It’s time to make your acquaintance with friendfeed

Exactly one year ago I blogged about a new trend with social media sites called  social aggregators.  While everybody was waiting for the next facebook, a new type of service was popping up that allowed people to aggregate all their feeds from facebook, blogs, flickr, Youtube, slideshare, twitter, Linkedin and many others into one stream through one main interface.

Social aggregators are like RSS newsreaders – but for all your social streams…. which we call your lifestream.  

The problem then was that outside of facebook, very few of my friends were actively contributing to other social media channels… so what was the point?  

Then something unexpected happened – twitter exploded in growth and popularity and everybody forgot about aggregators. 

How is that my friendfeed subscription requests have ballooned to 300 in a week? 

Quite simply, they added a utility that allows you to auto-find and invite your twitter followers to your friendfeed subscription. Twitter recently released updated APIs which make it easier for other sites to tap into the social graph of twitter.  

Having said that, it’s not like suddenly all my friends are contributing to multiple sources.  95% of my friendfeed subscriptions are just twitter streams as seen above. 4% are facebook streams, and 1% is mixture of slideshare, flickr, and YouTube.

Brands who publish to multiple sites (flickr, Youtube, twitter, facebook, their own blog etc…) have an opportunity to create an aggregate brand personality online with friendfeed that allows users to follow, comment, and interact with the brand in a user friendly and intuitive way. 

It’s like creating your own skittles site – but actually in the true spirit of what social media is all about.