Six months ago I started a new job at RevenueWire.  A new employer and a new chance to get my hands dirty (if you cansay that while working for a company that does all of its work at a computer keyboard.  After working at the university and spending a lot of time up to my elbows in legal work I was ready for something that provided a little more opportunity to own a project and carry it through to completion.  So it's time for a reflection.  Six months in to working for an affiliate network specializing in downloadable security products and what do I have to show for it.

Well, there has been a lot of learning going on.  I can say that.  Despite being a technical person, learning about affiliate marketing has been a consuming task.  And being as it is a changing beast I'll certainly be learning about it for the next six months as well.  It really has occurred to me that being an affiliate marketer means being someone who understands both the techniques of marketing and also the technical aspects of the being an online publisher as well.

One of the projects which I have been most involved in is working on www.constant-content.com a site that draws together Freelance Writers and people seeking well-written unique and unindexed content for their websites.  The site has a great community around it, they seem to be keen on the changes that we're bringing to the site.  We're starting to build momentum and I think it's on its way to becoming THE place to purchase articles online

All in all it's been great to be able to get into something new and even though climbing through yet another learning curve isn't the easiest thing, I'm pleased to be on this path. For now...

Problem: I live in Canada (and Canadian's love Facebook), no matter how awesome Identi.ca, Twitter or any of the other microblogging services are most of my friends still use facebook, nearly exclusively. I like my friends, I want to know what's up with them, however I don't want to login to facebook 5,10,20 times a day to see what's up.

Wouldn't it be great if Facebook status updates could funnelled into status updates into my Gtalk/XMPP/Jabber or any other instant messenger.  But how... Googling around didn't turn anything useful up.  I was stuck, I got an RSS Feed from Facebook and resigned myself to reading it occasionally. Then iafter reading a ReadWriteWeb Article on notifixio.us I started thinking it may be possible to feed notifixio.us the facebook RSS feed and get IM facebook status updates that way. Unfortunately, notifixious is dealing with a problem regarding Facebook RSS feeds, however, in my travels I discovered that FriendFeed could rebroadcast the RSS feed and Facebook status updates via IM possible!

Notifixio.us + FriendFeed - Helping Facebook Instant Message

Notifixio.us is a service that polls RSS feeds and sends the updates to you via GTalk/XMPP. So generally you could just plug in the rss feed that you get from Facebook and bingo, bango, bongo you'd have Facebook updates coming to you via IM, but there's a problem that stops that from working at the moment. So it's time to introduce FriendFeed. While FriendFeed is generally used to consolidate one's online posting activity so that friends can stalk (I mean, keep up with) all your online activity in one RSS feed, however, with a little encouragement we can use FriendFeed to re-broadcast the Facebook RSS feed in a form that Notifixio.us likes :). [Update 2009-02-16: There's something funny with either friendfeed's news feed or else notifixio.us it seems that I only tend to get a portion of the status updates. Not all status updates come through]

Here's how:

1. Log in to Facebook
2. Click on the Friends Section in the Top Navigation
3. Find the "Friends' Status Feed" on the Left of the Page
4. Copy the link location to the clipboard
5. go to FriendFeed and get a new account. We need a new account because we don't want this account to be crowded up with all the personal stuff that generally gets collected in FriendFeed.
6. After you've worked through the registration process, Click Add/Edit Services (it's on the right)
7. Click See All 59 services at the bottom of the screen
8. Click on "Custom RSS/Atom" (it's under Miscellaneous)
9. Enter the URL for your facebook status updates RSS and click "Import Custom RSS/Atom"
10. Go to your FreindFeed homepage and get the RSS feed link address for that page (It's way at the bottom)
11. Go to Notifixio.us and register
12. Go to "Settings" and work your way through the Gtalk/XMPP setup process
13. Click "Add Source" and paste in the Friends' Status Feed Url that we copied out of FriendFeed And Click "Go"
14. Choose how you'd like to be notified, for me it's my Gtalk/XMPP username
15. A confirmation IM immediately saying that updates will be coming soon

That's it! Facebook updates by IM. Wait patiently for one of your friends to post some banal detail of their daily life and enjoy reading about in close to real-time via your favorite IM protocal!

