Social media hounds have been in a constant orgasmic fit since the day FriendFeed launched. Early adopters have been on board and championing the coolness of FriendFeed. And, indeed, it is a cool social media service.
For those not in the cool kids club yet, FriendFeed is a social media site where you can aggregate your online activity across a myriad of different websites into a single feed. Your friends who follow you on FriendFeed will then be able to monitor and comment on your various activities across all these sites. FriendFeed can easily pipe in your activity across Twitter, your blogs, Flickr, LinkedIn, Disqus, Del.icio.us, Youtube, Google Reader, etc. Up to around 35 different sites in total.
FriendFeed is pretty new and, as such, users like me recognize some of the shortcomings of FriendFeed. Well, yesterday, the folks at FriendFeed released two new features that got users into a tizzy: rooms and re-sharing.
Essentially, a FriendFeed room is simply a little mini FriendFeed, but centered around a specific topic. People can join into the room and talk about something specific. A number of other techies (including me) went on a chat room registration spree which is reminiscent of the digital gold rush when everybody was picking up dot-com domain names like crazy. Of course, a FriendFeed room is never going to have the the staying power of a real domain name, but it can still be something utilized down the road. For my part, I set up a few rooms:
- Tech Bloggers
- Election 2008
- PCMech (of course)
- Tampa Bloggers
I also joined into a few other rooms.
I think the idea of rooms is a cool addition to FriendFeed. The major drawback to it at this point is that there is no public directory of rooms, so we’re left to sharing links to our rooms in the FriendFeed system. I would hope that FriendFeed will eventually have a directory of public rooms that people can join into. That seems like the next logical thing to me. Some are also wondering if there might be some side effects in the community. Others think that it doesn’t really get us anywhere because it could already be done elsewhere.
Before the day is out, though, bloggers were saying the initial tizzy of FriendFeed rooms was wearing out. They stopped the gold rush and started thinking about real world uses for the feature.
Regardless of the new rooms, FriendFeed is proving to be an enticing alternative to Twitter. Not to mention their uptime is much better than Twitter.
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