Martin Gordon's Blog

Facebook released their notes feature today, which is basically a blogging system inside of the Facebook network. The posting and importing features have already been covered, so I wanted to touch on a few things that I find interesting that may have been skipped over.

First off, the blogging system is very well integrated into the network. Facebook has modified the notion of Trackbacks/Pingbacks by allowing users to reference their friends in posts. Similar to the way pictures can be tagged, posts referencing users can be tagged as well. In the "My Notes" section, you can then view notes others have tagged you in, or view your friends' latest notes. There's also a "Read more notes about …" when you view anyone's profile and they have notes tagged with their name. I really like this feature because it adapts the great features about blogs (quick and easy posting interface, trackbacks, and comments) very well into the network. Compare this to MySpace's blogging functionality which is just bolted on to the network and doesn't provide much integration other than authentication for comments. Sadly, no RSS feeds are available for the notes and the developers' API doesn't have notes hooks built-in yet.

Second is the ability to import blogs. This is also a great way to integrate several (well, just one) other network (such as Flickr or del.icio.us) with an RSS feed. The downside is that you can only follow one RSS feed at a time (though previously imported and unlinked posts will remain). So for someone who has two blogs, a Flickr photostream and del.icio.us bookmarks he might want to potentially share, the only solution is to merge all the feeds into one or pick his favorite.

Picking a favorite RSS feed is like picking your favorite child, so I went with the former option. The first few RSS combiners I tried stripped all the HTML, including line breaks, and only showed partial posts, so they were quickly dismissed. This happened with about 3 or 4 combiners, and then I found this list of RSS re-mixers on RSS Compendium. I haven't had a chance to go through the list yet, but when I find one that works, I'll be sure to report back. If you know of one that works for sure, let me know and I can save myself some time.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, social networks, blogs, blogging, notes, RSS, feeds, remix, mashup