FriendFeed is not friendly
by kapil
I had high hopes. FriendFeed looked like a great service. Great idea, simple and clean UI – works for me. But only until I had desire of embedding my friends’ feeds on my blog. I imagined it would have been awesome if I could parse ATOMized RSS from FriendFeeds and show on sidebar. But FriendFeed refused to play. Its not serving up RSS to my code. Sucks.
Update: Heard that FriendFeed API is coming. Cool. Looking forward to it. Hope it gives me RSS.
Update 2: Got a reply from FriendFeed giving me the correct URL to get embed code. Pinned up the widget on the sidebar. What do I need now? I want to customize this widget since its too big and the blue theme does not suit my blog. Anyone hearing?
Kapil – I wish you luck man – I have been scouring the net for a customizable widget that fits with the look of my site. One thing that I did for another feed that I wanted to embed in an aesthetically pleasing way was to pipe it through Feedburner – this gave me a clean feed that fits in well on my site (check out the news section of my site). The problem with that approach with respect to FriendFeed is that the favicons are actually good signifiers for users to quickly scan the feed and its not possible to keep these in my experience when you pipe the feed through Feedburner and embed. The other thing I want to do is to get the entire feed and not just the snippet that is shown on the FriendFeed widget – let me know if you know anyway to get the entire feed so that one can present a type of lifestream. Good luck.