Using Friendfeed's Imaginary Friends as a Master Aggregator

Like lots of bloggers, my latest fascination these days is Friendfeed. The site, which opened up to everyone about three weeks ago, has been on fire. It aggregates the various streams of all your friends from across all the big social sites into a flowing river organized by date. You can find my stream here.

However, when you dig into Friendfeed, there's much more than meets the eye here. Using the site's Imaginary Friends feature you can turn it into a powerful, master aggregator.

First, sign up for a Friendfeed account. Then head over to the settings page where you can create an unlimited number of imaginary friends. Each of these can collect any number of feeds or streams that you tell it to. I have two for starters. One that tracks all of my in-bound links and Twitter replies and another that tracks my favorite RSS feeds and news. These are private and they work great on a mobile devices as well. In addition, the headlines (not the full text) are also searchable.

I am sure we can dream up even more creative applications for Friendfeed's Imaginary Friends feature. For example, it's easy to create a mashed up stream of news feeds and then to re-syndicate it out elsewhere. If you have ideas share them in the comments.

Comments

[PepperDigital]

The FriendFeed site is great. It is interesting to see how aggregators have evolved to become public domains.

Netvibes recently updated their site so users can publish their "universes," so they are accessible to the Netvibes community.

Yesterday we posted on the topic of aggregators that sometimes fail or have service issues, and FriendFeed seems like a good backup plan.

How do you consult your clients and colleagues on dealing with aggregators that sometimes fail?

[Internet Man]

Has anyone tried their blog widget? How about using it as a type of forum/social network for your blog?

[Tac Anderson]

I think aggregators like FriendFeed pose interesting opportunities for filtering. I'm setting up an invisible friend for things like Google Reader tags, Google Alerts, etc and then sharing those with colleagues.

[andymurd]

Steve, how do you track your inbound links? Is the feed an output of Yahoo Site Excplorer or Google Analytics? Or is it proprietary analytical software?

[Narendra]

Steve,

I am surprised you hadn't picked up on this use earlier. As you know 30 Boxes pioneered the whole notion of open web friend feeds over 2 years ago. In fact, you can build up "imaginary" friends with open web profiles using any feed reader of your choice.

Simply, visit http://30boxes.com/search

If you know someone's email address, we return a profile page and an RSS feed for that person...

[rainbow]

Yeah, and a lot of junky profiles too.

[Reginald]

Considering the content of the thread in this post, FriedFeed seems to be quite a hit.

How would you break down this concept for the beginner?

[Sally Wu]

Thanks for the tip. I just started using FriendFeed and really like it (so far).

http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/i-just-started-my-friendfeed/

[oyun]

Yeah, and a lot of junky profiles too.

[phpLD]

When I first saw all these social networking sites, I wasn't sure if they would work. Now I am seeing they are common place now, and can't be ignored. I'm going to be exploring what we can do with social media sites and phpLD in the coming months.Thanks,David

[Nick Carrasco]

I've thought about doing this since I first heard about FriendFeed. I just never actually looked into how to do it. Thanks for the info/idea.... I'll have to prepare one myself this weekend.... This will prevent me from having to double post a lot of stuff, especially my Digg stuff. Thanks

[Brent]

Great post, i didn't know about that feature, it'll definitely come in handy....i'm now using it to syndicate my twitter replies as well...

Have u seen SocialThing yet? It's like FriendFeed just allows you to manipulate the data using API's and OAUTH so you're never leaving the site if you wanted to reply to a comment or post something new.still in beta but as of yesterday you could still get in via the invite code on this post:http://www.addto10.com/socialthing-an-interactive-social-site-aggregator/

[kawika]

Synchronizing conversations seems key to driving a wider adoption. I like FriendFeed's ability to comment on a tweet while also replying to the author. Seems logical to extend trackback-like features to blog posts, news articles, social networks, etc. so anyone can enjoy the entire conversation around a topic among multiple sites.