Streamline Your FriendFeed Experience with FriendVenn

20 Jul 2008

Yesterday, I found a nifty tool for FriendFeed, which allows one to get a detailed view of their FriendFeed “universe”. It is called FriendVenn. Some would call it a social graph of sorts, but in essence, it details the relationships between you and your FriendFeed followers. To run the tool, you must input your FriendFeed username and password (NOT your remote access key), and let it do its thing. You must trust felix with this information in order to get into your account and present the data like so:

FriendVenn Results

The first column lists people you subscribe to, but have no subscribed back. The second column lists a reciprocated relationship, where you are subscribed to individuals and they have subscribed back. The third column shows people who have subscribed to you, but you have not subscribed back. So what does this all mean? That last column is the area of most concern. These are people who took the time out to subscribe to your feed and you have not subscribed back.

After using the tool, my first task was to subscribe to all those in that third column right away. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to stay subscribed to them, but I at least want to see what they share to see what we have in common. So far, I’ve had mixed results with this experiment, as some of my followers don’t even speak or share English! Since I can’t read Arabic, Chinese or Japanese, I’ve been forced to unsubscribe to these folks.

My next area of concern was the first column. Why didn’t these people reciprocate my request? Could it be the same reason that I didn’t reciprocate my followers? Laziness? At any rate, I took action and unsubscribed to most of the individuals in that regard. The tool seem to have a little glitch in this area, since I’ve visited some of these profiles and noticed they were actually subscribed to me. Before taking action, I verified this was actually true. With anything, there are exceptions. Some of these people, I’m willing to follow even if they don’t follow me back.

Why go through all this trouble? I believe this exercise will make FriendFeed a more potent source of information for me. I’d rather not have a one way fire hose of activity in my stream. I’d like to know that if I contribute to a shared item, that the person will #1, care, #2, be willing to contribute to the conversation. The side effects of doing this, especially if you have a lot of followers, is that there will be a great deal of hiding at first. I’ve been using this hiding activity as a mechanism to filter who I’m interested in the most. If I’m constantly hiding activity from an individual, and they haven’t been contributing to my activity, then I believe that’s grounds for an un-follow. It’s nothing personal, it just means that we’re not utilizing FriendFeed to it’s fullest potential.

If you can find the time, I highly recommend utilizing FriendVeen to comb through your follower list so that you can perform your own evaluation. FriendFeed is only as good as the people you follow.

You can follow me on FriendFeed here: http://www.friendfeed.com/bwana