FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. The first, and most requested topic, is how to best use the "Hide" function. With any luck, you can expect a new "FriendFeed Friday" post for a few weeks, until the point of diminishing returns is reached.

FriendFeed lets its thousands of users stream live updates from more than 30 services, including Twitter, YouTube, blogs, Flickr and many others, aggregating them all into a single, busy, feed.

Making sense of those updates, and separating the signal from the noise is critical for a positive FriendFeed experience. Luckily, the FriendFeed team has built a number of ways for you to cope, all hidden behind a simple option: "Hide".


An example of a FriendFeed entry, with 4 options.
Today, each item contains four options, including "Comment", "Like", "Hide" and "More". But "Hide" has many options, as outlined below:

1. Use Hide to Hide Individual Entries

Sometimes, a popular item can get a lot of comments. Each time a new comment is added, the item gets "bumped" to the top of your FriendFeed, so you can see a single item again and again, with the new comments.


A recent popular FriendFeed entry.
But if you get tired of this, click "Hide", and the entry will go away. If you choose, you can "Undo" this action, or go to the bottom of the page to "Show hidden items" and reveal it again.


Click "Hide" and the entry will disappear.
2. Use Hide to Hide A Specific Service

Depending on your preference, you might feel one service has more value than another. For example, you might like seeing Blog updates, but you don't want to show Twitter updates. To hide these, again, you click "Hide" below an entry from the offending service.

When you click on "Hide", text displays, saying "See options for hiding other items like this". (See above)


It's this easy to block all Flickr entries.
Click "See options for hiding other items like this", and the "Hide Entries" dialog will pop up. To block the service, click the button that says "Hide everyone's Twitter entries" or "Hide everyone's Flickr entries", etc., depending on the service. To fully block all updates from this service, make sure you keep the "even if they have comments or likes" box checked, or you'll still see these items if another FriendFeed user takes an action to that item.

3. Use Hide to Hide a Specific User's Service

You might not want to block all of a service's updates, but you might want to block one person's in particular. (Example: "Hide all Louis Gray's Last.fm entries.")

Follow the same method seen in #2. When you click on "Hide", click the text, "See options for hiding other items like this".


It's this easy to block Paul Buchheit's Flickr entries.
This time, keep the first button selected, that says, in this example, "Hide all Paul Buchheit's Flickr entries" and keep "even if they have comments or likes" checked.

4. Use Hide to Hide "Friends of a Friend" Updates

FriendFeed, by default, shows you items that friends of your friends posted, if your friends took action on an item, either by clicking "Like" or making a comment. Over time, with the more friends you add, and the more active they are, this can get "noisy." Again, the "Hide" item comes to the rescue.


This Twitter entry was from a Friend of A Friend.
In this case, click "Hide" and click the text, "See options for hiding other items like this".

Now, in the new dialog, you have an array of options, from hiding the service from that person, to hiding all services from that person, to hiding items from a specific friend's friends, or hiding all items from all friends of friends. It sounds complicated, but it's not too much, once you start using it.


Hiding all friends of a friend via Susan Beebe.


Hiding all friends of a friend from all friends.
In the above example, the first option would block all Twitter entries from Jianjun Zhang.
The second entry would hide all entries from Jianjun Zhang.
The third entry would hide all items are shown to me because Susan Beebe liked or commented on her friends' items.
The fourth entry would hide all items shown to me from any friends' friends.
The last entry would again offer what we solved in #2, blocking Twitter altogether.

5. Use Hide to Only Show Activity With Likes or Comments

The FriendFeed firehose can be lessened by filtering out the items that haven't yet been acted on by other users. You can do this by aggressively hiding all services or all updates from specific individuals "unless they have comments or likes". If you take this step for all available services, you're essentially hoping the wisdom of crowds is a good filter (which it can be), and none of the items will hit your FriendFeed without somebody else having taken an action first.

In this case, click "Hide" on any entry and click the text, "See options for hiding other items like this".


This hides all Tweets from Yuvi, unless they have likes or comments.


This hides all Tweets from everyone, unless they have likes or comments.
When the dialog presents itself, click the second button "Hide everyone's Twitter entries" but be sure the accompanying box "even if they have comments or likes" is unchecked. This means you won't see any Twitter updates unless someone in the FriendFeed community has taken action.

Of course, the best way to reduce noise on FriendFeed is to only sign up to your friends and peers. Randomly following industry name brands is the best way to increase activity on the site, thanks to the high number of people they follow and their rate of activity, as well as their own friends. But with aggressive use of the "Hide" function, it's pretty easy to follow hundreds of individual FriendFeed users, and to participate. But if you don't use the "Hide" key well, it can get pretty overwhelming. It's also worth noting that FriendFeedMachine honors the "Hide" choices you've made, so if you use that service, you wouldn't be subjected to seeing updates you thought you had blocked.

Do you use FriendFeed? Is there something you'd like to see featured in round two of "FriendFeed Friday" tips? Let me know.

Duncan Riley's First Week at The Inquisitr Is Inspiring

When news first hit that Duncan Riley had left TechCrunch, I thought his departure might see him theoretically fading into something like the proverbial sunset, as one of the blogosphere's most notable characters could have declared "Enough", put down his keyboard and gone home. On the news, I publicly wished him well, and hoped he would keep "staying aggressive". (See my comment.)

Not only has Duncan Riley stayed absolutely relevant, but he's captured the "aggressive" piece as well. Now, arguably, I'm reading Duncan Riley's news with more interest than I had been when he was at TechCrunch, and a week in, his transition to The Inquisitr, his new home, seems perfectly natural. Just one week in, the new site is getting about ten times the page views as I am, and he reports subscribers have already eclipsed my number, rocketing upwards to the 2,000 mark (myself included). Not shabby at all.

