Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph Is Brad Fitzpatrick's manifesto for a way of aggregating friends and followers across Social Networks.

Good stuff. Read it.

See Also OpenID: Great idea, bewildering consumer experience

Facebook's data feeds :

# friends' status updates;
# your own status updates;
# friends' notes;
# your own notes;
# friends' posted items; and
# your own posted items.

Expose them on some public web site for Google to index. You know it makes sense. ;)

They're a little hard to find and depend on your privacy settings.

Don't fall for the Potemkin scam :

The DRM business model is the urinary tract infection of media experiences: all of the uses that used to come in an easy gush now come in a mingy, painful dribble

What a glorious image and turn of phrase.

Anyone want to dig around in http://static.ak.facebook.com/js/statuspro.js?12:52414 looking for submitStatus() and /updatestatus.php

There is a route to updating Status remotely. Using cUrl and PHP
1) Login to Facebook, grab the cookies and store them
2) Switch to the mobile Facebook interface
3) Grab post_form_id from the form on the mobile home page using regex (be careful with regex pattern greediness)
4) Post the Form with curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,'post_form_id='.$form_id[1].'&status='.urlencode($status).'&update=Update');

The problem is that logging in from there logs you out in your browser which is really naff.

Come on Facebook. Make this easier for us.

» The workaround that pipes Facebook status entries into a Twitter feed | Berlind's Testbed | ZDNet.com : In response to last week's post where I said it'd be real nice if updates to my Facebook status cascaded to my Twitter feed and vice versa, ZDNet reader Dan York (blog) pointed me to Julian Bond's workaround which involves using Twitterfeed.com.

Nice to get some recognition. But what's missing here is the link back to Robert Sanzalone. It was his original post about Twitter4Skype that led me to Twitterfeed and the two techniques of feeding RSS of your updates to your main Twitter account and RSS of your friends updates to a dummy Twitter account that you befriend. After that it was just a case of finding the Facebook RSS for just your own updates.

Meanwhile my good friend, Mr Winer, has been busy writing code to route Flickr to Twitter. But I don't get it. Flickr has RSS, so why not just use Twitterfeed? Why does this need yet another application to do the job? Then there's the question of why do it at all. Whenever somebody starts using an automated service to Twitter that generates entries like "I'm Listening to" or "I'm browsing" It just gets really really annoying for their followers. It seems that the way we use Twitter has a sweet spot of a maximum of 5-10 updates per day. Any more than that looks like spam.

Craig Murray - We Killed One Million People - Yes, You and I Did : Of course we don't know the exact number of Iraqi dead. Nobody does - dead civilians are not considered important enough to count by the occupying forces. I don't care if the estimate of a million is 50% out, either way. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died a terrible death, and we caused it. Not one of us has yet done enough to stop it. The guilt lies heaviest on Bush, Blair and Cheney.

But it lies on you and me too.

I've always been just a bit short sighted. Not serious but just enough to need glasses for driving and watching TV. Now I'm getting old enough to get a little presbyopia. So the range between distance and short sight gets narrower and narrower. Eventually you can't read close up, but can't see far away either. Welcome to bifocals. But I'm still a good few years away from that yet.

But what was really disturbing is that some time in the last 6 weeks, my right eye has decided to go wrong. I had the eye test and there's nothing basically wrong except that I've suddenly developed some astigmatism in one eye. So that's a new lens for each of my pair of glasses when they're only 5 months old. But what's worse is that working at the PC with my glasses on it's now too close to focus on. With glasses off, I'm basically reading with one eye. The solution is the second pair of glasses which I could really do without.

While all this is happening, of course you start to have all the deep fears. What if I can't read any more! What if it's a detached retina! What if I've scratched the lens (cigarette ash burn, perspex flake while working in the garage)! What if it's brain damage, hypertension, diabetes. Oh, right, that's "Man Hyperchondria". We don't go and find out what's actually wrong, we just obsess about what might be wrong.

