Social Convergence and FriendFeed

March 24th, 2008 | Posted in blog posts |

I’ve been thinking more about converging the data from various social mediums (as I blogged about previously) and lo and behold, Twitter comes to the rescue!

Robert Scoble mentioned a service called FriendFeed that takes the RSS feeds available from a large variety of web 2.0 social applications and combines it into a single feed of data. You can also keep track of your friends in the same data stream.

The idea is almost exactly what I had in mind. I want to provide people a single place they can come and see what I’ve been up to on the web (in a Truman Show way, if you think about it). FriendFeed provides this, but I only wish it were more customizable.

For instance, instead of linking to a blog post, it would be nice if I could include the entire text of the blog. It would also be nice if the feed they provide contained more semantic data (such as the source of the entry or even preview icons/images) so I could more easily change the presentation based on where the data is coming from.

Another drawback is that the FriendFeed atom feed contains inline CSS in the code, which really makes it hard for me to syndicate into my own site. So really this application is close, but not quite what I want.

There’s another application that is supposed to provide closer interaction with social application API’s and provide a similar tool to FriendFeed. This application is called Socialthing!, and looks pretty promising. It is in closed beta right now, so unless someone is nice and can throw me an invite (hint, hint) I can’t evaluate it for my convergence needs just yet.

If neither of these work, I may have to consider my own solution. I need something simple that provides more semantic data than what is currently available, for the sole purposes of syndicating it and making it a part of my own site. Does any of this make sense?

Comment on this if you have any ideas, or shoot a tweet to @bratta.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 3:23 pm and is filed under blog posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.