Yesterday, the team over at FriendFeed made a radical move to their popular website, friendfeed.com. They turned the website into a giant river of ever-flowing information. For those of us who are familiar with the term, “real-time web”, we saw this as a positive step towards it becoming a reality. I’ve already blogged about ways to truly harness the power of real-time FriendFeed, and this new beta emboldens my tips. While there is much controversy on the implementation of the feature, I found myself enthralled by something else they added: filters.

As many have realized, FriendFeed provides a rich source of information for all kinds of interests. Since it aggregates data from social services which originate from all over the web, there is little that you can’t find on FriendFeed. Now with filters, FriendFeed has empowered us to save powerful queries for later usage. While these filters are not real-time like other parts of the site, they will be eventually (and what a day that will be)

Here’s my video walkthrough of the FriendFeed beta:

What is a FriendFeed filter? My loose definition is that it’s a set of defined criteria configured by the user in order to obtain desired data from FriendFeed. The criteria looks like the following:

• Name – This is the desired name of the FriendFeed Filter
• Include entries from – This is the source of the data you wish filter. The choices are all friendFeed users, your friend and group subscriptions, a specific pre-defined friendfeed list of friends/groups, and names of friendfeed users and groups.
• Keyword/quality filters – This is the filter criteria of the source data. There are several fields to utilize, but it should be noted that the “contain the words” field can utilize any FriendFeed search query string. I’ll explain later.

I found myself playing with these filters for most of the day yesterday and had a blast. I want to share with you some of the more powerful ones, but before I do, I will tell you the best way to create new filters. The basic steps are fairly straight forward:

1. Perform a search on the beta FriendFeed site – First, go here: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search/advanced and fill in the desired criteria. Perform the search and massage the search as needed. Some searches can be improved by updating the number of required comments and likes, so play with that a little bit.
2. Save the search as a filter – After a search is performed, you’ll notice a link that reads “make a filter”
   
   
   Click the “make a filter” link
3. Update the filter name and adjust as needed – Change the filter name to something more descriptive than the default text. Click Save filter to commit the filter
   
   
   

This is a basic, yet powerful approach to creating filters. Once you become more advanced, you’ll recognize the search syntax and perform boolean operands. Here are some of my favorite FriendFeed searches that you can save as filters by using the technique above. I’ll start with the search string, explain what it means, and provide a hyperlink (note: most of these search ALL of FriendFeed:

• Name: The FriendFeed Team
  
  Search String: comments:5 likes:5 from:tudor, bgolub, ana, gburd, kfury, jim, casey, sanjeev, paul, bret, dhsiao
  
  Meaning: Searches for all entries by the FriendFeed development team with at least 5 comments and 5 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Hot Comments
  
  Search String: service:(intensedebate) OR service:(backtype) OR service:(disqus) comments:1 likes:5
  
  Meaning: Searches all blog commenting services for entries with at least 1 comment and 5 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Hot FriendFeed Posts
  
  Search String: service:(friendfeed) comments:50 likes:30
  
  Meaning: Searches all native FriendFeed posts for entries with at least 50 comments and 30 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Hot Web Links
  
  Search String: service:(twine) OR service:(stumbleupon) OR service:(misterwong) OR service:(magnolia) OR service:(furl) OR service:(delicious) OR service:(diigo) comments:5 likes:10
  
  Meaning: Searches social bookmarking services for entries with at least 5 comments and 10 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Hot Photos
  
  Search String: service:(smugmug) OR service:(flickr) OR service:(fotolog) OR service:(photobucket) OR service:(zooomr) OR service:(picasa) comments:5 likes:10
  
  Meaning: Searches photo services for entries with at least 5 comments and 10 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Thomas Hawk’s Liked Photos
  
  Search String: service:(flickr) OR service:(smugmug) OR service:(fotolog) OR service:(photobucket) OR service:(picasa) OR service:(zooomr) like:thomashawk
  
  Meaning: Searches for photo entries liked by Thomas Hawk
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Hot Videos
  
  Search String: service:(youtube) OR service:(vimeo) OR service:(12seconds) OR service:(dailymotion) OR service:(joost) comments:5 likes:10
  
  Meaning: Searches for popular videos with at least 5 comments and 10 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search

You get the idea? You can get very creative with these filters. I highly recommend you also review the advanced search operators as it will allow you to venture further:

If you have any questions relative to the FriendFeed beta, I recommend checking out their beta FAQ. Of course, you’ll find me on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/bwana.

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HP Mini 1000. Check. Windows 7 Beta ISO. Check. 4 GB USB thumb drive. Check. HP Mini 1000. Check. Google. Check. Windows Vista. Uhhh… no.

That was my issue. There are a lot of great tutorials on how to create a bootable USB drive from the Windows 7 Beta ISO which Microsoft recently released. This is primarily a good solution for those of us with netbooks without CD drives. Unfortunately, a majority of these tutorials utilize a program called “diskpart”, which is a command line utility for managing partitions and disks. Coming from a UNIX background, I figured it would be easy to accomplish, but I found out the hard way, that the “diskpart” that comes shipped with Windows XP is not able to perform the necessary tasks. Namely, you won’t be able to see the USB drives in the list of drives, and you can’t set the USB drive to be active. I’ve got a lot more long winded blah blah for you, but I’ll get right to the point. Here’s how you do it if you’re stuck with Windows XP like I am. These instructions are were conducted on and are for an HP Mini 1000, I cannot guarantee this will work everywhere else (but I don’t see why it shouldn’t):

1. Ensure you have a USB Drive with more than 3GB capacity
2. Download and Install Daemon Tools Lite (or your favorite Virtual CD emulator)
3. Download the Windows 7 Beta ISO
4. Download and Install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
5. Download and Extract MBRWizard
6. Insert the USB Drive
7. Launch the HP USB Storage Format Tool. Select your USB drive for device. Select NTFS for File system. Check Quick Format. Click Start to format the USB drive.
   
8. Mount the Windows 7 Beta ISO with Daemon Tools (make note of drive letter it assigns)
9. Set the USB drive to be the active partition with MBRWizard: Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) and navigate to the directory where you extracted MBRWizard. Execute the following command: mbrwiz /list.
   
10. You should see your USB Drive in the list. Make note of the disk numbers next to the drives. In the following example, the HP Mini hard drive is drive #0 and the USB Drive is drive #1.
    
11. Execute the following command to set the USB drive to active: mbrwiz /disk=1 /active=1 In my example, the /disk=1 corresponds on the drive number of the USB drive. Make sure yours matches. Answer “Y” to the confirmation
    
12. Execute another list to ensure the active status has been updated. The USB Drive is now ready to be set to be bootable.
    
13. In the same command prompt, execute the following command to set the USB drive to be bootable: e:\boot\bootsect /nt60 D: (E: is the drive letter of the Windows 7 Beta ISO and D: is the drive letter of your USB drive)
14. Copy the contents of the Windows 7 Beta to your USB Drive
15. Everything should be ready. Reboot your HP Mini 1000, and on the boot screen hit F9. Select your USB drive from the dropdown list.

If it doesn’t boot, check the following:

• The USB Drive is formatted properly.
• The USB Drive has all the contents of the Windows 7 Beta ISO (including hidden files)
• The USB Drive partition is set to “active” (mbrwiz /list)

Like I said earlier, it’s a much easier process if you already have Windows Vista, but I found there were a few kinks with Windows XP. I’m sure someone out there has found an easier process than this one, so by all means, share with the rest of the class in the comments. The fruits of ye olde labour:

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