friendfeed: at last, I get it

I’ve been using friendfeed for quite a while now, but I’ve used it as a lifestream application mainly, importing my feeds, adding a few friends, and then looking at the site every day or two.

All along, I’ve been reading posts from the likes of Louis Gray and Robert Scoble about the value of friendfeed, as well as the robust discussion about their points. But I’ve not really understood how to make ff valuable to me.

So this morning, I posted to twitter asking for input on ways to make friendfeed personally useful. Nothing happened on twitter, but my twitter stream ports to ff, and people started jumping in immediately with ideas and suggestions. In the past hour: 21 interesting and useful comments.

OK, so now I get it. Friendfeed can be your static lifestream application, but it can be so much more, too. You can comment on items in the stream, hit the “Like” button for stuff you find useful, the “Hide” button for things you don’t want to see. The deeper customizations aren’t immediately apparent, but click on “Like” or “Hide,” for instance, and you’ll see a list of options that let you carefully tune the feed to get what you want from it.

So what advice did I get from other friendfeed users? Some highlights:

Robert Scoble
1. Click on the “Hide” link early and often.
2. Only follow smart people.
3. Hide data types that you don’t get value out of (for instance, if you hate watching videos, why are you letting them come into your view here?)
4. Learn to use the search feature here, especially “advanced search.”

Ian Betteridge
You know you can hide all the content from one source unless it has a comment or like, don’t you? I hide all Twitters except those that have a like/comment, which means I don’t see everything that I’ve already seen in Twitter anyway. Very useful feature! Oh, and I just noticed: when you set it to filter like that, it doesn’t affect the “Everyone” tab, only your friends. So if you want to get a massive, noisy stream and select goodies to like, you can still look at “everyone”. That’s the thing I like about FF – hidden depth.

So, yeah, I’m tweaking my feed to get what I want. And what’s the different between reading all this stuff in ff, as opposed to all the separate applications?

• It’s the next-level filtering that’s occurring, especially if you’re connecting to smart people.
• And it’s the comments and discussions that are taking place around the content. To paraphrase a point Jeremiah Owyang made on Wednesday: the readers of any blog are collectively smarter than any author.

It’s exciting seeing the community think and breathe, real time. I’m hooked.