FriendFeed – Combine social networking data into one RSS feed

Posted on March 24, 2008 at 6:32 am

Now these days if you use the Internet often, you’ve probably signed up to multiple social networking or social bookmarking sites, such as FaceBook, Last.fm, Flickr, Digg, Netflix, etc. This is all great, but the problem comes in trying to manage all of this data yourself and with family and friends.

What if you want to notify your friends and family of the recent pictures you posted on Picasa or Flickr? Or maybe you have an awesome movie list on Netflix that you want your college buddies to check out? Or there are a couple of interesting news bits you’ve been Digging on Digg?

Right now, you would have to go into each one of those sites and share each list, type everyone’s email addresses or select each person individually, and you would have to do this every time you posted something new!

FriendFeed is a new service that will enable you to keep up-to-date with all of the online activity of your friends and family easily. With FriendFeed, you can subscribe to a continually updated feed of web pages, links, photos, videos, music, and more that your friends are sharing. It’s kind of like the Facebook News Feed that everyone loves so much.

Even though FriendFeed will be another social network itself, it’s main focus will be on tracking your friends activity in all the other networks. You are then provided with a personalized feed of the data which can then be shared on the FriendFeed site or embedded onto another web page via a widget. You can also view it on your iGoogle hompage.

Since FriendFeed generates a regular RSS feed, you can subscribe to it and read it in any RSS reader like Google Reader, etc. I personally like these aggregator services because you don’t have to be stuck to one site in order to get your information. I like Facebook, but I don’t want to have EVERYTHING I do be in Facebook.

The cool thing is that smaller social networks, maybe focused on one topic like movies or shopping, can grow while allowing users to minimize the number of sites they have to visit.

FriendFeed can also track the activity of friends that are not member of FriendFeed. Basically, FriendFeed needs only a username in order to find all of the publicly available information for that user. If there is a site that requires authentication, FriendFeed can take advantage of the APIs provided by the sites to access the activity.

Overall, the site has been getting a lot of media attention since it was created by four ex-Googlers and is considered to be very well implemented. Check it out!

[tags]friendfeed, social networking, social networking sites, aggregators, social network aggregators[/tags]

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One Response to “FriendFeed – Combine social networking data into one RSS feed”

Trackle - Track everything on the Internet Says:

[...] online activities? If you use a lot of social networking sites, you have probably already heard of life streaming services like FriendFeed or Pownce, Jaiku, and [...]
February 15th, 2009 at 5:06 am