Yesterday, the team over at FriendFeed made a radical move to their popular website, friendfeed.com. They turned the website into a giant river of ever-flowing information. For those of us who are familiar with the term, “real-time web”, we saw this as a positive step towards it becoming a reality. I’ve already blogged about ways to truly harness the power of real-time FriendFeed, and this new beta emboldens my tips. While there is much controversy on the implementation of the feature, I found myself enthralled by something else they added: filters.

As many have realized, FriendFeed provides a rich source of information for all kinds of interests. Since it aggregates data from social services which originate from all over the web, there is little that you can’t find on FriendFeed. Now with filters, FriendFeed has empowered us to save powerful queries for later usage. While these filters are not real-time like other parts of the site, they will be eventually (and what a day that will be)

Here’s my video walkthrough of the FriendFeed beta:

What is a FriendFeed filter? My loose definition is that it’s a set of defined criteria configured by the user in order to obtain desired data from FriendFeed. The criteria looks like the following:

• Name – This is the desired name of the FriendFeed Filter
• Include entries from – This is the source of the data you wish filter. The choices are all friendFeed users, your friend and group subscriptions, a specific pre-defined friendfeed list of friends/groups, and names of friendfeed users and groups.
• Keyword/quality filters – This is the filter criteria of the source data. There are several fields to utilize, but it should be noted that the “contain the words” field can utilize any FriendFeed search query string. I’ll explain later.

I found myself playing with these filters for most of the day yesterday and had a blast. I want to share with you some of the more powerful ones, but before I do, I will tell you the best way to create new filters. The basic steps are fairly straight forward:

1. Perform a search on the beta FriendFeed site – First, go here: http://beta.friendfeed.com/search/advanced and fill in the desired criteria. Perform the search and massage the search as needed. Some searches can be improved by updating the number of required comments and likes, so play with that a little bit.
2. Save the search as a filter – After a search is performed, you’ll notice a link that reads “make a filter”
   
   
   Click the “make a filter” link
3. Update the filter name and adjust as needed – Change the filter name to something more descriptive than the default text. Click Save filter to commit the filter
   
   
   

This is a basic, yet powerful approach to creating filters. Once you become more advanced, you’ll recognize the search syntax and perform boolean operands. Here are some of my favorite FriendFeed searches that you can save as filters by using the technique above. I’ll start with the search string, explain what it means, and provide a hyperlink (note: most of these search ALL of FriendFeed:

• Name: The FriendFeed Team
  
  Search String: comments:5 likes:5 from:tudor, bgolub, ana, gburd, kfury, jim, casey, sanjeev, paul, bret, dhsiao
  
  Meaning: Searches for all entries by the FriendFeed development team with at least 5 comments and 5 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Hot Comments
  
  Search String: service:(intensedebate) OR service:(backtype) OR service:(disqus) comments:1 likes:5
  
  Meaning: Searches all blog commenting services for entries with at least 1 comment and 5 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Hot FriendFeed Posts
  
  Search String: service:(friendfeed) comments:50 likes:30
  
  Meaning: Searches all native FriendFeed posts for entries with at least 50 comments and 30 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Hot Web Links
  
  Search String: service:(twine) OR service:(stumbleupon) OR service:(misterwong) OR service:(magnolia) OR service:(furl) OR service:(delicious) OR service:(diigo) comments:5 likes:10
  
  Meaning: Searches social bookmarking services for entries with at least 5 comments and 10 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Hot Photos
  
  Search String: service:(smugmug) OR service:(flickr) OR service:(fotolog) OR service:(photobucket) OR service:(zooomr) OR service:(picasa) comments:5 likes:10
  
  Meaning: Searches photo services for entries with at least 5 comments and 10 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Thomas Hawk’s Liked Photos
  
  Search String: service:(flickr) OR service:(smugmug) OR service:(fotolog) OR service:(photobucket) OR service:(picasa) OR service:(zooomr) like:thomashawk
  
  Meaning: Searches for photo entries liked by Thomas Hawk
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search
• Name: Hot Videos
  
  Search String: service:(youtube) OR service:(vimeo) OR service:(12seconds) OR service:(dailymotion) OR service:(joost) comments:5 likes:10
  
  Meaning: Searches for popular videos with at least 5 comments and 10 likes
  
  Link: Click here to use this FriendFeed Search

You get the idea? You can get very creative with these filters. I highly recommend you also review the advanced search operators as it will allow you to venture further:

If you have any questions relative to the FriendFeed beta, I recommend checking out their beta FAQ. Of course, you’ll find me on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/bwana.

Post written by Bwana