Using FriendFeed To Follow Your Twitter Friends

Posted by Matt Singley on May 7, 2009 under Social Networking, Twitter, facebook, how-to | 10 Comments to Read

Easy integration with other social networks is new for FriendFeed

I’ve recently been getting a lot of emails from FriendFeed letting me know that somebody new is now following me over there. I have started receiving so many that I decided it needed to look into it…was I suddenly interesting whereas I was not before, or was there some change at FriendFeed that I needed to know about? Turns out I’m still not interesting, but there are some exciting changes at the social media aggregator FriendFeed, including the ability to import all of you Twitter friends’ feeds.

If you are are not familiar with FriendFeed, they describe their service as

“…a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends.

Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get an instant, customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from photos to interesting links and videos to messages just for you. And your friends get their customized feeds, full of the cool stuff that you’ve shared.”

Once you sign up, make sure that you add your services, particularly Twitter and Facebook. To import FriendFeed profiles from people you follow in these other services, simply look in the right side navigation bar called “Friends” and click on the link at the bottom that says “Browse/edit friends”. In that next page, in the upper right corner click “Find/invite friends”. You’ll then be presented with icons from Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail, and you can click any of them to find your friends from those other networks.

Easily find your friends from other social networks with FriendFeed

Clicking on the Twitter button will prompt you for your username (it does not ask you for your password) and then you simply click on the “Find Friends” button, and a screen will appear with all of the people that you are friends with on Twitter that also have a FriendFeed account. You have an option at the bottom to put them into a category, I selected the very natural choice “Twitter Friends”. Save your preferences and that’s it! Pretty cool.

Beyond Twitter and Facebook, there are a lot of other services (57 to be exact) that you can aggregate into your FriendFeed. I import Twitter, this blog feed, Flickr, Last.FM and Pandora. Occasionally I will share items from my Google Reader like I am interested in also. I like FriendFeed a lot, although I still spend most of my time using the Twitter service because I can more easily navigate, learn and communicate with 3rd party tools like Tweetdeck. Are you on FriendFeed? If so, hit me up, let’s get in touch.

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Tags: add, emails, facebook, friendfeed, social network, Twitter

Richard said,

interesting! i was thinking about this today, been getting lots of followers etc, thanks for the update
Matt Singley said,

Glad it’s useful, Richard! Solves quite a mystery for me too.
ascrivner said,

Howdy ho! Great article, thanks a million, that worked like a charm.
Gina Schreck said,

Wow this was exactly the question I had–”Am I suddenly interesting or is something going on at FF?” Thanks for helping me understand that Im really NOT that interesting all of a sudden!”
Michael Bailey said,

It’s like having 57 televisions all turned on to a different channel – sure, there’s a bunch of noise, but nobody is really “there”. To each there own I suppose, but it’s offers to added-value to me.
Adam said,

Been using friendfeed more and more lately. Though I wish they’d add a way to bulk move people into groups. When I imported my twitter people I put them in their own group and now wish I had them all on my home page so I could scan through all my tweets in real-time.
Matt Singley said,

@Adam…I agree, moving people into groups AFTER you add them is amazingly complicated. A bulk tool would rock.
Donna Brewington White said,

This answers one of those questions for which “I didn’t know where to start” to get the answer. Thank you!
Jack said,

Sorry, I don’t get it. Importing friends from twitter who are ALSO on friendfeed isn’t aggregating, in my book. It’s just a slightly easier way to find people on friendfeed.
How do I redirect my existing twitter stream (ie all the friends I follow, not just the banal updates I spew out) into freindfeed? ie, I never want to go to the twitter web page again, just view all the updates that I would see there, in friendfeed.

I’m a new feed/twit/face user, but pretty savvy in computers (unix device drivers, enterprise storage systems). I find these services totally baffling.

Even the english used on support pages seems to be the result of a cafeine and modafinil extended work session.
Eg, this from twitter support: “Any tweet beginning with @username is considered a reply. We call tweets with @username elsewhere in the update mentions.”

This results in a parsing error, for me. I think they they mean “tweet” when they say “update” and they need at least an apostrophe after “update”, and preferably quotes around “mention”’s. So they should have said “…tweets which have @username somewhere other than at the beginning, are called ‘mentions’ “
Andrew said,

I have the same question as Jack.

“How do I redirect my existing twitter stream (ie all the friends I follow, not just the banal updates I spew out) into freindfeed? ie, I never want to go to the twitter web page again, just view all the updates that I would see there, in friendfeed.”