Comments on: Followup: Still insufficiently paranoid

By: Steve Lawson

Steve Lawson — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:47:56 +0000

I haven’t fretted too much publicly about the Facebook purchase of FriendFeed, but I am worried about it.
I know you can’t trust the cloud and all that. I know if it doesn’t have a business model it is–as Jason Scott says–a party, not a service, and that parties all end.
But this has been a particularly interesting and stimulating party on FriendFeed, bringing me closer to people I already know, helping me find more similar people–i.e., librarians–to communicate with, and opening up whole new communities that I have looser ties with.
So I am a bit afraid, and it’s an emotional reaction, not a logical one. I like FF. For me, it is the best online community that I’m part of or aware of. And the thought that Facebook might strip out the best personnel and software and throw away the product as a competitor to its flagship worries me.

By: laura

laura — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:41:15 +0000

I don’t know that I’m paranoid about Facebook acquiring FriendFeed, but it’s true that Facebook has blown people’s trust over and over again by making changes in the services offered, by making changes in the terms of service, by burying some privacy settings, etc., etc., and that does give one pause.
And as for an analogy, one might consider OCLC’s acquisition of RLG. Some good has come out of that, I think, but a lot has also been lost.

By: Walt Crawford

Walt Crawford — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:12:50 +0000

Followup to comments 3 & 4: Thanks to the help of ScienceBlogs’ Tim Murtaugh, the blog has been unclobbered–and the increase type size I was looking for now seems to be present on all posts and comments. Hope that helps.

By: Walt Crawford

Walt Crawford — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:11:16 +0000

Peter: Any analogy is approximate–but it wouldn’t take too long to come up with cases where buyers have retained multiple services with some perceived overlap for years. (And in other news, I have no idea at this point what’s happening with type size, etc. When I came to this single-post view from the home page, the type was small. Now, coming to it from Gmail, it’s larger…could be a caching issue, I suppose. I’m beginning to believe that everything in personal computing “could be a caching issue.”)

By: Peter Murray

Peter Murray — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:03:00 +0000

Walt, I think your Google analogy is off. Those technologies were sufficiently outside Google’s existing suite as to be additive, not duplicative. The combination of the duplicative nature of FriendFeed with Facebook’s Wall function, plus the widely acnowleged reports that Facebook bought talent, not subscribers/services, does have a number of people concerned about the immediate future of the service. It also has somecalling for a similar service with a subscription fee to cover the business model concerns.

By: walt crawford

walt crawford — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:45:01 +0000

Kathleen: I tried to change that, but seem to have screwed up my main page in the process (and not fixed it for archival/individual post pages). I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead–I simply don’t understand the templates MovableType uses. You should be able to change the type size easily in the browser itself…

By: kmccook@tampabay.rr.com

kmccook@tampabay.rr.com — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:35:21 +0000

The font at this website displays very small. To read it I have to put on glasses or play with the “view” which means it is less frequently visited since this need not be done with other sites.
Your other site was fine w/o assistive strategies.

By: Walt Crawford

Walt Crawford — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 02:46:15 +0000

Ah, so trackbacks are turned off overall–which, frankly, is fine with me.
I actually don’t have a bunch of egosearch routines set up. Not for lack of ego; maybe for lack of skill. (Doing regular egosearches on major search engines is a little futile, since I’ve been doing “this stuff” for so long that it takes a lot of filtering to get any new stuff…before hitting the 3-digit result-viewing limit in the web search engines. Mostly, I don’t bother. I was aware of your post both because you’re in my Bloglines subscriptions and because I follow you on…well, on Friendfeed.)

By: Christina Pikas

Christina Pikas — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 02:40:28 +0000

Actually, when you see a “ping” comment left on someone’s post.. that’s a manual trackback bcs the overlords turned off the trackback feature for the same reason you did on your other blog. I usually assume that people have ego searches and can find if I talk about them if I link to them, but maybe that’s not a good assumption.