via Mashable! by Ben Parr on 2/23/09
Collaborative help for this guide was provided by Mona Nomura, a prominent member of the FriendFeed community.Perhaps you've heard about FriendFeed over the last few months. Perhaps you've been intrigued by its ability to aggregate all of your social media and social networking feeds all into one place. Perhaps you've heard about its remarkably fast-growing community (3327% in the last year, 26.6% in the last month alone).
But maybe you've put off joining because FriendFeed's community isn't as simple as it might seem. Making new friends on FriendFeed can be tough for new users and even social media veterans. If you're looking to truly utilize the fast-growing FriendFeed, understanding the community and making new friends is a must. That's why we've put together this step-by-step guide to connect, network, and make friends on FriendFeed. Take a look and after you're done, don't forget to add Mashable on Friendfeed. If you've got additional tips, we'd love you to leave them in the comments!
Step 1: Make Sure to Add Your Existing Friends First
Why: Before going off to make new friends, make sure that all (and I mean ALL) of your existing friends on other social networks are your friends on FriendFeed. They're the most likely to understand some of the tweets, blog posts, and YouTube favorites that are in your feed. It makes for a richer FriendFeed experience.
How: Lucky for us, FriendFeed provides A LOT of import options. Start with importing your Facebook friends. The FriendFeed Facebook application is a great app that can help you integrate your Facebook with your FriendFeed. Then search your Twitter friends and add them. Finally, if you're comfortable with it, import your email contacts.
Step 2: Don't Be Afraid to Subscribe to Strangers
Why: FriendFeed is not like Facebook, despite any similarities. Friendfeed is about discovering new content and you need to expand your circle to do that. Your goal should also be for people to discovery your content as well.
How: Start by subscribing to a couple dozen recommended friends. Don't be afraid to subscribe to hundreds of people - there is no stigma for subscribing to a lot of people. If you want to find the top FriendFeeders, there is nothing better than Alltop's top FriendFeed users. Robert Scoble and Louis Gray also put out regular lists of great people to befriend.
Tip: Don't forget to add us! We love being your friends! Mashable's feed; Ben Parr's feed; Mona's feed.
Step 3: Always Like and Comment on FriendFeed
Why: Liking and Commenting became such a strong feature on FriendFeed that Facebook decided to implement commenting and liking on their own news feed. It's even more powerful on FriendFeed because it can help you get noticed outside of your circle.
How: We're sure you can figure out how to comment and like items on FriendFeed. What some people don't do enough of is continuing the conversation. In some ways, FriendFeed is like a message board - any time someone likes or comments on an item, it gets bumped up to the top of your feed. This allows you to continue a back-and-forth conversation on a key item. As you do more and more of this, more and more people will notice and subscribe to you for the most important reason of them all: because you're interesting.
Step 4: Liberally Use the Hide and Block Functions
Why: Wait, isn't this guide about making new friends? Yes, but you're not going to do that if you have an intense headache from overflow or bad apples. FriendFeed can become very overwhelming, very fast. You will not survive if you treat your FriendFeed like an RSS reader - there's simply too much information on FriendFeed. Don't be afraid to hide items, and don't be afraid to block anyone that you don't want to hear from - be picky about your friends.
How: Here are a couple tips on using the hide and block features:
Hide: The hide feature will hide any FriendFeed item from your sight. But the important part is when it prompts you to hide other items like this one. If you want to control the flow, you need to specify exactly what you want to see. If you only like one friend's blog, but not their tweets, then hide their tweets. You can even specify that you only want to see items that your friends found interesting enough to comment on. Be very liberal with the Hide function.Tip: FriendFeed's Best of feature will show you the most popular entries among your friends over a day, week, or month. Use it if you only have time to scan FriendFeed. Make your life easy.
Block: We naturally have an aversion to blocking people - we want to give them lots of chances before we do it. But that's not how you should use it on FriendFeed. If someone annoys you or just doesn't interest you but keeps popping up due to Friend-of-a-Friend, don't be afraid to block them. It is your feed; customize it with what you want. The customization is one of FriendFeed's most powerful features.
Step 5: Build Friend Lists to Manage the Flow
Why: Friend lists are effective ways to organize your subscriptions and friends. If you organize your subscriptions, it will be easier to find the content and the friends you're looking for. It will also help keep FriendFeed manageable and compartmentalized.
How: The difficulty isn't in building a list, but maintaining and organizing lists. Every time you subscribe to someone new, you have the option to add them to a specific list - take advantage of it then, because you'll forget otherwise. Are they a big blogger? Make a list for favorite bloggers. Want to keep real life friends separate? Make a list for them as well. Lists aren't exclusive - you can have multiple categories for each friend.
Step 6: Join Rooms, Create Rooms, Invite Friends to Rooms
Why: Rooms are an underutilized feature of FriendFeed, but even despite that, they do a fantastic job of bringing people interested in a single subject together. There are rooms for everything from Battlestar Galactica to social media. You will find friends with similar interests very quickly.
How: FriendFeed has a great room search system; it even suggests rooms based on their popularity with your friends as well and gives you stats on how many members a room has and the last time there was a post there. I even did some searching and realized that there's a Friends of Mashable FriendFeed room (how did I not know this?!), so join up!
Step 7: Keep Your FriendFeed Fresh
Why: What use is your feed to others if you just make it and never log in again? The commenting, community, and discussion is the most valuable part of FriendFeed. So be sure to post cool websites, new ideas, and respond when people comment on your FriendFeed items.
How: Here are a few tools to help you get started with keeping things fresh:
Bookmarklet: Find something interesting on the Internet? You can share it directly to FriendFeed using the Bookmarklet. Sharing cool pictures and websites will make you very popular very quickly.
IM Notifications: If you want to know when anybody comments on your FriendFeed, you can activate IM notifications to inform you of new activity. That way you can comment back!
Post to Twitter: You can post some or all of your activity to Twitter via FriendFeed. If you want to have your YouTube favorites posted to Twitter, for example, this is the perfect way to do it.
Making New Friends Leads to Good Things
Finally, you may be asking yourself - why should I care about making new friends, and why FriendFeed? There are more things to do than just find cool websites and pictures; people are forging important friendships and using their relationships to do things like find jobs. FriendFeed is more community-based than almost any other social media website, so if you're looking for another tool to expand your network in a meaningful way, don't ignore FriendFeed.
More FriendFeed resources from Mashable:
- Top FriendFeed Tips for Twitter Users---
- HOW TO: Get the Most Out of FriendFeed
- FriendFeed on iPhone: Comparing the Options
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