By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

FriendFeed is on a roll lately, completely outpacing Twitter and other services in updates and access to your entire social graph. Just the other day I spoke about Enjit, a service which enables you to receive the entire FriendFeed firehose of data over your IM client. And now, as of today, FriendFeed has made an announcement of their own stating they will be providing their own instant messaging client to the service.


Add IM capability to your FriendFeed in Account Settings
To enable the service, go into your FriendFeed account settings, and click the button to enable your IM notifications. If you have a Gmail address or other Jabber client, your address will have already been populated into the address bar. Otherwise, fill it out. After clicking the enable button you'll receive a message via IM asking to add the FriendFeed user to your IM client, and then asking you to confirm by clicking on a link. Once you do that, you're set up!

From the account settings you can choose to enable either all posts, all posts and comments from your friends, or all posts and all comments on the site - FriendFeed is truly opening up their entire fire-hose to all with this update! Watching my IM client, (you can add me at [email protected]), I am seeing updates almost every second, if not more.

In addition to receiving posts and comments, you can also post back. This includes following and posting to rooms! To post messages back, FriendFeed has provided the following commands for their interface. From their Web site:

FriendFeed assigns a number to each entry when it is sent to you. You can use this number to comment on or like the entry. See the commands below for some examples.

@me message
Post a new message to your feed

@me
List the entries in your feed

@roomname message
Post a new message to the room with nickname roomname

@roomname
List the entries in the room with nickname roomname

@N comment
Comment on entry N. When you receive entry and comment notifications via IM, they are all prefixed with @N. You can reply to them by prefixing your comment with the same @N.

@N
Show entry N. Useful when you get a comment on @N and you want to see the original post.

like N
Like entry N

@nickname
List the entries in the the given user's feed

pause
Pause IM notifications

resume
Resume IM notifications

list
List the most recent entries you have received via IM

help
Print the list of IM commands

FriendFeed has just made their move in this microblogging and aggregation game of chess. Neither Facebook nor Twitter has the slew of aggregation and microblogging features and openness FriendFeed provides, so it will be interesting to see how this progresses. Dustin Sallings and Ken Sheppardson are rumored to be working on a Track IM solution to FriendFeed, so it will be interesting as things take shape if FriendFeed can beat Twitter at its own game.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

In an assuring statement in the Twitter API Developers Group, Alex Payne, the API lead at Twitter, shared that they have plans to have their Fire-hose of Data available to developers and users by "Thanksgiving at the Latest".  The Firehose, or Twitter's continuous XMPP stream (the protocol that powers services like Jabber and Google Talk), has been at the center of controversy for Twitter, where they opened it up briefly to developers, and had to take it down again when they realized the traffic was simply too much for their servers.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

I often get comments from people asking just how much time I spend on social networks, writing blog posts, and reading RSS feeds. Most of the time, that answer is hard to get, as I spend a few minutes throughout the day making sure I miss as little as possible, and try to limit the time it takes to write most posts to about 20 minutes or so. But there are software solutions out there to help track all my application and Web service activity, which, in theory, could give away exactly how much time I am wasting allotting to each task. Among the easiest, and growing increasingly popular, is Wakoopa.


Wakoopa, upon registering, provides a small tracker that, once installed on your computer, monitors both your foreground applications, and those in the background. It also tracks most major services, including Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader and Facebook, to find out how much time you're spending online.

Beyond tracking your own activity, making you guilty for each minute you might spend at the office on a social network instead of buried in Microsoft Office apps, you can review software you use, see other reviews from fellow Wakoopers, and monitor activity from around the service - including seeing the most popular applications from across the network, and seeing live activity, which streams vertically, much like Twitter's feed.

Wakoopa formally launched in early 2007, and has started to gain traction in recent months. In October, they were added as a supported service in FriendFeed, and according to Compete.com, they grew 12 percent month over month, seeing yearly growth of nearly 300%. (Usual caveat: Compete.com stats are questionable)

Given I already stream much of the social activity I do around the Web, and try and be as transparent as possible, I see little downside to keeping the Wakoopa Tracker on, showing you how often I use Adobe Photoshop or Apple Mail, when I boot up iTunes, or if I'm updating Facebook. Do I expect to meet new friends and peers through Wakoopa just because we share an affinity for word processing programs? Probably not. But if Wakoopa over time starts to tell me that I'm doing way too much socializing, and not enough business, that just might impact my future behavior.

If you get into the service, you can even highlight your own software and Web activity on your blog with embedded widgets, or see what other folks are using around the Web. The image at the top left of this post showing my top ten software apps is updated live based on my own activity, so you can see the service in action. You can find me tracking my activity at http://wakoopa.com/louisgray.

I am an information glutton. I want to know all the news, and get it as it happens, preferably before everyone else. By the time it's discussed in the afternoon, I want to already have seen it, dissected it and reacted to it. It's this demand for a real-time news firehose that has me turning to Twitter for real-time events instead of Google News, and what has had me looking to Google Reader and FriendFeed before mainstream news sites or Web portals for just about everything else.


Google Reader Tells Me 9 a.m. is the Primetime News Hour
As Google Reader's Trends statistics show, I read every single item that flows through my RSS reader, even if it's just for a second. But the time you're most likely to catch me, unblinking, in front of my RSS reader is around 9 each morning. The statistics show I'm parked on Google Reader most often at 9 a.m. with other spikes around 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., and on those days when I start earlier, 8 a.m.

Assuming a typical workday, I have probably taken in between 800 and 1,000 new items from RSS before the evening news comes on. By the time the news networks have selected what they'll focus on for 30 minutes, with each story getting maybe a minute's worth of attention, interrupted by commercials, I've likely seen the news break and get spun by multiple people whose opinions I trust. By 11 p.m., when the late night news comes on, I've more than moved on. And you can forget about waiting around for the next morning's paper.

By the time your papers are hitting the driveways of people across the country, much of the news is 24 hours old. That's why you've seen a rise of 24-hour news networks, headline news, and new ways to get the news shoveled ever quicker. I may not be a morning person, and the twins certainly aren't helping there... but I know to get the news early. Google Reader and other tools enable you to pick who your information filters are, and when you want to get your news. Don't wait for the networks or the paper to choose when you should get it. Just go get it already.