Are Seven

The internet’s become a noisy place, and while it was always the pinnacle of distraction, it’s gotten even more so. Every five minutes, there’s someone tugging at your sleeve asking you to friend them on some new software that seems exciting for five or ten minutes before you get distracted with your actual life.

Enter application-of-the-moment FriendFeed. It’s not a new or original idea, but it’s off to a perfect start and has nowhere to go but up. The concept is integration–something I’ve always been a huge proponent of with internet apps–and nothing but integration. It simply takes the public profiles of all the applications you’re using (or just trying out) and puts them in one place. You now have one place with one feed that takes in whatever you want it to, and just as importantly, can exclude those apps that you’ve stopped having any interest in. Should you get an itch to try something new, you just add it onto your FriendFeed and know that you don’t have to ask your friends to join that new one to see what you’re up to.

My footsie with FriendFeed started tentatively, but now I love it. In fact, I signed up to both iLike and Goodreads, knowing that the single point of FriendFeed not only makes it easier to manage, but I’m reminded of the services. You can embed the feed on any HTML page and in Facebook (where you can also have it display on your news feed, though I turned that off). It has the fantastic features of being able to comment on anything that a friend posts as well as post individual pages to FriendFeed, two features that Google Reader (among others) sorely needs.

But this is a service not worthwhile only for those of us who can’t control our application gluttony. It’s just as (if not more) useful for those who are only on a couple of the services available to plug into FriendFeed.

Wishlist for FriendFeed:

• The ability to turn off services by friend. So let’s say that you wanted to follow the Twitter and Shared Items of a friend, but not their Diggs. You could turn off just Diggs for that one person without affecting anything else by that friend or any of your other friends.
• Your own updates not coming through the Friends page and RSS feed. I’m the one sharing my stuff…why would I want it to come through my “Friends” RSS feed as well?
• Statistics. If FriendFeed could start reliably tracking and ranking articles being shared through their service, it would immediately turn it from a useful service to a marketing must.
• Exclusions. As with all the services it pulls in, FriendFeed is exciting for a while, until you’re overwhelmed with so many updates that it ceases being useful. FriendFeed needs the same ability to exclude certain services from certain friends if it gets too loud.
• Being bought. This is a fantastic service, but can you imagine how much more powerful it could be if it was automatically included in Google or Facebook? To be able to pull in everything into a single profile that you’re already connected with your friends through, not as separate applications or extensions, but as a feature of the product? That’s what the world’s looking for.

Of course, if you jump on the FriendFeed wagon: feed me, friend.

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