I’ve wanted a fancy schmancy email signature that shows my latest status/posts/whatever for a while now. FriendFeed added the ability to do an image-only embed a while ago, so this afternoon, I put the two together, with the help of the Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures Firefox extension, et viola! This is what now graces the end of all of my Gmail messages:
Josh Bancroft — http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com — 503-334-1889
That’s actually two FriendFeed embeds combined into one - the “badge“, and the “feed” widget. The “status” widget only shows the last update, and I wanted more than that. I also had to hack the URL of the feed widget to display 3 items, instead of the 1, 5, or 10 that the builder on the site will let you choose, but that was trivial.
Now, to dig into Outlook and make an HTML signature with this in it for my work email. Then, I’ll be able to annoy EVERYONE equally. 
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Wow! That’s very cool…you the man, Bancroft.
Great idea! And also, thanks for the mention of the Gmail Signatures extension. I’ve been so frustrated with Gmail’s no-html signature function lately, but I didn’t even think to see if there was a way to get around it.
The only problem I see with the list of services on the image widget is that each service icon isn’t actually a link to that service. Instead, the entire image is a link to FriendFeed.
However, you can configure the widget without the service icons, keeping other parts of it, and it will work the same.
@Phil - yeah, the javascript version of the badge makes the individual service icons clickable, which doesn’t work in the image version. But the javascript version doesn’t work as a signature. I left the service icons in, because I think they look cool, but you can definitely remove them from your own badge.
Actually Josh, since the widget is machine-generated, the generator at FriendFeed could actually use HTML click zones for each of the service icons (as well as the “view my FriendFeed - Subscribe to me” text) .. but I guess it would, in some cases, dramatically increase the size of the HTML source for the badge.
Just thinking out loud.
Phil - you’re right, it could use an imagemap to make the icons clickable. Maybe they’ll add that in the future. I could hack it in there if I was REALLY bored, but that’s not going to happen.
I have to admit that I secretly hoped that the image badge would work that way when I first saw it, and was slightly let down that it wasn’t so.