Leaving FriendFeed behind

Sorry, Paul Bucheit, Ben Golub and the rest of the FriendFeed crew, but I'm just not compelled anymore.

I don't like the feel of the realtime flow, and Google Reader offers me everything else I'm looking for in a social news discovery application. I know more active users, more intimately, on Facebook than I do on FriendFeed. Unfortunately for you, Facebook and Google definitely "stole" a lot of your momentum and innovation. The rest of what FriendFeed offers I already have through Twitter.

RIP FriendFeed, I see nothing that differentiates you or offers unique value anymore. I met a lot of interesting people early on -- which I think is one of the greatest experiences you have during early public betas of social network sites -- but these days it's loud, crowded, fragmented and just doesn't grab me like it once did.

I'll leave my feeds posting in, and I'll respond to interesting comments, (thanks to email notification) but that will be, and for some time really has been, the extent of my participation in FriendFeed.

Most awesome Twitter tool I've seen in a long time - TrueTwit

An acquaintance from the NYTM mailing list, Elaine Lee, turned me on to the most useful, most effective anti-spam anti-autofollow bot tool I've ever seen to hit Twitter: TrueTwit.

This service detects new followers and sends them a DM on your behalf (yes, I generally despise auto DMs, but only when they're disingenuous/spammy) asking them to verify their human-ness via reCAPTCHA on the TrueTwit website.

Once the new follower has successfully solved the reCAPTCHA challenge, TrueTwit will email you a notification very similar to the basic Twitter new follower notification. (Which TrueTwit recommends you turn off -- the point IS to avoid noise, after all.) From there you can choose to view the user's profile, or ignore, as you wish.

TrueTwit reduces the amount of time you spend looking at profiles to determine whether or not someone is worth following by eliminating all the non-human accounts BAM! right off the bat. Two thumbs up! My aggravation and distraction levels just dipped a point or two.

Software Architects Are Like Condoms from My 25 Percent

I keep forgetting to post these pics

The pics from the Twitter Times Square billboard project on June 8th are available on Picasa.

I bought stamps today

I bought a book of first class US mail stamps today for the first time in ... probably something like 5-7 years. Unquestionably over half a decade.

I nursed my last two stamp books until sometime in 2008 ... they were 30-something, .34 or .37 maybe. I would simply slap two of those babies on outgoing mail -- the rare pieces that I sent -- and said mail would arrive happily at its destination.

I've sent other pieces of mail here and there, but I either have the postage rung up at a counter, or via an online service, or I use UPS or FedEx. And when it comes down to it, I don't send a lot of first class mail, period.

It shocked me to think how long it had been since I had laid out money on good old stamps. I remember licking stamps as a kid. Will my kids even use stamps?