Rating:

This is a that has taken a long time to see the light of day. Not FriendFeed specifically, but the service it offers — a unified stream of user datas from multiple social networks, businesses and other entities that have sites with profiles. It’s simple, which is a characteristic that surpasses all features for me, and it does its job well. Very well.

The service can be used in two ways. At the outset, and most relevant to this review, users create a FriendFeed account and then add all of their other accounts through the simple “Share something” link. It supports 27 services in categories of news (Digg), photos (Flickr), bookmarking (ma.gnolia), blogging (Tumblr), status (Twitter), music (Last.fm), video (YouTube) and a variety of miscellaneous services like Netflix and Amazon Wish Lists.

You don’t even have to enter a password for most accounts as it just pulls the RSS. What you get is a feed of your entire web presence in a stream a sort of consciousness style. It’s similar to Tumblr but it requires even less effort.

An obvious side-function of this is that it can be used to pull your friends’ feeds as well. Currently it streams the feeds of friends you’ve added on FriendFeed, but a clear move for FriendFeed would be to add a mashup section where users can add whatever feeds they want to one giant feed.

In a wise-move FriendFeed has launched a Facebook App that is unobtrusive and does something I’ve been using Yahoo! Pipes to do: it pipes all of my data into Facebook via a streamlined app. The installation is painless and it doesn’t look like crap.

This is a good service. It looks barebones and I love it for that. No fluff, just utility.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook platform, friendfeed, social networking, data potability

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