A little hack: "mark as read" for FriendFeed

FriendFeed is missing one important thing: the ability mark posts that didn't change since you last saw them as "read." Ideally, new posts or posts with new comments should be visually different from those that are unchanged.


I created a bookmarklet that lets you put a visual indicator of your last visit to FriendFeed into the stream of posts. (You should click the bookmarklet when you begin reading, because during reading you won't see posts that are posted while you read. New and updated posts will percolate to the top, and appear on top of the marker.) It works by using the FriendFeed API to create a post to a special room. As this is a hack, you'll have to adapt the bookmarklet.

Steps:

1. create a (private) room, e.g. USER-read
2. drag this link to your button bar: FFread (RSS readers might mangle this)
   
3. adapt the bookmarklet, substituting USER for your username (2x) and KEY for your remote key (1x)
   
4. go to FriendFeed and test it
5. optional: see how often you are visiting FriendFeed and calculate how much time you wasted :-)

Update: This worked in Firefox 3.0. I updated to the Firefox 3.1 / 3.5 beta, and it doesn't work anymore. :-/