How Did I Not Know About The FriendFeed Toolbar?

Many people have made arguments for the productive uses of FriendFeed, noting its liveblogging rooms, potential for blog fodder, community building aspects, etc. Those are all great reasons to love the site, but at the end of the day, I still see FriendFeed as a timesuck. A huge, glorious, fabulous, incredible timesuck.

I’ve been spending more time in FriendFeed lately. Where before I wasn’t even a daily visitor, now I’m in and out throughout the day. I’m not much one for getting involved too deeply in the discussions on site, but I enjoy reading through them. And I’m also completely addicted to Mona’s feed. It is, as she would say, so. much. awesome.

Given my recent addiction enjoyment of the site, you would think I would have known about the FriendFeed toolbar. I mean, really! The toolbar isn’t an official offering from FriendFeed itself, but rather a Firefox add-on provided by the third-party FriendFeed tracker, ffholic. With the toolbar, you can search users and entries or search ffholic itself. There are, of course, quick links to various pages on ffholic (“most liked,” “most commented,” etc.), but it’s the “Latest Buzz” drop-down box that I’m really enjoying.

This button offers up a slew of links to the hottest stuff being shared on FriendFeed and clicking on those links takes you directly to the source. If the source is a FriendFeed post, then you’re taken to FriendFeed, but if it’s a blog post, flickr photo, video, etc., you’re taken to the original content, not the FriendFeed web site.

There’s also a “Share on FriendFeed” button and an optional timer for you to track your time on site. I’ve just installed this toolbar and already I’ve managed to waste over 40 minutes today. Excellent.

I’d love to see even more buttons on this toolbar which would link to “best of” pages, but for now, it works for me.

Seriously, how did I not know about this?

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Like most of you, I’d consider myself a technology addict. As Charlie recently noticed, I blog a lot yet somehow find myself immersed in social media a good bit too. Keeping up is a challenge, and I’ll admit that finding balance is a constant challenge. As I wrote today on ReadWriteWeb, technology really is both a blessing and a curse. I love it, but sometimes it steals me away from the other things (and people) I love, too. I’m always having to check and re-check my boundaries and making sure I haven’t become so immersed in the online world that I forget to live in the real one, too.  

In addition to my work in public eye, such as with ReadWriteWeb and Microsoft (a blogger, not an employee for the ongoing record), I always find myself with at least one side project too. Lately, this has involved being a webmaster of sorts for two other websites needing regular updates and reviewing book proposals for a publishing company. I’ve also just been informed…err…asked…by a family member to create yet another site, too. It’s not big deal, but I sometimes wonder how much longer I can keep it all up.

And why do I do all this? I guess I forget I’m just one person.

Unlike social media kings, Louis Gray and Robert Scoble, I don’t have superpowers. I struggle with information overload just as I know many of you do too. Managing multiple commitments and deadlines is hard on me…and I’m not one who likes to be tied down with obligations, either. In fact, I’m usually surrounded by people who plan things for me because I’d rather “wing it.” 

How do those guys do it? Louis Gray mastered something called continuous parallel attention. I never got the hang of that, but he did teach me something important: batching my activities into a workflow of sorts. When I stick to my schedule, it can work. When I goof off in FriendFeed for too long, I’m screwed. In fact, sometimes have so little “free” time that anything expected of me that goes beyond my established routine sort of puts me into a panic. That’s not healthy and it has to stop. Something may have to give soon.

In the meantime, I maintain a semblance of a normal life by setting some personal boundaries.

Here are 5 ways I’m keeping sane:

1) Unplug on weekends – Lately, I’ve been going offline on weekends. I’m generally unavailable all day Saturday and part of Sunday, too. I go do things that don’t involve the net. For example, this weekend I met friends from my old job for drinks, went to the San Antonio Rattlesnake Festival (which is less horrible than it seems – it’s mostly a craft fair and picnic), watched a movie with the husband (Sweeny Todd – oh, the blood!), caught up on the TV I missed, went out to dinner, and generally relaxed.

2) Set Boundaries – Now that I’m going to the gym, I have a definite, finite end to my workday. I have to wrap things up at a decent hour and leave the house. Although the primariy reason I’m doing this is to get healthy, the side affect of disconnecting for a couple of hours is an added benefit.

3) Batch Activities – Instead of being in FriendFeed and Twitter off and on all day long, I pop in a couple of times per day and interact. This may mean that I miss a few things here and there or arrive late to others, but at the end of the day, being the first to participate in the silly hate meme (or whatever) isn’t paying my bills. I love FriendFeed and Twitter, but I can’t put them at the top of my priority list.

