As mentioned earlier, I like FriendFeed. One thing I found frustrating was the lack of a feed just tracking what my friends are doing. The nearest thing provided includes my own activities. I know about these!
I posted in FF’s Google Group, but after a few days there are still no replies. However, a workaround is to use Yahoo! Pipes to manipulate the feed, filtering out my own activity.
Pipes is quite intuitive, so I’ll just outline the design of my FF pipe:
- Use a Fetch Feed node from the Sources section to retrieve your feed from FriendFeed. There is an authorisation ID in the url, so don’t share it!
- Add a Filter node from Operators. Set the filter to block all posts where the title contains “You “. I would have preferred to use a regex here, but the logical values (“^You .*” etc) didn’t work.
- Output!
Pipes output to RSS, email, SMS, etc, so you can now use your FriendFeed-without-you feed anywhere you like. I’m just using it to track how my peeps iz rollin’.
I’ve turned off FeedBurner’s link splicing feature. Although it was quite cool, it was like I was mixing my media all wrong. Instead, if you want the total information overload, I recommend following my FriendFeed.
FriendFeed is a great service. Good for tracking my content and other peoples’. It’s a touch inflexible in some ways, but it is easy to use and works well. More than that it’s evolving very quickly. They added search this week and I swear they didn’t have a Facebook app last time I looked.
FriendFeed has a feature to pull your friends graph from Facebook. This is great, and a requirement for any social service. The only problem is only one of my friends who record their lives online is really a Facebook user. I have lots of people as del.icio.us friends, Flickr friends and so on, creating lots of content I’d like to track in FriendFeed, but frankly I can’t be bothered to enter my list of friends again. This is a known issue in the social software world, but since FriendFeed have taken the step of yanking my Facebook friends, it would be nice to see this feature extended to other sites. Of course we really need a standard method or API for doing this, but that’s a year out yet probably. XFN is around, but it’s too much like hard work.
