Don’t look now but FriendFeed is getting a little greedy these days. It no longer seems content to be merely a social networking aggregator. It seems to want to be a content provider instead of just a conduit for all our information. How so you ask? Well, it’s always provided a platform to post messages just like we do on other platforms but now they’ve added some cool new features that truly make it tempting to give up all of the other services and make FriendFeed your primary communication tool for social networks, including Twitter (insert blood curdling gasp here)!
The most enjoyable and long awaited feature for me has been FriendFeed in RealTime! No more refreshing your browser or long gaps of nothing on your Twirl client. Just constantly self-updating messages from all your friends from all over the web. It’s the web the way it should be everywhere. If I could I would make bumper stickers and T-Shirts that said, “Just Say No to the Refresh Button!”
The message editing window is nice too because it provides several options. First, you can choose to post a message just to the FriendFeed public timeline (called My Feed) or to any of the FriendFeed rooms you belong to. They can be public or private rooms. The other things you can do with these posts is add a link to a website or news story you want to share or a photo which then appears in the timeline unlike Twitter which can only adds links. I do wish they would allow the ability to add audio and video as well but then that’s treading on Tumblr’s and Utterli’s territory. You can also just post a comment.
As if that weren’t enough, I then stumbled across the feature that allows you to automatically post any message you post on FriendFeed onto Twitter. Thus, in one fell swoop FriendFeed has done a 180 and instead of just regurgitating tweets in your FriendFeed timeline, you can now spew FriendFeed posts into the Twitter timeline. How tweet is that?
My immediate concern was getting trapped in some warped never-ending loop where a single message would post on FriendFeed then twitter then FriendFeed then twitter and so on and so on! However, FriendFeed made sure such loops don’t happen so there’s no need to worry about that.
Here’s how to set that up really quickly: Go to your Accounts page in FriendFeed and enable the option to publishing your FriendFeed messages to your Twitter account. You’ll have to enter your Twitter login ID and password but that’s about it. You can also choose which content to post to Twitter such as just your public FriendFeed posts or you can include your comments to other people’s messages and even those things you’ve liked. It’s all up to you how much you want to share on Twitter which is great.
So, all this makes me really wonder if I should just start using FriendFeed from now on instead of Twitter as my primary communication service with my social networking friends. Until I make that decision I will continue to use both. If FriendFeed keeps adding more cool features like these (like adding video or audio) then I’ll have no choice but to make the switch for good to FriendFeed. It’ll be Bye Bye Birdie at that point. 🙂