Many of you probably have heard of FriendFeed, some of you might have registered, but very few of you have spent the time exploring the possibilities FriendFeed has to offer. I wasn’t part of the early adopter crowd either, but recently I learned what a powerful & unique communication platform FriendFeed could be.
- First thing first, what exactly is FriendFeed (FF)?
Founded by a handful of ex-google employees, FF is a cross-platform aggregator that continuously lifestream the various social activities of those individuals you follow and allow others to follow what you’re doing on the socialweb. It currently supports feeds from more than 60 social sites, ranging from the well-known Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, youtube, Google reader, del.icio.us, flickr to the less well-known Disqus and Zoomr. Pretty much any social media service that generates a RSS feed can be imported. Friendfeed is a way for you to connect with other people through their posts and discoveries on various social websites: you can read the stories they have submitted to Reddit, tune in their favorite music on Last.fm and learn about what they recently updated on Facebook status all in one web page. Additionally, it’s also an interactive network itself where users can comment or reshare people’s stories to continue the conversation.
- Why you should consider using FF?
Back in March 2008, Mashable conducted a poll to learn how people are reacting towards this newly established conversational platform. Near 80% of participants stated it was adding noise to the social fishbowl; only 20% argued that it enriched the conversation. Fast forward 11 months, I’m sure this number is no longer true, proven by the steady growth of the user base and increasing volume of FF evangelists. However, the question remains that in a era when you constantly experiencing information overload, why would you bother with another social site? Hmm…it’s a not an easy case to make, but let’s take a closer look at what FriendFeed can do for you.
If you are a casual user or social media wannabe – FF provides you the most comprehensive way to observe how your friends and those social media thought leaders cruise the social web. Instead of simply subscribing to their blog and following them on Twitter, it gives you more opportunities to interact with them dynamically. If nothing else, at least it’s a stepping stone to relationship building with those you find genuinely interesting or trustworthy. Also, you can join FriendFeed “rooms” which are like mini FriendFeed channels for a specific niche or subject matter. Whether it’s social media or movie reviews, FF enables you to stay tuned by getting realtime streams, opinions and even make more like-minded friends while tracking the news.
If you are a twitterholic – FF might very likely become your new addiction once you give these tips a try. Under FF’s new “find your Twitter friends” feature, subcribing to your Twitter pals is only one click away. Not only can you extend the Twitter dialogue on FF, you can also send the comment back to the Twitter community so the thread is continuous and lives on both platforms. However, I agree with xx , FF is not much of a threat to Twitter, it is actually more comparable to Facebook’s news feed due it’s capability to stream activities to one centralized location. FriendFeed will increase in value as its user base (near 1 million now) expands and may potentially become a competitor of Facebook Connect.
If you are a small business owner or a team lead who is looking for a collaborative tool – FF allows you to easily set up your own private room and replace the traditional mailing list approach of knowledge sharing. The private chat room could be used for brainstorm, sharing links, relevant search feeds, or even broadcast service announcements and the like. Here are some more use cases from Chris Brogan. If you are seeking an integrated knowledge sharing wiki without pulling away from all the social sites your team has been comfortable using, then FriendFeed is the FREE one-stop solution you should consider.
Like all things in social media, you have to swim in the fishbowl in order to truly “get” it. Give FriendFeed a try, I believe you will find its service to be more valuable than what you originally think.
