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Friendfeed have joined other lifestream services, onaswarm and Mugshot, in adding a groups to their feature set called Rooms.

Set up a public, semi-public (non members can read and comment) or private room where people can post messages and links and comments…this is something Twitter has avoided so far.

If you are member of multiple rooms you can see all content in your “all my rooms” stream.
You can also check a box so the content of a room also appears on your main friendfeed page (this saves you from having to add a Rooms feed to your main page…actually what is my main page, it must be my friends page)

This “Rooms” feature is moving away from the lifestream mainstay, is basically sharing messages and links with a group. This is different than on-the-fly tags (hash tags, Jaiku Channels), with Rooms you actually have to join, perhaps get to know the members…more of a community (I don’t know about that when the numbers get too high).

Rooms also streams feed content…an idea would be to have an option for 2 streams in a Room, one for links and messages, and one for external feed stuff.

The external feed stream makes Rooms powerful as it can be used as a topic stream as well as interactive manual submitting of links, text and comments.

Mugshot and Ziki are a similar group lifestream concept, whereas FriendFeed Rooms don’t stream the lifestream of its members into one stream, it’s purely just a place for a group of people to share text, links and discuss. Just the same Mugshot Groups allow you to submit messages and links and comments, group chat, and even chat around an item…as well as stream external feeds.

Steve Rubel is using a private Room to save links and notes…kind of a read later stream, or even a link blog/stream like del.icio.us and Google Reader Shared Items.

BTW - I finally found a mobile version of FriendFeed.

The FriendFeed Apps page has some interesting hacks that increasingly makes it an alternative to Google Reader:
- read later
- creating group streams (above I mentioned that Mugshot and Ziki have group streams, well this is a similar thing…I guess it’s like grouping people in folders and displaying a folder stream)
- filter by service
- remove visited links
- Twitter enhancements

Related:

Friendfeed : social filter conversations

[ADDED 7/7/08: 13 FriendFeed Tools for Twitter Refugees]