Monthly Archives: March 2008
Recent Links on Ma.gnolia
A few interesting things this week …
Follow Twitter Conversations – Quotably
FriendFeed Comments Widget for Your Blog :: sarahintampa
TweetPeek is Mashup of the Day – MashupAwards
10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5
Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies – ReadWriteWeb
FriendFeed Stats – Home
Badges for Yahoo! Pipes (Yahoo! Developer Network blog)
Online Community ROI: Models and Reporting – Research Study Posted « Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy
FriendFeed Stats and Analysis
Internet Duct Tape recently posted an interesting analysis of a bunch of different FriendFeed stats broken down into 5 trends. I won’t cover them all here, but there were a few points that I found particularly interesting.
Twitter accounts for almost half of all items on FriendFeed, and 90% of the items come from the top 8 services (Twitter, Blog, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, YouTube, StumbleUpon). Anecdotally, I’ve noticed this trend within my own feeds. In fact, the Twitter traffic was so overwhelming that I decided to filter it out entirely with a FriendFeed Minus Twitter pipe.
I was also surprised and sad to see that Ma.gnolia was in the bottom 1% of services used. I like it so much more than del.icio.us, and it seems to also get a lot of usage from my friends. We must be atypical when compared to the broader group.
It also looks like FriendFeed is addressing some of the comment issues, starting with the ability to send an @ response directly to Twitter when someone comments on a Twitter item in FriendFeed. Now, if they would only find a way to do it with other services, like blogs. It would be great if a comment on a blog post in FriendFeed would also find its way back as a comment on the blog post. Ideally, I would love to see FriendFeed find better ways of dealing with comments so that I don’t need to use the FriendFeed Comment Finder pipe that I created to make it easier to find comments in FriendFeed.
While I think that FriendFeed is cool, I find that I have a hard time using it. So much of the information is duplicated for me. I already have feeds of people’s blogs, Ma.gnolia links, etc. I do find interesting things that I have missed in my regular feeds, but I haven’t quite decided if it is worth the time invested.
Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks
I’ve been having a lot of fun with Yahoo Pipes lately (some would say slightly obsessed with using them) to hack up RSS feeds and tweak them to be more useful for me and others. Justin told me it would be a good idea to pull them all together in one page to make it easier for people to find them, so I created the Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page. You can find it conveniently located in the Fast Wonder Blog menu bar, and I’ll try to keep it up to date with new Yahoo Pipes.
Recent Links on Ma.gnolia
Fast Wonder Comic: Ninja Code Invasion
Solution to Missed FriendFeed Comments: FriendFeed Comment Finder
A bunch of people have been talking about how FriendFeed allows people to comment on content within FriendFeed. This means that we have to log into friend feed every day and scour for comments, which remain fragmented from the source of the content. I can’t fix the fragmentation, but I think I have part of a solution (implemented as a Yahoo Pipe, of course).
The FriendFeed Comment Finder attempts to find content with comments or that people have marked as “liked”.
Important Caveats:
- Consider this highly experimental right now. Suggestions are welcome!
- FriendFeed has really convoluted feed structures, and this pipe is implemented in a crappy way right now.
- The feeds from FriendFeed seem really truncated with only the few most recent entries appearing. If you are using something like NetNewsWire, you should set persistence for x days, and not until they disappear from feed.
- I also suspect it might be missing a few comments, but haven’t been able to isolate this from the above problem. If you can find a pattern, please let me know.
To use the FriendFeed Comment Finder, enter your FriendFeed username, click “run pipe”, and then grab the RSS feed from “More Options”. Note that I think it is only picking up recent comments.
Fast Wonder Comic: Austin Geeks Know How to Party
FriendFeed Minus Twitter
I am apparently obsessed with Yahoo Pipes (again). Aaron Hockley just wished for a way to get a FriendFeed, but without all of the annoying Twitter posts that overwhelm the feed. At that point Todd Kenefsky walked by and said, “I bet you could do that with a Yahoo Pipe.” Obsession resumed … bedtime postponed.
I just had to oblige. Use this FriendFeed Minus Twitter Yahoo Pipe to get a nice little RSS feed of your FriendFeed without the million Tweets. Simply grab the RSS feed from your “friends” page, enter it into the box on the pipe, and grab the rss feed output 🙂