My Fascination with FriendFeed

Recently, I’ve been on FriendFeed quite a bit. In fact, I’ve been using FriendFeed to the exclusion of any other social network, such as Twitter or Facebook. There is something fresh and compelling about the service, yet familiar as well. I think the familiarity comes from how the interface works, it reminds me a little of a lot of different social services I have used in the past.

• Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) – Before the internets, BBSs ruled the phone lines. Incredibly dynamic for the time, people would log in to a BBS (usually one user at a time) and reply to messages, upload and download files, and perhaps chat with the sysop (system operator). Although we have come a very long way since then, there was a indescribable sense of community and feedback on BBSs. I have felt this more on FriendFeed than any other service.
• Chat Systems – I’ve used a few in my time. Real-time chat has an interesting, transitory, yet compelling feel to it. FriendFeed is similar, especially after the addition of rooms. However, chat systems don’t really have any affinity settings, you follow what is said by everyone in the room. Also, any external content must be brought in by hand.
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) – IRC was an early (and subversively successful in many ways) attempt to replicate chat system or chat room functionality on the internet. See Chat Systems above. I would make a separate bullet for Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and the like, but for this conversation they are similar to IRC.
• Forums – Forums are a framework for providing conversations around a topic. However, Forums attempt to keep a fairly permanent record of anything that is contributed, and the conversational flow is far from the dynamism found in FriendFeed. Plus, any external content must be added manually. Unlike chat systems, it is more worth the effort on a forum since it can be indexed by a search bot and found later.
• Twitter – The obvious comparison, of course. The big similarity here is that you interact with other people that you follow and who follow you. However, apart from the fact that stuff scrolls past, these services have more differences than similarities.

So already, FriendFeed feels a little like an old friend. Or perhaps a young friend with an old soul. Of course, it brings a lot new to the table, like content aggregation, social network features, content sharing and an advanced API. But at least for me, that explains what makes it more fascinating than, say, Twitter.

On To The Good Stuff!

The format I am going to employ here is to take it one tip at a time, and then explain why it should work for you. I will warn you that some of these tips could potentially be very annoying and disruptive, so I haven’t personally tried them all. However, experience and a bit of logic makes me think they should work.

1. Make Sure Your Profile Has Some Credibility

You know how I said that some of my tips may be a little dirty? This is one of them. Different people have different ways of vetting the people that they follow. Some will follow anyone who follows them. Others will only follow their friends. However, many take it case-by-case, or look for some criteria:

• Upload an avatar picture. This is very important. Either one of yourself, a picture of a person, or a an eye-catching cartoon or abstract image. Don’t upload anything offensive. As anywhere on the internet, people will be interested in looking at a girl picture more than a boy picture.
• People will often look for certain service icons in your profile. If all you have is Twitter and Flickr, pack it up and go back to the minor leagues, kid. I’m not saying you have to add every service that FriendFeed supports, but having more than 5 looks pretty good. You will want to make sure you have at least one or two Blog RSS feeds, a LinkedIn profile and a different established social network such as Upcoming or Last.FM. Having these gives the impression that you like trying out services and using what’s available on the internet.
• Choose a nickname that is inoffensive and easy to remember, and make sure your name is a real name, at least a first name. If you are using a bunch of numbers or something random, people will be confused or turned off.
• Some people will go to extra effort to see if you have liked or commented more than say, 5 times since you signed up. At the beginning, this is pretty much impossible to game.. As you use the service these numbers will accumulate.

2. Follow People

This sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But I suspect there are a LOT of people out there who joined the service, maybe had FriendFeed look at their address book to see which of their friends had an account, added a couple of people, and then waited. After getting bored, they added some of their other services, refreshed a few times, and got bored again.

The solution? Follow people. It doesn’t matter who. If you want to apply a template of some sort, you can, but actually, the more random the better. The reasoning up front isn’t that clear but once you start to get popular, you will notice a sort of herd mentality that FriendFeeders like to call the echo chamber. The more you can break out of the echo chamber the better. Might as well start from the beginning.

Here are some tips for getting started finding people to follow:

• Under the friend settings tab, there is a recommended link that will take you to a page that lists a bunch of people. Subscribe to all of these. Then refresh and you will get a new page. Subscribe to all of them too. Keep doing this for a while.
• If you have already subscribed to a few people (by using the above method or some other way), you should see them listed under the friend settings tab in my subscriptions, or in the right-hand navigation bar in the me tab. From either place, click on a few people and you will see who they are following in their right-hand nav bar. You can subscribe to more people from there.
• Ok, doing the first two methods going too slowly? No problem. Either go to one of your friends’ pages, and then click on see both over on the right-hand nav bar (to bring up all their comments and likes) or go to the everyone tab. Now just hover over any name you see. You can subscribe right from within the pop-up bubble that appears.
• Combine all three techniques to follow a lot of people. For now, don’t worry about how many people are following you.

