Well, recently I’ve been looking into and experimenting with ways to streamline my online. One of the things I came across was Friendfeed. Initially, I wasn’t too keen on it, since it does have some flaws for what I want.

Now what I want is simple enough, mostly from a blogging perspective but relevant across all social media thingies-gadget-mawhatsisnames:

• Generating content — like posting a blog post. This is the simplest one, and most stuff out there work from the point of view of allowing you to add content to the web.
• Noticing Content — reading other blogs, for example. Every place you open a profile, it becomes a whole new headache of how to keep up with updates to the people active at those places and on those profiles. I want one place from where to monitor them all.
• Interacting with content — the biggie:
• 1) responding to interaction with your content, like replying to comments on blogs and photos;
• 2) interacting with the content created by other people. This is the big one and not, to my mind, entirely the same as Noticing Content above. I don’t want to just monitor, I also want to comment and interact.

This is what I’ve been looking at, not ways to create more content but ways to take notice of and interact with the content produced by others. Just, in plain English, simplifying my online life.

Friendfeed does some of this.

What is Friendfeed?

at its most basic, Friendfeed is a system that aggregates your online output in one place. In other words, it’s a feed made up of all your online activity. It has a large list of options, from Twitter to Youtube to Digg to Stumbleupon, and even our own blog, and if you have profiles at any of those places, you can add them to your Friendfeed profile.

Whenever you do something at one of those places (tweet, or blog, or put a photo on Flickr, or favourite a video on Youtube), FF automatically picks it up and adds it to your personal feed on Friendfeed.

Your Friends on Friendfeed

But of course the main thing about Friendfeed is that it doesn’t just aggregate your content, it also aggregates your friends content and streams it all into one feed:

 
The Facebook connection

Friendfeed can connect to your Facebook profile, a rather handy feature, and then send all your updates to Facebook where it shows up in the newsfeed on your profile. Now, I’m using the new Facebook, so on my profile there’s a series of tabs near the top. If you click on Boxes, it will open up a bunch of stuff where you can also find your Friendfeed feed. Like so:

Now, for whatever reason, this connection did work in the beginning but is not updating anymore. I don’t know, FF itself is picking up updates from elsewhere on the web just fine. It’s just not updating that content to my Facebook profile. A handy aspect of this Facebook add, is that when you connect the two accounts then anyone you have on your Facebook profile who also have an account on Friendfeed automatically shows up on Friendfeed. Theoretically, as I’ve said, your FF feed should be showing up on your FB profile. That’s actually a very handy use for Friendfeed, since Facebook friends can follow your webdoings from within Facebook (and you can follow theirs). Will look into why mine is not doing it some other day.

Enter the widgets

This is the main reason why I’ll keep FF.

Off-topic trivia: me being me and never on the cutting edge of technology (I had a monochrome XT when people were on the 386 and muttering the mystical word “pentium”), when I stumbled across this option I just assumed it must have always been there and everyone knew about it. Amused me a little to come across a review from some early adopter types that “Friendfeed now has widgets,” about a week after I started using them.

Friendfeed allows you to embed your content stream onto your website or blog (which I suspect most people will use it for), but it also allows for widgets. I love widgets (widgets are those things in the sidebar of my blogsite, where you find different things, like the blog roll linking to other blogs or the Bookshelf, or The Wall where random passers can leave random, meaningless comments, or the orange Feed button. Those stuffs are widgets, each manually added for maximum lego-playing geek-out, aka personal customization).

Now, you can either take your entire FF feed, and create one widget and add that to your blog’s sidebar, or what I chose which is to make a separate widget for each of the accounts I wanted. So now I have:

Twitter:

as you’ll see on the widget, whenever I reply to someone else the widget adds a direct link to that person’s Twitter account.

Stumbleupon:

With the problems I’ve been having with the Stumble Digest plugin, I’ve been looking for a neat way to still make those stumbles available to people who don’t have a Stumbleupon account. This is one way, and I like it, since it does seperate the links and keeps them rather tidily together as well as prolonging their lifespan on the front page. However, I would still like to add them to the blog, since it does make for an easier read (and I want to do so without having to manually add the links into a blog post which is too much work).

