Has it happened to you? Have you had a rash of new followers on FriendFeed?
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.
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!
Ah, this explains why you popped up suddenly on mine too… was wondering about that.
Thanks for sharing ;)
You’re welcome!
Although – my time saving tip has just hugely increased FriendFeed’s community building efforts. I hope they appreciate it!
And I sent out my note on this post via ping.fm to all of my communities at like 10 social networks… but it’s all about time!
Connie
Connie, I did this early last week. Wish I’d known you were looking into it so I could have shared. The link just showed up in my friendfeed one day so I checked it out and it seemed highly valuable so I went along with it. Seems like a smart move to me. No way am I going to reinvent Twitter. Friendfeed folks clearly recognized that and did something about it. I call it smart!
The one thing that I believe might get lost in all of this are the comments being posted to tweets that show up in people’s Friendfeed’s. This is a huge opportunity to connect and I think people who have their tweets feed automatically into Friendfeed may not be monitoring the conversation on friendfeed that relate to their tweets. If they never see the comments, they could be missing an opportunity to connect. this needs to be fixed ore either top of mind for all who do this.
And I thought I was just so popular! Thanks for solving the mystery Inspector Bensen :)
“If there was a way to monitor FriendFeed by topic like I can with Tweetdeck then I’ll be interested.”
You’re in luck: http://www.frienddeck.com/Download
I did that auto-follow button thingy, too, a few weeks ago. This was after creating my FriendFeed account MONTHS AGO! My home feed swelled. I should have moved everyone to a new feed, but not possible.
Because there are no bulk management tools for FriendFeed–yet–it was too much noise for me. I couldn’t bulk unsubscribe to people, I couldn’t bulk move people, etc.
So, I deleted my account yesterday and then recreated it fresh. Starting new with the same name — http://friendfeed.com/ariherzog
I don’t see the point of FriendFeed following the same people you follow on Twitter. Because the engagement level is much higher on FF.
Long story short, I’m not going to click those buttons again.
I think Twitter and Friend Feed have different uses. I found out about the add thing a while ago and used it to find others who are using FF. I use both of them for different reasons.
Friend Feed I think could replace the use of hashtags for discussions in twitter by moving the conversation into a group or room. A lot of people are complaining about the use of so many hashtags and now spammers are exploiting the use of hash tags in twitter so their junk shows up in twitter search.
Friend feed works well when you want to create a longer reply to someone or be part of a larger discussion. Twitter works though to get information and breaking news out fast as well as a way to find people, places and things around you. I’ll be thinking more on this as Friend Feed changes.
I don’t think following hordes of friends on FriendFeed en masse is a bad thing. Like Mary said, Twitter and FF are two different things. We interact more personally on Twitter and simply follow the thread on FF… at least I do.
That being said, I’m wondering, with its newfound popularity, if FF will become more of a mainstream app that we will engage more pro-actively.
Ah, the wheel never stops turning does it. Like riding a merry go round and can’t get off. :)
if i worked , i must be 7 rank http://www.hadisdefteri.com , excuse me i dont speak english , i speak inglish so so