trails, trials and travails

P031509PS-0140, originally uploaded by The Official White House Photostream.

I really am enjoying the Official White House photos on Flickr, especially these of the Prez and Bo, the First Dog. Totally cool.

I’m blogging at Indicommons these days, which is a blog devoted to fans of the Commons
on Flickr.  Two of the weekly posts I write are about the most recent
uploads to the Commons and news from the internet about the Commons’
institutions.  Here are two samples:
Recent Uploads to the Commons
Carnival of the Commons

Getting organized for these two weekly posts has taken me a while to
nail down.  There are 23 institutions on the Commons.  I follow them
all on Flickr, but there is no easy way to follow just the Commons’
uploads, unless I make them all Friends and get rid of my other Friends
so that in one quick view I can see what’s happening with all 23 of
them (there are only 3 contact levels at Flickr).  That doesn’t work
for me, and neither does creating a new Flickr account just to follow
them.  Happily, all of their streams have RSS feeds, and one of our
users created a nifty Feedburner feed for all institutions.  I have
that feed added as a widget to my iGoogle since I’m frequently at my
home page, so I see what’s newly uploaded as it happens.

However, the Carnival post requires that I have access to every feed
from every institution –  be that a blog, website news, Twitter,
YouTube or Facebook — so that I’m tuned in.  For the institutions that don’t have anything
beyond a website, with no feeds, I don’t do anything: it’s too much to
go to their sites and collect the data every week.  However, following
everyone at each different social networking site isn’t really feasible
either (not enough time in the day to hunt all of that down).  Happily, these all have RSS feeds, too.

Instead of configuring a Feedburn for this, I decided
to try using FriendFeed.  I set up imaginary accounts for all 23 of
them, and then added every social networking site and feed for them
that I could find.  I stuck them all into a group.  Now, I just need to
check that group on FF every so often, and there it all is, fed to me
rather conveniently.  I suppose Google Reader could have worked too, I just have a few hundred feeds in it already, so that felt overloaded.

Of course, blogging all of this is a little harder.  I don’t log
into WordPress every time I see something new, so I had to find a way to
make notes about these things as I found them.  Google docs was the
solution for a while, but somewhat cumbersome, since I couldn’t format
the posts as needed for WordPress — their formatting more or
less sucks, in fact.

Enter Evernote. Using their web
clipping service, I can clip a web page or url or tweet or whatever,
tag it, and annotate it; it’s all saved up to Evernote.  That way, I
can sit down at WordPress twice a week, copy the annotations directly
and  insert the links easily.

Now, could any of this be streamlined?  Sure!  We could set
up that Feedburn for the institutions’ other social networking sites
and just port that into a page at the blog — sort of a Commons’
real-time activity stream — or just make the feed available to those
interested.  We could use the Flickr API to collect recent
uploads and display them all in one location, too.  But until then,
I’ll keep chugging along with the method outlined here.

One last thing, it seems that 80% of the info I use for the Carnival comes from Twitter.  That may well be why the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, Powerhouse Museum and the Brooklyn Museum are well represented at Indicommons.  Maybe RSS feeds are as dead as email these days. Just tweet it instead. Which makes me wonder why we are blogging — oh right!  It’s all the cool photos!

Status updates from a plethora of networks is a small problem of mine.  I’m on a few of them, mainly because different people in my life are on a few of them.  What I want is a way to view all status updates from my friends on all of those networks in one interface.  I want a desktop client to do this — I just don’t want to journey to every site every day to find out what is happening.

My favorite aggregator, Swurl, went into the deadpool earlier this year.  That’s a pity, since they were able to post some of the relevant stuff I want to see, even if my friends were not on Swurl.

FriendFeed is the next closest thing, but even it doesn’t do everything I’d like it to do.  It’s also, unfortunately, as TechCrunch says, the coolest app that nobody uses.  And it only shows me updates from people who are using FriendFeed, unless I add them as imaginary friends, which is far too time consuming.  But it’s pretty interactive if your friends are using it; the new Facebook design seems to have borrowed heavily from it.

So, what would the ideal aggregator do?  It would feed to me all status updates/recent activity (in a customizable way) from my network of friends — not just my stuff — on all social networking sites I am on.

For example, if I added Flickr to this aggregator, it would pull my list of contacts and show me their recent uploads and it would pull from my recent activity page and show me comments left on my photos.  It would also allow me to comment on and favorite photos from my friends.  It would show me what photos my friends just favorited, too, like FriendFeed does.

I’m on Twitter, too, but I’m a ghostly presense there — I tweet from Plurk, where I have a more robust social network — and I check Twitter infrequently.  So, this client would be able to pull all of my friend’s tweets and display them in a feed, allowing me to reply, DM, or re-tweet.  Ideally, it would do this for Plurk, too, although I’m not sure what is happening with Plurk’s API.  Sort of like TweetDeck or DestroyTweet, but for all social networks — aggregate them all and allow me to filter on network.

Facebook?  Bring it.  Let me select a custom list sans quizes and eggs and mafia wars, and show me status updates form that fb list.  Allow me to comment right back to fb.  Allow me to share stuff being pulled in from my other networks to FB.  I really dislike visiting FB, but this would let me stay in touch with so many of my friends who are using it.   

Getting the picture yet?  I want one location to check the pulse of everything happening elsewhere.  Ping.fm is great — but it only sends stuff out, it doesn’t pull stuff in.  TweetDeck is great, but it’s only for Twitter.  FriendFeed?  It doesn’t pull your info to me unless you’re on FriendFeed.  I even checked out this now-out-of-beta site, streamy, and must say that I’m not at all impressed with its aggegration.

Now, you might say, just use Facebook, Criz, it does what you want and everyone is there.  Yes, but it’s not the network I enjoy most and I don’t want to rely on one site to get my fix anyway.  If the web is all about sharing and openness these days, can’t someone write a usuable desktop client (it can be web based, I don’t care at this point) that truly aggregates the content I want to see all in one place?