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FriendFeed minus twitter

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I like friendfeed. I really, really like friendfeed. I lets me aggregate web footprint of any friend or acquaintance (even those not on friendfeed via the unfortunately named imaginary friend feature ).

But like all things new and web 2.0, it doesn’t work quite the way I want it to. You see, it treats all the services it supports equally. I suppose it must, but that doesn’t work for me. Let me explain.

Suppose that I want to see all of a friend’s web footprints except one. Let us further suppose that I don’t care to see their twitter postings. I suppose I could rant on about how much of a time suck I consider twitter to be but that would be an aside.

So assuming the above supposition, a couple of options appear to me immediately:

  1. Use FF’s wonderful API and filter our twitter postings
  2. Use some other means like Yahoo Pipes to filter out twitter postings

I decided to look at option 2. first as it seemed less work. But lazyweb came to the rescue - some one has already built a FriendFeed minus Twitter Yahoo Pipe

Now I just read the output of the pipe (in RSS format) in Google Reader.  Works for me.

Thanks Lazyweb (and thanks Dawn Foster )

2008 07 07 Play Comments (1) Permalink

There and Back Again

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Annals of Transport: There and Back Again: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker: Long but interesting New Yorker article about commuting. As someone who made a miles for square feet commuting trade off, I found myself in violent agreement with the following paragraph:

This analysis presupposes that commuting represents what economists call a rational choice, as opposed to a constrained choice. Postwar zoning laws aggressively separated living space from commercial space, requiring more roads and parking lots—known to planners as Euclidean zoning (after a Supreme Court decision involving Euclid, Ohio), and to civilians as sprawl. Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. ‘You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,’ Putnam said. ‘Where is your community?’ The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

(Via Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog.)

2007 05 19 Play Comments (0) Permalink