Here’s the crux: If you’re a Twitter addict who loves the fast-paced discussions and news sharing that can go on there, chances are you’ll love the social side of FriendFeed.

Now – you might well be tutting right now. You might have tried FriendFeed in the past, set up an account and then never really looked at it again. Maybe you think of FriendFeed as a place that puts all your output from around the web; blogs, photos, videos, tweets etc, in one place. Well yes, it is but it’s so much more than that!

With its latest redesign, taken out of beta yesterday, FriendFeed is now a realtime discussion engine beyond compare. Twitter addicts are used to posting a Tinyurl link to something interesting and then getting a disjointed conversation with their followers. It’s not very efficient and it can be hard to keep track of the discussion.

With FriendFeed you can get conversations started based on anything – items you’ve imported automatically via RSS feeds or posts (complete with links and pictures if you like) that you’ve made directly to FriendFeed. Comments are then listed below each item making it easy to discuss anything and keep track of what people are saying.

The best bit is it’s all in real time! As soon as someone posts something it appears at the top of your feed. It can seem a bit too much if you’re subscribed to a lot of people’s feeds – items can pop up one after the other like a waterfall of information at times, but there’s a ‘Pause’ button you can hit at any time to relax and take stock.

Twitter addicts regularly complain about the lack of easy ways to separate your friends into different groups. With FriendFeed that’s easy.

Twitter addicts complain about keeping track of search terms being more difficult than it should be. With FriendFeed you can save searches for keywords across a wide range of Social Media services with ease. Want to know what’s hot in your area of interest? You can set up searches as simple or as complicated as you like and get an instant view of what’s going on.

FriendFeed handles media better than Twitter too. Twitpics are displayed inline, as are video and audio links – in many cases you can play them without leaving the current page.

As you can tell – I love FriendFeed. It’s not perfect – kinks in the new realtime interface are still being ironed out but as a discussion platform I much prefer it to Twitter. The main problem with it is you’re not there! I currently interact with hardcore FriendFeed users and it’s enjoyable enough but I miss the community of Twitterers that I regularly talk to.  Our discussions would be so much richer, and enriching, with FriendFeed.

So, you’ve heard my pitch. What do you think? Sign up and give it a go. Give it a week or two of interacting with the service before you pass a judgement.

My profile is here – subscribe to me and some other users you find interesting and let’s see if we can help the service gain some more traction. It’s well worth the effort!

That’s all well and good but all that noise comes from somewhere.  Why not kill it off at the source?  Sure, some of the “noise” that people complain about is perfectly useful stuff for someone, it’s just that one person’s news is another’s noise.  The real problem is the stuff that’s pretty much useless to everyone.  Social Media content that’s created for no reason other than because it can.

One example of this comes from FriendFeed.  They recently launched the ability to stream every single thing you do on their site to your Twitter account.  I very quickly had to unfollow a couple of people of Twitter who decided to stream every FriendFeed comment, ‘like’ and shared item onto Twitter.  It was noise that was useless to everyone.  If someone wanted to know about all this stuff they’d follow the user on FriendFeed too.  All these FriendFeed items on Twitter simply clogged up my feed, making it difficult for me to see ‘genuine’ tweets.

Another example of pointlessly created noise comes from one of my pet-hate Social Media apps; BriteKite.  The idea of BriteKite is location-based social networking.  Don’t get me wrong – location-based apps are very exciting and given time and mainstream acceptance they’ll be very useful.

For now though, the main way people seem to be using BriteKite is to ‘check in’ at locations.  This simply means telling the service where you are.  BriteKite can then let your Twitter followers know where you are by posting a Tweet saying “I’m at Wormwood Scrubs” or whatever.  The tweet is accompanied by a full address for the location.  Now, this has its uses but I think that sometimes people “check in” just for something to do.  Do I care that someone is at Rochdale Station or on 5th Avenue?  No, and neither do at least 99% of their followers.  It’s just irrelevant noise.

I’ve probably been guilty of creating some pointless noise myself but I’m certainly careful these days to ask myself “Do I really need to broadcast this?” before I sign up to a new Social Media service.  So, maybe its time to ask yourself “Am I noisier than I think?”

While I’m there posts on this blog will take a backseat and will be either short or non-existent.  Normal service will be resumed in a couple of weeks.  See you then!

As great as FriendFeed is, there’s a feeling among many of its users that it’s not living up to its potential.  Because of the type of people who tend to pick up on services like this first, all the hot debate is about technology and Social Media issues.  While that’s to be expected, is it also the reason that a wider range of people aren’t using it?

