From the monthly archives:

August 2009

Post image for How to Bring Some FriendFeed Love to Facebook

How to Bring Some FriendFeed Love to Facebook

by Jorge Escobar on August 15, 2009

As every other FriendFeeder out there, I wanted to start the slow and painful migration from FriendFeed to Facebook (ironically FriendFeed staffers are moving as well) and of course, it’s been a rocky ride so far. I don’t feel quite as home, and the lack of real time kills me at times, but I wanted to share with you how I’ve managed to make an initial comfortable nest on the new tree.

The first thing you want to do is start to add FriendFeed friends over at Facebook. You can start with Kol Tregaske’s list and then you will start seeing familiar faces on each one of those profiles (make sure to join my page as well, as I’ll be actively posting notes that don’t make it to this blog).

The second thing you might want to do is add the FriendFeed application on Facebook. Now this sounds very easy, but it’s not, so here’s the step by step (and please note that there might be unnecessary steps, but like Voodoo, you don’t want to mess up with the process that you know works).

First add the Facebook application by clicking this link.

Then go to your Settings > Application Settings > FriendFeed > Additional permissions and make sure you tick on the “Publish to streams” option. You should see something like the image below:

ff-fb2

That should be all, right? Nope, that actually doesn’t do anything but allow you to see a FriendFeed tab on your profile. But if you want to show FriendFeed posts on your stream, you’ve got to do the following.

First, allow FriendFeed to post stories on Facebook by doing a Facebook Connect permission. You can do that clicking on this link.

Then, you need to authorize the app (again?) to publish to your stream, by clicking on this link.

Finally you’ll be able to post on FriendFeed and those posts will show up on your Facebook stream.

There are a couple of observations, though. One is that because Facebook limits the number of stream updates done by an application per hour, some of your posts might not appear on the stream. Second, although text and images will show (which is very cool), video embeds won’t.

As a final recommendation, I also added the Facebook Twitter application and allowed it to update my stream. If you do so, make sure to not post from FriendFeed to Twitter, because you might end with duplicates on your Facebook stream (and annoy the hell out of your friends).

What about other services? Look around on the Facebook Applications directory. I’ve seen some people have added a Google Reader application as well as a Digg application. But while FriendFeed exists, you don’t need those, so put those worries for later.

How is your FriendFeed to Facebook move going? Let me know and be careful with those boxes!

{ 33 comments }

After FriendFeed’s Sale, Trust In Social Sites Has Been Shattered

August 11, 2009
Thumbnail image for After FriendFeed’s Sale, Trust In Social Sites Has Been Shattered

It’s day two of the nightmare that started yesterday. I have been following comments, posts, news and feeds and one thing is certain.

People are mad.

Some users, like OurDoing’s creator, Bruce Lewis, haven’t been able to sleep. He wrote about his anger on a post on his blog, which caught the attention of some of the FriendFeed execs. You have to read the conversation as this is going on realtime, but it’s really amazing stuff that’s going on, it’s almost like looking at the disintegration of the Death Star in slow motion.

Read the full article →

With FriendFeed Out of the Way, Google Reader Has a Golden Opportunity

August 10, 2009
Thumbnail image for With FriendFeed Out of the Way, Google Reader Has a Golden Opportunity

This day has had a whirlwind of activity in many fronts. For the first time in the history of this blog I’m going to post twice in the same day.

But the news that Facebook acquired FriendFeed is really a shock for a lot of people.

You will be reading in the next couple of days a lot of information of what happened, why it happened, and what’s part of the deal.

I will summarize it in three short points and one possible once in a lifetime opportunity for Google Reader.

Read the full article →

Trust the Cloud? Then Don’t Put Your Life On It!

August 10, 2009
Thumbnail image for Trust the Cloud? Then Don’t Put Your Life On It!

Do you have precious content on Google Docs or Flickr or some other cloud service?

Back it up locally. Now!

There’s a flurry of activity regarding the death of tr.im, a popular URL shortener service that wasn’t able to enter into a path of self sustainability.

The losers, as usual, are its users.

The fact is we’ve become too used to having reliable, free web applications. The truth is that these companies are, in most cases, launched first to see if they grab an audience, and then try to make a business model to continue sustaining their operations. Louis Gray has a great post about the cycles that these companies go through.

Please, learn this golden rule: if you are not paying for it, it might be gone tomorrow.

Read the full article →

An Adventure Unfollowing All The People I Followed on Twitter (Without a Happy Ending)

August 3, 2009
Thumbnail image for An Adventure Unfollowing All The People I Followed on Twitter (Without a Happy Ending)

No, I’m not saying Twitter is dead by a long shot.

But it has changed.

It has now become the playfield of a thousand cheap marketers, social media “experts” and 10,000 people who auto-follow the other 10,000 people.

It’s a tangled mess.

Yes, we have tools like Tweetdeck and Seesmic which allows us to create lists of users. However, because Twitter does not support groups, I always feel like I don’t have portability of those lists (even though Tweetdeck allows you to save them to their server, or is it Seesmic). But in any event, I always feel like there are important Tweets being dropped by this layer on top of layer approach.

Plus my firehose is just filled with junk and noise.

So about a week ago, I decided I was gonna clean the slate and start from scratch. I would get back to zero followers. The first thing I did was ask the FriendFeed community, as using Twitter’s tools would take me forever to unfollow 900+ users.

Read the full article →