Keep Up With Your Friends And More Using FriendFeed
Okay, so I’ve been working on testing a number of new services lately. FriendFeed is one that has not been out very long, but it is incredible! It’s a service that combines updates from many services you use online (right now, it pulls from 35 different services) including, Twitter, blogs, flickr, delicious, Google Reader, LinkedIn, YouTube, digg and more.
So for example, I bookmark 3 stories on delicious, it’ll display to those following my friendfeed that I bookmarked those articles and makes the links available to them. At the same time it will tell followers when you make a blog post, add a video to YouTube, post a status update to Twitter and it’ll post those items to your feed as well. Currently I use it to display my Twitter status updates, delicious bookmarks, new blog posts, and YouTube videos. You can see my friendfeed by clicking here .
It’s been described by many, including myself, as a firehose of information. And rightly so! With the incredible amount of updates that are posted from multiple sources a day it can seem that almost every minute you’re presented with new updates and links. In fact, I follow 10 different sources (mainly from tech bloggers) and my friendfeed seems to have new items every 3 minutes! This is great if you’re following someone on Twitter who updates often, but it can be too much for those that occasionally follow someone using any of these services.
In addition to the friendfeed website, you can also download an app called "Alert Thingy " (I know, couldn’t they have thought of a better name?) to display your friendfeed updates on your desktop. For me this application is constantly updating, which I love and it keeps me from having to go back to the friendfeed website for my updates.
Of course, these two services are not for everybody, while it can improve your productivity on tracking updates from those you follow, it can also cause information overload (although because I follow a lot more tech blogs, I tend to get a lot more information than most), but if you are looking to simplify the process of tracking blog posts and twitter updates, it can really help!
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