FriendFeed: Part 1

Eddie asked, so I’ll try to explain why (I think) I love FriendFeed.

It Help Define Me

My activities on-line span multiple websites and services. Some of these activities are private, but many others are ripe for sharing. We’re social creatures and we want others to know what we think about the world and what we’re up to. Websites have wised up to this need to share and have adopted RSS as a baseline method of publishing this information. Most importantly (for non-programmers) many sites provide snippets of code that can be embedded on your website/blog to share this information in a more digestible format.

So, this was fine, until I ended up with more and more badges cluttering my blog. They were generally formatted differently from one another, and rather than having a “river” of updates, I had one block for Twitter, one block for Flickr, and so on. FriendFeed aggregates these updates and publishes them in a nice, coherent time-line. It understands the purpose of each service, and presents the information appropriately. Frankly, I can almost see this feed (if properly formatted) completely replacing my blog.

It Help Me Keep Track of You

The same principle applies for my friends. I had the option of subscribing to their delicious feeds, their Flickr feeds, and so on. Sometimes the services themselves would provide some help (Flickr will let me subscribe to ALL my contacts in one motion), but this still proved to be a frustrating and error-prone way to keep up to date. Now, I can subscribe to my friends’ FriendFeeds and be automatically updated on any new services they add or discontinue.

Part 2: Why Facebook is in Trouble