The FriendFeed chain of command

Posted by Craig Bailey in Social networking on 04 29th, 2009 | one response

One of the things that has made Twitter so popular is its simplicity and the 140 character limit.FriendFeed

The reason I’m hardly on Twitter anymore is because it is too simple and has a 140 character limit.

Yep, I can happily live with it going mainstream and having @oprah around doesn’t faze me at all (as opposed to the reactions noted here). Even all the ‘social media experts’ spamming me isn’t really a problem.

For me, its the richness that I’m getting on FriendFeed these days that is really interesting. I made the switch about two weeks ago when the new real-time beta went live. Being able to write longer messages, reply with longer messages, and vote up the items of interest is difficult to do without. It’s like Facebook but a little nicer. I’m liking it there.

But there’s still a few issues. The main one is that many of the people I’ve subscribed to have numerous sources coming into FriendFeed. This results in a lot of duplication. A common example is when people use ping.fm to publish to multiple social networks, that all get aggregated into FriendFeed. Thus I’ll see the same message from them shown 3 or 4 times in a row. Here’s a typical example:

FriendFeed duplication

Chain of Command

So, there just needs to be a simple ‘chain of command’ in place.

Here’s how I’ve set mine up now:

  • I have setup FriendFeed to be the source of all my ‘content’ including messages, comments, and posts from my blogs
  • I post messages to FriendFeed
  • FriendFeed will publish this to Twitter
  • Facebook pulls in my Twitter feed

Thus my message only appears once on each.

I’ve also streamlined my networks, so I no longer post to Identica, LinkedIn and any of the other networks I’ve signed up on in the past few years. I’ve decided to keep my content to just these 3 (Twitter, FF and FB) for now. And Video or Audio content will be referenced by my blog posts, so there’s no need to pull from YouTube or Vimeo.

The final link is any bookmarking sites I use. I’ve limited this to Digg and StumbleUpon for now, and both of these feed into FriendFeed only.

Anyway, that’s how I’m working at the moment. Any suggestions on how I should improve this?

[You can follow me on FriendFeed here.]



One Response to “The FriendFeed chain of command”

  1. Tony Hollingsworth says:
    May 8, 2009 at 11:53 pm

    Hi Craig
    I removed the Facebook Twitter app and replaced it with the Facebook Twitter Selective Status app by http://twitter.com/andyy

    This gives you a little more control over Facebook status via Twitter – you decide which tweets go to Facebook by including the #fb hashtag in a post.

    If you mainly use Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook it’s a good solution: post from FriendFeed, it auto-tweets, and auto-FB updates only if you include #fb – there are just some tweets that don’t need to be on Facebook.

    Personally, I’d prefer the default to be to always post to Facebook from Twitter, with the ability to not post using the hashtag – unfortunately for now it’s the reverse: posts wont go to Facebook unless you use #fb in the post.

    Cheers
    Tony

    Reply

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