Google social network fun and games

The chatter these days is about the new Google social network about which something new will be announced later this Fall, but hardly anyone I've noticed is talking about the Google social network that already exists. Google has been building it for years, and Google introduces new features nearly every week. They just don't make a big fuss about it because it is so incremental.

Maybe there will be a big splash later this year with a new roll-out, but maybe the big splash will be that Google just tells folks what they have been working on and slowly introducing all along. It will seem like a big splash and a surprise. One of the tricks is that Gmail is still by invitation only, as far as I know. You can't just go and sign up for a Gmail account because you want one, and the main way to notice the many social features that are, as of right now, up and running is to have been using the Gmail service for a while, in connection with Google Buzz, Google account profile, Google Voice, Google Reader, and Feedburner, to name what seem to be the most important ones. Oh, I forgot that Google Blogger, along with other blog platforms can be integrated through the Google Buzz connections.

I read today that Facebook and Skype are negotiating an integration of services somehow.

Google is already doing telephony in a much bigger and broader way. Say Android. Do you know about Google Voice?

The best thing about the existing Google social network is the expansiveness of it. It's not at all like living in a box, as with some social networks I've encountered.

If Google really has a bunch of new features that are soon to hit the streets, I'm excited.

Microblogging standards

In the ancient and arcane world of Usenet, cross-posting was considered by many to be a great sin, and it was usually discouraged.  It was discouraged because it was annoying.  Reading a cross-post was like reading a message from somebody who wasn't really there. Cross-posters generally weren't available for conversation. Cross-posters were not interested in conversation, they were interested in shoveling their message far and wide. Some were so unkind as to call out cross-posters as being "spammers."

The idea of microblogging standards involve the character length limit for microblog posts, and essentially, the ability of various services and platforms to cross-post. These days, cross-posting with blogs is not only encouraged, it is practically a fad.  I have pursued blog syndication myself with some gusto.

A few of the main players in the world of microblogging interoperability standards are found at: ostatus.org, and microblog. See Wikipedia also.

This type of interoperability, or cross-posting as I call it, is something that people donate large sums of money to further. In 2009 the Knight Foundation gave money to design a system that allows anyone, anywhere to easily create a Drupal online news site whose content can be published on Facebook in order to reach an extended social network. - from drupal.org

RSS to Ping.fm jury rigged

I'm thinking since Ping.fm was spawned in the micro-blogging Twitter World, and feeds from big-blogs introduce complexity and a level of pesky details previously not encountered by Ping.fm.  Parsing a single XML file type, the Twitter type, is not a big deal, but building a general purpose XML parser capable of dealing with a wide variety of RSS types is a big deal.  Yet, it can be done.  It has already been done by others, and I'm confident Ping.fm will get it right soon.  If not, they should quit.

Anyway, I've re-wired my experimental RSS distribution circuit to avoid any big-blog RSS inputs directly connected to Ping.fm.

This Blogger blog -> Feedburner -> Twitterfeed -> Status.net -> Ping.fm.

In this distribution scheme, Twitterfeed does the parsing of the big-blog RSS and shoves it to Stastus.net which generated the RSS feed that is input now (today - right now) into Ping.fm.

This is not an ideal arrangement, but it might work.  This is the eleventh time I've re-drawn or revised my Blog syndication distribution map. If you look at it tomorrow, it will have probably been changed again.

This post will be my first test of the new channel.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Ping.fm renders RSS input feed links like crap

Note: When I wrote this item, I was confused by Ping.fm's domain. (Dot)FM is the top level domain for the Federated States of Micronesia, and it didn't register in my head. So I erroneously typed it Ping.com throughout. The syndication service I'm talking about is Ping.fm, and not Ping.com. Sorry.

It's a new feature for Ping.fm, this business about taking a RSS feed directly and Twitterizing it for output to various social media platforms. It's a new and experimental undertaking for Ping.com to do this. Right now it limits user's direct input to a single RSS feed only. For experimenting with it.

It's a good thing Ping.com is undertaking, and I have been a Guinna pig for their testing, these past few days. So far, Ping.fm renders RSS input feed links like shit.

Back to the drawing board.

August 6 update: In all fairness, the trouble might not be with Ping.fm. It may be that Google-Blogger-Feedburner feeds are especially difficult to parse. I'll try an entirely different feed source with Ping.fm to see if makes a difference.