I have been considering ways to aggregate my content from Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Google Reader for a little while now. The best way seemed to be to make my own plugin that would pull data in from these various sources and allow me to display it on custom pages on my site. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that this is just what Friend Feed does already. It pulls all your “stuff” into one place and gives you a running feed of all that content.
So I thought I would just grab the RSS from Friend Feed important it and do some minor manipulation on the data for what I wanted. But I was quite shocked to see that Friend Feed inserts display styles and HTML into their RSS feed which makes it very hard to parse and manipulate the data. The Friend Feed engineers are meant to be top Google people and it was quite surprising to me the way they mixed all the display syntax into a data sharing format. It basically makes the feed useless for any application other than having a Friend Feed like box on your site.
So now I am back to designing/coding/using WordPress modules to do it. Gina Trapani’s Twitalytic looks awesome, and I am thinking of looking over that code and seeing if it will work as a general aggregator with interesting stats to boot.
Wow pretty big news for a Monday, it seems that Facebook has bought FriendFeed outright. Noone is sure exactly what this means for Friendfeed right now, but it is pretty big news.
I actually only started using FriendFeed on Saturday, but just from a few hours of use I was quite impressed by what it lets you do. The whole site feels very “instant” unlike many other sites that rely on RSS feeds, or even Twitter requires refreshing and polling every minute or so.
The biggest thing I am worried about though, it that FriendFeed seems to be a bit of a testing playground for developing social technology. For example, in my earlier post about Google Wave tech they are the first site to use the Pubsubhubbub to get instant updates from RSS feeds. If FriendFeed goes away it seems like the tech savy crowd it currently has, and the more bleeding edge environment might go away.
What I Hope Happens
Hopefully Facebook will be smart about this, they should leave the FriendFeed website alone and allow the team to continue development there. They should just try to focus on integrating some of the more real-time stuff into Facebook like the instant comments and great aggregation features of FriendFeed.
It just seems like it would be a mistake to dismantle the FriendFeed community when it is such a good place for development to continue and new technology to emerge.
Also, by keeping FriendFeed separate hopefully we will not be subjected to all the questionable ToS agreements Facebook comes up with.
This could be a great thing for everyone, it could mean that Facebook is finally opening up a little. Lets hope it works out like that.
Digg.com has been one of my daily sites for a long time now, I really like the idea of community submitted stories and the community “Digging” the stories to promote them. This is both good and bad because the community can be full of a bunch of idiots who just keep posting the same photo of a Tiger swimming in a pool, or they can post some undiscovered gem I have never seen before. But good or bad it’s always been about the community.
Digg.com adds Sponsored Stories!
Today for the first time I seen a Sponsored story on Digg. It makes it to the front page with only 4 or 5 votes. This is too much now. We already have to put up with the flash ads popping up on each page and now companies can pay to get their stories on the front page.
It’s not there all the time, it pops up randomly when you visit. But this is not a good sign for the direction Digg is taking. I know they have to make money, but this seems like a line that they should not cross. In my mind it’s like a news paper selling articles to corporations and letting them write the material.
As you can see from the default theme I decided to upgrade the site to Drupal 6.0. I know that I have said in the past to never develop on your main site, but I thought what the hell. It’s not like this is a mission critical site or anything.
Anyway, I got a few database warnings when upgrading and the site is acting a little funky. I just cleared the site cache information and it seems to be working a little better. So hopefully that was it.
However I am considering clearing out all the info in the database and starting from scratch. I have over 1000 users and when I was looking at them 90% are spam users who must have got in before I disabled user accounts.
I will continue to post as I go so we can experience it together.
When thinking about formats and design of the new site I started thinking about the Twitter markup characters they use. Due the to the short size of Tweets length becomes important. Because of this they use some single characters to signify special words.
For example, the @ symbol is used to show that a Tweet is directed at a person. @veronica for example shows that your Tweet is directed at Veronica Belmont. The hash symbol (#) is used to signify Tags or important terms in your post. These conventions were not invented by Twitter, but they could still be useful in other situations.
