Quickly following on from my previous post about realtime XMPP updates from wordpress.com:
For self-hosted WordPress blogs, there’s the Jabber Feed plugin, which promises something similar but is going to take me a while to set up. For something quick and simple, there’s the wp-sup plugin which “implements FriendFeed’s Simple Update Protocol. Your blog posts will appear on FriendFeed near-instantly after they are published.”
And indeed, they do. Even better, you can receive FriendFeed notifications via Google Talk/XMPP/Jabber, achieving pretty much what wordpress.com are offering via their IM bot.
FriendFeed is a decent social lifestreaming and messaging platform. There’s an iPhone interface, a FaceBook app; it allows for a little more engagement than Twitter with the ability to ‘like’ content and comment extensively (with no 140 character limit). I can see it being quite useful to aggregate and discuss course work. You can have private groups, too.
I’ve been trying to ‘hack’ ((I use the term ‘hack’ loosely. ‘Botch’ might be a better way of describing my approach to code.)) the plugin to also work for comments, but it’s beyond me. I’ve submitted an issue to the plugin’s Google Code site and, if it’s possible, maybe it will be possible in a future version.
Hoorah for the realtime web!