Disqus - Latest Comments for robsafuto

Re: Create a Lifestream in Less than a Minute with Ident Engine

robsafuto — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:12:34 -0000

This rocks. Can't wait to integrate it into one of my own sites.

Re: Robert Safuto | Jackman & Craig -- Can You Hear Us Now?

robsafuto — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:13:19 -0000

My wife and I saw The Boy From Oz with Hugh Jackman on Broadway a few years ago. He had some good fun then with a few people who had seats down in the front and entered after the curtain had gone up.

Re: Enough with shortened URLs (Scripting News)

robsafuto — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:12:29 -0000

Actually I did ignore (unintentionally) the last sentence of the comment. That's my bad. I did not know that the Twitter cut off was 30 characters. Even so, I think that Twitter should give their users the option to not shorten URLs (of any length) if users don't want them to be shortened.

Re: Enough with shortened URLs (Scripting News)

robsafuto — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:59:05 -0000

I frequently use Twitter. And Twitter auto-shortens URLs using Bit.ly. It's a fact. In fact, just to make sure I just posted a Tweet from the Twitter web interface that you can see here.

http://twitter.com/robsafuto/status/3297898104

That tweet was less than 140 characters and included the original url http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/2009/08... which was automatically shortened by Twitter to a bit.ly link.

Re: MyStream Open Source Lifestreaming App Released Written for ASP.NET 4

robsafuto — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:15:56 -0000

Amplifeeder looks good but there is absolutely no way I'm going back to developing websites using Microsoft servers. For me, it's the LAMP stack or the highway.

Re: Enough with shortened URLs (Scripting News)

robsafuto — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:07:45 -0000

The fact that Twitter forces shortened URLs on users is reason enough to limit use of the service to communication that doesn't have much value. How about a little choice for users? The character limit is 140. Fine. But I should have the option of all 140 characters being used in a url. Instead Twitter shortens urls automatically using Bit.ly. Dave is right. Enough. If the people who publish the content want to make short, pretty urls available to visitors then they should do that. But other services should not get to decide to make the link shorter to satisfy some arbitrary standard created to suit the particular service.

Re: DocStoc Launches an iTunes for Documents

robsafuto — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:28:41 -0000

I don't see how what DocStoc has launched compares in any way to iTunes. iTunes is a downloadable application that includes a store, but also offers local media management, access to iPhone apps, podcast subscription and all sorts of multimedia content. In contrast, the DocStoc store is totally web based and only offers access to a single type of media. In the post you back off from the declarative statement in the title by stating that, "DocStore is looking to be an iTunes for documents..." So its not iTunes for documents but it wants to be? Either way it doesn't make sense. A comparison to eBay would be much more appropriate. eBay is the most well known trusted exchange for buyers and sellers on the web.

Re: Scoble, your blog still loves you (Scripting News)

robsafuto — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:54:03 -0000

I agree. Who knows. A few years down the road the founders of FriendFeed may start something else and they'd be in a better position if their old fans felt good about how FriendFeed ended.

Re: Scoble, your blog still loves you (Scripting News)

robsafuto — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:05:02 -0000

What's lost in the whole discussion about FriendFeed selling off to Facebook is the fact that it is very likely that FriendFeed had to sell to Facebook because they weren't competitive and didn't have good revenue prospects. That situation existed in spite of Scoble's freelance evangelism for the service. So I think it's wrong to attribute the sale to the hard work of Robert Scoble. Had Scoble been more successful at bringing users to the service then Friendfeed wouldn't had had to sell. This is a separate issue from the question of whether or not Scoble should have worked so hard for FriendFeed in the first place. My answer is, "No." As far as I know FriendFeed never promised Robert any monetary compensation in return for his activity on the service so they don't owe him a dime.

Re: My Thoughts on the Current State of FriendFeed

robsafuto — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:18:15 -0000

My gut feeling is that FriendFeed is done. Facebook will inherit the best ideas and features and fold them into their site. I think it's better that way since I believe that just about everyone who was on FriendFeed is on Facebook anyway. I also think that the FriendFeed leadership sold because they had to. FriendFeed didn't appear to have any revenue generating possibilities. And they've been getting squeezed by both Google (via recent Google Reader enhancements) and Facebook in terms of functionality. Now that the team is with Facebook they can focus on developing their ideas without having to worry about competing with Google.

