How Things Change
You Took the Silver, You Took the Gold
Is Twitter Afraid of FriendFeed?
Disclaimer: If you are not familiar with FriendFeed this post may not make so much sense to you. If you are familiar with FriendFeed, congrats to you, you’re on the cutting edge. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, what the hell rock have you been hiding under, time to stop taking so many photos and spend a little time on the internets no?
An interesting post over on FriendFeed by Steve Gillmor asking a simple question, "what is the delay between tweets and arrival in FriendFeed?" Steve is talking about how long it takes for a Friendfeed user’s tweets on twitter to show up on FriendFeed. It’s not the first time that Gillmor’s raised this issue.
For those of you unfamiliar with FriendFeed, it is the current mother of all aggregators. It %*$*%ing rocks. FriendFeed pipes in all of your various playgrounds on the internet (Twitter, Flickr, Zooomr, Google Reader, your blog, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc. etc. etc.) into one easy to consume feed. It’s been the most interesting thing to come out for a while. It’s a better way to follow your flickr contacts, a better RSS reader than anything else you might be using right now, and one of the best communities currently on the web.
FriendFeed also though is probably the closet thing Twitter has to a real and viable competitor. As a photographer, the simple fact that FriendFeed offers visuals whereas Twitter is entirely text based alone is enough for me to call FriendFeed the superior platform. Essentially you can do anything on FriendFeed that you can do on Twitter but, well, better. In addition to posting real time post updates on FriendFeed (that are not limited to 140 characters) you get a far more complete run down on what your friends are up to.
The thing is though, one of the things that makes FriendFeed work so well is that you can leverage the existing larger communities elsewhere on the web at places like Flickr and Twitter. This is all possible because of cool things like open APIs and the whole culture of sharing kumbaya stuff that Web 2.0 (for lack of a better name) is supposed to be about. All our data belongs to us. All our data ought to be portable. Companies are able to thrive in 2.0 because they put our (the producers) best interests above theirs. You know the speech.
Unfortunately though, one thing that I’ve noticed in the past month is that my tweets that used to be instantaneously posted from Twitter to FriendFeed seem to be slowing down sometimes. I’m not sure why this is, but a part of me worries that maybe Twitter is doing something to slow down the firehose from Twitter to Friendfeed because they are afraid of FriendFeed as a competitor.
Last month Dave Winer suggested that the reason that FF isn’t overtly challenging Twitter right now is because if they do, "they might find their firehose slows down or develops gltches it didn’t used to have." And, well, that’s what it feels like may be happening. Do keep in mind that Winer did not accuse Twitter of this or any other wrong doing, he merely suggested it as a huge "if" as a possible scenario.
Now I have no idea if the reason why tweets do not seem to be posting as fast to FriendFeed as they used to has anything to do with Twitter. For all I know there could be a technical problem on FriendFeed’s end causing this. But I think the fact that tweets have slowed down on FriendFeed deserves a conversation about the causes.
Of course two of the things that may raise FriendFeed as a greater competitor in the eyes of Twitter could be the recent move that FriendFeed made to allow people to auto subscribe to their Twitter contacts on FriendFeed and to automatically post their FriendFeed postings to their Twitter accounts. Every one of these FriendFeed updates posted to Twitter includes a link back to FriendFeed. This is probably a very useful tool for constantly reminding the Twitter community that a better way to do lifestreaming exists over at FriendFeed.
As an interesting side note, Robert Scoble suggests that in Twitter’s recent move to begin "suggesting" Twitter users to new and existing subscribers that they seem to have bypassed the two FriendFeed users with the most followers, Scoble himself and Leo Laporte. Both of these users have been active on FriendFeed and Scoble probably more than any single other person has been instrumental in promoting FriendFeed as a service online. "I think Twitter is being threatened by friendfeed. The two most popular users of friendfeed (Leo and me) were left off of the twitter recommended friends list over on Twitter," says Scoble in the Gillmor’s thread.
If you’d like to follow my updates on FriendFeed you can do that here. If you’d like to follow my updates on Twitter you can do that here too.
Federal Reserve Cop Says You Can’t Film Federal Buildings
Yet another unfortunate example of a police officer trying to enforce their own made up in their head laws about photography being illegal.
Is Photography Prohibited on an Airplane?
I received an interesting email yesterday from a business traveler who wanted to remain anonymous regarding a recent run in that he had with Air France Airlines and taking photographs aboard one of their flights. According to the traveler he was doing what a lot of us do and taking a photograph of the wing outside the airplane on take off. He said the way that the wings were closing reminded him of an eagle type gargoyle like on the Empire State Building and he was trying to capture that abstract photo when he was confronted by an Air France flight attendant.
According to the passenger, the flight attendant informed him that he was not allowed to take photographs once inside the plane. When he asked to see a written policy regarding the “no photos” rule the flight attendant left to retrieve one but never returned.
Now this case is not the first time that a flight attendant has admonished a passenger for in flight photography. There are numerous other cases online in internet forums and other places where passengers have been told by flight attendants that they cannot take photographs. In one of the most egregious cases a Jet Blue passenger was actually escorted off a plane in handcuffs after refusing to delete a video that she recorded of an on board altercation. Interestingly enough, Jet Blue actually had a photo contest of photos taken from their flights while appearing to prohibit photography in the case of the altercation.
Finding specific written policy information about individual airline policies is not very easy. Most airlines don’t list their in flight photo policies on their websites. I was able to reach a PR representative from Air France to ask about Air France’s specific policy given the complaint above, but have not been provided a definitive answer on this yet. The Air France PR rep asked for more information about the incident and offered to speak to the individual to clear up any misunderstandings but has yet to confirm that any such policy regarding photography on Air France flights either exists or does not exist. I’ll update this post if I hear back with a more definitive answer from Air France.
A representative from American Airlines pointed me to their policy online where it would appear that the type of photography our Air France passenger was engaged in of a wing while in flight would in fact be a prohibited act. You can find American Airlines’ policy here which reads: “Use of still and video cameras, film or digital, is permitted only for recording personal events. Photography or video recording of airline personnel, equipment, or procedures is strictly prohibited. “
I put in additional calls with both Southwest Airlines and Unite Airlines asking for information on their policies, but calls were not returned.
My own experience has been that I’ve never had a problem shooting from literally dozens of flights over the years. I even had a Southwest Airlines flight attendant offer to stand up from her seat on one flight so that I could get a good shot from her window of Mt. St. Helen. Still, it is troubling to hear of flight attendants admonishing passengers for on board photography. I also think that it’s unfortunate that more airlines aren’t more forthcoming with regards to what their actual photo policies are as some really great photography has been taken over the years from commercial air flights.
Update: Andy Beal points us to a pdf of Southwest Airlines’ permitted devices which lists both a digital camera and video camera as being permitted devices above 10,000 feet. I suppose this would be one more reason to fly Southwest over either Air France or American Airlines.
Wordle of Barack Obama’s Congressional Speech Last Night
Economy is bigger than health which is bigger than education which is bigger than deficit which is bigger than power which is bigger than prosperity which is bigger than Iraq. The word terrorism did not make the Wordle at all and the world was only used once in the entire speech last night.
Thank Your Lucky Stars
Transform :: A short film for ScottKelby.com
Photographer Zack Arias has a thoughtful and inspirational video that he made about his photography. This is one of those videos that you will definitely want to watch through to the end. It changes course pretty significantly about 1/3 of the way into it. Do yourself a favor and click on the full screen togle for this one.
(Thanks, A Photo Editor!)
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
