The posts have been sparse for the last couple of weeks for three main reasons:
- Life isn’t blogging. This will surprise some of my co-workers. I had 11 days off from work, during which time we had about 35 extended family members celebrating Christmas in our home and had our college students home. When you’ve got all that real life happening, virtual connections via social networks take a back seat.
- I’ve been switching computers, from a Macintosh PowerBook G4 to a MacBook Pro. I expect to be writing about that soon (the process has been great, and I love the new laptop), but it’s taken some time to be sure I have all of the files synchronized. It’s been a good chance to do some digital file hygiene, and get rid of files that had built up over the last three years or so.
- Netflix. While we also patronized our local cinema, including 10 of us catching the Enchanted matinee on Christmas Eve (I also took my bride to National Treasure: Book of Secrets and my youngest to Alvin and the Chipmunks), by far the biggest consumer of our family leisure time was Netflix, both in the DVD methodology and through the “Watch Instantly” feature.
That’s why I was excited to see the development of a Netflix Application for Facebook (hat tip: Anthony LaFauce) that puts the movies you’re watching and the movies in your queue on your Facebook profile.
Read Anthony’s review for fuller details, but I installed it and it’s pretty nifty. It’s one more example of Facebook being a platform that can integrate feeds from your various web activities in one place.
Some people complain about Facebook being a walled garden, and that you can get data in but can’t export it. Some kinds of export and feeds have happened, but mainly Facebook is taking the Apple approach: engineer such a great experience that people will want to use it as the integration point (like iTunes and the iPod) because it’s so easy.
Compared to the vaporware of Google’s OpenSocial, I think it’s a winning strategy for social networking.