FriendFeed: Social Dashboard + PR Platform + News Tracker

Super Quick Quiz

Who did you talk to online today? What did you say? Where did you go? Why? What did your recommend? What did your friends do online today?

Super Quiz Answer

One window fulls of feeds – from you and your friends. It’s all there: twitter, Facebook, RSS, YouTube, etc. See what’s going on on FriendFeed right now.

That – in a nutshell – is FriendFeed. You decide what feeds you want to share and whose feeds you want to get. Subscribe to wiredprworks on FriendFeed.

For me, FriendFeed answers one of the biggest objections to social networking: overwhelm. Organizing your social networking activity into an aggregated dashboard makes sense. You save time. You follow who you want. Companies that want to reach you consolidate their efforts. Information flows more meaningfully.

To see how social networking sites fit into people’s lives, take a look at a the results of Symantec Norton Online Living Survey, a study that shows how people use social networks. A majority, 76%, of U.S. teens ages 13-17 years old “constantly,” “frequently” or “sometimes” visit social networking sites while 47% of U.S. parents “constantly,” “frequently” or “sometimes” use social networks. In China, the numbers are 78% of adults and 85% of children. Over half, 52%, of people around the world report having made friends online; 46% of users who made friends online said they enjoyed those relationships as much or more than friendships made offline.

Given the numbers, is this reason enough for companies to participate in social networking?

Jeremiah Owyang takes a look at how brands will use FriendFeed for public relations . . .
“Fortunately, there’s good news at hand, with social aggregation tools at hand, such as FriendFeed, a brand can create a Friendfeed account and easily consolidate all the assets from one location. What would this look like? A brand like Ford could create a Friendfeed account, submit to the various social services (Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, Delicious, and over 30 others), then encourage fans of Ford to either follow that public Friendfeed page, or to become actual ‘friends’. The end result? All the social media assets will be viewed from one location, searchable, findable, with the ability to comment, without using a SMPR.” [SMPR = social media press release]

While I like the idea of creating a FriendFeed account to manage the brand’s social media assets, I think there’s room for the SMPR as well. If your audience is online and into social networking, then this approach works right now. If not, jumping in is a time-waster.

Jeremiah’s future glance fits right into what Steve Rubel has to say about how reople follow peers and track news on FriendFeed:

People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations. And Friendfeed is more than an aggregation site or a community that’s layered on top of others. It’s a recommendation engine that surfaces content (both pro and amateur) via your peers – and that’s huge. Sure there are things wrong with it, but I believe Friendfeed is incredibly disruptive. It’s the next big thing online for consumers. It may even become the next Google.

What do you think – will FriendFeed overtake Google? Find out more about FriendFeed’s search.

What I Like About FriendFeed

Tracks everything all activity all in one place. Do other services do this – besides MyBlogLog?

Allows you to comment so you show up in your friend’s feeds.

Posts images.

Enables “rooms” where you can share information, like the ProBlogger Room on FriendFeed, and get to know who’s who.

Recommended option suggests friends

FriendFeed Facebook App appears to be more current than the twitter Facebook app

Tell Us More About . . .

How you use FriendFeed

How you feel about social networking

How you relate to your online “friends”

Technorati Tags: FriendFeed,Social Networking,Social Media release,Barbara Rozgonyi,Wired PR Works