Part of the intrigue posed by The Inquisitr is Duncan's mix of both tech news, which makes sense, and more spicy celebrity news, which can also be interesting, even to us jaded geeks. And the reduced stress through no longer posting at the grindstone of TechCrunch has clearly lightened Duncan's mood. Virtually gone are the f-bombs that would be a common sight on his Twitter feed, replaced instead with a plethora of smiley-face emoticons. And in the midst of his move, Duncan has even opened up to reconsider his stance on a few things where we had locked horns back in March.

To those unfamiliar, in mid-March, amidst unprecedented hype around FriendFeed, Duncan took a look at the service for TechCrunch, and came away unimpressed. Responding, I said, undiplomatically, that he had missed the point, and argued a response. As I wrote Duncan in an e-mail earlier this week, at the time, I had used his name in the headline to differentiate from TechCrunch, who has multiple authors, and had previously written some positive notes on the service, but my write-up hit him quite personally. Making matters worse, my response stayed atop Techmeme virtually all day that Friday, which I was monitoring from my sun-drenched seats at Spring Training in Arizona.

The unexpected exposure definitely had gotten under Duncan's craw, as the next morning, I awoke to a follow-on note from Duncan on his personal site, that bluntly questioned my goals and credibility. Uninterested in fanning the flames further, and gaining an enemy for life, I stayed quiet, but others made plenty of comments on my behalf.

Knowing this is a small industry, I hoped Duncan and I could reconcile the differences. After all, who knew when we would see each other at an event? What if we were on the same panel or even were asked to speak on the same podcast? But as the rift had been very public, I thought it unfortunately might not ever happen - until this week. Now at The Inquisitr, Duncan sent me an e-mail on Monday asking if I could help him understand why I supported FriendFeed. He said he was even open to reconsidering his stance and would listen to opposing viewpoints. So, not only did I send him a lengthy note with my answers, (See: The Inquisitr: Why You Should Use FriendFeed), but I also gave him more background on the March flare-up. I have always respected Duncan's efforts, and see him as a good writer, but if there was ever an example of getting off on the wrong foot... this had been it.

Monday night, I opened up the laptop, and saw that not only was the story published, but Duncan had re-signed up to FriendFeed, and was talking up his renewed relationship with the site via Twitter. It's a wonder what the combination of reduced stress, a little communication, and time can do. Now, you can find Duncan on FriendFeed, and he's doing more than using it as a broadcast medium, but he's engaged. He's commenting, and liking and giving tips to fellow users.

I'm liking the content I'm seeing from The Inquisitr. It's a fun read, and there's a good pace of new articles coming in through the RSS feed. But I'm more pleased (and relieved) the public rift with Duncan is over. As with the back and forth I had with Mashable back in January, there are definitely things I would change about the words I wrote, and the way things were portrayed, but in the end, we're stronger for it. I get along excellently with the team at Mashable, from Adam Ostrow to Mark Hopkins, and now, I feel I know Duncan better than I would have otherwise. Given the industry's size, it makes sense we try and avoid these battles that tear us down, and instead work to prop each other up. I'm glad Duncan's at a place where he can contribute to the tech blogosphere and stay stress-free. We're all better for it.

Web Service Notifications Outnumber Live Bodies In My E-Mail

E-mail used to be about connecting people, regardless of distance. With time, it developed new capabilities - sending attachments of ever greater size, acting as a marketing vehicle, both solicited and otherwise (see: Spam), displaying pictures and HTML, and of course, serving as a repository for status notifications for commerce, news, and social media. Now, there's no question for me that updates from online services greatly outnumber the amount of person to person communication I get each day in my personal e-mail. (Work e-mail, of course, is another story)

For me, e-mail is where I want to be updated for all things finance, be it bank statements, credit card invoices, stock trade transactions, or the electricity and cell phone bills. As I see it, every e-mail note there saves paper, and saves me digging through the mail to sign something off and send a check.

I also, despite getting them at an increasing rate over the last few months, still get notifications by e-mail when somebody chooses to follow me on FriendFeed, LinkRiver, Shyftr or Twitter, for starters. I also get notified if someone befriends me on other services, like Facebook and Digg. At times, especially when a particular topic is driving up conversation, I can hear the sounds of new e-mail hitting my computer every couple minutes, invariably drawing a sarcastic comment from my wife, who helpfully adds, "Well, aren't you popular?"


Twitter and FriendFeed follows come in pretty often these days...
While I could, of course, turn off these notifications, it helps to see if the person following is someone I'll be soon watching in turn, and it also alerts me to if I'm getting name-dropped somewhere. Usually, a quick visit to Summize or Google Blog Search can help with that.

Curious if others using Web services as I do were seeing a similar onslaught of Web notifications taking over their in box, I posted a question to Twitter, which also hit FriendFeed. So far, the response is certainly mixed.

Susan Beebe claimed 85% of her e-mail to be from "real people", but otherwise, the FriendFeed voting came out 16-2 in favor of services, while Twitter replies also came out with services ahead, 6 to 1. Bwana McCall wrote, "I get more Bacn than real email. It's sad.", while Hutch Carpenter said it simply, "Notifications by far."

While many people are fighting with the e-mail data deluge, striving for the proverbial "In Box Zero", handling online notifications is like any other system. You just need some good hierarchy. I've set up a folder called "Blog" in my e-mail for all correspondence related to the blog, from people pitching stories, to working with entrepreneurs and other bloggers. I have subfolders for some of the services where I've had the most updates, and of course, for real-world work, I have a "Commerce" folder, which surprisingly, has all my stock trade notifications from eTrade going back to the year 2000, and every Amazon.com order ever. Thank goodness for e-mail search, something Apple's Mail program does extremely well.

While robots may have taken over the inbound side of my e-mail, I still own the outbound side, and take every effort I can to keep up. But the mix has definitely changed.

Content Filters Proving Evasive for RSS, Social Media Sites

Whether it be RSS feeds, social networks, or one of the many social media aggregation sites, it's no surprise that even your closest peers are sharing data they care about that you just don't. But so far, despite many users calling for content-based filters, solutions to block keywords or topics are missing from the vast majority of information spigots. In fact, I can't think of a single one I use that's gotten the formula right.

