Dave makes a very good point. All of my blog feeds are photo feeds, but FF doesn't pick it up. This needs sorted. - Chris Nixon

Friendfeed supports mediarss extension to rss, and can determine pictures from a common 'blog' feed, check this entry for example: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Alexey Melchakov

It even supports georss and can make maps from ordinary feeds without any special support (like it have for brightkite), example: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Alexey Melchakov

By the way, there is an AWESOME service which enpowers rss with media rss, http://www.fflow.net/... just give it your feed with photos and it returns you photos-enabled feed which you may use with friendfeed. - Alexey Melchakov

I use mediarss and enclosures to include both pictures and sounds in rss submitted to FriendFeed by my jazz blog: http://jazz.appspot.com -- here's an example: http://friendfeed.com/e... - directeur

Thanks Alexey! - Chris Nixon

Alexey, thanks for the fflow.net tip, I bet that will come in handy! - Jason Wehmhoener

I'd like to see them break out the existing "Blog" into "Blog" and "Feed" where "Blogs" would be the general purpose service type for 80%+ of the users who just want to add a blog, and "Feed" would give you more granular control over how the fields in an RSS/Atom feed get mapped into new items. See also this feature request convo over in the FF Suggestions forum from a few days ago: http://is.gd/9CWY - Ken Sheppardson

@Ken, that's a great idea. I know they are listening. - Louis Gray

Paul Buchheit comments here: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Louis Gray

Alexey, that link is great! I used it for my Tumblr feed.. thanks! - Phil Glockner

Alexey: Thanks +1. I just moved my Tumblr feed over as well. - Ken Sheppardson

All of my Blog feeds are Photo feeds too. This is a tiny bit off topic. I finally decided to add YouTube here, and it will not take my username. I cleared my cache, and I know the settings on YouTube are correct because i import my feeds from there to other services. Who do I contact to get help. I went to the contact us page, and the closest thing I could find was to make a bug report. I've had no reply. Can someone point me to the right person or link to resolve this please! Paging RSS Help. Anyone! - Michael Fidler

In a perfect world Friendfeed would pick up photos, videos, mp3s, etc from any ordinary RSS or Atom feed (even if all three are mixed together in the same feed or even the same post). It would also be great if it would pick up the summary text and add it as a comment. Wouldn't it be great if we could just post to our own blog (whatever we want) and have it appear (regardless of content type) in an attractive form anywhere it's wanted? - Jason Wehmhoener

I would like to be able to embed video's from any source, not just YouTube, and Vimeo! - Michael Fidler via twhirl

Michael, NoiseRiver supports enclosure of these videos and has its own player for these. Very easy to add. Wonder why the FF team didn't did it yet :/ - directeur

Yeah NoiseRiver complements FF and levels the field a bit- Dave you should check it out. - anna

Jason, FriendFeed already does all that if you include the correct MediaRSS tags. Michael, we have a little bit of trouble detecting with YouTube usernames are valid and which are not. I've just changed the code to be more lenient -- please try again. - Paul Buchheit

Paul, I think the difficulty is with getting MediaRSS right. The Wordpress mrss plugin doesn't quite do the trick. How should John Doe go about getting their MediaRSS "correct"? - Jason Wehmhoener

directeur and I did a bit of fiddling around with MediaRSS earlier this week and had mixed results. (Looks like directeur is still fiddling around a bit? or is he messing with the API now?) - Jason Wehmhoener

Jason, I recommend finding another feed that does it right and then copying them. Take a look at directeur's example: http://friendfeed.com/e... I've also been thinking about creating a kind of "feed checker" that shows exactly what we get out of a feed, what we can do with it, and how to add additional content. - Paul Buchheit

yep. this has opened my eyes again. i need to revisit my own blog's RSS serialization and make sure to send media tags. - MikeAmundsen

