Adding Applications and Friends to your FriendFeed Account

Once you’ve established your account with FriendFeed, it’s easy to get lost and wonder what to do. The important thing to remember is that FriendFeed serves two purposes. The first is to aggregate your activity on other social networking and social media sites. The second is to connect with and make new friends.

So the first thing you should do is add all of your social media sites to your account. You do this by first clicking on your user name located at the front of the menu at the top right of the screen. This will take you to your personal page. At the top of the page will be some tabs. The rightmost tab says “Add/edit services”. Click on that to bring up a menu of social media that FriendFeed supports (see image).

At the bottom of this “screen” you’ll see a link that says “See all 59 services.” Click on that link and all 59 services will be displayed. On the right side of the list of services is a list of services you have currently active on your account. To add a service just click on the desired service name and follow the instructions. That service will then be added to your account.

A quick recommendation: for now I’d hold off adding Twitter to your FriendFeed stream. There are some quirks that if not dealt with will really irritate some of your Twitter followers. I’ll cover Twitter on FriendFeed later in this series.

After you’ve added all the services you wish to aggregate, you are then ready to add some friends. One word of warning here. Because your stream can rapidly get out of hand, I encourage you to add friends a little at a time. Once you get used to how things flow you can go to town. Add whoever you will.

Click on the friends link on your private feed page and you’ll be taken to a page that allows you to track and add friends to your stream. Across the top of this page are several tabs. The ones I’m interested right now are Imaginary, Recommended, and Find & Invite. The others I’ll touch on in another post.

Let’s start with Find & Invite. Clicking on this tab will take you to a page where you can choose to import all your contacts from Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, or Microsoft’s Hot Mail. It also allows you to search and find all your Twitter friends who are on FriendFeed and automatically subscribes you to their feeds. Like I said. I don’t recommend you do this with any of these services to begin with. Rather, I recommend that you use the middle area to invite just a few friends to join you on FriendFeed.

Here you enter your friend’s email address. You can enter multiple addresses separating them by commas. Then modify the personal message any way you wish (although you should leave the included link alone). Once you are ready, click send invitations and your message will go out to each addressee. They can then click on the included link and come visit your feed, where they can get their own account if they wish.

The area at the bottom is used to activate the FriendFeed application in FaceBook. If you have a FaceBook account, activating this application will keep all your FaceBook friends up to date with you FriendFeed activity. You’ll have to be logged into your FaceBook account and then add FriendFeed to your profile page once you’ve activated the connection. If you need help with that leave me a comment or send me an email, and I’ll talk you through it.

Clicking on the Recommended tab will cause FriendFeed to display a listing of people you might find interesting. You can subscribe to their feeds by clicking on the subscribe button under their name.

Finally you can have imaginary friends without actually being insane. What FriendFeed calls imaginary friends are people who do not have a FriendFeed account, but are active on social media sites. To create an imaginary friend you first click on the tab. You will be taken to a screen with one button labeled “Create Imaginary Friend”. Clicking that button will bring up a dialog box where you type in the name of your friend. This will create a FriendFeed page for your friend. Then all you have to do is add the services you know your friend uses. You’ll have to know your friend’s user name for each service, but you should already.

Once this is done you can assign your friend to one of your lists at the left side of your screen by clicking the add/edit link at the top of the page next to the Friend lists prompt.

Well, that’s probably more than enough for now. If any of this has been confusing or you need clarification. Leave me a comment or send me an email (click the email icon at the very top of this page — in the header). I’ll try to clarify things for you.

Next week we’ll talk about configuring specific aspects of your account.

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