The weekend I dug into FriendFeed

26 May

Posted by: BryanPerson in: Social aggregation, Tools

I’ve been kicking around — lightly — on FriendFeed for a couple of months (here’s my FriendFeed page), but it took until this weekend to incorporate the site into my regular online routine.

FriendFeed, if you haven’t heard of it, is what is known as a a “social aggregator” (Wikipedia’s definition), a site where you bring together the various feeds — from blogs, Flickr, delicious, shared items in Google Reader, etc. — of your online friends. Socialthing! and the unfortunately named Profilactic have set out to do the same. But at least from what I’m seeing, it’s FriendFeed that’s generating the most buzz.

How I’m using FriendFeed

Managing the Noise. My first impression of FriendFeed was that it was little more than another place to see my Twitter pals’ posts — and well, that just isn’t very useful. So how do I avoid wasting time with too much duplicate content? Mainly, I limit the number of friends on I follow on FriendFeed. To reuse a phrase I heard last week, I’m viewing FriendFeed as a “best of” collection of my friends’ online content.
Joining conversations. I’m a big fan of FriendFeed’s comment streams. They’re easy to contribute to, and unlike with Twitter, there’s no 140-character limit. Plus, in some cases, commentary is starting to shift from the blog post itself to FriendFeed.
Participating in room discussions. FriendFeed rooms were launched a couple of days ago and offer a “mini FriendFeed for a particular subject or group of people.” Rooms can be public or private, and members there can links, photos, videos, etc. and then add to comment streams. I’ve just joined the newly launched FIR Room, for listeners of the For Immediate Release podcast, and created separate rooms for Red Sox fans and the Social Media Breakfast followers. And the big advantage that FriendFeed rooms have over Facebook groups? They have an associated RSS feed with them, meaning I can monitor the discussions through Google Reader, too.
Adding “imaginary friends.” Hold the snickering, please. The imaginary friends feature allows you to follow a feed of someone who isn’t on FriendFeed. But you really can get creative and add any RSS feed, such as weather for your local city or all @replies to you on Twitter (hat tip to FriendFeed fanatic Steve Rubel for these suggestions).

Room for improvement?

Certainly. Content duplication and lack of notification on comments to my FriendFeed items are two features I’d like to see added. But on the whole, there’s far more to like than dislike about FriendFeed.

Have you given it a test-drive yet?

4 Responses

Doug Haslam
27|May|2008 1

I love the idea of FriendFeed– and use it (I am at http://friendfeed.com/doughaslam), but am still trying to grasp the tactical usage.

How do you digest the info? what’s your best interface for FF? How do I choke down the firehose of multiple feeds and deal strictly with the conversations and bubble-up buzz?
Inspiration Is All Around Us | Engage in PR
28|May|2008 2

[...] Facebook, rarely check FriendFeed (I just don’t get it to be honest, but definitely read Bryan Person’s post on the subject) and then I’m knee deep in network testing tools. Certainly there have been moments the past [...]
Quotes for the week ending May 31, 2008 «
31|May|2008 3

[...] Bryan Person, on the ’social aggregator’ FriendFeed that pulls in feeds from blogs, Flickr, delicious, and Google. [...]
BryanPerson
04|Jun|2008 4

Doug, sorry for the delay in approving your comment. It got caught in my spam filter.

I just use FriendFeed in a web browser. I check and contribute to it just two or three times a day, so it’s manageable.

Also, I like the fact that FriendFeed bubbles up the most active conversations. I seldom get beyond the first page, so I’m making the decision that the conversations on the front page of each tab are the only ones I need to be concerned with at the time.

Hope this helps.