@NowSourcing.Com

The popular real-time feed aggregator, FriendFeed, can bring a bit of traffic to a blog. As of today, FriendFeed’s Kevin Fox has announced it is adding its subscriber count to the number of RSS subscribers.

Site admins should start seeing a spike, possibly very significant, in the amount of RSS subscribers to their feed. It will show up in the statistics as “friendfeedagg”. NowSourcing is one of those prime examples, as you’ll see in the image below:

NowSourcing subscribers, sorted by RSS reader used.

Although this amounts to a substantial ‘bonus’  of sorts to a blog’s overall statistics, some say that very little difference is made. At some level this is true, but it does finally account what some folks use to keep up on new posts into the numbers. These numbers do make a difference, as RSS readers that have a sharing function can provide more exposure, even a potentially viral effect.

So, what can FriendFeed do for your blog? The people that subscribe to you on FriendFeed actually want to read what you have to say across the board. Not only is this simply a ‘feed’ of new posts, but it is a socialized RSS reader that allows you to connect in real time. It’s a great way to connect with your regulars, in addition to spreading the word out to those for whom your site is relevant, but hadn’t yet hit their radar.

Give it a shot. Boost your subscribers and your readership by taking advantage of this new feature.

If you aren’t already, be sure to add NowSourcing on FriendFeed.

I think some people miss the point of Friendfeed, just like they miss the point of Facebook or any other social network. A social network is all about networking and reciprocating. It’s all about talking to one another. But if you subscribe to someone and they don’t return the favour, that isn’t networking, that’s just being downright rude.   It’s like standing in the middle of a street and talking to a brick wall.  It also defeats the whole point of social networking in the first place. [...]

If you too got fed up with the whale carrying birds, then you must have turned you attention and free time to another micro-blogging platform. First came Jaiku, then Pownce, after which people started turning to Twitter. When the whale failed ashore, we turned our attention to Plurk. Not a new player has come into the scene by the name of Identi.ca.

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As Friendfeed starts to get better and better, and people start to contribute more to the site, users will increasingly want to find ways to export that valuable data back to their own blogs.   After all, if you’re the webmaster of your own blog, your obvious first priority is to drive that traffic back to your own site.   More traffic equals more pageviews and more pageviews equals more Adsense clicks and more RSS subscribers.   So it makes sense that you would want that bustling Friendfeed activity to be moved over to your own domain.

Luckily a couple of Friendfeed users have been hard at work dealing with that very issue and if you have a blog hosted on either Blogger or Wordpress, then you are in luck.    The Blogger method is much easier as it is just a simple copy and paste.   The Wordpress method has a bit more to it.    But nevertheless, both methods have so far been receiving glowing reviews and I will shortly be installing the Wordpress version on my own blog to capture some of that Friendfeed magic for myself.

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My favourite social networking site at the moment is without a doubt Friendfeed (but of course that is subject to immediate change if the “Next Big Thing” should rear its big ugly head).

But as with everything else on the internet, Friendfeed isn’t perfect by any means. Just like everyone else, I have my wishlist of what I would like to see on Friendfeed and it isn’t a big list compared to what others want to see. I am not a demanding person. My needs and desires are actually pretty small.

I am actually caught in a dilemma at the moment with Friendfeed. It’s the same dilemma I face with all new applications like this when I start out. On the one hand, I want to only subscribe to people that I know and end up with a close circle of real friends. That way, I shut out all the unnecessary noise, information overflow and so forth. I see only the quality stuff and I am disturbed only by real friends.

But on the other hand, I am finding Friendfeed insanely useful for work purposes (especially now that a memetracker has been developed). The more people I subscribe to, the more links I find to click on, that lead me to stories to write about. In a way, you could say that Friendfeed is helping to pay my bills. But then that leads me back to the noise and the information overflow that I was mentioning just a moment ago. By going through the links, the comments, the Likes, and God knows what else, I find myself literally drowning. More and more stuff gets added to Friendfeed every second and you can easily waste hours in there flailing, trying in vain to get out, only to find that Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis are the lifeguards!

Which leads me to my first wish for Friendfeed. This was first wished for by Internet Duct Tape – don’t cross the streams! In other words, there has to be a way to stop the duplication of links. I often send the same link to Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious and then that link gets posted three times on my Friendfeed account. There must be a way for Friendfeed to see that it is the same link and for two of those links to get zapped. I can’t believe it is beyond the abilities of the Friendfeed developers to work out a fix to this.

Another wish on my list would be for Friendfeed to pick up my comments on blogs and aggregrate them to my Friendfeed. By having all comments funnelled to FF, not only would I have everything in one place but it would also encourage the conversation to continue. I have tried setting up a Google Alert for my comments and then running the RSS feed through Friendfeed but it doesn’t work. I comment on a lot of blogs and I would love for all of those comments to be picked up and deposited on Friendfeed.

Internet Duct Tape has also done some great Greasemonkey scripts that I think should be picked up by Friendfeed as default features. There is one where you can filter out links according to a particular service (so all the YouTube links or all the Delicious links and so on).

There is also another one, by Friendfeed Apps, where you can mark links to be read later if you don’t have time to read it at that moment. The links get moved to a “read later” tab which is very useful.

The one thing I found extremely amusing with Friendfeed when I started using it was the “imaginary friends” feature. My first instinctive reaction was “imaginary friends! I haven’t had one of them since I was four years old!”. But when Steve Rubel discussed them in his blog, I finally realised the value of them. You can use them to track people who don’t use Friendfeed or don’t have any intention of using it – in other words, a stalker’s wet dream.

So Friendfeed still has some way to go until it is my perfect web application, but it is getting there. All it has to do is cut down on the noise, aggregrate my comments, integrate and improve some of the features that some developers have made and Bob’s your Uncle, we might actually have a perfect web app on our hands.

Written by Mark O’Neill