What about Other Status/Microblog Services

Identi.ca Works with Gtalk/XMPP/Jabber out of the Box

One thing that I really like about identi.ca is that you CAN send and receive updates from your people through Gtalk/XMPP/Jabber. This is great, because you can have updates from your friends, or followers coming into your life in real time. It is so handy when you're at an event and people are sending updates about not just life changing thoughts, but activities that are happening at the time. This is great, my same old Gtalk chat application all the identi.ca updates streaming in, realtime. Awesome!

Twitter can work with Gtalk/XMPP/Jabber with some Fiddling

I searched around for a way to do this with twitter. And sure enough tweet.im is offering a similar service. You can sign up with them, hand over your twitter username and password. (ugh, ouch! who are these guys anyways? But so far so good haven't seen any rogue posts yet.) and then just like identi.ca does out of the box updates from your twitter friends start flowing into your Gtalk/XMPP/Jabber instant messenger. It's great requires no special apps, only downside is handing over those login credentials. At this point I consider this a necessary evil. Message to twitter: seize the future start making Instant messenger Support Native to your platform. Please!

Technical Reflections on Polling (skip if not interested)

RSS has one really big flaw, you have to poll the server to see if anything new is there.  This means that every RSS feed you subscribe to means that a computer now has to poll that site to see if there is anything new there.  Which is no big deal if you've just got a few subscribers, but if you've got tons like twitter, you're servers are getting polled ALL THE TIME, so we're eating up band width to find out if anything is new on the site.  This is at least one reason why twitter's fail whale is so well known.  That's a lot of requests all the time, twitter limits polling to once a minute, jsut to keep their servers noses above water. XMPP is the future, this is a good first step.

CBC Radio is a staple for most Canadians. And beyond listening to CBC, just so that you can say "I heard it on the CBC" thereby invoking the Canadian equivalent of "this is gospel truth" they do put together some really great shows.

Payback is both a book and a Massey Lecture Series that CBC put on with Margaret Atwood (or perhaps it was vice versa). I happened upon it listening on the radio show as I was making a late night delivery to a friend from church. As near as I can tell the lectures are simply Margaret Atwood reading the book. Which makes both the book interesting as it has a strong conversational tone and the radio lecture interesting because it is well thought out and structured.

The book covers quite a bit of ground, looking through the aspects of the debt and creditor relationship as they stretch back in time and relay how this framework is only really possible because humans have a sense of fairness and are living as a society where relationships are a necessary part of our daily lives. It then stretches into looking at how debt and sin are related and how sinfulness has been extended to relate to both the creditor and debtor. The idea that debt is only possible because memory is possible is opened up and poked and prodded and found that indeed debt really can't exist with out memory (or accounting and ledgers).

Debt as a plot line is explored. This is a brilliant, if partially borrowed from Eric Berne, piece of work laying out how many of us are using Debt as a way to spice up our lives. In many cases, Debt may be used to add the story to the passing days of our lives. The subject is then spun out to a more national scale with some explanation of Taxes and how national debt works.

The book finishes in a somewhat dramatic twist by looking in upon the way that we as humans are in-debt to the Earth and how we are on line for some terrible times ahead should we consider to borrow on the large but diminishing reserves of Mother Nature Represented by the Spirit of Earth Day. When Mother Nature comes to collect you don't want to be the one that answers the door.

Through all this Atwood has woven the stories of Doctor Faust, Ebenezer Scrooge (who gets a big role), Shylock (from The Merchant of Venice) and a variety of other classic pieces of literature which act as expected to glue together and fill out the presented ideas. Atwood touches in the church and Jesus and where they seem to fit in the story, interestingly pointing out that the church has really been focusing on the sexual sins lately and has let what used to be equally significant finance related sins pass away. She also presents an alternate scenario for 9/11 where the American's choose forgiveness of the terrorists rather than revenge. (I've often wondered if the amount of money that has been pumped into the war efforts had been pumped into building up educational and infrastructure resources in Afghanistan and Iraq what would have happened in the ensuing years. I recognize that doing that kind of development would not be easy/possible in a hostile environment but it represents a different goal and I feel a better tactic.)

Both the Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth book and radio presentation are engaging and well worth the time.  While I can't speak to how well it agrees (or disagrees) with modern thought on debt, the book ties together a lot of strings to provide a cohesive and well thought out (not to mention Canadian flavoured) look at the subject.