zyrcster's blog

The City - it's great

pyramid and ship

I'm digging living in the City again.

I like taking public transit (BART or Muni) anywhere I need to go.  I love coming home to my amazing and tranquil flat, too.

Tonight, I went down to see this Mexican Naval ship, the Cuauhtémoc, which is docked for its last night at Pier 27 on the Embarcadero.  All these Latino families came down to say Hey to the crew and to party on the ship.  It felt invigorating.

This week I finally felt at home on my new job.  I work for an amazing company, Flickr, and with an incredibly fun and intense group of people.  I'm in awe of the job they do, even when I'm critical of it. 

I felt so out of my element last week... adjusting to not being my own boss and to feeling illiterate when it came to all the systems that are new to me.  This week?  I loosened up a bit and became more comfortable with the systems and the process.  Watched as a few critical systems needed help and jumped in to provide the support that my job entails. I even weathered listening to people I really respect criticize a few new roll-outs. But, I left work tonight feeling like I had made the right decision to take this job: I *love* it.  I love it in both a manic and a calm way.  It's manic because it's 40 million users and calm because I know my shit and when I don't?  The crew is cool enough to guide me through it.  I mean, I couldn't ask for a more supportive gig.

My 46th birthday also passed this week in the care of my familiar 'family' - a couple of ex's who I really love and respect.  Dinner out twice and lots of laughs and fun.  :)

Life is good.  Life is really fucking good.

settling in

Panorama of house #2

I am settling into life here in the City.

I started my new job last week.  It's both thrilling and terrifying.  Terrifying is the bit where are ~30 million users of our website.  Thrilling in that the team is awesome - supportive & fun - and the system is exhilarating.   I really made the right move doing this.

I finally unpacked everything today, except for the clothes (I need a storage system, since this flat is short on storage).  That was a huge feat... and this week at work should run smoother for me internally, since living out of those boxes last week was not pretty.

Unpacking is weird.  I re-visited so many people, places & events just going through everything.  But I'm in a good head space, so it was a pleasant re-visit.

I'm also starting to reconnect with old friends.  My bud, Erik, has been a rock.  My friend, E, finally got back from Africa... and I got to visit with her and her son today by showing off my flat and then having an awesome meal at Sunrise (Sunshine?) Cafe.  Yesterday, R & I also had breakfast and just chilled in her back yard enjoying the weather.

It's all still so unreal to me that I'm back in California after an 8 year absence and that I have a dream job.  I'm happy, which is a lot, you know?

There are still so many people I'd like to get caught up with, both here and back in CO.  It's a process.  I don't think I've ever left so good about a life change.  That's neat.

random city thoughts

It's been a long time since I last lived in San Francisco.  7.5 years.  That's just enough time for me to forget things... but the knowledge returns -- it's there, just a little buried.  But really, I'm realizing that all I really know is where things are and how to get from point A to point B.  This city has changed enough that anything I once knew about it is basically useless... and just serves to make me feel like a dinosaur.  Businesses I once loved are gone or have changed ownership... knowing a great place to eat from 8 years ago isn't worth much now.

One thing that hasn't changed is the constant background noise.  That's been the most jarring thing to get used to (other than the sheer volume of people here).   I've been waking up at dawn, and I know now why I do that.  It's the only time when the clamor of the city dies down to a low simmer... when you can hear birds singing and don't hear any crash and hum at all.  It's peaceful.

I like the vibrancy of the city, it just wears on me at around 10pm when people are still in the streets being loud.  Overall, I really have enjoyed being back... it's just that at least once a day I realize how overwhelmingly my life has changed in the past month.

People don't really acknowledge your existence in a city.  Drivers are rude and self-centered.  If I had come here with no knowledge at all of SF, I'd probably be freaking out right about now.  But that I do know at least how it is laid out is a comfort.

But you can never really go back to what you once knew.  Many areas of the city are not as I once knew them.  I went to China Basin yesterday and was surprised at how built-up SOMA is now.  The entire South of Market area is less seedy and more trendy now.  But vacant -- I guess the money dried up. Vacant but not seedy is a weird thing.

