FFDirect 0.6.0 is out. Most notable change is that FFDirect has it’s own friendfeed client ID now, so your friendfeed posts will show “from FFDirect” allowing your followers to filter them better. Plus you get some minor bug fixes.
This is how the “cliend ID” will show up in your friendfeed posts.
One of the nice features of FFDirect is automatic URL-tagging the links in your posts published to friendfeed and make them appear as a separate “campaign” in your Google Analytics reports.
Once you’ve installed and enabled FFDirect, go to Settings->FFDirect and check “auto-tag URLs for Google Analytics”, and you’re done!
After you’ve published a post or two with FFDirect enabled, check your Google Analytics reports. Go to Traffic Sources -> Campaigns and you should see something like this:
(you may have to wait a couple of hours for Google Analytics to create the latest report)
I’ve fixed some bugs in FFDirect, please upgrade to v0.2. I’m also working on a couple of ideas to make the plugin make the best out of friendfeed, like how is the body of the content better presented and adding auto URL-tagging for Google Analytics. Stay tuned.
I’ve just released version 0.1 of FFDirect!
Images included in your articles should show up in your friendfeed posts.
Here are some, for testing:
Any link to an audio file (.mp3, .wav, .aac) will also appear in your friendfeed entry, using the embedded audio player (I’m not sure if the player will play wav or aac files…)
Here is a link to na mp3 file: test audio
The newest WordPress plugin from BackType brings web activity back to your blog. It scans sources like Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, Reddit and other blogs, and brings conversations regarding your posts back to your blog as comments.
That’s a good idea, but it will never work as good as it should. For one reason, there will always be services that BackType doesn’t understand well or don’t know of. Or short URLs that can’t be scanned easily for domain names.
I consider my blog to be the one place on the web I truly own. It’s my on line home. My on line identity is not my email, it’s my blog. I would like every single web service to ping back to it, whenever (I’m) it is mentioned. Twitter, Digg, Flickr, Friendfeed, they should all ping back my URLs.
One more thing: wordpress should accept pingbacks/trackbacks for the homepage, so if vrypan.net/log/ is mentioned somewhere, the service should be able to pingback this page.
TechCrunch asks if url shorteners are evil.
URL shorteners are just lossless information compressors. Much like a zip function compresses information, in the same way URL shorteners compress a URL. No information is lost, but we need more resources to decompress and use it than in the original state.
There is one big difference between a function like zip and a URL shortener: the first one is based on an algorithm, all you need to extract the original information from a zipped file is knowing the zip algorithm. On the other hand, URL shorteners are using dictionaries: each URL shortening service is a dictionary that translates the short URL back to the original. If we don’t have access to this dictionary, the compressed information is useless.
In a way, there is a power shift from many to few: what everyone could read and “understand”, (ie go to a URL), now needs someone else’s permission, or at least existanse, to be read (ie the service must be up and running to convert the short URL to its original form). I think that’s what bothering Dave Winer when he says that “We need to prepare for the day when N of the URL shorteners go out of business. When that happens a large part of the web will die. It will not be a good day.”
Obviously, URL shorteners are useful, that’s why they exist. They are useful in cases where we are willing to sacrifice some resources (CPU cycles, and a couple extra HTTP requests) to have the same information consume less space (characters in this case). What us users should be asking for is a piece of the “power” we lost. “Let me map my own domain onto theirs, easily back up all my data, and give me the ability to switch services when I want, or when I need to”, says Winer.
But that’s not all. Many URL shorteners go beyond information compression. They keep extra stats, like click stats. They capture user “gestures” and user “attention”. They let us know “how many users clicked on the link I suggested on twitter”, when they did, etc. Marketeers have been using intermediate URLs for years to measure email and banner effectiveness. Many URL shorteners give this feature to everyone.
Unfortunately, these intermediate URLs (in the form of short URLs) are the best tool we have to do this right now. This is why I don’t see URL shorteners going away, even if we found an algorithmic (and not dictionary-based) compression method to shorten URLs. But there’s an interesting field for new tools there.
Yesterday, Dave Winer wrote:
One easy way to lower the cost of URL-shortening is to use our own domain names in place of tinyurl.xom, bit.ly, tr.im, et al. Any one of those services could take the lead here by allowing for that. Let me map my own domain onto theirs, easily back up all my data, and give me the ability to switch services when I want, or when I need to.
I would call it “data protability for URL shorteners”. It’s what I’ve been trying to push for more than a year by urlborg.xml (and was actually inspired by an older post of Dave Winer) .
I’m delighted with my boxee-enabled apple tv. It’s great. One of the features I like most is that I’m able to watch tv series not available in Greece (I live in Greece).
Like Comedy Central, for example South Park -I don’t mind the ads they insert, even though I would like to be able to pause.
But why on earth, is Hulu and CBS blocked outside the US? Correction: I know “why”, don’t get me into the legal and regional (business) agreements they have. I rephrase: how does this help them?
What happens, is that most users that would watch Lost, Heroes, How I met your mother, etc. on their browser or boxee, get to download the episodes via bittorrent. This means a) they see no ads, and b) it’s easy for them to share the files even with people that wouldn’t bother to download them, or don’t know how to do it.
CBS, Hulu, and others, wake up! Your decisions on online distribution cost you money!
Suddenly, yesterday, all my categories and tags disappeared from my blog. It was as if I had never tagged any posts, and never used any categories. I couldn’t even see the default category in the admin panel!
Here’s what went wrong.
I hadn’t realized it, but I was running out of disk quotas. Actually, I had no space left on disk on my server!
This caused some trouble to mysql (obviously).
All I had to do was to clear up some disk space (I deleted some big files, and backup folders), and restart the mysql service.
Dada! Everything works fine now.
I don’t like it, but I had to do it.
From now on urlBorg will ask you to login if you want to create a short URL. The reason is that spammers took advantage of the URL shortening service to create short URLs they included in spam emails. As a result I got many complaints, I even have to pay $199 to GoDaddy (where the domain is registered) to
[...] cover the costs of responding to or “cleaning up” the outstanding spam complaints Go Daddy has received against your domain name so far. This fee is also used to cover the costs of processing future complaints, forwarding these complaints to you, and ensuring that the offending affiliates have been deleted. [...]
I still think GoDaddy is wrong to consider urlBorg part of the problem, but the truth is that even free on-line services should try to make the web a better and safer place. Authentication should make urlBorg spammer-unfriendly, or at least make it easier for me to fight them by disabling spam accounts and all their short URLs if necessary.
Requiring an account might be annoying to some, I understand. On the other hand, you can be sure all your short URLs are tracked and added to your profile (a feature that most urlBorg users like and depend on). Plus it will add some more “credibility” to any links starting with “ub0.cc”.
Obviously, users just clicking on short URLs are not affected, this is for people using urlBorg to create short URLs.
API usage is not affected, either.