Library clips

Shawn over at Anecdote has shared the link to his Google Reader Shared Items.

This is basically his link blog (similar to del.icio.us) and it’s great that he can also share stuff he finds outside Google Reader into his link blog.

I share mine to, if anyone is interested, it’s very similar to my del.icio.us links.

If I subscribe to Shawn’s link blog it just becomes another feed in my Google Reader, I was hoping it recognised this feed and put it in Friends Shared Items section.

Problem 1

The “Friends Shared Items” section is automatically added if people in your Gmail contacts also use Google Reader. Umm, just because I emailed a person or they emailed me it does not mean they are my friend. Luckily we can manual deactivate any supposed friend.

Anyway I think the “Friends Shared Items” section should allow me to manually add their feed so it appears in this section, rather than in my regular subscriptions section.

Problem 2

We need another section call “Directly Shared Items”, these would be items that one Google Reader person sends to another Google Reader person. At the end of each item allows you to email an item, well rather just allowing to ping that item from Google Reader to email, why can’t it be Google Reader to Google Reader.

Of course this would mean Google Reader would have to be a open social network, where you can add friends. Once you have added a friend this means you would be able to push an item to a contact. Why be limited to email if that friend also uses Google Reader.

The manual way around this is to create a Google Reader tag for your friend, eg. “Abby”, and then make the tag public, this way your friend, can subscribe to the feed in any RSS Reader . Whenever you tag an item, “Abby”, it will appear in that feed, and Abby will see the items you offer her.

Problem 3

Shawn and I have shared our link blogs, but how do we find other Google Reader link blogs.

Maybe there could be a Google Reader Link blog exchange, just like Toluu does for feeds.

Readburner may be our answer, but I think you have to add your link blog feed (ie. your Google Reader Shared Items feed), I’m not sure if it looks for all the public Shared Items feeds that are out there.

But this is geared more towards being a hot news site rather than shopping for people’s link blogs.

For every shared item, it lists who shared the item, and if you click the name it takes you to the Readburner version of their link blog, there’s also a link to the original site of their Shared Items.
I found an item on the Readburner homepage that was shared by Louis Gray, clicking his name took me to his shared items view, then I clicked on the link to go to his actual Google Reader Shared Items page, and there I can subscribe to his link blog.

Idea

The other day I came across Twiffid

This gave me an idea, in our Google Profiles we can list our websites in our profile, here’s mine.

What if you could run your Google Reader OPML (or your Twitter friends list) through a Google Profiles register, and if any of the feeds in your OPML (or Twitter friends list) matches any websites listed in people profiles, it would give you a list. And further to this, from this list it would tell you which people have public Shared Items.

In an instant you could have your hands on the link blogs of your favourite bloggers.

Even better would be if Google Reader became a social network itself…see FeedEachOther, Streamy, Shyftr, and more.

Oops, I’ve already made a post similar to this one.

Summary

1. I want to shop for link blogs from bloggers I subscribe to
2. I want to subscribe to these link blogs, and for them to appear in a special section in Google Reader (ie. the already existing Friends Shared Items section).
3. I want to send items directly to other Google Reader users rather than email them

We are piloting communities at work, the gist of it is:

Blog - broadcast, experience, ideas, feedback, status
Forum - discussion
Wiki- collaborate, document, website

Step 1

The concept is, it’s much easier to do work using these new tools rather than using email to do all three of these things (broadcast, discuss, collaborate).

Let’s not mention that content is open and centralised for others to see, all have a voice, conversation can evolve into new knowledge, tune into your social filter to ask questions and finds things…pretty much a way to get things done.

Plus all your interactions, contributions, and readings happen in a contextual place. If I want to see the forum contributions I have made on the KM forum, I just go to the KM CoP, or goto my personal dashboard.

For me this beats trying to find this stuff in my email. I like my content to live in context eg. comments about a wiki to be in the wiki itself rather than be separated (disconnected) in my email client.

Jack Vinson talks about context as providing you with a “frame of reference”, he says:

“The better I understand the particular frame of reference (context), the better I can understand what this information or knowledge means.”

This is kind of different to the context I’m talking about. I’m talking about the context of a place, he is talking about seeing data in a context setting (even better if it’s a familiar setting) to help you use your current knowledge to create new information…I guess metaphor is another way.