The Mission feels so much different than it did in 1985.  Back then, I lived at Shotwell/25th, and daily had run-ins with some homophobic twit.  Now?  Yea, it's still the barrio and the Nortenos are still here... but they seem more subdued.  In fact, they seem like they are all posing for CD covers or something.  Most of the Mission now feels like a nice family neighborhood with a bunch of trendy hipsters thrown into it. 

The Castro, however, seems a sad parody of itself.  Most of the businesses or bars that I knew are now not there, even though others are still the same as they ever were (Orphan Andy's, Buffalo Whole Foods, Cliff Hardware, the Castro Theatre). But with rents going at $3000/mo for a 2 bedroom (or higher), I think all the coolness got priced right out of there. I think we were paying less than $1000/mo for our 2 bedroom on 20th/Collingwood when I last lived there, in the 90s.

Noe Valley is a real disappointment.  That vacant building that used to be Real Foods is pathetic, my favorite laundromat is now a bank, and I guess Whole Paycheck is moving into the Bell Market.  The Mission feels more like home to me now -- with a more down-to-earth comfortable air about it than Noe Valley now has. 

People are standoffish to strangers.  I very much get that city-vibe here, which I don't recall from earlier (maybe I was too used to it).  I may as well be in Chicago or New York, except that I know my way around here. It's a gorgeous city, too, and the views from anywhere still knock me out -- although I sense that a lot of people here aren't really awed by their environment. It just is what it is to them.  I'm starting to think I'd be better off just saying I'm from Colorado and not explaining that I used to live here (for 18 years!), because that merits at least some interest.  My landlord insisted that Gay Pride would be the most awesome thing I'd ever seen, for example... yea, I know, been there & done that.  I understand though, because people do come alive when they talk about how awesome their city is (and it is!).

Although when I say I'm from Colorado Springs, most people react as though I just came out of the Gates of Hell.  Sorry, California, you have no right to judge when y'all just voted down Prop 8 and your state is nearly bankrupt. Colorado has a lot of conservative right-wing evangelical Christians, but the whole of that state seems both more progressive and realistic and, well, friendly than California does right now. And even the most conservative people in the Springs still looked me in the eye on the streets, said 'Hello', and helped out if you needed it.  So, yea, I'm really not into this weird liberal judgement of everything not liberal. I'm not also not at all impressed by the "let the voters vote on everything" concept -- that didn't work out too well, huh? -- nor am I impressed by how invasive government is here.  I am breaking the law by throwing away my coffee grounds?  I guess all that libertarianism in Colorado rubbed off on me.

Anyway, I'm glad to be back, but it is an adjustment.

2nd Impressions of California

Some random thoughts I've been having since returning to live in CA after a 7 year absence...  I grew up here, so think of myself as a Californian first.  However, I really took to Colorado -- probably more than I realized until I got back here.

• The infrastructure in this state is terrible and an embarrassment. These are likely the worst highways/freeways/roads in the nation.  I-80 down from Nevada is a mess (yes, I can see they are working on it) but in the Bay Area it and neighboring freeways are disasters of cracked roadbeds and potholes in serious need of repair. 
  
• They still haven't finished the Bay Bridge reconstruction yet?  I think they started it when I left.  It took 3 years to complete the original bridge.
  
• The drivers here are worse than I recall.  Aggressive, greedy, inattentive... not much courtesy happening on the roads here.  I'm now glad the law says headsets only for cell phones... I'm getting a bit paranoid even taking my eyes off the road for a moment.
  
• What is up with the economy in this state?  I arrived to news that they may need to close 200 state parks. That saddens me.  This state is gifted with the best of everything: beaches, mountains, deserts, fertile plains (well, many are now suburbs), rivers, lakes, etc.  I can't imagine closing the state parks down.
• That new giant skyscraper South of Market?  That really messes with my reality.  I'm just not used to seeing it in this skyline.  Although, I do like the way it looks as you're on I-80 headed to Oakland... I'd like to get that photograph, maybe as a passenger.
• Why are groceries more expensive here than in Colorado?  Isn't this the breadbasket of the Western US?
• I forgot that no one looks at each other on the street unless they want to buy/sell drugs.
  

