Since joining Twitter a few months back, I have wanted to understand how it overlapped/interacted with the web-content aggregator friendfeed. I looked at friendfeed at least two or three times and never quite ‘got it’ – until today.

Robert Scoble was a guest on the recent episode 81 of net@night. This guy is quite the friendfeed evangelist (Arrington suggests he’s addicted to it). So much so that the net@nite discussion made me want to take another look. Leo mentioned that Scoble had done a ‘how to’ type video on friendfeed. A quick Google search lead me to this very informative 26 minute video: ‘Robert Scoble: 20 Things About Friendfeed”:

What Does friendfeed Do?

friendfeed is not easy to understand out of the gate. Following along with the Scoble video, I was able to learn the basics, how to how to set it up and how powerful it can be.  A primary function of friendfeed is to aggregate all of your web activities, posts, pictures, comments etc. into one place. I added feeds from each of the following web services that I contribute too(click each to see the underlying feed):

• Digg.com
• Disqus
• Facebook
• IntenseDebate
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• rss feeds from each of my Daleisphere, Video Game Law and iMedia Law blogs

Secondly, all my public web content will be streamed out, in real time, to those who choose to follow me on friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook etc.

Finally, I can follow others on friendfeed and have all of their public web content streamed out, in real time, to me – in one place.

[Jan 9, 2009 Update: I just noticed that Microsoft’s Windows Live ‘What’s New Feed’ function seems very similar to friendfeed.]

Addictive

I can see how friendfeed can become addicting. I initially set it to follow the same individuals that I currently follow on Twitter (those with friendfeed accounts that is – Dave Zatz, Davis Freeberg, Brent Evans).

I then expanded it to follow some of the diggirati that I respect such as Scoble himself, Michael Arrington, Paul Thurrott, Leo Laporte, Ed Bott, Ryan Block, Jason Calacanis etc. The quality of content (especially since CES 2009 is in full swing as I write this) is outstanding.  Clearly, following smart people with similar interests leads to fantastic results.

Search

The search feature is powerful. There are three normal ways to search friendfeed – your own content, your friends content or everyone’s content.

With all my content from around the web aggregated into one place, I can search all of my public-web content, going back for years in some cases, in one place. There is no need to traverse 8 different sites with eight different search engines to find my stuff.

Even more powerful, is the ‘Everyone’ content search. As I’m typing this post, the Palm Pre was just announced at CES. A simple search of ’Palm Pre’ in friendfeed found endless blog posts, comments, tweets, pictures etc. on the just-announced Palm Pre. Powerful stuff!

Advanced Search

You can granulize your search by content type. For example, you could search just for sub-content types from, say, flickr, or just tweets, or just blog posts etc. You can search by friend. Cool.

‘Best Of’ Feature

The “Best Of” feature, was particularly interesting. friendfeed users can effectively vote on what content is good by clicking on the ‘like’ button beside any entry. These ‘like’ votes are dynamically tallied such that if you click on “Best of”” (day/week/month), friendfeed will display the content that your peers/friends voted to be the best of that day, week, month. Terrific. This is a great way to surface the most interesting content. It’s kinda like “Digg.com for Smart People”.

Issues

Need a friendfeed Desktop App: Like Twitter, friendfeed is web-based. I use the twhirl application to access my Twitter feeds. I would like a similar application to access my friendfeed feeds. They must exist. Any suggestions?

[Note: I purchased the Nambu iPhone App ($1.99) to access Twitter and friendfeed on my iPhone. It seems to work well enough – but it is annoying to set up.]

Loosing Control of Comments: I’m new to this. I’m concerned that if someone comments on one of my blog posts within friendfeed, that I’ll loose those comments. I’d rather have them comment directly in my blog, not on friendfeed. I know Disqus and IntenseDebate were talking about importing those comments back. As I write this, I don’t know the status of backhauling friendfeed comments into the source blog’s database. As you can see below, IntenseDebate pulled in comments I made on this post from within friendfeed.