3. Comment and Like

This is very important. You are trying to make yourself noticed. This means you have to contribute in two ways, and commenting and marking as liked is one of those ways. You need to walk a line between being obviously spammy and being really active. To this end, here are some pro comment and tag tips:

• Contribute to established conversations and popular entries, but also comment on and like stuff that hasn’t been noticed yet. People quickly get used to seeing what a FriendFeed entry looks like without a comment or like. Just by liking an entry, you push that entry to the top, you make the entry more visible, and you associate your name with the entry. It’s a win-win-win!
• If you want to be noticed by people, not only do you want to comment on or like their various feed entries and FriendFeed updates, but also be sure to add, comment and like their friends’ entries too.
• When you see that FriendFeed has glommed a bunch of similar entries together, such as tweets or Google Reader shared items, be sure you click on the more button to look at those extra entries. First, you might find a hidden gem there that would have been overlooked, and second it gives you more chances to comment and like stuff.
• Try to be as helpful as possible when commenting. Your observations and thoughts are great, and if you are really funny, sure, use that, but if you can answer a question, or provide a link to a resource, or point out something new, you will get attention.

4. Make Sure You Are Contributing

This one is pretty simple. Only two pieces of advice here. Make sure the services you list have stuff coming in to FriendFeed, and also give that FriendFeed Bookmarklet a workout. Why do you want to do this? This adds to your cover story. Your cover story may not necessarily be a lie, but if someone visits your user profile page and it’s empty, warning lights will go off. You don’t have to go crazy here but at least 5 or 6 things a day, all services combined.

5. Promote Your Own Stuff

Ok, we are really getting into the voodoo now. This is an advanced tip that will let you get more eyes on your name. This is a grab bag of techniques so be sure to mix them up.

FriendFeed uses a secret algorithm to figure out when glom updates from a service together and present them as a truncated list with a more button. People like this because otherwise you would see nothing but tweets, but for you this works counter to what you want. Here are some tips to defeat this behavior:

• You can’t like your own stuff, but you can comment on it. This also effectively breaks the update out of the pack. Don’t use this every time, but if you have, say, 5 Google Reader shared items glommed together, comment on one or two of them. This will push them up to the top of the stream and show a comment, besides.
• Luckily, if you use the FriendFeed bookmarklet, it allows you to add a comment on anything you bookmark. So people will be used to seeing FriendFeed updates with comments. Ergo, use this as much as you can in lieu of other services. Every time you use the bookmarklet, the update will actually be seen by your followers, with a comment already attached.
• Use the FriendFeed bookmarklet’s ability to grab up to three images per link. Another technique you don’t want to overdo, but this is a real attention-grabber. Shared items that have an attached picture or graph almost always get a comment or a like. Don’t forget about this one!

6. Use Rooms

This is a bonus tip, and probably the one that requires the most effort on your part. Rooms are the double-edged sword of FriendFeed, and in fact most chat systems that use the room concept. Rooms can be active, fun and interesting, or they can be completely empty. Think of a room as a bar or a nightclub.. carefully consider every aspect of the room’s presentation and interaction with the larger FriendFeed community. Food for thought:

• If you decide to create a room, make sure it has a nice avatar. This is a light touch but worth the effort.
• Make sure your room is both novel and compelling. It can’t be too broad, but it can’t be too niche either. Things that are popular in the world are going to be popular in a room too, I suspect. Like photography or hobbies or cell phones.
• You have to work at keeping a room interesting. This isn’t Field of Dreams. If you create it, it won’t suddenly get popular, unless you are very lucky. You will need to attend to the room, inviting people, adding content, seeding discussions, maybe even having contests or giving stuff away.
• If you don’t have the time to work on a room, find a hapless lackey. There are plenty of people out there with boundless enthusiasm and charming naiveté. Use this to your advantage by making a room popular, and then allowing someone to help you keep the level of excitement and discussion high. How do you think Rob Malda and Kevin Rose made it big?
• Rooms can be public or private. If they are public, they are essentially sideband clones of the main feed. If they are private, you have much more control over who gets invited, who gets in, and what happens in the room.
• If you make a private room, it will require a completely different strategy than a public room. You will need to carefully consider how to get the news out that your room is awesome, and get people excited about being invited. Here’s a suggestion: Team up with a well-known personality who will talk your room up, but be careful to control access yourself.