On the other hand, some things are still as incredible as I last recall them.... the fog rolled in yesterday and it felt amazing.  The air here is slightly humid (my skin says 'yay!') and while the sky is missing that deep rich blue of Colorado, it's still awfully nice to be outside here. 

The Mission rocks.  In fact, it's gotten even better since I left -- more gentrified perhaps, but awfully hip with an amazing array of food, cafes, and murals.  I am so happy to call it 'home'.

Speaking of food, WOW.  I forgot what it's like to have every style of food at your fingertips.  And fresh produce!  Wheeeee -- awesomeness. 

I also walked into Safeway the other day, delighted to see aisles of beer, wine and liquor all right there (in Colorado, you can't buy those in a grocery store).  And Trader Joes?  Teh Awesome.

I'm happy to be back. 

All is well!

Thanks to the support responses from various folks around the web on my last post!  My brother actually read the news on Facebook, and he rallied my niece so that I could comfortably escape to their beautiful Glen Cove house in Vallejo -- the pets are happy.

Bedroom

Yesterday, I also signed a lease on a terrific flat in the Mission.  The landlord is cool with the pets; the pets have a wonderful fenced-in yard.  I love the colors and the hardwood floors.  It's perfect for us for now, too.  I say "for now" because, to my surprise, the lease is month-to-month, which means that as time goes on, if I want to re-evaluate the flat and move to something else, I can do so easily.  That's terrific for me.  But this flat is also terrific, and I can see myself parked there for a good chunk of time.

So, now I'm back on track, albeit short some of the money I had to fork out to stay in a hotel longer than expected over the weekend and the stress of dealing with the idiot landlord from hell.  I mean, seriously.  After my last post, I did stay in the basement there for a night to see if I could deal with them installing things while I lived there....

Oh hell, no.  The first morning, construction began at 6am in the unit above me, Abby got bit by one of the many spiders living in the basement (since it's not sealed) and her face swelled up the size of a football, and the toilet isn't ventilated, so on the first flush it all spewed out into the shower.  I packed and fled.  Today, I'm calling the city on the building.

But, more importantly, I'm going shopping today for some rugs and window treatments for the new flat.  :)

My furniture should arrive in Colorado sometime next week, just in time for my new job start on July 6th.  All's well that ends well.  Yay!

punked

Sweetness

What a weekend. I am currently quasi-homeless because I got punked by a stupid landlord -- and when I say stupid, I mean a clueless new homeowner who has no sense of anything outside of her artsy little world.

So, a couple of weeks back, I secured a sublet in San Francisco, which seemed the wisest thing to do considering that looking for an apartment to rent with two cats and a dog is not the easiest thing to do from Colorado.  Landlords wanted to see the dog; 3 animals are a lot for any landlord.  My friend, Erik, looked at one place for us, but based on his report, it seemed better to get a sublet to land here and do the footwork for an acceptable place. 

I found a sublet right away; the landlord was willing to take me and the pets sight unseen on a month-to-month basis.  She's 'family', and we had long conversations that set my 'danger-alert' sensor to off.  The rental is in Bayview (yes, I know what Bayview is like), and she said they were renovating the entire building, but it still seemed easier to live in the 'hood and to deal with construction in the building than to continue searching for a place from Colorado.  She wanted a June 15 move-in, which I said was impossible, so we agreed that they could use an extra week to ready the place and furnish it and I could move-in on the 20th.

I thought by 'ready the place' she meant furnish it and do minor trim.  That's what it sounded like on the phone.

All systems go.  I went without enjoying the hiking and goodbyes I would have liked to have had in CO so that I could get out to SF early and get going with the relocation.  The moving company came and packed the house.  I had the house cleaned.  I said a few simple goodbyes, packed the van and the pets, and made the trip... taking 4 days to get here instead of 2. On my last day, the landlady called me.  I was standing in the middle of the Nevada desert with cell phone service and no signs of life out to any point on the horizon.
..

"So, we aren't done with the flat yet, can you come later on Saturday than earlier?  Say, 5pm?"

