I Know FriendFeed is Useful, I Just Don’t Use It
July 31, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
I know I should, it’s got lots of handy features, but I just haven’t gotten used to using FriendFeed for anything. I know it consolidates and organizes much of the updates that I’m interested in across a variety of social networks. I’m just not using. Why not?
Maybe I just haven’t spent enough time really playing with it to figure out how it could really change the way I handle social media. I love using twhirl to update my twitter accounts, and I’ve got my FriendFeed account setup in twhirl, but I just don’t use it.
I like the grouping functionality that’s available and the ability to tag certain users as my favorites. I could see using this feature with that handful of friends that I really don’t want to miss any updates from during the day.
How do each of you use FriendFeed? Is it a replacement for other micro-blogging services for you? The one thing I know I don’t want to do and I don’t like is to send out an update that’s just duplicated as the same thing across multiple destinations. To me that’s just noise. Where do I find the balance between using multiple services like this?
I do like some of the tools that FriendFeed has for integrating in with your website and blog. That may be the angle I need to really approach this from to move forward. We’ll see what happens next.
I’m with you. It does become a lot of extra noise. I use FriendFeed mostly for updates and social media sharing that exceeds the 140 character limit on Twitter. I utilize Twitter more than anything else due to its simplicity and immediacy.
I think FriendFeed has its place, I just don’t know what place that is in my corner of the world.
The quest continues.
I just 2 weeks ago found my groove with Friendfeed!
Before I thought there was just way too much noise, then I started using it’s advanced filtering system to help. You can hide all the noisy services like everyone’s last.fm and twitter. Or just filter out those without comments. Which helped a lot.
For me, it’s all about “Groups” (formerly called “Rooms”). Subscribe to a bunch that align with your interest such as Apple, Social Media, Twitter, WordPress, Ubuntu, or Facebook. Now when you click that group from the sidebar you get all the posts people sent to that room. This way, you can follow the topics that really interest you. Also, you know when you send a post to that group (in the “To:” field) you are sharing it with the people who are interested in that topic. Watching these posts are also a great way of finding other’s to follow who have similar interests!
I even pull my friendfeed posts into my lifestream on my site at…
http://mitchmckenna.com