[Jan 9, 2009 Update: As you can see from my first comment below, Intense Debate pulls comments on a post made in friendfeed back into the blogger’s comments (details here). While it appears that Disqus is working on integration (see here) and there are some tools to do this with Disqus (see here), near as I can tell there is no formal solution for Disqus yet.]

No Comment Character Count: You can setup friendfeed to Tweet your friendfeed comments (as I have done). Twitter permits only 140 characters per Tweet. friendfeed permits more but it does not tell you how many characters you have typed in a comment. If you type more than 140, they get truncated in Twitter. Dang! I note that Nambu has the same limitation.

Outbound Feed Publishing to Twitter: Yikes, I quickly learned not to include every feed from every service in my outbound feed to Twitter. This was a bit much. As of right now, I only publish friendfeed comments, and new blog post entries to Twitter. Not sure what I’ll do with facebook status updates yet. I attempt to keep my Twitter feed more professional than my Facebook world. And I don’t want every comment I make everywhere on the web to appear in my Twitter feed. That’s just noisy overkill.

Conclusion

Will I continue to use it? Only time will tell. It is certainly more interesting, useful and impressive than I had expected. If I can find a good desktop app to run it, I probably will.

Since listening to this net@night podcast back in May 2008, where Amber and Leo interviewed Daniel Ha, the founder of the Disqus, I have been interested in implementing this kind of a community-oriented, commenting/discussion system on my blogs.

Early on, I had compared the feature set of Disqus and its competitor, IntenseDebate (“ID”), and Disqus’s feature set and looks won. Concerns surrounding the ability to import, export, sync and otherwise control my comments, held me back. I was not going to join any system where I lost ownership/control of my users’ comments.

In the interim, both Disqus and ID have added dynamic comment importing, exporting and synchronization features. I became comfortable that I would not be locked into any commenting system if/when I chose to leave. Scot Jangro’s December 30, 2008 post, ‘Comment System Review Redux’, compared the the two systems afresh and gave me substantial comfort that ID’s feature set had evolved to near parity with Disqus (see other comparisons: inquisitr.com | Mashable).

But the clincher came on Sept 23, 2008 when Automattic, the owner of Wordpress, purchased IntenseDebate. (See: Matt Mullenweg’s comment – IntenseDebate’s comment – Disqus’s comment). I expect Automattic to integrate IntenseDebate’s community comment / discussion system into the Wordpress core at some point. So, as a Wordpress user, it seemed a no brainer to go with IntenseDebate.

[January 23, 2009 Update: Despite what I wrote above, I ultimately switched to Disqus not long after implementing Intense Debate. In my ‘Why I switched from IntenseDebate to Disqus’ post [coming soon] I describe why I made the switch.]

IntenseDebate’s WordPress Plugin features are discussed here.  The newest Wordpress Plugin (v 2.0.18) has been completely overhauled, making the installation and comment import/export/sync process much easier than it was.

Below I describe why I installed ID. I then walk you, step-by-step, through the IntenseDebate installation process in Wordpress 2.7.

Why Intense Debate?

A list of ID’s features can be found here (see here for Disqus features). Below are a list of some of the reasons I wanted to do this:

• Threaded Comments: Commenters can reply directly on previous comments. Comment replies are successively indented. No more flat comments only. (Note: WP 2.7 has just added threaded comment functionality requiring template modifications to work).
• Commenter Reputation: Commenters that are ID members gain a reputation across all the sites they comment on. Anyone can vote on the value of any comment. A commenter’s reputation follows him/her across all ID sites.
• Email Notifications: Commenters are notified when anyone replies to their comments, so they can continue the conversation. They can reply to the email to add a reply. No need to navigate back to the blog.
• Commenter Profiles: Clicking on the commenter’s avatar shows the commenters profile. No longer are commenters unknown anonymous people. A real sense of community can develop.
• Cross-Site Commenter Following: If you like a comment, clicking on a commenter’s avatar will show show you other recent comments made by that commenter on other participating ID sites.
• Multi-Blog Moderation: I can now moderate comments from all my blogs through just one dashboard – instead of having to successively log into the moderation page on each of my three blogs. Though my first experiences with moderation on the ID website didn’t leave me too impressed. Moderation within the WP 2.7 dashboard is much nicer.
• Powerful Sidebar Widgets: A growing set of powerful sidebar comment-specific widgets are available. The one I like cross-promotes comments from each of my blogs across all of my blogs.

