Advanced FriendFeed Tip: The Imaginary Friend
They say write about what you know, and since I’ve been spending hours of my time on FriendFeed, I am starting to know it fairly well.
The Apology
Therefore, I am sorry that I’m contributing to the growing pool of I had this great conversation on FriendFeed and it inspired me to write this post-type posts, but this is going to be one.
The Set-Up
Recently, there was a conversation on FriendFeed that Trish Robinson started off with the question:
“Has anyone used the "create an imaginary friend" feature? Does it work?”
As it turns out, people use the ‘imaginary friend’ feature in different ways. Here is what we know about imaginary friends on FriendFeed:
- You can set up an imaginary friend to show you one or more syndicated feeds from any of the 41 (at last count) services FriendFeed offers.
- Only you can see your imaginary friend.
- Any comments or likes you put on an entry created by a imaginary friend are only seen by you as well.
- You can reshare an imaginary friend’s entry if you want others to see it.
- You can create an unlimited number of imaginary friends, and they can have any name at all. Even the names of actual FriendFeed users or other imaginary friends.
- Just like there is no way of deleting a room, there is no way of deleting an imaginary friend.
- If you unsubscribe from an imaginary friend, its GUID remains, but inaccessible from anyone but perhaps the FriendFeed gods.
- You cannot invite or otherwise add an imaginary friend to a room.
- If you see an entry from an imaginary friend in your main friend’s feed, you will not be able to hide the entry. (Unverified)
- If your actual friend creates a new account using the same name as your imaginary friend, that is entirely possible and you will potentially see duplicate entries.
The Payoff
So far, imaginary friends seem fairly straightforward. Let’s say you have a friend or a web site that is not represented well on FriendFeed and you want that information to be there in ff. Not a problem, add an imaginary friend, add a feed to it, away you go. You can treat that imaginary friend like you would other users aside from your likes and comments not showing up on the public stream.
However, if you look at an imaginary friend as a customizable feed reader, it suddenly opens up into a very useful construct that fits well into the FriendFeed workflow (or is that idleflow?). Now, you can see new feed items as they are published and you can like them to bookmark them, or comment on them to leave yourself little notes for research or further reading. Instant feed reader, no Google Reader needed!
You can also use imaginary friends to keep track of comment fragmentation. You can, for example, assign the comment feeds for different web sites to imaginary friends with those site names, along with their RSS feeds, then, you will see ongoing discussions as they happen on those sites.
You can keep track of people or entities on the internet that you love to hate, or just hate. You can then cathartically scream and punish your invisible enemy as much as you want, and nobody is the wiser (except for the aforementioned FriendFeed god, who if they know what is good for them will never tell anyone).
The Unexpected Bonus
I like you, reader, because I could have saved this tip for a different article. But you will get it here, a reward for getting this far! Here’s your bonus tip:
Most of these things you can do with invisible friends can also be done with private rooms.
Yep. You can create a room, add a feed or 3, reshare, comment as much as you like, etc. Private room entries also will show up in your main friend feed if you want them to. Rooms provide another layer of segregation of content, if you want it.
It would be cool if you could have invisible friends feeding in to private rooms, but since the functionality is duplicated, personally, I don’t miss not having it.
The Wrap-Up
Don’t take features for granted. Please refer to this post, where I say:
Find uncommon uses for the service. See if it makes a good search engine, or gets free concert tickets or a better job. You never know.
Even after using FriendFeed daily for almost two months, I am still finding cool new ways of doing things in the service. That, almost as much as the community aspect, keeps me coming back to it.
The Belated Credit
For some reason, I totally blanked on the fact that Justin Korn (FriendFeed profile) wrote up his experience using FriendFeed as an RSS reader and organizer on his own blog.
I feel especially bad because I encouraged Justin to write it! Honestly, I feel like a complete heel. When it comes to giving credit, I have a thing or two to learn.
My unreserved apologies, Justin.