16
Feb

2nd Look: FriendFeed & RSSMeme

Posted by Steven Hodson in Saturday, February 16th 2008      

FriendFeed Well it’s the weekend and right now I’m not feeling any dev mojo to work on TwitBox; and I really don’t feel like rearranging the office, so I thought I would spend spend some time taking a second look at a couple of new link blog aggregator sites that have been in the blogging headlines.

In my post about link blog aggregators the other day I was a little cranky about the sheer number of them that are popping up all at once and how I found them more of a distraction than anything else. While this hasn’t changed I should mentioned that I have tried a few of them but at the point when I did they just didn’t click with me. Primarily among the ones I had a look at were FriendFeed, ReadBurner and RSSMeme.

Now ReadBurner I already have as a feed coming into FeedDemon so I won’t really be talking about that service in particular but I did have a second go at the other two over the last couple of days. Of the two I think that FriendFeed is probably the most useful especially once I put my Web 2.0 crankiness in check and had a look around. Right now I have it opened as a tab in FeedDemon and have been playing around with friends subscriptions and the such.

What I have come to the conclusion I do like about the service is in fact the community you can create around your various information flows. There are some nice easy ways to interact with your friends information flows that they have decided to share such as the ability to comment within FriendFeed itself on whatever has been posted in your Friends Feed.

But the more I played around the more I can think of two things I would really like to see from something like FriendFeed. the first is a common complaint I have with services like FriendFeed and that is that fact that I have to manually refresh the page. come on folks isn’t this the age of Ajax and all those funky things you can do with web apps these days. How come I have to always manually refresh a page. Make it easy for me - I’m lazy.

The second thing I would really love to see is a public; or at least a developer’s, API. Let me get the data out of there and do what I want with it. Let me be able to post back to my feed, let me be able to use an interface of my choosing to talk with my community on the service.

Now with RSSMeme it took me a little longer until I found the compelling reason to keep using the service since it really wasn’t overly different that what ReadBurner is doing. However what RSSMeme does that I think is a definite plus is that in it’s links section below each item is support for Tags. Finally somebody who gets the potential that using tags has. There is one big problem though and that this idea doesn’t carry through to their RSS Feed. As well the complaint about refreshing that I had with FriendFeed I have with RSSMeme.

Like FriendFeed I would love to see an API; as long as the results provided the same information as you see on the front page of the service. Let the developers in there guys - let us have access to that information and maybe find different ways to present it to the readers. I’d love to be able to maybe build a desktop client that would be able to consume either or both services.

On the whole I will probably keep using both services but chances are that FriendFeed will stick longer than RSSMeme if only because of the RSS feed not including everything that their page on the site includes because for me the Tag links they include are its main attraction of the service. Either that or get some auto refresh options in there after all I’m lazy and this is the lazyweb after all :)

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under: The Social Web    

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