I said, no, not really.  I had booked one night in a hotel in SF that the company is paying for, but then I had to check-out at Noon and I cannot drive around SF for 5 hours with two cats and a dog in the car.  She said that she'd hustle to get it done then.

I called Saturday morning, and she explained that they had fallen way behind schedule and that the place would not be ready for move-in that day.  After a short panic, I extended the stay in the boutique hotel for a night (at my own cost) then left to go see what the place looked like.

Disaster.  They were installing the shower and a toilet, and finishing up grouting and trimwork throughout the flat.  There was no kitchen --the stove wasn't coming until Tuesday, the sink and counters were outside in the pitiful backyard that was full of their construction mess, and a window that had yet to be installed was also coming Tuesday.  There were no furnishings.  This wasn't a simple building renovation: The rest of the house was gutted down to the studs with two people living in make-shift rooms.  No permits were pulled for any of the construction.  My unit is below the garage -- entirely illegal in SF (I used to be an electrician here; I know the building code).

After a long conversation about the unacceptable and fucked-up situation, she agreed to hustle to get things done and that I'd move-in on Sunday.

She called this morning to ask me to spend another night in the hotel - they decided to get a simpler kitchen sink and counter at IKEA, which doesn't open until 10am today.  I said, no, I could not stay another night in the hotel, that I would be there at Noon, that I would unload my van and animals into the bedroom, and that they are not to open the bedroom door under any circumstances.  I'm looking at another apartment this afternoon with Erik. 

I'm beyond stressed out.  I keep trying to decide where I went wrong, since I had extensive phone conversations with her about the place two weeks ago.  I should have insisted she send photos.  My concern then was the 'hood, but Erik went out there and walked it and gave me the thumb's up.  I should have insisted she let him see the place, because back then it must have been gutted to the studs like the rest of the building.  My bad.  But I went with trusting a woman who sounded trustworthy after spending an hour with her on the phone.  I got sucked into her artsy personality (a real human landlord!) and didn't think about asking just what 'remodel' meant to her.  But she wasn't straight with me in any way at all about this.  I had to pry info out of her, and it wasn't until I saw it with my own eyes that I realized that 'remodel' meant 'total building renovation'.  There was no unit there 2 weeks ago: there was only a dirt basement.

I could stay another night here in the hotel, but it's at my cost and my money is dwindling fast.  Also, I cannot go anywhere without Abby as long as I stay here, which means no ability to eat anywhere unless Erik orders take-out or I order (expensive) room service.  So, despite the hell that this sublet has become, I'm stuck without much choice.  It's 'livable' in the sense that the pets will be safe and I'll be able to sleep at night, but it's a disaster: a total fail.  And it so happens that two of my best friends who could help me out here just happen to be out of the state this week -- one in Africa and the other in Oregon.  I have other acquaintances scattered around, but none are the sort that can help in a pinch like this.

And this all could have been avoided had we talked before the movers came and she had informed me that the unit would not be ready this weekend.  She 'had a fall' last Friday that stopped work on the place.... but she didn't realize it would put her a week behind until Friday.  Having met her, I now see that she's a total space-cadet that has no clue at all about how to do any of this 'remodeling' crap.  They are screwed since they went over-budget and are out of money to continue working on the building.  I am screwed for no good reason, since I could have stayed in CO until the end of the month.

I'll update later, after I see what awaits me today in the sublet from hell and after we look at that apartment in the Mission.  Welcome back to San Francisco. Not.

SF, here I come, right back where I started from

Oh my.  I have a lot to do.

woof!

I'll be relocating back to my favorite City, the only one I ever really called home, at the end of this month.  I have a new job, probably my dream job in many ways, because the team is fantastic, the position is perfect for my skill set, and the company rocks.  I'll be working for Flickr, for Yahoo! actually, but at FlickrHQ.

Elisha calls it 'defying gravity' in this job market.  I call it recovery.

So, I still love Colorado.  I'll be coming back here to retire, probably.  It was hard to leave once, to go off to Notre Dame, and I ultimately returned because it just was the wrong fit... and I knew that going out there. 

