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.

You can have multiple tabs open with several advanced searches going on. This seems like an improvement over something like Twitterfall, which is browser based, and doesn’t have the same advanced search functions.

Here are Yahoo’s goals for the app:

• Create a desktop application that allows for the creation, grouping, and auto-execution of advanced search queries against Twitter
• Leverage existing skill-sets and tools
• Target the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems and minimize the amount of platform specific code that must be written
• Open source the code so that others can learn from, contribute to, and/or extend the product as they see fit

But to be fair, it does also seem like the ONLY advantage is the advanced search. Sideline offers very little in terms of interaction, you can’t reply or DM anyone, you can’t even log in. You can mark tweets as favourites, but as you are not logged in, these will only be saved locally and won’t be viewable in your Twitter favourites.

Except for being a desktop client and featuring tabs, it doesn’t offer much more than the official twitter search. It only updates every minute, you can set this to be less frequent. But you can’t have it update every two seconds or so, meaning if you monitor popular search terms, you will be bombareded with 100’s of results to go through every minute.

Hopefully Yahoo will improve this Twitter client in the future to include some of the features that you have in TweetDeck and Twitterfall, but at the moment it doesn’t seem very usefull. I will stick to Twiterfall for my Twitter searches. But as mentioned on mashable:

Sideline seems to be more of a research project for Yahoo rather than building a new major new product or division.

There hasn’t been many reactions as of yet in the blogosphere, but there has been a few on Twitter:

mahadewa@avianto That’s cool :) re:sideline 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to avianto

alicam: Not sure if we need another Twitter search app but it works nicely – http://sideline.yahoo.com/ 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck

frumpa: trying out Yahoo’s Sideline but the links are NOT active hyperlinks http://sideline.yahoo.com 38 minutes ago from TweetDeck

e_D_D_y: Is Yahoo! SideLine an April Fools joke ? Can’t get any result, it’s just… empty :( about 1 hour ago from DestroyTwitter

Facebook now sends out your status updates directly to your fans news feed, exactly like Twitter. Users can even respond to your status updates from their own news feed, no need to go to the fan page any more.

All this crap you have been told about conversation, having a person behind the brand etc. – It is all a load of old rubbish. They’re just sorry for themselves, licking their wounds after having spent years of building up thousands of followers. You were the smart one; waited for Facebook to sort out your worries.

But they still say that I’m not ‘listening’

They’re just saying that to feel better, if you want to listen just look at the responses you get to your status updates. Users can now respond to them from their own news feed. You are just like one of their friends; they trust you.

Not even Facebook bothers about using Twitter in a serious way. Besides, look at this wine guy, Gary, one of the most popular Twitter’s. Just look how he’s using Facebook, exactly the same:

If that’s not enough, have a look at his latest video. Basically saying that Facebook is the ‘new thing’.

People will still bang on about minimalistic differences such as public versus personal conversation, listening to trends, monitoring your brand, expanding your network and all that nonsense. They will say stuff like; “You can’t monitor what your unhappy customers say” or that “You can’t see when people are talking about your brand away from your page”. Ignore it, why would you even want that? What the heck, point them to this post if you don’t want to bother with them.

I consider this a public service to all companies and businesses, who’s ever had to put up with the nonsense of social media experts and SxSW geeks. You can now finally forget about Twitter, period. Besides, we all know that Twitter is only about stalking celebrities anyway!

The audio of my Social Media presentation at WxWM (mp3) (courtesy of Rhubarb Radio).

Is there a difference between using social media profesionally or personally by kasperbs

The slides that accompanied my talk:

A list of all the other presentations (with audio) can be found at Rhubarb Radio

The Format:

Monday March 30th. around 2pm, 20+ online journalism students from Birmingham City University will use twitter to ask questions about twitter, signing their tweets ‘#twask‘. – We need people to help us answer their tweets; so if you are up for it, help us teach twitter by following the #twask hashtag Monday afternoon.

Background:

As some of you may know, I run BirminghamRecycled.co.uk and have a great team of online journalism students, mentored by Paul Bradshaw , to help me. We see twitter as one of the most important tools in our online journalism toolbox; both as a research tool, but mainly as a way of keeping in touch with our users. One of the primary objectives of the site is to interact and connect with the local community of bloggers and content producers.

The majority of students have had no prior experience with twitter and have now only been using it for a couple of weeks. Some are starting to find their feet and are now looking to build their twitter profile, expanding on what they have already learned. Others find it harder to get to grips with the social and conversational nature of twitter, and are a bit uncomfortable with the idea of ‘stalking’ strangers online.

We hope by arranging a session like this, we will demonstrate how useful twitter can be when multiple people are talking about the same thing. It will give the more adapt twitterers a chance to explore ideas around the use of hashtags , and introduce beginners to @replies and the social aspect of twitter in general. But most importantly it will be a, hopefully, fun exercise for everyone.

But how do you actually explain twitter to someone who’s never used it before? Well, Paul gave students 10 people to follow trying get everything going, which for the most part went pretty well. Unfortunately @chloebb got confused over @replies and actually following people. She was probably the busiest tweeter of the bunch but the tweets ended up like this:

Joanna Geary picked up on it and thought she was being spammed by a twitter bot and @paulbradshaw eventually ended up apologizing and everyone was happy again.

