Previous entries in this series: The "Hide" function, the bookmarklet, advanced search, how to integrate with Google Talk, how you can incorporate comments, determine an item's original source, how to learn about fellow users, and how to post to the service by e-mail.

At its core, FriendFeed is an aggregator of all your social services from around the Web. Whether you've made a post on your blog, updated your status on Twitter, selected a favorite video on YouTube, or made a bookmark in Del.icio.us, just as a few examples, your personal FriendFeed stream will show that activity, assuming you've added those services to your feed. But even though FriendFeed does a pretty good job at finding your activity quickly, sometimes it can feel like there's a delay, which can get people asking why their entries haven't shown up. In most cases, the solution is just a refresh away.

You can see any of your FriendFeed activity on the "Me" tab.

The Me tab not only shows your previous entries, but also your Services, your Comments and Likes statistics, 12 of your most popular subscriptions, and up to 8 rooms. (See mine here)

To refresh any feed that seems stuck, first click the "Edit/Add" button.

This brings up a window showing your shared sites, and the option to add more.


Click on the stuck service, and FriendFeed will show you your user name for the service, giving you the option to change the user name, remove the account, to refresh the feed, or cancel out. It's the "Refresh Feed" button that does the magic.


If you hit "Refresh Feed", a quick message will say "Refreshing (Service)", e.g. "Refreshing Digg" or "Refreshing Flickr". This forces FriendFeed's spiders to go out and fetch the most recent feed from that service - usually by RSS.

Typically, that's all it takes, assuming the service's RSS feed itself isn't the problem. So if you're super-excited about showing your bookmarks, shares, photos and videos, the "Refresh Feed" button is usually all you need.

As FriendFeed relies on other services to deliver your activity, a delay may instead indicate slowness at the third party site. For instance, if your blog post isn't showing up, it may mean that FeedBurner hasn't yet received your update. If that's the case, you can ping FeedBurner directly, and then go back to refresh your FriendFeed stream to get things back on track.


So if you're the impatient type who wants your FriendFeed stream to be perfect and "caught up", without delay, that's how you do it. As for your issues with attention deficit disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder, that's between you and your doctors.

I'm an unrepentant music-ophile. Through a combination of CD purchases and burns and iTunes downloads, my music library is a swollen 35 Gigabytes, featuring almost 6,000 songs, which would take more than three weeks to listen to straight through. As a result, it's no surprise there are a ton of great tunes that I haven't gotten to in a while, as I'm not constantly listening, as unfortunate as that is. But recently, I've been using Last.fm a lot more frequently, letting me broadcast my playlist to friends who follow me, and letting them know what I'm listening to, making it a more social, and fun, experience.


A Pet Shop Boys discussion from Thursday on FriendFeed
I have been a longtime Last.fm user, having first sent my data to the service back in 2005. Prior to that, I was also a happy user of MusicMobs, starting in 2004, which merged into Last.fm in November of last year. Both sites collectively offered a great way for me to catalog my listening history, find out which artists and songs I hit up most frequently, and discover new, similar, artists.


Another discussion on FriendFeed re: DJ Tiesto
But as fun as statistics are, it's just a new form of navel gazing, and I never really delved into finding "friends" and seeing who my "neighbors" were on the site. But now that Last.fm is integrated into the various lifestreaming applications out there, like MyBlogLog, and especially FriendFeed, I'm having a good time going through artists I've neglected, and hitting the "Love" button on Last.fm's desktop application, which tells people which songs I'm particularly enjoying.

What I've found is that you never know just who might share the same interests. For some reason, I've had people say they're surprised I listen to such electronic music and techno as DJ Tiesto, Underworld, Depeche Mode, Paul Van Dyk and Armin Van Buuren. I've also taken people back a decade or two by listening to classics from the Pet Shop Boys, and Information Society.


Last.fm tells me my top artists
Through Last.fm, I've found that Jeremiah Owyang is a Tiesto fan, that Steven Hodson has fantastic musical tastes, introducing me to Mind In a Box, which led me to Edge of Dawn, and that Kevin Fox likes Pet Shop Boys. Although I have to admit that in the last few months, I haven't had the laptop pumping out iTunes as much as it used to, largely due to not wanting to unnecessarily wake up the twins, sharing my tastes via Last.fm is getting me back into the music in a big way.

You can find me on Last.fm here:
http://www.last.fm/user/louismg

You can see my "Loved" tracks on FriendFeed here:
http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=lastfm

I've been a loyal eTrade customer since February of 2000, and during the height of their instabilities last fall, I actually went against the grain, moving my checking account to the service, away from Wells Fargo, and even flipping their stock a few times for short-term sales when many thought they were headed to zero. But that's not to say the relationship is perfect. Over the years, there have been occasional annoyances, and today, errors on their part make it look like I'm about to file for Chapter 11.