This time?  Oh, I am so stoked.  I can't even express how excited I am to move in this direction.  This fit feels right.

Meanwhile, I have a lot to do in a few weeks.  I want to start the new job as soon as possible, but I need to clean up a few things and do a few things before I head out. The list?

• Hand off my clients.  I have a few IT clients -- if anyone in COS needs to pick up extra stuff, let me know.  I have most of them covered, but there's a special one that I want to hand off to the right person.
  
• Hang out with the people that made a difference in my life here.  There are many.  These people restored pieces of me that I lost when my world crumbled and Jocelyn was killed in 2002.  These people, from the A-Crowd to the UCCS crowd to the LJers to Flickr Meetup crowd all are...  wow.  I have no words.  I want to say proper goodbyes.
• Sightseeing.  I want to take an overnighter out to Creede, Colorado, to re-photograph old and famous photographs held in the Library of Congress' archives.
• Hiking.  I need to get back out to the trails that gave me so much: Cheyenne Canon, Williams Canyon, Emerald Valley, etc.  Rocky Mtn Nat'l Park.

That sums it.  That's my plan for the next month untl I hunker down and give it all to the new job, city, and life. 

I'm grateful that I have such awesome connections in SF still.  The friendships I made there so long ago are still there. I even have some new connections there.  That's cool.

Life really is awesome... and quite unpredictable.

friendbinder: my social network app of choice

I finally found - and I can't even recall how, but it was an accidental find - the social networking application that meets 90% of my needs.  As you may recall from earlier posts, I've been looking for a one-stop-shop to view all activity on my social networks without having to visit them or jump through hoops to configure something to read from them.  That web based application is friendbinder, and it aggregates everything on my social networks.

What works:

For starters, after signing up, I told friendbinder what social networks I am on.  It doesn't currently have support for all of them, but it does have support for a goodly number of them.  After adding networks, including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm, it then imported all of my contacts from those networks into my stream.  I didn't have to tell it who my contacts were -- it found them and brought them in.  Big big big score there. 

There are some apps out there that handle this for Flickr, but -- with the exception of FriendFeed-- they all suck at it.  That includes DestroyFlickr and Feedalizer.  The photos come in one at a time, so if someone drops 50 photos onto flickr, you're fucked.  But feedbinder?  Oh, it handles it brilliantly.  It brings in a handful of thumbnails on a single line, and it even brings in what my contacts on Flickr have added as favorites, so that I can discover new content.  And -- here is where it surpasses friendfeed -- if I click a thumbnail, it opens the photo in a nice lightbox, includes the link back to the flickr photo page and the title/author of the photo.  And, you can scroll through the photos with Next and back buttons. 

Wow. Just wow.

I can shift friends around between 5 levels.  I am automatically defaulted to Level 1, so I can just see my own updates there.  Then, I can sort out people among the 4 other levels, choosing to just view the level I want to see at any time or I can select "all" and see everything.  For example, I put all my Flickr Commons (museums and libraries) contacts on the 2nd level. That includes their Twitter accounts and feeds for their blogs.  Now, at one glance with minimal effort on my part, I can see what they are all doing, which helps me when I write for Indicommons.  I can also add tags to friend, which further helps me to sort by interest type.  If someone's too noisy, I can drop them from this app without dropping them as a contact on the original service network.

I can also sort by service, so if I just want to see so-and-so's Twitter updates, I can do that.  I can also reply to someone on Twitter using this app.  I understand from the developer that support for commenting on the other services is in the works. 

Also, some people call themselves different things on different networks.  I can merge friends together, so that the system knows that all updates from their services shoud post to my feed under one name.  It's a little buggy right now; for example, I have 5 friends on Flickr who just go by "Mike" so they all show up as one person.  But that's pretty minor for now.

I can also see which of my friends is on the service by going to a tab that lists them and the services they are using -- I discovered that some of my friends were using Delicious that way, and I didn't know that.

The right hand column is devoted to @me replies (which is very handy for not missing them) and all the columns are sorted by date with date headers -- that makes it so easy to see where I need to catch up from.  I can update my Twitter and/or Facebook statuses from the top of the page. 

