At the start of month, FriendFeed introduced publishing of FriendFeed entries to Twitter. While this is no amazing feat from a technical perspective, it is great to see this rolled up inside the FriendFeed package and not being handled by an outside web service. With this feature, unique content posted to FriendFeed (such as ‘comments’ and ‘likes’) or anything collected by FriendFeed can be easily shared with the Twitter community.

This feature can be found in the account page under Feed Publishing. Once enabled you will be prompted to enter your Twitter username and password and then a number of options are displayed including selecting the type of FriendFeed entries and posts from services to be published.

Setup is quick and provides the initial options I was looking for, however, I was surprised to find that Feed Publishing only includes promoting activity on Twitter. While I haven’t seen plans for the future of this functionality, I hope to see this built out for other microblogs and platforms, including my WordPress blog!

If you’re not on FriendFeed but are still looking to promote posts from other services to Twitter, you may want to check out http://www.twitterfeed.com.

This Tuesday, the eyes of the world will be focused on the U.S. election. Whatever the outcome, history will be made. There are a number of ways you can watch coverage of and participate in the election. First and foremost, you can vote and watch coverage on TV. But did you also know that there are options for following along with the election on your favorite microblogging platforms? No longer do you have to wait hours or days for the political pundits and bloggers to say their bit. Microblogging makes feedback on election day nearly instantaneous.

We’ve highlighted what we see as the main sources for microblogging election coverage:
(If you know of another good source, please leave a comment below).

socialmedian

This aggregation platform will be pulling in all kinds of media from Tweets to blog posts to Flickr photos. They’ll widgetize all the updates they find and feature them on websites such as washingtonpost.com, guardian.co.uk, and mediadeluge.com.

If you’re more interested in watching instead of participating, you can also view the entire socialmedian feed or filter it out by candidate or view a feed for the poll information. In Digg-like fashion, they support both popular news and the up-and-coming news.

Twitter

This component has been well-known and live for a while now, but Twitter has their own election center. The main feature of the center include a scrolling view of election-related tweets.

Twitter also allows you to filter tweets by presidential and vice presidential candidate, as well as view the latest tweet from the two main presidential candidates. There’s also an area where it shows the hot topics of the election.

FriendFeed

While it doesn’t really fall under the realm of microblogging, it does a great job of aggregating information from a wide array of sources, including microblogs. This looks to be limited to only those who are actually members of the room, which is currently only 10 people.

FriendFeed also only shows you a limited network of people, so it might actually be more pertinent to what your friends are saying rather than what everyone is saying.

TwitterVoteReport

A more proactive solution is TwitterVoteReport. This tool allows you to interface with Twitter in order to give aid and insight to other users who are having difficulty in voting. Some of the suggested functions are warning users of long lines or broken machines, as well as giving an indication of the overall voting experience.

TwitterVoteReport is meant to be a geographically-confined service so you can pinpoint what’s going on in your area. You can send in tweets (by use of #votereport), SMS, or voice mail messages. There are also iPhone and Android applications (user participation guide).

Your Network of Choice

The source for the most relevant info to you will be whatever microblogging platform you choose to use. There will be no shortage of election related material, so just listen in. You can also participate in election debates and discussions with other users you’re friends with. Sending tips about line lengths, tech issues and your overall experience.

There are plenty of options if you choose not to watch TV. The above are just cases of microblogging coverage, but there will also be an influx of blog posts and web content.

In case you hadn’t noticed, today is Halloween. Holidays are typically a time when websites all over the world deploy a special theme to their website for that day. Google is the leading example, changing its logo hundreds of times a year. So what are the microblogging networks doing for Halloween?

In short, not much. I searched around this morning and couldn’t find a whole lot of change for today’s events. I did find that both Twitter and FriendFeed are participating on some level, but no other networks have joined the fun. FriendFeed has changed its logo, and Twitter is allowing special Halloween-themed characters in tweets. First, FriendFeed’s logo:

Here’s a map of the special characters you can use on Twitter, as seen on thenextweb.org:

Holidays are a time of celebration and having fun. I’d really like to see more microblogs participate in festivities like this. Here’s to hoping future holidays will be more festive.

FriendFeed has a wealth of information crossing its public timeline each day. There are already methods in place to use the API to search for specific terms, but they’ve now added the ability to search on a domain or specific link. That makes it really trivial to build a daily digest of users who mention your website.

Developers can call the API in a few ways - either using CURL or reading the response directly into a variable. The response comes back in JSON form and there’s no option to have it come back as any other format. If you’re using PHP and have JSON libraries installed, you can do something like the following:

$response_array = json_decode($response, true);

Add true as the second argument to get the method to return an associate array, making it much easier to parse the response. The resulting array contains all the pertinent information you’d want to know about people mentioning links to your site, including publish time, the publishing user, the link they posted, all the comments and likes about the post, etc.

In a little under 45 minutes, I was able to create a daily digest for all links that point to microblink.com and all posts that mention microblink. The final step is to set it up in cron so it runs on a periodic basis. All results get emailed to anyone you want.

This is simple, useful way of tracking who’s talking about your website. There are certainly other ways to track that, such as Social Mention, but FriendFeed is another resource you can tap.

Microblink’s very own Mark Bockenstedt has been hard at work to provide football fans on Twitter and FriendFeed with a quick and simple way to get the final scores of every game this season. During week one of its release there were a few bugs that had to be worked out, but now his NFL scorebot has been tweaked and should be set for the rest of the season.

To be updated on game scores follow @nflscorebot on Twitter and nflscorebot on FriendFeed.

For more on the NFL scorebot and Mark’s other projects you can follow his personal blog.