7 Ways to Utilize FriendFeed Rooms
May 23, 2008
Yesterday, FriendFeed launched a new feature called FriendFeed Rooms. Rooms allow you to create your own public or private area where you can post the same types of messages you can to FriendFeed directly. FriendFeed also introduced a “Reshare” feature which allows you to re-broadcast an existing post to your feed or to a specific room.
So what makes this so special? Jaiku offered channels a while ago and it didn’t work out to well, so why will FriendFeed Rooms make any difference? No one is exactly sure yet, but here are 7 ways you can possibly utilize them for your purposes:
- Use rooms to reduce FriendFeed noise. If you do not want to utilize the existing tools for reducing noise (discovery + hide + filters), you can setup FriendFeed not to follow any particular person, but you can join a specific topic based room. This requires little effort and allows the user to get good content fed to them quickly. (This depends on the quality of the content of the room of course)
- Use rooms as a discussion forum. The layout of FriendFeed is similar to that of discussion forums but lacking in many of the advanced features. But in essence, you have a topic, and comments about a certain topic, giving one a very basic forum. Rooms allow for these forums to be centered around a specific topic, and also make them public or private.
- Use rooms for live blogging. Someone on FriendFeed suggested this and I thought it was brilliant. You can create a FriendFeed room for live blogging events such as an Apple Keynote, post updates, and have users comment on each update.
- Use rooms for link aggregation. This is a direct result of FriendFeed’s “Reshare” feature. You could create a FriendFeed room dedicated for links found on the web surrounding a topic. Think of this as a del.icio.us but with discussion. Yes, I know this functionality is available in other places, but a FriendFeed Room could be used for it as well.
- Use rooms for photography tutorials. Credit Thomas Hawk for this idea. If you combine the Flickr integration with discussions, it makes for a powerful means of providing tips surrounding equipment and techniques. Flickr provides this within their groups, but the strength of FriendFeed lies with discussions and I believe the combination creates something powerful. There are already rooms for DSLR, Flickr Central, and Photowalking.
- Use rooms to plan events. If you wish to brainstorm ideas surrounding an event, each item can be a post within the room and members can discuss the pros and cons of each idea. This is an easy way to allow your group of people to plan and organize.
- Use rooms for technical support. This ties into the forum idea, but for small projects, a FriendFeed room could be a great way to track issues with software. If your project is not big enough for Getsatisfaction or Bugzilla, a FriendFeed room could be a quick way to interact with your user base. FriendFeed is using rooms for direct feedback now.
These are just some of the ways I gleaned from conversations on FriendFeed and from my own brain. What are some ways you utilize FriendFeed rooms? Are my methods wrong? A waste of time? Let me know.
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Tags: discussion, friendfeed, howto
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