Ya gotta love Scoble when he decides to offer up constructive criticisms slash suggestions much like he did today in his post about Twitter’s numbers going flat.

He quite rightly pointed  that any attempt to track Twitter numbers are bound for failure because a large portion of the users of the service don’t go anywhere neat the Twitter web page. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that over time Twitter’s number look like they are decreasing. In both cases it boils down to the simple reason that the largest number of Twitter users are using some third party client like Seesmic or TweetDeck.

All that aside though Robert offers up a bunch of ideas that he thinks would help Twitter gain new users. Here’s just a few of them to give you an idea.

4. Add comments to each tweet.
5. Make the new retweet feature more useful by showing much more information about each retweet.
6. Improve search so that it has some usefulness.
7. Integrate a game into Tweeting, like Foursquare has. Give out badges for good behavior.
8. Greatly expand the bio. Or, just scrap the bio and make a deal with Google to integrate Google Profiles (here’s mine) into Twitter. Make it easier to search for people and companies.
9. Get rid of the follower counts. They are a game that increases noise.
10. Get rid of the suggested user list and, instead, point people to Listorious or something like it, which would let people find groupings of people using Twitter (with a preview).
11. Give us a private Twitter that we can share just with our friends (and make it easy to choose where Tweets go).
12. Give us a much better direct messaging capability. Right now that’s very lame, even compared with the very lame Facebook capability.
13. Give us a major UI update. Time to take Twitter into 2010 and stop making it try to fit into a 2006 mindset.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not faulting Robert’s suggestion as many of them are good one. The only problem is that everything he is describing already exists.

It’s called – Friendfeed.

Robert Scoble offers up Twitter improvements .. except .. they already exists is a post from: The Inquisitr

Are you on any Twitter lists? Have you had your ego stroked by seeing the number of Twitter lists you are on climbing?

What the hell are Twitter lists you ask. Well my obviously social media deficient friend these lists are the new digerati’s A-List. It is how you are now going to be able to measure your worth in the world from this day forth. Yes sir you can now measure your value by how many lists you have been lucky enough to find yourself on.

Still not clear what all the fuss is about, well you see there is this social media juggernaut called Twitter and everyone who is everybody is climbing on board this bandwagon of warm and fuzzy collect as many followers as you can – or in the case of Stephen Fry getting off at the next stop. During the early heydays (last week) the principal way you could get any bragging rights about how well you were doing on Twitter was to con get as many people to follow you as possible.

This of course leads to the usual gold rush of spammers, marketers and PR firms doing everything they could to get themselves, or their clients they were ghosting for, to get as many followers as possible. After all this was the new world of touchy feely conversations with everyone in the world who cared about you.

However any value that you might have for your followers over the next person was short lived so Twitter came up with an idea. Lists. Yes we’ll let you all be able to create separate lists for all the different areas of interest and add people to those lists. Sound like a great idea huh?

Well according to much of the mucky mucks in the social media world this really is the best things since sliced bread and bacon. It’s got people like Robert Scoble smacking down on Google Reader and proclaiming to all who will listen that there is nothing better in the world than Twitter Lists (at least until next week).

It is, as Todd Zeigler at The Bivings Report says: the new endorsement. So the higher number of lists you are on the more value you have in the brave new world of social media.

People follow folks for lots of reasons.  Out of courtesy.  Because they like their avatar.  To get them to follow them back.  Adding someone to a list is more of an endorsement – you are saying this person is someone worth listening to.  While I’m sure people will now work to game their “lists” number, in the short term I think it provides a really interesting insight into how respected Twitter users are.

Short term is right if the popularity of sites that have sprung up to take advantage of this new feature of ego stroking from Twitter are any example. From sites that are basically outsourcing their list creation to more curated types like Listorious it is apparent that Twitter Lists are the new ranking.

Interestingly enough some of the early push back to the lists is coming in from people who you might not think of right off the bat. One of the first to speak about how these lists might not be all they are cracked up be is Chris Brogan who wrote this today:

In talking with friends about it on Twitter, people immediately started DM-ing me, telling me that they felt left out or even LESS important because they weren’t on any lists. Lists are exclusionary by nature. They’re static. There’s a lot of reasons why they might not be all that pleasant for people.

