Sturgeon's Law #091
10 July, 2008

http://www.sturgeonslaw.com/
RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SturgeonsLaw
Email: sturgeonslaw, gmail, you know the drill
Music from PMN, Enter the Haggis

Last show I told you about how I was checking out Plurk as an alternative or supplement to Twitter. Well, I didn't stick with it, mostly because the interface stymied my attempts to casually keep up. And that's what I want online, to be honest; a way to keep my eye on the river without having to hold my head under it all the time. Glub glub. So I dusted off my http://www.friendfeed.com/ account, and lo and behold, it had grown some awesome new features in my absence.

The basic idea of Friendfeed is very good: you make your profile there, then you tell it where to find all sorts of different online instances of yourself, for example Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Amazon wishlists, blogs, and for that matter anything with an RSS feed. Then, new posts or whatever to any of those show up as part of your feed, and peope who've friended you see it in their friends feed. Very nice; one stop shopping for social networking. But this is not the feature that got me excited about Friendfeed all over again.

The feature I'm talking about is amusing called imaginary friends. What this means is that I can create a sort of personal virtual profile for someone else that only I see, and associated their online instances as I said before, and get all the benefits of seeing their stuff appear in my friendsfeed... even if they don't sign up! That's the killer feature, folks -- useful social networking without having to strongarm every friend into trudging over to yet another service. Now, it's even better if they do, since they can add stuff you didn't know about, and follow you, too, although I should note that you can make your feed available via, you guessed it, RSS. Very very nice. Friendsfeed is now exclusively how I follow twitter. And flickr. And so on.

However, it's not really useful for posting to services (aside from itself.) It's an aggregator, not a client. Fortunately, some folks up the road from me in Tulsa, Oklahoma are there for you with the fairly new service http://ping.fm, which fills exactly that need. Ping gives you a way to post to blogs, send messages to Twitter and Plurk and all those guys, even set your Facebook status, all from one interface. And not just their web interface! You can send through ping using a bookmarklet to send URLs, you can use your phone, you can even IM, something I used to do on twitter on the rare occasion it worked. Hopefully there will start being ping widgets for all kinds of stuff. You can also set up custom lists with keywords so you can easily send to just select lists of services with one message.

So give these two services a try! They've made social networking actually fun to use for me. I'm rfrancis at Friendfeed if you want to catch all my stuff there -- including Sturgeon's Law posts. Which you can listen to with their flash player now. But digress.