Lifestream With FriendFeed

I came across a service called FriendFeed that confused me at first, but with closer scrutiny, I realized exactly what it did and immediately signed up to become a beta tester.

FriendFeed is a cool service, allowing an aggregated view of an individual’s social-web content to be captured within a single web site. The aim is to make it easier for friends to connect and stay in contact over the web, removing the need to check multiple sites for personal updates because all the information is pulled in one location.

“Lifestreaming” is a somewhat new term to me, which is what this service is. Lifestreaming is becoming increasingly popular on the web as RSS becomes more popular. Probably the best known lifestreaming service is the Mini-Feed provided by Facebook to pull updates from an individual’s profile to the Facebook News-Feeds of their friends. This is the only example of lifestreaming I can tell you about, because I am not too sure of others out there.

After creating your account and picking a nickname, the Services page allows you to easily add in the online accounts you want to pull into your FriendFeed from around the internet. A really wide range of accounts and feed types are supported. In about five minutes, I had easily added this blog, Digg, and Last.fm to my profile. Streaming of Amazon.com Wish Lists, Furl, Google Shared Stuff, iLike, Netflix, Picasa Web Albums, Pownce, Reddit, SmugMug, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Vimeo, Yelp, and Zooomr services is also supported

Once added, all your activity from all of your specified feeds is pulled into your lifestream and displayed in “My Feeds.” The page is nice and clear and quite easy to use. If you are tired of going to Facebook, then traveling over to Engadget, etc., then this service is just for you. I have quite a few websites I visit on a daily basis, so this service is perfect for me.

The service is free and is currently in beta, so you’ll have to sign up for a beta invitation.