Shared stuff, APIs, feeds, oh my!
There’s no doubt about the fact that we are generating lots and lots of content as part of our online activities. We blog, leave comments, bookmark sites, upload photos and videos, provide status updates and what not. There’s so much activity that it’s hard to keep track of it all. RSS/Atom feeds have helped but it’s just too much work to track down, subscribe and manage a dozen or more feeds for every person that you know.
On a personal level, I’ve tried to provide feeds for as many of the things I create/share as possible. There’s this blog, the tidbits blog, the tumblelog, photos on flickr, code commits, travel updates, status updates and more. Recently was my attempt at bringing all of these bits and pieces of info back to a single location on antrix.net. Although slick (bias!), it really isn’t what a central clearing house of a person’s activities should look like. As it stands, Recently is rather limited: it doesn’t provide permalinks nor feeds and does it allow interaction in the form of comments, etc.
Enter stage left: FriendFeed.
I’ve used FriendFeed on and off for some time now, most of the it spent trying to figure out what exactly it does. I still haven’t so I will not try to explain. What I will do is to tell you that as of now, I’ve settled on letting FriendFeed track as much of my publicly accessible info as possible. So everything I mentioned above, with the exception of twitter updates, is now available to you - dear readers - on a single FriendFeed page. Love it or ignore it!
If you are on Facebook, a smaller helping of this stuff should also appear in your Facebook news feed. Of course, only if you are my ‘friend’.
There’s exactly one thing that I did towards this shuffling of data that’s worth noting here. Regular readers will know that I’ve long been using del.icio.us as a link blog. I use it so much that I even wrote Dumble (and now oohEmbed) as a friendly tumblelog style front end to del.icio.us. So del.icio.us has to remain as the definitive link archive in these quarters.
With that in mind, you can understand why I’ve been so slow on the uptake of Google Reader’s shared items feature, although I’ve been using Reader exclusively since perhaps late 2006. Simply put, I didn’t want to fragment my shared links under two different sources - one of which wouldn’t play ball with Dumble. The horror! The only reasonable thing to do was to write some code that took shared items from Google Reader and posted them to my del.icio.us account. And so I wrote yummy. My last blog post alluded to this wee bit of code and indeed, yummy does incorporate feedback from you, dear readers. Where by readers, I mean Harish!
On the whole, I think I’m happy with the current situation. Of course, I’d much happier if we were in the year 2012 with all this drama behind us - a distant memory of less civilized times. :-)
Now, I shall go pack my bags since, as Dopplr says, I’m scheduled to be in Mumbai tomorrow!