Installation Instructions

These instructions assume you have already installed and are running Wordpress 2.7 (see my WP 2.7 First Impressions post here for more details).

• Delete All Spam: Might as well delete all current Akismet trapped spam before backing up and integrating Intense Debate.
• Backup: I strongly suggest you backup your Wordpress database files before you start. I use the WordPress Database Backup plugin for this.
• Sign Up: Sign up for an Intense Debate account here. It takes less than a minute.
• Add Your Blog: From the IntenseDebate dashboard, click on the ‘+add blog’ option on the dashboard (see pic below):
  You can set up as many blogs as you wish. I currently use ID with three blogs.
• Type in your Blog’s URL: Specify the URL of your blog and click ‘Next Step’
  
• Wordpress Blog Detection: IntenseDebate automatically senses that you have a Wordpress blog. So the second step, ‘Choose Platform’, is automatically skipped.
• Old Installation Instructions: As of the date of this post, the third step presents you with the older pre-Wordpress 2.7 installation instructions (click image for larger view):You can still follow those older pre-Wordpress 2.7 instructions, but I recommend you use the newer, easier and faster plug-in search and install tools built into Wordpress 2.7 (as described below) to automatically download and install the IntenseDebate plugin.
• Install Plugin in WP 2.7: In Wordpress 2.7, click on the “Add New” option in the Plugins menu (item 1. below). Type the search term “intensedebate” (one word) into the search box (item 2. below) and then click the install option on the right (item 3. below):
  That’s all that’s to it. The plugin will download and install automatically.
• Activate: Activate the plugin-like any other WordPress plugin by clicking on the ‘activate’ option beside the plugin in the WordPress dashboard plugins directory. Note, simply activating does not complete the installation process. You’ll need to import your current comments (export from your perspective) to the IntenseDebate servers to complete the process.
• Import Your Comments: To export/import your comments to ID’s servers, click on the ‘Intense Debate’ option that appears in your WP 2.7 Settings menu. You’ll first be presented with this login screen:Type in the username and password information you used when you signed up and you’ll be taken to the import screen. Click the ‘Start Importing Comments’ button:

  

• Queuing & Importing: You’ll likely see the ‘queued, waiting for import’ message below.
  On two out of my three blogs the queuing message disappeared within seconds. Once your comments start importing you’ll see a green progress bar followed by a ‘Finalizing … almost done” indication:

  
  It took only minutes for my comments to import once that progress bar appeared.

• Wordpress Dashboard Options Tweaking: Once done, you’ll be presented with the tweak screen below. There are several options to tweak both inside and outside of the Wordpress dashboard:
  Owing to a glitch, I strongly suggest that you set the “Moderation Page” option (see item 1. above) to the “Wordpress Standard Moderation” option. As of the date of this post there seems to be a glitch with the “IntenseDebate Enhanced Moderation” option. When moderating comments within the WordPress 2.7 dashboard, if you use the enhanced option, it makes the comment moderation window really small and hard to use. Until this is fixed, the default Wordpress 2.7 moderation setup is much more usable.
• Tweaking Blog Settings on IntenseDebate Dashboard: Clicking on the ‘Edit your blog settings on IntenseDebate.com’ link (item 2. above) takes you to this settings page for your blog on the IntenseDebate site (click image for larger view):

Once again, the settings you choose are up to you. I recommend unchecking the “Email admins when I have a comment that waits moderation” option. Akismet and the ID spam filters are constantly flagging spam for moderation. It drove me nuts receiving email after email asking me to moderate what was almost always nothing more than spam.  Grrr! I’d much prefer to manually filter out that spam in bulk every couple weeks.

