Face-off: Social Network Aggregator - FriendFeed vs. retaggr, UPDATED x2

If, like me, you’re a bit of a tech-head and are constantly trying to keep up with the latest trends in 2.0 and social networking sites, you’ve undoubtedly acquired quite the list of accounts (Google your username, it’s very depressing!). At some point, someone was going to have to step in and clear up this mess, before we lost track of everyone we’ve ever known. And like the London buses whose analogies rarely fit in blog posts, two came along at the same time. Yes, there are several others on offer, and I’ll explain my reasons for choosing these two.

FriendFeed is widely accepted as the most popular social aggregator, and packs features such as widgets displaying all of your updates, saving you the effort of having to pull all of your feeds into one place.

retaggr looks to be in the same vein, but with many more sites and feed accounts available to the user.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be using both services and trying to decide which one I want to use, OR if there’s a place for both of them in may already cramped online life.

I would encourage folks who’ve had experience in either of these services to leave a comment with your thoughts, and add to the discussion. Remember folks, this is a journey of discovery for us all! (in best horror movie voiceover voice)

Wish me luck!

Update #1: While FriendFeed’s emphasis seems to be on signing up to your social networks in order to keep track of what other people are doing, retaggr comes across as more of a way of creating a business card or forum signature with your latest twitters, blog posts etc that will follow you across the net.

Update #2: It turns out that FriendFeed only show you the updates from friends who are already using FriendFeed, rather than just using Digg, Twitter etc. This saddens me more than when Bambi’s mum died. I’m slowly starting to realise that neither of these two actually “aggregate” anything. It is possible to add an “imaginary friend” by logging into your Twitter account, and selecting that individual friend’s tweets to be added to your FriendFeed, but where’s the use in that? If I have to through each of my accounts adding people to the feed, then I’ll probably waste more time overall that just visiting Twitter, SocialMedian et al seperately. Muchly disappointing.

Tags: friendfeed, retaggr

Fringe’s ‘Walter’ - more annoying than sand in the crotch

Now, I’m all for wisened old characters who know what the craic is in a sticky situation, but for the love of God this guy makes Frasier sound like a hobo. We get it. You’re smart. Hell, even Pacey tells him to talk like a person in episode 2.

Nope, this one’s not for me. If my intelligence is going to be insulted, the show could at least be entertaining.

Tags: fringe

GameOnYou URL temporarily down

If you’re getting this message, you’ve won a prize!

OK, that was a lie. In actual fact, the servers are being a bit screwy while I play with them like the maniacal puppet-master that I am.

They’ll be back on soon. In the meanwhile, as alternative forms of entertainment, why don’t you try doing a crossword or spreading Philadelphia cheese on a cat.

Back soon, chaps and chapettes!

Dave

Beginner’s guide to RSS

A bit of a basic tutorial today, for all those who keep seeing and hearing about this RSS stuff but don’t actually have any clue what it’s all about.

First things first. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The basic premise of RSS is that you are able to keep up with the websites you like to read on a regular basis as efficiently as possible. I like to think of it as a virtual newspaper; you sit down whenever’s convenient and skim through the latest news, picking out stories which interest you to read in detail. Only with RSS, every story interests you - because you have tailor-made your newspaper.

Rather than trawl through your favourite websites for news, you can use a tool called an aggregator to bring all of these news stories together, in one place, for your viewing pleasure. All it requires is that your favourite sites have RSS functionality in-built (which most sites with a lot of activity do, including this one!). From there it’s all automated. To find out how to start making use of RSS, continue reading past the post break… Read more…

Tags: aggreagator, aggregation, alesti, blog, blogs, demon, diary, do, explorer, feed, feeddemon, feeder, feeding, feedreader, firefox, follow, google, help, how, howto, i, instructions, internet, internetexplorer, is, juice, keep, netvibes, news, newsreader, outlook, owl, read, reader, really, rss, rssowl, rssreader, simple, syndication, to, track, tutorial, what, whatis

Twitter Updates - 2007-11-19

• Actually using Twitter… crikey! #

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Wordpress themery!

At the moment I’ve got my site themed using MushBlue by MukkaMu. It’s quite tidy and stylish and I always prefer darker backgrounds (especially when presenting digital media; the darker surroundings better highlight colour/contrast in content)

Over the next couple of weeks you’ll hopefully see a few changes occuring - the first one being the site’s meta data! At the moment if you search Google for ‘evadwolrab’, you’ll see my site with MukkaMu’s default description tags.

I changed the html in header.php and hey presto, my blurb shows up correctly in search results.

Interestingly, Yahoo! indexed my site in about 10 minutes whereas Google took a couple of days.

Twitter Updates - 2007-10-31

• Editing Green Screen footage - adding sound to rough cut #
• Getting excited about Ubuntu Studio 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) #
• Dressing as Mario for Halloween! #

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Twitter Tools for Wordpress

This is a nifty little tool if you’re thinking of setting up your own blog.

Full of useful options such as the ability to post a tweet from within your own site, and a daily digest of your tweets which is automatically published as a post on your blog, allowing readers who only view your site through an RSS feed to keep up to date with your twittering.

Green-Screen 101

My Video Production group have been set the task of of coming up with a “What’s the word” abstract piece as a warm-up to get us back into the swing of things.

Something we’ve found massively helpful is a set of DVDs from VideoCopilot.

The DVDs are aimed at users of Adobe After Effects with limited experience and cost around £50 (get ‘em while the US Dollar’s weak!) If you follow the post link you’ll see an impressive trailer for the product. The instructions are really easy to follow and the end-product can be mind-blowing!

We’ve been experimenting with green-screen for the first time in our budding careers - I’ll post a link to the video when we’ve finished the post-production!

Joomla Diary 1

As part of my course, we’ve been given the task of creating a site for a local CofE Church. After speaking to the client (the vicar), we knew that the site needed to be updateable by the client who, understandably, isn’t particularly web-savvy.

Based on this, we instantly figured we should use a CMS (Content Management System) to deliver the product. This meant a lot of work for us, in that we needed to learn a new technology (only one of our group of 12 had ever used CMSs properly before) and obviously there’s a fair bit of setting-up involved in delivering a CMS, as opposed to delivering a static site.

Read more…