Not to overly repeat myself, but one of the major hopes I had for Google Reader last year was that they would add what I called "Negative Keywords", which would let me block specific posts from people I had subscribed to, be they off-topic posts on politics, family and sports, arrays of links from del.icio.us, or their latest cause du jour.

As the 2008 election season is heating up, it's no surprise that even the most geeky of tech news sources are starting to give some coverage to Obama vs. Clinton or Obama vs. McCain, and it will only increase over time. If I so chose, why couldn't I ask Twitter or Google Reader or FriendFeed to preemptively hide updates that included keywords like "Clinton", "Obama" or "McCain"? Today, I can't do that in any of those services, so far as I know.

Taking things further, I've also at times been tantalized by the idea of a "nuclear option" for the Web, where if I so chose, I could eradicate the mentioning of a keyword of any kind from all activity.

On Wednesday, Robert Scoble said “I wish when you blocked someone on Twitter they disappeared from Google Talk too.” Makes sense. But what if you had a button that not only blocked the person, but also, any mention of the person, from all social media services, by using their own name as the negative keyword? What if they were even automatically filtered out of Google searches, blocked just like profanity and pornography are from decency filters?

Google Reader hasn't yet debuted negative keywords. So Mahalo fans still get updates on Jason Calacanis' bulldogs and "fatblogging" and followers of this blog will still get summaries of Oakland A's games I attend. While I can always unsubscribe from somebody, there's got to be a safer middle ground in the social media and RSS space that lets me get the content I'm looking for, and not the content I'm not. Do you know of a service that's got negative keywords nailed?

The Social Media Feature War is the Wrong War

I've seen a lot of social media tools and aggregators. A good number of them are designed very well, and could be great tools, provided a swarm of early adopters, and then later, late adopters, showed up. Some of them trumpet just how many different services are supported, and use that as a rallying cry for why one site should be ditched for another. But it's the wrong approach. For while they may have been working on making fancier widgets and supporting yet another niche service, others have been building a foundation for community, making them the clear winners.

Examples of this are everywhere, but the most blatant examples that come to my mind are those of Twitter and FriendFeed. I could also make examples for LinkedIn and Facebook, but that's another post at another time.

Twitter has been roundly scorned for its occasional inaccessibility, costing users about 1 percent downtime over the last four months, according to Pingdom. While serviceable alternatives exist, in Pownce and Jaiku, for starters, those who have invested time in building up their Twitter community, including followers, those they follow, and an archive of "tweets" aren't going to leave, even if Jaiku and Pownce deliver 100% uptime, and manage to add features that Twitter simply doesn't match. Twitter has become more than a microblogging mechanism, but a serious community.

This was very clearly illustrated by Michael Arrington's piece on TechCrunch: "Twitter May Not Have To Care About Uptime Any Longer" last month, when he said, "after a three day weekend outage I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occured: I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me."

The same could be said for the lifestreaming and aggregation space.

On the Elite Tech News podcast this last week, the conversation turned to FriendFeed, and whether or not it had a GUI that would be welcomed by non early adopters. After suggesting Kevin Fox had big plans to upgrade the service, I also said it would take a lot more than a shiny new interface on another aggregator to get me to move. And it would take a lot more than bells and whistles, because in the last seven months of FriendFeed being in service, the site has developed many different sub-communities which make engaging and participating both fun and informative.

In order for me to leave FriendFeed for another service, be it Profilactic, SocialThing, Iminta or Plaxo, it would take the entire community shifting at once.

But that doesn't stop some social media sites from arguing it's all about the features. Take a blog post from Profilactic that compares its service with that of FriendFeed. The author writes, "FriendFeed supports 28 social sites. Profilactic supports 155. Not much else to say there."

And while time has passed, and both services have added more supported external sites, the author's summary, reading, "Profilactic supports 127 more sites than FriendFeed. We allow you to filter out your friends' feeds that you don't want to see. We give you features that FriendFeed doesn't offer like Clippings. And we allow you to take it all with you with badges," just doesn't give enough of a compelling argument, especially when it pertains to communities.

The gap between FriendFeed and Twitter and other sites who haven't yet gotten off the ground is going to make it incredibly difficult for alternatives to make headway, even if they do end up having more features, a prettier UI, or greater uptime. This is in part why I first highlighted the many tech bloggers flocking to FriendFeed, and why FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit has on separate occasions said, “Great products are more than just a pile of features” and that “FriendFeed has personal communities”. FriendFeed gets that the site isn't about a pile of features, but it's about the users. Once a community is built, they will rally around a service, and become extremely loyal, even if another option is shinier or louder.

FriendFeedMachine Enables FriendFeed's "Hide" Options

For those who find FriendFeed's firehose of updates overwhelming, rapidly finding the "hide" option, enabling users to block updates from any service (like Twitter) or updates from "Friends of a Friend" (FOAF), can mean the difference between enjoying and getting benefits from the service, or running away in the opposite direction. As such, integrating FriendFeed's flexible "hide" options is a must for any third party application interfacing with the service.

FriendFeedMachine's Scott Goldie, in his third update of the alternative Web UI for FriendFeed, made adding FriendFeed's "hide options" a priority for the latest release, as well as setting the option to block Twitter replies (via watching for the @ symbol), and a host of other filters, against services, users, and read items.

Not every FriendFeed user can handle the "noise" which can stem from following anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds or thousands of users. In fact, co-founder Sanjeev Singh's simple question: "Is FriendFeed too noisy for you?" has generated 60+ responses since he posted the query in February.

By tapping into FriendFeed's API and enabling FriendFeedMachine users to get the same kind of hiding preferences they do on the full service, Goldie's made it even more likely for users to consider migrating. Without these filters, even I wouldn't have stood a chance. For more information on the latest updates from FriendFeedMachine, check the official blog.

Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.

Some of the most confused buzzwords in Web 2.0 are those of aggregation and lifestreaming.

