fog of eternity

The continual development of new applications for web services is one of the best things about the online community. These applications or extensions massively increase the function and usability of services. Some of them are simple, some of them seem incredibly complex pieces of work.

I wanted to highlight two I've come across recently that can really benefit your social networking life. They're very different from each other, but both can help you to develop wider and more worthwhile relationships in the blogosphere, and give you the opportunity to add value.

Twitter2friendfeed - because you're leaving Twitter, right?

That's the trend anyway. Too many people annoyed at Twitter's downtimes. Friendfeed's increased functionality and reliability. And because it's the fashionable thing to do right now, yes?

Except you've got hundreds of people you follow on Twitter, and it'd take forever to add them all manually on Friendfeed. So you add the few most important and live a life split between Friendfeed and Twitter because you can't move your entire contact list over.

Until you use Twitter2friendfeed at least. It automatically runs through all of the people you follow on Twitter, and subscribes to every match it can find on friendfeed. Simple, but highly effective. And in a cool retro text program format!

It really was a lifesaver for me, because I wanted to increase my usage of friendfeed but didn't have time to manually move my contacts over. And that was just following 113 people. Can't imagine how useful the app could be for people who have several hundred or a thousand people they follow on Twitter.

I still use Twitter regularly, I'm not jumping ship because despite the problems I still like the app. But now I can get the best of both worlds, maximising my Twitter and my FriendFeed usage.

Comment Info Tip - rubbish name, cool app

I genuinely can't remember which blog I saw this on first. I guess kind of a hint there, that I remembered the app before I remember the blog. Comment Info Tip is a recently developed WordPress plugin that gives some public information about your commenters, and interactivity with their blogs.

It's particularly good for your regular commenters. It'll list the last three posts that they commented on, highlighting their contribution to the discussion. And if they have a blog it'll grab a snippet from their last blog post, with a link to that post. All of which appears in a mini popup when you mouseover the commenter's name. It'll also highlight pingbacks and trackbacks.

All of which is great for developing a more interactive relationship with your visitors. It highlights and rewards the people who contribute regularly. The link to their last post is particularly handy. Unlike the similar CommentLuv plugin (which I also like) it checks this link in real time. CommentLuv adds a link back to a commenter's latest post at the time of their comment. The Info Tip gives a link back to their latest post as of now.

Main flaw for me so far is with the interal links of the popup. I use SEO friendly URLs with WordPress. But when the popup links to "last posts commented on" in my blog it uses the default www.blogname.com/?p=35 addresses. That doesn't impact on functionality, but does have a minor impact on SEO and also isn't great for analysing web stats.