Finding New Things with FriendFeed

I find myself becoming addicted to FriendFeed.  I started using the service about a day or two before it exploded everywhere.  I find that I"m actually discovering a number of things just by leaving it up all day.  Not only do I love finding out what's going on with the people I'm following, but their "everyone" public feed is great too.  Every now and then I'll click over there and just watch the stream of stuff coming from a ton of people, and I don't even know who they are.  Today I thought I'd see what searching for Dallas (where I am) in the public stream would get me.  I actually discovered that there's a WordCamp event this weekend here as a result.  I have no idea how I missed hearing about this before.  I'm thinking that since it is a WordPress thing, and I don't use WP, that I just passed over it if I saw it somewhere.  However, I'm now trying to figure out my weekend schedule and try to go.  It would be great to go and network with people, and try to learn more about WordPress.  And to think that I never would have seen this had it not been for FriendFeed.

Tweet Tweet, Feed me a Friend

I've known about Twitter for quite some time. It took me forever to actually sign up, but I finally did. The sign up screen told me to say what I was doing, so I typed in living, and that was that. I didn't sign on again for months. I really wanted to use it, since it was so popular amongst the people that I followed online. There was only one problem, and that was that no one I knew in real life used the service. I can easily understand how great this thing could be, but without actually having anyone I knew personally on there, it didn't seem to do my much good. I told people that I knew about it, but they weren't interested. In the end, I just couldn't bring myself to use the service, since it didn't do me a lot of good to know what Leo Laporte was doing for dinner. I thought about trying to follow it just to see the interesting things, and ignore the rest, but I never did get into it. Then, I was listening to an episode of net at night and they mentioned some new service called FriendFeed. It sounded like a nifty little service. You can sign up, and put in all the services that you use, and it will import all of the updates that you make on those services into a feed. Then, other people can decide to subscribe to your feed so that whenever you make any update to any of the services you're on, it immediately updates your FriendFeed, and all of your subscribers can see it in one place. These sorts of things are called lifestreaming services. Apparently, there are a number of them out there. Another popular one I've seen in called socialthing!. I've not used it, though, so I can't provide any first hand information about it. However, I don't need to since other people already have. The thing is, most of the traffic I see on my FriendFeed is from Twitter. I'm finding myself discovering a lot of new things just by watching the stream of updates that come through from the handful of people I'm subscribed to on FF. This made me want to use Twitter even more. On top of that, to hear things like what Scoble describes just sounds awesome. So now I'm finding myself actually more interested in Twitter because of FF. Also, since FriendFeed now lets you respond to Tweets (those are messages posted on Twitter) through your FF page, it is even more compelling for me to use. I still am faced with the problem that I don't really know of anyone in real life that uses, or even knows about this service. Perhaps I need to work harder on spreading the word.