In a way it does relate to what I’m talking about as reading a forum reply you found in your email, makes much more sense when you see it in the bigger picture of the actual forum.

Anyway so I call the use of our communities as Step 1.

We can now learn to use social tools to get work done with much less confusion, and of course this creates a perpetual open dialogue where knowledge is continuously created and re-used in the open.

Another benefit is that you end up with less email to deal with, as now what would of been email lives at the context of the place (as a blog post/comment, forum topic/reply, wiki contribution/comment).

Although, without an inbox for each community (private messages), one-to-one messages are done in email. I’d rather these emails as private or public messages that live in context, ie. at the community…see more.

Step 2

Does this really give you less email to deal with…I don’t think so.

It’s great we are attempting to no longer just rely on the intelligence of the email system to do our work, these social tools enable us to work easier and content is no longer siloed (a centralised and flowing corporate memory). But we are still using email.

How? Notifications, that’s how.

In our communities we currently have RSS disabled for some reason, maybe it’s a good thing for now, to prevent scaring people with too much new stuff to absorb.

For each blog and forum you can get new content delivered as a new email, and this is not just a notification, it’s the full-text of the blog post or forum topic.
When you subscribe to a blog or forum you are also subscribed to blog comments and forum replies (personally I’d like a choice).

Also, each blog post and each forum topic has an email address.
This means when you get an email for a new blog post, you can hit reply and it will post your comment to the blog…nice one.

You can also publish a new blog post by writing a new email and sending it to the blog email address (you can include non-subscribers to your blog in the to: or cc: field, that way they will get the content even though they don’t subscribe to your blog…nifty!)

OK, first thing.

I really like this email interoperability, it’s bringing the use of new tools to people’s comfort zone. But at the same time I would also like people to visit the actual community to experience the whole realm. There’s more chance you are going to read something else or contribute, if you are at the community itself.

So right now, this email interoperability is both good and bad.

The more concerning issue that some people have been talking about in the forums is since the introduction of communities they are getting just as much email.

They allude to “what’s the difference to my inbox overload if someone writes an email or publishes a blog post which I get in email anyway…isn’t communities meant to help with the inbox firehose.”
They also mention that community content gets lost in their inbox amongst all other types of emails.

This just screams RSS Reader.

But it also may scream our community Watchlist page.

The Watchlist page is a stream of the lastest stuff you are subscribed to, so throughout the day you can go to this page to see what’s new in the stream. The saves you visiting every blog and forum that you like from every community you like…instead it’s in one personalised page.
But I think I have to have an email subscription in order for this stuff to be on my Watchlist…darn (gotta look into this).

Whether it’s a Watchlist or an RSS Reader, it becomes a second dashboard.
You have your email dashboard and your what’s happening dashboard.

You can read RSS feeds within your email, but the idea is that email is a tool for personal correspondence, and that’s it, and an RSS Reader is a tool for the latest updates.

Perhaps a startpage could combine both into one dashboard, or Outlook could have an RSS Reader module that is just as important as the email inbox…in fact Outlook would no longer be an email client, it would be a personal productivity dashboard.

Conclusion

At the moment we are in the pre-introductory stage of Step 1. - a social way of doing work
(lots of learning, and culture change issues to go with this)

We also need to be prepared for Step 2.

And it’s Step 2. that may win the KM team acclaim in reducing the common email overload problem.

Any department that can reduce the email overload problem is going to get kudo’s, will it be the KM team.

A while back I mentioned that Google Reader Shared Items (which is like a clip blog) needs to be merged with a service like Google Shared Stuff (which is like a clip blog).

The problem I was having is that I could not clip stuff I found outside Google Reader into my Shared Items stream, this meant I had to have two clip streams.

Well now this has been solved with Google Reader Notes.

In the Google Reader console there is now a page called “Your Stuff”, and under this there are two pages called “Shared Items”, and “Notes”.
Clicking on the “Your Stuff” link is a way to see “Shared Items”, and “Notes” in the one stream.

Share with Note

For any item in Google Reader there is an addition to the one-click “Share”, now there is another choice to “Share with Note”
- this pops-up a box where you can add a note/annotation (just like with my Facebook Posted Items).

Notes

“Notes” allows you to make a note without it having to be about a webpage, it’s just like blogging an item.

