn't using FriendFeed, or better still someone who tried to use FriendFeed and gave up, what THEY'D like to see.

More than likely you're already doing this, but it's probably something that needs to be emphasized. With so many "shiny toys" out there, there may be a limited time factor in which a new adopter will choose to either figure out an application, or forget about it and try another one.

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Great post, Paul. It definitely takes a long time to build a "product" that sustainably delivers value (like Gmail) than a feature and your articulation of this was perfect. I am not a user of friendfeed mainly because I think psychologically one needs to be on the destination site to "experience" the site / the reason one signed up there in the first place. While FF can be a good dashboard, I think it doesn't deliver the same experience as going to the destination social network. I'd still prefer to log in to LinkedIn and check the latest updates than to rely on a FF like dashboard. Similarly for Facebook and Youtube and others. And if I end up on the destination sites anyway then what is the incentive to be active on FF? This may be just me, though but a data point for you anyway.

Having said that, I do think there is a need for a system that aggregates all the updates I care about. I am just now sure what it should look like or be like.

All the best to you and the FF team.

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In the comments after this post by evhead, the question is asked: "What FriendFeed wants to be when it grows up... A conversation platform to rival Twitter?"
I'm guessing part of the answer arrives with who evhead is.
http://evhead.com/

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