Silona and the Unicorn

They say write about what you know, and since I’ve been spending hours of my time on FriendFeed, I am starting to know it fairly well.

The Apology

Therefore, I am sorry that I’m contributing to the growing pool of I had this great conversation on FriendFeed and it inspired me to write this post-type posts, but this is going to be one.

The Set-Up

Recently, there was a conversation on FriendFeed that Trish Robinson started off with the question:

“Has anyone used the "create an imaginary friend" feature? Does it work?”

As it turns out, people use the ‘imaginary friend’ feature in different ways.  Here is what we know about imaginary friends on FriendFeed:

• You can set up an imaginary friend to show you one or more syndicated feeds from any of the 41 (at last count) services FriendFeed offers.
• Only you can see your imaginary friend. 
• Any comments or likes you put on an entry created by a imaginary friend are only seen by you as well.
• You can reshare an imaginary friend’s entry if you want others to see it.
• You can create an unlimited number of imaginary friends, and they can have any name at all.  Even the names of actual FriendFeed users or other imaginary friends.
• Just like there is no way of deleting a room, there is no way of deleting an imaginary friend.
• If you unsubscribe from an imaginary friend, its GUID remains, but inaccessible from anyone but perhaps the FriendFeed gods.
• You cannot invite or otherwise add an imaginary friend to a room.
• If you see an entry from an imaginary friend in your main friend’s feed, you will not be able to hide the entry.  (Unverified)
• If your actual friend creates a new account using the same name as your imaginary friend, that is entirely possible and you will potentially see duplicate entries.

The Payoff

So far, imaginary friends seem fairly straightforward.  Let’s say you have a friend or a web site that is not represented well on FriendFeed and you want that information to be there in ff.  Not a problem, add an imaginary friend, add a feed to it, away you go.  You can treat that imaginary friend like you would other users aside from your likes and comments not showing up on the public stream.

However, if you look at an imaginary friend as a customizable feed reader, it suddenly opens up into a very useful construct that fits well into the FriendFeed workflow (or is that idleflow?).  Now, you can see new feed items as they are published and you can like them to bookmark them, or comment on them to leave yourself little notes for research or further reading.  Instant feed reader, no Google Reader needed!

You can also use imaginary friends to keep track of comment fragmentation.  You can, for example, assign the comment feeds for different web sites to imaginary friends with those site names, along with their RSS feeds, then, you will see ongoing discussions as they happen on those sites.

You can keep track of people or entities on the internet that you love to hate, or just hate.  You can then cathartically scream and punish your invisible enemy as much as you want, and nobody is the wiser (except for the aforementioned FriendFeed god, who if they know what is good for them will never tell anyone).

The Unexpected Bonus

I like you, reader, because I could have saved this tip for a different article.  But you will get it here, a reward for getting this far!  Here’s your bonus tip:

Most of these things you can do with invisible friends can also be done with private rooms.

Yep.  You can create a room, add a feed or 3, reshare, comment as much as you like, etc.  Private room entries also will show up in your main friend feed if you want them to.  Rooms provide another layer of segregation of content, if you want it.

It would be cool if you could have invisible friends feeding in to private rooms, but since the functionality is duplicated, personally, I don’t miss not having it.

The Wrap-Up

Don’t take features for granted.  Please refer to this post, where I say:

Find uncommon uses for the service.  See if it makes a good search engine, or gets free concert tickets or a better job.  You never know.

Even after using FriendFeed daily for almost two months, I am still finding cool new ways of doing things in the service.  That, almost as much as the community aspect, keeps me coming back to it.

The Belated Credit

For some reason, I totally blanked on the fact that Justin Korn (FriendFeed profile) wrote up his experience using FriendFeed as an RSS reader and organizer on his own blog.

I feel especially bad because I encouraged Justin to write it!  Honestly, I feel like a complete heel.  When it comes to giving credit, I have a thing or two to learn.

My unreserved apologies, Justin.

I believe I have a problem, perhaps genetic, that does not allow me to make sentences shorter than originally written or determine when an article has gone on for too long, resulting in things like paragraph-long sentences, long meandering digressions, people having to take a bathroom break before finishing one of my articles, and browsers crashing as they run out of memory.

That said, now I have even less space to write this article. Ok, let’s get to it.

You probably know what an anchor tag is. If you don’t, you may still be using AOL as your internets provider. An anchor tag usually the first or second HTML tag that you learn in how-to-build-a-web-page-1.0-school. It’s so ubiquitous, in fact, that I won’t even show you an example here.

