Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Google Reader: Update with FB feed information

I've been experimenting with Facebook and Twitter again.

The net result is I find Facebook oddly interesting and Twitter still puzzling. Facebook in particualr is proof that usability is not a requirement for critical success. I see the point of this NYT Magazine article:

... Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive...

I suspect the Lesser Depression is a powerful tonic for social networking sites. In my case the Twitter retry was triggered by a (voluntarily) departed colleague who does Twitter and the FB reboot was motivated by a critical mass of friends and acquaintances on FB. Both experiments have been aided by solid iPhone app clients.

Some quick comments and potentially useful references ...

• Tech for Luddites: Read, Send, and Share Tweets on Facebook: showed me how to get Twitter posts to show up on my FB wall. My impression was that it would also enable FB to Twitter posts but that hasn't worked (either my error or a security setting or a bug). The author of this blog is a few steps ahead of me so I'm learning a lot from her current and past posts.
  
• I added the Google Reader Share app to my FB page, but it was posting unpredictably. Sometimes it would concatenate my shared items into a paragraph of many links (good), sometimes it woudl create individual wall posts (bad, too much volume). I had to remove it.
• I experimented with the RSS app, but it generated "notes" which don't seem to fit the current FB sharing model
• I turned off the majority of the FB email notifications, instead I subscribe by feed to Events and Friends updates [1 - the friends updates subscription is gone]. So my mail is not interrupted, and I pick up FB activity when I use Google Reader. (I found a FB bug -- if I turn off too many email notifications at once FB doesn't save my preferences. I had to turn them off in 3-4 sets.)
• I've reviewed and played with the copious privacy configuration options, but I treat anything I post to FB as though it were going to my kids, my friends, the FBI, my parents, my boss, my company's customers, etc. So not super bland, but my pseudonymous blogs are much more interesting.
• LinkedIn is my corporate identity, Facebook is my personal "face", and the blogs are my alternative identity. So far, a reasonable balance and an interesting experiment.
• Facebook is very big on "data lock". So I don't put anything there I want to keep. So I won't be putting photo albums, etc on FB. I treat FB as an information black hole -- data goes in, but can't be extracted. (Yeah, I know this is bad physics, it's a metaphor!)
• I don't get the groups and events features on FB, it feels like they've been deprecated.
  

Update 8/26/09: Facebook has removed the status update feed. The feed I have in Google Reader still works, but it's no longer possible to create a new status update feed. The notification feed is still available (see bottom of the All Notifications screen). Yelvington has published a workaround to reproduce the old status update feed URL. Like him I wonder how long this will work ...

Here's how to get your status as an RSS feed.

1. Log into facebook.
2. Click on "Inbox."
3. Click on the "Notifications" tab.
4. Find the RSS link under "Subscribe to notifications" and copy it. THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT LINK but it contains essential information.
5. COPY the link URL arguments -- everything to the right of the "?" in the URL. This should looks something like id=563407515&viewer=563407515&key=1234aa32e7&format=rss20.
6. Attach the string you copied above this URL: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?

You now have a feed URL that will deliver YOUR status updates. You should TEST THIS URL using a browser that is NOT logged into Facebook. If you get an RSS feed containing your updates, this is valid...

I assume FB removed this to keep Facebook as closed as possible, and, importantly, this feed bypassed FB's access controls. I really miss it though and I'm glad it still works.

Nisus Writer Professional: the undocumented but critical improvement

A year ago I was disappointed to learn that Nisus Writer Professional didn't handle inserted images very well ...

Gordon's Tech: Nisus Writer Professional - the manual is a work of love

... NWP doesn't do image compression! Word has fabulous image compression, so a 2MB Word document can balloon into a 32MB NWP/NWE document....

I'm now on version 1.2, but there's been no reference to any change in how NWP handles images.

Today I retested with a 2.5MB JPEG (high quality compression). An uncompressed TIFF version of this image is 20MB and a compressed PNG is 10MB

Prior to testing an empty Nisus RTF document was 32K. After insertion it was 5MB.

So Nisus is now doing some form of image compression when documents are saved.

This is a big deal for me, but obviously not for most buyers!

I'm glad they made the fix, I feel better now about sticking with NWP.

Google Gmail voice and video chat - soon interoperable with other video chat?

GVC 1.0.8 is out. This is very interesting (emphases mine) ...

juberjabber: Gmail voice and video v1.0.8

... Added support for the H.264/AVC video codec, in addition to the H.264/SVC codec that we typically use. This allows us to be compatible with video software that does not yet support SVC. When using H.264/AVC, Gmail video chat will send and expect in-band parameter sets, and send using a single-NAL RTP packetization....

I'm not aware of any form of publicly available video chat that interoperates. The Apple article on QuickTime H.264 is illuminating ...

... Ratified as part of the MPEG-4 standard (MPEG-4 Part 10), this ultra-efficient technology gives you excellent results across a broad range of bandwidths, from 3G for mobile devices to iChat AV for video conferencing to HD for broadcast and DVD

So will Google Video Chat interoperate with OS X iChat? And what about that new iPhone ...

Update: A paste typo messed up the previous edition

Great set of iPhone apps to investigate

What's On (My) iPhone includes a Flash widget for that justifies the "First Screen" application set of an iPhone power user. Both the apps and the justifications are interesting.

