FriendFeed

Yes, I've quaffed the Kool-Aid. I set up a FriendFeed account for myself a bit earlier this afternoon.

You can find me here: http://friendfeed.com/johndupuis

I only have a few subscriptions set up so far, only some science-y types. No librarians as yet. Of course, Bora was the first person to subscribe to me, about 47 seconds after I set up my account. Feel free to subscribe to my feed or to suggest some feeds for me to subscribe to. I'm not sure what the FF protocol is on these things, but I'll certainly be happy to subscribe to anyone who subscribes to me. In particular, a couple of librarian feeds would be nice to get started.

What is FriendFeed, you ask? According to Wikipedia:

FriendFeed is a social aggregator that consolidates the updates from social websites such as blog entries, social bookmarking websites, and social networks among others. This allows individuals using multiple social websites to have a consolidated stream of details on all their activities across these websites.

Bloggers writing about FriendFeed have said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members' social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provides the facility to track these activities (such as posting on blogs, Twitter and Flickr) across a broad range of different social networks.

In other words, I get to stalk some people.

Why did I join? First of all, it looks cool and interesting and it's been a while since I signed up for a new cool and interesting service. Most importantly, it seems to be emerging as a very interesting and powerful tool for sharing and collaboration, something people are already thinking about. A lot of science types who are using it heavily to share information and I think it's worth seeing what all the fuss is about. We as librarians need to be in the same spaces as our users.

I'll be giving my Cool Tools for Scholars presentation again in the near future, and FriendFeed will definitely be part of the story this time around.