FriendFeed

FriendFeed aims at enhancing sociability among people through sharing of online content. This is achieved by seamless sharing of streams of information to which pooling keeps occurring at different stages. FriendFeed effortlessly allows its members to remain up-to-date about web pages, photos, videos and music that are shared by friends and family. When a user signs up to FriendFeed, it is followed by sending invites to friends. Consequently, the new member receives a customized feed that is made up of the content already being shared by the added friends. This content may have items like news articles, family photos or links to interesting websites and videos. Automatic importing of the common material from sites across the web occurs after the users tell the feed the networks the information belongs to. Consequently, if one of the friends favorites a video, the link and the thumbnail would automatically be sent as part of the feed to rest of the members of the group. It eliminates the need of communicating the links of the websites on the part of the user as this act is mechanically performed by the softwares FriendFeed employs. The networks which FriendFeed can track sharing from includes the likes of digg, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, Google Reader, YouTube, Flickr, Zoomr and many more. often In short FriendFeed is often credited as a great attempt to add to the social quotient people have. It was created by four engineers Bret Taylor (Co-founder), Jim Corris (Co-founder), Paul Buchheit (Co-founder) and Sanjeev Singh (Co-founder), all of whom have also worked at Google and been behind a no. of Google launches. Later many others were added which include Ana Yang, Kevin Fox, Tudor Bosman and Casey Muller. It is headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States and was launched on Feb 25 '08. There are several small yet tangible differences that separate FriendFeed from others in its class. One such difference is the ability to set up own 'Rooms' to have discussions. Setting up a room is possible by just a click on the 'rooms' tab on the top of the home. These can be designated as 'public rooms' allowing anyone to join or private rooms if the sharings have to be restricted to a few members only. One can also join any of the already existing rooms by clicking on the 'join this room' tab. The updating process however takes more time as compared to other sites. This online application has a unique objective i.e. to bring the close ones even closer. Use of varying shades of blue has been done effectively to make it appear peppy, conveying the correct message of fun and frolic. The home page does not throw the information on the user like many sites; rather it facilitates a smooth sliding into the heap. It has a list of icons to help identify the websites whose matter can be shared. Moving among pages is not a complex task. The site even gives a demonstration of how it works. It also gives a brief about the founders. On the whole, it is simple in design and execution. Creation of account is really a simple procedure. Only name, nickname, password and e-mail address is to be given. That is all it takes to create the account. This website provides the services free of cost. A funding of $5M was announced at the time of launching to take care of its operations. It can be of immense help to those who wish to keep a track of the proceedings of one or more events, as the progress made by one of the members is conveyed on its own to others having similar interests. This makes the discussions more appropriate and aligned to the topic resulting in greater benefits to the participants.