As evidenced by the many different sites that have debuted offering a single location for differing online activities, harnessing together RSS feeds from Web services and presenting them as one, delivering a base foundation for aggregation is not all that hard.

Plaxo did it. Profilactic did it. Iminta did it. Socialthing did it. FriendFeed did it. Facebook is starting to do it.

But simple aggregation is not enough. What FriendFeed got right very early on in the game is that it's one thing to get all the services in one page, and quite another to make them interactive, so friends can talk to friends and peers can show peers what they like. Back in November, I wrote, "I first became interested in FriendFeed as the service could aggregate friends' Web activity in a single place. But in recent weeks, it's grown to be much more."

FriendFeed became more because of two things: participation and discovery.

FriendFeed let me respond and interact with the services my friends were sharing. It also allowed me to discover new services, new friends and new sources for information. Through FriendFeed, I've found new blogs to read, found new online social circles, and engaged in real-time with people who are completely unreachable, even by e-mail or Twitter.

Now, as the early adopter crowd has found the FriendFeed religion, despite the occasional grumpy holdout, they're now finding that the real potential in FriendFeed, as with other Web services, comes through participation. It's one thing to passively aggregate your online activity in a single place, and quite another to thoughtfully add comments and like items you find interesting, and think your friends will. Robert Scoble, now as prominent a FriendFeed advocate as I ever have been, has highlighted this factor in The really interesting FriendFeed page to watch tonight, where he notes FriendFeed has set up separate "discussion" pages that aggregate comments and likes. (His | Mine)

Google Reader became the leading RSS feed reader for me not just because it was a strong, quick, offering, but because of the shared link items blog. Twitter is actually useful due to tracking of @Replies and the ability to see others streams intermingled. But to sign up to any of these services to broadcast, and not to participate, shortchanges the process.

There's a reason I've made more than 1,200 comments in FriendFeed since signing up in October, and why I've "Liked" almost 700 different items. It's not because I have a bot set up to do my dirty work. It's because it helps both those I follow, and those who follow me. Take away that participation, and FriendFeed becomes as quiet as a library, and just about as exciting.

So if you're not quite sure where to start with FriendFeed, with Google Reader, with Twitter or any other social network, get started and participate. That'll make all the difference.

FriendFeedMachine Speeds Up, Cleans Up, and Adds Stream View

On Monday, we announced the arrival of Scott Goldie's new FriendFeedMachine, a Web interface to FriendFeed that lets you filter between all contacts and close friends, and offers to strip out the noise that can occur in a site where aggregation from many corners of the Web can be at times overwhelming.

A week into its release, FriendFeedMachine has made a number of improvements throughout the user interface, including dramatically speeding up its use, which could crawl under heavy load (such as looking up all my friends' activities), separating the friends from their activities, and most interestingly, adding a new "Stream" view, which delivers, as Goldie writes in a blog post announcing the update, a "constant stream of entries from your home feed, easily viewable and sortable."


In this example, I'm sorting the stream by most commented, and deduping.
Essentially, FriendFeedMachine has taken a new approach to FriendFeed's content and made it more easily manipulated, like a database, in that while FriendFeed defaults to highlighting most-recent items at the top of the page, including those items most recently "commented" on or "liked", FriendFeedMachine lets you sort your stream, not just by "Newest", but by "Oldest", by user, by service, by the number of comments, by those with the most "Likes", or the least.

Now, FriendFeed can be sorted every which way, like an Excel table.

Also, FriendFeedMachine claims to have solved the infamous "duplicates issue" that at times can have FriendFeed users in a tizzy. By checking "hide duplicates", items otherwise displayed multiple times will be shown only once in your stream.

On top of giving a better way to view FriendFeed, and sorting good friends from casual acquaintances, FriendFeedMachine still offers the ability to like and comment directly within the Web browser. And in trading e-mails with Scott, I know continued updates are coming. But the first week shows strong promise already.

My Social Media Consumption Workflow

Amidst watching some talk about how they are reducing time in Google Reader due to information overload, or switching away from one service for another, whether due to its features, the friends, the noise or the content, I've been thinking a bit about how I consume social media, and specifically, the order of how I do it, to be sure I've caught up on everything quickly.

There's no question the amount of information I consume can be daunting. Glancing quickly, as of this morning:

1) I have 270 RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, sending between 500 and 800 items a day.
2) I follow 490 Twitter users.
3) I am subscribed to 269 FriendFeed users.
4) I have 210 Facebook "friends".

On the back of all this information coming this direction, I am pushing out information:

1) Posting one or two items here daily (1,300 so far)
2) Updating people on Twitter (334 updates so far)
3) Comments and Likes on FriendFeed (1,135 and 643 respectively)

In addition, there are a number of ways to engage and act on the data.

1) Adding bookmarks to Del.icio.us (630 so far)
2) Tracking activity via Technorati and Google Blog Search
3) Tracking comments here and elsewhere via Disqus
4) Trading e-mail with readers, entrepreneurs and peers

Add the above to a way a typical non-robot views the Web, including viewing news, sports and entertainment, not to mention everything to go with work and family obligations, and it can be hard to know where to start. While there's no question I'll vary from this process from time to time, below is a good idea of how I start the day in social media.


1) It always starts with e-mail. E-mail helps me know what's actionable. From e-mail, I can find out and act on:
a) New Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook connections
b) Direct Messages from Twitter
c) New comments on the blog via Disqus
d) If Google Blog Search has uncovered references to the blog
e) If there are conversations about upcoming posts or new services to check out.

When e-mail activity is completed, I open the Web browser. While FriendFeed is my home page, I usually leave it on the first visit of the day, and head to Google Reader, to rapidly consume the Web.

2) Reading Google Reader, I can catch up on the night's blog posts, add items to my link blog, or open posts in a new tab to bookmark or comment.

3) I'll open Twitter and do a quick scan of the first few pages of "tweets" from those I'm following to see what the discussions of the day are. I'll also check the replies tab to see if anybody tried to send me a message where action is required.

4) I head to FriendFeed.

