I’ve been giving FriendFeed a second chance and I’m glad I did. At first I really didn’t know what to think, it seemed to be comprised of noise which led me to think of it as a social RSS aggrigator on par with Google Reader.
Now that I’ve been using it for the last week I’ve really enjoyed it. Even though I may not be participating as much as I want, it’s a wonderful way follow other’s social streams and more importantly have conversations around them.
Rooms are extremely useful. I’m only participating in one but having a place to share links and feeds (something the group I’m a part of doesn’t allow) is excellent. facebook groups, probably the only other good option I can think of is…the modern day forum, too complex with about no additional functionality. FriendFeed keeps rooms simple and that’s where it excels.
That simplicity works into the interface. The homepage gets to be a burden at first but don’t fret, it’s an easy fix. Not sure when they added the “hide” feature but this is the feature that allows me to use the service. What I do: not saying it’s the perfect solution, is to hide all of the blogs and other items that I would normally get in GoogleReader and I don’t want to comment on at FriendFeed. I’m currently keeping Twitter in the mix so I can comment on the tweets with it being sent back to twitter as an @ reply. More importantly I keep twitter and other feeds that thrive in conversation, which are just about impossible to follow or find on twitter.
Those conversations run ramant on FriendFeed and they really make the service. I just wish more people were using the service, not just my “real friends” but I would like to see FriendFeed aggrigate conversations no matter where they originated.
I’ll try to expand on what I mean by aggregating conversations in another post, I should also bring up the terrific FriendFeed bot after I get more use out of it.
