Loic Le Meur muses about data portability, and how it would be nice to get all that FriendFeed back on his blog. I thought exactly the same thing when I signed up for FriendFeed.

The best solution I found is SimplePie, a service that pulls in RSS feeds. Mike of Flammable Animals introduced me to it, and it’s driving the FriendFeed section in my side bar. Also check out what Mike has done on his own site with his FriendFeed feed.

Using a template file, I can control what elements of the feed to display or not. For my sidebar, I just display the “item title” and “item content” where the good stuff like links are. That also removed the service icons which I didn’t care for. Also note that comments left by others on FriendFeed are pulled in as well.

And no, SimplePie a service you have to sign up for. SimplePie has plugins for several platforms. - I’m using the WordPress specific one.

All in all, FriendFeed is ultimately an RSS feed. And because of that, it does return information back to somewhere you’d rather have people access it.

Now about the “centralized me” - My “centralized me” is this blog. FriendFeed can’t take on that role, as it only posts links to blog posts as opposed to pulling in all the content from them. In that sense, it’s even less of a “centralized me” than Google Reader.

But concern over whether people ultimately want full control over their data is a big one, and it’s unanswered as of yet. The question overlaps with the future of web applications. GMail makes it possible to have all your emails on a Google server - if you’re comfortable with that idea. Outside of our tech bubble, many mainstream people are not, and prefer to download all their emails to their local machine. There are pros and cons to both approaches (such as losing all your emails when you fail to backup your home computer), but one potential future points toward housing more and more of our crap online.

I’m not totally on board with this “all online” future. While I value the convenience, I also have privacy concerns. There is a long list of services I would never put into a FriendFeed - say my purchases at Amazon, websites I visit, my bank account, or even Flickr photographs.

Anyhow, so far I feel FriendFeed supports my desire for data portability in regards to the trivial information on various social sites. Perhaps a future feature would be a “backup” button where you could download your feed from a time period, say, the last month, formatted in an XML file for backup purposes.

But I digress - if you want to get your FriendFeed on your “centralized me” - check out SimplePie.

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