EduGeek Journal » Blog Archive » Organizing it all – Socialthing & FriendFeed

Monday, July 7, 2008 (8:51 am)

Organizing it all – Socialthing & FriendFeed

Posted by: Katrina Adams In: Social Networking| Web 2.0

So we now all now belong to all these social networks – facebook, myspace, youtube, twitter, jaiku, etc. How in the world are we now going to keep up with all of them? Do you have one instance of Firefox (or Flock – either one is cool enough for an EduGeek) with all tabs devoted to your social sites?

Or, have you stumbled across a social aggregator that can combine all of your social feeds into one friendly feed? So far, I’ve checked out two:

FriendFeed
- Nice.
- Easy to add services.
- Seems to be a little slow in updating this morning.
- Had a little difficulty adding my Jaiku feed, but working now.
- Has 41 services you can import.
SocialThing!
- Very nice!
- Currently invite-only and still in beta.
- Very nice interface and very easy to add service.
- Currently only imports digg, facebook, flickr, last.fm, twitter, youtube, del.icio.us, pownce, and vimeo
- They’re currently working on adding myspace, livejournal, and rss feeds, and you can vote to add services (jaiku currently has 522 votes).
- Kind of shows threaded twitter discussions, which is nice.
- Can easily reply to twitter and facebook posts through ST!
- Shows that I have updates on my Firefox tab (my tab is now named ‘(2) Socialthing!’, telling me I have two updates)

So, right now, I’m going with ST! It’s the Jaiku to my Twitter. Cleaner. More user-friendly. Very promising. It doesn’t yet have all the services that FriendFeed has, but they’re working on it.

My questions for you: Have you used either or both? What do you think? Which do you prefer? Is there another social aggregator that is totally awesome that you can’t believe I haven’t mentioned?

Oh, and would you like an invite to Socialthing? I have one to spare. If so, post your email address in the comments, and I’ll send my one last invite your way!

Related Story:
2008 Killer Apps – Tools for Managing Multiple Social Networks

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6 Responses to "Organizing it all – Socialthing & FriendFeed"

1 | Richard Cunningham

July 7th, 2008 at 10:11 am

You might want to look at friendbinder (http://friendbinder.com). You can also post to twitter and facebook from it and has the tab updating like ST (also summize do this). We also have support for RSS if you need a network we don’t support or you want to read blogs.

2 | Matt Crosslin

July 7th, 2008 at 10:47 am

I am now using both (thanks to your invite!). FriendFeed does have more supported sites, but to be honest – I use it to dump my own feeds from around the Internet in to one URL for my less tech-savvy friends and family to look at. I only head back every once and a while to see if a service I am using has been added.

I keep SocialThing open in a tab in Firefox to keep up with my friends from other services. I love that. And, I like that I can post to those services, even reply to Twitter posts, right from the browser. I hope Jaiku services include that.

3 | Katrina Adams

July 7th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

Thanks for recommending friendbinder. I’ll definitely check it out. Unfortunately, though, it’s a private beta and requires an invite, which I’ve requested. … You wouldn’t happen to have a spare invite, would you? Thanks again!

4 | Richard Cunningham

July 7th, 2008 at 12:48 pm

Yes, I have sent you one. Just to point out that I run the site – I should have made that more clear. We are generally sending out invites within 48 hours.

5 | Katrina Adams

July 7th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

Thanks for the invite, Richard! Friendbinder shows promise — I do have comments:

Initially, seems to have nice 3-step setup wizard; however, for some accounts you need to go back and configure each. I.e. I went through and added my accounts, including twitter, but when I tried to post to Twitter, it popped up a msg saying I needed to configure the account. It would be nice if for each account, as your adding it, it takes you through any needed configuration, authorization, and adding of friends.
Had a hard time figuring out how to add additional RSS feeds. You can easily add one during the initial setup wizard; however, in order to add another, you have to click the ‘You’ tab >> Your profile settings >> Add Networks to this list. It’d be nice if you could have this functionality from the ‘Networks’ tab as well as the ‘you’ tab.
Unfortunately, the process of adding additional RSS feeds took me completely out of that initial setup wizard, and I cannot seem to figure out how to get back to it.
It took me a while to figure out the Interest Level functionality. (However, you probably explain it in the setup wizard, and I just missed it.) You initially set all your friends to 3-stars (for example) out of a 5-star rating, then you can go through and give certain friends higher interest-levels than others. For example, EGJ would of course be a 5-star interest level, and my Jaiku posts would maybe be 4-stars. Well, you can then filter so it shows 4-stars or higher interest level friends only. I’m probably not explaining it well, but it’s a nice feature.
You can single out specific friends for easy cyber-stalking functionality. (And I mean that in a good way!) I.e. if I want to see what Matt’s been up to today, but I have too many social feeds coming in to glance through, I can click his name in the friends list and it filters to only show his activity.
I did notice earlier that you can directly reply to tweets, but I’ve somehow managed to make my tweets disappear from my stream. But I did see a ‘Reply’ link earlier — as soon as I get them back, I’ll test replying.
A little buggy, but hey – it’s beta!

I think Friendbinder’s strong point is the filtering capabilities, while it’s lacking a bit in usability. Some work in that area, and it could be a definite alternative!

Thanks again for the invite, Richard. Feel free to correct, comment, or point out anything I missed. ‘You’re *blind*, woman! Didn’t you see the [ABC] button that does what you needed????’

6 | Richard Cunningham

July 7th, 2008 at 2:04 pm

Thanks for taking the time to look at our site.

We have only been in private beta for about a month and some of the features you talk of were implement since then – so we are very actively working on site.

In regards to the sign up – we are going to work on that to make it more straight forward and the same for the RSS feeds.

Interest levels were designed on a per-person basis. The idea is that you have people in your life ranging from close friends to casual acquaintances. Close friends/significant others might be a interest level 5 and casual acquaintances might be a 1. By doing this you an ensure that you don’t miss anything that interest level 5 people say in the noise and if you are very busy at the time you can skip reading some of the lower levels, till later (if it all – sometimes there is just too much to read).

We are working on usability, new features and some documentation. We have a blog at http://blog.friendbinder.com where we post updates about the site.

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