For those of you who use FriendFeed and are looking for even more information bombardment in your lives, you can now receive every update via instant message. FriendFeed now supports notifications and posting for Google Talk and Jabber. So if it is not enough for you to visit the site 12 times a day, or keep updated via a desktop client, or get your feed in your e-mail, you can now turn on the information spigot even more.
FriendFeed ultimately is a communication platform, so adding IM was inevitable. But please kill me now. Just the thought of getting a ping every 30 seconds when anyone I follow on FriendFeed decides to Twitter, blog, add a photo to Flickr, share something on Google Reader, or any of the dozens of other actions across the Web FriendFeed monitors is overwhelming. I need less noise in my life, not more noise.
Luckily, the IM features has some settings that allow you to control what sorts of messages you want to receive through that channel. For instance, you can set it so that you only get IMed when someone comments on one of your posts. I’m sure this will become a very popular feature. (FriendFeed also recently started adding maps into the feed whenever geo-data is available, which is very cool but you need to go to the site to see it—another reason not to go the IM route).
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It’s pretty easy to avoid overload. The settings for this feature allow you to choose which list to follow by IM, so you can create a list called “IM”, and only add the few people you really want to follow in real-time to it.
This post really made me smile Erick.
Yep. That is why filters (what was known as Track on Twitter) is so important. That is what I’m solving for… even if the existing services are not. Information Discovery is about getting the information you want in a way that allows you to digest it.
We will be sending our filtered FF stream to IM starting Monday.
http://ff-filtered.cosinity.com
Speaking of competing/complimentary services, Dustin Sallings (twitterspy and identspy) and I launched a service on Tuesday that also provides FriendFeed via XMPP. We’ll be adding more features and track functionality over the next few days.
http://www.enjit.com
I agree its a lot of noise. I would not want that…
12 times a day? Nah, I just leave the FriendFeed tab open all day, every day
Scoble is going to spank you for the less noise comment.
Erick, thanks for sharing this news. I’ve been carefully avoiding FriendFeed for a while for this very reason … I was dreading this feature.
Now I think I can’t resist it.
All the “twitter” features should have been added to IM clients in the first place. In fact, MSN IM or Yahoo IM should do that now and kill the little guys.
Why does TC insist on posting stories on things that they think are crappy or dumb? This post is a perfect example of “too much noise”. Erick is right in that this is just overkill for everyone, and probably no one will use it. So why post about it? Why waste our time with something that you think sucks and that no one will use?
Not a lot going on with startups these days and Jerry Yang just had a big week. What else is there?
I agree that this is . . . ridiculous. This medium does not present the information in a relevant context, in fact it so irrelevant that is annoying rather than helpful. That brings me to my point. It seems to me that a more relevant place for this information is an Address Book or whatever interpretation you want to put on that be it client application or web-based application. Thus I can see what my friend in Australia has been up to, when I am about to email him, receive an email from him, think about calling him etc. Watching Google contacts grows has been like watching water dry but I think one of the things that could be added to that part of Gmail is an equivalent to FriendFeed.
FriendFeed folks don’t want you to do anything so you don’t become their competition… lol.
Seriously, if you’re using FriendFeed, you have TOO MUCH TIME on your hands!
Laconi.ca has had this feature since they launched; so friend feed has not done anything new….they only added/copied an existing feature of a competitor; something the seem to do well.
Friend Feed is not Open Source and therefore in my view is not “Open”….in this case they are “Open” in a myspace or facebook style…They want your actions and your content to raise their valuation in in return they will give you nothing; not even the source code to the application that you have given value. To me Friend Feed as nothing more than web 2.0 Share cropping system.
We are going to take on Friend Feed as well as Twitter. Our Application is Open Source and we also give part of our revenue back the community….
The site is here http://www.adelph.us
The blog is here http://adelph.us/alpha/the-blog/
Killer App? Yes, killer…
Erick, you have this exactly right - and thank you for letting us know that sometimes too much information is exactly that. Let’s give people some chance to be proactive rather than reactive on comments, tweets, uploads, etc….
Staring above on my browser I see; Gmail, Twitter Tab, Google Reader, FriendFeed, and Skype down the bottom.
What we all need is Clone… Only a clone as an assistant to filter all of the above will understand which information from the above should even get through in the first place.
I hear the argument of turn it off and get a life, but its never black or white… and when you work for yourself time management and balance between social networking and work is all the more important.
Maybe one of the Techies reading this can invent a multi platform app that LEARNS from your habits and prioritizes the information from your emails all the way through to wading through the tropical forest of someones armpit/forum thread.
Adding more noise traffic.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
“But please kill me now.” - Erick - one of your better post titles and on mark. cheers -
O.M.G
You do not even know what friendfeed is and your consistent spamming to the tech crowd here makes no sense.
Please say something useful or go away.