Saturday, August 30, 2008
[Blog] | [Home]
Beta FriendFeed to the Rescue?
I've been fighting an ongoing battle with myself. I love talking politics, and I like stirring the pot with controversy.

You might have noticed this week that I've been a bit more grumpy and irritable than usual. It's because of junk like this:

It takes no brains to bring this sort of stuff up. Allen's comment is akin to "you forgot to put the apostrophe after the s, rather than before, in the second sentence of the third paragraph." It's arguing for the sake of arguing. If there's a good factual debate, or even a decent informed difference of opinion, I'm all about it.

When it's this sort of thing, it's annoying, particularly when it's the first comment. It ends up leading to stuff like that last comment, because it sets a negative and destructive tone.

The irony is that this was a fluff piece about VP candidate Palin's Chuck Norris jokes, a brand new meme on FriendFeed and Twitter. It's a particularly stupid question from Allen, because I had him on a panel with me in Washington DC earlier this year where I introduced myself to the room as the political editorialist for Mashable. It isn't like he doesn't know what's going on.

I've been a huge advocate of FriendFeed since it launched. Very quickly after starting to use it, it became my home page. Most of the Rat Pack hung out on there, and it was a great way to keep track of what we were all up to and have a sort of communcal chat room. One by one, though, most of them have either become significantly less active, or withdrawn completely.

Of course, now that FriendFeed is no longer private beta, alpha, or whatever it was at the time, there's a lot more people on there. As Veronica Belmont noted this evening, a lot of the conversations have been devolving into slug fests lately. Not fact based or informed opinion debates. Out and out in your face, this is who I am and I don't care if it offends you slugfests.

It's annoying as crap.

At any rate, I've tried one last ditch thing to save the FriendFeed experience for me. Within the new Beta, there's an option to set up lists of folks that you can theoretically categorize those you're following.

Here's my brand new arrangement:

Except for a few known troublemakers, I'm extending the benefit of the doubt to everyone and starting them out in the "Non-Irksome" list. I'll give it a week, and start rapidly paring down folks and throwing them over to the "Irksome" list as needed.

It isn't really personal, but I just need to cut down on the level of irritation being injected to my info-stream. I'm not particularly a fan of anyone in this presidential race, but that doesn't mean I don't have an ideology, beliefs and sensitivities. In the course of the general level of Obama zealotry going on in the tech community right now, abandonment of reason, tact and fact is at all time highs.

At any rate, I don't want to get into the nuance of that, or I'd just bellyache and complain for a few screenfuls. Bottom line, I don't want to end up hating everyone from my industry, so I'm going to try to segregate myself from their joyous worship of Obama for the duration.

Hopefully this works. I'd hate to block FriendFeed for three months, but given the amount of armchair punditry going on surrounding this election cycle, there might not be another option.

I'll try to let you know next week how it goes.

Labels: ,

posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 12:03 AM
blog comments powered by Disqus


   
Rizzn's Linkblog

Teenager Commits Suicide Live on Justin.tv - Michael Seibel finally issued a comment:

We regret that this has occurred and respect the privacy of the broadcaster and his family during this time. We have policies in place to discourage the distribution of distressing content and our community monitors the site accordingly. This content was flagged by our community, reviewed, and removed according to our Terms of Service.”
View Comments

ABC cans Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone and Pushing Daises - Oh seriously? I friggin' love DSM. Great show. That irks me.
View Comments

Dark Side of the Cloud -
View Comments

Life and death on camera [Deathcasting] -
View Comments

Obama's cell phone records breached (CNN) -
View Comments

Weedmaster P Is Her Dealer -
View Comments

Worst of the Week: You’ve Got Junk Mail - I remember when I was a kid - I used to get all sorts of junk mail and credit card offers for my BBS handle "rizzn."
View Comments

Who Would Have Guessed? Blackberry Users Love MySpace -
View Comments

videos to clog my tubes with -
View Comments

Commenters

Rizzn's Personal Blog

Finished With My RSS Reorg - It’s 4:30 AM right now. I’m bushed. A few days ago, I started on a quest to make myself more efficient with respect to...
Join the Discussion >>

#MotrinMoms are Out of Line - I took the weekend off from the computer, so I missed this affront against humanity while it was fresh, but you're likely ...
Join the Discussion >>

The Religious Nature of the Singularity - Do you believe in the Singularity?Do you know what it is?Finding it's roots in the research and philosophies of Ray Kurzwe...
Join the Discussion >>

I'll Admit It, I Liked Valleywag - Now that my linkblog is all exposed for the world to see here, it'd be pretty hard to deny that I'm a daily reader of Vall...
Join the Discussion >>

Introducing: Rizzn's Link Blog - Over the weekend, I finally undertook a project I remember discussing with MG Seigler almost a year ago. I built a rudimen...
Join the Discussion >>

Obama is a Media Money Maker - Brian Maloney over at The Radio Equalizer was one of many bloggers on my reading lists today to talk about the rumor publi...
Join the Discussion >>

Get Off My (Virtual) Lawn! - Just another cynical observation today, but it seems that with the election out of the way, and all of us settling into a ...
Join the Discussion >>

James Smith and the IITW - If you've read this site for more than a year and a half (and let's be honest, there's probably only about six of you), th...
Join the Discussion >>

On Unity and Reconciliation - Look, I respect the fact that Barack Obama is president-elect now, and when he assumes office, I'll give him as much respe...
Join the Discussion >>