So, one of the attributes you can give the anchor tag is called target. This allows you to define where the link in the anchor tag goes. This was super-awesome in 1996 when you had a two-frame web page and you wanted links in one frame to go to pages in the other frame.

Things change. Having frames in your web pages now means instant ridicule and ostracization from polite society.

So the target attribute died too, right? Not even close. Now, if you give your anchor tag a target, and the web browser can’t find a window with the target name, it just creates a new browser window with that target. Some browsers can be configured to open a new tab, instead.

Over time, then, this minor attribute that had a valid use before modern CSS methodology, has now been co-opted into quite a different use than originally intended.

“Great!” You might think. “I like having my links open in a new tab anyway.” (I know I did, for a long time.)

The only problem is, there has always been a way to force a link to open in a new window or tab, and the opposite is not true. For example, if you hold shift or alt when clicking on a link, it will open in a new tab or window. However, what do you click to force a link to open in the same window? There is no key. It can’t be done. Your choice is gone.

That is the crux of the problem. Not everyone wants the choice taken away from them.

I decided a few weeks ago to start removing all the targets from the anchor tags on my site. Steven Hodson, author of WinExtra (and now of Mashable fame), has as well. I’ll be investigating ways of perhaps having a small icon next to links to indicate that it opens in a new window, but for now, it is in your hands.

PS – Does anyone have any tips for a WordPress plugin or other utility for making a quick little “open link in new window” icon automatically in posts?

Background

According to the RSS Advisory Board, RSS was first developed at Netscape, in 1999. Netscape was looking for a way to allow end users to build their own “channels” of information on Netscape’s Netcenter service. At this point, RSS stood for RDF Site Summary. This new format was built in a language specification called XML (extensible markup language) that is similar to HTML (HyperText Markup Language — the native language of web pages and web browsers). Both XML and HTML actually developed from SGML, which itself was descended from GML. GML was written in the 60s by three men (Goldfarb, Mosher and Lorie) who worked for IBM. Their goal with GML was to develop a language to describe how to mark up text in to sections, paragraphs, lists, etc.

Let’s get back to RSS. So, originally it was used by Netscape as a way to allow end-users to customize the information that they would see on certain web sites. The original concept was as a sort of clipping service — you could choose the content (sports, technology, science, etc.) and Netscape would build the page for you, dynamically pulling the RSS content and building a web-page with it. Sort of like a grand-daddy of of My Yahoo! or iGoogle.

Other people and companies started getting interested in this new language, such as Dave Winer who worked with UserLand Software. When Netscape was bought by AOL, they eventually dropped the use and support of their version of RSS, leaving others to pick up the reins and further develop the standard. They started calling this newer RSS spec Rich Site Summary. They eventually pushed the the format up to version .92, and even though a version 1.0 standard was released, it wasn’t in wide-spread use.

In 2002, after several more sub-1.0 revisions, Dave Winer released version 2.0 of RSS, now officially called Really Simple Syndication. This is the point where adoption of this language really started to pick up and more traditional web tools, such as browsers, started to add features that allowed them to “read” RSS XML data (feeds) as well.

A good history with citations can be found on Wikipedia.

But What is RSS?

RSS, very simply, is a structured method to retrieve content from server to client. Think of it this way: Let’s say every day you go to a web site, for example CNN, to check sports news. But what if it was a slow news day? You check in the morning, but there’s nothing really new. You check again a little later, but no joy. You can’t use a ‘watchdog’ program to tell you when the site has been updated because CNN is always putting new articles up, just nothing that interests you. This is where RSS is the solution. Since CNN offers all of its news conveniently pre-sorted into different categories such as sports, you can get a feed reader and ’subscribe’ to the CNN sports feed. Now, you don’t have to check. You keep your feed reader open and it checks for new content periodically. You can set it to alert you for certain key words or article types. This frees you up to be productive, especially if you check not just one site, but dozens.

A fancy white paper was released in 2004 extolling the potential explosive growth of RSS, if you want to read it. But I also found this very instructive (and, in my opinion, delightful) YouTube Video:

YouTube – RSS in Plain English

By the way, there are lots of videos that try to explain RSS on YouTube, if you are bored.

Ok, I Got the Basics, What Else Can RSS Do?

People are finding new uses for RSS all the time, actually. But one of the original uses, outside of syndication a news or blog feed, was to distribute podcasts. If you have an Apple iPod, you have probably heard a podcast, or at least, heard of a podcast. Simply, a podcast is a media file, like a recording or a video clip, that is created for people to watch. Originally, video and audio on the Internet was limited to sites that had the software necessary to stream the content to your browser, like CNN video or RealPlayer video.. remember RealPlayer?

