Google has launched Friend Connect to perhaps aimed at a Global Social Network. Already thousands of sites have added the widgets and are using them.

While users are using the widgets and posting their activities, currently the FriendConnect System helps update these only on Orkut and Plaxo. It doesn’t provide either an RSS or a method to post these to other sites.

Well for users like me, who love to have all their web activities to be streamed this is a show stopper. Thankfully, we have the option of creating a Mashup to address this challenge.

Mashup in the context of web is defined as: “A web application or site mixing content from multiple sources”

So let’s get started. What you need are the following:

• A Yahoo Account for use with Yahoo Pipes, a mashup creating tool
• A Plaxo Account to capture the updates from Friend Connect
• And of course registrations on FriendConnect enabled sites

Here’s how you can do this in 9 steps:

Step 1: Open the FriendConnect Setting, add Plaxo and check “Publish my activities on other sites”. Click Done. This will enable your activities to be streamed to Plaxo and be visible on Plaxo pulse.

Step 2: Log in to the Plaxo site and navigate to http://www.plaxo.com/rss. Click on “Enable” next to option “Me” as shown below. This will activate a link. Copy the URL displayed.

Step 3: Log in to Yahoo Pipes and click on “Create pipe”

This will open up a Pipe Layout.

Step 4: Select Sources->Fetch Feed and in the URL add the URL copied from Plaxo.

Step 5: Select Operators->Filter, and connect the Fetch Feed to Filter as shown in the figure.

Step 6: Now Change the Settings on Filter to “Permit” items that match “all” of the following. Under Rules add “item.title” contains Friendconnect.

Step 7: Now link Filter to Pipe Output, as shown in the figure.

Step 8: Click save and voila! you have created your Mashup!

Step 9: On the Run Screen, click on Get as RSS, copy the RSS URL

That’s it… You have your RSS of FriendConnect activities. You can use this to feed it into FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Lifestream and any other tool which supports RSS import.

My preference is Twitterfeed.com feeding to Ping.fm, which updates lot of social networking sites at one go.

Get a flavor of how to get the web working for you? Welcome to Web 2.0.

Enjoy!

Popularity: 47%

If you haven’t heard of Twitter yet, it is social networking site, which lets you stay connected and network with people. It only allows short message of about 140 characters. These messages are usually referred to as Tweets.

If you want to know more about Twitter then give a reading about what it is on Wikipedia.

Now talking about Tweets, the standard way to add them is through the website by logging into the website. Tweet.im is a site which makes Twitter more usable and provides a time-saving interface, your Instant Messenger. While there was a direct option from Twitter to do this earlier, it is now disabled (indefinitely)

You can go to Tweet.im and register for the their service either with a Jabber account or a Google Talk account in just three steps. All you need to do is:

1. Provide your Twitter user name and password and the Google Talk or Jabber account you want to link with.
2. As soon as you register, you will be prompted in your Instant Messenger to add a friend names something like <Twitterusername>@Twitter.tweet.im
3. Accept the request and you are all set.

You can directly send a Instant message to this contact and it will be updated on Twitter for you. And should someone in your network post updates, they will directly come to you as a Instant message.

While there are other services like Ping.fm which let you update Twitter through IM, the difference with Tweet.im is that it returns the message posted by members of your network to the Instant Messenger.  Give this one a try, It is fun.

Image Copyright: Tweet.im

Popularity: 11%