David Ziembicki on Infrastructure Architecture : Social Networking

Virtualization and Cloud Computing Real-time Feeds!

davidzi — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:26:33 GMT

As mentioned here and in a few other posts, I’ve been using Friendfeed and Twitter quite a bit over the last couple months. I’ve been extremely impressed with Friendfeed in particular. I’ve created two Friendfeed groups that I’ve been posting content to in addition to my main feed. The groups are:

Microsoft Virtualization

Cloud Infrastructure

Their focus is self explanatory but consist of posts, comments, etc. from a variety of sources that I find relevant to each of those topics. The feeds also include posts from the relevant categories from this blog. Please join these groups if you have interest in these areas.

While these feeds are available over on the Friendfeed website, I’m also leveraging a feature they just rolled out around real-time search. If you scroll down the sidebar in my blog, you will see links to two new pages I’ve added:

Virtualization

http://blogs.technet.com/davidzi/pages/virtualization.aspx

Cloud Infrastructure

http://blogs.technet.com/davidzi/pages/cloud-infrastructure.aspx

These pages embed Friendfeed real-time searches scoped to the groups I created and will therefore update in real-time whenever I post or share new content to the group. If you want a wider scope in your results, take out the group: tag and put in any keyword you want such as “virtualization” and you will get updating results each time someone posts something to Friendfeed with that term.

For folks with similar interests, I think these feeds will be valuable as my goal is to highlight the top couple of articles, posts, etc that I come across each day out of the 50 – 100 that I read. Enjoy!

Social Bookmarking: How to know where to go…

davidzi — Sat, 16 May 2009 19:15:47 GMT

Continuing the foray into social networking I started on a couple weeks ago, today’s topic is social bookmarking. For those who are even later to the game than I am, social bookmarking is basically a site or service that lets you tag and store your website bookmarks in a central location that is accessible from any browser while also publishing your bookmarks for others to see. Advanced services let you publish your bookmarks as an RSS feed so that others can subscribe and be notified when you bookmark something. Delicious.com is the most well know of these and provides even more features like being able to subscribe to feeds based on tags so that you get a stream of all new bookmarks using one or more tags. An example would be creating a subscription for the tag “Hyper-V” where you would then see a list of all bookmarks created where someone added the Hyper-V tag. You can also use these services to see and follow what others are bookmarking, a good way to see what influentials in your area find interesting.

Lesser known than Delicious but utilized by nearly two million people are the TechNet and MSDN social bookmarking sites. Like nearly all Microsoft web properties, after an initial burst of coverage when launched, there is usually minimal follow-up coverage (hopefully that changes this summer…) so unless you caught the original announcements you may not be aware of these sites.

For a thorough introduction and steps to get started, check out this post over on Technically Speaking.

For my purposes, I will be using both Delicious and TechNet for social bookmarking. I’ll keep the TechNet list focused on the deeper, more informational bookmarks on technical topics. As with everything else I’m doing online, I will be bringing these bookmark feeds into Friendfeed which I’m using as a hub for all of my online activities.

For the bookmarks only, you can find me at these locations (RSS feeds available there as well):

TechNet Social Bookmarks: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Profile/en-US/?user=davidzi

Delicious: http://delicious.com/davidzi

Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed in One Client with .NET!

davidzi — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:56:15 GMT

So I’ve been using Seesmic Desktop as a Twitter and Facebook client for the last week or two. Very cool app built on Adobe Air. Today via @EverythingMS I heard about sobees, a .NET app that aggregates Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed (yeah!), and many other sources. I’ve only just started using it in the last hour but it looks very slick. In addition to bringing in a bunch of networks, it really shows off .NET/WPF and what you can do with UI design. It supports full Aero transparency, the ability to zoom text sizes in and out, multi-monitor support and a bunch of other UI niceties. There are several color themes available and a wide range of layout options for arranging the services. As an FYI it seems to run fine so far on my Windows 7 RC installation.

I don’t know anything about the makers of the software yet so other than pointing out that it looks like a cool beta implementation your mileage may vary.

Below you can see a screenshot of three services (you can add in more) updating in real-time (Note: I blanked out some of the Facebook status on purpose). Definitely worth checking out. They also have a video up if you wan to see it in action.

Facebook for Windows Mobile

davidzi — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:33:13 GMT

Microsoft has released Facebook for Windows Mobile. The application provides the following features:

Send messages to any of the people in your Friends list.
Take pictures and videos on your phone, then upload them right to Facebook.
Send messages or call people in your Friends list.
Manage your profile and post anytime, anywhere.

MobilityMinded has a very detailed step-by-step guide to the applications with lots of screenshots:

Image Credit: MobilityMinded.com

Facebook via Silverlight and WPF

davidzi — Sun, 03 May 2009 16:43:29 GMT

There was a lot of buzz last week with Facebook’s Open Stream API announcement. There were many demos of applications leveraging the new API, one good one is Seesmic Desktop which I’ve been using as my Twitter client and now has Facebook integration. It's an Adobe AIR based application. On the home front, Microsoft took part in the Facebook event and showed off some very slick Silverlight and WPF clients leveraging the Facebook API. Both were technology demonstrations created in 72 hours by two teams of 3 developers. This post over on Team Silverlight has the details and a bunch of screenshots. In their Twitter stream they say that they will be publishing the source code for these very soon. Below is a TechCrunch video showing them in action.