I’m a big fan of FriendFeed for several reasons, but one thing I really like about it is the ability to set up lists and groups to help me manage the folks I follow.
Steve Rubel wrote last week about Five Fantastic Friendfeed Filters for Flow and I agree with him on it. On the left you’ll see a screenshot of the lists and groups I’m currently using.
There are 2 significant differences in lists and groups on FriendFeed: 1. Lists are made up of FriendFeed profiles while Groups are made up of RSS feeds or profile feeds not part of FriendFeed, and 2. Though each list or group gets a unique URL, List URLs are tied to your account while Group URLs are public so once taken, they are gone.
There is another way to have a list with outside sources by creating imaginary friends, but I haven’t used it much and it’s worth exploring.
As you can see by the screenshot, I have a few geography-based Lists that pull in my FriendFeed connections in those broad locations. I also have one for FF people I consider leaders, and one more called “via RSS” that are the people I don’t want to miss so I subscribe to that list’s RSS feed in my gReader. One cool thing about lists is at the bottom of the page is a link to “best of the day” for that list. Nice way to catch up.
For Groups, there are a few I’ve joined and a few I’ve created. You can see /hulu-new, /lostsoup, /clemson-tigers, and /hurricane as a few of the groups I created. Since groups can be public, anyone can join them, follow along, and participate like a discussion board.
It’ll be nice when Twitter does this native instead of having to rely on 3rd-party applications to do it. That’s one reason I like FriendFeed better.
Another reason I like FriendFeed is that when I post an update, it can be cross-posted to Twitter with the check of a box. However, my FriendFeed page compared to my Twitter page is much more rich as it can include photos (which I try to include from time to time).
I once read somewhere:
Twitter is for meeting new people, Facebook for people you once knew well, FriendFeed for people you want to know better.
Are you on FriendFeed? You can see I have my latest updates showing up in the sidebar of orangejack.com, but you can also subscribe to me on FriendFeed at orangejack.