Why is FriendFeed last in this order? It's because unlike the first three, which feel like work, where there is an action that needs to take place, or a task that needs clearing, FriendFeed is more like the finish line, where I can finally relax and engage with peers. I don't necessarily want to be rushed when I'm on FriendFeed, but can take time to see what others have done throughout the Web, make comments and respond to others who have commented on my own activity.

Also, visiting FriendFeed last here means that my feed is "properly" filled, with shared items from Google Reader, bookmarked items from Del.icio.us, any updates on Twitter, etc.

5) Additional activity

All other social media activity is optional, and comes when it makes sense. That would include:
a) Submitting items to the Elite News Tech Reddit
b) Digging items from the Upcoming list of Digg's Technology section
c) Visiting Shyftr and posting comments or responding to conversations.
d) Seeing what's popular on LinkRiver, ReadBurner or RSSMeme.
e) Checking trends and news on TechMeme and the TechMeme River.

Everybody has their own route to how they consume and act upon social media. This is how I tend to do it, so I feel I'm on top of things. Am I doing it wrong? How do you go about your social media workday?

FriendFeedMachine Debuts New Approach to FriendFeed

While not everyone agreed with my early, glowing, assessments of FriendFeed, there is now no question the social Web activities aggregation site is among the fastest-growing on the Internet, amassing not only some of the biggest names in the tech blogosphere as its most active members, but, with the addition of an API, becoming a new platform for development, much like Facebook was in 2007. The newest approach to handling the data flow from FriendFeed is a service called FriendFeedMachine, which lets helps you filter between your true "Close Friends" and those you just want to follow, and gives a new approach to making comments, open items within the Web page, and even marking items as previously read.

Designed by Scott Goldie in Melbourne, Australia (Web site | Twitter), FriendFeedMachine was inspired by the very real problem some FriendFeed users have found through the site's growth, as "real life" friends are being drowned out by the noisier, more active participants, including Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington, and as some have let me know... me. Goldie also found that as the "real life" friends' activity would fall off his radar, items would go unread, and a new approach was needed.

"I wanted to see what my friends were doing by service (i.e. grouped by Twitter, Blog, etc.)," he wrote in an e-mail Saturday night. "I also wanted a way to view items without leaving the page where the feed info was."

While some on FriendFeed, Twitter and other communications mediums have opted to unsubscribe from the more active users, Goldie agrees with Scoble's assertation that "it's not who follows you but who you follow that's important." FriendFeedMachine is an attempt to organize the resulting noise and make it more useful.

You can login to FriendFeedMachine at www.friendfeedmachine.com, by entering your FriendFeed ID and your remote key. At first, you can see those individuals who are on your home feed, as you would with FriendFeed's main page, as well as the service they used to generate activity, be it Google Reader, Blog, Twitter, Digg, Del.icio.us or any of the other few dozen FriendFeed supports.

Clicking on the "Friends" button at the top lists all your friends you are subscribed to and the services they use. Even my 266 that I follow came up, though I'd assume the more friends you have, the slower the browser interface will be. Unlike FriendFeed, which organizes activity chronologically, including items most recently commented on or liked at the top, FriendFeedMachine organizes by individual. I can click on Frederic Lardinois' Twitter entries and see them all at once. I can click on Kevin Fox's favorite YouTube videos, or select Dave Winer's blog posts, for instance. From this window, I can either read each item individually, mark them as read, or close and return to the "Friends" area.


This example shows Kevin Fox's FriendFeed posts
But the most interesting element to FriendFeedMachine is the concept of "Close Friends". By clicking on the profile picture of any friend within FriendFeedMachine, I have a checkbox to name them a "Good friend". When I do that, their data is now shown not just in the aggregate feed, but under the "Close Friends" button. And yes, Good = Close as far as FriendFeedMachine is concerned. Now, the issue of separating "Real life" friends and all FriendFeed contacts is solved. If I choose, I can whittle down my 266 followed contacts in FriendFeed and have a "Close Friends" list of 3, 10 or 30... whatever I like. And the "Close Friends" button activity is just as the "Friends" stream operates, showing me their services, and letting me view each of the activities my friends have made on their individual services.


Viewing an item in FriendFeedMachine.
(Click for larger screenshot)
And don't get the idea that FriendFeedMachine is passive, as it's not. Like other FriendFeed API services that have debuted in recent weeks, you can make comments or like items directly from within FriendFeedMachine, by hitting the green arrow to go to the item, where you see it in full, and have the option to hit "I like it!" or make a comment and hit "Post". FriendFeedMachine also displays whether or not the item already has likes or comments, so you're not left out of the conversation.

Unlike some of the recent entrants approaching FriendFeed from a new angle, FriendFeedMachine is not an AIR application, or a GreaseMonkey script. It's a new, unique, Web interface for viewing and interacting with the FriendFeed activity - all of it. But now, you don't risk missing updates from your real friends.

3 Months Into Being a Twitter "Nice Guy"

This coming Sunday, it will have been three months since I did what I once said I would never do, when I signed up for Twitter, enabling me to send short messages out to the world in 140 characters or less. And while I still haven't immersed myself as part of Twitter Nation, preferring not to bore friends and strangers with my most minor thoughts and activities, I have found it a useful tool to keep updated and interact with others quickly, if not always efficiently.

As with any communications tool, Twitter can be abused or used well. There have been recent discussions of spam accounts increasingly signing up and "following" everyone on the planet. Elsewhere, aggressive social media leaders like Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis alternately complain and embrace the tens of thousands they've added to their Twitter stream. Some post song lyrics they're hearing on the radio. Others ask questions to their followers. Some use profanity for emphasis. Most do not.


My note from this morning... (link)
At its base, Twitter is a tool much like instant messaging, but permanent, and searchable. In the space of 140 characters, I can share URLs I've found on the Web, highlight my own recent blog posts, or talk publicly to people from around the world. I largely use my Twitter account to alert followers to blog posts ahead of the RSS feed (if they are subscribers), or adding comments to conversations that have developed, whether they started in Twitter, on FriendFeed, or in our blogs. Less frequently, I'll say if I'll be traveling, or if I've achieved a new milestone, like 500 Twitter followers or 1,000 RSS subscribers.