This can be done via going to the “Notes” page in Google Reader

This automatically shares the item into the “Shared Items” stream, as well as being in your “Notes” stream (which is private).
You can unshare a Note so it no longer appears in your “Shared Items” stream, and is only in your “Notes” stream.

“Note in Reader” bookmarklet

The “Note in Reader” bookmarklet allows you to add an item (along with a note if you like) into your private “Notes” stream.
The bookmarklet also has a box to check to include it in your “Shared Items” stream, before you press submit…otherwise you can decide to share it later on from your “Notes” stream.

Issues

- I wish a Note didn’t share by default
- I’d like to filter the Notes stream by Notes I have shared, and Notes I haven’t shared…this way I can keep some private notes in one spot.
- I can’t edit or delete a Note
- There isn’t a bookmarklet to create a new note (you can only do this from within Google Reader).

What could be next?

- Comments
- Tag “Shared Items”
- A calendar archive
- Template/sidebar additions
- Reblog and item from someone’s “Shared Items” to yours (like Tumblr)
- Merge your “Shared Items” with your friends (like a Tumblr group), or perhaps this could be a network instead like Friendfeed (this is more probable as there already is a “Friends Shared Items” feature.

Google Reader seems to be where I live, so instead of having another window for Webnote, I just like a tab in Google Reader…I wonder if there is a hack.

You’d think they may do this with there own set of products, at the moment at the top of Google Reader I have links to Gmail, Calendar, Docs, etc…what about tabs instead…maybe I’d use Google Notebook, rather then Webnote.

Actually this is what you can do with OtherEgo, but this is more of a profile aggregator by tabs (not quite a lifestream). Not sure if you can add a tab from a private service like Google Reader.

But I like this idea of a private startpage, but instead of widgets on the one page, it’s the whole page by tab.

In one window I could have access to:
Google Reader
Gmail
Twitter
Friendfeed
Facebook
Webnote
del.icio.us
My blog
…and several other pages.

Grazr is a place where you can splice/merge feeds into one stream, or even keep a whole bunch of feeds together and read them by source, which ever way, it’s basically a mini-RSS Reader widget. You can make as many of these as you like and they host it all.

If you merge feeds into the one stream, others can subscribe to this RSS feed.
If you have a bunch of feeds by source, others can subscribe to this OPML feed.

NOTE: Feeds are Grazr’s main deal, but you can also add other type of nodes other than feeds, like an OPML, plain text, links…

Now they have gone a step further and enable you to filter a Grazr by keyword (title, author, body), by date, and by media type. This isn’t filtering each feed you put into a Grazr, it’s filtering the overall Grazr.

All your Grazr’s are hosted in the “Files” tab, here you can re-work your files, etc…
But they are also hosted in a blog view, so each Grazr you make becomes a blog post.

Here’s my Grazr blog, how cool is that.

Each of my Grazr’s is a blog post, and you can subscribe to the feed or OPML of each post.
My Grazr blog also has an overall OPML and RSS feed…hmmm, I could put my Grazr blog feed into FriendFeed.

From what I see the “file” and “blog” views are the same content in different views, it would probably be better if you had the option to choose which files to go into your blog view.

Imagine this for Flickr, etc…sure you have all your Flickr photos in a stream, but this is like your back-end. Imagine each time you add a Flickr photo, you had the option to add it to your Flickr blog, that way your Flickr blog showcases your best stuff. People would rather subscribe to your quality Flickr blog, instead of your main stream…plus a blog is a place to hangout.

When a department has a change they think will affect the organisation as a whole they will send a broadcast email to the whole office.

In a past post I mentioned to perhaps also enter the email address of a blog, so the email can also be published in a blog (post to blog via email).

This way in the future we can consult the blog to remember what’s happened in the past (even derive a bit of analysis and patterns) rather than search through our emails, plus comments enable a two way interaction (valuable insight from the social captial).

Unless the whole office is subscribed to the blog, this still needs to be a broadcast email.

But what about changes that will not affect the whole enterprise, a department has to stop and think, who is going to need to know about these changes we are making.
What they do is find the relevant email groups and send the email announcement.

But have they reached everyone who needs to know…who knows?

Another scenario is a department makes some changes where they can’t forsee it affecting others, so they just communicate the announcement within their own team.

