FriendFeed
So you’ve signed up for Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. You have a blog on Blogger, use Google Reader, Delicious, Flickr, upcoming.yahoo.com, YouTube…your head is beginning to spin! There are so many websites out there. Maybe you should just throw in the towel and walk away from this social media business. It’s just a fad anyway, right? …or you could sign up on one more site which will simplify everything: FriendFeed.com
FriendFeed is a great solution for your desire to be a social networking regular. It is a social media “aggregator” meaning that it can pull in feeds from numerous websites and publishes it all in one location – in other words, in one “feed.”
FriendFeed minimizes the effort of visiting individual sites for feeds, blogs, bookmarks, videos, and photos that your friends share. It can be a central aggregator for importing and exporting shared content. On the flipside it can also help you keep up with what your friends, colleagues, contacts, etc. are doing online as well (as long as they have friendfeed accounts, too). With FriendFeed, you don’t have to visit hundreds of different sites to see your friend’s photos in Flickr or your co-workers shared items on Google Reader and Delicious. Additionally, FriendFeed allows you to comment on things your friends are doing online, so conversations can develop on any posted item.
FriendFeed works by using “web crawlers” like search engines. You provide FriendFeed with your username and it uses the crawler to gather the information. If necessary, FriendFeed will use a site’s API (application programming interface) to collect your information. This enables FriendFeed to provide a user-friendly way to connect to other websites and pull in this information.
You can choose to set your account as private or public. Anyone wishing to participate to your private feed, will need to be approved by you. If your account is public, no one will need approval and your feed will be active on FriendFeed’s homepage. You are also able to create lists of different groups of friends. This allows you to separate your personal and professional contacts. After you sign into your account, the lists are located in the left-hand navigation area. You can create personalized names for each list.
Some of you may be interested in reading RSS feeds here as well. FriendFeed allows you to add these as “Blogs.” Just put in the URL of the blog or feed found under “My Feed,” “Edit/Add Services,” “Blogging,” and then “Blog.” So, you will receive updated material from your favorite site.
Also, you can sync FriendFeed with Facebook. The updates will be sent to your Facebook mini-feed and in your profile. To sync these, add the FriendFeed Facebook application.
Creating an account on FriendFeed is a fast process. Here is a video clip that explains more:
So…feeling less overwhelmed? Are you using FriendFeed? What kinds of uses might this have in Higher Ed?
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