It's happened overnight. Actually, in the past two weeks, since FriendFeed announced a redesign of their site. Suddenly everybody is subscribing to FriendFeed (I've noticed a significant uptick in new followers) and it's looking like the new "it" tool in the social media toolbox.
Here's why:
1. FriendFeed has made it easier to find and subscribe to other FFers
See the graphic below. It takes a couple of clicks to get to this screen (don't know why they've made it so hard to find). Once you do you can click the Twitter icon, for example, and quickly find out which of your Twitter friends are already using FriendFeed. That's the key, BTW. It's obvious but worth repeating. They have to have a FriendFeed account in order for you to subscribe to theirs. Registration is free.
2. FriendFeed is an aggregator of the most used social media tools
It's about that simple. Once you're following someone on FriendFeed you can see what they're Twittering, posting to their blog, bookmarking on Delicious, submitting to Digg as newsworthy, adding to their YouTube channel, posting to their Flickr photo account, adding to their Facebook page, etc.
3. FriendFeed displays a real-time stream of conversation from your friends
Frankly, it's seductive. New content from your friends, whether from Twitter or Flickr or Delicious, pops up in front of your eyes if you're looking at FriendFeed online. With the new design, you see their comments on your Tweets in a way that makes sense visually.
Caveat: this works because you're allowing all these different services to access your username and password and trade the data back and forth. It's part of what's known as OpenSocial, which is manna for programmers who want to create apps and widgets for Facebook, etc.
Are there privacy risks? No doubt. Is it worth it to access this much information about the friends, colleagues and brands you're most interested in? Maybe.
For now, at least, know that this is the Next New Thing. It's probably worth experimenting with and it's not too hard to jump on the bandwagon.
Previous Comments
James S. Walker said on May 14, 2009 at 04:19 PM
Hi Debbie,
I signed up for friendfeed a while back, wasn’t a huge fan and left it alone. Although I’ve been resisting, after reading this I might have to check it out once more.
One question for you: Is FriendFeed just a better marketed (and designed) version of plaxo? I seem to get the same info you speak of in the plaxo email updates I get. With friendfeed, it just seems like a nice package. Am I missing something huge?
James
Debbie Weil said on May 14, 2009 at 04:30 PM
James,
That’s a great question. I confess I haven’t been a user of Plaxo. The tipping point, I think, is that FriendFeed’s new user interface is really simple and appealing. And that they’ve done a better job promoting their service.
Will be interested to see if others have thoughts on Plaxo vs. FriendFeed.
Maria Reyes-McDavis said on May 14, 2009 at 05:52 PM
I love this post, FriendFeed is and will become more of a valuable tool than Twitter ever could be. The cool thing is, you can integrate your Twitter and pretty much everything else, so what’s the point in hanging out on Twitter. Once it’s popularity catches up to Twitter (with same people being on both) I’ll be ONLY on FriendFeed :-) Good stuff, thank you :-)
Leslie said on May 14, 2009 at 08:19 PM
Hi Debbie,
I’m curious if you have a strategy for approaching each network. I’m not talking about a slick business strategy for leveraging “friends”, I’m just wondering if you mentally post a certain type of content to a certain kind of service.
I find that I use Twitter primarily for professional growth and Facebook to keep in touch with people unrelated to work.
The more I use these services, the more that line blurs and I’m not sure I like that because I end up feeling like getting on any social network means “I’m at work”. That’s exactly why I canceled my Friendfeed acount.
Aggregating all these things into one place devalued their mental context for me. I see personal family updates (weddings, new kids, vacations) mixed in with things that pull me right back into a work mindset.
Your perspective on the matter would be appreciated in a future post.
Thanks!
Guillaume said on May 15, 2009 at 12:13 PM
Friendfeed is useful to us because as you said it aggregates all our social media information and help people to follow all our activities. But it also matters to us as we can find more information online and find interesting people.
Debbie Weil said on May 15, 2009 at 06:43 PM
Leslie,
Interesting point. This is something that concerns/intrigues me as well—the blurred line between personal and professional. I don’t have a quick answer. I will say this: the best corporate blogs tend to be perso-professional, combining a bit of the “personal” along with industry expertise and commentary. More on this topic TK… it’s worth addressing.
michael paolino said on May 18, 2009 at 03:13 PM
We also have been using friend feed and although our feed didn’t make its way to google yet, Im sure it will sooner or later be like digg getting indexed more frequently.
With that said we love friend feed we have already combined all of our accounts to friend feed within a few short minutes 10 of our accounts among twitter,digg and delicious were combined, it was pretty easy once you get going and I advice if your in business you definitely should sign up now.
Michael said on June 11, 2009 at 11:42 AM
Ive heard of this several times over the last couple of weeks. Just after setting up a new wordpress mu with buddypress it really interests me, might have to take a look at it when i get some time as it sounds pretty cool!
Subscribe via RSS
Subscribe via Email
Social Media Blogs