widgetBeat…

On a treasure hunt: finding the FriendFeed widget

March 24th, 2008

by Al Merkrebs, March 24, 2008 @ 3:09 p.m. PDT

By all accounts, FriendFeed is the aggregator du jour for getting ALL of your friends’ social feeds in one place. And all hot social sites offer their own widget, right?

Well, in one of the many FriendFeed discussions I was reading, I found someone asking about how good their widget was. So I went to look for it. Good luck trying to find it.

Seems that they had one and then removed it. After digging pretty deep, I finally found out that you can still get it, but you have to know the “secret” place. The treasure was revealed on the Blogoscoped blog: you get the embed code by using this URL: “http://friendfeed.com/embed?user=yourname” (replace “yourname” with your FriendFeed user name shortcut, like “john”).

There are very few people using the widget, but Paul Buchheit, co-founder of FriendFeed, is one of them. Turns out that Paul was the creator and lead developer of Gmail! You can see the widget on his blog, or my example of it here:

This is clearly a beta version of the widget.

The widget shows YOUR OWN social feeds, but NOT those of your friends. I suppose showing your feeds could be interesting to your blog readers, if they want to dig deeper into what YOU are doing.

I also discovered that FriendFeed has a Google group, with discussions of the widget and a few minor tips on how to customize the beta version.

If you are an early adopter of bleeding-edge stuff (and who among us isn’t?), you can be first on your block to actually show your friends the FriendFeed widget.

Entry Filed under: widget in sight