4) Work More Early In The Week – For some reason, I’ve found I’m more productive earlier in the week. I decided to take advantage of that productivity and work ahead by cranking out more content then when I’m motivated than trying to do so later on in the week when I’m starting to burn out.

5) Stay Out Of The Inbox – Not entirely, of course – that’s not possible. But when I used to have the Gmail Notifier installed, I constantly checked my email. As new messages arrived, I popped into Gmail to see what they were about. A major time-suck! Now, I go into my email throughout the day as it fits into my schedule…not every 5 minutes.

I hope these tips help you better manage your time online and if you have any to share with me, feel free to comment and let me know.

I just discovered Samepoint courtesy of Killer Startups, and I was intrigued. A social conversation tracker? Sounds like something I want to check out. The site allows you to perform searches across the social web including Facebook, Friendster, Diigo, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Yelp, Twitter, MySpace, Simpy, Mister Wong, Blogmarks, and Reddit…but oddly, not Twitter. The site also searches blogs via Technorati and by performing searches on Wordpress.com.

Snapshots

After you run a search, you can narrow down your options using the “Search Within” feature in the right sidebar. Here you can select any one of the sites to see just results from the site. Now, you would think that in doing so, the main page of search results would be updated to display the filtered items, but instead, you’re presented with a “snapshot” of searches from that site just beneath the “Search Within” box:

Snapshot of searches for “sarahintampa”

Searches

The main search results attempt to aggregate the conversations around a particular topic to show you the source and the comments of that particular convo. For testing purposes, I ran a few searches on some of my favorite terms: “Greasemonkey,” “Twitter apps,” “FriendFeed,” and, of course, the requisite vanity search for “sarahintampa.”

I have to say, the results were confusing.

I don’t know how it determines how to group conversations, but the results were always in the format of “search terms” + “other word(s).” For example, a search for “Twitter apps,” returned conversations around “Update Apps” + “twitter apps,” “Chrome” + “twitter apps,” “Android Apps” + “twitter apps,” etc. For Greasemonkey, I received results like “Active Digg Users” + “greasemonkey,” “Que Hay” + “greasemonkey,” and “having” + “greasemonkey.” And even when I looked at the search results for one of my keywords and the apparently arbitrary other word paired with it, I couldn’t determine where or how the conversation even related to the terms.

Search Results for “Greasemonkey”:

Can I just say HUH? Clearly I’m doing it wrong.

But I don’t know how to do it right, then. I thought a search engine, social or otherwise, was for querying on keywords. Apparently not. So how this site is actually useful – or rather, how it’s more useful than a Google search, a Twitter search, a Friendfeed search, or a Google Blog search, etc. - I’m not entirely sure.

For goodness sakes, if you are looking for a universal social search engine, just head to Yacktrack’s Chatter page instead.  It makes a lot more sense.

FriendFeed

Better FriendFeed is a new Greasemonkey script based on the work done by Duncan Riley and AJ Batac. Basically, it’s a bunch of great FriendFeed scripts in one. With Better FriendFeed, you can do the following:

• Add and remove custom tabs to FriendFeed simply by specifying the URL and/or favicon UR
• Activate Cleaner FriendFeed to make everything a little "prettier"
• Configuration is located at Tools->Greasemonkey->User Script Commands->Better FriendFeed

The script creator notes that you should probably disable any other FriendFeed tabs scripts before installing this one.  However, I left my FriendFeed Tabs script installed (which adds Techmeme in a tab) and had no issues.

By default, the Better FriendFeed script adds Google Reader, Gmail, and Identi.ca to FriendFeed. Wow, I have those tabs open all the time! This is excellent. 

Oh, and how cool is this? If you have any questions or concerns, you can “dent” him on Identi.ca! (http://identi.ca/rahsheen) Nice!

Feedly

Next up, Feedly. For those of you who don’t know what or why Feedly is incredibly awesome, here’s a guide to get you started.

You wouldn’t really think of Feedly as something that needs a facelift, but it got one anyway by way of the Stylish Extension for Firefox. A blogger by the name of SLAX created a nice gray/blue dark skin for the site. You can click here to install it into Stylish.

Happy Friday!

When I was researching my RWW post this morning: “According to Study, Half of U.S. Adults Use Social Media,” I came across a pretty great slideshow on social media put out by Universal McCann (see below). There’s a huge amount of data in there, so I thought it was worth sharing. Enjoy!

After the initial rush to try out Identi.ca, not everyone stuck around. Why? Maybe it’s because Twitter started stabilizing and no longer was Identi.ca needed as a backup to Twitter. Or maybe it was a shiny new thing for some, but after playing with it, the shininess wore off. Whatever the reason, it seemed that the land rush was over. But then, Identi.ca was integrated with Twhirl and all of a sudden, it was happening again. It’s great to see. 

