friendfeed

FriendFeed's goal: More than just a feed aggregator

FriendFeed is a current Web 2.0 darling. The service performs the increasingly valuable job of presenting, in one place, all the online activity of the friends you want to follow. Twitter posts, blog entries, YouTube favorites, Last.fm listens, Flickr photos, you name it...FriendFeed lets you track it all (except Facebook updates). You can also talk about your friends' activities on FriendFeed itself, a clubbier environment than joining the fray on, say, a YouTube feedback page.

The service is not the only social aggregator, nor is it the first: Plaxo Pulse does a lot of the same stuff, … Read more

Facebook goes hyper-viral with 'People You May Know'

Facebook has about 67 million members. With the new "People You May Know" feature, the number of connections per member will skyrocket, extending the reach and stickiness of Facebook's social graph.

People You May Know finds people within six degrees or so of separation and suggests them as potential friends. It appears that the threshold is set at four, meaning you are connected to four of the same people as the suggested "friend." FriendFeed has taken a somewhat similar approach for recommending new people to "follow."

This type of recommendation engine, which taps … Read more

Welcome to the club: FriendFeed launches its API

I think we all saw this one coming. The hottest social aggregator out there today, FriendFeed, has launched an application programming interface, paving the way for third-party applications using its service. Full documentation for the API is available on Google Code.

This is certainly an important step for FriendFeed. The closely related service, Twitter, has benefited greatly from providing support for third-party developers, so FriendFeed should see a similar bump from the introduction of its API.

FriendFeed's API currently offers PHP and Python libraries, with support for OAuth apparently on the way. In making the API, FriendFeed also took … Read more

FriendFeed now talks to Twitter

A new feature in the personal feed aggregator FriendFeed lets users reply to Twitter posts that show up on the service, and have those replies posted to Twitter itself. Previously, what happened in FriendFeed stayed in FriendFeed.

You can only reply to Twitter posts in FriendFeed. Your post will start @(username), which is the standard for a reply on Twitter. You can't create a new Twitter item without the reply text. So FriendFeed is still not the new Twitter.

FriendFeed in reverse now exists, by the way: Ping.fm, a service that sends items to multiple microblog services at once. … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 683: Will you marry me?

EPISODE 683

Apple snags 14 percent of U.S.-based PC retail sales in February http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/17/ apple_snags_14_percent_of_us_based_pc_retail_sales_in_february.html

Yahoo: We’ll double our cash flow http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9896609-7.html http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/ releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=300145

Justices turn down Microsoft appeal http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/S/ SCOTUS_MICROSOFT?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Amazon: Vista SP1 to ship Wednesday http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9896597-7.html

Online oligarchy: Old guard dominates Net news coverage http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080317-online-oligarchy-old-guard-dominates-net-news-coverage.html

Returns, technical problems … Read more

FriendFeed is not the new Twitter. Is it?

Like my new boss, I am getting an increasing flow of bacn notices about people subscribing to my FriendFeed updates.

Many pundits, in the same boat, are wondering whether FriendFeed is the new Twitter since it serves a similar purpose: it tells you what your pals are up to. And it has the easiest and best procedure for finding and subscribing to your friends' feeds of any social-network app I've ever seen.

On Monday, the company added a handy new feature: search. This is a bit of a bigger deal that it appears at first. It's not just … Read more

Socialthing monitors your online life at home and on the go

2007 was the year of platforms, and I'm just about ready to call 2008 the year of social aggregators, or services that help you group together and manage all the social sites you're a part of. Opening up (in private beta) on Monday is Socialthing, a new contender that joins the ranks of Plaxo, MyBlogLog, Spokeo, Iminta, Profilactic, Friendfeed, and Facebook in giving you a single place to aggregate and interact with all that information in one, centralized feed.

As with some of the others in this space, Socialthing takes your log-ins and usernames from each service and … Read more

FriendFeed tells you what your friends are up to online

FriendFeed is leaving private beta tonight and opening up to everyone. It's a potentially useful service that aggregates what your friends are doing around the Web into one big feed you can easily scan. In other words, if you've got friends who Twitter, friends who post photos on Flickr, friends who favorite videos on YouTube, and friends who tag music on Last.fm or sites on del.icio.us, this service will keep track of them all. Except what your pals are doing on Facebook--that service was not scannable by FriendFeed in the beta version I tried.

The … Read more

Six Apart launches Activity Streams

Six Apart is releasing a new plugin for Movable Type this morning called Activity Streams that let MT users create a news feed and add it to their blog. Similar to the FriendFeed, which I checked out back in October, MT users can plugin their various affiliations with other social services and present all the information in one place where they are already publishing content--their blog.

MT's creators said the plugin is different from services, such as Plaxo Pulse, because you host it, not a third party company. Hosting it yourself keeps your login information in your hands. MT … Read more