Some recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room.

RSS vs email

Jason F.
Email is probably used 100:1 when compared to RSS
Jason F.
maybe 10,000:1
Ryan S.
RSS is harder to understand too
Ryan S.
it’s abstract
Ryan S.
compared to email
Jason F.
Email runs the world
Ryan S.
“send a notification” versus “somehow magically see updates in a different format on a different application”
Jason F.
People know how to get an email.
Jason F.
They understand an email
Jason F.
they’ve been getting emails for 10 years
Ryan S.
when we rely on RSS for things, it’s saying “here learn something new”
Ryan S.
instead of “use what already know”
Ryan S.
another plugin, or another application, another setup process, etc
Jason F.
RSS is way too techie still.
Ryan S.
it’s too complicated
Jason F.
I don’t even use RSS anymore
Jason F.
I wouldn’t want a company to force me to use yet another piece of technology to have to use our products.
Jason F.
Everyone on the planet who uses our products has an email address
Jason F.
a tiny sliver actually use RSS, know what RSS is, and understand the benefits of RSS.

Media descriptions

Matt L.
"Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Facebook Stake"
Matt L.
Sam S.
"Facebook, a service that lets people set up their personal Web pages,"
Sam S.
worst description ever
Jason F.
Sam: lol
Jason F.
It’s amazing how often the media just totally botches such simple shit like that
Sam S.
yeah, doesn’t give you a whole lot of faith in the things they’re reporting about outside your area of expertise
Jason F.
Good observation.

Roll the dice

Mark I.
Jamis, you’ll appreciate this: My 10 year old wrote a program to roll dice and is using it to play D&D by himself.
Mark I.
It’s actually more accurate to say that he has several programs. One for each die type. :)
Jamis B.
ha! awesome
Jamis B.
tell me he wrote it in Ruby!
Mark I.
Of course.
Mark I.
Using Hackety Hack.
Jamis B.
very cool!
Mark I.
It’s fun to watch. He swears it’s faster for him to load up the program and run it than it is to just roll dice. Of course, he’s delusional.

Russian spam

Mark I.
Incidentally, I came across a filtering rule for email that has completely eliminated all the Russian spam I used to get.
Mark I.
Matches: (в OR и)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it
Mark I.
If I got legitimate Russian mail, that wouldn’t work. But since I don’t speak Russian anyhow, I figure I’m safe. :)
Jamis B.
lol, awesome