I’ve been test-driving some social networking plugins such as Lifestream and the Facebook Dashboard Widget, and I’ve come to the conclusion that some of these things are just too user-unfriendly. As much as I like Lifestream, it appears that Facebook closed their API so that I can’t grab my status feeds from them. What does this mean? Well, it’s not the plugin’s fault that a well-known social networking site decided to shut off public access to feeds. But given that it is one of a few sites that I regularly check up on, would it be too much trouble to have an RSS feed work from it? At this point, I’m thinking I should just use blog RSS feeds, such as the one by Blogger, or a proprietary widget, from MySpace for example, to fill my sidebar.

Lifestream doesn’t work actually, it just fails to reload my dashboard page whenever I attempt to add a feed, so I’ve dropped it.

I found another annoyance: it seems that the newest Sidebar Login plugin is wreaking havoc with my sidebar formatting. I’ve rolled back to 2.1.7 to correct the issue, since I don’t have time right now to root around the code to fix it. Besides that, I dislike the gravatar image that was added in 2.2.1. It would be more appropriate in a personal site, but seems out of place in a multi-user portal site.