in-between thing: friendfeed and lifestream.fm

Two days in, and I can tell you neither of them is perfect. FriendFeed can't see my Facebook status. Apparently this is some sort of glitch that affects people who tried to add Facebook to FriendFeed after the "new" Facebook was released. The app developers said back in May they were aware of this problem and are working on it; obviously they haven't solved it yet.

Less critical, but still annoying: despite my telling Lifestream.fm that I was in Minnesota, my posts are time-stamped for Central European Summer Time (seven hours ahead of Central Daylight Time), which affects what day they're credited to. Sigh. Lifestream.fm is based in Germany, I believe.

Thing 41: Mashup Your Life

I get why this Thing is called "Mashup Your Life." But for how I will end up using it, "Mashup Your Friends' Lives" would probably be a more accurate description.

I joined FriendFeed this afternoon. I'd chosen it because I knew at least one friend of mine was already there (so I'd have someone to connect to) and because my coworker who's doing the More Things program had joined Lifestream.fm and loathed it. But about an hour later, another 23 Things-er invited me to join Lifestream.fm, so I've ended up comparing the two. Based on a few hours familiarity, I think I like FriendFeed slightly better (I see why the More Things on a Stick program would like people to try these services for a few weeks, but this close to the deadline it ain't happening). It mostly has to do with aesthetics, and that I don't like Lifestream.fm's search engine for trying to find out if your friends are already on the site. But I'll have to play with both sites some more to see if that preference holds. I'm glad that both services let you make your account private. I will probably make my accounts public until the end of More Things on a Stick--that's only a few days, after all--and then go private and personalize my chosen service.

I see the two sites differ in their focus. FriendFeed puts your friends' avatars first, and the source of each post is almost an afterthought, in small gray print at the end. Lifestream.fm leaves your friends' avatars out altogether and leads with the icon of the post source (Twitter's little t, the RSS feed's orange square, etc.).

Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, these social networking site aggregators don't seem to be nearly as popular. I think these kinds of services could be really useful. I'm tired of tramping around from Facebook to LibraryThing to Google Reader to Twitter and so on, just trying to keep track of what all my friends are doing. Now the question is, are these sites just about to catch on, or are they doomed to never be quite noticed by the world at large?

By the way, if I invite my friends to join either of these services, am I being pushy? Maybe the last thing anyone wants is still yet another account on another service. Or am I just doing social networking the way it's supposed to go, trying to forge more connections? Does anyone know if Miss Manners has addressed this issue?

I managed to get both the FriendFeed and Lifestream.fm widgets into this blog, which is overkill, but I'll be taking one out sooner or later. Both are mostly made up of posts from this blog--it's oddly circular.

Thing 40: Mashup the Web

Being someone who does a lot of walking in her neighborhood, I started with Walk Score. My neighborhood scored an 82 ("Very Walkable")--not bad at all. By contrast, the neighborhood I grew up in only managed a 35 ("Car-Dependent"). But looking at both maps, I see the mashup isn't taking terrain into consideration. You don't walk to the West 7th library from my apartment: I-35E lies between me and it. Back in my home town, there's a creek and a virtually unscalable river bluff between my childhood home and the amenities, so even that 35 is an overstatement. Nor is personal safety considered: while a previous neighborhood of mine was deemed 91 ("Walkers' Paradise"), let's just say walking there was an act of daring. Perhaps Walk Score should be mashed-up with CrimeReports?

Wheel of Lunch looked more gimmicky--and dizzying--than useful, but Lunchbox seemed quite practical. It might need a data update, though: a nearby Vietnamese restaurant didn't show up in a search for Vietnamese restaurants.

Searching for a mashup on my own, I discovered Reading Radar, a mashup of the New York Times bestseller lists and Amazon.com. What you get are the Amazon.com ratings for bestselling books. People do seem to enjoy the bestsellers: most of them scored around 4 stars. But I rarely read bestsellers, so I can't see myself using this all that often.

I played with Phreetings. It's a nice idea, but the site seemed to be allergic to Internet Explorer, which wasn't a good sign, and finding the instructions wasn't intuitive. But in the end, I managed a postcard.

Thing 32: Google Maps and Mashups

That's it? Just make a map and post it? Oh, thank you! After Thing 31, I was pretty much drained.

Yarn addict that I am, I decided to map out a few of the Twin Cities yarn stores. I didn't choose all of them for a variety of reasons:

1. After a few selections, I got the hang of it and didn't feel I needed to keep practicing.
2. We really do have a lot of yarn stores around here. I heard once that the Twin Cities have the highest number of yarn stores per capita, although I have no easy way to verify that.
3. May 20 is coming. Cannot spend all May perfecting this map.

View Twin Cities Yarn Shops in a larger map

Although pretty simple, there were a few tricks to putting this map together. 3 Kittens Needle Arts recently moved to a shopping center that literally isn't on Google Maps: not only is the shopping center itself not there, but none of the streets leading to it are there either. Google Maps had the proper street address, but unable to find a Main Street in Mendota Heights, they plunked the placemarker down on Main Street in St. Paul. I sense some irony in the fact that I had to look the address up on Mapquest (which did have all the streets in question) to figure out where to stick the placemarker in Google.

Another problem came up when I tried to place Knit'n From the Heart. Any other yarn store I looked up, Google showed me a map; when I looked Knit'n From the Heart up, I kept getting driving directions instead. Eventually I figured it out: the word "from" was throwing it. It was trying to tell me how to get to Knit'n from The Heart. (The solution was to search the store name as a phrase in quotation marks).

I could see uses for this in a public or academic library. But it takes a while to create one of these maps, so while it would be nice to produce one on demand, it'd make more sense to have a few choice ones ready and waiting for patrons.