Skip to main content

FriendFeed sounds cooler than it is?

General disclaimer: I haven't looked into this intensively and I hope that someone will leave a comment explaining how to fix my frustrations with this service.

I first heard about FriendFeed from one of Brett's blog posts. I thought, "that sounds cool!" Later, Will invited me, and again I thought "cool!" Today I got an email saying that Will and Bill had commented on my feed. Cool! How did they do that?

Five minutes later, after I found my "Friend Feed" and added it to Google Reader, I had my answer. I was also immediately annoyed.
  • My "Friends Feed," which is the one I assume is supposed to make my life easier by aggregating everything my friends do into one feed, includes things I did as well instead of just things my friends did. I don't need to be reminded of everything I do on the web. I was there after all. FriendFeed really needs to let me filter out stuff I don't care about.
  • I really don't like micro-blogs. They're boring. Not all of my friends subscribe to this notion, however. Beacuse of this, while reading my "Friends Feed," I am constantly interrupted with boring micro-blog turds. FriendFeed needs to let me filter out services I don't care about.
  • I really don't like bookmark feeds. People bookmark all sorts of things, and the bookmark itself contains no content, which by my definition, makes them completely uninteresting to read about in my feed reader. FriendFeed really really needs to let me filter out services I don't care about.
Having friends comment on my shared items, blogs posts, photos, etc. is great. Otherwise, I remain unconvinced.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Bot Commander r1 Released

I just published Bot Commander , the code for my Lego NXT rover . There's a lot left to be done, but release early and often, right? Currently it provides a UI for controlling the direction and speed of all three motor ports on the NXT brick. You can link motors together to adjust their speed in unison. In addition, you can enable "Tilt Control" for a steering-wheel-type experience. To use tilt control: Hook up motor A and B to be the left and right wheels of your vehicle. Hold the phone sideways (i.e. landscape). Tilt the phone forward and backward to drive forward and backward. Turn the phone right and left (like a steering wheel) to steer right and left. As you tilt the phone, you'll see the UI update the slider controls for the speed of motors A and B. I plan to expand the UI to provide a lot more than just motor control. Before that, though, I'll push a JAR to make it easy to integrate control of Lego NXT robots into your own Android project. The code
Read more

Email Injection

Not so long ago, I ran a wiki called SecurePHP. On that wiki, there was one particular article about email injection that received a lot of attention. Naturally, with all the attention came lots of spam. As a result, I disabled editing of the wiki and content stagnated. Still, the email injection article remained popular. About a year later, the server that hosted SecurePHP died and I never had a chance to hook it all back up. I saved the article though and I'm reposting it now. It may be a bit old (I've been away from PHP for a long time), and I didn't write all of it, so feel free to leave comments about needed updates and corrections. Though this article focuses on PHP, it provides a lot of general information regarding email injection attacks. The PHP mail() Function There are a lot of ways to send anonymous emails, some use it to mass mail, some use it to spoof identity, and some (a few) use it to send email anonymously. Usually a web mailform using the mail() funct
Read more

XBee ZNet 2.5 Wireless Accelerometer

I managed to put together a wireless accelerometer the other night using my two new XBees, an Arduino XBee shield, an XBee Explorer USB, an ADXL330, and some Python. I struggled a bit with some of it, so here's what I learned: First, a parts list. XBee 2mW Series 2.5 Chip Antenna Arduino XBee (with XBee Series 2.5 module) XBee Explorer USB ADXL330 I'm not sure exactly what the specs are on the XBee that comes with the Arduino shield. But, it is definitely a series 2.5. The first thing to do is to configure and upgrade the firmware on your XBees. To do that, you'll need X-CTU (for the firmware upgrade at least, but it's also nice for configuration) which, unfortunately, is only available for Windows. But, it works fine from VMware. First up, the XBee we'll hook up to the computer to read incoming data from the accelerometer: Plug one of the XBees into the Explorer (it's also possible to do this from the Arduino shield by shifting the two XBee/USB jumpers to USB
Read more