seesmic

Freelish.us - Federated Soial Bookmarks

Yesterday I signed up to a service that I thought was Evan Prodromou's April Fool for 2011. From a link on Identi.ca I read Evan's blog post about a federated social bookmarking service he was launching called Freelish.us. Think of it as the Identi.ca of Digg.com/Delicio.us. 

In Evan's words:

"Today, we're launching a new site [...]. Freelish.us is a social bookmarking service, similar to dozens of other similar services. It lets users store URLs – bookmarks – with tags to make them easy to organize and share. You can subscribe to other users' bookmarks and get a stream of interesting things to read in your inbox."

The reason I thought Freelish.us was an April Fool was the look and feel of the site. The logo and UI are very lilac (very, very lilac...), and it was so similar to Identi.ca (apart from the lack of character limit in posts and the "bookmarklet tool")
Freelish.us is very, very lilac.

The Bookmarklet Tool is a bookmark which is java code that runs in your browser and gives you the possibility to pass the webpage you are browsing to Freelish.us. In Firefox 4 it is all good: you drag the link to the bookmark bar and you get your button to pass pages to Freelish.us. Sadly I use Chrome/Chromium on smaller screens (netbooks/laptop) so I don't have a bookmark bar. The bookmarklet tool doesn't work for me at the moment, but I'm hoping some enthusiastic individual makes a Chrome/Chromium extension for this soon. Once that is in place I'll be all in on Freelish.us.

At the time of writing this post Freelish.us is a bit like departure lounges at Edinburgh airport at 4 am: there are hardly any people there, who would like to get going but there are no flights, no shops or cafes open and almost no other people to speak to.

I believe this service could take off and be a great success, especially if the API is usable in clients like Seesmic on mobile devices and more people get on board. Having said that, I'll go and convince Candice to sign up now...

How To: Set Up Identi.ca On Seesmic For Android

This "How To" should guide you through setting up an Identi.ca account on Seesmic for Android in three easy steps. I'm told that Seesmic for iPhone and Blackberry have similar settings so it may work in the same way there.


Identi.ca is an open source social networking and micro-blogging service. While similar to Twitter in both concept and operation, Identi.ca provides many features not currently implemented by Twitter, including XMPPsupport and personal tag clouds. In addition, Identi.ca allows free export and exchange of personal and "friend" data based on the FOAF standard; therefore, notices can be fed into a Twitter account or other service, and also ported in to a private system similar to Yammer.

I find Identi.ca is a great micro-blogging service, and usually post my status updates there. Identi.ca then posts my status to Twitter and Google Buzz pulls the status update from Twitter. To simplify things: I post once to Identi.ca, and maintain a presence on three separate social networks. [I deleted my Facebook account earlier this year, but you can set up Twitter to push your status to Facebook as well].



Seesmic For Android is a native microblogging client, that supports Twitter and Google Buzz. If this tutorial is successful you should be able to use Identi.ca from the Seesmic application too. [Seesmic is also available for Windows Phone 7, iOS and Blackberry on mobile devices, as well as for computer desktops and as a web client]

Before starting this "How To", there are a few things you should have set up:

  • An Android phone with Mobile Data / WiFi
  • The Seesmic for Android application [Available in the Android Market and from Seesmic]
  • An Identi.ca account [Register here]
I hope this tutorial makes sense and is easy to follow. Please let me know if there are any problems with it through the comments section at the end of the post, thanks!

Step One: Open The Seesmic for Android Application


You should be presented with a screen like this if you have not used Seesmic before and have no accounts set up. Proceed by tapping the "Add Twitter account" onscreen button. 

If you are already using Seesmic for Twitter and/or Google Buzz: [ Menu > Accounts > Add Account > Add Twitter account ]

Step Two: Enter Your Identi.ca Credentials


Enter your Identi.ca username and password, but DON'T sign in. Tap the "Advanced" drop down menu button under the "Make this my default account" tick-box.

Step Three: Set Up the Identi.ca REST API server Details


Under "REST API server" option type in identi.ca/api/ as shown in the picture above.

Then untick the tick-box called Use XAuth. Your final screen should look like this:


All done! You should now be able to sign in and use your Identi.ca account through the Seesmic for Android client. Enjoy!