The fall of FriendFeed

A long time ago, I mentioned in this blog that I really liked the idea of FriendFeed as a hub for people's activities online that was both open and semi-extensible. Unfortunately it was probably a little too complex for most people and it never really caught up with the masses and was eventually acquired by Facebook.

After the acquisition there was a mass exodus from people adding content directly to FriendFeed, but I could still follow must of the people that I liked to follow there, because of the "hub" effect. I couldn't follow the discussions anymore, but there was still something out there to see.

Well, tonight a new nail was added to the FriendFeed coffin: it was down and has been down for at least 45 minutes (I tried to access it 45 minutes ago and it was down and, as far as I can tell, it's still down). I'm getting a great message:

500 Internal Server Error
nginx/0.6.34

Not good at all...

Actually I'm really tired of all this "news push" technologies. I have even stopped reading regularly my RSS readers. I don't access Twitter or Facebook. I at least read my emails, but haven't been very good at replying to them.

So you might ask what I've been doing with all this extra free time on my hands? My blog hasn't been the one receiving all of it, so what is it? To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure. I've been working until reasonably late, dealing with wedding stuff, sometimes playing some video game at night (as "my" PS3 is going to stop being mine on Tuesday).

Other things I've been doing is struggling with OpenEmbedded... I don't even want to start on this one. It has been a very painful process to just get to build a distribution with the developer libraries of OpenCV for my BeagleBoard. It's one of the hard things of working with a reasonably fast moving open source project: the main documentation that are the user discussions all seem to refer to previous versions, because their suggestions don't seem to work for me. And I'm really learning to despise Windows 7. If they call this the best Windows yet, those Microsoft people are keeping their bar quite low to allow for even better OSs in the future.