ajb{log}: learn something new each day

FriendFeed is down as of 4:10PM Central.

Update: It’s back up (4:40PM) yay!

Friendfeed launched today a cool beta feature, Friendfeed Real-time. Here’s a quick tip on how to load Friendfeed Real-time on your Firefox sidebar:

1) Add this to your bookmark http://friendfeed.com/realtime?embed=1

2) Right-click the bookmark

3) Properties

4) Tick the “Load this bookmark in the sidebar”

5) You’re done!

It should look like the screenshot below

Now you get the best of both worlds in FriendFeed. The standard view and real-time view at the same time.

Enjoy!

Today is “Tad’s meme” day on Friendfeed.

Tad Donaghe started a simple spark posting a photo and a simple instruction “Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair - just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.” and guess what happened? It just spread like wildfire! Boy, it was a fun day at Friendfeed!

Here’s the photo that started it all:

And the rest followed…

(Click on the above image for the original size or you can visit the album here)

So, are you in this collage? I hope you are! Because we had a lot fun today at Friendfeed!

It was also a good day to push and leave the FriendFeed Beta!

UPDATE: Collage updated

Here are some options for minor improvements for the Cleaner FriendFeed Beta stylish style.

Here they are:

Extends the left sidebar’s width to fit your rooms:

#sidebar
{
width:160px !important;
}

Make changes to the font size of your rooms, friend grouping links to your preference:

#sidebar a:link, #sidebar a:visited
{
font-size: 12px !important;
}

Highlights the likes background to light pink

.likes
{
background-color: #FFEFE8 !important;
}

A screenshot of how a post item should look like after the update:

* Highlights likes with light yellow
* Highlights friends comments with light yellow
* Highlights your comments with powder blue
* Regular font color (gray) on comments from non-friends

While the powerful Gustav Hurricane Category 3 leaves Cuba, New Orleans residents already started to evacuate. Except for some people and three guys with a webcam.

I don’t know who they are but they are streaming live right now from New Orleans.

So, if you want to know what is happening at that part of the world, logon to their stream now and join the stream.

Just be safe guys and the rest of you out there at the path of Gustav.

I’ve created a new userstyle.org + stylish version of my old Cleaner FriendFeed for the new FriendFeed Beta that was launched hours ago. Grab it here.

Here are the screenshots (before and after)

Before Cleaner FriendFeed

After (Cleaner FriendFeed Beta applied)

So what were the changes?

* Cleaner and cool look and feel (FriendFeed Beta is already clean, this makes it a lot cleaner)
* Different font style
* Highlights friends comments with baby yellow (instantly know that the user is already your friend)
* Highlights your comments with baby blue (it’s cool to see your own comments from river of comments. Looks good when you are a distance away your computer, makes your comment a marker in conversations)
* Dims comments from non-friends (normal color of FriendFeed comment)
* Separated each posts with a bottom border

This userstyle brings the FriendFeed conversation to another level by instantly letting you know…

1) Your own comment (Powder Blue)
2) Your friends comments (Light Yellow)
3) Your non-friends comments (Normal FriendFeed Comment Color)

As FriendFeed becomes popular, you’ll definitely need some kind of instant and attention grabbing color that catches your eyes and tell you where you left off in a conversation.

Hope you like it.

You can download/install it over here.

Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit and the FriendFeed team broke the two month silence today launching the newly redesigned FriendFeed. VentureBeat spotted and reported this four days ago.

New features includes:

Friend List
Friend lists enable you to organize your friends into groups, get updates from your family separately from your coworkers, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

Best of day and Best of week Summaries
A “best of” page for a friend lists shows you the most popular entries among people in the list for the day/week.

Enhanced Photo Posting
You can now upload photos with your posts. The photo uploader lets you select and upload multiple files at once with no additional downloads required.

New sidebar link, favorite friends, groups, rooms and a lot more.

Head to http://beta.friendfeed.com and see the cool new FriendFeed!

Related articles:

• Spotted: FriendFeed Beta - coming soon
• FriendFeed summaries coming soon

There are many ways you can refresh your feeds on FriendFeed. One of my favorite is Hao Chen’s “FriendFeed Refresh Feeds Button” userscript. However, if you are not a Greasemonkey fan or you simply do not use Firefox, there is a way to refresh a feed on FriendFeed.

I took Tumblr as an example for this post. So here goes… I just posted something at Tumblr and I can’t wait for FriendFeed to schedule the crawling of my feeds. Here are the quick steps to force FriendFeed to refresh it immediately:

1) Assuming you are already logged in, click on the “Share something” button (image)

2) Now, click on the “Import your stuff” link. No, you are not going to import your feed again.

3) Once you’ve done that, click on the feed that you want to be “refreshed”. In this case, I chose Tumblr. Click on it.

4) You will see something like this (below). Now click on the “Refresh feed” link.

5) You’re done! You should see the content now on your Friendfeed.

It should be noted that you shouldn’t abuse this functionality as it might put some stress on FriendFeed’s servers although I’m pretty sure they can handle it.

By the way, I am using the  “Cleaner FriendFeed” userstyle in case you were wondering why I have a different look and feel. You can also use Cleaner FriendFeed. All you have to do is install the Stylish Firefox plugin then install the Cleaner FriendFeed userstyle.

Anyway, hope this helps someone today.

BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU plugins that adds distinct features and basic modifications to the WordPress MU interface.

The standard features of BuddyPress are as follows:

    * Extended Profiles
    * Personal Blog
    * Private Messaging
    * Friends
    * Groups
    * The Wire
    * Status Updates
    * Albums

Each one of the above is a separate plugin to that site admins can pick and choose which components they want.

Some more screenshots here:

Download and try it over here.

–aj

8Apps, a uber-cool collaboration tool that slightly resembles Basecamp is closing its doors come January.

While we have thought that the service was very useful, it might have dawned on users that they can do it all in Basecamp and/or other online tools such as goplan and Activecollab.

I would also say that it might have also been a lack of marketing promotion. It might have also be that the service was invite-only - that can have some impact on the growth too (invite-only service is cool if you need to manage the growth and scalability, but sometimes with too much competitors invite-only can prove fatal… *cough*pownce!*cough*).

Quoting factoryjoe:

“we’re using the invite system to start out slowly on purpose. We want to not only be able to scale up organically, but we also want to cultivate relationships with our brave early adopters so that we can build the best experience possible over time. And to that end — we want to make sure that when we do launch publicly, we’ve hammered out all the glaring issues — as well as minor one…”

Seriously, I really like to know the real reason why such a complete web application I consider very good shut down.

–aj