If I hadn't been away from LiveJournal for so long, I would have noticed that they have official Facebook support now. It's not huge support, but it has the one most important thing, which is putting a note on Facebook whenever I update on LJ.

Haven't tried it yet, but I'm going to see how well it works... now.

Tags: facebook

No, I did not die.

I'm still spending most of my on-line social time on Facebook. And I'm still wrestling with how to have all of my activity show up in one place. Like most people care. :-)

The best I can do right now is FriendFeed. You can find me there and see most every piddly detail of my on-line activity except for Facebook. Apparently the nitwits at FB don't think it's worth it to have individual users' activity available via standard means of sharing—and come to think of it, maybe they're right. So if you really want to see what I'm doing on Facebook, you can look me up directly on there.

I like FriendFeed because it also works in the other direction, letting me group friends' public, on-line activity feeds together in a logical way. Friends don't even have to be FriendFeed users, but it makes things nicer if they are. (hint) ;-)

FriendFeed is still not the holy grail, though (to me). As mentioned, Facebook doesn't play well with it, and there's still no way to read friends-only things (like semi-private posts here on LiveJournal) without checking individual sites. Maybe Flock is good at this, but I wouldn't know because I haven't tried it, and since it is a browser and not a website, it must be installed before it can be used.

So, bottom line: find me on Facebook to see what I'm doing on Facebook, look at my FriendFeed feed to see everything else (everything that can be made public, anyway).

And I may yet get back into making big posts one of these days. It may or may not be here on LJ, but it will be made known here.

Tags: facebook, flock, friendfeed, friends, social networks

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