Friendfeed - I Get It Now
phil | June 1, 2008
A few months ago, I’d opened up a Friendfeed account to see what all the buzz was about. After creating the account, I pulled in the various external services I use to create a river of news about me. Next, I sought out the Friendfeed streams of people I know, in order to add them to the main feed.
As it turned out, only one or two of them were using Friendfeed, so it seemed that the river was more of a trickling creek, and not very useful. Ah well, I thought - I’ll wait till it grows it’s user base and try again in a few months and see what’s what.
Well, it seems that biding my time for a while was a somewhat unnecessary strategy due to a feature I’d completely overlooked the first time - the morose-sounding but very useful “Imaginary Friend” feature.
If the people you know are already using other services such as a personal blog, Twitter, Flicker, Youtube, Del.icio.us or any of 35 other services, but aren’t on Friendfeed, fear not - you’re still in business. You can utilize the imaginary friend feature to create a virtual profile for them within your account, connect it to their services, and you’re off, without them needing to be a user of Friendfeed at all.
Friendfeed also lets you gather your contacts into groups that they call Rooms. The Rooms feature is a good way to separate the people you know personally from the constant “noise” of industry blogs and the Twitterati out there. All of these rooms are available as RSS feeds, so you can even use Friendfeed to consolidate groups of RSS feeds into one categorized feed, a la Yahoo Pipes, if you feel like simplifying your feed reader (which is always a good thing).
So, if you gave it a try and it seemed like a somewhat quiet service, give it a second look - there’s more to it than meets the eye.
