Looking for a single place to keep track of what you’re doing on the following sites: Amazon, Flickr, Google Reader, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Netflix, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Yelp, a single RSS feed, del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google Shared Stuff, iLike, Last.fm, Pownce, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube and Zoomr? Then FriendFeed, currently in private beta, might be of interest to you.

FriendFeed (FF) Developer Brett Taylor kindly sent me an invite to FF which seems more useful to me as an aggregated activity tracker than as it’s being promoted: a social network aggregator and twitteresq automated system. Before anybody asks, I don’t see any way yet to invite anybody else and share the love, am I missing this option somewhere, Brett? You can request an invite on the FF main page like I did if you’d like to check this service out before it hits prime time. My invite arrived within a day. If you want to friend me, go ahead, I don’t bite.

(not too hard, anyway)

From a technology standpoint, I’ve been impressed so far with how fast FF stays updated. A refresh during the writing shows music I listened to less than 10 minutes ago. Geeks have to appreciate the amount of pinging going on behind the scenes. Whether or not FF can scale, time will tell. Also, FF smartly doesn’t make new entries for each new song listened to unless you have activity elsewhere in between songs. Example of last.fm entry:

listened to Van Halen – Good Enough, Van Halen – Amsterdam, and 10 other songs on Last.fm
8 minutes ago

There is an optional Facebook application that will include your FriendFeed info automatically which could be an easier way to update those in your friend’s list on Facebook what you’re doing online.

Is FF useful to others?
I’m curious if this would be useful to friends and family? The problem I have with FriendFeed is it’s an all or nothing proposition with the individual entries/updates inside sites you add and that sort of firehose probably wouldn’t be useful to even my closest friends online. Before shelving the service, I’m giving it a serious try this week. Maybe there is some value in sharing a raw activity stream with others online? The concept fascinates me.

You don’t need Facebook to follow my FriendFeed, you can find that at friendfeed.com/tdavid. I also added the widget to my TD Goodliffe VTOR author profile page. The widget color scheme sort of fits the VTOR design colors nicely.

Suggestion: more focused activity tracking
Must admit from a productivity standpoint, I find activity trackers helpful in managing time. Maybe FriendFeed when it launches should/could (or will) focus more on that instead of being a web service aggregator. You can make your web service activity private if you want and choose what services to add to FriendFeed, so you can control what others will see. There is nothing stopping people from going to the individual sites if you are sharing it there though, so FF is just making it easier to allow others and yourself to keep track of what you did recently.

If FriendFeed was tied into something that could keep track of the time spent using different services that would be another handy optional feature. Maybe something like SlimTimer, or perhaps less technical by just calculating a generic — configurable, even better — amount of minutes for each task tracked. This way us web working types can see where time is going. Some tasks like music playing in the background via iLike or last.fm may not contribute to a loss in productivity, but others might.

More than one RSS feed, please
FriendFeed only allows adding one RSS feed, which means that you’d need to use something like FeedBlendr to combine multiple blogs you post into one feed to share through FriendFeed. One bummer about having only one blended feed is that you can’t separate the blended feeds into categories of multiple feeds. Say for example, I wanted to have one blended feed for technology blogs on FriendFeed and another blended feed for personal blogs. Can’t do it with only a single RSS feed. If they increased the number of RSS feeds to say 5 or 10 that would be plenty.

Overall, FriendFeed provides some useful functionality. Doubtful I’ll be using the social functions like commenting on aggregated entries very often. I need less places to check for comments, but do enjoy the ability to check for a quick aggregated snapshot of what I did with the services included for the day. Maybe that will be of use to some readers as well. What do you think?

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