Deciding Who To Follow On FriendFeed
Mar 23 2008 
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Since news is running slow today, I thought I’d take the time to go through my FriendFeed subscriptions and also check up on who’s subscribing to me that I should probably follow. I’m now subscribed to 51 people on FriendFeed, down from 66. Here’s 3 things I considered to help me quicken the process and get the best results.
Why Do It?
Other than the fact that I have nothing else that I’m pressed to catch up on, sorting through FriendFeed was a great way for me to minimize on information overload. I consume a lot of information very quickly, but when I take the time to process it all, it can leave me with a headache or make my eyes hurt from reading so much. Cleaning up my list of subscribers helps me to ensure that I get as much relevant information as quickly as possible and to also maintain and build upon great connections that I’ve made on FriendFeed.
So, What Were My Requirements?
If you’re not providing any feedback and only using FriendFeed to stream, I’m not subscribing to you.
I checked just about everyone’s ‘Discussion’ section. This section tells you how many comments a user has left not only this week, but all time. It tells the same information for items a person has ‘Liked’. I paid close attention to this because I only want to subscribe to active users of the service. All the rest is just noise to me. I want those who will be active because I’m an active user and it keeps things flowing. Now, I can almost ensure I’ll have something to read, comment on, or discuss with the amount of active users that I subscribe to.
If you haven’t shared anything of value to me, in the past week, I’m not subscribing to you.
For me, this has been an extremely slow week for tech news. Most of the hype surrounding a lot of products has died down. It’s like the calm before the storm. This has also been the hardest week for me to find content to blog about. Aside from the color wars on Twitter, ReadBurner reopening the old version of their site, Shyftr implementing their version of a link blog, Pocket Blog, and Sobees desktop widgets, nothing new has floated pass me. More discussions, rather than breaking news, are happening.
However, there are a handful of people who can still find something great to share outside of the hype. Those people have shared it on FriendFeed, and have helped me to keep posting, discussing, sharing, and staying busy during a slow week. These are the most valuable articles on the web right now and the people who have shared them and participated in the discussion are just as valuable.
If you’re not streaming a blog or Google Reader Shared Items list, I’m most likely not subscribing to you.
A blog and a link blog are the most valuable services on FriendFeed to me. I use FriendFeed not only to discuss information, but also to find new information. Therefore, without these two services, or at least one of them, you’re pretty irrelevant to me (unless I know you). I don’t like reading Twitter feeds in FriendFeed. I don’t have a problem with those who stream it (I do it, though begrudgingly). However, most of the people I subscribe to on FriendFeed, I already follow on Twitter. I’m not of huge fan of flickr either. I do check out what people Stumble and bookmark, but other than that, I just scroll past the other services. They have no interest to me and I’d honestly have nothing to say to YOU about them. Why waste time trying to be friendly to everyone? So, if you don’t have a blog, tumblr, or link blog, I probably won’t subscribe unless what you bookmark and stumble are interesting.
A Great Network of Connections
I now have great and valuable connections to build upon. I can socialize with those who share similar interest, learn from them, build a relationship with them, and also find new and exciting things to discuss and share with others. It’s the same thing vice versa if they’re subscribing to me. Everyone’s happy! Everyone wins!
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I had to run to see if I made the mark. Glad to see I did. Expecting great discussions in our future!
Do I know you? :-) I am in stages of cleaning my multiple sites up, FriendFeed just adds to the mix
This makes a lot of sense, but a few things are still unclear to me — not in your post, mind you, but with regards to Friendfeed.
The first is that I’ve only been using it on and off, mainly because I haven’t found a lot of people to add or interact with in the first place. Now, if it were easy to add people from Twitter for instance, my collection of contacts would make more sense and I’d feel more comfortable engaging.
Secondly, how do you add people? Personally that is: where do you get their FF usernames from? Just searching for them seems a drag and hasn’t yielded a lot of results (for me at least, so maybe I know “the wrong people”) and taking my pick from the recommended section just feels a lot like picking from a most-popular gallery. Not that I don’t know a (surprisingly large) lot of them or follow them already, but still…
So, I’d love to hear more of your views on that (and apologies if you posted that already; I’ve only just subscribed here).
stumbled :)
Hmm … this is pretty interesting. I’ll definately look into FriendFeed later today.
I came over from Ms Danielle’s site. I like your content. Keep up the great work :)