Whether or not we get over being left out of other peoples lists doesn’t change the fact that Twitter Lists will become the new ranking system in Social Media. They will be the new measure of worth to a lot of people and you can be damn sure that even now there a lot of people, marketers, spammers and PR firms who are trying to figure out just how they can use this new TwitterRank to their benefit.

Twitter strokes egos with a new A-List popularity contest is a post from: The Inquisitr

Robert Scoble has announced that he is leaving his role as the head of online video for Fast Company.

Scoble started the job in January 2008 after a long stint at the now defunct podcasting company Podtech. His role at Fast Company included running FastCompany.tv, the video portion of the site, and hosting his own show. According to a report at The Next Web, Scoble’s hand was forced after his prime sponsor Seagate pulled the plug. Other reports put that sponsorship at $1 million a year.

Scoble and I haven’t always been the best of friends over the years, but more recently I’ve come to appreciate him as one of the few people in this space who isn’t afraid to go deep on a story. Yes, some of his video interviews are dry, but this depth of reporting has more often than not resulted in information and news that would have never been obtained any other way. Scoble offers a real service to the tech community, and I hope that his next step is to go independent, giving him the ability to really leverage his influence and skills to provide news that is far beyond what we get from the mainstream media.

I can’t contribute much to a Scoble fund, but where I can let me be on the record that I’m in. Scoble’s only response on FriendFeed so far:

Duncan: I learned a lot this past year. Turns out even if you work for a big(ger) company you really are an entrepreneur anyway. I’m thinking a lot about this and the role of new work in the future. On the other hand, some things require teams and capital and infrastructure. Those will be tough to get access to this year if you’re starting from scratch.

Still, surely someone out there with money might fund him well. Ceiling cat speed to you, Robert Scoble.

Robert Scoble leaves Fast Company is a post from: The Inquisitr

There have been past efforts in the early life of Twitter for folks to try an monetize their Twitter stream. After all for many bloggers Twitter is taking up almost as much time in their workflow as writing posts for their blogs. For some it has taken over more of their time and if you are like Robert Scoble it has people wondering how spending so much time there; and FriendFeed, instead of his blog is going to pay off off him. After all his blog is sponsored in part by Seagate but with him spending less time blogging and more time on Twitter one has to wonder – where’s the money.

Well according to some sharp digging by Louis Gray it appears that Robert has started to slide in an Amazon affiliate link for the Kindle. Granted it’s gonna take a lot of people actually clicking through and buying a Kindle for him to see any serious money but it raises and interesting question that goes beyond Robert’s experiment.

What if Twitter becomes the new affiliate marketing arena for less scrupulous people than Robert. As Louis pointed out in his post there was no disclaimer anywhere that this was an affiliate link that Robert had slid in there as a part of his Twitter message and given the 140 character limits on Twitter messages it is a little hard to do. However there are a lot of people out there using Twitter who aren’t of the same trust factor as Robert and given that inserted links on Twitter are usually shorten versions of the actual links how do we know that those links won’t start heading us to marketing pages without our explicit permission.

Affiliate sales are one of the largest money makers on the web but typically users visiting a site or blog will be able to tell that the links are indeed affiliate links; whether it by by disclaimers by the author or other means. Sure there are the unscrupulous ones who do everything they can to hide them but in general most bloggers are up front about this sort of thing.

With Twitter though there is no room for disclaimers or notices about affiliate links regardless of how honourable the person posting might be – or might not be. how are we going to know that the link we just clicked isn’t going to take us to some marketing page that we never wanted to go to. As much as we might want to trust the ethics of Robert in this case I think what he has done is going to end up being the tip of the marketing iceberg on Twitter for some time to come – and not one I’m looking forward to.

Is Twitter the next affiliate link hunting ground? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Scrapplet is a new service that allows users to mash content from other sites onto the one page. Louis Gray has a great review of the service here.