Conclusion

I don’t feel too guilty for sharing these tips with you, my eager reader. Sooner or later, these and more effective secrets will be discovered, so why not be out in front of the pack a little? Go forth and have fun. If you found this article useful, share it. Digg it. Mixx it. I’m not proud, this is how I get readership!

… rss2email, which is an open source project that uses Python …

Use Your Email Client

This is actually a fairly popular alternative to reading feeds in a standalone app or online. A lot of email clients now support RSS feeds directly, such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Thunderbird and Mac OS X Mail. But even if you use an old-school email client like Eudora, you can still get your RSS feeds delivered by email. The easiest way to do this, of course, is a feed-to-email service such as FeedBurner, Feedblitz, Feed Mailer, or RSSfwd.

But you can roll your own RSS to email as well. One of my close friends uses rss2email, which is an open source project that uses Python to parse and repackage RSS streams as emails. Then, you can use pretty much any email client (even web mail clients!) to read your feeds.

Lastly, there are plug-in RSS feed handlers for big email clients such as Outlook that handle single feeds or full corporate feed systems. One such company is Attensa, which actually produces a whole vertical line of RSS feed products, from a corporate server on down to a free client app.

Use Your TV

Some people are all about bringing their PC use to the living room. They have their media server set up, and they do everything from web surfing, DVR use, and video games to watching podcasts. Of course, something that rolls right in to this is feed viewing.

A popular option here is an extension of Windows Media Center creatively named MCE RSS Reader. They have a version for Windows Vista Ultimate as well. Both these products install nicely with Media Center and run a small external app to gather your RSS feeds and display them on-screen. They also work great with podcast RSS feeds, giving you a full-screen view of whatever podcast video feed you want to add.

The roll-your-own solution MythTV has a plugin for feed viewing which looks very nice as well. Both these products are geared to your TV resolution — so the fonts are extra-big and navigation is accomplished easily with a remote control.

Use Twitter

Twitter is blowing up right now, especially with the Gen Y set. There are a lot of startups and application developers taking advantage of this new medium to build extra functionality. Obviously, with Twitter’s 140-character limit you won’t be getting full feeds. However, it is perfect for getting new post headlines.

One service that lets you push feed headlines out in Twitter is Twitterfeed. Create a new twitter user, connect Twitterfeed to that user and voila, instant feed headlines. Get creative and use Yahoo! Pipes to pull several feeds together, and then push that to a twitterfeed account and you have yourself a twitter-based headline clipping service.

Listen to your Feeds

Text-to-speech translation has come a long way since the original speech synthesizers of the 1970’s. If you spend a lot of time in a car, train or plane, and you love your iPod, why not listen to your RSS feeds? Everybody knows about podcasts, but there are a few services out there that will actually translate an RSS feed from straight text to a very pleasant voice, in MP3 or other convenient format.

I have just added odiogo support to this blog while researching the links to be used in this article. It plugs in to WordPress really nicely and allows each article to be converted to speech from within the browser, or through a RSS subscription (mine can be found here).

And, for just a taste of what I found on the first page of a Google search, you can have fun with the Apexoft RSS to Speech Widget (iGoogle or Standalone), Blogbard, and Speakwire (thought I couldn’t get the service to work for me).

Watch a Ticker Tape or Screen Saver

This may be the least-useful ways of viewing feeds of the bunch, but often they are also the prettiest.

First, let’s look at Snackr. This is a brand-new Adobe AIR application that gives you a slick ticker tape that can be docked to any side of your screen and slowly scrolls posts from your RSS feeds. You can either add feeds manually or import an OPML (or compatible XML) file from your favorite feed reader. That’s it! It will list random posts at a user-configurable speed which you can click on to get a snippet, or open the post in a browser.

There have been several efforts at making fun screen savers that use your RSS feeds as content. Probably the best-known and most successful of these attempts is the one that comes built-in to Mac OS X 10.4 and newer. Not much to look at in a screenshot, but you get an idea of it if you watch a video.

There are similar screensavers for Windows, with rsssaver being the imitating the Mac version most directly. However, you can get nice savers from nuparadigm, RSSmore, even from some MSDN developers.

If anyone has a favorite that they have vetted out, please link it up here in the comments! I’m always looking for a decent, non-crashy new screensaver to try.

Wrap Up

There are a lot of options out there for you. Obviously, these alternative paths aren’t going to be for everyone. In fact, they probably won’t be for a majority.

But, if you have a Mac at work that you want to show your blog articles off on while you are at lunch, there’s a screen saver for you. Or, if you spend an hour on a train every day, pick up an audio podcast of your favorite feed and off you go.

If you know of any novel RSS feed apps out there (or entire categories) that I failed to cover, please hook them up in the comments below. Thanks!