Getting Facebook into Twitter

Facebook status updates and Twitter have a lot in common. They're both microblogging platforms that let me casually stalk my friends and find out all kinds of stuff about what they're doing that I wouldn't normally know.

I wanted to have a unified view, so whenever I use a Twitter client, I can see all my Facebook Friend's update. But there's a twist - I didn't want all my Facebook friends. Some of my friends use Twitter to update their Facebook status with the Twitter app (like I do), and I didn't want to get duplicates.

You can see on the right how it works. Here's how I did it:

1. Get the URL to your Facebook Friend's status feed
2. Feed it into a private Twitter account (in my case friends) with a name of "Facebook" and a profile icon that is the Facebook logo via TwitterFeed.
3. Follow friends in twitter

Voila, I now get Facebook and Twitter together in any Twitter client.

Ok, here's the trick - step 1 is really hard.

Step 1 - Getting your Facebook Friends Status URL

First, I want to say "Thank You!" to Kristi Barrow's blog post about Facebook and RSS feeds. This step entirely comes from the information provided in her post and the comments. Without the information there, I never would have figured this out.

In order to create an RSS feed for a single group of your Facebook friends, you will need three internal Facebook IDs.

• Your facebook ID
• Your friends' key
• Your friend's group number

Facebook ID and Friends' Key

You can get these three pieces of information from two facebook links. The first link comes from one of your applications. I use the "links" application, but any application with the "Subscribe to ... -> My Friends Links" can be used.

So, first select "Links" from the "Applications" menu as shown on the left. This will bring you to a page that shows your friends' links - as shown on the right.

If you right-click on the "My Friends Links" RSS feed, and copy the URL, it should be something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/share_friends_posts.php?id=xxxxxxxxx&key=yyyyyyyyy&format=rss20

Your Facebook ID is xxxxxxxxx
Your Friends' Key is yyyyyyyyy

Your friend's group number

In order to find your friend's group number, you should click on "Friends" at the top of the facebook page, and then select the friend list that you want from the menu on the left.

If you look at the URL in your browser it should look something like:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/friends/?filter=flp_zzzzzzzzzzzz

Putting it All Together

Ok, now we have three pieces of data:

• Your Facebook ID is xxxxxxxxx
• Your Friends' Key is yyyyyyyyy
• Your Facebook Friend's Group ID zzzzzzzzzzzz

Now, lets put it all together into a URL that gets you a feed of your friend's status:

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=xxxxxxxxx&key=yyyyyyyyyy&format=rss20&flid=zzzzzzzzzzzz

If you want all of your friend's statuses, just leave off the flid=zzzzzzzzzzzz portion of the URL.

Get a new Twitter Account

Ok, sign out of twitter, and create a new account - I call mine friends. You can see a picture of the twitter account settings that I use to the left. I describe each of the settings below:

1. Twitter Username - the username you will follow - as you can see it is friends - you can pick anything you want, it really doesn't matter.
   
   
2. Profile Name - I chose "Facebook" because it means that any time this user tweets, it shows up as coming from "Facebook" in my feed.
   
   
3. Profile Email - You can use a trick that I use all the time with gmail, which is that you can create a new email address by using <your-username>+<anystring>@gmail.com to create a new email address. It will get delivered to your regular gmail account.


4. Picture - I use the facebook icon as the picture for the account - again, this just helps show the icon in my feed when I get an update


5. Protect My Tweets - It is really important that you check this box. The reason its important is because under facebook, statuses are not open to all. If you don't check this box, your friends' statuses will become viewable to everyone in the world. Protect your friends - check this box.
   

Feed your account with TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed is a tool that allows you to post the contents of one or more RSS feeds to Twitter. Head on over to twitterfeed.com, and get an account (you can either use OpenID, or sign up there).

You'll be taken to your "Feed Dashboard", where you should select "Add a Feed".

The URL for the feed will be the URL you created above, the twitter account should be your new twitter account.

I also have my facebook notifications fed into this twitter account, so I get messages like "So-and-so just commented on your status."

Follow Your New Account

Ok, go back to twitter, and log out of your new account. Then you'll need to follow your new account from your regular account. Once you do this (you'll have to grant permission to follow), you're all set.

Any twitter client (including the twitter website), will now have your facebook friends' statuses and notifications.

Riding on the Assabet River Rail Trail

Connor's been riding his bike a lot lately, and he recently graduated away from training wheels.

We've been riding around the neighborhood quite a bit, but there's lots of traffic and lots of hills. I remember reading about the Assabet River Rail Trail a while ago, and had seen parts of it where it crossed various streets in town, but had never been on it.

The trail is planned to run from Marlborough to Acton - passing through Hudson, Maynard and Stow. Only the Marlborough and Hudson parts are finished right now, but its still 6 miles of paved trail.

