A brief surge of interest FriendFeed

FriendFeed is back on the radar, although not necessarily mine. I've had an account since it launched and never really been able to sustain the enthusiasm. The other problem is that it's intermittently blocked on my work internet, so simply logging on can be a small triumph.

Anyway, recently the site has had an overhaul - or, more accurately, it is attempting to become Jaiku - and since more people are wandering over to Friendfeed, I thought I ought to give it another go.

I've got a bunch of new subscribers, and I've subscribed right back at 'em, and I've even sorted them into little groups (Personal or Professional - look, I never said it was an extensive sorting operation).
As I was pottering away in my FriendFeed stream some new photos from the Daily Post Flickr group popped up in my stream, reminding me that I probably ought to create a Liverpool Echo Friendfeed (the Echo Flickr group is starting to flourish now; it's amazing what a difference just being visible on the group page makes) so I suppose FriendFeed has proved useful already.

I can't say how long I'm going to keep using it though; I guess I'll give it a week of being one of my web tabs (as long as the work webmasters let me anyway) and see if it makes a difference in how I follow links, tweets, images and Shared items on people's Reader. But then, if it hasn't grabbed my attention, I'll forget about it again.

Sometimes, I can be quite antisocial with social media...

Befriending FriendFeed

A couple of days ago I tweeted to the world in general that Friendfeed - which I joined several weeks ago in a flush of enthusiasm - was "more complicated than a social network had any right to be".
And I was picked up on my gripe by Trinity Mirror's digital supremo David Black, who pointed out it was an aggregator rather than a network.
I figured he might have been right, but I still was falling out of love with FriendFeed.
This weekend that all changed. I can say, hand on heart, that I LOVE FriendFeed - and it's all thanks to Twhirl.
Twhirl is something I've been using for a while - it's a desktop Ttwitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform which (among its many other functions) lets you post photos to Twitter, post to Jaiku and Pownce as well and now, thank God, has added FriendFeed to its abilities, after being acquired by Seesmic.
I found out about it here and loaded it on Saturday.
And it was so useful to have updates from friends and networks I was interested in appearing on my Twhirl/FriendFeed panel. Unfortunately, there's no way of mashing it up with my Twitter/Twhirl application so I have them sitting separately on the desktop but I can live with that... for now.