Friendfeed allows a total of 49 social media services to feed into their social media tool aggregating system. Blogs, bookmarking, books, news, photos, status updates, music, video, comments, and miscellaneous are ten categories Friendfeed supports. Like all social media tools, Friendfeed allows you to network and share your feeds and information with friends, family, and professionals alike. Discussions are then spawned from comments on your posts and the viral nature is born.
Is Friendfeed just ahead of its time and is viable in your social media strategy or a viral social media tool that will only make its users ill?
Friendfeed is an RSS aggregator that allows you to see the feed of your social media tool’s status and updates. Additionally, you can connect with friends and see their updates too. You can comment on their pages and updates giving it the social media vibe we’ve seen in the previous social media tools I’ve reviewed. There are other tools out on the market that position themselves as a social media tool aggregator other than Friendfeed. The question on the table is does having a tool that displays everything you and your friends do in the social media world help or hinder you?
I’ve decided that with this tool I would poll cyberspace to get people’s reactions to Friendfeed when it initially started getting buzz early in 2008.
SheGeeks just gushed over Friendfeed saying it was the next big thing. That social media aggregators were the next big thing in social media strategy. It’s true, as you’ve notice from my own personal use of social media tools, there are more social media tools out than we know what to do with. Having an easy and straightforward product, that will give me updates on all my social media tools, would be nice. It’s just like the Bottomline for sports or Sportscenter. You have one place to get all the scores and highlights packed into a few minutes.
Duncan Riley on the other hand didn’t understand why Friendfeed had become this year’s Twitter. He believes there is a market for social media aggregator’s, but doesn’t’ know if this is the right way to do it or how it works into your social media strategy.
Then there was Paul Stamatiou who sat on the fence for Friendfeed. He liked the fact you could combine everything together and go to one place, but isn’t sure it has the pulse to last and be one of the legit social media tools.
I guess I’ll have to break the uncertainty and just come out with a clear cut answer. Friendfeed makes me a little nauseous.
Like many products today, as a result of consumer’s demands, everyone wants that all inclusive product. The Blackberry Storm, Playstation 3, and Car Hard Drive Audio Systems all combine features that you would otherwise need separate gadgets for. I like convenience, but sometimes convenience is overwhelming. When I first started heavily reading blogs everyone was telling me sites to check out. So I started using Pageflakes an RSS feed aggregator, similar to Friendfeed but not as social, and I was done using it in about 4 days. I became so overwhelmed seeing all the updates and new posts. Instead of shutting myself in my room to catch up in reading or just cutting back on blogs I said forget it.
Friendfeed has that same feel to it. While it’s great that I have one stop to see all my updates I find it less overwhelming to check ten sites with a few comments each than one site with hundreds.
Perception is everything.
I give Friendfeed a:
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