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I believe so.

Everybody has friends, they post tons of things on tons of sites, all these sites have RSS feeds and API.

So the next big thing is to keep up with all your friends activity, everywhere, by subscribing to their feeds.

I just started testing Friendfeed and to me it’s a bit of a mix between Facebook’s best feature, the status update, and Twitter, with the possibility to post quick messages and links.

Except that all you want to share from Flickr, Amazon, Digg or your blog can be consolidated here in one single feed for your friends to subscribe to.

Here are some sceengrabs of the sign up process… thanks to Friendfeed people for sending me the beta test invitation.

1. Facebook integration : once you have created your account, you can add your Facebook friends to your feed… cool, no more need to visit FB.

Since none of my friends on FB have the application, I can subscribe to some popular friendfeed users.. Not a bad idea.

I can also create an imaginary friend :

You can keep track of your friends that don’t use FriendFeed by creating “imaginary friends.” For example, if you know your friend’s Flickr username, you can create an imaginary friend with that Flickr account, and you will get notified every time your friend publishes a photo.

2. Set up your profile image : I didn’t find the one I usually use so I uploaded a high def image of a camel I met in Mongolia. It took some time but it worked :

3. Import your feeds : select the sites where you are active and you want your friends to get updates.. (delicious, Flickr, Picasaweb, Stumble upon, Youtube, Google Reader, Twitter, maybe Reddit is missing).

Of course you can import your blog too.

4. Set up your email alerts for when people subscribe or comment your feed or update theirs :

5. Here is my feed (before I changed the picture.. But I kind of like the default one)..

6. I can post messages or links directly from the page :

7. And here is how my feed looks in Netvibes :

8. Oh, and you can embed all this in your blog of course, as a widget :

Now how does is compare to Spokeo ?

Spokeo does about the same, but it’s more of a feed reader itself. I tested it a few weeks ago, and I was impressed at the amount of things it retrieves on your friends.

Main differences with Friendfeed is that with Spokeo you can enter your email and it will retrieve all your contacts activity on the main social sites, whether they like it, or not..

It’s pretty impressive.. You can see who has posted what on Flickr or added what to their Amazon whishlist, without them knowing at all you are tracking this.

So it feels a bit like spying… except that all the data found is totally public. They use the email addresses and the sites APIs.

What Spokeo doesn’t yet offer is a feed for all your friends activity, so you have to visit the site.

So all in all, I think apart from the process of importing your different accounts, Friendfeed wins over spokeo because it gives you more control of what you want to share, and also to whom.

The good idea also is that Friendfeed comes with a facebook app, which makes it theoretically possible to avoid going to Facebook, if only your friends decide to sign up and add the application. But this time, it’s no “Yet another social network”. It’s maybe the one app that will help sync them all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Real Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.