Jan

28

Keeping up with the news and your friends: Some thoughts about Friendfeed and Readburner

January 28, 2008 |

Just a few weeks ago, my main way of keeping up with tech news was the Google Reader to browse through individual feeds and TechMeme to see where the discussions were going. Interestingly, in just the last few weeks, I have seen my attention spread out to a few other innovative services: friendfeed and ReadBurner.

Friendfeed has become my main way of keeping tabs on what my closest “online friends” are posting online and ReadBurner, which aggregates shared items in Google Reader in a digg-style fashion, is slowly eating my attention cycles away from TechMeme. Both of those sites, which are in very rapid development cycles, look like they are poised to become important items in every blogger’s tool chests in the near future.

It’s also very cool to see that small groups of people (or even single programmers) can beat a big dog like Google in developing such useful apps without any hype. After all, wouldn’t you have expected Google to be first to leverage shared Google Reader feeds? Instead, they go themselves into a discussion about the privacy of those feeds.

Here are a few observations about those two sites in no particular order:

ffFriendfeed:

  1. Friendfeed aggregates your own and your friends’ output on the net, ranging from Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader, their blogs, Facebook, Digg, reddit, YouTube etc.
  2. They are adding new features almost daily. Now allows you to mute the Twitter posts, which greatly de-clutters the interface if you have very prolific tweeters are friends.
  3. Works best if you have a limited amount of friends in it.
  4. You can comment on people’s Tweets - wouldn’t it be great if those comments would be fed right back into Twitter (maybe as on opt-in?). It’s always hard to know if people will actually see your comments on FF right now.
  5. You also have the option to ‘like’ any item. A very digg-like function, but the results of this ‘liking’ aren’t aggregated anywhere yet.
  6. The interface is simple, but highly effective.

ReadBurner:

  1. rbIt’s basically a digg-like site where the voting is replaced by sharing items in Google Reader.
  2. The mix of people sharing items and adding their blogs to ReadBurner right now makes it a great meme tracker for the tech blogosphere. It also picks up items very fast!
  3. I wonder what the site will look like though once it gets more traction. Right now it is pretty much self-regulating because the users are pretty much self-selected tech bloggers, I think (at least in the English language section).
  4. Does a great job keeping different language feeds apart.
  5. Has very good, customizable RSS feeds coming out of it.

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