PSA: check out friendfeed

[piranha]

in the ongoing search for software that makes the whole social networking experience more bearable because even on my new monitor i am running out of space for keeping tabs open to all the sites on which people hang out, i've come across friendfeed, which aims to collect all ongoing information on the blogs, photos, videos, music, twitters, books, etc etc that people whose lives you're interested in are sharing. it's aiming to be a super-aggregator, plus it allows commenting on the site itself (i gather that's how it wants to build its own community). at this point there are 33 different sites/interfaces from which it collects up-to-date information -- any RSS feed (which includes LJ and its newer clones since we all have one), flickr, picasaweb, twitter, youtube, facebook, amazon wishlist, librarything ... new ones seem to be added at a steady clip.

even better, it actually create a feed itself, so you can read it in your favourite aggregator, or embed it in your igoogle.

it's all still pretty raw, but usable, and i am gonna watch it, and try to participate to make suggestions for what i would like to see (filters!).

my favourite thing at this point is that until y'all create an account over there and aggregate your information for me, i can make "imaginary" friends where i can do it instead. that's really useful.

thanks much to geekchick for the pointer. my feed is open and you can find me at pleochroic.

Comments

[azarias.livejournal.com]

Mmm. Does this only aggregate data from people who have signed up, or whom you've input manually? I can't say I like the idea if it, say, just rips your LJ flist and goes from there, tracking down everything it can on everyone you've got friended. While my online presence is my own responsibility, I don't like the idea of a random person being able to sign up, plug my screenname into this thing, and have it do a bit of data mining *for* them. People should at least have to work to stalk me.

friendfeed

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

no, it doesn't scrape/mine like that. either you have to add all your own information to your own account, or somebody has to manually input it as an "imaginary" friend (and those can't be shared with other friendfeed users -- umm, i think. i gotta try it to make sure).

[liv]

That does look useful. I am a bit ambivalent about these meta-networking things; in some ways I want to have at least the option to keep my various identities separate. But since I am mostly too lazy to make sure stuff can't be traced back, I can't help appreciating the convenience of having everything in one place. So I've compromised by creating a non-public account, username individeweal.

friendfeed

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*nod*. i don't really have anything that i want to keep totally separate online -- i mean, i am obfuscating my own identity somewhat, and use nicknames for anyone i talk about publicly, but that's really for the convenience of being able to talk about personal stuff without every tom, dick, and harry immediately knowing who's who -- since that's never the point. i decided long ago that while i am a private person, i wasn't gonna be closetted about anything, and if somebody wants to dig deep enough, they can find it all. and then what? *shrug*. good luck trying to fuck with me.

but other people aren't so lucky, or just care more about some of their identity aspects being away from random strangers' grasp. i would really dislike a site that did all sorts of digging to find things just by me putting in a name (digging more deeply than google, that is). but this setup seems relatively benign (i can see how it could be abused even without the scraping -- i mean they could collect all this access information and then sell it to somebody down the line who could then go scraping).

i dunno. i can see both sides, but for me it's convenient because i keep falling behind what with LJ, DJ, JF, IJ, GJ, blogger, wordpress, flickr, orkut, ravelry, folia, facebook and the list goes on. still, i think i will be careful with creating imaginary friends of people who i know to be sensitive about keeping stuff separate; i won't link journal A and blog B over there if they're not linked here; just in case.

Re: friendfeed

[liv]

The privacy thing is mainly that I don't want potential employers to google me and find anything like my LJ. There's nothing terribly shameful in my LJ, just it is casual and personal, not professional and formal. I think it probably works if I have all the social networking stuff linked together, but none of it linked to or from anywhere with my real name attached. By now, if someone really wanted to stalk me, they could probably figure it out, but I'm ok with that; the only way to prevent that is not to have a web presence at all, and even then you're stalkable because of what your acquaintances post about you. But they'd have to be trying, I think I'm reasonably obscure from a simple keyword search.

I agree that the Friendfeed site seems well set up, it's focusing on giving you convenient access and aggregation, not on joining up the dots to make semi-private data minable. I like the imaginary friends system; it looks like they do create a public page, but with a completely obscure URL, so the only way you'd ever find it is by rogue search engines indexing the content. And really anything that has a feed is already cloned all over the internet anyway. There's a remote chance that someone less scrupulous than you are might make an otherwise obscure link between two different identities slightly more transparent by the imaginary friends thing, but I can live with that.

It's inconvenient, but obviously a good thing for security, that I can't include my friends' locked LJ posts or Twitters in the aggregated data. It wants their password, mine isn't good enough though of course it lets me read the original posts. This closes the major security hole of people on one's friendslist having bad security hygiene. I am not quite clear if people who have my permission to subscribe to my feed (created by me, not imaginary) can aggregate my f-locked LJ posts; I think not, but I'm not sure.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

So would you only see public entries?

[geekchick]

I just added my LJ to my feed, and it didn't ask me for any LJ login info; looks like it's reading the public atom feed and my locked entries aren't showing up over there.

friendfeed

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yes. which makes it a lot less convenient for LJ+clones (most people i know who use other software don't lock their entries). but it's not like i would give my LJ password to a third-party site anyway; unless this all works in a way i consider secure enough that's not going to happen.

Re: friendfeed

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I use Newsfire as an RSS feed for non-LJ content, but I can add LJs, and tell (my local copy) my LJ password, which means it scoops up anything friendslocked I have access to. So I'd really want to see that feature in friendfeed.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I'm there! (As bosthoon.)