Saturday, June 14, 2008

Weekend thoughts on Twitter and FriendFeed

About a week ago, finding myself spending more time on FriendFeed than on Twitter the past few weeks, I tried Eric's Twitter to FriendFeed contact importer.

It worked flawlessly but all of a sudden, I found myself a little overwhelmed with my new Friendfeed stream. Yes, overload.

They are two different services that at least, I use for different reasons. The activity in my main feed became, well just weird, so until I got around to deciding how I was going to deal with it, I temporarily blocked Twitter feeds from Friendfeed (You can still see them any time you want by going down to the bottom of the page and tapping 'Hidden Posts').

I haven't yet gotten around to my ideal solution (there are numerous including Duncan Riley's Greasemonkey scripts, having the new version of Twirl open at the same time, and many others).

Late last night I tapped on the FF 'hidden Twitter' link only to see I had missed more than a couple of 'tweets' that were interesting or important to me. If you're blocking, you may want to give some thought to this ... and, of course, your suggestions are always welcome below on Disqus or on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed made LOTS of progress this week with numerous fixes and improvements, among them, blocking (finally). You can block individual users so you will no longer see them and they will no longer see you. Most of us know this comes in handy, and more importantly it's self-moderation which is a whole lot better than having a team of moderators. I actually have learned to 'like the noise', but there's always a few that you want to bid a fond farewell to.

Blocking (not yet 'officially announced') can accomplished by clicking on the individual's name and on the next screen, you should see the block option.

Here's one more to think about.

I take a little time to 'clean up my FriendFeed mess'. What I mean by this is, that on occasion, a post draws no reaction or just 'sinks'. Other times, duplicate posts appear from my blog(s) and then someone's shared feed, fragmenting the comments. If there are comments, I tend to leave what's there there. If not, I usually give it a few days (some take up to 3-5 days to get noticed), then delete them. (They're still on my blog and probably on my shared feed).

None of this is really time consuming and keeps the stream at the lower right on this page interesting.

Finally, I usually try to dig up some cool free software for guys (and gals) ... to check out on weekends.

This weekend is an exception. I hope all the Dad's (the good Dads :) have a GREAT Fathers Day and enjoy some quality family time this weekend. I'm looking forward to it.

Charlie