Or maybe they announce their changes to a few people in another department, but those people fail to pass the message on within their own team.

As we can see, there is too much cognitive stress in figuring out who your audience is, there is too much relying on others to let others know.

Scenario

I was on a Document Management Support call and I couldn’t work out why something was behaving different than usual.

My last resort was to ask the IT Support team to troubleshoot the problem.

After explaining the problem, IT told me they changed something in the system and that’s why I was having these issues. It seems they couldn’t forsee how their changes to the system affected my knowledge capability of supporting users.
The problem was easily resolved as I was verbally communicated the remedy.

The problem here is that it was reactionary, I had to have an issue and demand the solution, plus it was embarrasing as they use could clearly see that our departments aren’t communicating properly.

To conclude I was not privy to knowing about this change (nothing to do with privacy, moreso not being on the emai list), and I should have been as it affected my capacity to work, and ultimately wasted company time.

This is typical departmental communication silos, and it’s happening a milion times now in every organisation as I publish this post.

Solution is visibility

The remedy is so easy…we need more visibility, rather than using email and email lists.

Visibility is exactly what I posted about the other day. It’s no a big social enterprise 2.0 effort, it just has to be visible.

In this example if the IT department published this change in a blog announcement, they don’t have to forsee which people this change will affect, as the blog is visible and public for all to see.

As mentioned before thay could still email a list, but also email the blog email address, that way, others not on the email list, can wander over to the blog homepage and see what’s new, or they could even subscribe to the blog.

By just adding the blog email address to that communication we solve the problems in the scenario described above. All it takes is putting one more email address in your email, and you don’t have to worry about lacking to communicate to all the concerned parties.
In turn we have less confusion and embarrasment, and have not wasted time and money.

Visibility is the key.

Decisions, process and actions in one department will affect another, and it’s hard to speculate all parties that will be affected, so why not make this communication public, and others can tune in.

As I mentioned in my K-flow post:

Pull = RSS subscription
Push = email broadcast

We are pushing to who we think should know; we are certain they will get the message as we are pushing it into their inbox, and we can even get a receipt they have read the email.

We are also pushing the message to publish to a blog, without having to go to the blog.

People can visit or pull (subscribe) the new content from this blog
- now people we didn’t think of who should know may be informed

Conclusion

Without any extra effort other than including the blog email address:

- we are not changing the way we work
- we feel secure in knowing we have pushed the message to who should know
- we can also feel comfort in knowing that the public (visitors and blog subscribers) will know what’s going on
- we can visit the blog to see the history of announcement (rather than searching our email)
- people can leave comments for feedback, discussion, etc…

If we had an enterprise blog culture and I was confronted with the scenario above:

A. I would already know the answer as I subscribe to the right blogs

If I didn’t subscribe, I would visit…
B. my teams blog
C. the IT Changes blog

All this without me having to even talk with anyone, and without IT having to know that I should know.

Visibility is the key to communications.

OFFICE
SlideRocket - yet another online presentation service, see more here.
[via RWW]

RSS - MEME
RSSmeme - similar to ReaderBurner (now about to be resurrected), RSSmeme tracks shared items from various Google Reader users creating a hot news site.
[via mashable]

RSS - READER - NETWORK
Shyftr - a new social network RSS Reader like FeedEachOther mentioned above, and something Google Reader will eventually do…the ability to add friends, visit users, message friends, comment on items, send friends links, share links which can be aggregated into a hot meme pages like RSSmeme mentioned above.
A lot of use won’t move from Google Reader no matter how much more hip these new social readers are, so something like FriendFeed (FF) becoming a social network might gain more traction with my existing network…FF is not an RSS Reader, but in a similar realm.
[via RWW]

MEME-BOOKMARKS
Fraxi - now the makers Pligg who offer a non-hosted way for you to create your own social bookmarks/memedigger are also offering a hosted version called Fraxi, also see CoRank.
[via TC]

NETWORK
Flux - create your own social network, also see Ning.
[via TC]

COMMUNITY-NETWORK
Grouply - manage all the groups you belong to in one spot by getting all your emails in a digest, also has social networking (what doesn’t)…reminds of Fuser.
Also checkout Linqia, this is a place that has aggregated groups across the web so you can browse them in one spot…listen to a great podcast.

