FriendFeed takes a interesting step

May 22, 2008

FriendFeed is one of my favorite places on the web. Not only does it aggregate the various content I produce on the web, it is beautifully designed and has spawned one of the best little biogeek communities on the web (case in point this wonderful discussion on code repositories for science).

Today, FriendFeed added a new feature; rooms. Will rooms be useful? The jury is still out, since they’ve been around for all but a couple of hours, but that didn’t stop me from creating a room for our community there. My hope for The Life Scientists is that it will become the kind of resource for me that Digg or Reddit have never become; place for us to share our miscellaneous links and items of interest.

At a more fundamental level, I’ve often talked about trust (channeling Jon Udell). That’s one of the reasons I really like Lijit (which needs to add FriendFeed post haste). The rooms in FriendFeed could become the custom Reddit I always wanted, a trusted source of information. Of course, this being the web, I am cautiously optimistic, but given the quality of FriendFeed thus far, I think that optimism is somewhat justified. The challenge is going to be correctly balancing my own feed with the room.

Image via Wikipedia

Technorati Tags: FriendFeed, Reddit, Digg, Lifestream, Social Networks