A favorite comment from Shyftr's Matt Shaulis (link)
Not exactly the most exciting of all streams, if you ask me. But what I have tried to do is not flood the system. I don't want to be the guy who "tweets" too much, or becomes uninteresting, so when I do comment, I want it to have substance, or call attention to something that does. On Wednesday, I was impressed by a well-written piece from Dan Blows on his blog called Twitter: The Web’s Playground, where he noted people can adopt different personalities on Twitter. Some are nice guys. Some are bullies. Some are seniors, and others, fashionistas. I was included, in addition to Mathew Ingram, and Scoble, as one of the "nice guys", and that's a great crowd to be part of.

Over the 90 or so days I've been a Twitter user, I've, so far, sent fewer than 300 updates, about 3-4 a day. And while I started out being very selective as to who I chose to follow, I've updated my stance, now reviewing each new "follower" and seeing what they have to add. Now, by default, I follow them as well, and can always unfollow them if they get too off-topic, too noisy, or just aren't my type. As Scoble has mentioned a few times, some of the real power in Twitter can be how many you follow, even more so than how many follow you - so long as it doesn't become too overwhelming.

I've even started using some tools to help make sense of the Twitter kingdom:
1. Tweetscan: louisgray or "Louis Gray"
2. Tweetclouds: louisgray
3. Alpha Twitter: www.alphatwitter.com
4. Twitter Karma: http://www.dossy.org/twitter/karma/


A fun find through Tweetscan. (link)
Responding to Twitter via FriendFeed has also added to my using Twitter. From FriendFeed, I can post both on that site, and have it act as an @reply on Twitter. The only downside so far is that FriendFeed doesn't yet make sure I stay within Twitter's 140-character limit, so when I mess that up, I look pretty silly. But I'll live, and expect they'll fix it soon, just like they have with so many other small issues in the last six months.

So, with three months of Twittering under my belt, it's not been the evil I once thought it was, and yet it hasn't been this panacea that changes my life for the better either. It's a tool for quickly sending updates and talking with people. And in the end, there's nothing wrong with that. You can find me at http://www.twitter.com/louisgray.

Shyftr Responds to Critics, Alters RSS Commenting Strategy

Friday night's discussion around the fragmenting of comments between blogs, FriendFeed and RSS readers grew well beyond what I had expected. While the issue of comments and where they should live, relative to the original blog, has come up before, new entrants to the market, like Shyftr, Plaxo and AssetBar made some uncomfortable about how their full feeds were being utilized. After a few days of some high-profile trashing, as well as some supporting posts from people like Robert Scoble and myself, Shyftr has capitulated, by pulling full feeds where discussions are taking place, while retaining full attribution, in hopes to quell fears about stealing the conversation away from bloggers.

In a post this morning (RSS Feeds, Community, Publishers, and Revisions), Shyftr's founder, Dave Stanley, reiterates the key goal of Shyftr, namely:

"Shyftr was developed to help people find and subscribe to publishers that they otherwise would have never found on their own, through the community and network of friends. Having a community where people can share and discuss the feeds they read helps to facilitate this goal."

But, as mentioned, not everyone liked Shyftr's plan to have full discussion on the full feed, so given some of the feedback, Shyftr has adjusted their approach. Stanley's post shows that for those feeds which enable discussion, Shyftr will no longer show full feeds. He writes:

"We have decided to revise the format around our discussions. We will only display the title, author, and date of an item where discussions occur outside of the reader. We deeply respect content publishers, and it is not our intention to cause unease."

You can see how this has changed by looking at some of the commented posts within Shyftr, including one from Tony Hung (Fine, I'll Say It: Shyftr Crosses The Line), another from Mashable (Shyftr: Good, Bad, and Potentially Quite Ugly) and mine from Friday. (Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?)

I made my opinion clear on Friday that I personally had no problem with what Shyftr was doing. Sarah Perez's initial coverage of Shyftr on ReadWriteWeb (Social Feed Reading With Shyftr) didn't bring up fractured comments as an issue, nor did my coverage back on March 4th. (Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings). Corvida of SheGeeks was the only one to bring up the issue prior to this weekend, that I can tell, in her review: Google Reader Trumps Shyftr.

Unlike some have speculated, Shyftr is not on the dark side of the Web, a content scraper or a splogger (spam blogger). Instead, the service is trying to grow and find a niche where friends can share and comment on feeds, and over the last few months, I've grown to like the service and respect the individuals behind it, so I hope they can overcome this blip and work with the blogosphere.

I expect that over time, the RSS community will band together and find a great way to cross-pollenate comments from Readers to bloggers, and all will be one. You can see Nick Halstead's post on the Fav.or.it blog (Fractured Commenting - Again) where he offers Shyftr use of the fav.or.it API to do just that. I don't think we're all that far away from getting this issue solved. Luckily, Shyftr is listening and already making change. The question is, will these changes be enough? If you had issues with Shyftr's approach, let me know what you think about their update.

You can also find me on Shyftr here: http://www.shyftr.com/profile/louisgray

Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?

One of the more frequently mentioned suggestions for avid Google Reader users is the addition of comments to the service, so RSS readers could respond to blog posts, either directly from the reader and back to the originating blog, or within the Google Reader community itself, in effect, becoming a social network. But while Google Reader has not yet enabled comments, other services are, and it seems the excitement of adding this capability is hardly universal - and its opponents have gone so far as to call it "outrageous" or "theft".

While the discussion around where a blog's comments should reside has raised its head before, especially around services like FriendFeed, (See: Sarah Perez of Read Write Web: Blog Comments Still Matter) it flared up again this afternoon when I had (innocently, I thought) highlighted how one friend's blog post from earlier in the week was getting a lot of comments, and had become the most popular story on Shyftr, a next-generation RSS feed reader that enables comments within its service.

