Social Aggregating
Posted on March 14, 2008
6 Comments
Social Aggregation seems to be the new cool thing in the web 2.0 world this week. The premise seems sound: Why follow folks via a dozen different services? Instead, pull them all into one service and follow there.
To that end, I’ve been experimenting with a couple of the apps this week. Both have great potential. And, in my humble opinion, neither quite hits the target.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.
FriendFeed is pretty easy to work with. After you sign up, you start “importing” from all your various online presences. Anything you want to show up in your stream is probably already an option — if it isn’t, you can just go with an RSS feed. As an example, that’s my list to the right.
As you can see, most common services are represented (there are, as of this writing, 28 services).
As I update any of those services, those updates flow into my FriendFeed account.
Before I even start following friends, I have a nice little “life streamer” going on. In fact, I’m using their embed option on my home page. For self-only life streaming, this seems to kick tumblr’s butt (I’m just sayin…).
Now, start adding friends that you want to follow. Here’s the downside: They also have to setup a FriendFeed account. If they haven’t, you can manually create them as an “imaginary friend“.
Once you’re following friends, you can just bring up the page and let it auto-refresh and keep an eye on what your peeps are up to. You can even add comments on the FF page that other FF users can see and/or respond. It has some neat social aspects around that.
Socialthing
At first glance, Socialthing seems a lot like FriendFeed. However, look closer — they’re similar, but definitely not the same.
See everything that’s going on with your friends in all the sites you use, easily figure out where you’re missing connections with your friends, interact with multiple sites at once, and more!
They don’t offer quite the depth or breadth of services that FF does (in fact, I think right now there’s even a smaller subset than normal due to a TechCrunch article traffic spike). However, they do something that I like quite a bit.
When you add a service, such as Twitter, you’ll have to provide your credentials. In exchange, though, you’ll get all your Twitter friends automatically added.
See the difference there? Your friends don’t need to sign up to use Socialthing. You don’t need to manually add them. They’re all just magically there. That rocks.
Granted, you have to be willing to trust ST with your account credentials…
You can’t add feeds or as many services to ST as you can with FF. And, my chief annoyance, is that the page doesn’t auto-refresh (hopefully coming soon). You have to click a refresh button.
[Update] I forgot to mention this last bit. While Socialthing doesn’t do the on-site commenting stuff like FriendFeed does. However, it does support and allow you to respond to things on the original system. For instance, if you see a tweet come across, you can hit the response link to respond directly back to Twitter. Rather slick.
I have some invites left for Socialthing. Drop a comment if you’d like one.
Summarized
Here are a few of my recent Twitter ramblings:
For me? I’ll stick with FriendFeed as my individual life stream capturing. I’ll use Socialthing to follow all my friends on all their various services.
Tags: aggregate, feed, FriendFeed, social, social-aggregation, Socialthing
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6 Responses to “Social Aggregating”
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Ugh.
Pownce vs. twitter
socialthing vs. friendfeed
blueray vs. HDDVD
That’s it. I don’t want a choice any more.
Microsoft needs to buy everybody and tell me what to do.
PS. I’m kinda kidding. I’ve Switched.
I think I’d like OpenID better if clicking my name went to my website instead of theirs….
I really hate what happens with the verisign version it just goes to a dead end page. That’s helpful for neither of us.
I think Friendfeed seems to getting to critical mass faster, if I am not mistaken.
I agree Shantanu and it’s strange to watch it emerge as an evident leader in the field and I’m not sure what the determining factor was in this case. It sort of seems to be oozing to the top slowly.
I’m not using it like I thought I would. It wasn’t ’sticky’ enough for me somehow.
I’m pretty much the same, Rich. It’s nice and all, but I don’t find myself going there very often.
Granted, I’ve been on the road vacationing which is quite disruptive.
But so far, FriedFeed works better for me as my own “life stream” service. I’m not doing so well following others with it.