Wendy Boswell stays on top of Web search and social media trends at About.com. You can catch up with her via Twitter.

FriendFeed is a social media feed aggregator that makes it easy to follow many different individuals’ various social activities on the Web all in one convenient place, instead of jumping from service to service (and having to create new accounts ad infinitum!) to see what the people you’re most interested in are doing.

It’s basically a continuous river of information that you can use as a virtual water cooler of news and content, but it’s also interactive – you’re encouraged to comment on other people’s stories, “like” something that resonates with you, and more. If you’re looking for something that is a one-stop solution for a variety of different content frames: feed readers, micro-blogging, images, etc, then FriendFeed is a good fit.

Let’s look at a few tips for both beginning and more advanced FriendFeed users that can help you make this service as useful as possible.

FriendFeed: Basic Tweaks

Signing Up

Signing up at FriendFeed is easy. Just come up with a username, and then start adding all the services you’d like to trickle through your FriendFeed stream.

Adding Services







For the most part, you won’t need specific service URLs, just usernames (Facebook and LinkedIn both require specific feed URLs, which is somewhat tedious). Once you have your different media outlets all plugged in, it’s time to play with your FriendFeed settings, found by clicking on the Account link.

Settings







This is where you can specify how you want your FriendFeed stream to be seen, decide if you want email notifications, or set up IM pings to your Google Talk or Jabber account for specific activities: a comment on your post, activity from friends, etc.

Following People







In order to get the most out of FriendFeed, it’s important that you find people to follow, and then comment on what they’ve shared. Interact. Become part of the FriendFeed community to make it a more intuitive, useful service. The more you interact, the more FriendFeed will be able to personalize your friend recommendations and your FriendFeed stream will get more interesting since you’ll be learning from other people.

Finding Friends







How do you find friends? Click on the Friends tab, and you can use your email contacts to initially find people to follow. Once you have shared a few things on FriendFeed, you can click the Recommended tab on the Friends page for people FriendFeed thinks might be of interest to you.

Friend Organization

You can also find interesting people by joining FriendFeed “rooms” – there’s a long list at http://FriendFeed.com/rooms/search. Rooms are basically private chat rooms you can use to talk about specific topics: holiday recipes, social media, the Super Bowl, etc.

Once you’ve got a good list of people that you’re following, it’s time to get organized. In order to make this as meaningful and structured as possible, divide your friends into Lists, found on the FriendFeed Favorites page. Personal and Professional are already laid out; you can create more groups as you need them.







FriendFeed is also a sneaky way to get around joining every new kid on the social media block, because you can see what people are doing whether or not they’re on FriendFeed. You can do this with the Imaginary Friends feature, found in your Friends settings.

FriendFeed: Advanced Tweaks

Filtering Information







How do you cut down the FriendFeed noise to signal ratio? Can you limit which services you see? Say you don’t want to see every mundane (I like soup) Tweet, or every Facebook status (Joe is working) update. You can limit your FriendFeed information feed by using the Hide feature, a simple yet effective way to instantly filter what you want to hear from a specific user or service.

Getting More Traffic







FriendFeed is also a great way to get more traffic to your personal site or blog (if that’s what you’re looking for). Since your feed is part of the FriendFeed info stream, once people read it they have the ability to give it a thumbs-up, comment, etc. If they like it, that particular piece of content gets shared with all THEIR friends, and on and on. It’s a snowball effect.

Creating Specialized Groups with Search







FriendFeed has added a Search feature recently, which (obviously) enables you to find specific information, but also to create a personalized group of people who are writing exactly about what you want to read. Add this to your FriendFeed List, say about “google innovations,” and you’ve just created an extremely up-to-date source of information.

Comments







Follow the comments you (and the people you follow) make to find new people to follow. Sometimes the conversations on FriendFeed are the best ways to discover new content or find new people to track.

Desktop Clients







If you don’t feel like having FriendFeed take up browser space, you can use a FriendFeed desktop client to stay on top of everything. So far, there aren’t a lot of candidates in this space, but Alert Thingy, Twhirl, and Eluma are worth a look (for more reviews of FriendFeed desktop clients, read My Search For The Perfect FriendFeed Desktop Tool [List].

Sharing with a Bookmarklet







If you’re more of a sharer than a talker, then the FriendFeed bookmarklet is right up your alley. This simple tool allows you to share anything from all over the Web directly to your FriendFeed.

FriendFeed: A Useful Service

FriendFeed, while known mostly for its capability as a social media aggregator, also provides myriad opportunities for connecting with other like-minded people – as well as deep, well-connected, almost real time research that would be difficult to replicate anywhere else.

It’s simple to set up, easy to personalize, and I’m sure we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg as far as FriendFeed innovations; for instance, I’d love to see the ability to customize real-time views of my FriendFeed streams with specific topics or cluster different rooms into one rich feed.

What’s been your favorite use for FriendFeed so far? Let’s hear in the comments – or at FriendFeed:

Pete Cashmore Adam Ostrow Adam Hirsch Stan Schroeder Mark Rizzn Hopkins Sean Aune Sharon Feder Tamar Weinberg Karen Hartline Brett Petersel

you can find me at http://friendfeed.com/wbsowell.