More Connected by the Minute.

I came across yet another neat social networking tool that has the potential to be used in the academic world. FriendFeed allows you to connect to a variety of people, and condenses all the various multimedia tools people use into a single feed. It essentially creates individual user feeds which can contain almost anything. Some common items included are: blogs, twitter postings, amazon favorites, flickr accounts, facebook postings, youtube videos etc. Users can then subscribe to groups or other users based on their interests. So far the best way I can describe the site is to say that it is something like a glorified RRS feed with a community attatched to it.

In addition to the RRS feed type component of FriendFeed, the site is easily searchable, provides possible 'friend' recommendations, allows you to keep track of other sites which are not linked up to FriendFeed and lets users select their level of privacy. The site could easily be used by academic users who are attempting to keep on top of various times of media which is relevant to their work. My only qualm thus far is that because there is such a wide range of features on the site it does take a little bit of time to attempt to understand how everything works and connects.