Benefits of installing the Friendfeed Facebook application
Most of the times I do not bother installing facebook apps of services I am using because they have the tendency to do 'more' stuff than the original intent. Also I try to be very careful about what I do to my profile(s) and set up 'information flow rules' in how I put information somewhere.Friendfeed is a collection of your streams, or in my case the streams I find 'worthy' enough to be displayed as mine. Meaning I will not give you my every Upcoming entry, nor Amazon wish list entry etc, and I will heavily try to avoid duplicates. Up until now that meant routing my twitter updates to status updates on my Facebook profile, as it makes sense but for example not include my jaiku stream in Friendfeed because jaiku just receives my twitter updates.
And while friendfeed has a lot of relevant features missing, I somehow like them and I see how they improve their offering.
The (un) expected benefit
It puts all the entries of my friendfeed page into facebook and while I would have preferred to have an option of a 'clean' feed without liking / comments, I can see why they provide it. I added this to my facebook profile because it makes sense to show what I am doing in other spaces.
I did expect to be able to find the friends on Facebook who also use the service, and to be able to subscribe to them. Which it did, and I now doubled the number of people I am subscribed to - in other words, roughly a third of my facebook friends seem to be on Friendfeed with the app installed.
What I did not expect was the automated subscription (nice) plus the subscribing back - it seems as if everybody who has installed the app on facebook now is automatically subscribed to me. I have a hunch that they did not get the information via mail like they would have gotten if I manually subscribed to them (bad), but they should see me suddenly popping up in their friendfeed.
So if you like an easy subscribe / subscribe back, use the facebook app. If you rather would not like to see it pollute your profile, just remove the box afterwards, but make sure to add a link in your "profiles in other spaces" section in facebook, because people like myself love to explore where you are in other spaces.
Different for example to the stumbleupon facebook app, where I up until today do not know how to subscribe to my friends without spamming everybody else, this is a nicely done and usable facebook application! :)
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6 comments
- That is something unexpected!
I was actually surprised when it asked all kind of permissions when adding and I thought of removing them later. I suspect most people, myself included, don’t really look at what permissions we are giving away
Angsuman Chakraborty 30 March '08 - 12:01 - wow, you sure have a lot of early adopter friends. i’ve had friendfeed since january, and still none of my facebook friends have caught on.
allan hough 30 March '08 - 23:24 - Ah, THIS is why I am following so many ppl on FRiefeed w/o remembering to have them subscribed manually ;)
Oliver 31 March '08 - 00:51 - @Angsuman
I actually usually do look very careful, not reading eulas so much, but this is one of my pet peeves and the reason I have done nothing with socialthing and most likely never will.
@Allen I have that many friends in these certain areas but your answer made me realize that I miscalculated, I took the total number and set them in comparison to my fb friends which of course is stupid. Still, adding the fb app added an additional fifth of my fb friends to ff to the ones already using it.
and it is possible that I do have a total of 20-30% of my fb friends as ff users just due to the nature of what people I am connected to. (It would be higher but a lot of my german friends surely will take their time).
Anyway, I was surprised at how big that was.
@Oliver
Sometimes it also seems because people add a “with friends” feed or so. Unsubscribing certain feed types plus that are my most used option. ;)
It is true that they have not activly subscribed, but it would be nice to see who is suddenly following you as well :)
Plus I smell trouble in the system because what if you do remove the FB app, will they unsubscribe you at once? That should become more sophisticated over time.
Nicole 31 March '08 - 03:42 - Thanks, I add the app to my Facebook because of your post. :)
felix 31 March '08 - 05:57 - I never know that we can do in this way.. thanks
Jeslyn Wong 23 May '08 - 01:18
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