Intense Debate Problems/Issues

Note re: Comments.php File: IntenseDebate works by substituting its own content for your comments.php template file. If, like me, you made customizations to your comments.php file, they will be gone. In my case I had inserted Adsense and Amazon Affiliate scripts in that file. I had to modify my post template to accommodate this change.

Bland Default Avatars: Most of my commenters, at this point, are not IntenseDebate users. As I mentioned here, I really liked the default WordPress comment avatars for anonymous commenters. As you can see, the default IntenseDebate avatar is a rather boring grey/black one.

No Option to Require Email Addresses: To reduce spam I used to require commenters to leave a name and email address. When you use ID, there is no such option. Users are either anonymous or ID users. As a result, I get way more anonymous spam than I did before. This needs to be addressed by ID.

Issues with Two of Three Installs: I had tried to install Intense Debate on my iMedia Law blog in early December 2008 just after I wrote my WP 2.7 First Impressions post. It got stuck at during the importing comments stage. I assumed this was a glitch due to WP 2.7 still being in beta at the time. So I gave up. When I tried the updated plugin at the end of December 2008, it got stuck again, even with the latest 2.0.18 version. However, after a few emails to support@intensedebate.com they solved the problem. I had to provide them with the value in the "id_import_token" from my wp-admin/options.php page. Shortly after providing that value, they tweaked something on their servers and import finished in seconds. My second install to my Video Game Law blog went off without a hitch. It took only minutes to install. Unfortunately the install process got stuck once again when I first attempted to install ID into this Daleisphere blog. Once again, an email to to support@intensedebate.com had the problem solved in minutes. So while there still seems to be issues with the install process, the ID support folks responded quickly and were very friendly and helpful.

Video Tour

Below is a video tour of the Wordpress plugin for IntenseDebate. It is a bit out of date in that it demonstrates the plugin in Wordpress 2.6.x and shows the manual plugin installation process now made obsolete with the automatic plugin installation system integrated into Wordpress 2.7. But, its still useful to get a sense of what its about.

What about Disqus?

I may very well deactivate IntenseDebate and install Disqus at some point just to give it a whirl. Since all my comments remain synced in my MySQL database, as per the experiences of others (see here), this should be pretty straight forward. But, as I said above, I think the Automattic purchase will mean that IntenseDebate will become increasingly integrated with WordPress making Disqus less and less attractive over time.

The End Game

As good as Disqus and ID are on their own, the end game will have to be some kind of unification of the systems, or at least some industry standard specifications so the two communities interoperate and are not islands. Think how AIM and MSN Messenger users, for example, could not IM between the two systems. Or how Prodigy and CompuServe users could not email each other before Internet email became a standard. In an ideal future world, commenter reputations, identities, comment histories etc. would follow the commenter whether the blog is an ID, Disqus or other comment community site.

Please Comment

Please comment on this post to see how this all works. So far I’m not liking how the comments are squished up against the left margin. I’m not sure how to tweak this since my comments.php file is no longer used.

In Episode 49 of the net@night podcast, Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte interviewed the co-founder of animoto, Brad Jefferson. animoto is a web service that generates professional quality, customized videos from your images and music. FYI, here’s Leo’s video.

I decided to give it a whirl. I am impressed. So far I’ve ‘produced’ three videos including this one of my 2002 trip to Thailand (turn on your speakers for this).

The images in this video were taken from these Thai locations in this order: Bangkok (including the backpacker Mecca of Khao San Road), Ko Samui,Ko Tao, Phuket, Ko Phi Phi, Rai Leh, Ao Nang Krabi, Kanchanaburi (Bridge Over River Kwai), Phang-Nga then back to Ko Samui

Except for the uploading and processing time, assuming your pictures are generally ordered on your computer or hosted web service in the order you want them in your video, the process takes only about 10 minutes of your time.

