I'm a frequent user of many so called "Web 2.0" services. Lately I've been spending most of my time in Facebook, a social networking site. Some of you non RSS-subscribers might have noticed my Facebook presence banner in the right column of my site. Facebook is not as music oriented as MySpace, and people can't go crazy and personalize the HTML with animated gifs and magenta backgrounds, so things looks way "cleaner" and more organized in Facebook than in MySpace. On the other hand, Facebook isn't as "serious" as LinkedIn (where I'm also listed), and it has some cool features for organizing events, managing groups and so fourth. But the main reason I'm using Facebook is that it's wildly popular in Norway, and particularly at the Norwegian University of Technology and Science. At the moment the NTNU network on Facebook have 9525 members, and it's spreading faster than any Internet worm I've seen.
One of the nice things about Facebook is that it can import your blog (or any other RSS feed). How ever, the import feature is limited to only one feed. By using Yahoo Pipes you can avoid this limitation.
Another great "Web 2.0" service I've been using for quite some time is Flickr, which I assume won't need any further introduction. Flickr, as many other of these new and cool online services have some open APIs and cool ways to integrate. One of the things both me and Hege are doing is using Flickr as a mobile photo blog. The way it works is that you sign in to your Flickr profile, and go to their upload tools page, and click on the link "upload pictures by e-mail".
On this page you get a auto generated "obfuscated" e-mail address you can use to send pictures to your Flickr account. You can also configure which tags Flickr should apply to any pictures received on this address. So I've configured Flickr to tag any pictures received by e-mail with "mobile". The subject of the email message becomes the title, and the body of the message becomes the subscription. So the next thing you do is to bring up your tags page and click the "mobile" tag, and then the "feed icon" to bring up an RSS feed with all your pictures tagged with mobile. This is essentially your "mobile blog".
Earlier this year Yahoo released a really cool and innovative Web 2.0 service called Yahoo Pipes. You can look at this as simple "drag and drop mash up tool" that comes with a set of "building blocks" (or pipes if you want) that you can connect together to spit out some kind of functionality. It lets you combine a wide range of services such as RSS, maps, feeds, searches and so fourth to create your own customized mash up. I haven't blogged about Yahoo Pipes before because I haven't found any cool scenarios where I could use it… Until now!
So I have my Flickr Mobile Blog feed, and I have my primary blog feed coming from this site (well, it's actually hosted by Feedburner but that's a different story). What you can do next is to use Yahoo Pipes to create one "master feed" which merges your Flickr mobile feed with your primary blog feed. To do this I used two "Fetch Feed" pipes, one "Union" to combine the two feeds, one "Sort" to sort the new feed on pubDate, and finally everything get's piped to out.
Once you have the pipe up and running all you have to do is sign into your Facebook account, go to the notes section and click "blog import settings", and import the Feed exposed by your Yahoo Pipe.
It literally took me 5 minutes to create a Yahoo Pipe merging my Flickr mobile feed with my main blog feed and import the end result into Facebook. Now that's painless integration!