RSS-READER-NETWORK-BLOGS
Profy - an RSS Reader, blogging platform, and social network (send IM, msgs, add friends) in one, also see Buddypress.
I still like the idea for a distributed social network for the blogosphere.
[via TC]

BLOGS
CoveritLive - live blogging in that as you blog it’s being streamed (no need for a submit button), perhaps this is text streaming. Visitors can interact, take part in polls…what a great idea for events.
[via RWW]

RSS-NEWSMASTER-ATTENTION
Feedhub - upload your OPML and it’s claims it will learns your preferences and delivers items that you really want to see…it generates a feed so you can read these items in your RSS Reader. AideRSS does this sort of thing based on social popularity rather than personal…Particls is the most advanced tool in this space.
[via SF]

ATTENTION
Tiinker read and rate stories, and be recommended new stories…seems similar to Spotback (not sure if it’s still around).
[via RWW]

BONUS LINK
AideRSS now filters your Google Reader content by social popularity.
Also see more robust memetracking like in BlogBridge, FeedDemon, and others.

If you ever used the now closed Share Your OPML (SYO), which I have posted on a lot in the past, we now have a new service called, Toluu, where we can upload our OPML and compare feeds with others, in order to discover people and feeds.

Other ways for feed recommendation are usually built into the RSS Reader eg. Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. A really good one is FeedEachOther, where, just like Toluu, you visit peoples profiles to check out their feeds, you can also be recommended feeds…others are

Toluu is still in private beta, so I’m sure there’s more to come and most of my feedback will probably be on their to-do list.

I wonder if they are going to be a full social network with private messages and a comment wall.

A Toluu type service for podcasts would be a neat idea as well.

Upload your OPML

Only lets you upload an OPML file not an OPML URL.

You can also upload single feeds, or homepages (and it will find the feed)

It doesn’t matter in this instance, but I wish Google Reader had my OPML in a URL instead of just a file I have to download to my PC then upload to a service like Toluu. Actually I wish I could select tag labels and even feeds to make an OPML on-the-fly.
If my OPML lived at a URL, and Toluu subscribed to this URL, then whatever happens at this URL like deleting/adding feeds, would auto-magically reflect at Toluu.

Toluu has a bookmarklet to let you add feeds later on, and it’s integrated with your RSS Reader…after it adds the feed to Toluu, it then proceeds to your RSS Reader so you can add the feed there, very nifty. This doesn’t apply when deleting a feed from Toluu or Google Reader.

Activity

When you launch a new window toToluu to view your profile, the first page it shows is an activity stream, of you and your contacts…a Facebook News feed type thing

- I got an email telling me that someone added me as a friend (I think this also appears in the activity page)
- I got another email telling me this person who added me as a friend added a new feed to their profile (I think this also appears in the activity page)
- you can also get an email when someone recommends a feed (I think this also appears in the activity page)
- you can turn of these email updates in your account settings, as hopefully the activity page can have all this info
- from my profile page there is no button to go to this activity page

My profile

My feeds - your OPML
Favourite feeds - mark your favourite feeds into a list (they also appear as bold in your main list)
Contacts - you can add friends
Fantastic feeds - popular feeds according to the community

Feed profile

When you click on a feed you can add it to your profile, and also add it to your favourites, and also recommend (select friends and submit)
You can read the latest summaries of the feed as well.

Doesn’t show who subscribes to a feed (this was the best part of SYO), so I’m not sure how I’m meant to discover people
…I can’t find a general people directory either.

I can’t export my OPML as a URL, I’d like Toluu to host my OPML.

Friend Profiles

When I visit a profile I notice that I may have some feeds in common with others, but they are not listed in the “You both read…” list, maybe it’s because some blogs have multiple feeds and we both have a different feed for the same blog.

I can’t export a friends OPML, either as a file or a URL.

When I visit a profile it tells me feeds we have in common (mutual feeds), and unique feeds
- along the top of a profile these are called “Shared”, “Unique”, and this calculates our relationship as a %, called “Match”.

In the body of the profile we see “Feeds you might like…”
- why don’t they just use the term “Unique feeds”, and why would I like these feeds anyway, they are just feeds we don’t have in common.

Next we have “Recently added feeds”.

Next is “You both read…”
- this is the same as “Shared”, again terminology is not consistent, I think “Feeds in common” or “Mutual feeds” is a better label anyway, as I’m not really sharing.

