Josh’s Blog

Welcome to the first entry of my new blog, I’m not entirely sure what the focus of this blog is going to be, but I’m going to kick it off by looking at the FriendFeed API.

The API was announced earlier tonight and you can read all about it on the FriendFeed blog. If you haven’t read my ultra sparse about me page yet, I’m a developer at Invision Power Services, so I spend a lot of time thinking about forums. One of the more difficult aspects of both FriendFeed and Twitter is following a conversation, this is something that forums happen to be very good at however. I’ve spent an hour or so playing around with implementing FriendFeed into IPB, what I have now is a special forum that allows each user to view their own FriendFeed. It creates a topic in that forum for every entry and then attaches replies for every comment, here’s a screenshot of what the forum looks like after importing my last 30 FriendFeed entries:

and here is what a topic with replies looks like:

Although I haven’t yet implemented it, it would be trivial at this point to allow you to reply directly to this topic and have that reply sent to FriendFeed. If you used just this forum to reply with, you could easily build a threaded discussion around an entry using the Threaded View mode built into IPB. One thing I would like to see the API include is a uuid for comments, to make duplicate comment detection easier during an import.

Speaking of importing, this is done using the task system in IPB, it runs every 15 minutes and adds any new entries to your forum and any new comments to the existing topic. I’m still playing around with this, checking for new comments isn’t very exact without having a uuid from FriendFeed.

This is still a long way from a usable solution, the display needs cleaning up, comments need to go back to FriendFeed, and it needs an interface to specify your name and remote key. I think it’s an interesting concept though and hopefully I’ll get a chance to finish it soon. Let me know what you think about integrating forums with FriendFeed or even Twitter and the like.