Weekly Recap 071808: Define ‘Frienderati’
July 18, 2008 6 Comments
Literati means intelligentsia…
Intelligentsia means…a social class of people engaged in complex mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them
Guy Kawasaki’s at it again…he rolled out his latest list of the “Top” in a medium, this time FriendFeed…his Frienderati lists ~100 people on FriendFeed and their 5 most recent entries…I actually follow a number of the people on his list…
But something’s not quite right with his list…Frienderati is a derivative of the term literati…look at that definition above…Frienderati should have a hand in the “development and dissemination” of culture on FriendFeed…
But many of them don’t…Shey Smith wrote Frienderati: Making it Easy to Find Popular Inactives in which he questioned the “-ati” credentials of Guy’s list…his title hits the nail on the head, inactives…
There’s Amber Mac, listed as a “new media journalist”…her FriendFeed stream is all Twitter, and she has 3 comments and 1 Like all time…Paul Kedrosky, “investor, writer, entrepreneur”…he streams his tweets and blog posts…2 comments, 1 like all time…Rebecca Briggs, “helping the world heal from the inside out”…tweets and blog…has never commented or Liked anything in FriendFeed…
The best has to be Guy Kawasaki putting himself on the list…nearly all twitter, which he only added on July 4th…2 comments all time…and there are others with similar levels of inactivity…
In what universe are these people the ones that develop and disseminate the culture of FriendFeed? They barely know it!…Two things at play here…
- Guy wants to make sure there are known personalities on his list, because you can’t just have a list with us regular folk who actually are part of the culture
- The lifestream aggregator part of FriendFeed is still important. Frienderati looks at FriendFeed as a simple aggregation of the streams of Important People, not as a place of interaction.
The nice thing is that FriendFeed makes it easy for n00bs to find interesting people…friend-of-friend and comments can help users get beyond the Important People…
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I’ve never said meh…
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Mattel, maker of Barbie, won its lawsuit against MGA, maker of Bratz. Mattel alleged that Carter Bryant, a designer at Mattel, created the Bratz concept while under contract for Mattel. Two pieces of evidence…
- He used a discarded Barbie body and Ken boots to mock up a concept of Bratz (via LAT)
- He used a Mattel notebook to write about the Bratz concept (via WSJ – subscription)
I don’t disagree that employees are obligated to provide value to their companies…but the actions of Carter Bryant are probably similar to those that a lot of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have done…imagine if all the big companies came down on ex-employees for taking ideas they started while employed and building their own companies…
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Noticing increased use of pictures in FriendFeed direct posts…they really make a post clickable and interesting…I did a quick survey of 100 FriendFeed direct posts in my ‘Friends’ stream…46 of the 100 direct posts had pictures…
And the pictures really work…they tend to dominate the poor text-only links…however, a bunch of comments on a text-only link still is the #1 draw for me…
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Interesting comment by Wai Seto regarding the iPhone’s too-short battery life and AT&T…
On the power issue, I have learned that handset receive and transmit power is actually set by the network over the air. The base station can tell the handset to tune down or up real time. The rumor is because AT&T coverage is not very good (not enough base stations?), so they set this setting very high and drain most of their 3G devices pretty quick. The power setting at AT&T is believe to be higher then European operators.
I looked at Wai’s LinkedIn profile, he’s a software architect at Nokia…so I’m thinking he knows what he’s talking about…
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Possibly the cutest baby picture ever…
Uploaded to Flickr on July 16…by July 18, it already has 10,732 views…
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See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Weekly+Recap+071808%3A+Define+%27Frienderati%22&public=1
About Hutch Carpenter
I'm Not Actually a Geek 
Good points about the Frienderati – maybe it will adjust itself over time. Or Guy will.
Oh! What a wonderful baby!!!
Great point about the Frienderati. The whole point of FF is unearthing the gems rather than being a repeater for every other channel out there…which is what happens if you just follow the A list.
Mark – Guy better update that list. FriendFeed is still way to early to have a static list like you might have with bloggers.
Mayuresh – ain’t those little babies cute?
Elliott – that’s the fundamental problem with the list. It appears to be yet another list of the best known people. Surprised Barack Obama wasn’t listed as Frienderati.