An interesting project — Hackers for Charity — started by Johnny Long.

Short summary: people in technology donate their time and skills to charity in return for 1) gratification from giving back, and 2) references from industry professionals.

Here’s a microcast with Johnny done by Martin Mckeay:

Links

[ Hackers for Charity | hackersforcharity.org ]
[ Hackers for Charity Microcast | mckeay.net ]

FriendFeed is a relatively new service designed to let you stay in contact with your friends in a more complete way than other services. Twitter is an excellent service because it allows one to microblog and push updates via sms, but this doesn’t show your friends everything you’re doing.

Someone wanting to follow your blog posts, your Twitter updates, Picasa/Flikr photos, or your Amazon wishlists would have to add those things separately.

FriendFeed solves this problem by consolidating updates from all these places (and many more) into a single interface. It’s basically a better way of doing what you’re already doing online, i.e. following the lives of your friends on the Internet.

Just go to FriendFeed, sign up, and add the services that you use, e.g. your blog, your FaceBook, your MySpace, your Twitter account, your Google Shared items, your Picasa/Flikr account, etc. Once you’ve added your accounts, you can continue using those various services like usual, but when update one of those services FriendFeed will update as well.

So there are really two steps to enhancing your connection to your friends via FriendFeed:

1. Get your friends to create FriendFeed accounts and add their various services to it. This way you can follow them.
2. Make your own FriendFeed account and add your services to it. This way they can follow you.

Example

Here are the services I have in my own FriendFeed:

• My Blog
• Twitter
• Google Shared Items (shared links)
• Google Picasa (photos)
• My Amazon Wish List

So all someone has to do to keep up with me is subscribe to my FriendFeed feed, not to all those different services. Not only that, but it also has a full vote-up and comment system where people can give input on the content you publish.

It’s an extremely powerful platform for staying in touch with friends regardless of what types of social networks they use. Have a go.

Links

[ FriendFeed ]
[ Twitter ]