Too many social networks? Get it together with FriendFeed

If you do any social networking with your friends or colleagues online, then you know what a pain it is to check all the sites to monitor their activity. You have to go to each site, sign into your account, check the updates. This gets more and more tedious as you connect with more people using different social networks. You’ve got friends on YouTube, and some are on Facebook, your colleagues are on LinkedIn, he uses Digg, she uses Flickr, you get the idea. It’s getting to be a big distraction just to keep up, and your CPA (constant partial attention) is getting stretched to its limit.

Enter FriendFeed, a social media aggregator that combines activity from all of your social networks into a single stream. While FriendFeed does not currently have a mobile-friendly version of the service, there are other ways of using it on mobile Safari and we’ll tell you how after the jump.

FriendFeed imports data from Facebook, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr, Picassa, Twitter, and many more. In fact, you can connect to over 35 social networks and more are being added all the time. You can even connect any RSS feed to your stream so that you can keep an eye out for any new posts from your favorite blogs.

Getting your very own FriendFeed takes only five minutes to set up. You sign up for a free account and FriendFeed, then you select which social media networks you wish to connect to, then you add friends to your FriendFeed network so that their digital life streams into your feed. Now, whenever you are mobile with your iPhone or iPod touch, you can check in with your friends or colleagues by pointing mobile Safari to your FriendFeed. No more having to check this network, then that one, and so on. All the updates from all the people in your network will appear in that one single feed.

You can easily connect to your own contacts by letting FriendFeed tell you which of your friends are already using FriendFeed. You simply authorize FriendFeed to access your address book in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, or Hotmail. Or you can import your address book from your desktop or other web site. You can also search for your friends by name, or send them invites so they can join you on FriendFeed. Once you find the people you wish to connect to, simply subscribe to their feed and all their online updates will be added to your feed.

You can sort your feeds in a few different ways to help you see who is doing what, and when. The main feed is found on the tab called “Everyone” and this is very similar to Twitter’s public stream. Any non-private item that is shared by any FriendFeed user will appear on this view. Use the “Friends” tab if you want to view only those updates from your friends. The “Me” tab is self-explanatory; it contains only the updates submitted by you. And the “Rooms” tab lets you join or create private rooms with people you invite.

Please note that FriendFeed currently does NOT have an iPhone optimized site, but every feed in FriendFeed is available as it’s own RSS feed which means that you can read your stream in something more suited for mobile Safari, like say, Google Reader. You won’t be able to add updates from Google Reader, but it will let you easily monitor your social networks on-the-go. Another way you can access FriendFeed from iPhone or iPod touch is by using the extremely handy utility, FFToGo, created by Benjamin Golub. FFToGo converts FriendFeed into a mobile friendly format for mobile web browsers including Safari. FFToGo removes extraneous elements from the user-interface and provides options for increasing the font size. This makes FriendFeed much more usable on iPhone so you don’t have to constantly zoom and pinch to read the feeds.

FriendFeed is a simple, yet powerful idea that is executed almost perfectly. It would be a flawless utility if only it offered built-in optimization for iPhone and iPod touch. Until then, however, we can certainly make do with FFToGo or just simply reading FriendFeed’s RSS in our favorite reader apps. When it comes to organizing our online lives, FriendFeed helps us get it together.

FriendFeed
www.FriendFeed.com

FFToGo
www.fftogo.com

Google Reader
reader.google.com

 

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