techno.blog("Dion")

FriendFeed is marching on. I prefer it to Twitter these days, but of course the users are still mainly on Twitter. The best of both worlds for me is to run FriendFeed as my “client” yet have Twitter users happily following and not knowing or caring that, that is the case.

We may have the pieces to actually do this right now:

Posting to Twitter

FriendFeed added support for posting activities to Twitter for you. People immediately worry about spamming Twitter with this stuff, so you should think about that and turn off a bunch of services. I currently use TwitterFeed, which I will turn off if I use this feature (as FriendFeed will handle that as I turn on my blog service).

Seeing your @replies

FriendFeed is one of the few companies who have access to the XMPP firehose. They should be able to grok the replies (e.g. @dalmaer) and merge those into the comment stream.

In the meantime, DeWitt has a great hack:

I created an imaginary friend on FriendFeed and subscribed it to http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%40dewitt

I did this, registering “To Dion” as the friend. It is ugly as it doesn’t merge into your flow, you can’t easily tell who has replied, and it is one big link… but it is good enough.

Friend / Follower Syncing

The people I follow on FriendFeed and Twitter isn’t in sync, and it should be. I haven’t caught up on FriendFeed. The beauty of the imaginary friends feature is that you can add Twitter folks even if they don’t have FriendFeed accounts yet. Ideally, I could tell FriendFeed to do the syncing and followee management for me.

For now though, I could try this sync script and see if it does the trick.

Good times for FriendFeed. I also think that it shows how great their real-time Web experience it is, auto updating in front of my eyes. If they implement these features natively, I will be a total convert.