August 27, 2008 94 Comments

How to Use Friendfeed as a Collaborative Business Tool

teacher The social media aggregation software, Friendfeed has much more value than one might originally think. The tool lets you add several disparate parts of your social web use into one spot (it collects your blog, your Flickr account, your upcoming.org event list, your bookmarks, etc).

Most people use this as a way to share a more enriched experience with friends and colleagues. But I think there’s a business opportunity in using the tool for collaborative business. Remember, Friendfeed can collect your status information, your presence, media from several sources, your bookmarks. There are many ways to use that. Here’s one set of use cases to consider for that purpose.

How to Use Friendfeed as a Collaborative Business Tool

  1. Sign up for an account on Friendfeed.
  2. On the “me” tab, on the right where it says “services,” click “Edit/add.”
  3. Add appropriate accounts. (See below).

Here’s where it gets interesting. You can do lots of things at this point. Let’s list several possible use cases:

  • Add any company blogs of relevance.
  • Add any external blogs of relevance.
  • Add search terms via Technorati and Google Blogsearch.
  • Add search terms via Twitter Search (here’s how to search Twitter).
  • Add any Flickr (or other web-based) photo groups.
  • Add location-based data via Brightkite.
  • Add relevant news services using their RSS subscription URLs.
  • Add YouTube videos.
  • Add Delicious.com for social bookmarks.
  • Lots more.

So, pick a few things from the about to think about. If you had lots of people in multiple locations, one way to dashboard their locale would be to have all of them add a Brightkite account, and you could “friend” them and invite them into a group. Pow, instant location-status-presence. There are many ways to configure the 43 or so apps that plug into Friendfeed to be useful for your business.

  1. Add your coworkers’ accounts as friends.
  2. Create a group and invite those friends to the group.
  3. Send private updates to the group. Send more public facing ones to the public timeline.

Friendfeed provides many opportunities to go further than just collecting information in one place. I’m sure there are some other ideas for application of what I’ve just covered that you could improve upon. What do you think? How else could you see this being used?

Photo credit, foundphotoslj

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