I mentioned the FriendFeed service in a recent blog post about lifestream tools. Since then the FriendFeed service has opened up to the public and I now have an account there.

I have to say that I am mighty impressed by the service they are offering at FriendFeed. The thing that makes FF useful is the fact that it solves a problem and does so in a clean, elegant manner. The problem is that people are publishing in a variety of places all over the internet. And if our friends or family want to follow us then either them or us have to have a decent level of technical skill.

If we’ve got the technical skill then we can grab all the RSS feeds from different sites and plug them into a tool that spits them out in a stream. Then we add the links to that stream here and there. It can be quite a but of work. If they have the technical skill they grab all the feeds and put them into a feed reader. But what if neither party is that web saavy? That’s where FriendFeed and services like it come in handy.

RSS Auto Discovery

Currently FF supports about 28 publishing services (including YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Netflix and more) out of the box. That means you can simply enter your username or another key piece of data to allow FF to import your posts. FriendFeed support RSS auto discovert too. So the user can simply enter the web address of a site that has an RSS feed and FF will import all new posts on that site. I wrote about the importance of RSS auto-discovery last November. This feature of blogs and social websites takes RSS out of the equation and allows a site to have a single address to serve all purposes.

Subscribing To A Person

By now people are used to subscribing to blogs or podcast shows. But what about subscribing to a person? This is a pretty new concept but a very important one. Relationships rarely fit into a single dimension. I follow Mike Dunn on his blog. But I’m also interested in what he’s posting to Flickr. And Mike’s Twitter updates are important to me as well. So I really want to subscribe to Mike Dunn. I can do that now with the FriendFeed service. I could do this before using SimplePie or Yahoo! Pipes. But now I can do it in a simple, elegant manner that is much less time consuming.

If you’re a person publishing via multiple sites it is a very good idea to use a service like FF to bring it all together. Think of it as a service for your friends and family. To me lifestreaming is about convenience for others. I might even go so far as to call it a best practice for publishers. The features in FriendFeed make this process a very simple one. And if you don’t want to share your updates with the world you have the option of publishing a private feed that only your friends can see.

Choice Is Important

FF allows you to choose the services you can add to your stream. The service also allows you to choose how you receive updates. You can: 1. View updates on the FriendFeed site; 2. Subscribe to an RSS feed of updates; or 3. Get an email with your updates. Very nice indeed. There’s is something there for all technical skill levels. In the future maybe they can deliver updates via SMS. But this could result in quite a few messages and might degrade the quality of communication. I think that the three web options are fine right now.

Does Quantity Degrade Quality?

An interesting discussion about ‘noise’ popped up in my feed yesterday. It appeared via an interesting feature called Friend Of A Friend. In certain instances, if a FOAF posts a message I will see it in my feed. The option exists to turn these types of things off. But in this case I was lead into an interesting conversation.

Quantity can most certainly degrade quality. But in this case you have to consider the types of items being published as well as the way you read them. FF makes it easy to scan a lot of data quickly. Short summaries are provided so you can make a quick decision on whether or not to stop and dive into some content. Being selective with your friend list helps to. I believe it’s smart to take the time to see if you’re really interested in someone before you add them to your feed. I find that this type of scrutiny ensures that I really won’t get tired of seeing all that info. Mileage will certainly vary.

See For Yourself

I prepared a thirty minute video screencast that shows off the FriendFeed service. Have a look and you will see many more features than what I’ve been able to write about here.

More On Lifestreaming

A gentleman named Mark Krynsky has been covering this topic for some time over on his Lifestream Blog. His blog is highly recommended reading if you share my enthusiasm for personal aggregation technologies.