This content originally appeared on Modern Web Development with Chrome and was authored by Paul Kinlan
<p>I have been beavering away at a lot of social network API's recently which lead me first to Twitter's API and then onto FriendFeed's API. I really like FriendFeed's API, it is very meticulous in the data it aggregates and makes available to developers.</p> <p>So after a couple of hours playing with the API I endeavoured on my first major project with FriendFeed. I named the project <strong><a href="http://www.frienddeck.com">FriendDeck</a></strong>, the basic premise is that there is no similar tool available for FriendFeed that works like TweetDeck.</p> <p>FriendDeck is entirely hosted on the <strong>Google App Engine</strong> and in the most part is entirely UI driven through liberal use of <strong>jQuery</strong>.</p> <p>The main problem that I have with FriendFeed is that you see all your friends posts, which is great in the most part, but I want to be able to see posts on the general topics that I am interested in as they occur around the world. So FriendDeck's first focus is to allow you to search FriendFeed and always be up-to date on the topics you are interested without ever leaving the browser or refreshing the page.</p> <p>You get an ever refreshing view on the parts of the real-time web that you are interested in, and not what all your friends are interested in.</p> <p>A great example of its use was described by <a href="http://friendfeed.com/neville">Neville Hobson</a>, where he was tracking the real-time web using FriendDeck with regards to the US Airways Crash into the Hudson river. His screen-shot of his Deck can be seen <a href="http://i.friendfeed.com/3db96c3806e0efcc683d3cfa98803d7f612b2aef">here</a></p> <p>I made the decision early on that I wanted as much of the User Interaction to be done through the Query box so I designed a very basic language to support multiple types of queries.</p> <p>The most basic query is a general topic search and this can be achieved by typing any text into the Query box.</p> <p>You can post to FriendFeed from FriendDeck, (if you are logged in) by stating the command <strong>say:here is my comment</strong>.</p> <p>You can also view a list of a user’s likes by using the query <strong>likes:{username}</strong> for example <strong>likes:kinlan</strong>, you can also see a users comments by typing <strong>comments:{username}</strong> in the query box. A user’s friends can be obtained by querying <strong>friends:{username}</strong>. A list of posts relating to a URL can be found by using the query <strong>url:{url}</strong> (so <strong>url:www.frienddeck.com</strong>) and likewise a list of posts about a domain can be found using the query <strong>domain:{domain}</strong>. If you are associated with a room you can view all the latest posts by using the command <strong>rooms:{roomname},</strong> for example<strong> rooms:frienddeck</strong> </p><p>Every minute each of your decks will auto refresh (I fixed a bug tonight that was causing them not to refresh correctly) so you will always get the latest information. </p><p>A few new features will be available soon, such as inline commenting. You can currently see a list of all the comments by clicking on the comments count. Your comments being highlighted red. </p><p>I am always keen to hear peoples comments so please feel free to get in contact.</p> <p> </p> <p>FriendDeck: <a href="http://www.frienddeck.com">www.frienddeck.com</a></p> <p> </p> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; float: none; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">A Topical Search Engine Tags: <a href="http://www.atopical.com/FriendDeck" rel="tag">FriendDeck</a>, <a href="http://www.atopical.com/FriendFeed" rel="tag">FriendFeed</a>, <a href="http://www.atopical.com/Google%20App%20Engine" rel="tag">Google App Engine</a>, <a href="http://www.atopical.com/GAE" rel="tag">GAE</a>, <a href="http://www.atopical.com/jQuery" rel="tag">jQuery</a>
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This content originally appeared on Modern Web Development with Chrome and was authored by Paul Kinlan