Lastly, “Favourite feeds”…it’s a pity this doesn’t have an OPML either.

Matches

I mentioned before when you visit a profile you can see how close you match, well there is a feature called “Matches“, where it will rank people in the system that have matches with you (obviously ranked with the high matches on top).

Problem I had is that my top match was 96%, this person only has 5 feeds, and we have 3 in common…this top match was not really useful to me. Not sure how this will change once this system scales with lots of users.

Visit me on Toluu here, johnt.

[ADDED 3/04/08: I also noticed that the RSS URL of each feed is not promoted on Toluu, I want to be able to copy-shortcut and whack a feed in my RSS Reader…just found out that now you can to subscribe to a feed in your RSS Reader in one-click…and there is 2 feeds for your activity stream, one for you, and the other for you and your friends]

Related

Feedshow sharing OPML’s
Share Your OPML : social attention
OPML Factory
Dynamic Newsmastering with OPML

I’ve already mentioned FriendFeed, but I thought I’d elaborate as finally we have a simple to use lifestream service, but most of all it’s got my community (similar to my Twitter and blog network).

Now the idea of a lifestream is to bunch all your profiles and content into one place, but even just as much fun is that you can add friends who are doing the same thing, basically a friendstream, and not only that but you can discuss the web with your social filter.

This is really the winning feature, up until now I use web 2.0 to subscribe to my trusted social filter (people who publish and point to stuff), now I’m extending that by discussing with them, but not in a scattered way, instead these discussions are all on the one Friendfeed site.

Like only a few other lifestream services you can add imaginary friends, and Friendfeed also recommends friends and has statistics.

Comments

Like many of the lifestream services you can even add inhouse content in the way of text or a link, and even leave comments on any item…Louis Gray seems to think this is unique for some reason.

Now this leaving comments brings up Duncan Riley’s point, why would I leave a comment on a blog post or a Twitter post within Friendfeed, why wouldn’t I just do it at the native service.

Now I tend to agree to an extent as I’d like comments to my blog post on my blog, but according to the podcast on Read/Write Talk there is a subtle difference. This is a way for you, your friends, and their friends to comment on stuff, you will not see comments by other people who are not connected to your extended network.
So it’s a quality discussion limited to people in your network, this sort of thing doesn’t happen on blogs
eg. imagine you could filter all the comments on TechCrunch to just your friendfeed friends, see more at the Lifestream blog.
But is this really unique, you have this same functionality at Jaiku.

Mugshot and especially their groups feature has this down to an art, but they are going down the group member road, whereas Friendfeed is doing it via your network…Mugshot has plenty of other features like swarming, chat, share link, externals feeds, etc…

A real difference with Friendfeed to other lifestream services is that comments are not linear.
eg. on Jaiku when there is a new comment it appears underneath the item being commented on, but it also becomes a new post of it’s own.
Friendfeeds approach is for comments to not be a post of their own, but to only be threaded underneath the item.

So how do you know when there is a discussion around an item that is a day old and has rolled of the page?

Well, it doesn’t roll off the page…sure Friendfeed is a river of news of recent items, but if an older item is being commented on it moves back up the river, so it’s on the front page where you can see it.
The idea here is that these discussed items are popular and the discussion needs to be seen, it won’t pass you by.
In Jaiku you can be updated with recent comments in a discussion, but the discussion is not promoted, in fact if you miss it, it will pass you by, whereas Friendfeed tries to keep conversations visible (on the frontpage)

Basically, if you are tracking discussion you never have to leave the front page of either your “friends” tab or “me” tab. Heavily discussed items on both these tabs will always be on the front page, this is very much in contrast to the linear approaches we have seen so far. In fact this could make it a “hot news” ranked page based on comments and voting, so it’s kind of in TechMeme, Twitter, Digg territory.

Only thing I forsee is if this site becomes the discussion, where most items are discussed, then when I login, I indeed may have to go 5 pages back to see all the days hot discussions. I’m sure in the future they will a separate stream or tab for ultra hot discussions.

