FriendFeed - Web 2.0 for Fans of Discussion Forums

Several of my friends on Facebook have joined FriendFeed. I did, too, yesterday, and am very pleased with what I’ve found. For one thing, it distracted me from the frustration of playing with a bunch of Google Gadgets that won’t fit into our already-too-crowded sidebar; but mostly because this is a very cool network.

Mark “Rizzin’” Hopkins, at Mashable, explained it this way:

…What goes on behind the login screen at FriendFeed isn’t indexed by Google or publicly discoverable, either, so a lot of the comments get a much more ‘behind-the-scenes’ raw and uncut feel to it….This opt-in discussion, thus, is seeming to be a much more common theme in the social media/Web 2.0 world. I must say that I like it. While services like this can be a time sink, it doesn’t compare to the type of time-sink an actual web forum would be. In fact, forums, for the last several years, have been completely cut out of my surfing habits due to the fact that simply don’t have the time to commit to developing the relationships inside several small communities. With FriendFeed, though, it’s a place that I can go occasionally that is doing some of my posting for me (i.e. grabbing my feed items and republishing them), as well as allowing me a place to have short exchanges with a lot of the folks I know and read on a daily basis.

According to its “about” page,

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…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.

I’m able to view my FriendFeed from Facebook, or from any feed reader, or even by e-mail. I can even add “imaginary friends” - friends that aren’t signed up for FriendFeed, but have feeds elsewhere on the web that I like to follow. This is a big time-saver to me, as a blogger, because so much of blogging involves linking to what other bloggers are doing, and now I can see what they’re doing all in one place. Sign up for FriendFeed here.