Animoto ‘How To’ Summary

• Select Images: Upload your pictures to animoto (one picture per second or two of music worked well for me). Alternatively, you can select pictures from your flickr, facebook, smugmug, picasa or photobucket account
• Arrange Images: Arrange the photos in the order you wish. You can tell animoto which pictures to highlight in the video
• Select Music: Select one of their canned tracks or upload an MP3 file from your computer
• Payment: Pay either U.S. $3.00 per video, or $30 for a year long unlimited all-access pass, with Paypal or Google Checkout (unfortunately no credit cards yet). Note: See the referral program info below to get $5 off the all-access pass
• Processing: animoto will churn away for an hour or two analyzing your pictures and chosen music and then create a customized video. animoto will email you a link to the finished product when done

Below I describe what you can do with the resulting video and provide a step by step guide, showing how I made the Thailand video.

What You Can Do With It:

Currently you can:

• remix the video (change/add/delete images, change the order, choose a different song) – as often as you want at no extra cost.
• email a link to the video to friends and family (click here for example)
• embed it in your Facebook account, your blog (as I did above) or your website
• download the video in mpeg4 format
• export it to Youtube
• or any or all all of the above

Animoto Step-by-Step ‘How To’

1. Getting Started: After creating your animoto account, click on the "+" icon on the top left to create your first video.

Then click on the "Full-Length" video option.

There is a rather unsatisfying 30 second ‘animoto short’ video option if you wish to give it a test run for free.

2. Select Images: You can upload images from your computer or retrieve images from any of your flickr, facebook, smugmug, picasa or photbucket accounts (other web photo services coming soon).

I chose to upload from my computer.

After clicking the ‘Upload Now’ button, an upload window opens on your computer. The picture below is Vista’s upload window – your upload window will vary depending on your operating system.

Navigate to the directory where your pictures are. Select some or all of the images in your picture directory and animoto will begin uploading the pictures. Below is animoto’s uploading progress screen:

Uploading times vary depending on your Internet connection speed, the number of photos you chose and the size of your photos. The larger the photos, the longer the upload time. It took about 5 minutes to upload the first 95 of my very large images files over my Rogers 1 Mb/sec upload connection (There are 140ish images in the Thailand video).

When your pictures have finished uploading, you can successively add more pictures by clicking on the ‘add more’ button as often as you wish. The process is the same. The next group of pictures will be added the end of your previously uploaded group of pictures.

3. Arrange Images: By default the images are arranged in the order they were uploaded (which in my experience is in the order they were in my Vista directory).

You can move them around and reorder them with your mouse in the same way you move icons around a Windows or Mac desktop.

The toolbar under the thumbnail pictures provides you with options to upload more images, rotate, ’spotlight’ or delete images. The thumbnails surrounded with a yellow border above were the one’s I chose to spotlight (emphasize) in the video.

4. Add Music: When the pictures are arranged the way you want them, click on the music tab on the left. You’ll be given the choice to select from Animotos’ canned music collection or to upload your own MP3 files.

I chose to upload my own music – in this case Ma Ya Hi by Dan Balan. The same upload and status screens that are used to upload images are used when uploading music (see above). When done you can edit song name and artist if necessary.

5. Finalize: After your pictures and song is uploaded, select the ‘finalize’ tab and you’ll be asked to add a title for your video, a description and the name of the video’s producer – that’s you. Then choose (again?) whether you want a free "Animoto Short" or a "Full-length Video".

If you choose "Full Length Video" and have not yet paid for a single video or do not have an all-access pass, you’ll be prompted to pay with this "Whoops" message.

Click on the ‘buy now!‘ link to pay one video at a time ($3.00 U.S.) or purchase an all-access pass for $30 (see $5 referral discount option below). The all-access pass gives you the ability to produce as many videos as you want during the next year.