Re: TechCrunch writing caught fibbing about startup numbers

robsafuto — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:17:57 -0000

Look, there's nothing special about Teens In Tech. It's just another internet pump and dump scheme. There's no good content over there. It's a WordPress MU install like thousands of other ones floating around the web. And I think that calling the young man who is the webmaster over there a "wunderkind" is really setting the bar low for wunderkinds.

The right (and responsible) thing for the (so called) advisors of Teens In Tech to do is teach Daniel how to build a community organically, with lots of sweat equity and personal outreach. Exaggerating the numbers doesn't help a low traffic site like that get larger. Better content and superior technology will help but those are only two pieces of the pie. Daniel has a lot to learn so his advisors should teach him the proper fundamentals rather than enabling him to continue on with the fantasy that Teens In Tech is anything more than run of the mill WordPress blog.

Re: Robert Scoble leaves Fast Company

robsafuto — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:07:00 -0000

Well, the Web 2.0 startup scene is really going to suffer now. What will they do without the jolly Scoble showing up to point his camera at some computer screen that no one else can see while pitching softball questions and gushing over their products? Perhaps this approach was unique a few years ago. But there is no shortage of cheerleaders today for all the dopey web apps that are popping up daily. So the service that Scoble provides just isn't as valuable as it used to be. Maybe they should've stuck with that photography show they produced one episode of and then abandoned.

Re: the Hulu situation

robsafuto — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:27:25 -0000

What a dumba$% move by Hulu.

Re: Now this is how you do broadband

robsafuto — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:40:09 -0000

I see people talking about Korea and Luxembourg and their penetration of broadband. Now consider this. South Korea's total area is about 38,000 square miles. Luxembourg's total area is less than 1,000 square miles. Now compare those numbers to the area of the U.S. which is about 3.8 million square miles. So the cost to deploy a network that fast across North America would be exponentially more expensive and more logistically difficult than in small countries like South Korea and Luxembourg. The bottom line is that people need to be willing to pay for the cost of the upgraded service. I don't think it's fair to place the cost of such nationwide upgrades like that on the backs of taxpayers, many of whom have very modest needs with respect to internet data usage.

Re: Enough bitching – Feedburner housecleaning time

robsafuto — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 09:27:27 -0000

I think that you'll lose more subscribers by going to partial content feeds than switching from FeedBurner to your own WordPress feed.

Re: Launch of the First Lifestreaming Backup Service | Lifestream Blog

robsafuto — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:33:06 -0000

For the life of me I can't decipher what they mean when they say they will "backup" your lifestream. Let's say you have five RSS feeds that you want to have backed up. Do they create a single stream from all the posts that you can view as html? Do they create a database? Do they capture the comments? In the case of Google Docs or Flickr are they stripping out media and saving it on a directory somewhere? This really doesn't make sense to me.

Think about this. Why do you need a backup of a photo that you uploaded to Flickr or a video you uploaded to YouTube? It's already on your hard drive. And if you want to backup the content of all of your RSS feeds you can install a desktop based feed reader and import the content everyday. Or you could use Google Reader to the same thing and have it web based.

We'll see what they come up with at launch but so far it's nothing that's too special and certainly not worth paying for.

Re: louisgray.com: Content Sharing Platform Fachak Launches In Alpha, But Is Raw

robsafuto — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:25:30 -0000

The description of what Fachak is and what Fachak does is nearly incomprehensible. And the name. Not good in my opinion. After scanning the documents on the website I realized that Fachak is FriendFeed with star ratings instead of a like button. I don't see this going anywhere.

Re: louisgray.com: What FriendFeed Needs to Do To Grow and Keep New Users

robsafuto — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 09:59:44 -0000

A lot of the things that you suggest are things that would appeal to current users, which might build a bit more loyalty but won't spur too much growth. What about growth? I don't know that user growth is the most important thing either. Friendfeed has a base of thousands of passionate users of their service. FriendFeed needs to find some good sources of income. Because they're not going to grow to the size of a FaceBook and attract hundreds of millions of dollars in financing.

