I've been pretty obsessed with Facebook lately. Don't ask me why.

They have new options for pulling in posts from other sites like Flickr, Pandora, etc., which I think is swell. I like the idea of a central place to show off all of my activity, which is scattered far and wide across a number of Web sites (some well-known, some more obscure). Other sites like Profilactic, iStalkr, and that one Red Hat thing (Mugshot?) have attempted to be the place for people to do this, but they haven't grabbed me. Someday I'd like to roll my own and put it on my personal Web site (now gathering dust bunnies), but I have been alternately too lazy and too scatter-brained to do this.

So Facebook is doing its feed-inclusion thing, and they have an option for adding your own custom RSS feed. Great, I thought, I can just load it up with a bunch of feeds. Nuh-uh. Facebook only gives me one slot for that.

Hmmm, okay. I decided to attack it by mixing all of my feeds together into one. And, again, I found a number of sites that want to make themselves the place to do this. But, again, I prefer having something that gives me a little more personal control.

So I'm revisiting something I haven't looked at in a while: Yahoo! Pipes, the Swiss-army knife of RSS feeds (or, if you prefer a less masculine metaphor, the KitchenAid of RSS feeds). I'm at a loss for words to describe it, other than to say that Mac OS X geeks who have used Quartz Composer will find some strong similarities. In any case, I'm finding it just powerful enough to do the kinds of things I need to do to blend my feeds together. I can add on the name of each feed to the title of each item so they are easily identified on my Facebook page. I should be able to do some fine-tuning on each feed, too, where the formatting as rendered by Facebook is lacking.

Wait, why am I doing this, again?

Tags: facebook, rss, yahoo, yahoo pipes