MyBlogLog Adds Activity Feed

February 29th, 2008

MyBlogLog Activity Stream

Gee, suddenly it seems everyone is jumping aboard the “activity feed” bandwagon. I wonder if this is the new tech concept to take hold for 2008, much as 2006 was social sites and 2007 was widgets.

I’m already hooked on FriendFeed, but here comes MyBlogLog, the social networking site spread across blogs, with an activity stream. It does what one would expect: you list all the social sites you’re involved in and it combines all your updates and links into one feed.

The Bad

  • MyBlogLog is missing what I consider the killer feature of FriendFeed: comments. In FriendFeed, you can comment on everything people are doing, which keeps me returning.
  • In the past year, MyBlogLog has been overrun with questionable “friends” meaning I have over a hundred “friends” that if I were to check out all their activity feeds, I would explode.

The Good

  • MyBlogLog has way more websites available to include your activities from, many of which I have never heard of: ActiveRain, Bebo, Blogger, del.icio.us, Digg, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed (!), Friendster, Google Calendar, Jaiku, Jumpcut, Kiva, Last.fm, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Multiply, Blog Comments, MySpace, Netflix, OpenID, Plaxo, Pownce, Second Life, Shelfari, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Textamerica, The DJ List, 30 Boxes, Trulia, Tumblr, Twitter, TypeKey, Upcoming, Wakoopa, Wink, Yelp, YouTube, Zillow, Zorpia (whew).
  • MyBlogLog already has a large user base of bloggers and everyone with a Yahoo! ID.
  • MyBlogLog already has widgets deployed on tons of blogs, so deploying the activity feed in the same manner should be way easier.

But it all comes back to the feed

One thing that both MyBlogLog and FriendFeed need to work on is getting the feed portable so bloggers like myself can add them to our blog sidebars or custom pages. I’ve spent some time trying to get the FriendFeed feed to appear as I would like it here, with no success. For starters, the widget doesn’t have enough customization options, and I haven’t gotten the Feed List WordPress RSS plugin to play nice with the atom feed produced (any one know of a better one?).

Basically, I want to apply CSS styles to the widget. Google Reader (shared items) and del.ici.ous come to mind as sites that provide customization information to get their feeds to match a blog’s theme. All it really is, is adding id attributes and tags and making them public.

But having said that, I’m sticking with FriendFeed as it has that killer comments feature. As more and more folks sign on the conversations will only become more “sticky.” I figure their feed will be improved, especially now that the competition is heating up.

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  • Mike
    I've had good success with SimplePie. They make a WordPress plugin, too - not sure if it's a sidebar widget, but if it just outputs PHP/HTML, you can dump that into a widget (maybe a special PHP/HTML widget, but I know it's possible).

    Yeah, this is like when MySpace added an activity feed. I don't really care much.

    I had a bunch of services in MyBlogLog that it automatically just began keeping track of. Some of the entries were way outdated, like my Last.fm data. And really, the whole thing seemed fairly clunky. The MyBlogLog site is ugly, frankly. I'll stick with FriendFeed, which could use some work, but is definitely ahead in this.
  • SimplePie definitely looks like a more robust plugin. I'm going to try that one out - thanks!
  • Funny you should mention this after your post on Glut. This is just more information that I don't need or want. I've never felt like it was difficult to find blogs I'd care to read or locate what friends were doing.
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