FriendFeed is an interesting service, which I was alerted to by Neville Hobson.
It enables you to create a ‘lifestream’ – a list of all your interactions with various social networking sites. It create a narrative list of, for example, tweets, blog posts, flickr postings, youtube videos, del.icio.us links etc etc.
As an example, here’s mine (please be my friend).
You can also choose to subscribe to other people’s feeds, which is presented on the friendfeed homepage in a Twitter stylee, or you can click to view the entire FriendFeed universe in a river of news type affair.
FriendFeed is useful, there’s no denying that. The splitting of our online personalities is well due for a reassembling, and FriendFeed makes a pretty good stab at doing that with an interesting social element to it as well. I do wonder how much services like this, and Twitter, are drawing us away from our RSS readers and back to using actual websites on a regular basis. I find myself less reliant on RSS, getting the key ‘must read’ updates through other means these days. Not that I am reporting the death of the aggregator, of course, merely that it’s slightly less dominant these days, for me at least.
I also think there might be some really useful applications of this, especially if it becomes possible to extract stuff from the public timeline along the lines of subject matter, maybe through tagging or just identifying keywords, rather than just by identity as it is done now.
Oh, and Scoble‘s in now. So it’s going to be huge.
Hi Dave.
During my day job, I work for the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Can you imagine what sort of information a friend feed, or lifestream, or whatever you call it, could serve up about you?
It’s a stalker’s wet dream.
I’m just saying.
Possibly – but you do choose which services you publish… and isn’t this stuff available anyway?