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More on FriendFeed, Facebook, etc.

By on August 20, 2009 | Category: Article

Update:

So that didn’t go well… Seems that Tumblr didn’t like importing feeds so I decided to investigate all the hoopla and jumped in with both feet to Posterous. I can thus control where and how I post all via email which also means that I can maintain an archive through gmail. Now all the random tidbits that I find during the course of the day will end up on stream.blhill.net.

Just when I was starting to feel pretty good about my flow of information and the organization/integration of that information, a wrench got thrown into the works. I was using the venerable FriendFeed as a means of aggregating all of my online activities. FriendFeed would pull in feeds from this blog, twitter, and various other sources. It seemed like an ideal situation, as I have enjoyed using FriendFeed as a means of perusing the aggregated content of others that I respect and follow.

And then this: FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook and will be integrated into the latter’s service. For me this is frustrating. I use Facebook solely as a means of interacting with actual friends and family – most of whom use Facebook as their sole online venue. I don’t want to try to add in the hundreds of people I follow on FriendFeed to Facebook – Facebook’s interface is just not very conducive for me to stay abreast of the goings on in tech and the architecture/engineering/construction/legal real-time web.

As far as aggregating my own content, I’ve set up a stream via Tumblr that will pull in everything I do. Many of those items from that stream will also make their way to my Twitter account. I have the option of cross-posting to my Facebook status and Twitter using a variety of tools, but I don’t want to saturate Facebook with the dozens of links I come across on a regular basis – as I stated above, Facebook just isn’t the right tool for managing a large stream of information. What about FriendFeed? For now, I’m going to keep using it. Using the grouping features combined with real-time search makes it easy for me to hone in on various topics. But I am going to do away with it eventually. I have been using the excellent Seesmic Desktop app for managing twitter and Facebook updates, but I really need to spend some time grouping the people I follow to aid in managing that flow of information.

Sorry FriendFeed. You guys made a great product that I have used almost daily for many months now. But I don’t want to have to integrate with Facebook. I’m not saying that I won’t derive value from this acquisition in the future, but it isn’t what I’m looking for right now.


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A New Face

By on June 8, 2009 | Category: Article

I finally updated this site with a fancy new theme. As part of the upgrade I spent some time revamping my entire online persona. I have now added Flickr, Facebook and some other tools that are integrated.

I also moved the “about” page to the front of the site. I don’t update the blog frequently enough and I want a true “home page”. There are still some things that I’m working on, but for what it is worth, here I am.

As has been the case for some time, most of my activity online isn’t on this blog. I’m not a professional blogger and I just don’t have all that much to publish on a regular basis. There is a lot of activity though on FriendFeed (blhill), so please check that out and if so inclined, set up an account and add me to your subscriptions. If you’re more of the Twitter persuasion, you can follow me there (@blhill). As mentioned, I did add a Facebook account, but I am going to limit it to just actual friends and family, so if I don’t add you there it is either because I hate you or I don’t really know you. (Just kidding…)

Enjoy.


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FriendFeed, Twitter, WordPress, et al.

By on April 5, 2009 | Category: Article

I am an admitted early adopter of new technology, comparatively speaking. And I love online/web-based/cloud tools. I’ve been a fan of WordPress for many years following Moveable Types movement to paid services. Most recently I’ve taken a real liking to Squarespace, which I am using at work to completely revamp our neglected website.

I also am a big fan of Twitter, FriendFeed and several other services. I use FriendFeed a lot, checking in several times a day. I don’t use Twitter directly so much unless I’m on my phone, but it gets updated from FriendFeed. At least it used to.

For some inexplicable reason, FriendFeed stopped updating Twitter with both “comments” and “likes”. FriendFeed is a huge source of information for me, second only to Google Reader. When I “like” something in FriendFeed, it is because I really like it. I sometimes also use the “like” feature in FriendFeed in lieu of the “re-tweet” for tweets that others have posted. (I use FriendFeed as my main interface for Twitter – the UI plus list organization are much easier to deal with.) But if FriendFeed doesn’t send out a post to Twitter with a “like”, my system breaks down.

I started messing around with all of this because I was trying to implement a sort of “daily digest” post using one of the WordPress plugins. For some reason none of them worked too well with my system and it exposed that my Twitter feed was not being updated with either “likes” or “comments” from FriendFeed. Long story short, here is what I’ve done to hopefully fix the problem:

  1. Turned off the “post to Twitter” in the settings for my FriendFeed account.
  2. Disabled the Twitter feed in my FriendFeed account to avoid a possible endless loop.
  3. Set up twitterfeed with three separate feeds:
    • The feed for my FriendFeed posts including updates from this blog
    • The feed for my FriendFeed likes
    • The feed for my FriendFeed comments
  4. Re-activated the Twitter Digest plugin based on Alex King’sTwitter Tools plugin

I’m hoping that this will achieve the desired result. If not, plan B is to go to a dual platform model. I’ll set up a Tumblr blog for capturing most of the stuff I do in a day, and continue to use WordPress as more of a general CMS (content management system).


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