One of the great features of the Windows Live Services is hidden away on your Profile page. This feature, Web Activities, allows your other web services to advertise their activities and be seen on your Windows Live Profile in the “What’s new” feed.
So, if you have pictures on Picasa, or Flickr, or if you use Twitter your Live account can detect your activity on those services and share updates in the “What’s new” feed on your profile. This means that by adding a picture to one of your Picasa photo albums you will be alerting your Windows Live Network of friends that the picture is there. After all, what good is posting something if no one knows to go look, right?
Currently there are about a dozen Web Activities that you can choose from for you own Windows Live Service. You can see the list of available activities on your own profile, down in the lower left side of the page. Click on the “Web activities” link and follow the simple instructions to link any of these fine activities to your Live Profile’s “What’s new” feed.
But… What about other services? You may have a WordPress blog. That activity can be linked easily. But there is no activity for a blogger.com blogs. What do you do then? In this case the answer is simply to choose the “Custom blog” activity. This one is easy to set up as well. All you really need to do is enter some URL information it needs.
But… What if you have two blogs? This activity can only be added once. So, if you use it, you’ll have to make a choice as only one can be added. I hope that they remedy this in the future, but for now it is what it is.
But what if you want to share your FaceBook activities? That’s one of those cases where there is no Web Activity to help you out. We are told that they are working on it, and it may come very soon. But for now you are out of luck.
Or are you?
So, what can you do? In this case, you can turn to your friends at FriendFeed to help you out. FriendFeed is not hamstrung by having just a dozen or so activities available. Nor is it limited to using each one just once. FriendFeed currently has around 59 web services that it allows you to track your activities (and your friends as well, if you like) to share with your friends.
This means you can track two (or more) blogs on FriendFeed. It also means you can track FaceBook activities, what your new favorites are on YouTube, you Netflix queue, blogger, twitter and dozens more. This is really nice.
But how does this help you? Well, if you could get your friends to go look at your FriendFeed they could see what you’ve been doing. So, that’s a great idea, but how can we do that? Going to each friends’ FriendFeed to see their updates is as awkward as manually going to Live Groups to check for updated discussions. There really must be another way.
And, there is.
Our new friend FriendFeed tracks your web activities by its own methods. It posts the updates on a webpage that you give permissions to others to view. According to the help, it does this by polling your other web services periodically for updates, and it publishes the things it finds in one place. This is good for your friends if you can get them to check it out on a regular basis. Good luck with that.
But there is another way. Aggregating all your web activities onto one single webpage is useful, but like I said, only if friends go there to read them. How can you bring the updates to your friends? This is the key.
It turns out that FriendFeed has several other methods to deliver your updates. These other methods actively deliver the updates directly to your friends instead of passively waiting for your friends to show up and read the changes. You can publish your updates on iGoogle, your FaceBook Page or even using twitter.
But that doesn’t help. The method we will be using is the RSS feed. Yes, our FriendFeed can be read with RSS. So, on your Space you can set up a Feed module to read this. Your friends will still have to come to your Space to read it. But we’re getting a little warmer. Here is what feed looks like on my Space:
The next step requires a little imagination. And using it requires that you give up one of your Web Activities. In fact, you’ll be losing the Custom Blog activity which can only be used once.
However, since you’ll be using it to track FriendFeed, and FriendFeed can track any number of anything it tracks you’ll be happy to make this sacrifice. Once you make these changes you’ll be able to advertise updates on your “What’s new” feed on Live Services to all your Network buddies. Here is a sample of what it looks like on my profile:
This is broadcast out to my network. It lets my friends know that I put a new movie on my Netflix queue, added a couple of new favorites to my YouTube account to do stuff with Second Life, and that I changed my “What am I doing right now” on FaceBook. You also see I posted a blog on my Lagrange Point blogger service. Neat!
How can you do this? I won’t go into the fine details of adding each service on FriendFeed. I don’t think I can improve upon the instructions they provide. But I will go into the steps you’ll need to follow, and how the connection is made on the Live Services side of things. Here is how it is done:
- Set up a FriendFeed account.
- Pick all the services you want to track the activity of and add them to your account.
Here is what mine look like:
Now that you have added your services you need to hook them up to the Live “What’s new” feed. This is accomplished by using the “Custom blog” web activity on your Profile page. Here are the steps for that:
- Go to your Profile page
- Click the “Web activities” link on the lower left hand side.
If the activity hasn’t been added already then click “Add” or if you are already using it then click “Manage”
If you are adding it for the first time it will see a page with something like this:
And if you chose the manage option then you have already done this before. In that case you’ll just be changing a URL, and I assume you’ll be able to do that since you already did it once.
So, click “Add" and you’ll see this screen:
The areas circled in red are things that are required for this to work. You can click on the picture to enlarge it as I know it is hard to see as is. The first is the Blog URL for your Custom blog. I’ll show you where to get that information in a bit. The second is a check box for “Show updates in the what's new list.” You should make sure it is checked or you’ll be defeating the purpose of this whole thing. The third is the permissions. You’ll need to choose the level you want. I chose to make mine public so anyone visiting my profile page can see my activities. You can set yours however you like.
Now we will address the blog URL. But first, why does this work? The FriendFeed is not a blog. It works because the Custom blog activity is really a RSS feed reader that assumes it will be connected to a blog. Hence, this is why you see things like:
“Jeffrey added the blog post You: Shutter (via Netflix queue) on FriendFeed”
We have to live with the “blog post” part because we are using a Custom blog activity. I would like it if the Windows Live team would add a FriendFeed activity or even a generic RSS feed reader, but until that time we will do it this way.
OK, so now we will add the URL. You’ll need to log into your FriendFeed account. In the upper right side of the page are links pertaining to the account itself.
Jeff | Friends | Tools | Account | Sign out
Click on the “Tools” link. On the new page that opens your find a section toward the end called “Access your FriendFeed” which lists all the possible ways to track it. We are interested in the one labeled “Feed Reader” so click on that one. That opens the feed page up in whatever browser you are using. The URL of this page is what you need so copy it from the address bar of your browser and past it into the “Blog URL” box of the “Custom blog” settings. Once you click “Add” you’re done!
So, what’s next? I don’t know for a fact how the Web Activities work on the Live Services, but I suspect that they are a push based service. I am guessing that when you update a blog like one on WordPress that it is WordPress that notifies Live Services that something has changed. This would allow the updates to appear in your “What’s new” feed as quickly as you make them.
However, the custom blog wouldn’t work that way. It would likely be more of a pull based service. I expect it periodically polls the blog RSS to get the most current one and then publishes its findings. This is also how FriendFeed works according to their help documentation. This means that there might be a longer period of time than you would normally experience with the regular Live Web activities using this technique.
Anyway, I am using this technique as well as a Spaces feed, and so far it has worked well. If I run into any problems I will post them here, and if anyone else has ideas to improve this please be sure to comment about them. Have fun! Try this out, and let’s see if it works for everyone.
