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. In plain English, FriendFeed allows you to monitor the activity of your friends in various social media by presenting you a real-time stream of their activity.
How to use it?
1. Setting up
The sign up process has three stages.
In Stage 1, you must open an account by providing details such as your name, your, preferred user id, your password, etc.
In stage 2, you can allow FriendFeed access to your Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as to your Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail contacts; FriendFeed will present you with a list of friends that already use FriendFeed and you can select which ones you would like to follow.
In Stage 3, FriendFeed will suggest potentially interesting users which you can also select to follow.
2. Viewing your Friendfeed
Once you complete the sign up process, you will begin to see a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared – from photos to interesting links and videos to messages just for you. If you see an item you like, you can click on "Like", or on "Comment" if you want to start a discussion.
You can also click on “Share” to post a copy of an item to your own FriendFeed stream.
3. Managing your friends
FriendFeed lets you separate your friends in three default lists (Favorites, Personal and Professional) for more controlled viewing of their consolidated stream of social media updates. Click on any of the three links on the right hand menu and select which friends would like to include in the list you clicked on.
Of course, you can create custom friends lists as well. Furthermore, you can follow (or create your own) thematic groups of FriendFeed users; just click on the “Browse\Create groups” link in the Groups box.
4. Customising your account
Click on “Settings”. You will be taken to a control panel from which you can enter or change your personal details [1], upload a picture or change your avatar photo [2], link one of your other e-mail addresses to FriendFeed or change your password [3] and make your feed private [5] (which means that any users wishing to see your feed will first have to be approved by you).
The “import a service" link allows you to configure which of your social media updates will be monitored by Friendfeed. At present, FriendFeed monitors more than 50 services, including Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot identi.ca, delicious, Slideshare, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Reader, Library Thing, Diigo and Tumblr.
Importing a service is very easy. Most of the times you just need to provide your username in a particular feed:
You can also import almost any RSS feed you like. When you find an interesting web site or blog that offers an RSS feed, click on the RSS icon and copy the URL of the page you will be taken to. Next you will have to go to Settings > Import a Service in FriendFeed and click on “Custom RSS/Atom”. Paste the RSS feed URL in the window that will open and click on “Import Custom RSS/Atom”.
5. Viewing your own feed
Your FriendFeed stream can be found at the following URL:
http://friendfeed.com/username
(make sure you substitute “username” with the actual username you selected when you signed up).
Similarly, you can view any user’s FriendFeed stream (provided it has not been set as private) by substituting your username with theirs.
6. The FriendFeed Bookmarklet
The bookmarklet is a button that will let you share web pages on your FriendFeed. You can even attach thumbnails of images from the pages you share! To install it, surf to the bookmarklet webpage and click and drag the button to your browser.
Friendfeed bookmarklet
Whenever you see a passage in a web page that you would like to share, just highlight it and click the “Share on FriendFeed” button.
A window will open, into which the web page title and the highlighted text have already been pasted.
The shared item will be added to your stream as soon as you click on the "Post" button. You can also post it to any of the groups you have subscribed by simply typing the group's name in the "To:" field [6]. You can also select to carbon-copy this posted item to your Twitter account [7]. Finally, you can also click on up to 3 images in the original page, in order to include them as thumbnails in your post.
Taking Friendfeed further
How I use FriendFeed (Ideas for advanced FriendFeed use)
button to your browser.
