FriendFeed Lifestreaming Service Now Open to Everyone
FriendFeed, a social network aggregator from a group of former Google employees, has tossed off the beta shackles and opened its door to the public. FriendFeed works something like your Facebook news feed, but instead of being limited to items in Facebook, FriendFeed can grab content from just about anywhere on the web.
The idea behind FriendFeed is to make it easy for you to organize all your “social web” content in one spot — Facebook updates, Digg posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, Last.fm music, Twitter posts or Tumblr blogs.
FriendFeed enables users to comment on feed items (keeping the conversation centralized) and you can mark friend’s items as favorites. Any time someone comments or favorites an item it moves back up in the feed, which helps keep the conversation going.
If you’re looking for something to read, FriendFeed offers recommendations — just head to Friend Settings >> Recommended. Naturally there are JavaScript widgets available if you’d like to embed your FriendFeed activity on another page.
Of course the idea behind FriendFeed — collecting all your disparate social network content in one place — isn’t exactly new, in fact it’s what we’ve seen many people do with their personal sites and blogs.
For those already using a dedicated URL to create a lifestream, FriendFeed can be yet another source — the site offers an API that allows you to scrape comments on your posts. Just send in your various feeds and pull out any friend’s comments. At the moment the API is a little limited, but FriendFeed says it’s looking to expand it in the near future.
The site is well designed and easy to use and one of the oft overlooked aspects of FriendFeed is the very nice collection of graphs and charts that track your (and your friends) activity and interactions.
FriendFeed isn’t exactly a novelty, Iminta, which we looked at recently, Plaxo’s Pulse network and others all do roughly the same thing.
Even Facebook seems to taking the so-called lifestreaming game more seriously. The rumor mill claims the site is planning to soon allow users to add content from outside sites into the Facebook news feed.
But FriendFeed is significantly different from your Facebook news feed. For instance, where the Facebook news feed lets you know about all kinds of onsite info — like when a friend adds a new friend or joins a new group — FriendFeed is primarily about the various online posts/links/movies/music/etc you and your friends find interesting.
In other words, FriendFeed is about content and the conversation around content. As someone who couldn’t care less about the groups you join on Facebook or who you’re friends with, FriendFeed is a much more compelling service.
There’s also quite a bit more you can do with FriendFeed that may not be obvious at first glance. The Google Blogscoped blog has a nice post highlighting some other ways to use FriendFeed, like subscribing to any RSS feed, adding comments from forums or blogs, adding a Google News alert feed and more.
[image from the FriendFeed blog]
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