I also understand that they have a mobile website which makes using friendbinder from a phone really easy.

Last, their developer, Richard, is a wonderful guy.  He's accesible.  He also responsive.  It's really refreshing to be so able to communicate with a developer of a service you're thinking of trying.


What could work better:

Support for Plurk and possibly FriendFeed. 

I say "possibly FriendFeed" because I'm getting ambivalent about using that service since I found friendbinder.  On FriendFeed, you set up your services, and it pushes everything you do out to your stream there, where other FriendFeed users can comment/like your stuff... and you can see/comment/like their stuff.  But if I want to see stuff from someone not on FriendFeed, I have to set up an imaginary friend.  That's a pain in the ass.  I'm also not thrilled with how they moved out of beta on their last interface update, removing service icons (so, what service did that update just come from?) and imaginary friends.... only to re-add imaginary friends back a few weeks later.  I don't have the time, will or patience for that sort of development.  FriendFeed also seems to be the bastion of hardcore "social media gurus" -- all of whom I lost respect for this weekend when that Spymaster thing hit Twitter.  I ended up removing half of them as contacts on both FriendFeed and Twitter due to the spammy noise that game generates.  Most of the people I really care about aren't using FriendFeed, so I'm not having the robust conversations there that I'd like to be having.

However, the neat thing about FriendFeed is that the user controls what social networks they add, so I can see what people are posting from NetFlix without needing to join NetFlix.  So, since I am a bit invested in FriendFeed, it'd be nice if friendbinder supported them.  My concern there is the duplication factor, but I understand the friendbinder developer has plans to handle it.

It might be neat if mutual contacts on friendbinder could comment/share/like each other's stuff at that service.  Because it's just so out-of-the-box easy to use, I can more of my friends using it, so robust conversations could be possible.

Plurk is the micorblogging service that my funnest contacts use.  I enjoy Plurk a lot more than I do Twitter.  However, they still haven't moved their API out of unofficial status.  Richard said he'd give it a look, though.

Perhaps LiveJournal support would be great, too, since I find I'm not visiting my flist as much as I used to.  I could set up the RSS feed for it, though, in friendbinder; I'd just miss any private journal entries.

===

At any rate, I could go on and on, but why not try it out for yourself?  The service is in private beta at this time, so you have to request an invite.  Richard got back to me within hours of my requesting an invite.  However, he did give me an invite code to hand out to friends, so if you want one, just PM me.  It takes a nominal committment of time to set up and then you get a nice overview of what's going on in your friends' worlds.

Getting Organized

I'm blogging at Indicommons these days, which is a blog devoted to fans of the Commons on Flickr.  Two of the weekly posts I write are about the most recent uploads to the Commons and news from the internet about the Commons' institutions.  Here are two samples:
Recent Uploads to the Commons
Carnival of the Commons

Getting organized for these two weekly posts has taken me a while to nail down.  There are 23 institutions on the Commons.  I follow them all on Flickr, but there is no easy way to follow just the Commons' uploads, unless I make them all Friends and get rid of my other Friends so that in one quick view I can see what's happening with all 23 of them (there are only 3 contact levels at Flickr).  That doesn't work for me, and neither does creating a new Flickr account just to follow them.  Happily, all of their streams have RSS feeds, and one of our users created a nifty Feedburner feed for all institutions.  I have that feed added as a widget to my iGoogle since I'm frequently at my home page, so I see what's newly uploaded as it happens.

However, the Carnival post requires that I have access to every feed from every institution --  be that a blog, website news, Twitter, YouTube or Facebook -- so that I'm tuned in.  For the institutions that don't have anything beyond a website, with no feeds, I don't do anything: it's too much to go to their sites and collect the data every week.  However, following everyone at each different social networking site isn't really feasible either (not enough time in the day to hunt all of that down).  Happily, these all have RSS feeds, too.

Instead of configuring a Feedburn for this, I decided to try using FriendFeed.  I set up imaginary accounts for all 23 of them, and then added every social networking site and feed for them that I could find.  I stuck them all into a group.  Now, I just need to check that group on FF every so often, and there it all is, fed to me rather conveniently.  I suppose Google Reader could have worked too, I just have a few hundred feeds in it already, so that felt overloaded.