But with the advent of RSS, people could record video and audio in a number of different free formats and then distribute those files out to their listeners/viewers for them to enjoy later, either on their PC, or iPod (or other portable device). RSS allowed fans to subscribe to the media feeds they enjoyed, like NPR or even, yes, CNN. Honestly, there are thousands of podcasts to choose from now. The iTunes Store is also a good place to look – their software is free, even if you don’t own an iPod and they have an extensive directory of podcasts that you can subscribe to and retrieve directly into the iTunes client.

The Future of RSS

This web site is all about social media and software. I really like the term convergence culture, which, if not coined by Henry Jenkins of the MIT media lab, he at least made it a buzzword and wrote a book with that title. Anyway, as a site tracking developments in social software, I can tell you it is obvious that nothing new gets built without some sort of RSS support out of the box.

RSS is becoming the new social fabric that is stretched on top of the internet. It cleanly separates content from code and, like an obsessive librarian, adds all sorts of useful tags to everything that is placed therein. Creation date. Type of media. Summary of contents. Related information. Even if you don’t care about 9 out of 10 of these tags, your feed reader does, and it can do all sorts of tricks once your feed has been retrieved. Sort by newest? Sure. Search for keyword? Ok. Combine all your feeds into one mega-feed? Absolutely!

Popular applications like Twitter, FriendFeed and even Google Mail (or gMail) are getting RSS-enabled. Yes, you can get all of your friends tweets via RSS. You can get all of your friends everything by RSS through FriendFeed. You can even get your EMAIL via RSS if you are using Google Mail.. they just added support for that.

I would hazard to say that a lot of the heavy lifting for this new generation of social media web sites is RSS. And even if some of those sites are using something else, RSS will be de facto supported going forward, of that you can be sure.

Sure, there are ways around this — in Firefox you can save your bookmarks in one big local web page as a list.  Put that on a flash drive or publish it to a web site and away you go.  But what if you have a bunch of bookmarks you want someone else to see, but they are in the middle of your huge bookmark file along with a lot of private links?  Now you have to do extra work to get those bookmarks wrangled in a format your friend can use.

Here is another scenario:  What if you pride yourself on always finding very cool web stuff that your friends love.  You started out mailing links out to a group of friends, but some people didn’t like all they mail they were getting.  So you switch to blogging your finds — now your friends can tune in to your blog when they want, or refer back to a particular entry later.  Good stuff!  But there’s a problem.  Your blog doesn’t have a search feature!  Or maybe one of your friends saw a link that was awesome but they totally can’t remember the web site name or anything that your blog search picks up! 

Enter social bookmarking.  Web sites designed to address particular bookmarking needs have been around for a few years now, and each site has a slightly different goal or methodology in mind on how to organize and publish your bookmarks.  In the beginning, web sites like blink and backflip were basically web-based bookmark repositories.  A site like del.icio.us, however, was one of the first social bookmark sites and stays focused on a specific goal:  To allow you to bookmark your stuff online, categorize it using tags, and (if you want) share those bookmarks with your friends.  It also keeps track of how many times a particular URL has been bookmarked and shows that statistic as well.  You can then search your own bookmarks for a word, phrase, or list bookmarks by a tag or collection of tags.  You can also do that on all the public bookmarks on the site or on anyone else’s public bookmark collection. 

So, at the core, a social bookmark site gives you a place to keep, tag (or organize), and search your bookmarks.  Many of these sites offer more features as well.  ma.gnolia is very similar to del.icio.us, but it takes a snapshot of each bookmarked page (where it can), so that if a particular page disappears off the net, there’s a good chance mag.nolia will have it saved.

Building on these popular features, and the rising popularity of news blogs (like slashdot), a new type of social bookmarking site emerged:  Enter Digg and Stumbleupon.  These sites leveraged the power of the internet-based user community to categorize and review web bookmarks (now more often called links) to show the relative popularity of particular web pages as well as providing archive and search ability.  Digg, in fact, tries to offload the editor’s work on a news blogging site like slashdot, and allow articles to live and die by how popular they are to the Digg readership.  Of course, this doesn’t make digg a great place to store all your bookmarks — but if you are a cool hunter or a newshound, this will appeal to you.  Stumbleupon attempts to still provide a storage mechanism a la del.icio.us, along with robust ranking and snapshot capabilities.

There are other, similar services, such as MetaFilter and Technorati that take some or all of these concepts, and integrate thinks such as ping-backs and backlinks to evaluate the popularity of articles or even entire web sites.  However, at that point we are going beyond the scope of this simple primer.