Using Friendfeed To Gather And Organize Your Life Streaming Activities

In the early days of the search engine, there were dozens of competitors. Anybody remember Alta Vista, Lycos, GoTo or Hotbot? But over time, Google and to a lesser degree Yahoo, started to gain in popularity and the other search engines either got bought up or went bust.

Web 2.0 sites are still in their infancy and while Facebook is the clear winner at the moment in terms of social networking, the market is still tremendously fragmented. Many of use use Flickr for photos, YouTube for videos, Technorati for blogs and so on.

As Web 2.0 sites are all about interaction, we are increasingly finding that we have accounts at dozens of different sites designed for different purposes and while no doubt that list will shrink over time, just as the search engine worl did, for now we need to remember a lot fo details.

Enter Friendfeed. Friendfeed had the marvellous idea of helping you to tie all your Web 2.0 accounts together into one single account. Once you have signed up, Friendfeed provide you with a page much like a Twitter page where you can add details of your accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Stumble Upon and dozens of other similar properties.

In this way, your online friends can easily see *all* your networking activity in one single, neat place.

Personally, I’ve been using Friendfeed for some time and I love the way it simplifies life for my network. I have added their rather clever widget to my blog so that my friends can see all my activity at once. Whether I upload a video to YouTube, add a favourite to Digg or add a new tweet to Twitter, my friends will know. Even better, in true Web 2.0 form they can then choose to interact with me in the way that suits them rather than me.