Still. It's appeared suddenly. Maybe it will fix itself suddenly.

An application that let's use your FB Identity as an OpenID.

Here's a clue for Social Network Designers. Stop using "Friend" and switch to "Following" and "Followed By". Then you won't be tempted to overload Friend to control who can see what parts of a profile. And you won't have to annoy your members with endless "XXX says they are your friend, please confirm" messages.

If you use Following and Followed By, then the act of linking to a contact is entirely driven by the person who wants to follow you. So there's no need for a confirmation.

I'm beginning to think this was the single biggest innovation in Twitter.

Oooh, Errr. Upload your music collection (what all 100Gb?) to Anywhere.FM and then play it back mixed in with some Last.Fm style friends and neighbours. Uses Amazon's S3 storage. There's some deep copyright questions there.

The new Maps API ads layer: Released and ready for you to try - Google Maps API | Google Groups : Currently, the feature only shows ads for businesses in US. Apologies to our (many) international developers, who can, however, still implement the ads layer in advance of international ad inventory becoming available.

ARRRRR! Yet Another USA Only Maps Feature.

KTHXBAI !!

When you find yourself turning into a grumpy old man.

This is going to hurt my reputation as a closet anarchist, but I've been browsing a couple of UK Police Blogs. Police Inspector Blog and The Policeman's Blog.

When they're hanging round the local market town on Friday night, or stopping you for speeding and giving you the lecture, the Police seem like some strange version of humanity that was probably bullied as a kid and grew up to be power hungry bullies themselves. And I've never been able to work out why people become policemen. But then you realise what shit they have to go through every day and what shit happens on the edges of society and you realise we couldn't pay them enough if we tried.

The Ambulance blog Random Acts of Reality is a bit of an eye opener as well.

Dave Winer on Twitter : The key is lots of users, a growing user base, and an API with no dead-ends.[1]

That means a dead simple API that goes both ways. It's important to have lots of RSS out. It's equally important to have an API that let's you update the service from an external App. That's what separates Twitter from Facebook. It's why Twitterfeed can exist for Twitter but not for Facebook.

Where it gets tricky is when you've got the API, growing user base but not lots of users and not lots of developers working with you. Even if I exactly duplicate the Twitter API or Facebook API on Ecademy, I still won't be able to get the developer ecosystem going until we have 10 times the users. And although it would be trivial, all those Twitter Apps would have to be rebuilt because they all hard code the connection to a specific service. So this hard for me, but what about Linkedin? Let's say LinkedIn do their own Facebook style API. Will they be able to get traction? Will anyone actually code to it?

In the middle of the article, Dave drops another mind bomb. One of the things we talked about was micro-blogging. I asked the people if they would like it if the only way you could create a WordPress site was on wordpress.com. Think for a moment. Is a distributed Twitter possible? Where everyone runs their own system to show their latest status update and some aggregation system appears to draw all the content together and provide the following - followed by Social Network functionality?

[1]Dave. You need to see the last blog about routing Facebook to Twitter. It's got RSS. It's got APIs. It's got Open Identity standards. Should be right up your street.

Here's a recipe for routing all your and your friend's Status updates from Facebook to Twitter. See also my post about doing the same with Ecademy and other services.

Things you'll need:-
- An Open ID
- An RSS feed for just your Facebook status updates. Go to your profile, click on minifeed, see All. Click on Status Stories. There's a Subscription link bottom right.
- An RSS feed for your friends' Facebook status updates. Friends - Status updates from the drop down at the top of the page. There's a Subscription link bottom right.
- A dummy Twitter account. Create a new Twitter account and follow it from your main account.

1. Route your Facebook updates so when you post it also posts to Twitter.
- Login with your OpenID into Twitterfeed.
- Create a new entry. Put in your main Twitter account ID and Password and the RSS for your status updates.
- Update 30 minutes, Include title only, Include Item link, Prefix each Tweet with FB.

