friendfeed continues to prove the value of a lifestream over simple microblogging like twitter. my list of internet friends is still stored on twitter. friendfeed is of no help in getting the list migrated. after weeks of hoping someone else would do it, i made a ruby script to at least give the twitter usernames that are not showing up in the friendfeed friend list.

Here is the output of a run of the script:

donp@donp-desktop:~/Documents/Code/ruby$ ruby twitter_friendfeed_sync.rb donpdonp password
twitter user 'donpdonp: 143 loaded
friendfeed user 'donpdonp': 39 loaded

 117 friends on twitter that are not on friendfeed: adamd,agavebee,agualadie,aileen_jeffries,akfarrell,
amyrsward,anna_atwell,annanten,anselm,apavka,arouse,
barackobama,barcampportland,bkajino,bobuva,brampitoyo,
bryanstearns,campd,cfisk,cheekyboots,chengus,chrisorourke,
cleverlemming,ctb,davidhoenig,dietrich,dodeja,donpdonp2,
drewish,dreww,ekki,elainajoy,emailstine,ericcurtis,eroi,
expatrick,firebot,frenchlover,ginabean,hashtags,hnordeen,
igniteportland,jennifercloer,jimblandy,jmartens,jnyp32,
johnweiss,jtkeith,kamarama,katiewyoming,kittenchicken,
kmikeym,lilbutterfly,lucassheehan,luckymike,lyzadanger,
maestrojed,manimal,mariadeathstar,martinwehner,matasar,
mattking,mattpdx,missburrows,mnology,morabbin,mtrichardson,
nathanpbell,nprpolitics,oleoptene,oregoniansteve,
patrickmotorrad,pdxbenjamin,pixelmatrix,privateaye,
rachkj,rael,rcoder,reidab,ryansnyder,sadiemedley,
salmagundia,samkeen,sarkenobi,sashab,scasso,schwern
,seeger,selenamarie,serafaery,sfearthquakes,sharong
,skkeith,slyness,smb,soda241,spinnerin,stadler,subbit,
teejayvanslyke,tiesque,timoreilly,toffermann,tomwsmf,
tweetip,twigz,twitstat,tylerincmyk,tywbooth,veronica,
waxpancake,wayne_rowe,webframp,writeinmovement,xolotl,
yuetsu,zbskii

 13 friends on friendfeed that are not on twitter: bleything,caleb,corourke,dion,greggspiridellis,jaacob,
kenefsky,lyza,marshallk,reid,selena,seths,veronicabelmont

thats a good start. the friendfeed API has no mechanism to manage the friend list so the script cannot actually add the missing users. id like the script to check for the existance of the username on friendfeed to skip the twitter users with no corresponding friendfeed account.

XFN based sync

what if the sync was not username based? what if it was based on the XFN me-cloud?

twitter.com/johndoe -[me link]-> myblog.com -[me link]-> friendfeed.com/jdoe

that would work much better. in fact, friendfeed could skip the whole service-management parts and spider from a single url (preferrably their openid url) to find services. though its currently difficult to manage your services by editing HTML than using the friendfeed interface.