One thing directeur and I were struggling with was getting Friendfeed to pick up multiple photos. And what if a single post has two photos, a video and an mp3? What about summary text? Love the idea of a "feed checker" that would be awesome. - Jason Wehmhoener

Paul, yes, in fact, what would be HUGE is having a friendfeed's own player to include videos from enclosures/mediarss. I've been doing it since july I think on NoiseRiver. and in fact, that was really easy to setup. For eg. Embedding 12seconds videos or blog's videos was so easy with a flash player, given that we do have the enclosures - directeur

Thanks Paul, it worked! - Michael Fidler

Jason, it is possible to include as many mp3 as you want (I extended the feedgenerator to include many enclosures) Now for the video part, I think that FF should include a custom video player (like I did for NoiseRiver). For the multiple-thumbnails question. Yes, they really could, but, what about thumbnails that come from youtube? vimeo? (useless to include 'em all) - directeur

directeur, what if you had all of those things in one post? and what about summary text? - Jason Wehmhoener

Jason, that's what my recent tests were about in fact :) Friendfeed can include both a video and (many) mp3, many pictures and mp3s, but NOT the three at the same time. Regarding the description (and I think that it's what Dave's talking about) The best was to do it is to automatically create a comment from an excerpt of the RSS entry body. But that'd be up to Friendfeed (though it's really easy to to do with the API) - directeur

Right, so, I guess what Dave and I are asking for is for situations like "all three at the same time" or "with description" to be handled elegantly, and without having to resort to the API. I think it's OK to expect people to learn MediaRSS, but I'm not convinced the existing resources are sufficient (the spec leaves some room for interpretation, and it doesn't specify what Friendfeed decides to do with MediaRSS, that's something Friendfeed needs to document) - Jason Wehmhoener

I think this has been a really productive thread! Louis was right, they were listening. That's nice to now. I love the fact Paul listens and helps as much as he can. Closed mouths don't get feed. - Michael Fidler

I think that with some better MediaRSS docs + the feed checker that Paul mentioned, we could hammer out a better MediaRSS wordpress plugin that would meet the needs of the average non-programming Friendfeed user. - Jason Wehmhoener

Then again, the same wordpress plugin could be achieved using the API, but I like the idea of using RSS to get this done. - Jason Wehmhoener

It should be possible to have multiple thumbnails -- internally everything gets converted into media-rss. Just be sure that each distinct image is its own media group. We also do generic video streams such as those produced by 12seconds (there is essentially zero custom code for the 12seconds service). See http://friendfeed.com/e... - Paul Buchheit

Wouldn't it be easier to include the whole entry for RSS (maybe in a mouse over or via a click or other action) -- a la iGoogle google reader gadget -- basically turn FF into a feed reader? - Brian Sullivan

Paul, I tried to set every thumbnail in a different media:group and only one was picked :( (also tried with media:content) - directeur

So, do we need <media:thumbnail> at all? or just <media:group><media:content type="image"></media:group> <media:group><media:content type="image"></media:group> ? If you know of an example of a MediaRSS post that includes multiple images, please point me to it so I can fix my code... - Jason Wehmhoener

Thumbnails are preferable. I'll try to make a "demo" feed sometime this week to show off all these different options. - Paul Buchheit

Thanks Paul! Looking forward to it. - Jason Wehmhoener

Paul, here's a snippet of what I'm doing: http://rafb.net/p... - Looking forward your demo ! Thanks :) - My bad, pasted the wrong snippet - directeur

directeur, we need width and height on the thumbnails. If you point me to a live feed that has that and still isn't working I can take a look tomorrow. - Paul Buchheit

Paul, ah! But, it worked fine for one thumbnail even without the width/height attributes. Yes, you can look at : http://jazz.appspot.com/... Thanks again! :) (only one thumbnail here: http://friendfeed.com/e...) - directeur

Paul, a demo feed is a great idea. - Dave Winer

Paul: IT WORKED! http://friendfeed.com/e... :) - directeur

hurray! - Jason Wehmhoener