friendfeed - cool web 2.0 tool

Okay folks, this isn't a regular post but actually homework for my library web design and development class. I figured I'd drive home the "2.0" element by posting it to this blog instead of making a lame-o word doc.

The web 2.0 tool that I've been exploring for class is Friendfeed. I played around with it several months ago, but only had a few friends that used it, so quickly dismissed it. A few months ago I gave it another try and my interest lasted several weeks. By now you may be asking "what the heck is it?" To put it simply, it's a social networking aggregator. It pulls in social actions from all of your networks: facebook, myspace, flickr, etc. It builds a new social network that crosses all of those network and includes some people you may not even know (i.e. friends of friends).



So once you have it set up to work with facebook, flickr, etc. and you update your Facebook status, you will automatically publish a new Friendfeed item reflecting the new status. The neat (and possibly not) thing is that this update in Friendfeed may be commented on, but in FF--in no way connected to Facebook. It's an interesting way to keep conversations about the same stuff separate. The one negative part to this that I can consider is that FF imposes a barrier to dialogue across networks, it would be really cool if someone commented on a Facebook item and that comment was then fed also back to Facebook and posted there too. FF also allows items to be posted natively within itself, not drawn from other networks.

Back to the part about becoming friends with people you don't know. When you register your existing social networks, FF looks to see if your friends from those networks use FF, if so, it puts them in your friend list. From then on you get all updates from those folks, as well as some updates from their friends, especially if there are several mutual friends-of-friends going on. I really expanded my social network by all of this peripheral friend action, eventually adding several of them to facebook, flickr, twitter, etc.

One of the biggest drawbacks of Friendfeed is that it is a timesink. So you have friends commenting on a post in Facebook, then you have FF friends commenting on the same post in FF. Now you have to visit two places to view those comments. You get the idea. Not to mention you have incoming info from your friends, as well as their friends, which during certain times of the day can be a huge amount of information. I quickly worked up to spending 2 or 3 hours per day on FF because goodness knows it's impolite to miss anything! After a few weeks of this I had to just stop using it, I was wasting too much time, even though the high degree of connectedness was so very satisfying. I haven't yet tried FF as a casual rainy-day tool. The ability to toggle greater/lesser interest in certain webs of friends might be useful to help cut down "fluff."