I just wanted to write a quick note about FriendFeed. First off, I wanted to let all of you know that I am now using the FriendFeed service in case you’re interested in my various online activities outside of this blog. You can find my feed at http://friendfeed.com/mithrill. Second, I wanted to write a few quick impressions of the FriendFeed service.

Before I outline my impressions of FriendFeed, I want to explain what it is for those of you who are not yet familiar with the service. FriendFeed provides a consolidated feed of various online services such as YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, Netflix, etc. (support 33 services at this point). So basically, when I Digg a story or write a Twitter message, FriendFeed will keep track of it on a single web page and feed. Keeping track of your own stuff isn’t particularly useful to you because you know what you did where but it helps your friends keep track your various online persona’s.

I’ve only been using FriendFeed for a couple of days even though I’ve known about the service for a while. Given my short experience with the service, I don’t have a very detailed review. However, I can say from setting up the service that it is super easy to use. Its not at all complicated to add your different profiles. In most cases you simply need to provide your user name. For the weird cases, like Netflix where you have to add an RSS feed that you may not have known existed for your account, FriendFeed provides good directions and a link to the place where you’d obtain the info.

The FriendFeed interface is really easy to navigate and read. Its very clean looking. Unlike many of the social media sites, you don’t have the option to customize the design of the page but that doesn’t bother me because in most cases people will be reading the info via a feed reader or on iGoogle.

Something else that I really like about the service was that limited amount of information you have to provide in order to sign up for an account. In just about every case when adding services to your feed, you don’t have to provide the password to that service, just your user name (the one exception I can think of it Twitter if you protect your updates). This is quite different from my short-lived experience with Pownce (I almost immediately deleted my account after seeing how invasive it was). During setup FriendFeed does ask if you want to import your contacts from you web mail in order to find out if any of your friends use the service. I did opted out of doing that because I’m not too fond of giving that amount of control to an application especially when it requests the password to your email account in order to do it. Hopefully, when Google Contacts API gets off the ground requests like these will be minimized.

It does at times seem a bit slow to refresh items. Of course this could not be problem with FriendFeed at all but one with the refresh rate of the service its pulling from. For instance, I’ve noticed it takes a few hours for a video favored on YouTube to show up on my feed. In actuality this is not a problem because you don’t need this type of information in real time. Its not going to hurt me if I don’t find out the instance one of my friends finds a cool video. Nonetheless, since this is a mini-review of FriendFeed I thought I bring up my observation.

So feel free to subscribe to my FriendFeed in your feed reader and also add me as a friend if you use any of the other services listed on my feed. Additionally, if you use FriendFeed leave a link to your account via the comments below.

For those who prefer not to use FriendFeed, I do try to keep my About page current with a links to my different online accounts. This also seems like a logical place for me to plug my Wii friend code: 4184 2367 4442 0239.