That's clearly a stab at Twitter. It'll be interesting to see if Merlin's new focus will cause others to question their Twitter use (and interesting to see if it makes any difference in Twitter's traffic.)

and I only follow people that I've met irl

also, if you go to local programming/hacker meetups, you're bound to find a few who use twitter.

What if you just stuck to following friends only? Or is it the chicken/egg problem?

Just because they follow you doesn't mean you have to follow them. :)

But you're right - if you don't have a solid group of friends using it - it's retarded.

Seriously, most of the things people would say there - Merlin and Zeldman especially - were more geared towards humorous than they were towards at all interesting. RSS worked a lot better if I was looking for productive content.

What's funny is: even though there is a ton of of things to criticize Tim Ferriss for, he chooses something that is actually pretty awesome: outsourcing repetitive, mundane tasks. The point of 4 hour work week is not to lay in a hammock the rest of your life; it's to do what you enjoy. I think Tim's an epic dbag (auto responder? - please.) and even I picked that up.

Sidenote: What the heck are those "digital nomad" ads? Those people sound like they should be writing the sequel to the Secret. Ugh.

It's like admitting that you like him or his ideas in front of the cool kids means you're some kind of sucker.

"Epic dbag" because he recommends auto-responders . . .?

And because he's polarizing, which he admits and actively tries to do. Also he's a glorified scammy sounding pill pusher who is a master of PR and good at articulating ideas. The pill advertisements for BodyQuick and BrainQuicken, which he owns, are reminiscent of weight loss or penis pills.

Any time you praise someone who's done a lot of good and bad I think it's essential to qualify the parts you like about them.

But I do understand your point and should have elaborated in my original post. In addition, to the autoresponder (btw, what's hilarious is emailing him, getting an autoresponse and then a reply from him a minute later), here's a list of some of the other things he does or actively promotes that I think qualify him as an "epic dbag" or rather take a lot away from his successes, ideas and good qualities:

1. Shady pills making ridiculous claims

2. This is his world record: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9pWKB2D23k

3. He "won" Wired's greatest self promoter of all time

4. Read about the Chinese kick boxing championship

5. Self claimed "Advisor to more than 30 world record holders in professional and Olympic sports (not substantiated)."

6. Self claimed "Cage fighter in Japan, vanquisher of four world champions (MMA)" and a "National Chinese kickboxing champion" (not substantiated)."

7. Self claimed: "Actor on a hit TV series in mainland China and Hong Kong (not substantiated)"

8. Plagiarism? http://www.johnwinsor.com/my_weblog/2008/04/was-another-new....

Ivygate (yeah, I know) has a pretty hilarious write up as well: http://www.ivygateblog.com/2007/05/timothy-ferriss-out-vayne...

http://is.gd/2pjW

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/48588149/better

http://www.43folders.com/2008/09/08/gears-shifting

To put it more simply -- how can following a productivity blog make me more productive?

The only problem is that the marginal returns on such implementations diminish very quickly, so after you've got the big ones down--like breaking down big, intimidating tasks into smaller, doable ones and realizing that you don't need email to auto-update every 5 minutes at every hour of the day--there's not much to gain from reading productivity blogs.

The big problem is that is it easy to get caught up in the huge initial improvements and fail to realize that the time you gain from implementing these marginal improvements is less than the time you already spent on implementing the improvement itself. It's especially bad if you're the typical geek like me and enjoy fiddling with programs and plugins and constantly trying to solve "third order" problems, even when they don't actually do anything in practice. However, exploiting this weakness is exactly what most productivity blogs do to keep their traffic up, so I now have a lot more respect for Merlin, who's actually trying to do something about this problem.

Love it!

Also, once his "productivity" blog became so popular, others who smelled easy money started their own blogs that seem to capitalize on keeping people caught up in maya* to draw traffic rather than actually helping them solve their own problems, productivity or otherwise.

* See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_%28illusion%29#Concepts_an...

A useful hack is one that takes you from one mode of operating to were you want to be.

86monocles.com is available, if anyone is interested.

I'm pretty sure it also preceded the great majority of those domains.

The other big one, 37signals, is named after the signals sent into space in search of intelligent life. No clue re: 43things. All the other numbers exist because every other url was taken.

I think the other 43 domains followed 43folders, they succeeded it by a year or three IIRC.

Perhaps not.