We took off from Marlborough center and started toward Hudson, thinking we'd make it only a mile or two before turning around. But we ended up going all the way to Hudson center before turning around - 4.5 miles - or 9 miles round trip.

It was really amazing that such a beautiful area was hidden right through town - and so few people know about it. It even goes right under the highway. Anyone who lives near the ARRT should go and use it - walk, bike, take your dog for a walk or anything.

It was a really beautiful ride. I can't wait until we can go again. Next time we'll probably ride right from the house instead of driving to get there.

They're going to start construction again in 2013 - a long way off, but it will make a great ride all the way from Marlborough to Acton - much better than on a bunch of hilly roads.

Moving Megan to a Mac

Well, after a long run with a Windows laptop, Megan finally got sick of running Windows enough to want to deal with the switchover to a Mac.

So I found a MacBook on Craigslist for $500, and moved everything over.

There's a couple of things that I didn't know how to do in the past, and gave me a bit of trouble, so I figured I'd mention them here.

Moving Firefox Profiles

Instead of using bookmarks, Megan just uses the firefox smartbar to get to all her various websites.

It never occured to me that you wouldn't use bookmarks, but because she visits the same sites over and over again, the smartbar had everything she needed - history, bookmarks (those she did have) and search results.

In order to move the smartbar information - along with bookmarks, extensions, etc - we moved the entire firefox profile.

A quick google found this helpful forum post on exactly how to do this - something that was very easy to complete. Start up Firefox, and we had the smartbar working exactly as it was on Windows.

iTunes

Well, the only other thing (other than the browser) that Meg usually uses on her computer is iTunes. Moving it was a little more difficult.

She has songs from a long time ago that she had imported from CD, songs that she downloaded from the iTunes store, songs downloaded one-by-one from the internet and songs loaded from the Amazon MP3 store.

There's a fairly simple procedure that google turned up.

Hurry up and Wait

But this procedure assumes that you can have iTunes consolidate your library. In order to do that it needs extra space to be able to copy your songs to a single folder. This takes a long time, and requires a lot of disk space (aparently its a copy not a move).

So after cleaning out lots of space from the cramped 80gb drive, we successfully copied everything over.

When we attached her iPod again, it even recognized it - and even synced just the changed songs. The only problem is that it wasn't formatted for the Mac - so we had to restore the iPod and resync all the music.

So to transfer 30gb of music, we had to copy (not move) it to a different location on the old HDD (1+ hour), then copy it over the network (1.5+ hour), then completely resync the iPod (1.5+ hour). The only necessary step (IMHO) was the network copy. So that sort of was a waste of time.

Other than that the transition seemed to be fairly easy. Goodbye to Windows in my house. Yay!

I'll update you all in a few weeks to let you know how the adjustment from Windows to Mac has gone.

OSX and Apple-Tab

Ever since I bought a MacBook Pro, I've been trying to get used to OS-X.

I have never done well with the concept of multiple windows in an application - I've always thought of windows as top-level things. Which is why I don't like the default Apple-Tab behavior on OS-X (Switch between applications, but not windows within an application) -- Or the Apple-` behavior (toggle between windows in an application, not different apps).

After a bit of googling I found something that will probably help me get the most out of my Mac. Which by Many Tricks. Gives me back the behavior I want, and its mapped to Option-Tab, so its not too different than what I'm used to. Yay!

Making the ClearCase Remote Client (CCRC) Use a Real Merge Tool

I'm a Java developer (at least I occasionally write Java code), and most of the time the CleaseCase remote client running inside of Eclipse does everything I need for source code control.

The one complaint I have about CCRC in Eclipse is that it keeps using the old-looking and not very useful clearcase GUI for doing diffs and merges.

A few weeks ago someone pointed me to meld, a graphical gnome tool for doing merges and diffs. Meld works great, but I couldn't access it via clearcase - which is usually what I needed to do diffs.

So I wrote a script that can be used to modify the CCRC installation to use meld instead of the CCRC diff tool. It's available at:

http://employees.org/~mlepore/files/ccrc_meld

Note: as far as I know this works on Linux, and it might work on MacOS X, but I'm not sure how to make it work on Windows, because I think that Windows is looking for an .EXE file. Perhaps a batch file will work, but I haven't tried it.

Comparing IT Staffing to Basketball

The fastest way to lose respect is to put clueless managers in charge. Clueless managers equal clueless CIOs. Can you ever imagine Doc Rivers, coach of the 2008 world champion Boston Celtics, talking about player resources like they were interchangeable? "I need two guard resources." "I need a center resource." No. Talent and teamwork make winning teams. Talent matters. Don't pay lip-service to talent. Find a way to locate and use the talent in your organization. You will only be as good as the team you assemble.

From 9 Reason Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless

Attack of the Sticky Notes

A few months ago, a bunch of us at work moved out of our cubicals and into a bullpen. I went away for a mix of vacation and a conference - overall a great trip.

When I came back to work I found my workspace a little yellower than I left it.