Well it’s been a few weeks now since I starting using Firefox for everyday browsing and I have to say it is currently unusable for multimedia web use. Here are a few of the things I have noticed in my time using it.
There seems to be a lot of chatter from people like Leo Laporte (twit.tv)and Veronica Belmont (TekZilla), that the Blog being made obsolete by sites like Facebook and Twitter, but I feel that the blog will become more important. I recently signed up for twitter (@codemonkx) and Facebook (facebook.com/nickys) and I think they really great. But will they replace a blog? I don’t think so, I think they will just change its role.
For me social sites do not spell the doom of blogs, but an opportunity for blogs to change into something more useful. The blog should become the hub for all your personal information. tweets, blog posts, flicker photos, del.icio.us links, calendar events, forum posts, blog comments which are all scattered across the net. The blog can act as the catch all for all your online content.
Google Wave seems to be making some moves in this direction, by allowing content from many sources to be consolidated into once feed. Wave, from what I have seen in videos, is more of a personal information manager and is not used as your public face to the world.
Imagine your blog that consolidates all your tweets, flicker photos, comments posted on other blogs/forums/websites, or videos. By leveraging the other social sites like twitter and Flickr blogs should be the central place for people to find everything you publicly post.
Of course, most people to not need this they will be perfectly happy with a facebook page or a twitter feed. For people with several accounts on many different sites or who already have blogs they should still be the center of their public information. Hopefully for a long time to come.
Well it did not take long to find a problem with XMarks. I installed XMarks on my main computer running Firefox 3.5 with no issues. It seems that XMarks offers to sync passwords too, which I did not do. I then spent thirty minutes cleaning up all my bookmarks and synced with the server.
Then I jumped to my Mac and installed the plug-in in Firefox for Mac, logged into XMarks and synced the book marks up. Everything worked great… then I went to Safari.
After downloading the installer, which I did not like right off the bat, and installing the plug-in I was forced to logout and back in (essentially a reboot) then Safari refused to load complaining about a plug-in framework that failed to load. XMarks still worked, and synced the bookmarks, but I could not browse anything without Safari locking up.
I also hated the fact that XMarks installed a system icon in my system tray (sorry forgot the Mac term for the system tray) a browser plug-in should not require a permanently running app in the background.
Also, the fact that the actual plug-in did not even work in Safari is a problem. So I un-installed it immediately.
I am still happy with it for Firefox, but I think they might have been premature in removing the “Fox” part of their name. Because they are obviously still mainly a Firefox application.
It seems that Safari’s plug-in architecture might be to blame too, I just hope that the Chrome version is alot better when it’s release.
After using Chrome for just a few weeks I have already become accustom to the great address bar functionality it provides. With just one address bar where you can type addresses, searches, without thinking about it is a great thing. Now I am using Firefox 3.5 again I started searching for ways to duplicate the functionality and found something a little disturbing.
Recently I pretty much switched to Google Chrome as my browser of choice on my Windows machine. The feature I liked the most was the speed by far. I use GMail alot now and JavaScript performance is important. Firefox 3 was lagging behind quite a bit by being perceivably slower than Chrome at loading and working with Javascript heavy sites. Thankfully Firefox 3.5 (in particular TraceMonkey) takes a big step in closing the gap.
Firefox 3.5 still does not seem quite as fast too me as Chrome, but it is much much faster than 3.1 was. It’s so much faster that I can now live with it again. I am even willing to give up some of the features I loved about Chrome like the unified URL bar, and the threaded tabs to get access to some of the extensions in Firefox.
As I recently posted I bought a Macbook Pro, and have been using Firefox as the main browser in OS X. So now using extentions like XMarks or the in development Weave Project to keep all my bookmarks and links together.
Firefox 3.5 so far seems like a good upgrade and has once again taken the thrown of default browser on both my systems. Hopefully this fierce competition will continue, and leave IE even further in their dust.
It’s not like this is a mission critical site or anything.