Get Fed via FriendFeed
Do you post tweets on Twitter? Do you upload pictures to Flickr? Do you post videos on YouTube? Can’t get enough blogging done in a day? Then FriendFeed is just the right thing for you and your friends.
Built with the same concept as “News Feed” on Facebook, FriendFeed let’s you aggregate your activities and subscribe to all the activities of your friends. Once configured FriendFeed accesses your activity from the external service(s) via back-end custom integrations. The data is retrieved periodically and aggregated into a unified stream of activities. Your friends and family then can subscribe to this aggregated feed and access all your activities across multiple services.
Unlike other RSS feed splicers, FriendFeed has implemented custom integrations to external services to offer access to various types of activities. For example once configured FriendFeed can access your blog posts, new media from YouTube / Flickr, new Diggs, new DVD selections at Netflix and many more.
As a user not only you can aggregate your feed, you can also subscribe to aggregated feeds of other interesting individuals. The service then allows you to comment on specific feed items or like / dislike it. This encourages community interactions between the users and their subscribers.
The service has been launched by ex Googlers as a way to aggregate interesting data from friends. At a high level this is a nice way to for me to access the data from people I am interested in. Otherwise I will have to browse multiple sites, which is painful and time consuming.
Yes I do have some suggestions for the service. As of now only FriendFeed users can subscribe to each other. Non registered users can only get an RSS feed of FriendFeed users they are interested in. This restricts my access to FriendFeed users only. I am hoping that Friend Feed can directly import “favorite” or “subscription” data from other sources. This way using FriendFeed I can get an aggregated view of YouTube favorites and Flickr contacts even if those other users haven’t regsitered on the service. In addition it will be nice to have a basic profile page for all users to give them a bit more identity on the service. This can easily be achieved by importing data from Facebook or LinkedIn.
Finally I must talk about the problem I have with the service, which I feel will grow over time as user-base grows and adds new subscriptions. I have subscribed to 17 people at this point. Already I feel overloaded with the information they generate. My subscriptions are mostly bloggers and power users, so I maybe an extreme. However I see this happening gradually over time with other folks as well. Once you have decent amount of subscriptions, the data can get too much to handle, thus leading to information overload. FriendFeed needs to sort this out before it becomes an issue. Maybe an improved categorized UI would help, or an intelligent way to filter stories based on likes and dislikes.
Anyways they have bunch of smart people there who can figure this out better than I can. Go ahead check out the service. Who knows you may find it addictive. Don’t forget to subscribe to my feed.
Note: There has been some chatter about SocialThing, a competitor to FriendFeed. However I haven’t received my beta invite to check out the service. I will write further about it once I do.
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