I’ve made a concious decision lately. I’m going to use FriendFeed more. What is FriendFeed? Lets see if I can explain this. You have a blog right? Flickr account? Delicious? Digg? You get the idea. You write to your blog actively, upload photos to Flickr regularly, and bookmark sites to delicious daily. When you create an account at FriendFeed, you tell it about all of these sites and accounts. You can even add things like your Amazon Wishlist, YouTube account, Google Reader shared articles, and many more. You tell FriendFeed about all these sites, accounts, and things so that it will aggregate it all into a single place. Your friends on FriendFeed can then subscribe to your FriendFeed account and see updates as they happen. Twitter posts show up as you post on Twitter, new blog posts are aggregated, and new photos from Flickr are displayed. With me so far?

FriendFeed’s been around for a nice little while. You might have even heard someone mention it. It’s a little like Twitter in that people will at first, have a hard time understanding it. But it is a nice and interesting way crowd source news.

And that’s where FriendFeed’s shining gem lies. As people get on the service and begin marking “Like” on different articles and share various findings from the web you can find a lot of interesting articles on a lot of topics. Everything from information on the latest Iran election riots to iPhone news.

With all this in mind, using FriendFeed takes some getting used to. It’s different than Twitter. And it requires a lot more than just casual observence. You have to read the articles and “Like” things and comment on items as well. You have to be involved.  While I don’t have the time to focus on it full time like some people do, it is a nice way to see what’s going on.  If you utilize it’s Groups feature you can really segregate your news by subject.  But it still works best when you follow people that talk about the things you’re interested in.  That is where you will derive the most value out of the service.

I’m hoping that over time I can really come to understand the full power of FriendFeed and find a way to integrate it into my daily online routine.  This is going to take time though.