Code, Camera, Action

In a move few FriendFeeders anticipated, Facebook bought FriendFeed today. Robert Scoble published an audio interview with one of FriendFeed's founders discussing the deal.

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop.

• Discovery. Whenever a friend on FriendFeed likes or comments on something, the item pops to the top of your feed -- whether or not you're friends with the poster.
• Email. FriendFeed treated email with respect. If you wanted to get your updates by email, you could, in a way rich enough to replace email listserves. Heck, if you wanted, you could use FriendFeed entirely through email and never visit the site past the first time. If only Facebook let me reply to its emails!

The disadvantage is that somebody needs a FriendFeed login to leave a comment.  Because FF accepts FaceBook, Google or Twitter logins, though, that may not be such a big hurdle

Querying FriendFeed

FriendFeed's API let's you pull a JSON version of posts and comments with a single query.

http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/url?url=[your url here]

This gives us every FriendFeed item that refers to a particular URL.  (The current post, in this case.)  Those results come back in JSON format, where we can act on them in script.  For convenience, FF let's us name a JavaScript function that will be called when we get the data.  I've called mine ffDisplay, as you can see.

callback=ffDisplay

To get this to work, we put the url and callback parameter together in a script tag, like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/url?url={{ page.url }}&amp;callback=ffDisplay" defer="true"></script>

Then it's up to us to format these the way we want.  To do this, we'll need our ffDisplay function.  This simply walks the structure of the JSON results, as documented by the FriendFeed API.  We also need a place on the page to put the comments.  This script puts comments inside a div with an id of "ff_comments".

As the comment on lines 8 and 9 notes, there is one tricky thing here.  The url value in the JSON is either the URL we want (the one for the FriendFeed discussion) or the blog post's URL (which we don't want).  In our case, anything that's not a FriendFeed URL points to the original post.  To link to the FriendFeed discusion, we combine the userid and post id into an undocumented FriendFeed URL that works just fine.  I hope this behavior doesn't break in the future.

So there we go.  FriendFeed comments on page, courtesy of the FriendFeed API and JavaScript.

One last plug for the FriendFeed API.  JavaScript just touches the surface of that API.  

If you're using WordPress or MovableType to run your blog, there are other options.  Look for the FriendFeed Comments plugin for WordPress or an import plugin for MovableType.  But if you're limited to JavaScript by something like Jekyll or Blogger, then this JavaScript method just might work for you.

Let me know how it goes in the (FriendFeed) comments.

At the office, we use FriendFeed for sharing and discussing links. It’s great for that. There’s a bookmark that lets you share links and images with a click. And we use groups to keep discussions (somewhat) on-topic — especially for our top-secret internal discussions.

Perhaps your office is like ours, however, in that Certain People are much more comfortable sharing links in email.

With yesterday’s redesign of FriendFeed, even email addicts can use all of FriendFeed’s functionality — from their email inbox.

Here’s how to setup FriendFeed to work with email —

1. Add an email address to FriendFeed
2. Post to FriendFeed by email
3. Receive FriendFeed messages by email

Do these tips work for you? Let me know in the comments here — or find me on FriendFeed.