I can see there will come a day when I might consider paying AT&T their SMS tax. (Though I'm hoping iPhone 3 may avert that.)

iPhone car charger solutions

There were a lot of things about my iPhone that bugged me 6 months ago. Some of them will persist, others have been fixed, or I've found workarounds, or they should be fixed with version 3.

There's one in particular, however, that still burns. Apple stopped supporting 12V (firewire, automotive adapter) charging for iPods and iPhones.

This meant that a large number of integrated automotive solutions, from low end car chargers to high end automotive sound systems, including my SONY radio and my Griffin FM transmitter stopped, working.

Apple never explained - of course.

This one decision earned Apple a lot of customer ire, and affirmed my desire for more Fear in Apple's future.

I've purchased a number of cheap USB chargers car chargers, but they've been very unreliable and many don't work with my iPhone. Meanwhile my reliable firewire/12V car adapters go unused. I've spitefully refused to purchase a new adapter, but our latest family trip convinced me I need to give in. My phone kept running out of juice about 3 pm. After six months of use the iPhone can't make it through the day. Map use, email, gaming, GPS, entertainment, push calendar sync, occasional conversation -- it's too much for a middle-aged battery.

I need regular power for the computer.

So I had to look at what's available. I know from past experience that unbranded chargers/adapters are worthless. The device has to have a good name and the negative Amazon reviews can't be too bad. Kensington devices look like they have some quality issues, so that leaves one of my favorite vendors - Griffin.

From Griffin we have:

• PowerJolt SE: very simple, and on sale now. I'd prefer a non-integrated cable however and the coiled cable is too bulky for travel.
• PowerJolt for iPhone: Just the power supply. Amazon's listing is incorrect; it describes an older version of this. Has detachable cable.
  
• Griffin firewire to USB converter: Not yet available on Amazon, but available directly from Griffin. This would allow me to use my existing devices, and it's compact for travel. Very appealing. [Update: back-orded at Griffin, so I'll just pre-order via Amazon.]
  

The latter two are good options. On balance I think I'll take a try on the firewire to USB converter, even though there are no Amazon reviews yet. That would allow me to use several devices I already own. Griffin has a 30 day return policy so if it doesn't work out I can send it back. I may also buy the PowerJolt separately.

Update 5/5/09: The PowerJolt for iPhone is perfect, I asked Amazon to correct the listing. Even better, the Firewire to USB converter also works!

Google reader shared items to Facebook

Inspired by Peter C I've been experimenting with incorporating my Google Reader Shared Items feed into my Facebook stream.

I had a surprisingly hard time figuring out how to do this; I had to carefully read some posts in the "Google Reader" Facebook page (Peter explained it to me, but I didn't get it). Judging from those posts, I'm not the only one flailing about. The trick is the "settings" button beneath the "Write something" field on the "Wall". If you click it it a new area appears as below ...

You can add any feed, there's a shortcut for Google Reader. I clicked on it, then opened my Google Reader Shared Items web page and copy/pasted that URL. The feed is first named with a long digit, but you can rename it to something meaningful. The long string of digits is the user name, don't change it. I share a lot of posts, so I was worried I'd overload my feed. So far, however, it's concatenating several items into a single transaction, like this ...

That's not too bad. I'll just have to track and see how the feed behaves. It's ironic that even as the power user desktop feed reader market dies, millions are consuming feeds via Facebook without any idea of what's behind the scenes.

Update 3/30/09: Uh-oh. The setup seems fine, but nothing I share is appearing on Facebook.


Update 3/30/09b: Another set showed up. Maybe it updates once daily? That would be fine.


Update 4/19/09: It started updating several times a day, which was much too high a volume for my friends. I had to turn it off. The update behavior seemed unpredictable.


Update 4/25/10: I decided I'd try this again but link Facebook to a single blog. Alas, it looks like this feature was discontinued. I don't think there's a way to do this without an app of some kind. The most recent summary I could find on this topic was posted in mashable.com August 2009, but even that is out of date.

Facebook is all about lockin, so this type of functionality is going to be fragile. I suspect most vendors have given up. Twitter, for all of the things about it that truly annoy me, is not a lock in solution. (So sad that Google mangled Buzz.)

Looking around a bit, it feels like the action is in mashup services that deliver interconnection. One of these is "twitter feed", it connects any valid feed to a publishing service and it supports OpenID and OAuth -- so I don't need to give them my personal credentials. I'm going to look at what I can do with this.


Update 4/26/10: I did an update on this topic using the twitterfeed service alternative.

Ecto 3 - still breaking my heart

I'm a huge fan of Windows Live Writer.

There's only one problem with WLW. The first W.

So I've long hoped someone would clone WLW for OS X. It doesn't have to be as good as the original, a reasonable clone would be a joy.

Unfortunately, the closest thing to WLW for OS X is ecto, and I'm saddened to find it hasn't changed since October of 2007.

It still has one fatal flaw for use with Blogger. It requires that Blogger blogs have "convert line feeds" disabled.

If that feature is enabled (default behavior) then Ecto posts have extra line feeds. If it's disabled existing posts lose their paragraph formatting.

There are other issues with Ecto, such as the way it retrieves Labels (it just looks at Labels on recent posts), but this one is a killer.

Won't anyone please try to clone Windows Live Writer? I mean, I know there's no market out there but ...

Oh, right. No market.