Blog.

Yesterday, Joshua Schachter had an excellent piece on the perils of the URL shortener: it's clear, concise, and scathing. Jason Kottke and Dave Winer had a few suggestions on how to mitigate the problem, or get us on the right track to eventually deprecating the use of URL shorteners.

I agree with Schachter's assessment, and I think Kottke and Winer are on the right track, but I think the URL shortener problem is far greater than what Schachter enumerates: no longer satisfied with controlling the initial click, URL shorteners have decided to add toolbars to promote ther content or to sell adspace: the most notable and recent addition to this group is Digg's toolbar, DiggBar. Dubious utility aside, they are trampling in the garden of an angry god.

A couple weeks ago, one of the founders of FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit, asked the world their ideas on the perfect FriendFeed.

Over the past couple of days, I've been thinking about Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing as it relates to social media, and truth be told, I'm lost. Rather than go into a rant about how the internet's wronged me today, or try to get into a lesson about an abstract concept, I'm going to go through my take on the state of B2B social media marketing and pass it off to you, the reader.

Although the title should make for some excellent Google bait, there were a couple topics today that seem to fit into what I've been discussing for the past couple of days. This morning, there was a lot of discussion on FriendFeed started Robert Scoble about Gabe Rivera's comments on FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit's post on FriendFeed (hope you're still with me). From the post, Rivera said:

Nobody should count out FF. The obvious technical excellence of the team and the very impressive pace of innovation you guys have already demonstrated make that clear. But I think people are alarmed that so many people have tried the site and then abandoned it (or at least that's how it appears). I personally think the way commenting and liking works has created incentives for the wrong kind of behavior, and you might be stuck in a kind of local maximum as far as uptake until you really shake things up. But what do I know? Anyway, good luck, I'll use FF regardless (though I don't comment any more...).

This sparked some interest from Scoble, who asked Rivera to elaborate: Rivera complied, adding "leaving dumb comments will increase the attention you get. Not so on Twitter, where dumb tweets hurt your follower count." Rivera's comments mimic a good portion of things I've heard about FriendFeed (and Twitter, too, but that's not important). What was more interesting to me was the level of vitriol on FriendFeed towards comments like his. Chief among the responses to his comments were attacks against Rivera's service, Techmeme, implying and directly stating its inferiority to FriendFeed. Other responses included explanations of FrendFeed as levity to otherwise (ostensibly?) miserable online existences, or how Rivera doesn't participate therefore he'll never get it.

This was a lot of exposition: it's a very cabal-like discussion and in many ways the exposition should serve to illuminate how little importance the topic has, but I think it's an interesting case study in what not to do when arguing with someone, and here's why.