Marketing Myself : FriendFeed Service

What is FriendFeed?

FriendFeed is a service for people to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that their friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

The goal of FriendFeed is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information. You get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. And your friends get their customized feeds, full of the cool stuff that you’ve shared.

Why should I use FriendFeed?

It's open: FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, making all the sites you already use a little more social.

It’s flexible: FriendFeed requires as much effort as you want to put in. You can use it just as a way to see what your friends are up to — browsing and reading the stuff they share, or you can actively share your own items and leave comments and have discussions with your friends. There are also lots of ways to access and display your FriendFeed.

And it’s easy to get started: There’s nothing to install, and you can share stuff on your feed as soon as you sign up. Light-weight conversations naturally sprout up around shared items and you can even get introduced to interesting news from friends of your friends.

How does FriendFeed work?

FriendFeed aggregates all of your activity from the sites you choose using web crawling technologies similar to those used by search engines. For most sites, all you need to provide FriendFeed is your username, and the FriendFeed crawler will automatically find and broadcast all of your public activity on that site. For other sites, or for services that contain private data and require special forms of authentication, FriendFeed takes advantage of the APIs provided by those sites to collect your activity.

By using an automated, crawl-based approach to finding the content you find interesting, our hope is that your FriendFeed experience will be completely "maintenance free" — you can help your friends and family discover what you’re sharing without changing the way you already use your favorite web-based products.

What web sites does FriendFeed support?

FriendFeed currently supports:

We are constantly adding new sites. Help us prioritize by suggesting a site.

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.

Post your FriendFeed comments back to Twitter

For you Twitter users: When you are commenting on a Twitter post in FriendFeed, you now have the option of sending your comment as an @reply in Twitter as well:

Happy Tweeting!

it’s also fast and easy to start discussions around shared items. On FriendFeed, you and your friends contribute to a shared stream of information — information that you care about, because it's from the people that you care about.

You don't need to install anything to use FriendFeed. But if you already use Facebook, you can add our Facebook application to connect your Facebook profile to all the other products you use around the web. You can also view your FriendFeed in your iGoogle homepage or read it in a feed reader. If you make your FriendFeed publicly visible (kind of like a blog that writes itself), you can embed your feed in your home page or blog.

Let us know what you think in the FriendFeed discussion group or check our our FAQ for more information. You can get continuous updates from the FriendFeed team on the FriendFeed blog.

To get started, create an account »

Get a room!

It started when we wanted a better way to share feature ideas and product plans with each other here at FriendFeed, but not the rest of the world -- a mini FriendFeed of our own. We could have set this up on its own machine in the office, but we knew that we weren't alone in our desire and that the right way to go was to extend FriendFeed's capabilities for everyone. And so FriendFeed rooms were born.

A room is simple to set up: You'll notice a new 'rooms' tab at the top of the page. Click it and you're on your way to making your own room and inviting folks to it. You can make a room public so anyone can join it and participate, or you can make it private so only invited people can see it and become members. Whether you're sharing something via the FriendFeed site or using our bookmarklet, you can now designate where you want it to show up in FriendFeed. You can even choose whether you want stuff in a particular room to show up in your main feed or not.

Thanks to rooms, my family has a place to brainstorm travel plans for my Cousin Sara's upcoming wedding, and my Irish dance friends can discuss the merits of different dance shoes without cluttering up everyone else's FriendFeed. Of course, there's already a room for talking about how to make rooms more useful, and it's a good thing too, since this is just the beginning. Of course we've also updated the FriendFeed API to support rooms.

To give you some ideas for what you can do with rooms, here are a few other public rooms created by FriendFeeders:

So now, go get a room of your own!

So you see...most community feeds that bloggers are signed up to, FriendFeed is where they all get organized, and placed in one easy accessible site.