Blogs can do everything Facebook or Twitter can do, though they lack the centralization. You have to manually go out and visit them to see what’s new, or use RSS, which isn’t exactly intuitive to less technical users. Blogs are, in their barest form, a reverse-chronological listing of postings. Those posts can be of any length, and contain any type of information. Plain text, images, audio, video, etc.. Some platforms, like WordPress and Tumblr, even offer features to differentiate between types of posts. Photo galleries? You can even do that if you set it up right. Profiles? That’s what About pages are for.

The only thing that’s missing is a standardized federation API that broadcasts information about a blog, linking them together so you can have user-friendly news feeds like Facebook or Twitter. The API would include basic profile information, such as your name and the URL of your chosen avatar, the URL of the blog, and anything else that a social networking would need to query.

Using that information, a user could skim through their friends’ latest updates from a convenient dashboard. It would pull in information from the federation API and aggregate public posts.

WordPress.com is already doing something along these lines, only it’s internal to their hosted service. You can “follow” a WordPress.com blog, and its posts end up in a news feed of sorts. Imagine if it became a part of the open source WordPress project as well, and any WordPress blog could be followed in the same way. And if it was later opened up and inter-operated with other platforms as well. You could even follow non-personal sites such as Smashing Magazine, much like you would a “fan page” on Facebook.

Just add remote replies, so you can comment on a post without traipsing over to the other user’s site, and you’ve got a social network. You could even have mobile apps. WordPress and Blogger have had XML-RPC APIs for a long time, and the WordPress team even made an iPhone app for on-the-go posting an comment moderation. Add the aggregation into the mix, and you basically have Twitter or Tumblr, but more open.

Given the extensibility of the more popular blogging platforms, WordPress especially, it wouldn’t be out of the question to handle it as a downloadable plugin. The idea would probably gain more traction if the Automattic team was on board, though, and integrated it with WordPress.com.

Forget Google Plus or Diaspora, the future is going to be even more open.

Joost de Valk has put together a good tutorial on how to fix that issue. It features code snippets that will load the widget JavaScript asynchronously, keeping the buttons from holding up the page loading. Also, it even adds Google Analytics and Clicky tracking so you can tell if people are actually using your buttons.

When Google released +1, I quickly identified how to track interaction with that button. The obvious “follow up” was questions from people on how to track interaction with other buttons. Not for each of these social buttons tracking of interaction is actually possible. It depends on how the button was designed whether this will work or not. I got it working for Twitter and Facebook, so I’ll share the code for tracking interaction with their respective social buttons below.

Social Buttons: Adding them to your site & Tracking them [Yoast]

It’s not well-documented, but the two social media sites have JSON APIs for that purpose.

• http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=THE_URL
• https://graph.facebook.com/THE_URL

With a little bit of jQuery magic, you can collect the values on page load and update the DOM with the number. Here’s something I threw together for a project I was working on:

(function() {

var url = 'http://xkcd.com/792/';

jQuery.getJSON("http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url="+url+"&callback=?", function(data) {
jQuery('#socialstuff span.twcount').html(data.count);
});

jQuery.getJSON("https://graph.facebook.com/"+url+"&callback=?", function(data) {
jQuery('#socialstuff span.fbcount').html(data.shares);
});

}());

As long as you remember to include jQuery, and have the right HTML elements for the JavaScript to populate, it’s pretty much plug-and-play.

You can see it in action here.

The good news is that there’s now an open-source bookmarklet that can scan your profile and recommend tweaks to lock-down your profile a bit, since Facebook’s privacy settings are so byzantine that few have the patience to wade through them. ReclaimPrivacy.org’s script runs a series of tests and gives you a convenient button to fix the problem if you so choose.

A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.

It sounds to me like they just patented a fairly obvious mechanism that has been long used by sites like Twitter, Digg, Reddit, RSS readers, blogs, etc..

Am I the only one who isn’t okay with this sort of patent-trolling behavior? Why does the USPTO keep letting these kinds of application through? It’s bad enough that Amazon is still fighting to have their one-click buying patent approved, and now we have another stupid patent that is just too obvious. Facebook is by no means the first website to have a “news feed,” and the idea is hardly patent-worthy.

Facebook Just Patented The Feed – What Does That Mean For Everyone That Uses Them? [TheNextWeb]

One night at a Hackathon a few years ago (see Prime Time Hack), I started my first piece of code transforming PHP into C++. The languages are fairly similar syntactically and C++ drastically outperforms PHP when it comes to both CPU and memory usage. Even PHP itself is written in C. We knew that it was impossible to successfully rewrite an entire codebase of this size by hand, but wondered what would happen if we built a system to do it programmatically.

Interesting, for sure. Imagine using it with WordPress for a high-traffic blog…

HipHop for PHP: Move Fast [Facebook Developer Blog]