While I had hoped the author (Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist, who I highlighted on Monday and like quite a bit) would be pleased to see his post had gained traction, the reaction was not what I had expected. He said he was uneasy about seeing his posts generate activity and community for somebody else. Another FriendFeed user called it "content theft" and said "if they ever pull my feed and use it there, they can expect to get hit with a DMCA take-down notice". (See the discussion here)

I can see how content creators can feel threatened or wary of services who leverage full RSS feeds, or might actually have a case if they have publicly asked for no repurposing of their content, via Creative Commons or other methods. But I also see that the whole idea of reading feeds in isolation, without engaging, is going to soon be something of the past. AssetBar, Social|Median and Shyftr have been among the first to add comments in their site. Fav.or.it, via Disqus, offers the ability to post comments to the originating blogs. FriendFeed, RSSMeme and many, many others offer links to the content but contents on their site. And that's not even touching on the social news sites like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc., where comments and community are generated, essentially through leveraging third party headlines.

As a blogger, I am a content creator. I don't want my content stolen, or reposted without attribution or under somebody else's name. But I am also a huge advocate of RSS and continuing to adapt where the conversation is being held. Just as my blog's RSS views have undoubtedly eclipsed my blog page views, I would not be surprised to see that more comments on my posts might eventually live outside of my blog. It would behoove me and other bloggers to be aware of the other places the conversation will be taking place, and to engage there, in my opinion, rather than railing against the continued evolution of how we're consuming content and engaging online.

Even the conversation about this issue has escaped the blogosphere. Eric, on FriendFeed writes, "It's slightly troubling that this conversation is taking place here instead of on one of our blogs," but it's not so much troubling in my mind, but instead requires a changing mindset.

The Web as a whole has clamored for full RSS feeds, not partial, so we don't have to return to the originating site. Some of us have just as loudly asked for comments and conversations to enter the world of the RSS feed reader. Now that we're starting to see what it's like, maybe it's not what we had fully anticipated. But it's the way things are headed, and rather than label innovators like Matt Shaulis (Twitter | FriendFeed) and Dave Stanley of Shyftr (Twitter | FriendFeed) as outrageous or possibly illegitimate, we should engage and speak up about what we think is right. As for the developers who enable these services, there are definitely ways they can help raise the visibility of the practice - through e-mail alerts, trackbacks, or even giving the option to opt out. But we'll be seeing this more and more going forward. I promise you that.

Former Jobster CEO's Social|Median Incubating in Alpha

At the end of 2007, Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster, stepped down, leaving the online career site behind and taking on a new job of his own, founding a stealth mode online social news site, called Social|Median. Months after raising less than $1 million in seed money from a number of angel investors, the site has risen from "dog food" mode to alpha, on the backs of an offshore engineering team in India and Jason's own efforts, seeing more than 500 early adopter users join the site, aimed at creating topical news networks and sharing hot news with friends. (See their blog here)

While the site has been in closed alpha stage for several months, I managed to snag 200 invites to Social|Median, with the code of "LouisG". (Sign up here)


Social|Median Has a Feed Showing Updates In Your Networks
Despite its alpha stage and so-far underdeveloped user interface, the site has already shown a number of interesting features that put it in line with similar services, from BlogRize to Yokway and to a lesser extent, FriendFeed.

The site bills itself as "a social news service that connects people with personalized news and information".The site's main hubs are its "News Networks", which are user created, whether on tech topics, including Apple, Web 2.0, Tech News or Venture Capital, or other interests, from History to Team Building and Triathlons. Users can join any number of news networks, effectively subscribing to view posted news on topics they find interesting. Some of the networks are quiet, seeing only five stories a day, while those more broad topics can see hundreds of new items in a 24-hour period.

New additions to the site include the ability to find news networks by searching the site, as well as new location-based news networks, for example, "Seattle", "Silicon Alley" or "Incredible India".

Also a unique wrinkle to Social|Median is an intelligent way for new News Networks to automatically grab the best sources around the Web for those items. Want a network on cars? It's like Social|Median will offer up Car and Driver, or if you can't get enough dirt on Google, Google Blogoscoped or Google Operating System would emerge.


You Can See Most Popular and Newest News Networks

There are two ways to add content to Social|Median, the first being a Twitter-like "Snip", where you can post your thoughts on any topic, or a "Clip", where you can post a headline, a URL to the story and any comments you have. Interestingly, Social Median does the hard work of using its algorithm to determine what are the appropriate news networks for your story, based on the submitted content, and that story can be listed in more than one network at a time.

A Social|Median user's front page consists of what's called the "Hot List", featuring relevant activities from people who are in your news networks, whether they've created new networks, added new clips, or commented on posted items. Soon, the site will also feature more analytics, including "most popular" stories in a network, and whether you want to see more or less from individual users, a lot like Facebook's "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" feature which encourages more or less of a specific item.

As with other social news sites, Social|Median isn't forcing you to be on their site 24 by 7 to get all the latest news. Users can get e-mail alerts of the top 5 most popular stories across Social|Median as frequently as three times a day, or less often if you don't want to see your e-mail in box go entirely social.


More E-mail from Social|Median, Please...

Goldberg's team is entirely based in Pune, India for now, working hard at coding and developing the site prior to its public launch, expected later this summer. Like FriendFeed's "Changelog", which shows the latest additions to the code, Social|Median is striving for a similar level of transparency. You can see the team's latest updates and code revisions on the product development blog found here: social|median: Product Development. As the site says frequently, it is in early alpha, and should be for those willing to accept a less-defined GUI in search for a more social way to share news and find new topics.

If you want in to Social|Median, you can start with the code of "LouisG". (Sign up here)

FriendFeed's Increased Filtering Clears Deck of Unwanted Junk

Before the end of 2007, after making FriendFeed an integral part of my daily Web experience, I publicly posted a number of requested updates that would help make the social Web activity aggregation service even more of a must-visit site than it already was for me. While I've obviously been one of the more vocal and visible proponents of FriendFeed, especially following its opening to the public, the site and its six employees have now catapulted themselves well beyond my little blog, making headlines daily on TechMeme, and getting their unfair share of fawning reviews, questions from the not yet converted, and as I did a few months ago, the occasional list of user's hopes and dreams.