But is this exhaustive enough to make sure you have tracked every comment people make on your items. The Fast Wonder blog has a solution to create a feed of comments made to your stuff on Friendfeed.
Hmmm…the settings page says “Send me email when people comment on my feed and I haven’t logged in recently”

Search

And now they have search, which I see is kind of competing with my Google Reader search, as I can search just me, or my friends…or as TechCrunch say a “destination site”.
If “Tibet” is the news of the day, I can search my friends to see who is talking about it.
In Google Reader I’m most likely just subscribed to their blog feed, but here I’m subscribed to all their stuff.

The advanced search enables you to search just one person, and even filtered by service…this is awesome.

Hang on, this isn’t full-text search, but it’s still good…and it generates an RSS feed.

I am using TweetScan (core network) to track the term “friendfeed” amongst select Twitter friends, I can now do this with Friendfeed itself, both of these services generate a search feed.

NOTE: I couldn’t do without Google Reader

Icons, filters, full-text, bi-directional

Another good feature is that you have a view for all posts you have commented on.

I’d like another view for my items people have commented on, I know these will be on the front page, but once there are no subsequent comments, they roll of the page. But I guess on my own blog I can’t filter to see only posts that have been commented on…in the meantime we can use the hack linked (Fast Wonder blog) to above.

Next to each item is an icon from the service it was originally published on, if you click this you can see just content from that service.
So if you are on your “friends” tab, and see an item from Twitter and click the Twitter icon, you will now only see Twitter items from all your friends…this is almost like being on Twitter.

What you can’t do is post back to Twitter or comment on a blog, unlike SocialThing, or favorit.

Should Friendfeed be a two way thing, where you can post a comment back to appear on the original service…and at the time of commenting have the option to, “comment just here”, or “comment here and the original”.
[UPDATE 26/03/08: Just in…when commenting on a Twitter feed, you can send it to Twitter as a reply]

Another thing Duncan Riley mentioned was that to actually read blog posts you have to go to the original source, then come back to Friendfeed to leave a comment. Once I go to the original blog post, I’d probably comment then and there, so I think Friendfeed needs to work out a way to keep you from leaving. Perhaps they could do like Ask/Bloglines search where the full-text of an item displays when you hover over it.

Getting back to the icon view, eg. just see Twitter posts from your friends, I wish there was a list of these icons on the sidebar ie. a list of icons of all the services your friends use…more easier like Spokeo.
I’d like this for me as well, but the icon list representing all the services I use will launch to the native service when you click

…and where is an “FF” icon for my inhouse friendfeed posts.

Another thing is that I’m adding my Twixtr photo blog feed and my LibraryThing feed using the blog feed icon, this means if I filter a search with this icon I will get more than just my blog posts…darn.

Duplicates

I really like how it collapses items, so the stream is less congested, this is all part of the pleasant user experience.

You can also reduce the noise by hiding a service from a given user, meaning if you do not want to see userA’s flickr photo’s, you can turn that off, see more.
I’d like to do that for my whole Friends stream, ie. turn off the Flickr service from all my friends. There is a hack available to do this sort of thing for the moment , eg. Friendfeed minus Twitter.

But what about duplicate items?

eg.
- my del.icio.us links are in my blog feed (via Feedburner)
- my del.icio.us links are in my Twitter feed only because my blog feed is in my Twitter feed (via Twitterfeed)
- some items I share in Google Reader, I also bookmark in del.icio.us

So you see what’s happening here, if I add my:
- del.icio.us feed
- Google Reader Shared Items feed
- Blog feed
- Twitter feed

You will see an item I bookmark in del.icio.us appear in my Friendfeed 4 times.
You will see my blog posts appear 2 times.

There must be a way for Friendfeed to de-dupe URL’s or titles.

Identity

This could become a lifestream social network like Ziki where you can private message friends…public message would be good as well (also the ability to share or push an item to a friend).

If they want people to live in Friendfeed, I’m guessing in the future they would add ways to contact people, just like Ziki allows you to add sidebar links or widgets:
- GTalk me
- Jaxtr me, etc..

Why not go the whole way and have people tags.

But let’s not get excited as Friendfeed may want to keep it simple, as simple is the reason why people like del.icio.us, Google, and Twitter.

Mobile

I’m using this mobile version I found via Steve Rubel:
http://friendfeed.com/embed/googlegadget

Only thing is I can’t post or comment on my phone…when is Friendfeed mobile coming!!

