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, as do smaller operations like Profilactic and Iminta. But FriendFeed is well-funded, and since launch the team has taken to rolling out new features quickly.
FriendFeed is currently a "social-network aggregator." It picks up the stuff you do online and tells your friends about it, saving them the hassle of visiting all your online hangouts to see what you are up to. But as many people have noticed, this leads to social overload. It's too much information to process. Buchheit and Taylor were clear with me that they have more work to do on FriendFeed to make the core aggregation feature more useful. In particular, they want to add intelligence to the service so it highlights what you're interested in, not every last thing your friends are doing.
One of the use cases that they have not solved for, Buchheit told me, is the infrequent user. Say you visit FriendFeed after an absence of a few weeks. Some of the "old" information will still be relevant to you--week-old photos of your nephew's birthday party, for example. But other, newer news will be irrelevant due to its age, like a three-day-old blog posting about a stock you're following. FriendFeed needs to a better job of differentiating content so old-but-relevant news can surface ahead of data that might be newer, but is less valuable.
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