FriendFeed: What it is and why you should be using it

FriendFeed: What it is and why you should be using it
What is FriendFeed?
FriendFeed is a great application that I first started playing around with last October, but something which in recent months has helped me to keep a track on what I do on a daily basis, to keep abreast on what my friends are doing, and to discover new people and content out on the social web.
For a great explanation of what the application is all about, check out this video of a presentation given by co-founder Bret Taylor at FOWA 2008 London. (And no, I'm not being paid to write this).
Why should I be using FriendFeed?
Because I've never found anything that allows you to keep a track on the masses of information that social networking sites now provide. Have you embraced Web 2.0, and all the various sites that allow you to swap and share content with your friends? Great! YouTube for video, Flickr for pictures, Delicious for bookmarks, Last.fm for music and Facebook for general updates. Perhaps you've recently picked up on Twitter, or like me, you want to build the LinkdIn profile that you've had since 2003 and never really done anything with.
But how once you've built up those profiles, it becomes almost impossible to keep a track on everything you've done, let alone what you're friends are doing.
How does FriendFeed help, though?
With one profile you can import all your data from 52 services which then appear as updates when you, for example, upload videos on YouTube or write a blog. It creates a simple stream of updates from what you've been doing across the internet
When is that of any use?
I often find that during the course of a day, I will often scan through the news in Google reader, picking out articles I like with the 'share' button. Similarly, I might StumbleUpon a few websites and bookmark the pages using FriendFeed's bookmarklet tool, or favourite a video I've seen on YouTube.
When it comes to the end of the day, I can scan through the list and pick out a handful of the most interesting things as a link list article for the website.
From a discovery point of view, it's great because you can choose to subscribe to a list of people as 'friends', both close friends and relatives as well as people who you perhaps admire or are fans of, such as Robert Scoble or Matt Cutts. The strength of the site is the way that you can decide how their feed is displayed. You can choose to see the whole feed of a single person in its entirety, or single out their updates from one particular site - such as say YouTube.
You can then group people in categories. For example, those people that I know locally live in one section, those who are famous tech people in another, those who are journalism bloggers in another, and so on.
Another thing that's great is that in the settings you can choose to export the updates that FriendFeed collates, and then export that as a feed in its own right or post them to Twitter. I tend to find this is useful because it allows people to track what I'm doing - which is also helping to build my admittedly small following.
Who should use it?
Anyone who finds it difficult to track everything that's going on.
Are you on FriendFeed and think I should be looking at at what you do. Let me know. Want to see what I'm up to: check out my FriendFeed feed.