Robert Scoble chimes in, suggesting that it’s a difficult service to explain, and not particularly consumer friendly.

Maybe it’s the trauma I’m still suffering from trying to do some Christmas Shopping this morning, but I must be looking at a different service to Robert, because what I found is completely the opposite. This service is so consumer oriented it would likely not appeal to first adopters and geeks.

The concept is simple enough: drag and drop stuff on the page so you get a new page of embedded elements, anything from pics through to embedded pages themselves. You can even add text.

The result is the most god awful looking thing I’ve seen since Geocities circa 1996.

Actually, no, that’s unfair to Geocities, and I put a lot of effort into my Geocities page back then to make it look good.

The results speak for themselves. These aren’t pages made by first adopters or geeks. These are pages made by people with little idea for web design, who think flashing animated gifs are cool.

It’s 110% a consumer play.

Will it work though? Maybe. It’s simple, provides a service, and no doubt people will like the mash made simple idea. I’m rating it a win.

Here’s a few pages from the site. The most popular, perhaps not ironically is this one. My advice is to not consume food when clicking the link.

Scrapplet: anything this ugly has to be a consumer play is a post from: The Inquisitr

I don’t get it.

Really I don’t understand this seemingly insatiable need to declared someone the king of some stupid ass hill – even if that hill is Twitter. In a blogosphere where everyone on the A-List says there is no such thing as an A-List they now want to pull a Time magazine and declare someone as a Twitter of the year. Please tell me this isn’t serious – someone’s having an early April Fool’s joke on us – right?

Well according to Karoli; who is one of my favourite bloggers and Twitterers, this is indeed the case. Now I’ll give you two guesses as to who is leading the charge on this inane idea and the first one doesn’t count. Yup that’s right – the indomitable Robert Scoble. Here’s the hilarious part – he asked the following question

“Who is “Twitterer of the Year?” My two submissions? Jay Rosen and Tim O’Reilly. Who are yours?”

not on his blog, not on Twitter but on FriendFeed.

Correction: Robert did actually post this on Twitter but the way that he has his Twitter feed pulled into FriendFeed I was wrong. I apologize for that error Robert but my point still stands.

That would be like asking the People’s Choice Awards to pick and celebrate the Academy Award winners. Of course Robert is now all over the place defending his let’s get a little traffic happening for the weekend post.

Karoli is absolutely correct when she says there is no such thing as a single Twitterer of the year. The very idea of proposing such a thing goes against the very nature of what social media is suppose to mean. Twitter is a hub for each of our own communities that we create using it. Sure we can have our favourite Twitterer within our own group but that does in no way imply that I give a shit about anyone in any other Twitter social network.

If Twitter is one thing it is the true democratization of communication. There are no moderators. There are no Twitter cops telling you how to behave. There is no goodie two shoes patrol looking over your shoulder tsk tsk’ing when you drop a F bomb or aren’t politically correct in something you say. Member’s of my Twitter community may not even know who the hell Robert Scoble is and nor should they be put in a position to have to know him because he – or some other candidates suddenly are declared the most important person on Twitter.

It’s bullshit and really an insult to everyone on Twitter to propose that we should even think of naming some twit as top Twitterer.

Instead everyone should be considered the Top Twitterer because that is the real truth of the matter.

Twitterer of the Year: You! is a post from: The Inquisitr

Funnily enough it was a post about how blogging isn’t dead but is in fact alive and kicking

So it turns out Robert has been quiet because he is currently visiting technology centers in China. While we have been bored and trying to find interesting things to write about; but left with regurgitated ideas, Robert has been gagged by China.

The one benefit about this is that he should have quite the backlog of cool stuff to tell us when he returns home where blogging isn’t something that can end you up in jail – yet anyway.

