Online Media Cultist

Web producer, writer, online media cultist. That's how I roll.

I wish FriendFeed or Google Reader would tell me who's sharing my stories

Using FriendFeed and Google Reader in tandem is great. On FriendFeed, I get access to a huge range of stories that people are sharing, and the one-click ability to “like” the stories I like is an easy and addictive way to add my two-cents to the stories I, well… like. And of course if I want to add more than two cents I can hop in and leave a comment. And on the Google Reader-end I can share stories that I’m into, giving other people on FriendFeed access to the stories I’m checking out in the same way.

This is all great… but, there’s a small but to throw in there.

This morning, I wrote a story called The post-blogging generation. During the day, I noticed that Online Media Cultist was picking up a nice amount of traffic from the story, with the general referral coming from somewhere on FriendFeed.

This has happened to me a number of times. It’s fantastic to know that one’s story is getting checked out somehow, but always a bit frustrating to not be able to pinpoint the source. And in the case of FriendFeed, I’d love to be able to know who is sharing the story, who is liking it, and most of all I’m keen to check out and respond to comments.

Now, the first thing I investigated of course was to see if people were responding to the story on FriendFeed through my own personal feed. As had also happened several times in the past, this was not the case. After a minute of mulling the situation, I decided to use FriendFeed’s search bar to search for keywords in my story’s title.

Bingo. I found no less than five people – including (the omnipresent and perhaps omniscient) Louis Gray, Hutch Carpenter, Marco, Mike Fruchter, and Colin Walker – who had shared the story using Google Reader. Each iteration of the share had picked up its own smattering of kindly “likers” and even a few generous comments.

So in essence the whole decentralization of conversations… conversation is hitting home here. It would be really nice if there was an easy way for me to see – on the Google Reader-side or more realistically on the FriendFeed-side – who is sharing my stories. Even if all of conversations and likes aren’t brought together in a One Ring to Rule Them All kind of way, it would be great if there was an easier way to get a Big Picture view on the shares than hunting them down through search.

Or am I merely being lazy?

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Date
July 10th, 2008

Author
Eric Berlin

Category
OMC

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  • You can use RSSmeme, ReadBurner or Feedheads to find who is sharing your story, or you can search by headline on FriendFeed to get the answers.

    And it's... omnipresent. :-)
  • Looks like feedheads hasn't launched yet, or not quite yet on PC?

    I like rssmeme and readburner... but I'd really love an aggregated way to see shares/comments/likes on friendfeed itself. Searching by headline -- which I stumbled across while writing this piece -- seems to be the best way for now.

    And if that's how the omnipresent do it, then I feel good rolling that way myself. ;-)
  • Ah, saw your note on FF that feedheads is a facebook app
  • Hutch Carpenter
    I've been adding a "find on FriendFeed" link to each of my blog posts. The links are to everyone searches on FriendFeed for the blog post. Readers can see what link got the most comments and jump in if they want. Distributed conversations are a good thing. It's also useful for me as a quick way to find various instances of a blog post inside FriendFeed.
  • I noticed something similar on Duncan Riley's Inquisitr, really liked the notion of including friendfeed convos back on the homesite. Anyone know of a hack to grab code to do that?

    Like I noted above, I'm lazy. :-) Well, and busy too. Yeah, that latter bit.
  • I've done the same as Hutch, created a link which searches who:everyone for the post title - it's not pretty but it gives you an idea of what's going on.
  • Yeah, that'll be a staple of how I use FriendFeed with relation to my own stories from now on, thanks !
  • I do the same as Hutch & Colin, set up a who:everyone search in FriendFeed for your blog title. Then grab the output as an RSS feed and import into Google Reader.

    I have similar feeds set up for del.icio.us, digg, reddit and the three major search engines. These get merged into a single "alert feed" and republished by Google Reader.

    I also use TwitterFeed to alert me as soon as the alert feed gets updated. RSS rocks, you can do loads of cool things with it.
  • Great use of RSS Andy !

    I've been thinking a lot about the potential for RSS with relation to custom search and content aggregation lately. I think there's HUGE value to be provided in this space.
  • Should Friendfeed coalesce duplicate shares of the same article into a single entry with a single comment stream, especially if the shares occur at roughly the same time?
  • That was definitely my next question and my answer is: yes I'd love to see that. Maybe have a simple toggle that lets you "coalesce" around something like a 24-hour period. Or maybe even use FF's day / week / month model which they use to see "best of" right now.
  • Thanks Eric, my use of RSS like this is far from original but it works well for me. I see RSS as a useful layer in an N-tier architecture. I think that architecture is missing really useful endpoints for RSS - widgets, tumblr, iGoogle, myYahoo! etc are OK but not *must have* yet.

    It will happen though, FriendFeed is damn close to perfect but it's a service that you have to use before you love it. My boss is not convinced, nor is my mum - when they "get" aggregation the service that provides it will be huge.
  • RSS isn't really even "mainstream" yet so it's easy to forget that FriendFeed is still very much "edge" social media app.

    I think in a few years people like your boss will be actively using FF (or a FF competitor) for info-sharing and work-related research, your mum / my moms *might* be using it to share pics, and so on. It's such a flexible platform, and the feature roll outs on it have been pretty near flawless thus far.
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