I’m running a little ongoing experiment using the rooms feature on Friendfeed. Friendfeed recently added the ability to add RSS feeds into rooms. Being a big RSS and Google Reader junkie, I decided to start a room dedicated only to an individual’s Google Reader feed. I posted on Friendfeed asking for people’s Google Shared URL, there was close to 40 replies with feeds for the room. I created this room on Friendfeed and unloaded the 38 various Google Reader shared feeds.
The room has 38 members, or better yet editors. Thirty eight editors handpicking the best content that they deem worthy of sharing. Most of the editors share the same interests as myself, which in turn enhances the value of the feed for the individuals in this test group.
Here is some feedback on this experiment:
This is a pretty cool idea, a whole set of hand picked stories - and you can’t even directly tell who they are coming from, so no biased clicking. - Tim Hoeck
I’m adding this rooms feed to my Google Reader. Nice to meet you.- Erhan Erdogan
With that being said, here are some of my thoughts on this early ongoing experiment:
Positives
- Excellent pool of feeds from some of the brightest minds & bloggers in the social media blogosphere.
- Approx 35 of the feeds are technology/social networking/media oriented.
- Has potential to be a replacement for Google Reader.
- Can be highly customized with feeds from select editors.
- The room has an RSS feed that can be added into any RSS reader.
- No need to subscribe to multiple websites feeds. Let the room editors do it for you.
Negatives
- Duplication of content
- Stories with a note, get imported into the room as a comment. On Friendfeed it shows me as the person who left the comment, not the actual person who noted it in their Google Reader.
This will only work with a large pool of Google Shared feeds. The pool has 38 feeds currently. Want to participate? Post your Google Shared URL on the comments on this blog, or on the Freindfeed thread.
Related Posts
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 28 people and commented on 18 times hide- Franklin Pettit,
- directeur,
- Susan Beebe,
- Jon-Paul Bussoli,
- Grant Bierman,
- Sarah Perez,
- Marcos Marado,
- Noah Carter,
- Dobromir Hadzhiev,
- Thomas Hawk,
- Mathew A. Koeneker,
- Prolific Programmer,
- Kevin C. Tofel,
- Marco,
- Zulu,
- Rob Diana,
- Shey,
- Kenichi Matsumoto,
- Benedikt Koehler,
- Nils Geylen,
- David W,
- edythe,
- Robert Scoble,
- Hutch Carpenter,
- Tim Hoeck,
- Mitchell Tsai,
- Mark Trapp,
- Irene Katz
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With Twitter down, I see this as where the conversation is headed: Friendfeed, rooms, shared feeds.
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twitter seems down only for some of us, and it is still bigger than FF and 'easier' on non-techies.
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@oliverg True, I consider myself hyperconnected and still have issues with FF. But if Twitter won't get it right soon...
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Nils, since I have been on Friendfeed, my Twitter usage has drastically dropped to the point where I hardly use it anymore. The down time certainly has not helped.
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Ditto to the 100th power Mike
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I've been looking for workarounds to some of FFs less interesting features. "Hide items like this" sure helps for Adium status updates etc.
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Nils, Very interesting take on the experiment so far. It has given me some food for thought. On your blog you mention my negatives about comments being exported from G Reader into the room. That to me is a positive, the problem is notes pulled from G Reader are showing me as the person who left the comment, rather then the person who noted it and shared it. This bug could have some serious consequences.
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I still find the 140 char limit on twitter liberating. When I can type as much as I want on FF sometimes I panic.
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Kenichi Matsumoto - I get this error when trying to add your feed. The given URL does not appear to be a Google Reader shared items URL
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Nick, Yuvi, Mike & Sarah, feeds added. Thanks!
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Kenichi, disregard that message. I grabbed the url off your feed. Thanks
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I thank you, Mike! I could have subscribed to some valuable shared feeds out of the room :)
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Just wondering - do you add everyone, or is there a "bar" you have to be over?
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Yuvi for this experiment, any Freindfeeder with a Google Reader shared account can participate.
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Andy, Jason, Erin, Thanks for participating. Feeds have been added.
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The only problem I see with this experiment is that for readers of the group like me, the amount of data is too big... It would be great to have a room with the links who had two or more likes from this one (for instance) - or better, friendfeed should let me choose "I want to see only entries that someone liked, or at least x people liked"...
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Marcos thanks for the feedback. I should have an updated post of week 2 of the experiment, the pluses and negatives. Filtering is the next stage.
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I'll be waiting then :-)
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