China gags Scoble but blogging still lives is a post from: The Inquisitr

As you know with Shared Feed you can add a note about why you are sharing this and Robert makes good use of it which is nice. However sometimes it gives us gems like this

Shared by Robert Scoble
Cringley taps into the feeling I have about Microsoft. I just don’t know that it’s strong enough to get enough people on board its cloud computing platform. All the startups I know are on Amazon or Rackspace. I am asking them all whether they will consider Microsoft. I’m getting lukewarm answers, but it’s still early and people are still learning about what Ray Ozzie is up to. It’s not an automatic “bet the company” kind of response that Microsoft had back in the 1990s when they brought out things like SQL Server or Visual Studio, though, and that, indeed should be troubling for Microsoft.

Robert’s basic premise appears to be that Microsoft’s attempt to join the cloud could fail to meet expectation because all these startups are more inclined to use Amazon or Rackspace; which by the way only a recent entry into the cloud themselves which I was suggest that developers will be just as wary of as they might be of Azure. Just how much business does Robert think startups have that will drive more adoption of cloud usage.

Chances are that you could take all the startups currently running and they wouldn’t even come close to what the usage of the corporate market can bring to the table. While startups are looking to do everything on the cheap because they have to be supported by an extremely questionable business model corporations are looking for a consistent platform from a known vendor and while Amazon could give them that they aren’t providing the kind of developer ecosphere that revolves around Micorosoft and its products.

Startups have their place and thank god for their innovation but that doesn’t mean that they are going to be the driving force that Robert seems to think they are – not when it comes to the broad adoption of the cloud. I call bullshit on that idea – sorry Robert.

Hey Scoble – startups aren’t the cat’s ass you think they are is a post from: The Inquisitr

Scoble noted that he’s an “agnostic Muslim” and by no means a faithful follower of the faith he now holds, but none the less, legally he is a Muslim.

But what does Robert Scoble teach us about Islam?

I could jokingly suggest that all Muslims must be fat, loud and regularly wrong, but that wouldn’t be fair given that description could fit a 100% committed atheist like me…well, maybe not the fat part as much.

What it does teach us all is that Muslims are normal people as well.

I don’t want to preach religious tolerance too much because this isn’t really the right forum for it, but in an age where “Muslim” has become a dirty word, used by supporters of the McCain campaign as a tool to denigrate Obama, it’s important to note the lesson.

The reality is, as it is with any person, that there are good and bad people, and that their religion, race, nationality or sexuality should never be used as the determining factor.

Black people commit crimes, but that doesn’t make all black people criminals. An Australian recently killed a funded startup and failed to communicate with his stakeholders, but that doesn’t make all Australians inept. Germany likes to invade other countries, but not all Germans are Nazis. Some Asian people eat dogs, but that doesn’t mean that your local Chinese restaurant is stealing pets and passing them off as chicken.

Some Muslims are awful, commit crimes, and a smaller number again have declared a jihad on the Western world, but that doesn’t mean all Muslims are terrorists or bad.

In the big scheme of things Scoble’s religion really means nothing; very few people if any will change their minds about Scoble based on him being “one of them,” and nor should they. But that same generosity extended to Scoble through familiarity should be extended to any Muslim person in your community unless there is evidence of wrong doing, in the same way it should be with anyone. We’ll all be better off if people thought this way first, and not in the xenophobic way that seems to be growing through certain parts of the United States.

What the worlds most famous Muslim blogger, Robert Scoble, teaches us is a post from: The Inquisitr

What makes a blogger different from a journalist, beside formal training? The biggest difference broadly speaking is that journalists write about what they’re told to write, bloggers blog about what they are interested in, or have knowledge of.

As blogging matures, the top of the blogosphere is blending into the mianstream, and the line between blog and traditional news provider is difficult to spot online. I was interested to learn recently from a number of people across several blogs, that their blogging revolved around topics dictated to them from above. It’s not strange in a traditional news room sense, but it’s something that hasn’t traditionally been seen with blogs.