Let’s say ‘Joe Newbie’ wants to try out FriendFeed.  Here’s what he does:

1. He signs up and searches to see if any of his friends are already there.  They aren’t.

2. He sees the ‘Recommended users’ tab on the settings page.  “Great!  That’ll give me a taste of what this is all about!” he thinks.  But when he adds Bret Taylor, Chris Brogan, Dan Farber or any of the other people listed he finds that all they’re talking about is Technology and Social Media.

3. Bored in five minutes, he goes back to Facebook.

If, however, people were talking about what he enjoys (let’s say Football and going to music festivals) he’d have been more likely to stick around.

A search for ‘football’, for example, brings up lots of items but not many comments and conversations around them.

Thinking of music festivals, how about a search for ‘Glastonbury’?  Again, lots of items but little talk about them.

Try ‘Google’ though and it’s a different story – loads of comments and conversations.

How can we drive more interest groups to FriendFeed, making it a more interesting place in the process?  I’m guessing if you read this blog you’re into technology but you must be interested in other things.  Why not invite some people from other forums you visit over to FriendFeed?  Maybe set up a room for your favoured topic – that’ll ease Joe Newbie into the whole concept.  You never know, he might stick around this time!

One man who’s giving mobile blogging from Glastonbury a go is James Whatley. Not wanting to rely on phones like the one in this picture, he’s got a load of equipment together. His stash includes two Nokia N95s and an E61i as backup, plus a solar charger and lots more. He seems to be quite successful so far. You can find his blog here.

Meanwhile, several charity workers at the festival are using their phones’ GPS to post updates as to what they’re doing around the site. Alfie’s Blog has a map that allows you to follw their movements. As more devices become location-aware in the coming months we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing. Techcrunch has information on an upcoming iPhone application that uses GPS to allow people to gossip about what’s happening in the area directly around them, for example.

When it comes to an events like Glastonbury, mobile blogging and location services can give an extra dimension to the experience for those of us who can’t make it. We can always watch it on TV, but that’s not quite the same. Most of the BBC’s TV coverage centres on the bands, with only occasional ‘look at the freaks’ packages where they show crusties juggling, people falling in mud and Michael Eavis saying “We’re coping better than we did last year”.

As someone who’s never been to Glastonbury (when I was a student I couldn’t afford it, now that I work I can’t get time off to go) seeing frequent updates from the festival makes me feel a little less left out. Let’s just hope all these mobile bloggers have a plan for what to do when their batteries run out!

[Image Credit: whiper on Flickr]

Being so far from home brings with it a problem. How to keep in contact with those back home? I’m sure a lot of my family and friends will be interested in following our round trip through central Japan, taking in Tokyo, Mount Fuji and Kyoto. Postcards just don’t cut it any more. When I was in Turkey last September I posted 5 cards, none of which arrived at their destination. Add in the distinct possibility of me being home for weeks before a postcard from Japan has even had a chance to leave the country and it’s obvious a more hi-tech solution is needed.

So what am I going to do? Well, while I’m there my wifi and GPS-equipped phone (I’ll be taking an iPhone 3G with Nokia E61i for backup, most probably) will be my best friend, allowing me to send updates about what we’re doing via Twitter while my photos are geotagged and uploaded to my Flickr account. This means people back home will not only get regular updates about how we’re getting on, they’ll also be able to see photos *and* the exact location they were taken on a map!

It’s fair to say that most of my family and friends are not all that clued up on things like RSS feeds, so they’re not going to be already subscribed to my Twitter and Flickr. No, what I need is some way of bringing all this content together so they can just bookmark a web page and come back to it at any time to check up on the Japanese adventure. There are several options out there for doing this. I did consider setting up an account on Tumblr, for example. Instead, however, I’ve gone for the current darling of the Silicon Valley set, FriendFeed.

FriendFeed allows you to collect everything you do on various web services and put it all in one easy-to-find place. There’s more to it that that – the community side of things is great for discovering new information and content – but on the most basic level it’s about putting your life in one place. Here’s my FriendFeed profile, for example.

FriendFeed has recently launched a ‘Rooms’ feature. This allows you to cordon off your own little area, away from the bustle of the main FriendFeed community. Rooms can be Public, Semi-Public or Private, allowing you to control who gets to see the content. Those who are worried about their privacy and sharing things with strangers could set up an invite-only room. That could allow only their family to view or comment on their holiday snaps etc. Being someone who’s already sharing all this stuff anyway, that doesn’t bother me. I’ll still be setting up a room, however, as it’s a convenient way to create a separate ‘Holiday Feed’.

This plan, of course, relies on easy access to free wifi. I’m hoping some of our hotels will be obliging on this front. Nearer the time, I’ll post details of the room up on here and you can follow my holiday without the need for anything as archaic as postcards!

[Image credit: Kamoda on Flickr]