The advanced search features of Friendfeed makes it a pretty good twitter search alternative. It even supports real-time, so you can make your own twitter news monitors.

I wrote this for the Online Journalism Blog, read the rest there.

Friendfeed let’s you publish everything, or a few selected services to Twitter. If you have a lot of stuff going into your Friendfeed stream, you might not want to share everything on Twitter.

Sign up for an account on Friendfeed if you haven’t already got one. Import your Google Reader shared items and go to your Advanced Twitter Setting. Check the box that says ‘Post my FriendFeed entries on Twitter by default’, then select to share ‘The services I’ve selected below’ and put a check mark in Google Reader. Save Changes and your shared items will be republished to Twitter.

Link to the original source or the Friendfeed entry?

You might notice that at the top of the settings page, you have the choice of ‘Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation (does not apply to comments)’. If you don’t check this box, the link you send to Twitter will send your visitors to your Friendfeed entry. If you like me, want to encourage people to subscribe to your Friendfeed page you might like this. But for most people using Friendfeed only for this purpose, it makes sense to check it and send your visitors to the source.

Ryan has a great post on a more detailed strategy for sharing links, I encourage you to read it of you frequently share links on different platforms.

And… if you’re not too hung up on the Google Reader interface, consider installing Feedly into Firefox. It allows you to easily share stuff on Twitter, it even shorten the link.

It seems like hardcore twitter users are mostly trying to compare the two services, and friendfeed users take pride in separating the two.

I have been describing friendfeed as Twitter on steroids which I believe to be true to some extend. At least to someone who’s not familiar with friendfeed but is using Twitter like nobody’s business.

Some of the stuff that to me shows their differences are the fact that, you can’t link to individual comments and on Twitter we hate when users are simply spamming their streams with automatic rss feeds, where on friendfeed we love it. To me it suggests that people expect more intimacy on Twitter than they do on friendfeed, or that Twitter users expects some kind of selective sharing, where on friendfeed you are expected to share everything by default.

A lot of features separate the the services. Friendfeed has an impressive set of features that Twitter lack. This will undoubtly make friendfeed more popular by tech geeks and social media addicts who are used to dealing with lots of information and needs these filtering options. But, it seems like only a very small amount of friendfeed users can actually handle that amount of info, as only a small percentage of it’s users are actually subscribed to more than 40 friends. Or, is that just a snapshot of the active user-base that friendfeed currently has? Is Mike Arrington right after all?

here are some of the responses I got on friendfeed. I’m sorry I can’t link to them ;-)

friendfeed will not be superior to twitter for conversation before a feature to easily isolate, and link to individual comments is released.

I say:

[E]specially bloggers and news reporters, frequently use responses they get to questions posed on twitter in their final stories. Such responses would be impossible to link to here on friendfeed. And if friendfeed can’t persuade bloggers and news-makers to come over here, friendfeed will have a very hard time getting a substantial user-base.

Lindsay D.:

FriendFeed has a loyal following and community, many of who prefer it to Twitter for their day to day communication with others online, and take offense to Twitter being referred to as superior [...] FriendFeed outshines Twitter in many ways, and is much better for conversation in my opinion.

Lindsay D.:

So I would suggest that FF’s goal may not be to have bloggers linking comments in their blogs, but getting the whole conversation here instead. [...] I think the people who prefer Twitter are not the same as the people that prefer FriendFeed because they have different needs and expectations.

I say:

[A]n interesting take, that friendfeed is trying to steer away from individual comments because they want to focus on the whole debate. I think individual comments can be worth more than that, and a feature to like comments or link to them would be very useful I think. For example; a question about someones opinion on X, is encouraging opinion regardless of context and would give a lot of individual viewpoints that likely could be very worthy, even out of context.

This was simply some selective highlighting of the main points, but if you want the whole picture and participate in the discussion, I recommend you take a look at the original friendfeed entry.

I really like the potential of Friendfeed, and I want to get a few more subscribers than the 11 I have got now . here are a few of the things I’m going to try to change that.

• Use Friendfeed to post status updates.
  I will start posting status updates to Friendfeed and cc twitter. This will show my subscribers that I’m actually using Friendfeed and not just aggregating. The problem with people that only aggregate, is that they probably won’t see the comments you make on their entries. By posting actively to Friendfeed I can show that Iactually spend time there. The other upside is that all my short URLs on twitter will be ff.im/xxxxxx, people on twitter using Friendfeed can see that I’m on Friendfeed and maybe they’ll subscribe (I know it’s a long shot but anyway).
  Update: I have my twitter settings set to ‘Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation’, deselect that, and your twitter links go directly to your Friendfeed entry instead of the link source. It publicises your Friendfeed account more, but it also requires one more click on your users’ part. Scobleizer and Thomas Hawk use this so it can’t be that bad, considering they are some of the biggest Friendfeed users. – Maybe I should try it?
• Join rooms and, most importantly, contribute.
  Contribute to the community! Friendfeed supports ‘groups’ as they call them. Everyone can create their own room and invite others to post to them, this gives a space for a community to have a specialised discussion. A little like you know it from forums and discussion boards. Posting to these rooms should get my name out there to the Friendfeed community and hopefully a few people will notice and follow me.
• Use the Friendfeed bookmarklet
  The Friendfeed browser bookmarklet is actually quite handy. It works almost like the Shareaholic Firefox add-on . You can share anything on Friendfeed by the click of button. It’s an extremely easy way to post interesting links, and if you use the post to twitter option your links will go straight to your twitter stream. No more copy pasting into Tweetdeck or various URL shortening services.
• Discuss on Friendfeed, not twitter.
  I will start engaging more in the discussions that are happening on Friendfeed. It’s super easy to follow discussions on Friendfeed, they are all grouped together around the original post, like a blog post.
• Using saved searches (filters).
  This saved searches are really filters, bu t I guess saved searches make more sense to the average user. These let’s me filter for keywords, like count and comments count. Great feature if you want to cut down on all the noise and discover the most important discussions. Let’s say you are into formula 1, you can filter all entries with 1 or more like which have at least 5 comments, – powerful feature .
• Like more.
  It’s no secret that I have had doubts about what the like feature on Friendfeed and Facebook was good for. But with the saved searches function it really makes sense, it’s like a voting system where you can filter out the best entries. Whenever you like an entry, a little link to you Friendfeed profile is displayedjust underneath the entry saying ‘kasperbs liked this’.

It might sound like I’m all interested in the number of followers or subscribers. And I’m am, to a certain extend. For a service like Friendfeed to be more useful to me, I think you need to build a following just like you do on twitter. These services are great for instant discussion, but it doesn’t make sense if you are only talking to yourself. – That is why I still have the ‘post to twitter’ option turned on so all my updates will go to twitter, where most of the people who care, spend their time.

The new beta design of Friendfeed adds some really nice advanced filters. I’m really excited about the addition of ‘popularity filters’ as I call them. They allow you to search for conversations or posts, that have received x number of likes or comments.

Just imagine how you can put this to use in your own field. You can search everybody’s posts (or just your friends’) for keywords, and filter them in terms of popularity. You have a unique ability to catch content way before it makes it to the mainstream online media.

Full res. on flickr.