Friendfeed And Twitter – The Dynamic Duo

Twitter has it’s limitations but when combined with Friendfeed they make a powerful system.

A number of people have been noticing Friendfeed receiving a surge in new users, especially users joining via Twitter. It’s not surprising as the two services complement each other quite well.

Friendfeed was built by former Google employee Paul Buchheit. Paul worked on gmail and on adsense in his Google days. Friendfeed is quite innovative and is gaining more and more traction, even despite its recent spate of extended down times.

Friendfeed is something most of us don’t really “get”. It has been termed a “social media aggregation tool”, as you can collect and view all your social media activities (your blog, twitter, bookmarks etc) in the one place. It is like Facebook in many ways but just a lot more open, as you can share your stuff with everyone not just your friends.

It differs from an RSS reader in that Friendfeed also allows you to comment on your friends online activities. It’s a great way to share and collectively comment on interesting sites, books reviews, videos and photos. Interestingly, the majority of the comments that occur are around twitter posts – it’s a value add for Twitter.

Other Features

Friendfeed does more that just aggregate your activities in one place, for example:

you can create private groups (rooms) which receive private member updates. You can also make them public. This allows you to setup communities interested in a certain topic.
you can organize your friends into lists, a feature twitter lacks. This is a useful filter to see what close friends are up to as opposed to work friends or business friends.
there is also a “best of” view which gives you a type of summary of the stuff your friends have been commenting on most. A great way to keep up on what is hot.

TIPS

to counter information overload you can configure Friendfeed to hide tweets unless they have been commented on or liked i.e. there is no need to watch tweets from both Twitter and Friendfeed.
use Friendfeed as a conduit to tweet google reader content you want to share. Ed Dale did a great presentation on how to use google reader from an iphone that explains how to set this up.
use Friendfeed for research. You can search for items shared by everyone not just your friends. Just go to Advanced Search, choose “shared by everyone.” and enter your search phrase.
you can easily find the people who find your content interesting just go to the stats page. You will see people listed who are sharing your blog content with friends and commenting on your Friendfeed entries
embed a Friendfeed widget into your blog sidebar. We have done this at excitedbylife.com. It’s a great way for others to see your social activities when they visit your blog e.g. your last tweets.
import all the people you follow in Twitter into Friendfeed. That way you get to see their bookmarking activities and can also join the conversation of comments on their Twitter messages. Just go to http://friendfeed.com/friends then Select Find / invite friends and select twitter.

We have decided to post some of of our twitter messages now from Friendfeed to prompt people to comment.

About Danny Sheehan

Danny lives in Hong Kong but is originally from Australia. He is Married to Maggie and together they have two children with whom they enjoy sharing and enjoying an exciting life with daily. Danny's passions are freedom, adventure and discovery, mainly in nature and science but also spiritually. He is a great believer in living in the NOW.
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