There has been a lot of discussion recently about two new services, FriendFeed and SocialThing. Both sites provide ways to aggregate your friend’s activity across a variety of Web 2.0 sites. A major difference between the sites is that FriendFeed wraps a social network around your friend’s activity. This is a fundamentally different approach, and creates a whole different experience.
What Is FriendFeed
FriendFeed is (yet another) social network. You sign up, you add all your friends (again), then you can view all of their activity on the web. FriendFeed allows you to comment on any item (ex. any Twitter message, or any story dugg). You can also post things directly to FriendFeed, almost like Twitter.
What I Like About FriendFeed
- Imaginary Friends: This is one thing I wanted from other social network aggregators, the ability to track people who haven’t signed up for the service. While it is a great idea, the implementation could use some work.
- Public Profile: FriendFeed does offer a nice public profile with links to all my networks. It’s nice to have one link to give to someone instead of 8.
What I Don’t Like About FriendFeed
- Yet Another Social Network: I don’t see the purpose in commenting on a third party site. If I want to reply to a Tweet, I’ll do it on Twitter. If I want to reply to a blog post, I’ll do it on the blog. That’s where more of the audience is, and most likely, more of the publisher’s attention. FriendFeed just adds one more place to check for responses
- Adding Friends Twice: Let’s say I find some new friend on Digg that I want to follow. I first friend him on Digg, then have to go search (by name) for him and add him on FriendFeed.
- Adding Imaginary Friends: I like the idea of adding imaginary friends, but the process is kind of painful. It takes too many clicks to add one friend, and there’s no way to import friends from Twitter, Digg, etc.
What Is SocialThing
SocialThing is more of a social activity aggregator. After signing up you enter in your credentials for the various other social networks. SocialThing then displays a news feed style layout of your friend’s activity. From this view, there is some interaction with the social networks. For example, you can reply to Tweets on Twitter, or view all the replies to a Pownce message.
What I Like About SocialThing
- No Friend Adding: I just enter my information for the sites I want to track, and SocialThing grabs my friends from the site. It’s also always in sync with the site, so once I add a friend on Digg, they show up in SocialThing
- Interaction with Social Networks: As mentioned above, SocialThing adds in a way to interact directly with the given social network. This makes it more than just an RSS reader. I’m sure this will be expanded on as more services are added. Also, the iPhone version allows posting to Twitter and Pownce.
What I Don’t Like About SocialThing
- Popular Services Are Disabled: After the inital release, the dev’s disabled some of the more popular services, like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. The devs have also mentioned that they will be adding a Digg-like voting page for picking new services to track
So thats my view. I am looking for an aggregator of activity, not another social network. SocialThing just makes more sense for me. Make sure to add me on FriendFeed (pb30), and I’ve got a couple SocialThing invites one invite for anyone who comments on this post.
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