FriendFeed is a website that starts as an aggregator of all of your online activity and enables you to publish directly to your profile. You can pick and choose what activities link up to FriendFeed and get published under your profile. I have my Tweets, Flickr photos, Blog Posts and shared Google Reader Posts flowing automatically into FriendFeed. You can manually post information as well, using full sentences and complete thoughts as you are not limited to 140 characters. I have the Bookmarklet sitting in my toolbar and can easily post any website directly to FriendFeed (and have it automatically post to Twitter as well).
Staying ahead of the curve is easy with FriendFeed. Why? Because so many early adopters gravitated to FriendFeed, there is an intelligent and engaging audience waiting for you. More importantly all comments are attached to the post creating conversations you can engage with from simply “liking” the post or adding in your 2 cents. Creating conversations is an art form in social media marketing, FriendFeed enables you to be an artist.
How do you find friends to subscribe to on FriendFeed? The suggested friends are somewhere between the ordinary and the extraordinary. As you subscribe to people the suggested people to subscribe to evolves based on who your subscribers are subscribing to. That may sound confusing, but the core point is that these people are selected based on popularity amongst the people you are subscribing to. This is more interesting than the suggested follows on Twitter which are less focused.
Last but not least you can check your email, FaceBook and Twitter to see who you know on FriendFeed and subscribe to them. I have found the most people coming over from Twitter, but slowly the contacts in my Gmail have been coming on board. As with other networks, it is a good idea to check monthly (or more frequently) for new potential people to subscribe to. You can also check who is subscribing to you and Subscribe to them. As this number grows it is a good idea to use the List feature to enable you to effectively monitor and participate in conversations.
The last word on FriendFeed is evolving. This site is a great example of high tech software as a service. They are building in new features regularly and you can really customize your experience. FriendFeed has a corporate copycat in SocialCast, which is a great white label social network using the newsfeed format of FriendFeed. As FriendFeed evolves you have to play with the features to figure out how to make them useful to you. Luckily, we are all learning together.
