FriendFeed Explosion

Whats going on with FriendFeed? FriendFeed is a service which, instead of layering a meta-network on top of all your other social networks, will create a news feed incorporating them all much like the Facebook news feed. It’s an idea that isn’t too difficult or bothersome for social network users to adopt. The site has been around for a while but in recent weeks I have been seeing a lot of activity on my profile that I hadn’t seen before.

FriendFeed aims to be a one stop shop for all your social networking updates and news items. The four founders were all team members at Google and helped to launch such products as Google Maps, Adsense, GMail and Google Groups. They’ve brought their expertise to a slightly different area: social network aggregating.

Users tell the feed which networks they belong to (Facebook, Digg, Last.fm etc) and FriendFeed personalizes your data feed with info from each of the sites.

I’ve had an account for a while and never use it actively. I signed up for the FriendFeed account and plugged in all of my feeds and then left it alone. There were other features such as the ability to comment and share links but I never used them. I started following some other social media icons like mashable,  l0ckergn0me, Jason Calacanis, Chris Brogan, Leo Laporte, and justine, but I never looked at it.  If I wanted to leave a comment, I would do it on the same platform the feed came from and not an aggregator.  There wasn’t a whole lot of activity from other people and it looked like most people did the same as me. Set it and forget it.

Looks like things are changing though. Once a dormant social site that I used only for aggregating my rss feeds has now become a full fledged community. In the past few weeks I have gotten a lot of emails of people subscribing to my feed. Really I think I had 5 people following me last month and now I get comments on my links. Now I find myself digging through FriendFeed profiles the way I do with Twitter.

Do you have a FriendFeed profile? If not and you have more than  one social media profile, you should really take 3 minutes and sign up for one. Then add me as a friend there and let me follow your online stream.