I’ve acted in a number of roles in blogging over the years. I never had paid staff at The Blog Herald, only the occasional guest writer, so I never really had cause to exert editorial control. At Weblog Empire, I hired people who knew what they were writing about, and although I may have occasionally forwarded a story idea, or made a suggestion about tone or frequency, I never regularly dictated what they wrote about. Same at b5media, although that would have been impossible to micro-manage. As a writer at TechCrunch I can say that for all his faults, Michael Arrington gave me nearly complete reign to write about what ever I felt like. He may have occasionally forwarded story ideas, or suggested that I don’t write about a company, but 95% of the time I did as I pleased….well, as long as what I did delivered Techmeme headlines. With that background, I’ve adopted the same policy at The Inquisitr. I do forward some things on, and occasionally ask for posts to be written up, particularly where I can’t do them myself, and we do talk about focus around big stories on occasion as well. But that aside, the team here at The Inquisitr has free reign to do as they please in terms of picking content.

So then Scoble wrote this on a Google Reader share on one of Steven Hodson’s posts

“Oh, Duncan is now saying “there’s worse to come.” Fear monger! I get it, he’s playing both sides. He gets his new author to attack me for being too negative, then he goes negative himself. That way he gets both audiences: the folks who want just positive news reported, and the folks who want the hard truth. Heheh, brilliant strategy. Me? I’m going to Zig to this Zag.”

I could spend an entire post covering why he’s wrong about the negative/ positive stuff, but I’ve already dedicated a number of posts to the subject (this one was posted BEFORE he made this comment), and yes, we are fence sitting to a degree, but overall we’re going to try and be more positive because I believe that our mix is better suited to good news.

The issue I have is the highlighted section. I emailed Scoble two days ago saying that I was disappointed with his comments and explaining our editorial policy. He didn’t respond, so lets make this public.

Independent blog editorial policies rock.

I didn’t ask Steven to do a hit post on Scoble, and trust me, if I was going to go after Scoble, I wouldn’t delegate the task, I’d do it myself. When we announced Steven joining the team, I noted in that post that I wouldn’t always agree with what he wrote…but that was the strength in the hire. Most of the debate in that post seemed to be more centered around the comments, but maybe I misread it. Either way, Steven writes what he believes, and that’s pretty much the end of the story.

You see, when people work with me, I trust their ability to pick stories. In fact, it’s the key factor that influenced my hiring of our key writers. I mean this as no disrespect to our writing team, but not one of them was the best qualified for the positions they have in terms of writing history of the low three figures we got in applications. There were some amazing applicants, some who had worked in the mainstream media and on leading blogs and similar websites. Other sites have probably since snapped them up, and I’m sure many of them are doing very well. But a great resume and way with words doesn’t always come with the ability to pick stories, and the ability to provide comment on those stories. Our main writers won their positions because I believed in their ability to be independent, to pick great stories, to provide their unique take on them, and to do their own thing. I believed that I could in the most part take a hands off editorial approach with them (in part due to geography, because I’m not online until mid-afternoon US time), and although I may forward the odd email, or talk about things we can do better, or story focus on big news days, 95% of the time I never exert any influence on their writing. I most certainly do not order hit posts on people like Scoble. Again, if I was going to come after someone, I’d do it myself.

I mean this as no disrespect either to my many friends, and associates, who work for blogs where content is dictated from the top down, because I know many of them are capable bloggers who are more than able to pick good stories. But when you’re in a blogging position where stories are dictated to you, you become something close to a journalist than just a blogger. There’s some irony there in the years old are bloggers journalists debate, and likewise I’m not belittling journalists either. But there is that distinction.

Bloggers tend to be passionate about what they write. The best bloggers are often passionate bloggers, one thing I’m sure Scoble might agree with me on. If you’re picking the posts you’re writing every day, chances are that some, if not all of them will be tied into passionate blogging. If you’re writing about stuff dictated, there may be some crossover, but the chance of the topic and post not being passionate are greater than if you’d picked the topic yourself.

