FriendFeed, Aggregate and Share Web Content With Friends

by Scott Beale on February 26, 2008 · 18 comments

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a new social network that aggregates and shares your feeds from various web services. You just add the accounts you use and then your posts to those services are automatically added to FriendFeed and shared with your friends, who then can can then comment on various items that are posted.

FriendFeed was created by a team of ex-Google employees and recently launched out of private beta, now open to everyone. Here’s my account on FriendFeed.

The goal of FriendFeed is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information. You get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. And your friends get their customized feeds, full of the cool stuff that you’ve shared.

Check out Eric Eldon’s excellent VentureBeat write-up on the FriendFeed launch.

Top Sites per FriendFeed

FriendFeed also includes some interesting usage statistics, for example here’s a pie charge showing top sites where I post.

UPDATE: Per Ted’s recommendation, I’m checking out iminta as well. Here’s my account on iminta. For more on iminta, check out the recent write-up on Mashable.

Related Posts:

FriendFeed Comments on Laughing Squid

Fuelly – Track, Share & Compare Your Car’s MPG

FriendFeed Beta Redesign Featuring Updates in Real-Time

Super Friends Cartoon Meets Friends Sitcom

ShareThis, Making It Easy To Share or Send Blog Posts

filed under Social Networks

{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Andy February 27, 2008 at 7:20 am

Did you hear about http://www.spokeo.com.

“Perfect” for any stalker, jealous friends, parents….

Reply

2 Ted Rheingold February 27, 2008 at 11:14 am

I recommend iminta.com. It’s made with love, not self-funded millions.

http://iminta.com/people/tedr

Reply

3 Scott Beale February 27, 2008 at 11:26 am

Ted, I use several services that are self-funded, overfunded and so on. That usually has nothing to do with why I like a service or not.

It sounds like there is more to the story. Do tell.

Reply

4 stega February 27, 2008 at 11:32 am

My question is, what’s to stop them from using your seemingly innocent RSS/site reading prefs as a data mine and selling it off.

OpenID options are much more viable solutions.

Reply

5 Ted Rheingold February 27, 2008 at 11:44 am

Sorry, nothing to the story. I just like iminta. Though I will share I’m confused by a company that does a mostly self-funded formal Series A instead of just investing their own money like what is normally done and giving themselves shares. But that is all unqualified armchair speculation. I just been using iminta and enjoy it.

Reply

6 Chris Pommier February 27, 2008 at 3:40 pm

Signed up for both FriendFeed and Spokeo today because of this post. Have to say, out of the box I like Spokeo better. Less work. and it doesn’t ask if it can email all my friends with yet another invitation. Just quietly scrubs social sites for my friends’ email addresses and delivers their feeds to me.

Agree with stega above, though … what WILL happen to all that lovely data I’ve been tagging and organizing for these nice companies?

Reply

7 Kelley Buhles February 27, 2008 at 3:49 pm

I also use Iminta.com!

I love it.

Reply

8 Andy February 27, 2008 at 6:32 pm

My concern with all of these sites — you enter your email account password etc. — so these sites should be HIGH on any hacker’s list. Literally a treasure trove given that most people use the same (or a small set of) passwords over & over again.

Not to mention the privacy intrusions that can occur without you ever knowing it.

I’m staying away from all of them ….
And you may want to read this before posting your photos/videos to sites : http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2008/02/19/how-the-rights-to-your-photo-are-being-hijackedthrough-photo-contests-social-media/

Reply

9 Aaron February 28, 2008 at 8:40 am

@Andy, these sites don’t ask you for your password for any of these services. They pick up data available publicly in rss feeds, atom feeds, and public apis. Delicious bookmarks, for example, are available to anyone that queries for them. Each individual site (well, most of them) have options to disable this feature.

Iminta.com lets you also choose who can see the data that it scripts. You can make all the information it picks up public (so anyone can see it) or you can share it with specific friends. But the important thing is that the data is already public, and if you don’t like it out there, then your beef is with Flickr, Youtube, etc. etc.

-Aaron (@ iminta.com)

Reply

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Please read our Comment Guidelines before leaving a comment:

Moderation: Because of comment spam issues, all comments are manually approved, so if your comment is approved it may take a while for your comment to appear on this blog post.

Name & Website Required: Due to rampant abuse, we are no longer posting anonymous comments. Please list your real name and provide a link to your website. If you don't have a website, then use a link to your account on Twitter, Flickr or some other form of web presence. With very few exceptions, comments that do not refernce include an actual name or url will not be approved.

Also when we ask for your name we mean your actual name, not Discount Car Products or some other attempt at spam or lame SEO.

Be Civil: Irrelevant, obnoxious or abusive comments will not be approved. Let's keep things civil and on topic. Basically what we are saying, if your comment does not add to the conversation, it will not be approved.

Spam: Spam comments in any form will not be approved. We also do not approve comments that left for the sole purpose of posting a link.

Corrections: If you want to point out a typo or correction, please email us instead. Typo or correction comments will not be approved since they are pretty much useless once they are corrected and then only tend to confuse things.

Gravatars: If you would like a Gravatar to show up with your comment? Just sign-up for an account and any comment with your email address will display your Gravatar.

Previous post: SXSW Interactive 2008, A Massive Geek Convergence in Austin

Next post: The Pirates vs The Klowns, The Leap Day Leap