The best thing is probably just to throw yourself in there, not being afraid of what you might or might not say. Focus on understanding the basics will probably be the best way to go, start following a few people. Don’t start out by following 2000 people as long as your account is relatively new. If a new user who only has a few updates starts following 1000′s of people, it’s usually a spammer who just hope people will auto-follow back. Understand that twitter is a social network more than a publishing platform. It’s strength lies in instant discussion and the ability to dig into ongoing discussions in real time. It’s a stream of commentary and open discussion between people, imagine a busy conference where you just pick and choose who you want to listen to. Any time you log onto twitter, you get a snapshot of the world at that particular time.

Twitter is really great for learning by doing, and I think that’s the best way to go. You pick up on things that are going on and respond to them in your own way. But if you are stuck and don’t really feel comfortable just throwing yourself to the masses, try creating a twitter template. Basically picking 5 twitter users that you enjoy or you know are popular (they must be doing something right), analyse their tweets and see if you can find a pattern and replicate that with your own tweets.

A few templates worth highlighting from twitip.com:

@kevinrose wrote -> Lunch then movie at home, relaxing weekend. http://twitpic.com/zeeb
Template – What I’m doing -> picture

@tferriss wrote -> Experimenting w/ various ways to start a fire in a fireplace. How about a Coke can + bar of chocolate? http://tr.im/2nor Your tips + tricks?
Template – Ask question? Offer potential answer (or title) -> link -> question?

And a few I just made up to get you networking:

Being a web designer, I probably tend to notice the visual appearance of profiles a little more than the average Twitter user. When I run into a cool looking Twitter profile, I almost always find myself clicking on to the authors website and for the most part end up actually following.

Twitter has found a way to let people customize their profiles, but only to an extend where it still looks clean. They have found the magical middle ground between the messy MySpace profiles and the über clean Facebook pages. The limitations of a changing a few colours and only use one background image, encourage creativity.

Anyway I love Twitter and I love great looking Twitter profiles. It was actually @MakeLiterature who inspired me to do this blog post, as I think their list could use some additions, although I won’t go as far as listing my own profile ;).

As Twitter is currently as (or more) popular than Digg, I was surprised to find that my poor google skills only turned out a few blog posts on this. I have already mention one of them, there is Gopal also who listed his 12 favourite Twitter designs, only to realise two weeks later that he had 15 more. Lee Munroe also has a nice list although I don’t know if they are all original creations.

The Finalists

I wanted to narrow my list down to 10, but I started out with a few finalists:

• @benek from BenekDesign.com
• @divvoted from divvoted.com
• @jakemarsh from TheJakeMarsh.com
• @pixellent from styledeficit.com
• @justtweetit from JustTweetIt.com
• @imjustcreative from ImJustCreative.com
• @chricoyier from css-tricks.com
• @Nabbit from nabbit.com
• @chrisbrogan from ChrisBrogan.com
• @waynesutton from SocialWayne.com
• @SeanMcColgan from ForwardslashMedia.co.uk
• @bzkicks from BZKicks.com
• @MtTweet from MrTweet.net
• @mashable from Mashable.com
• @garyvee from GaryVaynerchuck.com
• @problogger from ProBlogger.net
• @keylimecreative from KeyLimeCreative.ca
• @939design from 939Design.com

A pretty neat list with a few ‘Twitter Celebs’ worth following if you don’t already. It’s by no means a complete list and I have probably missed quite a few genius designs, if so drop me an @ replay on Twitter (@kasperbs) or leave them in the comments.

Best Twitter Designs/Themes

So here are the ones to beat, in no particular order. Let me know who should be the winner!

@939Design

I stumbled upon 939design by accident and I absolutely loved the colour scheme. The wooden floor effect works great and the fact that the logo is on the right makes it stand out.

@Benek

The default Twitter design is nice and clean in itself but a little personalisation doesn’t hurt :).

@Divvoted

There seems to be a trend in web design at the moment leaning towards hot air balloons and parachutes. Divvoted certainly make great use of this trend which is why they have earned their place on this list.

@Pixellent

Pixel drawings are always fun, and even though there are a one or two free pixel Twitter themes on the market I haven’t seen this before.

@Nabbit

Nabbit is an online music service with quite a few followers. I love the use of green on the web and this just feels so fresh!

@WayneSutton

Wayne’s Twitter profile was definitely on my top 3 list. Twitters clean layout don’t lend it self well to ragged edges, but someone forgot to tell WayneSutton.

@MrTweet

Apart from offering a great Twitter app, Mr Tweet also has a sweet design. I love animations on the web, maybe because I’m not an artist myself.

@Garyvee

Gary Vaynerchucks profile was my favourite for a few weeks, it’s clean, simple and perfectly branded for his popular Thundershow.

@ProBlogger

Darren Rowse is one of the few blogs where I actually read every single post. His Twitter profile grabs attention and is very cleverly designed. One of the only ones I have seen where the sidebar isn’t coloured.

KeyLimeCreative

Probably my favourite from the bunch. Obviously I love green and limes are just delicious :).

All right… Time to rip the list apart, who did I forget and who shouldn’t have made the list?