Scoble, I’m sorry you feel the need to play up victimhood at the drop of the hat. This year, despite our rocky start (the first thing you ever said to me in person when I met you was “do you have any startups in Australia”…I’ll let our Australian readers explain what’s wrong with that statement…considering you were with Chris Saad tonight ) I probably have gained more respect and understanding of you, and I very nearly included your shared items, and even your blog, as part of our mix on the front page with the new site. But if you’re going to cry like a little baby every time someone disagrees with you, and if you’re incapable of understanding that a multi-person blog has an independent editorial policy, and that there’s not a conspiracy from above to get you, you can get fucked. I’m not changing our editorial policy because you don’t like it. I believe in our bloggers on this site, and that respect includes faith in their ability to write what they please, even if I don’t always agree with it. I’d rather this then a team of bloggers who just churn stuff out. Passionate bloggers Scoble…remember?

Hey Scoble, Independent blog editorial policies rock! is a post from: The Inquisitr

Multitudinous echoes awoke and died in the distance. . . . . And, when the echoes had ceased, like a sense of pain was the silence. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It’s easy to be passionate about technology and the internet and its place in the world, and I make no apologies for often joining the crowd in sharing a passion for the new and shiny. But any such immersion is always taken with a grain of salt, the seeded idea that for all that I feel necessary to buzz that often many of these products are doomed to fail, the concept of mainstream acceptance replaced by one that lacks a business plan, that aims for the next Crunchmeme headline or Arrington write up and ignores the billions outside of the space.

Have we, living inside a bubble of who is first with what is shiniest lost touch with the world outside our digital frontiers, a world where MySpace became the king of social networking, and where Photobucket is the prefered choice of photohosting over the tag friendly Flickr. A world where people don’t have 300 accounts across 25 microblogging platforms, a dozen social networking sites, and god knows how many other sites we tried then forgot 5 minutes later.

Strangely, it’s why I loved Gnomedex so much. It wasn’t the typical tech conference crowd and speaker list, instead Chris challenged the audience with a rich tapestry of varied thought, from Mars, to Ignite, and the realities of the global poor through the efforts of the simply amazing Beth Kanter. Next to the Cyborg Anthropologist was a guy who made a living bringing 4chan cats to the mainstream, and a guy who spends his time dancing around the world. Certainly in depth occasionally it may have been frivolous, but it was a strong reminder that outside of the crunchmemeosphere that there are people creating, challenging, innovating, and they aren’t simply tied to the next business plan free first adopter aimed web startup.

I heard . . . . . . the great echo flap And buffet round the hills from bluff to bluff. Lord Alfred Tennyson

Every space needs its first adopters and passionates. The seed that spreads the word of value must always start somewhere. In a world dominated by corporate manipulation that the tech world has cast aside its reliance on the corrupted memes of mainstream media instead allowing a guy like Scoble to have a voice that spreads further than the newspapers of old is a positive. But it must be taken with not a grain of salt, but with an entire truckload, because in replacing one medium with another we are creating our own elites, an echo that bounces round the hills from bluff to bluff, with the rest of humanity often residing on the other side, oblivious to our rambles.

I will not pretend to offer an answer to the problem, particularly when I am sometimes a contributor to it. Keeping it real is a poor cliche, but the reality distortion medicine should be prescribed in twice daily doses from your family doctor. Rise up from your keyboards and cross the street, observe if you’re outside of the Valley the unwashed masses living without many of the things we use. See how the things they use are different, and note that while it is alright to like shiny things, the real opportunities lie outside of the cruchmemeosphere we live in.

headline credit: Alexander Pope

And more than echoes talk along the walls [Crunchmemeosphere] is a post from: The Inquisitr

The best quote of the day: Leo Laporte
““It’s funny to see all the Twitterati flock to – we’re all so desperate for a Twitter that works. Why not just clone it?”

Why not indeed. We love the community on Twitter, but we hate the train wreck it has become.

Where this need for working platforms becomes a challenge, from Veronica Belmont
“OK, I joined the new one. Man, I’m getting kind of tired of joining things.”

Shel Israel asks
“Is there anyone here who has actually left Twitter?”

Some have, some find it hard to part company, a point I fully understand.

Need friends to follow on Indenti.ca? Directeur and Dave Winer come to the rescue, both threads providing lots of great people to follow.

