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.

The people who miss the point of Friendfeed think that the actual purpose of doing it is to amass as many followers as possible, that it is an online popularity contest (“look! I have 1000 friends! I’m REALLY popular!”).   When in actual fact, it should be the opposite. What you SHOULD be doing to make the most out of it is to refine your Friendfeed network to the people you are friends with the most, the friends you talk with the most, the people whose content you appreciate the most, and who appreciate YOU the most. If you don’t do this, then all you’re going to end up with is a whole lot of noise and other people’s content pushed upon you while your content gets lost and ignored.

To help you do this effectively, let me point you in the direction of a very powerful and effective tool called FriendVenn written by a Friendfeeder called Felix. Right away, you’re going to shriek at me and say “aaagh! this app wants my Friendfeed password!”. Well, what can I say? Felix professes to be trustworthy and a lot of other Friendfeeders also trust him enough to have used the app in the past. No-one has complained yet that their accounts have been taken over. So I guess it’s ultimately up to you. If you’re really freaked about giving your password, you can do this and then change the password immediately afterwards to something else. Then you can sleep easily at night, knowing that your account is safe and secure!

Right, with that out of the way, what does FriendVenn do? Well, what this tool does is analyze your Friendfeed friends and separates them into three columns :

• Those that ARE following you but you are not following them
• Those that are following you and you are also following them (the ideal scenario)
• Those that are NOT following you and you are following them (the worst case scenario)

Now obviously you want everyone to be in the middle column and if everyone is already there then congratulations. You don’t need to do anything else. You can move on and do something else. But if any of your contacts are in any of the other two columns then you have some work to do to fix that.

If any of your contacts are in the first column then that is easily solved. Go to their Friendfeed profile and follow them. Easy. They’ll then move into the middle column and everyone’s peachy. But if they are in the third column, then it’s time to consider whether or not you should unsubscribe from them. As I said, Friendfeed is all about reciprocating and meeting you halfway. If you’re subscribing to them but they are not showing any interest in you, then what are you getting out of the deal? A bunch of names who couldn’t care less about you and your work?  Is that what you call a “friend”? If so, you might want to redefine the word “friend”.

Saying that however, if you only subscribed to their feed a few days ago or last week, you might want to give them a little more time. They may be on holiday or they may be sick or they may be busy at work. So try to remember when you subscribed to that particular feed if you can. Not everyone is a big web junkie who checks their email and their feeds every few minutes or every few hours (believe it or not). I got rapped across the knuckles some time back by someone who reminded me not too subtly that he “wasn’t married to his email” (unlike me – I live virtually 24/7 in my email inbox!).

I managed to filter out 21 people whom I was subscribed to who weren’t subsequently returning the favour. Using FriendVenn, it was then a simple case of clicking through to those profiles and unsubscribing.

FriendVenn is a web app you should keep in your favourites and use on a regular basis to houseclean your Friendfeed profile. Maybe by unsubscribing from the people who don’t “get it”, those people will get the hint that social networking really is all about reciprocating and meeting you halfway.

That’s what “friends” do, you know?

By Mark O’Neill

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.

So after hearing people talking about it, I too decided to create an account just to claim my username. It is named by many “the Twitter killer” and they are right on a certain level. It allows the federated use of the service (laconi.ca), it comes equipped with Jabber IM and OpenID support. More upcoming features include SMS, URL shortening or cross posting to similar platforms. In theory, the service is a great, reliable alternative to Twitter. Ping.fm even included their service in their system, so that you can update all the services at once.

So why haven’t you heard more of it? Why hasn’t everyone moved there? Plurk is still going strong, with traffic increasing daily, updates coming at a steady rate. Twitter works by leaps and bounds, but it does the trick at least half of the times. However, twitter has what many other similar services don’t have: the numerous active users. They might leave for a brief amount of time, while Twitter uses the newly appointed funds to improve its platform.

I for one dislike the simple interface of Identi.ca, resembling Twitter’s. I am updating my Twitter profile less and less since Plurk came along. All in all, the platform you use depends on what kind of user you are: for providing updates about your blog or simply sharing information, use Twitter; for keeping in touch with your friends on a daily basis and building your relationship, use Plurk; when others fail, Identi.ca is the backup option.

About the author:maxyRO is a social media maven, web 2.0 enthusiast, passionate writer and blogger since he first came across digg or stumbleupon. Find out more about him by checking out his blog or profiles.

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.

You can find the Blogger method here and it was designed by Pat Hawks.   He has scripts for both the old and the new Blogger templates and as I said, it’s a simple copy and paste.   Since I haven’t used Blogger since last year, I can’t personally endorse the script and say how good it is.   But he was linked to and praised by Louis Gray so that has to count for something.

Here’s what it apparently looks like.   Plain but functional but far as I’m concerned, functional is all that matters.

Now for the WordPress plugin.   It’s made by Glenn Slaven and it’s like any other WordPress plug-in.   You have to download it, unzip it and upload it to your blog domain.   After activating it, you have to enter your Friendfeed details and configure it.   You then have to go into your WordPress template, to the single page template, and place the <?php wp_ffcomments(); ?> inside the loop so that Friendfeed can match the page with the comments on Friendfeed.

Now here is what it’s supposed to look like :

What I like about it is that you can see the picture of the Friendfeed user, you can also see who “liked” the post and how many people commented on it.   So a lot of information there.

I haven’t been able to find any live blogs with the plug-in though. Glenn says that Corvida was his first live tester but that blog is currently down.   If anybody knows of a blog that is running these plug-ins, please post the link in the comments as I would really like to see the plug-ins in action.

Now what we need next is a way to export Twitter comments whenever you post a link to one of your blog posts on Twitter.    I wonder when someone will come up with that?

Written by Mark O’Neill

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

Alertthingy was rushed out to please impatient Friendfeed users and the features are extremely limited. Now those once-impatient Friendfeed users can’t stop bitching about how terrible the app is! You can’t adjust the fonts or the colours and you can’t narrow the size of the box. The whole app also seems to be a bit on the buggy side. Couldn’t the developers have taken a few extra days to work on it a bit more before bringing it out? Who cares if a few Friendfeeders are whining if their new toy takes a few more days to appear? Isn’t quality better than speed?

Well maybe this is why they were rushing. TWhirl (my favourite Twitter client) is now doing what Alertthingy does by supporting Friendfeed – and they are doing it BETTER. By upgrading to the new version of TWhirl, you can have a window open with your Twitter feed AND a second window open with your Friendfeed :

What makes TWhirl better? Well for a start, TWhirl is more customisable. You can change the background colours, the fonts, you can alter the size of the box….all things Alertthingy doesn’t allow you to do. This may not be a big deal for some people but if you have bad eyesight like I do, it IS a big deal. If you have hundreds of posts flowing through on a daily basis and you’re trying to keep up with hurting eyes, it becomes a very big deal.

Today, in an amusing twist, Techcrunch has announced that Alertthingy, determined not to be outdone, is rolling out the heavy artillery and is adding Twitter support! Are you dizzy yet?

As Yoda would no doubt say in a situation like this, “Begun the Friendfeed Desktop Wars Have. The Force Is Strong In This One. Hmmm!”

Written by Mark O’Neill