Thing 41. Mashup your life. FriendFeed

I starting working with FriendFeed, but found it kinda problematic. I mean, I like the concept of being able to aggregate all your 2.0 items on one site and allow friends to access it and share their stuff. As the conservatives would say, it's downright socialism! A nifty concept. As long as one isn't too paranoid about all your eggs being in a single basket and available for all to see (depending on your privacy setting).

Now the problem(s). As stated, the coolest thing with FriendFeed is bringing all your 2.0 stuff, in FF called services, under one roof. But, just try to find a way to do it. Like so many new 2.0 sites, the developers place very little information on the front page. Often, you have to register just to get an "about" link. So, you're entering like a new-born babe, all blinking and blind and trusting and who knows how your registration info is going to be used. Hopefully it won't be hooking you up to a Russian mob's botnet or something.

After giving in and registering and posting my pic (easy), I needed to set up my 2.0 stuff on FF. But, lo and behold, I couldn't figure out how to do it. I ended up clicking around the site just about forever, tried Googling for more info, even found YouTube vids that weren't too helpful. Finally, under "settings," I discovered the tiny little RSS icon for services and started adding stuff.

But, get this: to do this, you need to find the right url for your 2.0 items within their respective web pages and FF isn't too friendly about helping you do this, either. After more hand-wringing and a few f-bombs, I managed to get the links for my blogs and Delicious to work, but none of the others. So, my FriendFeed page has the blog links and a bunch of Delicious bookmarks and that's it. And as for the other cool thing about FF, being able to add friends and their stuff, that doesn't work so hot either. I send invites off to folks and they all found the site either too confusing or didn't want to register just to take a look around.

So, while FF is a good concept, I think the developers need to user-friendly it a bit. Make adding the services simpler and add some content to help folks join in, that's all. Good idea, but clutzy execution. So far.