Laura Norvig gave me a sneak peak at her ingite presentation for NTC Ignite called the Many Uses of FriendFeed. I'm looking forward to hearing her give the talk.
For those of you who are wondering what the heck is an ignite presentation, it is a style of presenting where the speaker has 20 slides, mostly visual, and spends no more than 20 seconds explaining each one. It is intended as a rapid and engaging way to present information. For more details, see this wikipedia entry.
Some of you may be wondering what the heck FriendFeed is as well. It is one of a number of "life streaming applications" where individuals and organizations who are active on the social web can port their activity across social networks into one, easy to follow, read, and comment activity stream. These services are powered by the RSS feeds that each network offers to its users and makes following activity across sites easier and in one spot. With Twitter becoming more mainstream, perhaps we'll see more activity on FriendFeed.
I use FriendFeed to follow a group of people in more depth because I can see their complete social media activity in one place. It gives me a better snapshot that just following a Twitter stream. I've used a little social network theory to design my FriendFeed friending strategy. It boils down to following the few to find the many! In other words, I identify connectors across different "hubs" or communities that I want to track.
It is also good for conversation around resources or crowdsourcing research. In fact, I watched Laura crowdsource some of her presentation on FriendFeed. FriendFeed also has "rooms" that can be public or private - these feeds with discussion items.
About a year ago, a group of nonprofit technology social media early adopters ran a couple of experiments using FriendFeed and an NpTech room. I summarized our learnings from this experiment in a series of posts that also includes some useful how to posts. I remember Laura was an active participant in those experiments.
What I love is the idea of setting up a private room for organizational listening that Laura suggests in the slide deck. She suggests that FriendFeed private room would be a great way to facilitate some discussion around the feeds. Of course, the folks participating would have to be comfortable using FriendFeed and make a habit of it - but might be a good way to support a team listening effort with free tools.
What do you think?
FriendFeed Resources
- Use FriendFeed to Keep Up on Nonprofits by Laura Norvig
- Louis Gray's FriendFeed Blog Posts - key expert in FriendFeed
- Lifestream Blog - News, tips, resources, reviews, scripts, services, and sites for creating a Lifestream
- SocialTNT: How to Use Friendfeed for Better PR - Although parts of this post assume you are interested in getting PR coverage from Silicon Valley reporters, it does give a nice overview of FriendFeed for newbies.
- How Bloggers Can Use FriendFeed Effectively - This post includes some great tips on how to contribute value to FriendFeed, keep your "signal-to-noise" ratio high, and use "rooms" effectively.
- How To Use FriendFeed To Keep Up On Nonprofits - (Netsquared)
- How Nonprofits Can Use FriendFeed by Beth Kanter
Thanks for the shout out, Beth. Yep, I think it's a pretty cool tool for a low-cost listening strategy.
Posted by: Laura Norvig | April 21, 2009 at 01:36 PM