Talking of Dave, the most that started the morning for me: Oh happy days.

It’s not been all clear sailing in Indenti.ca land. Besides becoming very slow as more and more people signed up, they also broke the cardinal sin of new services: never upset Robert Scoble:

“Someone already registered scobleizer on identi.ca — I sent an email asking for my account back. Sigh.”

“Funny, my email to identi.ca bounced back. FAIL. FAIL. FAIL.”

A full, running update on the Identi.ca discussion can be viewed on FriendFeed here. The Inquisitr’s coverage here, and a more informal post I wrote on my personal blog here.

Other coverage: VentureBeat, Sarah in Tampa, Ross Mayfield, Tom’s Tech, Mashable and The Standard.

“We’re all so desperate for a Twitter that works.” The Identi.ca wrapup post is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to a post at Global Neighborhoods, Israel claims that he asked to take the GlobalNeighborhoods.tv (GNTV) out of FastCompany.tv and to show it instead on the Global Neighborhoods website. Israel notes that the cost of sponsoring a show with Fast Company involved was too high and now that the show has been liberated, it will cost less to sponsor the show.

Israel also claimed that the move away from Fast Company allows him to declare himself an “an independent online journalist” and that this is a liberating experience.

Israel claims that he is still involved with the Workcast show with Robert Scoble…on FastCompany.tv, so perhaps the “independent online journalist” concept only extends to solo video blogging?

The GNTV show launched to a mixed response this year, and spawned a puppet based comedy series from 1938 Media.

(img credit: Spin Art Gallery, via FF)

GlobalNeighbourhoods.TV No Longer With Fast Company is a post from: The Inquisitr

I was initially concerned as to how the XML feed from FriendFeed may be parsed in terms of updates, I’m happy to report that the page refreshes in full and provides ongoing updates in order as well as providing new stories as they reach the list (vs placing the new stuff on top like the same raw feed does in Google Reader).

I though I’d compare the list on QMeme as I write this post to Techmeme. Now I love Gabe and I’m still a Techmeme addict, but at the dawn of the personal memetracker there are some significant differences in what one delivers over the other in terms of my personal likes.

Lead stories

The top story on Techmeme now is about Google developing an ISP throttling detector. The top story on QMeme is Chris Pirillo saying that he’ll never use BrightKite and that he values his privacy. Now remember QMeme is based on the best content on FriendFeed as voted by my friends, associates and others I follow, so not surprisingly I much prefer the Pirillo item. It’s a little bold, out there, but more importantly there is a really interesting discussion on FriendFeed as well (the link in this case is a FriendFeed entry). Google measuring Comcast throttling BitTorrent traffic…bit to nerdy for me.

Next Two posts

Techmeme: yet another Microsoft-Yahoo post, this time Tim O’Reilly having ago at Michael Arrington, then Andrew Sullivan trying to argue that Google makes us all brain dead in the Times of London. Qmeme has two FriendFeed posts: one discussion based on people’s positions for their name in Google, then an item about reciprocal following on FriendFeed. Honestly none of these overly excite me, however I got more out of the two in QMeme because the discussion was there. But admittedly it was tight call.

4th
Steve Gillmor on TechCrunch seeing dead people vs Scoble responding to people suggesting that he is a paid shill. Scoble wins hands down.

There are more I could compare, but testing this in the middle of the weekend isn’t really fair on either because fluffy items tend to rise to the top when news is quiet. I might try this again mid-week when big stories are breaking to see whether Techmeme has the upper hand.

Not everyone will like content on QMeme as they won’t like the content on Techmeme, but as we enter the age of personalized memetracking there will be many more QMeme style memetrackers out there than there will be versions of Techmeme. FriendFeed users already have this feature from within FriendFeed now, I’m just the first person to take it out of FriendFeed to share it with the world, and I most definitely won’t be the last.

Update: if anyone would like a QMeme widget for their own site or homepage there is now a 300×250 on the right hand side here on The Inquisitr. Click on share for the various options, including support for iGoogle and Netvibes.

QMeme Day One is a post from: The Inquisitr