Weblog
Jun 11, 02:27 pm: Creating imaginary topical friends on FriendFeed?
The value of FriendFeed, clearly, is the ability to have people you know, like and/or respect (sometimes all three!) point to things and the comment on them in one big friendly pile.
But Marshall Kirkpatrick’s thoughts on microsites have been stuck in my head. That’s a great use of the internet for nonprofits. As Jon Stahl said in the comment here, “building out a thoughful custom project by weaving together a “pipeline” of commoditized services from the interweb, rather than relying on a monolithic “do-everyting” application.” Still, though, I’ve been trying to suss through easy ways to do this.
Maybe a combination of imaginary friends and rooms on FriendFeed is a way to do this. So, the imaginary friends feature lets you pull together the RSS tracks of your friend’s internet trails — if your friends haven’t yet done this for themselves on FriendFeed. And rooms is a way to gather together and join in a conversation.
Let’s say you want to pull together a microsite based on marriage equality — a topic that doesn’t get a lot of result in the FriendFeed search box but does show up on sites like flickr, del.icio.us etc. Well, find those RSS feeds, pull them together as an imaginary friend and then start a room joining that friend to the conversation (can you do that? I haven’t tried yet).
Of course, since an imaginary friend has an RSS feed this might be a way to pipe the aggregated content onto another site. Much less elegant than Marshall’s plan* but it might be quicker and easier way to do it. And it has the bonus of making it easy for people to follow, share bits, and engage in conversation.
Have you seen examples of this? Is there value to doing it in this tool or should it just happen on a website or, say, in a blog?