This morning, Rackspace went public, the first technology company to IPO in quite some time in what's been a quiet year. And while, so far, their debut hasn't been all that amazing, I did manage to get some shares through gaining early access via my eTrade account, a usual sign that the stock would be headed down and not up, given my spotty track record.

(See also: Top Eight Worst Stock Moves I Ever Made)

But the fact Rackspace hasn't gone through the roof isn't the issue. The bigger issue is that prior to 5 a.m. this morning, I not only received confirmation from eTrade that my bid was accepted, but I received confirmation six times in the space of two minutes. And checking in with my account online, eTrade, despite only allocating to me the shares I had requested, actually looks like it withdrew the total amount of the stock buy for each confirmation. This means that instead of being cash-positive in my brokerage account, I show a deficit of more than $36,000.


eTrade Confirmed I Received Shares. And Again. And Again!
While I tend to believe this will be sorted out without any intervention on my part, I'm sure that this "glitch" will impact my ability to make trades if I wanted to. Not only is the actual cash I believe I should have unavailable, but if I sold other stocks in the account, I wouldn't have that cash available for different trades, as it would undoubtedly look like it was being used to pay down my debt.


eTrade Tells Me I Owe Them Some Serious Dough
eTrade doesn't get to participate in IPOs all that often, and it looks like they haven't quite gotten the process down. I just hope I don't start getting notice after notice that my account is "on margin" or that I get locked out. It's happened before due to stupid clerical errors like this, and I'm not interested in playing that game again. So eTrade, please get your act together and give me my money back. Thanks!

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)

I'm afraid to admit it, and feel ashamed for the Stay family name, but I can't take all the credit for my last article on Facebook removing features and the confusing nature of the new design. Yes, it's a shame, but I'm going to have to tell you the real story behind us guest bloggers on LouisGray.com. You see, it's not really us blogging most of the time. Louis Gray has an entire army of baby guest bloggers that post for him regularly. Louis recruits us, but in reality he really is looking for the amazing talents of our babies.

I'm going to come clean on this one though. I'm going to have to blame most of my last article about Facebook on my 4 month old son, Jesse III, who has recently been recruited as a new guest blogger for LouisGray.com. It appears we got the II's (from my name) and III's (from his name) mixed up as we were entering our logins that night and he very easily and mistakenly posted as myself that night.

I caught the mistake the next day and was able to quickly correct it, showing that Facebook's new design was definitely not easy enough for a baby to use. I mean, if he couldn't figure out the new Facebook redesign, how could I? I have since docked his allowance and limited him to just one binky per day for the incident, and it will never happen again. Coincidently, it was also him who posted on my blog awhile back, under his own name, saying he was on hiatus from Twitter. He didn't tell me beforehand and I was stuck eating his words as people thought it was actually me leaving Twitter. I mean, why couldn't Twitter allow suffix meta tags so we didn't have to share the same username? I have since found his counsel quite comforting though, as Identi.ca and FriendFeed seem to be working out pretty well for me so far. He certainly knows how to cause a stir though!

Louis Gray, in his open, family-oriented format, is no stranger to baby-blogging. After all, it was his baby Matthew that recently was the center (no pun intended) of the Gray Family/CenterNetworks controversy, and after much heartache and emotions he is now back blogging so I hear for his Dad when his Dad is too busy with work. You often wonder how Louis does it, following everything on FriendFeed, posting sometimes multiple times a day to this blog, and now on SocialMedian. Well, the answer is, so I hear, he doesn't - this is a family establishment here on LouisGray.com and Matthew is as much a part of the family as the rest of our babies are.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira is also a welcomed guest blogger on LouisGray.com. What you may not know is that her 2-year old daughter, Pete, has been moonlighting on the side of her job with CenterNetworks.com to occasionally help out her mom on LouisGray.com. Yes, while Matthew has been criticized by Allen Stern for slacking on the job, sweet little Pete has also been spending a little time over here helping out in her spare time. We certainly appreciate the help! In fact, Cyndy's first post to LouisGray.com was actually a Seesmic video from her daughter, Pete. Cyndy does such great posts, it's hard to tell which ones her daughter may actually be helping her out on and which ones are actually Cyndy. Thank goodness they don't have the same name!
Next time you read a LouisGray.com guest post, think of the babies behind those posts. We may put our names in front of them, but in reality, our babies are the true reason behind Louis Gray's success. Louis wasn't joking when he said he is an "early adopter".

Jesse III's next post will be on Facebook privacy, for babies.