6. Payment: You can pay in advance (though its not clear how on the main page) or wait, as I do, until you get the Whoops screen prompting you for payment. After clicking on ‘Whoops’ page’s ‘buy now!‘ link you’ll get the pricing option screen:

I’ve been paying $3.00 a pop but am beginning to regret not purchasing the all-access pass for $30.

Notice the "have you a code?" link circled in red above. To save $5.00 on an all-access pass enter a referral code (preferably mine – see below).

After making your choice, you’ll be given the option of paying by Paypal or with Google Checkout. Credit cards are not accepted yet.

I use Paypal. After clicking the Paypal, a standard Paypal payment window opens. Fill in the usual Paypal credentials (email address and password), confirm your purchase with the Paypal "Buy Now" icon and that’s that. Paypal sent me a confirming email and animoto returned me to the ‘finalize your video’ screen above. Note: You may need to refresh the screen a couple times until Paypal notifies animoto that payment was made. It took only a couple seconds for me.

Select the "Full Length Video" option again (see above), then clicked on the Create Video button:

7. Processing: From there you will be presented with this status window showing you how far along the in the production process animoto is.

Go watch some TV or do something else. animoto will email you when the process is done. Or, if you leave the processing screen up on your computer, the video will automatically load on that screen when ready. For the Thailand video above the production process took 67 minutes.

8. What You Can Do With It: You can, of course, view any of your videos from your "My Videos" page (click on the "my videos" button in the toolbar).

Below is my current ‘My videos’ page.

If this is your first video, only one video appears on the "My Videos" screen. Click ‘play’ to watch it. The toolbar on the bottom of video playback page

allows you to do any of the following:

• remix the video (change/add/delete images, change the order, choose a different song) – at no extra cost.
• email a link to the video to friends and family (click here for example)
• embed the video in your Facebook account, your blog (as I’ve done above) or your website
• download the video in mpeg4 format
• export the video to Youtube, or
• any or all all of the above

As you can see from the greyed out icons in the toolbar, animoto is working on adding additional functionality to: (i) automatically add the video to your video iPod (iPod Touch) or (ii) burn the video to a CD or DVD.

Stand-Alone or Facebook App

Animoto can be used from their stand-alone web service here, or you can add it in to your Facebook account as an ad-in application here.

Referral Program

animoto has a referral program. If you refer someone to animoto and they user your referrer code when purchasing the $30 all-access pass (see the "have you a code?" link circled in red in the ‘pricing options’ image above) they get a $5.00 discount and you get a 3 month all-access pass.

That’s my referrer code on the left – hint hint. In full disclosure, I sneakily embedded my referral code in every link to animoto in this post. Do with it what you will.

A Couple Nits

• Credit Cards Not Accepted: Not being able to pay with a credit card will keep most non-geeks away. Not too many people I know outside the geek community are Paypal or Google Checkout users.
• No Warnings If All Pictures Not Used: If you upload too many images, the system doesn’t necessarily use all the images you upload, or play to the end of the song you selected. Originally I uploaded 187 images for the Thailand video but the system only used 140ish. Given that you can remix as often as you like (and I did to create the video above on my second attempt) this is not much of a problem. But it would be nice to know in advance what the limits are (ie. maximum number of pictures and maximum length of song) so you don’t have to go through the relatively long remixing process several times to get all the pictures you want.
• animoto Logo in Embedded Version: Dave Zatz pointed out that given that I paid for the video, its odd that they put their logo in the embedded version (see video above). I agree. But I do note that the logo is not within the video in the version hosted on the animoto site (click here for example) nor do they embed their logo in the mp4 file that you can download.

But these are small nits given the otherwise terrific service.

[March 11, 2009 Update:  Here’s another terrific step-by-step animoto tutorial.]

Other animoto Blog Reviews: TechCrunch | Robin Good’s Master New Media | profy | Rocket Surgeon | News Blog | Online Tech Tips

animoto in the press: USA Today | Wall Street Journal | CNN Video/Chris Pirillo | Wired | PBS | and lots more here