DISQUS

Adam · 1 year ago

I'm going to be the curmudgeon again. More & faster is not necessarily better. I think from a technical perspective this option is pretty neato, but from a philosophical, social, and cultural perspective, it seems merely an additional push towards the more-speed-less-substance end of the spectrum.

Do we need this firehose?
Does it help us make us *usefully* more informed?
Does it improve our lives?

Or would that time better be spent reading a book, writing a novel (or even a real blog post), or even just walking out in a field and putting together ideas and inspirations and so on?

I know, I know. Sometimes I'm such a luddite. But I can't help but be uncomfortable with the pace of frantic change coupled with the increase in, well, franticness.

Jesse Stay · 1 year ago

Adam, it depends on who you are and what your purposes are. As you mentioned, from a technical perspective this is very useful. In addition, as a blogger or journalist it's a great way to scan for the "latest and greatest" as it comes through. From a marketing or PR perspective, if track gets implemented as I predict, this is one of the most useful ways of getting data, realtime, about your brand and even competitors' brands.

From the general user's perspective, it also depends on where you stand. If you need a good way to network, see where those you want to network with are and what they're doing, this is an excellent way to track that, as well as communicate back with those people, building relationships along the way. Staying in a dark room coding or working or doing whatever you do and not building relationships will never grow your career beyond what you currently do. If you're happy with that, then this isn't for you. Again, all this, meaning social media, is about building and nurturing relationships. Reading a book or going for a walk, while good for you, aren't going to help you build relationships as well as these tools will.

Adam · 1 year ago

Jesse, I strongly take issue with your implied connection between opposing firehoseness and opposition to building and nurturing relationships. I just feel strongly that the latter should involve a greater emphasis on deep and measured conversations and commentary which, IMHO, cannot possibly be either communicated in 140 characters nor thoughtfully digested when it's being firehosed at you. It's the difference, IMHO, between real friends and -- to quote Fight Club -- "single serving friends." I'm all for online networking and connections , and in fact have been active in online communities (even helping create them) for over two decades (yes, before there was a public internet). I just feel there's currently a disconcertingly large proportion of efforts focusing on quantity over quality, speed over depth.

Jesse Stay · 1 year ago

Adam, as I said, it depends on the person. For the average person, the firehose of their friends data should be enough to consume anyways and it could be a much better way than Twitter or other services to consume and communicate data. For some it won't be. When I originally used Twitter's XMPP feed, this was how it was for me - I only had 50-100 friends max, and it was quite bearable. With track, it made for a very useful service on an interface I was already used to.

For those with much bigger networks, many of those are interested in consuming lots of data. This benefits them as well since it enable them to see the latest and greatest news and hot topics of the time. Those that aren't interested in that it won't benefit.

Then there's the mainstream user who doesn't use a social service at all, rarely uses e-mail except to communicate with family, and turns off their computer at night like my parents. They'll never have a use for the firehose, but then again they'll never have a use for Twitter, or FriendFeed, or even Facebook.

william · 1 year ago

Cooool Service !!!!
We have been doing this for a while with our micro blogging service "Conversations"
At adelph.us we believe that "Conversations" is the new command line
We also have many more features that push items from our top of the line news reader to "Conversations" and then to IM/SMS
We are also using "Conversations" to allow members to let other members know their buying intentions by simply typing in <$ product name $>
In the coming weeks we will also be rolling out several very viable ways for user of "Conversations" to generate some revenue using the service

orangepascal · 1 year ago

Having the realtime FF in the sidebar of firefox sort of works, but having it in my IM client, in this shape, really doesn't. Interesting concept, and someone probably takes the idea and runs with it in a slightly better direction ;)

Jesse Stay · 1 year ago

Orange, I agree - in reality, the web UI realtime feed will be much easier to digest for the average user. Where this will be most beneficial will be for developers looking for new ways of digesting real time information. It is a nice way to digest the data in a 3rd party program native to my Mac though.

