What Are Your Friends Up To?
By Mark Levy, CEO MaxxoMedia
I thought I had the social network angle all covered with my Facebook profile, Linkedin profile, Plaxo, my website and a blog. But then I noticed people “Twittering” and “Zanneling” through my Facebook updates and I was intrigued. What were these new strange verbs, I thought?
So I went over to www.twitter.com and www.zannel.com and I looked around.
What I found was people of all ages, all across the globe sharing their lives in bite size bits — sharing web pages, photos, news stories and conversations being overheard. More bits sharing ideas, new product launches, videos, bookmarks and slideshows. Even more bits with moments of the mundane, the sad and the peculiar.
Then I dug a little more and found that there are many more sites with strange names, encouraging people to share their interests, loves, hates and lives. Some of the sites share information with other sites. They create a daisy chain effect where, for instance, I can Zannel a new video of the woodpecker harassing me during my conference calls, and it will feed the link to my Twitter account, which then feeds Plaxo and Facebook.
But what if you wanted to share and collect all the information on all your friends regardless of which site they are using? 
Enter FriendFeed. (www.friendfeed.com) FriendFeed enables me to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that my friends and family are sharing. It automatically imports shared stuff from a list of 35+ social-oriented sites across the web.
The list of sites that feed into the service includes popular photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picasa web albums and Smugmug; video sharing sites including YouTube, Vimeo and Seesmic, and even online radio services like Pandora and Last.fm. In fact, pretty much anything you want to share with others can be fed into FriendFeed. 
Here’s what I learned today from my friends on FriendFeed: Xerox is getting out of the copier business. Robert Scoble has 25 stickers on the side of his Mac. A company named Infectious is offering custom art to personalize the outside of your car. I also found out Marcus needs more sleep.
So what do all these little updates and tidbits mean to me?
Well, last week I removed Fox News from my home page feeds because the “news” they report is never new. It feeds on the downtrodden, the mentally ill and the foibles and tragedies of mankind. I had enough.
With FriendFeed, I get news that my friends think are interesting in their lives and the lives of others — the people I share with and follow provide updates on things they are building, investing in and caring about. They provide a vision into the goodness of this world that seems to have lost its way in mass media. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend my day being fed a healthy diet of optimism.
It’s good to have friends.
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