Your Ad Here

Tag Archive for 'friendfeed'

Turn FriendFeed Into A Twitter Client

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on May 22, 2008
in Asides
. Comments

Internet Duct Tape has a great Greasemonkey script which will effectively turn FriendFeed into a Twitter client; adds the ability to tweet directly from FriendFeed, complete with a 140-character counter to keep you within Twitter parameters.

Still “client” is a bit misleading… to be able to see the messages of everyone you follow on Twitter, you would still need to follow them on FriendFeed (if they’re there) or add them as imaginary friends… which as I said before, is actually a really sweet feature. The same source also has a downloadable script to do just that; if you are on windows.

On Why FriendFeed Makes A Twitter Replacement Unnecessary

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on May 21, 2008
in www
. Comments

Every so often you see rumbles on Twitter about the likelihood of someone building A Better Twitter, with the idea that everyone will jump ship after getting fed up with Twitter’s downtime. Arguably, Pownce already is a “better” Twitter in some respects — yet the jump hasn’t happened.

I could be wrong (sources say this has happened before), but I think FriendFeed makes a new, improved Twitter… well, basically unnecessary.
Continue reading ‘On Why FriendFeed Makes A Twitter Replacement Unnecessary’

Google’s Friend Connect == “Openbook”?

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on May 20, 2008
in www
. Comments

I’m signing up for a “sneak preview” of Google’s Friend Connect, and it’s looking an awful lot like the Openbook I just described in a recent post.

So what would this mean? Hopefully I’ll get to look at it pretty soon. I’m not stuck on the idea of building something from scratch, so if what Google is attempting is moldable into the same sort of scenario I described as “Openbook,” I’d be more than happy to piggy-back on their efforts.

Of course, there is again the potential problem of who has the data and exactly how much you can do with it. Google’s Friend Connect and OpenSocial seem promising, though, and I don’t see any reason why the data that interacts with their APIs couldn’t be on a non-Google database server, or an Openbook-style social network which simply plays nice with their APIs.

Scoble also mentioned Friendfeed as a potential Facebook replacement. I can see this working, also — in a sense. Not necessarily FriendFeed as it exists on their site, but more as an API or a platform that you could build a client for. I has sort of neglected to use or think about FriendFeed for quite awhile; Paul Buchheit said this at Startup School (approximately 23 minutes into the talk), which made me reconsider:

I don’t really consider FriendFeed as an aggregator. It performs aggregation… in the same sense that an email client aggregates SMTP traffic. So… it’s a different experience; it’s a different product.

The ability to import feeds makes it a lot more useful than… if it didn’t do that. Just as an email client that couldn’t receive email wouldn’t be as useful.

This drew a big laugh, of course. But the fact that Paul described and thought of the product in that way definitely made me want to take another look at it as something more than just a mashup of a bunch of feeds.

At any rate, I do think the concept of an “open,” distributed social network is something that would be of value. Whether or not Google’s Friend Connect has the potential to be a major component of it probably remains to be seen.

(Gosh I hate ending blog posts that way. I’m not writing a throwaway piece of crap for WIRED or something. How many retarded say-nothing magazine articles all end “whether or not X does Y still remains to be seen.” Yes, we know it remains to be seen. It’s in the future. It hasn’t happened yet. That is why we call it “the future”. Um, okay. Rant done. Maybe. It remains to be seen.)