Now each time you post a status update on Facebook, within 30 minutes it will create a Tweet from you on Twitter with a link back to your profile on Facebook.

2. Route your Friends' Facebook updates so when they set their status on Facebook, you can read it in Twitter.
- Login with your OpenID into Twitterfeed.
- Create a new entry. Put in your dummy Twitter account ID and Password and the RSS for your friends' status updates.
- Update 30 minutes, Include title only, Include Item link, Prefix each Tweet with FB.

Now each time any of your friend's post a status update on Facebook, within 30 minutes it will appear in your Twitter Friend's timeline with a link back to their profile on Facebook.

You can use the same basic technique for any service that has one or both RSS feeds. It works better with services that include the name of the poster in the title. So Facebook, Plazes, Jaiku but not Pownce.

AFAIK, Twitter is the only service with an API for updating a status externally and a 3rd party RSS to post service. Which means Twitter ends up as the best aggregator for all your services. So the next question is which service you should use as your main update. I'm finding myself doing most of my updates on Twitter with occasional updates on Facebook and Ecademy to keep my profile on those services fresh.

twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter - post RSS to twitter automatically
[from: del.icio.us]

TwitterWhere
makes it easy to post your location to Twitter [from: del.icio.us]

I missed the announcement but Google have widened the number of countries where there Geocoder works.

Developer Knowledge Base - : The Maps API Geocoder can currently geocode addresses in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, The Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, and the United States.

That's better but still not perfect. It shouldn't be too hard for them to expand this for town+country to the whole world.

It's irritating that so much geographical information is copyright. The thing holding this up is Google (and the others) having to arrange licensing agreements with multiple organisations in multiple countries.

I heard that Plaxo are doing something with openID. So I thought I would check it out. They didn't like my password, and wanted me to turn on web access in the Outlook Toolbar. So much later I seem to have an account and web access. I'm wandering round setting things up and importing my linkedin contacts when a message comes on the screen.

We've sent birthday requests to all your contacts.

Oh, bugger.

I really, really, really didn't ask them to do that.

Bastards.

And frankly there are so many dead ends, inconsistencies and bugs in the system that I won't be going back. As far as I'm concerned Plaxo may still be a useful utility but it's still the same old spam system we know and hate.

Just gone live with Twitterwhere. It tries to make it easy to post your location to Twitter so it gets picked up by Twittervision.

I mainly used it as a project to learn about OpenID. It uses OpenID for authentication with zero sign up.

In the process I discovered that Twittervision now has personal pages. eg http://twittervision.com/jbond that use the same format and name as your Twitter page.

One thing I think is missing is a map page that shows where all your contacts are currently located. Like this one on Ecademy.

While talking about this on Skype chats, I realized that
- I've given up on Jaiku because its RSS doesn't contain the poster's name in the title.
- I've given up on Pownce because of the lack of RSS
- I've given up on Plazes because it never seems to work and the UI always confuses me. How do I create a new Plaze?

The Moving to Facebook issue continues to drive high emotions. Here's the problem:-

Facebook is a Black Hole. It has huge gravity. It sucks everything into it. Nothing escapes.

I saw a Skype Mood: Lets hope MS buys Facebook so we can all leave.

Oh and Paul, in the comments I tossed in some grenades. They were misunderstood, so I posted an explanation. The explanation was misunderstood by some but others got it. Does posting a blog that repeats the misunderstood criticism of the original grenades add anything? Yes, comparing Facebook with AOL is ridiculous. Except that both systems were/are popular and both systems were/are closed silos. And yes, a Facebook page and a Blog serve different functions. One is closed, private, and largely only visible to friends, while the other is personal publishing to the world. So, yes, that's an idea for Facebook. Introduce a section that is about personal publishing to the world. And the reason for tossing that grenade in is to make the point that Facebook is "closed, private, and largely only visible to friends".