More

Steve Rubel also has a post on using the Imaginary friends (private feature) and as an ego aggregator of sorts. You could use this feature to subscribe to all your Friendfeed searches, kind of like an inhouse watchlist.

Lifestream blog has picked up on a way to subscribe to a friends comments and likes, but it seems this is now a feature, you can go to a profile and get a feed for a friends likes, comments or both.

…and OPML.

The Facebook app is full featured, very nice…not sure if there is a general widget yet.

I wonder if it may include a newsfeed type feature where it tells you when a friend adds a new friend, it already displays when a friend comments or votes something.

What exactly is friendfeed?

- Personalised Memedigger/Breaking news based around my OPML (social filter and extended network)…the search feature is great for hot topics
(will we soon see blog post footer buttons saying “Share on friendfeed”)
- Conversational Web (based around my social filter)
- Lifestream/Friendstream
- Identity page
- Expert locator (if it added people tags)

I’m getting the feeling due to the comments feature that friendfeed is reminding me of the immediacy of Twitter conversations, but friendfeed discussions are more in context of an object.

Is Friendfeed going to cut the lunch of the new breed of social network RSS Readers like FeedEachOther?
I’ve been wanting Google Reader to be a social network, but now Friendfeed is just that and more, just wish you could fwd or share a link with another Friendfeed friend.

Google Reader is still my tool for essential reading, but Friendfeed may become the new conversation and recommendation/discovery place…to complement Twitter, and in a way to achieve what I hoped would happen on Facebook, ie. an aggregated conversation and link sharing social network.

I like this quote by AVC, as a result of a new place to see comments on his stuff and other conversations:

“…an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention”

The essence of Friendfeed:

“FriendFeed is for community discussion surrounding the social web”

fav.or.it is the latest social RSS Reader, just not sure if it is a social network.

RSS re-mixing

You read feeds (by category, rank or tag…also generate a spliced feed), comment on posts (even send to original blog), even blog posts, etc…

The screenshots show a profile page, I’m not sure if these are public, or if you can: add someone as a friend, msg friends, get recommended feeds…

Link sharing

There is plenty of link sharing going on, here’s a screenshot. Basically share links to external services like Twitter, and share links into your library, and make communal libraries…still not sur eif you can share a link to another user.

Attention

The rank works according to how long you read a post, in aggregate this will make it a powerful attention engine (there is also voting)…most services determine what’s popular or hot in the blogosphere based on inlinks and more (TechMeme), submit/vote (Digg), or clicks (Spotback).

Comment on blog posts without leaving

What a great idea to be able to not only comment with the fav.or.it network, but to also have that appear on the actual blog.
What about displaying current comments from the actual blog, and these being synched in fav.or.it as they appear in the actual blog posts.
For comments to appear on actual blog posts, these blogs need to hook up with the system via an API.
If you use Google Reader, try the Firefox hack to read and post comments.

You own blog

Wow, you don’t have to leave this place, you even get a blog…not sure if you can even auto-populate this blog via a feed, a la SuprGlu.
How it works is that you can blog posts that get included in the fav.or.it database for others to read, if you like you can also turn it on to publish these posts to an external blog.

What about clips streams like Google Reader, ie. saving or bookmarking posts which are displayed on stream pages and/or as a take away feed. It’s invite only at the moment, and the homepage does say you can re-publish stuff (even adding a description would be great)…it seems there is more in the works…aha re-publishing content.
I wonder if you could bookmark items you find outside fav.or.it into a clip stream…I guess you could use the inhouse blog as well.

Auto-tags

From the screenshots it seems to cluster similar posts together into tags, although I’m not sure if this is manual or done by the machine, actually the TechCrunch UK post mentions auto-tags.
This is what we see with MyFeedz, WizAg, Feeds 2.0 and others…this is like memetracking by topic. The only way you can do this in Google Reader is by searching for a term (this is just appearances of the term, not really a post being about that term).

Other RSS Readers like BlogBridge and FeedEye go the further mile by memetracking around a post, the most linked to posts in your RSS Reader are ranked to the top of your pile, and related posts are clustered around it.
Feedable does clustering, but not from items within your RSS Reader, rather items from the blogosphere.
SharpReader will cluster new and old posts around an item based on having links to these items.

Here’s a screenshot.

At this moment I’m not sure if it’s in the social network pack like: FeedEachOther, Streamy, and Genwi.