As an expatriate who lived at least 25% of my life out of my hometown Tabriz, I found myself toward using Facebook more seriously to connect with my old friends, coworkers and family I left behind.

It came to a point that Facebook, like for many people, became a part of my daily ritual along with checking emails, reading news, tweeting, etc. I started sharing photos and videos, commenting on people’s post and stuff that my mom does when she uses her PC. As a matter of fact, she, being a physician became a PC user, merely to be able to connect to family overseas.

Although I always had this voice in the back of my head to think twice before posting stuff, I sort of relied on the yet to be perfected privacy features of Facebook to keep my information safe from the prying eyes. Now that we all know that the great Mr. Zuckerberg doesn’t believe in privacy as much as the rest of the world does, perhaps we are too involved to just close down our accounts the next morning in cold blood, knowing the fact that Facebook actually owns what lies in their databases.

The phone that had a blue “f” on it

As usual it started with the rumours and continued with Facebook denying it almost immediately that they are working on building a mobile phone, and  there were other sources confirming the news (Google it to see the frenzy). We won’t know for sure until Facebook officially confirms it, but it will keep everybody busy speculating for some time.

The idea of Facebook making a phone (well, actually rebranding an Android phone of some sort) came unappealing to me at first and I was grumbling about who needs another phone and from a non-phone company? Remember NexusOne? Not the best project Google rolled out.

But after thinking twice about it I thought it is not a bad thing after all. It can heat up the competition if done properly and it might make mobile phones more social, if it is not social enough already. Giving Facebook’s financial resources and a 500 million and counting user-base they have the ability to market it properly having another contender in the market is always a good thing for the consumer.

On the other hand, the fact that if I would be comfortable having my contacts, my phone log, and my whereabouts stored on a phone that Mr. privacy-is-not-in-my-vocabulary is selling, is another story.

If these rumours are true and Facebook is really working on a Facebook phone, I speculate they will start, or most probably, buy a voice/video company to skip Skype or Google. Such device will incorporate Facebook apps, games, ads, etc. and maybe comes with a Facebook like UI. A full-fledged mobile portal to Facebook. Otherwise why would they bother making a phone that only comes with a Facebook app preinstalled?

For now we can just speculate and have fun imagining the uncertain future. But Facebook, if they are really into building the fPhone (or facePhone) they must come up with a good weapon against Apple, BlackBerry and others.

Well, there is a way that you can merge all (or a particular group of them) together and filter them against some keywords.

So what? Then you have a SINGLE feed filtered based on the topic you want to read about. Imagine you are interested about what is happening to GM and you check CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and millions of other feeds everyday. What if you could just check one single feed?

Getting Started

All you need is a Yahoo account. Yahoo has a brilliant tool, Yahoo! Pipes, that will let us create what we want. Actually Pipes can do much more than what we need and you can check it out if you are interested.

OK just login to Pipes page at pipes.yahoo.com to start creating your first pipe. There are useful demos and documentation for you to get into the details.

Click on “Create a pipe” to go to the design environment.

It might look a bit scary for newbies but it’s extremely easy to use.

Start with dragging a “Fetch Feed” component from the right sidebar and dropping it to the work area.

Suppose you want to focus on the “Large Hadron Collider” that CERN built to find out about the begining of the cosmos.

So we need to search in news and scintifics sites. If you don’t have any particular sources in mind, just create a related Google News feed and add it to the “Fetch Feed” component.

I added 2 more feeds (you can add as much as you want) from Reuters and Science Magazine to enrich my search scope. Try adding more sources yourslef.

Note: Don’t forget to save your work regularly or you lose your beloved pipe!

Now drag a “Filter” component from the sidebar and drop it below “Fetch Feed”. It’s in the “Operators” section.

Well, now to make the work flow to make sense, try to connect the output of the “Fetch Feed” (the circle on the bottom of the dialog box) to the input of the “Filter” (the circle on the top of the dialog box).

We need to put something in the “Filter”. Try “Large Hadron Collider” for the title of the feed. To make sure we won’t miss anything, enter “LHC” for feed title as well as “Large Hadron Collider” for the description.

don’t forget to change “Block” to “Permit” AND “all” to “any” at the top of the dialog box, otherwise you’ll see everything but what you were looking for!

Now it’s time for the output. Just connect the output of the “Filter” to in put of the “Pipe Out” and click on the “Pipe Out” itself (or click on “Refresh” in the debugger area down below the screen) to see the results of your very first pipe.

There’s one more step to go. To use the output of the pipe you need to add its RSS feed to you favorite news reader. Click on “Run the pipe…” on top of the screen. A new window/tab opens that has loads of options and tools like publishing tools and etc. All we care is to get the output as RSS. By clciking on “Get as RSS” you can add the feed to your reader and save time by checking ONLY one feed about a topic.

Just note that this pipe is very basic and you can fine tune it with other tools like Regular Exressions and etc.

One of the greatest inventions of the internet age was news feeds (Atom, RSS, …) that help us avoid navigating through 10s and soemtimes 100s of websites everyday. It is sometimes really hard to skim the news when you are browsing in a poorly designed crowded web site filled by silly Flash adverts, so RSS enters and solves it all for you!

However, when you have your RSS list growing ridiculously and you have Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and a bunch of other social media oblgations added to this missery, there should be something, a tool that can help you with all that icoming data!

EventBox

EventBox from CosmicMachine is a very easy to use tool that does it all for you. It acts as an information aggregator and becomes the single platform you use for news feeds, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Redit, Flicker and Pownce.

You can also submit posts and contents centralized in one platform.

You can try EventBox for almost 2 weeks and if you liked it, buy it for only $15. It’s totally worth it

Missing Features

There are however few missing features that EventBox developer team promised to address. What I personally miss is the ability to interact with Tumblr and WordPress. that would make it unbeatable!

It would be also great if they make an iPhone version of the application as free bonus for those who purchased the software. Too much expectations?!

More features on Facebook front-end will be awesome too.