Of course, blogging all of this is a little harder.  I don't log into Wordpress every time I see something new, so I had to find a way to make notes about these things as I found them.  Google docs was the solution for a while, but somewhat cumbersome, since I couldn't format the posts as needed for Wordpress -- their formatting more or less sucks, in fact.

Enter Evernote. Using their web clipping service, I can clip a web page or url or tweet or whatever, tag it, and annotate it; it's all saved up to Evernote.  That way, I can sit down at Wordpress twice a week, copy the annotations directly and  insert the links easily.

Now, could any of this be streamlined?  Sure!  We could set up that Feedburn for the institutions' other social networking sites and just port that into a page at the blog -- sort of a Commons' real-time activity stream -- or just make the feed available to those interested.  We could use the Flickr API to collect recent uploads and display them all in one location, too.  But until then, I'll keep chugging along with the method outlined here.

One last thing, it seems that 80% of the info I use for the Carnival comes from Twitter.  That may well be why the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, Powerhouse Museum and the Brooklyn Museum are well represented at Indicommons.  Maybe RSS feeds are as dead as email these days. Just tweet it instead. Which makes me wonder why we are blogging -- oh right!  It's all the cool photos!

social networking

Status updates from a plethora of networks is a small problem of mine.  I'm on a few of them, mainly because different people in my life are on a few of them.  What I want is a way to view all status updates from my friends on all of those networks in one interface.  I want a desktop client to do this -- I just don't want to journey to every site every day to find out what is happening.

My favorite aggregator, Swurl, went into the deadpool earlier this year.  That's a pity, since they were able to post some of the relevant stuff I want to see, even if my friends were not on Swurl.

FriendFeed is the next closest thing, but even it doesn't do everything I'd like it to do.  It's also, unfortunately, as TechCrunch says, the coolest app that nobody uses.  And it only shows me updates from people who are using FriendFeed, unless I add them as imaginary friends, which is far too time consuming.  But it's pretty interactive if your friends are using it; the new Facebook design seems to have borrowed heavily from it.

So, what would the ideal aggregator do?  It would feed to me all status updates/recent activity (in a customizable way) from my network of friends -- not just my stuff -- on all social networking sites I am on.

For example, if I added Flickr to this aggregator, it would pull my list of contacts and show me their recent uploads and it would pull from my recent activity page and show me comments left on my photos.  It would also allow me to comment on and favorite photos from my friends.  It would show me what photos my friends just favorited, too, like FriendFeed does.

I'm on Twitter, too, but I'm a ghostly presense there -- I tweet from Plurk, where I have a more robust social network -- and I check Twitter infrequently.  So, this client would be able to pull all of my friend's tweets and display them in a feed, allowing me to reply, DM, or re-tweet.  Ideally, it would do this for Plurk, too, although I'm not sure what is happening with Plurk's API.  Sort of like TweetDeck or DestroyTweet, but for all social networks -- aggregate them all and allow me to filter on network.

Facebook?  Bring it.  Let me select a custom list sans quizes and eggs and mafia wars, and show me status updates form that fb list.  Allow me to comment right back to fb.  Allow me to share stuff being pulled in from my other networks to FB.  I really dislike visiting FB, but this would let me stay in touch with so many of my friends who are using it.   

Getting the picture yet?  I want one location to check the pulse of everything happening elsewhere.  Ping.fm is great -- but it only sends stuff out, it doesn't pull stuff in.  TweetDeck is great, but it's only for Twitter.  FriendFeed?  It doesn't pull your info to me unless you're on FriendFeed.  I even checked out this now-out-of-beta site, streamy, and must say that I'm not at all impressed with its aggegration.

Now, you might say, just use Facebook, Criz, it does what you want and everyone is there.  Yes, but it's not the network I enjoy most and I don't want to rely on one site to get my fix anyway.  If the web is all about sharing and openness these days, can't someone write a usuable desktop client (it can be web based, I don't care at this point) that truly aggregates the content I want to see all in one place?