Has it happened to you? Have you had a rash of new followers on FriendFeed?

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It’s been a topic of discussion for a couple of weeks. Last week at Community 2.0 it came up at our workshop during our discussion on social networks. We agreed that the new followers are our friends & people that we know.

I have been following trends on social networks & the FriendFeed Following Frenzy had me wondering. This morning I spent the time to get caught up on following most everyone back. But it is a painfully slow process so I emailed FriendFeed and asked them to make it faster. I also asked where all the new followers were coming from?

I got an email from FriendFeed saying:

http://friendfeed.com/friends/search makes it easy for you to find your Friends on Facebook, Twitter, and your email contacts.

AHA! People can now auto-follow their friends on Facebook, Twitter & 3 major email platforms. And there’s the friendly ‘recommended section’.

So being the curious sort that I am I tried it. umm I followed 1200 people in a couple of clicks. Was that right or wrong? Well, I think it will save me the time of manually following all these people back. So I’d highly recommend doing it. It will save you LOADS of time! pass the news to your friends.

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But – then I got this question –

Hey Connie – great to see you here on FriendFeed. I’ve noticed a lot of my Twitter network showing up here lately. Question – what made you decide to get more active here?

Let’s not get carried away here! I will be honest that I don’t spend much time in FriendFeed. I do like their new auto-updating page, but I don’t watch that. If there was a way to monitor FriendFeed by topic like I can with Tweetdeck then I’ll be interested.

My company’s social media monitoring tool, Techrigy SM2 gathers conversations from FriendFeed so that’s my way of monitoring it now.

I do have a room for Community Managers that is active. I have thought about utilizing the ability to create a group of select people to follow but I just haven’t had time. But then if I only watched their conversations I would lose the serendipity of the masses.

What are your thoughts? Do you feel better that the mystery is solved? I hope that it saves you some time!