Recently, I put up a forum for our couples small group.

Most people wanted a way to communicate without overloading inboxes with replies to all. Let’s assume for the sake of this post that we want a private community. I thought of a few options for mass communication:

• Private Facebook group (which we already had)
• Google Group
• Private FriendFeed room(s)
• Private Forum

The shortcomings of the Facebook group was that it doesn’t send notifications out about new posts in groups, or at least private groups. No RSS feed to speak off (typical Facebook). I will admit I do not know everything about Facebook.

A Google Group wasn’t a bad idea, but Google will still index and own your life. Although I’m not totally familiar with Google Groups either, it seemed like a Forum would give us more control and options (but require more maintenance).

I really (really!) liked the idea of a private FriendFeed room. It has an RSS feed, although comments made on posts after the RSS post is pushed don’t make it into the feed. That means people would actually have to go to the site. Also, one room might contain several different main topics (events, general commentary, study ideas, etc.). We could make more than one room, then aggregate them all in a “master” room. That would give people the option to pick and choose which rooms (topics) they follow or all of it.
But, asking people to sign up for another online service coupled with the unfamiliarity of life streaming took it out of the running.

So, we are back to the forum. I chose Simple Machine Forums, due to my slight previous experience and that it was easier to integrate mods. I set up the boards, usernames/passwords, theme, options and thought we were set. Then I realized the whole reason for creating this (better notifications via RSS) didn’t work. RSS on private forums don’t work. A major reason for this is the lack of support from web readers (Google Reader) for private feeds. Another being it can be insecure based on the authentication method (cookie, login/password, unique key).

I wasn’t going to give up that easily.

After exhausting the Google looking for mods for SMF or other forum packages that supported private RSS, I started to focus on using what was available. Most forum software will send out e-mail notifications for new topics and replies. I figured I would use those e-mails to create RSS feeds via some sort of e-mail to RSS gateway. The two that seemed to work were mailbucket.org and email2rss.com. Ultimately, since email2rss doesn’t parse the text properly, mailbucket worked better.

Two issues:

1. SMF doesn’t send out notifications for replies on monitored forums. It will only send out notifications of replies on threads the user specifies. To create the full feed, I would have to individually monitor every post. That’s not going to happen.
2. Would Google index these not so private RSS feeds? Would a spider crawl a mailbucket or email2rss xml? This would be slight problem. I don’t really want our private posts to show up in Google search results.

I’ve searched for an open source email to rss gateway I could use either on a hosting account or a computer at home. So far, no luck.

Maybe other forum software sends out notifications on all replies on boards without manual intervention of each thread. I’ll try phpBB next.

Open source RSS reader that accepts e-mails and turns them into feeds? Something else?

If anyone has any suggestions, I would appreciate it. I’m trying to think outside of the box, but so far I haven’t been able to solve my problem.

I don’t really see the value of Facebook.

I graduated 9 months before it really blew up at colleges. Imagine how I felt, as a nerd, to be behind the curve on such an important interweb issue.

Well, I still haven’t caught up.

The people I talk to on a regular basis typically aren’t very nerdy. They don’t have blogs, participate on FriendFeed, or even use social bookmarking like Delicious. I encourage people to step into the world of the social, interactive web, but only a few have attempted.

The rest communicate via e-mail/phone/random text messages. Most aren’t on Facebook.

My Facebook “friends” consist mainly of people I know from college and barely talk to, people I know from high school (and rarely talked to even then), and random co-workers. I’m not friends with internet celebrities, business contacts, or people I don’t actually know. I use Twitter and FriendFeed to follow internet celebrities and LinkedIn and Plaxo for my business network.

Although I don’t sign on to Facebook often, I’m always online with Facebook Chat via Adium. I also e-mail myself my mini-feed (status messages) on a daily basis.

These daily e-mails were convenient until the recent rush of people from high school started updating regularly.

Do I care about someone’s sick kid? Or how well the child slept? Or random other stuff from people I barely talked to in high school?

The sad part is, most of these folks are on a limited profile anyway.

I’m drawing the line. I am unfriending people I didn’t talk to in high school, barely talked to in college, and former co-workers.

When the number of people on a limited profile is close to the number of people not, you should know there is a problem.

I’m sorry to be so unfriendly, but as the internet nerds say, your experience on a social network is only as good as the people you follow (@scobleizer). In this case, it is only as bad as the people you follow.

One exception, I will keep all of my friends who are fans of the Facebook Gangsta. I’ve thought about downloading the theme song ringtone.

“Oooh. A real gangsta….”

(The following is NOT the Facebook Gangsta, but still very amusing.)

UPDATE (01/29/2009): Not that I need to feel justified in my friend removal, but here is an interesting article on the same subject: Link – (thanks Trebuchet of Emotion)

I resolve to blog twice a month.

Not because anyone actually reads my posts, but because I enjoy doing it.

I realize my resolution is 7 days late, but oh well.

Some non-blogging 2009 resolutions:

1. Take GMAT
2. Paint and set up guest room
3. Paint living room
4. Redo kitchen (probably new cabinets and paint)
5. Paint our bedroom

I like to set my expectations low, so I always feel good about myself.

Perhaps I will do a check point in 6 months and see how far, or not far, I’ve gotten.

Also, I think I will blog more about food (even though my wife does most of the cooking) and random thoughts.

This post doesn’t count towards my twice a month quota.

Unless I fall off the bandwagon quickly, expect two more posts this month.