How to Use Friendfeed as a Collaborative Business Tool

August 27, 2008 · Comments

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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  • This seems pretty interesting. I don't think that i would use it though. I don't really care for friend feed. The idea is good, but still needs some work and improvement. Agree?
  • Hi Chris,
    there are some interesting points in there - I thought of FF as a social marketing instrument - but there are more possibilities, you're right!
    Thanks for sharing! :-)
    André
  • Cool, it's like a free intranet.

    There is only one concern - who holds all the info?
  • Hmm, this could actually work out pretty well. Great thinking, Chris!
  • Chris - I like the list and suggestion to use FF as a collaborative tool for business; however, and this is something I am struggling with in my own business universes, you assume that with tools like FF or even delicious that folks are singing off the same page and have the same level of interest, ability, inclination and just plain philosophy around sharing what they are reading and what they know.

    One of the ways I'm working on this is to get folks to see that these tools can help in THEIR own worlds (stay on top of industry trends, be in the know, find their saved bookmarks) - THEN, there's the sharing component.

    How often do I get hit with "I don't have time to fill out my profile" or "why would I spend time contributing to a wiki" or "who cares what others are reading online." Could be my particular environments and/or the lack of understanding that to be a knowledge worker today (whether you are client facing or not) means you need to stay on top of ways to organize your own content in addition to sharing with others.
  • Friend Feed is great but just how many people would actually use it?

    Majority of people prefer to stick to seperate social networks. Do correct me if I'm wrong.

    Somehow until today, I have never had the thing for Friendfeed. I guess it still misses something.
  • Every article I read about the over-hyped and underwhelming Friendfeed neglects to mention that Yahoo! Pipes (which was released in early 2007) does all of the aggregation that FF does, but a whole lot better. If you can't afford to buy/build your own enterprise software for your company's intranet (and you don't mind exposing all your data to the internet), then I would use Pipes over Friendfeed hands down.

    And no, I don't work for Yahoo!.

    Besides, for most enterprises -- especially financial institutions and the military/gov't -- this sort of willy-nilly cloud-based aggregation is totally out of the question anyway. For anything to serve as a viable intranet, it needs to be hosted behind the company's firewall or by a trusted 3rd party in a secure, SSL-based SaaS environment. Friendfeed is neither of those things. So while it works fine for aggregating stuff that's meant for public consumption, it would never work for a true enterprise intranet.
  • Interested article with useful info, thanks for sharing. I was going to give friendfeed a miss, but think I will investigate further now. :)
  • Unfortunately not everyone's company can provide real IT support for all the different team's needs... that is another form of a cloud computing strategy, expecting the average IT dept to properly support a team of people who are used to collaborating using 2.0 tools - wish it was the case, but almost all big companies I know (and I know a few) do not properly support their various constituencies

    Most importantly, this sort of usage is great for a smaller company with no IT department, or a non-profit, or any ad-hoc group. For Social Media Club, we replaced our mailing list with the Friend Feed Room. Just yesterday I created a private room for a research project my agency is doing.

    This option is also great for a project extranet - easier to share info in then a wiki, especially when those tools are behind the firewall and the people you need to share with are outside of one.

    The key to any IT based collaboration effort is to get everyone to agree to use the same place for storing their stuff and connecting with each other. No technology is a single silver bullet for the people challenges we face in group collaboration, but when you install the FF bookmarklet in your browser, it sure makes it a whole lot easier for people to see how simple it can be...
  • Interesting idea for sure.

    I'm just getting into friendsfeed personally so the main use of bringing all my social tools into one place has been my focus.

    That said - I like the idea here. Though others have brought up good points about security and the like.

    At the end of the day I think its about possibilities and being creative with the tools we have. Its not going to work in every case, but my world it could be great for sharing non secure information and communication. As well as a 'teaching' type of thing to get more and more people using and understanding the social web. I work at a tech. Co, but not everyone stays up on current tech. - a lot of people just focus on what we do.

    __
    http://twitter.com/franswaa
  • Great ideas Chris. This menu of items (or something similar) might be integrated into strategies we recommend to clients. But as the other commenters have alluded to, what does FF provide that other apps do not? There is an issue here, that I and others have discussed, related to consolidating social media to a point where standardization provides needed efficiencies. Until such a system comes along (or emerges from the morass of apps presently available - will it be FF?) I think it will be a challenge to justify the ROI of such approaches to business.
  • @Ami - my answer, with regards to the training, is that it doesn't discount my premise, but rather, that training and cultural indoctrination is something else entirely and needs attention. You're right. Not everyone does all the social good stuff. But should they? Well sure!

    @Saravanan - my point is that you as a business leader instruct your company to make it part of where they gather news. If your company isn't helping people parse the web, they must not value the web.

    @Chris B- you're right. Pipes does great stuff. I dare you to walk into a typical non-software business and get them to build their own pipes versus just poking a few buttons. You're thinking like a tech, not like a business process person. Pipes works great. Friendfeed works prettier. For businesses, do you think they want to learn even the Pipes syntax? I say no.

    Your point about the data sharing is spot on *if* I was recommending that they share their internal data. I was mostly pointing to external sources.

    I think @Chris Heuer makes a good point: maybe I should've been more clear to define the extranet, and not just a platform all amorphously.

    Funny, two different comments about clouds. I've stopped thinking about that term as much directly. Instead, I'm trying to pluck benefits out of the soup.

    Thanks, everyone for your thinking. I'm appreciating your perspectives.
  • Now I do get what you mean... Sorry I guess I interpreted what you said on the post wrongly.
  • Funny you should write about this today, Chris. I was just working with FriendFeed last night to pull together a single feed of all the new-media projects I'm working on for my company.

