Thoughts, Raves & Outright Beatings

Despite my insistence that I need more time away from my computer, I’ve become hopelessly addicted to Twitter. The fact that my husband now has an account on there as well, along with a couple of friends of mine frankly isn’t helping much. But, oh well. A quick microblogging update is easier than writing an email, sometimes.

Anyway, thanks to the twitterings of some folks I currently follow (lots of high-profile tech dudes in Silicon Valley - see, I’m not strictly about the pop culture, peeps), I made my way to a couple of aggregators that basically does the same thing the folks at Facebook were bitching about a year or so ago; keep track of everything you, or anyone you are interested in, uh, following, on any or all of your online doings from any site, or collection of sites, that shares your activities on it/them. On Facebook, this type of activity aggregator was/is called a mini-feed, and it was condemned by old time Facebook users as an invasion of privacy. Of course, elsewhere, it’s called “sharing”. And as a result, the vanity in yet providing even further content to a breathless and waiting world from all your little sites into one feed becomes all the more evident.

Not that I mind. I mean, I keep a blog, don’t I (actually about 5 of them, two of which I rarely update)? I also have a myspace, a facebook, and a bunch of other pages I’m finding hard to keep track of. I had one old online friend breathlessly tell me that I’m “everywhere”, when he found me on Facebook. Seems like that with a lot of folks, these days. Forget early adoption. This is all about keeping up. But given my attention whore tendencies, one would have expected nothing less. Plus I have stuff to promote. Why not?

So I set up two aggregating pages, one on FriendFeed, one on MyBlogLog.

FriendFeed

MyBlogLog

First thing I notice on both of them, after the initial setup and rss import; the stuff from YouTube goes on there first, even though I added those videos to my YouTube favorites ages ago. Eventually the other sites followed along. However, FriendFeed is a lot more thorough and quick in terms of updating the Friendfeed Page with content from my other sites. MyBlogLog took a bit longer, and didn’t add quite as much content. Both sites handle RSS feeds and updates from some of the other sites differently, or one offers updates from one site, but not from another. For instance, you can track instances of WordPress blog postings on FriendFeed, but not on MyBlogLog, whereas you can track your Myspace doings on MyBlogLog, but not on FriendFeed (although you can put up the RSS to your Myspace blog). Last.fm updates are treated differently. On MyBlogLog, every track you’ve recently listened to from Last.FM is noted, whereas on FriendFeed, updates only happen when I “favorite” a song, or add one to a playlist. I’d rather have the MyBlogLog’s tracking of last.fm activities. I really don’t mind immediately showing off to the world how much I’ve been enjoying that new Joe Jackson album, or that, after about thirty years, I’ve rediscovered Graham Parker and the Rumour, without having to go the last.fm page and bestow some special status on the songs I just listened to. I tried to set the recently played tracks list as a blog import, but the RSS feed redirects back the last.fm page, which doesn’t have a native feed in it (the actual RSS feed comes from ws.audioscrobbler.com). Oh well, I’m sure some fix will come around for it eventually.

In the end, however, I’m finding I like FriendFeed a little more, given how quickly it adds content to your FriendFeed site, as well as some of the display options. But I’m keeping MyBlogLog due to the portability of it’s RSS feed. For if you try to place the FriendFeed into, say, your wordpress.com blog via the RSS widget, you just get the words “Array”, as opposed to an actual headline. Whereas, with MyBlogLog, the actual headline does show up. Also, I have a Yahoo account and MyBlogLog, having (just?) been purchased by Yahoo, was an easy signup.

However…three day trial for looking at stats? Huh? When Google bought Feedburner, they waived my “Pro” premium payments indefinitely? Why couldn’t Yahoo have done that? Come on, guys…

Anyway, these two seem like a good way to navigate and negotiate all of your online presences in one or two places. I’m just kind of wondering, however, do I really want the whole world to know every little online thing I’m doing?

It begs a pondering…