How to Use FriendFeed as Your One Stop Shop for Social Networking

With social networking quickly becoming the most popularform of communication, people are finding themselves checking multiple websites to remain up to date on all of the goings on with their friends and family.  The reigning king of social networking is Facebook but most people have at least one other social network that they belong to (i.e., Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, etc.).  I am currently signed up with about 5 different social networking sites (partly because of friends who are using those sites and partly because of personal preference).  Being the geek that I am, instead of waking up and reading the newspaper in the morning, I wake up and surf the net checking friend’s status updates, updating my status and reading top stories on my favorite websites.  With the decline of the newspaper I’m sure I’m not the only one with this new morning ritual.  But wouldn’t it be nice if you could hop on one website, see (and comment on) the updates of all of your friends across all of their social networks and yours as well as catch up on articles on your favorite sites?  Enter FriendFeed.  FriendFeed is a social network aggregator that allows you to do just that.  It’s literally a one stop shop for social networking.

FriendFeed is a simple yet intuitive website that updates you (now in real time) on the activities of your friends across different websites.  For example, if one of your friends adds a photo to their Flickr account (and you’re following them) as soon as the picture is on the site you will get an update in your  FriendFeed.  You can comment directly in the feed, you can share the picture, or “like” the picture.  Anytime you do this it shows up in your FriendFeed which will alert your friends of what you’re doing.  You can follow friend updates on Twitter,Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Google Talk, YouTube, Google Reader, the list goes on (for a total of 58 services).

When you first sign up you have the opportunity to import your networks, from that point on anytime you update one of your websites your friends who are subscribed to your feed will be notified on your feed (don’t worry you can pick and choose which networks and accounts you want to show up on your feed).  After you import your sites FriendFeed helps you find your friends through your address books and contacts on various accounts (Gmail, Facebook, etc.), choose who you want to follow and voila you’re done.

“But what if my friend isn’t using FriendFeed?” you may ask.  Well, first I would recommend you get them on the bandwagon and second FriendFeed has this nifty feature called the imaginary friend.  If you know your friends username on the service you can follow their updates to that service by entering them into your imaginary friend list.  You can also make your feed public or private (only available for friends to see).  In addition to all that fun stuff you can also post directly to your Facebook and Twitter accounts from your FriendFeed.  Another great feature is the ability to create rooms (private or public) where people can come together and share their thoughts, pictures and links surrounding a specific topic (Apple products for example).  Oh and if you don’t have time to sit at your computer all day and watch the updates roll in FriendFeed has created a plethora of options to remain connected.  First you can always hop on to FriendFeed at the end of the day and click the “Best of Day” which will give you a list of the posts that had the most comments and “likes”.  If you want to be updated throughout the day FriendFeed has a new desktop notifier (which is very handy).  You can also be notified through e-mail, IM, or access your FriendFeed through any feed reader. (You can also embed your feed into webpages – see (and subscribe to) my feed in the right column of this blog)

All that being said you may be asking yourself, why isn’t everybody using this product.  Unfortunately I don’t have an answer for you, I have no idea why this service isn’t right up there next to Facebook. One thing I would like to see is an actual FriendFeed iPhone application, there are some alternatives and FriendFeed has a very nice mobile site but it would be nice to have a native app (maybe with push notifications?) but that’s not enough to keep me from using it.  Part of my reasoning for writing this is to get the word out to people about this service.  FriendFeed is an awesome tool for people who find themselves jumping from one social networking website to another.  It truly is your one stop shop for social networking so go check it out!

Do you agree?  Disagree?  If you’re not using FF why?  Leave it in the comments!