    But I've hit a snag. Once those feeds are all in one place (I made them into an "imaginary friend"), what's the best way to publish that feed elsewhere? I tried using WidgetBox to create a widget, which I could then place on the side of my own blog, or on other sites. But WidgetBox doesn't seem to recognize RSS on the FriendFeed page. I must be doing something wrong. Any suggestions?
  • At Room 214, we spend a great deal of time not only setting up social networking strategies (and accounts) for our clients - but also on reporting on their engagement. For a while, we were relegated to a central collection of spreadsheets we would share within Google Docs as part of our reporting.

    We found that Friendfeed was a quick and simple solution for giving the client a different view into their social media. In summary, I guess you could say we use it purely as a reporting tool.
  • Great idea, Chris!

    @David B., have you tried using FeedBurner to re-publish your FriendFeed?
  • @Kyle No! It didn't even occur to me. Brilliant idea...I'll try that!
  • @chrisbrogan Thanks for responding to my comments. I'm glad you're reading them and responding and not just writing in a vacuum like so many other A-list bloggers.

    I'll concede the point about Yahoo! Pipes as it certainly is harder to use and not as pretty as FF. I guess if you want power and flexibility, you might have to sacrifice some of the user experience. As a developer, maybe my perspective is skewed, but I think any IT Admin could probably handle setting up a pipe for his or her less technical "knowledge worker" counterpart. But if you want the knowledge worker to set up his or her own aggregator, then FF *is* a better choice.

    However, regarding your comment about internal vs. external sources: if I'm doing competitive intelligence research or anything else of a sensitive nature, I may not want the whole world knowing what I'm consuming online, even if it's from external sources. This is why I like Google Reader's "share" feature so much -- it keeps me in control of which articles I'm choosing to let others know that I'm reading. I live a highly transparent life online, but even if I'm consuming publicly available content, there are many cases where I don't want the rest of the world to know what content I'm reading/bookmarking/emailing to others/etc.
  • @Chris - Yes - my comments about education, training and getting folks to "see the light" and "want the light" are the necessary before social media or collaborative solutions are presented to folks - just wanting to make sure that these components don't get lost in the "hey this is cool" language we all use when trying something new. I've been learning this the hard way and wanted to make sure I shared with others :) Never underestimate the role of education with the change management process and the role the evangelists and early adopters need to play to get others on board the cluetrain. Thanks for generating an interesting discussion per usual.
  • Totally unrelated to your great post above, a co-worker at Myxer just walked into my office to tell me he had set up a Friendfeed Room to aggregate mobile industry news and other stuff we like to discuss internally. I laughed and asked if he had read your blog post this morning. He said "Who's Chris Brogan?" LOL. Your impact goes beyond the reach of your readers! Hehe.
  • Patrick Cameron
    Using Yahoo pipes or pulling 30 feeds into FriendFeed is still fairly complex geek stuff. For the rest of the world there is Filtrbox.

    You give them search terms they track mentions across mainstream news, blogs or social media with Twitter and Friendfeed support.

    Give it a shot and see if it works for you filtrbox.com
  • FriendFeed is a great general purpose aggregator. I recently showed FF at meeting with a client and she got very excited by what was possible.
  • Chris, this is so cool. I've been using Friendfeed for a while now to aggregate all of my social media output into one convenient place, but it never occurred to me to use it for clients or my agency as well. I'm definitely going to try this out.

    I love finding new business uses for exisiting social media tools. I generally start out using them personally to see how they work, and then try to figure out business applications. You've definitely given me a lot to work with here, as usual. Many thanks!
  • I like it, thanks for the great tips.
  • Your idea was at hand, and i suspect several useres were already playing with it.

    For instance, a group of portuguese bloggers have setup a room, were content is bookmarked and feeds are imported:

    http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ptblogs

    So, besides business collaboration, we'll have also grassroots movements, for example.
  • Hi Chris,

    FriendFeed is pretty cool. I think it is really great for masterminding with others in the same niche. If you follow too many people it can be noisy. I'm big on cutting down Information overload :-) I recently added a blog post with 3 ways online entrepreneurs can use FriendFeed.

    I think it could be a nice tool add value for people with web-savvy clients too.

    http://daliburgado.com/3-ways-online-entreprene...
  • I recognize what you write here. In my team (7 people, co-located) friendfeed has almost completely replace the traditional email to all. We have setup a private room with the 7 of us, and use that room to brainstorm, share links we think the rest of us needs, broadcast service announcements (like: trains will strike on Monday) and the like. We have spawned other private rooms with the goal of brainstorming on one specific topic. We also defined a delicious tag that was previously not used in the system,and we source in that rss so that we can all keep using delicious as our primary bookmarking service. All in all, we use friendfeed like this since May of June, and it proved extremely valuable for us.

    Regards,
    Nick.

    http://friendfeed.com/NickBoucart
  • I came here through Bill Johnston sharing this on Friendfeed. I used Friend feed to aggregate a real-time Twitter conversation across 4 time-zones around the hashtag/idea of #4change (using social media tools for social change). Twitter's Search page is great for pulling terms/hashtags in, but FriendFeed allowed folks to comment/share.

    Here's our Squidoo page on the topic: http://www.squidoo.com/4change

    Here's the FriendFeed thingy: http://www.friendfeed.com/4change

    I also ran the Friendfeed RSS through a Wordle to do pseudo-conversation analysis: http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/828702/%234c...

    The trick is making SENSE of all these great streams and then TAKING ACTION on them (or not).
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