Fall in Love with FriendFeed - Steve's Tips

I am 100% into FriendFeed (as my loyal readers will no doubt know slash be sick of hearing about). FriendFeed is a social aggregator; part social link sharing, part commenting/discussion hub, and part microblogging service. At first glance you might not see how alive and useful FriendFeed is because of the unassuming text-on-white minimal design, so here are my tips for digging in.

1. Create an account and add your icon picture (duh).

2. Subscribe to A LOT of people – don’t worry if you don’t know them, it’s not Facebook, you are peeking in on people’s digital streams, not initiating a friendship. Try Scoble and Rubel (the pied pipers of FriendFeed) to get started with social media info, Mona and Corie for great links, or Brian and Sebastian cause I know ‘em.

3. Add (import) your own feeds: your blog, your flickr, your youtube etc. Now you are adding content to the feeds of those who are subscribed to you.

4. Participate! Grey text is the discussion of a post. Start commenting (or clicking “like”) on anything and everything that catches your eye. When you comment, you become more visible to other users, and you make that post rise to the top of the list again. Social Darwinism.

5. Make FriendFeed “native” postings from the bookmarklet – as you surf, just send interesting links to FF (including pictures) these stand out and bring more discussion.

6. See more discussion and “traction” than you probably ever saw on a blog post, and you might soon find yourself addicted. Back to step 4, repeat.

I asked this question of my FriendFeed followers today: “I’m about to do a demo of FriendFeed for a bunch of friends. Help me out - what do YOU get out of FriendFeed?” - This is the running thread of the results - not bad!

Some more thoughts:
• FriendFeed was created by the former Google employees who made Gmail. The search box in FriendFeed is very powerful – need some friends? - then click on the “everyone” tab, then search terms of things that interest you (Batman, iPhone, Platypus Migration) – you’ll find good posts/discussion in no time.

• FriendFeed is open and scalable. Nothing is hidden (unless you want it to be) and almost every possible element of the service has its own unique URL.

• FriendFeed has rooms – these are groups of people who find, share and discuss posts on a specific topic. A great way to discover info and make connections (plus you can make your own rooms). Here are my favorites (many of which I run ;)
ComicCon • Foods • IPhone • Movie Marketing • Movie Reviews • New York Internet • NYC • Obamamania • Project Runway • Social Media • The Watchmen Movie • Bitchfest • Spore

There you go, I hope this helps. If you join up, here’s my feed to get you started.