0018 - Aggregator Altered (and, anecdotally, annoying all acquaintainces)

With lifecasting being all the rage these days, and every tracker and socnet's website providing separate feeds, providing some kind of aggregate feed is almost a necessity, unless you REALLY want to invite ALL your friends to every network you belong to. That's what I thought.

To some extent, Facebook is trying to do the reverse; bring the apps to the people. Invite all your friends to one network, and broadcast your life using the apps within... the problem of course, is that you can only broadcast within Facebook. OK, so you can get RSS feeds for the status updates, "notes" and "links", but nothing else. That I can find. Yet. And let's be honest, half of the time the Facebook status is something contorted because of the "is..." (and Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku all have better features), Facebook Notes << a real blog, and you can't tag or categorize your shared links like you can with a real social bookmarking site, so why even bother. Any why do I have to subscribe to three separate feeds? I haven't found a (simple) way to get RSS for anything else, either. Only email, and then only when its something directly about me.  What if I DO want to know about every photo, video, and event? I understand their game is to drive website traffic, and that's fine, and if its enough for most people, good for them. But I'm disappointed.

From now on I'm just not going to bother using the Facebook apps. "OMFG!!!" I hear you say. "No more Facebook updates? How on earth will people know what you're doing?!?"

Profilactic. In conjunction with all the sites I usually use: Blogger, Twitter, del.icio.us, Wakoopa, last.fm, anybody that provides a feed.

In the past I had played with Yahoo Pipes and public sharing of Google reader folders to aggregate my various updates (rare as they are, but, whatever). But Profilactic does it all much more simply, formats it all pretty darn nicely, and, then when you throw the Profilactic RSS Mashup feed over to Feedburner for further customization for the master feed... As Bob and Doug would say: Beauty, Eh?

And the final step: Configure Facebook notes to load the master feed instead of my blog. Sure, it may result in some overkill, but that's why God invented /addignore, right?.