The positive to this, as well as youtube below, is that it provides some neat additional content to a visitor on your website/ blog, something people with active blogs might want to think about. The drawback, obviously, is that for people who (for example) are interested in the stumbles would have to keep visiting the website in order to see when new ones are added. Good for the blog owner, true, but it is a drawback when viewed from the perspective of the blog follower. Obviously, this is a reason why I would like to fix the Facebook connection as well as get the Stumble Plugin working again for the blog itself– easier to share the links with minimum effort on the part of the interested.

Youtube:

One problem i do have with these widgets is the comment function on them throws you back to the user’s Friendfeed accout, and likewise when you click on a specific service (for example Twitter), it doesn’t take you to my Twitter account, but rather to Friendfeed with a summation of my Twitter output. Understandable, since FF obviously wants to draw traffic to itself and which is why above I mentioned I’m pleased to see when clicking on someone’s name @reply, it does take you to their Twitter accounts.

The Flaws of Friendfeed

A big flaw for me personally with Friendfeed, although an understandable one from their perspective, is that it runs the danger of drawing interaction away from where you want it (your different profiles or blogs), and can take it to FF itself instead. You can see this in the public streams, where often people are commenting and interacting on the Friendfeed page. That’s exactly what I did not want, and the reason why I chose ultimately to not allow comments on livejournal anymore. I do believe it’s essential that, when generating content, you make it as easy as possible for other people to access that content (example: using the Stumble Plugin initially to bring my links to the blog, instead of forcing people to sign up for a stumble account, and linking the wordpress blog to livejournal for ease of use by lj readers), but there’s a fine balance there, where you also don’t want to fracture yourself too much. The idea, for me, is to reach broadly and bring everything into a tight, concentrated package, not rupture yourself and others into a million splinters. Now, you can follow FF using Twhirl. I chose not to activate mine, so if anyone comments on my content on FF, sorry, but I’ll never know.

FF is also public, meaning when you update content it gets tossed into the public stream, similar to Twitter. The thinking there is that it’s probably an easier way for people to find new people. They also have chatroom thingies and shit. You can also read someone’s FF feed in a standard feedreader. That has some promise, which leads me to:

Imaginary friends

This…could be very useful.

At face value, Friendfeed does appear to be almost everything I was looking for actually. It is one place where you can, in one glance, see all the content produced by all your friends anywhere on the web (if the service if covered by FF, not all of them are). Provided, of course, they have Friendfeed accounts. Yes? Not necessarily. FF has the option of what they call “Imaginary friends,” this is when someone you know has a profile somewhere that you want to follow (like Flickr) but they’re not on FF. You can create an “account” for them on your friends list and get updates whenever they generate new content.
Friendfeed has a wide net, so it’s excellent for quick and dirty updates on what’s going on…everywhere. Because of the God’s eye view, it’s also a lot more impersonal. Interacting is easy enough (just click through to the appropriate profile), but it cannot overcome the distance of a more personal touch. Like, lj locked posts, or myspace bulletin commenting, or personal messages to social network profiles. It just feels a bit cold overall, but for what it does it’s perfect.

Summary

For now, the widgets are my biggest thrill, and an excellent addition to your website or blog. I suspect that, as I have more time to look around and get comfortable with Friendfeed, I might just become more of an enthusiast than I am now. A potential keeper in the long term.

for people wanting a broad, general overview of what’s going on. Overview — let me stress that; there is no detail here. Probably also ideal for those obsessed with the accumulation of online contacts, live in mortal terror that there is somewhere on the internet they are not reaching and don’t care too much for genuine personal contact.

I’ll recommend it to use because of the speed and width it allows me/you to cycle (some) online content, specifically content from places like Flickr where I/you don’t have a profile but people I/you know do, but mostly for the extras it gives you to use — the widgets and the facebook connection (which currently is non-working. bah.)

Questions?