If you’re using FriendFeed (and many more people are nowadays), there are a couple of default settings I feel everyone should set up. Please? This isn’t a post to convince you to use it or why you should. It’s for people already on there or thinking about going there though I added some thoughts about it at the end. At the top of your FriendFeed profile page you’ll see room for some bio information. See mine. You’ll see there is a link off to the right you can make edits to your settings.
Once you go into your settings you’ll find several new things you can do.
First thing to set is your picture. I’m surprised how many people are on FriendFeed and haven’t added a profile. They have usually done it everywhere else, so please do it here as well so we don’t all see the silly smiley face for your avatar. Second, add a description for yourself. It’s your bio. Just like on Twitter, it’s important for others to read this to know more about you. When this isn’t filled out for someone, I usually click on their Twitter profile to learn who they are. You can save us all that extra work by just filling this out. You can put anything you want (don’t know the limit) and you can add at least minimal HTML. I provide a link to my website and location because those are the items I really like from the Twitter profile (URL, location, and bio). Third, you may not know it, but FriendFeed added email notifications to conversations you participate in. This was a big improvement recently. It used to be that the only way you would know if someone commented on your content, you had to be on FriendFeed all day long. Now you can receive notifications for all kinds of stuff.
Set these up to at least catch when someone comments on your stuff. At most you can receive notifications of conversations you’ve participated in or care about. All of the above are settings so you can have conversation and interaction. The other thing FriendFeed is useful for is aggregating all of your social media (and much more, but that’s a conversation for later). As of this post, they are offering almost 60 services but with the ability to add any RSS feed, it’s pretty much unlimited.
So why are more people moving into FriendFeed? Not fully sure, but I think many early adopters are moving from Twitter to FriendFeed (I’m also getting twitter-fatigue). One advantage is that it is so much easier to have a conversation since each entry is more like a blog post with comments instead of fragmented conversations on Twitter with @’s all over the place that are difficult to trace. There’s more like creating filters, searches, etc, but I’m not that far along with it. I like it because it’s real-time and I can control where my updates go easily. When I post to FF, I can tell it to add it to Twitter or not. I can also add the #fb tag so it’ll also go to Facebook (but that’s a Facebook setting). I also created a filtered group of “can’t miss” people so I can click on that filter any time (or subscribe to that filter’s RSS). Remember, just like any other web presence, this is another place people gather. For you the decision to participate here should be driven by the question “is my current or potential audience there”? If so, go. But have a strategy first. These settings will get you off on the right foot.
