From the category archives:

Internet 101

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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!

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

August 10, 2009
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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.

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PubSubHubbub + Wordpress + Feedburner + FriendFeed = Realtime Awesomeness

July 27, 2009
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PubSubHubbub is a fancy name for a rather new protocol being promoted by various services like FriendFeed, which allows you to receive updates of RSS feeds without polling.

Basically it will allow blogs and readers to communicate real time, in a push-like method, like instant messaging, and not via pulls like the way it happens now (which can take minutes or even hours).

The cool thing about PubSubHubbub is that it works on top of existing protocols (in this case Atom) so readers and source don’t have to change much. The only thing you need is to notify a server that you published and the clients have to be subscribed to that server. Dave Winer has a good, deeper, explanation of how it works.

In this tutorial I will show you how to implement PubSubHubbub in a self-hosted installation of Wordpress, using Feedburner for feed distribution and FriendFeed as the receiving client. With this system in place, your blog posts will appear in your FriendFeed in a matter of seconds.

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Push Technology is the Core of the Real Time Web

July 7, 2009
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Push technology is a term that is used often but rarely explained. Although we take it for granted, push technology hasn’t been around for long, and it had a false start at the very inception of the world wide web.

A client is usually your computer or your cellphone. A server is a service you use, like E-mail or Twitter. The event is usually a new piece of content, like a new Tweet or a new E-mail.

What’s the opposite of Push technology? Yes, you guessed it, it’s called “Pull Technology” and its been the most common way of transferring content on the web. In a ‘Pull’ scenario, the computer or cellphone asks the server every so often if there’s any new content, and the server then tells the computer or cellphone if it does or if it doesn’t.

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