• E-mail this page
• |  Print this page
• | 
• | 
• | 

First Impression: FriendFeed Is The Social Network For Power Users

FriendFeed is absent in body from Web 2.0 Expo this week, but present in spirit. It's coming up quite a bit in conversation, even though the company isn't exhibiting or speaking here. FriendFeed is a social network for power users -- it aggregates feeds from your Twitter account, blog, Flickr, LinkedIn, and 31 other types of social services and presents them in a single feed for your friends to read. I decided to give FriendFeed a try and share my first impressions with you.

I signed up for FriendFeed when I first started hearing about it on Twitter a few weeks ago, but bounced off it, I think because I went into it with incorrect expectations. When I heard about it, I thought of it as something that every social networking power user wants: The single service or page that reflects all your activities all over the Internet. You can just give that URL to your friends, family, and business associates, and never have to worry about them following you on all those services you're spending time on.

But that's not how FriendFeed works. Because, not only does it aggregate all your socnet feeds, but it also allows you to friend other people on FriendFeed, and let them friend you, and they can leave comments on your posts and you can leave comments on theirs and pretty soon you've got yet another social networking service to check in on, and who has time for that?

Or so I thought a few weeks ago. But this week I looked into it some more and said to myself: Is another social network really a bad thing? Because the entire point of social networking is to reach out and connect to other people, cementing existing relationships and creating new ones. And another socnet means a whole other community to meet people on. And that's good.

So I took a break from Web 2.0 Expo to get some alone time with my laptop and FriendFeed. Yes, I am aware of the irony: I have traveled all this way to a conference saturated with social networks, and I left the conference to connect with a social network.

This is my FriendFeed account. Friend me and I'll friend you back. I also set up a FriendFeed for InformationWeek; friend that account and you'll get all InformationWeek headlines delivered to your FriendFeed.

I've configured FriendFeed to import my updates to Facebook, Twitter, my personal blog, del.ico.us, Flickr, LinkedIn, and Google Reader Shared Items.

I also set it to post my updates to this blog, the InformationWeek Blog. Here's a nice touch: FriendFeed asked me if this is a multiauthor blog, and I said it is. FriendFeed asked me my byline, and now it knows to only post items that have my name in the author field. Neat.

Like most social networks nowadays, you can give FriendFeed access to several third-party address books, and it'll go out and find people on FriendFeed whom you already know. The list of supported address books on FriendFeed is a little scant: Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL. Compare that to Facebook, which supports 10 different online services, several international variants of those, and, if that's not enough, you can export your desktop address book in vCard format and upload it to find friends that way.

Another way to add friends on FriendFeed: Even if your potential friend isn't on the service, you can add them yourself, inputting the IDs for the public feeds to their Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, etc., accounts, and viewing them in FriendFeed. FriendFeed calls these kinds of feeds "Imaginary Friends," which I love.

I don't know if your imaginary friends are visible to other people; if they are, that presents a possible privacy conflict if the real-life counterpart of your imaginary friend doesn't want his feeds on FriendFeed.

Steve Rubel suggests a couple of good applications for Imaginary Friends: use them to follow Twitter replies and favorite RSS feeds and news.

One area where FriendFeed excels is filtering. You can hide all messages from your friends on selected services. For example, I've set FriendFeed it to hide all Twitter entries from my friends. I like reading my Twitter friends' messages on Twitter itself, they get confusing and overwhelming elsewhere. (Thanks to LouisGray.com for explaining how that works -- the "Hide" link on FriendFeed sort of fades into the background, and I had to do some Googling to get it pointed out to me.)

I have encountered a couple of problems: There are two desktop applications for accessing FriendFeed: One is Twhirl, which also supports Twitter. The other is AlertThingy. However, I've been unable to get them to work. Twhirl asks for my FriendFeed user name and remote key, and AlertThingy asks for those and, in a separate window, my user name and password. I'm sure I'm entering those values correctly -- but the apps won't log me in. I'll try again another day.

Also, FriendFeed doesn't seem to be seeing my del.icio.us account.

I like FriendFeed so far. I like being able to connect with people using all the content I create and post to the Internet, and I like reading everybody else's posts. On the other hand, I feel a little isolated there -- I don't have the conversational give and take that makes me feel at home on social networks like Twitter and Second Life. However, I've only been using FriendFeed about a day, so it's really too early to pass judgment.

« Desperately Seeking: Green Tips And Tricks (Big Or Small) That You Think Can Make A Difference | Main | Google Uses Its Googley Eyes When It Comes To Design »