The identi.ca community is active, friendly, and fun. They’re quick to answer each other’s questions and they enjoy tech-related conversations. And don’t worry, identi.ca is still far from the mainstream if that’s what you’re looking for - you won’t see Obama posting “dents” here anytime soon. (Well, there is a user, but he’s not active). 

But why identi.ca and not Twitter? When I asked identi.ca users why they were here, for a lot of them it was about supporting the fact that identi.ca is open source (and federated):

(Of course, Evan said it’s because I’m there, but I’m pretty sure he was just sucking up.)

David asked why even bother with Identi.ca earlier today, so I guess that’s your answer.

Also, for me personally, I have to add that the Twitter community has gotten so large that being on Identi.ca just feels smaller and more intimate. I’m sure this is partly my fault for following so many people on Twitter, but there you have it. 

What’s New

A lot of people were discussing the recent changes on Identi.ca today. It goes without saying that the community is thrilled for the Identi.ca/Twhirl integration, but there were a few other updates too, including:

• Auto-follow your followers: a checkbox in your settings –> profile tab lets you automatically follow those that follow you. It’s recommended for “non-humans,” but I’m giving it a go.
• SMS: Another tab in your settings lets you get your dents via SMS. Just enter your phone number and carrier.
• IM Replies Update: Although you could get IM updates via Jabber/GTalk before, there appears to be a new checkbox that lets you select whether or not you want replies from those you aren’t subscribed to. (Is that new? Or did I miss that before?)
• Greasemonkey Fun: If you haven’t already added “Identica Reply” to give each dent a reply option, do so now. Next, add “Identi.send” which lets you send a message by pressing <enter>. For FriendFeed users, “FriendFeed Identi.ca” lets you add a tab to FriendFeed for Identi.ca.

Spaz & Posty

Two other AIR clients besides Twhirl now also support identi.ca. Spaz, the open-source client is one. The other is Posty, whose identi.ca support is still in beta. (You can download the Posty beta from here.) I hear Twitterfox might be next.

Have I missed anything? Help me fill in the blanks, if so.

Update: I have just been pointed to Identifox, a modified version of TwitterFox which works with Identi.ca!

You know how this goes – you mark it for later and then don’t get around to it. Maybe these wouldn’t have filled out an entire blog post or maybe there’s not that much to say about them, but they’re worth a mention nonetheless. They’re kind of awesome. This is no spliced in del.icio.us link list – I killed that long ago, please go do the same. This is a list of worthy links.

I’ve done this before, but it’s not a regular feature. Anyway, here we go:

• I found some hacker’s blog with a tip on how to get a 3G iPhone for $199 without a contract. Totally exploiting a loophole. My guess is that loophole is closed now, but I’m not certain. Anyone want to try it? It’s sort of a lot of work and probably illegal, so I think I’ll just wait to buy one later. 
• From CNet, a post on gAttach: “gAttach is a small utility that reassigns Gmail as the default mail account from Windows documents. With gAttach installed, selecting Send from Windows Explorer, Firefox, and Microsoft Office automatically attaches the files to a Gmail composition instead of opening a new e-mail in your mail client.” Oh hello! I totally needed that.
• From DownloadSquad: Last.fm integration into geeky media player, VLC. The pre-release of VLC 0.9.0 Media Player for both Windows and Mac now supports Last.fm (Audioscrobbler). To enable Last.fm support in the 0.9.0 release, enter your username in the preferences pane under Audioscrobber.
• You’ve seen FriendZone but have you seen FriendVenn? FriendVenn is a FriendFeed app that divides your relationships into a venn diagram of people who you subscribe to who don’t subscribe to you, people who both subscribe to you and who you subscribe to, and people who only subscribe to you.
• Another excellent FriendFeed script from the man who brought you the better recommended page and the better subscribed to me script. It’s the FriendFeed Profile. This script adds a user profile section on FF user pages. It retrieves Twitter and LinkedIn info if available and allows customization of which fields to display by editing the script and setting the variables at the top. Now I can figure out who all of you people really are. Nice!

I’ve been looking into ways to get my followers in sync between the various services I’m using, mainly FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and Identi.ca. It’s not easy. Of course there’s the Twitter 2 FriendFeed Importer, but ultimately, adding contacts is still very much a manual process these days. I tend to batch this process on a regular basis by going through my email and opening tab after tab (see?). This is insanity, actually.

My need for data portability is desperate. I’m literally wasting huge amounts of my time adding, adding, adding the same friends over and over again. If you’re my friend online, then you should just be my friend no matter what service I sign up for. I’m quite sick of it.

