Organizing FriendFeed: A Basic Guide

It is important to be as organized as you can. This makes life so much easier because you will increase your efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity. Whenever possible, I like to (at minimum) categorize items and information.

With this in mind, I recently started to reorganize the list of people that I follow on FriendFeed. Here’s how I named them: Personal, Professional, Home, Twitter Friends, Twitter 2nd Tier, and Twitter 3rd Tier. Home is a standard feature on FriendFeed, and I use it only for my posts, and the posts of the groups within FriendFeed that I participate in. Personal and professional are just what they sound like – they are feeds that I follow that are of personal or professional interest. My Twitter feeds I’ve set up in a similar fashion to that of LinkedIn connections in a tiered system. My Twitter friends feed are the people that I’ve become friends with, tweet with often, or retweet often.  Twitter 2nd Tier refers to people that I’m just getting to know, or don’t tweet with that often. Twitter 3rd Tier are generally just people that we follow eachother.

When you’re setting up your lists, be sure to check out the Twitter feature which allows you to import into your FriendFeed all of your Twitter friends that also use FriendFeed. It can save you literally hours – I say this from experience. I recommend that you use this feature once a month in order to update your lists.

I have to admit, the real time feed that FriendFeed now has will take some getting used to. There is a pause button which I’ve used on many occasions to catch up on posts if it’s moving too quickly to read. The only feature that I wish FriendFeed had would be a retweet button. Any post that I would like to retweet still needs to be cut and pasted into the post box, just like you would for the Twitter homepage.

Since I mentioned the groups feature, I would like to suggest to you that you join the FriendFeed Feedback group. In this group you can give your personal opinions and ideas directly to FriendFeed. This is a powerful tool right at your fingertips. The realtime feed that’s been put into place came from the Twitter community as well as this group. There are other groups that you will find along the way as well. Join whichever intrigue you the most.

I hope that this guide has helped you. I look forward to reading your comments, and if you have any questions.