Friendfeed has emerged as the “shiny new tool” in the social media arsenal for building community with friends, around causes and with businesses. Although Friendfeed has been active for over a year, it recently rolled out a series of new tools that makes their interface seem more appealing than Twitter – but is it better? Linda did not know , as she’s an active Twitter user – so she enlisted the help of social media maven, Karoli Kuns, to help deliver an introduction to this social media tool (more about how to contact Karoli at the end of the article).

             FriendFeed 101: Lifestream in the Realtime Fast Lane

Now that celebrities have discovered Twitter and it's been seen jumping a giant shark in the deep blue sea (when the Twitter "Fail Whale" lets it), maybe it's time to find the next shiny thing in social media. For me, the shiniest thing in the park is Friendfeed.

Even though Friendfeed has been around for well over a year, they've just rolled out a set of power features that makes Twitter look like yesterday's child. Here are just a few:

                Aggregator and Hub

At its most basic level, Friendfeed is a great way to put everything you do, share, and say on the Internet into one place. If you did nothing but set up an account, add all your social networks, and send all of your activity to Friendfeed, it would be worth the effort, simply because your friends can see all of your activity around the web. No matter if it's Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, your blog, last.fm and many, many more, all your subscriptions will feed what you post on Friendfeed.

Subscribers to your account can see every service you set up and send to Friendfeed without needing to travel around to the different sites. But Friendfeed doesn't stop there. It's a social network, after all.

You can set up lists of friends by interest, relationship, or any other category you create, subscribe to others' feeds, comment, and "like" entries that others post. Do you have a friend who isn't using Friendfeed yet? Create an "imaginary friend" and pull in their public feeds from other services. The imaginary friend feature is one of the most powerful features on Friendfeed. If you have the time and patience to create them, you can aggregate yours and others' activities in one place, escaping Twitter and Facebook outages while gaining access to a site that goes with you on your mobile device, laptop or desktop.

                "Like" is the new Retweet

Twitter is littered with retweeted links, posts, quotes and sayings. Retweeting is when you decide you like a person's "tweet" enough to repeat it to your followers. On Friendfeed, a click on the "like" link can send two signals. To the Friendfeed community, it signals an interest in whatever one "liked". But when 'likes' are sent to Twitter, they become a form of retweeting that sends that information back to one's Twitter network of followers. In this case, Friendfeed once again functions as an aggregator, by keeping track of everyone who 'liked' a shared item, but also by radiating it out to the larger Twitter or Facebook networks. (Friendfeed can be added to Facebook via the Facebook Friendfeed application).

                Streaming Data

Real-time data and activity streams are amazingly powerful. They shift the conversation, the paradigm and the control away from the 'mainstream outlets', democratizing information, trends and news. Twitter has already shown how powerful the real time stream is with respect to trending topics of conversation. Now imagine grouping Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, news feeds, Google Reader shared items, and comments in real time on one stream. It might look something like this:

                Complex, powerful, aggregated search

The Friendfeed creators are ex-Google employees, and that experience has translated into a powerful tool for searching, identifying trends, and aggregating data in one place. When all of that is combined with a real-time activity stream, an incredibly powerful research and information tool and trend-spotter emerges, which can be used to identify emerging areas of concern, such as the recent swine flu outbreak, product trends, or any other trending topic of concern or interest. The best part? Once you've got a search set up that you like, it can be saved as a custom search linked on the sidebar to use any time you want.