FriendFeed: Any Nonprofit Staffers Using It? How? Why?

FriendFeed is in a category called digital lifestyle aggregators that let you aggregate all your various feeds and share with your friends.  (There's also  MyBlogLog's lifestream, Lifestream.fm and Facebook's primitive version lifestreaming, which involves integrating a handful of services into users' Mini-Feeds and News Feeds.

Need to understand FriendFeed?

• What is FriendFeed? (Read this)
• Why should you use it?  (Read this)
• Does it have any value for nonprofit folks?  (leave a comment)
• Who is the poweruser of Friend Feed?  (Louis Gray)
• What blog posts and information has Louis Gray read and digested on Friendfeed?  (Sniff is del.icio.us friendfeed tag and pluck something out and leave a note in the comments to point to it ..)

I set up my account back in February when it started to get buzz.  I admit I haven't done much with it except to use it on my Facebook profile to update my profile content versus having all these individual apps on Facebook do it for me. 

I'm not in the habit yet of scanning the combined feeds of my friends on friendfeed because my initial knee jerk reaction is too much content.  I haven't yet figured out filtering, either.   So, now I'm using the dip in approach or browse the bookstore approach ...  don't have to read everything - just scan for patterns and then drill down into something that might be useful, interesting, or connect with something I'm doing.

• How are you using Friendfeed?
• Does it have any value for those of us work for nonprofits?  Or is it early adopter geek stuff?
• It seems like it would be of value if you had large friend group and a way to filter or if you had a small rightly defined group or community of practice as your friends.  Has anyone experimented with filtering or using it for knowledge sharing?

 

 

Comments

[laurence timms]

Beth, I work for a nonprofit organisation here in the UK and while we are pretty switched on for a charity in terms of what we can do with new tech, I can't honestly see a place for FF in the mix right now. Not that it's going to particularly scare any of these guys - they're good at assimilating lots of data. Just that I don't think there's an FF-shaped hole anywhere.

[Judi Sohn]

It's purely toe-in-the-water stuff now. The folks I follow on FriendFeed are mostly tech types, and I enjoy getting that view of what they're interested in and sharing online.

The information has to be better organized. Not just filters. It drives me nuts that 3 different people can bookmark the same page, someone else can share it on Google Reader, and every single entry has its own comment conversation under it about the same source.

When it's a bit more streamlined, I could see a nonprofit having a FriendFeed of news and items of interest in their cause, but not yet. I am just at the point where folks are starting to get more comfortable with the RSS on our site, and most are doing email subscriptions rather than reading our feed in their browser.

[Beth Kanter]

Judi: Thanks for your insights. I'm doing the same thing as you - toe in the water. So, it's a watch and wait on the social stream stuff. As early adopters, we have to keep one foot in the cutting edge and the other foot where people are at.

[Beth Kanter]

@laurence - thanks for your insights. What the heck is a ff shaped hole?

[laurence timms]

:) I mean that FF is a solution looking for a problem. Prior to FriendFeed, did anyone actually say that they wanted *more* noise (apart from Scoble, obviously)? All the attention was on memetrackers like techmeme, megite et al - including mine, chuquet, for a short period of time. Yet while the memetrackers have made some inroads, it could be argued that they are only really popular with the same group of people who are currently wowed by FriendFeed. Go figure.

The reason I wouldn't want to see FriendFeed getting traction in my own nonprofit work environment is that it'd leave too many people behind in the race to communicate. There are a lot of valuable opinions in this organisation but those individuals sometimes lack the necessary skills to make their voice heard across the network. They need champions to promote them, not noise to drown them.

[Todd Mundt]

Beth -

Thanks for the post! I started using ff as a simple lifestream for all my content, but after learning a little bit about the "hide" feature, I've found I can finetune the content to get the stuff that's closest to what I want to see - either job-related stuff, or topics that interest me. It's surprising how quickly you can tame ff to hone down to what matters.

I wouldn't call ff life-changing, but I've come to appreciate the functionality and now I can more clearly see the value of it, next to my feedreader, for instance.