The concept of FriendFeed is simple enough. You add disparate accounts across blogs and social networking services, and Friendfeed aggregates them so friends can follow what you’re doing. The interface is clean, not surprising given the company was founded by ex-Googlers, and using it is easy.

I asked for some feedback on FriendFeed via Twitter and Michael responded saying that Friendfeed was this year’s Twitter, complete with SXSW inflection point. Others, such as Steve Rubel and Louis Gray are talking about the service like it was the most amazing thing they’ve seen in years.

I signed up to FriendFeed yesterday to see what the fuss is about. Having used it for a day I don’t get why FriendFeed is that much better than the range of other services that do exactly the same thing. Plaxo Pulse immediately comes to mind, and there’s Spokeo, Second Brain, Social Thing and Iminta as well. Certainly FriendFeed wins (by a small margin) on usability and scope, but it’s still yet another service in a sea of similar startups.

Then there’s the why behind wanting a feed of content from your friends in the first place. As the chart I pulled from FriendFeed demonstrates, nearly half of all entries from my friends come from Twitter. But if I’m a Twitter user and these are Tweets from friends wouldn’t I be reading them in Twitter anyway? Next comes blogs, and while I may not have every friend’s blog in my feed reader, the ones I mostly want to read I’m already subscribed to. Like Twitter this seems like duplication to me, and FriendFeed doesn’t offer the content from the post either like a full feed would. Google Reader is next on the list: again, duplication as it pulls shared posts from Google Reader…which are shared within Google Reader.

Ah, but you can leave comments on feed entries some will point out and engage in a FriendFeed conversation. If most of the content on a FriendFeed is pulled from Twitter, wouldn’t discussing the points on Twitter be the logical outcome for the majority of people? Blog posts get comments on FriendFeed as well, but how rich an experience is a comment thread based on a headline with a link? As a publisher, wouldn’t you want people to hold these discussions on your blog? There’s already a precedent of sorts as well: coComment tried to take blog commenting to a centralized point without 100% of the conversation remaining on the blog itself, until it realized that it was a failed model.

There is a market for aggregation services, and yet instead of creating a two way interactive service like Google’s still in development SocialStream will be (the real future of aggregation), FriendFeed seems to be nothing more than a fancy RSS service with commenting thrown in for good measure.

I may be wrong on FriendFeed; it took me months to get the appeal of Twitter so I may well end up becoming a FriendFeed convert as well. But what I see so far keeps prompting me to ask “what am I missing?”

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The new feature is an activity stream of recent activities by all users on various social networks – blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc. The image shows the new profile page – mine is here, and I’ve added a summary widget below.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the startup feature du jour. Facebook first popularized the news feed in late 2006. Later others took the idea and opened it up, creating a news feed around activities on a variety of social networks. FriendFeed is the most popular, and recently raised a $5 million round of financing. Plaxo, Soup.io, Iminta, Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, 30Boxes, Mugshot, Readr and Second Brain all have variations. Party planning site MyPunchbowl recently released its version. And now, Facebook is planning to open up their NewsFeed and allow users to add other services as well.

Yeah, I know. That’s way too many similar services to test out. If you’re a casual observer and just want to try out one service, go with FriendFeed (my account is here). People are flocking there, and starting to use it as a hub to leave comments and other content. If you’re already a Plaxo user, their Pulse product is just as good. Facebook isn’t open enough yet to really be called a competitor.

The new MyBlogLog features are a great addition to the product, but it’s not innovative enough to make a big impact. They do have a large community of loyal bloggers using their service, however (including me), and I’ll certainly keep an eye on the activity streams of the people I follow there.

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Third parties can already integrate directly today via the Facebook API, Beacon and the Facebook Platform, but adoption from these companies, which are indirectly also competing with Facebook, has been slow. Now, users can add the content stream directly. Users simply tell Facebook what third party services they use the most, along with their credentials or public feed for the site. The content stream is then pulled into your Facebook News Feed.

What this means: in your friends news feed, you may start to see more content from Flickr, Twitter, Digg and other third party services. This competes directly with what a number of startups are doing – namely FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and the more recently launched Iminta.

This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.

But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.

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There are other services that are very similar – FriendFeed (still in private beta) and Plaxo Pulse are the most well known, but others include Mugshot, Readr, 30boxes and Spokeo.

For the most part, Iminta has features that are similar to those services, particularly FriendFeed. There are some differences worth noting, however. Whereas FriendFeed has only a single setting to make your feed public or private, Iminta allows you to create groups of friends and determine which groups see what content. On the flip side, they allow people viewing your feed to strip out some of your feeds. So if you Twitter too much, for example, your friends can choose not to see that, but leave everything else. Iminta also allows you to filter data by type when you are viewing a number of friends, or all of your friends, at once.

It makes for a less simplified interface than FriendFeed, which has its pros and cons. But as you add a lot of friends, the ability to manage the data is, in my opinion, a good thing.

Another thing I like about Iminta, and the reason I’m writing about it, is that the company has been bootstrapped to date by founder Aaron Newton (an ex CNET product manager) – I always like the non-funded startups. Newton says he began working on the site a year ago just because he wanted the product for himself and his friends. He got more serious about it, and left his job at CNET, when he first heard about FriendFeed in October.

You can request an invitation on Iminta now, and Newton says they’ll bring in as many people as they can starting on Tuesday. Once you are in you can also invite your friends – we’ve added Iminta to InviteShare to help you get a quick invite (FriendFeed is here).

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