FriendFeed is the new darling of the web elite — an aggregator of social networking data that ties together your activity on many of the most popular sites into a central feed. FriendFeed monitors your Flickr photostream, Upcoming.org events, RSS feeds, Twitter updates, and various other services, putting all of your updates into one convenient news feed. And in addition to aggregating all of your social data, the FriendFeed application has a number of its own features that make the site itself a conversational venue.
It doesn’t take spending much time on FriendFeed to figure out that the different modules of functionality on FaceBook can be replaced with various other social networking sites. So here is a quick rundown of how you can use FriendFeed to build your own alternative to FaceBook that spreads your data out amongst an assortment of services, instead of locking it all into one central location.
Photo Sharing
Flickr is the photo sharing site of choice for many web geeks, as well as many amateur and professional photographers. Free accounts provide a limited but adequate amount of bandwidth and storage, and Pro accounts priced at an affordable $25 per year make Flickr a way to share as many digital photos as you can upload, which also doubles as an offsite backup for your photographic memories.
If you are a Picasa Web Albums fan, FriendFeed works with Google’s photo sharing service too.
Video Sharing
FriendFeed can hook up with your YouTube account. I doubt YouTube in and of itself needs much explanation.
Events
Upcoming provides a way to manage and respond to both public and private events. You can track events among your network of friends, as well as search for interesting things to do in your local area. And Upcoming.org uses a “machine tags” feature that ties into Flickr, allowing the site to automatically discover photos from events.
Status Updates
Can’t pass a day without letting your crew know what you had for breakfast? Microblogging service Twitter lets you publish short status messages — short meaning 140 characters or less. You can post to Twitter from their web interface, SMS, or a variety of desktop applications.
FriendFeed also works with Google Talk.
Hook in your blog
FriendFeed can read any RSS feed, which means that every blog post you write can appear in your FriendFeed stream of activity.
Conversations
Conversation on FriendFeed is different than on Facebook. Instead of collecting messages back and forth between users on a “Wall”, FriendFeed allows members to comment on any update that takes place. Whether it’s new Flickr photos, a favorited song on Last.fm, or a shared blog post from Google Reader, you can post a comment.
Complete the Circle
To bring everything full circle, there is a FriendFeed Facebook application that will post all of your FriendFeed activity to your Facebook mini-feed.
This article has highlighted just a few popular social networking sites that solve many of the same problems that are addressed by various functionality present in Facebook. These are not the only services supported by FriendFeed. Read more about FriendFeed if you would like to know about the other services that can hook into your FF stream.
