DISQUS

Dhrumil · 2 years ago

Disqus is the best. I have no idea why people are still using old school comment systems.

ceonyc · 2 years ago

I don't like it in LinkedIn at all.... seen it yet?

RacerRick · 2 years ago

CEONYC might be the biggest linkedin user in the world, so if he doesn't like it - look out!

ceonyc · 2 years ago

LinkedIn is a fantastic utility to me... something bothers me about
the idea of making it more of a social place.

RacerRick · 2 years ago

I agree. Totally. I will not be uploading a photo.

Vishy Venugopalan · 2 years ago

@ceonyc: Yes, I don't particularly like the LinkedIn update stream either. I suspect it's because the feed does not adhere to the UI innovation Fred talks about above. Instead it's a disparate bundle of updates (invitations, profile updates, people who joined) each displayed in their own category, which splits it up conceptually and may even give off the perception of information or design overload.

News feeds from friends are picking up steam, thanks to services like Twitter and Tumblr. But if it hasn't happened already, these updates too will eventually add to information overload. I've attempted to create basic time-slices for Twitter and Tumblr (or any other RSS feed) with a content-timing service called WhenGuard (http://whenguard.com). Here, you can provide an RSS feed URL and start and end times that you want to track it. WhenGuard gives you a special URL--known as a jitlink--which will start passing through updates from the RSS URL it aliases at the specified start time and expire after the specified end time.

You can stick jitlinks in your RSS reader and follow interesting people only for the time that they are interesting. Want to see what Robert Scoble has to say, but only for the duration of the next Web20 conference? Create a WhenGuard jitlink around his Twitter feed around the right start and expiration dates and there you have it. Marry this jitlink to a perpetually caching RSS reader like Google Reader and you have a TiVo equivalent for RSS. See http://whenguard.com/faq#rss for more info.

WhenGuard works not just for RSS content, but for any content that has a URL. Feedback is welcomed, as the service is still in its very early stages.

RacerRick · 2 years ago

I think that the clean google homepage has probably been a source of frustration/growing pains for google as well so that's a great comparison.

ewan · 2 years ago

I'm sure that everytime Google has a new product they want to launch, the decision over whether to put it on the frontpage is a huge tempation and a huge risk at the same time - what happens if the service performance is too slow, what happens if it's a huge success and it doesn't scale, and of course what happens if it bombs and everyone hates it.

RichK · 2 years ago

Your Disqus feed is very interesting. Doesn't CoComment allow you to follow comments across many sites?

jayanthi · 2 years ago

I've used that firefox plugin. It's like a bookmarklet that saves pages for you to check back on. Doesn't work particularly well IMO.

Mel · 2 years ago

Fred -- when you talk about "success" for Twitter, how do you qualify the word? It has been my experience that outside of the digerati, there are few users of twitter and even fewer who know about it.

markslater · 2 years ago

fred - i agree - i am a commenter before i am a blogger, and similarly i would love to follow mt friends comments as it may draw me to a conversation that i would otherwise not participate in. I asked arrington to open up the techcrunch comments as i spend time there, and he told me that i should just use trackbacks.

Joe Lazarus · 2 years ago

The interesting thing about the "news feed" layout, in addition to it's simplicity, is that it has a strange effect of encouraging people to read every post till they catch up to where they left off last visit. It's like going through your email inbox. I feel anxious till I've caught up. I don't think I would read all my friends Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook messages if they were presented in a format other than reverse chronological. Of course the benefits of this layout quickly become problematic when you're faced with too many messages and too many friends. My social inbox cup, it runneth over.

Yen · 2 years ago

I find it overwhelming to keep track of the different feeds I am interested in given there are generally just the occassional snippets from friends, blogs and news sites that interest me and I prefer not to read everything that comes out of the firehose to get those! So, I agree that my day is too filled w/them, but I also look forward to the day that the newsfeeds have effective search based on reputation and contextual filters.

Michael Hocter · 2 years ago

I think the Tumblr Dashboard is great, while I'm following a few people. But I wonder how it would scale, in terms of usability, if I was following hundreds or thousands of people.

fredwilson · 2 years ago

God forbid!

Marengo · 2 years ago

The news feed is the new UI innovation. Currently the newsfeed is static - on Facebook, on Tumblr, on Twitter the news feed doesn't change unless you hit refresh. At Marengo, we have made the news feed dynamic. View a screencast of our prototype here http://www.marengoip.com/videos/wb2.html

Read about it here http://blog.marengoip.com/2007/09/textpane-mash...