friends

Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with "Friend Connect" on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites."

Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter … Read more

For quite a while, I was nothing more than a social network hater. To me, social networks seemed like a ploy for those with so-called "notoriety" to massage their egos just a little bit more and provided no real benefit to anyone. After signing up for almost every social network in existence, I can say now that I was dead wrong.

Whether it's Twitter, FriendFeed or even Flickr, I'm extremely surprised by how much value each provides. And although I can't speak for everyone who uses these services, I honestly believe that each is unique and useful enough to justify your time.

Here's why:… Read more

If BattleBots were mashed up with Roombas and rumbled in the backyard, it might resemble the hotly competitive landscape of today's robotic lawnmowers. Robo-mowers like the LawnBott and Auto Mower are always searching for new gimmicks to distinguish themselves, such as going hybrid with solar energy.

But the "Robomow" is taking a different tack altogether, introducing a limited edition that celebrates England's St. George's Day. The custom mower, which bears the St. George's Day cross on its hull, has been named "Sir Cut Alot, Mower of the Roundtable," according to U.K.… Read more

Shortly after Loic Le Meur's Seesmic acquired the excellent Twitter client Twhirl, the new geek hotness FriendFeed got its first AIR application, Alert Thingy (review), which also handles Twitter feeds. Le Meur charged his new employee with putting FriendFeed features into Twhirl to maintain parity.

FriendFeed support in the current version of Twhirl is pretty sparse. If you find it frustrating, however, sit tight for a few more hours because yet another update to Twhirl is on the way, Le Meur told me tonight.

This new version will let you post images to your FriendFeed account just by dragging … Read more

AlertThingy, the first (I believe) AIR application for FriendFeed, is now out. If you're a FriendFeed user just go and install it. It's probably what you've been waiting for: A desktop application that funnels all the things your friends are doing that make it into FriendFeed to your desktop. You can also post comments back to FriendFeed (and the sites FriendFeed then posts to) with the application.

Most of the content I see in my FriendFeed account comes from Twitter, but I don't find the application to be as clear or well-sorted as Twhirl, everyone's … Read more

FriendFeed is a current Web 2.0 darling. The service performs the increasingly valuable job of presenting, in one place, all the online activity of the friends you want to follow. Twitter posts, blog entries, YouTube favorites, Last.fm listens, Flickr photos, you name it...FriendFeed lets you track it all (except Facebook updates). You can also talk about your friends' activities on FriendFeed itself, a clubbier environment than joining the fray on, say, a YouTube feedback page.

The service is not the only social aggregator, nor is it the first: Plaxo Pulse does a lot of the same stuff, … Read more

Flickr has a helpful new way to let you find people you know who have Flickr accounts. It's called find friends, and it will tap into your Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or Windows Live Hotmail to cross check those e-mails with Flickr users. When it finds matches it serves them up in a list--all of which require you to opt them in one at a time as one of Flickr's somewhat ambiguous friends classifications.

Assuming you've got accounts for all three, the odds are good you'll be able to discover some people using Flickr you hadn't … Read more

I think we all saw this one coming. The hottest social aggregator out there today, FriendFeed, has launched an application programming interface, paving the way for third-party applications using its service. Full documentation for the API is available on Google Code.

This is certainly an important step for FriendFeed. The closely related service, Twitter, has benefited greatly from providing support for third-party developers, so FriendFeed should see a similar bump from the introduction of its API.

FriendFeed's API currently offers PHP and Python libraries, with support for OAuth apparently on the way. In making the API, FriendFeed also took … Read more

A new feature in the personal feed aggregator FriendFeed lets users reply to Twitter posts that show up on the service, and have those replies posted to Twitter itself. Previously, what happened in FriendFeed stayed in FriendFeed.

You can only reply to Twitter posts in FriendFeed. Your post will start @(username), which is the standard for a reply on Twitter. You can't create a new Twitter item without the reply text. So FriendFeed is still not the new Twitter.

FriendFeed in reverse now exists, by the way: Ping.fm, a service that sends items to multiple microblog services at once. … Read more