Review of Friendfeed apps

After using friendfeed for several months now, I've started to deviate away from their standard web interface and look for applications that can integrate my friendfeed into my day to day work without the requirement to spend additional time browsing a web page.

I like friendfeed for its feed aggregation and its ability to add more than the 140 character limit that we have all being using on Twitter. The 140 limit is great for making messages succinct, but sometimes it just isn't enough. There are a number of desktop apps now, some listed below that are aggregating feeds to one source, but without the friendfeed text ability. I believe friendfeed will grow significantly in popularity this year.

What follows is a review of some of the tools I've started using, some are desktop apps, others expand the functionality of the standard interface via other web apps.

During my search I found Rob Diana's review of Friendfeed applications and to date the market hasn't changed that much. Although I've read lots of reviews of the simplicity of the Friendfeed API, this hasn't really been supported by a proliferation of Friendfeed applications springing up all over the place.

I also reviewed Mashable's list of friendfeed applications some of which seem to have now vanished. I visited the Friendfeed Machine for a start and it seems they have now stopped their app offering. Others are included in the list below.

First up, Alert Thingy, my first experience of a friendFeed app. Recently upgraded to v2 which interestingly dropped their support for friendfeed! They still support friendfeed through a separate app, but not via the main application. This was a bit of a blow to the app for me, it had recently been asking me to upgrade on launch and then failing with the upgrade. After visiting their site I downloaded v2 only to find that it didn't support friendfeed any longer. They have now separated the two and have a friendfeed app and a v2 that supports several other feeds such as Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. Which kind of defeats the beauty of friendfeed for me as a feed aggregator (including content directly placed into FF). The revised "old skool" Alert Thingy also obviously missed out on the design time spent on the new v2 Alert Thingy as I find the text quite indecipherable, compared to a nice interface on v2, I hope this will be addressed soon.

Feedalizr is an Adobe Air desktop app I have only just discovered, looks very similar to Alert Thingy, but I suppose after a while it's almost like reinventing the wheel when it comes to designing these UI's. I've got to say I am quite impressed with Feedlizer, its neat and allows feeds from many sources including Facebook, Jaiku, Twitter, Flickr and more. It allows you to filter by user or application, cutting your stream down to follow what you like. Not the same personalisation as you get from NoiseRiver, but they are two different beasts. I do find I have to turn off the systray update feature you get from the app, while its good for a while, its constant nature becomes a bit too much for me after a while.

Friendfeed apps uses Firefox and Greasemonkey to add additional functionality to the existing site. While I use Greasemonkey to add additional functionality to other web apps, such as blogger, I don't always find it works as smoothly as I'd like. I haven't tried ffapps additions, but I'd be interested to hear any feedback on them.

Sobees bTT , requires .NET client to be installed, not an unusual request but has hindered my uptake as it required a reboot even though I do have an older version of he .NET client already installed. I have now tried installing after a reboot, but there seems to have been an issue with .NET 3.5 framework install and it is still preventing me from installing bTT. I'll endeavour to continue and install it at some point, but it doesn't bode well from a usability perspective, although product does look good from the site info. I'll update at a later stage.

Friendfeed Spy, mentioned on Mashable's list has now furthered its coverage by accepting public feeds from Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed. This is a true mash-up of all public feed data for those of you with as much time on yours hands as a parking ticket fair play enforcement officer. With an overload of data flicking before your eyes in the blink of an eye, a great method of diving into the real-time web environment, but a bit bewildering for most. The guys who create this also created LastFM Music Maps and Twitter Spy providing a mix up between geographical and category specifics to fine tune feeds of music or twittering

NoiseRiver is an interesting offering extending the functionality and creating a more personalised feed from your existing friendfeed service. Using effectively a tagging service it allows you tailor your friendfeed experience, you can add keywords and then place favour upon these keywords which then grants specific priorities to those feed subject either promoting them or demoting them in your feed. In addition you can apply a similar process for your "friends", specifying how much you like or dislike a specific friend (heaven forbid anyone ever found this info, can you imagine the horror of being hated by fellow ff'ers!)

I found the review helpful myself, particularly my discovery of Feedalizr, something I can see myself using going forward. What it has highlighted though is after an initial burst on the market, there seems to have been a slight depression in the number of apps that are coming onto the market that are specifically targeting friendfeed. To be honest, this doesn't surprise me as the market now seems to be in applications that accept feeds from all sources, such as Feedalizr.

I'll leave you with this recent post by Josh Porter that reviews the standard web interface that friendfeed uses currently, interesting points raised by Josh.

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