Excellent explanation of how to get feeds into a FriendFeed room. Here are the answers I've been looking for, clearly and concisely.
Adios

Thanks, Philipp!

I read your site regularly for couple of years already and somehow to me it is the best post ever... Maybe because it reflects my particular needs very well :)

A nice tip of integrating FF with the blog. I am going to try this on my site. Thanks for the info!!

I would appreciate we stop the advertising on FF and focus on Google. Thanks. FF is not that useful, don't know why bloggers get so excited (maybe they get a piece of the cake).

Yup, been using FriendFeed for a while already and like it. This is a really interesting idea, though – thanks Philipp, never thought about it before.

Not sure if I understood this correctly (I don't use any "social networks"), but this fairly-new service seems to offer a sizeable subset of that "friendfeedian" functionality:

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Hey Philipp, I recommend you switch the focus of this blog to FF instead of Google and perhaps get a job to work with them. Please stop the promotion of FF. I'm sick and tired to be hearing about FF all the f*** time.

Roger, out of interest, what's your problem with FriendFeed? It's a website created by ex-Googlers (hence the interest from a Google-orientated blog like this one, although this blog also covers 20% non-Google stuff, so there's really no need for me to justify it) and it's used by many of the regular members and, presumably, other lurkers of this forum. So what makes you so angry about it? I'm curious...

Tony, I have nothing against FF, it just that gets blogged and blogged and re-blogged again and it seems to me that it is in order to promote it. I tried FF first (thanks to the promotion of this blog) and I did not understand the big deal out of it.

Here is how it works. Some ex-googlers (supposedly some super smart guys (promotion promotion)) start making a very basic product. It consists of pulling up into one page all your online social activity and then being able to comment on it. They have no clue where they will take this to but they know one thing: the value of a social network is its user base. So they start promoting the product and we keep on hearing and hearing and hearing about it.

Blogs such as this one see an opportunity: I promote your site but in exchange I'm your friend and you shall not forget about me (job, stock options etc..).

The founders still don't know where they're gonna take this too but now it does matter anymore because thanks to the promotion they have:

1) the geeks with them.
2) the bloggers with them.
3) some smart people who want to work for them (minimal stocks for them of course).

And at the very end they sell the product anyway with no consideration to their users (you get zero).

What I'm saying is that this whole FF is founded on fluff and on promotion by blogs like this one. There would be no FF if there would no promotion because the product would not have been able to get the user base just by the quality of the original product.

So please stop the promotion. Each time a new feature comes up on FF, we get to hear about it. That's enough. Thanks.

> There would be no FF if there would no promotion because the
> product would not have been able to get the user base just by
> the quality of the original product.

Isn't that true of any new service though? There's only so far that word of mouth will take you. And, for the record, I heard about FriendFeed through a friend rather than through a blog. I tried it and liked it. A lot. That was enough to keep me there and to recommend it to my friends. You don't understand it, so you don't promote it. I think that's perfectly reasonable. But I don't get why you would try to discourage others from promoting it who clearly find it useful. I honestly can't understand how you could feel so strongly about all this and yet still claim you "have nothing against FF" when asked. And I don't get how it's any different to any other service which would make you feel like that.

Regardless, what Philipp's doing is reporting both the good and the bad, just as he does with Google. I'm absolutely sure he wants nothing in return from FriendFeed. And certainly not stock or a job. In the other post on which you commented, he was actually pointing out a poor design issue. I suppose you could argue "there's no such thing as bad publicity" but we all know that's not true.

Well I might as well stop reading this blog.

I don't like leaving a negative impression however. I'm not angry at FF or at their founders. I was just trying to illustrate the fact that FF receives a lot of promotion ... but you may as well call this "attention" because it is so great.

I do think that there are plenty of other products out there that deserve as much (if not way much more) "attention" then, only their founders did not have this chance to harass bloggers to get their words out.

And no I will not talk about Twitter ... which this blog rarely mentions (of course it is a FF competitor or at least a wanna be competitor). And again no I will not mention Twitter because FF just isn't at the same level and the two shall not never associated (for an artificial buzz being created).

I don't want to speak in Philipp's behalf, but I'm sure he doesn't have an agenda for promoting FriendFeed. It's just a site he likes and he probably visits it frequently, so he's familiar with its interface and features. FriendFeed looks and feels a lot like a Google product, it's more Googly than YouTube, orkut etc. and it managed to become popular without advertising or a well-known parent company.

Roger, I find the notion that I'm advertising FriendFeed to get something in return beyond my discussion, for starters by the simple logic that if I were you and would believe Philipp is a corrupt liar, then no further comment by Philipp should be taken seriously – hence from your position it is useless to discuss with me (a corrupt liar saying "I'm not a liar" does not make that person a truth teller – if you think of me as corrupt, then nothing I say can and should convince you otherwise).

If on the other hand someone voices the concern that the blog is reporting too much in regards to FriendFeed, then I may take that seriously, in particular if the person is not a first-time commenter, but someone who may also sometimes voice positive feedback (simply because that would seem more objective, less "agenda" like).

Just one thing: a forum rule here is to not repeatedly make the same point over and over. That's why I deleted most of your comments today – but not all – which cross-posted your same concern into several threads, which makes the threads appear on top of the forum for everyone (including those who do not want to follow that particular discussion). So it is not about your argument itself, which you are free to make in a single thread (like this one) for a certain period of time (though if you make the same point without new arguments for a too-long time in this thread, then too that forum rule will limit the discussion). Please have a look at the forum rules: http://blogoscoped.com/forum/rules.php

Let's simply say I was expecting more independence from you, Philipp.

Take for example Alltop, another of these companies founded on nothing (yeah it's a copy of Popurls). Today it released a new feature and we get to hear and hear about it every where from ReadWriteWeb to Mashable... Now there is nothing extraordinary about Alltop though, only that its founder Guy Kawasaki wants to be a figure of the Web 2.0 through continual promotion of himself (http://www.guykawasaki.com/).

Another of these companies that started on Fluff and got blogged and blogged (suspeciously) again by Techcrunch is Ning. It started to be some obscure (called at the time "revolutionary" by techcrunch lol) social app website to finally become a copy of myspace (replace a person profile by a group profile). Again nothing special about Ning only that Mark Andreessen, its founder, has lots of $$$ and must a pretty large network of influence.

I'm just asking this blog to keep its pertinence and independence with respect to the choice of stories it covers. That is there is no need to blog about FF twice a week. Thanks.

I enjoy reading about FriendFeed here. I personally don't use it, but I understand that it's a site that the author of this blog uses frequently – Hence his interest in talking about it.

I think it probably falls into the 80% Google category for reasons mentioned above. It not, it definitely falls into the 20% non-Google.

Besides, why would it ever be our choice to decide what someone else does or does not blog about – ON THEIR WEBSITE??? If you don't like it, don't read it – see ya.

I'm not the slightest bit interested in Friendfeed, but I found Philipp's post interesting because he described an interesting hack. Philipp posts these from time to time, and I'd be happy to see more.