Aggregating your Social Networks with FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS / Atom feed.

Users can use this stream of information to create customised feeds to share and comment with friends.

The goal of FriendFeed is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information.

You have a Facebook account and a Twitter account, and several other social media accounts, each with their own lifestreams.

Isn’t it about time you aggregated all these and feeds into one? FriendFeed can do this and I’ll show you how.

Firstly you will need to either create an account, or sign in using,

Add your existing friends:

Before you make new friends I would recommend seeing if any of your existing friends from other networks are already on FriendFeed.

Click on Friends in the green Friends box,

Then click on Find/invite friends,

Firstly see if any of your Facebook friends are on FriendFeed by clicking on the Facebook icon,

Click on <Allow>, so that FriendFeed can access your Facebook account,

Your Facebook friends will appear.. click on <Subscribe> to subscribe to their feed,

Now lets see which of your Twitter friends are on here.. click on <Twitter>,

Enter your Twitter username then click <Find Friends>,

Your Twitter friends will appear.. click on <Subscribe> to subscribe to their feed,

Repeat this same process for Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. You can also send emails directly to people by clicking Email Invitations, requesting that they also join up to FriendFeed.

FriendFeed will also offer recommended friends. These are users who are popular among your existing friends on FriendFeed. Once you find someone on FriendFeed you’d like to subscribe to, go directly to their feed and click either “Subscribe” or “Request a subscription” (if they have a private feed).

Don’t be afraid to subscribe to strangers as Friendfeed is about discovering new content and you need to expand your circle to do that. Your goal should also be for people to discovery your content as well.

Add services:

FriendFeed can automatically pull in the things you’ve shared from over 50 services across the web, including Twitter and Flickr.

To do so click on Settings,

Click on add/edit,

Click on the services you want to add and fill out your username, etc when prompted,

Groups:

A group is just another feed, but multiple people can contribute to its contents. Think of it as a mini FriendFeed for a particular subject or group of people. Everyone in the group can share stuff with each other and leave comments that others in the group can see.

To join a group click on Groups in the orange Groups box,

Then click on Find groups,

Either search for a group or choose a popular one,

Once you have found a group, subscribe to it,

Friend Lists:

Friend lists help you organise your subscriptions.

If you organise your subscriptions, it will be easier to find the content and the friends you’re looking for. It will also help keep FriendFeed manageable and compartmentalised.

The default Friend lists are Personal, Professional, and Favourites, but you can change their names, delete these and create new ones.

Just remember lists aren’t exclusive – you can have multiple categories for each friend.

Click on Friends –> then New friends list,

Enter a friend list name then click <Create>,

Choose the friends you want to add to this list,

Select / deselect the friends you want to add to this list, then click <Save changes>,

These friends feeds will now appear in this friends list.If you create another list and add the same friend, they will appear in that list also.

Friend lists are just a way to group and filter friends and information.

A good tip is to when you add new friends to put them into groups from the outset.

Posting:

To post something on FriendFeed type your message into the text box, then click the <Post> button. You can also attach photos to your post,

If you also want to CC your post to Twitter you will need to allow FriendFeed to connect to your Twitter account,

This post updates both your FriendFeed and Twitter accounts,

Your Twitter post will have a link back to your FriendFeed lifestream.

If you want to send a Direct Message to someone just start typing the name in the “To:” box. You can send direct messages to multiple people at the same time. Everyone in the “To” box will be able to see and comment on that entry. Make sure you’ve deleted “My feed” in the “To:” box to ensure that a direct message is sent only to the intended recipients. You can only send direct messages to people who are subscribed to you,

You can also direct message a user by hovering over their name in FriendFeed and clicking on the “Direct message” link that appears on the bottom right corner of their profile card,

You can re-share your posts or other’s post by clicking on the Share link beneath that entry,

When the share dialog box appears, you can edit the text of the entry, and choose whether you want to share something to your main feed, or directly to one of your groups.

From this dialog, you can also access the permalink and shortened URL for the entry. You can also copy the embed code into your website to display a realtime view of comments and likes.

There are also links at the bottom of the dialog so you can share this entry directly to another one of your services, such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg or del.icio.us,

Commenting and Liking are strong features on FriendFeed because they can help you get noticed outside of your circle. Whenever someone comments or likes an item, it gets bumped to the top of your feed.. which allows you to continue the conversation back and forth. The more you do this the more people will notice you and subscribe to your feeds.

The commenting and liking links can be found under any post,

Don’t be afraid to use the Hide function as this can help filter information.. this can be found under any post,

You can further filter by clicking on the hide other items like this one link. If you want to control the flow, you need to specify exactly what you want to see. If you only like one friend’s blog, but not their tweets, then hide their tweets. You can even specify that you only want to see items that your friends found interesting enough to comment on. Be very liberal with the Hide function,

Publishing my feed to other sites like Twitter and Facebook:

Whenever you’re posting a message or a link using the text box at the top of your feed, there is a check box to “Cc:” Twitter. If you check this option, you will be asked to log in to your Twitter account. After that, you can choose on a per-post level to have your post show up on both your FriendFeed and your Twitter accounts.

You can configure additional Twitter settings by clicking on Settings,

Then on Twitter publishing preferences,

The Advanced Twitter Settings page displays where you can configure additional publishing settings,

For Facebook, you can add the FriendFeed Facebook application. The app will put your FriendFeed on your Facebook profile and in your mini-feed. You will also be automatically subscribed to your Facebook friends who are already using FriendFeed, and your friends on the two services will continue to be kept in sync.

Searching:

To search for something just type your search query in the search box at the top of the page and click the <Search> button.

You can also search FriendFeed using advanced search operators,

from: return entries from a specific user from:bret
room: return entries within a specific room room:movie-reviews
friends: return entries from all of that user’s friends    friends:jim
service: return entries from a particular service    service:yelp
intitle: return entries with specific words in the entry title    intitle:pizza
incomment: return entries with specific words in the entry’s comments    incomment:awesome
comment: return entries that have been commented on by a specific user    comment:paul
comments: return entries with at least this many comments    comments:10
like: return entries liked by a specific user    like:sanjeev
likes: return entries with at least this many likes    likes:10
- exclude a term (word, user, etc.) from your search    jobs -steve
, perform an OR     from:paul,bret,jim,sanjeev friendfeed

Notifications:

You can receive notifications when there are updates to your feed via email, IM and/or downloadable notifier.

You can configure this by clicking on Settings,

Then on Email/IM preferences,

From here you can configure your notification preferences,

Keeping your FriendFeed Fresh:

The discussions, commenting and community is the most valuable part of FriendFeed. Make sure you post plenty of links to cool websites and new ideas, and respond when people comment on your FriendFeed items.

FriendFeed can be used to network with others and make friends and business contacts, you might even find a job on here.

FriendFeed is more community-based than almost any other social media website, so if you’re looking for another tool to expand your network in a meaningful way, don’t ignore FriendFeed.

Related posts:

1. Social Mention – Real Time Search