If I were the folks at FriendFeed I would find ways to convert the passionate current users in paying customers who also get rewarded as they help grow the service. What if I want to share a photo, video or mp3 but it's not online? There's an opportunity in storage fees. What if I want to combine several (but not all) of my feeds into one feed and share that on other sites? A "pro" service could combine storage, feed management, better statistics and other tools (like subscription via email) into one sweet package. That makes sense to me.

Then there's loyalty. Every web service that wants their users to be highly active should reward the users that help to grow their site and make it better. Every user should have the opportunity to become an affiliate, receiving a cut of the revenue for referring paid users. Users should also be awarded "points" for quality activity on the site, with points redeemable for "pro" level services or merchandise.

Re: rizzn's socnets: Podango Shutters: What’s the Industry Effect?

robsafuto — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:50:51 -0000

Podango? A good opportunity? Ha ha ha. Free media hosting supported by advertising is a non starter. How's Mevio doing? I call it a bad model with delusional management that waited way too long to inform show producers that they were pulling the plug.

I've also read that there were serious problems with Podango Show Builder Lite that never got resolved. http://davidjackson.org/2008/04/26/goodbye-poda...

So now we've got bad decisions combined with flawed technology. Anyone who buys that mess is out of their noggin.

Re: The Power Grid Imperative

robsafuto — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:18:02 -0000

In your post you state that, "I believe that we to realize that we need a massive works project that will build out a fully planned nationwide power grid system; not just a collection of individually controlled grids." Exactly how does gutting the entire North American electric grid make it any more reliable?

You make a leap from the 2003 blackout to the Brattle Group Report to the need for a massive public works project without making a coherent argument as to how the project improves the reliability of the grid. It's the same poorly constructed argument that we've heard frequently in recent months if only from politicians, journalists and activists who have zero experience with power systems or electric markets. A bit of education on power systems and electricity markets is required in order to speak authoritatively on this topic.

Rather than take up any more space in your comments I'll just say this. The sky is not falling. A massive public works project is not required. What's needed from the federal government is support for development of new transmission by private entities. They can help by performing analysis to determine where upgrades are necessary and by providing incentives to developers who site projects in the identified areas. The designation of national interest electric transmission corridors has been a good first step towards improving the reliability of the grid. http://nietc.anl.gov/index.cfm

Re: rizzn's personal blog

robsafuto — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:57:56 -0000

The community over on FriendFeed is a very liberal one. At least that is my perception. If people do have conservative views they are not sharing them very much. Probably because they know this is the kind of reaction they will get. People just need to know that If they share something perceived to be negative about Barack Obama then they're likely to get a negative reaction from the crowd over there.

Re: Voices from the Community: “Mad about Widgets”

robsafuto — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:16:48 -0000

I'm always jazzed to discover (or in this case rediscover) tools that can help me to reach a wider audience. Widgetbox makes it easy to find a larger audience so I'm enjoying all the possibilities and wanted to throw back some love via the blog. Keep up the good work.

Re: Delicious 2.0: Who bookmarks any more?

robsafuto — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:22:21 -0000

I bookmark a lot. One of my blogs is a news site on a particular topic. Most of the posts are inspired by the news items I find. I use Delicious as the place to archive those new items and share them on my site via a WordPress plugin that imports the feed to a special "news" page. Leo Laporte does something similar with TWiT.

Re: FriendFeed Hack for Immediate Feed Item Updates

robsafuto — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:12:27 -0000

For what it's worth Mark, I've been wondering how to refresh feeds on demand as well. I didn't know there was a link to do that. It must have been a very recent addition to the interface.

Re: Please Gabe don’t listen to Dave

robsafuto — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:01:19 -0000

Dave's just whining because people aren't gushing about Dave's new Obama-centric, er I mean social political news site at Newsjunk.com. It looks to me like Scripting News in a headline format. Perhaps Dave should hire a graphic designer and do a bit of marketing.