briantroy · 1 year ago

While I agree that the Real-Time nature of the social web is important - I still can not agree that a social media command line (which I wrote about here last week: http://is.gd/6pC7 ) is the appropriate user interface to participate in the conversation.
I created friendfeed filtered (ff-filtered.cosinity.com) specifically to enable track - and streaming that feed to any IM network (why just XMPP) is coming very soon. But I still do not think posting/commenting/participating via IM is particularly valuable. In a stateless peer messaging stream (a.k.a, Twitter, Laconica) it works - but FF isn't stateless and there are entity relationships that matter (comments, likes, rooms, etc). The future is in those relationships - and those relationships make IM based participation hopelessly complex.
We need to define the problem correctly - we need solutions for information discovery (track) and solutions for participation. They may not be one in the same.

dustin · 1 year ago

We're building the tools that work well for us. I can't be bothered to go to various web pages just to talk to people. I have an IM client for that. I stopped going around to various web sites when RSS picked up. This is the obvious next step.

I built a track tool for myself for twitter (over xmpp) and laconica (over xmpp) because it does what I need. It's trivial to adapt that to a web view in theory, but the other way around is more complicated. I haven't taken the step (other than to give myself an RSS stream of matches) because it's not valuable to me. twitterspy has been open source since like, July and nobody else has bothered either. Not saying it's a huge userbase or anything, but it's clearly solving problems for people.

Why XMPP? Because all of the other networks need to die. Soon. I have very little control over my YIM connection (I keep to talk to a couple people) and end up getting SPIM from it when they don't change the protocol to lock out my client. AIM is the same way, although I get less SPIM. YIM doesn't allow HTML. AIM does, but I can't embed other set of arbitrary data in it (see twhirl integration with identispy). In both cases, it's fairly easy to get my XMPP server working as a gateway, but then I have to deal with AOL and Yahoo when I'm rate limited. It's not worth the hassle to participate in a limited fashion in proprietary networks that need to die off already.

The richness of content we can send through enjit, for example allows an XMPP client (not just an IM client) to do far richer stuff than just shove an IM in someone's window. But even when it's just IM, you can't do stuff like this with AIM or YIM: http://public.west.spy.net/adhoc.png

As for track...we've got a content tracking engine already. It's really fast and scales quite well. We haven't introduced the two pieces yet as we're still working in some other areas. Combining them is trivial, and can be done in a simple, yet rich way.

briantroy · 1 year ago

Dustin - I wish you the best of luck. Perhaps you are correct - perhaps not. At the end of the day I'd like you to consider that XMPP like RSS is about publication - not rich interaction. Sure technically you can do it... but that isn't the point. People want to consume (or discover) information in ways that are logical and appropriate for them - they don't give a darn about the mechanism.
More importantly - I'm glad you brought up RSS. The point is RSS does ONE SIDE of the solution set well - information discovery. I content that IM (XMPP) is equivalent to RSS for that part of the solution. However, much like RSS - you will need a separate mechanism to participate - because RSS (and XMPP) can not provide a usable enough interface for that.
I'm sure you disagree - and that is great. But I continue to believe that the UI that will win for real-time social media participation is not the command line.

dustin · 1 year ago

None of RSS, XMPP, or HTTP provide user interfaces. User interfaces are built atop them. I've gone through a few RSS readers with good interfaces, where the discovery mechanism was a link on a page. Works pretty well for me.

Adium, twhirl, and my web browser are capable of providing fine interfaces into such things.

The enjit interface is a bit of a hybrid model. You get an IM that has a link to the item on friendfeed. I can go to friendfeed from that and tell friendfeed to stop sending it to me if I find it annoying. Similar things can be done with track.

I'm not sure how your workspace is set up, but I my desktop provides me realtime notifications through adium, and allows me to poll my RSS reader, email, and other things that can go more slowly.

Of course, I'm not saying that I'm more right than you (this doesn't really seem like the kind of thing we can disagree on so much, as it's more a factor of how we work). I generally find myself in the minority on most things, but I'll continue to do the things that serve me the best, and I'll continue to encourage you and everyone else to do the same.

micronauta · 1 year ago

Trying it. Loving the idea.