Welcome to the first episode of How Do You Use It? (full description here) - the feature on everydayUX where I spotlight an application or product, say how I use it (if at all) and then solicit the reading community to use the comments section to weigh in on how they use it. The main goals of this feature are as follows:
1) To provide a central location to gather people’s tips, etc. for a product so that people interested in that product can quickly and easily get a sense of the different ways it can be used.
2) For products that are outside of my purview and workflow, I’d love to see why other people find them compelling. I’m hoping this might lead to people finding unexpected solutions to problems they might be trying to solve.
Since the blog is relatively new, I expect this feature to get better as time goes on. Please send me any suggestions for applications you’d like to see covered as well as tweaks to the format of the feature you think would make it better. You can email me here.
I’m going to kick things off with FriendFeed - an application built by former Googlers and one of the first startups to make noise in the lifestream/status aggregator space.
As someone who uses a bunch of social sites and has an obsessive tendency for organization, the idea of a social aggregator was immediately intriguing to me. I signed up right away and plugged in all of my relevant feeds but once I got past the initial satisfaction of organizing them, the application has left me a little unsatisfied and I think its partially because I haven’t quite figured out how to best integrate FriendFeed into my daily workflow.
I’m curious to hear how other people are using it and what they like/don’t like about it. Do you drop your FriendFeed into a feed reader and take it from there? Do you go straight to the FriendFeed site? Do the updates from the various sites appear quickly enough for you? Do you find the commenting feature useful? How’s the signal to noise?
Hope to hear your thoughts in the comments and if you sign up, add me as your friend.
I too signed up, added my feeds and never really went back… for me it’s easier to browse my Flickr contacts feeds (on flickr.com) and to keep an eye on my Facebook NewsFeed than it is to remember to go to an entirely different site.
I did add the FF Facebook widget to my Facebook page… which I’m finding is how a lot of my friends see my latest Flicks posts (apparently not everyone is as obsessive about checking Flickr contacts as I am - huh!).
(Worth noting that it’s not a Friend Feed problem that keeps me from going back to the site - same thing exists with SocialThing. I think I’d rather have a desktop app running in the background that cycles through these things - Twitterific style, or even better like the FB Firefox plugin behaves - rather than having to consciously check these sites 2-3x per day)
Started working my way through FriendFeed last week. Things I’ve noticed immediately:
1) The UX for FriendFeed on FaceBook is better than its own native site.
2) I find it curious and wonderful the multitude of things you can add to FF, yet it only displays on FaceBook you can’t feed from FaceBook. (e.g. FF doesn’t pick up status updates from FacebBook and stream into the Ffeed).
3) (more of a general question/observation) For personal blogging and social networking will site side navigation (links to other stuff, how to get around the site etc.) become less important? If users are coming to the site from external links like friend feed ,ore predominantly (and in an rss fed world, only when you update) do you really need to give them a map noting where everything lives?
4) I wish I have more friends on Friend Feed. Lots of early adopter geeking going on right now– want to see how the slower to adopt in my friend set will use it.
I’m still trying to figure out how I should use it to get the most out of it, but what I’m liking a lot so far is:
1) It’s a lot easier to catch up on Twitters with the FriendFeed presentation. I need everyone I’m following to sign onto FF tho
It’d also be nice if there was a routine to go find the FriendFeed account of people you follow on Twitter, much like Pownce offers.
2) I like the inclusion of comments a lot, but it seems a little disconnected from the original source.
3) I really like the blending in of other sources — particularly google reader and bookmarking sites. I’m not so much for photos, but I’m sure other are.
All in all, it’s got a ton of potential, and I like it a lot better than Jaiku, Pownce, etc. I’m very interested to see where all of this is going.
Thanks to Whitney Hess, I found this post from Google Blogoscoped on 10 Ways to use FriendFeed. While I think most of these would fall under “hacks” rather than normal usage, the list is still interesting.
i use it on Facebook- that was my first exposure to the application. but now, i find people i am linked up to on the feed and peruse other’s feeds, much like delicious, and see the capabilities. I haven’t completely gotten hooked—– yet.
I check FF through the FriendFeed.com site, usually in Firefox and sometimes on my Blackberry in Opera 4. I think the comments and the likes are what make FF interesting, fun, and addictive. I find the signal:noise ratio to be pretty high, even though I’m subscribed to 150 people and approximately 900 people are subscribed to me. I wrote a post about my FF usage at
http://www.jessyoko.com/blog/2008/02/04/why-i-like-friendfeed. My feed is at http://friendfeed.com/jessica
Ducan Riley doesn’t get it either: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/03/duncan-riley-misses-point-of-friendfeed.html
ReadWriteWeb just did a great piece highlighting the differences between FriendFeed and Socialthing!. The big nod that FriendFeed gets is:
I think I’m going to give FriendFeed another look. I just wish there was another way to digest it.
Read it all here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/friendfeed_vs_socialthing.php#more
A nice example of serendipity as a result of Lifestreaming (in this case, FriendFeed): http://lifestreamblog.com/lifestreaming-increases-chances-of-serendipity/
ReadWriteWeb posted a poll on whether or not people are using FriendFeed (or other lifestreaming services): http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/poll_are_you_using_friendfeed.php
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Some more good thoughts….
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/thoughts-on-fri.html
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