And for the most part, what we’re getting from developers are YAWA offerings – that’s “yet another web app” - instead of tools that help us manage the ones we have today. And because they’re these shiny new objects, we sign up, add friends, and the cycle repeats. It repeats because we’ve just proved to the app’s creators this is what we want. It repeats because we’re going to sign up for the next app, too.

So when I see someone trying to address this issue, I get excited. Whether it works or not, I’m excited because they care. They’re at least moving in the right direction.

I was excited about the post I did today on Genome. They’re trying to make identities flexible and portable, but did this get a lot of positive comments? No. And the ones left weren’t even that nice.

I don’t get it. Explain it to me, because today, I’m lost. Do we, as social media enthusiasts really only care about the next cool thing and not about the process of actually making these tools effective for the everyday user. Is that just “oh, ho-hum, that’s for someone else to worry about?”

I hope that’s not the case. Hey, I love the next new thing as much as the next guy (see identi.ca early adopter tips), but I give equal time to the problem-solvers, too.

So, on that note, here’s your problem solver tip for today:

From the same guy who brought you the Better FriendFeed Subscribed To Me script, comes the Better FriendFeed Recommended Page. It works by finding the subscriptions of your subscriptions and sorts them by popularity (mutual subscriptions) as shown below:

There you go, equal time. Something useful. That deserved a post.

After my initial Identi.ca lovefest, I quickly became swamped with invites to connect with others on the service (I’m still working through my inbox on those, by the way – someone build me a “follow my followers app?”). Of course, once you have followers and friends, you have conversations. And god forbid you have a life away from your computer because stepping away from your computer meant you were sure to miss some replies – that is, unless you were fortunate enough to uncover geekygirldawn’s identi.ca Yahoo Pipe. Still, the world is a much better place when there’s just a button you can click to see your replies, isn’t there? Well, now there is! So if you’ve been waiting for that special moment to sign up for identi.ca, I’d say you found it. Replies make the darned thing work.

And if you’re still wondering why in the world we need another Twitter, the short answer is – we don’t. We need one that works. Identi.ca with its open source model may work, but at the very least its an alternative system for when Twitter is down.

Updating Our Million Apps

Unfortunately, with all the latest micro-blogging tools and services, what we really need is an app that makes keep up with them all much easier. Recently on RWW, I profiled 6 ways you can update your status on multiple services, my favorite of which is Ping.fm (need an invite code? try “pingyoulater”).

Of course, that was only my favorite because I actually did not know about an AIR app that did the same: Posty. (I know it’s shocking, given my recent AIR app obsession. Can I be on a mailing list for hot AIR apps, please?) This charming little app lets you update Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, and FriendFeed – not bad! But I still need Plurk and Identica, so I’m sticking with Ping.fm for now.

Come to think of it, what I actually need is an app that lets me multi-post as well as track replies. I would even be willing to continue with Ping.fm for the multi-post if only Twhirl would integrate identi.ca. I wish someone would just clone it already and give me all of Twhirl’s features plus those I want instead of trying to create their own look and feel for an app. I’m sorry, but Twhirl’s UI (save for the FriendFeed 2nd window – yuck) rocks.

Anyway, if you want to add me on identi.ca, I’m http://identi.ca/sarahintampa and I swear I’ll attack my inbox today and add all of you back.

Update: Oh, hotness! A FriendFeed Identi.ca tab! Swoon!

More Coverage: SheGeeks - Identi.ica Finally Adds a Reply Tab

FriendFeed/Twitter AIR app Feedalizr has just launched into beta today. They had been previously been in a public alpha, but they now feel that their feature set is rich enough and enough of the bugs have been squashed to qualify their app as a beta.

Along with the launch, feedalizr has been updated with a few new features that make it worth a look, including support for FriendFeed’s rooms. With the new app, you’ll now get the messages that have been sent directly to the rooms you’re a member of and you, in turn, can also post directly to a room via a drop down box that lists all the rooms which belong to.

Another new feature is tab support. With this, you can choose to see just your Twitter messages in a tab, for example. To activate this feature, you only need to click on the service icon from your FriendFeed stream to show all the posts from that service. When you load more tabs than you have room for, feedalizr just adds an arrow so you to scroll over to the others that don’t fit on the app’s main screen.

In addition, this release improves support for Twitter DMs by adding a “direct” link underneath a friend’s tweet.

Of course, Feedalizr has always stood out from the other AIR apps by including support for Jaiku as well as support for flickr and video uploads. If you’re looking for a good FriendFeed desktop client, Feedalizr should be on your list.

You can download the latest version here.