But even as their user base has grown tremendously, FriendFeed has remained focused, posting frequent enhancements, including one long-awaited item today, which allows for the blocking of a service altogether from the site. (See: FriendFeed: Paul Buchheit: Super-Hide is now available!)


If I were to block Tumblr, I could do it like this...
Now, as I asked back in December, you can finally block Twitter, and never have to see it again, if you don't want to. Now, I can stop seeing Disqus comments any of my friends make, or even their friends, should a discussion break out. Now, if I want, I can stop seeing Last.fm song updates, or Seesmic videos. After all, as FriendFeed has made it incredibly easy to harness all the updates from all your friends from around the Web in one place, there is the potential you could get a lot of noise mixed in that just gets in the way.

As with other updates FriendFeed has made over time, the option is quite flexible. You can hide one item. You can mute comments on a busy conversation. You can stop seeing friends of specific friends, or block specific services from individuals, or even use the nuclear option, as I've been doing, to hide entire services. FriendFeed simply enables the platform for you to view what you want to see, from those you want to share items with.

If you haven't yet caught the FriendFeed bug, you really should. You can see my FriendFeed here, or even better, you can see my "Comments and Likes" stream, showing interaction. Just don't hide everything I do. It'd hurt my feelings.

Yokway's Social Sharing Site Launches In Beta

At the beginning of the month, I profiled an early edition of Yokway!, an interesting Digg-like derivative for small social circles of friends interested in similar topics. Now, nearly a month later, the site is ready to open up for beta users, having upgraded their user interface, adding search functionality, and reorganizing the site to better help users find friends interested in similar topics. And while Yokway! doesn't yet have the kind of buzz behind it that FriendFeed has developed, it debuts with a number of handy items that the popular social aggregation site doesn't yet have nailed.

Yokway's central offering is a site that lets you view items shared from your friends. Unlike some other lifestreaming services, which pull data from RSS feeds via services around the Web, Yokway requires users to post items one at a time, like Digg, select a topic, and provide a comment. This is called "Yoking", to be used as in the phrase, "What's Yoking?", also translated as "What's Happening?"


The Yokway! stream in action with two shared items.

The "What's Yoking?" stream has three modes, much like FriendFeed does, offering a "my network" stream with updates from myself and all friends, one just for my activity, and a third, for "everyone", encompassing all Yokway users.

Running alongside the "What's Yoking?" stream is a "Recent Activity" board, which shows not just what's been posted recently, but who may have rated an item (from one to five stars), when they did it, and if they made comments or added new contacts.

In this early beta phase, the "Recent Activity" encompasses the last 12 hours, but undoubtedly, as users increase, it could provide a live, to the minute, feed.

Beyond the basics, what sets Yokway apart from FriendFeed is the use of topics, which Yokway calls "My Sharing Circles". Anybody can create a new "Sharing Circle", and I immediately joined a few that are likely no surprise to you, including "Web 2.0 Technologies", "Startups", "Faebook", and "Semantic Web". Clicking on any sharing circle shows all shares within the circle, as well as comments, the total number of views, and their rating.

Another pleasant feature from Yokway is the ability to state your relationship to a contact. While with many services, including Twitter and FriendFeed, you're either a "friend" or you're not, Yokway has an option to mark a contact as a friend, family or coworker. While I don't yet see how this is used at this stage, the groundwork is there to maybe share items with family or coworkers only, for example, or it could be to show other contacts how you know a contact they're not familiar with.

The service will have an uphill road to climb to take on sites like FriendFeed or Digg who have significant market traction, but its features are certainly interesting, and the team has done a lot of work in the last four weeks to upgrade the user interface. If you would like to start using Yokway, head to www.yokway.com and post your e-mail address to get a beta account. You can find me here: Yokway!: LouisGray.

UPDATED: Elite Bloggers Joining FriendFeed In Droves

Update 2: Given how this is now seen as a reference point for the hot bloggers on FriendFeed, we're going to try and keep it updated. Added in this round includes folks like Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, Tris Hussey, Chris Pirillo and others...

Also See: Stephanie Booth of Climb to the Stars: FriendFeed Appeals to Women, Too!.

New adds are marked as *NEW*.

Update 1: Welcome visitors from TechMeme, Susan Mernit's Blog, Mark Evans, Scobleizer and The Last Podcast! I've added links for Jeremy Toeman, Susan Mernit, and Jeremiah Owyang.

---

Although it hasn't even been a month since FriendFeed opened up to the masses, and announced Series A financing of $5 million, momentum is definitely on the company's side. Garnering incredible media and blog coverage, FriendFeed has also been a magnet for a significant number of top tier "name brand" bloggers. And while not every one of these A-Listers is using the site to its fullest, their information is there for subscribing, letting you follow their daily Web activity.

I've taken the first step in capturing some of the most recognizable names out there in the blogosphere who have joined FriendFeed. Is it complete? By no means, and of course, making this "elite" list is subjective. So please, if you should be included here, or you know somebody on FriendFeed who should be here, please let me know, and I can update this list. Of course, while I'm not elite in any way, you can always find me on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/louisgray.

Adam Ostrow / Mashable
http://friendfeed.com/adamostrow

Allen Stern / Center Networks *NEW*
http://friendfeed.com/allenstern

Andrew Chen / Futuristic Play
http://friendfeed.com/andrewc

Andy Beard / Niche Marketing
http://friendfeed.com/andybeard

Ben MetCalfe / Dot Ben
http://friendfeed.com/dotben

Brian Solis / Bub.blicio.us
http://friendfeed.com/briansolis

Chris Brogan / ChrisBrogan.com
http://friendfeed.com/chrisbrogan

Chris Pirillo / Chris.Pirillo.com *NEW*
http://friendfee