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:

1. 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!
2. 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.
3. 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.

A friend of mine runs a children's theatre company and wanted to build a site to promote herself. I recommended she use MySpace instead and gave her a rough strategy for marketing through MySpace.

1. Get set up

Set up a MySpace, customise it so it stands out a bit, but keep it tidy and good looking (no animated stuff, crazy bits and pieces). There are some quite good Pimp Your MySpace type sites out there or even spend a few hundred quid on a designer to do a great job.

Add content. Write a description of you that's useful for readers and search engines alike (i.e. it explains what you do in clear sensible language, "children's theatre" vs "young persons dramatic experience" etc). Put details of shows in the events section so people can see when you're playing. If you have photos or even video definitely put that up (use YouTube for video). Quotes from previous audience members or organisers are also great. MySpace lets you do a blog too which you can use to talk about how you work, what you think and feel which is a) interesting and b) good for search engines to make you findable.

2. Grow your audience

Put the url (myspace.com/blah) on everything you do: email footer, flyers, posters, tickets, business cards, costumes, everything.

Make friends with people who are doing similar things, people you admire, anyone. Encourage members of your audience to add you as a friend.

3. Keep your audience in the loop

Once you have lots of friends, you have people to communicate with. Every time you do anything you can then send out a message to everybody you've been in touch with via MySpace. Announce new shows, tell people about workshops or prizes. You can also post comments on other people's profiles. It's quite common to add a flyer for a show in a comment post. It's a little cheeky maybe, but a lot of people are doing it and it will generate attention.

Some general marketing hints

Decide who your audience is, what they will be looking for and what actions you want them to take. If your audience is school teachers and you want them to book your show, then you need to convince them that the show will be entertaining and you will be professional and easy to work with. Think about your message in every communication.

Building an audience gives you an opportunity to dispense success stories and wisdom. When people search around or come straight to your site because they want to work with someone like you, they'll see that you're super popular and won't have a second thought.

Louise and I went to St Petersburg. It was pretty interesting to see what Russia is like these days, pounded by Tsars and communists, and finally starting to get some freedom, though of a limited sort. They love Putin, he's increased salaries by 10x on average. I took some pictures.

I've also started using Intense Debate, a 3rd party comment system which allows OpenID and should prevent spam a bit more. I may not stick with it, but I've been trying to find time to build an OpenID-powered comments system for a year now and it doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon! This is an excellent stop-gap.

So you can embed Google Maps really easily now. I just had to try it. Here's a map of where I work at MyMart.

View Larger Map

Just click "Link to this page" at the top right corner of the map, as well as an url, you'll get some HTML to cut 'n paste.

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Last updated at 17:31, Monday March 24th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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