Almost everyone has one: the friend who has become obsessed with his or her online life. The always-on set have an ever-proliferating array of sites on which to post and pose: Friendster, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Amazon, Pandora and, of course, Twitter. There are dozens more. How can you possibly keep up with their latest posts all over the place?
FriendFeed, a site created in 2007 by a gang of former Google workers, gives you a way to track all of your crazy friend’s posts to nearly 60 sites. His blog posts, Flickr photos and Twitter status updates are gathered and displayed in a single column on FriendFeed. The site’s stripped-down layout makes for easy skimming.
Your friend can create a feed for himself. FriendFeed will start by automatically importing his latest posts on every site he lists with the service. (The site is surprisingly clever about finding your accounts elsewhere without requiring you to type them in.)
From then on, FriendFeed will crawl these sites. Any new posts will be added atop his FriendFeed page.
To follow him, you needn’t even log in. Go to friendfeed.com/search and type in your friend’s name. If he’s set up a FriendFeed for himself, it’ll be atop the results. Bookmark his feed’s URL, which will look like friendfeed.com/paulboutin.
If your friend won’t set up a FriendFeed account, you can sign up yourself and create one for him, as long as you know the sites and member names under which he posts. Some sites, like Facebook, require you to enter the password of the account being followed.
For example, I use FriendFeed to track my professional colleague Brian Solis, a prolific publicist, photographer, blogger and link-sharer. No way would I bother to check Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, bub.blicio.us and identi.ca every day to see what Brian’s up to. (I’m not even sure what identi.ca is.)
Instead, FriendFeed lets me hit Brian’s all-in-one feed. When I open the page, I see thumbnails of his latest camera uploads to Flickr, interspersed with Brian’s text posts to multiple Web sites, beginning with the latest updates. I can scroll through a few days of Brianworld in a few seconds.
The system isn’t perfect yet. FriendFeed works great on well-known megasites like Facebook and Twitter, but when I tried to add Gadgetwise to my own feed, the setting that tells FriendFeed to only show posts written by me didn’t work. It put all my co-authors’ posts into my feed. On another blog, FriendFeed displayed the comments, but not my posts.
The more obsessive Internet users you have in your life, the more valuable FriendFeed is. This week the site is helping me keep up with the giant load of oversharing coming from Austin’s South by Southwest conference. When a friend at the event IMs me to ask excitedly if I saw their photos from last night’s afterparty, I can pop over to FriendFeed, scroll down the page, then type back 10 seconds later, “Why yes, of course I did!”
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